by Jack Webb
But there is nothing the detectives can do except charge all four with violation of the Juvenile Code under subsection “M” dealing with illegal possession of explosives and a machine gun.
Is this how Tom Sawyer would feel if he wandered out of his lazy, happy 19th Century into today’s world? It is at times like these that Daisy Storms says, “I could stand some lipstick.”
V
The battleground is Hollywood. No other division in LAPD has had so many varied problems. There are the phonies still trying to storm the movie lots, though there are fewer lots than there used to be, and turning to crime when they fail. There are the strong-arm men prowling for furs and jewels. There is the nest of homosexuals, which lives under constant threat of murder, shakedown, and blackmail.
During the war years, the homos were victims of more than one thousand robberies and hundreds of other crimes— so many that the police appealed to the armed forces to keep their personnel out of the purple district.
When Captain Bert Jones commanded the Hollywood Division, he said the place reminded him of a crime recruiting office. “We keep sending them to the penitentiary,” he explained, “but the ranks keep filling up.”
In a place like that, where the crime scenarists just look out the window for fresh material, the strenuous sleuthing demands great detectives. Hollywood had three such: Sergeant Colin Forbes; Sergeant Arnold Hubka, his inseparable partner; and E. M. (Al) Goosen, who rounded out the triumvirate.
The detective is a counter-puncher. He waits for the first blow, and then hits back. Forbes, Hubka, and Goosen had to play it that way.
“We never played to the gallery,” Forbes says today, “and we seldom got ‘screen credit.’ But we sure drew the people. Hollywood was a lodestone for the phonies, the connivers, and the bad eggs who thought the town was a pushover. That calls for work, if you’re a policeman.”
Donald L. Rider was a guy, just a guy, it seemed, if you didn’t know his FBI record which reached from Phoenix, Arizona, to Helena, Montana. By the age of nineteen, in just two exuberant years, he had worked at robbery, burglary, car theft, jail escape, and strong-arm terrorism.
Now, with only seventeen shopping days till Christmas, he blew into Hollywood, extending the season’s greetings at gunpoint to one and all. The first day, he stuck up a motel on Sunset Boulevard for $759. Haphazardly, he hit motels and restaurants and once paused on the street to relieve a passerby of $150.
He wasn’t very bright, and he didn’t think big, but he was a busy mugg, and that kind causes just as much trouble to a detective. Forbes and Hubka were right behind, trying to make him a Christmas present for the division, as he ran up $5,168.15 in holdup loot. They missed their private goal by two days.
On December 27, Rider knocked over a loan company for $3,302, his biggest take, and casually lit a cigarette as he departed. That was at 2:50 p.m.; and, at 4:10, Forbes and Hubka collared him without a struggle in a hillside motel between Hollywood and San Fernando Valley.
“You guys are quick,” Rider observed professionally. “How did you tumble so fast?”
Forbes asked simply, “Who taught you to throw match folders on the floor of the place you rob?”
“Was that how you found this place?”
Hubka grinned. “The folder had the address of this motel. Happy New Year.”
Rider drew a life sentence, and police recovered about half of his more than $5,000 loot. This was given back to the victims in proportion to the amount of their losses. He’s the old three-striper—
It was the kind of inside job that makes a detective talk to himself because it’s so obvious and yet you can’t put your finger on the culprit. The owner of one of Hollywood’s smartest haberdasheries complained that money had been taken from the cash drawer of the open safe. Forbes questioned the employees, but didn’t get anyplace.
About three days later, the owner called back to report the same thing had happened again; and thereafter, about every three days for the next four months, he was on the phone again with the same complaint and an increasing asperity of tone. Were the police going to do something?
Forbes was doing all a detective can do. He questioned and requestioned every employee. Without advance warning, he questioned some at their homes at night just to see if he could spot any expensive clothing, furniture, or jewelry.
