1 The Hollywood Detective

by Martha Steinway

  “So you know about it? The people at Joe’s said it’s huge! Eyes like dinner plates, long claws like talons and a sleek, black coat.”

  I looked up at her. “I saw it myself only that description isn’t—”

  “Oh my!” Her eyes widened.

  “It was closer to me than you are now. It certainly had big eyes and sharp claws, but sleek and black it wasn’t. Orange and white from head to toe.”

  “What?”

  “It was a tiger.”

  “Stop making fun of me, Spencer.”

  “Trust me, this was real. About an inch away from being too real.”

  “But the sightings are of a panther. A big black panther.”

  I didn’t doubt Red was relaying everything she’d heard at Joe’s, word for word, so that meant there were only two possibilities: she had poor information; or there were two big cats making their home in the Hollywood Hills. Normally I veer toward the more likely of two options, if I have a choice, but after what I’d seen at Powell’s place and heard from the stable boy at Goebel’s Farm, I had a bad feeling there really were two big cats on the loose. Two big, hungry cats looking for their next meal.

  No wonder no one had noticed what had happened to Clara at the party.

  Red tried to pump me for the details of my feline encounter. Though it was a great story to tell, especially if I embellished the details a little here and there, I reminded Red I had an important case to solve and she could hear all about my adventure after we’d located Clara Lockhart.

  “So, what did you find out from the hospitals?”

  She talked me through the various notes on my desk, each one representing a careful record of her conversations with every hospital in the city.

  “Not one had admitted a woman named Clara Lockhart, either dead or alive. But when I pushed, I did discover three patients without identification that match Clara’s description. Two are yet to regain consciousness, and the other is down at the morgue with a “Jane Doe” tag on her toe.”

  “Good work,” I smile encouragingly at her. “I mean it—real good work. I’ll check them out tomorrow.”

  “No need.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I thought I should strike while the iron was hot.”

  “You’ve visited the hospitals?” I didn’t know if I was angry or impressed.

  She nodded. “Those poor girls were in a desperate state.”

  “You’ve been to the morgue too?”

  “Why, yes. Of course I have. I couldn’t very well wait for you to reappear. What if one of them had been Clara?”

  “And what exactly did you say to the doctors and the coroner’s clerk?”

  “I merely explained that I needed to ascertain if one of the girls they had was the girl we were looking for.”

  I tried to take a breath, count to ten. I got as far as two.

  “And they agreed to speak to you? Let you see their patients and corpse? Just some strange dame who walked in off the street?”

  “Naturally I showed them your card. That seemed to suffice.” She pulled one of my calling cards from her purse and waved it at me.

  I snatched it out of her hand. Beneath my name she had written: “Associate, Rose Randall”.

  “Jeez, will you quit? I can’t have you steaming into places, letting them think you’re some kind of… lady P.I., goddammit.” I got to my feet and started pacing the room.

  “But they were quite happy to speak to me.”

  “That is not the point!”

  She started relaying what she’d discovered at the hospitals but I was too het up to listen to her.

  I stopped pacing.

  “This isn’t going to work out,” I told her. “I need you to leave. Right now.”

  “Oh come on, Spencer. Don’t overreact. Don’t get mad at me for showing some initiative. There’s a girl missing and you expect me to do nothing?”

  “I expect you to file.” I shook my head. “And answer the phone when it rings. Take messages.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Keep the place clean and tidy. You know—what a secretary is supposed to do!” I banged a fist against the file cabinet. “Dammit, Red, you don’t work with me, you work for me. There’s a big difference. I need someone who’ll stay in the office.”

  “Yes—I think you’ve made that quite clear.”

  “Obviously I’ll pay you for today but—”

  She turned away and grabbed her purse from the desk. “Don’t insult me with your money. I wouldn’t take it if I were hungry and homeless.” She picked up her hat from the coat stand and marched toward the door.

  I bit my lip. I’d done nothing I needed to apologize for. So why was she making me feel as if I should? She opened the door and hesitated for a moment on the threshold. “Good day, Mr McCoy.” And with that, she left.

  I listened as her heels clicked and clacked their way down the stairs. I heard her open the door onto the street and listened as the traffic noise rose up with stairwell. Then I heard the door slam shut behind her.

  Probably for the best, I told myself. I mean, I really couldn’t have some broad who didn’t know the first thing about investigations setting off fires all over town. Fires that I’d have to put out. I guess I shouldn’t have let her walk out like that, but she had wound me up so tight that telling her to leave felt like the only option I had. I just knew I should have been a bit nicer about it.

  Annoyed at myself, I turned to the pieces of paper Red had left on my desk. She’d made meticulous notes of her conversations with every hospital admittance officer in the county. She’d listed the name of every female patient between the age of fifteen and thirty who’d been admitted between ten o’clock on Sunday, when Benny Bowers had said they’d arrived at Powell’s place, and ten o’clock the following night. Where the information had been recorded by hospital staff, Red had even bothered to add the names of the people accompanying the sick and injured girls. I couldn’t accuse her of not being thorough. I was left with a whole heap of names on my desk, names of girls that meant nothing to me. I sifted through the sheets and found the guest list from the party. It took me a while to realize that Red had cross-referenced all the names from the hospitals with the ones on the guest list.

