Eureka (25 page)

CHAPTER 21

I made a call to Ski at the Wilensky house and got one of the forensics men. After I identified myself, he confided Ski was out in the neighborhood.

“Anything new?” I asked.

“Ski thinks whoever iced the lady laid up all day in the house next door and then went after her when she got in the tub.”

“When Ski gets back, tell him I've got a call to make and then I'll be on over.”

“Sure,” he said, and we hung up.

I made one more call and then drove across town to a little bar called Murphy's Eight Ball, which was a hangout for off-duty cops and newsies. It was 3:30, too early for any action. The bartender was unloading bottles of beer in a cooler behind an empty bar. In the rear, a tall, rangy guy chewing on a wooden match was practicing side-pocket bank shots at one of the two pool tables. Up front, the dozen tables and booths all were empty. Jimmy Dorsey's “Amapola” was muttering from the jukebox, its volume turned down to a whisper. The bartender looked up through bored eyes and gave me half a smile.

“Zee,” he said with a nod. “Little early for you, isn't it?”

“I'm meeting Jimmy Pen,” I said. “Draw me one, will you?”

He took a frosted mug from the refrigerator and tilted it under the beer spigot and jimmied the glass full without putting too much head on it. I picked up a rumpled copy of the early
Times
edition and retreated to a booth as far away from both men as possible. Under a wall lamp that put out about as much wattage as a penlight, I read the banner head:
bismarck
attacked. The lead graph told me all I needed to know: the British Navy had hunted down the German juggernaut, which had sunk the HMS
Hood
and all its hands three days earlier. A battle royal was going on somewhere in the North Atlantic. I leafed back to the obits but there was no follow-up on the Wilensky story.

The door opened and a shaft of sunlight cut through the dark interior as Jimmy Pennington strolled in, hat on the back of his head and a newspaper folded and stuffed in his jacket pocket. He was carrying a brown nine-by-twelve envelope. The door swung shut behind him and he peered around the room until he spotted me.

He pointed to my glass and said to the barkeep, “Hey, Jerry, gimme one of these, will you please?” as he sat down, dropped his hat on the seat beside him, and laid the envelope by his elbow. Then to me, “I don't believe it, you can actually read,” as he pointed to the dog-eared early edition.

“I can count all the way to ten, too, if I take my shoes off,” I said.

“You must want something awful bad to offer to buy me a drink.”

“I'm going to do you a favor, pal,” I said.

“
And
pay for my drink? You don't believe I believe that, do you?”

“Why are all you newsies such cynics?”

“If I am, I learned it from you. So what's the scam for today?”

“No scam. I'm offering you a trade.”

“Uh-oh.”

Jerry brought the reporter his beer and a dish of pretzel sticks. I told him to put it on my tab.

“The last time a cop bought me a drink, we still had Prohibition.”

“That's worth an item right there.”

“I assume all this has something to do with the stuff you asked for.”

“A reasonable assumption.”

“What the hell are you interested in Mendosa for? It's off your beat by about a hundred miles.”

“I'll get to that. First, I'm going to offer you an exclusive story. Your end is, you can't break it until the five-star tomorrow afternoon.”

“How big a story?”

“It'll put a smile on your face.”

“Front page?”

“Hell, I'm not an editor, I . . .”

“Don't hand me that shit, Zee. After fifteen years you know a banner story when you see one. Above the fold or below it?”

“What do I know about folds? Do we have a deal?”

“It's a pig in a poke. What's your angle?”

“You'll understand when I finish. After we're through talking, I'll go back and write my report, which will back up everything I tell you. You can write the story ahead of time but you have to hold it until 4:00 tomorrow. I'll file the report then, and that'll give you a scoop.”

He thought for a minute and said: “Make it 5:00. We hit the street at 5:30 and all the competition'll be off and drunk by then.”

“I can work that.”

“This some kind of undercover job you've been working on?”

“You want to listen or play twenty questions?”

He took a sip of beer, took out a little green pad and the stub of a Ticonderoga pencil, and stared at me.

