Chapter 3
In the Hollywood precinct, a short, plump detective in his early forties, wearing a Panama, rose from a battered desk and studied an area map on the wall. The map of the Hollywood area had two red pins in it. Lieutenant Mike Bishop glanced impatiently at his watch. Almost one o'clock. Trask should be back any minute. If there was any new stuff on prowlers in the Hollywood area during the lunch hour, he'd have it. He glanced moodily out the window at the quiet, sunny street.
No matter how much he tried, he could never completely accept Los Angeles, and he wondered why for the thousandth time, since he had left Brooklyn. Was it because his wife, Helen, was so overboard about southern California? Or the sameness of the weather? Sometimes he felt that if he did not escape occasionally to the cool darkness of a bar just to get out of the damned sun, he'd go nuts. He was homesick for Brooklyn again. He could tell when he was really homesick. His consumption of chopped liver and hot pastrami at Cantor's Delicatessen soared. It was the only place in town that reminded him of the sawdust-filled pastrami palaces of his old neighborhood.
Maybe it was just that he was fed up with working on prowler hunts. Sometimes it seemed as if he had been chasing nothing but sex offenders since he quit the New York police. You could get type cast in a police job, too, he thought bitterly. Every time he tried to get one of the cushy bodyguard details-like squiring a VIP around town, a job where you floated from a plush suite at the Beverly-Hilton to the Sunset Strip-somebody in the Chief's office always nominated him for a prowler detail.
Bishop looked angrily at the area map.
And what the hell could he do? Right now some bastard off his rocker was in that tangle of streets, climbing into bed with some terrified woman or ripping at her flesh, and there was not a goddamned thing he could do. He had been working on the damned case for a week-night and day without a smell of a clue. He was helpless.
He heard the door open and close behind his back and the firm quick step of a newcomer who headed straight for the desk. Bishop closed his eyes. The only guy who entered a room like that was Larry Davis-the crime genius of the Los Angeles Chronicle. It was time for Davis' daily application of the needle and he readied himself.
"What's the poop, Lieutenant?" the voice behind him asked pleasantly. Bishop turned and saw the tall, lanky reporter shuffling through several glossy photographs.
"Put those down, Larry," Bishop said wearily. "They're not for publication."
"Who's this babe?" the reporter said.
He showed the detective a pretty girl in a pair of the scantiest black lace panties imaginable.
There were several other photographs on the desk. Girls-pretty girls with long legs, fleshy thighs and firm breasts-all wearing black lace panties.
"Wipe your lips and stop drooling," Bishop said, taking the pictures.
Davis grinned at him, a puckish twinkle in his blue eyes.
"My mother told me this was no job for a clean-living boy. You know, just about the time I went to journalism school in Chicago, she'd been frightened by several novels about reporters who got shot at by gangsters."
The phone rang shrilly.
"Lieutenant Bishop," the short detective said. A moment later he sighed into the phone.
"All right, Irish, come on in out of the beautiful California sunshine. Or better still, go on to Cantor's Delicatessen. We'll have lunch there and talk."
The detective's face suddenly flushed a deep red color as he listened.
"So, what the hell's wrong with chopped liver? Aren't you sick of eating that damned pizza all the time? Where the hell does an Irishman get this mad passion for pizza? It's un-Irish. You must have insanity in the family somewhere. You live on the damned stuff."
As he said it, the words burned him. In his pleasure at the rough exchange with his sidekick, Sergeant Trask, he occasionally forgot that insanity was a painful word with the Irishman. For years, Trask had mothered a nephew who had been discharged from the service as a psychoneurotic.
"All right, Al," he said in a milder voice, "come in here. I guess I ought to wait another half-hour anyhow. There may still be a report from a patrol car cruising the area."
"How many attacks does that make so far?" Davis asked gently, when the detective had hung up.
"Three," Bishop said wearily. "How many times do you want me to tell you? Three. All women in their twenties."
"I'm sorry, Mike," Davis said. "But this is a hot story and I'm trying to work it up into copy. This is my bread and butter."
"For Christ's sake, it's just another prowler story."
"No, it's not, Mike. You ever hear of prowlers operating at noon?"
The short detective scrutinized the lanky reporter with his brown eyes. "There's no law says that prowlers have to operate at any special hour."
"Maybe not," Davis said affably. "But it makes a hell of a good headline: PROWLER AT NOON."
"Oh, God," Bishop said, looking upwards.
"And what makes it more interesting is that they've taken the best prowler-catcher of them all off a rackets investigation," Davis said.
"My wife doesn't think that's interesting," the Lieutenant growled. "She's threatened to divorce me unless I tell them I'm not going on any more prowler hunts."
The reporter's eyes widened. "Can I use that?"
"You do and I'll bash your brains in."
"Okay, okay," Larry Davis said. "I gotta try all angles. Look, give me some kind of an angle, for Pete's sake. I've used the calm peaceful neighborhood slant twice now. Do you have any better description of this guy? I mean other than that he's tall and wears glasses. Hell, that could be a million guys. He even looks like me."
Bishop studied his features and frowned.
"That's right, he does. Maybe you're the prowler. Maybe you're going around doing this to scare up a story. How the hell do I know?"
Davis looked at him in a funny way.
"Are you serious?" he asked slowly.
"About you being the prowler?" Bishop scowled. "I wish you were, you goddamned scavanger. But I doubt it. You probably get all the sex you want from these dumb mid-western dolls who come out here to break into the movies. Look, do me a favor and run, huh, Larry? I got calls to make."
Davis did not move.
"You mean he really looks like me?" he asked again.
"He could. Why?"
"Nothing," Davis said, smiling brightly. "Nothing. I just got an idea for a story, that's all."
He turned to the phone. "Can I just call the desk, Mike?"
"No," Bishop roared. "Use the pay phone outside. That phone's paid with taxpayers' money."
"Just this once, Mike," Davis said, and began dialing as he always did when Bishop bellowed his refusal. He was on the phone for fifteen minutes.
"You'd better hurry, Mike," he said, when he had hung up. "Ten women called this morning to ask for action. All from the Hollywood area the rapes occurred in. They're getting panicky up there. Say the police aren't doing anything."
The door opened to admit a tall, young, rawboned plainclothesman with a round, pink face and brilliant red hair.
"Who isn't doing aything?" he asked in a booming voice. "I should have known it'd be you, Davis. What are you writing today-a bird's-eye view of how sex works in Hollywood?"
Davis reddened. "I got a better yarn, Trask," he said. "I'm going to do a take off on the newest method of scientific detection in Hollywood."
"What's that, pray tell?" the tall Irishman asked politely.
"It's brand new. A clear beat over Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and Mike Hammer," Davis said impishly. "The team of Bishop and Trask solves its cases by sifting all the available clues in the spice-filled, pungent atmosphere of Cantor's Delicatessen."
"Get out of here, Larry," Bishop said, warningly.
"As the magnificent scent of hot pastrami wafts toward the sensitive nostrils of the two beagles," Larry intoned, "the clouded crystal ball becomes clear. Lieutenant Michael Bishop, prowler hunter supreme of the Hollywood precinct, says, 'Quick, Trask, the mustard,' and all goes well. Another case solved."
"Get out of here," Bishop said, with dead seriousness.
"Let him alone," Trask said, laughing. The Irish detective's heavy jowls shook with amusement. "He's only telling the truth."
"Go on, Larry," Bishop said, smiling. "If you ever get tired of newswork, you can can that humor and use it to sour milk. You'd be great in a yogurt factory."