Zombie Confidential (part 2)

EXCERPT:
THE HOLLYWOOD HERALD-EVENING EDITION
CHARLIE  COLE‘S CRIME BEAT
JUNE 8th, 1953

Leg work ain’t easy, guys and dolls, but I do it diligently for my loving audience.  And this week, I had my work cut out for me.  In addition to schlepping all over LA in pursuit of primo skinny on the Bobby Mucci mob trial and the Patty Parish gang rape scandal, I also took a day to dig deep into the former life of Red Starlet Lizzy Long.

Employment records confirm that she worked most often as a waitress but occasionally as a B-Movie Queen.  She apartment-hopped and never had more than $150 in her bank account at one time.  The paper trail, though, never tells the whole story.

I hit the Blue Moon café for a 99 cent breakfast, hoovered three cups of so-so joe and squeezed a waitress for juicy dirt on her former coworker.  She promptly pointed me to our first likely suspect: the grieving boyfriend.

I caught up with the distinguished Mr. Reese (that’s Conrad Reese, high-minded producer of low budget monster movies and bottom of the barrel nudie flicks) hiding out on the Paramount lot.  Convinced that the cops are aiming to pin Lizzy’s murder on him, Reese has taken to spending his days in dark screening rooms and his nights in run down jazz clubs.

I found him in an editing bay cutting celluloid with Edward Dmytryk and got right to the point.  “Tell me about Lizzy Long.”

“I didn’t kill her if that’s what you’re driving at,” said Reese.

“I’m not driving anywhere near there,” I said.  “I just wanna know who did kill her.  Any ideas?  You knew her.  Did she have enemies?”

“I read your paper, Mr. Cole.  I know your shtick.  I give you an innocent quote and you twist it into something sinister.”

“You got me all wrong,” I said.  “I just want the truth.  How’d you meet Liz Long?  What was your relationship?”

“Lizzy came into my office a couple of months ago looking for work.  I did a screen test with her just like I do for all the pretty dames come in here.  I told her she was better for stag films than creature features, but she kept working me, trying to get a part in one of my legit pics.  She insisted she had a talent for it, but the only talent I ever saw confirmed what I said about the stag films.”

“I’m sure you, of course, were just an innocent bystander to all her maneuvering, you not being the type to string a girl along giving her the impression you might have a role for her somewhere in one of your wonderful epics, am I right?”

He didn’t appreciate my tone.  I could tell.

“She was no stranger to the ways of the world,” he finally said.  “Lizzy knew how things worked and she worked it right along side the rest of us.”

I took the talk in another direction.  “How were things lately?” I asked.  “Just before the murder?”

“Our fling was cooling,” Reese claimed.  “She had a new guy.  Some asshole mobster who’d been telling her he owned half a movie studio.  She said his name was Johnny or Jimmy or something like that.”

“And you weren’t jealous?  You weren’t feeling jilted, looking for revenge?”

“I was glad she had some other fella to pester.  I was two fucks short of breaking it off with her anyway.  She figured this grease ball could get her a movie and I figured it was good riddance for the both of us.”

“She believed this guy?” I asked.  “She really believed he was gonna put her in a movie even after you’d just strung her along?”

“She trusted anybody she thought could help her get famous.”

Later, I tracked “Jimmy” down through a number of Crime Beat connections whose names are best left unprinted.  As is “Jimmy’s.”

According to police sources, he was a suspect early on in the case but was cleared by his alibi; his wife claimed he was at home with her while the murder was taking place across town.  Convenient.

Cross-checking “Jimmy’s” name with other police reports, I discovered that a girlfriend of his had disappeared six years ago and never turned up.  Why the boys in blue weren’t still following this white hot lead was a mystery even I could not solve.

EXCERPT:
DIARY OF CHARLIE COLE

I found myself back at the crime scene thinking about the long streaks of blood that had fanned out across the lot a few days earlier.  Something in the pattern seemed wrong.  I had seen hundreds of crime scenes and crime scene photos since I was a kid, and I had never seen splatter like that.  Almost like the spray on a slaughterhouse floor.

The sun set cozy into the Hollywood Hills, a burst of crimson, pink and orange to kindle the horizon.  Again, I thought about those two errant halves calling for me to put them together.  Yet somehow, I could not make them fit.

EXCERPT:
DIARY OF CHARLIE COLE

A few days after the Red Starlet murder, most reporters had already resigned themselves to the notion that the crime would not be easily solved and had moved on to bigger and better sensationalisms.  I, however, continued to write about the case’s progress (or lack thereof) in the Herald.

This had apparently not gone unnoticed because Detectives Mars and Roe paid a visit to the news room and interrupted my lunchtime Reuben to tell me to leave the case alone.  That they needed “room to solve it.”

