ZOMBIE CONFIDENTIAL
-OR-
DEAD
MEN
DON’T
COMMIT
FELONY
MURDER
-(part 1)-
EXCERPT:
THE HOLLYWOOD HERALD
CHARLIE COLE‘S CRIME BEAT
JUNE 6TH, 1953
Dig this, dearest cats and kittens, and dig it good: the devil is alive and well and dwells right here in the City of Angels.
LAPD responded yesterday morning to gulps and gasps on the west end of Wilshire Boulevard where a gaggle of goons gawked at Hollywood’s latest horror production. Lizzy Long (actress-slash-waitress-slash-hophead party girl-slash-slasher vic) was found sliced, diced and filleted in a vacant lot just off the Pasadena freeway.
Detective William Mars, famously dogged pursuer of dangerous crooks and felonious punks, was on the scene with the county coroner’s team and the usual swarm of L7 uniforms. Mars scanned the patches of grass and dirt beneath his vic’s bloody body for clues. I could tell from the twitch inching its way into his stare that he was coming up empty.
Detective Denny Roe, fresh from a year-long trek through the Orient and a passionate practitioner of something called the Martial Arts, was working crowd control. Known around the department as Cop Suey, Roe was Detective Mars’ latest partner and seemed more interested in safeguarding what was left of the late Ms. Long than holding back the imposing masses.
The girl’s body was halved, butchered at the waist. There were carefully crafted carvings on her cheeks and forehead, a jumble of crescents and pentagrams, a splash ad for the occult. It was clear, despite all the gore, that this Red Starlet was at least half a looker. Once upon a time.
Yours truly arrived on the edge of the lot at 9AM with my trusty Hawkeye Brownie, ready to snap the vivid pics that my discriminating readership has grown accustomed to ogling. I’m sad to report, my little chicks and hipsters, that I was promptly stopped in my size-nine tracks by the aforementioned Denny Roe, Zen Detective.
“Charlie, I can’t let ya’ snap this girl,” said Roe. “You can write it up but ya’ can’t run any pictures.”
“What’s so special about this cooz?” I asked with my usual tact.
“Look at her, Charlie. You don’t wanna put that in your paper.”
“It ain’t a matter of what I want. It’s a matter of what I owe my readers. They demand the ugly truth. Who am I to deny?”
Roe played the compassionate cop, flashed his baby blues and put on his “I believe in you” face. “Be a paladin kind of guy for once, Charlie. I know you have it in you.”
Detective Roe and I went way back. Early in my career, I wrote a think piece about him called ‘Cop in Crisis.’ You may recall; it won awards.
After being shot in the line of duty and almost kicking the mortal bucket, Detective Roe went hiking through the Himalayas, philosophizing and soul searching with a freewheeling cast of sherpas, globe trotters and holy men. He came back a different kind of cop. A cop with a bigger perspective than your average Angelino (no offense, dear readers).
I wrote his journey up, and it made us both household names. For a while.
Roe had made a point to return to wander the back roads of Tibet and China every few years after that. On his most recent trip, he was given the green light to practice his beloved Fu Manchu street fighting while on American terra firma. Apparently the first westerner allowed to do so.
Staring into Roe’s puppy dog eyes, I was compelled to grant his request. I lowered my shutter box and agreed not to commemorate the starlet’s massacre in a two-page gatefold spread. No matter how classy it would have been.
“You’re a good man,” Roe continued. “You’ll be a lucky son of a bitch in the next life.”
EXCERPT:
DIARY OF CHARLIE COLE
Detective Roe and I continued to shoot the breeze. The ever charming Detective Mars made a beeline across the lot to put a lid on our convo.
“I don’t know how the Hong Kong police run their investigations, Roe, but here in Los Angeles we don’t talk to Press.”
“Old friends,” countered Roe. “We were just catching up.”
“What better place to get reacquainted than the middle of my red ball crime scene?” asked Mars. “You two old chums wanna have a picnic lunch right on the corpse? ‘Cause I can arrange that.”
The corpse, at that point drawing as many flies as onlookers, filled the morning with a suffocating miasma, a toxic fog that strangled the words from your throat and the good thoughts from your mind.
In addition to being carved up all satanic-like, Lizzy Long had also been stabbed through the chest at least a dozen times. And there was a hole in her head where her brains had been taken out.
