CHAPTER 12

    

    It was hot. I had the window open in my office but all that did was let me know that it was just as hot outside. The heat made everything still. There was little traffic on the boulevard, and what people there were walked slowly and stayed in the hot shade whenever they could find any. The sky was cloudless and bluer than cornflowers. I had my coat and vest off, and every little while I'd go to the sink in the corner and rinse my face and neck with tepid water from the tap.

    It was the kind of heat where families begin to eye each other's throats, where mousy accountants turn savagely on their boss, where irritation turns to anger and anger turns to murder, and murder turns into rampage.

    The phone rang. It was Bernie Ohls, the DA's chief investigator.

    "Got a murder off Beverly Glen," he said. "Near Stone Canyon Reservoir. Thought you might want to ride out with me and take a look."

    "Better than sitting here in a slow oven," I said.

    

***

    

    I was outside on the corner of Cahuenga when Ohls came by ten minutes later. He didn't seem in a hurry. He didn't hit the siren as we rolled down the boulevard west, toward Beverly Glen.

    Ohls was a medium-sized guy, blondish hair, stiff white eyebrows. He had nice even teeth and calm eyes and looked like most other medium-sized guys, except that I knew he had killed at least nine men, three when somebody thought he'd been covered. He was smoking a little cigar.

    "Found several pieces of a woman, in a gully off the Glen, down maybe a hundred yards from the road. There wasn't much blood and there were several parts missing, so it looks like she was dismembered somewhere else and dumped there." Ohls puffed a bit of smoke and the hot air swirled it out the open window. "Since not all of her is there, we figure she was probably dumped elsewhere too."

    I felt the pull of gravity at the bottom of my stomach.

    "You ID'd her yet?" I said.

    "Not really," Ohls said. "Her head's missing and both hands."

    We slid down Fairfax and onto Sunset.

    "So why'd you invite me along? You miss me?"

    "I heard you were looking for Carmen Sternwood," Ohls said.

    The weight at the bottom of my stomach got heavier.

    "Un huh."

    "There was a purse with the body. All the ID was out of it, but whoever did it missed a book of matches. Inside the matches was a phone number."

    "Carmen's?" I said.

    Ohls nodded.

    "One of the harness boys called and checked as soon as they found it."

    "I thought they were supposed to leave that to the detectives," I said.

    Ohls grinned. "Guy's planning to be chief," he said.

    

***

    

    Near the top of Beverly Glen, before you make the curve to Mulholland Drive, there were four black and white L. A. police cars, and two L. A. sheriff's cars. Behind them was an ambulance with its back doors open, and an L. A. County fire rescue truck with its light still rotating. Ohls pulled in behind the ambulance and flashed his badge to the sweating uniform cop directing traffic. Then he and I scrambled on down the embankment, through the scrub pine and interlacing thorny vines that grew among them. There was the hot smell of vegetation and old pine needles and the harsher smell of fallen eucalyptus leaves. The slope flattened into a gully and in the gully were half a dozen assorted county employees including a man from the coroner's office with a white coat on over his tie and vest. He was a fat guy with a neck that spilled out over his collar and his face was bright red as he straightened from squatting next to a tarpaulin-covered form.

    He knew Ohls.

    "This is a real mess, Lieutenant," he said. He shook his head in disgust and slowly peeled back the tarp by one corner. "Guy didn't even have sharp tools," he said.

    Under the tarp was the bottom half of a woman's torso, with one leg attached.

    Ohls had no reaction.

    The medical examiner draped the tarpaulin back over the corpse.

    "There's couple other parts," he said, "over here." He nodded his head toward another tarp. "We let everything lie where we found it."

    "Wonderful," Ohls said.

    "Want to take a look?"

    "Not right now," Ohls said. "You know anything?"

    "Woman's dead," the medical examiner said.

    "Always brightens up a case," Ohls said, "to have a funny ME."

    The medical examiner chuckled so that the fat on his neck wobbled a little over his collar.

    "Don't know a hell of a lot more than that, yet."

    "Cause of death?" Ohls said. "Aside from getting cut up like a fryer?"

    "No way to know until we find all the pieces," the medical examiner said. "Don't know if she was alive when she was cut up."

    Ohls shook his head harshly as if there was a bee in his ear.

    "ID?" he said.

    "Caucasian, female, judging from what we've got, not an old woman. Twenties or thirties, maybe a well-preserved forty at the oldest. Skin tone is still pretty good, what there is of it."

    "Any idea yet when?"

    The medical examiner shook his head.

    "Last couple days at the outside, assuming she was dumped here shortly after she was killed, and wasn't refrigerated someplace. That's as close as I can get." He glanced down at the tarpaulin heap in front of him. "We've got a stomach, at least, so we can make some guesses depending on when she ate, and what she ate, but we're not going to get much closer. Blood's all drained out of her. That screws us up."

    "What a shame," Ohls said. "Any thoughts, Marlowe? Could be the Sternwood girl."

    "Guess on the skin coloration?" I said.

    The medical examiner reached down. "I'd say dark. Here, take a look."

    "No, thanks," I said. "That was my guess. Was she slim?"

    The medical examiner shrugged, still bending over with a hand on the edge of the tarpaulin. He peeled it back again. I looked away. From the corner of my eye I could see him bend over and pinch some flesh on the one leg. I looked away harder.

    "No," he said. "I'd say she was fleshy-not fat, mind you, but sort of, you know, buxom. Mae West, say."

    "That would make her not one of the Sternwood girls," I said.

    "Body hair's black," the medical examiner said.

    "Carmen was blonde," I said.

    Ohls nodded.

    "Who found her?" he said to one of the sheriff's deputies.

    "Couple high school kids had three quarts of beer," the deputy said, "slid down here in the woods to drink it and stumbled right on her. Probably take care of their underaged drinking for a while."

    "Every cloud," Ohls said. "Lemme talk to them, and the officer that found the matchbook."

    He climbed back up the banking to the road with me behind him. By the time I got to the road my shirt collar was limp and I could feel the sweat trickling down my spine. I leaned against the car while Ohls talked to the scared kids and to the young L. A. cop that had discovered the purse with the matchbook. Above us a little way the hill crested and Beverly Glen turned and headed down into the valley. Ventura, Sherman Oaks, people in ranch houses with two bedrooms and GI mortgages. People with kids, coming home from work, sitting down to supper, talking about the job and about the weather and about baseball and the stock market. None of them thinking anything about a one-legged half of a female body with the blood long since drained from it lying in the leaf mulch at the bottom of an arroyo off Beverly Glen. None of them were talking about that or thinking about it. But I was and I'd think about it for a long time.

    Ohls came back to the car when he finished with the witnesses. He jerked his head at me and we got in and headed back toward Hollywood.

    "Why don't you kind of tell me about what it is exactly that you're doing with Carmen Sternwood," he said.

    I told him what I knew except for the part about Eddie Mars and Vivian. I left that out for no particular reason, except there's never any need for cops to know everything. And there was something about telling him that Vivian was with Eddie Mars that I didn't like.

    "This Bonsentir," Ohls said. "He's got so much clout that he doesn't need to cooperate."

    "That's what he says."

    "And Al Gregory says so?"

    "Yeah," I said.

    "And he's up the top of Coldwater Canyon?" Ohls said.

    "Yeah."

    Ohls wrenched the car around and headed up Beverly Drive.

    "Let's you and me go give his chain a jangle," Ohls said.