“If you mean wolverines, yes.”
“Lord. Well, I admire his taste in mustelids, if not the way he displays his appreciation.”
Danny sighed. “Mr. Cormier, do you know anything about the Joredco Dental Lab?”
“Sure, just down the street. I think they make animal choppers.”
A clean take. Danny saw takes from Claire De Haven’s movie, pictured HIM seeing it, getting aroused, wanting more. “I’d like to see your wolverines.”
Cormier said, “Thought you’d never ask,” and walked ahead of Danny to the refrigeration shed. The air went from warm to freezing; the yapping became snarling; dark shapes lashed out and banged the mesh fronts of their pens. Cormier said, “Gulo luscus. Carcajou—evil spirit—to the Indians. The most insatiable carnivore alive and pound for pound the meanest mammal. Like I said, I admire your killer’s taste.”
Danny found a good sun angle—light square on a middle pen; he squatted down and looked, his nose to the wire. Inside, a long creature paced, turning in circles, snapping at the walls. Its teeth glinted; its claws scraped the floor; it looked like a coiled muscle that would not stop coiling until it killed and slept in satiation—or died. Danny watched, feeling the beast’s power, feeling HIM feeling it; Cormier talked. “Gulo luscus is two things: smart and intractable. I’ve known them to develop a taste for deer, hide in trees and toss nice edible bark down to lure them over, then jump down and rip the deer’s jugular out clean to the windpipe. Once they get a whiff of blood, they will not stop persisting. I’ve heard of wolverines stalking cougars wounded in mating battles. They’ll jab them from behind, take nips out and run away, a little meat here and there until the cougar nearly bleeds to death. When the poor fellow’s almost dead, Gulo attacks frontally, claws the cougar’s eyes out of his head and eats them like gumballs.”
Danny winced, transposing the image: Marty Goines, HIM, the creature he was watching. “I need to look at your records. All the wolverines you’ve lent out to movies and animal shows.”
Cormier said, “Officer, you can’t lend Gulos out, much as I’d like to make the money. They’re my private passion, I love them and I keep them around because they shore up my reputation as a mustelidologist. You lend Gulos out, they’ll attack anything human or animal within biting range. I had one stolen out of its pen five or six years ago, and my only consolation was that the stealer sure as hell got himself mangled.”
Danny looked up. “Tell me about that. What happened?”
Cormier took out his cigar butt and fingered it. “In the summer of ’42 I worked nights at the Griffith Park Zoo, resident zoologist doing research on nocturnal mustelid habits. I had an earlier bunch of wolverines that were getting real fat. I knew somebody must have been feeding them, and I started finding extra mouse and hamster carcasses in the pens. Somebody was lifting the food latches and feeding my Gulos, and I figured it for a neighborhood kid who’d heard about my reputation and thought he’d see for himself. Truth be told, it didn’t bother me, and it kind of gave me a cozy feeling, here’s this fellow Gulo lover and all. Then, late in July, it stopped. I knew it stopped because there were no more extra carcasses in the cages and my Gulos went back to their normal weights. About a year and a half or so went by, and one night my Gulo Otto was stolen. I laughed like hell. I figured the feeder had to have a Gulo for himself and stole Otto. Otto was a pistol. If the stealer got away with keeping him, I’m sure Otto bit him real good. I called hospitals around here to see if they stitched a bite victim, but it was no go, no Otto.”
Bit him real good.
Danny thought of sedation—a wolverine Mickey Finned and stolen—HIM with his own evil mascot—the story might just play. He looked back in the pen; the wolverine noticed something and lashed the wire, making screechy blood W noises. Cormier laughed and said, “Juno, you’re a pistol.” Danny put his face up to the mesh, tasting the animal’s breath. He said, “Thanks, Mr. Cormier,” pulled himself away and drove to the Joredco Dental Lab.
* * *
He was almost expecting a neon sign facade, an animal mouth open wide, the address numbers done up as teeth. He was wrong: the lab was just a tan stucco building, a subtly lettered sign above the door its only advertisement.
Danny parked in front and walked into a tiny receiving area: a secretary behind a desk, a switchboard and calendar art on the walls—1950 repeated a dozen times over, handsome wild animals representing January for local taxidermist’s shops. The girl smiled at him and said, “Yes?”
Danny showed his badge. “Sheriff’s. I’d like to speak to the man in charge.”
