by Mary Miley
‘Come join me,’ he called, without even rustling the damn newspaper. The man had eyes in the back of his head.
‘What laws did I break now?’ I groused as I climbed the steps.
He rested the newspaper in his lap. His warm brown eyes smiled at me, and I let down my guard a little. ‘None that everybody else isn’t breaking, but why don’t we talk about crime for a while? Your recent adventures in crime solving, I mean.’
My guard went back up. ‘I haven’t solved any crimes.’
‘Not in the last week or two, I guess – have a seat there, Jessie – but you’re off on another murder investigation as sure as I’m sitting here minding my own business, which is what I wish you’d do now and then, for your own good. The Los Angeles city fathers, in their infinite wisdom, have employed hundreds of men to fight crime and investigate murders, and they prefer that pretty young girls not get involved in this dangerous business.’
‘Well, bully for the city fathers. I’m not involved in any dangerous activity.’ I used my upstage, snooty voice that would cow most people. Not Carl. He merely regarded me as if I were a fourteen-year-old brat in need of reining in.
‘Come on, Jessie, sit down. Let’s not quarrel. Even if you don’t realize it, I’m on your side.’
‘Really?’
I glared at him for several moments before I realized it was futile. I was not going to intimidate this man. He already knew he was not going to intimidate me – he’d ceased trying months ago. I gave in and took the other dilapidated wicker chair. ‘So, Carl. It’s been a long day. I’d like a drink. Can I get you one? I’ve got gin or whiskey – the real McCoy. Or are you going to arrest me for violations of the Volstead Act?’
‘Not if you tell me you’ve had this liquor since before Prohibition started.’
‘I’ve had this liquor since before Prohibition started.’
He smiled at the bald-faced lie. ‘Then it’s legal. I’ll have whiskey with a piece of ice, if you have any. No water.’ He went back to the newspaper as I entered the house.
Myrna heard me come up the stairs to the bathroom and stuck her head out of her room. ‘He’s been here over an hour,’ she whispered. ‘He asked where you were, but I told him I didn’t know. And it wasn’t a lie; I didn’t know. Where were you? He’s not going to arrest you again, is he? He’s kinda cute, isn’t he?’
‘Don’t worry. I was investigating that shooting at the Lyceum Theater downtown, and somehow he found out about it.’ I shook my head in bewilderment. ‘The man must be clairvoyant.’ I heard voices coming from the porch.
‘Sounds like Helen’s home from the market,’ said Myrna. ‘Melva and Lillian are at the beach with friends.’
‘What are you doing home alone on a pretty Sunday afternoon?’
‘Rehearsing my part for tomorrow. It’s that one I told you about, for Caveman. I’m not sure, but I think if I do a very, very good job, I’ll get my name in the credits this time.’
I squeezed her hand. ‘I’d like to see you do your bit, after Carl’s gone home.’
I took my time washing up before taking my bottle of whiskey down to the kitchen for glasses. Helen Reynolds, a salesgirl at Robinson’s department store who had recently been promoted from gloves to unmentionables, was there, unloading a box of groceries. A gawky child stood beside her, arms dangling at her sides.
If she hadn’t been wearing a sailor dress with pleated skirt, I’m not sure I’d have been able to determine whether she was male or female, and it took a second hard look to peg her age. She was about twelve or thirteen, I guessed, and a more unattractive girl would be hard to find. All knees and elbows, she had a pointed little nose, cheekbones like an Apache Indian, angry eyes hooded by bushy brows, and dark, uneven hair she must have hacked off herself with a dull knife. A battered straw hat and scuffed Oxfords completed the look.
‘Hello, Helen,’ I said as I fished the ice pick out of the utility drawer. ‘Hello,’ I added to the young person.
‘Oh, Jessie, this is Kit Riley. She’s a cousin of mine who’s staying with me for a week.’
‘Hello, Kit. How nice to have you visit with us.’
Kit’s unblinking eyes followed me to the icebox where, pick in hand, I started chipping away at the block of ice in the top compartment. Clearly, the rude little girl was unhappy with the arrangement.
