The table held a naked female corpse, cut in half at the waist–a pudgy girl coiffed and made up to look like Elizabeth Short. Fritzie grabbed Charlie Issler by the scruff of the neck, hissing, “For your cutting pleasure, may I present Jane Doe number forty-three. You’re all going to slice her, and the best slicer buys the ticket!”
Issler shut his eyes and bit through his lower lip. Old Man Bidwell went purple, starting to foam at the mouth. I smelled loosed feces on Durkin and saw Orchard’s wrists broken, twisted to right angles, bones and tendons exposed. Fritzie pulled out a pachuco toad stabber and popped the blade. “Show me how you did it, you filths. Show me what didn’t get in the papers. Show me and I’ll be nice to you and make alllll your hurt go away. Bucky, take off their cuffs.”
My legs went. I stumbled into Fritzie, hurled him to the floor, ran for the alarm and pulled the lever. A code three response siren went off so good, so loud, so hard that it felt like its sound waves were what propelled me out of the warehouse and into the drunk wagon and all the way to Kay’s door with no excuses and words of loyalty for Lee.
So were Kay Lake and I formally joined.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Tripping that alarm was the costliest act of my life.
Loew and Vogel succeeded in putting the hush on it. I was booted off Warrants and back into uniform–swingwatch foot patrol out of Central Station, my old home. Lieutenant Jastrow, the watch boss, was thick with the demon DA. I could tell he was checking out my every act–waiting for me to snitch or rabbit or somehow follow up on the big wrong move I had to make.
I did nothing about it. It was the word of a five-year officer versus a twenty-two-year man and the city’s future District Attorney, backed by their hole card: the radio car officers who responded to the alarm were made the new Central Division Warrants team, a piece of serendipity guaranteed to keep them quiet and happy. Two consolations kept me from going crazy: Fritzie didn’t kill anybody, and when I checked the city jail release records I learned that the four confessors had been treated for “car crash injuries” at Queen of Angels and shipped to different state ding farms for “observation.” And my horror pushed me where I’d been too scared and stupid to go for a long, long time.
Kay.
That first night she was as much my grief catcher as my lover. I was afraid of noise and abrupt movement, so she undressed me and made me be still, murmuring, “And all that,” every time I tried to talk about Fritzie or the Dahlia. She touched me so softly that it was hardly touching at all; I touched every whole and healthy part of her until I felt my own body cease to be fists and cop muscle. Then we roused each other slowly and made love, with Betty Short far away.
A week later I broke it off with Madeleine, the “neighbor girl” whose identity I had kept secret from Lee and Kay. I didn’t offer a reason, and the rich gutter crawler aced me as I was about to hang up the phone. “Find somebody _safe_? You’ll be back, you know. I look like her.”
Her.
A month passed. Lee didn’t return, the two dope traffickers were convicted and hanged for the De Witt–Chasco killings, my Fire and Ice ad continued to run in all four LA dailies. The Short case moved from headlines to back pages, tips fell off to almost zero, everyone but Russ Millard and Harry Sears went back to their regular assignments. Still assigned to _Her_, Russ and Harry kept putting in straight eights at the Bureau and in the field, spending evenings at the El Nido, going over the master file. When I got off duty at 9:00, I’d visit for a while on my way to see Kay, quietly amazed at how obsessed Mr. Homicide was becoming, his family neglected as he prowled paper until midnight. The man inspired confession; when I told him the story of Fritzie and the warehouse, his absolution was a fatherly embrace and the admonishing, “Take the Sergeant’s Exam. In a year or so I’ll go to Thad Green. He owes me one, and when Harry retires you’ll be my partner.”