Eureka (32 page)

CHAPTER 27

The neon sign spelled albacore point in startling red letters that burned the name into the fog. Under it: vacancies. At this time of year it should have said Full. Charlie Lefton apparently was too far off the beaten track to attract much trade. Or maybe he didn't care. Maybe Charlie was happy to have his little place by the ocean. Maybe he was independently wealthy and reclusive and used the place as a tax dodge. All Moriarity had said was that Charlie would give us a good price if we wanted to stay the night. Lefton's was perfect since it was on the way south to Mendosa.

We got to Lefton's by driving down a hard dirt road that led from Route 7 west toward the ocean and then curved around at a two-story hospital and followed the shoreline south. About five miles past the hospital, a sign had pointed off to the east to Milltown and a half mile beyond that was the paper mill, a black silhouette against the darkening blue sky. It was an eerie, ugly giant, a noisy complex with stacks that spewed reeking smoke and ash into the air. Man-made clouds obliterated a fiery sun sinking toward the horizon.

As we passed the plant, an early fog had suddenly surged out of the gathering dusk, not on little cat feet as Sandburg would have it but like a broiling storm cloud that had been grounded. Driving into it was like driving into a swirling, gray tunnel. The headlights reflected off it and were swallowed up. I switched to low beam and it gave us maybe ten feet of grace on the road. I was driving fifteen miles an hour when I spotted the red sign and slowed down, looking for the driveway into Lefton's place. I found it under the neon sign and turned onto a shell drive, the tires crunching beneath us as I eased down it.

“I hope the ocean isn't anywhere near here,” I said. “If we roam off the road, we could end up in the drink.”

After a moment, Ski said, “I can't swim.”

I laughed at him. “Hell, you couldn't sink if you tried.”

A sign jumped out of the fog at us, an arrow cut from a two-by-four, painted white with black letters: office. I felt disoriented, isolated in the middle of nowhere, with visibility of about five feet. I stepped out of the car and yelled, “Anybody around?”

My words sounded lifeless, without resonance, as the mist swallowed them up. Then a voice came back just as flat, “Who wants to know?”

“Customers,” I yelled back.

A spotlight blinked on, a blurred orb somewhere off to our left. A shimmering image came toward us, a rail-thin six-footer, his face leathered and tanned by sun and wind, his windblown black hair in need of a trim, and his face covered with four or five days' growth of graying beard. He was wearing denim work pants, a clean white sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and what was left rolled up over his shoulders, and light blue canvas deck shoes. There was a tattoo on his left biceps, a knife piercing a waving banner on which were the words death before dishonor.

“Charlie Lefton?” I asked.

“Yeah, I'm Lefton,” he said in a voice so quiet it was almost a whisper.

“I'm Zeke Bannon, this is my partner Ski Agassi. We work for Dan Moriarity. He said you might have room for us.”

“Homicide cops, huh?”

I nodded.

“Follow me up to the lodge. Can't see shit in this soup.”

We followed him down a slight embankment and into the arena of light formed by the searchlight. I could hear water beating against something.

“We close to the ocean?” I asked.

“About a hundred yards to your right,” he answered. A moment later a small wooden bridge appeared through the fog. It led to the lodge, as Lefton called it, a strip of eleven rooms. The office was in the middle, five rooms on each side. A narrow walk surrounded the primitive billet and below it, a grid of four-by-fours supported it about five feet off the ground. Nearby, just out of the light's perimeter, I could hear a boat groaning against its tie lines, and much farther away, almost out of earshot, the ocean smacking against rocks.

“Where the hell are we?” I asked as we walked down to the office.

He pulled open a squeaky screen door and flicked on the office light and pointed to a map on the wall. It was a sectional of the coastline. We were on the back side of a narrow cove, like a finger pointing inward from the Pacific. Lefton's lodge was built on stilts in the event of an extremely high tide.

“Been here since ‘32 and never got a drop of water under the place,” Lefton said. “Always have been a little too cautious for my own good.”

