“Just a coincidence.”
He dropped into the chair next to Masuto and stretched out his legs. “Have you caught your killer yet?”
“I’m close.”
“But not close enough.”
“That’s right. Not close enough. It’s like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. You solve the puzzle, and then when you’ve finished, you discover that two or three pieces are missing.”
“I noticed you were looking at that woman’s fingernails,” Cooper said.
“You notice things. That’s a rare gift.”
“To a great many men, those long, painted red fingernails are pretty disgusting. I’ve had men tell me it’s a complete turnoff. Yet the women do it. I guess they feel it’s a sex symbol.”
“Or a class symbol. You don’t mop floors or play a piano with those fingernails,” Masuto said. “You know, the missing pieces can be the most important.”
“Missing pieces?”
“There’s no time left,” Masuto said. “There’s no time to play games. Anyway, I don’t like to play games. Not when someone’s life is at stake.”
“Don’t you tend to dramatize, Sergeant?”
“Now look,” Masuto said, “don’t be deceived by the fact that I don’t act the role of a TV cop. I’m not joking and I’m not playing games. I told you yesterday that I didn’t give a damn whether you were a homosexual or not. I don’t. But if you keep on lying to me, I’ll make you wish you were never born. I’ll slap more violations on you than you can carry. I’ll hound you right out of this town, and don’t think I’m making empty threats. So if you want me to walk out of here and forget that we ever met, just answer my questions and answer them truthfully.”
“You got one hell of a nerve! You can’t come in here-”
“I can and I am! Now why didn’t you tell me that Mitzie Fuller worked here?”
“You didn’t ask me.” He took a deep breath. “Anyway, she was only here a week and she only worked mornings.”
“Did the other women know her then?”
“No. That was before they became my customers.”
“Why did she leave?”
Cooper hesitated, and Masuto said, “I want it all. All-and quickly.”
“Because I wanted to marry her.”
“You’re gay.”
“And what you don’t know about gay, Mr. Detective, would fill a book. Sure I’m gay. That doesn’t mean I can’t fall in love with a woman. That doesn’t mean I can’t stop being gay.”
“But she didn’t marry you?”
“She would have. She just said that she saw too much of that kind of marriage end up as tragedy. She didn’t want to do it to me or to herself.”
“So she married Billy Fuller.”
“Yes.”
“They were married six months. What broke up that marriage after six months?”
“Why don’t you ask Mitzie? Why don’t you ask Fuller?”
“You know damn well that I asked them and that I got nowhere.”
“Maybe that’s the way it should be. Maybe there are some things that even cops don’t have the right to know.”
“Granted. I’m not curious, Cooper, and I’m not peddling gossip. I could guess the answer to the question I asked you, but it’s no damn use for me to guess. I have to know.”
Cooper sat with his legs stretched out, staring at his clasped hands. The moments ticked by. Finally he said, “You really think this creep intends to kill those dames?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Mitzie?”
“Yes, Mitzie.”
“Okay. Here it is. Mitzie was a hooker, a hundred-dollar-a-night hooker. Billy Fuller married her without knowing that. Can you imagine what it did to a man with Fuller’s phony macho when he found out? I’m amazed he didn’t try to kill her right then and there. Oh, he slapped her around all right. She showed me bruises the size of purple plums. But mostly he cried. Mitzie said if the little bastard weren’t so impossibly nasty, she would have felt sorry for him. That after he used her for a punching bag.”
“How did he find out?”
“You always got a good friend who’ll tell you what you don’t have to know.”
“But when she was married to him, she had stopped?”
“Hooking? Yes, of course.”
“I’m not up on all the folkways. Now exactly when did she begin to work as a prostitute?”
“Is that important?”
“Yes, very.”
“Mitzie is twenty-nine. She came to Los Angeles about eight years ago, dreaming the old impossible dream. And it is impossible, believe me. She worked around as a waitress, and that’s when I got to know her, maybe six years ago when she was waiting a joint around the corner. I talked her into a job here, because I wanted her around and because I thought she was the prettiest kid I ever saw. Well, she was already turning a trick every now and then, and after she left here, she didn’t go back to slinging hash.”
“She became a full-time prostitute.”
“If you want to call it that.”
“What would you call it?”
“I don’t call it. To me, it’s no worse than being a cop.”
“We won’t discuss that. You said she was a hundred-dollar-a-night girl. You don’t walk the streets and pick up hundred-dollar customers. Did she have a pimp?”
“No!” Cooper snapped. “She hated their guts.”
“Then how did she work?”
“Do you know a place called The Bar?”
“Just that, The Bar?”
“That’s right. It’s in Hollywood, up on a hill to the left as you drive into Laurel Canyon. A driveway up to a parking lot, and then from the parking lot up a staircase. It’s got a lot of color and a wonderful view of the city lights. It’s a bar and restaurant, and the food isn’t bad, and it’s the kind of place people go when they don’t want to be seen. There’s always two or three girls working out of the place, and the guy who runs it, George Denton, is pretty decent to the girls. It brings him trade. There’s no cheap pickup. I suppose you could call George a pimp, because if a guy wanted something, George hustled it, but he never took more than ten percent from the girls. Mitzie worked out of that place until she met Fuller. I guess she met him two years ago. He gave her a couple of small parts, but she was no great shakes as an actress.”
“And that’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Masuto rose and held out his hand. “Thanks, Cooper.”
Cooper took his hand. “Forgive me for not getting up. I’m washed out. I work my ass off in this place, and I don’t know for what.”
Masuto let himself out, closing the door behind him.
A strange world, Masuto thought, wherein he earned his daily bread, a world of sunshine and palm trees and million-dollar mansions where a girl with the face of an angel was a hooker and a Zen Buddhist was a cop and a grocery store in Beverly Hills sold tomatoes for a dollar and seventy cents a pound and a boutique sold dresses that weighed less than a pound for three thousand dollars. But, he wondered as he got into his car, was any world less strange? On a planet gone mad and apparently intent upon destroying itself, was Beverly Hills abnormal?
He maintained his sanity and his equanimity by refraining from judgments. He did his work, and although it was past quitting time, he still had work to do.
He drove north to Santa Monica Boulevard and then to Sunset Boulevard, through the Strip into Laurel Canyon
