I turned off the flashing light and slowed down going through Santa Barbara, then flicked it back on and leaned on the gas again. I drove straight through to Sunset and headed east. The streets in L.A. were bone-dry. I was home by 10:30.
I pulled into the drive and sat for a minute. My gut was still throbbing. I got out of the car carefully, swinging my legs out the door first and then pulling myself to my feet with my hands on the doorsill. The pain didn’t get any worse; it couldn’t have. Stooped over, I made the door, unlocked it, and got inside. I went in the bedroom, pulled off jacket and tie, and opened my shirt and checked my torso in the bathroom mirror. Two dark red bruises the size of dollar pancakes formed a sideways figure eight at the bottom of my rib cage. The one-eyed man could hit.
I got the Ben-Gay out of the cabinet and went back in the bedroom. Rosie was scratching the back door, so I put the bottle on the night table and groaned my way to the back door. He was so happy to see me he jumped up on me and gave my a sloppy kiss. His paws hit me right at ground zero and added new pain to my aching gut.
“Jesus,” I yelled. He jumped back, looking like I had whacked him on the rear.
“It’s okay,” I said, and got down on my knees and held my hand out to him. He came over and leaned against me, and the heat of his body felt good against the bruises.
“The old man took a bit of a beating,” I said.
I fed him, gave him a bone, left the back door open, and went back to the bedroom. I lay down on the bed and eased my pants off. The Ben-Gay burned as I carefully spread it over my abdomen, but then it began to work its magic. I lay there looking at the ceiling until the pain eased. I don’t know how long I lay there, thirty minutes maybe, long enough for Rosie to finish with the bone and come back in. He put his front paws up on the bed and looked down at me, his nose twitching from the pungent odor. I scratched him behind the ears and took deep breaths and waited for the ache to subside.
When I could move I got up, locked the front door, got the Canadian Club and a water tumbler, dropped a cube of ice in the tumbler, and went back to the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed, poured myself a half-glass of whiskey, rolled a cigarette, and lit up. Just inhaling hurt.
Rosie sat at my feet, looking concerned. I patted the bed.
“Come on up,” I said. He jumped on the bed and sat down and looked down at me with concern.
“I’m okay, pal, nothing broken,” I told him. That seemed to satisfy him and he went to his side of the bed, did his little circle thing, and lay down.
My trip had earned me more than a sore stomach. I was sure now that the Wilensky woman’s death was no accident.
I swallowed half the drink, smoked awhile, finished off the drink, and doused the cigarette. The whiskey soaked up a little more of the pain. I lay down on my back, worked my way under the sheet, and turned off the light.
It had been a very long day. I was asleep before Rosie started to snore.
CHAPTER 17
I t was 7:15 when the phone woke me up. I don’t know how long it had been ringing. I rolled over to reach for it and I felt a hot wire slash across my stomach.
“Oww!” I yelped. Rosie jerked awake as I reached across him and picked up the receiver.
“Yeah,” I moaned.
“That you, Zeke?” I heard Bones say on the other end of the line.
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s the matter, you sound all in. Have a rough night?”
“You’ll never know just how rough,” I groaned.
“Want to stop by the morgue on your way in? I got the post-mortem ready for you.”
“Right. Thirty minutes.”
“No hurry,” he said gleefully. “None of my patients is going anywhere.”
“Cute,” I said, and hung up. I called Ski and told him I was running a little late, and to call the precinct and tell Ozzie, who handled the radio, that we had to stop off at the morgue on the way in.
“How’d it go up there?” he asked.
“I’ll give you a report when I see you,” I said, and hung up.
I struggled out of bed and went into the kitchen to let the dog out, then realized I had left the back door open all night. Rosie was in the yard, watering the trees and shrubs. I went into the bathroom and turned the hot water as high as I could take it and let it wash over me for about ten minutes. Then I shaved; dressed in my tweed jacket, dark gray flannels, a dark blue shirt, and black tie; set out Rosie’s food and water for him; and left to pick up Ski.
