I showed my phony insurance business card to the desk sergeant, who didn’t seem impressed, and asked for the detective division. Nonplussed, he said, “Third floor” and pointed me in the direction of the Lysol-smelling muster room.
I took the stairs two at a time in almost total darkness, and came out into a corridor painted a bright school-bus yellow. There was a long arrow painted along the wall underlining “Detective Division: The Finest of Milwaukee’s Finest.” I followed the arrow to a squad room crammed with desks and mismatched chairs. Nostalgia gripped me even harder: this was what I had once aspired to.
Two men occupied the room, conferring over a desk underneath a large ceiling fan. The men were blond, portly, and wearing identical gaudy hand-tooled shoulder holsters encasing .45 automatics with mother-of-pearl grips. They looked up when they heard my footsteps and smiled identically.
I knew I was going to be the audience for a cop comedy act, so I raised my arms in mock surrender and said, “Whoa, pardner, I’m a friend.”
“Never thought that you weren’t,” the more red-faced of the two men said. “But how’d you get past the desk? You one of Milwaukee’s finest?”
I laughed. “No, but I represent one of the finest insurance companies in Los Angeles.” I fished two business cards out of my coat pocket and handed one to each cop. They responded with identical half nods and shakes of the head.
“Floyd Lutz,” the red-faced man said, and stuck out his hand. I shook it.
“Walt Kraus,” his partner said, extending his hand. I shook it.
“Fred Underhill,” I returned.
We looked at one another. By way of amenities I said, “I take it Will Berglund called you about me?”
By way of amenities, Floyd Lutz said, “Yeah, he did. Who choked Johnny DeVries’s sister, Underhill?”
“I don’t know. Neither do the L.A. cops. Who sliced Johnny DeVries?”
Walt Kraus pointed to a chair. “We don’t know,” he said. “We’d like to. Floyd and I were on the case from the beginning. Johnny was a beast, a nice-guy beast, don’t get me wrong, but seven feet tall? Three hundred pounds? That’s a beast. The guy who cut him had to be a worse beast. Johnny’s stomach was torn open from rib cage to belly button. Jesus!”
“Suspects?” I asked.
Floyd Lutz answered me: “DeVries pushed morphine. More correctly, he gave it away. He was a soft touch. He could never stay in business for long. He’d always wind up on skid row, sleeping in the park, passing out handbills and selling his blood like the other derelicts. He was a nice, passive guy most of the time, used to hand out free morph to the poor bastards on skid who had got hooked during the war. Floyd and me and most of the other cops did our best not to roust him, but sometimes we had to: when he got mad he was the meanest animal I’ve ever seen. He’d wreck bars and overturn cars, bust heads and fill skid row with dread. He was a terror. Walt and I figure his killer was either some bimbo on the row he beat up or some dope pusher who didn’t like a soft touch on his turf. We checked out every major and minor known heroin and morph pusher from Milwaukee to Chi. Nada. We went back over Johnny’s rap sheet and checked out the victims in every assault beef he ever had–over thirty guys. Most of them were transients. We ran makes on them all over the Midwest. Eight of them were in jail–Kentucky to Michigan. We talked to all of them–nothing. We talked to every skid row deadbeat who wasn’t too fucked up on Sweet Lucy to talk. We sobered up the ones who _were_ too fucked up. Nothing. Nothing all the way down the line.”
“Physical evidence?” I asked. “ME’s report?”
Lutz sighed. “Nothing. Cause of death a severed spinal cord or shock or massive loss of blood, take your pick. The coroner said that Big John wasn’t fucked-up on morph when he was sliced–_that_ was surprising. _That_ was why Walt and I figured the guy who sliced him had to be a beast or a friend of Johnny’s–someone who knew him. Anyone who could slice a guy like that when he was sober had to be a monster.”