by Jon Talton
I laid this out for Don as he kept shaking his head. He said, “This is a homicide. Do you know how close you came to being a suspect if I hadn’t snagged your business card?”
“Yes, but now I have a legitimate reason to dig.”
“You have a legitimate reason to stay the hell away.”
“What are you going to do about it? Your bosses are stonewalling any investigation into this killing, no new Winnie Ruth Judd scandal to taint the tourism business.”
He gave me a sour look.
“We’ve reclassified it as a suspicious death.”
After I stopped laughing, I said, “Yes, having your head and arms and legs sawed off is suspicious, even to me. It’s too bad no reporter in this town will see it written in the file, and if he did his editors would shut down a story. I know how it works.”
Don slammed his fist on the desk. “What is it with you and the Sir Galahad impersonation? Trying to save damsels in distress. Are you trying to atone for Mother’s death? She didn’t die from anything you did but from the Spanish flu. We were five thousand miles away in the Army and damned lucky it didn’t kill us, too. It was especially deadly for young and healthy people our age!”
“I’m doing my job, especially if you won’t do yours. And by the way, why would Kemper Marley know that the dead girl wasn’t the victim of a fall from the train?”
“What the hell?”
I told him about my conversation. “He says he has his sources in the department. I guess with the money he has to throw around, he can find them. Hope one isn’t my brother.”
That was a needless dig, but our blood was up.
He stood and stomped for the door. Before opening it, he turned. “Don’t do this, Gene. If you do, I might not be able to help you.”
“Are you going to do something?”
He stared at me a long moment. “Give me that goddamned business card.”
I went to the safe and handed him the envelope.
“I’ll get it dusted when I can. That’s all I can do for now.”
Nine
Choir practice was mostly devoted to preparing our upcoming Easter Sunday performance of the last two choruses of Messiah, “Worthy Is the Lamb Who Was Slain” and the “Amen,” with its demanding vocal runs. Most people didn’t realize that the “Hallelujah” chorus was also in the Easter portion of the masterpiece because it was always sung at Christmas. Anyway, this was hard work, and in the weeks to come we would be recycling anthems from the past two years that we knew well so we could focus on rehearsing Handel. And to think he completed the entire composition in twenty-four days.
I doubted twenty-four days would take me any closer to finding the man who had murdered and cut up Carrie Thayer, or whatever her name was. Still, after rehearsal I drove back to the crime scene. I parked off Sixteenth Street and grabbed a flashlight. It was full dark, a moonless night with overcast and cold. The citrus growers would be worrying about a killing frost if it lingered.
Heading south toward the tracks, a shadow silently emerged to my right. I reached for my .45 and was about to unholster it when I heard my name. It was Jimmy Darrow. He wore a zippered leather jacket, open, with his SP police badge pinned to his shirt and a billy club stuck in his pants.
We made small talk for a few minutes: Jack Halloran’s acquittal, a month’s reprieve for Winnie Ruth Judd, Governor Moeur asking the congressional delegation to send relief money, women getting the right to sit on juries. Jimmy had a pro and con argument on every subject, or so it seemed. I let him ramble on both sides of these fences.
Then he said, “I didn’t give you the whole truth, the other day, about the night that girl was found.”
I could tell that at the time but said nothing as he lit nails for both of us, handing me one. After a long drag and painful coughing, he continued. “I was walking east out of the mouth of the yard when I saw a car with its headlights on, facing my direction. It was parked right by where the girl was found.” He kicked the dirt. “Don’t know if that helps.”
“It might. Did you approach the car?”
“No. I was alone, and the car wasn’t on railroad property. But after it drove away, I walked over to see why he might have been parked there. That’s when I found the remains. The car was there for several minutes while I was watching, but I couldn’t say how long it had been sitting there before I came along.”
After he had a horrendous coughing fit, I asked if he saw anyone in the car or could identify the make.
“The headlights kept me from seeing anything until he turned north on Sixteenth. Then I’d guess it was a Packard Eight from the silhouette, white walls, the spare tire on the side of the body sitting on the running board.”
“Two doors, four?”
“Four. But the window was up, and I couldn’t make out the driver or whether he had a passenger. He drove fast.”
I stared in that direction, smoking.
“You don’t buy that she fell from the Sunset.” He said it as a statement, not a question.
“No.”
I walked him back to my car, where I pulled out a file with the photograph of Carrie. “Ever see her, hanging around the depot, anywhere?” I shone the flashlight on it.
“My God, that’s her!” He nervously lit another cigarette.
I pressed, “Ever see her alive?”
“No.” He shook his head. “What a shame. Pretty girl. Who would do such a thing?”
After another smoke, he turned back toward the railroad yard while I crossed the two lanes of Sixteenth Street and walked the fifty or so feet to where someone had laid out the body parts so meticulously.
My day had included a visit to Ezra Thayer of Phoenix. I kept it convivial, but he denied sending the telegram from Prescott. He didn’t have a daughter or granddaughter named Carrie. He didn’t recognize the young woman in the photograph. I had no reason to doubt him.
But someone had sent them. Calls to Prescott were equally fruitless. Given the volume of telegrams and Railway Express, neither Western Union nor the express agent had a memory of who might have sent the wire or parcel to me. It would have been easy for Frenchy Navarre or Kemper Marley or Suspect X to take the train to Prescott and send them back to Phoenix. But it was a lot of time, trouble, and expense.
Now I was in the dark, only the flashlight beam to guide me.
Then I saw it.
Someone had been drawing in the dirt exactly where the body parts were found. It was an elaborately designed cross: A skull at the top, with a straight vertical line leading down, a horizontal line that led to a B on one end and a backward S on the other, and finally a long X with curled ends. I placed the flashlight under my arm and sketched it in my notebook. I had never seen anything like it.
The night was very quiet. Not even a sound from the SP yard to the west. I ran the flashlight around for other clues and found only one. Broom strokes on the ground, meant to conceal any footprints.
I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was being watched.
Back in the car, I drove up to Washington Street and called Victoria from a telephone booth. She met me half an hour later and took pictures of the drawing in the dirt. And just in time, because a cold, heavy rain started to erase it.
Afterward, we sat in her car with the engine and heater running. Rain sluiced off the windshield like a phantom in the darkness was hosing us down.
She said, “Maybe it was kids.”
“Maybe. But how would kids know the exact location of the body? The location was not precisely given in the newspaper. That would be a big coincidence.”
“I know.” Victoria laced her warm fingers in mine. “I’m afraid, Eugene.”
“Of what?”
“For you. This is all so…” She searched for the right word. “Sinister. This girl was murdered and sawed apart. And the evidence in her p
urse was meant to implicate you. Why?”
I shrugged.
She said, “What if she came by your card herself? What if she were coming to see you for something?”
I’d thought about that. When I set up my PI business, I’d persuaded several businesses to set out my cards on their countertops. I’d handed them out to lawyers, too. But whoever killed her had taken anything that could identify her from the purse. They either left the card by carelessness or by design. I didn’t dare assume it was an oversight. The card was meant to be found.
“I would ask you to let this alone,” she said, “but I know you won’t.”
“I can’t.” I struggled to articulate a rationale. “The police won’t find her killer. Somewhere a mother and father are wondering what’s happened to their daughter. And what if he kills again?”
“Then I’m going to help you.”
“No!” I reacted too quickly and soon regretted it.
“Don’t you dare...” Her dark eyes torched me. “Who did you just call just now? Your brother? No. You called me. As you should have.” She pulled a small snub-nosed .38 out of her pocket briefly, slid it back in. “I can take care of myself. You know that, Eugene. And I can help take care of you. So, give me an assignment.”
The rain came down harder, settling the matter. Looking back later, I regretted not proposing to her right then.
Ten
The next morning, I put on my best suit and drove east on the Tempe Road. In daylight, it was a different view from the night when I visited the Hooverville: Two lanes of concrete, telephone poles on both sides, farmhouses and outbuildings, and ancient farm equipment. The vast Tovrea Stockyards and slaughterhouse. The strange new birthday-cake castle atop a rocky knoll intended as a hotel by Alessio Carraro. The Depression ended that dream, and “Big Daddy” Tovrea bought the property in ’31, just before his death. Now the castle was only occupied by his young widow, Della. Next, off to the left, the Papago Buttes where Victoria and I sometimes hiked.
Across the Salt River, I was in Tempe, then parked and walked across campus to the Old Main building of Arizona State Teachers College. Not so long ago, it had been Tempe Normal, then Tempe State Teachers College, offering a teaching certificate. Since ’29, it was also bestowing a four-year bachelor of arts in education. Now it had a new name and would soon have a new president, Grady Gammage, a man said to have ambitions for the school. The sun was out, but the weather remained chilly, in the fifties.
The registrar was a man with a shock of white hair and a lavish mustache that seemed on the verge of cascading down the sides of his mouth. He was suspicious of helping a private investigator until he read my card.
“Gene Hammons,” he said. “You were a Phoenix Police detective.”
I said that I had been.
He took in a long breath of air. “You solved the University Park Strangler case.”
Right again. It was a hell of an icebreaker.
He looked away for a moment and when he faced me again his eyes were wet. “My granddaughter was one he killed. Grace Chambers.” He reached out and took my hand in both of his. “She had her whole life ahead of her when this monster took her from us. The not knowing who did it was one of the hardest things. And you got him. It’s un-Christian of me, but I was glad when they hanged the bastard.” He looked around, but no one was nearby. “Thank you.”
I squeezed his hands back with both of mine. “It was my job. I’m so sorry about Grace and the other girls.”
Grace Chambers: Sixteen, redhead, pretty, fit his pattern. Disappeared one night and her body was dumped on a lawn at Thirteenth Avenue and Polk Street two days later. Like the others, she had been raped and strangled. In her case, she was also tortured. I was happy to see the SOB swing.
“How can I help you, Detective Hammons?”
I pulled out the photograph and laid it on the counter. “All I have is a name, Carrie Thayer.”
He bent down and studied it carefully.
“I’ve seen this girl.” He retreated to a filing cabinet and thumbed through it. Then he pulled out a ledger and went through several pages.
“No Carrie Thayer,” he said, which didn’t surprise me. I wasn’t even sure this was her name. “But she looks familiar. Now we have 875 students. It’s harder to keep track.”
“Do you mind if I show her picture around campus?”
“No. Not at all. If anyone questions you, tell them I gave you permission.”
* * *
I walked down the steps and into a flock of students changing classes or lounging on the grass by droopy palm trees and sitting on the side of the circular fountain, despite the cool air. “T Mountain”—really more of a rocky butte—sat in the distance. Before the war, I thought about going to college. Teaching held no appeal, so that would have meant attending the University of Arizona in Tucson. And study what? I was a bit aimless, as any good seventeen-year-old should be. Don, four years older, went to Tucson and studied history. He worked his way through the university with a part-time railroad job thanks to our father’s pull. He thought about becoming a lawyer but was made an officer when the war came. He was awarded a Bronze Star. Without a degree, I rose to sergeant and got a Purple Heart. Now I surveyed this campus a bit wistfully before getting to work.
It was easiest to approach a group of coeds chatting at the fountain. Easier on the eyes, too. No teacher of mine ever looked like these four.
“You look like a cop,” one said, a green-eyed, chestnut-haired wren. The others laughed.
“Am I that obvious?”
“Yes, but you’re not bad looking.”
“I’m a private detective.”
“Oh,” a blonde said, “a private dick.” More laughter. I joined in.
This was much more satisfying than doing Kemper Marley’s dirty work.
“Do you have a roscoe under there?” Wren patted my jacket and felt the .45 in its shoulder holster. Her playful smile froze. I gently set her hand aside, telling her she read too many pulp novels, and showed around the photograph.
“That’s Carrie Dell,” Wren, who introduced herself as Pamela, said. “I was in several classes with her. But I haven’t seen her this semester.” The others agreed. The progress was stalled when I asked if they knew anything about where she lived, who were her close friends, or any boyfriends.
But I had a name, at least, to take back up the stairs to get Carrie Dell’s information from the registrar.
Halfway up, Pamela called. “Aren’t you going to cuff me, private dick?”
“Maybe later,” I said over my shoulder.
* * *
Carrie Dell was nineteen years old, a straight-A student, and came from Prescott. This and other miscellany, plus the names and address of her parents, were in my notebook as I walked back around the pretty shaded campus.
On a lark, I asked directions to the Art Department, where I knocked on a professor’s door. A woman in a paint-stained smock answered and introduced herself as Pearl Kloster, instructor of Fine Arts. With twinkling brown eyes and light-brown hair in a chignon, she was somewhere in her thirties.
“Come in, come in. I don’t think I’ve ever met a private investigator.”
“We’re even, because I’ve never met a fine arts professor.”
She had a spacious office that doubled as a studio. An unfinished oil painting sat on an easel, a stunning sunset and mountains.
“That’s beautiful.”
“Thank you,” she said. “I’m no prodigy, but I usually drive out and set up outdoors to paint landscapes. Here I teach basics to students who might go on to teach art in high schools. I’m never going to make a living off my paintings. You want to see greatness, go find George Burr. He’s a magnificent etcher, lives on Lynwood Street in Phoenix. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.”
“Sorry, no.”
&n
bsp; I could see her opinion of me drop like the oil gauge of a jalopy.
“He’s world famous,” she sniffed. “He’s been kind enough to lecture at some of my classes.”
I showed her the photo.
“Carrie Dell,” she said. “She was one of my models. Don’t get the wrong idea. She never modeled nude. But I teach a class where students sketch and paint the human form. She’s so beautiful. She was a natural. A model has to be patient, hold a pose.”
She walked over to a large piece of furniture containing flat file trays, thumbed down to drawer three, and pulled out a canvas.
“Hold it at the edges,” she said.
It was a watercolor showing a blonde on a chair draped with a white sheet. Her shoulders were bare and a long nude leg stretched out behind her. Even with her face in profile, it was unmistakably Carrie. This was the first time I had seen her alive in color, the fair skin, golden hair, vivid blue eyes, and magnetic smile. Alive, at least, through the eyes of an artist.
“This is her,” she said. “Carrie is a perfect model, because she can sit for an hour at a time while the students work.”
I couldn’t make out the scrawl at the bottom. “Who painted this?”
“Tom Albert. He’s a junior, also plays football. He’s got talent. Unfortunately, he also has an attitude.”
“Is he in love with Carrie?”
She adjusted her smock and smiled. “Every boy on this campus is in love with Carrie.”
I handed it back. “What is she like?”
“Very confident.” She gently touched her hair, making sure it was in place. “I only had her for two semesters. I haven’t seen her this year.”
“What about this?” I showed her Victoria’s photograph of the sketch in the dirt of the murder scene, my original motive for coming here.
She ran finger across it.
“Where did you find this?”
“At the scene of a murder.”
