The Big Nowhere (14 page)

Bordoni flicked his eyes around the room. Danny walked to the curtains, looked out at dark yards and houses and thought of his killer leaving him, clued to a trap by the light burning. He flipped the wall switch; Bordoni let out a long breath. “Really bad for Marty? That the truth?”

Danny could see neon signs on Hollywood Boulevard, miles away. “The worst, so tell me.”

Bordoni talked while Danny looked out at neon and dwindling headlights. “I came out of Quentin two weeks ago, seven out of seven for heists. I knew Marty when he did his turn for reef, and we were buddies. Marty knew I had a parole date, and he knew my sister’s number in Frisco. He’d send me these letters every once in a while after he got out, phony name, no return address, ’cause he was an absconder and he didn’t want the censors to get a handle on him.

“So Marty calls me at my sister’s five days or so ago, maybe the thirtieth, maybe the thirty-first. He says he’s playing horn for peanuts and hates it, he took the cure, he’s gonna stay off horseback and pull jobs—burglaries. He says he just got together with an old partner and they needed a third man for a house-break gang. I told him I’d be down in a week or so, and he gave me this address and told me to let myself in. That’s me and Marty.”

Darkness made the room pulsate. Danny said, “What was the partner’s name? Where did Goines know him from?”

“Marty didn’t say.”

“Did he describe him? Was he a partner of Marty’s when he was pulling jobs back in ’43 and ’44?”

Bordoni said, “Mister, it was a two-minute conversation, and I didn’t even know Marty pulled jobs back then.”

“Did he mention an old running partner with a burned or scarred face? He’d be mid to late twenties by now.”

“No. Marty was always close-mouthed. I was his only pal at Q, and I was surprised when he said he had an old partner. Marty wasn’t really the partner type.”

Danny shifted gears. “When Goines sent you letters, where were they postmarked and what did they say?”

Bordoni sighed like he was bored; Danny thought of giving him a peek at his old pal’s eyeballs. “Spill, Leo.”

“They were from all over the country, and they were just jive—jazz stuff, wish you were here, the horses, baseball.”

“Did Marty mention other musicians he was playing with?”

Bordoni laughed. “No, and I think he was ashamed to. He was gigging all these Podunk clubs, and all he said was ‘I’m the best trombone they’ve ever seen,’ meaning Marty knew he wasn’t much but these cats he was gigging with were really from hunger.”

“Did he mention anybody at all, other than this old partner you were going to team up with?”

“Nix. Like I told you, it was a two-minute conversation.”

The Miller High Life sign atop the Taft Building blipped off, jarring Danny. “Leo, was Marty Goines a homosexual?”

“Marty! Are you crazy! He wouldn’t even pork nancy boys up at Q!”

“Anybody up there ever make advances to him?”

“Marty would have died before he let some brunser bust his cherry!”

Danny hit the light switch, hauled Bordoni up by his cuff chain and twisted his head so that it was level with a long slash of wall blood. “That’s your friend. That’s why you were never here and you never met me. That’s heat you don’t want, so you just stay frosty and think of this thing as a nightmare.”

Bordoni bobbed his head; Danny let him go and unlocked the cuffs. Bordoni gathered his stuff up off the floor, taking extra care with his tool case. At the door, he said, “This is personal with you, right?”

Buddy Jastrow long gone, four shots a night not enough, his textbooks and classes not real. Danny said, “It’s all I’ve got.”

Alone again, Danny stared out the window, watching movie marquees blink off, turning the Boulevard into just another long, dark street. He added “possible burglary partner” to “tall, gray-haired,” “middle-aged,” “homosexual,” and “heroin-wise”; he put off Bordoni’s protestations that Marty wasn’t fruit as sincere but wrong—and wondered how long he could stick inside the room without going crazy, without risking the landlord or someone from the front house dropping by.

Looking for house lights that might be
Him
looking back was childish; eye prowling for sinister shapes was a kid’s game—the kind of game he played by himself as a schoolboy. Danny yawned, sat down in the chair and tried to sleep.

He got something near sleep, an exhaustion shortcut where he wasn’t quite out, couldn’t quite form thoughts and saw pictures that he wasn’t making himself. Street signs, trucks, a saxophone man running scales on his instrument, flower patterns, a dog at the end of a stick. The dog made him twitch; he tried to open his eyes, felt them gummed and eased back to wherever he was going. Autopsy instruments hot from an autoclave, Janice Modine, a ’39 Olds rocking on its suspension, a look inside, Tim pumping Roxy Beausoleil, an ether-soaked rag up to her nose so she’d giggle and pretend it was nice.

