gotten out of the tub to play the record, then went back in.” Jack dug a fingernail into the worn wooden table in front of him. “The blood could’ve been from any time.”
Gertie reached across the table. She put her hand under Jack’s chin and lifted his glance to meet hers. “Her bathrobe had blood and snot all over the front lapels. If you die naked in a tub, you don’t bleed on your bathrobe.”
Jack’s eyes followed a stream of cigarette smoke snaking its way up to the dark rafters.
“Plus,” Gertie said, “I talked to the neighbors.”
“And?”
Gertie reached into her purse. She pulled out a few sheets of paper. They’d been folded in half and in half again. She passed them to Jack. “This is what I think happened, based on everything I could find and what everyone who would talk to me told me.”
The paper was worn soft. It felt almost like a handkerchief. The typed letters looked to be pressed down by carbon, not ink. A copy. Gertie probably kept the original back at her place. Some of the letters along the folds had been worn away. Jack lit his hand-rolled cigarette. He took a deep drag, made a slow exhale. He angled the paper into a pool of light and read Gertie’s story.
It was too much. Too sudden. Jack could read some of the words, even make meaning out of some of them. Mostly, they were just squiggles on the page. More than he could take right now. He pretended to read and thought of the bruises Gertie had seen, imagined some tony bastard choking the life out of his Wilma. It’s peacetime, he told himself again. Hold it together.
“Nice story,” he said. He folded the pages and stuffed them into the inside pocket of his jacket. “You write like Dashiell Hammett. You should be a novelist.”
“This isn’t about my writing.”
Jack nodded. “So you think she was murdered.”
“Of course she was murdered, Jackie.”
Jack felt the weight of the Springfield on one side of his coat and the weight of Gertie’s story on the other. “And who was the man?”
Gertie pushed her empty plate aside and leaned her elbows on the table. She looked over Jack’s right shoulder as if she were hoping to find someone there who was entirely smarter and more reasonable than her former brother-in-law. “If I knew that, I’d do something about it.”
Jack pulled his uneaten sandwich closer. He wrapped it back up in its wax paper and stuck the whole thing in his outside jacket pocket. She must’ve tried to do something, Jack figured. Nearly two years had passed. Gertie must have followed trails until she was scared or bullied off. Jack would try to get that part of the story later.
He said, “Let’s say she was murdered. Just for the sake of argument, let’s say that.” He rubbed the back of his neck, felt the tension in his taut muscles. “Then what?”
Gertie burned into Jack with her blue eyes. “Then you find out who did it.”
“I find out who did it? Me?”
“Why not you? You were a cop.”
“I was a shitty cop. I never investigated anything.”
“You know the right people. You can get into the right places, find some answers.”
“I knew people. I don’t know them anymore.”
“Of course you still know them.”
“It’s been too long. Everyone thinks I’m dead.” He thought, but didn’t add, I’m mostly inclined to believe them.
“Excuses, Jack. You’re just giving me excuses.”
Jack shook his head. “I’m not sure what you want from me. I don’t know what you think I can do.”
Gertie stubbed out her cigarette and tapped her bun to make sure every hair was in place. “You can find the bastard who killed your wife, Jack.”
He took stock on the red car home. For two of the past three years, he’d been in a POW camp in Germany. There were also the months he spent alone behind the lines in Germany, and the months he spent after the camp, trying to make it home. The Army paid him a lump sum for those years. It wasn’t a fortune, but it was enough money to give him time to think. He didn’t want to go back to the force. He was no cop and he knew it.
He could’ve taken over his father’s PI business, but he was even less of a dick than a cop. And his father never really investigated anything. The old man had spent a life as a hired thug. Not much more.
The PI license was still around the house on Meridian Street. Same name as Jack’s, only missing the junior. Jack Senior wouldn’t be using it anymore. Like almost everyone else, he’d died while Jack was in Germany.
A baby in the back of the interurban screamed out. Her mother cooed and held the child close. Jack looked at the little boy swaddled in a blanket, snot dripping from his nose, spit gathering around his mouth as he screamed. Jack looked at the mother, with loose strands of hair falling onto her face and dried mucus smeared on her shoulder. A thought flashed across his mind before he could tuck it away: I dropped a bomb on that baby. That baby and his mom. He glanced around the car, saw men in factory blues, mechanics with motor oil wedged in the cracks of their skin, seamstresses with that sewing squint, maids and men in business suits, and women with bags of groceries. I killed the German equivalent of every one of them, Jack thought. I killed them all and slept through the night.
The next thought Jack didn’t want to think but couldn’t keep from bubbling up was this: wartime and Germany and Nazi soldiers weren’t the only things that drove him to kill. The war had taught him that most people can’t kill another person. Even when soldiers are getting shot at, even when their lives are on the line, most can’t shoot back. Or, really, they can shoot back, but they subconsciously shoot high or low or wide. Most men can’t shoot to kill. Most humans can’t kill other humans. But some can. For whatever reason. And Jack was one of those people who could. So it wasn’t that he didn’t want to find out what happened to Wilma. It wasn’t that he didn’t want her killer to pay. He just feared the horror show once he did find out. He wanted the killing to stop. For the rest of his life.
Jack pulled out his packet of tobacco and started to roll a cigarette. Small routines helped.
He’d have to find ways to keep his thoughts in check if he was going to look for the man who murdered Wilma.
WILMA, 1943
WILMA HADN’T INTENDED to throw such a party. Gertie stopped by with one of her pals from the studio, a wardrobe girl named Ethel. Ethel had a bottle of red. Wilma poured three glasses. They sat on the dusty chintz love-seat and matching chintz chairs that came with Wilma’s new bungalow on 243½ Newland Street. Conversation drifted everywhere it could as long as it avoided the war. Less than a month earlier, two Air Force officers—one a chaplain—had showed up on the doorstep of Wilma’s then-apartment in Los Feliz to deliver the bad news that Jack’s plane had been shot down over Germany. “There were no survivors,” the chaplain told Wilma. As if she couldn’t take the next logical step from that one, the chaplain made it perfectly clear. “Your husband, Sergeant John Chesley, was killed in action.”
Wilma didn’t want to talk about it anymore. All she’d done for the past month and a half was talk about it. She asked Ethel, “Any new talent over there at Republic?”
“Oh, honey, is there!” Ethel said. “We have this new dreamboat on contract. Tom Gutierrez. He’s a Mex but you wouldn’t know it to see him. All you’d know about is those deep, dark eyes. A woman could get lost in those.”
“He is a handsome fellow,” Gertie said.
“Honey, handsome ain’t the word. That lug walks on