“Regarding?”
“Regarding animal teeth.”
The girl tapped an intercom switch and said, “Policeman to see you, Mr. Carmichael.” Danny looked at pictures of moose, bears, wolves and buffalos; he noticed a sleek mountain cat and thought of a wolverine stalking it, killing it off with sheer ugly persistence.
A connecting door swung open; a man in a bloody white smock came in. Danny said, “Mr. Carmichael?”
“Yes, mister?”
“It’s Deputy Upshaw.”
“And this regards, Deputy?”
“It regards wolverine teeth.”
No reaction except impatience—the man obviously anxious to get back to work. “Then I can’t help you. Joredco is the only lab in Los Angeles that fashions animal dentures, and we’ve never done them for a wolverine.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because taxidermists do not stuff wolverines—they are not an item that people want mounted in their home or lodge. I’ve worked here for thirteen years and I’ve never filled an order for wolverine teeth.”
Danny thought it over. “Could someone who learned the rudiments of animal-denture making here do it himself?”
“Yes, but it would be bloody and very slapdash without the proper tools.”
“Good. Because I’m looking for a man who likes blood.”
Carmichael wiped his hands on his smock. “Deputy, what is this in regard to?”
“Quadruple homicide. How far back do your employment records go?”
The “quadruple homicide” got to Carmichael—he looked shaken under his brusqueness. “My God. Our records go back to ’40, but Joredco employs mostly women. You don’t think—”
Danny was thinking Reynolds Loftis wouldn’t sully his hands in a place like this. “I think maybe. Tell me about the men you’ve had working here.”
“There haven’t been many. Frankly, women work for a lower wage. Our current staff has been here for years, and when we get rush orders, we hire bums out of day labor and kids from Lincoln and Belmont High School to do the scut work. During the war, we hired lots of temporaries that way.”
The Joredco connection felt—strangely—like it was clicking in, with Loftis clicking out. “Mr. Carmichael, do you have a medical plan for your regular employees?”
“Yes.”
“May I see your records?”
Carmichael turned to the receptionist. “Sally, let Deputy whatever here see the files.”
Danny let the remark slide; Carmichael went back through the connecting door. Sally pointed to a filing cabinet. “Nasty prick, if you’ll pardon my French. Medicals are in the bottom drawer, men in with the women. You don’t think a real killer worked here, do you?”
Danny laughed. “No, but maybe a real live monster did.”
* * *
It took him an hour to go through the medical charts.
Since November ’39, sixteen men had been hired on as dental techs. Three were Japanese, hired immediately after the Jap internment ended in ’44; four were Caucasian and now in their thirties; three were white and now middle-aged; six were Mexican. All sixteen men had, at one time or another, given blood to the annual Red Cross Drive. Five of the sixteen possessed O+ blood, the most common human blood type. Three of the men were Mexican, two were Japanese—but Joredco still felt right.
Danny went back to the shop and spent another hour ch
atting up the techs, talking to them while they pried teeth out of gum sections removed from the heads of elk, deer and Catalina Island boar. He asked questions about tall, gray-haired men who acted strange; jazz; heroin; guys with wolverine fixations. He breathed blood and animal tooth infection and stressed strange behavior among the temporary workers who came and went; he threw out teasers on a handsome Hollywood actor who just might have made the scene. The techs deadpanned him, no’d him and worked around him; his only lead was elimination stuff: most of the temps were Mex, wetbacks going to Belmont and Lincoln High sans green cards, veterans of the Vernon slaughterhouses, where the work was twice as gory and the money was even worse than the coolie wages Mr. Carmichael paid. Danny left thinking Reynolds Loftis would faint the second he hit the Joredco line; thinking the actor might be circumstantial linkage only. But Joredco/Cormier still felt right; the blood and decay smelled like something HE would love.
The day was warming up; heat that felt all the worse for coming after heavy rain. Danny sat in the car and sweated out last night’s drunk; he thought elimination, thought that the day labor joints kept no records in order to dodge taxes, that the high school employment offices were long shots he had to try anyway. He drove to Belmont High, talked to the employment counselor, learned that her records only went back to ’45 and checked the Joredco referrals—twenty-seven of them—all Mexes and Japs. Even though he knew the age range was wrong, he repeated the process at Lincoln: Mexes, Japs and a mentally deficient white boy hired because he was strong enough to haul two deer carcasses at a time. Gooser. But the rightness kept nagging him.
