Angel in black nh-11 Read online

  Angel in black

  ( Nathan Heller - 11 )

  Max Allan Collins

  Max Allan Collins

  Angel in black

  1

  The two pieces of her lay porcelain-white in the ankle-high grass and weeds of a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue, like the upper and lower sections of a discarded marionette. No strings could ever reanimate this disassembled figure, however-a sadistic puppeteer had made certain of that.

  “Jesus frig,” Fowley said, as ashen as the bisected corpse that lay, bizarrely posed, alongside the sidewalk. “Where’s a fuckin’ photographer when you need one?”

  We were in a neighborhood of Los Angeles called Leimert Park, an area where development had been stalled by the war, and the weedy lots retained sidewalks, driveways and fire hydrants, as if the houses had been whisked away by a particularly tidy tornado.

  “Yeah,” I said, “Richardson wouldn’t want to leave entertainment value like that just layin’ around.”

  James H. Richardson was Fowley’s boss, the city editor of Hearst’s morning Examiner, and Bill Fowley-son of a legendary New York American editor-was one of about twelve guys who fancied themselves Richardson’s star reporter.

  A rumpled gray porkpie hat sitting tight on his round skull, Fowley had the same reddish brown hair as me, only his was cropped close to the scalp, like a guy going to the electric chair. He was small, a good five inches shorter than my six feet, and forty pounds lighter than my one-ninety; he was almost swimming in a baggy light brown suit, wind whipping it-I wasn’t swimming in my tan double-breasted gabardine, but the wind was making waving flags out of my pantlegs, too.

  “What am I thinkin’?” Fowley said, pacing at the feet of the spread-eagled, on-its-back bisected corpse. “Felix keeps a spare Speed Graphic in the trunk. Here…”

  He lobbed me the keys and I caught ’em.

  “… grab it outa there, Heller. You know how to use a friggin’ Speed Graphic, don’t you?”

  I was not a reporter, star or otherwise. I was, and for that matter am, Nathan Heller, at that time president of the A-1 Detective Agency of Chicago, which is to say a private detective. And since a good deal of my business, over the years, had been divorce work, yes, I knew how to use a friggin’ Speed Graphic.

  But I didn’t feel like shooting grim pinup photos of a nude, dead, once-beautiful woman, and declined, graciously.

  “Fuck you, Fowley,” I said. “Take your own ghoulish goddamn pictures.”

  Whirling, Fowley-who looked like a pleasant bulldog, only right now his expression wasn’t all that pleasant-said, “You want to keep me happy, don’t you, gumshoe? Or don’t you and your partner still want that free publicity?”

  “No need to get shitty about it.”

  “Maybe you cheap bastards would rather hire a p.r. agent than get the Examiner ’s goodwill, for fucking free.”

  I unlocked the trunk and fetched the camera. Fowley was normally an amiable joe, but he had just caught front-page fever: the bisected body in this vacant lot had all the earmarks of a headline story… a beautiful woman, butchered by some maniac. Sex and murder-ideal breakfast reading.

  The morning was almost cold under a gun-metal sky, the breeze bristling the weeds into tickling the two halves of the girl, who-unlike the rest of the scattered refuse, rusty cans, disintegrating cardboard, broken bottles-had been carefully arranged, as if by an artist; buzzing flies circled this lurid masterpiece, critics having a closer look.

  Her arms were above her head, as if someone had poked a gun at her and demanded money; her legs were spread wide, as if in carnal invitation. But there was nothing inviting about this young woman, not anymore. Her raven hair a tangle of damp curls, she had been cleaved at the waist, the two sections crudely aligned, the top half of her angling somewhat into the lot while her left foot pointed to the nearby sidewalk. Her lily-white flesh had a waxy look, and appeared strangely clean, despite slashes to her face and to either well-formed breast, and to one shapely thigh; a nasty vertical gash extended from her navel to her wispy pubic thatch.

  “Not much of a bush on her,” Fowley pointed out.

  “Jesus, Fowley.”

  “All I mean is, she’s just a kid,” he said, shaking his head as he scribbled in his notepad. The buzz of flies sounded like fluorescent lighting shorting out. “She could be fifteen.”