Danny jerked out of it, eyes opening to light through a part in the curtains. He swallowed dry phlegm, caught a reprise of his last image, got up and went to the kitchen for a drink of sink water. He was on a big gulping handful when the phone rang.

A second ring, stop, a third ring. Danny picked it up. “Karen?”

The girl was almost breathless. “City radio. See the maintenance man, Griffith Park, the hiking trail up from the observatory parking lot. Two dead men, LAPD rolling. Sweetie, did you
know
this was going to happen?”

Danny said, “Just pretend it didn’t happen,” slammed the phone down, grabbed his evidence kit and walked out of the upholstered slaughterhouse. He forced himself not to run to his car, eyes circuiting for onlookers, seeing none. Griffith Park was a mile away. He stripped off his rubber gloves, felt his hand tingle and gunned it there.

Two LAPD black-and-whites beat him.

Danny parked beside them at the foot of the hiking trail, the last stretch of asphalt before the stretch of mountain that formed the park’s northern perimeter. No other cars were in the lot; he could see four bluesuits up ahead where the trail cut into woods, a longtime haven for winos and lovebirds without the price of a room.

Danny marked the time—6:14 A.M.—got his badge out and walked up. The cops wheeled around, hands to holsters, shakes and queasy looks. Danny pointed to his tin. “West Hollywood Sheriff’s. I’m working a dumped body case, and I heard what you got over the air at the station.”

Two cops nodded; two turned away, like a County detective was lower than dirt. Danny swallowed dry; West Hollywood Substation was a half hour away, but the dummies didn’t blink at the time glitch. They separated to give him a view; Danny got a mid-shot of hell.

Two dead men, nude, lying sideways on a little bed of dirt surrounded by low thornbushes. Rigor lock, coats of dust and leaf debris said they had been there at least twenty-four hours; the condition of the bodies said that they died at 2307 North Tamarind. Danny pulled a bush section back, knelt and zoomed his Man Camera in nightmare-close.

The men had been placed in a 69 position—head to groin, head to groin, genitals flopped toward each other’s mouths. Their hands had been placed on each other’s knees; the larger man was missing a right index finger. All four eyes were intact and wide open; the victims had been slashed like Marty Goines all over their backs—and their faces. Danny examined the pressed-together front sides; he could see blood and entrail residue.

He stood up. The patrolmen were smoking cigarettes, shuffling their feet, destroying the chance for a successful grid search. One by one they looked at him; the oldest of the four said, “Those guys like yours?”

Danny said, “Almost exactly,” thinking of the real camera in his evidence kit, snapshots for his file before the City bulls closed off
their
end of
his
case. “Who found them?”

The old-timer cop answered him. “Maintenance man saw a wino running down the hill screaming, so he went up and looked. He called us, came back up and got sick. We sent him home, and when the squad gets here they’ll send you home, too.”

The other cops laughed. Danny let it pass and jogged down the trail to get the camera. He was almost to his Chevy when a plainclothes car and Coroner’s wagon pulled into the lot and jammed up next to the black-and-whites.

A big, beef-faced man got out of the unmarked and looked right at him. Danny recognized him from newspaper pics: Detective Sergeant Gene Niles, squad whip at Hollywood Division, in up to his ears over Brenda Allen, no indictment, but a quashed lieutenancy and stalemated career—rumor having it that he took no cash, just trade goodies from Brenda’s girls. The man’s clothes said otherwise: smart navy blazer and razor-creased gray flannels, custom stuff no honest cop could afford.

Two Coroner’s men hauled out collapsible gurneys; Danny saw Niles smell cop on him and head over, looking more and more curious and pissed: strange meat on his turf, too young to be working the Homicide Bureau downtown.

He met him halfway, a new story brewing, plausible stuff to satisfy a savvy cop. Face to face, he said, “I’m with the Sheriff’s.”

Niles laughed. “You a little bit confused about your jurisdiction, Deputy?”

The “Deputy” was all scorn, like a synonym for “cancer.” Danny said, “I’m working a homicide just like the two you’ve got up the hill.”

Niles bored in with his eyes. “You sleep in those clothes, Deputy?”

Danny squeezed his hands into fists. “I was on a stakeout.”

“You ever hear of carrying a razor on all-nighters,
Deputy
?”

“You ever hear of professional courtesy,
Niles
?”

Sergeant Gene Niles looked at his watch. “A man who reads the papers. Let’s try this. How’d you get up here twenty-two minutes after we logged the squeal at the station?”

