True Confessions

by John Gregory Dunne

  Jack Amsterdam did not look at Tom Spellacy as he turned and walked out of the dining room. Des sat down and stared across the table.

  “Jesus, Tommy, you can be a pain in the ass.”

  Ten

  The morning after Tom and Des Spellacy had lunch at the Biltmore, the Express, under Howard Terkel’s by-line, printed the full pathological report from the Medical Examiner’s office, omitting mention only of the rose tattooed above the victim’s pubic region and of the votive candle in her vagina. Two hours after the Express hit the streets, a girl who worked in the rouge room at Max Factor called the special telephone number set up by Chief of Detectives Fred Fuqua to receive information on the Mystery Beauty. The girl in the rouge room said that her ex-roommate used to melt down candles in order to put the soft wax into the holes in her teeth where the fillings had fallen out. She said that her ex-roommate’s name was Lois Fazenda and that Lois Fazenda had skipped three weeks before, sticking her and her six other roommates with her share of the month’s rent. The girl in the rouge room also said that Lois Fazenda stole the candles she melted down into fillings from a religious-supply store on Hollywood Boulevard, and that after she was caught shoplifting, she began blowing the owner of the store to keep out of jail. The caller said, her name was Gloria Deane, and for the newspapers not to forget the e at the end of Deane.

  At the same time that Gloria Deane was calling Fuqua’s special number, Tom Spellacy was checking the overnight reports from the Central Division. Fuqua’s idea. The systems approach. The votive candle could be a definite pattern. Look for rosary beads in the crotch. Crucifixes. Scapulars. Mite boxes. A definite pattern of Catholic boffing. Tom Spellacy shuffled the reports. 93 thefts. 42 burglaries. 21 robberies. 6 assaults with deadly weapons. 2 morals offenses. One rape. One attempted rape. 32 stolen vehicles. No mite boxes.

  He wondered if he should call Des. Maybe an apology was in order. He thought not. He wasn’t good at apologies. No better than Des was. They hadn’t spoken since lunch. Des didn’t say much after calling him a pain in the ass. I wonder if he’ll confess that. Don’t bet on it. Des always did have a very relaxed idea of what constituted a sin. Even the sixth commandment. He didn’t get too choked up about Thou shalt not commit adultery. There were always extenuating circumstances. He was very big on extenuating circumstances. What he needed was one of those tough old ginney pastors who’d chop off your arm you reached for a second piece of pie. Try extenuating circumstances on them and they’d have you walking up Wilshire Boulevard on your knees.

  They had walked out the front door of the Biltmore, still not speaking. John Dever, the CPA, and Tommy Brady, the bandleader, were standing by the taxi rack. There were a lot of two-handed handshakes. John Dever said he was doing the books for Our Lady of Good Hope. Cooking the books if I know Monsignor Sagarino, Tommy Brady said. A good laugh was had all around. Tommy Brady said he had played at Vinny Sagarino’s twenty-fifth anniversary in the priesthood. He had done a Jew bar mitzvah in the afternoon, then Vinny’s shindig in the evening, but that was what made orchestra leading such an interesting business, all the people of different religions you met. John Dever said he’d give Des a ride back to the chancery. Tommy Brady was left alone on the sidewalk with Tom Spellacy. The bandleader didn’t quite know what to say. He began tapping his foot.

  He runs a grand raffle, your brother. A real wiz at bingo. He could get them Mexicans at Our Lady taking chances on whether Easter fell on a Sunday or not. Where you living? Saint Jude’s?

  Perpetual Help, Tom Spellacy had said.

  Last time I saw you, Tommy Brady had said, you were still living in Saint Jude’s.

  61 disturbing the peace. 2 arson.

  That was real swell of the wiz at bingo, telling him that Mary Margaret was coming home. He still hadn’t figured out how to tell Corinne. Maybe she and Mary Margaret could make a novena together, work it all out. You get Sunday mass, I get Friday nights. You get the Stations of the Cross, I get the afternoon matinees. You get Des, I’ll take Tom. It was funny about Corinne. She seemed as hipped on Des as Mary Margaret. She went to Saint Vibiana’s to watch him say mass. He wears loafers on the altar, she reported. She received Communion from him. His nails are buffed, she said. And he has a razor cut. She wanted to meet him. Why, he had said. Because sometimes I think I’m fucking him, she said.

