Smoked Out (Digger) (4 page)

Brackler had insisted and Digger finally filled out the form. He left the fifty thousand dollars to the Westminster Kennel Club, with a stipulation that it be used for improving the breed of Great Pyrenees. "They’re a little too high in the shoulder," he told Brackler. Brackler said, "You’re sick."

"That’s why I shouldn’t be allowed to have insurance," Digger had said. Logic had gotten him nowhere, however, and the Westminster Kennel Club was just waiting for him to die. Along with his ex-wife. And maybe everyone else who knew him.

He read carefully the police department reports on Mrs. Welles’s accident. There was a report, complete with diagram, signed by Patrolman Romeo Rocca. It was countersigned by Lt. Peter Breslin, Detective Bureau, Acting Commander.

Lt. Peter Breslin was young and handsome. He had a square jaw, clear blue eyes, a suit that Digger could not have afforded and four books of criminology on his desk which, Digger was glad to see, Breslin had never opened. Digger never trusted cops who read books. His father had told him: "Those cops couldn’t find a bass drum in a phone booth. And then when you need them, if you’re in a pinch, they’re always off somewhere telephoning their college to find out what their final marks were. Stay away from them."

Breslin looked at Digger’s business card.

"All right, Burroughs, what can I do for you?"

"I’m looking into the death of Jessalyn Welles."

"You got any ideas?"

"No. Routine kind of thing. Big claim, check it out."

"You use to be a cop?"

"No."

"Most your kind of guys are. Ex-cops. Get bad backs or get tired of worrying about somebody trying to give them an extra eye in the middle of their head, they quit. Go to work for an insurance company. Maybe I’ll do that. Money any good?"

"You’ll probably wind up police commissioner first," Digger said. "The money sucks. How long you been on the job?"

"Nine years. I know. I look younger than that. That’s part of my Irish charm. Hollywood cop. I took the job and went and got my teeth capped. Around here you never know when you’re going to be discovered. Anyway, that’s what I thought. But it turns out that producer that you arrest for killing this week’s nookie because she’s been screwing some horseback rider isn’t in the mood to hire anybody. Frame of mind is wrong. Anyway, I got good teeth out of it. I’m too short, anyway. You know that goddamn Clint Eastwood is six-feet-four? I stood next to him once. He’s like a fucking tree. And he’s got a chipped tooth. There’s no justice. What about Mrs. Welles?"

Digger said, "So far, routine. But it’s a big policy I read the accident report. You were at the scene?"

"Yes. The cops called the detectives in and they called me."

"You see anything?"

"No. You never know, so you always look. But there wasn’t anything. By the neighborhood, you’d say some drunk ran off the road. But at 6:00 A.M.? If you’re that drunk at six in the morning, you’re sleeping, not going to work."

"Who told you she was going to work?" Digger asked.

"Girl at the store. Lurene or Norelle…"

"Lorelei Church?"

"Right. She said Mrs. Welles was coming in early all week. Probably bored with her husband out of town. Just some kind of accident."

"She wasn’t drunk?"

"They sliced her afterwards. No booze," Breslin said.

"You have a copy of the autopsy report?"

"Yeah, but I can’t give it to you without a court order. Rules."

"Anything in it I should know?"

"No. Just somebody who ran off the road. No drugs, no booze and no breakfast. Nothing in her purse. I thought about the booze, like I said. I thought about it in the house."

"You went into her house?" Digger asked.

"Yeah. See if anybody was there or what. Nobody there. No signs of a party. Bed was half-made. Like she slept in it, got up and didn’t have time to fool with it but just pulled up the spread to make it decent. A bachelor bed. You know. I nosed around. Even though that we’re not supposed to, but there wasn’t anything there that you wouldn’t find in a normal Hollywood doctor’s house."

"Except a maid," Digger said.

"She showed up later. It was her day off."

"Mary Beckwith?"

Breslin nodded. "You’ve done your homework." He shrugged. "Just another accident."

Digger said, "Can we talk? Really talk?"

"We can try."

"How sure are you about that? Just an accident?"

"What else would it be?" Breslin lit a small filter-tipped cigar.

"Well, try suicide."

"No. There was no suicide note. Mrs. Welles wasn’t depressed. Anyway, it’s not the way people commit suicide."

"What way do people commit suicide?" Digger asked.

