Free True Confessions by John Gregory Dunne Page B

used chicory in her coffee. She also put a bay leaf in her spaghetti. There was a spice rack in her tiny kitchen, and when she cooked, he handed her the bottles of dill weed and thyme and tarragon and oregano and sweet basil. Mary Margaret did not use herbs or spices. Spices caused diarrhea, Mary Margaret said. Mary Margaret also did not do the things to him in bed that Corinne did.
    He made a note to call Corinne.
    Mary Margaret had Saint Barnabas.
    He had Corinne.
    “Are you going to book me or not?” Tommy Diamond said.
    He had forgotten that Tommy Diamond was sitting there. Tommy Diamond was fingering the papers in his out box.
    “Hands off,” Tom Spellacy said. Tommy Diamond was the only person he knew who parted his hair in the middle.
    “I did it.” Tommy Diamond had a disability pension from Water & Power. He had slipped in a puddle of spilled Jello in the company cafeteria. His back was bent and he could not clerk and now he had time on his hands.
    “You ever get tired of confessing, Tommy?”
    “I did it.”
    “You queer?”
    “My back was okay, I'd throw you out the window, saying that.”
    “This is the sixteenth homicide you confessed to since I been downtown. What else am I supposed to think? You want to go to the joint and be someone’s sweetheart.” He leaned across the desk. “You pitch or catch?”
    Tommy Diamond smiled. “Anyone else confess?”
    Better to talk to Tommy Diamond than to think dirty thoughts about Corinne. “Two marines from Pendleton.”
    “Shipping out, I bet. Didn’t want to go fight for Aunt Sam. Fuck the red, white and blue.”
    “You understand confessing, Tommy.”
    “Who else? There’s always a lot of nuts in a case like this.”
    He laughed. “A drunk from the Lincoln Heights tank.”
    Tommy Diamond shook his hand. “I’ve been in there. You can’t turn around without someone pissing in your face. I’d say I had a contract to hit the Pope if it got me out of there.”
    The end of the comedy hour. “Get out of here, Tommy.”
    “You’re going to be sorry, Lieutenant. One of these days I’m going to kill somebody and no one’s going to believe me.”
    They’re coming out of the woodwork, Tom Spellacy thought. Take yesterday. An astrologer in Altadena asked the exact time of death and promised to deliver the murderer’s name in five days, fourteen hours and twelve minutes. A man who said he was a Ph.D. in extrasensory perception asked to photograph the dead girl’s eyeball; the final image in it, he said, would be the face of the killer. A woman in Covina said her husband did it. She wanted grounds for divorce. A landlord in Studio City said his tenant did it. He wanted to evict the tenant and double the rent.
    The telephone rang. Tom Spellacy held the receiver to his ear and took a sip of the cold coffee. It tasted worse than it looked.
    “So your daughter’s name is Mary Lou,” he said after a moment. “And the last time you saw Mary Lou was the middle of January.”
    “The sixteenth,” the woman said.
    “January sixteenth.” He took a pencil and wrote the date down.
    “1943.”
    “1943,” he repeated. “You didn’t say that before.”
    “I was going to bring it up.”
    “Right,” he said. “She went out to get a package of cigarettes.”
    “She always smoked Philip Morris. I got to think it was Philip Morris she went out to get. The girl you found, she smoked Philip Morris, she could be my daughter.”
    “That’s the last time you saw her, January sixteenth, 1943.”
    “Right with Eversharp.”
    “And you never reported her missing before.”
    “She moved around a lot. 1939 was the last time I saw her before that. She was on her way to Seattle. Going to work for Boeing, she said. She was punching a keyhole press before that, I think. In Tulsa. Maybe it was Oklahoma City. She lost a couple of fingers in the keyhole press. That’s what she told me, at least.”
    “This one we got,” Tom Spellacy said, “she’s got all her