“Which is why he can’t be disturbed. And no one can see him fingerprinted at the station. We have to come to him, carrying our little kit and talking happy like we’re itinerant preachers saving his soul.”
“Very funny,” I said.
“I’m never funny.”
“Sit down, Detective.” Mercy pointed to a chair. Surprisingly, he sat. He pulled at the cuffs of his shirt until the edges showed under the sleeves of his sports jacket. He evened them up, flicked a piece of lint from the sleeve, then sat there nodding his head, watching us.
“What?” From me.
“Two nosy women.”
“We try.”
A sliver of smile, forced, “And what have you learned?”
“Are we sharing information?” I asked.
“You’re trying to save James Dean’s skin. I’m trying to shore up the evidence against him.” He reached into his pocket and extracted copies of Carisa’s letters. He fanned them, dramatically. “I’ve never seen such a fascination with letter writing. You know, Carisa had a bunch of letters on her desk. But some were missing.”
“How do you know that?” I probed.
He watched me, eyes narrow. “I suspect you noticed that yourself, Miss Ferber. You were alone in the apartment for some time-you and the body.” He glanced at Mercy. “In reconstructing the scene, I surmised that you, Miss Ferber, were alone there for what? Ten minutes? Fifteen? Twenty? What did you do?”
I smiled. “I touched nothing. No prints of mine.”
“But I’m supposing you noticed the scattered letters on the table.”
“I did.”
“What else?”
“Well,” I said, “I saw a syringe.”
He smiled. “Good. Me, too. Do you know what was in the bag?”
“No.”
“Heroin.”
“As is rumored,” I said.
“In fact, the autopsy showed she had just ingested some into her fragile body. She may have been a little loopy when she let in the murderer.”
“Or,” I surmised, “she shot up with the murderer who took his own syringe with him.”
“Interesting. Maybe. Maybe not. What else did you see? I mean, besides the things you outlined in the thorough statement you’ve already given us.” His tone was sarcastic.
“A neat woman, though a packrat. She saved every scrap of paper.”
“True.” He nodded. “And what does that mean to you?”
I glanced at Mercy. “Well, it suggests that she might have
“Exactly. Somebody took a letter or letters.”
“And you don’t know what letter or letters?” Mercy asked.
“Hard to say,” he said. “The letters left behind were family notes, a mother in San Francisco, birthday cards, Christmas cards, junk. She saved everything.”
I nodded. “And someone knew that.”
“Maybe. Or realized it once he was there with her. She may have mentioned something about it-which led to the murder.”
“So,” I continued, “if the murderer took a letter, then we have trouble knowing the motive for the killing.”
“We?” He raised his eyebrows and frowned. “You mean me-
“I was using the royal
He frowned. “In your wanderings have you two ladies found anyone who likes to write letters?”
“All literate people write letters,” I noted. “The telephone is for luncheon engagements and to berate shopkeepers.”
“Can you imagine Max Kohl writing a letter? Or, say, Josh MacDowell?” He paused. “Maybe James Dean scribbles letters?”
“I can imagine Max Kohl pasting a letter together with words cut from
Cotton laughed a hearty fake laugh. “Good one.”
“I’m being serious.”
“You’d like to pin the murder on him.”
“I just want to clear Jimmy,” I said. “You know, I’d have thought the epistolary tradition had died in an earlier century, but, I gather, it lives abundantly, if absurdly, in modern Hollywood.”
He narrowed his eyes. “What?”
“Nothing.” I waited. “Did you get anything out of Max Kohl this morning?”
He smirked. “Not that it’s any of your business, but no. He’s a slippery one. The problem is that he seems to have an alibi for the time Carisa was killed. Or at least he’s lined up folks who lie for him. We’ve learned he knew Carisa a while back, dated her, maybe, and then disappeared. Seems he was in jail in New Jersey for a couple months, a bad check charge, but drifted back here and back into her life about the time James Dean dumped her. A troublemaker, muscle for a local boss for a time, got into a numbers racket, and, I suppose, the source for Carisa’s drugs. Biker fanatic. How he met Dean, I understand.” He stopped.
“Why are you sharing this information with us?” I asked, finally.
“I suspect you know much of it already. And I’m hoping some of it-something I say-will trigger something in you, something you stumbled on. Either of you.”
“I don’t stumble onto things,” I said emphatically. “I uncover truth.”
His tongue rolled over his upper lip, then disappeared back into his mouth. “Manuel Vega says you ask very good questions.”
“Well, thank him for me.”
Again, the tongue, a wary gesture. “Maybe you’ll
“And share it with you?”
“You’re a law-abiding citizen. And, so far, the only one here I can say with any certainly is
“What about me?” asked Mercy. Cotton didn’t answer her.
“Did the autopsy show anything else besides her being pregnant?” I wondered.
He hesitated. “Well, yes. Seems she’d been killed some time just before you gals sauntered in. The M.E. says between seven and eight. You arrived at eight-thirty, just on the heels of the murder.”
“Good God,” said Mercy.
“Indeed, Miss McCambridge. The body was still warm.”
“And was she killed with that statue?” I asked.
He smiled. “Oh, that’s right. You were alone in the apartment. You noticed it before the cops got there.”
“It’s hard not to notice a body and a statue…”
“Lying right nearby. And did you note the kind of statue?”
“It looked like a fertility goddess.”
“That’s right. Aztlan, in fact. Aztec. Piece of chiseled stone. Weighty. Big bellied woman.”
“A good murder weapon.”
“But not what killed her, it seems.” He stopped, seemed to be waiting for me to say something.
“But…”
“Autopsy shows she died from smashing her head on the metal edge of a table. Looks like, so far’s we can reconstruct it, someone hit her with the statue, but it just grazed her shoulder, she fell, hit her head, bled to death in minutes. Being stoned didn’t help her. Traces of liquor and heroin in the bloodstream.”
“So it may not have been a premeditated murder,” I mused.