‘Um, Kit’s deaf, Jessie. She can’t hear or speak. Her mother said she can read and write, though, so we need to write things down when we want to talk to her. I’ve got this notepad to use.’
‘I see,’ I said, somewhat abashed at having judged her so quickly. I took the pencil and wrote ‘Welcome Kit!’ on the pad. She glanced at it but made no response. ‘I didn’t know you had family in Los Angeles, Helen.’
‘I didn’t either. Rose Ann Riley – that’s Kit’s mother – is my mother’s cousin, so I guess that makes Kit and me second cousins, right? But I didn’t know Rose Ann lived in Los Angeles. And I’ve never met Kit before today.’
I nodded to Helen as I poured three fingers of golden liquid into each glass, added a chunk of ice, and rejoined Carl on the porch. It was top quality hooch, part of the large shipment of legal, ‘medicinal’ whiskey that David had bought for his drug stores. The best medicine money could buy. Carl probably knew it came from David’s stock, but I didn’t mention that. I didn’t want to talk about David and his arrest, not to Carl. I didn’t want to see Carl hide his satisfaction.
‘Damnation!’ he said, savoring the first sip. ‘I haven’t tasted whiskey like this in years. Thank you kindly, ma’am.’
The chair swing creaked when I sat, and I caught Carl glancing at the blue ceiling as if to make sure the chains were fastened securely. We shared the silence for a few minutes, each waiting for the other to break it. Finally I did.
‘So how did you know I was investigating the Lyceum murder?’
‘Well, now, let’s see, it was about one minute after you left the theater that those usher boys called down to headquarters all excited, asking for Bruce Vogel, the detective investigating that case, so they could tell him what they’d found. They dropped your name, of course, and he recognized it.’ I admit this gave me pause, that police detectives in downtown Los Angeles were recognizing my name when I lived over here in Hollywood, but I shrugged it off, telling myself that I couldn’t worry about policemen’s gossip. ‘Vogel knew I’d had some dealings with you in the past, so he telephoned me.’
‘So you could warn me off?’
In no rush, he savored another sip of whiskey. ‘I’ve given up trying to warn you off. You’re stubborn as a team of mules and set on getting your own way, and I know when I’m licked. I persuaded Vogel that you could help him. He didn’t want to work with a girl, but I said I would.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I want to solve this murder, and I don’t much care how it gets done or who gets the credit. And while you can be a pig-headed young lady, you also have an uncanny knack for reading people, for sensing what they are thinking. I’ve never known a person to notice things the way you do. It’s a shame the department doesn’t hire women because you’d peel the paint off most of the detectives on the force.’
I almost thanked him for the compliment, but he had more to say, and I wanted to hear it all before I let praise go to my head.
‘Since I know you’re going to keep at this with or without my approval, I’d prefer to be working with you, in case you stumble into something dangerous. What do you say?’
Now it was my turn to sip my drink and contemplate our tree-lined street. No question I could use someone on the police force to give me information about what they had discovered and what they were thinking. Carl was honest – probably the only honest cop on the Los Angeles roster – and he caught on fast. I liked Carl okay, and I trusted him as much as I could ever trust a man wearing a police uniform. A lifetime in vaudeville had left me skittish around cops. All vaudeville performers are. We’re easy targets. Traveling around
like we do from town to town, never staying in one place for longer than a week, we get blamed for lots of things we don’t do. People love vaudeville players when they’re on stage; off stage we’re no better than gypsies or tramps, always on the move. It’s simpler to pin crimes on us than to bother finding the real culprit.
I decided to accept, but I kept him waiting a while longer, just as he had. I saw his lips twitch, and I knew he had recognized my payback. ‘It’s a deal,’ I said finally. I held out my hand and we shook.
‘So, partner, tell me what you learned at the theater this afternoon.’
Having someone trustworthy to confide in can be a great relief. I knew Carl would understand what was bothering me. He was good at understanding.
