True Confessions (33 page)
Authors: John Gregory Dunne
AH FONG’S
Redondo Beach
Chinese Specialties
Oriental Takeout.
It was nearly eleven before Tom Spellacy left the El Segundo Barracks. First he went to a hardware store in Redondo and bought a heavy-duty industrial lock and a large red sign that said, DANGER—EXPLOSIVES. Then he returned to the barracks, locked the main gate and wired the sign to it. He did not expect that either would keep out anyone who really wanted to get in, but the fewer people poking around, the better. That Lois Fazenda had been killed on the top floor of the fourth barracks he had little doubt. A section of the floorboard was stained a dark mahogany color by what he was sure was blood. Bugs feasted on tiny droppings of shriveled and decaying matter. Tom Spellacy worked slowly and methodically. From the trunk of his car he brought a packet of envelopes and a cardboard grocery box. He put the box on the floor and the envelopes, a pencil, a notebook and a penknife on a window sill. Then he examined every inch of the barracks, careful to touch nothing. Time was of no matter. In the latrine he spotted two strands of human hair. In a corner a votive candle melted almost to the nub. A Shrine matchbook. A fragment of wood with hair sticking to it. On his knees he examined what the bugs were feeding on. He was no pathologist, but he would bet fragments of dried skin. Gristle. Entrails. Cartilage picked white. He tried to imagine what had gone through the killer’s mind, how a little innocent barbering of pussy hair had got out of hand. The thing was, he really did not care. Harold Pugh was just a name, Lois Fazenda just a body. A mechanic didn’t care about the Pontiac he worked on, it was just another car. He was a mechanic and they were Pontiacs, it was as simple as that. If a Pontiac hits a friend, you don’t blame the Pontiac. So it was useless to speculate on the lives that Harold Pugh and Lois Fazenda had affected.
Enough of that, he thought.
Back to work.
With his penknife he scraped the skin and gristle and mahogany-stained substance from the floor and put samples of each into separate envelopes. He marked the envelopes and put them into the grocery box. The task was endless, but as always, he found the sheer tedium of it refreshing. Especially now. He was a free agent. No one knew what he knew. He could proceed at his own pace. Systematically. First the blood scrapings from the floor. Give it to an assistant in Woody Wong’s office and get it typed. The ME’s office wouldn’t ask who the blood belonged to, he was sure of that. They were up to their ass in corpses and one more blood sample wasn’t anything to get excited about. Then a photograph of Harold Pugh. There was no sense in bothering Mrs. Harold Pugh. She might get worked up if Detective Lieutenant Spellacy asked for a picture. There was plenty of time later to ask her what the Hall of Famer did at five in the morning. No. Save Mrs. Harold Pugh. The Department of Motor Vehicles would have a photograph. There was one clipped to every DMV driver’s license application. A little Chinese at Ah Fong’s in Redondo, then flash the badge and the picture of Harold. If he was lucky, Ah Fong would remember the face, if he wasn’t, it was at least a free meal.
All in all, a pleasant way to spend a Saturday.
The rest of the material would keep in the trunk of his car. There was no hurry to turn it over to the Scientific Investigation Division. Harold Pugh wasn’t going to hurt anyone. And the sooner SID did a workup, the sooner Fuqua would start taking bows.
If he waited, maybe Sonny and them would pick someone else to be chief.
When he got back downtown, Crotty was standing amidst the piles of folders in his office.
“What the fuck you up to?” Crotty said, waving his hand at the folders.
“Looking for a definite pattern,” Tom Spellacy said. He knew Crotty would never believe the obvious.
“Shit,” Crotty said. He picked a folder from the floor. “How’s Mary Margaret?”
“Swell.”
“She still cook good?” Crotty dropped the folder on the floor and picked up another.
“Swell,” Tom Spellacy said. Change the subject. “What are you doing in on a Saturday?”
“One of my Chinamen,” Crotty said. “His nephew leaned on a girl. I said I’d see what I could do.”
“Any charge?”
“Murder One.”
“Jesus, Frank.”
“I didn’t say I’d spring the kid, Tom. I said I’d see what I could do. Open and shut. Bang, bang. Two in the ticker. Get a good lawyer is what I’ll tell him.”
Tom Spellacy laughed drily. Crotty and his Chinamen. A full-time job. One good thing: Crotty would not get too curious about the folders on the floor as long as he was preoccupied with his partners.
“You going to read all this shit?” Crotty said.
“I’ll get Masaryk to do most of it.”
“Find anything?”
Tom Spellacy shook his head.
“It must be grand having Mary Margaret home,” Crotty said.
The blood-test finding came up from the medical examiner early in the afternoon. Type O. The same as Lois Fazenda’s.
A half-hour later Tom Spellacy picked up the photograph of Harold Pugh at the DMV. The license application said that Harold Pugh was forty-seven years old, weighed 140 pounds and was five feet four-and-one-half-inches tall. The application was stamped, MUST WEAR GLASSES. Harold Pugh wore rimless glasses in the photograph and a pencil moustache.
At three o’clock, Tom Spellacy had lunch at a Pup ‘n Taco on Olive.
At three-thirty he was checking the records at the department’s automobile pound on Temple. The record showed that the wreckage of Harold Pugh’s 1936 Ford V-8 was being held at a junkyard on Vermont Avenue pending the settling of his estate.
The owner of the junkyard on Vermont said that the 1936 Ford V-8 would not even bring fifty dollars in scrap.
Tom Spellacy scraped some dried blood from the windshield of the 1936 Ford V-8 and put it into an envelope.
In the back seat of the car he found a scrub brush, two empty boxes of Chinese food from Ah Fong’s and behind the seat a large kitchen knife that had begun to rust.
There was a decal for the San Diego Zoo stuck on the rear window.
The force of the accident had jammed shut the trunk of the 1936 Ford V-8. Tom Spellacy borrowed a crowbar from the owner of the junkyard and pried the trunk open.
There was more dried blood in the trunk, which he scraped into a second envelope.
Also a bloodstained two-by-four with bits of hair sticking to it.
Everything went into the grocery box in the trunk of Tom Spellacy’s car.
The night-lab assistant at the medical examiner’s office said he could not test the two blood samples from the 1936 Ford V-8 until after dinner.
Take your time, Tom Spellacy said. There’s no hurry.
The admitting clerk in the emergency room at County General said that the blood type of the DOA named Pugh, Harold, processed on 15 April, was AB negative.
At Ah Fong’s in Redondo Beach, Tom Spellacy had hot and sour soup, peach duck, Szechuan shrimp and lichee nuts.
Ah Fong said he recognized the man in the DMV photograph.
Shortly after midnight, the lab assistant in the ME’s office called in the test results. The specimens were both human blood. AB negative for the first specimen from the windshield, Type O for the one from the trunk.
“You know who I been wondering about, Tom?” Mary Margaret Spellacy said.
Tom Spellacy shook his head. Looking for a dead man, he thought. The definite pattern no one had considered. The name right there in the folders all the time. Pugh, Harold. Member Southern California Chapter Barbers’ Hall of Fame. 902. 901H. DOA. The numbers and letters justifying Fuqua’s passion for the triplicate. Giving Fuqua the last laugh . . .
“. . . That girl,” Mary Margaret Spellacy said.
She wasn’t a girl, Tom Spellacy thought. She was a headline. Someone to read about who wasn’t your sister. Someone to get your rocks off over . . .
“... You know the one,” Mary Margaret Spellacy said.
They’d feel cheated, the people who read about her. Cheated of their vicarious vengeance because Pugh, Harold, was DOA. They’d blame her. She was only a tramp, after all. And they’d wait for the next headline.
“. . . The one from Holy Resurrection,” Mary Margaret Spellacy said.
Sweet Jesus, Tom Spellacy thought. “She didn’t go to Holy Resurrection.”
“Yes, she did,” Mary Margaret Spellacy said. “When Red Kennedy’s sister, Mother Agatha, was principal. You saved her life, remember. The one on the Jury Commission.”
So that was what she had been leading up to. And look at Des. He’d like to bury himself in the molded salad. I hope the son of a bitch chokes on a marshmallow.
“Imagine that, the Jury Commission,” Mary Margaret Spellacy said. “Such a grand position for a girl from Holy Resurrection . . .”