“What happened to the window?” was the first thing he said when he got in the car. Then he took a closer look at me and added, “What happened to you? You’re as pale as white bread.”
“I met Captain Culhane,” I said.
“What’d he do, hit you with a sledgehammer?”
“That’s about right,” I said, and gave him a quick report as we headed downtown.
“It’s a bust,” I finished. “We can forget Verna Wilensky. Nobody up there is going to help, and legally we haven’t a case for a subpoena.”
“You going to let him get away with rocking you like that?” he said angrily, the blood rising to his face.
“Oh, I did my share,” I said, and told him how the fight had ended, and about putting the gun and badge in the bag.
“The old man’s gonna want to do something about this,” Ski said. “He’ll be mighty pissed off that a cop did that to another cop, especially to one of his.”
“I made my point,” I answered. “I don’t want to hear the name Culhane or San Pietro or anything like it for the rest of my life.”
“We could go back up there and make life miserable for him,” the big man said.
“Ah, we’d be outnumbered. Of course, it seems like he only hires the handicapped. On the other hand, the one-eyed guy didn’t need both eyes to damn near break me in half.”
“I’d like to have a piece of the son of a bitch,” Ski said. “You shoulda taken me with you, partner.”
“You probably would have killed one of them. The last thing we’d want to do is spend twenty years in that place.”
You can add morgues to a high place on the list of things I hate. Perhaps it’s the smell of formaldehyde, blood, and alcohol that permeates the sterile confines of what Bones calls “the coolest place in town.”
The room was white-tiled, with a bright light hanging from the ceiling over each of the tables, and a butcher’s scale hanging from the ceiling beside the lamp. Each table had a ridge running all the way around it, and a sink at the foot into which water, blood, and any other unwanted material was channeled. A spigot hissed aerated water into the sink. The mixed odors of alcohol, blood, disinfectant, and death permeated the cold air in the room. There were half a dozen stretchers, elevated at the head and sloping down to the foot. Beside the table, a stenographer wearing a face mask sat at a wheeled desk, equipped with a shorthand writer. In the corner, almost inaudibly, a record player was providing something by Bach.
A large woman’s corpse lay on its back on one of the tables, her dark hair showering over the raised end of the table. The body was the color of spoiled meat, and was split open from chin to Venus mound. Bones, in a white butcher’s apron and wearing yellow gloves, was leaning over the corpse, digging around in the cavity, and dictating to the stenographer. He looked over the top of his glasses when I stuck my head through the swinging doors of the examination room.
“Zeke, m’boy,” he said cheerily. “Want to take a look? See what cyanide does to the innards?”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
He stopped what he was doing and told the steno, whose name was Judith, to take a break. She stood primly, straightened her skirt, and left the room through a door on the far side. Bones peeled off the gloves, turned off the light over the table, and pulled off his gown. He dropped gown and gloves in a large trash bin near the door.
“Feelin’ any better? You look like hell,” he said.
“I sprung a couple of ribs,” I s
aid.
“She must’ve been quite the athlete,” he said wryly.
“Don’t I wish.”
“Where’s it hurt?”
He stopped and reached out with both hands, feeling the bottom of my rib cage.
“Right there,” I said.
His nimble fingers worked around my sides and back again.
“Nothing broken. You’ll probably be sore for a couple of days. Let’s see what Mrs. Wilensky gave up.” He led me to his office, which was adjacent to the laboratory: a cubicle of a room large enough for a desk, a couple of file cabinets, three chairs, and a table that held a coffeemaker, a couple of mugs, a tall sugar shaker, and a bedpan full of ice, in which a bottle of milk rested. There was a calendar on the wall, displaying a drawing of the human form with all the vital parts identified on it. The motto on the bottom read topfer’s surgical instruments in large letters, and under that stainless steel precision tools for every occasion.
