The Laughing Gorilla (15 page)

Without touching the clawed and cut body, McGinn made mental notes on what he could see of the awful injuries themselves. First he studied the marks around her throat. In exerting manual pressure, the killer had left perfect impressions of his hands—strong, gripping fingers with unusually square thumbs and long nails that had bitten deeply into the flesh on both sides. He studied the victim’s nails. Had she managed to scratch or even bite her assailant? LaTulipe would find out when he got there. There had been another case like this, but McGinn was loath to call it to mind. He reopened his notebook and entered his findings.

Husted and Desmond fanned out to search the hotel, and McGinn retrieved the steel tape kept in the growler. He took the room’s exact dimensions, like a tailor preparing to make a suit. He drew a sketch of the corpse in situ on the bed, noting the relationship of the chair to the bed and chest, the location of the window to the chair, and so on.

McGinn held up her dress by two corners, then turned her purse out. Several tawdry keepsakes fell onto the wooden dresser top—a pair of tarnished earrings, a gold-plated clasp pin, a string of cheap pearls, a cheap compact, two or three loose cigarettes, a lipstick, 27¢, a mirror, and a skeleton key to some as-yet unknown house—the remnants of a sad, pathetic life. She carried no identification, but that was not unusual for the Bay Hotel and its clientele. McGinn studied the white-gold ruby ring on her left index finger.

It looked valuable, yet the killer had left it behind. Robbery was not the motive nor was this a sex crime, at least as understood by the psychology of the time. Nor, as McGinn suspected, were any of the other traditional propelling motives: greed, revenge, jealousy. If there was a motive it was one McGinn had not encountered before. “Then what the hell was his intent?” McGinn asked himself. The hat went back farther on his head. He scratched his bald scalp. He was at a loss to explain such brutality.

The victim on the bed was no beauty, yet some killer had sought her out and in his fury gone beyond the borders of civilization. The crime had to be premeditated. The killer had brought along tape to bind her and a sharp cutting implement to dissect her. Obviously, he preyed on the lower strata of life, those he had believed would never be missed. But the killer had miscalculated. His crime had been too blatant, too horrifying. It had to have been to shake such a veteran as McGinn. The press would call it “a sadistic orgy of violence in which a woman was horribly slashed and mutilated in the most ghastly manner.” Regardless of the victim’s station in life, she was a human being and as such was valuable. In the end, the thrust of McGinn’s grim work was to prove each life important, even sacred. And like every victim, the woman on the bed deserved justice. No matter how long it took he was determined she was going to get it.

“Should we fingerprint her?” asked Desmond, who had returned.

“There will be plenty of time for that later,” snapped McGinn. “She’s not going anywhere.”

He checked his watch. Everyone was waiting on the photographer, the coroner’s deputy, Tony Trabucco, and Frank LaTulipe. McGinn couldn’t even roll the body until they arrived. The weapon might be beneath it. Having done all he could, McGinn went to the open window. He watched the downpour striking the fire escape three windows away. Had the killer escaped the locked room that way and climbed up to the roof with its giant billboard? No, it was an impossible climb, though Bernstein’s roof was even with the third floor. If he could fly, the murderer might be leaning against the big billboard and waiting even as they waited.

Kelleher checked the rooms on both sides. No one had heard a disturbance during the night. Perhaps the driving rain had drowned out any sounds. And her mouth had been taped. “I’ve got one question,” McGinn said. He walked around the room and bath. “Where is their luggage?”

He rode down to the lobby where Anna Lemon confirmed the room door had been locked. Their “cold-blooded gent” had taken the hotel key away with him. He might still have it on him; the murder weapon, too, because it was not in evidence. McGinn got Anna Eve Lemon’s full name and the names and addresses of anyone else who might be a witness. First was the absent night porter, Otto von Feldman, then the night clerk, John Smeins. Selchaw had no forwarding address for von Feldman, but did for Smeins. McGinn scrawled “John Smeins” on the right-hand page of his notebook along with the address Selchaw provided. “When did they check in?” he asked.

“Let’s see,” said Selchaw, pulling the register to himself, and ran his finger down a line of signatures. “Here it is. Smeins registered the woman and her husband registered just after 3:00 A.M.”

