The Case of the Kidnapped Angel

11

Masuto deposited the Gucci suitcase in the trunk of his car and drove Elaine back to the Barton house, explaining on the way about the proceedings scheduled for that evening. “I want things to be as loose and easy as possible. Mrs. Holtz can have cake and coffee for those who want it. Can Miss Jones mix drinks?”

“I’ll help her. But what makes you so sure they’ll come?”

“They’ll come. This is not simply Beverly Hills, it’s the American dream factory. Each one of them has either a starring or a supporting role, and they wouldn’t miss it.”

“And that’s what the suitcase is for?”

“Perhaps. You know, Miss Newman, there is a Zen belief that what one sees is illusion. The reality is what one refuses to see.”

“Yes, and now it’s Miss Newman again.”

“I’m a policeman.”

“And married?”

“And married.”

“They always are.”

Leaving her at the house, Masuto drove to All Saints Hospital and made his way down a flight of steps to the basement and the pathology rooms. Dr. Baxter was waiting to welcome him with a malicious smile.

“Finished, Doctor?” Masuto asked pleasantly.

“I, my Oriental wizard, am finished. You have just begun.”

“I am sure you will make it less difficult for me.”

“Oh, no. No, indeed. I intend to make it damned confusing for you. Not with Mike Barton. A simple case of a bullet in the head, twenty-two caliber. Not with Mr. Kelly, whose skull was blown open with a thirty-eight. But with the Angel-ah, there we have a nest of worms.”

“You know what killed her?”

“You’re damn right I do. I’m a pathologist, not a cop. Would you like to hear what killed her?”

“Very much.”

“Good. Then come over here and have a look at the body of the deceased. Having seen only one puncture hole on the arm of the deceased, you Sherlocks concluded that the Angel was not a user. Nothing of the kind. In her circle it is not fashionable to mark the arm. She used her thighs.”

Masuto turned away, and Baxter covered the body. “Squeamish, huh? Now let me tell you what killed her. It was a combination of three things-Scotch whisky, chloral hydrate, and a large dose of heroin.”

“Chloral hydrate?”

“The venerable Mickey Finn. My guess is that it was mixed into the whisky, which would put her to sleep, and while she was in slumberland, someone not concerned about marking the beautiful arm slipped in and shot her full of heroin.”

Masuto made no response to this, his carefully constructed puzzle tilting and crumbling, and Baxter watched him with satisfaction. Then his usually impassive face creased in unhappiness, and he whispered, “Oh, my God, what a fool I was.”

“Not alone, young fellow,” Baxter said cheerfully, “not alone by any means. One among many, because now comes the whammy. Brace yourself.” Silent, Masuto stared at him. “You can’t guess? Come on, throw a wild one at me.”

“I don’t know what the devil you’re talking about,” Masuto said tiredly.

“Kind of upset you with that three-way knockout. By the way, any one of those three, the Mickey, the whisky, or the heroin would probably not be lethal. Put them together, and you have a one-way ticket into the great beyond. Still waiting for the whammy?”

“Yes, my good doctor,” Masuto said coldly.

“Okay, here it is. Your Angel is not a woman. She’s a man.” Pleased with himself, he waited for Masuto’s reaction.

“Is this another manifestation of what passes for your sense of humor?”

“Really getting to you today,” Baxter said, rubbing his hands together. “As a matter of fact, it’s pretty damn funny, isn’t it?”

“You are the coldest, most inhuman imitation of a healer I have ever encountered!” Masuto said angrily.

“Healer? Hell, no. I am a pathologist, sonny, and don’t you ever forget that-and a damn good one. And what I said before goes. Your Angel is a man.”

“All right, I’m listening.” His anger passed. Now the last few pieces were falling into place. “Please explain it.”

“Have you ever heard of sexual reassignment?”

“You mean the medical change of a man into a woman?”

“Exactly. There have been half a dozen notorious cases and several thousand that the public never hears about. Now you take our Angel here. A rather small, delicately built man, not a homosexual, decides that he’s a woman in a man’s body. Some authorities feel it’s a fixation. Others that it’s a genetic error at birth. He goes to Denmark or France-or even up her to Stanford-where they’ve been doing it lately.”

“Just what do they do?” Masuto asked.

“You want the whole thing?”

“Yes.”