What is she doing now? Mary Margaret had said
.
Des tried to help out. Red Kennedy is an interesting case, he said. The funny thing is, he didn’t get his nickname because of the color of his hair.
That girl from Holy Resurrection, Mary Margaret said.
It was the red socks he always wore, Des said.
I don’t know, Tom Spellacy said.
I thought you’d know, Mary Margaret said.
Even after he was ordained, Des said.
I really don’t know, Tom said.
And he didn’t. Until he found the letter in his in box Tuesday morning.
Dear Tom,
It’s all right. I mean, I thought you might be worried—/ don’t mean “worried” exactly, I mean interested—and I wanted to tell you it’s all right. What made me write this letter is that I was having a drink with a friend last night—I did have friends, you know. We never saw them, but I had them, and some of them had families and some of them were sad and some of them were lonely and some of them were happy and I suppose most of the men wanted to “get into my pants,” as you never liked to hear me say, but anyway I had them, although we never saw them—anyway, I was in this place and there was a sign over the bar and the sign said, To obtain an alcoholic beverage, you must have been born before this date: May 25, 1925. And I started to cry, because I was 13 in 1925, which makes me 34 now. 1 wasn’t crying because I was 34—there’s nothing wrong with being 34—but because I was 34 and I never knew my plumbing was on the blink. It’s a terrible word, ‘’plumbing,” but you used to get embarrassed if I said words like c—t and I don’t know what else to use, so I use that. Specifically, it’s not strong enough in there to hold a child to term, or even for much more than three months. If you’ve followed me so far, I think you’re getting the gist. I miscarried. Naturally. I mean I didn’t have to go to a doctor. I’m sorry I had to wait until I was 34 to find this out—I mean, I might have had an operation when I was younger to make it stronger, if I had known, that is—and it means I’ll probably never have a baby, but at least I didn’t have to go see one of those people who would have got rid of it. All the time I was thinking about going to one of those people, I kept putting it off because all I could think of was the nuns at Holy Resurrection. That’s funny, isn’t it. With my track record, I mean. Everything I ever did with men, I always measured against the reaction of the nuns at Holy Resurrection. How 1 thought they’d react is what I mean, because needless to say I never told them what I did, except in my dreams, and that’s one thing I’m glad I never had to tell them, even in a dream. I bet you never thought I was guilty about that, but I was. Just like you. You want to know something funny? I once made a list of all the guys I ever knew that way—it was shorter than the telephone book, which will probably surprise you—and I left you off. You were different; that was why. All the others never felt guilty, but you always did. It was like you went to Holy Resurrection, too.
I guess that’s all I have to say. I’ve gone back to work and I have a new apartment and I bought a cat and some plants and a secondhand sewing machine so I can make my own clothes and I’m going to go to night school and take a course in something interesting and Vm going to teach myself to be a better cook. The problem is I’ve always defined myself in terms of a man, and there are times when I’d like to think they’re all bastards, but they’re not—or if they are, that’s something I’ve got to learn to live with. I suppose there’s somebody out there, but not knowing who he is right now is what scares me. Almost as much as what will happen when we get together. With me, it’s always been like peeling away the leaves of an artichoke. When you reach the heart, it’s all over. Don’t try to get in touch.
Corinne
Tom Spellacy folded the letter and put it into his desk drawer. From the information operator he got Corinne’s new listing. She answered on the second ring. He deepened his voice and said he was from the Welcome Wagon and when she said, “Tom?” he hung up.
At least she was safe.
The afternoon mail brought another letter.
Dear Tom,
I’m sorry.
Brenda
The morgue attendant pulled out the drawer and Tom Spellacy
lifted the sheet. For a moment he stared at the body, then dropped the sheet and nodded at the attendant. The closing of the drawer to the refrigerated compartment echoed through the cool green room.
When the attendant disappeared through the door, Tom Spellacy said, “She had a cat.”
“Dead as a goddamn doornail,” Crotty said. “There was enough gas in there to take out half of downtown.”
“The other one. The gas get her, too?”
Crotty shook his head. “Septicemia,” Woody said. “From a bad scrape. She’d been dead for four days. She must’ve been getting a little rancid.”
