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…”
I got up and went to the street. Skid marks were burned into the gutter. Whether these were marks made by the car screeching to a stop, or peeling out, it was impossible to say. I took another picture.
“He was headed south,” Fowley said.
I nodded, rising.
As if the skid marks had come to life, squealing tires behind us announced a patrol car pulling in. Two uniformed cops climbed quickly out.
One of the cops was lanky, about thirty, the other was much younger, a rookie with a linebacker build; hard-eyed and pasty-faced under their uniform caps, both were undoing the safety straps of their holstered revolvers.
“Take it easy, fellas!” Fowley called out, holding up his hands; mine were already up. “I’m a reporter on the Examiner.”
Then Fowley reached inside his suitcoat pocket and the revolvers jack-in-the-boxed into the cops’ hands.
“Jesus Christ, boys,” Fowley sputtered, “I said I’m a reporter! Fowley’s the name! Let me show you my i.d.”
“Get ’em up,” the older one said, then to his partner added, “Check his i.d.”
The young one made his way over to reach inside Fowley’s coat and have a look.
“He’s okay,” the young cop said.
Nobody bothered to check my i.d.-the camera in my hand was apparently sufficient: I was an Examiner photographer.
Then the younger cop angled over toward the weeds, to get a gander at the drunk woman disturbing the peace. “Oh my God-Mike… Mike!”
“What?”
“This girl-poor girl, Jesus Mary, somebody’s cut her in half!”
The older cop, holstering his revolver, had a look at the body in the weeds, joining his partner, who was weaving like he was the drunk.
“Get on the radio, Jerry,” Mike told the boy, steadying him with a hand to a shoulder. “Get put straight through to the watch commander. Have ’em get a team over here pronto.”
Jerry nodded, but paused, thinking about whether or not to puke, didn’t, and-on unsteady legs-somehow got over to the patrol car, reaching in for the dash mike, calling in a dead body “at the 390 location-probable homicide.”
That seemed a fair assessment.
“Monitoring police calls, Mr. Fowley?” the older cop asked.
Fowley shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, hell, it’s legal, Officer.”
“Compromising a crime scene isn’t.”
Fowley was reaching in his pants pocket; but this time no revolver jumped into the hand of the man in blue. “Listen, Officer… I’d like to phone this in to my city editor.”
“You just stay put.” But somehow the cop didn’t sound like he meant it; a ritual was in progress.
Fowley handed the guy a folded-up tenspot. “Maybe you got change for this buck.”
The patrolman took the tenspot, put it in his pocket, and came back with a nickel, which he flipped to Fowley.
“Go make your call,” the cop said.
This would have never happened in Chicago-a buck would have covered it. Maybe two.
“Your photographer stays,” the cop said.
“Fine,” Fowley said, “swell, not a problem.” Then he turned to me, took the Speed Graphic out of my hands, and said, “I’ll be right back.”
“Thanks,” I said, just thrilled to be left here on deposit.
Then I was alone with the two cops, and the dead girl, under a gray sky, waiting for all the other cops in L.A. to show up.
“Poor kid,” the older cop said to the younger one, shaking his head. “That was a nice body ’fore it got butchered. What a waste.”
Jerry swallowed; he was as pale as she was. “Geez… I wonder who she is?”
“You mean you wonder who she was,” the older cop said.
I wonder.
2
I suppose I would have been happier hearing my bride say she was pregnant if my girl friend hadn’t phoned that same day with similar news.
Former girl friend, that is-what kind of heel do you take me for?
“This is Elizabeth,” the voice on the phone had said. The voice was soft, low, husky, vaguely refined.
It was early on a Thursday evening, six days prior to that vacant lot in Leimert Park.
I was in the living room of our bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel and my wife was sitting on the sofa next to me. The bungalow, a modest affair with a marble fireplace and French doors looking out on a private patio, was outfitted in plush furnishings that matched the peachy-pink walls and pink-and-green floral carpeting. My wife’s dainty yet curvaceous frame was outfitted in a dark green bolero slacks suit with a white top; her open-toe-sandaled feet were on the Queen Anne coffee table, ankles crossed.
“Who?” I asked the phone. The voice had been familiar but I didn’t immediately place it.
“You know-Beth. Beth Short.”
“Oh!” I glanced at my wife, who glanced back at me, pausing as she leafed through the latest Silver Screen magazine, in that chilling “Who is that, dear?” manner known by all men who’ve received a phone call from a woman while their wife is in the room.
“I take it you remember me,” said the sultry voice on the phone.
“Yes. Of course.”
And here is why looking at my wife reminded me of who the girl on the phone was: they looked alike.
The girl on the phone had lustrous brown hair so dark it almost appeared black; so did Peggy. The girl on the phone was not quite as petite as Peggy, but they had similarly creamy pale skin, slender shapely figures, and big beautiful eyes (Beth’s were blue-green, Peggy’s were Elizabeth Taylor violet). Both of them had fabulous smiles, slightly chubby chipmunk cheeks, with movie-star features reminiscent of screen songbird Deanna Durbin. And both liked to wear white flowers in their dark hair.
I had known the former Peggy Hogan-my bride of almost a month-since 1938; but we had gotten serious in the summer of ’45, and soon were more or less engaged; then by the end of the next summer, we had broken it off. Rather, Peggy had broken it off, and gone gallivanting to Las Vegas to work for a friend of mine. Soon she and that “friend” were romantically inclined, which is to say reclined, so for about three and a half months-roughly the fall of ’46-I had been a spurned, rather bitter lover.
And like so many a man enraged with the woman who cast him aside, I had promptly gotten myself involved with another woman whose striking physical resemblance to my lost love would allow me to bask in equal parts joy and misery.