Bob didn’t have to think: “Commonplace, but they usually catch the killer fast. Barroom jobs, drunks strangling prostitutes, that kind of thing. Very often the killer is remorseful, confesses, and cops a plea. Is this an academic question, Fred?”
“Yeah, strictly. How about premeditated strangulation murders of women?”
“Including psychopaths?”
“No, presupposing relative sanity on the part of the killer.”
“Relative sanity, that’s a hot one. Very rare, kid, very rare indeed. What’s this all about?”
“It’s about an ex-cop with time on his hands. Thanks a lot, Bob. Goodbye.”
I watched TV that night, but television coverage of the murder was scant. The dead woman’s face was flashed on the screen, a photograph taken some twenty years before upon her graduation from nursing school. Marcella Hams had been a very handsome woman: high, strong cheekbones, large widely spaced eyes, and a determined mouth.
The somber-voiced announcer called on all concerned citizens “who might be able to help the police” to call the detective bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department. A phone number was flashed across the bottom of the screen for a few brief seconds, before the announcer started a used-car commercial. I turned the TV off
I started collecting all the newspaper articles I could find about the murder. By Tuesday the Harris murder had been relegated to the third page. From the Los Angeles _Times_, June 24, 1955:
LAST HOURS OF DEAD NURSE RECONSTRUCTED
LOS ANGELES, JUNE 24–Marcella Harris, who was found strangled in El Monte Sunday morning, was last seen alive in a cocktail lounge on nearby Valley Boulevard. Police revealed today that eyewitnesses placed the attractive redheaded nurse at Hank’s Hot Spot, a bar at 18391 Valley Boulevard in South El Monte, between the hours of 8:00 and 11:30 Saturday night. She left alone, but was seen huddling in conversation with a dark-haired man in his forties and a blond woman in her late twenties. Police artists are now at work assembling composite drawings of the pair, who at this time are the only suspects in the grisly strangulation murder.
Father and Son Together
“Michael will always bear the scars, of that I am sure,” William “Doc” Harris, a handsome man in his late fifties, said yesterday. “But I know that I can make up for the love he has lost in losing his mother.” Harris ruffled his nine-year-old son’s hair fondly. Michael, a tall, bespectacled youngster, said, “I just hope the police get the guy who killed my mom.”
It was a peaceful but sad scene at the Harris apartment on Beverly Boulevard. Sad because police are powerless in dealing with the grief of a motherless nine-year-old boy. El Monte police spokesman Sergeant A.D. Wisenhunt said, “We’re doing everything within our power to track down the killer. We have no idea where Mrs. Harris was killed, but we figure that it had to be in the El Monte area. The coroner places the time of her death at between 2:00 A.M. and 5:00 AM., and the Scouts found her at 7:30 A.M. We have detectives and uniformed officers out circulating composite drawings of the two people Mrs. Harris was last seen talking to. We have to be patient–only diligent police work will crack this case.”
Half of me felt crazy for even following newspaper accounts of this “case,” but the other half of me screamed inside when the words “cocktail lounge” jumped out at me from the printed page. I hemmed and hawed, and pounded myself internally for several hours, until I realized there would never be a moment’s peace until I gave it a whirl. Then I picked up the phone and called Sergeant Reuben Ramos at Rampart Division.
“Reuben, this is Fred Underhill.”
“Jesus H. Christ on a crutch, where the hell have you been?”
“Away.”
“That’s for sure, man. Jesus Christ, did _you_ get fucked! What happened? I heard tons of rumors, but nothing that sounded like the straight dope.”
I sighed. I hadn’t counted on recalling the past to a former colleague. “I got the wrong man, Rube, and the department had to make me look bad to take the onus off them. That’s it.”
Reuben didn’t buy it. “I’ll settle for that, man,” he said skeptically, “but what’s up? You need a favor, right?”