Eureka

“So, what about Culhane?” I asked innocently.

  He responded as only Moriarity can. He was a product of what I call the bureaucratic system of ambiguous response. Moriarity could be standing knee-deep in a pouring rainstorm and if you asked him if it was raining out, he would probably respond with something like, “It’s hard to say” or, more likely, “I think Gary Cooper shoulda played Rhett Butler.” In the bureaucracy, the less specific you get, the safer you are. So when I asked about Culhane, he thought a minute, and said that he had heard that Culhane was everything from a demagogue to a commie; from dangerous, tough, heartless, corrupt, merciless, and a cold-blooded murderer to heroic, compassionate, charming, and, as far as the citizens of San Pietro, California, were concerned, “Joan of Arc with a pecker.”

  “What do you think?” I asked.

  He thought for a minute and said, “I think God has a great sense of humor.”

  I smiled and waited, but he didn’t have any more to say on the subject.

  “So, why get so excited about Culhane? I’m going up there to talk to a couple of banks.”

  “Thomas Brodie Culhane. His friends call him Brodie, everybody else calls him Captain. Nobody calls him Tommy or Thomas or anything kin to it.”

  “How come?”

  “How would I know? Maybe he doesn’t like the name.”

  “Well, he’s stuck with it.”

  “Not if he doesn’t say so.”

  “That’s the way he is, then?”

  “That’s the way he is.”

  “What’s he captain of?”

  “He was in the Marines in the war.”

  “Sounds like a real bulldog.”

  “If God’s a bulldog, that’s what Culhane is. If you’re going up there to snoop around, dance on your tiptoes.”

  “I’ll avoid him.”

  “He’ll know you’re there before you do.”

  “Maybe I should make a courtesy call.”

  “If he doesn’t beat you to it.”

  “Hell, all I want to know is who’s been supporting Verna Wilensky for all those years.”

  “Read about it in the scandal sheets.”

  “It’s not a hundred miles. I can be back late tomorrow night.”

  “I suppose you wanna take Agassi up there with you?”

  I didn’t want to push my luck, so I told him I thought I could handle it alone. “I’m just gonna check a couple of banks and see what they can tell me.”

  “I suppose you want a car and some play money?”

  “That’d be nice. I don’t trust my heap for more than twenty miles at a clip.”

  He sighed, opened his desk drawer, and took out a pad of expense forms and car chits. “Why don’t you get rid of that junk pile. Get yourself something decent. Hell, you just got a raise.”

  “Is that what that was? I thought it was a tip.”

  “Funny. Hell, you can get a brand-new Pontiac coupe for eight hundred bucks at Nordstrom’s showroom over on Welch Avenue. I just saw the ad. Tell ’em you’re a cop, maybe they’ll give you a break on the price and arrange a little loan.”

  “Maybe in your world; not the world I live in.”

  “Christ, what a hard head you got.”

  I didn’t say anything. He glared up at me for a second and shook his head while he scribbled things on the two pads.

  “Here’s for the car, tell them to fill it up. And you can draw ten bucks for meals. Keep the receipts.”

  “Gee,” I said, looking at the chits, “I may just lam it down to Mexico and retire.”

  “Send me your address, I’ll put you on my Christmas card list.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Stay outta trouble up there.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “I’ve heard that line before. I’m still remembering the time you went up to Tahoe to pick up that firebug and ended up in the hoosegow for smacking an undercover cop.”

  Before I could say anything else, Moriarity shook his head. That meant he was tired of our banter. And tired of me.

  “Get outta here,” he said. “If you get hung up, there’s a fishing camp right on the water about ten miles south of town. A buddy of mine, Charlie Lefton, owns it. Tell him I sent ya.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But don’t.”

  “Don’t what?”

  “Get hung up.”

  CHAPTER 10

  When I left Moriarity’s office I checked my mail slot. There was a message from Frank Templeton, the manager of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, inviting me to a screening of The Ziegfeld Girl on Thursday night. “Screening at 7:30, get there about 7:20. We have a couple of rows ribboned off for big shots, of which I consider you one. Yuk, yuk. Bring a friend. Frankie.”

