June, 1949

The bottle of Bourbon on my desk was three-quarters empty. The sun was still high above the "Hollywoodland" sign. My hands weren’t shaking yet but there was a hum in my nerves that only the hot amber liquid could silence. It was a familiar ritual. One drink to forget the body, two to forget the morgue and three to forget I worked for a man like Lieutenant Briggs.

The door creaked open, admitting an unwelcome slice of light. Morales came in, sweating through his linen suit, his face a mask of weary disgust. He looked at the bottle, then at me.

"We got another one, Jack. Laurel Canyon. Just off the fire road."

In this job, ‘another one’ never meant a winning lottery ticket. It meant someone was getting fitted for a toe-tag. I reached for the bottle one last time, but Morales put a hand on my wrist. His grip was a silent plea. I yanked my arm away, wiped my mouth with the back of a hand and grabbed my hat.

"I'm fine." The room tilted for a second before righting itself. "Let’s go see what the city spat up this time."

We drove up the winding roads of the canyon in Morales’s battered Chevy. Every turn made my stomach roll, the bourbon sloshing around like bilge water in a sinking ship. I put a stick of chewing gum in my mouth and bit down on it every time the bile rose.

The crime scene was lit up in stark relief by the harsh afternoon sunlight. Briggs was already there, leaning against a black Cadillac, polishing his designer wing-tips with a silk handkerchief. He pointed at a uniform. "Keep the press back, dammit. I’ve got dinner at Musso & Frank’s later and I don't want to be late."

He watched me stumble out of the car, a cruel smirk playing on his lips.

"Careful, Delaney." Briggs spoke loud enough for the uniforms to hear. "The ground’s level, even if your head isn’t. If you puke on my crime scene, you’re suspended."

I ignored him. Bile rising in my throat again, I followed Morales down a small deer trail to a patch of dirt, framed by two scrub oaks. The evidence techs were standing in a circle around the body, taking photos.

She was bound in a way that made my skin crawl. It was an intricate web of hemp, tied with obsessive precision. Arms pulled behind her back, fastened at the wrists and elbows. Her knees were bent back, ankles tied together and cinched to her thighs. A slip-noose was pulled tightly around her neck and connected to a low hanging branch. The ropes were so tight they’d cut into her skin.

She wore heavy makeup. Tears had caused mascara to run down her cheeks in black rivers. Tape completely covered her mouth, the heavy-duty kind used to secure ammo boxes in the field during the war. Her blonde hair was matted and damp. She was dressed in only a pale blue slip. If the noose didn’t indicate strangulation, then the burst capillaries in her wide-open eyes did.

"Look at this, Jack." Morales pointed to the ground while avoiding looking at the stiff. In the soft dirt, three circular indentations formed a perfect triangle. "Just like the other three dump sites."

"You still think those marks indicate a tripod--"

Lieutenant Briggs' voice came from behind, derailing my train of thought. "Handle this quietly. No headlines. No heroics."

His voice had the low, dangerous rumble of a man who knew the cost of loose lips in this town.

He'd done the same thing on the Orchid Girl case six months earlier—a quiet burial of a starlet’s body to keep the scandal from hitting the studios.

I looked at Briggs. "Like the 'Orchid Girl', Lieutenant. That kinda quiet?"

Briggs leaned over, the smell of his pomade filling my nose. "You keep poking that bruise and you’re going to find yourself walking a beat on the skids. Is that clear?"

"Crystal."

I stumbled into the office early the next morning and poured a cup of coffee thick enough to cut with a jack-knife. The night-watch boys like it strong and I needed to be brought back from the dead. The desk Sergeant glared at me in the break room.

"Is it a special occasion, Delaney? I’ve never seen you crawl out from under your bottle this early before."

"You spoiling for a fight, Leo?"

"You’re so hungover you couldn’t punch your way out of a wet paper sack."

"Get lost, knucklehead."

We squared off but Morales stepped in.

