III. Kay and Madeleine

Chapter 25

Time passed. Kay and I worked and played at being a young married couple.

After our quickie San Francisco honeymoon, I returned to what remained of my police career. Thad Green talked turkey to me: he admired what I did with the Vogels, but considered me useless as a patrol cop—I had earned the enmity of rank and file blues, and my presence in a uniformed division would only create grief. Since my year of junior college showed straight A’s in chemistry and math, he assigned me to the Scientific Investigation Detail as an evidence technician.

The job was quasi-plainclothes—smocks in the lab and gray suits in the field. I typed blood, dusted for latent prints and wrote ballistics reports; scraped ooze off the walls at crime scenes and examined it under a microscope, letting the Homicide dicks take it from there. It was test tubes and beakers and clinical gore—an intimacy with death that I never became inured to; a constant reminder that I wasn’t a detective, that I couldn’t be trusted to follow up on my own findings.

From various distances I followed the friends and enemies the Dahlia case had given me.

Russ and Harry kept the El Nido file room intact, continuing to work overtime hours on the Short investigation. I had a key to the door, but didn’t use it—per my promise to Kay to bury “that dead girl.” Sometimes I met the padre for lunch and asked him how it was going; he always said, “Slowly,” and I knew that he would never find the killer and never quit trying.

In June of ‘47, Ben Siegel was shot to death in his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills living room. Bill Koenig, assigned to 77th Street dicks after Fritz Vogel’s suicide, caught a shotgun blast in the face on a Watts street corner early in ‘48. Both killings went unsolved. Ellis Loew was soundly trounced in the June ‘48 Republican primary, and I celebrated by cooking up beakers of moonshine on my Bunsen burner, getting everyone in the crime lab fried.

The ‘48 general election brought me news of the Spragues. A slate of reform Democrats were running for seats on the LA City Council and Board of Supervisors, “City Planning” their basic campaign theme. They asserted that there were faultily designed, unsafe dwellings all over Los Angeles, and were calling for a grand jury probe on the contractors who built the structures back during the ‘20s real estate boom. The scandal tabloids took up the hue and cry, running articles on the “boom barons”—Mack Sennett and Emmett Sprague among them—and their “gangster ties.” Confidential magazine ran a series on Sennett’s Hollywoodland tract and how the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce wanted to lop the L-A-N-D off the giant Hollywoodland sign on Mount Lee, and there were photographs of the Keystone Kops director standing beside a stocky man with a cute little girl in tow. I couldn’t quite tell if it was Emmett and Madeleine, but I clipped the pictures anyway.

My enemies;

My friends;

My wife.

I processed evidence and Kay taught school, and for a while we reveled in the novelty of living a squarejohn life. With the house paid off in full and two salaries, there was plenty of money to spend, and we used it to pamper ourselves away from Lee Blanchard and the winter of ‘47. We took weekend trips to the desert and the mountains; we ate in restaurants three and four nights a week. We checked into hotels pretending to be illicit lovers, and it took me well over a year to realize that we did those things because it got us out of the pad the Boulevard-Citizens bank job paid for. And I was so heedless in my pursuit of pampering that it required a live-wire shock to spell it out.

A floorboard in the hallway came loose, and I pulled it all the way off so I could reglue it. Looking in the hole, I found a cash roll, two thousand dollars in C-notes secured by a rubber band. I didn’t feel joyous or shocked; my brain went tick, tick, tick, and came up with the questions my rush into normal life had quashed:

If Lee had this money, plus the dough he was spending in Mexico, why didn’t he pay off Baxter Fitch?

If he had the money, why did he go to Ben Siegel to try to borrow ten grand to meet Fitch’s blackmail demand?

How could Lee have bought and furnished this house, put Kay through college and still have had a substantial sum left when his cut from the aborted heist couldn’t have amounted to more than fifty grand or so?

Of course I told Kay; of course she couldn’t answer the questions; of course she loathed me for dredging up the past. I told her we could sell the house and get an apartment like other normal squarejohns—and of course she wouldn’t have it. It was comfort, style—a link to her old life that she would not give up.

I burned the money in Lee Blanchard’s Deco-streamline fireplace. Kay never asked me what I did with it. The simple act gave me back some smothered part of myself, cost me most of what I had with my wife—and returned me to my ghosts.

Kay and I made love less and less. When we did it was perfunctory reassurance for her and a dull explosion for me. I came to see Kay Lake Bleichert as wasted by the obscenity in her old life, just short of thirty and already going chaste. I brought the gutter to our bed then, the faces of hookers I saw downtown attached to Kay’s body in the darkness. It worked the first few times, until I saw where I really wanted to go. When I finally made the move and came gasping, Kay stroked me with mothering hands, and I sensed that she knew I’d broken my marriage vow—with her right there.

1948 became 1949. I turned the garage into a boxing gym, complete with speed bag and heavy bag, jump ropes and barbells. I got back into fighting trim, and decorated the garage walls with fight stills of young Bucky Bleichert, circa ‘40—’41. My own image glimpsed through sweat-streaked eyes brought me closer to her, and I scoured used book stores for Sunday supplements and news magazines. I found sepia candids in Colliers; some family snapshots reproduced in old issues of the Boston Globe. I kept them out of sight in the garage, and the stack grew, then vanished one afternoon. I heard Kay sobbing inside the house that evening, and when I went to talk to her the bedroom door was locked.

Chapter 26

The phone rang. I reached for the bedside extension, then snapped that I’d been a couch sleeper for the past month and flailed at the coffee table. “Yeah?”

“You still sleeping?”

It was the voice of Ray Pinker, my supervisor at SID. “I was sleeping.”

“Past tense is right. Are you listening?”

“Keep going.”

“We’ve got a gunshot suicide from yesterday. 514 South June Street, Hancock Park. Body removed, looks open and shut. Do a complete work-up and drop the report off with Lieutenant Reddin at Wilshire dicks. Got it?”

I yawned. “Yeah. Premises sealed?”

“The stiff’s wife will show you around. Be courteous, this is filthy rich we’re dealing with.”

I hung up and groaned. Then it hit me that the Sprague mansion was a block from the June Street address. Suddenly the assignment was fascinating.

I rang the bell of the pillared colonial manse an hour later. A handsome gray-haired woman of about fifty opened the door, dressed in dusty work togs. I said, “I’m Officer Bleichert, LAPD. May I express my condolences, Mrs.—”

Ray Pinker hadn’t given me a name. The woman said, “Condolences accepted, and I’m Jane Chambers. Are you the lab man?”

The woman was trembling underneath her brusqueness; I liked her immediately. “Yes. If you’ll point me to the place I’ll take care of it and leave you alone.”