City of Dark Corners by Jon Talton (novels to read .txt) 📗

Turk, given name Liam, immigrated from Ireland and still spoke with a brogue.

“You were the hotshot homicide dick, lad,” he said. “You had better things to do than us lowly vice cops. Anyway, he’s kept his nose clean in the city. Running the news service isn’t illegal. The other thing is, Greenbaum has made friends with some respectable locals.”

“So, he’s turned over a new leaf?”

“I seriously doubt that. He spreads money around to the city commissioners, so there’s no incentive for us to give him a good look. Why are you asking?”

“I have a client who’s asking.”

“Well, tread carefully, lad. He has friends, and he has the Outfit connections. I’d hate to find you with a bullet in the brain.”

I thanked him for that pleasant thought and rang off.

Then I lit another Chesterfield and spread out the murder photos that Victoria had taken.

She said it was the worst she’d ever seen, and Victoria had seen plenty. In addition to her work taking news photos, quinceañeras, weddings, and portraits, the police department paid her to shoot crime scenes. That was her biggest source of income.

She was at the murder house where Winnie Ruth Judd allegedly single-handedly killed Anne LeRoy and Sammy Samuelson. But it was only bloody—the bodies were gone, to be unpacked from trunks in Los Angeles. The photos before me now showed a dead woman in pieces, no trunks. They were among the worst I had seen, too—at least since the war—and my old job had shown me plenty of ways that humans can put an end to each other.

I pulled out the magnifying glass from my middle drawer and scrutinized the images.

The ones of the head showed that disfiguring scream mouth. No bruises were visible on the neck, which would indicate strangulation. But it was hard to tell, given the severed tissue. Her eyes weren’t bloodshot, a sign she had been suffocated with a pillow or a hand. The alternative was chilling: the girl had been tied down, gagged, and cut apart. Maybe he started with an arm or a leg, letting her bleed out while he watched.

I spread out other photos. Her limbs didn’t show signs of a tourniquet, which might indicate this path, where the killer amputated a limb but controlled the blood flow to keep her alive—and awake.

That left the possibility that the victim was restrained and killed by beheading. The sharp instrument had done the killing as she watched the preparations, then felt the first incision until the loss of blood caused her to pass out and die. The result was too rough to be a surgical bone saw or even a machete. Those left clean marks. I’d investigated a case of a hophead doctor who killed his wife in a fight, then used a bone saw to decapitate her, claiming some fiend had broken into their home. He might have gotten away with it if we hadn’t found the saw. Another time, a bar fight in the Deuce saw one participant pull a machete and whack the arm off his antagonist. Again, nice clean cut.

Not this time. It had to be an axe, but a sharp one. Her eyes were wide open, although the black-and-white picture didn’t capture their blue, or hair the color of a wheat field. The first blow happened here, severing her head from her body, I’d bet.

But that axe would have to be damned sharp.

More memories informed my thinking.

Back in ’24, when I was still a uniform, I caught a call to a house on Lincoln Street, south of the tracks. It was barely more than an adobe hovel, and the neighbor who called was inarticulate with horror. I drew my pistol and knocked, standing to the side of the entrance for safety’s sake. You never knew when somebody would shoot through the door.

When nothing happened, I turned the knob, announced myself as police, and stepped inside. I found a colored boy, maybe fifteen years old, holding a hatchet. He was beside a man who had been hacked to death. The boy dropped the hatchet and let me handcuff him. “He made me do it,” the teenager said over and over, trance-like. And that was pretty likely, given that neighbors told us the father mercilessly beat his son every day with a horsewhip. The kid could have run away. But who knows how you’ll react in the moment? A Maricopa County jury, not given to going easy on Negroes, let the kid off with a manslaughter conviction.

The point was that my dismembered beauty didn’t look like the father on Lincoln Street, either. His wounds were random, wider gashes to flesh, deep but still not fully detaching bones. That was a crime of passion, in the moment, sure. This was obviously calculated. But I had to consider that other tools were used. Unless the cops had found something after Don ran me off, the killer still had the murder weapons with him or had disposed of them elsewhere.

Next I examined the arms and the legs, severed at the middle of the upper arms and near the hips. Like the beheading, this must have produced huge sprays of blood, but little was visible where the body was found.

Her nylons were undisturbed and garters neatly disconnected. I would bet the killer murdered her while she was nude, or wearing other clothes, then wiped her clean with towels. Next, he would have dressed her, the stylish pink suit meant to button up to the neck and the pink shoes. All were nearly spotless. Then he drove her to be found by the railroad tracks and displayed her. It was hard to tell, but it didn’t appear that rigor had set in when we were there, so it was three or four hours from the killing.

I ran the magnifying glass across photos of her garments. Victoria took a close-up of a label on the suit: J.W. Robinson’s. That was a Los Angeles department store. Maybe she was from L.A.