Cut to facts:
_He_ was inside Duke’s pad post–Nite Owl. It was tidied up and print-wiped; Duke’s clothes had been gone through. The San Bernardino Yellow Pages were ruffled–the pages for printing shops especially. Pete and Bar Englekling owned a printshop in San Berdoo; Nite Owl victim Susan Nancy Lefferts was originally from San Berdoo.
Cut to the coroner’s report:
The examining pathologist based his identification of Cathcart’s body on two things: dental plate _fragments_ cross-checked against Cathcart’s prison dental records and the “D.C.” monogrammed sports jacket the stiff was wearing. The plate fragments were standard California prison issue–any ex-con who’d done time in the state penal system could have plastic like that in his mouth.
Cut to his insider skinny:
Kathy Janeway mentioned a “cute” scar on Duke’s chest. There was no mention of that scar anywhere in Doc Layman’s autopsy report–and Cathcart’s chest was not obliterated by shotgun pellets. A final kicker: the Nite Owl stiff was measured at 5 ‘8″; Cathcart’s prison measurement chart listed him at 5 ‘9¼”.
Conclusion:
A Cathcart impersonator was killed at the Nite Owl.
Cut to:
Smut.
Cindy Benavides said Duke was getting ready to push it; Ad Vice was investigating smut back then–he’d read through Squad 4’s reports–all the men reported no leads, Russ Millard died, the fuck book gig fell by the wayside. The Englekling brothers told their story of Duke Cathcart’s smut approach, how they visited Mickey Cohen in prison, how he refused to bankroll the deal. They thought Cohen ordered the Nite Owl snuffs Out of batshit moral convictions–a ridiculous idea–but what if some kind of Nite Owl plot got started with the Mick? Exley submitted a report that said he and Bob Gallaudet talked up that theory, but the jigs escaped around then–and the Nite Owl got pinned on them.
Cut to:
His theory.
What if Cohen told some prison punk about the Cathcart/Englekling plan–or his man Davey Goldman did? What if the punk got paroled, talked up crashing Duke’s stable while he was really just shoring up juice for his Duke impersonation? What if he killed Duke, stole some of his clothes and ended up at the Nite Owl by chance–because Duke frequented the place, or more likely–_as part of some kind of criminal rendezvous that went bad, the killers leaving, coming back with shotguns, blasting the Cathcart impersonator and five innocent bystanders to make it look like a robbery?_
Flaw in his theory so far:
He’d checked McNeil parole records: only Negroes, Latins and white men too large or two small to be the Cathcart impersonator were released between the time of the Cohen– Englekling brothers meeting and the Nite Owl. But–Cohen could have talked up the Cathcart smut proposal, word could have leaked to the outside, the impersonation could have been four or five times fucking removed.
Theories on top of theories, theories that proved he had the brains to call himself a detective:
Say the Nite Owl snuffs came out of smut intrigue. That meant the niggers were innocent, the real killers planted the shotguns in Ray Coates’ car–which meant that the purple Merc seen outside the Nite Owl was a coincidence–the killers couldn’t have known that three spooks were recently seen discharging shotguns in Griffith Park and would rank as natural first suspects. Somehow the killers found Coates’ car before the LAPD–and planted the shotguns, print-wiped. It could have happened a half dozen ways.
1. Coates, in jail, could have told his lawyer where the car was stashed; the killers or their front man could have approached him for the information-or could have coerced him into making Coates talk.
2. The jigs could have spilled the location to one of their fellow inmates–maybe a planted inmate in with the killers.
3. His favorite, because it was simplest: the killers were smarter than the LAPD, did their own garage search, checked out garages behind deserted houses first–while the police went at it in grids.
Or the spooks told other inmates, who got relcased and got approached by the killers; or–unlikely–a cop finger man told them how the block search was breaking down. Impossible to check it all out: the Hall of Justice Jail destroyed its 1935–55 records to make way for more storage space.