  “Or twenty,” I said, and the bisected corpse strobed even whiter under the Speed Graphic’s flashbulb.

  In the ten or eleven inches separating the two sections of her, green grass waved in the wind, except where her distended liver matted it down.

  A sick feeling boiled in the pit of my stomach. I was not a novice to crime scenes; I had seen my share of grisly homicides. I was thirty-eight years old and an ex-cop and a combat veteran and it took a hell of a lot to make me sick.

  But this was the worst, most brutal, as well as saddest homicide victim I’d ever seen-a once-lovely young woman, carved in two, then arranged with thumb-to-the-nose glee by the sick fuck responsible. Yet there was more to my reaction than the tragic loss of young life and the grotesque sadism that had caused it.

  Memories were stirring in me. I had been part of an investigation in Cleveland, not quite ten years before, and had been at a similar crime scene, a rubble- and rubbish-infested dump in the middle of town, where the torso of a young woman had been found. In some respects that one had been even worse: the head, the arms, legs, and feet had been severed and scattered about the dump like so much garbage, making a puzzle out of a human being to be reassembled by the police. The murder had been one of thirteen torso slayings attributed to the same maniac.

  And we had found that psychotic son of a bitch, my friend Eliot Ness and I, and we had given him a lifetime enrollment in an Ohio laughing academy-the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run, the newshounds had called him. He was safely tucked away in a padded suite; nonetheless, the resemblance of this bisected torso slaying to the Butcher’s modus operandi stirred memories in me, and nausea.

  When that memory had passed, as I kept playing photographer for Fowley (“Here, I’ll stand blocking her dirty parts, Heller, and you shoot from behind me, and we’ll get something Richardson can goddamn publish”), another memory, jogged by the windblown grass, kicked in…

  After the Japs had come at us in the morning, up a slope of golden kunai grass, screaming “Banzai,” machine guns chattering, we cut them down with our M-1s and they dropped into the grass, scattered about like ragdolls, bodies in the weeds, flung there by our bullets, bodies barely visible, and that afternoon as we waited for the next wave of them, their dead lay puffing and ripening in the sun, sending a sweet foul wind riffling through the grass…

  I lowered the camera, turned away.

  “Heller! Nate… are you okay?”

  I nodded.

  “Shit, man, you look whiter than she does.”

  When I turned back around, Fowley-porkpie hat shoved back on his head now-was hovering over the fly-attended corpse, way too close.

  Anger blotted out the nausea, and I charged over and yanked him back. “What the hell are you doing? You’re tainting a crime scene! Stay away from her!”

  Close up like this, I noticed for the first time the purple bruises and rope burns around her wrists and ankles. She’d been tied up, probably tortured.

  “I was just gonna close her eyes,” Fowley said. He looked shaken.

  That was when I got my first real look at the girl’s face; I’d been avoiding it, I guess, because the sadistic artist had reserved perhaps his most grotesque touch for her high-cheekboned, movie-star-pretty countenance: she had been slashed ear to ear, widening her mouth into a garish clown leer of death.

  And her eye
s-which were of a lovely clear mountain-lake blue-were indeed half-lidded open.

  “Go ahead,” I said numbly.

  Fowley knelt, closed the woman’s eyes gingerly, gently, and moved away. I already had.

  In fact, I was standing in the street, legs unsteady, weaving. Because the worst memory of all the memories invoked by this gruesome crime scene had come to me, on that closer look at her.

  I knew this girl.

  Jesus Christ, I knew this girl!

  Detectives do not believe in coincidence. Some of us believe in fate, a few even believe in God; but none of us believe in coincidence-when we see it, we know it’s not true, we know something smells, we know somebody’s trying to fuck us.

  Nevertheless, my knowing this girl, whose dead body we’d stumbled onto, was a coincidence, pure and simple-and I would just have to live with it (and you will just have to take my word for it). Trouble was, this pure and simple coincidence would look impure and complex to the cops.

  And as for reporters and coincidence-newspapermen like Fowley, here, and his boss Richardson-they would hang me out to dry, by the short and curlies.