“All right. It begins with chemotherapy procedure. There are two families of hormones that play a major role in determining who is a man and who is a woman, the androgens and the estrogens. Both are present in both sexes, but in a man the androgens predominate and in a woman the estrogens predominate. The first step in sexual reassignment is to reverse the role and put the man on massive doses of estrogens. That starts a biochemical process of change. The male functions cease. The growth of the beard slows, the hips become rounded, then the entire musculature takes on a feminine aspect. Even the breasts begin to increase.”

“Just from the hormones?”

“You’re damn right, just from the hormones. But that’s just the beginning. Electrolysis takes care of the beard. That’s permanent. Then we go into the operating room. Silicone discs are implanted in the breasts. And then they do something called a bilateral orchiectomy, which, without going into details, mean, the changing of a man into a woman through operative procedure, removal of the testes and the conversion of the penis into an artificial vagina-and that’s what you have lying there on my table, a woman who was once a man. Would you like to have another look?”

Masuto nodded, and once again Baxter removed the rubber sheet that covered Angel Barton’s body. Even after having listened to Baxter’s detailed lecture, Masuto found it hard to believe that he was not looking at the body of a beautiful woman. Watching him, Baxter said, “You start with a very handsome young man, you get a beautiful woman.”

“Could she have intercourse?”

“After a fashion.”

“What does that mean?”

“She’s altered. That doesn’t make her a whole woman. We’re not God.”

“Then eventually Mike Barton would have known.”

“Unless he was a total idiot.”

“Poor fool in a kingdom of fools,” Masuto muttered. “The idol of millions married to a man who became a woman-his terrible secret. What clowns we are. That was his word. The only word. The proper word. How could he let the world know?”

Baxter covered the body. “Not a bad day’s work. As for our movie star. He danced-and he paid the piper.”

“I would appreciate it if you could sit on this for twenty-four hours.”

“I’ll be delighted to cooperate,” Baxter said. His victory had almost mellowed him, but he could not resist adding, “I regret that I haven’t handed you the killers on the same silver platter, but the city does pay you gentlemen for service.”

Masuto departed without replying. His car was parked behind the hospital in the lot, but he felt a need to walk, and as he walked, circling away from the hospital and toward Sunset Boulevard, he once again contemplated the ridiculous anomaly of a Zen Buddhist policeman in Beverly Hills. Why did he go on with it? Why did he continue? What kind of karma brought him to this ultimate barbarism which was also the glittering crown of a monied civilization. These were questions he had proposed a hundred times before. They always remained unanswered.

He walked back to his car and drove to his home in Culver City. It was only one o’clock, and Kati was both alarmed and delighted.

“This is my spiritual and physical nourishment for today. I have eaten wretched food, and tonight I shall not be home before midnight. I have a half hour, dear Kati. Can you prepare something?”

It was a sudden descent and an imposition. She had just fed her two children and sent them back to school, and now she was in the midst of her ironing. The nisei women in her consciousness-raising class, which she had begun to attend a full year ago, would have voted to send Masuto out to a lunch stand. But since none of them were witness, Kati embraced her husband, and after she had assured herself that no injury or other tragedy had sent him home, prepared the tempura from the night before with amazing speed.

She sat opposite him, watching him eat. In spite of her consciousness-raising class, it was her pleasure to watch him eat.

“We live in a wilderness,” he said.

“It’s those terrible murders. I was listening to the news this morning, after the children left for school.”

“Death is always terrible. But this is a sickness.”

“Why do they do it, Masao?”

“Money, hatred, revenge.”

“It frightens me so,” Kati said. “Not because I expect anything to happen to me. I’m not afraid of such things. I wasn’t afraid of that skinny Chicano boy who was such a foolish burglar. But because I lose my faith in the whole world.”

“One should neither have faith nor lose faith. What is faith? This is the way things are.”

“But why? Why are things this way?”

“Because we lose touch with what is real and then we invent what is not real.”

“That’s Zen talk,” Kati said with irritation. “I don’t understand it.”

“Perhaps I don’t understand it myself,” Masuto said gently. “I need a few minutes to myself, a few minutes to sit and meditate.”

But Kati’s food helped more than the meditation, and driving back to Beverly Hills, he felt better, reflecting on what a primitive thing a man is, that a bellyful of good food could color the whole world differently. When he entered the police station, Beckman was waiting for him.

“Bingo,” Beckman said to him. “Do you want to hear about it?”

“In a few minutes. First, where’s Wainwright?”

“In his office. I got something for both of you to hear.”