“Room to solve it?” I asked.  “The fuck does that mean?  I’m trying to help you guys.  I’m the only one reassuring the public that this hatchet-happy menace is someday gonna get caught.  You do know you’re supposed to catch this guy, right?”

“We can handle the public,” said Detective Mars.  “That ain’t your damn concern.”

“It is actually,” I answered.

“It ain’t when I tell you it ain’t.  Got it?”

I didn’t, but I played along.  “Got it,” I said.  “Anything else I can help you two   with before I finish my sandwich?”

“Stay outta our case,” Mars replied.

They left me with a cold corned beef and a load of hard questions.  Numero uno was why they were so jazzed for me to drop the story.  Even the reddest red ball had never provoked a flat out squelch of the first amendment.  I was dead set on finding answers.

I started by breaking a cardinal rule of crime reporting; I trailed the cops.  I figured they broke the rules first by trying to muscle me out of doing my job.  With that rationale in tow, I followed Mars and Roe through the night as they supposedly investigated the Starlet’s murder.

I floored my Ford onto the Pasadena freeway and raced to keep up as the Detectives gunned their unmarked sedan out of town.  I tailed them all the way to St. Sebastian’s Asylum.

St. Sebastian’s was home to the worst of the criminally insane that Los Angeles County had to offer.  It operated more like a prison than a nuthouse.  Its residents were responsible for some of the most shocking crimes in the city’s history.

I kept a good distance as I followed the detectives in through the visitor’s entrance.  I eavesdropped as Mars spoke to the nurse on duty.

“Detectives Mars and Roe.  Here to see Dr. Voorman.”

“Yes, Detectives,” she answered.  “He’ll be right with you.”

Dr. Zaul Voorman, former county coroner, had been forced out of office by HUAC when allegations of communist affiliations came to light.  Voorman denied the rumors but still lost the job.

Long before those accusations, there had been reports of strange things happening in Voorman’s county morgue.  Word around City Hall was that HUAC was brought in solely to fabricate a Red charge as an excuse to get rid of the guy.

Shortly after he took over as Director of Wellness at St. Sebastian’s, rumors flew there too.  Strange experiments going on in the basement.  Usual spook house stuff.

The Detectives spoke with the doctor for over an hour while I waited outside.  I remembered an interview I once had with Dr. Voorman during the HUAC attack.  He was a cold fish but got passionate when we talked about science.  “The new religion,” he called it.  His eyes, though, never lost their cold, detached emptiness.  And he never lost the air of being more ghost than flesh and bone.

Later that evening, I watched the Detectives visit three separate locales: a church, an apartment building and an abandoned house in Laurel Canyon.  Not a one of these places had a thing to do with Lizzy Long.  Nevertheless, they conducted a full scale search of each building.

EXCERPT:
DIARY OF CHARLIE COLE

At the county clerk’s, I pulled records on the three addresses searched by the detectives.  The one thing that all three pads had in common was a name on the lease: Byron Boggs, AKA Jack the Rip-Off, dead since 1947.  Boggs was a Jack the Ripper copycat killer and devout devil worshiper who was caught, convicted and hanged.

Back at the Herald office, I pulled the Boggs file.  It was immediately apparent why Mars and Roe were searching his old haunts.  The moment I laid eyes on the photos, I saw it; all the vics, all women in their twenties, had symbols of the occult carved into their faces.  None were cut in half and none had their brains scooped out, but all had been stabbed repeatedly through the chest.

I cruised into Homicide Bureau to speak with Detective Roe.  He made a quick effort to cover something on his desk as soon as he saw me.

“Why are you searching for a dead man?” I asked.

He chose to feign ignorance.  “What dead man?  What are you talking about?”

I found him unconvincing.  “You’re looking for Byron Boggs in all his old hideouts but last time I checked he was pushing daisies with the other members of the crooked neck club.”

“You tailed us?”

“No, but I got sources.  I also know you talked to Zaul Voorman.  How the hell is he involved?”

“You gotta stay outta this, Charlie.  This case is bigger than a red ball.  It’s the goddamned sun.  And you don’t wanna be anywhere near it.”

“Who are you really looking for?  Did Boggs have an accomplice you didn’t know about?  Somebody he recruited to carry on his work?  Is the killer a former patient of Dr. Voorman’s?”

I glimpsed a list of other cases on Roe’s desk.  I memorized a handful before he shuffled papers to cover it.

“Go home, Charlie,” he said.  “Stop writing about this case.  You’ll be all the better for it.”

I walked away in silence, both of us knowing full well that I would not take his advice.