The Last Embrace Read online

  “I’m sure Kitty’s roommates will have some names for you to pursue,” Lily said. She wondered how to bring up what she’d overheard in the alley. “Did they mention any boyfriends? Any trouble Kitty might have been in?”

  “We already spoke to the redhead.” Pico checked his notepad. “Roseanne ‘Red’ Viertel. She gave us a coupla leads.”

  “Like what?” Lily was surprised; Red hadn’t told her much of anything.

  With a tight smile, Pico tucked his notepad away. “What’s this, Miss Kessler? Are we playing Twenty Questions?”

  Lily’s cheeks grew hot. She’d slipped unconsciously into the rhythm. You asking questions, them parrying, you rephrasing, the pressure building until finally they broke and something useful emerged.

  But he unsettled her, this long, tall drink of water. And now he was following her around the room, trying to spook her. They learned it in detective school. Well, she knew a few tactics too.

  “Just one question, then.”

  She gave him a tomboy smile that hid more subtle wiles and leaned her ass against the sill. Examined him from downcast lashes.

  Use what you’ve got.

  “Have you talked to Max Vranizan?”

  Behind Pico’s eyes, something clicking into focus. “I thought you only got here yesterday, Miss Kessler. Yet you seem to know an awful lot. What can you tell us about Mr. Vranizan?” he asked, his voice cool and businesslike.

  Lily shrugged. “Just that he was a special effects guy who also worked at RKO. He was sweet on Kitty, but she had her sights set higher than a toy maker.”

  “When did he tell you that?”

  “He didn’t. The roomies did last night.”

  Pico’s eyes grew razor sharp even as his voice grew more measured. “Red said this Max fellow was obsessed with Kitty.”

  “That doesn’t mean he killed her. He’s probably a harmless freak,” Lily said, fishing for information. “A grown-up guy who lives in a fantasy world of dinosaurs and apes and monsters. A little kid.”

  “Little kids can be cunning. I’d stay away from him. And stay away from RKO too. You’re unlikely to get discovered.”

  So that’s what he thought she was after!

  She regarded him coolly. “I have no desire to be an actress.”

  “Then again, if you play your cards right, you might even be able to take over Miss Hayden’s contract.”

  “I would never—”

  His eyes crinkled. “Of course not. That’s why you showed up here as soon as you heard, then moved right into Kitty Hayden’s room and into her life.”

  Lily uncoiled herself, stretched to her full height, but still barely saw over his shoulder.

  “You know nothing about me. I’m hardly some starstruck ingénue. I grew up in L.A. And I’m staying here because Kitty’s mother asked me to find her daughter.”

  Pico rolled his eyes. “Then you’re free to go. The professionals will take over.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  She was irked that he’d riled her so easily. “I hope you display a better bedside manner when you talk to Kitty’s roommates or you won’t get very far.”

  A wicked light danced in his eyes. “I’ve never had any complaints about my bedside manner. In fact…”

  “Then let me be the first,” she said, ignoring the innuendo.

  He shook his head. “You don’t give up, do you? Anybody ever tell you that you have a masculine brain?”

  “Now you’re insulting me?”

  “Far from it.” The idea seemed to entertain him.

  “Maybe I just have a criminal brain,” Lily said.

  “Oh?”

  “You want to catch a murderer, you have to think like one. That’s all.”

  The amusement faded from his eyes. “That’s exactly why they’ll never let women on the force,” he said.

  “What’s why?” she asked.

  “Because if you want to catch rats, you’ve got to swim in the sewer, and that’s no job for a girl. You’d lose your sense of wonder and goodness about the world, and we can’t have that.”

  Lily’s mouth twitched. “Save it, Detective. We’re not helpless simpering creatures that have to be protected. We’ve held down jobs, traveled the world. Seen people die. Nobody’s innocent anymore.”

  “The war’s been over four years. Things are going back to how they were.”

  Lily thought of the CIA, reassigning its women agents to desk jobs. Her bosses had claimed their Soviet contacts felt more comfortable handing over secrets to men. That the female temperament was unsuited to surveillance, interrogation, high-stakes dissembling. That women were ruled by their emotions, while espionage required cool, hard reason. No matter what successful female spy Lily brought up, they had an answer: Virginia Hill was an exception; Christine Granville had gotten lucky; Amy Thorpe traded intelligence for sex. Lily’s gorge rose at being lectured by yet another man in authority.

