Lost Lady Read online

  I looked at the body on the bed. It was neat enough as murdered bodies go, but I’ve never liked looking at them, and never will. Maybe it’s because murder rooms are never quite as they’re described. There’s always something sordid, something indecent about the corpse’s helplessness. And there’s always an odor. Fresh or ripe, there’s an odor. Once you’ve whiffed it, you never forget it. It comes back to you the instant you walk into the place, bringing with it a memory of all the other bodies you’ve ever seen that have got that way violently.

  We had two flashlights turned on this body. It was almost completely nude: nothing on but an expensive, lace-trimmed slip-and a pair of sheer nylon stockings. You could see, without being a medical man, that she’d been dead quite a while, but not so long as to obliterate the appearance of not belonging where she was.

  She was lying at an angle across the bed, her feet pointing to the garage door. The bed itself was not mussed up. The spread was still on. The first impression was that no matter what she’d come to the motel for, it hadn’t happened that way. There was no immediate visible evidence of what is politely referred to as a “party.” But there was plenty of evidence as to what had happened to her otherwise.

  There was a little round hole in the slip. It was just below the right breast. The two lieutenants examined it, then turned the body over. Farther down, but on the left side, there was another hole. It was smaller than the first and it told its own story: that the bullet had ranged downward and to the left and passed through the body. Its course indicated that it must have touched the heart or some other vital organ. The appearance was of sudden death, not of slow agony. And I got the idea that it pretty definitely wasn’t suicide, because if she’d wanted to kill herself she’d have held the gun about where she thought her heart was, not to the right of center. There was very little blood. Just a few drops here and there. Beside the bed was a pile of clothes; nice clothes, expensive clothes. When Bert Lane held up the dress it was easy to locate two bullet holes that tallied with the two in the slip.

  Lane said, “Somebody killed her, then undressed her.”

  “Probably didn’t kill her in here either. Not enough blood.”

  “In the car?”

  “Could have been. Someone sitting on her right could have aimed the gun that way, hoping to reach the heart.” Walsh turned his flash full on the dress. “Held it close, too. These are powder marks or I’m a monkey’s uncle.”

  This seemed to be making sense. If Dorothy Halliday didn’t figure to be the sort of woman who would be stepping out with a boy friend in a motel, that still didn’t protect her from having been murdered in her car and brought to the place after she was dead.

  Walsh said, “Maybe it happened after they were in the garage, with the door pulled down. Maybe she decided at the last minute she didn’t want to play. So the guy got mad.”

  “Real peevish,” agreed Lane.

  Near the bed was a big, expensive-looking reptile bag. It was open. I riffled through it. There was a wallet, the one containing her identifying driver’s license and some other stuff, but no folding money. I noticed something else, too.

  “No jewelry,” I commented. “Not a thing but a wedding ring.”

  “Maybe she didn’t wear any,” said Walsh. “But we can check that easy enough.” He frowned and shook his head. “Could be robbery. Could be just plain murder with theft as an afterthought. That’s two angles.”

  “Or,” I said, “it could have been murder with the robbery angle thrown in to fool us.”

  We started moseying about the room, being careful not to touch any surface that might have fingerprints or other bits of evidence. Then I noticed something on the floor. I studied it, then called the others. I said, “Look.”

  I didn’t have to diagram it any further. From the garage door—the one opening from the garage directly into the room—there was a double track in the nap of the rug, the sort of double track that could have been made by a pair of high heels if they’d been on the feet of a dead woman, and if she had been dragged from the door to the bed. That also would account for her position on the bed.

  Bert Lane said, “Nice goin’, kid.” All three of us dropped to our knees and turned our flashes on the tracks. The way the nap was rubbed, it had to be like I figured—that she’d been dragged into the room, probably by someone holding her under the armpits. That helped substantiate the theory that she’d been dead before she ever saw the inside of the room.

  We examined the heels of the shoes at the bedside. The backs of them showed tiny scrapings of rug.

