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postcombat trauma stay in the mental ward at St. Elizabeth’s. But now and then I got the craving—stressful situations, mostly.
    “So the Examiner beat me here,” she said, plucking a tobacco flake off her tongue. “Well, too bad for them they only got a morning edition. . . . Did he have a photographer with him?”
    “No.”
    “It doesn’t matter, anyway. Jack’s right. This is gonna be a hard one to print pictures of.”
    I was lighting up off a book of matches she’d tossed me. “You okay, Aggie?”
    “Yeah. But, Nate, I swear to God that’s the worst one I ever saw. I mean, I caught some bad traffic accidents, and plenty ofnasty homicides, from ice picks to axes . . . but, hell, this . . . the sick bastard put that poor little dame on display. It’s like a French postcard sent by the Marquis de Sade.”
    The younger cop was saying to the sergeant, “I make her for about thirty-five. What do you think, Sarge?”
    But it was Aggie who answered the question, trundling over, saying, “I got girdles older than that kid—she’s barely out of her teens.” Fully recovered, Aggie knelt over the corpse and pointed. “She’s got smooth skin. Get a load of those firm thighs, boys—she’s young and I think she might’ve been pretty. Who do you suppose she was? A starlet, maybe?”
    Maybe Aggie had her act together, but I was still trembling, leaning against the squad car, sucking on the cigarette. They could speculate all they wanted, but I knew who the dead girl was —and, yes, she had been pretty—only, to do my civic duty and inform police and press that this was Elizabeth Short, of Medford, Massachusetts, would be to reveal myself as a prime suspect. This woman had, after all, tried to hit me up for abortion money, less than a week ago. A child belonging to me was probably still inside her, right now, a tiny Heller every bit as dead as she was.
    On the other hand, if I kept quiet now, and the cops found out about the connection between us later, I could wind up breathing in more than a Camel cigarette, namely cyanide fumes at San Quentin.
    Still . . . despite the jam I was potentially in—and the murdered girl’s attempt to shake me down—I felt my eyes welling up and throat getting lumpy, and I wasn’t catching cold, either, despite the nippy wind under the gray sky. I had liked this girl—she’d been nice to me, and not just sexually; sure, she’d been troubled, with more ambition than common sense, one of the legion of pretty girls who came west daily, looking to trade beauty for fame, hoping to be discovered—just not in a vacant lot.
    More cops (from neighboring divisions), more reporters (from all five Los Angeles daily papers), arrived, as did numerous plain citizens; this desolate stretch of wired-off lots—previously populated chiefly by weeds and telephone poles—was suddenly teeming.The circus had come to this neighborhood once again, just not Ringling Bros. and Barnum and Bailey this time. Onlookers, kept back by cops, stood on top of their parked cars to get a gander.
    Oddly, for such a mob, a quiet settled over the scene. People were talking, sure, but with voices low, respectful, as if this were visitation at a funeral home.
    Before long, a plainclothes dick from nearby University Station—Lieutenant Haskins—took charge, casually informing Aggie that this would be his case. That proved to be wishful thinking.
    Aggie had moved away from the crime scene and was interviewing a little boy on a bike from the neighborhood when an unmarked midnight-blue Chevy sedan arrived and parked, barricade-style, to help block traffic.
    Even before they climbed out, I pegged them as homicide dicks from Central Division; no great deduction on my part: it happened I knew one of them a little—again from the Peete case—and this was not a lucky break for me. Aggie, distracted by the extreme nature of the slaying, had glossed over the presence of a private detective at this crime scene;