The Last Embrace by Denise Hamilton

walk home from the trolley stop at night without looking over my shoulder. That’s why Kitty’s murder terrifies me and every woman in L.A. It could have been any of us.”
    Pico looked ready to argue. But just then the LAPD Crime Lab squad arrived at the door—four men who carried metal toolboxes and cameras.
    “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need to ask me any more questions,” she said, slipping past them into the doorway.
    “I think we’re through, Miss Kessler.”
    And good riddance.

    But they weren’t through. An hour later, Pico appeared downstairs. Jinx, who’d been recounting a story about how Kitty had once loaned her an expensive dress for an audition, trailed off. A crackling tension and flirtatiousness seeped into the kitchen, chasing away the worst of the gloom.
    “Coffee, Detective?” Red swished over with the pot, her hips approaching a rolling boil.
    “Just what I needed, thank you.” Pico sat down.
    “Sugar and cream?” She bent over the table, cleavage popping.
    “This is wonderful.” Pico beamed at the young women arrayed around him like petals of a flower. Lily wondered if he meant to pluck them, one by one.
    A new girl walked into the kitchen. She was about Lily’s height and weight, with brown hair in a similar cut, but her features were more angular, her posture straighter, her demeanor brisk, reminding Lily of a female pilot she’d known during the war.
    “You must be Louise Dobbs,” Lily said, going up to her.
    “Yes,” the girl said. Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen. “And I’m so sorry. When I sent the cable, I never imagined…maybe if I’d done it sooner…?”
    Lily squeezed her hand and was about to respond when Pico broke in.
    “It wouldn’t have made a difference, Miss Dobbs. She’d been dead several days by the time…Hey, now, hey, now,” he said with embarrassment as the girls launched into wordless snuffles and tears.
    Jinx was the first to recover. She propped her trembling chin in one hand. “Tell us, Detective, do you have any idea who killed her?”
    Pico leaned back. “Well, now, the LAPD always has leads.”
    God, he was too much, Lily thought. And Kitty’s roommates, veering from coy flirtation to tragic swooning and back in the blink of a mascaraed eye, as if this were some kind of audition. But maybe it was at that. A husband audition.
    Fumiko, busy at the stove, was the only one who didn’t join in.
    Red pulled her hair back with one hand, cupping her temple Greta Garbo–style. Lily could have sworn her voice had dropped an octave. “Detective Pico,” she asked in a sultry voice, “do you always get your man?”
    “I always get my woman too,” Pico said. “We can’t assume anything at this stage.”
    Pico took a sip of coffee, sighed with appreciation. “You make a fine cup of joe, Miss Viertel,” he told Red.
    “Do you want to brief us on what you’ve got so far?” Jinx asked, eager to reclaim center stage.
    “Since you asked so politely,” he said with an arch look at Lily, “all right. But first, I’d like to know. Did Kitty keep a journal? Or a calendar? How about a phone book?”
    Jeanne, hands fluttering with her hair, said she’d walked into Kitty’s room to borrow a sweater once and seen her writing in a white leather journal.
    Pico frowned. “We didn’t find anything like that.”
    “Wouldn’t she keep her calendar and phone book in her purse?” Beverly asked haltingly.
    “There was no purse found with the, ah, Miss Hayden,” Pico said.
    Lily cleared her throat. “What about the RKO man? Could he have taken it?”
    Annoyed, Pico jotted in his notebook. “I certainly hope not.”
    The detective now told them that Kitty had been seen dancing in Palm Springs nightspots two weeks earlier with known associates of gangster Mickey Cohen. Lily flashed immediately to the small man who’d administered the brutal beating. Was he one of them? No wonder Magruder had lit up when she’d mentioned gangsters.
    At