by Jon Talton
I slid it back into place. Frenchy was definitely not Big Cat. I wondered again who was.
Two hours later, Frenchy was as patched up as possible. They wanted to admit him for fear of internal bleeding, but he was having none of that. He had three broken ribs, had lost two teeth, and came close to having a fractured cheek and ruptured spleen. He was staggering from a dose of morphine but still winced in pain as I slid his holster and other cop gear back on and put him in the passenger seat for the ride home.
“What the hell am I going to tell my wife?” he slurred as we arrived.
“Lie well. You’re a cop and got in a fight. Say you look a lot better than the toughs you took down tonight and threw in jail.”
He started to laugh but this turned into a moan from his broken ribs as he wrapped his arms around his battered middle.
“You ever been in love, Geno?”
I nodded.
“I mean really in love,” he said. “I had what I thought was a tumble with this young girl. But she caught me like a fish on a hook. ’Course my wife didn’t know. Anyway, she made me feel like I was seventeen again, made me forget all the dirty stuff that comes with the job. God, I miss her.”
I waited and calculated, then decided to risk it. “What was her name?”
“Carrie.” Tears started down his bruised cheeks. Electricity ran up my spine.
“What happened to her?”
“She died. A tragedy.”
“What happened?”
Now he was visibly sobbing. “I don’t know. I don’t know. Wish I did. Feel like it’s left me at the end of a long, dark cave with no way out…”
I waited for more, but he stopped himself. I couldn’t tell if he wanted to confess to killing Carrie or if he was genuinely innocent.
“What do you do for fun, Frenchy? To relax? You need to take a few days off after what happened. Get your story straight for McGrath and stick to it. Hoodlum ambushed you, you fought, he ran, and you lost him. He’ll give you a few days.”
“What if he kicks me off the Hat Squad, Geno? We’re supposed to be tough.”
“Nobody doubts your courage, Frenchy. You’re safe.”
He furrowed his brow, thinking it through. “I guess I could take time off and cook. Family likes my steaks, my gumbo.”
Maybe the steaks explained his purchases at the restaurant supply store. Nothing could explain him slitting the throat of an innocent man. Despite this, I made myself get out and help him from the car to the driveway.
“You gotta get my car…”
“It can wait. You’re in no condition to drive. You can barely walk.”
“No! Please. Please get it, Geno. It’s a ’32 Chevy, black four-door, parked near the train station.”
He handed me the keys.
“What were you doing down there?”
“Got a tip from a snitch,” he said. “But it turned into an ambush.”
That might have been true. Or he had followed me and run into unexpected trouble.
* * *
At the foot of a darkened Fourth Avenue, the lights still glowed from the Union Station waiting room. One or two no-name passenger trains and the westbound Fast Mail would still be arriving tonight.
I had dropped off my car at the apartment, fetched a flashlight, and hopped the Kenilworth line streetcar down to Washington Street, walking the rest of the way.
Now, Frenchy’s four-door Chevy sat unmolested a block north of the depot. It was the same car I had followed from the junkyard to Marley’s house. If I were still a real police officer, I would be burdened by the need of such pesky things as search warrants. Instead, I was your friendly local private eye, with the keys to my “friend’s” car. It could easily have been the one watching my place or the one that followed Victoria home. Spare tire on the outside.
I slipped on my leather gloves. Without the attached trunk to search, I opened up the driver’s door, flipped on the flashlight, and had a look inside. The glove box was disappointingly neat, with an extra set of handcuffs and road maps. I felt under the seats—nothing. The floor and upholstery looked new, with no bloodstains. I pulled up the back seat and, aside from dust, it was lacking anything, much less evidence that he had used this vehicle to kidnap Carrie and murder her.
Nothing was left for me but to drive the car back to Frenchy’s house and leave the keys under the visor for him to find in the morning. That was when a key on his ring attracted my attention. The car key and house key were obvious. But a third one was different: thin, sturdy, brass. It opened a safe-deposit box.
I drove up to the Monihon Building and let myself in. I locked the door behind me and took the darkened stairs up to my office. There I pulled out my cigar box of lock-picking gear and made a clay mold of the safe-deposit key. When I was satisfied it was exact, I slipped the key back on Frenchy’s ring. Fifteen minutes later, I dropped off the car in his driveway and walked home through the silent streets, missing Victoria terribly.
Twenty-Two
The next day I rolled into the office early. A wire was waiting from Victoria: She had arrived safely at Los Angeles Central Station. I scribbled a response and left it for Gladys to summon a Western Union boy. I retrieved the clay mold and walked down Washington Street to my favorite locksmith. Favorite because he still thought I was a cop and because he could work magic in duplicating any key. Thirty minutes later, I had the key to Frenchy’s safe-deposit box.
But which bank?
Start at the best. I walked up Central to Monroe Street, where the imposing new Professional Building hulked over the southeast corner. On the bottom floor was the lobby to the Valley Bank & Trust, the strongest such institution left in Phoenix.
The lobby looked like a high temple of money, with soaring ceilings, art deco carvings, sleek hanging chandeliers, and walnut teller counters and benches so beautiful they made me feel every inch the imposter. It was almost enough to make you trust banks again. The armed guard was a retired patrol sergeant, so that greased my skids to the vault manager after a few minutes of small talk.
