Masuto spoke slowly and chose his words carefully. The last thing in the world he desired at this moment was a feud with the Los Angeles police. “Perhaps Beckman was assertive. It’s the way he works. But he doesn’t push people around, certainly not Los Angeles policemen. No one does. I think Captain Kennedy knows that. It’s quite true that the boy’s body was in Los Angeles, but he wasn’t killed there. His body was dumped out of a car. We think the boy was involved in a murder case, and the killer executed him to get rid of a witness.”
“What murder case?”
Masuto spelled out the events of the day, detail for detail. When he had finished, there was a long moment of silence, and then Kennedy said, “And what about the chemist?”
“We are dealing here,” Masuto said, “with a pure botulism toxin, not with decayed food, but with the toxin that the botulinus produces. Your man at the poison lab assured me that only a trained chemist could produce it. Well, what kind of a chemist would risk his freedom and career to produce a deadly poison-a poison which he would have to surmise would be used to kill people? What kind of a chemist would be vulnerable? Almost certainly a chemist mixed up in the dope rackets. The odds are that he would have a criminal record. My own guess is that we are dealing with a killer who is indifferent to human life and allows nothing to stand in his way. He gets rid of witnesses. That’s why he killed the Chicano kid, so my analysis was not entirely fortuitous. I guessed that sooner or later he would kill the chemist. He tried the botulism, and it failed. Now, something else. Was the chemist killed with a twenty-two pistol?”
“That’s right,” Bones said grudgingly.
“Shot behind the ear?”
“Yes.”
“No sound of the shot?”
“No, no sound of a shot,” Kennedy said.
“Have you got anything?”
“Not a damn thing. The chemist’s name is Leroy Kender. He served time for refining horse. Then he was picked up for angel dust, but that didn’t stick. He lived alone in a furnished room on Sixth Street. He had almost nine hundred dollars in his pocket, so it wasn’t robbery.”
“It wasn’t robbery,” Masuto said. “This one doesn’t touch the money in his victims’ pockets.”
“That’s rich blood,” Kennedy said.
“Very rich. Fingerprints?”
“We’ll have plenty of fingerprints. But what the hell good are fingerprints unless you got something to match them with?” Kennedy asked.
“This one doesn’t leave fingerprints. But you have something to match if you want it,” Masuto said.
“What’s that?”
“The bullet that killed the Chicano boy you found on Mulholland and the bullet that killed the chemist. I have a notion they’ll match up.”
“Okay,” Kennedy said. “I’m glad you leveled with us, Masuto. Maybe we had a reason to be sore, maybe not. If you catch up with this killer-well, we got our own case against him.”
“I’ll stay in touch,” Masuto said.
“And keep us informed,” Wainwright said. “We’re in this together.”
When the two Los Angeles cops had left, Wainwright shook his head and said, “One day, Masao, you’ll get us in deep, and I swear when you do I’ll let you fry in your own juice. Where’s Beckman?”
“Sitting in his car outside the Crombie place.”
“On overtime.”
“Yes.” Then he added, “I have the four women there.”
“Where?”
“In the Crombie house. I had Laura Crombie bring them over.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to talk to them. Because someone is trying to kill them, and if it happens it won’t do this city’s image one bit of good.”
“You really think someone’s trying to kill four dames whose only crime is that they live in Beverly Hills?”
“He’s killed three people already.”
“I got to call my wife,” Wainwright said.
Masuto went downstairs. He came out of the building and paused for a moment under the light at the entrance. He never heard the shot, only felt a hot pain at the side of his chin, as if a bee had stung him. As he put his hand up to his face, he heard the roar of a motor, and across the street a dark car shot away.
There was blood on his hand.
A prowl car had just parked, and the officer leaped out and ran over to him. “What happened, Sarge?”
“A bullet nicked me,” Masuto said.
“I didn’t hear a shot.”
“He uses a silencer. Look around a bit, Cowley. See if you can find the bullet. A little slug, a twenty-two. It might be embedded in the door.”
“I ought to get after him.”
“We don’t know who he is or where he went,” Masuto said gently. “Look for the bullet.” Then he went back into the building.
Wainwright was just putting down the phone. “What in hell happened to you?” he demanded.
“I have been shot.”
“Let me look at it. Yeah, it just nicked your cheek. Where do they keep the peroxide?”
“In the john.”
Wainwright swabbed out the cut and put a Band-Aid across it. “You say he was in his car across the street. That has got to be sixty feet, and with a twenty-two pistol, he is cne hell of a shot, maybe an impossible shot.”
“He could have had a shoulder brace or it could have been a target gun this time, maybe a rifle. Or maybe just laying the pistol on the door of his car to steady it. Or he might have been aiming for my chest.”
“Which would still be pretty damn good shooting.”
“It would.”
“Why you?” Wainwright asked. “If it’s the same guy?”
“It is.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because he called and spoke to Polly, and she told him I was handling the case.”
“That’s stupid!”
“No-he might have had information. How was she to know? I’m the one who’s stupid. He knows a lot about us. Well, now I know something about him.”
“What, if I may ask?”
“He-it-the killer is a man. He’s an expert pistol shot. He drives a Mercedes.”
“So do half the people in Beverly Hills. But why a Mercedes? You said you couldn’t see the car, just that it was dark.”
“I know that sound. There’s a particular sound when you gun a Mercedes. Also, he’s rich.”
“Not uncommon in this town.”
“And he has an enormous ego and a complicated but childish mind. The botulism, for example. Not brilliant, not even clever, but complicated. Also-and this I think is where I’ll get him-he has killed before.”
“You mean the chemist and the Chicano kid?”
“No-no. There’s killing somewhere in his past that we don’t know about.”
As Masuto was leaving, Wainwright called after him, “Masao, be careful.”
“I am always careful,” Masuto said.
6
Alice Greene
A curved drive in a half-moon shape swept in from the sidewalk, past the front door of Laura Crombie’s house, and then back to the sidewalk. A low hedge of variegated plantings stretched parallel to the sidewalk, from one end of the driveway to the other. The house was well lit inside, but the driveway was in darkness.
Masuto parked his car in the street, behind Beckman’s car, and then walked slowly up the driveway where three other cars were parked. At one side, the driveway was intersected by a connection with the garage. The garage doors were closed. Masuto looked closely at the three parked cars. The first in line was a Mercedes two-seater 450 SL. “Twenty-seven thousand dollars,” Masuto said to himself. Beverly Hills was not a place where people hid their wealth under a bushel. Next, a Cadillac Seville, sixteen thousand dollars. The third in line was a Porsche Turbo Carrera, the price of which, Masuto guessed, ranged between forty and forty-five thousand dollars, just about twice what he and Kati had paid for their little house when they first purchased it. Well, he thought, his two children were safe at home in their beds and Kati was at a consciousness-raising session, while the four women inside the house were in deadly danger. He made no moral judgment, nor did he place value on a piece of shiny machinery priced at forty thousand dollars. Himself, he was paid to protect these people, and this he would do to the best of his ability.