The Laughing Gorilla (8 page)

Because all the streets were curved and steep, it made a stakeout difficult and concealed any potential attack on Josie around the corner. The roads were built wide to accommodate big automobiles like the 1926 sable black Phaeton Lincoln custom touring car in front of Josie’s house. Its engine was running smoothly. In those days you could get eight good years out of such a model with a radio and a speaker set into bird’s-eye maple.

Mrs. Walter Bowers, a neighbor, saw the touring car at 4:30 P.M. “A man drove up in the car—owl lights, a low tonneau and extra-thick trunk,” she said, “and appeared to conceal his face with a hand and his cap pulled down over his eyes.” She also sensed there might be a second man sitting in the rear seat. Fourteen doors down Mrs. G. E. Little of 55 Lakewood also scrutinized the unique sedan and its driver. “A horse-faced young man, about twenty-three, with a close-cropped mustache was sitting in it,” she said. “He tried to shield his face, but I got a real good look at him. I would recognize him if I saw him again. He was Verne Doran, you know, Mr. Frank Egan’s chauffeur.”

At 4:35 P.M., Josie rang her friend Mrs. Joseph Dennis. “It’s gotten so I’m afraid to leave the house at night,” she lamented. As they chatted Mrs. Dennis heard Josie’s doorbell sound. “It might be someone trying to get me,” said Josie, and hung up.

An hour later Mrs. Albert E. Jacks, sixteen doors up, saw Frank Egan walking within a block of Josie’s home. That was not unusual because he lived so nearby. Shortly after, the Lincoln started up and came cruising north along Fairfield at twenty-five miles per hour. As it turned into Kenwood Way, Malloy adjusted his little spectacles and noted the uncommon Phaeton trunk and unique spotlight that hung from the median of its radiator, which was very unlike a Packard’s jutting radiator (gangsters commonly took their victims for a last ride in a Packard sedan). Within two years, except for Fords and Chevys, the square radiator would be replaced by the streamlined radiators of the Chrysler airflow and the Pierce-Arrow’s gracefully tapered front. The back and side curtains were tightly drawn, and Malloy could not see inside. The car pushed on east, swung south on Keystone Way, then rolled back around on Ocean Avenue, the local main drag, to Lakewood. The sedan crept past the lookouts for a second time. As if testing the waters, it came around a third time. When the sedan passed a fourth time traveling at sixty miles per hour, its lights were out and it quickly passed out of sight.

When the dark sedan did not return, Malloy and Lally felt secure in relinquishing their surveillance because they knew Josie never went out at night; at 8:35 P.M., they returned to the HOJ. An hour later Mrs. Jacks observed a large touring car with its lights out back away from Josie’s unused garage. A second man slipped from the bushes at the end of the driveway, closed the garage door, and slid into the auto like a cat. At 9:45 P.M., the speeding Lincoln passed Rena and Warren Louw walking east from Timothy Pflueger’s new white-towered movie palace, the El Rey Theater on Ocean. They had just seen
The Champ,
a tear-jerker starring Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper.

When the cruising auto returned, this time going west, and slowly passed the Louws, it made them nervous enough to step back into a doorway. The Louws waited until the car had rounded the curve of Kenwood and swooped northeast before they continued up the severe incline for another two hundred feet to 150 Kenwood. They reached the O’Neil home—white picket fence, weedy overgrown yard, street pole, and a dark shape lying in the road flush to the curbstone. “You don’t think much finding a woman’s body like that,” recalled Mr. Louw. “You just feel.” He ran the twenty doors down to his house and rang the police from there. “Then I went back to see if she was really dead. She was.”

When Inspectors Herman Wobke, Ray O’Brien, and LaTulipe reached the scene, they saw no evidence around the body of any accident. “No skid marks or broken glass,” LaTulipe remarked. “It’s chilly and she’s not wearing a coat or hat. She has no purse and there are no house keys on her. The car was going downhill, yet her head is pointing uphill and her ankles are crossed.”

Anyone hit by a speeding car is usually thrown headfirst in the direction the car is going. No blood about the face (only the bruise marks of what looked like a fist) and no marks of having been hit before being run over. Her sole identification was a gold ring inscribed “Joe to Jessie.” When this fifth unidentified female body of the year was conveyed to the morgue by Deputy Coroner Mike Brown, the best known and most respected coroner in the state, Lieutenant Pete Danahy and reporter Charlie Huse were waiting. Danahy saw no cuts or bruises on the hands, arms, elbows, feet, knees, or legs, places where they should be. “That don’t look so hot to me as a hit-and-run case,” said Danahy, dragging out his pad and pen, “but it sure has possibilities as an old-fashioned murder mystery.”