  So how did I come to be standing in this vacant lot in the University section of Los Angeles, over the bisected corpse of a girl I had known? Let’s start with what a Chicago boy was doing in California in the first place-the usual reasons: business and pleasure. The business aspect had to do with the branch of the A-1 Detective Agency I was opening, going partners with Fred Rubinski.

  Fred was an ex-cop from Chicago who’d been running his own one-man agency out of the Bradbury Building in downtown L.A. since before the war; he also had a piece of a Sunset Strip restaurant and good connections with the movie industry, both studios and stars. He was at the point where he needed to expand, much as I had done a few years earlier. Throwing in together would benefit both of us. So Fred was now Vice President of the A-1, with offices in Chicago and Los Angeles; and we were looking toward New York.

  I’d arranged to stay for at least a month, getting the new partnership up and running, during which time-here’s the pleasure part-I would be on an extended honeymoon. Today-January 15, 1947-was in fact our one month anniversary, the former Peggy Hogan and me.

  My wife and I were staying in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel-expensive digs, but the A-1 had landed a security-consultant contract with the hotel management, and this was a perk, a hell of a nice one. Less than half an hour before I found myself shooting photos of a bisected nude corpse in a Leimert Park vacant lot, Fowley had picked me up at my hotel, after breakfast, in a blue ’47 Ford.

  I had the use of one of the agency’s cars, but my wife would be taking it to go shopping (I prayed it wasn’t Rodeo Drive again), so Fowley was escorting me to his paper, where he and I and Jim Richardson were supposed to work out the exclusive arrangement whereby the A-1 fed information to the Examiner in exchange for ongoing, positive publicity, starting with a big spread that would announce the merger of the Rubinski and Heller agencies.

  “You understand, Bill,” I’d told him, as he made his leisurely way east along Venice Boulevard, “the A-1’s clients’ interests come first.”

  “Do I look like a T-bone steak?”

  “Not particularly.”

  “Then spare me the friggin’ A-1 sauce.” Fowley said this with a friendly sneer, cigarette dangling. “Sure, a couple Chicago boys like you would never think of sellin’ out a client.”

  “Well, we wouldn’t. It’s not good for business.”

  He shrugged. “My biggest worry about this arrangement is your pal Bugsy Siegel.”

  I shifted in my seat, spoke up over the police radio calls Fowley was monitoring. “He’s not my pal, and I wouldn’t call him ‘Bugsy’ to his face, if I were you.”

  “Didn’t you work with him in Vegas?”

  “I worked for Ben Siegel in Vegas, yes. Did a security job at the Flamingo. Taught his little private police force how to nab pickpockets, and stopped the pilfering that was nickel-and-diming him.”

  “Yeah? So who was doing the pilfering?”

  “His little private police force.”

  Fowley sailed his spent cigarette out the window, spraying sparks of color into the gray morning. “I’m just warning you that the boss has a hard-on against Siegel-they’re blood enemies.”

  “I thought Richardson relished the idea of my clients including the likes of Capone and Frank Nitti.”

  “Oh, he loves that. Chicago gangsters are colorful. It’s the West Coast variety Jim hates-they’re criminals, y’know… except for Jim’s pal Mickey Cohen, of course.”

  Fowley’s Ford was approaching Crenshaw Boulevard when a crackling voice on the shortwave said, “A 390 W down, 415, empty lot one block east of Crenshaw between 39th and Coliseum. Please investigate-Code Two.”

  Code Two meant proceed quickly but without red light or siren; a 390 W was a drunk woman, and 415 was a public disturbance. This all added up to a drunk woman passed out in a vacant lot.

  Fowley reacted like an old firehorse hearing a familiar bell. “Huh! We got a naked drunk dame, just a block or so over! Let’s have a look…”

  “Stop the presses. What the hell makes you think she’s naked?”

  “She’s disturbing the peace and she’s unconscious; ’bout the only way a broad can pull that off is to pass out in the buff. Where’s your sense of adventure, Heller? Maybe she’s a looker!”