  It seemed she’d found a match.

  She’d circled just one name on the list: Eddie Mannix.

  13

  The next morning, I arrived at the office just after nine. I heard the phone ringing from downstairs as I opened the door, so I rushed up to the second floor in double time, in the hope of answering before the caller rang off. I reached the office and fumbled with the keys, unlocked the door and dashed over to my desk.

  “Spencer McCoy,” I said, trying not to pant too heavily into the mouthpiece.

  “Hello Spencer, this is Miss Randall.”

  The voice was familiar, but not the name.

  “Rose Randall. I was with you yesterday.”

  It took another moment before the penny dropped.

  “Oh… Red.”

  “Or maybe I should say I was for you yesterday. Today I am most definitely for the other guy. Any guy who isn’t you. That was a poor show you put on last night.”

  I heard a lot of noise in the background, like fans whirring.

  “About that…” I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. “I guess I was a little… out of line. I would’ve called you, but I didn’t have your number.”

  She let out an impatient sigh. “That is somewhat irrelevant. I’m calling you… that is… Look I just want you to know that what I’m about to tell you isn’t for your benefit.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “I’m doing this for Clara.”

  “Yes?” I figured the less I said, the better.

  “I’m at a beauty parlor over in Silverlake.” The hair dryers in the background made it hard to hear her. I strained to make out her words. “I saw the reservations book as I came in,” she continued. “There’d been some ki
nd of mix up when I called to make the appointment, so they made a big production of showing me the book, to let me see just how popular they are and how darned lucky I am that they could squeeze me in.”

  Red struck me as the kind of girl who would be squeezed in pretty much anywhere she chose to go.

  “I noticed that Myrtle Willoughby is coming in at eleven this morning.”

  “Should the name mean something to me?”

  “Check your list, Mr McCoy.”

  And with that, she hung up.

  I took off my jacket and pulled out the Powell guest list from my case. Sure enough, a dozen or so lines down, there was Myrtle, her name emphatically underlined in pencil by Mary Treen. I called the operator.

  “Good morning,” I said. “ I just got cut off. Could you please reconnect my last call?”

  “One moment.”

  I got the address of the parlor in Silverlake from the receptionist who answered the phone. I had just finished writing it down when the phone rang again.

  “Spencer McCoy.”

  “This is Mary Summers. Mary Treen.”

  “Good morning Miss Summers, I was about to call you.”

  “You were?”

  “I wanted to give you an update… I think it may be time to inform the police.”

  “I really don’t think they’ll take me seriously—”

  “It’s been two days now, the police have a duty—”

  “No, you don’t understand. That’s why I’m calling you. I’ve heard from Clara. Or at least… I think I have.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Would you be able to come over and see me?”

  We made an arrangement to meet up at lunchtime and she hung up before I could ask her anything else.

  *

  Silverlake was not a part of Los Angeles I ever had much to do with. It wasn’t near the ocean, it wasn’t in the hills, it didn’t have the busy hum of downtown or the glitz of Hollywood. To me Silverlake has always seemed like a little piece of Milwaukee dumped, by some freak accident of geology, in the middle of the gleaming metropolis.

  Maybe if I’d needed the services of a beauty parlor I might have known the streets a little better. Lorimer’s had quite a reputation among the women of Los Angeles. It was run by an old guy named Clark Lorimer who used to work for the studios. The way he liked to tell it, he’d styled for Garbo, Clara Bow and Dietrich, and made his reputation by treating his regular clients at the parlor as if they were movie stars themselves. And, as there isn’t a single woman in California who doesn’t secretly hope she might one day be up there on the silver screen, Lorimer attracts a loyal following.

  As I got out of the car I noticed the newsstand on the corner was doing a lot business: the good people of Los Angeles were lapping up big cat stories like kittens at a saucer of cream. People were buying the Times and the Chronicle, just in case one reported more sightings than the other. I’d already read them both: neither said how the panther had gotten to Beverly Hills, and neither mentioned the tiger I had most definitely seen. I’d heard some reporters refer to Howard Strickling as “The Strangler”, such was the man’s grip on their profession. Seeing as, according to the press, the tiger didn’t even exist, it seemed Mr Strickling was living up to his reputation. I was surprised he hadn’t managed to snuff out stories about the panther too.

  As I crossed the sidewalk toward Lorimer’s, a tall, thin woman with a newly coiffed bob of red hair was just leaving. A change of hairstyle can do a lot to a woman’s appearance and it took me a second or two to realize who it was. When she saw me, she turned the other way.

  “Red! Wait.”

  She carried on walking, so I sprinted to catch up with her.

  “I thought I told you to get here for eleven.”

  “You did, but I figured you’d told me that time precisely because you thought you’d be finished by then.”

  “You can be smart when you want to be, I’ll give you that.” She still hadn’t met my eye, nor had she slackened her pace.

  “I thought I’d come a little earlier so I could… so we could…” I wasn’t able to find the right words, so I said, “Your hair looks nice.”