‘You know what, Carl? It wasn’t what I expected. After I talked with the ushers and the projectionist, I started thinking hard about the killer. A stupid man, said one of the ushers, to wear a red coat so easily recognized. But the killer wasn’t stupid at all. He was very clever. The coat’s color was a distraction, like his disguise. The beard and mustache were designed to be noticed and to come off in a jiffy. He knew he couldn’t run downstairs after firing those shots – the ushers would hear the gunfire and try to stop a fleeing man. Much safer to run up the stairs to the balcony and take off the disguise there. Even if they had halted the picture and emptied the theater right away, he’d have had time to change his appearance. It couldn’t have taken more than a few seconds.’
‘And as it turned out, they let the picture run to the end, giving him plenty of time.’
‘Right. No one in the audience would have noticed the gunshots over the music and everyone would have been engrossed in the story – it was a Chaplin picture, after all – so no one in the balcony would have noticed a man entering from the rear door. Standing in the dark behind the last row, he could remove his disguise – the coat, eyeglasses, mustache, cap, and beard – without being seen. But what to do with these things? And more important, the gun? At first I thought he might have had an accomplice, a woman waiting in the balcony who could stash the disguise under a long skirt, maybe wrap the stuff around her thigh. That’s always a possibility, but the gun makes for a more difficult problem. He had to assume the police would search the ladies’ purses, so that was out. I imagined myself as the killer, standing behind the last row. I asked myself, What would I do with the disguise and the gun? The easiest solution would be to wipe the gun clean of fingerprints and leave everything on the floor under a seat. They would be found as soon as the balcony was searched. But that’s not what happened. And I wondered why. Why didn’t the killer just abandon the evidence and let the police find it? There would have been no way to link him to the stuff.’
I searched Carl’s face, but he made no move to respond. So I answered my own question. ‘Because he wanted to keep the disguise or the gun or both. He couldn’t count on sneaking them out, and he couldn’t leave them where the police would discover them. He needed to leave them hidden in a safe spot until he could return for them.’
‘Why would he want to keep them?’
‘I’m not sure. Guns are expensive. Or maybe this one had some sentimental value, like it belonged to his father, or something like that. Anyway, I asked myself, Where would I hide these things where they wouldn’t be found during the police sweep? I looked around and the answer was easy, because it was the only one possible. Inside the cushion of a seat. There are a couple hundred seats in that balcony, but the one he chose would probably be in the back row, behind the audience. A knife or sharp instrument would cut the upholstery where it attaches to the frame, and he could slip the gun inside with the stuffing. Anyone sitting on that particular seat cushion would feel something lumpy, but he counted on that not happening.’
‘What if there were people sitting in the back row? They would see him.’
I hadn’t spent a lifetime in vaudeville theaters without knowing where the best seats were. ‘The favorite seats in any balcony are the front rows, so it was unlikely that there would be people in the back unless every seat in the theater was taken—’
‘Or if a pair of young lovers was more interested in the dark than The Gold Rush.’
That sounded like the voice of experience, but I moved along without comment. ‘Whatever the circumstances, there is one seat in this particular theater that I promise you no one ever sits in, and that is the one on the far right facing the stage, partly behind the pillar. You can’t see the whole screen from that seat. I know. I tested it. I suspect that seat has never been used. The killer could sit himself in the seat beside that one and lean over to cut the plush upholstery without being noticed. I tried that too. And remember, it’s dark while the film is running. He slits the fabric where it meets the frame, slips the gun inside where it’s surrounded by the stuffing, and tucks the fabric back in. It won’t hold if someone sits on it, but that’s about as likely as a lightning strike. When the police search the joint, they don’t manhandle each seat, they just look underneath where they see nothing.’
‘What about the disguise and the red coat?’
‘Those would fit inside a seat cushion too but not the same one. And none of the other cushions were slit, which is why I think the killer must have carried those items out of the theater with him. A theatrical coat like the red one he wore could be made of a thin fabric like silk, and maybe he folded it flat against his chest under his shirt or inside his trouser leg.’
