And on, and on…. I had never seen a case more open and shut.
“Are you sitting down?” Fred’s voice said over the phone.
“Yeah,” I said, and I was, in my office in the Loop.
“After deliberating for two days, the six men and six women of the jury found Bud and Louise not guilty.”
I almost fell out of my chair. “What the hell?”
“The poor kids were ‘victims of circumstance,’ so says the jury-you know, like the Three Stooges? According to the jury, the Overells died due to ‘the accident of suicidal tampering with dynamite by Walter Overell.’”
“You’re shitting me….”
“Not at all. Those two fresh-faced kids got off scott free.”
I was stunned-flabbergasted. “How could a jury face such incontestable evidence and let obvious killers go free?”
“I don’t know,” Fred said. “It’s a fluke-I can’t imagine it ever happening again…not even in California.”
The trial took its toll on the lucky pair, however-perhaps because their attorneys had tried to pit Bud and Louise against each other, the girl literally turned her back on the Boy Scout, after the verdict was read, scorning his puppy-dog gaze.
“I’m giving him back his ring,” she told the swarming press.
As far as anybody knows, Louise Overell and Bud Gollum never saw each other again.
Nine months after her release, Louise married one of her jailers-I wondered if he’d been the guy who passed the love letters along to the prosecution. The marriage didn’t last long, though the couple did have a son. Most of Louise’s half million inheritance went to pay for her defense.
Bud flunked out of pre-med, headed east, married a motor-drome rider with a travelling show. That marriage didn’t last long, either, and eventually Bud got national press again when he was nabbed in Georgia driving a stolen car. He did two years in a federal pen, then worked for a radio station in the South, finally dropping out of public view.
Louise wound up in Las Vegas, married to a Bonanza Air Lines radio operator. Enjoying custody of her son, she had a comfortable home and the security of a marriage, but remained troubled. She drank heavily and was found dead by her husband in their home on August 24, 1965.
The circumstances of her death were odd-she was naked in bed, with two empty quart-sized bottles of vodka resting near her head. A loaded, cocked .22 rifle was at her feet-unfired. And her nude body was covered with bruises, as if she’d been beaten to death.
Her husband explained this by saying, “She was always falling down.” And the Deputy Coroner termed her cause of death as acute alcoholism.
I guess if Walter Overell dynamited himself to death, anything is possible.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Fact, speculation and fiction are freely mixed within this story, which is based on an actual case and uses the real names of the involved parties, with the exception of Heller and his partner Fred Rubinski (the latter a fictionalization of real-life private eye, Barney Ruditsky). I would like to acknowledge the following works, which were used as reference: The California Crime Book (1971), Robert Colby; For the Life of Me (1954), Jim Richardson; “Reporters” (1991), Will Fowler; and the Federal Writers’ Project California guide.
SHOOT-OUT ON SUNSET
The Sunset Strip-the center of Hollywood’s nightlife-lay near the heart of Los Angeles, or would have if L.A. had a heart. I’m not waxing poetic, either: postwar L.A. (circa late summer 1949) sprawled over some 452 square miles, but isolated strips of land within the city limits were nonetheless not part of the city. Sunset Boulevard itself ran from downtown to the ocean, around twenty-five miles; west on Sunset, toward Beverly Hills-roughly a mile and a half, from Crescent Heights Boulevard to Doheny Drive-the Strip threaded through an unincorporated area surrounded by (but not officially part of) the City of Angels.
Prime nightspots like the Trocadero, Ciro’s, the Mocambo, and the Crescendo shared the glittering Strip with smaller, hipper clubs and hideaway restaurants like Slapsy Maxie’s, the Little New Yorker and the Band Box. Seediness and glamour intermingled, grit met glitz, as screen legends, power brokers and gangsters converged in West Hollywood for a free-spirited, no-holds-barred good time.
The L.A. police couldn’t even make an arrest on the Strip, which was under the jurisdiction of County Sheriff Eugene Biscailuz, who cheerfully ignored both the city’s cops and its ordinances. Not that the L.A. coppers would have made any more arrests than the sheriff’s deputies: the Vice Squad was well-known to operate chiefly as a shakedown racket. A mighty bookmaking operation was centered on the Sunset Strip, and juice was paid to both the county sheriff and the city vice squad. This seemed unfair to Mickey Cohen.
The diminutive, dapper, vaguely simian Cohen was a former Ben “Bugsy” Siegel associate who had built his bookie empire on the bodies of his competitors. Rivals with such colorful names as Maxie Shaman, Benny “the Meatball” Gambino, and Tony Trombino were just a few of the violently deceased gangsters who had unwillingly made way for Mickey; and the Godfather of Southern California-Jack Dragna-could only grin and bear it and put up with Cohen’s bloody empire building. Cohen had the blessing of the east coast Combination-Luciano, Meyer Lanksy, the late Siegel’s crowd-and oldtime Prohibition-era mob boss Dragna didn’t like it. A West Coast mob war had been brewing for years.
I knew Cohen from Chicago, where in the late thirties he was strictly a smalltime gambler and general-purpose hoodlum. Our paths had crossed several times since-never in a nasty way-and I rather liked the street-smart, stupid-looking Mick. He was nothing if not colorfuclass="underline" owned dozens of suits, wore monogrammed silk shirts and made-to-order shoes, drove a $15,000 custom-built blue Caddy, lived with his pretty little wife in a $150,000 home in classy Brentwood, and suffered a cleanliness fetish that had him washing his hands more than Lady MacBeth.
A fixture of the Sunset Strip, Mick strutted through clubs spreading dough around like advertising leaflets. One of his primary hangouts was Sherry’s, a cocktail lounge slash restaurant, a favorite film-colony rendezvous whose nondescript brick exterior was offset by an ornate interior.
My business partner Fred Rubinski was co-owner of Sherry’s. Fireplug Fred-who resembled a slightly better-looking Edward G. Robinson-was an ex-Chicago cop who had moved out here before the war to open a detective agency. We’d known each other in Chicago, both veterans of the pickpocket detail, and I too had left the Windy City PD to go private, only I hadn’t gone west, young man.
At least, not until after the war. The A-1 Detective Agency-of which I, Nathan Heller, was president-had (over the course of a decade-and-change) grown from a one-man hole-in-the-wall affair over a deli on Van Buren to a suite of offices in the Monadnock Building rife with operatives, secretaries and clients. Expansion seemed the thing, and I convinced my old pal Fred to throw in with me. So, starting in late ’46, the Los Angeles branch operated out of the Bradbury Building at Third and Broadway, with Fred-now vice president of the A-1-in charge, while I of course kept the Chicago offices going. Only it seemed, more and more, I was spending time in California. My wife was an actress, and she had moved out here with our infant son, after the marriage went quickly south. The divorce wasn’t final yet, and in my weaker moments, I still had hopes of patching things up, and was looking at finding an apartment or small house to rent, so I could divide my time between L.A. and Chicago. In July of ’49, however, I was in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, for whom the A-1 handled occasional security matters, an arrangement which included the perk of free lodgings.