In Wainwright’s office Masuto closed the door and faced Beckman and Wainwright.

“You’re getting them tonight-all of them,” Wainwright growled. “And so help me, Masao, you’d better come through!”

“Ah, so,” Masuto said. “Would the honorable captain listen and stop shouting at me?”

“Not if you give me that shogun crap.”

“I am trying to inject a note of lightness into a very miserable affair. I have been to All Saints Hospital, and I have been lectured to by our Dr. Baxter. It would appear that the Angel was a heroin addict. The glass of whisky that was handed to her when she returned was laced with chloral hydrate-”

“A Mickey,” Beckman said.

“Exactly. And when she passed out, someone came into her room and shot her full of heroin.”

“That would do it,” Beckman agreed.

“More to come. The Angel was a man.”

When Masuto had finished giving them every detail of Baxter’s story, they still were unwilling to accept the facts.

“I just don’t buy it,” Wainwright said. “You can’t turn a man into a woman-yeah, maybe into some kind of freak, but the Angel was no freak. She was one of the most beautiful dames I ever saw. She’s been photographed and interviewed.”

“She was stacked,” Beckman said. “Those weren’t falsies. Hell, that dressing gown didn’t half cover her. She was all woman and built like something out of a Playboy centerfold.”

“And she started out as a man. We may hate Baxter, but he’s no fool. I saw the autopsy. So let’s not waste time arguing about it. Now we know what she held over Mike Barton and what she blackmailed him with. As he saw it, if word got out that he had married a man, and that’s the way they would have put it, he was done, finished as a star.”

“No question about that,” Beckman said.

“Perhaps, perhaps not. But that’s the way he saw it.”

“Didn’t he know? I mean, when he married her?”

“Would you know?”

“You mean they could have slept together?” Wainwright asked.

“So Baxter tells me.”

“I’ll be damned.”

“Do you think they knew?” Beckman asked. “I mean, the others.”

“Maybe. If they did, they all lied. But maybe they didn’t know-except-”

“Except who?”

“Kelly,” Masuto said. “Well, we’ll see. You said they’re all coming?”

“That’s right.”

“Sy and I will get there by eight-thirty. We still have a few things to do.”

Back in his own office Masuto said to Beckman, “All right, Sy, let’s have it.”

Beckman was still bemused. “What was she, a man or a woman?”

“Baxter calls it sexual reassignment. It’s a long, complicated operative and hormonal procedure, and he says it’s been done thousands of times.”

“But how could Barton-”

“Come on, Sy. How could you? How could everyone else?”

“You tell me. It gives me the creeps. Was she an addict?”

“Yes.”

“Heroin?”

“Yes.”

“You know, Masao,” Beckman said, “if anyone else was working with you, and you say to him, go out and search, he might just ask you what he was searching for.”

“All right, you found it,” Masuto said, looking at his watch.

“Well, why the hell didn’t you tell me what I was looking for?”

“Because I didn’t know what you were looking for.”

“And now you know?”

“That’s right.”

“You are one weird son of a bitch, Masao. All right. I turned that place upside down. I found these in a jar of cold cream.” He took three small ampules, each covered with a stretched rubber top, out of his pocket and placed them on Masuto’s desk. “You know what they are?”

“Heroin?”

“Prepared stuff. I had Sweeney run a test. High grade, pure heroin, medicinally prepared, according to Sweeney, and legally imported from England.”

“Illegal. I don’t think a doctor can prescribe it in California, but I suppose that if you pay enough, you can get it. Well, that’s what killed her, that and the whisky and the chloral hydrate.”

“Where’s the fourth ampule?”

“In the garbage at the Barton place, I imagine, or in a garbage dump somewhere. It wouldn’t help us. Everyone’s too smart about fingerprints these days. That was good work, Sy, damn good. Now what about the war records?”

“I unloaded that one on Keller. You were very nice to him, so he was very glad that we don’t hate the FBI the way the L.A. cops and the New York cops do. I explained that we were a very small outfit and that we appreciated what the FBI could do for us. He said he’d call in the information as soon as Washington worked it up.”

“Today?”

“That’s what he said, this afternoon.”

Masuto looked at his watch again. It was twenty minutes to three. “How long to get to the bank from here?”

“Our bank? Five minutes.”

Masuto dialed the number of the Barton house. Elaine Newman answered, and Masuto said to her, “About that suitcase of money-did you see it open? Did you see the money?”