  “Christ, Fowley, I don’t wanna follow you on some wild goose-”

  But he was already turning south on Crenshaw; next it was east on 39th, where he started to crawl through the barren war-zone landscape of vacant lots, some of which were staked off every thirty feet or so. Traffic was nil.

  “Pretty wide-open spaces,” Fowley said. “See that lot over there? That’s where Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey used to put the circus on, before the war.”

  “There she is,” I said, pointing to a bare white foot in the weeds.

  Fowley slowed, craned his neck. “Hell, that’s not a woman-that’s a store mannequin or something…”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  There’d been no sign of whoever called it in to the cops; not surprising a citizen would take a pass on getting involved in the likes of this.

  Now-some minutes later-Fowley was scribbling frantically as I took a few more flash pictures, the Speed Graphic spitting blackened flashbulbs onto the crime scene; any moment a patrol car, having heard the same police call, would roll up and take over. Me, I wished they’d hurry.

  But, as I may have mentioned, I was a detective, and, for better or worse, that’s how I looked at things. And I heard myself saying to Fowley, “You notice anything weird about this?”

  Flies were blowing me the raspberry.

  Fowley looked up from his notepad, raising his eyebrows, smirking as he said, “Oh hell no. This is about as routine as they come, Heller.”

  “Where’s the blood?”

  “The blood…” His eyes slitted, then widened. “Where the hell is the blood?” Suddenly Fowley was looking around like somebody who misplaced his car keys.

  From the sidewalk, I pointed to the two-part corpse. “Look at the wounds-no signs of coagulation.”

  Nodding slowly, Fowley said, “The grass isn’t bloody around the body, either-not even… you know, between the halves.”

  “No sign of any other internal fluids, either. See that grayish white knob? That’s her spine. It looks like some organs have been removed.”

  “What is this guy? A friggin’ vampire?”

  “Maybe a werewolf.”

  “Hey, that’s good!” Eyes popping, he scribbled that down. “That’ll make a swell headline… ‘Werewolf Murderer Butchers Beauty’!”

  “Mention me at the Pulitzer dinner.” Tentatively, I stepped closer; thinking like a detective gave me distance, and kept the nausea in check. “Can you see that vertebrae? Lower part of her.”

  “What about it?”

  “No bone
granules. It’s a clean cut-not sawed… severed.”

  “Heller, look at this…”

  “Get back, Fowley! You’re too close.”

  He was waving away the flies. “Aren’t those… bristles? God, they’re embedded right in her skin. Like off a wire brush!”

  “You may be right, and that would make sense. There’s no way she was killed here. This isn’t a murder scene-it’s a dump site. She was bisected, drained of blood, scrubbed clean, and carted and dumped here, off the main drag, probably before dawn.”

  I looked at the gray sky, wondering if it would keep its threat of rain and wash this lot clean of evidence. There was no rumble of thunder and this was, after all, California; it had been three weeks since it last rained. Still, maybe I needed to keep playing photographer…

  Slowly I scanned the vacant lot and its scant scattering of refuse; then my eyes fixed on a discarded cement sack, its limp gray cloth draped in the grass a few feet from the girl’s head. Going over to it, but trying to keep my distance and not further pollute the scene, I saw on the cheap gray material a few droplets of what might have been dried, watery blood.

  “This may have been used to haul one half of her,” I said, and pointed out the possible blood drops to Fowley. “Not inside the sack, more like using it as a sling.”

  “Brother,” Fowley said, snugging his porkpie back down, “she musta been drained damn near dry.”

  I took a flash picture, retrieved the spent bulb.

  Returning to the sidewalk, I said, “There’s a few drops here, too…” I recorded that with the Speed Graphic, then kept looking. “Hey! This might be a piece of luck…”

  On the driveway to a house that had never been built was the dried-blood imprint of a shoe’s heel, half of one, anyway, partly obscured by an automobile tire track. Probably a man’s shoe, possibly a woman’s oxford.

  “So our killer pulled in here,” I said, kneeling over the partial heel print in the driveway, taking a flash picture, “made two trips hauling ‘garbage’ out of his trunk, making this heel print…” I glanced toward the street. “… then he took the hell off, backing over and partially smearing it…”