  That was one thing about Corinne. She didn’t beat around the bush about the sixth commandment. She was asleep when he returned last night. Don’t wait up, he had told her, I’ll be working late. Which meant spending half the night listening to Crotty talk about his Chink partners until he was sure she wouldn’t be awake. That was one way to avoid mentioning Mary Margaret. He did not turn on the light when he came in. She snored quietly. In the dark, the Murphy bed with the trench in it seemed to fill the entire room. He suddenly realized how small the apartment was. The only place he could be alone was in the bathroom. Not even there, really. The jar of Arrid made the bathroom hers. And the Nair. He had never even heard the word depilatory until he met Corinne. The hair on Mary Margaret’s legs was like a beaver compared to hers. Now Corinne was using his Gillette. Every morning her leg stubble pitted his blade. He had tried to get her to wash the blade, but she always forgot. It occurred to him as he was getting undressed how little he knew about Corinne. She knew everything about him except that Mary Margaret was coming home, but he could not recall her ever mentioning friends or family, except her former husbands and the occasional first name at the Jury Commission who had got fired or been promoted or missed her period. He wondered if he had just blotted it out, if fucking women was burden enough without getting to know them. They had no life outside the tiny apartment, yet he found it impossible to call the apartment home.

  “How did lunch go?” Corinne’s sleepy voice had come from the trench in the bed.

  “You’ve got a cunt like cashmere, I hear,” he had answered. What a shitty thing to say. But he didn’t want to talk about lunch and he didn’t want to talk about Mary Margaret checking herself out of Camarillo.

  “Is that what you hear?”

  He put his shoes under the bed and his Police Special in one of the shoes, just an arm’s length away. As he perched himself between her knees, he wondered who he was going to shoot.

  “Do you love me?”

  “Yes, of course.” He wondered what muff-diving had to do with love.

  “You never say it, you know.” Her voice had been quiet, matter-of-fact. “I mean, I say, ‘Do you love me,’ and you say, ‘Yes.” But you never say the word itself. It’s not a complaint, Tom, it’s an observation.”

  “I do.”

  All in all a day I’d like to forget, he thought. He thumbed through the remaining reports. Peeping Toms. Vag loitering. Solicitation for the purposes of prostitution. Murder One in the Rampart Division. A husband took out his wife. That’s the kind I like. Give the poor bastard a cigarette and he tells you why he did it. His old lady had wax in her ears. Or hair on her tits. Something you could understand, him whacking her out for. Twenty minutes later he’s in the gas chamber. There was no crap about definite patterns.

  12 bunko.

  One suicide. He picked up the report. A jumper. Off the roof of the Bradbury Building. The jumper took the elevator to the top floor, went up the little staircase to the roof, took off his shoes, hat and glasses, put his wallet in the crown of his hat open to his driver’s license so that he could be identified, then jumped. He was dead the instant he hit Broadway.

  It was the jumper’s name that caught his attention. Shit was going to hit the fan. The report was something Crotty should see. This jumper was his problem.

  Masaryk was standing by the water cooler in the squad room, practicing quick draws from his shoulder holster.

  “Where’s Crotty?” Tom Spellacy said.

  Masaryk jumped. He quickly began twirling the chambers of his .38 as if he had only been trying to see if it was loaded.

  “With a 261 suspect,” Masa
ryk said. He talked very fast. “Name of Rafferty. Raymond F. He’s got a sheet fourteen pages long. Caucasian. Five feet eleven and three-quarter inches in height, 147 pounds, thirty-one years of age . . .”

  If only his draw was as good as his memory, Tom Spellacy thought. Put Masaryk on a tail and he’d tell you exactly how many steps the suspect took before he lost him.

  “. . . snake tattoo right forearm, no other identifying marks.” Masaryk was trying to put his .38 back into its holster. The telephone rang and so startled him that he dropped the gun on the floor.

  “The phone,” Tom Spellacy said. He put a pencil in the barrel of the revolver, lifted it from the floor and handed it to Masaryk.

  “It’s X. O’Brien,” Masaryk said, giving him the phone.

  “Shit.” Francis Xavier O’Brien, criminal attorney, was always called X. He weighed 247 pounds, and winter and summer he wore a black FDR cape. His specialty was sex. Pimps. Rapists. Exhibitionists. Smut peddlers. Foot freaks. His only legal strategy was delay. Never give anything away. File enough motions and the judge might have a heart attack. Hope for a mistrial. “What’s X.?”