Early Saturday morning, Egan raced down the marble steps to the coroner’s clammy basement office to identify Jane Doe number five. “Mrs. Jessie Scott Hughes is an old and very dear friend,” he told Mrs. Jane Walsh, the coroner’s chief deputy. “It’s her. I’ve handled her business affairs for years as an advisor, ever since I was in private practice.”

“Has she any relatives?” asked Mrs. Walsh as she bent to retrieve a blank form.

“Yes,” Egan said, “but she is not on friendly terms with any of the family. As Mrs. Hughes would have wished, I shall take charge of the funeral arrangements.” Mrs. Walsh nodded her head sympathetically, asked if Josie had left a will and who the beneficiary was.

“I am,” said Egan. “She left an estate of $25,000 and named me the executor.”

“Did she have any insurance?”

“Only a $2,000 policy,” Egan said as he signed the delivery receipt to turn Josie’s body over to a private undertaker. “Relation to deceased: Executor,” he printed.

Reporter Henry “Hank” Peters, at a cashier’s window, overheard Egan and went directly upstairs to Dullea’s office. “I didn’t intend to get a ‘raise’ out of the captain,” Peters said later. “All I did was casually mention the hit-and-run body from last night had just been identified by Frank Egan. But when I spoke the name of Mrs. Hughes, he almost hit the ceiling. He said the case might develop into something tremendous, and then he closed up and wouldn’t say any more and told me to get out.”

Alone in his office Dullea felt as if the shadow of the Gorilla Man had fallen over him again. Once more, he’d been unable to save a woman’s life. He wondered whether it really was a hit-and-run accident or if Egan actually carried out his plot in front of his detectives. Without warning, Egan strutted into Dullea’s office, took a chair, and tossed his expensive tan fedora onto the blotter. “I’ve just come from the morgue, Charlie,” he said. “This Josie Hughes, who was run over last night, was an old friend of mine. This is a terrible thing. She was like a mother to me.”

“Where do you suppose she was going at that hour on a chilly night without a coat?” Dullea fought to contain his fury. Under the desk his hands were clenched.

“Josie frequently went for long walks without her hat and coat.”

“That’s not what the neighbors say. They said she prided herself on her appearance and never even went out to hang clothes on the line without wearing a hat. She was afraid to go out alone at night, especially so far above her home on the sharp incline where her body was found.”

“Oh, no, you’re wrong there, Charlie. I had often warned her against walking about the neighborhood in the evening. Mrs. Hughes frequently took walks in the hills about her home attired only in house clothing and sweater—no coat, no hat. I cautioned her not to go out without her glasses—about a year ago she was almost hit by an auto—just as she was last night. Her son, James, fourteen, was killed in an auto accident fifteen years ago.”

Dullea contemplated Egan’s facial expressions. Was he a cold-blooded murderer or not? His placid, self-assured demeanor provided no clue. But Egan was a skilled jury lawyer and consequently a fine actor.

“By the way, Charlie, I was coming in to see you this morning anyway. Something ought to be done about the parking arrangements in front of the Dreamland Pavilion on fight nights. They’re terrible.”

Dullea’s heart gave a leap, though his face remained impassive. There it was—the alibi he had expected. “Dreamland Pavilion? Is that where you were last night?”

“Yep. I came early and remained ringside the entire evening. On the whole, it was a pretty good card, but the parking was terrible.”

“Well, you should speak to [Captain Charles] Goff at the Traffic Bureau, not me.”

“An amusing thing happened, by the way. Some drunk sat behind Dr. Housman and I and spent the whole evening throwing Eskimo pies at a friend who was with me.”

“It’s lucky he didn’t throw them at you. He’d have made a fine mess of that.” Dullea indicated Egan’s spotless fedora. Now he was morally certain that last night’s tragedy had been the work of the man before him, but it would take more than a moral certainty to convince a jury. “San Francisco’s public defender had murdered Mrs. Hughes,” he thought, “yet I can not arrest him.”

