The next week was spent on the bad side of town. Everyday Walt and I spent several hours a day going through every place that a runaway would or could hide. We kicked doors down and pulled people out of places that weren’t fit for a rat to live in, talked to anyone who was able to talk to us. I showed Sally Ann’s pictures to everyone. Most of the time we heard that she’d been there, and gone. Yes, she still had the gun, it was a revolver. She’d threatened to shoot several people with it. Apparently, there had been an incident a few days ago, a couple of johns had tried to got too rough with her, or something, anyway she’d pulled the gun and scared them off.
That was good as far as I was concerned. It meant that she was still alive, had the gun, and was still fighting to live.
It was getting colder at night now. The temperature had long ago started dipping down into the 40’s and 50’s most night with the wind coming in of the ocean, it pushed the temperature down even more. When it rained as liked to do this time of year, it was even colder.
Finally, I had a break. It was a wet cold miserable morning when I found her. The rains had come in off the coast, and the temperatures were down even more. So I was hearing both my suit coat and trench coat.
The building looked it had been bombed out during the war.
Pushing what had once been a nice oak door open I entered the lobby of the abandoned hotel. It now housed winos, junkies and whores, and anyone else who needed a roof over their head for a time. I showed a picture of Sally Ann to the wino lying in his own puddle of piss on the lobby floor. He moved just enough to point upstairs.
I eyed what had once been a grand entrance. And now it looked like an obstacle course of broken bottles, paper bags, and stuff I don't even know what it was, and frankly, I didn’t want to. Carefully Picking my way up the stairs. The landing was as littered with garbage. The stench was a combination of piss shit and other things I had no idea about. Working my way through the rooms I finally found her.
Her own father wouldn’t have recognized her. I wouldn’t have either if I didn't have the pictures. And hadn’t seen her before. It was Sally Ann Stone alright. But a shadow of her former self.
Carefully swinging in the old door. I called quietly;
“Sally Ann,”
“Yeah who want to know?” she answered feebly.
“Its ok Sally Ann, No one wants to hurt you.”
I stepped into the door so she could see me. She was hunched in the far corner of the room. On a pile of old blankets and an even older mattress. Her hair was a mess, and she was dirty. I could tell she hadn't had a bath n months. He cloths barely covered her and what there was of them were long past any good. She kneeled on the mattress holding the gun up with both hands, pointed directly at me. I stepped into the room. I’d seen soldiers like this in the war.
“I don’t know if you remember me. We met back in August. Once very briefly. At the movie theater. Remember?”
I could see the fog starting to clear from her mind barely.
She lowered the gun and I stepped closer to her and gently took it from her hands. I pulled her to her feet. Sliding the revolver into my trench coat pocket I gently lead her out of the room. It took me probably a half an hour to get her down the stairs and out of the hotel. She could barely walk and stand up. So I all but carried her. Once we outside she collapsed against my car. Opening the door I let her fall into the front seat.
**
Once I had her all in and the door shut. I get in and started the car. The question was “What to do with her?”
By Rights, I suppose I should have taken directly to Bob and turned her and the gun over to him. But I didn't always to the “Right” Thing. This was fast becoming one of these times. Yeah, I knew what she’d done. But I also knew from first-hand experience that there are a lot of reasons that people do a thing that the rest of us won’t understand. Would the law understand her to need to get revenge for her friend? Somehow I doubted it. Would Bob? Personally Yes. But as a cop, he’d have to do what the law required. I drove around for a while thinking. Part of me wanted to dump her off at Bob’s office and go home. But I knew I couldn’t. I knew what Ben Roberts had been doing to girls all these months, and that wasn’t even counting his attacks on Brenda, and me. He had hurt a lot of people over the last few months. It occurred to me the death of Ben Roberts had been a public service. It definitely saved the state of California money. Now it didn't have to hold a trail and house him for all these years in jail. But that wasn't the point. An hour later I still didn’t have an answer. I called Brenda at home. She was getting ready to head out and do some shopping. She said she'd meet me at a restaurant. It was public and yet had places to sit and talk privately. And we probably wouldn’t be recognized. So I said I’d her I’d met here there in about 15-20 minutes as it happened I wasn’t far from the restaurant we decided on. I pulled into the back of the parking lot and told her to sit still for a minute. While I went into the trunk of the car. Finally finding the extra trench coat I kept in the trunk I got it out and had put it on. It was too big for her, but it covered the mess of clothes she was barely wearing. I ushered us in and headed for a back booth where I could see the front door and the kitchen doors. Yeah I know, I didn’t even have a case anymore, but old habits…
The waitress came over and I ordered coffee. Sally Ann doesn't know what she wanted so I asked for a glass of water for her. A few minutes later they came. I played with my coffee while it cooled down, and Sally Ann drink her water.
A few minutes later Brenda walked in the front door. Watching he walk from the light into the shadows and relative darkness of the restaurant did things for me, But that was for later.
Brenda slid in next to me. I kissed her.
“Sally Ann Stone, this is my wife, Brenda,”
“Brenda this is the girl I told you about Sally Ann. He father is detective Stone,” Brenda shot me a glance.
