The Twenty-Year Death (44 page)

Before I could take a step, the front door opened and closed with a click. There was the sound of the switch and then the light in the front room went on, spilling a rectangle onto the kitchen floor.

I stood still and listened. There was no audible reaction to the sight of the dead man. The police would have knocked first and there would have been at least two of them, but no one spoke. Footsteps crossed the floor and stopped right about where Merton’s body was. They were high-heeled footsteps.

I stepped into the doorway. Vera Merton was standing in front of her brother. She was wearing the same clothing I had seen her in that afternoon. She reached into a small clutch purse, her head down, her hair hiding her face. When her right hand withdrew from the bag it was holding a silver-plated .22.

“You won’t need that. He’s already dead,” I said, stepping into the room.

Her head jerked up. Her eyes were red despite an expert attempt to hide the signs of crying with makeup. The hand with the gun in it jerked up too, drawing a bead on my chest.

“And you might want to turn out the light. Anyone can see you from the street through that window.”

She didn’t look behind her to see which window I meant. She steadied the gun. “What are you doing with that knife,” she said.

I reversed my hold on the knife so that it was not threatening. “Knife’s missing from the scene. I was just going to add it in. It’ll look more real that way. You really don’t need the gun.”

She didn’t lower it. “What are you doing here?”

“Your father sent me. I think he meant for me to take the fall for this.”

Her face broke a little then, and no makeup could hide the pain in it. “He called me and said that he was going to call the police. I was just going to make sure...I knew Tommy was...”

“I’m taking care of it. Put away the gun and turn out the light. We haven’t much time.”

She lowered the weapon then, but she didn’t move. Instead her eyes went back to the body, and her head and shoulders fell. She might have been crying.

I went and turned out the light. “How’d your father know what was here?”

“He came by this afternoon.”

“Your brother gets a lot of visitors for a dead man.”

I stepped around her, wiped the knife clean with my handkerchief, pressed it against his fingers, and then put it on the floor below his hand.

She spoke behind me. “Father wanted to talk about Tommy’s options. As if Tommy had any options.”

I checked the window. There was no sign of the police. Even with the lights out, we could probably be seen from outside. I took her arm. “We have to go. Where’d you park your car?”

She didn’t move. “There’s something wrong with us, isn’t there?”

“Nothing a little hard work wouldn’t cure.”

She looked up then, her eyes hidden in the dark. “Hard work!” There was a note of hysteria. “Do you know what Tommy did? What we let him do again and again?”

I took the gun out of one hand and her purse out of the other. I put the gun back where it had come from and held onto both. “Yes. I saw his work yesterday and it was much worse than this.”

She looked back at her brother. “He had no more options.”

“Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he would have
gone to the police or gotten some help. Maybe he would have snapped out of it. It doesn’t matter. He has no options now.”

“I had no more options. And now...”

“Don’t say it. Don’t say anything else. I’m working for your father, so I’m helping you out of a jam, but if I were to know otherwise we’d have to have some law in it. You understand?”

She nodded her head.

I checked the window again and saw a black-and-white parking silently across the street. I pulled her arm again. “Come on. We’re out of time.”

There was the sound of car doors slamming. She was pliant now, and I dragged her into the kitchen, her high heels clicking on the floor behind me. When the police walked in, they would see a poor slob who had written his own ticket. Merton could fix anything else that needed fixing himself. Except for Mandy Ehrhardt. She had been a cold one, but that didn’t change what happened to her. It was better that Tommy got his own.

We went out the back door in the kitchen. I pushed her ahead of me and closed the door behind us. The backyard was a slab of concrete with overflowing metal garbage cans tucked up against the house. A small chain fence enclosed the slab with an opening that let into an alley. When they got no answer, one of the cops would come back here. I wanted to be out of the alley before then.

I hurried us down the narrow path between the slabs of concrete. There were fences all the way, creating a wall that separated people’s private garbage from the public trash. “Where’s your car?” I asked again.

