The Last Embrace (8 page)

“I guess I’m un-American, then.”

Pico clicked his tongue. “I’d watch where you say that. You said you’ve been gone since 1944. Well, things have changed at home.”

“I didn’t mean I was a Red,” Lily said frostily. “I mean I want to be able to work and live on my own and walk home from the trolley stop at night without looking over my shoulder. That’s why Kitty’s murder terrifies me and every woman in L.A. It could have been any of us.”

Pico looked ready to argue. But just then the LAPD Crime Lab squad arrived at the door—four men who carried metal toolboxes and cameras.

“I’ll be in the kitchen if you need to ask me any more questions,” she said, slipping past them into the doorway.

“I think we’re through, Miss Kessler.”

And good riddance.

But they weren’t through. An hour later, Pico appeared downstairs. Jinx, who’d been recounting a story about how Kitty had once loaned her an expensive dress for an audition, trailed off. A crackling tension and flirtatiousness seeped into the kitchen, chasing away the worst of the gloom.

“Coffee, Detective?” Red swished over with the pot, her hips approaching a rolling boil.

“Just what I needed, thank you.” Pico sat down.

“Sugar and cream?” She bent over the table, cleavage popping.

“This is wonderful.” Pico beamed at the young women arrayed around him like petals of a flower. Lily wondered if he meant to pluck them, one by one.

A new girl walked into the kitchen. She was about Lily’s height and weight, with brown hair in a similar cut, but her features were more angular, her posture straighter, her demeanor brisk, reminding Lily of a female pilot she’d known during the war.

“You must be Louise Dobbs,” Lily said, going up to her.

“Yes,” the girl said. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen. “And I’m so sorry. When I sent the cable, I never imagined…maybe if I’d done it sooner…?”

Lily squeezed her hand and was about to respond when Pico broke in.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference, Miss Dobbs. She’d been dead several days by the time…Hey, now, hey, now,” he said with embarrassment as the girls launched into wordless snuffles and tears.

Jinx was the first to recover. She propped her trembling chin in one hand. “Tell us, Detective, do you have any idea who killed her?”

Pico leaned back. “Well, now, the LAPD always has leads.”

God, he was too much, Lily thought. And Kitty’s roommates, veering from coy flirtation to tragic swooning and back in the blink of a mascaraed eye, as if this were some kind of audition. But maybe it was at that. A
husband
audition.

Fumiko, busy at the stove, was the only one who didn’t join in.

Red pulled her hair back with one hand, cupping her temple Greta Garbo–style. Lily could have sworn her voice had dropped an octave. “Detective Pico,” she asked in a sultry voice, “do you always get your man?”

“I always get my woman too,” Pico said. “We can’t assume anything at this stage.”

Pico took a sip of coffee, sighed with appreciation. “You make a fine cup of joe, Miss Viertel,” he told Red.

“Do you want to brief us on what you’ve got so far?” Jinx asked, eager to reclaim center stage.

“Since you asked so politely,” he said with an arch look at Lily, “all right. But first, I’d like to know. Did Kitty keep a journal? Or a calendar? How about a phone book?”

Jeanne, hands fluttering with her hair, said she’d walked into Kitty’s room to borrow a sweater once and seen her writing in a white leather journal.

Pico frowned. “We didn’t find anything like that.”

“Wouldn’t she keep her calendar and phone book in her purse?” Beverly asked haltingly.

“There was no purse found with the, ah, Miss Hayden,” Pico said.

Lily cleared her throat. “What about the RKO man? Could he have taken it?”

Annoyed, Pico jotted in his notebook. “I certainly hope not.”

The detective now told them that Kitty had been seen dancing in Palm Springs nightspots two weeks earlier with known associates of gangster Mickey Cohen. Lily flashed immediately to the small man who’d administered the brutal beating. Was he one of them? No wonder Magruder had lit up when she’d mentioned gangsters.

At Cohen’s name, Beverly gave a small moan. The detective turned to her.

“What can you tell us about that?” he asked sharply.

“I don’t know anything about gangsters,” Beverly said. “She told us she went there with a girlfriend.”

“Ah,” Pico said. “What was her name?”