The office barely earned the name. There was a scarred-up old desk against one wall, three straight-back wooden chairs, and a gray metal three-drawer file cabinet facing the desk on the opposite wall. An upright telephone, a small desk lamp, and a hot plate with a percolator held down the desk, and a 1939 calendar from a tackle shop adorned the wall.

“You guys just spending the night?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We'll by pulling out about seven.”

“Well, I brew up coffee at 6:30 if you need a jump start to get moving. Got some sugar and cream in my room, which is next door.”

“You live here?” Ski asked.

“Here and on my boat. She can hold eight. I like to sleep on her. She rocks me to sleep.” He spoke in that low voice, almost without modulation. I had the feeling you could set off a load of TNT in the next room and he wouldn't blink.

“Why don't you take 1 and 2,” he said. “They got an adjoining door. They're open. Keys are in the top dresser drawers. You can settle up when you leave. Two bucks apiece sound fair?”

“More than fair,” I said.

“Hell, they'd go empty anyways. Just gotta show a little profit. There's an ice chest filled with Mexican beer on the back side. Twenty cents a bottle. Throw the money in the tin can on the side.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“Come down from Pietro?” he said, making conversation.

I nodded.

“Where you heading this evening?”

“Mendosa.”

Lefton seemed genuinely surprised.

“Jesus, why?” he asked.

“We have to interview somebody.”

“Hmm. Well, don't mention the captain down there. You know the story about the feud between him and Guilfoyle?”

I nodded.

“Worst case of bad blood I ever saw. I'd walk light down there; your badge ain't worth a damn. One thing Guilfoyle really hates is big-city cops. He's mean as a constipated skunk but he's not as dumb as some think and he's got a real short fuse.”

“So we've heard.”

“He wouldn't get homicidal with a couple of out-of-town cops, would he?” Ski said with a smile.

“You seen the fog we got here. You could disappear into the Pacific and nobody would ever find you. It's happened a lot more often than you might think.”

“To cops?” I asked.

“To anybody he gets a hard-on for.”

“Great,” Ski said dismally.

“How come Culhane doesn't go down there and clean the whole bunch out?” I asked.

Lefton shrugged. “It's a Mexican standoff. The captain doesn't give a damn, long's Gil stays on his side of the county line, which is about ten feet from here.”

“You know Guilfoyle pretty well?” I asked.

“He brings a fishing party down here once a month or so. Doesn't like his guests to spend too much time in the daylight in Mendosa, if you know what I mean.”

“Not exactly.”

“They're his guests
.
Hard cases, I'd say; sounds like they're usually from back East somewhere. They fill up the place for a week. Or a month. Pay good, tip big. I don't ask questions.”

I remembered what Jimmy Pennington said about Mendosa being called ‘Hole-in-the-Wall' after the Montana hangout of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

“Well, we're not planning to spend a lot of time there. Grab a bite to eat, gas up the jalopy, do our work, and come back.”

“Mendosa's straight down the road about fifteen miles, just past the icehouse. Probably take you half an hour in this fog.”

“Thanks, Charlie.”

“Glad to do it,” he answered. “Anything I can do for Dan.”

That's all he said, although I was sure there was more to that story than he cared to tell. He walked in front of the car with a flashlight and guided us through a turnaround and back up to the main road.

It took us just under thirty minutes to crawl into Mendosa. We passed Ferguson's Icehouse on the right and about two miles from Mendosa we drove out of the fog as suddenly as we had driven into it.

“We got an address on Shuler's place?” I asked Ski.

“Yeah. End of Bellamy Street on the north end of town. Take a left at the second light, which is Main Street, and then right when the street forks.”

I pulled into the first filling station I saw. The sign out front told us it was warthog miller's fill-up. The attendant was a short, mean-looking guy with a gimpy leg, oily hair, bad teeth, and the breath to go with it. I told him to fill it up and got out as he was pumping the gas. There was a lot of background noise. People, music, horns blowing. Friday night noises.

“You Warthog Miller?” I asked pleasantly.

“I suppose so,” he snarled.