Tom Spellacy knew the answer to the next question even before he asked it. “Anyone we know?”
“Lucille Cotter. Remember her?”
He remembered the cat trying to pounce on a bird that afternoon with Brenda in MacArthur Park. “Silver Tongue.”
“She deserved her name, that one, she really did.” A faraway look crossed Crotty’s face. “It was like you died and went to heaven.”
Silver Tongue. Reduced to hustling tricks on lower Sunset. She got old, Brenda had said, it happens. Silver Tongue, who had once run into Harold Pugh. My God. Nothing crossed. And everything did. “Brenda did the scrape.”
Crotty did not ask how he knew. “Well, she must’ve done it with pliers and a screwdriver. It was real amateur night.”
Tom Spellacy turned suddenly and walked out through the autopsy room, not looking at the cadavers on the tables, and down the tiled tunnel leading to the elevators. Poor Brenda. Four days with her cat staring at Lucille Cotter’s corpse. She knew the penal code, Brenda. Murder One reduced at most to manslaughter. A Folsom pop at best, the gas chamber at worst. No place to go, no one to turn to. And still it took four days to turn on the gas. By the time he called after getting her letter, she was already in the morgue. And the leaking gas had nearly asphyxiated two other tenants at the Alvarado Arms.
Crotty caught up to him at the elevators. Good old Frank. As soon as the news came over the wire, he had gone to the Alvarado Arms. Just in case he might find something incriminating.
Crotty suggested they go to Wo Fat’s. Tom Spellacy wondered idly if Frank had found anything incriminating, but he really did not care. So Silver Tongue had checked out on Brenda’s couch and not under Harold Pugh’s surgery. All it meant was that she had sucked six or seven hundred more cocks. It’s nice to have someone to say good-bye to, Brenda had said. Maybe that was why Silver Tongue had gone to Brenda’s. To say good-bye.
“You ever read the brassiere ads?” Crotty said after he had ordered.
Tom Spellacy shook his head.
“I read them all,” Crotty said. “I can pick them out. I walk down the street, I see a girl, I see the straps through her blouse and I know it’s a La Trique latex Breathe-Ezee. With matching garter belt, $5.95.”
“It’s a good thing to know, Frank. Useful.”
Crotty held a cup of herbal tea in both hands. “Why’d she write you, Brenda?”
“The last time I saw her,” Tom Spellacy said evenly, “she said she had no one to say good-bye to.” He took a deep breath. “Except old whores and people she bought.”
Crotty avoided his eyes. “She used to give me free ass.”
“She told me.”
“I figured she had.” Crotty stuck a napkin in his shirt collar and let it hang like a bib. “She called Jack, too.”
Tom Spellacy’s eyes flickered, but he said nothing.
“The switchboard operator where she lived,” Crotty said, “he was a listener. Everything went through the switchboard and I told him I was going to run his ass into the joint, he didn’t tell me who she called. Your house a couple of times, but she always hung up. A woman answered, he said. I guess it was Mary Margaret.”
Oh, my God, Tom Spellacy thought.
“Then there was this other number. I checked it out. It was Jack’s. She asked him for some money.”
“She wanted to open a joint in Nevada,” Tom Spellacy said almost to himself.
“She told him she was in trouble and Jack said she was going to be in big fucking trouble, she didn’t let him alone.”
“I asked her if she wanted a reference,” Tom Spellacy said. It was almost as if he were not listening to Crotty. “And she said she never had any trouble buying cops.”
“She’d get herself whacked out, she didn’t watch out, is what he told her, Jack,” Crotty said.
They stared at each other across the table.
“And then she turned on the gas?” Tom Spellacy said.
“The next day,” Crotty said.
Tom Spellacy picked up the teapot, held it for a moment and then let it drop to the floor. The pot shattered and the steaming liquid splashed over his pants, scalding his leg. He did not flinch.
“Jesus Christ,” Crotty said.
“Let’s nail that fucker, Frank,” Tom Spellacy said.
“I don’t like it,” Crotty said.
Tom Spellacy explained again. The scenario was so simple. The girl had the green cards. Jack was financing the green cards. The girl tried to stiff him. The girl was snuffed. It was so logical that he could almost make himself believe it.
