Eureka (31 page)

She looked me over with an experienced eye. “You shouldn't have any trouble finding company. Great eyes, nice nose, good strong jawline. Nice straight teeth. Trim. You could use a few hours in the sun. And not too tall. That's good. Anything over six feet I find intimidating.”

“Who're you kidding? Nothing intimidates you.”

“How would you know?”

“It's a measured guess. Is this how you size up your young ladies?”

“I'm not too concerned about height where the ladies are concerned,” she said, sitting down on the chaise. “Some men like amazons, some like midgets.”

“No kidding. I've never met a lady midget.”

“Would you like to?”

“I can't afford it. A drink in this place would bankrupt me.”

“Maybe a free sample, then. But I get to watch.”

“Is that your monkey? Watching?”

“More like an audition.”

“I already have a job,” I said with a laugh.

“Not like the job I have in mind.”

“I'm sure.”

“Are you any good at it?”

“My job?”

“Yes, your job.”

“Not bad.”

“Brodie says you're a pit bull. Are you a pit bull . . . What's your first name?”

“Sergeant.”

“Cute,” she said sarcastically. “Is this where you go into your official act? Where's the blackjack?”

“We stopped using them, they leave bruises,” I laughed. “My name's Zeke. And I assume Brodie told you to go mum on me.”

“Brodie doesn't tell me what to do; I figure things out for myself. I think you're chasing some half-baked idea and you think if you talk to enough people, somebody's bound to tell you a lie you can hang your hat on.”

“I suppose you could look at it that way.”

She shook her head slowly. “Well, at least you're honest about it,
Sergeant,”
she said with a little spit in her tone.

“Why don't you call me Zeke.”

“I don't think we're going to get that chummy.”

“Really? I heard you have a thing for cops.”

“I have a thing for
men
.”

“Ow . . . got a thing for acid, too.”

“You don't chip easily, do you?”

“You're pretty good, but not
that
good.”

“I'm just warming up.”

“I won't be around for the finale.”

“Really?”

“This won't take that long. What do your young ladies do for kicks?” I asked, making it sound as casual as possible. “San Pietro isn't exactly the Lido.”

“They're driven into Santa Barbara or Los Angeles when they want to have fun. Sometimes they sneak into town for a movie.”

“Do they do well? I mean, do they make a nice living?”

“Is this going to be twenty questions?”

“Curiosity.”

“Jade, the naked sun goddess, is studying biology at U.C.L.A. She only works summers and holidays. So far, she's put herself through three years of college, makes straight A's, and will have a nice little nest egg when she graduates. That answer your question?”

“I was wondering where they bank,” I said, and tried to blow a smoke ring, which fell apart as it left my lips. She blew three perfect ones and stared hard at me as they rose toward the chandelier.

“Do you shill for a bank on the side?” she asked after a minute crept by.

“I'm sure you know about the five hundred a month the woman Verna Hicks Wilensky was getting. I just talked to the notary at one of the banks. She described two of the buyers as five-three or five-four, a hundred and ten pounds, sexy, very fancily dressed for San Pietro. Pleasant, friendly, self-assured. The description could fit either of the naked goddesses down by the pool. And probably all the rest of the gals in your sorority.”

“Or any other good-looking girl five-three or five-four.”

“The descriptions of the buyers all follow the same line. Pretty, far too well dressed for your average San Pietro girl, in their early twenties. Well spoken, good manners, friendly but not overly so . . .”

“What are you building?”

“As you told me, your girls sneak off to Eureka for an occasional movie but don't spend time down there.”

“It's called San Pietro. Eureka is history.”

“Not from where I'm standing. Some things don't wash off.”

“And you're different? Your badge makes you any better?”

I thought about that for a moment or two.

“Maybe you're right, Delilah. Maybe it's the same gutter no matter how you dress it up.”

“Maybe you better sashay out of here.”

“I'm not through yet. We were talking about your dollhouse. The girls wouldn't be recognized down in the village. They don't give their names, they hand the notary an envelope with five Ben Franklins in it and the name of the payee, get the check, put it in an addressed, stamped envelope, and get lost. I'd like to talk to some of the girls.”

“Sure. Just as soon as I fall over dead on the floor.”

“I could get pushy.”

“You could lose that pretty smile of yours.”

“We could do this the hard way, Delilah.”

“
My
first name is
Miss
,” she said harshly. “And you're up here chasing your own tail. Trying to pin something on me or Culhane or somebody else up here. Let me show you something.”