  “Crotty’s got a boy of mine stashed away, Tom,” X. O’Brien said. Every client was X. O’Brien’s “boy.” He loved to listen to the charges against them. A grand story, X. O’Brien would say. A mortal sin if you prove it. Tell it to Father Toby McNamara in confession and his hair would fall out. But he was making a retreat that day, my boy. Thinking about becoming a Catholic. Converts don’t shit on your toe.

  “What’s his name, your boy?”

  “That’s for me to know and for you to find out.”

  The only way to deal with X. O’Brien was never to argue with his logic. “He’s got a guy named Rafferty. Suspicion of rape.”

  “My boy never raped anyone in his life.”

  “He’s got a sheet fourteen pages long, X.”

  “His sister’s a postulant.”

  “Then Rafferty is your boy?”

  “How do you know his name is Rafferty?”

  “He told us.”

  “On what evidence?”

  “Oh, for Chrissake, X. His mother told him.”

  “That’s hearsay.”

  Making a point like that could keep X. O’Brien happy for a week. Tom Spellacy said he would check with Crotty. He picked up the suicide report and walked down the corridor to the interrogation room.

  “A regular sweetheart, our friend Rafferty,” Crotty said. “A real addition to X.’s stable. He hops into the lady’s car and tells her she doesn’t drop her panties, he’s going to cut her into veal chops like he cut the Mystery Beauty.”

  “All it was was a way to get something fast,” Raymond Rafferty said. He had watery green eyes and the snake tattooed on his right arm coiled around the letters M-O-T-H-E-R. “I’ll take the bounce on this one, but I don’t do knife tricks, that’s not my M.O.”

  “He hits the horn on her car when he starts fucking her,” Crotty said. “But he’s so hot and bothered he doesn’t even notice until the black-and-white pulls up.”

  “She was sixty-one years old,” Raymond Rafferty said. “They’re all over sixty, that’s my M.O., look it up on my sheet. I stay away from tight pussy.”

  “You know, you really got terrible teeth,” Crotty said. “No wonder you’re a rapist.”

  “All that green shit,” Tom Spellacy said. “You ever see a dentist?”

  Rafferty moved his lips over his teeth. He spoke without moving his mouth. “Fuck the dentist.”

  “It’s a well-known medical fact,” Crotty said, “people with clean teeth commit less crime.”

  “You listen to Bob Hope?” Tom Spellacy said. “That’s no shit about Pepsodent. ‘You wonder where the yellow went, when you brush your teeth with Pepsodent.’ You think Bob would bullshit you?”

  “I get plenty,” Raymond Rafferty said.

  “Like our friend the Mystery Beauty,” Crotty said.

  “I’m telling you, I stay away from tight pussy,” Raymond Rafferty whined. “You know my M.O. Old dolls. I been telling you, I knocked over an old broad on Western and Romaine that night. I don’t remember the address, but it was apartment 3B, she must’ve made a complaint.” Crotty nodded at Tom Spellacy. “A nice old broad, about seventy-five, eighty years of age.”

  “She liked you, too, Raymond,” Crotty said. “Especially you coming in her nose. It’s something she’s been missing the last sixty years.”

  Crotty knocked on the door of the interrogation room. A uniformed officer came and took Raymond Rafferty back to his cell. Crotty lit a cigar.

  “It checks,” he said. “He was poking the old broad in the nose from midnight to five in the morning. She’s ready for the farm, but she won’t file charges.”

  “X. O’Brien will love that,” Tom Spellacy said. He handed Crotty the suicide report. “Leland K. Standard.”

  “Who the fuck is Leland K. Standard?”

  “Jumped off the Bradbury Building last night.”

  “So what,” Crotty said. He opened the report. A round of cigar ash fell on his white vest. He read for a moment, then stared at Tom Spellacy. “His brother’s a Dominican.”

  “Brother-in-law.”

  “He leave a note?”

  Tom Spellacy shook his head.

  “His old lady and the kids?”

  “Still visiting the grandparents.”

  Crotty shut the report. “Then fuck him.”

  “Someone’s going to know he was down here, Frank?”