  Templeton and I had gone to school together and I occasionally did some after-hours security work for him. My name was on the permanent guest list at the box office.

  I sat down at my desk and looked around. Drab would be a compliment. The walls of the big squad room were covered with wanted posters, notices, the assignment board, and an enormous map of the greater L.A. area.

  My desk was in the center of the room, surrounded by other desks, all of which looked pretty much alike. On mine were an in- and out-box, with a telephone, a notepad, and a gaudy ashtray from The Oyster Bed in Ventura. There was a typewriter on the stand next to it. The ashtray and a half-finished report in my in-box were its only distinguishing traits. I leaned back in my chair and thought about Millicent Harrington and Zeke Bannon. The picture was pretty bleak.

  I could picture the scene: coming home for dinner and her asking me what I did in the office, and me telling her about the fellow who walks up the street after dinner to get a newspaper and a drunk jumps the curb and splatters him against a wall; or the woman who comes home unexpectedly and finds her husband in bed with a neighbor and she, unheard over the sounds of passion, gets his pistol from a drawer and walks back in and kills them both with one shot, through the back of his neck and into her forehead; or the starlet who dreams of being the next Betty Grable and is sleeping her way up the ladder and ends up in Topanga Canyon very naked, very dead, and very pregnant; or the way a man falls when shot dead, not gracefully as in the movies but like his bones have turned to dust and he has collapsed into his own skin.

  Oh, by the way, darling, please pass the cream.

  But I thought it might be fun for a little while to squire a lady of class around town. What the hell, a security man can always use a beautiful assistant, especially when Tommy Dorsey is providing the mood music.

  A movie would be as good a place as any to start.

  I called her office. The secretary plugged me through.

  “Hi, this is the police calling,” I said in my most threatening monotone.

  “Hi,” she said. “I was just thinking about you.”

  “Must be a slow day.”

  She laughed.

  “Look,” I said. “I hate to call on such short notice but I have an invite to a sneak preview Thursday. I thought you might like to join me.”

  I waited two seconds for her answer. “Sounds great!” she said with enthusiasm. “What time?”

  “We’d have to be there by 7:20, so I thought we could grab a quick bite at a little place I know down the street. Is 5:30 too early?”

  “Do you know how to find my place?”

  “I’m a cop, remember?” I paused a moment and said, “How do I find it?”

  Another laugh. The house was on Boxwood Drive, on the south side of Coldwater Canyon.

  “Got it,” I said. “Five-thirty, then.”

  “Yes,” she said, and hung up.

  I hung up, sat for a minute, then broke out in a happy laugh.

  A detective named Travers looked back at me. “Geez, you musta got some good news,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I had five bucks on a nag at Santa Anita and he came in first.”

  “Oh,” Travers said. “I thought maybe you heard your mother-in-law just died.
”

  I called the photo department at the Times, got hold of a guy in the darkroom I knew named Jerome, and asked if he could blow up the picture of Wilensky for me.

  “I got two speeding tickets hangin’ fire over there,” he said.

  “Not anymore.”

  “Gimme an hour.”

  Then I called the coroner’s office and asked them if they’d dig up one of Bones’s close-ups of Wilensky.

  I was down in the garage waiting for them to tank up the company Chevy when Ski found me.

  “Thanks,” he growled. “Going on a little pleasure trip and you tell the boss you don’t need me.”

  “I didn’t think he’d go for two of us taking the ride.”

  “San Pietro’s like the Riviera. The movie stars go up there to play around. Rich boys to play golf and act studly with their girlfriends.”

  “I got ten bucks for expenses. Maybe I’ll run into Clark Gable and treat him to a night on the town.”

  “Hell, you’re not gonna find anything on Wilensky, Zeke. If she had relatives, she woulda left a will.”

  “I got one of those feelings.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Sheesh. Every time you get one of your feelings, I end up in the hospital and you get a promotion.”

  “That happened two years ago. Aren’t you ever going to get over it?”

  “Nope.”

  Louie, the garage man, pulled the Chevy up and hopped out. He had washed it; water was dribbling off the running board. “Treat it like a lady, Zeke,” he said, tossing me the keys. “She’s a cream puff. I altered the radio in her. You can pick up local stations.”