Danny drove to a bar in Chinatown. After two shots of house bonded, he knew this was his last day as Homicide brass: when he told Considine Ted Krugman was shot, he’d be shot back to the West Hollywood Squad, packing some large blame if Ellis Loew thought he’d jeopardized the chance for a successful grand jury. He could keep looking for HIM on his off-hours—but there was a good chance Felix Gordean would talk to his golf buddies Sheriff Biscailuz and Al Dietrich and he’d get dumped back into uniform or jail duty. He’d made an enemy of Gene Niles and pissed off Dudley Smith and Mike Breuning; Karen Hiltscher wouldn’t play pratgirl for him anymore; if Niles could prove he B&E’d 2307, he’d be in real trouble.
Two more shots; warm wisps edging out the gloom. He had a friend with rank and juice—if he could make up for blowing his decoy job, he could still ride Considine’s coattails. A last shot; HIM again, HIM pure and abstract, like there was never a time when he didn’t exist, even though they’d been together only a few weeks. He thought of HIM free of Reynolds Loftis and last night with Claire, taking it back chronologically, stopping at Augie Duarte dead on a stainless steel slab.
The facial cuts. Jump forward to last night’s file work. His instinct: the killer knew Marty Goines’ pal—the youth with the bandaged face—and drew sexual inspiration from him. Jump to Thomas Cormier, whose wolverines were overfed—worshiped?—during the summer of ’42, Sleepy Lagoon summer, when zoot sticks were most in use. Cormier’s interpretation: a neighborhood kid. Jump to Joredco. They hired youths, maybe youths out of skid row day labor, where they didn’t keep records. The burn boy was white; all the high school referrals were Mex and Jap, except for the non-play retard. Maybe the workers he talked to never met the kid because he only worked there briefly, maybe they forgot about him, maybe they just didn’t notice him. Jump forward to now. The burned-face boy was a burglar—Listerine Chester Brown tagged him as burglarizing with Goines circa ’43 to ’44, his face bandaged. If he was the one who stole Thomas Cormier’s wolverine some eighteen months after his summer of ’42 worship, and he was a local kid, he might have committed other burglaries in the Bunker Hill area during that time period.
Danny drove to Rampart Station, the LAPD division that handled Bunker Hill felonies. Mal Considine’s name got him the squad lieutenant’s attention; a few minutes later he was in a musty storeroom checking boxes of discarded occurrence reports.
The boxes were marked according to year; Danny found two grocery cartons stencilled “1942.” The reports inside were loose, the multi-page jobs stapled together with no carbons in between. There was no rhyme or reason to the order they were filed in—purse snatchings, muggings, petty thefts, burglaries, indecent exposures and loiterings were all lumped together. Danny sat down on a box of ’48 reports and dug in.
He scanned upper right corners for penal code numbers—Burglary, 459.1. The two boxes for ’42 yielded thirty-one; location was his next breakdown step. He carried the reports into the squadroom, sat at an empty desk facing a wall map of Rampart Division and looked for Bunker Hill street names to match. Four reports in, he got one; six reports in, three more. He memorized the ten north-south and eight east-west blocks of the Hill, tore through the rest of the pages and ended with eleven burglaries, unsolved occurrences, on Bunker Hill in the year 1942. And the eleven addresses were all within walking distance of Thomas Cormier’s house and the Joredco Dental Lab.
Next was dates.
Danny flipped through the reports again quickly; the time and date of occurrence were typed at the bottom of each first page. May 16, 1942; July 1, 1942; May 27, 1942; May 9, 1942; June 16, 1942, and six more to make eleven: an unsolved burglary spree, May 9 to August 1, 1942. His head buzzing, he read “Items Stolen”—and saw why Rampart didn’t put out beaucoup men to catch the burglar:
Trinkets, family portraits, costume jewelry, cash out of purses and wallets. A deco wall clock. A cedar cigar humidor. A collection of glass figurines. A stuffed ringneck pheasant, a stuffed bobcat mounted on rosewood.
More HIM, more not Loftis HIM. It had to be.