  “I’m surprised you even noticed. A girl’s got to look her best when she’s hunting down a new job.”

  “About that…”

  “Ye-es?” She squeezed two syllables out of the word and slowed to a halt. We were now standing outside a flower shop with buckets of blooms covering the sidewalk. I couldn’t tell if the sneer on Red’s face was due to the overpowering scent of flowers, or because she was anticipating what I was going to say.

  “Listen, I was out of line yesterday, but really, you gotta see things from my point of view.”

  “Do I?”

  “You threw me. I hadn’t asked you to go to these places and—”

  “Are you saying that I was too good at my job?”

  “I hardly know you. And you don’t know the way things are done in my line of work.”

  “I told you I’d read Black Mask.”

  “That’s all baloney and you know it. Right now a girl is missing and I—”

  “—Feel bad for not finding her, and so you took out you disappointment and frustration on me.”

  “You’re quite the head doctor. Look, I’m trying to apologize here. I shouldn’t have let you walk out like that and…” She had me flustered again. I could feel my stomach muscles tightening. “Those lists you made were pretty good. Helpful even.” I had already made plans to seek out Eddie Mannix that afternoon, but Red didn’t need to know about it. I really hated to grovel, especially as I could tell she was enjoying my discomfort so much.

  “Are you offering me my old job back, Mr McCoy?”

  “That’s why I came early.”

  She looked at me as if I had a smudge of dirt on my face and she was wondering if she should tell me about it or let me walk round like a fool for the rest of the day. “No thank you, Mr McCoy.”

  “No thank you?” I couldn’t believe it.

  “No thank you. You made it quite clear what you want from an assistant.”

  “A secretary.”

  “Precisely. And I’m not really suited to that sort of role.”

  “Well maybe we can talk about it. Back at the office.”

  “Listen,” she prodded a manicured finger into my chest. “If you want some angel to file your receipts and take your messages, you need to find a girl with wings.”

  “Most girls would be happy with a job like that.”

  “Then hire most girls. Good day, Mr McCoy. We have nothing further to discuss.” She walked away from me.

  “Red!”

  She carried on walking.

  “Rose?”

  She stopped.

  “Ye-es?”

  “Where else are you going to find a job where you can discover a tax felon one day and track down the heir to a fortune the next? Today we’ve got a missing girl to save.”

  “We?”

  “Sure. You said yourself you get bored easy. I promise you won’t get bored with me. There’ll be some dull chores—every job has them, but I’m not going to chain you to a desk. I’ll let you spread those wings occasionally.”

  She narrowed her eyes.

  “But I will need you to come out with me a few times first, to show you the ropes.”

  “Hmm. You seem awfully topsy-turvy. I mean—one day you’re all cold and unforgiving, and the next you’re so hot and flustered you’re chasing me down the street. I’m not convinced.” She started to smile, ever so faintly.

  “Quit playing with me, Red! Do you want the job or not?”

  She looked at the imaginary mark on my face and scrunched up her features. “Well, all right then, as you’ve been so terribly insistent.”

  I smiled at her.

  After a long pause, she smiled back and said, “How are we going to handle Myrtle?”

  14

  Myrtle Willoughby, as best as I could tell, wa
s a gangster’s moll. She had a New Jersey accent as thick as the San Francisco fog. She was a cross between Mae West and a German Shepherd and must have been hoping Clark Lorimer’s talents with scissors and hair dye could tip the balance toward Miss West and away from Rin Tin Tin.

  I’d never had much to do with the Mob, but I’d decided over the years they must like their women to be more like Garbo than Garland—decorative and silent. I’d gained this insight from observing plenty of molls who—when out of earshot of their menfolk—would not shut up. Myrtle Willoughby was no exception. The only difference today was everyone wanted to hear what she had to say.

  “Mickey says he’s going to have a lawyer make a suit for me.” Her voice was nasal and squeaky. “I thought he was confused, you know, I thought tailors made suits, but he soon put me straight.”

  “Well, he’s right to,” Clark Lorimer sympathized as he curled her platinum locks. “It could have had your arm off.”

  Myrtle was wearing a long-sleeved dress with a very noticeable bandage protruding from her cuff.

  “You must have been so scared,” an older woman in the next chair said. “I would have fainted away in terror.”

  “Well at first, I didn’t think anything of it. You know, boys will be boys and all that, and besides… Mickey was with me and I never thought he’d ever let anything bad happen. So even when they talked about opening the cages, it didn’t occur to me to be scared.”

  Red and I were waiting on the couch in the reception area. Red had told the girl on the desk that having talked it over with her husband—me—she wanted a little more taken off her bangs. The girl told us we’d have to wait for Mr Lorimer to finish up with his current client. Which was just peachy by Red and me. We could listen in without arousing suspicion.

  “I guess,” the older woman next to Myrtle said, “that we’re so used to seeing wild cats in the movies—do you remember that leopard in Bringing Up Baby?—that you forget how dangerous they really are.”

  “And of course, after three or four Manhattans, your judgement gets a little screwy,” Myrtle added.

  “And after your fifth…” Clark said with a twinkle in his eye.