"Leo, leave him alone. Jack, come with me." He grabbed my arm and dragged me to the squad-room like you'd drag a whining child away from a toy display.

"Doc Sterling’s office called. The medical exam of 'Laurel Canyon Jane Doe' is scheduled for this afternoon." Morales laid a reassuring hand on my shoulder. "You know I'm no good when it comes to that morgue stuff. You need to pull yourself together."

"I’ll have it together by this afternoon."

"No booze, not until the autopsy is over. Hell, I may join you for a slug after."

The heat made the asphalt feel like it was turning back into liquid. Ready to return to the La Brea pits. Stepping into the basement of City Hall usually felt like stepping into a tomb, but today, the chill of the morgue was the only thing keeping my shirt from sticking to my ribs. I wiped a bead of sweat from my temple with my handkerchief and stepped up to the exam table. Morales looked pale. He never did well with the dead ones.

"You’re early for once, Detective." Doc Sterling was a thin man with sharp features and glasses that always seemed to be sliding down his nose. "I suppose even you can’t stand the sun today."

The girl on the table couldn’t have been older than nineteen. In the harsh light of the exam room, she looked made of pale marble. The only color on her was the deep, brutal purple ring around her throat and the angry red welts on her wrists, ankles and thighs.

"The time of death was sometime between midnight and six am." Sterling tapped his pen against the metal table. "Ligature strangulation. The hyoid bone is fractured and the petechial hemorrhaging in the eyes is extensive. The killer used a rough-textured cord, likely the same one that was cinched around her neck. But it’s the way she was secured that’s unusual."

Sterling turned to a side tray where a length of rope had been set aside. It had been cut off during the exam but the knots themselves were still tight and intact. They looked like a tangled puzzle of loops and tucks.

"The contorted position combined with the tension of the rope would have caused extreme discomfort. Maybe even excruciating pain if she was left that way long enough."

Morales stepped closer, his eyes narrowing. His jaw tightened as he stared at the rope. "Doc, let me see that."

He leaned over the tray, his fingers tracing the coarse fibers without touching them. "This isn’t just a knot, Jack. This is a Rolling Hitch finished with a Spanish Bowline."

I spent the war in the South Pacific. He’d spent the war on The USS Indiana before pinning on the badge. I looked at the rope mess and then my partner.

"Forget the names. What does that mean?"

"It’s maritime work." Morales looked at me, grim face. "These aren't the kind of knots you use to tie a suitcase to the roof of a car. These are designed for heavy tension in high winds. The Spanish Bowline creates two permanent loops that won't slip, no matter how much the load, or the girl, pulls against them."

The precision of the knots spoke volumes, a chilling form of signature.

My tongue felt thick. ‘Meaning the bastard knows exactly what he’s doing, and he’s been doing it long enough for the knots to be second nature.’

I looked back at 'Jane Doe'. The image of her struggling against knots designed to hold down tons of freight made the room feel even colder.

"So we’re looking for someone who knows his way around a deck." The weight of the case settled into my gut. “We’re not looking for some drifter or a jealous boyfriend."

I turned back to Sterling. "Anything else, Doc?"

Dr. Sterling didn’t look up from his clipboard. "Just that he was efficient. He knew exactly how much pressure it took. He strangled her to the point of unconsciousness several times before she finally died. This could have gone on for hours."

"Any signs of sexual assault?"

"None of the usual signs. No hemorrhaging or vaginal or anal tears. I took swabs but they’re still pending. That doesn’t mean that the repetitive strangling wasn’t a sexual ritual though."

"Do you think the same creep did the other three ‘Jane Does’?"

"It’s highly probable because all the victims were bound and strangled. The women were all young blondes. It’s a very specific calling card. Unfortunately I no longer have the ligatures used in the other murders for comparison. A detective from Central Division picked up the evidence last night."

I snorted derisively, reaching for my hat and settling it low on my brow. The heat outside was waiting for us, but the docks were going to be even worse. With thousands of sailors coming off the merchant ships, we had just been handed a map with no landmarks.