I gave him a pretty straightforward rundown on how we found Verna Hicks Wilensky, Bones's initial reaction, then got into the stuff in the strongbox, and finished with the five-hundred-a-month and the cashier's checks. That got his attention. I continued with my trip to San Pietro, how the bankers were giving me the cold shoulder, left out the encounter with the two cops, and then dropped the second shoe: Bones's reanalysis of the situation. He stopped writing and took a long swig of his beer when he realized he was on top of a murder case.

I then recounted the Wilma Thompson murder case, the appeal, and the missing witness, Lila Parrish; Eddie Woods's probable assassination of Fontonio, his connection with both cases; and finally the fact that most of the checks came from San Pietro. I didn't tell him I knew Eddie Woods had sent at least one of the checks; I kept that for my hole card.

“Is that it?” he asked.

“For Christ sake, you want me to write it for you?”

“You're trying to tie this to Culhane's tail,” he said, and it wasn't a question.

“I can't tell you that, it's privileged.”

He chuckled. “The hell you say.”

“You didn't get to be top-slot reporter on the
Times
by having somebody else do your thinking for you,” I said.

He tapped his pencil on the table several times and stared at me, then said, “You want me to grease the tracks for you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don't act dumb. You're going up against Brodie Culhane and you want me to point the finger in his general direction.”

“I didn't say that.”

“No, I said it.”

“You want the story or not, Jimmy?”

“I
got
the story. Question is, what am I gonna do with it? And how are you going to tie this to Culhane?”

“You're beginning to sound like Moriarity.”

“I'm sounding like my editor. Can I quote you that you're looking for a connection up in the San Pietro area?”

I juggled that around for a minute. Before I could answer, he said, “And how do you plan to tie Woods into this? So he lives in Los Angeles, so do a million and a half other people. And what's the connection with Mendosa?”

“Let's talk about that for a minute. What've you got for me?”

He slid the envelope over, opened the clasp, and pulled out a sheaf of clippings. “Most of this stuff was written by Matt Sorenson, who covered state news,” he said.

“Where is he now?”

“The big time lured him to New York. But he used to talk about Mendosa. He wanted to blow the roof off the town, but it's outside our circulation area and the publisher squeezes every nickel so hard the buffalo gets a hernia. Most of what Matt wrote was what he could get over the phone, mixed with AP and UPI reports.”

“You need these back?” I asked, lifting a handful of clippings.

“Yeah, but there's no rush.”

“Tell me what you know about Mendosa.”

He finished his beer and ordered another.

“Since when did you start drinking on the job?” I said.

“I'm through for the day. I'm gonna take full advantage of your tab.” He lit a cigarette and started: “When Culhane got rid of Riker and Fontonio, the number-three man in the mob was Guilfoyle. He took a powder. He moved down south to Mendosa. It's in Pacifico County. It wasn't much of a town, a lazy little place. Its main claim to fame is a sanitarium, mostly a spill for drunks, druggies, and senile old folks their kids want to dump. Guilfoyle didn't have much trouble taking over and turning it into another Eureka. It wasn't quite as wide open but the town turned dirty from head to toe.”

Pennington rooted around in the clippings and found a photograph. “Take a gander at Guilfoyle. He's a real package.” He slid it across the table to me. I held it under the anemic light and saw a tall, beefy mutt in a light suit, uglier than a cross-eyed moose. He had thick features over a bull neck and two hundred pounds of muscle and flab. A cigar was tucked in the corner of his mouth and he wore a derby low over weasel eyes. His lips were curled into a smile that was closer to a sneer.

“Straight out of central casting,” I said.

“So what's your interest in Mendosa?”

“One of the checks came from a bank up there.”

“If you think you had trouble with Culhane, I'd steer clear of Mendosa. Guilfoyle could get you two years for disturbing the peace if you sneezed in town.”

“Let me try something else on you. Supposing when Lila Parrish vanished she went down the road and hid out in Mendosa for a while. Then migrated down to L.A. and changed her name.”

“You think Verna Hicks was Lila Parrish?”

“Think about it. All these events happened within about eighteen months, starting with Riker's trial in late 1922 and ending with the Fontonio hit in 1924, the same year Verna showed up in L.A., telling people she was from everyplace in Texas.”

