Max Allan Collins - Angel in Black (Nathan Heller Novels)

1

The two pieces of her lay porcelain-white in the ankle-high grass and weeds of a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue, like the upper and lower sections of a discarded marionette. No strings could ever reanimate this disassembled figure, howevera sadistic puppeteer had made certain of that.

Jesus frig, Fowley said, as ashen as the bisected corpse that lay, bizarrely posed, alongside the sidewalk. Wheres a fuckin photographer when you need one?

We were in a neighborhood of Los Angeles called Leimert Park, an area where development had been stalled by the war, and the weedy lots retained sidewalks, driveways and fire hydrants, as if the houses had been whisked away by a particularly tidy tornado.

Yeah, I said, Richardson wouldnt want to leave entertainment value like that just layin around.

James H. Richardson was Fowleys boss, the city editor of Hearsts morning Examiner, and Bill Fowleyson of a legendary New York American editorwas one of about twelve guys who fancied themselves Richardsons star reporter.

A rumpled gray porkpie hat sitting tight on his round skull, Fowley had the same reddish brown hair as me, only his was cropped close to the scalp, like a guy going to the electric chair. He was small, a good five inches shorter than my six feet, and forty pounds lighter than my one-ninety; he was almost swimming in a baggy light brown suit, wind whipping itI wasnt swimming in my tan double-breasted gabardine, but the wind was making waving flags out of my pantlegs, too.

What am I thinkin? Fowley said, pacing at the feet of the spread-eagled, on-its-back bisected corpse. Felix keeps a spare Speed Graphic in the trunk. Here...

He lobbed me the keys and I caught em.

... grab it outa there, Heller. You know how to use a friggin Speed Graphic, dont you?

I was not a reporter, star or otherwise. I was, and for that matter am, Nathan Heller, at that time president of the A-1 Detective Agency of Chicago, which is to say a private detective. And since a good deal of my business, over the years, had been divorce work, yes, I knew how to use a friggin Speed Graphic.

But I didnt feel like shooting grim pinup photos of a nude, dead, once-beautiful woman, and declined, graciously.

Fuck you, Fowley, I said. Take your own ghoulish goddamn pictures.

Whirling, Fowleywho looked like a pleasant bulldog, only right now his expression wasnt all that pleasantsaid, You want to keep me happy, dont you, gumshoe? Or dont you and your partner still want that free publicity?

No need to get shitty about it.

Maybe you cheap bastards would rather hire a p.r. agent than get the Examiners goodwill, for fucking free.

I unlocked the trunk and fetched the camera. Fowley was normally an amiable joe, but he had just caught front-page fever: the bisected body in this vacant lot had all the earmarks of a headline story... a beautiful woman, butchered by some maniac. Sex and murderideal breakfast reading.

The morning was almost cold under a gun-metal sky, the breeze bristling the weeds into tickling the two halves of the girl, whounlike the rest of the scattered refuse, rusty cans, disintegrating cardboard, broken bottleshad been carefully arranged, as if by an artist; buzzing flies circled this lurid masterpiece, critics having a closer look.

Her arms were above her head, as if someone had poked a gun at her and demanded money; her legs were spread wide, as if in carnal invitation. But there was nothing inviting about this young woman, not anymore. Her raven hair a tangle of damp curls, she had been cleaved at the waist, the two sections crudely aligned, the top half of her angling somewhat into the lot while her left foot pointed to the nearby sidewalk. Her lily-white flesh had a waxy look, and appeared strangely clean, despite slashes to her face and to either well-formed breast, and to one shapely thigh; a nasty vertical gash extended from her navel to her wispy pubic thatch.

Not much of a bush on her, Fowley pointed out.

Jesus, Fowley.

All I mean is, shes just a kid, he said, shaking his head as he scribbled in his notepad. The buzz of flies sounded like fluorescent lighting shorting out. She could be fifteen.

Or twenty, I said, and the bisected corpse strobed even whiter under the Speed Graphics flashbulb.

In the ten or eleven inches separating the two sections of her, green grass waved in the wind, except where her distended liver matted it down.

A sick feeling boiled in the pit of my stomach. I was not a novice to crime scenes; I had seen my share of grisly homicides. I was thirty-eight years old and an ex-cop and a combat veteran and it took a hell of a lot to make me sick.

But this was the worst, most brutal, as well as saddest homicide victim Id ever seena once-lovely young woman, carved in two, then arranged with thumb-to-the-nose glee by the sick fuck responsible. Yet there was more to my reaction than the tragic loss of young life and the grotesque sadism that had caused it.

Memories were stirring in me. I had been part of an investigation in Cleveland, not quite ten years before, and had been at a similar crime scene, a rubble- and rubbish-infested dump in the middle of town, where the torso of a young woman had been found. In some respects that one had been even worse: the head, the arms, legs, and feet had been severed and scattered about the dump like so much garbage, making a puzzle out of a human being to be reassembled by the police. The murder had been one of thirteen torso slayings attributed to the same maniac.