The two pieces of her lay porcelain-white in the ankle-high grass and weeds of a vacant lot on South Norton Avenue, like the upper and lower sections of a discarded marionette. No strings could ever reanimate this disassembled figure, however-a sadistic puppeteer had made certain of that.

“Jesus frig,” Fowley said, as ashen as the bisected corpse that lay, bizarrely posed, alongside the sidewalk. “Where’s a fuckin’ photographer when you need one?”

We were in a neighborhood of Los Angeles called Leimert Park, an area where development had been stalled by the war, and the weedy lots retained sidewalks, driveways and fire hydrants, as if the houses had been whisked away by a particularly tidy tornado.

“Yeah,” I said, “Richardson wouldn’t want to leave entertainment value like that just layin’ around.”

James H. Richardson was Fowley’s boss, the city editor of Hearst’s morning Examiner, and Bill Fowley-son of a legendary New York American editor-was one of about twelve guys who fancied themselves Richardson’s star reporter.

A rumpled gray porkpie hat sitting tight on his round skull, Fowley had the same reddish brown hair as me, only his was cropped close to the scalp, like a guy going to the electric chair. He was small, a good five inches shorter than my six feet, and forty pounds lighter than my one-ninety; he was almost swimming in a baggy light brown suit, wind whipping it-I wasn’t swimming in my tan double-breasted gabardine, but the wind was making waving flags out of my pantlegs, too.

“What am I thinkin’?” Fowley said, pacing at the feet of the spread-eagled, on-its-back bisected corpse. “Felix keeps a spare Speed Graphic in the trunk. Here…”

He lobbed me the keys and I caught ’em.

“… grab it outa there, Heller. You know how to use a friggin’ Speed Graphic, don’t you?”