He talked at length to the girl with the box office name, Nevada Skippy Murphy, a nineteen-year-old blonde, four feet seven, eighty-eight nicely curved pounds. Forbes didn’t question what hope had brought her to Hollywood, and it was more polite not to ask. Skippy, right now, was cashier in the haberdashery.
Every three days or so, she told him, it was the same thing. She would go to the cash drawer, discover the money had been taken, and report it right away to her boss. A Hollywood detective has to know a good deal about women’s clothing, and a quick rundown of Skippy told Forbes she was wearing what the average working girl would wear. She was obviously cooperating with him, and he crossed her off his list.
Then, by chance, on a routine cruise through Hollywood one night, Forbes saw a Cinderella. All decked out in an expensive gown and expensive jewelry, Skippy was just entering a smart night spot.
With his partner, Forbes followed and after a few questions, asked if she would object to having her apartment searched. “Why no,” Skippy said calmly. “I have nothing to hide.”
Why did she say it? The minute the detectives walked in, they spotted the new fur coat, the expensive wristwatch, the new pieces of furniture. “Well?” said Forbes.
“I wanted to live nice,” Skippy said slowly. “I wanted nice clothes. What girl doesn’t! Especially here in Hollywood. But how many of us have the money? Well, I saw a way to get the money. I guess I was too weak to refuse it.”
But, Skippy made it very plain, she was not a thief. From a desk drawer, she took out a black ledger and handed it to Forbes. In it were dates and various sums of money which matched the dates and sums of the four months of thievery.
“Some day, when I got to be something in Hollywood,” Skippy said virtuously, “I was going to pay it all back.”
She was sentenced to the Los Angeles County Jail for petty theft.
Whose knowledge is riper?
Sometimes a Hollywood detective plays it soft with the Skippys whose dreams betray them, and then sometimes hard when he’s up against a killer. Once, Colin Forbes went on the trail of a shadowy character who had trussed, robbed, then killed a Vine Street tailor, leaving behind only the heelprint of a cowboy’s boot on his victim’s forehead. It took him two years, but he traced the boot to Texas and then found the murderer in an Army camp right in California.
Sometimes, you play it very rough. Forbes went up against Erwin (Machine Gun) Walker, the slayer of a California Highway Patrolman, and got a slug in the stomach himself. He still carries the bullet lodged against his spine.
When Count Rudeni arrived in town, the ladies were overwhelmed. He had the courtly manners of a count and, what counts don’t always have, money, too, being by reputation a landed gentleman. There was also a dash of the virile about him; not one of those decadent counts, you know. He had been an FBI agent, he told them, and now he was in Hollywood as a technical adviser on an FBI picture. It was a complete mystery how so much feminine misinformation could have gotten around town unless perhaps it was spread by plain old Hymie Bernstein, which was the count’s real name.
No sooner was Count Rudeni established in town than he fought a brief, losing battle with his worse half, Hymie Bernstein. He entertained a lady, drugged her, partially disrobed her and chastely plucked a purse containing $580 from her bra. There followed a four-year schizophrenic crime career in which the gallant count wangled the dates but in which Hymie did the dirty work, including the slugging of an eighty-year-old woman for her diamond ring and $1,200 cash.
In California, the statute of limitations on robbery is three years, and since they couldn’t find the elusive count, Forbes and h
is partner obtained a secret indictment in the slugging case. Their foresight was justified.
From the license plate of a car which the count had been seen driving, they finally ran him down. It was two days after Hymie should have been safe because of the statute of limitations. But the secret indictment held, and he was tucked away in San Quentin for a period of five years up to life.
It was the same old malarky. But this one spelled it with a capital M. The name should have been plain warning, and certainly a less unblushing fraud would have changed it. James M-a-l-a-r-k-y. Malarky’s business was selling people shiny new cars he didn’t own, and he made a thriving thing out of it on one very simple gimmick. There was no particular shortage of cars the year Malarky operated, but nobody was selling them at his price—up to 40% off the list price.