‘And the rest of the disguise?’
‘The mustache and beard are so small they could have been concealed anywhere on his person. The eyeglasses he may have worn or put in a pocket. Who’s suspicious of eyeglasses?’
‘And you think he returned for the gun soon after?’
‘I know he did, because the upholstery was slit and the gun wasn’t there today.’
Carl fell silent as he sipped his whiskey and mulled over what I’d told him. So far, all the sharing had gone one way. It was my turn to ask questions.
‘Does your fella Vogel have any suspects?’
He shook his head glumly.
‘Does he know that Joe Petrovitch was a wife beater?’
He nodded glumly.
‘Does he know that Simon Wallace, Barbara’s brother, beat up Joe once and threatened to kill him if he hit Barbara again?’
More nods.
‘Simon would seem to be a pretty good candidate for the role of murderer. Does Vogel know where Simon was that afternoon?’
‘Simon Wallace is a longshoreman with a tough reputation all right, but he was ringside at the fights that day. With friends who vouch for him.’
‘Friends often do that.’ I was that kind of friend. I’d already decided I would say whatever I needed to say if it would keep David out of prison, perjury be damned. ‘Isn’t the new arena located near the Lyceum?’
‘You’re suggesting Simon Wallace ran four blocks to the theater, shot Joe, waited for the end of the film and the slow exit of all the spectators, and ran back to the arena without being missed?’
‘It’s probably a coincidence that the arena and the theater are so close together, but you gotta admit, it’s one heck of a coincidence. However, I don’t think Simon Wallace pulled the trigger. The young projectionist described the killer as an average-sized man. Average height, average weight, average looks. That’s not how anyone would describe Wallace. Still, it wouldn’t be the first time someone hired a killer to do the job. Did Detective Vogel ever find any of Joe’s friends to interview?’
Carl shook his head.
‘Didn’t any of his friends come to the funeral?’
‘Unfortunately, Vogel didn’t have the chance to attend or he would have nosed around some.’
What Carl meant was Vogel didn’t bother to attend or didn’t think it worth his while. My opinion of the ineffectual Detective Vogel sank even lower. ‘I talked to Joe’s wife Barbara today. I saw the Serbian letter. Did you know about that?’
‘Yep. Officer Steve Marks tra
nslated it for Vogel. It didn’t say much. Just that some friend of his had died in New York.’
‘I’d like to know the name of Joe’s cousin who wrote it. Surely it’s in there. I just couldn’t read all those funny-looking letters.’
‘Why?’ he asked, in an echo of the question Barbara had posed an hour earlier.
‘I thought if I could get his name, I might find out an address and write him. Maybe learn something about Joe and whether he had any enemies. For all we know, Joe is a New York gangster who fled to the other side of the country – that would explain why he has no past and no friends.’
‘Until his past and his “friends” caught up with him, you mean? I’ll admit, Joe’s murder does have the flavor of a mob hit – deadly and efficient. I’ll ask Marks if he remembers the cousin’s name; if not, I’ll swing by the Petrovitch house and pick up the letter so he can see it again.’ He drained the last of his whiskey. ‘Any chance of another taste of that swell firewater before I go?’
SEVEN
‘Jessie, can I borrow your heavy blanket for a few days to make a pallet on the floor for Kit?’
Helen had appeared at the kitchen door as I sliced off two pieces of bread for a toasted cheese sandwich. Carl had taken himself away, and I was ready for something to eat. ‘Sure,’ I said, plopping a chunk of butter in the frying pan and cutting into a hunk of orange cheese. ‘You could take my bedspread too.’
Kit trailed into the kitchen behind Helen, sullen as a wild animal newly caged, but since she couldn’t understand the conversation, I felt free to say, ‘It’s nice that she’s come to stay, Helen, but what are you going to do about tomorrow?’
‘Tomorrow?’ she asked.
Kit slumped into a chair and glared at me.
‘Tomorrow. Monday. You, me, and the girls are all going to work in the morning and Kit will be home alone all day. Or does she go to school?’