  The rest of the room yielded little information that seemed of importance. The bathroom basin had been used. Apparently someone had washed his hands, using the soap and tossing the towel on the floor. We’d hold the soap and towel, of course, but the odds were strong that they wouldn’t show anything. Other things were in order.

  We went into the garage. As the patrol boys had warned us, it was empty, but we trod softly and only around the edges, hoping that tire prints would be obtainable and that they might help.

  While we were standing around waiting for the coroner and the crime-lab boys, Bert Lane briefed Walsh on the advance dope we’d got the previous night: the missing-person report, the pitch Iris Kent had made for me, her insistence that her sister would be found murdered, her accusation of her brother-in-law, my invitation to the home, the swimming party of that afternoon. Walsh looked at me and said, “Well, whaddaya know? Already we got a man with an in.”

  I could see that I was about to be elected. He quizzed me about everything that had happened at the house, and I handed it to him straight.

  “Anything else?” he asked.

  “Not especially.”

  “What does that mean?”

  I hesitated. Then I told him about the way Iris had kissed me. I expected him to start kidding me, but he didn’t. He said thoughtfully, “Could be she just liked you. Could be she was in the mood for love. Could be she was merely trying to soften you up.”

  “For what?”

  “For being a friend when the body turned up. If I had killed somebody, or if I knew someone who had killed someone, I’d like to have a sweetheart on the police.”

  “Nuts,” I said.

  Bert Lane said it wasn’t nuts.. He said it could be accident, biology, coincidence, or part of an elaborate scheme.

  “But I’m not Homicide,” I reminded them. “I’m just a working dick on the Hollywood night watch.”

  “She wouldn’t know police procedure,” stated Marty sagely. “She might think you could be assigned to it, especially after she’d spilled to you.” He thought it over carefully. “And I’m beginning to think she had an idea, Danny. Maybe she overplayed her hand, but it was a good idea.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Looks like we could use you. If it’s O.K. with Bert, we’ll talk to the Skipper and see whether we can get you assigned to this deal, full time. Iris Kent seems like she wants to play with you. So we’ll give her the chance. Let her get as friendly as she wants to. She’ll tell you everything she wants you to know, but she’ll also tell you some things she doesn’t want you to know.”

  I wasn’t enthusiastic. As a cop, yes; as someone who sort of liked the girl, no. I started to protest, but Bert Lane cut me off.

  “Marty’s got a good idea, Danny,” he said. “Chances are you can learn things that ordinary investigation might not uncover.”

  It was a break, all right; the sort of thing a cop would figure he couldn’t help liking.

  But I’d kind of gone for Iris. Not too far, but some. I said I’d do the best I could if they turned me loose on it. But all the time I was saying it, I was reminding myself that I was a policeman, and that it wasn’t right for me to feel like a heel.

  I had a strong hunch that Iris was about to get hurt. And for some reason, I didn’t relish being the one to hurt her.

  Chapter Seven

  The mob showed up from downtown. Technicians,
men with fingerprint kits, deputy coroners, police photographer. We stepped outside and Marty Walsh gave the newspaper boys enough for their morning stories. It was then about eight o’clock. They were promised a free hand once the technical boys finished.

  Lindstrom and Thalman were standing in the long lane separating the two lines of cottages. They barged in right away and Carl took over.

  “Got something,” he announced.

  Lane asked what.

  “That cottage she’s in was rented night before last. About eleven-thirty. Whoever rented it paid for two days in advance.”

  “Unusual, isn’t it?”

  “The manager’s wife says no. Says they do a strictly up-and-up business. She was saying that to a cop. She would.”

  “Looks like a fairly legitimate place.”

  “Good enough. What I mean is they take ‘em as they come and no questions asked. Why the hell else was motels invented? Anyway, that ain’t the whole story. They got the license number of the car.”

  “Did you run it?”

