Dick
Double-locked in the bottom drawer:
His file on the Janeway/hooker snuffs, his private Nite Owl file–textbook pure, like he learned in school.
Two cases that proved he was a real detective; Dick’s shot at Ed Exley. He pulled them out, read them over–college boy stuff all the way.
The Janeway string.
When things sizzled down with Lynn, he started looking for stuff to jazz him. Prowling for women didn’t cut it–ditto his on-and-off thing with Inez. He flunked the sergeant’s exam twice, paid his way through school with Dick’s stash, worked the Mobster Squad part-time: meeting trains, planes, buses, taking would-be racketeers to the Victory Motel, beating the shit out of them and escorting them back to planes, trains, buses. Dud called it “containment”; he called it too much to take and still like looking at yourself in the mirror. Good cases never came his way at Homicide: Thad Green bootjacked them, assigned different men. His classes taught him interesting stuff about forensics, criminal psychology and procedure–he decided to apply what he’d learned to an old case that still simmered with him: the Kathy Janeway job.
He read Joe DiCenzo’s case file: no leads, no suspects, written off as a random sex kill. He read the autopsy reconstruction: Kathy beaten to death, face blows, a man with rings on both fists. B + secretor semen in the mouth, rectum, vagina–three separate ejaculations, the bastard took his time. He got a flash backed up by case histories: a sex fiend like that doesn’t kill just once, then go back to twiddling his thumbs.
He started paper-prowling–the kind of thing he used to hate.
No similar solveds or unsolveds anywhere in the LAPD and Sheriff’s Department files–the search took him eight months. He worked his way through other police agencies–Stens’ money for a stake. Zero for Orange County, San Bernardino County; four months in and a match with the San Diego PD: Jane Mildred Hamsher, 19, hooker, DOD 3/8/51, the same handwork and three-way rape: no clues, no suspects, case closed.
He read LAPD and SDPD M.O. files and got nowhere; he remembered Dudley warning him off the Janeway case–ragging him for going crazy on woman basher jobs. He went ahead anyway; paydirt on a tn-state teletype: Sharon Susan Palwick, 20, hooker, DOD 8/29/53, Bakersfield, California. The same specs: no suspects, no leads, case closed. Dud never mentioned the teletype–if he knew it existed.
He went to Diego and Bakerfield–read files, pestered detectives who worked the cases. They were bored with the jobs–and gave him the brush. He tried reconstructing the time and place element: who was in those cities on the dates of the killings. He checked old train, bus and airplane records, got no crossover names, put out standing tri-state teletypes requesting information on the killer’s M.O., asking for call-ins should his killer ply that M.O. again. Nothing came in on the info request; three dead-body reports trickled in oven the years: Sally NMI DeWayne, 17, hooker, Needles, Arizona, 11/2/55; Chrissie Virginia Renfro, 21, hooker, San Francisco, 7/14/56; Mania NMI Waldo, 20, hooker, Seattle two months ago: 11/28/57. The call-ins logged in late, the same results: goose egg. Every angle, every schoolboy approach tapped–for nothing. Kathy Janeway and five other prostitutes raped, beaten to death–open stuff only with him.
A 116-page dead-end file to take to the Hollywood squad–his own case, dead for now.
And his major case–pages and pages he kept checking oven. Dick Stens’ case: nails in Ed Exley’s coffin. He got goose bumps just saying the words.
The Nite Owl case.
Starting in on the Janeway job brought it back: the Duke Cathcart/smut connection, evidence withheld, insider stuff to fuck Exley. Timing was against him then: he didn’t have the smarts to pursue it, the niggers escaped, Exley gunned them down. The Nite Owl case was closed–the weird side bits around it forgotten. Years passed; he went back to the Janeway snuff, discovered a string. And little Kathy made him think Nite Owl, Nite Owl, Nite Owl.
Brainwork.
Back in ’53, Dwight Gilette and Cindy Benavides–Kathy Janeway K.A.’s–told him a guy who came on like Duke Cathcart was talking up muscling Cathcart’s pimp business. What “pimp business”?–Duke had only two skags in his stable, but he had been talking up going into the smut biz–at first it sounded like a pipe dream coming from a major-league pipe dreamer–but it got validated when the Englekling brothers came forward and told their story of Cathcart approaching them with a deal: they’d print the smut, he’d distribute it, they’d approach Mickey Cohen for financing.