Free The Laughing Gorilla by Robert Graysmith Page A

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,”