The manager wore a conservative suit and toupee that wasn’t fooling anyone. I could use my badge but that might raise issues of warrants, so I decided to brazen it out.
“Leonce Navarre.” I shook his hand. “I’d like to get my safe-deposit box.”
I held up the key.
“Of course, Mr. Navarre,” he said. “Come this way.”
Barely believing my luck, I followed him as he waddled to a gate, unlocked it, and did the same with a sturdy polished steel door. Then we passed an immense open vault door and soon were inside a long room filled floor-to-ceiling with boxes. Each had two keyholes.
“I believe you’re 1207,” he said.
“Sounds about right.” I was about to say something about not having been here for a while but who knew? Maybe Frenchy had been here last week and dealt with someone else. I held my breath. The man produced a key and inserted it in the correct box. I did the same with mine. And it turned. The little steel door opened, and he pulled out a long rectangular box. Carrying it to a table in the middle of the room, he said, “I’ll leave you to it. Let me know when you’re done.”
Then he was gone.
For a moment, I stared at the walls containing money, gold, jewelry, important documents—and secrets. Tamping down my curiosity, I focused on the little fortress in front of me and opened the hinged top.
Inside was money: Seven neatly bound packs of hundred-dollar bills. A quick flip through the C-notes in one pack made me sure Frenchy had at least ten thousand dollars hidden away here. I set them on the table. And saw the brown manila envelope.
I carefully undid the string and let a heavy handkerchief fall to the tabletop. Unwrapping it slowly, I saw a blood-caked straight razor. It had been dusted for fingerprints and inside the envelope were four neat latents on an o
fficial police form. They were clear partial prints. But no name was listed on the paper. No suspect, no investigating officer.
The packs of money went back in the safe-deposit box. I wrapped the blade in the handkerchief, careful not to leave my own prints, and put it and the paper with partial fingerprints back in the envelope. That went in my suit coat pocket.
As I walked back to the office, it was time to reorder my thinking.
If Frenchy really murdered Zoogie Boogie, why keep the straight razor? The immediate answer was so that he could plant it on the Negro suspect of his choice. But if that were the case, why dust it for prints, lift latents, and put both in a safe-deposit box? That made no sense.
No, Frenchy found Zoogie dead—arriving at the junkyard ahead of Muldoon—and took the razor. Then he claimed the killing to get Kemper Marley off his back. This went a long way to untangling his convoluted explanation about the murder of a man who was secretly collecting for him in Darktown. Someone else did the killing and Frenchy either knew who he was or he was protecting the evidence until he could match the prints.
Back at the office, I locked the envelope containing the razor and prints in my safe. No more carelessness like the kind that had cost me Carrie’s diary and letters.
McGrath hadn’t responded to my report. On the plus side, he hadn’t demanded my badge back.
Some unrelated business came in. A few weeks ago, I would have welcomed it. Now it was an unwelcome distraction.
Barry Goldwater put me on retainer for the Williams Investment Company, which was formed by his family with two hundred thousand dollars of capital stock. What they intended to do—maybe purchase land—and why they might need a private eye were mysteries to me. I felt as if he was taking pity on me. But the four-hundred-dollar retainer fee he offered helped my dwindling treasury. A few weeks ago, I would have stuck the money in the safe and celebrated with a shave and haircut from Otis Kenilworth, a shoeshine, and a movie and prizefight with Victoria. The shave and haircut would have to do.
A man named Street hired me to help him in a dispute with the city. He didn’t want to pay an assessment on his property at Twelfth and Van Buren streets, claiming the contract was awarded illegally. It was boring by my standards but it was fifty bucks and easy money. The job entailed working up background on the contractor, the Phoenix-Tempe Stone Company.
As part of the Street case, I attended a city commission meeting in the sparkling new commission chambers at City Hall. I sat in the back and took notes as the city attorney discussed Street’s case.
The four commissioners were R. E. Patton, J. B. Guess, David Kimball, and O. B. Marston. These worthies were behind my layoff from the force. I wondered how many saw me sitting there. I wondered how many were in compromising photos taken from the wall peek in Kemper Marley’s whorehouse. A case like this gave my mind plenty of time to wander.
Once the meeting ended, I grabbed a late lunch at the Busy Bee Café and got back to the office. Removing the Carrie Dell file from the locked filing cabinet, I turned to the call log for Summer Tours and started dialing.
As a police detective, I quickly learned that there were basically two kinds of cases. One set were obvious, with the suspect already apprehended or easily identified. Most murder victims knew their killers. The second kind were rarer but more interesting. They were cases that appeared random and evidence was scattered, requiring many hours, days, even months of work plus creativity. That was certainly true back in 1929.
Twenty-Three
On Monday, March 11, 1929, the next new moon, the entire force was mobilized to apprehend the University Park Strangler before he killed again. All vacations and leaves were canceled. Twelve-hour shifts with overtime were authorized.