The sun was beating down on us like a white-hot hammer by the time we reached the Port of Los Angeles. A shimmering wall of diesel, rotting fish and hot tar greeted us. We hit the harbor-master’s office first, a cramped sweltering box that accentuated the smell of dead fish and caused my bile to rise once again.

The clerk didn’t even look up from his fan. He pushed a list of arrivals toward us that was three pages long. Half the world had docked in the last forty-eight hours. Dutch tankers, British freighters and enough local fishing boats to carpet the Pacific.

"Searching for a sailor in this mess?" The clerk wheezed, his shirt stained yellow at the pits. "That’s like looking for a drop of water in the ocean, Detective."

We moved on to the canneries. The noise was a deafening roar of machinery and steam whistles. I showed Jane Doe’s photo to a foreman with hands permanently stained red from the tuna line. He barely glanced at it, shouting over the din.

"Doesn’t look familiar. Half the girls in San Pedro come here looking for work or boyfriends. If she wasn’t on the clock, she didn’t exist."

By 5:00 p.m., we were leaning against the fender of the Chevy, watching a crew unload crates of pineapples. Morales looked defeated. His shoulders slumped.

"I’ve talked to two dozen deckhands, Jack." He tipped his hat back to let his forehead breathe. "They all say the same thing. Those knots? Anyone who has served in Merchant Marine or the Navy knows them. Doesn’t narrow it down. It just reminds us how many of them there are."

I lit a cigarette, and the smoke tasted like ash. A group of sailors sat on some pylons fifty yards away, laughing and passing a bottle in the shade of a warehouse. One of them was fiddling with a piece of twine, looping it absentmindedly through his fingers.

It was an economy of movement, a knowledge of rope that went past work and into instinct.

His movements were practiced, almost unconscious—the kind of fine motor skill born of long hours at sea, not a hobby in a Hollywood apartment.

"Every one of ’em has muscle memory, don’t they?"

Morales sighed.

The docks weren’t giving up a thing. No one saw her, no one knew her and the man who killed her could have been on a ship that cleared the breakwater before the sun even came up."

After four hours pounding the pavement, the precinct was a pressure cooker. The sound of twenty different typewriters clattering at once sounded like a firing squad. I was sitting at my desk, my tie undone and my shirt collar damp, staring at the empty coffee cup in front of me. Thousands of sailors, miles of rope and not a single witness who remembered a girl with a pretty face. I wanted a slug of bourbon like a drowning man wants air.

"Jack, we got something." Morales came charging through the bull-pen, weaving around desks. He held a manila folder in one hand and a black-and-white 8x10 in the other. He didn't look defeated anymore.

"From Missing Persons?" I sat up.

"Match confirmed ten minutes ago." Morales dropped the photo onto my desk. "Her name was Iris Vance. Nineteen years old. Came out here six months ago from Ohio."

The photo wasn't a mugshot or a driver's license picture. It was a professional headshot. The kind thousands of girls carried around in their handbags, hoping to catch the eye of a casting director. She was smiling, her blonde hair curled in perfect waves, a string of faux pearls around her neck.

In the photo, she looked like she owned the world. On Sterling’s table, she didn’t even own her breath.

"Iris Vance, what was she doing down near the canneries?"

"She wasn’t." Morales leaned over my desk. "She was living in a rooming house on Yucca Street, right off Hollywood Boulevard. Her roommate got worried when Iris didn’t come home from her shift at the drugstore. She told the uniform that Iris was ‘this close’ to her big break."

"They all are. What else does the missing person’s report say?"

"A photographer." Morales pointed to a note scribbled on the edge of the folder. "According to the roommate, Iris had a session scheduled three nights ago. Some guy who promised her a spread in Modern Screen. A guy who told her he had a 'unique' nautical theme in mind for the shoot."

I felt a cold prickle on the back of my neck that had nothing to do with the office fans. "A nautical theme."

"The roommate didn’t get a name, but she said Iris was excited. Said the guy had a studio near the Sunset Strip."