“That's another stretch, Zeke. Supposing Lila Parrish is living with her husband and family in Dubuque? Does the word slander mean anything to you? Do you have anything other than a hunch leading you there?”

I decided to play my hole card. “Can we go off the record a minute?” I said.

He pondered that. Reporters hate to go off-record for anything.

“Is it important, or one of your Canadian Club dreams?”

“It's fact.”

“Okay, but I get it first when you're ready to go public.”

“It's your story all the way.”

“What a sweetheart. Okay, let's hear it.”

“One of the more recent checks sent to Hicks was bought and mailed from here in town. The buyer was Eddie Woods.”

That perked him up a bit. “You can prove this?” he said.

I nodded. “The teller who sold him the check ID'd him to me over lunch.”

“It's still a stretch.”

“Look, I've given you all the background we have on Hicks. You can point out that she showed up down here after Lila Parrish vamoosed. The dates are more than coincidental.”

“How about the checks. Can I get photos of them?”

I nodded. “I'll list the number of checks and how many came from the San Pietro–Mendosa area. I can't give you the stats of the original checks because there may be some question about how I got them without a search warrant. I don't want to get anybody in trouble over this.”

“How about her checks?”

“Fair game, they were in her safety box at home. I can also make the deposit books available to you.”

“Exclusively?”

“Until the story breaks. Then anything in the report is fair game.”

He laughed. “You'll be all over the papers again.”

“I won't be here.”

“Where will you be?”

“Up north,” I said.

“Anything you get, I get first. That's part of the deal.”

“Must be nice,” I said. “Having me do your work for you.”

“Works both ways, pal,” he said, and then with a leer added: “By the way, mind if I mention that pansy dog of yours in the story?”

“Where did you hear about the dog?”

“I can't tell you that,” he said. “It's privileged.”

I had a different feeling going to the house in Pacific Meadows this time. Murder changes everything. Just knowing it happened is sobering. But inside the house, Ski was jubilant, as was Bones.

“Progress,” Bones said. “We've got enough fingerprints from this place and the empty house next door to keep the F.B.I. busy for a month.”

“I don't have a month. I don't have a week. Every day, this case slips further away.”

“We've made some progress,” Ski said casually.

“All talk and theories. I need some hard evidence.”

“Oh,” Ski said sardonically. “Well, how about this. The killer is about your size, maybe a little shorter, ten pounds heavier. He was wearing dark pants, a dark shirt, and a bowler. He cased the neighborhood for an hour or so the day before he killed her. At about 6:00 a.m. the day of the killing, the killer parked his car in the empty lot at the end of that strip of stores up on Main. He walked down six blocks to the house next door, after ascertaining that nobody was home from the papers gathering on the porch and possibly calling once or twice. He sat at a table near the front door for the whole day. Actually, he ate a sandwich, which he probably brought with him, and took the refuse with him when he left.”

I sat there entranced as Ski painted a verbal portrait of the killing. And he was almost as good at it as Bones.

“When Verna went inside, the killer went out the back door, went to the side of her house, and watched her until he heard her drawing a bath. He wouldn't have used the front door, too chancy, but none of the windows were locked either. He went in, took off his gloves, went straight into the bathroom, and about 9:18 p.m. he shoved her underwater. He held her under for about five minutes. Then he noticed the radio, pulled down the shelf, and let it drop in the tub with her. He went out the same way he came in, walked back up to his car, and at about 9:50 he drove away.”

“How do you know all this?” I asked.

“An old man two blocks over had a stroke six months ago. He sits on the front porch swing all day, every day. He saw the guy drive by four or five times. Tan-and-black ragtop. He thinks a Ford. A kid left his baseball mitt up at the ball diamond. He went up there on his bike to get it when he got up about 6:15 a.m. He was riding slow because he had a flashlight in one hand to see where he was going. When he passed the house, he saw the guy we described jimmy open the door. The guy had a small penlight in his mouth and the kid got a good shot of his hands. He was wearing black gloves. Gloves in May?”