The Waterfall, page 36
One of the other guys put his hand on the tall man’s back as a signal to give in and talk. He shrugged as if he couldn’t care less. He pointed up the street past a grocery shop with wooden shutters over the windows. ‘Back of the movie theatre.’
‘All right. Now beat it.’ He stood strong while the three men looked at each other and silently agreed to stalk away. One of the two mutes picked up the bat on the way.
Jakes went back to the car.
‘They say he’s in there.’
The front of the Venice Theatre, a stone’s throw from the pier, was a lavish building with white tiles and yellow moulded flowers. Red bulbs blazed its name above the entrance. Tickets were a quarter, or ten cents on Tuesdays.
Ken and Coraline had paid their ten cents once. They’d watched a comedy and laughed for a while. Now, underneath letters spelling out ‘Double Indemnity’, were more announcing ‘Who Drew First? starring Frankie Angel’. He saw that Diane had clocked the sign and bitten her lip.
A prowler passed with a cop hanging out of the window yelling through a loudhailer: ‘Stay in your homes. Do not go out on the street. Stay in your homes. Do not go out on the street. Stay in…’
‘Is it safe around here?’ Diane squawked. ‘It doesn’t look safe. Can we go back?’
‘We need you,’ Jakes told her while watching the theatre. ‘We’re goin’ in there. You can wait outside.’
‘You’re going to leave us here alone?’
‘Only if you want.’
‘No, no, take us!’ She sounded distraught.
‘Okay, then.’
Jakes took a snub-nosed .38 revolver from a hip holster, opened the cylinder to check it was loaded, snapped it closed and put it back in the holster.
‘Shouldn’t you have that in your hand?’ Diane insisted.
‘Not necessary. Better like this. Safer. You go in with a piece in your hand and everyone gets jumpy real quick.’
She turned to Ken. ‘What about you, do you have a gun?’ she asked desperately.
‘No.’
‘Then… But…’
‘Jus’ get outta the car,’ Jakes demanded, his temper slipping away.
They all climbed out onto the crumbling asphalt. Ken looked up and down the street. Piano jazz was drifting out from the window above a carpet store. It was the only sound, except for a tap-tap-tap as the leader of the barricade men dragged his baseball bat over the uneven sidewalk and through puddles of light from the streetlamps.
‘We shouldn’t—’ Diane began.
‘Christ, Diane, just follow them,’ Carlos growled as Ken and Jakes walked carefully towards the cinema, watching for movement. She took his advice.
They reached the front doors, which were covered in weather-beaten posters for movies that had come and gone. There were no lights on inside the lobby, so it was the street lamps that picked out a couple of blue velvet-covered seats and the ticket booth in the centre of the room, standing desolate and open, its cash register empty. A strange, fast popping sound took Ken’s attention, and he made out a bar in the dark corner where a glass cabinet was spilling popcorn across the floor like an invasion of cockroaches. A rubber tube stretched from the bottom of the cabinet to a large orange gas canister. Ken’s feet crunched over the popcorn as he went to turn the lever and choke off the gas. The popping stopped, and they could make out the sound of voices on the other side of the double doors into the auditorium. The voices were arguing. One was a man’s deep voice, the other female, shrill and furious.
Jakes glanced back to Diane and Carlos. Ken threw his coat and hat aside.
‘Let us go!’ Diane whispered.
‘You’re safer here where I can see you.’ Jakes pushed the door but found it locked. He thumped hard on it. ‘Police,’ he yelled. ‘We want to see who you got. Might be someone we know!’
Mumbling from the other side. ‘… Cops…’ ‘… sure they are…’ ‘… not what we need…’
Jakes slammed the bottom of his fist harder on the wood. ‘Open up, or we’re comin’ in!’ And he shooed his two guests a few yards away, as if the place might explode any second. ‘Last chance!’ He checked the revolver cylinder again. Ken could see that, behind the bravado, the detective was nervous.
‘Have you ever pulled that trigger?’ Ken asked.
‘Once. Hit a dog.’
‘How did it do?’
‘Died.’
‘Well, that’s what’s meant to happen.’