Danny knew brass balls was the only way to cover his lie. “I was down at the doughnut joint on Western, and there was a black-and-white with the radio on. How come it took
you
so long? You stop for a manicure?”

“A year ago I’d have reamed you for that.”

“A year ago you were going places. Do you want to hear about my homicide or do you want to sulk?”

Niles picked a piece of lint off his blazer. “The dispatcher said it looks like a queer job. I hate queer jobs, so if you’ve got another queer job, I don’t want to hear about it. Roll,
Deputy
. And get yourself some decent threads. Mickey Kike’s got a haberdashery, and I know he gives all his prat boys a discount.”

Danny headed back to his Chevy seeing red. He drove down the park road to Los Feliz and Vermont and a pay phone, called Doc Layman and told him two Marty Goines companion stiffs were en route, grab them for autopsy no matter what. A minute later Niles’ car and the Coroner’s wagon went by southbound, no lights or sirens, flunkies killing a fine winter morning. Danny gave them a five-minute lead, took shortcuts downtown and parked in the shade of a warehouse across the street from the City Morgue loading dock. Fourteen minutes passed before the caravan appeared; Niles made a big show of shepherding the sheet-covered gurneys to the ramp; Norton Layman came out to help. Danny heard him berating Niles for separating the bodies.

He settled into his car to wait for Layman’s findings; stretching out on the front seat, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep, knowing Doc would be four hours or more on the examinations. Sleep wouldn’t come; a hot day started sizzling, warming up the car, making the upholstery sticky. Danny would begin to drop off, then start remembering his lies, what he could or couldn’t tell whom. He could brazen his lie to the patrolmen, acting sheepish over being at the doughnut stand at 6:00 A.M., implying he’d been with a woman; he had to coddle Karen Hiltscher into keeping his stint at 2307 Tamarind under wraps. He couldn’t let anyone see the contents of his evidence kit; he had to clue in LAPD to the letter that hipped him to Marty Goines’ pad, post-dating the occurrence, making it seem like nothing big, letting them discover the gore for themselves. Leo Bordoni was a wild card, but he was probably con-wise enough to stay quiet; he had to fabricate a story to account for his whereabouts yesterday—a phony summary report to Dietrich was his best bet. And the big fear and big questions: if LAPD canvassed Tamarind, would a local report the tan 1947 Chevrolet parked outside 2307 overnight? Should he take advantage of his private lead, rape the neighborhood for witnesses himself, then report the letter, hoping that the worst they could get him for was
not
calling the dope in? If LAPD decided to ease off on their two homicides—Niles as catching officer hating “queer jobs”—would they canvass at
all
?
He
had taken the call from Lexington State Hospital himself, via Karen Hiltscher’s switchboard. If it all got tricky, would she blab fast to save herself? Would LASD/LAPD rivalry reduce the mess to something that only he cared about?

Heat reflecting off the windshield and too many brain wires short-circuiting on angles lulled Danny to sleep. Cramps and glare woke him up sweaty and itchy; his foot hit the horn and black dreamlessness became sound waves bouncing off four bloody walls. He looked at his watch, saw 12:10 and at least four hours unconscious; the Doc might be done with his dead men. Danny got out of the car, stretched his cramps and walked across the street to the morgue.

Layman was standing near the ramp, eating lunch off an examination slab, a body sheet for a tablecloth. He saw Danny, swallowed a bite of sandwich and said, “You look bad.”

“That bad?”

“You look scared, too.”

Danny yawned; it made his gums ache. “I’ve seen the bodies, and I don’t think LAPD cares. That’s scary.”

Layman wiped his mouth with a sheet corner. “Here’s a few more scares for you, then. Times of death—twenty-six to thirty hours ago. Both men were anally raped—O+ secretor semen. The wounds on their backs were pure zoot stick, identical in size and fiber content to Martin Mitchell Goines. The missing-finger man died from a throat gash made by a sharp, serrated knife. No cause of death on the other man, but I’d be willing to bet barbiturate OD. On our missing-finger friend I found a vomit-coated, punctured capsule, right up under the tongue. I tested some powder in it and got a home compound—sodium secobarbital, one part, one part strychnine. The secobarbital would hit first, inducing unconsciousness, the strychnine would kill. I think missing finger got indigestion, puked up part of his Mickey Finn and fought to live—that that was when he lost his digit—fighting with the knife man. Once I test the blood on both men and pump their stomachs, I’ll know for sure. The missing finger man was bigger—a larger bloodstream, so the compound didn’t kill him like it did our other friend.”