Shouting, “Jack Roller!” “Nigger!” “Baby fucker!” he kicked the other three chairs to the floor. Now there were confessors dangling four abreast, shrieking, grabbing at one another with their legs, an octopus in county jail denim. The screams sounded like one voice—until Fritzie zeroed in on Charles Michael Issler.
He roundhoused the knuckle dusters into his midsection, left-right, left-right, left-right. Issler screamed and gurgled; Fritzie yelled, “Tell me about the Dahlia’s missing days you syphilitic whoremonger!”
My legs felt like they were about to go. Issler screeched, “I… don’t… know… anything.” Fritzie shot him an uppercut to the crotch.
“Tell me what you know!”
“I knew you at Ad Vice!”
Fritzie winged rabbit punches. “Tell me what you know! Tell me what your girls told you, you syphilitic whoremonger!”
Issler retched; Fritzie moved in close and worked his body. I heard ribs cracking, then stared off to my left, to a burglar alarm lever on the wall by the connecting doorway. I stared and stared and stared; Fritizie ran into my field of vision and wheeled over the sheet-covered table I’d noticed before.
The loonies flopped on their hooks, moaning low. Fritzie got right up next to me, cackled in my face, then whipped off the sheet.
The table held a naked female corpse, cut in half at the waist—a pudgy girl coiffed and made up to look like Elizabeth Short. Fritzie grabbed Charlie Issler by the scruff of the neck, hissing, “For your cutting pleasure, may I present Jane Doe number forty-three. You’re all going to slice her, and the best slicer buys the ticket!”
Issler shut his eyes and bit through his lower lip. Old Man Bidwell went purple, starting to foam at the mouth. I smelled loosed feces on Durkin and saw Orchard’s wrists broken, twisted to right angles, bones and tendons exposed. Fritzie pulled out a pachuco toad stabber and popped the blade. “Show me how you did it, you filths. Show me what didn’t get in the papers. Show me and I’ll be nice to you and make alllll your hurt go away. Bucky, take off their cuffs.”
My legs went. I stumbled into Fritzie, hurled him to the floor, ran for the alarm and pulled the lever. A code three response siren went off so good, so loud, so hard that it felt like its sound waves were what propelled me out of the warehouse and into the drunk wagon and all the way to Kay’s door with no excuses and words of loyalty for Lee.
So were Kay Lake and I formally joined.
Chapter 22
Tripping that alarm was the costliest act of my life.
Loew and Vogel succeeded in putting the hush on it. I was booted off Warrants and back into uniform—swingwatch foot patrol out of Central Station, my old home. Lieutenant Jastrow, the watch boss, was thick with the demon DA. I could tell he was checking out my every act—waiting for me to snitch or rabbit or somehow follow up on the big wrong move I had to make.
I did nothing about it. It was the word of a five-year officer versus a twenty-two-year man and the city’s future District Attorney, backed by their hole card: the radio car officers who responded to the alarm were made the new Central Division Warrants team, a piece of serendipity guaranteed to keep them quiet and happy. Two consolations kept me from going crazy: Fritzie didn’t kill anybody, and when I checked the city jail release records I learned that the four confessors had been treated for “car crash injuries” at Queen of Angels and shipped to different state ding farms for “observation.” And my horror pushed me where I’d been too scared and stupid to go for a long, long time.
Kay.
That first night she was as much my grief catcher as my lover. I was afraid of noise and abrupt movement, so she undressed me and made me be still, murmuring, “And all that,” every time I tried to talk about Fritzie or the Dahlia. She touched me so softly that it was hardly touching at all; I touched every whole and healthy part of her until I felt my own body cease to be fists and cop muscle. Then we roused each other slowly and made love, with Betty Short far away.
A week later I broke it off with Madeleine, the “neighbor girl” whose identity I had kept secret from Lee and Kay. I didn’t offer a reason, and the rich gutter crawler aced me as I was about to hang up the phone. “Find somebody safe? You’ll be back, you know. I look like her.”
Her.
A month passed. Lee didn’t return, the two dope traffickers were convicted and hanged for the De Witt—Chasco killings, my Fire and Ice ad continued to run in all four LA dailies. The Short case moved from headlines to back pages, tips fell off to almost zero, everyone but Russ Millard and Harry Sears went back to their regular assignments. Still assigned to Her, Russ and Harry kept putting in straight eights at the Bureau and in the field, spending evenings at the El Nido, going over the master file. When I got off duty at 9:00, I’d visit for a while on my way to see Kay, quietly amazed at how obsessed Mr. Homicide was becoming, his family neglected as he prowled paper until midnight. The man inspired confession; when I told him the story of Fritzie and the warehouse, his absolution was a fatherly embrace and the admonishing, “Take the Sergeant’s Exam. In a year or so I’ll go to Thad Green. He owes me one, and when Harry retires you’ll be my partner.”
It was a promise to build on, and it kept bringing me back to the file. With my days free and Kay at work, I had nothing to do, so I read it over and over. The “R,” “S,” and “T” folders were missing, which was an annoyance, but other than that it was perfection. My real woman had Betty Short pushed back across a Maginot Line into professional curiosity, and I kept reading, thinking and hypothesizing from the standpoint of becoming a good detective—the road I was on until I tripped that alarm. Sometimes I felt connections begging to be made, sometimes I cursed myself for not having ten percent more gray matter, sometimes the report carbons just made me think of Lee.
I continued with the woman he saved from a nightmare. Kay and I played house three and four times a week, the hours late now that I was working swingwatch. We made our tender kind of love and talked around the bad events of the past months, and as gentle and good as I was, I kept churning inside for an outside conclusion—Lee back, the Dahlia killer on a platter, one more Red Arrow shack with Madeleine or Ellis Loew and Fritzie Vogel nailed to a cross. What always came with it was a big, ugly replay of me hitting Cecil Durkin, followed by the question: how far would you have gone that night?
The beat was where it ate at me the most. I worked East 5th Street from Main to Stanford, skid row. Blood banks, liquor stores selling half pints and short dogs exclusively, fifty-cent-a-night flophouses and derelict missions. The unspoken rule down there was that foot beat hacks worked strong-arm. You broke up bottle gangs by whacking winos with your billy club; you hauled jigs out of the day labor joints when they insisted on getting hired. You rounded up drunks and ragpickers indiscriminately to meet the city quota, beating them down if they tried to run from the drunk wagon. It was attrition duty, and the only officers good at it were the transplanted Okie shitkickers hired in the manpower shortage during the war. I patrolled half-heartedly: little jabs with my stick, handing winos dimes and quarters to get them off the street and into the wine bars where I wouldn’t have to roust them, low quotas on my drunk sweeps. I got a rep as the Central swingwatch “sob sister”; twice Johnny Vogel saw me passing out chump change and hooted uproariously. Lieutenant Jastrow gave me a Class D fitness report my first month back in uniform—a clerical aide told me he cited my “Reluctance to employ sufficient force with recalcitrant misdemeanants.” Kay got a kick out of the line, but I saw a stack of bum paper building up so high that all Russ Millard’s juice wouldn’t be able to return me to the Bureau.