True Confessions

by John Gregory Dunne

  The police department received another message glued together from newspaper lettering. This one said, “Had my fun. Turning in Monday. Virgin Tramp’s Killer.” No one turned himself in. A police-lab analysis showed that the hairs on the Scotch tape sticking the letters to the paper were different in both messages. The first message came from a man with red hair on the back of his hands, the second from a man with black.

  Fourteen more people confessed to the murder of Lois Fazenda.

  Tom Spellacy asked the landlady of the rooming house on Sierra Vista if she had a Bromo Seltzer. His head pounded. Leg-work, Fuqua had told the Major Crime Section. Legwork is how we’re going to crack this thing. Masaryk was the perfect partner for legwork. He didn’t have a brain in his head, but he wrote everything down. And never interrupted his train of thought. And typed a beautiful, neat report. With every fact in place. The fact was, Tom Spellacy liked legwork. Check and recheck. A teletype to all divisions ordering them to report any unusual disturbances the night of the murder. Check the baggage-claim areas at the railroad and bus stations and at the airport. Lois Fazenda must have left a suitcase somewhere. Check the cab companies. Show her picture. Check the funeral parlors. See if the morticians had anything funny to report. Go over old ground. Such as the rooming houses where Lois Fazenda had once lived. Which is what brought Masaryk and Tom Spellacy to the living room on Sierra Vista.

  The landlady said she did not have any Bromo. “I’m Christian Science,” she said. “That’s what first attracted me to Lois.”

  “She didn’t like Bromo either?” Masaryk said.

  “She was Christian Science, too,” the landlady said. Her name was Mrs. Parnell and she was wearing a faded violet housecoat which she nervously pinched between her thumb and forefinger to wipe an imaginary smudge from her rimless glasses.

  “What’s that got to do with Bromo?” Masaryk said. His notebook was out and his pencil poised. He thinks Bromo’s the breakthrough, Tom Spellacy thought.

  “Forget it,” he said.

  “It could be important,” Masaryk said.

  “It’s not.” His shirt clung to his back. It was the second day on the shirt and he knew he was beginning to smell. Corinne’s fault. She wanted to think about things, she said. Meaning she wanted to be alone. Meaning he was back in the Chester Hanrahan Development in the Valley. Where the sheets were gray and there was no clean laundry.

  “She didn’t have good Christian Science habits,” Mrs. Parnell said. She avoided looking at both policemen, smoothing an antimacassar on the back of an overstuffed chair, crumbling a paper doily on an armrest. Tom Spellacy knew the type. A widow come upon hard times, forced to take in boarders she resented. There were neatly lettered signs in the hallway by the pay telephone. No Food. Do Not Put Your Juice in the Refrigerator. She was too refined ever to complain openly about Kotex flushed down the toilet or the lipstick staining the toothbrush glass or the menstrual leakage on the sheets. Just signs. My Castle Is Your Home.

  “In what way?” Tom Spellacy said. The only thing he knew about Christian Scientists was that there was some crazy woman who wouldn’t let them see doctors. Or use Bromo. He remembered a drugstore at the corner. He could get relief there. He cursed Corinne. Thinking about the abortion gave him the headache. Abortions. Brenda knew where to get one. And Jack. Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea getting them all together. Corinne, this is Brenda. Jack, this is Corinne. It was the way everyone knew everyone else, the way that everything was coming together that made his head feel that it was going to blow out, like a tire.

  “She cheated the telephone company,” Mrs. Parnell said. “You cheat the telephone company, you’re cheating yourself.”

  A perplexed look passed over Masaryk’s face. “I think I missed something.”

  Tom Spellacy smiled at the landlady. “How is that?” He wondered who had made Corinne pregnant the first time. Her other abortion. Or if it was only the first time.

  Mrs. Parnell opened a drawer in a side table. She took out two rolls of coins and held them in her hands. “I didn’t want to say anything when the policeman came the first time. She’d just passed to the other side . . .”

  Masaryk lifted his pencil. “Where?”

  “. . . and I didn’t want to say anything that would reflect on her.” Mrs. Parnell’s face hardened. “Even though she never did pay me her last week’s rent. And the week before that.”

