Jeff Sherratt - Detour to Murder

“Rita, cut it out. You know what I mean.”

“OK. What do you want me to do? About the Roberts case, I mean?”

I smiled inside and said, “I’ve been thinking. When it all started for Roberts, he was coming to L.A. to find some girl by the name of Sue Harvey, a singer in the New York nightclub where he played the piano. She came west to break into the movies. But get this: he said that when he finally got to town, he never spoke to her. That doesn’t sound right. Traveling all that way, then not even calling her.”

“Maybe he wanted to keep her out of it,” Rita said.

“Yeah, that’s what I think. But it’s possible she might know something that would help.”

“You want me to track her down? My God, Jimmy, that was thirty years ago.”

“Stefanie Powers could’ve found her.”

“She had better writers than I do.”

That afternoon I drove tothe Los Feliz District, near Griffith Park area. I looked in the phone book and found the name of the motor court where Vera had been murdered. To my amazement it hadn’t been torn down and replaced by one of the ubiquitous strip malls that were popping up and spreading like fungus all over the Southland. When I called the place, an elderly woman named Mrs. Hathaway answered. After introducing myself-sticking with my story about being a journalist doing a history of Los Angeles in the forties-she told me that she had owned the motor court since before World War II and had been managing it alone ever since her husband, Dink, had died in the late fifties.

“Of course I remember the murder,” she said after I asked her about that day in 1945. “How could I forget? People don’t get knocked off in one of my bungalows every day, you know. I don’t run that kind of place.”

I knew I had to take a look at the murder scene, if nothing else, to verify the facts stated in the police report. But I also knew it could turn out to be a few hours wasted. After almost thirty years there couldn’t be much about the motor court that was the same.

Dink’s Hollywood Oasis, “Comfy beds, Cool rooms,” consisted of ten separate clapboard cabins rimming a pea gravel parking lot located on Los Feliz Blvd, close to Vermont Ave. The office occupied the first cabin to the left as I turned off the boulevard into the lot.

Mrs. Hathaway stood behind a wooden counter when I entered the office. A door behind her led to her private quarters, I assumed. She had to be in her seventies and wore a high-neck dress with black and white polka dots. The shoulders were padded, giving her a broad and square posture.

I introduced myself and she started in, telling me about the beef she had with the District Attorney’s Office and cops who investigated the murder back then. “Goddamn fingerprint powder all over the place. Took hours to clean it up. Not only that, we couldn’t rent the bungalow for several days after the murder. The bastards had it all tied up. Who’s going to pay for that, I asked Dink.”

“Yeah, murder can be a problem,” I said.

“I called the authorities, told them if they don’t pay for the damages I’d sue.”

“Can you tell me anything about the murdered woman?” I asked. “Her name was Vera, but that’s all I know.”

“A tramp. Said they were married. But they didn’t fool me none. Signed the register with different last names. But hell, I didn’t care. I got money up front. The woman paid. The weasel she was with just stood there with his hands in his pocket. Playing with his pecker, for all I know. He was no good. He killed her, you know.”

“That’s what I’m trying to find out. Did you see or hear anything suspicious that day?”

“Didn’t see a thing. But that Roberts guy did it, all right. I could tell. Those eyes of his, shifty.”

“How about letting me take a look at bungalow number 2, the murder scene?”

“All right, but we’ll have to make it snappy. My weekly mah-jongg circle meets this evening.”

“Mah-jongg?”

“Yeah, our group gets together and we play mah-jongg every Friday night.”

What the hell is mah-jongg? I wondered.

“You play mah-jongg, Mr. O’Brien?”

“Just in Vegas.”

“They don’t play mah-jongg in Vegas.”

“Oh, yeah. Must’ve been roulette.”

She gave me a funny look, then grabbed a key from a hook on the wall. We marched across the parking lot and entered the bungalow. Stepping into the living room, I glanced around. The room was clean but musty. The furniture consisted of a well-worn couch, coffee table, and two overstuffed armchairs. A couple of generic still-life prints hung on the walls.

“Sure is hot and stuffy in here,” Mrs. Hathaway said as she opened the window looking out at the parking lot. She turned and pointed to the right. “Kitchenette.” Then she nodded toward a door facing us. “That’s the bedroom,” she said in a low voice.

We both remained silent for a moment.

I noticed a telephone with a rotary dial and a long cord resting on a small end table placed close to the door.

“They say she’d been strangled with the telephone cord,” Mrs. Hathaway said.

“That’s the way it looked in the crime scene photos, but actually, there were bruises on her throat that indicated someone had strangled her with his bare hands.”

Opening the bedroom door, I slipped in quietly and surveyed the room; a double bed covered with a thin bedspread and a dressing table with a hinged mirror were the only pieces of furniture present. As Vera died, blood had seeped from her mouth onto the bedspread, but I didn’t see any stains on the bed, only in my mind.

“Everything’s almost the same,” Mrs. Hathaway said from the other room.

I turned, “What did you say, Mrs. Hathaway?” She had a solemn look on her face.

“Not much has changed since that day. New sheets and blankets. That’s about it.” She sounded a little down, like her past was catching up with her.

“Yeah, human nature hasn’t changed much either.”

The murder occurred in the forties, no credit cards in those days; everything was paid for in cash or by check. “When she registered, she didn’t happen to pay for the bungalow with a check, did she?”

She gave me one of those oh brother looks that my ex-wife had perfected during our short but memorable marriage. “Afraid not. In God we trust, all others pay cash.”

“Yeah, I guess it was a dumb question,” I said.

“Dink was the dumb one. He didn’t get a deposit for all those phone calls she made.”

“Phone calls?”

“That woman made a lot of calls, long distance. Roberts skipped, didn’t pay up. But I included the charges in my lawsuit.”

“You sued the county?” I asked.

“Yeah. At first the assholes in the DA’s office just laughed, but I collected. You’d better believe it. Dink said just let it go. But I showed him. The bastards coughed up the dough-ray-me. Took a little time, but they paid.”

“What about the phone calls? How many did she make?”

“You sure ask a lot of questions.”

“Just trying to get the facts straight. You don’t happen to know who she called, do you?”

“How could I remember names from thirty years ago?” she asked.

“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” I turned to leave. There was nothing here that would provide any information that wasn’t already in the arrest report.

“Have the phone numbers, though.”

I turned back. “What?”

“I kept the phone bill, over a hundred dollars. Kept receipts of everything that I’d included in my lawsuit.”

My heart raced. “You kept all that stuff for almost thirty years?”

“When they paid up, Dink said I’d better keep everything. Said they might want to see the proof someday.”