Her lower half, nude but for a thin platinum anklet, did not appear to have been mangled. Aside from being torn away from the rest of her.
I found myself staring at the two fractions, trying to piece them back together in my mind. She was a dismantled puzzle demanding reconstruction.
Detective Mars disrupted my daydream. “Hey, Jimmy Olsen. Take a hint and get the fuck outta here, will ya? Beat it.”
“I got a right to be here,” I told him. “I got news to report.”
“And you can come to the goddamn press conference like everybody else,” he offered.
“Well okay,” I said. “Now you’re being a friend to the Press. Don’t it feel good to be nice?”
“Press conference, two o’clock,” said Detective Mars. “The fuck out now.”
I did a quick crowd scan on the way to my wheels. My pop always said to memorize the gawkers at a crime scene. That some perps can’t help but hang around and admire the chaos they’ve created.
I looked across the faces that had come to see the murder circus. As I committed their details to memory, I took in their curious mix of attraction and repulsion, eagerness and angst, spiritualism and nihilism, and headed home dragging a piece of the devil behind me.
EXCERPT:
DIARY OF CHARLIE COLE
A gaggle of bloodthirsty reporters gathered at Police Headquarters for the usual bullshit Q&A Show. Mars fed us the expected spoonful:
“Gentleman, at 7:33AM, Homicide Bureau received a call about a DOA in a vacant lot on Wilshire Boulevard. The vic’s been ID’d as Elizabeth Long, a resident of Los Angeles County. Ms. Long, a waitress at the Blue Moon coffee shop, was twenty-eight years old. Cause of death has been determined. Blunt force trauma. She was stabbed multiple times in the throat and chest and bisected, most likely with an axe, as she lay dying from her knife wounds.”
A Times reporter chimed in. “Any arrests yet?”
“It’s too early to discuss a suspect, but we’re following a number of promising leads.”
“Like who?” I asked.
“I’m not gonna get into that right now,” Mars answered.
The bosses loomed in the background. A chorus of silent Svengalis.
Mars continued, mindful of the watchful eyes behind him. “That’s all I can tell you for now, fellas. Just do me a favor and tell your readers we’re gonna find who did this. And that no one else is gonna die at their hand.”
“Can you guarantee that claim, Detective?” Me again.
Mars gave me the stink-eye. “That’s all, gentleman. Thanks for your cooperation.”
I padded up to my Cop Suey buddy Detective Roe as the meeting of the minds broke up. He threw me a cold shoulder.
“It’s a red ball, Charlie. No favors on this one.”
“What do you take me for?” I asked. “I’m here to say hi. Hi.”
“Okay, hi. Nice to see ya.”
“So, what’s your partner hiding? And don’t tell me nothin’.”
He looked me square in the eye and said “Nothin’.”
“He’s hiding something. I can tell.”
“You sound like your father.” He knew I had a nose for news and tried to rattle my cage.
I thought of my pop sitting in that nuthouse rec room muttering about conspiracies, ghosts and that goddamned Woodrow Park case. I declined to see the similarities.
“I’m nothing like him,” I said. “When I call conspiracy, there’s a conspiracy.”
“There isn’t one,” Roe responded. “Just a gruesome murder that we wanna put down before the city falls into panic.”
“There’s gotta be something you can give me. Even if it’s OTR, gimme a goddamn scrap.”
“Can’t do that, friend. You gotta find your own path this time around. The enlightened man paves his own way.”
“You do wanna catch this guy before he practices his magic act on another innocent chickadee, don’t you? I can help you put this down. You know I can. Just point me in a direction.”
Roe could always be counted on to want to do the right thing. He caved almost immediately. “There’s a boyfriend,” he confessed. “We’re tryin’ to track him down. We haven’t found him.”
“You think he’s dirty?” I asked.
“Conrad Reese. Maker of low budget monster movies. General scumbag. He’s who I like for it,” Roe concluded.
“Thanks, pally. You’re the coolest.” I am sincere about once a year, and that moment was it for 1953. “Much appreciated.”
I shambled back to the world to work my lead, my ace reporter brain running through the math, figuring out which angle would give me the best copy. For some reason, I thought back to the rubber-neckers at the Red Starlet’s crime scene.