So more than a hundred customers fought to make cash deposits or give Malarky their old cars in return for contracts which solemnly stated they would receive delivery on a car of their choice within the next month to three months. Among them were buyers who most certainly should have known better. Teachers who might have speculated about this strange working of the economic laws; policemen who should have smelled the ripe, distinctive aroma of fraud. But even organizations like a teachers’ association sent business Malarky’s way, and the caper was overfed.
A high school principal paid him $3,300 cash for a new Cadillac, and after four months received one that didn’t somehow seem brand-new. A month later he received a warning from a dealer in used Cadillacs that the car would be repossessed unless the payments were made on time.
Malarky, it then developed, had purchased the car, which already had had two owners, making the minimum down payment and the first two monthly installments. Then he had turned it over to the school principal, and in Malarky’s easy-come, easy-go way of doing business, that fulfilled his contract.
Another of the lambs traded a three-year-old Studebaker and $1,000 cash for a new Pontiac. The promise of a new Pontiac, that is. He waited several months, and then Malarky told him to pick up his car in Michigan—Pontiac, Michigan. Nobody there ever had heard of Malarky, with a capital M, that is.
The victim called Malarky long distance, and the dealer in imaginary cars was abjectly apologetic. The car had arrived in Los Angeles. But would the gentleman mind stopping off at Omaha on his way home and picking up a car, a year-old Chevrolet, at the airport parking lot? The keys would be in the airport office.
Dutifully the purchaser flew to Omaha, found the car which Malarky had described, and started west for Los Angeles. In Nebraska, the State Police stopped him for speeding, and it took considerable explaining on his part to assure them that he was in legal possession of the car. Especially since he was pretty well bewildered himself by this time.
Twenty miles up the highway, he ran into a road block. The suspicious state police had double-checked his license number and found that it had been issued to a Caddy rather than the Chevvy he was driving. This time, he had to tell his peculiar story in court, and several phone calls were made for verification by the equally bewildered authorities.
Finally, they let him go—on payment of $15 court costs —and he staggered on westward toward home and the promised land of the new Pontiac. It isn’t quite clear whether he ever laid hands on it.
But an Army colonel fared even worse at Malarky’s game of city-city, what city’s got the car. The colonel was directed first to a town in Louisiana. There was no car there, and by phone Malarky re-directed him to Kansas City. Again, no car, and he was told to try Pontiac. When that lead petered out, too, the colonel threw up his hands in disgust and went back to Louisiana. He bought a new Pontiac at a comparatively stiff price, but at least it was a car he could see.
At last Malarky’s scheme of sedans-in-the sky collapsed, and he knew he was bankrupt. He tried one more caper, arranging the “burglary” of a $25,000 original Whistler painting which a friend had entrusted to him. He hoped to collect on insurance he had taken out, but Forbes took one fast look at the crime scene, and the hoax was uncovered. The chisel marks indicating forced entry were on the inside of the door.
Along with other investigators, Forbes worked twenty-five days to untangle the auto fraud. Scores of victims were personally interviewed, and their checks and bank slips scrutinized to prove that Malarky had actually received their money.
For two days, the victims crowded into the Hollywood Station to make their complaints. When the reckoning was completed, Malarky, spelled M-a-l-a-r-k-y, was shown to have stolen $80,000. He escaped with a sentence of nine months in the County Jail, plus three years of probation.
So you see, Baraum, though right, was wrong.
Of the thousand, two thousand emergency phone calls he received, Forbes will never forget the one that came without warning to his home one September noon. “Forbes?” the man at Headquarters asked tonelessly. “Yes.” Then Headquarters asked, rather than ordered, and Forbes said yes again, and hung up the receiver slowly.
From his pocket, where he had been carrying it for six years, he took out the photograph and studied it. He put it back inside, donned his coat and drove to southwest Los Angeles where his brother, Robert, operated a ceramics shop.
Other officers were already there, and they led him silently to a small room used for storing the pottery. Forbes looked down at the body of his sister-in-law, Despine, four bullet holes in her head, her face slashed and bloodied thirteen times from a pistol whipping. He braced himself and looked at the other body.