Lily watched the girls ripple uneasily under the detective’s gaze. She felt the swirl and eddy of conflicted allegiances. The OSS had taught her to listen and observe, to be patient. Kitty’s roommates were afraid of something. They hadn’t told the detective everything they knew. From the way Pico’s thumb and forefinger tightened almost imperceptibly against his pen, Lily knew he sensed it too.

“Kitty never told us her name,” Red said, looking around the room, as if defying anyone to contradict her.

Pico raised one eyebrow.

“Do you think there’s any connection to Mimi Boomhower?” asked Louise, practical once more.

“Who?” said Lily.

“Mimi was a Bel Air socialite and widow who disappeared several months ago,” Pico explained. “Left her front door open and her lights burning. No one’s seen her since. And no body’s turned up.” He grimaced. “Unlike your roommate.

“Now,” he said, surveying the solemn faces, “I’d like to question each of you separately. And I want you to answer me as thoroughly as you can, thinking hard to dredge up every tiny detail you can remember, because it might be that one insignificant thing that helps us catch her killer.”

“She was such a dear,” said Beverly with a sniffle. “If she caught a fly she’d release it outside. Some of the memories I’ve got, they’re almost too painful to recount.”

Pico’s smile grew wider, his voice more expansive. “Well, take a couple aspirin for the pain and try, or I might think you’re withholding evidence.”

At his words, Fumiko, who was peeling and chopping a gnarled brown root on a cutting board, cursed under her breath and popped a finger in her mouth.

“Sorry,” she said. “I cut myself.”

While Pico interviewed Kitty’s roommates, Lily went for a brisk walk to clear her head. As she slipped out, several men clutching notepads and cameras scurried toward her.

“Miss, were you a roommate of Kitty Hayden? Can you tell us about her boyfriends? What was she like?”

The questions came fast and furious, a barrage of words, the cameras exploding in front of her. Holding up her purse to block her face, Lily made her way down the street, but they followed her like a moving organism. Most persistent of all was a young blonde with coral lipstick and a matching jacket. At least she didn’t have a camera, just a notepad. The woman’s heels clicked conspiratorially as she whispered questions to Lily just out of reach of the men, appealing to their shared bond as young women. Lily put her head down and kept walking.

Undeterred, the reporter trailed after her.

“I’m with
Confidential
magazine, miss, and I’ve been authorized to offer you a onetime payment in exchange for an interview. Perhaps we could go somewhere private”—a meaningful look back to the men five paces behind them—“where we can—”

“Please stop,” Lily said. “I don’t want to talk to the press.”

Lily saw face powder dusting faint hairs on the reporter’s upper lip. The woman smiled, exposing small milky teeth. Reaching into a pocket, she pulled out a bill, snapping it crisply.

Despite herself, Lily looked. It was a hundred-dollar bill.

“I thought so,” the woman said with a laugh.

Lily slapped the bill from the woman’s hand. “
That’s
what I think of your foul offer.”

As she ran off, the woman called out, “Violet McCree at
Confidential.
Call anytime, twenty-four hours a day, the service will find me.”

D
etective Pico left the boardinghouse with only a pounding headache to show for two hours of questioning. Make that thirty minutes of questions and an hour and a half of leg-crossing, eyelash-batting, and moist actressy snuffling into tissues. He shook his head. And that annoying Kessler girl. She was sharp, and not afraid to show it. Pico knew a lot of men didn’t like brainy gals. He didn’t mind, especially when it came in a package like that.

The girls and Mrs. Potter swore Kitty had no enemies or vices. She worked long hours and dated a lot but had no one steady. There were no jilted lovers either, but Pico was keen to interview that special effects whiz Max Vranizan. The girls had also mentioned a thuggish fellow at Sinatra’s rehearsal who’d flirted with Kitty and claimed the starlet had stood up his friend, but they didn’t know his name. He’d have to bring over some mug shots for them to look at.