  “Not everyone wants to go back to how things were.”

  “Sure they do. People are settling down, having families. It’s the American way.”

  The taunting tone was back. You want it too, his voice seemed to say. Just admit it.

  “I guess I’m un-American, then.”

  Pico clicked his tongue. “I’d watch where you say that. You said you’ve been gone since 1944. Well, things have changed at home.”

  “I didn’t mean I was a Red,” Lily said frostily. “I mean I want to be able to work and live on my own and walk home from the trolley stop at night without looking over my shoulder. That’s why Kitty’s murder terrifies me and every woman in L.A. It could have been any of us.”

  Pico looked ready to argue. But just then the LAPD Crime Lab squad arrived at the door—four men who carried metal toolboxes and cameras.

  “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need to ask me any more questions,” she said, slipping past them into the doorway.

  “I think we’re through, Miss Kessler.”

  And good riddance.

  But they weren’t through. An hour later, Pico appeared downstairs. Jinx, who’d been recounting a story about how Kitty had once loaned her an expensive dress for an audition, trailed off. A crackling tension and flirtatiousness seeped into the kitchen, chasing away the worst of the gloom.

  “Coffee, Detective?” Red swished over with the pot, her hips approaching a rolling boil.

  “Just what I needed, thank you.” Pico sat down.

  “Sugar and cream?” She bent over the table, cleavage popping.

  “This is wonderful.” Pico beamed at the young women arrayed around him like petals of a flower. Lily wondered if he meant to pluck them, one by one.

  A new girl walked into the kitchen. She was about Lily’s height and weight, with brown hair in a similar cut, but her features were more angular, her posture straighter, her demeanor brisk, reminding Lily of a female pilot she’d known during the war.

  “You must be Louise Dobbs,” Lily said, going up to her.

  “Yes,” the girl said. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen. “And I’m so sorry. When I sent the cable, I never imagined…maybe if I’d done it sooner…?”

  Lily squeezed her hand and was about to respond when Pico broke in.

  “It wouldn’t have made a difference, Miss Dobbs. She’d been dead several days by the time…Hey, now, hey, now,” he said with embarrassment as the girls launched into wordless snuffles and tears.

  Jinx was the first to recover. She propped her trembling chin in one hand. “Tell us, Detective, do you have any idea who killed her?”

  Pico leaned back. “Well, now, the LAPD always has leads.”

  God, he was too much, Lily thought. And Kitty’s roommates, veering from coy flirtation to tragic swooning and back in the blink of a mascaraed eye, as if this were some kind of audition. But maybe it was at that. A husband audition.

  Fumiko, busy at the stove, was the only one who didn’t join in.

  Red pulled her hair back with o
ne hand, cupping her temple Greta Garbo–style. Lily could have sworn her voice had dropped an octave. “Detective Pico,” she asked in a sultry voice, “do you always get your man?”

  “I always get my woman too,” Pico said. “We can’t assume anything at this stage.”

  Pico took a sip of coffee, sighed with appreciation. “You make a fine cup of joe, Miss Viertel,” he told Red.

  “Do you want to brief us on what you’ve got so far?” Jinx asked, eager to reclaim center stage.

  “Since you asked so politely,” he said with an arch look at Lily, “all right. But first, I’d like to know. Did Kitty keep a journal? Or a calendar? How about a phone book?”

  Jeanne, hands fluttering with her hair, said she’d walked into Kitty’s room to borrow a sweater once and seen her writing in a white leather journal.

  Pico frowned. “We didn’t find anything like that.”

  “Wouldn’t she keep her calendar and phone book in her purse?” Beverly asked haltingly.

  “There was no purse found with the, ah, Miss Hayden,” Pico said.

  Lily cleared her throat. “What about the RKO man? Could he have taken it?”

  Annoyed, Pico jotted in his notebook. “I certainly hope not.”

