Chicago Lightning

“You mean, she couldn’t get in?”

“Right.”

“Well, hell, man, she would’ve knocked.”

“Eastman says if she did, he didn’t hear her. He says there was high wind and pounding surf all night; he figures that drowned out all other sounds.”

I smirked. “Does he, really? So what’s your scenario?”

“Well, when Miss Todd found she couldn’t get into her apartment, she must’ve decided to climb the steps to the street above, walked to the garage and spent the rest of the night in her car. She must’ve have gotten cold, and switched on the ignition to keep warm, and the fumes got her.”

I sighed. “A minute ago you were talking suicide.”

“That’s still a possibility.”

“What about the blood on her face and dress?”

He shrugged. “She may have fallen across the wheel and cut her mouth, when she fell unconscious.”

“Look, if she wanted to get warm, why would she sit in her open convertible? That Lincoln sedan next to her is unlocked and has the keys in it.”

“I can’t answer that-yet.”

I was shaking my head. Then I pointed at him. “Ask the elderly gent upstairs if he heard her opening the garage door, starting up the Packard’s cold engine sometime between two a.m. and dawn. Ask him!”

“I did. He didn’t. But it was a windy night, and…”

“Yeah, and the surf was crashing something fierce. Right. Let’s take a look at her shoes.”

“Huh?”

I pointed down to my scuffed-up Florsheims. “I just scaled those two-hundred-and-eighty steps. This shoeshine boy’s nightmare is the result. Let’s see if she walked up those steps.”

Rondell nodded and led me into the garage. The print boys hadn’t been over the vehicle yet, so the Lieutenant didn’t open the door on the rider’s side, he just leaned carefully in.

Then he stood and contemplated what he’d seen. For a moment he seemed to have forgotten me, then he said, “Have a look yourself.”

I had one last look at the beautiful woman who’d driven to nowhere in this immobile car.

She wore delicate silver dress heels; they were as pristine as Cinderella’s glass slippers.

The Coroner at the inquest agreed with me on one point: “The high winds and very low cold prevailing that week-end would have preserved the body beyond the usual time required for decomposition to set in.”

The inquest was, otherwise, a bundle of contradictions, and about as inconclusive as the virgin birth. A few new, sinister facts emerged. She had bruises inside her throat. Had someone shoved a bottle down her throat? Her alcohol level was high-.13 percent-much higher than the three or four drinks she was seen to have had at the Troc. And there was gas left in the car, it turned out-several gallons; yet the ignition switch was turned on….

But the coroner’s final verdict was that Thelma died by carbon monoxide poisoning, “breathed accidentally.” Nonetheless, the papers talked suicide, and the word on the streets of Hollywood was “hush-up.” Nobody wanted another scandal. Not after Mary Astor’s diaries and Busby Berkley’s drunk-driving fatalities.

I wasn’t buying the coroner’s verdict, either.

I knew that three people, on the Monday I’d found Thelma, had come forward to the authorities and reported having seen her on Sunday, long after she had “officially” died.

Miranda Diamond, Eastman’s now ex-wife (their divorce had gone through, finally, apparently fairly amicably), claimed to have seen Thelma, still dressed in her Trocadero fineries, behind the wheel of her distinctive Packard convertible at the corner of Sunset and Vine Sunday, mid-morning. She was, Miranda told the cops, in the company of a tall, swarthy, nattily dressed young man whom Miranda had never seen before.

Mrs. Wallace Ford, wife of the famed director, had received a brief phone call from Thelma around four Sunday afternoon. Thelma had called to say she would be attending the Fords’ cocktail party, and was it all right if she brought along “a new, handsome friend?”

Finally, and best of all, there was Warren Eastman himself. Neighbors had reported to the police that they heard Eastman and Thelma quarreling bitterly, violently, at the bungalow above the restaurant, Sunday morning, around breakfast time. Eastman said he had thrown her out, and that she had screamed obscenities and beaten on the door for ten minutes (and police did find kick marks on the shrub-secluded, hacienda-style door).

“It was a lover’s quarrel,” Eastman told a reporter. “I heard she had a new boy friend-some Latin fellow from San Francisco-and she denied it. But I knew she was lying.”

Eastman also revealed, in the press, that Thelma didn’t own any real interest in her Sidewalk Cafe; she had made no investment other than lending her name, for which she got 50 percent of the profits.

I called Rondell after the inquest and he told me the case was closed.

“We both know something smells,” I said. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What?”

“I’m going to hang up.”

And he did.

Rondell was a good cop in a bad town, an honest man in a system so corrupt the Borgias would’ve felt moral outrage; even a Chicago boy like me found it disgusting. But he couldn’t do much about movie-mogul pressure by way of City Hall; Los Angeles had one big business and the film industry was it. And I was just an out-of-town private detective with a local dead client.

On the other hand, she’d paid me to protect her, and ultimately I hadn’t. I had accepted her money, and it seemed to me she ought to get something for it, even if it was posthumous.

I went out the next Monday morning-one week to the day since I’d found the ice-cream blonde melting in that garage-and at the Cafe, sitting alone in the cocktail lounge, reading Variety and drinking a bloody Mary, was Warren Eastman. He was between pictures and just two stools down from where she had sat when she first hired me. He was wearing a blue blazer, a cream silk cravat, and white pants. He lowered the paper and looked at me; he was surprised to see me, but it was not a pleasant surprise, even though he affected a toothy smile under the twitchy lttle mustache.

“What brings you around, Heller? I don’t need a bodyguard.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I said genially, sitting next to him.

He looked down his nose at me through slitted eyes; his diamond-shaped face seemed handsome to some, I supposed, but to me it was a harshly angular thing, a hunting knife with hair.

“What exactly,” he said, “do you mean by that?”

“I mean I know you murdered Thelma,” I said.

He laughed and returned to his newspaper. “Go away, Heller. Find some schoolgirl who frightens easily if you want to scare somebody.”

“I want to scare somebody all right. I just have one question…did your ex-wife help you with the murder itself, or was she just a supporting player?”

He put the paper down. He sipped the bloody Mary. His face was wooden but his eyes were animated.

I laughed gutturally. “You and your convoluted murder mysteries. You were so clever you almost schemed your way into the gas chamber, didn’t you? With your masquerades and charades.”

“What in the hell are you talking about?”

“You were smart enough to figure out that the cold weather would confuse the time of death. But you thought you could make the coroner think Thelma met her fate the next day-Sunday evening, perhaps. You didn’t have an alibi for the early a.m. hours of Sunday. And that’s when you killed her.”

“Is it, really? Heller, I saw her Sunday morning, breakfast. I argued with her, the neighbors heard…”

“Exactly. They heard-but they didn’t see a thing. That was something you staged, either with your ex-wife’s help, or whoever your current starlet is. Some actress, the same actress who later called Mrs. Ford up to accept the cocktail party invite and further spread the rumor of the new lover from San Francisco. Nice touch, that. Pulls in the rumors of gangsters from San Francisco who threatened her; was the ‘swarthy man’ Miranda saw a torpedo posing as a lover? A gigolo with a gun? A member