The Patrolman - 37 (2/2)

A resounding quiet filled the bar. Time dragged, but it could've only been for a minute. Groans and sobs followed. Cigarette lighters snapped, and Lacey and Carruthers mumbled while they smoked. He didn't care for Carruthers' menthol Big Chiefs, but he smoked one anyway. The two men had taken these four thugs head on and kicked their asses. But it had come at some cost to them - bloody knuckles and likely some fractured ribs.

Someone dragged themselves through broken glass. The shards scratched the wood floor. It set his teeth on edge. There was panting coming from the other side of the room near the bar.

Lacey and Carruthers dropped the butts and stamped them out. As they neared the bar, they heard a scuffle. The sister ran. A beer glass exploded over the counter. Her shock of black hair billowed, and her dress trailed behind her like a flag.

It had already been a tough day at the office. The two of them had had enough. Carruthers lifted his jacket and took out his .38 Detective Special.

'Don't make me shoot you,' he said. He sounded like a gruff old man. 'Come, sit down. We ain't gonna hurt you.'

The sister had already made it to the alcove in the second half of the building. She waited around the corner. Her heavy breathing passed through the silence.

'What do you want with me?'

'To talk,' he said. 'We showed you our badges, didn’t we?’

'What about my friends?'

'They're fine, so long as they don't take another swing. If they do, we'll have to call in a paddy wagon and the rest of Newton Division.'

She thought about it for a moment. 'Fine,' she said. 'I'm coming out.'

She came around the corner with her hands above her head. Carruthers laughed and told her to put them down.

Lacey found a table still standing and three chairs. The girl sat. Carruthers helped himself to a bottle of rye. By the time he got back, a couple of her goons had dragged themselves out. An engine growled and screeched when it reached peak speed. He offered the girl a Lucky, and she took one. He lit it for her, and she coughed - a non-smoker.

'Right,' Lacey said. 'Let's start from the very beginning. What's your name?'

'Beatriz.'

'Miranda and Beatriz, your mother likes Shakespeare?'

'Loves it,' she said. 'Wanted to be an English teacher.' The sister was starting to soften.

Carruthers left them to it.

'So we're clear,' he said. 'Why did you run?'

'Why did I run? You didn't do a great job following me.'

'Fine. At your house, you mentioned a party the night your sister disappeared. We know you'd have made a statement to the local Sheriffs, but we want the truth, nothing missing out. Anything small can be useful in helping us find her.'

'Yes,' she said.

She began with a brief explanation of how Williams Ranch worked. The landowner charged the foreman and his wife to keep an eye on all the residents. It was a small and tight-knit community. The kids all played together. There was never any trouble. Well, except the occasional bit of reefer snuck in. But even then, the kids went to the lagoon to smoke it in secrecy.

There were two of them. This lagoon was the furthest west on the property. The smell never wafted over to the other bungalows and shacks. They called it 'Sleepy Lagoon' after the Harry James song. Lacey didn't know the song and made a mental note to find it.

'What about the murder?'

The night Miranda Vasquez disappeared, they found a local kid dumped on 26^th Street, beaten to a pulp. He died in the hospital before his parents could get there.

'Beatriz, tell us what happened,' Lacey said. 'There's no such thing as a coincidence when it comes to homicide. They don't come in threes.'

The sister looked at Carruthers, who offered nothing. He had sat there and handed the whole interview over to Lacey.

She nodded at the packet of Luckies on the table, and Carruthers lit one for her.

'Mira wasn't as nice as my parents made out,' she said. 'Sure, she was an honor student and a popular girl in school, but she liked playing around with boys.'

'Like you?' Carruthers said.

She shot him a look but let it pass. 'She used to fool around, though she had a boyfriend. On the night she went missing, one of the neighborhood girls, Eleanor, was having a birthday party. Her parents had traveled to Mexico for a funeral, so she threw a party. Some guys she knew brought booze.'

'What boys?'

'The 38^th Street gang,' she said. 'But she didn't invite them, only bought the booze from them. The two guys who left are the last ones on the outside. The rest are in jail.'

'We'll come back to that,' Lacey said. 'So they crashed the party?'

'That's right,' the sister said. 'Mira knew them. She'd dated one of them years back. Her ex turned up and saw her with another guy. A fight broke out.'

'How do you know this?'

'Because the other guy was Jose Gallardo Diaz,' she said. 'The guy who died in the street.'

'He was involved with your sister?'

'I mean, I grew up with the guy. But I caught him a couple of times lurking near the house. I asked him once, and he laughed it off. Jose wasn't the problem.'

'Who was? Her ex?'

'No,' she said. 'Her boyfriend.'