She led me across the room and pointed to a small photograph mounted on the wall. It was a shot of Brodie and his crew, somewhere in France. The remnants of a town formed the background and they were up to their ankles in mud. Below the photograph, mounted on black velvet, were a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. She stared at Culhane's figure as though transfixed.

“Why did you leave, Brodie?”

He shrugged. “To see the world.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You want to know the truth? I was running away from what I just came back to.”

She smiled ruefully. “You were sweet on Isabel, Ben was sweet on Isabel, and Isabel was sweet on both of you. Me? I was sweet on you and I couldn't make it to first base.”

“Hell, we were just kids, Del.”

“Doesn't make it hurt any the less.”

“We were all good friends. Still are, I should hope.”

“Nothing could ever change that, Brodie.”

She went to the record changer and put on an up-tempo jazz record, “Aunt Hagar's Children Blues,” and started to dance. Brodie had seen girls in Paris dancing like that, loose, legs flying, swinging to the rhythm of the music.

“C'mon, I'll teach you to do the Charleston.”

“Can I do it on one leg?” he asked with a smile.

She stopped and lifted the needle off the turntable.

“I'm sorry . . .”

“Hey, it's nothing. In another month I'll be good as new. Still a little gimpy, that's all.”

She sat down near him.

“Here's to us,” she said, holding up her glass. When they tapped them, the fine glassware pinged like tiny bells.

“To us,” he echoed. “A month from now you can teach me to dance. Give me an excuse to come by.”

“You'll never need an excuse, Brodie. Just show up. I'll give you the key.”

 

Without looking at me, she said, “Do you know about these men?”

“I've met most of them,” I said. “Look, I'm not up here to give anybody grief, particularly a bunch of war heroes. I'm here because I've got a job to do and it involves murder and . . .”

“Go back to L.A. You think anybody up here will give you a nickel's worth of news? There's not a man in that picture wouldn't lie, kill, or die for Culhane. And you can include me in the club.”

“I didn't say anything specific about Culhane.”

“I think you're dancing with the idea.”

“I think some of your girls have information that can help me. You want to do it the hard way?”

“Oh? And how would that work?”

“The scenario would go something like this: I send the black wagon up here from L.A. I come in with a fistful of warrants, and we haul a dozen of your ladies down to the city and go in the little room with the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and get real serious. All we want to know is where they got the bucks to buy some cashier's checks.”

“You'd have to wade through a couple of lawyers who make more money while they're taking a leak than you do in a year.”

“I've done rounds with the best. Lawyers don't rattle me, although being in the same room with them usually gives me a rash.”

“You're an arrogant son of a bitch.”

“I've been called a lot worse.”

“I'm sure you have,” she said, standing up. “Well, that's what you're going to have to do, so you may as well trot on home and get your warrants.”

“I think you've told me enough already.”

“Don't bang your head on the wall, Sergeant. A couple of dozen very well heeled, very well connected gentlemen come through here every week. Any one of them could have slipped one of the girls some Ben Franklins and asked her to do that little chore. The girls don't know any of them by name.”

“Then why are you getting wrinkles in your corset?”

“It's bad for business.”

“So's murder.”

“I think you should finish your drink and toddle along. You can take the cigar with you.”

She walked across the room and opened the door.

“Swell,” I said. “And I was hoping we'd get along.”

“Save up your money for about ten years and come back; you'll find out how pleasant I can be,” she answered.

“So long, Delilah,” I said. “Thanks for the drink and the cigar.”

The big colored guy was waiting for me at the front door with my hat.

“Good day, sir,” he said.

“It could have been better,” I told him.

I walked back toward the parking lot. I was guessing that the discreet side door hidden behind the hedgerow probably led to a private room for the locals.

Or maybe it was where the milkman made his morning delivery.

CHAPTER 26

Ski was in the diner when I got back there a little after three. He had commandeered a large booth in one corner and was leafing through his little black notebook.

Brett Merrill was sitting across the room in seersucker, a white shirt, and a blue tie, talking to a well-dressed gentleman who didn't look like he belonged in a diner. Neither of them did.

“The big guy in seersucker talking to the older fellow is the D.A., Brett Merrill,” I told Ski.

“Ex-D.A.,” Ski corrected. “He retired. He's Culhane's campaign manager now.”

“So, how'd you do?” I asked.

“Not bad.”

That was encouraging. Ski, who had been in the bureaucracy six years longer than I had, was a master of the noncommittal, having learned the trick from Moriarity. His responses ranged from “not much” to “not bad.” Nothing less, nothing more. “Not bad” held promise.

“How'd you do?” he asked.

“Well, I had a steak sandwich and traded pedigrees with Culhane, met the Gormans, scored some points at a couple of banks, and then went to a whorehouse.”