The sound of footsteps told them the door was being opened. They stood back.
What emerged was a face that looked like it had erupted and never healed. Volcanoes and deep caverns had ripped apart the flesh. Two deep eyes and a sunken nose confirmed a diagnosis of syphilis.
‘We don’t need you,’ the broken-up face drawled through a three-inch gap between the double doors.
‘Where you from, friend?’ Jakes asked.
‘T’nnessee,’ it replied, clipping the first syllable.
‘A long way from home.’
‘What?’ it started, confused, then looked angry. ‘Can I help you with something?’
‘We heard you had someone in there. Someone who might be the man we want.’
‘We got this one, Sheriff,’ the ruptured face laughed. And he tried to shut the door. The barrel of Jakes’s gun wedged it open.
‘I heard you folks from Tennessee had better manners.’ The barrel was pointing down, but Jakes slowly tilted it up.
The ruptured face cracked into a sneering smile. ‘Okay, okay. You got it. You come on in and see what we got.’ He stood back. Jakes shoved him aside and entered, followed by Ken. Diane and Carlos scuttled in behind them.
As he stepped into the darkened chamber, blueish-white light shone in Ken’s eyes, blinding him for a second. Then he focused. On the screen, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck were tearing strips off each other, their shadows moving, warped, across the seats.
All those seats were empty except for three in the centre of the front row, which were occupied by men looking up towards the screen. But it wasn’t the movie they were watching; it was what was happening on the stage in front of the screen itself. An obese man with his wrists and ankles bound by rope was trying to crawl into the wings while the three in the stalls laughed. His face was covered in red welts and blood trickled from his nose. Another man, stripped to the waist and shining with sweat, stood over him, with cloth wrapped around his knuckles to protect them as they pounded down. He looked up as Jakes entered and wiped his arms across his forehead. Not worried, just hot.
‘Come in, officers!’ called the middle of the three men in the front row seats. ‘Watch the show. We’ve been doing your job for you.’ He turned around. He was tall and black, with a lot of gold jewellery that glinted like an eye when the light from the movie fell on it. The two white men on either side were laughing like gurgling drains.
Ken caught Jakes’s glance and bounced it back to Diane and Carlos. She looked ready to vomit from fear, while he was edging himself squarely behind Jakes.
Jakes lowered his gun but kept it in his hand. Mr Tennessee smiled and went to the front, leaning nonchalantly against the stage as the fat man above him tried again to crawl away.
‘You know who he is, don’t you?’ Ken said to Jakes, studying the policeman’s face.
‘I know who he is.’ He raised his voice to the fat man. ‘Didn’t know you were out, Arnie.’
Arnie’s mouth moved, but the sound was only a moan. He did his best to get to his knees until the man standing over him kicked him hard in the ribs.
‘My God!’ Diane burst out. And she turned tail and ran.
‘You better go after her,’ Jakes told Carlos.
‘Her look-out if she leaves us,’ he replied.
Jakes didn’t care.
‘He confess to anythin’?’
‘Give us time,’ the black man called back with confidence.
‘Time. Time,’ Jakes said, walking slowly towards the front, his gun out of sight but not out of his grip. Ken checked where the exits were as he followed. ‘Time won’t be enough. You think Arnie’s the Mannequin Killer? Don’t make me laugh.’
‘Caught him snooping about an old lady’s house, Sheriff,’ said Mr Tennessee.
‘Probably after her underwear. I wouldn’t trust him alone with my wife, but the Mannequin killings? Not a chance. He couldn’t stage that. He don’t have two brain cells to rub together.’
‘Another ten minutes, and we’ll have him confess.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you will. He’ll confess to shootin’ President Lincoln if you beat him enough.’ He got close to the stage. ‘Problem is, that still leaves the real killer out there. An’ I can’t have that.’
Ken spun around and grabbed the hand of the man from Tennessee, twisting it over while rocketing his left fist up and under the man’s chin to punch him so hard that it lifted him from the ground. The man fell back into an upturned seat, dropping a black-gripped Colt .38 Super Automatic. Ken caught it in mid-air.