I grabbed my fedora and stood, the chair screeching against the linoleum. "So he brings the docks to Hollywood. He uses ropes, he ties up the girls he wants. If this guy is 'casting' for a model, he’s probably already looking for her replacement."

For the next week, Morales and I hit every "Poverty Row" studio on Gower Street, talking to the bottom-feeders who promised young girls fame for the price of their dignity. The pattern was emerging. The killer seemed to be the kind of man who sat in the back of diners, nursing a single cup of coffee for hours, watching the girls who hopped off the Greyhound bus from Wherever, USA.

"He’s playing a part." We sat in a stakeout car outside a modeling agency. "He’s a 'professional photographer.' He offers them a portfolio. He tells them he’s got an 'in' at one of the studios. He’s small, non-threatening. They feel safe."

We were getting nowhere fast. I wondered if I should ask at Victory Studios. I wondered if Howard Kleinfeld could be involved. I called his office and his secretary told me Kleinfeld was out of town. On location in Monaco for the last two months and not due back for two more weeks. Not exactly an airtight alibi but I didn't have any real proof or even a thin hunch to go on. Talking to Kleinfeld would be a dead end. Briggs would have another reason to give me grief.

I found myself at The Frolic Room, staring into a glass as if it held the secrets to the case. I thought about the killer. I knew his type. He was a man who felt small, so he used rope and a camera to feel big. I was a man who felt too much, so I used a bottle to feel nothing. We were both chasing ghosts in the dark.

Morales found me there at midnight. He took the glass out of my hand and set it on the bar.

"You’re falling apart, Jack." He spoke softly. "Briggs is looking for any excuse to pull your badge. If you’re drunk, you’re helping him."

"I see them when I close my eyes."

"Then keep your eyes open. And stay sober enough to find the bastard who did it."

Leads were few. Witnesses were as plentiful as snowmen in June. We went over all the creep files from Vice. We looked for a shitbird with a naval background and a bondage kink. Whenever we approached a possible suspect, Briggs was there. The investigation was being stifled from within.

I went to Briggs' office in Central. He was giving orders to one of his cronies. When he saw me he swiftly waved the crony away. I came in hot, a slug of bourbon warming my already over-heated body.

"You’re burying the Iris Vance investigation, why?"

Briggs' eyes narrowed. "If the public thinks there’s a wolf in the fold, the studios lose money. When the studios lose money, I lose my retirement fund."

"I hope you retire to a cell in San Quentin."

The break came from a girl named Rita Legasse. She reported an assault. The report came across my desk from Leo of all people. It seemed like a solid lead. I had Morales call the girl and arrange a meeting. But not at the Precinct. She agreed to meet us at a diner on Figueroa. She sat in the booth, her hands shaking so hard the water in her glass looked like a storm at sea. My own hands were twitching in my pockets, the withdrawal starting to bite.

"Thanks for meeting with us, Miss Legasse."

"I want you to get the crumb who put his mitts on me." She was an artificial platinum blonde. No older than her early twenties with a cartoonish high-pitched voice.

"Please, tell us everything that happened, Miss Legasse." Morales was laying it on thick.

"I met him at Schwab's lunch counter." She snapped her chewing gum and I caught a whiff of mint. "He said I had the 'look' of a star and wanted to hire me for a shoot. Gave me this."

She slid a business card across the table. It had a simple, elegant font. George Steiner – Fine Art & Fashion. No address and a number I recognized as a message drop in Hollywood.

"What kind of photoshoot did he want to hire you for?"

"Said he needed a model for a detective magazine cover-shoot. It sounded aces until he said he would have to tie me up like a ‘damsel in distress’."

Morales and I looked at each other.

"The whole thing seemed screwy to me so I decided to leave. That’s when he started choking me."

She pulled down her collar. The bruises still looked fresh.

"Then what happened?"

"Well, my daddy, god rest his soul, told me 'Rita, if a man ever puts his hands on you, kick him right in the goose-eggs,' so I did."

