Clandestine

Walt Kraus pointed to a chair. "We don't know," he said. "We'd like to. Floyd and I were on the case from the beginning. Johnny was a beast, a nice-guy beast, don't get me wrong, but seven feet tall? Three hundred pounds? That's a beast. The guy who cut him had to be a worse beast. Johnny's stomach was torn open from rib cage to belly button. Jesus!"

"Suspects?" I asked.

Floyd Lutz answered me: "DeVries pushed morphine. More correctly, he gave it away. He was a soft touch. He could never stay in business for long. He'd always wind up on skid row, sleeping in the park, passing out handbills and selling his blood like the other derelicts. He was a nice, passive guy most of the time, used to hand out free morph to the poor bastards on skid who had got hooked during the war. Floyd and me and most of the other cops did our best not to roust him, but sometimes we had to: when he got mad he was the meanest animal I've ever seen. He'd wreck bars and overturn cars, bust heads and fill skid row with dread. He was a terror. Walt and I figure his killer was either some bimbo on the row he beat up or some dope pusher who didn't like a soft touch on his turf. We checked out every major and minor known heroin and morph pusher from Milwaukee to Chi. Nada. We went back over Johnny's rap sheet and checked out the victims in every assault beef he ever had—over thirty guys. Most of them were transients. We ran makes on them all over the Midwest. Eight of them were in jail—Kentucky to Michigan. We talked to all of them—nothing. We talked to every skid row deadbeat who wasn't too fucked up on Sweet Lucy to talk. We sobered up the ones who were too fucked up. Nothing. Nothing all the way down the line."

"Physical evidence?" I asked. "ME's report?"

Lutz sighed. "Nothing. Cause of death a severed spinal cord or shock or massive loss of blood, take your pick. The coroner said that Big John wasn't fucked-up on morph when he was sliced—that was surprising. That was why Walt and I figured the guy who sliced him had to be a beast or a friend of Johnny's—someone who knew him. Anyone who could slice a guy like that when he was sober had to be a monster."

"Did Johnny have any friends?" I asked.

"Only one," Lutz said. "A chemistry teacher at Marquette. Was. He's a wino now. He and Johnny used to get drunk together on the row. The guy was nutso. Used to teach a semester, then take off a semester and go on a bender. The priests at Marquette finally got sick of it and gave him the heave-ho. He's probably still on skid; the last time I saw him he was sniffing gasoline in front of the Jesus Saves Mission." Lutz shook his head.

"What was the guy's name?" I asked.

Lutz looked to Kraus and shrugged. Kraus screwed his face into a memory search. "Melveny? Yeah, that's it—George 'The Professor' Melveny, George 'The Gluebird' Melveny. He's got a dozen skid row monickers."

"Last known address?" I queried.

Kraus and Lutz laughed in unison.

"Park bench," Kraus said.

"Slit trench," Lutz rhymed.

"No dough."

"Skid row." This sent the two detectives into gales of laughter.

"I get the picture," I said. "Let me ask you something: where did a skid row bum like Johnny DeVries get morphine?"

"Well," Floyd Lutz said, "he was a pharmacist by trade, before the dope got him. I always figured he was using George 'The Gluebird's' lab to make the shit. We checked it out once; no go. Beats me where he got the stuff. Johnny was kind of formidable in a lot of ways; you got the impression that maybe he was hot stuff once." Lutz shook his head again, and looked at Kraus, who shook his, too.

I sighed. "I need a favor," I said.

"Name it," Kraus said. "Any pal of Will Berglund's is a friend of mine."

"Thanks, Walt. Look, Will told me that maybe Johnny DeVries and his sister were involved in a drug robbery at the naval hospital in Long Beach, California, during the war. They were both stationed there. Could you call the provost marshal's office there at the hospital? A request from an official police agency might carry some weight. I'm just an insurance investigator—they won't give me the time of day. I—"

Lutz interrupted me. "Are you fishing in the same stream as us, Underhill?"

"All the way. A big load of morph was stolen, I know that, and that would explain where Johnny got the stuff he was pushing."

Kraus and Lutz looked at each other. "Use the phone in the skipper's office," Lutz said.

Kraus jumped up from his desk and walked to a cubicle partitioned off and festooned with Milwaukee Braves' pennants.

"All the particulars, Walt," Lutz called after him.

"Gotcha!" Kraus returned.

I looked at Lutz and popped my next request: "Could I see DeVries's rap sheet?"

He nodded and went to a bank of filing cabinets at the far end of the squad room. He fumbled around in them for five minutes, finally extracting a file and returning to me.

I was getting nervous. Kraus had been on the telephone a long time, and it was only 6:00 A.M. in L.A. His protracted conversation at that hour struck me as ominous.