The bib around Crotty’s neck was soiled with sweet-and-sour sauce. “I still don’t like it.”
“It adds up,” Tom Spellacy said. It occurred to him that he had been adding it up since his days in Wilshire Vice.
Crotty took off his bib. “He didn’t do it.”
“He’s got a motive,” Tom Spellacy said. He had never believed much in motive and now he was promoting a false one.
Crotty wiped his fingers on his napkin and tried not to look at Tom Spellacy. “He still didn’t do it.”
Tom Spellacy did not hear. “It’s Jack,” he insisted. Jack on Page One. It was worth it. A grainy photograph of Jack in handcuffs. Arrested. Indicted. The headlines would wipe the slate clean. All the way back to Wilshire Vice. Even things with Des. Pay off the debt to Brenda. Corinne, Mary Margaret. The whole thing was mixed up with them, too.
“It’s the barber.”
It took a moment for Crotty’s voice to penetrate.
“Harold Pugh,” Crotty said.
Tom Spellacy slumped against the back of his chair. He took a deep breath, then a second and after a while he said quietly, “How’d you find out?”
“That stuff in your office. I read it.”
“Why?”
“I’m a cop.”
“You’ve never read anything longer than a menu, Frank. Why’d you read this? You remember what you told me the day we found her? Right here. This very table. Where the Chinks treat you like the emperor of Spring Street. You said one thing was for sure, you weren’t going to lose any sleep over who took that girl out. What made you so interested all of a sudden? Saturday. Sunday. The Stars had a doubleheader Sunday. I bet you missed it, all the reading you had to do. Why, Frank?”
“It was on your desk.”
“Why, Frank?”
Crotty’s eyes were blinking rapidly. “My Chinamen . . .”
“What about them?”
“They pulled out of the motel.”
“So?”
“I’m up to my ass in debt, Tom. I got a note due in three weeks. And not a pot to piss in.”
Tom Spellacy did not take his eyes off Crotty. “So . . .”
“So I called a friend of mine at Warner Brothers. I been talking to them off and on. They think there’s a picture in it. The thing was, they wanted the files.”
“And if you gave them the files, they’d take care of your note.”
Crotty nodded. “I’m no dummy, Tom. The stuff’s right there on your desk. I see the name Harold Pugh turn up twice, I can put two and two together. I don’t know how or where, but I know he did it.”
“Anyone else know?”
Crotty stared at the soiled tablecloth.
“Who, Frank?”
“Lorenzo Jones.”
Tom Spellacy started to laugh.
“I needed somebody to check the car,” Crotty said defensively. “And he was the officer on duty that night. Plus which he’s an ambitious dinge. He’ll keep his mouth shut, I tell him to.”
Tom Spellacy calculated the odds. Lorenzo knew, and Lorenzo knew that he and Crotty knew, but Crotty was right, Lorenzo would not be a problem. “What about your pal at Warner’s?”
“Shit, Tom, I didn’t give them copies of that.”
Tom Spellacy probed a hole in a back tooth with his tongue. “You know what Brenda said about Jack?”
Crotty shook his head.
“She said he liked to think he was born at sixty, building cathedrals.”
Crotty looked at him suspiciously. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We’re going to bring him in, Frank,” Tom Spellacy said quietly.
“He didn’t do it.”
“Then his lawyers will get him off.”
“I don’t like it, Tom.”
“He’ll just get his picture in the papers. And maybe Howard Terkel will tell a few stories about him and Brenda and the old days.”
Crotty said nothing for a long time. “He’ll bring up Wilshire Vice,” he said finally. The recollection seemed to pain him.
“Not if you bust him, Frank. I’ll let you take all the bows.”
“Tom . . .” There was a note of desperation in Crotty’s voice.
“He builds cathedrals. He’ll never admit he used to be a pimp.”
“I can’t go along with it.”
“It’ll be a real feather in your cap.”
“You’re just trying to settle an old score,” Crotty pleaded. “And that always means new trouble.”
Tom Spellacy smiled pleasantly. “You’ve got a note due in three weeks, Frank. And it’ll be taken care of.” He paused. “If no one blows the whistle on you . . .”