Danny tingled, like he was being dangled on electric strings. He went back to the storeroom, found the ’43 and ’44 boxes, looked through them and got zero Bunker Hill trinket jobs—the only burglary occurrence reports for those years denoted real 459.1’s, real valuables taken; burglary reports resulting in arrest had already been checked City- and Countywide. Danny finished and kicked at the boxes; two facts kicked him.
The killer was ID’d as middle-aged; he had to be connected to the wolverine-worshiping burglar—a youth—who was emerging from today’s work. Chester Brown told him that Marty Goines and his burned-face accomplice B&E’d in the San Fernando Valley ’43 to ’44; station houses out there might have occurrence reports—he could roll there after he muscled a certain Commie stagehand. And summer ’42 was the height of the wartime blackout, curfew was rigidly enforced and field interrogation cards were written up on people caught out after 10:00 P.M.—when the wolverine lover was most likely prowling. If the cards were saved—
Danny tore the storeroom apart, throwing empty boxes; he sweated out his booze lunch, got sprayed with cobwebs, mildew and mouse turds. He found a box marked “FI’s ’41–’43,” thumbed back the first few cards and saw that they were–amazingly—in chronological order. He kept flipping; the late spring and summer of ’42 yielded eight names: eight white men aged nineteen to forty-seven stopped for being out after curfew, questioned and released.
The cards were filled out slapdash: all had the name, race and date of birth of the interrogee; only half had home addresses listed—in most cases downtown hotels. Five of the men would now be middle-aged and possibles for HIM; the other three were youths who could be the burned-face boy pre-burns—or—if he was tangential to the case—Thomas Cormier’s neighborhood kid wolverine lover.
Danny pocketed the cards, drove to a pay phone and called Jack Shortell at the Hollywood squadroom. The squad lieutenant put the call through; Shortell came on the line sounding harried. “Yeah? Danny?”
“It’s me. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, except I’m getting the fisheye from every City bull in the place, like all of a sudden I’m worse than worse than poison. What have you got?”
“Names, maybe a hot one right in the middle. I talked to that Cormier guy and hit Joredco, and I couldn’t put them straight together, but I??
?m damn sure our guy got kissing close to Cormier’s wolverines. You remember that old burglary accomplice of Marty Goines I told you about?”
“Yeah.”
“I think I’ve got a line on him, and I just about think he plays. There was a bunch of unsolved burglaries on Bunker Hill, May to August of ’42. Mickey Mouse stuff clouted, right near Cormier and Joredco. LAPD was enforcing curfew then, and I picked out eight possible FI cards from the area—May through August. I’ve got a hunch the killings stem from then—the Sleepy Lagoon killing and the SLDC time—and I need you to do eliminations—current address, blood type, dental tech background, criminal record and the rest.”
“Go, I’m writing it down.”
Danny got out his cards. “Some have addresses, some don’t. One, James George Whitacre, DOB 10/5/03, Havana Hotel, Ninth and Olive. Two, Ronald NMI Dennison, 6/30/20, no address. Three, Coleman Masskie, 5/9/23, 236 South Beaudry. Four, Lawrence Thomas Waznicki with a K-1, 11/29/08, 641 1/4 Bunker Hill Avenue. Five, Leland NMI Hardell, 6/4/24, American Eagle Hotel, 4th and Hill Streets. Six, Loren Harold Nadick, 3/2/02, no address. Seven, David NMI Villers, 1/15/04, no address. And Bruno Andrew Gaffney, 7/29/06, no address.”
Shortell said, “All down. Son, are you getting close?”
Another electric jolt: the Bunker Hill burglaries ended on August 1, 1942; the Sleepy Lagoon murder—the victim’s clothes zoot stick slashed—occurred on August 2. “Almost, Jack. Some right answers and luck and that fucker is mine.”
* * *
Danny got to Variety International Pictures just as dusk was falling and the picket lines were breaking up for the day. He parked in plain view, put an “Official Police Vehicle” sign on his windshield and pinned his badge to his coat front; he walked to the guard hut, no familiar faces, pissed that he was ignored. The gate man buzzed him in; he walked straight back to Set 23.
The sign on the wall had Tomahawk Massacre still in production; the door was open. Danny heard gunfire, looked in and saw a cowboy and an Indian exchange shots across papier-mâché foothills. Lights were shining down on them; cameras were rolling; the Mexican guy he’d seen outside the morgue was sweeping up fake snow in front of another backdrop: grazing buffalos painted on cardboard.