“Yes.”

“Can you remember the bills on top? Tens, twenties, fifties?”

“They were twenties. I think-no, I’m pretty sure. I heard them talk about it after Mike left. Twenties.”

Masuto did some quick calculations, and then he said to Beckman, “Sy, Polly has a draft for a thousand dollars waiting for us at the desk. Take it to the bank and get fifty twenty-dollar bills. Then stop at a stationery supply place and get ten reams of twenty-pound bond paper.”

“How do I pay for the paper?”

“Tell them to bill us. Better hurry.”

After Beckman left, Masuto sat at his desk, his eyes half-closed, his hands folded in his lap, and began to put the pieces together. He assembled them in his mind and let them fall into place, like the bits and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He was sitting like that when a cop opened his door and told him that Wainwright wanted to see him.

The city manager was in Wainwright’s office, and he offered Masuto a bleak nod. “The captain’s been telling me about tonight, Sergeant, and I don’t like it. I think you ought to call it off.”

“Why, if I may ask?”

“Because you’re playing with fire. Jack McCarthy is one of the most important lawyers in Los Angeles, and a resident of this town to boot. Joe Goldberg is one of the biggest producers in town, and Ranier is a damned important businessman. And Hennesy-Sergeant, he’s a member of the House of Representatives. You have money there and you have power, and sure as hell they’ll slap us with a lawsuit that’ll curl our hair.”

“On what grounds? No one’s being forced. No one’s being charged. They’re coming because they wouldn’t miss tonight for the world. They’re coming to see a killer exposed. I promise you that they will not be badgered or provoked. In fact, I won’t even question them.”

“Then what the devil do you want them for?”

“Because one of them murdered Joe Kelly, and because that man is an accessory to the murder of Mike Barton.”

“Sergeant, I have a lot of respect for you, and I know what your record is. But how do you know that?”

“What I know is meaningless and unimportant until I can prove it, and unless you let this take place tonight, I doubt that I’ll ever be able to prove it.”

“Captain Wainwright tells me you’re convinced that Angel killed Mike Barton.”

“I am, yes.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Possibly. Tonight.”

“And who killed Angel?”

“I think I know, but I have no evidence, none whatsoever.”

“I’d still like to know.”

Masuto shook his head. “Then it would be an empty accusation. I don’t do that. But about tonight, I can assure you that there’ll be no heavy-handed police methods. I think you should allow it to proceed.”

The city manager looked at Wainwright. “Captain?”

“I’ll be there,” Wainwright said, “so you can have my word that whatever is done will be done with a light touch.”

“All right. But I’m holding you responsible. This kind of thing, three murders in one household, does the city no good. The sooner it’s cleaned up and forgotten, the better off we’ll all be.”

Masuto’s phone was ringing as he entered his office. It was Frank Keller, the very young FBI man, obviously pleased with himself. “I got it all, Sergeant,” he told Masuto. “Shall I send the records over?”

“Can you give me the salient points over the phone?”

“Can do. Start with Joseph Goldberg. World War Two. Enlisted in 1942. Field artillery. Do you want the unit and battle record?”

“No. What about marksmanship citations?”

“Goldberg ended up a lieutenant, field commission. Small arms-that’s common in the field artillery. McCarthy was World War Two as well, tank driver-can you imagine, with that paunch of his? Also small arms. Ranier was in the Korean War, quartermaster corps, no citations, and also in the Korean War, Hennesy served with the Coast Guard, rank of midshipman. That’s it, very briefly. Should I send the records over?”

“I would appreciate that,” Masuto said. “And thank you for your efforts.”

Beckman came in while Masuto was speaking. “Anything?” he asked.

“Not much. They all know how to use a pistol.”

“The paper’s in my car. Ten reams-do you know what that weighs?”

“About the same as a million dollars in twenty-dollar bills, more or less.”

“And the money’s here,” patting his bulging pockets. “It’s a nice feeling to walk around with a thousand dollars in your pockets.”

“Do you know where there’s a paper cutter-one of those power jobs?”

“We could try City Hall. They should have one. I get the drift of what you’re going to try, but what about the suitcase?”

“Courtesy of Gucci.”

“Same one?”

“So Miss Newman says. I promised to return it, so we’ll handle it carefully. Now let’s try for the paper cutter.”

Beckman took a packet of currency wrappers out of his pocket. “You forgot about these.”

“So I did. I wonder what else I’ve forgotten.”