Pico resented Magruder for leaving him to conduct the interviews alone, especially on his first homicide case. Maybe the veteran cop didn’t realize it, but Pico had paid his dues, first with five years as a beat cop attached to the Seventy-seventh Street Division, then two as a detective in Central Robbery. Now he itched to find Kitty’s killer quickly and establish a reputation as a straight shooter. But he’d already learned that any serious police work he and Magruder did would be shoehorned between restaurant meals, drinking sessions, and visits to stores with small back rooms where his new partner placed bets several times a day.

Magruder was a perfect example of why Angelenos didn’t trust the police. Drinking on duty, leering at everything in skirts, the never-ending vicecapades. Just like the brass. The papers had been full of stories all summer, how the grand jury had indicted LAPD Chief C. B. Horrall and Deputy Chief Joseph Reed and charged a slew of others with perjury. Then there was Hollywood Vice, a gravy train with half the squad on the take and openings so rare that twenty-six officers had vied for the job when his father retired in September after thirty-five years. The thought of his father made his head throb more painfully. Pico had fantasized about how he’d come home from vanquishing Nazis in Ardennes, France, with the Forty-fifth Infantry Division and tackle evils closer to home. He hadn’t realized how entrenched things were and how easy it was to slip into it. A few drinks here. A meal there when you were short. The sense, conveyed with hand gestures, winks, and offers everywhere a cop went in Los Angeles, that the spoils were there for the taking.

At the Boulevard, Pico turned right and soon came to a bar called the Firefly. Boulevard substation! Ha, that was a good one. Inside the swampy light of the room, Pico spied Magruder sipping something blond and creamy from a highball glass. The older cop waved him over and Pico slid onto the adjoining stool. Magruder’s drink had yellow flecks in it. Some kind of fruit. All those GIs coming home from the South Pacific and decorating their houses with tikis and mixing up tropical drinks. Just went to show you how selective memory could be.

Magruder stubbed out his cigarette, pushed aside his racing form. “What’ll you have?”

“What have you got?”

“Buttermilk.” Magruder rubbed his belly. “Coats the stomach. Always my first drink of the day.”

Pico made a face. “Brew 102,” he told the barman.

As they drank, he recounted what he had learned at the rooming house and described his suspicions about the animator. Magruder agreed that Pico should talk to him.

“Reckon I’ll head out to Palm Springs,” the older cop said. “Work my gang sources.”

Pico could imagine the debauch as Magruder toured the nightspots.

“I want you to work the L.A. angle,” Magruder continued. “Find Mickey’s people, see what they say. And pay a visit to that wop Dragna, who everyone says is trying to kill Mickey. Nighttimes he’s at his club, Largo. Daytime try his restaurant on Westwood Boulevard. Vernichello’s.”

Pico nodded, glad for the marching orders. If he broke the case on his own, he’d make sure everybody knew it. He ran one last thing past Magruder.

“The body boys said they found some unusual hairs on the vic’s clothing and possibly under her fingernails.”

Magruder looked thoughtful. “Dog hair. Cat. Could tell us something.”

“They don’t think it’s dog or cat. I told ’em to send it to the lab.”

Magruder raised an eyebrow. “Coyote, then. That happens when a body stays in the hills too long.”

“It wasn’t coyote either. Or mountain lion. It was black.”

“We’ll wait and see, then. Maybe it’s nothing.”

Pico wondered why his partner was so quick to dismiss this potential evidence. Magruder smoked and contemplated the wall.

“You’re a good-looking fellow,” the older cop said after a pause. “A man doesn’t usually comment on another man’s looks unless he’s a fruit, but I saw those dames making cow eyes at you. You can use that. Someone in that henhouse knows more than they’re saying and I’ll bet it’s that stuck-up one who ID’d the body. Work things right, she’ll be eating out of your hand.”

“What if I don’t want her eating out of my hand?”

The older detective gave a worldly laugh. “That too. Little on-duty action never hurt anyone. Some of us get all our action at work.”

Magruder gave his pants a hitch. “Why don’t you tail her when you get a chance? See what she’s up to.”

He winked, avuncular now.
This is how it’s done, old son. Watch and learn.
Pico wondered if the older cop saw him as the son he’d never had. He recalled something about a child, but as far as he knew, Magruder lived alone, full of coppish swagger and rough lessons, glorying in the camaraderie of the badge, the closed clubhouse air of it, no girls allowed, forever rumbling with lewd innuendo and hoary wisdom. He wrapped himself in the fug of cracked leather, oiled weapons, Cuban cigars, distilled liquors, and strong cologne. A man’s man.

