“Thank you, Floyd,” she said. “Then lock up, would you?”
“Sure,” he said, and slipped out, closing the door behind him.
“Your physician’s assistant?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said; impatience tinged her tone. “Now, Mr. Heller, if I can assure you that Elizabeth Short was not referred to us by the A-1, will that allay your trepidation?”
“Then you’re saying she was a patient?”
Her gaze was withering, her sigh disdainful. “No, I am not. Is that all, Mr. Heller?”
I said for the moment it was, and shook the smiling Dr. Dailey’s hand, complimenting him on his jade collection-he offered to take me over and give me a closer look, but I declined-and nodded to Dr. Winter, who nodded back, icily, and opened the door for me. After that, I found my own way out.
In the corridor, I leaned against the balcony railing, feeling dizzy: it wasn’t vertigo; I wasn’t even looking over the edge. I was still gazing at the frosted glass doorway of the Dailey practice.
Their physician’s assistant, Floyd, had not seemed to notice me, when he interrupted my conference with the two doctors; but I had noticed him.
Only his name wasn’t Floyd, not really: it was Lloyd.
Lloyd Watterson.
Also known as the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run.
16
Union Station’s courtyard, with its peaceful patio of trees, bushes, benches, and flagstones, provided a less frantic setting for farewells and welcomes than most big-city train stations. With sunset approaching, cool blue shadows touched the low-slung sprawl of red-tile-roofed white stucco buildings, overseen by a formidable clock tower.
I was surprisingly relaxed, and not at all tired, as I moved through the immense ticket room, with its tall, colored-mosaic ceiling, whistling a tuneless tune as I fell in with the flow of the hurrying crowd, passing through the soundproofed elegance of the waiting room with its leather chairs where bums slept and passengers waited. The cavelike, well-lighted passenger tunnel, with its eight ramps feeding sixteen tracks, echoed with footsteps, conversation, and the jolts and screeches of trains lurching in and out of the station. I stopped at the ramp where the Union Pacific had just come in, and saw Eliot Ness in the process of tipping a colored porter who was handing him a single buckled bag.
Eliot looked both older and smaller than I remembered. His freckled, Scandinavian boyishness was largely obscured in a pouchy, puffy face; he was in his mid-forties, but-I was a little shocked to see-looked more like his mid-fifties. Eliot’s gray suit was typically well tailored, with a gray-and-shades-of-blue-striped tie, and a snapbrim fedora of a darker gray, a trenchcoat folded over the arm.
Moving up the ramp, the aging Untouchable spotted me and smiled; but his gray eyes seemed troubled. He’d had a long train trip, which could take it out of anybody; still, I could tell this was more than that-something was wrong.
Me, I was jingling the change in my pocket and whistling my tuneless tune.
“You’re in a pleasant mood,” Eliot said, as we shook hands and I grinned at him.
“Yeah, I’ve had a productive day.”
The troubled gray eyes tightened. “Well, I’m afraid I’m going to spoil it for you. Can we take a moment, before you take me to the hotel? We need to talk privately.”
The best place to talk privately, of course, is in public. The station fronted Alameda Street and I guided Eliot a few steps west, to the Plaza, that beaten-down circular patch of grass, pigeons, and spreading magnolias where Los Angeles was born, with the neighboring shabby relics to prove it. To the east the curio stores and restaurants of old Chinatown lurked; to the north sprawled Olivera Street, where Peggy and I had explored the bazaarlike tourist-trap marketplace; to the west stood the adobe walls of the Old Mission Church, adorned with a marker of historic significance, as well as graffiti (“ KILROY WAS HERE!”); and at the south loomed the twenty-story white tower of City Hall, the present presenting its middle finger to the past.
We sat on a bench with pigeons scavenging at our feet-I had bought some popcorn and a cold bottle of Coke from a street vendor, and Eliot was sipping a paper cup of black coffee into which he’d poured something from a silver flask. Around us, on nearby benches, elderly Mexicans in food-stained shirts and well-worn dungarees sat staring blankly, as if wondering how their city had managed to fall into Anglo-Saxon hands; a few others had abandoned such empty speculation and were curled up and enjoying a siesta. A stone bench, circling the park, seemed the province of bums and winos. Dusk settled a cool, soothing hand on the indigents and on two old friends, about to share secrets.
“My dad would have been comfortable here,” I said.
Eliot blinked at that. “What?”
“Lot of the big labor demonstrations are held in this plaza. Pop would have been in his element.”
“Do you still carry his gun?”
“Yeah-the nine-millimeter. Well, not at the moment… It’s in my suitcase. I probably should be carrying it-this is turning into that kind of job.”
I told him about punching out Fat Ass Brown.
“Christ, they’re corrupt out here,” he said, shaking his head. “Worse than when I took over in Cleveland.”
“At least when the Chicago cops do want to solve a crime-as opposed to commit one-they can pull it off.”
“What about Harry Hansen?”
“The Hat’s a real detective.” I sipped my Coke; the bag of popcorn was propped between my thighs and I alternated eating a kernel or two, and pitching one for the birds to fight over. “Hansen’s one of the smart, honest ones, even if he is a glory hound.”
Eliot sighed. “I’m almost sorry to hear that he’s competent.”
“Why?”
He watched the pigeons pecking the popcorn I was pitching them. He sipped his coffee. Then he looked at the darkening sky for several long seconds, and finally at me, and said, “Nate… I have terrible news.”
“Personal or professional?”
“Both.” He shook his head. “This is something we have to keep to ourselves… something we have to do ourselves, work on in a… sub rosa manner.”
“Of course.”
“Nate, you’re the only one I can trust-”
“Eliot. Go on. Spill.”
He shrugged, gestured with both hands-no way to soften this blow: “Lloyd Watterson is in California.”
“Really.”
His brow clenched and the gray eyes were confused at my lack of reaction; nonetheless, he pressed on. “After we spoke on the phone, I figured I should check out Watterson’s status-personally. I went to the Sandusky Soldiers and Sailors Home, where Lloyd was in the psychopathic ward.”
“I wasn’t aware Lloyd was a veteran.”
“He wasn’t, but his father, Dr. Clifford Watterson, was. Anyway, I learned that because Lloyd was signed in as a patient voluntarily, he could be signed out the same way.”
I frowned. “That wasn’t part of the deal you cut.”
“Certainly wasn’t.” Finished with his coffee, he wadded up the paper cup and pitched it perfectly into a nearby trash receptacle. He turned to me and the gray eyes had hardened into steel. “Lloyd was to be committed, kept off the streets, completely out of circulation-and now I’ve learned that from August 1938, when he entered the mental hospital, until September 1944, he was signed out by his father eight times, for periods up to three weeks.”
“Jesus… What about after September ’44?”
He breathed in heavily, breathed out the same way. “His father died in August of that year. And then in September 1944, Lloyd signed himself out… and hasn’t been back since.”
Something wasn’t adding up. “What about those taunting postcards you received, postmarked Sandusky?”
Eliot helped himself to some of my popcorn, pitched it to the pigeons. “I did some good old-fashioned poking around-asked orderlies and patients about Lloyd. Turns out the Ohio Penitentiary Honor Farm shares certain facilities with the Soldiers and Sailors Home. Seems Lloyd struck up a friendship with a guy named Alex Koch, a convicted burglar.”