  Tom Spellacy took the coin rolls and opened one. Nickel slugs fell into his hand.

  “But now from all the things I read about her in the newspapers . . .” Mrs. Parnell shook her head. “All those people she didn’t pay the rent to. People like me. With no other income but our rents. It’s not right.”

  Tom Spellacy held up a slug. “Your phone?”

  “No, never my telephone.”

  Of course not. Too easy to trace.

  “Mr. Melnicker at the drugstore used to complain. I never made the connection until . . .” Mrs. Parnell pointed to the coin rolls and suddenly she began to chatter, as if Tom Spellacy were going to ask why a Christian Scientist would talk to a druggist. “I only buy my toothpaste at the drugstore. And dental floss. A home perm now and then. Toni. No Bromo.”

  Out on the sidewalk, the palm trees offered no protection from the sun that blasted down on Tom Spellacy’s head. With his thumbs, he massaged the veins in his temples. For a moment the sun made him light-headed. The headache had been constant since he left Corinne’s. Or had she thrown him out? He wasn’t clear on that. A mutual leave-taking. Room to breathe. Except he hated his breathing room. You get used to a woman. You get used to their doing the little things. The socks, the Jockey shorts he had not wanted her to buy. It was the same thing with Mary Margaret’s meat loaf. It was there, he expected it. Fucking was extra. He wondered if the nuns at the chancery took care of Des. It was funny, it had never occurred to him before that someone must buy Des’s underwear, someone must order a dozen boxer shorts, size-32 waist, to cover the priestly basket.

  Masaryk coughed discreetly, awaiting instructions.

  He stood on the sidewalk with pencil and notebook ready. Tom Spellacy knew that Masaryk still did not understand about the slugs. He was still trying to figure out the Bromo Seltzer. Nor had Masaryk been able to understand checking out the funeral parlors either. He took down the dimensions of the morticians’ tables and the manufacturers’ names, but only when Tom Spellacy explained did Masaryk realize that a slab with gutters on the side to catch the blood was a perfect place to dissect a body and not leave a mess. Another possible Mystery Clue. Now he waited patiently for Tom Spellacy to draw in the lines between Christian Science and antacids and Pacific Telephone. It would all be in his notebook. He took perfect notes. He never missed an address or was wrong about the make or caliber of a weapon or the label in a hat or the color of a pair of shoes. It was the connections he was bad at.

  “She was pumping slugs into the pay phone at the drugstore,” Tom Spellacy said. He spoke slowly so that Masaryk could take it all down. “You go to the telephone company and get a record of all the calls made from that phone during the time she was living here. She was probably using other pay phones around here, too. Just so nobody would get too suspicious. A gas station, maybe, a grocery store. So find out from the phone company if any other telephones in the neighborhood were turning up a large number of slugs in that same period. Get the records from those phones, too. Then start comparing numbers, see if the same ones show up.”

  “On all the phones,” Masaryk said.

  Tom Spellacy nodded. The movement hurt his head.

  “Then we might find someone she knew.”

  “Right,” Tom Spellacy said. He patted Masaryk on the shoulder. “We do the same thing, every place she’s lived the past three years.”

  “I knew she had to use those slugs for something,” Masaryk said. “I thought it was for Hershey bars.”

  Tom Spellacy reflected for a moment on Masaryk’s remark. “Why not Milky Ways?�
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  “No, I lost a filling once to a Milky Way. A frozen Milky Way. I had to have a root canal. Hurt like a bastard.” Masaryk opened his mouth, pointed to a tooth and then imitated a dentist’s drill. “Bzzzzzzz. And cigs. She could’ve used the slugs for cigarettes. Tough to trace, though. And I don’t know how much good it would do, tracing cigs.”

  Tom Spellacy had had enough of Masaryk for the morning. At the drugstore he called in. There was a message to call Brenda’s 24-Hour Courier Service. That was something Brenda never used to do, call him at headquarters. The voice on the line at the 24-Hour Courier Service said he was to meet her in MacArthur Park at noon. The third bench west of the boathouse. Leave it to Brenda to remember the bench. It was where she used to pay him off. Sometimes at night she brought a blanket and they fucked on a knoll above the lake. It would be her idea of a joke to meet him there.

