Richardson was trying to snap his boys back to attention, with the gallows humor so typical of reporters and, for that matter, cops.
But his boys-seated here and there around the big table-were staring at the grisly body, still in shock.
“What about the Mocambo, boss?” Fowley asked, the only reporter not unnerved. He was referring to a heist at the famous nightspot that had made recent headlines.
“Wrap fish in it,” Richardson said with a snort. “The heisters are behind bars, and this murderer, this wonderful fiend, is very much at large.” He sighed smoke admiringly as he surveyed the photo. “Ain’t she a pip?”
No one disagreed; no one said anything.
Sensing the pall, Richardson affected a football coach tone: “Are we going to let that prick Hansen take this away from us? Are the cops gonna control this story, or are we?”
“We need something on them,” Fowley said.
The other reporters nodded, one chiming in with, “Yeah, yeah we do.”
But their editor was shaking his head, the coach disappointed in his boys.
“Naw-pull your heads out of your asses. That fucking Hansen is as clean as he is press hungry.” Richardson spoke with authority: he had helped take down more than one local crooked administration.
“I don’t mean corruption,” Fowley said. “We give them something-so they owe us.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. If we’re out there in force, we may turn something big up before they do. It’s like you always say, boss-the cops in this town couldn’t find a horse turd in a box of chocolates.”
That got a few nervous laughs from the boys, but not from Richardson. “Yeah, that’s what I always say, and it’s true of most of the cops-but not the Hat.”
I had been trying to just fade into the woodwork, but I couldn’t let this pass.
“What’s this nonsense about Hansen being ‘clean’?” I asked, the Chicago cop in me offended. “Put him on the damn payroll, already!”
Next to me, Fowley shook his head. “The boss is right, Nate-the Hat’s a straight arrow, so clean he squeaks.”
“Yeah? And where’d he get those fancy threads?”
“Paid for them.”
“On a cop’s salary?”
Fowley shrugged. “Harry’s wife has money, plus he earns income off the textbooks he’s written. He’s also sold his life story to Hollywood two or three times… The guy has solved hundreds of murders.”
“What, like the Peete case?” I looked at their city editor, standing at the head of the table like a patriarch getting ready to carve a turkey. “Come on, Richardson-you were there back in ’44-you saw that pompous prick steal my thunder.”
Richardson waved at me dismissively. “What’s the difference whether Hansen solved those cases, or just convinced the world he did? He’s put himself up on a pedestal like no other dick in town, but I’ll be goddamned if we let him take our story from us.”
“You know, boss,” Fowley said, something sly in his voice, “the Hat ain’t partnered with McCreadie anymore.”
“No?” This perked Richardson up. “Who’s Hansen’s new Watson, then?”
“Finis Brown,” Fowley said.
“Fat Ass Brown?” one of the other reporters said. “Well, he’s no fuckin’ straight arrow.”
“Hardly. As of a few months ago, he was Mickey Cohen’s bag man.”
Cohen, who I’d met, had taken over for Ben Siegel in Los Angeles when Ben shifted his base of operations to Vegas. The bagman role Fowley was referring to probably meant Sergeant Brown was the local mob’s payoff conduit to scores of bent cops.
Shifting in my hard chair, I said offhandedly, “So him you could put on the payroll.”
“Yeah, for what good it’ll do us,” Richardson said.
“What do you mean?”
“Hansen’s no fool-if we know Brown is bent, don’t you think the Hat does, too? He’ll likely use Fat Ass as an errand boy and keep him in the dark as to what’s really going on.”
“If we could identify her before they do,” Fowley said, drumming his fingers on the scarred table, “that would put Donahoe in our pocket, and give us leverage on the Hat.”
And, of course, a man who could have identified her sat among them-and I was starting to think that by keeping it to myself, I was just digging myself a deeper hole.
“What are you planning to do, Bill?” one of the reporters asked Fowley, flipping a finger toward the still moisture-shiny blowup of the bisected corpse. “Show this around and see if somebody can identify that?”
Fowley had no answer, but his boss did.
Richardson said, “I’m already on top of that. I have a staff artist working with Heller’s photographs to see if he can come up with a sketch.”
“Good,” Fowley said.
Another of the reporters asked, “Which staff artist, boss?”
“Howard Burke.”
The reporter nodded. “Yeah, well, Howie’s a good artist, all right-but do you really expect him to be able to come up with a representation of what she looked like before her face got carved up and beat to shit?”
“Yes, I do-the bone structure, the eyes, even the general shape of the mouth, despite that gash… plenty for an artist to go on.” Richardson leaned on the table with his palms and his smile was almost as ghastly as the corpse’s. “And then we could give that sketch to the cops, to show Captain Donahoe and Detective Hansen just how helpful we’re trying to be.”
“Boss, I’m with you on this,” Fowley said, “but they got their own artists, remember. If Howie lucks out and comes up with a good likeness, I say screw giving it to the cops-we run with the pic in this extra edition and encourage phone calls from our loyal readers and see if we can identify her before the cops can. We hand them a name, they’ll start cooperating all the way down the line.”
A name. They wanted a name Elizabeth Short and the only guy in this town who could give it to them Elizabeth Short besides the killer was sitting right beside them. I knew who she was Elizabeth Short and the cops didn’t, which gave me a head start if I wanted to try to crack this thing Elizabeth Short before they made me as a suspect, which couldn’t happen till they figured out who the hell she was Elizabeth Short but first I had to shake loose of these newshounds…
One of whom was saying, “Bill, you can forget that. The Hat’s probably identified the dame by her fingerprints, already-that’s where he made his reputation, in the Records Bureau. They say he could trace fingerprints faster than a team of ten.”
“You’re almost right, Ed,” Richardson said, and he finally sat down. He folded his hands, prayerfully. “I just had a call from Sid Hughes, who tailed the Black Maria over to the morgue.”
So they had the same slang for the black morgue wagon in L.A. as in Chicago. And when they arrested you, they probably threw you in a paddy wagon, here, too…
“Sid’s sticking to the coroner like toilet paper to a shoe,” Richardson said, panning his gaze around on his boys, the slow eye taking its sweet time catching up. “And word is Hansen’s already eliminated this girl from local fingerprint files.”
“That’s impossible!” Fowley said. “They haven’t even had time to autopsy the body!”
“That’s a fact-the coroner took one look at her and said, ‘This can wait till after lunch!’” Richardson was lighting up a new cigarette off the old one. “But they did take time to print the half of her body that had fingers on it… and a card’s winging its way to the FBI for identification right now.”
The FBI had 104 million Americans on record in their neatly cataloged, cross-referenced files. Would Elizabeth Short be in there? I wondered.
“You’re assuming the girl was in trouble,” I said quietly.
Richardson’s wall-eyes settled on me, one at a time. “Well, we know she was in trouble at least once, Heller-when some bastard decided to take her on a date that was so lousy, she just went to pieces… Anyway, she may have worked at a war plant, or some other defense-related-”
“Boss!” Fowley was sitting up, like a kid in bed who woke from a bad dream. “Are you saying they sent the prints airmail special delivery, to the FBI-in Washington, D.C.?”