  “Not a chance,” Crotty said. “I called him at the office, asked him to come down, nice as pie, there’s a couple of things I’d like to ask him. It’s not the sort of thing, he goes to the gang at the water cooler and says, ‘Lieutenant Crotty wants to know if I been waving my pecker again, so I’m going downtown, see if I can help out our friends in blue.’ He didn’t say that, I bet. The wife, she’s going to think he’s been up to old tricks and couldn’t live with himself anymore, is what she’s going to be thinking. The Dominican’s going to be thinking good riddance, and try to fix Sis up with Johnny Cosgrove, the rich widower’s been wanting to get in her pants all these years. Me, I got the file in my bottom drawer, where I forgot it’s there, anyone asks. ‘Oh, that Leland K. Standard,’ I’ll say, anyone asks. ‘The family man.’ Don’t waste any sleep over it, is what I’m trying to tell you. They happen, these things. It’s nobody’s fault. He should’ve kept his pecker in his pants, the first place.”

  They walked back to the squad room. Masaryk was on the telephone. He cupped his hand over the receiver.

  “They think her name’s Lois Fazenda,” Masaryk said.

  Gloria Deane said that the apartment building where Lois Fazenda lived until three weeks before her death was on North Cherokee Avenue in Hollywood. It was a nondescript two-story bungalow turned into a warren of one-room apartments with hotplate privileges. There were eight girls sleeping in four double-decker bunk beds in what used to be Lois Fazenda’s apartment. The rent for each girl was a dollar a night. Their bathroom was strung with wet lingerie and the wastepaper baskets were overflowing with balls of split hair, rouged Kleenex and brown paper bags filled with used Kotex. Besides Gloria Deane, the girl from Max Factor, there were three actresses, a model, a singer, a telephone operator and a cocktail-lounge employee living in the one room. A check of police-department records established that two of the girls had records for prostitution, one for shoplifting and a fourth for acting in a stag movie as a minor. Five of the eight had moved into the apartment since Lois Fazenda’s departure and only the girl from Max Factor, the singer and the telephone operator remembered her. All three recalled that Lois Fazenda had a rose tattooed on her lower abdomen and that although she claimed not to know a soul in Los Angeles, she had a date nearly every night. Gloria Deane remembered a “tall sinister elderly man” who drove a Packard and sometimes paid her rent. The singer recalled a radio announcer with a British accent named Maurice and the telephone operator a f
amous prop man at Paramount, Jim, Johnny, a man named Red, a pilot from Chicago, Jack, Lee, an outfielder from the Sacramento Solons and someone named Fred who possibly ran a model agency. The girl from Max Factor said that the telephone operator remembered all these names because she was always eavesdropping on Lois Fazenda’s telephone calls. The telephone operator said she was trained to remember names. She also said that the girl from Max Factor had been sweet on Lois Fazenda. Gloria Deane replied that the telephone operator had a nigger pimp.

  The building on Cherokee was owned by one Timothy Mal-lory, who had a record making stag movies going back to 1937 and who called himself an associate producer. Framed on the wall of his apartment was a headline from the June 6, 1944, Los Angeles Times: BRUSH FIRE IN HILLS THREATENS HOME OF HOLLYWOOD ASSOCIATE PRODUCER.

  “Same day as D-Day,” Timothy Mallory said. “No one gave a fig about my house.”

  “About your alibi, homo,” Crotty said.

  “It’s hard to check.”

  “Why?” Tom Spellacy said.

  “I’m a pimp, that’s why. It’s not exactly a nunnery I own here. Not very many people, bright eyes, are going to tell you, ‘I saw Timmy today and his new find, that twelve-year-old dinge from the Belgian Congo.’ “

  “You pimp for Lois Fazenda?” Tom Spellacy said.

  “Pussy pictures, that’s all I did with her,” Timothy Mallory said. He adjusted his toupee in the mirror and then pulled a nudist magazine from a drawer. Lois Fazenda was lying in a glade, the sun glinting off her hair. The thrust of her leg elongated and distorted the rose tattooed on her lower abdomen.

  “A rock is a rock, a tree is a tree, shoot it in Griffith Park,” Timothy Mallory said. “It’s an old saying in the Industry. Meaning it’s where I shot the picture.” He smiled at Tom Spellacy. “I know your murderer.”

  “It’d be a help if you told us.”

  “J.H., Columbus, Ohio, that’s who you should look for,” Timothy Mallory said. “He wrote the magazine and said he had a thing thirteen inches long and where he would like to put it was guess where. J.H., Columbus, Ohio, was the way he signed himself.” Timothy Mallory sighed and once again straightened his toupee in the mirror. “Ou sont les ’J.H.’ d’antan?”