Ski was sitting in one of the chairs, staring stoically at the calendar. Ski could look at body parts all day long, but the aroma of death in all its incarnations really got to him.
I sat down next to Ski and Bones sat at his desk, which was piled with papers, books, a phone, and a human skull, which had an ashtray wedged inside it, just behind the gaping mouth. He rooted around in a desk drawer, ultimately coming up with a file folder, and proceeded to read from his report.
“Could you just reduce that to simple English?” Ski said after a moment or two.
Bones smiled, retrieved his cigarette, and leaned back in his chair.
“I make her closer to forty than forty-seven. Bleached blonde. In simple English, both lungs were full of water and traces of lye and other ingredients consistent with soap.”
“In other words, she drowned, as we suspected,” I said.
“Yes and no,” he said.
“Now what does that mean?”
“She drowned all right, but remember what I told you about electrocution?”
“Yeah, it’s the big freeze,” Ski said. “Everything stops on a dime.”
“Very good. So . . .?”
“So what?” Ski said.
“So how’d all that water get in her lungs?” He grinned like a man holding four aces.
It took a minute to sink in.
Ski said, “Uh-oh.”
I didn’t say anything. I just stared at him.
“In simple terms, boys, the lady was dead before the radio fell in the tub with her. You got yourself a nice, sweet homicide here. And a murder one unless the killer just happened to be strolling past Wilensky’s bathroom on his way home and decided to hold her underwater for four or five minutes. She broke a toe thrashing around and there’s some skin under a couple of her fingernails.”
“Please don’t say ‘I told you so,’ ” Ski said to me.
What had been conjecture on my part was now a reality. The assurance that Verna Wilensky was murdered in cold blood didn’t make me feel good. It streaked through me like a cold wind had sneaked through my pores. It chilled my heart. And with that came the realization that perhaps Culhane knew the truth and was simply toying with me, safe in the belief that somebody had beat murder.
“My guess is that whoever killed her knocked that radio in as an afterthought,” Bones said. “As most killers would, he probably thought he’d committed the perfect crime.”
We both sat there and stared at him.
“Homicide,” he said gleefully, and snapped his fingers. “Did I make your day or what?”
CHAPTER 18
I put on the red flasher, tweaked the siren, and made it to Pacific Meadows in a little under twenty minutes. I didn’t say anything on the way. Instead, my mind was working overtime. I was thinking of Verna Wilensky’s last minutes.
She draws a hot bath, lights a candle, folds her bathrobe neatly, and puts it on the toilet seat. She tests the water with her toe. Then lowers herself carefully in the tub, settles, takes a sip of her gin and tonic. Lights a cigarette.
Sinatra murmurs a love song on the radio.
She doesn’t hear the window in the living room slide up, doesn’t hear or see the figure slip through.
He walks across the room, peers around the corner of the bedroom doorway. He sees cigarette smoke swirling in the light from the candle. He slips into the bedroom.
He takes off his gloves and suit jacket. Lays them on the bed. Rolls up his sleeves. Flexes his fingers. He sidles up to the bathroom door, peers around the corner.
Verna lolls in the warm water. She takes another drag on the cigarette and snuffs it out, drains most of her drink. She is feeling light-headed. She closes her eyes, hums a little tune.
She doesn’t see the shadow wriggling on the wall as the candle dances to the movement the killer makes walking into the room. He walks up to the tub. Stands over her, flexes his fingers again.
His knuckles crack.
She opens her eyes. Looks straight up and sees the shape of her killer hovering over her. Before she can scream, he grabs a handful of her hair and thrusts her head underwater.
She begins thrashing.
Her killer is a shimmering silhouette filtered through water.
He plunges his other hand in the water and shoves her body against the bottom of the tub. The water roils as she fights to free herself.
She reaches up, scratches the killer’s hand. He pulls it away and her head breaks the surface of the bath for a moment. He plunges his hand down and shoves her head underwater again.
She is kicking and flailing her arms.
