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

his wife refused to support his alibi that he was home the nights of the murders. And when I told the truth: We found a soundproof room added to his garage. Then he spilled.

By that time, other detectives had executed a search warrant at his home, finding the knickers and stuffed animals taken from the first two victims, as well as a bloody baseball bat. His typewriter matched the taunting note sent to the police chief. His wife expressed surprise, then outrage that we suspected her husband of such heinous crimes. But I suspected she knew all along.

He wasn’t a taxi driver—that cab had been stolen specifically to snatch Juliet, who he had been watching. He was a clerk at a building and loan. Each of the female victims had opened passbook savings accounts with him. This was the link we didn’t find.

Emil Gorman, forty-five, was a model employee at the building and loan, shy, kept to himself. He didn’t have so much as a parking ticket. His neighbors on East Pierce Street were similarly surprised that Gorman was suspected of being the strangler.

With one exception: an elderly woman with a habit of watching the street saw him leave late at night on the date of Grace Chambers’s disappearance. She remembered because it was also her daughter’s birthday. He didn’t return until early the next day.

His arrest and confession were national news. The Hearst Examiner’s headline: FIEND OF PHOENIX CAUGHT!

Although Gorman confessed to all the murders, I always wondered if there were more. Maybe he got his taste for it on prostitutes nobody would miss. University Park seemed only sinister coincidence. The first girl lived there, and it was fertile hunting ground. Then he liked the name bestowed on him by the press.

It was the case that made me famous, at least for a time.

Twenty-Seven

Now, four years later, I didn’t feel famous or accomplished. In the morning light, my apartment still smelled of Greenbaum’s cigar. I pulled the chair away from the door, lit a nail, and made coffee.

I had my strong suspicions about Carrie/Cynthia’s game, but the smoke bomb ensured that my evidence, in the form of letters and diary, was gone. All I had left were two boxes of expensive women’s clothing, size small, and her hardcover journal. I had no interest in reading the juvenile fiction of a nineteen-year-old, whatever her pretensions. But I picked it up anyway—the cover read “My Stories,” and prepared to make a go of it.

But it wasn’t a journal. After the first page, also labeled “My Stories,” it opened to reveal a hidden compartment. A black spiral notebook, five inches by three, stared out at me.

I lifted it out and proceeded to read.

* * *

I spent the next week discreetly interviewing the clients of Summer Tours.

A state senator, Superior Court judge, bank president, city commissioner and other big wigs.

Whether in their offices, over lunch at the Arizona Club, or in more hidden nooks such as the Original Mexican Café on East Adams Street, each confessed to consorting with the college girls provided by Carrie. All were “summer bachelors” because they had the means to send their wives to cooler climes. They happily paid the steep fees for companionship they could have only dreamed of in the past. None seemed capable of killing.

I sewed it up with another trip to Tempe, where Pamela, the auburn-haired smoke-ring blower, admitted she had been one of the dozen girls who stayed for the hot months and made money. She fiercely denied being a roundheels and offered up the justifications of the young and attractive. As I’ve said, I’m not a moralist. I could not have cared less if murder were not involved. Pamela finally came to realize that she might have been cut up beside the railroad tracks, too.

The problem after all this gab was that I felt no closer to finding Carrie’s killer.

Twenty-Eight

Victoria’s latest letter was the one I most anticipated: An invitation to Los Angeles. I grabbed it and told the Central Methodist choir director I would be missing some rehearsals.

That night, I boarded the westbound Sunset Limited and let the porter show me to my Pullman berth as the lights of Phoenix, then the orchards and farms, slipped away. Afterward, I went to the dining car for a delicious meal served on fine Southern Pacific china as we sped through empty desert.

Later, I went to the lounge-observation car at the end of the train, lit a smoke, and let the bartender fix me a martini. This was definitely a sign that Prohibition was on the way out. As I sipped my drink, I studied the photographs Victoria had sent me from Los Angeles. Her photographs. The majestic Los Angeles Coliseum from the 1932 Olympics. Griffith Park with a sweeping view of the city, where she wrote that an observatory was being planned. Downtown with dense, multistory commercial buildings, movie palaces, and crowds. A massive Union Station under construction. The towering new City Hall. Santa Monica Pier and the Pacific Ocean. Tony Beverly Hills. The HOLLYWOODLAND sign.

She also had an assortment of crime photos taken on scenes with the LAPD.

Phoenix had nothing like this, and I was pleased with the artistry of her photographs. Yet I wondered if she could ever be happy in little Phoenix again. Or happy being with me, a small-town shamus with uncertain prospects.

Should I have proposed to her a long time ago? Would that have made a difference? I never wanted to stand in her way. I hoped to be a part of her future, wherever it was, but the tone of her letters from California was slightly more distant with each one. As for me, I never found how to assemble the truest and best words I knew, to explain how I felt about her. Now I suspected this trip would be goodbye.

I ordered another drink and mulled over the case as the car rocked. A speedometer on the wall said we were racing along at