True Confessions (7 page)

Sonny McDonough . . .

There was a sudden stir at the rear of the sanctuary. And then His Eminence Hugh Cardinal Danaher appeared on the altar. He must have thought better of his flu bug, Desmond Spellacy thought. Put-A-Pool-In-A-Catholic-School. The Cardinal blessed the casket and then stood at the foot of the altar steps until the bustle in the cathedral quieted down.

“It is not the custom in this archdiocese,” the Cardinal began, “to deliver a eulogy at the funeral of a layman. But I would be derelict if I did not acknowledge in some way the passing of Chester Hanrahan and pay my respects to his godly wife and his two children, Brother Bede and Sister Mary Peter, whom he gave to his Father Almighty.” There was absolute silence in the cathedral. “I remember that day so many years ago, the nation coming from depression into war, when I asked Chester Hanrahan if he would take over the Building Fund. I think you all know what he answered. ‘YES!’ said Chester Hanrahan. And over the years, everything I ever asked of him, a new boiler for Saint Malachy’s, new classrooms for Our Lady of the Assumption, a new hospital for the Sisters of Saint Joseph, you know the answer I always received. ‘YES!’ said Chester Hanrahan . . .”

Tom Spellacy chewed on a hangnail and waited for the pain in
his stomach to pass. Gas, probably. In the three days since the discovery of the body at 39th and Norton, he had eaten nothing but donuts and hamburgers from the cafeteria at the corner of First and Temple. All those hours and nothing to show but BO and constipation. No fingerprints, no identification. No friends, no neighbors, no employer, no acquaintances. The girl at 39th and Norton seemed not to exist before her murder as she did not exist now. He picked up the report from the night watch. Five witnesses heard a woman scream the night of the murder two blocks from where the body was found. A house-to-house investigation. The screamer was a young woman whose husband had returned that day from service in the Pacific with the marines. It was the first day she had had sexual intercourse in three years, four months and two days. He wondered who had computed the days, the woman or the night watch.

The cream in his coffee had curdled. Flecks floated on the surface of the olive-colored liquid and the soggy paper cup had begun to leak. He watched the stain widen on his desk blotter. Corinne used chicory in her coffee. She also put a bay leaf in her spaghetti. There was a spice rack in her tiny kitchen, and when she cooked, he handed her the bottles of dill weed and thyme and tarragon and oregano and sweet basil. Mary Margaret did not use herbs or spices. Spices caused diarrhea, Mary Margaret said. Mary Margaret also did not do the things to him in bed that Corinne did.

He made a note to call Corinne.

Mary Margaret had Saint Barnabas.

He had Corinne.

“Are you going to book me or not?” Tommy Diamond said.

He had forgotten that Tommy Diamond was sitting there. Tommy Diamond was fingering the papers in his out box.

“Hands off,” Tom Spellacy said. Tommy Diamond was the only person he knew who parted his hair in the middle.

“I did it.” Tommy Diamond had a disability pension from Water & Power. He had slipped in a puddle of spilled Jello in the company cafeteria. His back was bent and he could not clerk and now he had time on his hands.

“You ever get tired of confessing, Tommy?”

“I did it.”

“You queer?”

“My back was okay, I'd throw you out the window, saying that.”

“This is the sixteenth homicide you confessed to since I been downtown. What else am I supposed to think? You want to go to the joint and be someone’s sweetheart.” He leaned across the desk. “You pitch or catch?”

Tommy Diamond smiled. “Anyone else confess?”

Better to talk to Tommy Diamond than to think dirty thoughts about Corinne. “Two marines from Pendleton.”

“Shipping out, I bet. Didn’t want to go fight for Aunt Sam. Fuck the red, white and blue.”

“You understand confessing, Tommy.”

“Who else? There’s always a lot of nuts in a case like this.”

He laughed. “A drunk from the Lincoln Heights tank.”

Tommy Diamond shook his hand. “I’ve been in there. You can’t turn around without someone pissing in your face. I’d say I had a contract to hit the Pope if it got me out of there.”

The end of the comedy hour. “Get out of here, Tommy.”

“You’re going to be sorry, Lieutenant. One of these days I’m going to kill somebody and no one’s going to believe me.”

They’re coming out of the woodwork, Tom Spellacy thought. Take yesterday. An astrologer in Altadena asked the exact time of death and promised to deliver the murderer’s name in five days, fourteen hours and twelve minutes. A man who said he was a Ph.D. in extrasensory perception asked to photograph the dead girl’s eyeball; the final image in it, he said, would be the face of the killer. A woman in Covina said her husband did it. She wanted grounds for divorce. A landlord in Studio City said his tenant did it. He wanted to evict the tenant and double the rent.