His eyes wandered to our license plate, the whip aerial on the back bumper, and the spotlight mounted beside the door on the driver's side.

“Lookin' for anybody in particular?” he said, too casually.

“Nope. Just gonna grab a bite to eat.”

He finished pumping and asked if we needed oil.

“No thanks,” I said, paid him two bucks for the gas, and got back in the car.

“Sounds like they're having a riot,” Ski said.

“Friday night in a crooked mill town,” I ventured.

“Ain't we the lucky ones.”

As we pulled out, I watched Warthog in the rearview mirror. He scurried into the office and dropped a nickel in a pay phone on the wall.

“I think we got made,” I said.

“What a surprise.”

When we got to Main Street I sat for a minute, waiting for the light to change, then took a right.

“I said left at the light,” Ski mumbled.

To our left, Main Street was as dark as a mole hole.

“I gotta make a phone call.”

Main Street wasn't as bad as I expected. A small town with a tree-lined main drag. We drove six or seven blocks and saw three bars, a nightclub that advertised “dancing ladies” in neon, another that had a sign telling us it featured genuine New Orleans jazz, a gaming parlor with its windows painted black, a billiard parlor, a pawnshop, and a restaurant that bragged “We never close.” Otherwise, there was the usual collection of hardware stores, grocers, meat markets, an ice cream parlor, and a movie theater. But it was a noisy town, with music spilling from the joints and streets filled with people looking in the doors and milling about. A lot of activity for a little town, even for a Friday night.

I drove another block and came to a restaurant called Ma's Home Cooking.

I parked and we went in and grabbed a table.

A waitress with henna-colored hair piled on top of her head and lipstick the color of blood sashayed over to the table and popped her gum for us.

“Hi, boys, what'll it be,” she said. “The meat loaf's the specialty. It's so good the cook keeps the recipe in a safe.”

“Just two coffees,” I said.

“What kind of pie do you have?” Ski asked.

“What kind would you like, Shorty?” she said with a half-assed grin.

Ski's laugh rattled the place.

“How about banana cream?”

“You got it,” she said. And to me, “Pie for you, too?”

“No thanks,” I said.

“Two javas, one B.C., coming up.”

I went to the phone booth in the back of the place near the rest rooms and looked up the Shuler Institute in the phone book, dropped a nickel, and dialed the number. A man answered the phone and I asked for Mrs. Fisher. She was on the phone within seconds.

“This is Superintendent Fisher.”

“Mrs. Fisher? My name is Tyler Marchand the Third, from Santa Maria. I'm sure you've heard of Marchand Estates.”

“Uh . . . yes, of course,” she said. Took the bait.

“You've been highly recommended by several people in my club—I won't mention names, I'm sure you respect their confidentiality—and I'm sure you'll understand when you hear my predicament.”

“Which is, Mr. Marchand?”

“My brother has become a real problem. He's a drinker and we have tried everything. He's very tight right now and I wondered if I might bring him by there.”

“You mean now?!”

“I really need your help. I've been told you are a truly concerned establishment. I've driven over forty miles.”

“Mr. Marchand, we require a letter of sponsorship and a substantial deposit prior to an examination. This late at night . . .”

“This is an emergency, Mrs. Fisher. He's been drinking for days. What better time to evaluate him? I can be there in ten minutes. I'll be glad to give you whatever deposit is required.”

She hesitated for a few seconds and finally she said, “Alright, Mr. Marchand, but I'll have to talk to you before we admit him. There are a lot of details . . .”

“I'll be there in ten minutes,” I said, and hung up.

The waitress was back by the time I returned to the table, carrying coffee in each hand and the pie perched on one of the cups.

“There you go,” she said. “Shorty, you look like a man who'd just love an order of that meat loaf.”

“And so I would,” Ski said. “But we're running a little late for an appointment.”

“Well, ain't that a boot in the ass,” she chirped, and retreated to the back.

Ski took a long swig of coffee and glanced casually over the lip of the cup through the front window as he was drinking. He set the cup down, smiled, and said casually, “We got company.”

“What kind?”