The national press had caught the story, labeling the perpetrator as the “Fiend of Phoenix” but “University Park Strangler” stuck locally. Part of me wondered if it was because people in other parts of the city used the moniker as an incantation to keep the killer there and safely out of their neighborhoods.
Captain McGrath worked out a plan to focus marked police cars on the fringes of University Park, to “give him a sense of safety” inside the neighborhood itself. At the same time, members of the Hat Squad and patrolmen in plain clothes stationed themselves around University Park in parked cars, commandeered delivery trucks, and one empty rental house with good views of the street.
Everybody worked in pairs. Pump-action shotguns and Thompson submachine guns were issued. McGrath kept me with him at our new headquarters, which probably made sense because officers could use call boxes to notify us of the situation. But I wanted to be on the street. We were all in position as the sun went down.
Yet nothing happened that night.
Just after sunrise two days later, Wednesday, a homeowner at Thirteenth Avenue and Polk Street called. A girl was on his front yard, half dressed, not moving. By the time I got there, the street was crowded with people, police cars, and an ambulance. But she was long dead. Her head was turned at an angle, cherry-red hair swept back, eyes staring at us reproachfully. On her stomach with her blouse off, I made an immediate check: The cross was carved in the small of her back.
“Goddamn it!”
Muldoon knelt down and put his big arm around me. “Easy, lad. We all feel that way, too. But civilians are around.”
It was the only time I ever lost my composure on the job.
As the girl was sent off for the postmortem, we fanned out to interview everyone within two blocks of the body dump. Nobody saw anything. Not even the milkmen who were out that early.
More information allowed us to sort out the basics. She was likely Grace Chambers, sixteen, who never came home from the movies the night before. Her parents felt it was safe for her to see the pictures at the Rialto with her steady boyfriend, Ben Chapman. It was her birthday, and they also wanted to reward her for perfect grades this year. They felt safe because they lived in the Las Palmas neighborhood, north of McDowell Road, miles from University Park.
When neither Grace nor Ben came home by nine on Tuesday night, as agreed, her parents notified the police. Because of the letdown the night before, headquarters was short-staffed, the desk sergeant made a report and said he would send a car to interview the parents—but somehow it never happened. A fight in the Deuce distracted the patrolmen on duty. As McGrath said sourly, “The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.”
Ben Chapman, seventeen, varsity athlete, choir member, was the prime suspect. That certainty, borne of desperate policemen, wasn’t dimmed when Ben’s ’28 Buick was found parked outside the Arizona Citrus Growers warehouse on Jackson Street an hour later. But it was not to be. Two hours after Grace’s body was identified by her parents, Ben Chapman was found bludgeoned to death out in the county, inside an orange grove. Mexican farmworkers discovered him. He was beaten badly. Don guessed a baseball bat. His hands were tied behind his back with rope.
As in the prior cases, Grace had been viciously raped and strangled, her underwear taken. But the killer had more time with her: She was not only tied up with a rope, but also with barbed wire. Her body had multiple cigarette burns. Her bottom had been whipped with a belt or whip, hard enough to leave bruises and bloody welts.
The pathologist guessed she was first bound with rope, perhaps at the same time as her boyfriend. He was a well-built young man, so it raised the possibility the two had been forced to give in at gunpoint. Then the killer made Grace tie up Ben, and she was restrained by the killer. As always with victims, they held out hope: “This is only a robbery. He’ll let us go if we do what he asks.”
The fingerprint tech went over Ben’s car, and the latents were sent off to the FBI. Victoria took photos of both scenes.
Here the evidence petered out into our speculation. Did the killer take them both somewhere and force the boyfriend to watch as he tortured and raped Grace? Then what? Beat Ben
to death before her eyes, finish her off, and leave her in University Park? Then dump his body outside the city limits? Quite a night’s work and plenty of risks of being discovered, but possible. Frenchy raised the possibility of two killers, one following the other, who drove Ben’s car. Then both could make a quick escape.
The heat came quickly, from the city commission, the chamber of commerce, the newspapers, and two sets of well-connected parents. It came from inside headquarters, too. Three members of the fifteen-man Hat Squad had daughters around the age of the strangler’s victims. Senior patrolmen and sergeants, too. And those weren’t shy about voicing frustration and recriminations.
On Thursday, a typed letter came, addressed to the Chief of Police Matlock:
The Phoenix Police can’t solve the greatest crime ever to hit our city. Doesn’t speak well for your new city hall and police headquarters building.
It’s me, you clowns. I’ll get your tiresome little hidden tricks out of the way: I take their knickers and stuffed toys. I use a sock to keep them quiet. I carve my brand in their backs. I used barbed wire on the latest girl.
Believe me now? I am HIM.
You thought you had me all figured out. So predictable, you flatfoots. But I nabbed two lovers this time and had my way with both of them. Took them to my lair, isn’t that what the reporters will call it?
Made him watch while I did things to her. Nice and slow. Made her watch while I did things to him while he cried and pleaded, then killed him. Then it was only us. I was naked and bloody. She was screaming and begging right to the end. Nobody could hear her. I delivered her body to the neighborhood like the morning newspaper.
Speaking of THAT…I’m sending a copy of this letter to the papers and radio stations.