  “I didn’t do nothin’ else. It belongs to Mrs. Dorothy Kent Halliday of Valleycrest Drive.”

  “Did they have anything on it? Wreck? Impound? Anything like that?”

  “Nope. No trace. But look, that ain’t all. There’s a mix-up here that ain’t gonna help us.”

  Bert asked him what he meant by a mix-up. You had to ask Carl Lindstrom questions when he had something; he wasn’t the sort just to come out with it.

  “I mean this,” said Carl. “This place is run by a man and his wife. They got a maid comes in daytimes to help. But they do most of the work. The old man has been sick for several days. Four days ago—that was May seventeenth—his wife got a touch of the same thing. This virus that’s been going around. She needed help. So she contacted a guy that had applied to her for a job. I got his name here. Michael Morgan. Age about fifty. She says he told her he’d had experience running motels in other parts of the state. She hired him by the day while her and the old man was sick. This morning she felt better so she let him go. Didn’t need him any more, see? Paid him off in cash. Doesn’t know anything about him or where he might be, except that he mentioned having relatives in some town starting with San. There ain’t but about eighty-eight thousand of them in California.”

  “Did she take his address in L.A.?”

  “Sure. Nite-Lite Motel, on account that was where he was gonna be livin’ while he worked here. She says he had one little bag when he reported for work, and the same little bag when he left. Me and Thalman checked downtown and elsewhere. No record on any Michael Morgan. All the old lady could tell us was that he was tall and thin and about fifty years old; sparse iron-gray hair, dark eyes.”

  Marty Walsh asked quietly, “What’s so important about it?”

  “Oh, nothin’, Lieutenant. Nothin’.” Carl waved airily. “Except that he was the guy who registered the Halliday dame in here night before last. He marked the time, the cottage number, and the car license, all accordin’ to Hoyle. And this afternoon, just when he could have given us a little info, he shoved off.”

  That wasn’t so good. Usually motel managers have pretty good memories when you press them hard enough.

  “What else?” asked Walsh, figuring—and correctly—that Lindstrom still had a card or two up his sleeve.

  “Leave me show you the register.”

  Carl led the way into the little office. The wife of the sick manager was in there, looking sicker than he must have looked. She was going to get a lot of publicity out of this, but it wasn’t the sort of publicity she liked. It might even cost her job.

  Lindstrom showed us the entry. It said, “Mr. and Mrs. Jonathan L. Connor, San Francisco.” The date was the nineteenth, the hour eleven-thirty p.m. The license number was inscribed in a heavy rough scrawl. Also the item “$10.00 paid.” And under the head of checking out time, “5/21, 6 p.m.”

  “That’s how come the room wasn’t serviced until this evening,” he said. “They could have had service by asking, but when they didn’t ask—what with this lady being sick and all—they just let it slide.”

  I took a look at the register. The “Mr. & Mrs. Jonathan L. Connor, San Francisco” was written in an awkward backward slant, probably indicating an effort to disguise the handwriting. You could tell just by looking at it that it had been written slowly, not just dashed off. Bert Lane studied it over my shoulder.

  “Disguised handwriting, of course,” he said. “But it looks like a woman’s hand.”

  I hated to agree, but I had to. Of course, you can’t be sure about something like that unless you’ve got something to compare it with, and only handwriting experts are competent to do the comparing. But if you had to go out on a limb, you’d say a woman wrote it. Obviously Carl Lindstrom thought so too, because he was looking at us smugly.

  “No wonder,” he whispered, “that she was trying to finger her brother-in-law.”

  Marty Walsh was questioning the fluttery little woman who ran the place, or who helped her husband run it. He couldn’t get a thing out of her except how terrible it was that a murder had to occur in her motel. No, she hadn’t been present when the couple registered; no, she didn’t even know for sure that it was a couple; no, she couldn’t say if it was a man or a woman; no, she didn’t know anything about Michael Morgan except that he had twice asked her for a job and had handled things satisfactorily the few days he’d worked there; no, she didn’t know where we could find him. She said further that Morgan had scrupulously accounted for every cent of cash taken in, and she pointed out that the laws relating to motels had been strictly adhered to. It was all very clear and very discouraging.