‘Safety’s off,’ he said. ‘My friend’s a cop. I’m not.’ Mr Tennessee tried to pull himself up from the chair, but Ken kicked his legs away. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Carlos sink down into one of the rows of seats.
‘Now, Kourian,’ Jakes began.
‘Enough of that. Who is he?’
‘Arnie Holman. Lowlife. Not a killer.’
‘Then we’re leaving.’
‘You’re leaving him to us?’ asked the black man.
‘We’ve got more important things to deal with.’ Ken ejected the round from the chamber, released the magazine and flung it to one side of the auditorium and the gun to the other.
‘I guess we’re leavin’,’ Jakes said. ‘You ladies have a good night. He confesses to anythin’ he might have done, call the station. Ask for anyone ’xcept me.’
Chapter 25
Diane was huddled in the back seat of the car, flitting from one window to another as if she could see killers in every direction.
‘Where to now?’ Ken said.
‘Ah hell, why ask me? I know as much as you. Back to the station, I guess. As good as anywhere.’ Jakes put the car in gear and started driving. But even in the ten minutes they had been in the movie theatre, things had begun to change on the street. The barricades had grown bigger. There were more men on them.
‘You ain’t comin’ down here!’ one yelled at the car from fifty yards away. And he and his eight or ten buddies started walking towards them to make the point. Jakes slowed the car to a crawl.
‘What, you’ve got a gun, haven’t you?’ Carlos burst out nervously.
‘I’m not gonna start shootin’ just ’cause they got ants in their pants,’ Jakes snapped back. He put the car in reverse, then pulled a fast U-turn and went back the way they’d come. They all watched the men behind them begin to trot after them in the half-light.
‘Be careful,’ Ken said. He could feel the atmosphere turning ugly.
‘I get you, I get you.’
They hung a right onto Pacific, which would take them towards Clune. At least it would if another group of men, half a dozen of them, weren’t doing their best to build another barrier across the road. They were different to the others. These guys looked Chinese, though it was hard to tell because they had caps pulled down and neckerchiefs pulled up. They checked quickly back as the car approached. A couple started shouting. Ken caught a few words and guessed they weren’t friendly. This time, Jakes hit the gas and threw the car towards a gap in the mass of crates they had roped together. The men scattered, waving their fists at the car as it whipped past.
Suddenly something hard and heavy smacked onto the car roof. Looking up, Ken could make out a dent in it. Another on the hood. A stone or brick. They were being thrown down from the apartment buildings along the road. A bottle, a child’s wooden doll, a broken stick all fell like hard rain. And then there was an explosion on the side of the car, swerving it across the road.
‘They’re shooting!’ screamed Diane.
‘Blow-out,’ Ken told her. ‘We drove over broken glass.’ He turned to Jakes. ‘Can we make it in this heap?’
‘We’ll see.’ He pumped the gas pedal again, and the car shook but kept moving. As they reached the end of the block, the falling trash disappeared and was replaced by a few whoops and shouted cusses.
Jakes drove them past a burning car and a clothes store where the windows were smashed and empty. The mannequins that had modelled the shop’s goods were on the sidewalk, broken to pieces. ‘Crazy kinda retribution,’ Jakes said.
‘Let’s hope they stick to dummies.’
‘Ain’t that the truth?’
They rolled unevenly on, passing a boarded-up gas station. No money left here said paint across the front of it. That wasn’t stopping three men and a dirty-haired girl from breaking in. Ken checked Jakes. No, he wasn’t going to stop. The girl watched with a sullen glare as they drove on past. Ken was struck by how young and hungry she looked.
Onto West Washington. The car rocked and swerved as the wheel rim cut the burst rubber to pieces. They were a hundred yards from the precinct house, but they weren’t driving that last hundred. A small mob was marching up the street, shouting. Jakes asked a straggler, a young woman with her hair in a net, what their business was.
‘Cops doin’ nothin’!’ came the answer. ‘They doin’ nothing, we gonna give ’em no peace!’
‘What you got in mind?’
The woman grinned knowingly. ‘You gonna come ’long?’
