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Out on Central, I marked his taillights going south, the same direction as Victoria. He caught the green light at Roosevelt Street, then it turned amber and red. I ran it and kept my headlights off until there was enough traffic that I could turn them on and blend in. A quarter mile farther south, with neon decorating the business district ahead, he turned right on Van Buren Street. This was the same route Victoria would take to reach her bungalow, which doubled as her photo studio.
I hung back, watching his taillights as we crossed Seventh Avenue. When he turned left on Tenth Avenue by Woodland Park, my gut tightened. Victoria’s house was close. I turned off my lights again and cruised slowly down the darkened residential street.
In quick succession, I saw Victoria park, unload her equipment, and walk past the trunks of palm trees to her bungalow. The dark car waited for her to go in, shut off his lights, then crept past. I parked at the curb fifty feet behind them.
Then he pulled a U-turn at Adams Street and came back. He pulled into a spot south of Victoria’s house far from a streetlight. And sat there.
I gave it fifteen minutes, then climbed out on the passenger side of my Ford, gently closing the door and walking south, mostly concealed by palm, olive, and pepper trees on the narrow parking lawn between the sidewalk and the curb. I left my apartment without my regular pistol, as well as a coat, and the cold penetrated uncomfortably. But I had the .38 Detective Special from the glove box. Now I held it in my right hand, keeping it down against my leg.
The street was quiet except for train noises from the tracks a few blocks south, locomotive whistles and cars coupling, then silence. He stayed in the car, a dark four-door Chevy, so I took my time. With the temperature around freezing, fog wafted from his tailpipe. His engine was on.
Then I was parallel to him, concealed by the lazy fronds of a lush, low Canary Island date palm. Ideally, I would have liked to keep walking, then approach him from a blind spot to his rear. But the tree cover didn’t extend down the street. A nail glowed through the driver’s window but not enough to show a face. The four-door Chevy looked similar to Frenchy’s, to Don’s, to a thousand cars in Phoenix.
I walked fast, stepping off the curb, coming straight at him. But it wasn’t fast enough. He saw me and pulled out. I grabbed the driver’s door handle with my left hand, but he gunned it. The door was locked. For a second, I thought about hanging on and trying to make it up to the running board. But I couldn’t get my foot up in time, had only the barest grip on the door handle, and would have been dragged down the street. The next thing I knew, I was spun around and deposited on the cold pavement. When I looked up, he was a block away and moving fast, lights off, no chance to catch a license plate.
Then he was gone. Who knew the trick of camouflage by driving with your lights off? Cops and criminals. In my mind, the two were rapidly blending together.
Another thing about that Chevy sedan: It had the spare tire outside on the running board. Jimmy Darrow, the railroad bull, said the car he saw pulling away from where Carrie’s body parts were dumped had the same feature. He said it might be a Packard. But what if he were wrong? Hell, even my two-door ragtop had the spare placed that way.
I walked to Victoria’s house to tell her what happened. She tended to the bloody scrape on my left hand.
After I left, I stayed in my car for an hour, watching. Her light went out. I walked through her alley. Sat in the car again. Nothing stirred.
This was familiar terrain beyond the fact that Victoria lived here. North of Van Buren was the University Park neighborhood. At one time, the Methodist Church planned to build a university there. It never happened, but the name stuck as it became a residential subdivision. It had been the center of the murders that became my most famous case. They happened on quiet nights.
Now, no one else came down her street. I finally gave up my watch and drove the empty drags of Phoenix, half aimlessly, half chasing four-door Chevys. Finally, I went home, put on a Duke Ellington record, and started to read some of the material Victoria had retrieved from the college.
As a homicide detective, I often imagined the victims speaking to me. I would talk to them in my head, sometimes out loud: “Tell me how you died. Tell me what happened. Who did this?” It was a useful mental exercise in the investigation.
This time, Carrie was speaking to me through entries in the two-inch-thick diary, written in blue ink, feminine cursive. I would soon realize that some of the contents were more personal than I expected. I picked some random diary pages to get a flavor.
* * *
CARRIE DELL’S DIARY 5/15/32
Tonight K was giving her dewy smile as “Edward” laughed, his cigarette holder at a jaunty angle. P was blowing smoke rings, projecting disinterested bravado. She is all sardonic irony. I caught two lovebirds in the hallway outside the kitchen. The party was only getting started.
This is so easy it’s scary! We’re up and running like my wild palomino when we raced through the woods in autumn. Dad always said I should run my own business, work for myself. But I bet he never had this in mind. With the right connections, Prohibition makes everything possible. People are such hypocrites. The biggest moralists are the biggest libertines. Scratch that prissy, churchgoing surface and there they are. Revealed! Naked as can be. Someday I’ll make them characters in a novel. Times are hard, but big money is to be made from this crowd, with the right partners. I think I’ve got them. Now if I can keep trusting them. My bet is that money will ensure that.
So far, the business is operating as I intended. We’ve started with a core of a dozen regular clients. I checked out each one myself, made sure the connection was right and tight. You wouldn’t believe who some of them are, and Cynthia’s not telling. Confidentiality is what we’re selling. Am I a poet and don’t know it? The Biltmore job is the perfect cover. Better than that, really. My business actually complements theirs.
Carrie Dell is a long way from Prescott and not going to end up as a teacher. I can feel the sidewalks of Greenwich Village under my feet, being on the arms of handsome beaux in the jazz clubs of Harlem. But…must not get uppity, girl. Always watchful. Always on guard.
CARRIE DELL’S DIARY 9/20/32
He tells me to call him Frenchy. But I love his real first name. Leonce. It has music to it. My Frenchman. My Cajun lover. The appeal of an older man, and, no, I’m not looking for a daddy. His forty years vs. my nineteen. So I call him Leonce and he always laughs.
He’s so much more interesting than the college boys who want me. He’s worldly, dangerous. I always went for the bad boys. But his bad side is real, earned. He’s a real detective, too.
He tells me about the police, and it’s exciting. His fellows on the “Hat Squad,” he calls it. I sit in the car and watch them. The ones he talks about the most are Turk Muldoon, Don Hammons, and his brother Gene. That’s the detective who caught the University Park Strangler. Leonce is envio
us. Gene is also tall and handsome, and Leonce is envious of that, too. It’s an itch my Frenchman can’t scratch. I know the advantage that good looks convey. I wonder how Gene uses his?
We go to fancy dinners and speakeasies, and he introduces me as Cynthia. It’s a name I found in the newspaper women’s page. I like it. I can tell he’s worried, though, that people might see us together and tell his wife. He hates her. She hates him, at least to hear him tell it.
My group is envious. They want to know who this man is. And he’s interested in them. It makes me proud and territorial, a little jealous.
Tonight we got a hotel room and he finally took me. I didn’t resist. He likes his love rough. I acted as if it was my first time. He wondered about that because it didn’t hurt, no bleeding. Maybe all that horseback riding already “broke me in.” Ha! I was barely drunk and remembered every second. How his muscles flexed and tensed. He told me he loved me. How the tables turned as we went on. He doesn’t know that he isn’t my first affaire!