“I parked on Front Street, one block over.” There were no tears in her voice now, and some of her self-assurance had returned.

I let go of her arm and she stayed with me. “Good. Go to your car and get out of here.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Does it matter?”

She didn’t answer. We were at the end of the alley now, stepping onto the adjoining street. She took her purse from me, and left without a word. I went the opposite way to come back around to West Market. I crossed the street and hurried along to my car. If I were just getting here, I would be coming from my car.

Both uniforms were still at the door. Or maybe they had already checked the rear and had come back around to the front. They pounded on the door again, loud enough that I could hear them halfway down the street. The summer night sounds of the neighborhood had died away, killed by the police cruiser.

Once they went inside, I could pull away. But before I could get in my battered Packard, an obvious unmarked pulled up and double-parked along the marked car. I waited a moment and then started up the middle of the street for it. Samuels got out. He was by himself. He saw me coming and said as I reached him, “You call the law?”

“No,” I said. “Just you.”

“What’s going on?”

“I think this guy is your man. Other than that I don’t know any more than you do.”

Samuels led the way up the walk. We were friends again. “Officers,” he said to the other cops, “Detective Samuels with Robbery/Homicide. What’s the trouble?”

“Call about a possible prowler. Nobody’s home.”

I liked the call about the prowler as much as I liked having my teeth kicked in.

“Step aside,” Samuels said, and stepped between them and banged on the door with his fist. He turned back to me, still standing on the path. “How sure are you about this?”

“Sure,” I said.

“We’ll get a warrant later,” Samuels said, and opened the screen door and tried the knob, which opened for him as well as it had for me. He stepped inside and the lights came on. The officers followed after him, and I followed behind. The scene was just as stunning the second time. “Damn it!” Samuels said. He turned on me. “Okey, spill. Wait a second.” He turned to the officers. “This was your call. You call it in, and wait outside for the dusters to get here.” Once the two policemen, one ashen faced, the other red, were gone, Samuels turned on me again. “That’s Daniel Merton’s kid. You going to tell me something now?”

“Remember the other case, the one before Christmas? Merton had the story quashed. There’s another one a couple years back. Merton probably killed that one too, because it never went anywhere. When I looked into it, a couple of Hub Gilplaine’s stooges used me for a punching bag. They tried to prevent me from seeing Merton earlier today too. I’m guessing Gilplaine was blackmailing the old man, and it wasn’t worth anything if other people knew. I managed to check in with the old man anyway and he gave me this address. I called you and you know the rest.”

He looked at me with narrowed eyes. “I don’t like it.”

I shrugged and kept my mouth shut.

“You’re claiming that Thomas Merton killed at least three girls and that his father has covered it up for him? Do you know who Daniel Merton is?”

“Sure,” I said.

He looked back at the stiff. “I don’t like it. But I guess I’ll take it. What did Merton senior say when you talked to him?”

“He said that it was okay if his kid killed a couple of girls as long as nobody noticed. I guess killing a girl who’s going to be in a picture gets noticed. And so we have it.”

“He told you that?”

“Not in those words.”

“Well, you keep a lid on this thing. We’ll figure something out.”

“You always do, detective,” I said.

He gave me another squinty-eyed look and then dismissed the comment with a wave of his hand.

“There’s more,” I said.

He shook his head without even looking at me. “You’re going to tell me this other stiff under the boardwalk was Merton’s too.”

“You’re pretty good at this,” I said.

“I’m also good at using my gun as a club without knocking it out of line. You want me to show you that trick too?”

“You said you like it straight.”

“Like it? I don’t like it one bit.” He sighed. “Give it to me short. We’ll go back to the station and you can tell it as long as you want.”

“Tommy and Greg Taylor were friends. They were both out, looking to get high. I’m guessing Tommy killed Ehrhardt on the way. When he realized Taylor could be a witness, he took care of him also.”

