Richardson exhaled smoke, impatiently. “They didn’t send ’em Pony Express.”
Now a slow grin began to form on Fowley’s pleasant bulldog puss. “That’s what you think, boss. You got any idea what’s going on out on the East Coast right now?”
“Is the East Coast my business? I’m city desk.”
“Snowstorms are grounding planes all along the Atlantic seaboard. Washington, D.C.? They’re buried to their ass in two feet of snow.”
Richardson’s eyes were narrowing, even the wall-eyed one.
Fowley was saying gleefully, “They’ll be lucky to get to Chicago. It’ll take days, maybe even a week to get those prints to Washington for identification.”
Dragon smoke poured out of Richardson’s nostrils. “Then why are you grinning like the cat that ate the canary?”
Fowley was damn near bouncing on his chair. “You want to get the cops on our side? Let’s offer them the SoundPhoto machine! We can send the prints over the goddamn wire!”
I felt sick; I thought I might puke… maybe I could do it right on that blowup and cover that grotesque picture up…
“Prints over the wire?” Richardson was on his feet again. “Can that be done? Has it ever been done?”
Fowley shrugged, grandly. “I don’t think it has been done, but I don’t see why it couldn’t be-if it works for a pic of Betty Grable’s gams, or DiMaggio’s ugly mug, why wouldn’t it work for fingerprints?”
Nodding slowly, sucking smoke, Richardson smiled and said, “Why wouldn’t it…”
It wasn’t exactly a question.
“And,” Fowley pointed out, “the SoundPhoto is something we got that the cops don’t.”
“Yeah… yeah.” Richardson pointed with his cigarette between thumb and forefinger. “And I could call Ray Richards at our Washington bureau and have him deliver them to the FBI.”
Fowley was nodding, grinning. “And we share it with the cops on the condition that the other papers don’t get the info until we’ve run our morning edition.”
The wall-eyes bugged again. “Fowley, there’s only one thing wrong with that idea.”
“Yeah? What?”
“ I didn’t think of it… Back to your desks, check if our boys in Leimert Park have phoned in with anything. We should have Burke’s sketch in a few minutes, and you can start showing it around.”
“Where?” one of the reporters asked.
“She was a good-looking piece, before she got turned into two pieces. Show the sketch at the studios, the casting agencies, up and down Hollywood Boulevard-do I have to do all the goddamn fucking thinking around here? Go, go, go!”
They went, went, went… but when I started to rise, Richardson held up a hand in a “stop” motion.
“Nate,” Richardson said, and he came over and looked right at me, hand settling on my shoulder just about the same time his left eye caught up with his right. “Stick around-we’ll talk.”
“We can hash out this p.r. business later,” I said, “when it’s not so frantic around here-”
“Yeah, yeah… but just sit back down, give me a few minutes. I gotta call the Hearst Washington bureau, gotta phone the FBI… Want me to get you some coffee?”
“No-no, that’s okay.”
“Sit, sit, sit.”
I sat, sat, sat. Alone in the editorial chamber, I wondered what the hell I was still doing here, right smack in the middle of an investigation into a crime for which I might momentarily become a suspect. My head start had evaporated, or likely soon would, thanks to Fowley’s wirephoto brainstorm and the FBI’s 104 million sets of fingerprints.
All the while, the grisly photo of that poor butchered girl glistened on the table, taunting me… and then, as if Elizabeth Short herself had whispered in my ear, it finally dawned on me that right smack in the middle was still the best place for me. With the jump Richardson had on this case, I could be in a position to know whether Beth’s murder was in any way leading back to me.
And if Fowley’s slant on sending those prints via wirephoto really did i.d. the corpse as Elizabeth Short, the cops would owe them bigtime-meaning most everything the cops had would be shared with Richardson and his boys.
Much as I wanted to flee the Examiner, like Stepin Fetchit exiting a haunted house, I knew the best way not to be a suspect in this murder would be to solve the fucking thing-to find the maniac responsible. If I could lend my skills to the investigation, help bring it to a quick resolution, I could clear myself before I needed clearing, before anybody had even tumbled to my connection to the girl.
After all, I had known her in Chicago, hadn’t even seen her in L.A., the only contact being that single phone call.
So what I needed to do now was find some way to stay a part of this… to stay on the Examiner ’s team…
I was pondering that when Richardson came back in, as usual lighting up a new cigarette off an old one. He shut the door, unintentionally slamming it a little, glass rattling-and rattling me.
But then the city editor settled in next to me and again placed a friendly hand on my shoulder.
“We have a singular opportunity, Nate,” Richardson said, and smiled, and looked at me sideways-of course, he always looked at you sideways, even when he was looking at you frontways.
“What would that be… Jim?”
“This whole notion of ballyhooin’ your agency in the Examiner? It’s blossomed from a nice little mutually beneficial arrangement into a once-in-a-lifetime golden opportunity.”
“Really.”
“Oh, yeah. I believe this ‘Werewolf’ case is gonna be the biggest thing since the Lindbergh baby. Fifty years from today, they’ll still be talking about the L.A. ‘Werewolf’ slayer.”
“It really ought to be ‘Vampire.’ ”
The wall-eyes flinched. “Huh?”
“She was drained of blood. That’s not a werewolf-it’s a vampire. Also, ‘Werewolf’ slayer sounds to me like somebody’s going around slaying werewolves…”
Richardson patted his chest. “Leave the wordsmithing to us, Heller-your job is investigating.”
Perfect-this was going to be his idea…
Playing reluctant, I said, “But this isn’t my case. And you know how the cops frown on private detectives working an active murder.”
“I’m putting every man I can spare on this thing.” He swiveled to look right at me-one eye at a time. His smile was just slightly crazed. “Nate, I’ve just talked to the Chief on the phone… and he’s as excited about this story as I am. Sees the full potential.”
By “the Chief,” Richardson meant Old Man Hearst himself.
“We’ll run circles around every other paper in town,” Richardson was saying, “and the cops, too-we’ve got expense accounts that make their allocations look silly.”
“Are you saying you want to hire me, Jim?”
“You’re goddamn right I want to hire you.”
“I’m not a reporter, you know-and you’re damn lucky those pictures turned out halfway decent…”
So to speak.
“Listen, Nate, the difference between a reporter and a private detective is no wider than a gnat’s eyelash. Hell, when I was in between reporting jobs, I worked as a private eye myself.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Some of my best friends are private eyes-Harry Raymond, remember him?”
“Got blown up in a car, helping you try to bring down Mayor Shaw?”
“That’s the one. Hell of a guy.”
This was all so reassuring.
Richardson sucked on his cigarette, then said, “Considering the possible scope of this thing, me sending out crews of reporters and photogs, I’m gonna be shorthanded as hell-stay and help investigate this thing, Nate. You and Fowley’ll be the guys who were in on it from the start. You stick with Fowley, and keep playing photographer.”
“I told you, I’m no photographer, Jim.”
“Well, pretend you’re peeping through a window-we can always hang drapes on a Speed Graphic, to make you feel at home.” He laughed, raspily, and it turned into a cigarette cough, after which he continued: “We’re gonna solve this damn case, Nate, and hand the murdering son of a bitch to the cops on a platter… and when we’re done, we’ll be the only paper that anybody in this town bothers reading, and you’ll be the most famous private eye in America.”