  He dropped Masaryk off at Pacific Telephone. How do I get back, Masaryk said. Walk, Tom Spellacy said. Or call a cab. Or go over two blocks and take the Number 7 bus. Masaryk nodded and wrote it down in his notebook. It was still early. Tom Spellacy drove around MacArthur Park checking out the cars. Force of habit. Whether you were being paid off or going through a barricaded door, the M.O. was always the same. Know the turf, never be surprised. He was not certain of many things anymore, but he was sure of one thing: he was a very good cop. Maybe not always honest, but always thorough. He liked the trivial detail work of an investigation. Especially now. It gave an order and purpose to his days and kept his mind off Corinne. He liked cataloging the women’s clothes that were reported found and interrogating hotel keepers in San Pedro and talking to the waitresses and widows who reported seeing the victim before she died and he liked going through unclaimed luggage at the railroad station and listening to the crazies who confessed. He even liked tracing the false teeth. A newspaper delivery boy had reported picking them up a block from the murder site and Tom Spellacy had followed that old and badly constructed plate through the dental-supply houses and the union medical plans and the records of the VA hospitals. It was the VA who told him that the owner of the plate had died of malnutrition two days before Lois Fazenda’s murder.

  And it kept his mind off Corinne.

  “I went to confession.”

  “Swell.”

  “To your brother.”

  “You’ve got a real gift for doing the smart thing.”

  “He didn’t know I had anything to do with you.”

  “He’s a lot of things, Des, but dumb isn’t one of them.”

  “I just wanted to talk to him.”

  “He must’ve got an earful.”

  “I had a longer conversation with him than any I’ve ever had with you.”

  “He’s a terrific talker, Des. He doesn’t have a fucking clue what life is all about, but he’s got all the answers. He works them out somewhere between the fairway and the green.”

  “He told me to do the right thing.”

  “His idea of the right thing is not to get a bogie on a par-five hole.”

  “He’s just like you.”

  “Well, you got all the breaks then, don’t you?”

  “All I know is that you’re afraid of fucking and dying and feeling guilty and doing the wrong thing and even doing the right thing.”

  “What the fuck you want me to do? Go see Des? ‘Corinne says we’re so much alike, I thought I’d stop by, find out what the fuck the right thing to do is.’ “

  “I want to think about things, Tom. Alone.”

  So he left. And tracked down false teeth. And tried not to think about her.

  It was harder than he thought.

  He parked two blocks from MacArthur Park. Not that anyone would be poking around. It was just force of habit again. There was still half an hour. He bought an Orange Julius and a newspaper and waited in the car. As always, he read the sports pages first. Ike Williams and Bob Montgomery signed for a rematch in Philly. Sonny Shaw, the jockey, lost a paternity suit. Bill Tilden was in trouble again. Dick Wakefield was 0 for 37. He turned the pages. A chicken in Auburn, New York, had laid an egg nine inches long and nine inches in circumference, with three yolks. The president was in Key West. Hedda Hopper said that Rita Hay-worth was involved with an Arab prince. He wondered what it would be like going to bed with an actress. He thought she would always be talking about the set and how Franchot Tone kissed. Fuck her. Britain was balking on the Red pact and the King of Denmark was better and the suicide of banker C. K. Dodge had nothing to do with the slaying of Lois Fazenda, according to Chief of Detectives Fred Fuqua. “Darling,” C. K. Dodge’s suicide note had read.

  We could have been so happy if you had continued to have me. I have your picture in front of me. I will look at it for the last time. I love you so much. To think you are in the arms of a clarinet player is more than I can bear. I love you.

  Sincerely,

  C.K. Dodge

  On the front page, three women mystery writers discussed the murder of the Virgin Tramp. Ngaio Marsh said the murderer was a foreigner, Craig Rice said it was a transient pickup and Mignon G. Eberhart said the killer knew his victim. An editor’s note announced that the murder would be discussed the next day by Ben Hecht and on succeeding days by Steve Fisher, Rex Stout, Adela Rogers St. Johns and by the handwriting expert who was a prosecution witness at both the Lindbergh and the Aimee Semple Mac-Pherson trials.