McGinn turned the book. Two inked lines as jagged as barbed wire read: “Mr & Mrs. Meyers.” The mysterious Mr. Meyers had put a period after
Mrs.
, but not after
Mr.
On the left-hand page of McGinn’s notebook was a space for suspects. He wrote “Mr Meyers.” “I’m curious,” he asked. “How did Mr. and Mrs. Meyers explain their lack of luggage? I couldn’t find any suitcases in their room.”

“Luggage? I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Smeins. But I do know the man left a wake-up call.” He pointed out the notations “3:00 A.M.” and “10:00 A.M.”

“I will ask Smeins,” said McGinn.

Because the night clerk lived only blocks away, he ordered Desmond and Kelleher there. “Hurry,” McGinn said. Exiting the Bay Hotel, the two waterfront cops passed LaTulipe coming in the front door. Only half a block away all four clock faces of the Ferry Tower were illuminated, glowing softly down on the dismal hotel. Close on LaTulipe’s heels trotted the police photographer carrying the huge cameras of the time. Investigator Ray Boreas was just crossing the street. Now the detectives could truly begin finding the answer to the puzzle of the murder on the third floor of the Bay Hotel, the most horrible any of them had ever seen. Because Smeins had seen the face of the murderer and could identify him, he was crucial to their case. He might even be in danger himself. Desmond and Kelleher quickened their pace.

—THE GOLDEN RULE OF INVESTIGATIONS

 

 

 

 

 

AT
4:35 on the rainy Saturday afternoon of April 6, Francis X. La Tulipe reached the small drab room in the Bay Hotel. The falling rain outside had tinted its walls a tea-stained blue the texture of smoke. Ever after, the expert criminologist called number 309 “the blue room.” He dragged his forensic equipment—micrometers, microscopes, and bulky instruments used to make meticulous measurements—from the elevator. He was a brave man to do battle armed with only these tools. LaTulipe dropped his apparatus outside the door. Inside was a rapid succession of
pops,
the photographer “shooting a flashlight.” A final searing
crackle
resounded as he hurled one last bulb to the carpet, having photographed the victim from every conceivable angle—close-ups of the head, full face, and profile—all crucial to learning her real name. The photographer packed up, and as he left gave a thumbs-up to LaTulipe.

When someone garroted wealthy patroness Mrs. Rosetta Baker with a sheet in her hotel apartment at 814 California Street, La Tulipe had gone over the death chamber inch by inch with a powerful glass. He located a dime-size irregular patch of skin torn from a finger during the struggle, a white button ripped from a man’s shirt, the worn lift of a man’s shoe heel, and the thin wooden peg used to hold it in place. “It was a perfect case,” La Tulipe recalled. “Plenty of evidence at hand, but we couldn’t get a conviction.”

“Seek the evidence . . .” he thought, the mantra of Dullea’s men, as he studied every inch of the nude body. “Frenzy,” he said, “whoever it was was carried away with frenzy.”

Yet that same frenzied someone had tidied the room, made the bed with her in it, left very little blood, and been cool enough to bring along a roll of tape. “Mutilated and gagged with adhesive tape,” he wrote. “Why gag someone who was already dead? Had she been alive during the mutilation?” He hoped not. Using tweezers, LaTulipe carefully peeled away the three strips of tape crisscrossing her mouth. Beneath were three elevated, white tattoos, permanent compression marks. They were white because after death blood can no longer reach the capillaries.

He studied her bruised throat where large, powerful hands were outlined in black. Nine years earlier, the Gorilla Man’s strong gripping fingers had left the same bruises. His hands, too, had been huge, with long flat nails. Gorillas have long flexible thumbs capable of stretching to grasp large branches, but almost every muscle, bone, internal organ, and blood vessel of the gorilla is repeated in man. Even their hands are relatively short and wide—like human hands.

LaTulipe examined the cuts. Were they lacerations or incisions? Lacerated wounds have ragged, contused edges split away at bony prominences with strands of connecting tissue bridging the gaps. He saw none of these characteristics. All her wounds were incised, the least common wound, and implied a very sharp razor or knife. Knives were not ordinarily carried, except by seamen.

