Clandestine

The woman pointed to Twenty-eighth Street. She started to run in that direction. I ran after her. Wacky followed me. She led us halfway down the block and up to an old, white wood-framed fourflat. She pointed up the stairs leading to the second story. The door was wide open.

"Uh, uh, uh," she stammered, then pointed again and backed up against a row of mailboxes, biting at her knuckles.

Wacky and I looked at each other. We both nodded and Wacky gave me the beginning of a smile. We drew our guns and raced up the stairs. I entered first, into what had once been a modest living room. Now it was in a shambles: chairs, bookshelves, and cabinets were overturned and the floor was covered with broken glass. I held my breath, and advanced slowly, my gun held in front of me. Behind me, I could hear Wacky breathing hoarsely.

There was a small kitchen straight ahead. I tiptoed up to it. The white linoleum was broadly spattered with congealed blood. Wacky saw it and immediately tore back into the rear rooms of the apartment, completely forgetting caution. I ran after him, almost knocking him over in the bedroom doorway just as I heard his first exclamations of horror: "Oh, God, Freddy!"

I pushed him aside, and looked into the bedroom. Lying on the floor on her back was a nude woman. Her neck was black and purple and twisted to the side. Her tongue was hugely swollen and stuck out obscenely. Her eyes bulged in their sockets. There were puncture wounds on her breasts and abdomen and deep gashes on the insides of her thighs. She was covered with dried blood.

I checked my watch—9:06 A.M. Wacky stared at the dead woman and then at me as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing. His eyes moved back and forth frantically while he remained motionless.

I ran downstairs. The woman who had summoned us was still next to her open apartment door, still gnawing at her knuckles. "The phone!" I yelled at her. I found it in her crowded front room and called the station, requested a team of detectives and a meat wagon, then ran back upstairs.

Wacky was still staring at the dead woman. He seemed to be committing to memory the details of her desecration. I walked through the apartment, writing down descriptions: the overturned furniture, the broken glass, and the configuration of the dried blood in the kitchen. I knelt down to check the carpet: it was a dark-orange phony Persian, but light enough so that the trail of blood was still visible. I followed it into the bedroom where the dead woman lay. Wacky suddenly spoke out behind me, causing me to almost leap through the ceiling: "Jesus fucking Christ, Freddy. What a mess."

"Yeah. The dicks and the coroner are on their way. I'm gonna keep looking around here. You go downstairs and get a statement from the woman."

"Right."

Wacky took off and I returned to my note-taking. It was just a homey middle-class apartment, clean and comfortable looking, not the kind of place that even a desperate hophead would burglarize, but that was what this looked like. Further investigation revealed a blood-soaked terry cloth bathrobe on the floor in the little dining room that separated the living room and kitchen. At the end of the kitchen was a door that led downstairs to what looked like a laundry room; there were bloody footprints on the rickety wooden steps.

I went through the apartment looking for the murder weapon and found nothing, no sharp instruments of any kind. I checked the victim again. She was a pretty brunette and looked to be in her middle twenties. She had a slender body and very light green eyes. She was wearing dark red toenail polish and lipstick that matched perfectly the color of her dried blood. Her body was sprawled in what seemed like reluctant acceptance of death, but her face, with its open mouth and bulging eyes, seemed to be screaming, No!

I went through the rooms again, looking for more details that might mean something. I found a bloody partial fingerprint on the hallway wall near the bedroom door. I circled it with my pen. There was a telephone stand in the living room with no phone on it, just an ornate crystal ashtray filled with matchbooks. One of them caught my eye—a colorful orange job with three stars on it, all arranged around a martini glass. The Silver Star. I poked in the ashtray. All the matchbooks were from bars and nightspots in the central L.A-Hollywood area. I looked around for smoking materials—pipes, cigarettes, or tobacco. Nothing. Maybe the woman was a barhopper or matchbook collector.

I heard loud footsteps thumping up the stairs. It was Wacky, followed by two plainclothes cops and an old guy I knew to be an assistant medical examiner. I nodded them in the direction of the bedroom. They went in ahead of me. I heard whistles, moans, disgusted snorts, and declarations of awe:

"Oh, God. Oh, shit," the first detective said.

"Holy Jesus," the second detective said.