"There’s two ways. Fakers…the ones who don’t mean to die…they take a few pills, call for help, then take a few more. They don’t take a chance until they’re sure that help is on the way. Real suicides kill themselves. They jump off big buildings because there’s no changing your mind on the way down. They take a lot of poison. They climb inside their ovens. They rearrange their brains with bullets. What they do not do is drive off cliffs, particularly low cliffs. That’s messy, painful and risky. You’ve got just as good a chance of being turned into an artichoke as you do of killing yourself." He blew a smoke ring and seemed very proud of it. "Scratch suicide."

"All right," Digger said. "Murder."

"Who’d murder her?"

"Dr. Welles."

"I talked to him less than an hour after the accident. He was in San Francisco at some horseshit seminar or something, four hundred miles away from here."

"Maybe he monkeyed with the brake cables or whatever you call those things?" Digger said. "It always worked for Humphrey Bogart."

"With a four-hundred-mile-long pair of scissors?" Breslin said. "This isn’t a murder. It was an accident. There was even a witness, some old guy who lives on the same street. He saw her leave her house. They talked. She was fine and cheerful. Then she drove off the cliff. Sorry, Burroughs. It was an accident. Maybe not your normal garden variety kind of accident, but an accident anyway."

Digger sighed. Nothing was ever simple. He had been hoping for a clean, ordinary million-dollar murder. "All right," he said. "The car was okay?"

"New Mercedes. Perfect condition. You live around here?"

"Las Vegas. You interested? They’re always looking for cops."

"Naaah. Too much temptation with all that money. I’d wind up shot or indicted. I’d rather wait here and be discovered. How are the chickies?"

"Next to your town, the best-looking in the world and not a square pair of heels inside city limits."

"I love it. I didn’t know anybody lived in Las Vegas."

"Nobody does. We’re all passing through, on our way from nowhere to noplace. You a gambler?"

"Blackjack, small stakes. You don’t look like a degenerate," Breslin said. "I figured only degenerates spent a lot of time in Las Vegas."

"I was a degenerate when I moved there. When I straightened out, I stayed to take the waters," Digger said.

"Maybe you’ll show me around some time. Anything else I can do for you?"

"Anytime. The car? Where would it be now?"

"Rizzioli’s Garage. That’s on Ventura Boulevard. You know where it is?"

"Yeah. I’m staying there."

"He contracts with the police as a pound. When we got the car up from off that goddamn hill, we sent it over there. Then one of our mechanics went over it. Nothing wrong. It stays at Rizzioli’s for ninety days, then it goes back to Dr. Welles to do whatever he wants with it. He can junk it. Goddamn thing looks like it went through a trash compactor."

"Okay to mention your name at Rizzioli’s?"

"Sure. Why don’t you put your home number on your card?" Breslin asked. "If I ever get to Las Vegas, maybe you can show me around. How tall are you, anyway?"

"Six-feet-three."

"Lucky prick. Like Eastwood. If he was my size, he’d still be digging swimming pools. I hate the bastard."

"He always speaks highly of you," Digger said.

Digger sadly decided that Alphonse Rizzioli represented the final degradation of the gene pool which had produced Galileo, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Fermi and Caruso.

But he was only too glad to do Digger a favor, particularly since Digger had mentioned Lt. Breslin’s name. Rizzioli was one of those who always did favors for policemen, since he knew, as a certainty, that there would be a day in his life when he would need a policeman to do him a favor.

He took Digger to Mrs. Welles’s car, a twisted mass of metal. The front was caved in, one of the passenger doors had been ripped off and the trunk section had been accordion crumpled. Apparently the auto had gone off the cliff, then bounded over, end over end, like a Slinky going downstairs.

"Pile of junk," Alphonse Rizzioli said.

"It takes death to teach some people to fasten their seat belts."

"Naaaah. Belts don’t make no difference when it’s like this. This is a Mercedes, too. Imagine with one of them shit cars. It’d be like a stain on the rocks. You should see some of the Detroit numbers what gets in accidents. You can’t even tell what kind of cars they are."

"Must be fascinating."

"Yeah. I mean, a car like this goes for Thirty-Nine-Five. That’s a lot of money. Doctors got a lot of money. You think of all the money wasted, smash, bang, gone."

"Were you here, Alphonse, when the police mechanic looked the car over?"

"You can call me Al. Yeah, I was here. What’s your name again?"