“Well, I have to hurry to wind up Josie’s affairs,” Egan said, rising. “Busy, busy, busy.” On his way out he brushed past Lally, who had Louw’s statement in hand. “So Louw got a good description of the car did he?” Dullea asked Lally. “Louw knows cars,” Lally said. “He’s a garage mechanic and saw the cruising Lincoln well under a street light.”

“Fine. Now make a list of all of Frank Egan’s friends and former clients, especially ex-cons and see which one owns a car like that.” Then he sent for Homicide Inspector Allan McGinn, head of the Death Squad.

McGinn was a burly man, his tiny eyes and mouth lost in a broad, square face. His features were made even smaller by his prodigious nose and huge ears. He had carelessly shaved that morning, his shirt needed pressing, and in almost every respect he was drab. Only the shining gold of his shield accented his cheap suit and vest. McGinn placed his battered gray fedora where Egan had laid his splendid hat.

McGinn was in bad with Chief Quinn that morning and was consequently depressed. The day before, Louis Zanardi had been beaten to death by three unidentified men after a baseball game at Rolph Play-ground, and McGinn was getting nowhere finding them. “Get out to Josie Hughes’s house,” Dullea told him. “Find out what really happened there last night.”

McGinn, LaTulipe, and Inspector George Engler coursed up busy Market Street in its generally westward path toward the Pacific and rolled up and over Twin Peaks. Some twelve thousand feet below ran the longest transit tunnel in the world (an extension of the No. 12 streetcar downtown line). The two-and-a-quarter-mile-long bore took five minutes. From 4th and Market over 20th Avenue and Ellis Street, it took McGinn forty-two minutes to reach Ingleside Terraces and call Dullea.

“Every window is locked,” McGinn said, “and every door is double-bolted and locked from the inside.”

“Then how did Josie get out?” Dullea asked. “She didn’t have a key on her. Get inside no matter how.” McGinn was smashing a window with his gun butt when Anthony J. Bell, a special police officer employed as a watchman, pulled up. Bell had patrolled the vicinity of Josie’s home for several years and knew Josie and her habits. “What’s going on here?” Bell shouted. “Frank Egan called me last night and told me to pay particular attention to the Hughes home and see that nobody breaks in.”

McGinn flashed his badge, then climbed through into the vestibule, entered the front living room and down a hallway to the dining room. Inside, fifty canaries in fifty little cages began to sing all at once. Covering his ears, McGinn turned left into the kitchen and a small breakfast nook. Josie’s frugal dinner was still laid out to be cooked. Her keys were still on the dining room sideboard. Upstairs, her hat and coat lay on the bed. He tested the locked windows, then walked out onto the little porch above the garage. He went downstairs where he and LaTulipe observed that the garage double doors had a self-engaging spring lock. “So they took her out by way of the garage,” surmised McGinn. “That’s the only way.” He knelt and smelled a puddle on the floor—water, soap, and cleanser. But whoever had scrubbed the concrete had missed four black impressions.

“Tire marks!” said LaTulipe. “But Josie didn’t own a car.” Positioning his tripod directly above the treads to prevent foreshortening, he directed a light across the surface for maximum contrast and snapped a shot with his mounted four-by-five speed Graphic. Then, starting at one edge, he pressed a strip of fingerprint tape onto the print, overlapped it with a second strip by a quarter inch, and lifted the entire impression. On the concrete he found several long gray hairs, which he put into a glassine envelope.

 

 

AT
the morgue Dr. A. M. Moody, the pathologist, briefed Dullea. “Josie Hughes died of a crushed liver. Her chest was caved in by the wheel of a car and the left side of her face and shoulder were covered with friction burns. She was flat on her back at the time.”

“Could she have lived long enough to turn herself over?”

“No, death was instantaneous.”

“Then since she was found lying facedown someone must have placed or thrown her that way after she was dead.”

At the sloped table Dullea methodically went over Josie’s white waist with a magnifier. Near the left shoulder the garment was badly soiled with grease, but the brown silk sweater over it had no holes, tears, or dirt marks. It was also buttoned wrong. “Her sweater was put on after she was killed,” said Dullea. “Someone else dressed her and that means she was killed at home.

“Egan’s accomplices, and it must have been a two-man job, borrowed a heavy car, drove it into Josie’s garage, chloroformed her unconscious and threw her under the wheels of the car. They ran back and forth over her prone body
inside her own house.
They dropped her dead body into the road several blocks away to simulate a hit-run accident.”