  We walked outside again and stopped long enough to light cigarettes all around.

  Marty Walsh started checking things over.

  “There’s several people we want to talk to,” he said. “First, Iris Kent. Second, Dean Halliday. Third, Dolores Laverne. Know anything about this Laverne dame, Bert?”

  Lane said he only knew what Iris Kent had said, that Dean Halliday was keeping the woman. He said Elsie Barker might be able to locate her, so at Walsh’s suggestion he got Elsie on the telephone.

  He told him to see whether he could locate where Dolores Laverne was living. He wasn’t to tip her off, however; just find out. The idea seemed to be that we’d walk in on her without giving advance notice. He told Elsie to keep it under his hat. He also advised sending out wails every fifteen minutes re-alerting radio cars to keep a lookout for Mrs. Halliday’s license number. We wanted that car and we wanted it bad. If it was found, it was to be staked on and not touched until Homicide got there. Elsie said he had contacts and thought it wouldn’t be too much trouble picking up Dolores Laverne’s address.

  Things were moving now. I’d only been on the Department since 1946, and I’d never quite got over the excitement that marks the beginning of a man hunt. I knew how the machinery worked, but it was still a kick to see it start working; to watch a couple of efficient guys like Bert Lane and Marty Walsh get things rolling.

  Walsh did one more thing. He sent Lindstrom and Thalman to stake the Halliday home on Valleycrest Drive. They weren’t to interfere with anybody going in, but if anyone came out, he was to be stopped. No information was to be given, but they were to radio downtown and have the call relayed to Hollywood detectives who would know where to get in touch with him or with Bert Lane.

  Eventually we had got everything we could get out of the motel, and we took off for Hollywood Station in Bert’s car, Thalman and Lindstrom having used the Homicide car. On the way it was decided that Lane would take over in the station, make the reports, and correlate things generally as and when they showed up. Walsh planned to take me with him when he went visiting; he’d keep in touch with Lane so they’d know where we were at all times.

  “Danny O’Leary,” stated Walsh, “I feel it in my bones that you’re going to be a very busy man for a while.”

  I said yes, it looked that way. I didn
’t say anything else, and neither did he. It was too early to start spilling theories. It was too early to have ‘em. This was the phase of criminal investigation that was straight grind.

  Sergeant Gram was on the desk when we got back to the bureau. Elsie Barker met us in the hall and led the way to the Homicide-Robbery room. He closed the doors.

  He gave us a slip of paper. It contained an address, a telephone number, and the words Apt. 421. “That’s where Laverne lives,” he told us. “I got kidded when I asked about her. Guy who gave me the info will keep his mouth shut. He’s a two-time loser himself and he’s working for me as a stoolie right now. He knows if he ever started shooting off his mouth I’ve got enough on him to send him back to the joint. He says she used to be a torcher in third-rate spots around town. Says she’s being kept by some rich guy and that she sizzles. Says if you can get her to do a strip-tease for you, she’ll strike you blind. Need any help?”

  Marty grinned and said he and I would handle it, and we started out.

  The apartment house where Dolores Laverne lived was a nice, new building with a small, smart lobby, an automatic elevator, and a discreet air; the sort of place where a bride or a keptie would feel safe and secluded. Nothing fancy about it, nothing garish, but you could bet that the apartments in it didn’t come cheap.

  We went up to 421 and knocked. No answer. Marty knocked again, this time a little louder. No answer. He was just about to give it a third try when a deep, rich contralto sounded from the other side of the door. The voice said, “Who is it?”

  “Police officers,” said Marty. “We’d like to talk to Miss Laverne.”

  There was a moment of hesitation, then the door opened a half inch or so. She had unlocked the thing, but it was still held by a chain bolt.