He looked at me. “This isn’t the world we were born into,” he said. “It wasn’t like this when we were kids. If a man killed you, he did it looking you in the eyes and he had a good reason, and everyone slept all night.”

“You believe that?”

“Not for a second,” he said, and went back outside.

I followed, leaving the door open.

At the station, I gave the police my story, leaving out Daniel Merton at Detective Samuels’ suggestion. I then went home and gave the story, leaving in everything, to Fisher. Then I collapsed on my bed. When I came to, the sun was shining, and I went out for a newspaper in the same clothes I had on.

There was no mention of Merton on the front page—not the father, not the son. I took the paper back home and read through every article, but there wasn’t one on the Mertons or on the Ehrhardt killing. I went back down to the newsstand at the corner and bought three other papers and took those back upstairs and read through every article in those too. Nothing. The fix was in. That left me a loose end.

I considered the house visits I needed to make while deciding if I should change my clothes. In the end I left without changing. At the studio, my name was on the list. When I got up to the secretary’s desk, she picked up her phone at the sight of me and had it back on the receiver by the time I was in front of her.

“You’re to go right in,” she said, without a hint of expression.

I went through the door. The curtains were open this morning. It made the office feel grand and light. Merton was at his desk with a folder open in front of him and three more to the side. Two telephones had appeared on the desk as well. Maybe he locked them up at night.

He looked up. His face was stern.

“Aren’t you in mourning?” I asked.

“I still have to eat,” he said.

We looked at each other, holding eye contact for half a minute before I decided there was nothing in it and looked away.

“I hope you know I didn’t expect that murder rap to stick on you,” he said.

“Sure, suicide plays just as well, and it’s easier to keep it out of the papers.”

“I can keep anything out of the papers I damn well want to.”

“I’ve noticed that.”

He leaned back in his chair and the bluster drained away. An old man looked back at me. “It had to stop. He was getting too hard to control.”

“I’ve got no problem with what you did.”

“Not me,” he said.

And then I flashed on it. That’s why she had been sitting in the dark.

“Some family you’ve got,” I said.

“It’d make a great picture,” he said. “Too bad I can’t make it.” Then he leaned back over the open folder. “My secretary has a check for you. I filled in an amount, but if it’s wrong, she can write you another one.” He turned a page in the file. I was dismissed.

The secretary gave me my check without any comment. It was for $2,500. I considered tearing it up and walking out, but that wouldn’t do anybody any good. I went down to my car to make my final stop.

The Enoch White Clinic was housed in two adjoining mansions and five outbuildings that had been built by oil men in the years before the pictures came to southern California. Signs
along the long drive pointed the way through the acres of grass and trees to a parking lot that had been poured in front of the eastern of the two main houses. The door displayed a brown placard with businesslike letters that read RECEPTION.

The front hall was two stories high, a large bank of arched windows at the rear displaying the grounds behind the house. It was a peaceful view that suggested that the city was far away or maybe that there was no city at all. It was the kind of view that you could grow to love until it made you lonely and became stifling. The reception desk was to the right facing away from the window. I had to sign my name on a clipboard and they asked me to take a seat in one of the chairs that were provided for visitors. I was the only one there. The house was silent. They kept the crazies under wraps here. Screaming was bad for business.

When a nurse came to get me, I followed her down a wood-paneled hallway that had large gilt-framed portraits showing men in collars and robes in between every two doors. At the end of the hall, we turned into another hall just like it. Shem Rosenkrantz was leaning against a doorframe, drinking from a flask.

“I ought to kill you,” he said.

The nurse looked flustered and turned and left without saying anything or pointing out which room belonged to Chloë Rose. I think I had an idea.

“The doctors say Clotilde is sick. They won’t let her go. They say she’s got a nervous constitution. That she may never be able to leave. They say she’s a danger to herself. They know her better than I do. They know her better than she knows herself.”