  “Well,” Ski said, “you and your little cream puff have a good time. I got stuck with Gruber for the day. He eats garlic for breakfast. The last time he brushed his teeth, Herbert Hoover was vice president.”

  “Give him a pack of Dentyne.”

  “He can’t chew gum, his teeth are so rotten they’d fall out.”

  “Then keep the windows rolled down.”

  “It don’t help. You stop at a light, people on the sidewalk stagger around gasping for breath.” He clutched his throat and his mouth bobbed like a fish out of water. I broke up. Ski should have been in the movies.

  “I’m going to miss you, partner,” I said.

  “What about Little Miss Moneybags?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe I’ll spring for four bits and call her long distance.”

  “Oh, that’ll really impress her. If it ain’t folding money, those people toss it out the car window. Loose change bags down their pants.”

  I laughed. “See ya later, pal.”

  “Be careful up there. They play rough.”

  I shrugged. “I’ll tell them I’m an insurance man looking to give away some money.”

  “Oh yeah, they’ll really believe that story.”

  CHAPTER 11

  It was an easy drive. The traffic was light and after I passed Santa Barbara, the two-laner was almost deserted. Occasionally a truck would rumble past going south with a load of produce, the driver giving me a friendly wave. A yellow Lincoln limo passed me as I was leaving Santa Barbara. The chauffeur was stiff as a mannequin and was hanging on to the wheel as if he was afraid he’d blow out of the car if he let go. Four kids, all of whom looked to be under six, were playing tag in the backseat. One of them looked out the window as they cruised by and stuck her tongue out at me. I smiled at her and she looked as startled as if she had walked in on Mommy and Daddy having a nooner.

  I thought a lot about Millie, then my mind went to work, back to the list Jane at the bank had prepared for me. The night before, I had sorted through the bank names on that list. Then on my blackboard I had listed in different colors the ones with the most checks to their credit and, vertically under them, the dates the checks were received. It boiled down to four banks in San Pietro, one in Mendosa, a little town south of San Pietro, and a bunch of banks in nearby towns like San Luis Obispo and Chino. And there was a smattering of other banks: a couple in L.A., a couple in San Diego, one in San Francisco, probably mailed when the sender was on a business trip. Then I rearranged them by dates and ended up with a chart.

  A pattern had begun to emerge. No two checks were ever sent from the same bank back-to-back. They were spaced evenly, with the oddball dropping into the mix occasionally. But basically it was Bank A, Bank B, Bank C, Bank D, Bank E, Bank F, and so on. There were seven main feeders and the other three were spaced in here and there.

  A check every eight or nine months, not often enough to raise any suspicions at the banks.

  Somebody was being very cautious about the five hundred a month. A lot of work went into the plan, somebody was keeping track. Somebody had a little book with all this data neatly written out, the dates probably projected ahead for six months or six years. And it had been going on for at least sixteen years, probably longer than that considering she was four grand ahead when she checked into the West L.A. National and the modest house in the Meadows.

  Using cashier’s checks and moving from bank to bank was clever. If this was blackmail, the money trail would be almost impossible to follow—unless the blackmailer meticulously kept a list of every check, year after year. If Verna Wilensky had been blackmailing someone all these years and kept such a list, why wasn’t it in a safe deposit box somewhere instead of in a desk at home where it would be easy to snatch? Perhaps Verna Wilensky was simply a fastidious record keeper. Clever or meticulous? I wondered which applied to Verna.

  One thing was certain, whoever had been paying her five hundred bucks a month for all those years was either rich or corrupt.

  Or both.

  Five hundred dollars is a lot of money now. It was really a lot of money in the heart of the Depression. But the checks came like clockwork on the third of every month.

  Why? What did she have on this person, if that’s what it was?

  I thought about the picture of Verna Wilensky, the one from the newspaper. A dumpy little middle-aged brunette in a cotton dress, staring off-camera with a shy grin. She didn’t look like a woman who had done something nearly two decades ago that had kept her in niceties for all these years.