"Did you notice anything else about your attacker?"

"Yeah, he had "HOLD FAST" tattooed across his knuckles."

Morales's eyes went wide. He leaned over and whispered in my ear. "Navy ink."

"Are you willing to testify to this in court, Rita?"

She snapped her chewing gum. "Yeah."

I looked at Morales. "Sounds like probable cause to me."

We didn't wait for a warrant and we didn't tell Briggs. Instead I went to R&I and quietly inquired about George Steiner. He had a rap sheet stretching back to Pearl Harbor. Assault. Indecent exposure. He was arrested in '42 for aggravated statutory. The judge gave him a choice, military service or the can. He enlisted in The Navy and served as Enlisted Naval Correspondent. Meaning he took pictures of the war for Uncle Sam.

Steiner lived in the basement of a crumbling Victorian near Bunker Hill. The air in the hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and damp wood. As we kicked in the door, the first thing that hit us was the red light. The air was thick with the smell of acetic acid. The whole apartment was a darkroom.

Steiner was small, mousy, wearing a cardigan that looked like it belonged to a grandfather. He was holding a camera.

"You’re late." Steiner’s voice was a thin whistle. "The light is fading."

Morales went to search the bedroom. I moved toward Steiner, and for a second, the room spun. I was overdue for my 5 o'clock drink which I usually had at 10am. The red light turned into a crimson fog. I reached for my cuffs, but my fingers felt like lead. Steiner saw the tremor in my hand and smiled. It wasn't a monster's grin. It was the smile of a man who recognized a fellow traveler in the dark.

The urge to crumble was a physical weight, heavier than the gun on my hip.

I felt the desperate, sweating plea of every nerve ending crying out for relief, but I forced the moment down.

"I have some whiskey in the kitchen, Detective. It helps the focus."

The insult of his sympathy cleared my head. I slammed him against the wall, the camera clattered to the floor. I didn’t use the cuffs. Just held him there, feeling his pathetic, frantic heartbeat.

The basement apartment on Bunker Hill didn’t just hold a killer. It held a meticulously indexed library of human suffering. While Morales kept Steiner pinned against the water-stained wallpaper, I forced myself to look. I needed to see what the bottle had been helping me ignore.

The evidence wasn't just physical. It was a psychological map of a man who saw the world through a viewfinder, stripped of all human empathy. Clotheslines stretched across the room from wall to wall like a spider web. Hanging from them, held by silver clips, were hundreds of photographs.

Against the far wall stood a heavy steel filing cabinet, out of place in the squalid room. I jerked the top drawer open. It didn't groan, but rather slid open with the oiled silent smoothness of something frequently used. Inside were dozens of manila envelopes, each labeled with a date and a location.

I pulled one out. It was marked "Blue Dress - Griffith Park - Oct '47". The photos were chronological. You could see the progression. First, the girl was smiling, posing awkwardly. Then, the confusion. Then, the rope. Then the abuse. And finally, the grisly end. Inside weren't just photos. There were "souvenirs." A single pearl earring. A lock of blonde hair tied with a bit of the same hemp rope used in the killings. The only thing missing was the victim’s name, which probably wasn't important to him. Steiner wasn't just a murderer. He took their lives, then he kept the pieces of who they’d been to play with later in his darkroom.

In the center of the room sat the workbench where he processed his "art." The evidence here was clinical and chilling. A wooden crate filled with different gauges of rope. Some were soft silk cords, others were rough hemp. Beside them lay a pair of industrial shears and a large roll of tape. A stack of leather-bound notebooks lay near the enlarger. I opened one and felt the bile rise. It was filled with Steiner’s cramped, precise handwriting. He had scripted the murders like movie scenes.

"The Nurse. Lighting: Low-angle, 4 p.m. shadow. Must ensure the transition from 'glamour' to 'realization' is captured in the third roll. She resisted the third knot. Added five minutes to the production."

