It looked like a classic self-inflicted shotgun job: overturned leather chair, the outline of the stiff chalked on the floor beside it. The weapon, a double-barreled .12 gauge, was right where it should have been–three feet in front of the body, the muzzle coated with blood and shredded tissue. The light plaster walls and ceiling showed off blood and caked-on brains to full advantage, the teeth fragments and buckshot a dead giveaway that the victim had stuck both barrels in his mouth.
I spent an hour measuring trajectories and spatter marks, scraping matter into test tubes and dusting the suicide weapon for latents. When I finished, I took a bag from my evidence kit and wrapped up the shotgun, knowing full well it would end up the property of some LAPD sportsman. Then I walked out to the entrance hall, stopping when I saw a framed painting hung at eye level.
It was a portrait of a clown, a young boy done up in court jester’s garb from long, long ago. His body was gnarled and hunched; he wore a stuporous ear-to-ear smile that looked like one continuous deep scar.
I stared, transfixed, thinking of Elizabeth Short, DOA at 39th and Norton. The more I stared the more the two blended; finally I pulled my eyes away and settled them on a photo of two arm-linked young women who looked just like Jane Chambers.
“The other survivors. Pretty, aren’t they?”
I turned around. The widow was twice as dusty as before, smelling of insect spray and soil. “Like their mother. How old are they?”
“Linda’s twenty-three and Carol’s twenty. Are you finished in the study?”
I thought of the daughters as contemporaries of the Sprague girls. “Yes. Tell whoever cleans it up to use pure ammonia. Mrs. Chambers–”
“Jane.”
“Jane, do you know Madeleine and Martha Sprague?”
Jane Chambers snorted, “Those girls and that family. How do you know them?”
“I did some work for them once.”
“Count yourself lucky it was a brief encounter.”
“What do you mean?”
The hallway phone rang. Jane Chambers said, “Back to condolences. Thank you for being so nice, Mr.–”
“It’s Bucky. Good-bye, Jane.”
“Good-bye.”
o o o
I wrote out my report at Wilshire Station, then checked the routine suicide file on Chambers, Eldridge Thomas, DOD 4/2/49. It didn’t tell me much: Jane Chambers heard the shotgun explosion, found the body and called the police immediately. When detectives arrived, she told them her husband was depressed over his failing health and their eldest daughter’s failing marriage. Suicide: case closed pending forensic crime scene work-up.
My work-up confirmed the verdict, plain and simple. But it didn’t feel like enough. I liked the widow, the Spragues lived a block away, I was still curious. I got on a squadroom phone and put in calls to Russ Millard’s newspaper contacts, giving them two names: Eldridge Chambers and Emmett Sprague. They did their own digging and calling, and got back to me on the station extension I was hogging. Four hours later I knew the following:
That Eldridge Chambers died enormously wealthy;
That from 1930 to 1934 he was president of the Southern California Real Estate Board;
That he nominated Sprague for membership in Wilshire Country Club in 1929, but the Scotsman was rejected because of his “Jewish business associates”–i.e. East Coast hoodlums;
And the kicker: Chambers, through intermediaries, got Sprague kicked off the real estate board when several of his houses collapsed during the ’33 earthquake.
It was enough for a juicy newspaper obit, but not enough for a test-tube cop with a foundering marriage and time on his hands. I waited four days; then, when the papers told me Eldridge Chambers was in the ground, I went back to talk to his widow.
She answered the door in gardening clothes, holding a pair of shears. “Did you forget something or are you as curious as I thought you were?”
“The latter.”
Jane laughed and wiped dirt from her face. “After you left I put your name together. Weren’t you some sort of athlete?”
I laughed. “I was a boxer. Are your daughters around? Have you got someone staying with you?”
Jane shook her head. “No, and I prefer it that way. Will you join me for tea in the backyard?”