Read Collins, Max Allan - Nathan Heller 12 for Free Online

sticker on the windshield drew up, parked in the street, and a fortyish fireplug of a woman in a raincoat, her short red hair uncovered, hopped out and headed over, trailed by a photographer—a real one—loading a bulb into his Speed Graphic.
    Round faced with pleasant features given an edge by her hard bright eyes and firm set jaw, Aggie Underwood might have been a schoolteacher; instead she was the first rival reporter to arrive at the scene. Sort of a rival, anyway: like Fowley, she worked for Hearst, just a different paper, the afternoon Herald Express .
    Trouble was, Aggie knew me—we were friendly acquaintances, having met when I came to L.A. in late ’44 on the notorious Peetecase; Louise Peete—currently sitting on death row—was scheduled to be the second woman in California history to be executed. Aggie was regarded by many as the best police beat reporter in L.A., with a tough-as-nails, aggressive reputation that I knew from personal experience was well deserved.
    She didn’t notice me at first—I was standing off to one side—and when the younger uniformed officer, Jerry, stepped forward, holding out a traffic-cop palm, saying, “Just a minute, lady!” she brushed past him, speaking to the older cop, Mike, notepad and pencil at the ready.
    “Remember me, Officer?” she said chirpily. “Underwood of the Express ?” Still charging forward, she jerked a thumb back at her photographer, who was ambling up behind her. “Jack here took that swell picture of you that made page three last month—that school fire?”
    “Miss Underwood, please stay back—”
    “What have we got here?”
    “It’s a bad one, ma’am, please prepare yourself . . .”
    Aggie laughed at that—the thought of any crime scene bothering a tough cookie like her being simply absurd—and then the laugh caught, and Aggie froze, one foot on the sidewalk, the other on the grass, almost stepping on the corpse’s left leg. The blood drained out of Aggie’s face, leaving her complexion fish-belly white under the shock of red hair.
    “Christ almighty,” she breathed. Swallowing, she said, “This poor kid’s been cut in two!”
    Nice to have a reporter on hand, to spell that out for the rest of us.
    And now Aggie was doing something she probably had never done before: she was moving away from a big story, walking backward till she dropped off the curb and stumbled against the nose of that first squad car. She covered her mouth, clearly queasy.
    Finally she said, “What kind of sick son of a bitch would do something like this?”
    Nobody bothered answering—not that anybody had an answer.

    I didn’t have one, either, but I figured I better break the ice, just the same. Better I make myself known than wait to be noticed.
    Joining her where she was propping herself against the patrol car, I said, “Been a while, Aggie.”
    She turned to me blankly; then recognition narrowed her eyes and she smiled, faintly, shaking her head, saying, “Nate Heller. Heard you were in town. . . .What brings a handsome devil like you to these picnic grounds?”
    Without mentioning I’d played photographer, I told her I’d been tagging along with Fowley for a meeting at the Examiner , to get some ink for my new partnership with Fred Rubinski.
    “And you didn’t come to me first?” she said, fumbling in her purse for cigarettes. She was shaking, a little. “After all we’ve meant to each other? . . . Jack! Get off your dead keister and take some goddamn pictures!”
    Jack—thin, thirty, a burning cigarette bobbing—looked at her with wide eyes that supposedly had seen everything, and said, “What the hell picture can I take of that?”
    “You take every picture, every angle you come up with, and leave the worries to the airbrush boys.”
    He sighed smoke. “Gotcha.”
    Aggie offered me a cigarette, a Camel, and I took her up on it. Like a lot of servicemen, I’d started smoking overseas; I’d managed to shake the habit, during my