The telephone rang. Tom Spellacy held the receiver to his ear and took a sip of the cold coffee. It tasted worse than it looked.

“So your daughter’s name is Mary Lou,” he said after a moment. “And the last time you saw Mary Lou was the middle of January.”

“The sixteenth,” the woman said.

“January sixteenth.” He took a pencil and wrote the date down.

“1943.”

“1943,” he repeated. “You didn’t say that before.”

“I was going to bring it up.”

“Right,” he said. “She went out to get a package of cigarettes.”

“She always smoked Philip Morris. I got to think it was Philip Morris she went out to get. The girl you found, she smoked Philip Morris, she could be my daughter.”

“That’s the last time you saw her, January sixteenth, 1943.”

“Right with Eversharp.”

“And you never reported her missing before.”

“She moved around a lot. 1939 was the last time I saw her before that. She was on her way to Seattle. Going to work for Boeing, she said. She was punching a keyhole press before that, I think. In Tulsa. Maybe it was Oklahoma City. She lost a couple of fingers in the keyhole press. That’s what she told me, at least.”

“This one we got,” Tom Spellacy said, “she’s got all her fingers.”

“I figured that,” the woman on the telephone said. “Actually, she had a face like a horse, Mary Lou, you want to know the truth, so I had a feeling she couldn’t be this Mystery Beauty that they’re calling her in the newspapers.”

“Yeah.”

“Say, listen,” the woman said after a moment, “I get downtown a lot.”

“That’s nice,” Tom Spellacy said.

“I take the bus,” the woman said. “I get off at Figueroa and Olympic, the weather’s nice, and I walk. It’s raining, I take the trolley on Sixth Street. I could stop in and see you sometime. Your name is?”

“Diamond,” Tom Spellacy said. “Tommy Diamond.”

“I’ll call you sometime, Tommy,” the woman said. “Maybe we can have a drink. Woman of fifty-two, I don’t look bad, I say so myself. You know how to play carnival?”

“I don’t know that one, no.”

“I sit on your face and you try to guess my weight,” the woman said. “That’s a swell one, isn’t it?”

Tom Spellacy hung up and swore to himself. Mystery Beauty. Beauty only because Crotty had told reporters she had nice tits and a nice bush. Mystery because there was still no ID. There was nothing to go on, not even a dental profile because her face was so smashed up. Unless you counted the clothes. There were a lot of clothes, actually, if you believed all the breathers calling in. Four pair of silk hose, corner of Pico and Vermont. A pair of red sandals, size seven, 3400 block of Slauson. A black high-heel patent-leather pump, six triple A, back of a coon whorehouse on West Adams. A red halter. A green wool knit skirt. A leather handbag with a Kotex in it. A plaid purse with a package of Trojans inside. Listen, I found a brassiere. Size 34, C-cup. Black lace. She was the type wore black lace, I bet. Nice ones, Jeez, I bet she had nice ones. Pointy, you know what I mean. And a pair of panties I found, too. With a blond pussy hair in it. The hair between her legs is blond, these are her pants, I bet.

Tom Spellacy swiveled in his metal chair and put his feet up on the desk. His office was a cubicle separated from the Robbery-Homicide bullpen by a flimsy wooden partition topped by a section of frosted glass; the whole divider was less than six feet high. Through the open door he could watch the detectives in the long, green bullpen. The ringing of telephones caused a constant din. He had assigned Masaryk and Bass to check up on the breathers. Bass made the calls and Masaryk typed up the reports. Never mind that Masaryk was a moron, a forty-watt bulb in a hundred-watt socket. He typed fast, which was why Fuqua plucked him out of Admin and made him a detective in Robbery-Homicide. He was a real asset when you got behind on your reports. Always willing to help out. Ninety words a minute and never a mistake. Then there was Bass. Thirty-five years in the department and no one could make him turn in his papers. Where am I going to go, he said. I got no family. 1911, he joined up. 1911. When it was the fucking Pony Express, Crotty said. And always the lessons from Ben Bass. You want to break up a card game, Ben Bass said, you knock on the door and ask for a guy named Slim. There’s always a guy named Slim in a card game. Or else you piss under the doorway and they’ll think it’s a drunk and open up. Piss under the door and ask for a guy named Slim. Thirty-five years in the department and that was what Ben Bass had picked up.

Masaryk and Bass. The Lone Ranger and Tonto.