“It’s a hard town,” Magruder was saying, “and I’d hate for that li’l gal to get hurt. In fact, I’d rather…” He chuckled. “Stuck-up dames like that need a good pounding. Under all the priss, they’re just asking for it. Every damn one of them.”

“She didn’t strike me as particularly prissy,” Pico said.

“It’s all a front. Believe you me. When you’ve been around as long as I have…”

And Magruder proceeded to lecture Pico on what women really wanted. Then he asked how Pico’s father was enjoying his retirement. “I hear he was flush there for a while,” Magruder said.

Pico had heard the same thing. There had been elaborate dinners, trips to Catalina, visits to Big Bear. But the lucky streaks never lasted.

“I wish they’d stop taking him to the track.”

“There are those who like to have him beholden,” Magruder said. “And you as well.”

“You know I don’t play the ponies.”

“There are many ways to be beholden, Stephen. You’ll find that one hand washes the other. It’s about loyalty. Respect. Your pa understood that.”

“They knew he couldn’t say no, and they took advantage of it.”

“Your father’s a grown man, Stephen. No one forced him to do anything.”

“He has a sickness.”

“And now he must pay.” Magruder’s voice had gone quiet and whispery. “And if the father cannot pay, they turn to the son to make them whole. They are reasonable people, Stephen. They don’t want money. There are things more valuable.”

“Like what?”

“When the time comes, you will know it.”

Magruder slid his bulk off his stool. “All this talk has got my blood up. Let’s go roust Olga,” he said.

“Who’s Olga?”

“Surprised your old man never took you around. You’re gonna love Olga.”

The alcohol glow made Pico feel he was sliding through glass as he drove, the colors bright and electric. Beside him, Magruder stirred.

“Those actresses probably had you pegged as a Latin lover, that olive skin of yours,” he said. “You’re part Mex, ain’t you, Pico? Name like that?”

Pico felt the alcohol warmth ebbing away. He’d noticed he was “Stephen” when Magruder felt friendly and “Pico” when he didn’t.

“You know my family’s been here a long time.”

“A breed, even. Your white great-grandpappy found him a squaw?”

“We were already on the
rancho
when your ancestors were grubbing for rotten potatoes in Ireland.”

Magruder shot him a dirty look. “Maybe so, but we were God-fearing people. We didn’t go in for fornicating with the natives.”

“I hear you fornicate with them plenty today.”

Magruder guffawed. “I’m partial to the native
blonde.
”

They drove in silence. Then Magruder said, “Pico Boulevard. That named after your people?”

Pico stared out the window. His mouth twitched. “Naw,” he said “I don’t think so.”

Following Magruder’s directions, he turned south on Vine and parked in front of one of the fancy buildings with several floors.

As they walked up the front steps, Pico heard a jazzy piano tune inside. A man stepped onto the landing.

“How ya doing, Detectives?” he said in a nasal twang, coins jingling in his pocket.

Pico wondered if he had purposely lingered on the last word.

“Haven’t I warned you, Henry, about addressing us in that manner?” Magruder’s voice was so low that Pico strained to catch it. “We don’t need to advertise it.”

Henry’s upper lip curled. “Sorry, Detective. Just remember, you want rough stuff, go over to Hattie’s. We don’t do that here.”

Magruder caught the bouncer by his bow tie, shoving him against the wall so hard that Pico heard his head crack. Grabbing the man’s neck, Magruder squeezed.

Henry made spluttering, choking sounds, his face turning purple as he tried to pry Magruder’s meaty hands from his windpipe. The cop’s eyes were wide, his jaw working.

Pico tried to pull him off, but it was like trying to move a mountain.

“Magruder,” he yelled. “Let the fuck go.”

Slowly, the older cop’s fingers loosened. The bouncer fell to his knees, gasping for air. Magruder stared down dispassionately.

The door was opened by a uniformed maid with café au lait skin and a welcoming smile. They stepped over the still-writhing body and went inside.