He shook his head. “I got six years' seniority on you and I get to spend the last three hours in the records room with a sweet little old lady named Glenda, listening to gossip, and blowing dust off old files. You eat steak, meet the snotty set, and get a matinee.”

“Privileges of rank.”

“Find out anything while you were eating and slumming with the rich?”

We started a familiar routine. Exchanging ideas and building on the evidence in some kind of logical order, trying to make sense of all the information we were gathering.

“I think I know who brokered the checks,” I said.

“I'll take a wild guess,” he answered, flipping through his notebook. No one, not even a cryptologist, could decipher Ski's scrawl. He looked over at me. “Delilah O'Dell,” he said.

“You been snooping around the banks, too.”

He nodded. “At least one check was bought by a working stiff I assume could have been her Japanese gardener. The rest of them were bought by sexy young ladies nobody knew. I get the feeling nobody wants to admit that the local madam has a chauffeur of color driving her and her employees around in a Rolls-Royce.”

The man Merrill was talking to got up. They shook hands and the man left without so much as a glance at us.

“You think O'Dell was banking Lila Parrish?” Ski asked.

“No. I think she's the front. Her girls go into L.A. on occasion as well as San Luis Obispo and other towns along the route. Easy for them to make a five-minute trip to a bank. What did the records department give up?”

“A few interesting items. Some may fit in, some are just local history. For instance, there's a death certificate on an Eli Gorman Junior. He was born in Massachusetts in 1900, died September 1920. That's from the record. Isabel Hoffman and Ben Gorman were his parents. They were married in Massachusetts. Gorman was going to Harvard and she went with him. She was seventeen at the time. That's from Glenda.”

“The kid was killed the night of the Grand View massacre,” I told him. “He drove his car off the overlook. That was his mother we saw with the flowers up on the cliff.”

“Eli Gorman, Ben's father, owned this whole valley at one time. The deeds are all on file.”

“He won it in a poker game with O'Dell.”

“Not all of it. O'Dell snookered him. He sold the deeds to the property that was then the town of Eureka to Riker the day of the game.”

“And started a war,” I said.

Ski thought about that for a moment or two.

“It probably started long before that,” he said. “The old-timer, Tallman? He put up with the town's sins. After the shoot-out in Delilah's place, Culhane turned up the heat on Riker.”

I finished the analysis. “And when Riker went up the river, and Fontonio was shot, Culhane ran Guilfoyle and the rest of the bunch out of town.”

“I think I got a surprise for you. I took a stroll through the cemetery and came across a tombstone that's interesting.” He looked at his notes. “Jerome Parrish. Born 1869, died 1908. Loving husband and father.”

“The daughter was Lila Parrish,” I guessed.

He nodded. “She was born in the clinic here, in 1900. Which would make her forty-one, close enough to fit Verna. Her mother was divorced when the kid was four. She remarried and divorced again. Her name now is Ione Fisher. Here's the kicker. Ione Fisher was, and still is, a nurse at the Shuler Institute, the sanitarium down in Mendosa. Very private. I understand Mrs. Fisher is head nurse now. She's sixty-two.”

“That's a lot of stuff to get out of old records.”

“Mostly Glenda. She's fifty-six, has a big nose, and loves to talk.”

I said, “So Lila blows town, heads down to Mendosa, hides out with her old lady in a private sanitarium for a while, and when Guilfoyle moves on Mendosa, Lila slips down to L.A., gets a new ID, hikes her age up a bit, and becomes Verna Hicks.”

“I have to wonder two things,” Ski said. “If she was being paid off, why would she hide out twenty-five miles from here in a town run by Riker's boy? Seems a little risky, wouldn't you say?”

“You're forgetting the time element,” I said. “Guilfoyle didn't move into Mendosa until after Riker's appeal, which was almost a year after the trial.”

“You'd think if she was a key witness against Arnie Riker, Culhane would have found her when Riker appealed the case,” Ski said. “Hell, if big-nosed Glenda knew who her mother was, Culhane certainly did.”

“Sometimes what seems obvious isn't necessarily fact,” a voice drawled, and we turned to face Brett Merrill. “Mind if I join you?”

He looked larger when confined in a small place. He was probably six-two and a hundred ninety or two hundred pounds. He sat down before we had a chance to answer him.

“Some things are bothering us,” I said to Merrill. “Maybe you can help us out.”

“I can try,” he drawled pleasantly.

“Lila Parrish was your key witness in the Thompson case. It seems to us that you would have kept a leash on her—knowing Riker was sure to appeal his conviction.”

