OFFICER REYNOLDS DROVE the patrol car down from Bunker Hill. Clark sat in the back with Officer Doyle. Reynolds had a Liberty League badge just like Timmy Townsend’s on his uniform lapel, but the fatter, older cop didn’t. They had the regular radio on—NBC, even, although it was a shade too early for Wallis Beekins. It murmured in the background through his haze of thoughts. Three Little Fishes by Kay Kyser, and they swam and they swam and fell right over that dam, just the way he was falling. Then a newscast about Marshal Petain making up to the Nazis in France, then how the Republicans at their convention in Philadelphia were talking of choosing some dark-horse-nobody called Wilkie, and the big mystery of who the Liberty Leaguers were going to put up—a mystery to which Clark, with an even deeper falling, realized he had the answer.
Was this the real trap which April Lamotte had been setting for him—to implicate him in her own death? But that made no sense. Just as likely, the body they were taking him down to City Hall to identify wouldn’t be hers. No, that was it. And somehow, in some way he hadn’t yet figured, she was setting him up for a murder rap… But that didn’t make much sense either. At least these were plain old street cops in uniform and not suits from homicide. They’d gotten hold of this sheet simply because they worked the district which covered Stone Canyon and were after some easy time-and-a-half.
Twilight outside now. The streetcars on Broadway threw sprays of sparks. City Hall loomed, its windows a lit mosaic, the white flecks of a few gulls still floating on the fading thermals above. Janitors and cops drifted in the big marble entrance hall. Many of the specialist departments of the LAPD—drugs, homicide, sedition, vice—worked out of City Hall, and the corridors beyond had the feel of a busy precinct station. The air smelled of Gestetner fluid, Thunderbird wine and vomit. Officers in shirtsleeves and shoulder holsters shepherded whores, smokehounds, political discontents and transvestites into offices and holding cells.
The Coroner’s Department and the city morgue lay down some stairs in the basement. No windows here and half the lights were off, leaving spaces of black along the corridors. A typewriter was clicking somewhere. A phone rang unanswered.
“It’s this way…”
The air had already dropped a few degrees as Officer Doyle held open a final door.
It wasn’t like in the feelies. They didn’t lead you into some tiled auditorium and rack out the body from one of those sliding trays set in a wall. What they did was take you into a small room. Posters on the walls about agricultural credits and the dangers of orange blight and the boll weevil. An aproned mortician pushed a sheeted gurney through a rubber flap door.
“Okay, Mr Lamotte.” He felt the old cop’s hand rest on his shoulder. “You ready?”
He nodded yes.
“I’m just going to pull back the sheet so that you can see the face, right?”
Officer Doyle signaled to his younger colleague, who, looking like he’d much rather be somewhere else, stepped around to the front of the gurney and, using the tips of his fingers, lifted the top of the sheet back and off.
It was April Lamotte. Her lips were blued beneath what was left of that burgundy lipstick and her lively green eyes had been closed and were just starting to sink and her red hair had been flattened and pulled by the way she’d been handled. But it was her. There was a meaty smell which he knew would soon get stronger, and a faint reek of car fumes and vomit which the perfunctory wipe-down which the morticians had given her hadn’t quite removed, but stronger still was the odor of Chanel Cuir de Russie. It was April Lamotte, and, for a corpse, she looked surprisingly beautiful. No bloating of rot and gas. Only a mild roadkill stench.
Officer Doyle’s hand squeezed Clark’s shoulder. “For the record, do you recognize this person?”
“Yes. It’s April Lamotte.”
The cop’s hand squeezed again. “Maybe you want to be left alone in here with your wife for a moment?”
“No. It’s okay.”
He stepped back. The young cop was about to pull the sheet back up to cover the body, but the whole scene still didn’t seem real. He reached out to touch the translucent flesh of April Lamotte’s shoulder. He was half expecting his fingers to pass right through, but all he felt was cold flesh.