Jurgensen was sitting inside the screened porch on a lawn chair. “Hello, Underhill,” he said, “sit down.” He pointed to the wicker armchair next to him. I sat down.
“About this afternoon, Captain–” I started to say.
Jurgensen shushed me as he had the dog. “Forget it, Fred. Enough said. As of now you are temporarily attached to the detective bureau. Lieutenant Smith will tell you about it. He’ll be here in a few minutes. Would you like iced tea? Or a beer?”
“Beer would be fine, sir.”
The captain brought it, in a coffee cup, just as I saw an old prewar Dodge pull up to the curb. I watched as Dudley Smith carefully locked the car, hitched up his trousers and walked across the front lawn toward us.
“Don’t be scared, Fred,” Jurgensen said, “he’s only human.”
I laughed and sipped my beer as Dudley Smith knocked loudly on the flimsy wooden frame of the porch. “Knock, knock,” he said broadly in his musical, high-pitched brogue. “Who’s there? Dudley Smith, so crooks beware.” He laughed at his own poetry, then walked in and stuck out a huge hand to Captain Jurgensen. “Hello, John. How are you?”
“Dudley,” the captain said.
Smith nodded in my direction. “And this is our brilliant young colleague, Officer Frederick Underhill?”
I got up to shake the big cop’s hand, noting with satisfaction that I was two inches taller than he. “Hello, Lieutenant,” I said, “it’s a pleasure to meet you.”
“The pleasure is entirely mine, lad. Why don’t we all sit down? We have grave matters to discuss, and we should relax our bodies while we tax our brains.”
Smith folded himself into the only padded chair on the porch. He stretched out his long legs and smiled charmingly at Jurgensen. “Beer, please, John, in a bottle, and please take your time getting it.”
The ranking officer walked dutifully away while the big Irishman stared at me with beady brown eyes, hugely offset by his blunt red face. After a moment, he spoke.
“Officer Frederick U. Underhill, twenty-seven years old, college graduate, not a veteran. Exceedingly high marks at the academy, excellent fitness reports at Wilshire and Seventy-seventh Street. Killed two men in the line of duty. I am suitably impressed, and I don’t give a damn what vigilante actions you have taken lately. John is an excitable, traditional cop. I am not. I applaud you for your actions and congratulate you on your intelligence in taking your investigation to a superior officer. Enough horseshit. Talk to me of dead women and killers. Take your time, I’m a good listener.”
The little brown eyes had never left my own, and they remained on target while Dudley Smith fished in his trouser pockets for cigarettes and matches, then lit up and blew smoke at me.
I cleared my throat. “Thank you, sir. In February, I was working Wilshire Patrol. My partner and I were summoned by a distraught woman to a murder scene. The victim was a young woman named Leona Jensen. She had been strangled and stabbed to death in her apartment; the place had been ransacked. I called the dicks. They came and said it looked as if the woman had interrupted a burglar. I noticed a book of matches from the Silver Star bar on a table, but didn’t think anything about it.
“Last week another woman was strangled in her apartment in Hollywood; I read about it in the papers. Her name was Margaret Cadwallader. I started thinking about the similarities between the two murders. The Hollywood dicks put this one off as a burglary killing, too, and they were basing their entire investigation on that thesis. I had an intuition about it, though. It wouldn’t let me sleep. I trust my intuitions, sir, which is why my record of felony arrests is so good.
“Somehow I knew the two deaths were connected. I broke into the Cadwallader woman’s apartment”–I slowed down as I got ready to drop my first outright lie–“and found a book of matches for the selfsame bar under the corner of the living room carpet.” I paused for effect.
“Go on, Officer,” Dudley Smith said.
“All right. Now I knew that the Cadwallader dame had gone to the Silver Star, at least once. I wangled my way onto day watch so I could go there at night, too. I had a hunch that the Jensen woman and Margaret Cadwallader had been picked up there by a loverboy type. I enlisted the aid of the bartender, who told me about ‘Eddie,’ a real smooth operator who picked up a lot of women at the joint. Eddie came in the following night. The barman pointed him out to me. He tried putting the make on several women, who turned him down. He left, and I tailed him to a queer bar in West Hollywood, where he had an argument with a guy. Then I followed him to his apartment off the Strip. He stayed there all night. The next morning, I tailed him to Santa Anita racetrack. From his conversation with the man at the fifty-dollar window, I determined he was a heavy gambler who frequently brought women to the track.