"Borose. You can call me Mr. Borose. That’s what Lt. Breslin calls me. What kind of job did the mechanic do?"

"What mechanic?"

"The police mechanic we’re talking about. The one who looked the car over."

"Some of these guys they hire. They don’t know shit. Civil Service. You give a guy Civil Service and put him on that tit and he don’t want to work no more. It’s our tax money that’s paying for it, too."

"That’s true," Digger said. "We should be able to send our tax money to whatever department of government we want. You could send yours directly to the probation department. What kind of job did he do?"

"He looked it over. Got under it, crawled around awhile and said there wasn’t anything wrong with the car."

"What could go wrong with a car to cause that kind of accident? You know, straight ahead, off a cliff," Digger asked.

"A lot of things. Steering linkages, busted cables, jammed throttle. The brakes could have been gone. Power steering not working. A lot of things. Maybe a blowout."

"All those things," Digger said. "You could still check them?"

"I guess. Anything that isn’t ripped out. Why? You think there’s something funny with the car? How’s this involve you, Mister…?"

"Borose. Mister Borose. Some of the boys sent me here to check it out. They think maybe there’s something wrong with the car. It’s the only way to explain the accident. That’s what the boys think." He winked at Rizzioli when he mentioned "the boys."

"Maybe. But it was one of them rich bitches. They’re always drunk and partying. Probably just fell asleep at the wheel. Serves ’em right. Was they working, that wouldn’t happen. Was they having to get up in the morning, they wouldn’t always be running off cliffs, killing themselves."

"I hadn’t realized till now how epidemic it was," Digger said. "You could inspect the car again?"

"I could. But I got a big place to run here." He waved his hand around at the dozens of wrecks which constituted his legacy.

"Well, the boys would want to make it worthwhile for you. We wouldn’t use your time for free. How about a hundred dollars? I know what a busy man you are."

"A hundred dollars. Sure. I can look at it."

"Here’s what we want. We want you to check anything that could go wrong to make a car go off the road that way. Steering, brakes, link-em-ups, whatever you call it. Jammed thingamajig. Check everything. Don’t leave anything out. If you find something, there might…well, you never know. The boys can be generous. How fast can you have it done?"

"I’ll work on it today."

"All right. I’m at the Sportsland Lodge. Call me there. Room 300. If I’m not there, leave your number and I’ll call you back."

Digger gave him twenty dollars. Rizzioli asked, "When do I get the other eighty?"

"You don’t think the boys are good for it?"

"No, no. Just wondering, is all."

"I’ll stop by tomorrow and pay you the rest. There could be more where that came from. And we don’t have to tell anybody about it. This is cash. Between me and you. No IRS reports…you know what I mean."

"Sure I do, Mister Borose. I’ll phone you as soon as I’m done."

"Thank you, Alphonse. This is a fine thing you’re doing. Our people won’t forget you. And they can do you some good. I’m going to tell them how you cooperated with us. I don’t have to tell you that you must keep this quiet, right?"

"You can trust me, Mr. Borose."

"I know I can, Alphonse. That’s a noble name, Alphonse. You should walk proud. Walka proud."

On his way into Beverly Hills, Digger stopped to buy a newspaper. There was a brief story on the funeral of Mrs. Welles. He cursed under his breath when he read that Mrs. Rochelle Lindsley, the dead woman’s mother, had left immediately for her home in Connecticut. He had wanted to talk to her, but now it would have to wait.

When he got to Wilshire Boulevard, Digger was surprised to find that the Occidental Gift Shop, three blocks from Rodeo Drive, was open. The store’s small display window was filled with California’s high-class rendition of New York schlock. In New York, junk shops sold cheap, sprayed-gold reproductions of the Empire State building made of genuine plaster. In California, they sold three-inch-high models of California cliff-houses made of genuine wood, complete with rope and wood bridges and shingled roofs. The display window also featured shells. Digger liked shells, often having thought that his ex-wife belonged in one. She had been a woman with no discernible backbone, developing one only when she got him into divorce court.

Digger pressed the button that turned on his tape recorder. He could feel the faint vibrations against his back. A bell over the door rang as Digger walked inside. A young woman with dark brown hair sat at a small desk in the rear of the store. She seemed intent on a cluster of pill bottles spread out on the desk in front of her. Digger recognized her. She had been at the funeral. Lorelei Church. Miss Surf’s-Up of 1981, 2 and 3. The one who thanked him.