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.”