  At five minutes to noon, Tom Spellacy walked into the park. He stood for a moment on the knoll above the boathouse. Below he could see Brenda feeding the pigeons. She was wearing a large floppy hat to shield her face from the sun. It had always been a house rule never to let her girls take much sun. The tricks didn’t like tan markings. Or stretch marks. Or appendicitis scars or Caesarian scars. There was a time when he knew all of Brenda’s house rules. How different his life would have been if he had never met her. It was just chance. That great fucker-up of lives. The memory was like a dream. He was a beat cop. Alone. His partner was sick. An ambulance barreled up Sunset. No siren. No lights. He followed. The ambulance pulled into a house in the hills. He was no dummy. He knew the address. Brenda was polite. There had been an altercation. First between a gentleman and a lady, then between the bouncer and the gentleman. It was always best to handle these things quietly. That was why the police had not been called. Although Officer Spellacy would always be welcome. The gentleman for whom the ambulance was summoned was a pillar of the community. A city councilman, in fact. Not one to complain about his internal bleeding. As the lady would never complain about the cigarette burns on her bosom. There was an envelope in the city councilman’s jacket. There appears to be money in it, Brenda said. Count it. I don’t wish to be responsible. It must contain five hundred dollars. He stopped counting at two thousand. He knew the drill. Leave the five hundred dollars, keep the rest. He asked to use the telephone. Brenda brought him into her office. The telephone was in a cabinet in the desk. There was also a miniature deputy chief’s badge in the cabinet and a paper on which were typed the home telephone numbers of a captain and a watch lieutenant in Central Vice. Brenda smiled at him. In case he did not get the picture that she was well wired. A nice smile. If you want to make it a three-horse parlay, Brenda said, we could fuck.

  Brenda.

  She knew her man.

  She did not look up when he sat down on the bench beside her. A cat crouched on her lap, ready to pounce on any bird that dared to pick up the bread she was throwing.

  “You feeding the pigeons or your cat?” Tom Spellacy said.

  Brenda laughed. “Day-old bread. There’s a bakery down the street that gives it to me.” She crumbled a piece between her fingers and lobbed it into the water. The cat watched a duck gobble it up. Tom Spellacy knew enough not to rush her. She would say what she had to say when she wanted to say it. No sooner. He checked the other benches around the lake. No one there but old people feeding the birds. He knew the type. They would strike up a conversation with the mother of a young child and say
the baby was the picture of Ginger Rogers or the image of Clark Gable. And then almost without pausing for breath they would begin talking about Kitty Foyle or Mutiny on the Bounty and after that Carole Lombard and Nothing Sacred and wasn’t it a shame the way poor Carole went, what it must have done to Clark, but at least he knew she died selling war bonds for her country, that must have been a comfort.

  The scene vaguely depressed Tom Spellacy and then he understood why. The projection of an old and lonely Brenda sitting by the lake feeding the pigeons was not one he wished to contemplate. It was too much a coded portrait of his own life.

  “Where’s your other cat?”

  The question sounded strange and forced, and he realized suddenly it was because in all the years he had known Brenda, they had never really communicated except in sexual reference points. Hustling and the payoff were the perimeters of their knowledge of each other. She knew everything there was to know about coming, and as a matter of course she told him about the number of free fucks it took to buy a grand-jury transcript and the cost of a deputy chief and about the triple-decker sandwich the lieutenant governor liked to watch. But that was all. It was a slum of a relationship surrounded by acres of indifference.

  “It died.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It got run over by a car. A blue Packard. The bastard didn’t even stop.”

  “If you know the license, I’ll try to do something.”

  “It won’t bring the cat back.”

  Tom Spellacy watched the ducks swimming in the lake. Except for Corinne, he had only one reference point with all the women in his life. It made them easy to ignore. Religion with Mary Margaret. Sex with Brenda. That was the trouble with Corinne. She was too complicated to ignore. There were too many reference points.

  “You asked about a cutter,” Brenda said.