“Yeah,” Ski said. “And since her mother lives in Mendosa, you'd think Culhane would look for her there.”

“Lila Parrish didn't live with her mother at the time of the murder,” Merrill said. “She lived with another girl in a shanty in Milltown. She left her mother when Ione married Fisher. They were on the outs. Our people interviewed Ione Fisher. I'm convinced she wasn't hiding Lila down there.”

“She was your only eyeball witness. How hard did you really try to find her?” I said.

Merrill shrugged and said in his easy drawl, “Lila Parrish vanished the day after she testified. Her roommate worked at the mill. When she came home from work, Lila's things were gone. Nobody's seen her since.”

“And you couldn't find her?”

“Look, boys, sometimes you have to play the hand you're dealt. We had Riker dead-to-rights. He and his boat were covered with her blood. The Parrish girl had testified she saw Riker shoot Wilma Thompson and throw her in his car. Thompson's blood was all over the car. Riker had spent ten days in jail for beating her up once and she ditched him. Plenty of motive for a guy with Riker's reputation. And he had no alibi. He said he went to his boat that night, got drunk, and passed out. When he was arrested on the boat he was still wearing bloody clothes and there wasn't a scratch on him. He was lucky they reduced the sentence to life without parole.”

I smiled. “Said like a true prosecutor.”

“It was a solid case. The legwork was first rate. Woods and Carney gave me a preponderance of evidence.”

“Where's Carney?”

“Died of a heart attack five years ago.”

“When Woods shot Fontonio, why did you dead-docket the case against him?” Ski asked, suddenly changing the subject.

“I thought you were investigating an L.A. homicide,” Merrill said softly. The smile got a little cooler.

“Just curious,” Ski said.

“Making a case against Eddie Woods would have been a waste of time. There were no eyewitnesses. We had started a grand jury investigation against what was left of the Riker outfit and Eddie Woods went to Fontonio's place to deliver a subpoena. He says Fontonio went for a gun and he shot him. There was a gun in Fontonio's hand we couldn't trace.”

“His wife and bodyguard said he never packed heat,” Ski said.

“C'mon, boys,” Merrill said, slowly shaking his head. “Would you go before a grand jury with a wife and a hoodlum as your only witnesses? The attorney general sent a man down from Sacramento to look into it. He looked over the evidence, said, ‘Thanks a lot for nothing,' and went back to Sacramento. Then Eddie resigned.”

He finished his coffee and dabbed his lips with a napkin.

Ski asked, “You came here from someplace else, didn't you? Just curious. Accents interest me.”

“Everybody in California came from someplace else,” Merrill answered. “I came from southern Georgia.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I had a little law firm and a partner named David Vigil, who had kept business alive while I was off fighting the war. There really wasn't enough business for the two of us, and my brother and sister-in-law were barely scratching out a living on the family farm. One day I got a call from California, probably the longest long-distance call in the town's history. It was Brodie. He said, ‘How'd you like to be D.A. of Eureka, California? I need some help out here.' So I packed my valise, took the bus to Atlanta, and hopped the train west. We kept busy. A shooting every week or ten days. Once in a while somebody stupid would rob the bank. If Buck Tallman didn't drop them in their tracks coming out the door, Brodie would ride them down. There was a lot of law but not much order.” He stopped and chuckled. “Probably a lot more than you wanted to know. Southerners tend to go on.”

“We're still trying to get a handle on the five hundred a month Verna was getting,” I said, cutting off his monologue. “Somebody was paying her off for
some
thing.”

“I wouldn't know about that.”

“Does Culhane know?”

“You'll have to ask him,” he said, grabbing his hat.

He laid a quarter on the table.

“Pleasure meeting you, Ski,” he said, and strolled out, leaving us staring at the door.

After a minute or so I said, “Know what I think? I think we've run out of gas here. Nobody's going to tell us a damn thing.”

“I'll tell you what I think,” Ski answered. “I think Lila Parrish lied at Riker's trial. Merrill didn't have Thompson's body because Riker fed her to the sharks. So
somebody
arranged for Parrish to testify she had witnessed the murder, then paid her to vanish.”

“Interesting theory, Ski. But why, after nearly twenty years, does she turn up dead in her bathtub?”

“If we knew that, we'd know who killed her.”

“Maybe Merrill was giving us the shoo-fly about Ione Fisher. Maybe she knows where her daughter went.”

“Maybe.”

“There's only one person who might give us a straight answer,” I said.

“The mother.” Ski nodded. “And she's right down the road.”

“Worth a shot,” I agreed, and we headed south.