He picked up the telephone and dialed the Jury Commission. “Mrs. Morris,” he said.

“Mrs. Morris,” Corinne said when she answered the phone.

“I’ll be by tonight,” Tom Spellacy said.

“For a change,” Corinne said.

He lowered his voice and watched the door in case someone walked in. “We can play carnival.”

“I know how to play carnival.”

“You do?” The answer dampened his enthusiasm for her. She took bed for granted, knew more about it, in fact, than he could concoct in his wildest dreams.

“I sit on your—”

“Never mind,” he interrupted. “I’ve got a call on the other line. I’ll see you around seven.”

And she never felt guilty about it.

Masaryk stood in his open doorway. His hair was clipped to the skull and his face wore its perpetual look of surprise. Tell Masaryk that the sky was blue or the ocean deep and he would treat the information as he would have the Resurrection the first Easter.

“Fuqua called when you were on the phone. He wants to see you and Crotty.”

“Where’s Crotty?”

“Interrogation room 3.” Masaryk remained in the doorway. “Tom . . .”

Tom Spellacy waited.

“I think that’s a swell Mystery Clue. I mean, I couldn’t even tell my wife.” Masaryk put up his hand to shield his mouth and whispered, “And she’s Italian.”

Interrogation room 3 was down the corridor past the bunco bullpen. Tom Spellacy told Crotty that Fuqua wanted to see them and then looked through the two-way mirror at the man sitting at the table in the room. The man’s hands were shaking and he was weeping uncontrollably.

“Who?”

“Leland K. Standard, family man,” Crotty said. “Wife named Maureen and three little ones named Mary, Dorothy and Theresa. Little Theresa’s mental. One of them mongolian idiots there, I think they call them. His wife’s brother’s a Dominican priest. He has a cocker spaniel named Lester and he makes $4,500 a year as a draftsman for Pacific Telephone.”

“Alibi?”

“Tight as a popcorn fart,” Crotty said. “Drove the parish chorale up to Ventura County. The K of C singalong at Saint Boniface’s in Santa Paula there. Stayed the night in the parish hall. Got back in the morning.”

Tom Spellacy lost interest. “Let him go, Frank.”

“Fuck him,” Crotty said. “Let him sweat. He didn’t want to be here, he shouldn’t make a habit of flashing his weenie.” He waved a manila folder. “It’s in the file. ‘Shake hands with this, little girl,’ he says to one of them. ‘Liquid candy, little girl,’ he says to another. Dad and Mom there pressed charges, he’d be waving it around in Folsom, is where he’d be waving it. Know why they didn’t press charges? The Dominican brother-in-law is why. He goes to see Dad and Mom, promises them two box seats in heaven. He also tells them Leland K.’s lawyer’s going to put their little girl on the stand, let her tell the jury how big it looked, and wouldn’t that be a terrible thing. Big deal he’s married and got a family. It’s only a matter of time he does it again.”

Through the mirror Tom Spellacy watched Leland K. Standard slump forward on the table and cradle his head in his arms. It always surprised him how few suspects realized that the mirror was two-way and that they were always under surveillance even when they were alone.

“One thing I should tell you is I checked out that chorale group there,” Crotty said. “Twelve girls and the guy driving the bus and we know who the guy driving the bus was. Our friend, the candy man. Fourteen and under the little girls are. He’s got something on his mind, I think, and it’s not the four-part harmony, I bet.”

“We got enough troubles, Frank, without a Dominican on our ass.”

“There’s nothing to worry about is what I’m trying to tell you,” Crotty said. “The wife and kids are out of town, visiting grandma and granddad at the farm, milking a cow, I think. What’s he going to do? Call the Dominican, swear to God his fly’s been zipped ever since he pissed in Little Nancy’s belly button? Don’t you believe it.”

Fuqua stood framed by the window in his office as the photographer moved a chair to get into better position. His suit jacket was buttoned, all three buttons, and stays held the collar points on his white shirt firmly in place. The fan had been shut off so as not to rustle the papers on his desk. The heat was stifling. Fuqua told the photographer to include the picture of his wife and two children in the shot. Tom Spellacy looked at the photograph. Both little boys wore braces. On the wall behind Fuqua’s desk there was a framed certificate attesting to his successful completion of the Police Management Course at the Roger J. Minihan School of Penology and another certificate noting that he had passed the marksman’s course on the department range. Tom Spellacy could feel the half-moons of sweat spreading down the side of his shirt. The photographer asked for one more picture. Fuqua put on his glasses and stared at the report in his hand. Crotty jumped when the flashbulb exploded.