He studied a shallow pool of blood surrounding the breast on the night table. A slicing tool suggested that the killer was undersexed. In his sadistic delirium, he had employed a cutting tool as a symbolic mimicry of sex. The pointless mutilations told La Tulipe this might be a lust murder. The lust murderer bites, dissects—slashing the abdomen, exposing abdominal viscera, and eviscerating the torso. He amputates the genitals.

La Tulipe looked for “scarf-skin”—abrasions confined to the cuticle—but found no blood or skin beneath her nails. Even if he found some he could do very little except determine blood type, sex, and race. A triangle of black celluloid-like material on the floor caught his eye. He bent and retrieved it. The killer’s tight grip on his cutting tool had broken off a piece of the handle. Getting down on his hands and knees, LaTulipe peered under the bed. As his eyes grew accustomed to the darkness he saw the instrument of mutilation—a razor marked with a residue of flesh, cartilage, and crusted blood. LaTulipe bagged it and a tuft of coarse hair. He placed both in a clean pill box.

Deputy Coroner Mike Brown drove the morgue wagon to the Bay Hotel himself. The roly-poly veteran was out of breath as he wheeled his gurney into the elevator. Heavy, thick-necked, turtlelike, he was a head shorter than McGinn. Two years earlier on another April weekend, Brown had conveyed Josie Hughes’s body to the morgue. “He is an ace investigator,” said McGinn of Brown, “a relentless searcher of facts, one of the kindliest and most sympathetic of all men in spite of his daily work among the tragic dead.”

What was the worst he had seen? Brown thought a moment. “A construction worker’s suicide with a shotgun filled with water,” he decided. “When he placed the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger, the pressurized water acted explosively and took off the top of his head.”

But Brown had never seen anything like the atrocity in room 309. He took one look at the body and began sobbing. Even the cerebral La Tulipe was touched by his compassion. Coroner Thomas B. W. Leland arrived and, after viewing the body, authorized Brown to remove it. Sergeant Birdsall gathered the clothes from the chairs, and followed the gurney down in the elevator. Brown was still crying. Birdsall put his beefy arm around his shoulders.

After Brown drove the body away, La Tulipe began rooting for latents. He studied the victim’s nails and the victim herself. An attacker’s fingers bearing blood can actually leave prints on skin. La Tulipe decided to try a new fingerprint trick. He placed iodine crystals in a glass tube and blew lightly through an atomizer. The heat of his breath transformed the crystals into a gas that would react actively on any greasy matter. He got close and blew back and forth over the wall. Previously invisible prints appeared. But the second he ceased blowing, the fugitive brown marks began to fade.

He took a photo, fumed some more and took another. He repeated this process until his head began to ache. The toxicity of the gas in such close proximity caused his head to swim. Men had died doing this test. Staggering to the window, he stuck his head outside and took several deep breaths. After his mind cleared, he began to dust the window frame. As the cloud of finely ground carbon settled, made sluggish by the misty rain, it adhered to one good print. LaTulipe picked it up on tape, affixed it to a card, and after taking exact measurements of the blue room, locked the door and left.

 

 

DESMOND
and Kelleher, walking briskly, reached the night clerk’s home a few blocks from the Bay Hotel. The two seasoned waterfront shooflies had been the perfect men to send. No one knew the Embarcadero as well; no one understood those who lived there better. Kelleher’s son, Tim, within a few years, would join his father as a SFPD detective. It was still raining, but lighter now. Sailors passed arm in arm with smiling women in colorful outfits. Everyone was getting ready for Saturday night. The bars were doing a thriving business. Music and loud voices sounded. Neon lights sprang on. Just after 5:00 P.M., Desmond and Kelleher reached two rows of tawdry boardinghouses with stone lions out front. They climbed the steps. It took Desmond a moment to read the mailboxes and locate the right room. He rang the bell. Neither man expected the living skeleton who answered the door.

A bald head with pinkish, hooded eyes shone luminously in the darkness. The long, grim face, beaklike nose, veined neck and prominent Adam’s apple suggested a vulture. The undernourished skeleton had drawn on thin triangular eyebrows and wrapped an argyle-patterned robe around his narrow shoulders. The design added to his general angularity. His bare legs suggested to Kelleher that he was naked beneath the robe. The smell of lilac vegetal was overpowering.