The smell of fixer and developer was overpowering. In the trays of murky liquid, half-formed images of Iris Vance were still swirling. It was as if she were being murdered all over again in the chemical bath, her terror slowly darkening into permanent record.

We cuffed Steiner and walked him out of the apartment. A black Cadillac pulled up. Briggs stepped out, flanked by two goons from Central. Someone must have tipped him off.

"We'll take him from here, Delaney."

"Where?"

"Official business. We’re taking him to a secure location for questioning."

Morales put a hand on his holster.

I stepped in front of Steiner. "A 'secure location'." I smirked. "Like the bottom of the Pacific?"

I leaned in close to Briggs. "I might be a drunk. But even at my worst I’m still a better cop than you’ll ever be. The evidence in there is going to the District Attorney. Not your office."

Briggs’ face turned the color of a bruised plum. "Fine." He waved his men back. "Take him. But remember this, Delaney. You can’t clean a sewer with a toothbrush. Tomorrow, there’ll be another Steiner, and another girl, and I’ll still be your boss."

The interrogation room at Hollywood Division was permeated with the chemical rot clinging to Steiner’s skin and clothes. A single bulb dangled from a frayed cord, swaying slightly in the draft of the vent.

I sat across from him. I hadn’t touched the bottle in hours, and the world was coming at me in sharp, jagged edges. My skin felt too tight, and my head throbbed with a rhythmic pulse that matched the ticking of the clock on the wall.

Every time Steiner shifted in his chair, the sound grated on the nerves that were still screaming for a drink.

Morales stood in the corner, his shadow stretched long and thin against the door. The silent witness. He knew I needed this. Not just for the case, but to see if I could still function without a liquid crutch.

Steiner didn't look like a killer. He looked like the man who fixes your watch or sells you a bus ticket. He sat with his hands folded neatly on the metal table, his eyes darting toward the two-way mirror. I knew Briggs was likely standing on the other side, sweating through his silk undershirt.

"The lighting in here is terrible, Detective." Steiner's voice was a thin, reedy rasp. "Flat. No depth. It does nothing for your bone structure."

"Forget the lighting, Steiner, let's talk about the knots. The 'Spanish Bowline.' That’s a difficult one to tie on a moving target."

Steiner’s eyes lit up. The vanity of the "artist" was his weakness.

"It requires cooperation. I tell them it’s for the 'Caged Bird' series. Very avant-garde. They want to be stars, Detective. They’ll do anything if they think a camera is watching. Iris was so sweet. So trusting."

"And when the camera stops clicking?"

"The camera never stops." A terrifying intensity flared in his gaze. "The shutter is just a heartbeat. I’m capturing the moment the soul realizes the dream is a lie. You know how hard that is to find? Most people live their whole lives in a fog. My girls, they are never more awake than in those final ten seconds. How fear catches the eye, it’s better than any starlet’s smile."

The interrogation continued for hours but we didn't learn anything new. He confessed to Iris Vance's murder but then recanted. We dropped him in a cell. I went home while Morales waited for the public defender.

The paperwork took weeks, the D.A. was ecstatic, and Briggs couldn't touch the evidence chain we had forged. But the victory felt hollow; I still had thirty-three folders filled with ghosts.

Steiner went to the chair a year later.

I didn’t go to the execution. I was sitting in a church rec room in East LA, holding a cup of lukewarm coffee listening to a man talk about his first week without a drink. Steiner’s file cabinet contained a total of thirty-four envelopes. Each contained shots of a victim and "souvenirs". Including Iris Vance, investigators identified seven. Mainly because those envelopes contained a driver’s license or other materials to facilitate identification. The rest remain unidentified and will likely remain so.

The neon of Hollywood still bleeds into the gutters. The girls still hop off the buses with nothing but a suitcase and a smile. Hollywood is a dream factory, but every factory has a trash heap. I spend my time sorting through the refuse while men like Steiner hide in plain sight. Cloaked in the shadows between flashbulbs.

Recommendations

More from Marc