The last pain she feels is her toe, breaking against the side of the tub.
Bubbles burst from her nose and mouth.
She looks up through heavy eyes, sees her deliverer’s arms, wriggling as the bathwater floods into her lungs.
Then blessed sleep.
The killer holds her under until the bubbles stop. Until the thrashing stops. He stands up, looks down at his work. The music ends and the disc jockey’s funereal voice comes on. He begins to introduce a Glenn Miller tune.
The killer leans on the shelf, jogs it, feels the screws rip loose from the wall. He jumps back, holding his hands over his head.
The radio splashes into the tub, hits her on the jaw as sparks pop from it. The water sizzles for a second.
Then it is quiet.
The killer, satisfied, returns to the bedroom. He wipes his arms free of water but does not dry them with a towel. He rolls down his sleeves, puts his gloves and jacket back on, leaves by the window.
A dog barking.
Too late.
“Jesus, look out!”
Ski’s voice snapped me out of it. I was in the opposing lane. I swerved back just as the city bus rumbled by, its horn bellowing angrily.
“My mind wandered for a minute,” I said.
“Yeah, so did the car.”
“I was just thinking about the case.”
Bones had already dispatched Oachi Okimoto, his best man, to the Wilensky house with a forensics team, and I had called radio dispatch and asked for King and Garrett to be assigned to us for the day. I told them it was for a neighborhood canvass but left out all other details.
Oachi Okimoto was already on the job when we got there. Okimoto was a short, thin, Japanese fellow with close-trimmed black hair, yellow eyes behind horn-rimmed bifocals, and delicate, manicured hands. He had on a white shirt with a striped bow tie, dark pants, and loafers. Okie was a pleasant little guy and very good at the trade. He had a map of the entire area spread out on the dining room table when we got there.
“Hi, boys,” he said in a soft, very precise voice. “Big surprise, huh?”
“Oh, yeah,” said Ski.
I explained that I had two uniformed cops on the way and would round up two more teams as quickly as possible. His three assistants were busy dusting everything in the house but the ceiling.
“Don’t forget the toilet,” Ski said. “Maybe he had to take a leak. Nobody wears gloves whe
n they take a leak and flush.”
Okie told us that Bones had already pulled the dead woman’s prints for comparisons.
“She lived alone and, from what I gather, didn’t have many visitors except maybe the people next door. They were close.”
“I’ll get prints on them,” Okie said. The front door opened and Officer King stuck his head in. “Hi, Sergeant,” he said, “what’s up?” I motioned him in. Garrett was sitting in the squad car. King came in and stood at attention. He did everything but click his heels.
“This stays under your hat for now,” I told King. “Wilensky is now a murder one.”
“Wow,” he said. “How?”
“That’s what we’re here to find out,” Ski said, with a touch of sarcasm. He didn’t like King; Ski didn’t like attitude.
“I want that angle soft-pedaled,” I went on. “I’m trying to keep this out of the papers for now, although it gets less likely by the minute. The story is: there was a heist in the neighborhood, we’re looking for strangers starting early Monday morning up until say ten Monday night. On foot, in a car, you know the drill on that. Kids’ll be a good bet, there’s a lot of them in the neighborhood, they’re all over the place on bikes. Be careful with them, though; they tend to make up things to get in on the act. I have to go back to the precinct now. Ski will be in charge. Okie has a map of the whole neighborhood. Use it to plan the canvass.”
I jerked a thumb at the house on the corner. “Start next door and work this block first.”
“The folks on the right are out of town,” King said.
“How do you know that?”
“I checked when we came on the scene the other night. According to the Clarks, they left for San Francisco on vacation early Saturday morning. Be gone two weeks.”
Ski walked to the living room window and stared thoughtfully at the house. “Bunch of papers on the porch,” he said. “Apparently they forgot to put a hold on it.” Then he turned suddenly and walked to a low, flat, coffee table near the front door. He picked a key off the table.