‘Maybe I will. Maybe I won’t.’ He let her stride away and told everyone in the car to get out and stick behind him. They hurried up the side of the street, but only made it about twenty paces before the mob started pointing at them. ‘Let’s go!’ Jakes said.
At that, they ran.
The entrance opened at the last second, held by a uniform with his hip holster unclasped. ‘You got about a hundred angry people comin’ this way,’ Jakes told him as they fell into the lobby.
‘Yeah, we saw.’
The waiting room was full of families in a fury, in tears, telling of property broken into, of fights with their neighbours, of cars stolen. They hadn’t come to the cops because they thought the cops could do something about it, they’d come because they were afraid and had nowhere else to go. Jakes pushed his way to the desk and tore the desk sergeant away from taking down the details of a white-haired old woman.
‘What the hell’s goin’ on?’ Jakes demanded.
‘We’re swamped, Detective. We asked for backup, but the Chief said we had to deal with it ourselves.’
‘We need to get you out of here,’ Ken said to Carlos.
‘Yeah, yeah, let’s do that.’
‘Deal with it?’ Jakes said. ‘Hell, the next—’
He spun around to see the entrance crashing open and the cop on sentry duty knocked back by the mob spewing in, turning over benches and trash cans.
‘The apartment!’ Ken shouted to him.
Jakes grabbed Diane and Carlos, dragging them to the side entrance. Ken kept up with them and they burst out into the parking lot just as a prowler was backing in. Jakes threw the driver out and commandeered the car, pushing Diane, who was red-faced with shock, into the back.
‘Let me go!’ she cried. But the detective wasn’t listening. He gunned the car, and they swept out through the gates.
‘Look out!’ Ken said. A body bounced off the passenger-side fender. A very tall man dressed in dusty and torn clothes shook himself and came urgently to the driver’s open window. Ken saw Jakes’s hand drift down to the gun on his hip.
‘You a cop?’ the man rasped through a hole where his front teeth should have been. Some kind of bug fell out of his hair.
‘I’m a cop,’ Jakes said warily.
‘I need to talk to you.’
‘Then talk.’ He didn’t say it in a friendly way.
‘It’s me,’ he said with a lisp through his teeth. Jakes waited. ‘I told you, it’s me.’
‘Okay, pal. What’s you?’
‘I’m the killer. The Mannequin Killer. I did it.’
‘Oh yeah? Okay, well, you go straight in there and tell the desk officer what you did. And don’t leave nothin’ out, you hear?’
The man seemed to shake all over, like a dog. Then his lips stretched back to bare his remaining teeth. And his head burst right through the open window, winding his shoulders through, grappling with Jakes, trying to force himself into the car. Ken went for the revolver on Jakes’s hip, but just as his fingers closed on it, Jakes hit the gas pedal and the car lurched forward. The dirty man was thrown clear, smacking down onto the road and rolling a couple of yards. Within seconds, the car was doing twenty.
‘You want to go back and check he’s okay?’ Ken asked, watching him in the rearview mirror. The car jumped forward again. ‘Thought not.’
* * *
They came to a sharp halt in front of the apartment building where Diane and her husband had shared a home until someone decided that Frankie Angel’s life had run its course.
There was something very different about it today, though. Most streets in Los Angeles were deserted. This one had a small crowd gathered in front. At first Ken thought they were about to face down another mob. But it wasn’t that. These people, mostly young women, had sad faces, not angry ones, and they were gathered around a small patch beside the entrance. Ken eased a few aside and looked down. A framed photograph of Frankie Angel – autographed, maybe by him but more likely by a press agent – was surrounded by candles and cheap paper flowers. A makeshift shrine to a second-rate actor.
Through the lobby, then into the elevator. Diane was gently shaking, and tears were smearing lines through her rouge. Carlos had a grim, stony face. The moment the car opened at the penthouse floor, Diane burst through between Jakes and Carlos, running to her front door with her keys in her hand, scrabbling at the lock and throwing it open. She rushed in and flicked the light switch. Nothing happened. And yet there was a glow in the room. A line of candles was burning on the floor.