This had come as news. The parents said nothing about any boyfriend. She gave them the spiel and swore them to secrecy.

Miranda Vasquez had met her boyfriend at an evening class. She was trying to learn French. He was a nice guy, according to her, but he was white. Still, the two of them dated and managed to keep it from her parents. About a month before she disappeared, the boyfriend started coming around the ranch. He snuck up to their bedroom one night while she was sleeping. The sister had seen the guy. But she screamed, and her father came charging into the room, saw the guy, and chased him away. Her parents had asked her all about it and demanded that she never see him again.

'But he kept showing up,' she said.

The guy followed her to and from school. He was a little older and kept a job as a bartender. Lacey asked her if he owned a car, and she couldn't answer. Carruthers and him exchanged looks. He told her to continue.

It went on every day until Miranda Vasquez reached her limit and confronted him. The perv lurked on the corner, the same one where Lacey and Carruthers had waited that afternoon. She ran out, slapped him, pulled his hair, and told him to never show his face around here again.

'When was this?' Carruthers asked.

'That morning,' the sister said. 'The morning of the party.'

They took a short break. She needed the bathroom. Lacey and Carruthers convened at the bar and fixed drinks. Carruthers - another rye. Because Lacey didn't drink, he got a glass of Coca-Cola, the same as the girl.

She returned, smoothing her dress down.

They passed around cigarettes. Smoke hung in the air like a truce. Lacey had another one of Carruthers’ and decided he didn't like Big Chiefs at all.

'Where was I?'

They were up to the morning of Miranda Vasquez's disappearance.

'Right,' she said. She described the party, the mix of people there. How it all went wrong with the fight. But Eleanor kicked 38^th Street out, they returned to a party they'd crashed earlier that night. They would say that, though. Wouldn’t they? Especially if the majority of the gang was facing a murder beat.

But the sister said she had also been at the party, though she was pretty drunk. She saw them leave after the fight. Jose Gallardo Diaz stormed off to Sleepy Lagoon. Miranda Vasquez followed him, and she was never seen again.

Carruthers leaned in now. 'What's your opinion? What do you think happened to your sister?'

She took stock of them both. Tears rolled down her cheeks. She caught a lump in her throat. Here it was, the guilt.

'One of the neighborhood guys walked me home. I was pretty drunk. I shouldn't have had so much, but it was my first time. I'm twenty-one now, though,' she said. ‘On the way, we saw a car. The driver rolled down the window, and it was him, Miranda's boyfriend. I couldn't tell him where she was, and that was it. He drove off. End of story.'

'You think he killed her?'

She bit her lip and nodded like a child. 'He killed her,' she said. 'He knew what went on at Sleepy Lagoon.'

Lacey and Carruthers had it - the story. Of course, she had embellished some of it. Some shortened for dramatic effect. But the core was still there. If she was right, this creep of a boyfriend had driven right to Sleepy Lagoon after spotting her. Then he had found his girl with some spic and beat the fucker to death. As for Miranda Vasquez, Lacey didn't know what had happened to her.

This was a year ago now. If he'd already established his M.O., he would have dumped her in a secluded area where someone could find her. If not, and this was his gut instinct, it was their guy's first kill. His first murder. And he'd modelled the rest of the girls on Miranda Vasquez. All were in their late teens or early twenties. All were of similar height and weight. Yes, this was the picture their guy was painting. He was recreating the night of his first kill and had been doing that every day this week.

With the murders and the riots, he had caught his big break. He'd made headlines as the 'Zoot Suit Strangler'. Lacey almost believed what the killer said about stopping. Once the cover of the riots was over, he'd skip town. Like he had here. He'd skipped Commerce and come up to Hollywood and Downtown. Yes, he decided. This was their creep. The Zoot Suit Strangler.

Lacey and Carruthers thanked her for speaking with them. When she asked if the information was worth anything, Carruthers laughed. He said her payment wouldn’t land her in a jail cell after everything that happened here. She went red in the face after that.

With the girl embarrassed, Lacey went in for the kill. The final detail they needed to solve the case and put this guy behind bars.

'Two more questions,' he said. 'One, what color was his car?'

She looked down at the table, looking into the past. 'Green,' she said.

'And you're sure about that?'

'Yeah,' she said. 'John Deere green.'

'Excellent,' he said. 'Final question, what was his name?'

The color drained from her face. Her parents had taught her never to rat. But this wasn't ratting. This was the man who had murdered girls in Los Angeles and had taken her sister away from her.

'Tom,' the sister said. 'Thomas Emerson.’

 

© J. A. Stapleton 2025 - Image Source: Wikimedia Commons