The waitress came back over, and we ordered food. Sally Ann hadn’t ordered in a restaurant in a long time, so she let us. I Asked what she used to like, Hamburgers was all I managed to get out of her. So We ordered hamburgers all the way around. It wasn’t until it came that I realized I hadn’t eaten in far too long.
Sally Ann picked at the sandwich, at first, but eventually, the smell of food and her empty stomach won. And she quickly downed the whole thing.
Once we’d eaten and the table was mostly clear, I secretly showed Brenda the revolver, holding it in cloth handkerchief.
Once the ice was broken with Sally Ann, especially with Brenda, prompting her, and coaxing her to talk. She talked. And told us everything.
**
Sally Ann told us about meeting Ben Roberts at her high school. She had been a winner in a local essay contest. And he had been one of the judges. In fact, he even read her winning piece about picking up the pieces after a war. He had seemed to be very impressed with her writing abilities and wanted to mentor her in writing with the eventual idea of her writing a screenplay. So they started seeing a lot of each other. After several months it became much more than student/mentor, They begin to have an affair. Meanwhile, his second movie was a bust.and he turned to both Lisa Mayor and her for support. Lisa dumped him and refused to even go to the studio after a while. So he took up with her. For quite a while she stayed at the mansion, living in the room right next to his room. He had started to spiral downward and lose control of himself and she tried to distance herself from him. But when he found out he could make money making skin movies. She’d even started in a couple. Once she was into the lifestyle and prostitution and the sex game. It was hard to get out. She had left home earlier in the year because at that time she thought she had something with Him. As it turned out she didn't but by then she was too far gone to come home.
Sally Ann Stone went on to tell us about being there when he had killed her friend Mona Feilding form Iowa. She had come to Hollywood to be an actress and wound up in the same spot as her. They managed to stick together and would often “Work” together. They had been at a party at some Hollywood big shot and things got out of control, and Mona wouldn’t or couldn’t do what they wanted, Ben was called, and he lost his temper and strangled her. Right there in front of everyone. No one dared try to stop him. When he came out of it, he apologized and called his goons who kept the girls in line, and they came and cleaned up the mess. The last she saw that night he was handing out huge stacks of money to everyone in the room. It was right after that she’d completely disappeared. He friends on the street had told her about my looking for her. The last couple of months she’d been living in any old and abandoned building she could find, and stealing food when she could. She hadn’t turned any trick in a couple of months.
She said she worked up the nerve to kill him because she’d seen what he did to Mona and Lisa, and others, and she knew he’d get off if he went to trail, and she didn’t want him to be loose again.
I told her we had more than enough evidence to convict him, He wasn’t going anywhere. But she didn't believe me. All of her friends were scared he’d get out and come after them.
Brenda and I looked at each other. What to do with her? By rights, I should turn her over to Bob. Gun and all. But what would happen to her, and her father, As much as I disliked him. I couldn’t hand his daughter to him as a murder. We drank more coffee, and Sally Ann had some more soft drink, and we talked at length about the ramifications of not turning her in. I had already decided not to tell Walt about her, at least not until it was over. I didn’t want him involved in whatever we did, which could come back to hunt us very badly. By now the restaurant was thinning out and we were starting to be obvious. So we paid our bill and left. I called Walt and asked him to open the bar tonight. I was unavoidably detained tonight and Brenda was with me, I told him I’d explain later. We took my car and Sally Ann rode in the back. While Brenda was in the front. Where we were going was any of our guesses. I had no idea what to do. I just knew I didn’t want her convicted for killing a monster like Ben Roberts. This brought back my moral questions from the war. How to balance doing something wrong, for the greater good. Right is Always Right, Right? And Wrong is always Wrong? Wrong. I had wrestled with this many times during the war. I never completely got a good answer. The best I could come up with is the that doing the wrong thing now contributed to the greater good. Therefore it was the right thing to do.
Brenda and I talked about this issue for some time. While Brenda had no clue what I’d done in the war, especially the last part of the war when I’d been declared MIA and then Dead, She did know I’d done a lot of things that I wasn’t proud of. Most of the stuff I did was covered under the national securities act which forbids me to even talk about it. Even if I wanted to.
What it boiled down to as near as we could tell were three choices.
Turn her and the gun in and hope she convinced a jury that she was acting in desperation and she really believed that he’d get off and come after her. Turn her in without the gun. And the could charge her, but without the gun, the chances of a mistrial, or hung jury or acquittal were better. Or last we could make her disappear completely.
“Without the gun, what have they got?” I asked Brenda
“A lot of eyewitness accounts, and probably pictures from the reporters, who will all be very willing to get on the stand and say it was her.”
“But they don’t have the actual murder weapon. Making it harder to prove she did it. At least in Theory.”
After much more discussion and ideas, we finally called it a night. And headed home.
At the bungalow, we set up the spare room for Sally Ann, and I put the gun still wrapped up in a handkerchief in the safe. It was still early for us, But having called in and said we weren’t going to the bar, and we put Sally Ann to bed and having locked up the house we went to bed early for a change.