Emmett came back and handed me four U.S. passport holders and a sheet of paper. Madeleine said, “If you turn in those warrants, we’ll ruin you in court. Everything about us will come out.”
I stood up and kissed the brass girl hard on the lips. “Then we’ll all go down together.”
o o o
I didn’t drive home to write it all out. I parked a few blocks from the Sprague manse and studied the list of addresses, spooked by the juice Madeleine had shown, by her sense of how deep our stalemate went.
The houses were situated in two locales: Echo Park and Silverlake, and across town in Watts–bad territory for a fifty-three-year-old white man. Silverlake-Echo was several miles due east of Mount Lee, a hilly area with lots of twisting streets, greenery and seclusion, the kind of terrain a necrophiliac might find soothing. I drove there, five addresses circled on Emmett’s sheet.
The first three were plain deserted shacks: no electricity, broken windows, Mexican gang slogans painted on the walls. No ’39 Ford pickup 6B119A nearby–only desolation accompanied by Santa Ana winds blowing down from the Hollywood Hills. Heading toward the fourth pad just after midnight was when I got the idea–or the idea got me.
Kill him.
No public glory, no public disgrace–private justice. Let the Spragues go or coerce a detailed confession out of Georgie before you pull the trigger. Get it on paper, then figure out a way to hurt them with it at your leisure.
Kill him.
And try to live with it.
And try to lead a normal life with Mickey Cohen’s good pal running the same type of schemes on you.
I put it all out of mind when I saw that the fourth house was intact at the dead end of a cul-de-sac–chaste exterior, the lawn neatly tended. I parked two doors down, then prowled the street on foot. There were no Ford trucks–and plenty of curbside spaces for them.
I studied the house from the sidewalk. It was a ’20s stucco job, small, cube-shaped, off-white with a wood-beam roof. I circled it, driveway to tiny backyard and around a flagstone path to the front. No lights–the windows were all covered with what looked like thick blackout curtains. The place was utterly silent.
Gun out, I rang the buzzer. Twenty seconds, no answer. I ran my fingers down the door-doorjamb meeting point, felt cracked wood, got out my handcuffs and wedged in the narrow part of one ratchet. The teeth held; I whittled at the wood near the lock until I felt the door play slacken. Then I gave it a gentle kick–and it opened.
Light from outside guided me to a wall switch; I flipped it on, saw a cobweb-streaked empty room, walked to the porch and shut the door. The blackout curtains held in every bit of illumination. I moved back into the house, closed the door and stuck wood slivers into the bolt fixture to jam the lock.
With front access blocked off, I walked to the rear of the house. A medicinal stench was issuing from a room adjoining the kitchen. I toed the door open and tapped the inside wall for a switch. I hit one; harsh light blinded me. Then my vision cleared and I placed the smell: formaldehyde.
The walls were lined with shelves holding jars of preserved organs; there was a mattress on the floor, half covered by an army blanket. A red-headed scalp and two notebooks lay on top of it. I took a wheezing breath and forced myself to see it all.
Brains, eyes, hearts and intestines floating in fluid. A woman’s hand, wedding ring still attached to her finger. Ovaries, glots of shapeless viscera, a jar filled with penises. Gum sections replete with gold teeth.
I felt dry heaves coming on, and squatted by the mattress so I wouldn’t have to see any more gore. I picked up one of the notebooks and leafed through it; the pages were filled with neatly typed descriptions of grave robberies–cemeteries, plot names and dates in separate columns. When I saw “East Los Angeles Lutheran,” where my mother was buried, I dropped the book and reached for the blanket for something to hold; crusted semen top to bottom made me throw it at the doorway. I opened the other binder to the middle then, neat masculine printing taking me back to January 14, 1947: