City of Dark Corners

by Jon Talton

  “He likes to keep a tight grip. Wouldn’t look good to the Outfit if his backyard was messy.”

  Tight grip Gus.

  “Well, I can solve your case easily. Zoogie’s throat was cut by Frenchy Navarre.”

  Cleveland’s body tensed. “How do you know this?”

  “I heard Frenchy bragging about it to Kemper Marley. Kemper blew a gasket. He’s afraid of Greenbaum but wants part of his action.”

  Cleveland’s eyes narrowed. “‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here.’ Goddamn Frenchy. That shit Marley. He pays me to procure colored girls for that whorehouse he runs. You know, he’s got a wall peek there so he can take photos of what’s going on in each room and who’s doing it, from businessmen to politicians.”

  “I guess that helped ensure he’d get the first liquor distributorship in the state.”

  “Indeed.” His big head nodded. “What I don’t get is that Frenchy is Greenbaum’s bagman. Why would he kill Zoogie, who collects for me as part of my partnership with Gus?”

  “To hear him explain it, he wanted to pin the murder on a colored man, make it seem like Greenbaum needed protection south of the tracks and Kemper could provide it, as long as he got a cut from the wire service.”

  His bass voice went down an octave. “That’s crazy.”

  “Nobody ever accused Navarre of being a genius.”

  “I tell Gus this and Frenchy’s gonna end up in the riverbed with a dime dropped on him.”

  “A police officer?” I said. “Killing a cop is dangerous business, breaks the code, brings down heat, and takes away a valuable asset. Even a stupid, double-dealing police detective is worth more alive than dead.”

  Cleveland thought it over. “You’re probably right. But that doesn’t preclude a well-administered beating. And Frenchy’s promise that this murder goes unsolved, not pinned on an innocent Negro. That’s my code.”

  I’d love to watch that. Cleveland reached across for the C-note but I pulled it away.

  “You got your money’s worth.” I wrote out a receipt and handed it across.

  “Heh.” He stood, the signal we were through.

  I stayed seated. “What do you know about the girl who got killed and had her body dumped by the railroad tracks a month ago?”

  He pulled a cigar from a humidor on his desk, cut it, and slowly lit it with a match. It was Cuban—quality will tell.

  “I know that a Negro doesn’t want anything to do with a pretty, white, blond dead girl. We’ve never had that kind of lynching in Phoenix, and I don’t want to be the first one. Race relations are pretty good here, considering. But these are crazy times. Communists. People who think Mussolini is the way to go. Okies and hoboes coming through, gas moochers…”

  I let him go on. He sounded like Marley. But he knew Carrie was pretty and blond with no prompting from me.

  When he wound down, I said, “What about the white man having something to do with the pretty, white, blond dead girl? You hear things.”

  The perfect smile reappeared. “It’s like back in the trenches, Hammons. A man hears lots of things. Funny, though, is he never hears the artillery shell that kills him. But I’m not worried. You’re the man who caught the University Park Strangler.”

  Nineteen

  At eleven thirty p.m. on Thursday, January 10, 1929, the westside patrol car driving on Van Buren was flagged down by a frantic man, who led the officers to his house at 324 N. Twelfth Avenue. His daughter was dead, murdered. The blue light and horn sounded at headquarters, and more officers headed that way. I was the sole night detective and arrived a little before midnight. It was cold out, and even most speakeasies were closed.

  Edna Sawyer was seventeen years old, pretty with flame-red hair. She had been raped and strangled in her bed. Her periwinkle- blue flannel nightgown was pulled all the way up, exposing pert breasts, parted fair legs, a ginger bush, and a pool of semen on the white sheet. I ran the gawking uniforms out of the bedroom, instructing one to sit with her parents—her mother had found her and her father had called headquarters and then ran a block to busier Van Buren, where he was fortunate enough to find the police car cruising.

  Captain McGrath arrived with a beautiful, raven-haired female photographer. She had no hesitation in bossing me around as she took shots of the crime scene. It was the first time I met Victoria. Don and Turk Muldoon came soon after. I briefed them and, as the youngest member of the Hat Squad, prepared to step aside when Turk put a hand on my shoulder.

  “You were here first, lad,” he said in his rich brogue. “You’re the primary.”

  At the exact same moment, I felt a thrill—and a terrible responsibility fall upon me.

  After they left, I shut the door and surveyed the scene, making detailed notes and sketches.

  Entry was obvious. The killer came in through an unlocked window facing the backyard and caught the girl sleeping. Her brothers and parents were also asleep but separated from Edna’s room by the bathroom. A sock stuffed in the girl’s mouth took care of any screaming as he prepared to go about his work. But she must have fought. Her nails were bloody and flakes of the attacker’s skin were underneath them. In return, he punched her in the left eye. He must have been straddling her. Afterward, he exited the same window, leaving it fully open.

  Through the door, the mother was wailing, and the father was angrily demanding a doctor. But Edna’s body was cold.

  We didn’t realize it at the time, but this was the first victim of the killer who the press would call the University Park Strangler.

  The postmortem confirmed the obvious: Death by strangulation, genital bruising, penetration. She fought hard enough to break one fingernail. The killer would have received a nasty gash on his face. But he was very strong. Edna’s windpipe was collapsed, as was the cricoid cartilage surrounding it. The pathologist said it took forty-five pounds of pressure to produce such damage. He also speculated that the killer had been in no hurry, slowly strangling her.

  With the sock stuffed in the girl’s mouth, I assumed the rape preceded the strangulation. But the doc, who had worked at the coroner’s office in Los Angeles and seen such cases before, said it was possible that the murderer was raping Edna while he was slowly crushing her windpipe. “It’s part of the excitement for him.”

  He turned her to show me a small cross carved into the exact middle of the small of her back. It looked as if it was done with a penknife rather than resulting from some accident, and it was fresh.

  “He marked her,” the doc said. “Mutilation is part of the M.O. of a lust murder.”

  I had never heard the term before, I told him.

  “It was first used by the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing in the 1880s,” he said. “The killer receives intense sexual gratification from killing someone.”

  “A nice pair of nylons always does the trick for me.”

  “You cops and your black humor. Lust murderers can be much worse that this. Genital mutilation. Cannibalism. Inserting objects into the victim’s orifices. Necrophilia. This killer is only strangling with great force and cutting the victim, but you should be prepared for worse.”

  I left him with the body, but the cross stuck with me. It wasn’t like a typical one found in Christian churches. With the two arms meeting in the middle, it reminded me of the simplified iron cross the Germans were using by 1918. The balkenkreuz, or beam cross. Were we looking for a war vet or a German immigrant?

  Edna was a straight-A student at Phoenix Union High School, popular, a cheerleader. She was the oldest of three children. Captain McGrath assigned three of my Hat Squad colleagues to interview her friends, teachers, and steady boyfriend. He was the son of Chauncey McKellips, president of the First National Bank of Arizona and had an alibi for Thursday night. The detectives also started rounding up suspects with morals offenses and transients. Migrant farmworkers were m
ostly gone for now, the lettuce harvest complete and more than four thousand carloads shipped by rail.

  A crime such as this had never happened before in Phoenix, much less in a pleasant Anglo middle-class neighborhood only a few blocks from the state capitol.

  On Monday afternoon, with two hours of sleep and fueled by the sludge that passed for coffee at headquarters, I went back to the house on Twelfth Avenue and interviewed her parents in more detail. They were shattered, sleep-deprived, but cooperative. Edna’s father worked in insurance and her mother was a housewife. Neither had sensed anything unusual about their daughter, no indication she was afraid, no enemies, no strange men following her. They always closed the blinds and curtains at night. But on cool nights, Edna liked to open her bedroom window slightly and sleep under a thick comforter.

  I took a careful inventory of her bedroom. It was untouched since the attack, her parents complying with my request to leave it alone. With the sun streaming in, the room became clearer. The bedclothes had been thrown off Edna and folded on the floor. With the body removed, I noted the bloodstain dried on the middle of the sheet; this was a hellish way to lose her virginity. I went through her closet and drawers, her mother trailing me. “Tell me if you see anything out of place or missing,” I said.

  “I don’t see her knickers,” she said. “Edna always slept in them. She was a modest girl.” Then the tears came. “Who could do this to her?”

  It took time for her to focus again. “Wait, where is Theodore?”

  “Theodore?” I was thinking of a cat or a dog.

  “It’s a Teddy bear she’s had since she was a little girl. He was always in the bed next to her pillow.” She fussed around the room. “He’s gone!”

  The killer took trophies.

  * * *

  Almost a month later, on Saturday, February 9th, he killed again. Dorothy Jameson was raped and strangled in a Spanish-colonial revival house on Taylor Street, a quarter mile from the first killing. She was an only child who lived with her grandmother, who was hard of hearing. The woman didn’t discover her body until the morning when Dorothy, usually an early riser, wasn’t already up.

  Some elements of the crime were identical: The sock in her mouth, nightgown pulled up, and bedding folded. He came in by an unlocked bedroom window. The second victim was a redhead, although not a natural one. Dorothy had small firm breasts and delicate, “cute girl” features like Edna Sawyer. She had the same cross carved into the small of her back.

  But the evidence revealed some differences, too.

  He took more care and time with the assault. The girl’s wrists were tied with rope to the headboard. The rope strands were cut to exact lengths and brought by the killer, as was the sock. Perhaps the gash he received in the first attack made him want to restrain the victim. Had he spied on the house to know the grandmother was nearly deaf, thus giving him more time for the attack? Her legs were raised and knees bent with her feet on the mattress, as if he arranged her that way after the rape. This time he didn’t have to worry about being overheard by parents and siblings.

  Dorothy had a cat that slept with her. Her grandmother said she always kept her door partly open so the animal could come and go. But Dorothy’s door was closed and the cat was hiding under a chair in the living room. The killer somehow immobilized the girl, or she was a hard sleeper, then shooed away the cat and shut the door. This was the second victim whose family didn’t own a dog. Did the killer know this in advance? Of course he did. He reconnoitered his targets.

  Unlike the first scene, where the ground below the window was covered with grass, the Jamieson home had a flower bed. We were able to get a clean cast of a footprint, a tennis shoe or sneaker, size eleven. Don guesstimated that the wearer was a well-built man, at least a hundred-eighty pounds.

  When I went through the bedroom with Dorothy’s grandmother, a pair of the girl’s knickers was missing. So was a stuffed animal, a puppy with a red ribbon around his neck. I also went carefully through the girl’s diary, but it gave no clue that she was afraid, being stalked, or had enemies.

  The postmortem was similar to the first victim. Genital bruising and bleeding, slow strangulation by a man with strong hands. It was possible she was raped and then killed. But the doc’s comment, once again, about the penetration occurring along with choking her to death stayed with me. “Maybe it’s the only way he can maintain arousal and orgasm,” he said. “Characteristic of a lust murder.”

  Dorothy was another straight-A student at Phoenix Union High, a clarinet player in the band, member of the pep club, popular. She was sixteen, a year behind Edna Sawyer. Interviews with her friends indicated that she didn’t know Edna, didn’t have a boyfriend. She was hoping to attend the University of Arizona.

  Once again, detectives talked to neighbors, who saw and heard nothing. They hadn’t seen any peeping Toms, and the police call logs backed that up. Another roundup of potential suspects went nowhere, either because of alibis or the most promising ones failing to break under heavy interrogation. One whacky who was familiar to us came in to confess. But he didn’t know even the basics of the crime, especially the parts we held back from the press: taking trophies, the penknife cross, and tying her hands with ropes. I sent telegrams to Tucson, Los Angeles, San Diego, and El Paso, asking if they had anything similar. Nothing close came back.

  As for the rope lengths and sock, they could have been purchased anywhere. The shoeprint matched a Converse, but that was available in at least a dozen or more stores. Fingerprints from the second house produced no suspects, although they did match the ones from the windowsill of the first murder. It was the same killer, not a copycat.

  As with Edna, though, it was as if she had been murdered by a ghost.

  Now the city fell into a panic. People started locking their doors and windows, calling us to report “suspicious” people walking down the streets—even though none of them turned out to be potential suspects. Neighborhoods demanded more streetlights. We put more officers in University Park, especially at night, both uniformed and plainclothes. Overtime wasn’t an issue. I was going on three or four hours of sleep a day.

  Arizona was only a generation removed from the frontier, less than twenty years from statehood, so many people owned guns. More folks purchased them from gun shops and pawnbrokers, whether they knew how to use them or not. One woman in University Park fired her shotgun at a neighbor taking out the trash one night, sending him to the hospital with a few pellets of buckshot in his backside. The newspapers and radio played it up, while the city commissioners demanded an arrest.

  But we had nothing but clues that led to dead ends.

  * * *

  Don was focused on pervs and peeping Toms, but I wasn’t sure. Muldoon interviewed all the teachers the two girls had, turning up nothing but squarejohns and proper matrons. Navarre, not surprisingly, rousted Negroes in Darktown. We spoke with every relative and friend of the two girls, then went back and did it again.

  I started compiling lists of janitors and maintenance men at the high school; short-order cooks at nearby restaurants, especially the Nifty Nook right across the street; and workers at other nearby businesses. People who would see the coeds. Everyone willingly gave his name. Everyone wanted to help. Only two on my list had records, one for burglary and another for bootlegging. But the burglar angle interested me. Although this individual committed his crime twenty years ago and had an alibi for the nights of both murders, what about someone else? What if burglary was the gateway impulse that led to murder?

  Then we faced the killer choosing University Park as his target. What was this geography to him? Maybe he lived there, or once did. I started compiling burglary reports in the neighborhood. The few arrests led to individuals who were still in prison. One incident stuck out: Back in November, a woman claimed that someone had been in her house while she slept. Nothing was taken but items were rearranged, and an unlocked
window was left open, all of which she noticed in the morning. The officer who took the report at the time noted skeptically, “Hysterical female, no evidence of forced entry.” The house was two blocks from Edna Sawyer’s.

  I started wandering University Park at the hours when the girls would have been coming or going to school. I added interviews and names from postmen and dairymen, delivery drivers, plumbers, city garbagemen, Western Union messenger boys, and Central Arizona Light and Power crews.

  Finally, I noticed that both crimes happened on nights with new moons. Maybe it mattered, maybe not, but Captain McGrath agreed we should go full-out on the next one, March 11th.

  But the University Park Strangler had other plans.

  Twenty

  “I had never heard those details about the early murders in University Park,” Victoria said. “So, you thought I bossed you around, huh?”

  “In the nicest possible way.”

  We were lying in my bed, our legs entwined, listening to jazz on the radio. The room was dark.

  “You can’t kick yourself for losing the diary and love notes,” she said. “You were thinking of me. That’s sweet.”

  “Sweet won’t catch this killer,” I said. “What kills me…”

  “Pun intended?”

  “What slays me? Anyway, what frustrates me is that Carrie specifically mentioned Navarre in her diary. There’s a good chance the love letters were from him. But a second man is involved, too. Big Cat. She was afraid of him, and he probably wrote her the threatening letter. But I can’t go to McGrath now because I don’t know enough.”

  “I know,” she said. “But there’s also a good chance the love letters weren’t from Frenchy.”

  I raised an eyebrow. She slipped out of bed and walked to the window. The ambient light gave her body an enchanting glow.

  “Is our friend in the Chevy out there?”