Big paydirt.
2281 South Mariposa was a Mickey Cohen hideout, an armed fortress where the Mick’s triggers holed up during their many skirmishes with the Jack Dragna gang. It was steel-reinforced concrete; shitloads of canned goods in the bomb shelter/basement; racks of Tommys and pump shotguns behind fake walls covered by cheesecake pics. Only Mickey’s boys knew about the place–making it conclusive proof that Morris Hornbeck was connected to Gretchen Rae Shoftel. I drove to Jefferson and Mariposa–quicksville.
It was a block of wood frame houses, small, neatly tended, mostly owned by Japs sprung from the relocation camps, anxious to stick together and assert their independence in new territory. 2281 was as innocuous and sanitary as any pad on the block: Mickey had the best Jap gardener in the area. No cars were in the driveway; the cars parked curbside looked harmless enough, and the nearest local taking the sun was a guy sitting on a porch swing four houses down. I walked up to the front door, punched in a window, reached around to the latch and let myself in.
The living room–furnished by Mickey’s wife, Lavonne, with sofas and chairs from the Hadassah thrift shop–was tidy and totally silent. I was half expecting a killer hound to pounce on me before I snapped that Lavonne had forbid the Mick to get a dog because it might whiz on the carpeting. Then I caught the smell.
Decomposition hits you in the tear ducts and gut about simultaneously. I tied my handkerchief over my mouth and nose, grabbed a lamp for a weapon, and walked toward the stink. It was in the right front bedroom, and it was a doozie.
There were two stiffs–a dead man on the floor and another on the bed. The floor man was lying face down, with a white nightgown still pinned with a Bullocks price tag knotted around his neck. Congealed beef stew covered his face, the flesh cracked and red from scalding. A saucepan was upended a few feet away, holding the caked remains of the goo. Somebody was cooking when the altercation came down.
I laid down the lamp and gave the floor stiff a detailed eyeing. He was fortyish, blond and fat; whoever killed him had tried to burn off his fingerprints–the tips on both hands were scorched black, which meant that the killer was an amateur: the only way to eliminate prints is to do some chopping. A hot plate was tossed in a corner near the bed; I checked it out and saw seared skin stuck to the coils. The bed stiff was right there, so I took a deep breath, tightened my mask and examined him. He was an old guy, skinny, dressed in clothes too heavy for winter LA. There was not one mark of any kind on him; his singed-fingered hands had been folded neatly on his chest, rest in peace, like a mortician had done the job. I checked his coat and trouser pockets– goose egg–and gave him a few probes for broken bones. Double gooser. Just then a maggot crawled out of his gaping mouth, doing a spastic little Lindy Hop on the tip of his tongue.
I walked back into the living room, picked up the phone and called a man who owes me a big, big favor pertaining to his wife’s association with a Negro nun and a junior congressman from Whittier. The man is a crime-scene technician with the Sheriff’s Department; a med school dropout adept at spotchecking cadavers and guessing causes of death. He promised to be at 2281 South Mariposa within the hour in an unmarked car–ten minutes of forensic expertise in exchange for my erasure of his debt.
I went back to the bedroom, carrying a pot of Lavonne Cohen’s geraniums to help kill the stink. The floor stiff’s pockets had been picked clean; the bed stiff had no bruises on his head, and there were now two maggots doing a Tango across his nose. Morris Hornbeck, a pro, probably packed a silencered heater like most Mickey muscle–he looked too scrawny to be a hand-tohand killer. I was starting to make Gretchen Rae Shoftel for the snuffs–and I was starting to like her.