  The detective now told them that Kitty had been seen dancing in Palm Springs nightspots two weeks earlier with known associates of gangster Mickey Cohen. Lily flashed immediately to the small man who’d administered the brutal beating. Was he one of them? No wonder Magruder had lit up when she’d mentioned gangsters.

  At Cohen’s name, Beverly gave a small moan. The detective turned to her.

  “What can you tell us about that?” he asked sharply.

  “I don’t know anything about gangsters,” Beverly said. “She told us she went there with a girlfriend.”

  “Ah,” Pico said. “What was her name?”

  Lily watched the girls ripple uneasily under the detective’s gaze. She felt the swirl and eddy of conflicted allegiances. The OSS had taught her to listen and observe, to be patient. Kitty’s roommates were afraid of something. They hadn’t told the detective everything they knew. From the way Pico’s thumb and forefinger tightened almost imperceptibly against his pen, Lily knew he sensed it too.

  “Kitty never told us her name,” Red said, looking around the room, as if defying anyone to contradict her.

  Pico raised one eyebrow.

  “Do you think there’s any connection to Mimi Boomhower?” asked Louise, practical once more.

  “Who?” said Lily.

  “Mimi was a Bel Air socialite and widow who disappeared several months ago,” Pico explained. “Left her front door open and her lights burning. No one’s seen her since. And no body’s turned up.” He grimaced. “Unlike your roommate.

  “Now,” he said, surveying the solemn faces, “I’d like to question each of you separately. And I want you to answer me as thoroughly as you can, thinking hard to dredge up every tiny detail you can remember, because it might be that one insignificant thing that helps us catch her killer.”

  “She was such a dear,” said Beverly with a sniffle. “If she caught a fly she’d release it outside. Some of the memories I’ve got, they’re almost too painful to recount.”

  Pico’s smile grew wider, his voice more expansive. “Well, take a couple aspirin for the pain and try, or I might think you’re withholding evidence.”

  At his words, Fumiko, who was peeling and chopping a gnarled brown root on a cutting board, cursed under her breath and popped a finger in her mouth.

  “Sorry,” she said. “I cut myself.”

  While Pico interviewed Kitty’s roommates, Lily went for a brisk walk to clear her head. As she slipped out, several men clutching notepads and cameras scurried toward her.

  “Miss, were you a roommate of Kitty Hayden? Can you tell us about her boyfriends? What was she like?”

  The questions came fast and furious, a barrage of words, the cameras exploding in front of her. Holding up her purse to block her face, Lily made her way down the street, but they followed her like a moving organism. Most persistent of all was a young blonde with coral lipstick and a matching jacket. At least she didn’t have a camera, just a notepad. The woman’s heels clicked conspiratorially as she whispered questions to Lily just out of reach of the men, appealing to their shared bond as young women. Lily put her head down and kept walking.

  Undeterred, the reporter trailed after her.

  “I’m with Confidential magazine, miss, and I’ve been authorized to offer you a onetime payment in exchange for an interview. Perhaps we could go somewhere private”—a meaningful look back to the men five paces behind them—“where we can—”

  “Please stop,” Lily said. “I don’t want to talk to the press.”

  Lily saw face powder dusting faint hairs on the reporter’s upper lip. The woman smiled, exposing small milky teeth. Reaching into a pocket, she pulled out a bill, snapping it crisply.

  Despite herself, Lily looked. It was a hundred-dollar bill.

  “I thought so,” the woman said with a laugh.

  Lily slapped the bill from the woman’s hand. “That’s what I think of your foul offer.”

  As she ran off, the woman called out, “Violet McCree at Confidential. Call anytime, twenty-four hours a day, the service will find me.”

  CHAPTER 8

  Detective Pico left the boardinghouse with only a pounding headache to show for two hours of questioning. Make that thirty minutes of questions and an hour and a half of leg-crossing, eyelash-batting, and moist actressy snuffling into tissues. He shook his head. And that annoying Kessler girl. She was sharp, and not afraid to show it. Pico knew a lot of men didn’t like brainy gals. He didn’t mind, especially when it came in a package like that.