It was his brother, Robert, with four bullet holes in the head.
The officers looked at him, a question in their eyes, and he said softly, “I want to handle this one.”
Efficiently, the investigation drove ahead. Who found the bodies? A bakery driver making deliveries shortly after 11 a.m. How long dead? More than an hour. Any physical evidence? One possible heelprint. Witnesses?
A service station operator half a block away told Forbes about the car that had parked daily across from his station, morning and afternoon, for more than two weeks. Always, there had been a man in it, watching something. The service man had feared he was casing his station for a holdup. Apparently, he had been casing murder.
Other witnesses filled in bits and pieces. Robert Forbes had left the shop at 9:15 a.m. to get some breakfast for Despine and himself. The killer must have slipped in immediately afterwards through a door off an alley. He surprised Despine, pistol-whipped her, then put four .45-calibre slugs into her head from a gun equipped with a silencer.
Two bowls of breakfast food were standing on the table where Robert had placed them on his return to the shop. Before he even knew his wife had died, he got four slugs in the back of the head.
Sergeant Forbes again looked at the photograph that he had carried next to his heart for six years. It was that of James Merkouris, the epileptic son of a Greek priest and Despine’s former husband. Forbes had feared this day ever since Robert married Despine and her ex-husband had harassed them with obscene letters.
Within an hour after discovery of the bodies, an All Points Bulletin was out for Merkouris and his car.
Very shortly, the first report was in from a Los Angeles County deputy sheriff. At 11:40 a.m. that day, he had sighted a car of the same description parked on a bluff overlooking the ocean near Malibu.
The spot was unusual, but because Malibu is good fishing territory, he thought a surf caster might be trying his luck below. After the APB, he quickly returned to the bluff, but the car had vanished. Next day police skin divers probed the ocean off Point Dune for the murder weapon, but it was never found.
The second report came from Pueblo, Colorado, where Merkouris’ car was found overturned and wrecked. Forbes didn’t entirely buy that. He had heard Despine say that Merkouris liked Hot Springs, Arkansas; and so the search was concentrated there. Merkouris was picked up and returned to Los Angeles.
Forbes had also traced him to a downtown hotel where he had been registered until th
e very day the murder watch of Robert and Despine had apparently gotten underway. But that day, Merkouris insisted, he had gone to Galveston, Texas, and hadn’t returned. He denied any knowledge of the double killing. He was ordered held for sanity tests.
What the shock and the investigation drained out of Sergeant Colin Forbes, is impossible to know. Maybe there were other factors, too.
“For fifteen years I tried to make Colin sleep at least five hours a day,” says his wife, Vivian. “If I wasn’t doing that, I was nursing him through colds he received in rainy backyards waiting for hoodlums, or just worrying if he was all right when I didn’t see him for three days at a time.”
“You can’t work as hard as he did for twenty years and expect to keep your health,” says a fellow officer. “I’ve seen him work twelve or fifteen hours a day for months to catch a murderer.
“And then he would work just as hard and long to see that the man’s wife and kids had a place to sleep and plenty to eat.”
Then there were his close friends who were felled, too. Sergeant Hubka died of cancer. Al Goosen collapsed from diabetes, induced by stress.
Whatever the cause, Sergeant Colin Forbes has reached the end of the hunter’s trail at the age of forty-six. He is a heart disease cripple, pensioned off at $300 a month.
He’s the Sergeant, young man, He’s the Sergeant.
THE LIEUTENANT
AT NIGHTFALL, THE TWO TINY BLACK LEOPARD CUBS nuzzled close to their mother for warmth and nourishment that cool spring night in Griffith Park Zoo. The next morning they had vanished as completely as though a hawk had scooped them up with his talons.
The gates and fences of the leopard cage were secure, the adjoining tiger cage seemed undisturbed. Except for the whining of the mother, there was nothing to indicate that the furry little mites had existed at all.