  But then, they never do. When I was in Missing Persons I had a case involving a Beverly Hills banker who was as clean as fresh bedsheets: a deacon in the church, beautiful wife, three kids, perfect health, president of the Rotarians, never played around or even flirted with another woman. Mr. Wonderful. His name was Rupert Archman. Archman vanished one day and so did fifty thousand of the bank’s dollars. Poof, just like that. Three months went by. Then a car drove in front of a fast-moving freight out in Burbank one afternoon. The driver was welded into the wreckage. We had to check his teeth to determine who he was.

  It was Archman. Eventually we traced his footsteps. They started in Reno, where he picked up a naked dancer seventeen years old, took her down to Tijuana, blew the fifty on booze, gambling, and little brown cigarettes, and when he ran out of dough she ran out on him. So he came back to L.A. and drove his car in front of a train. No note, no nothing. He wasn’t even wearing his wallet.

  I always liked my partner’s take on it: “Hey, two months living it up with a seventeen-year-old punch. What else could ever live up to that?”

  Why? I had no idea. What did I know? I was twenty-four at that time, three years on the force. You have to be a lot older than that to crawl into somebody’s brain and trace its scars with your fingertips. Maybe you never get that old.

  Or maybe it was something simpler with Verna. Maybe she had an illegitimate child, couldn’t take care of it, and sold it to some rich couple who couldn’t have children. It wasn’t that unheard of in the early twenties, even less unusual during the Depression. I was hoping it would be an answer like that, something with a little heartbreak attached. A story the sob sisters would give an arm and a leg to get exclusively:

  mother who sold baby drowns in bizarre bathtub accident

  But deep down in my gut I knew better.
br />   A few miles on, I approached a dilapidated roadside fruit stand and pulled off the highway onto the crumbled macadam of the shoulder, its ground-up pieces showering the underbelly of the Chevy like shotgun pellets. The ramshackle stand looked like it had been built from washed-up beach lumber. It was at the bottom of a hill. Rows of orange trees lined the crest. There was a small picnic table beside the stand, with sagging seats and a mildewed beach umbrella that shielded one side of it from the sun. I was attracted by the hand-painted sign that told me I could get fresh orange juice for a nickel. My mouth was dry. I stared over a shelf the width of the shack, covered with oranges the size of melons, at a small, round Mexican woman the color of a pecan nut, who sat forlornly on a rickety stool in a corner of the small shack. She was reading the Spanish edition of a dog-eared paperback with a lurid cover: A well-endowed woman with her dress ripped in shreds was looking saucer-eyed at a large Chicano gent who had either murder or amour on his mind, it was hard to tell which. Behind her were several shelves holding straw baskets of apples, papayas, and some anemic-looking strawberries.

  She gave me a smile that revealed two missing teeth in the center of her mouth. I learned quickly from the little woman that five cents was for the small size, indicated by a paper cup she held up that was roughly the dimensions of a Dixie cup. The only other size was big enough to hold a keg of beer. My Spanish was negligible so I took the bigger cup and pointed to a spot about halfway to the top.

  “Quanto?” I asked.

  “Fi’teen?” she answered, making it a question.

  “Sure,” I nodded.

  She picked five of the prettiest oranges from the shelf, took them to a small table near the back of the shack, sliced them with a machete which she then buried in the side of the table, and started squeezing them; the juice, golden and sweet-smelling, poured into the base of the squeezer, which she then emptied into the cup. I put two dimes on the counter and told her to keep the change.

  She had no trouble understanding that. She flashed her toothless smile and returned to her stool and her book.

  I took a seat near the end of the picnic table under the umbrella. The juice was warm but sweet as sugarcane and I took it down in small sips, letting it wash the inside of my mouth before swallowing it. I stared up the hill behind the stand as I drank. Near its top, a young woman in a white silk shirt and jodhpurs was riding a black-and-white pinto stallion. Her jet-black hair was tied in a ponytail that snapped in the wind. She knew what she was doing. She traversed part of the hill and then wheeled the horse around as expertly as a cowboy dogging a steer and went at full gallop back the way she had come, leaning forward in the stirrups, her rump barely touching the saddle, like a jockey steaming down the homestretch. Then she pulled him around and trotted over the crest of the hill and vanished into the orange grove.