  The girls and Mrs. Potter swore Kitty had no enemies or vices. She worked long hours and dated a lot but had no one steady. There were no jilted lovers either, but Pico was keen to interview that special effects whiz Max Vranizan. The girls had also mentioned a thuggish fellow at Sinatra’s rehearsal who’d flirted with Kitty and claimed the starlet had stood up his friend, but they didn’t know his name. He’d have to bring over some mug shots for them to look at.

  Pico resented Magruder for leaving him to conduct the interviews alone, especially on his first homicide case. Maybe the veteran cop didn’t realize it, but Pico had paid his dues, first with five years as a beat cop attached to the Seventy-seventh Street Division, then two as a detective in Central Robbery. Now he itched to find Kitty’s killer quickly and establish a reputation as a straight shooter. But he’d already learned that any serious police work he and Magruder did would be shoehorned between restaurant meals, drinking sessions, and visits to stores with small back rooms where his new partner placed bets several times a day.

  Magruder was a perfect example of why Angelenos didn’t trust the police. Drinking on duty, leering at everything in skirts, the never-ending vicecapades. Just like the brass. The papers had been full of stories all summer, how the grand jury had indicted LAPD Chief C. B. Horrall and Deputy Chief Joseph Reed and charged a slew of others with perjury. Then there was Hollywood Vice, a gravy train with half the squad on the take and openings so rare that twenty-six officers had vied for the job when his father retired in September after thirty-five years. The thought of his father made his head throb more painfully. Pico had fantasized about how he’d come home from vanquishing Nazis in Ardennes, France, with the Forty-fifth Infantry Division and tackle evils closer to home. He hadn’t realized how entrenched things were and how easy it was to slip into it. A few drinks here. A meal there when you were short. The sense, conveyed with hand gestures, winks, and offers everywhere a cop went in Los Angeles, that the spoils were there for the taking.

  At the Boulevard, Pico turned right and soon came to a bar called the Firefly. Boulevard substation! Ha, that was a good one. Inside the swampy light of the room, Pico spied Magruder sipping something blond and creamy from a highball glass. The older cop
waved him over and Pico slid onto the adjoining stool. Magruder’s drink had yellow flecks in it. Some kind of fruit. All those GIs coming home from the South Pacific and decorating their houses with tikis and mixing up tropical drinks. Just went to show you how selective memory could be.

  Magruder stubbed out his cigarette, pushed aside his racing form. “What’ll you have?”

  “What have you got?”

  “Buttermilk.” Magruder rubbed his belly. “Coats the stomach. Always my first drink of the day.”

  Pico made a face. “Brew 102,” he told the barman.

  As they drank, he recounted what he had learned at the rooming house and described his suspicions about the animator. Magruder agreed that Pico should talk to him.

  “Reckon I’ll head out to Palm Springs,” the older cop said. “Work my gang sources.”

  Pico could imagine the debauch as Magruder toured the nightspots.

  “I want you to work the L.A. angle,” Magruder continued. “Find Mickey’s people, see what they say. And pay a visit to that wop Dragna, who everyone says is trying to kill Mickey. Nighttimes he’s at his club, Largo. Daytime try his restaurant on Westwood Boulevard. Vernichello’s.”

  Pico nodded, glad for the marching orders. If he broke the case on his own, he’d make sure everybody knew it. He ran one last thing past Magruder.

  “The body boys said they found some unusual hairs on the vic’s clothing and possibly under her fingernails.”

  Magruder looked thoughtful. “Dog hair. Cat. Could tell us something.”

  “They don’t think it’s dog or cat. I told ’em to send it to the lab.”

  Magruder raised an eyebrow. “Coyote, then. That happens when a body stays in the hills too long.”

  “It wasn’t coyote either. Or mountain lion. It was black.”

  “We’ll wait and see, then. Maybe it’s nothing.”

  Pico wondered why his partner was so quick to dismiss this potential evidence. Magruder smoked and contemplated the wall.

  “You’re a good-looking fellow,” the older cop said after a pause. “A man doesn’t usually comment on another man’s looks unless he’s a fruit, but I saw those dames making cow eyes at you. You can use that. Someone in that henhouse knows more than they’re saying and I’ll bet it’s that stuck-up one who ID’d the body. Work things right, she’ll be eating out of your hand.”