While I was eating, I pondered the discussion with Culhane. He knew who I was, knew I’d been to see the little Scot, probably had talked to Gorman. Now he knew why I was there and he didn’t believe the funeral story for a minute. He was a hard-boiled egg covered with sweet chocolate and he had just given me my walking papers.
I was also thinking about the events that coincided with Verna Hicks’s departure from San Pietro, if indeed she had ever been here. I didn’t have a thing. All I really knew was that Buck Tallman had been killed two or three years before Verna Hicks had shown up in L.A. Hard to make a connection there. Maybe Moriarity was right. Maybe I was spinning my wheels.
I decided to take one more shot. I walked down Ocean Boulevard and found the office of the San Pietro Sentinel, a narrow little building painted a pale yellow, with a gabled roof. There was a counter inside the front door and behind it a hot-metal typesetter, trays of fonts, and two desks littered with copy and notes, some of which had blown to the floor, prompted by a desktop Diehl fan that revolved in a half-circle aimed at the business end of the room.
A man in his late thirties, wearing gray work pants, a red-striped shirt, and a solid-blue bow tie, was working at the keyboard of the typesetter. He had a boyish face betrayed by thinning, light brown hair that grew to a widow’s peak over watery eyes behind tortoiseshell glasses. He lowered his jaw and peered at me over the rims as I entered the office.
“Yes?” he said.
“You the editor?”
He nodded. “Charlie Goodshorn; what’s your pleasure?” He had a friendly but high-pitched voice that sounded like it had never changed.
I showed him my badge. “I’m doing a little background work,” I said. “I was wondering if I might check your morgue for a span of two years or so, back in the mid twenties.”
He went back to work on his typesetting and said, “Sorry, sir, that wouldn’t be possible. I’d be glad to help you but I can’t.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “See that scorch mark down the wall?”
There was a jagged streak down the wall the color of hot chocolate, with arteries spreading out to the left and right of it.
“Lightning hit us hard four years ago. We saved this side of the office, but the building next door took a beating. What wasn’t burned was so waterlogged we had to throw everything away. All our files and back issues were lost.”
He finished what he was working on and spun around on his stool and leaned forward, hands on his knees.
“Was it something in particular?” he asked.
“How long have you been editor?” I asked.
“Since my dad died in 1933. I was working for the Denver Post. Really liked Denver but somebody had to take over the business.”
“You a weekly?”
“We went to five days a week two years ago.”
“Is it working for you?”
“Doing okay.”
“Glad to hear it. I was interested in the Buck Tallman shooting. You weren’t working here then, were you?”
He chuckled. “I was delivering papers back then. I know about the event but what I remember you could put in a thimble.”
Another bust. I thanked him and started out the door.
“Tell you somebody who might give you a hand on that.”
“Who would that be?”
“Barney Howland. He wrote for the paper for years and also shot pictures. He likes a taste every now and then, but when he’s sober he has quite a memory. Likes to talk, too.”
“How would I find him?”
“He’s on Third Avenue just off February.”
“February’s a street?”
Goodshorn laughed. “The streets are named for the months of the year,” he said. “Twelve streets, twelve months. Easy to remember.”
“Thanks, Mr. Goodshorn.”
“Want me to give him a call, see if he’s in and willing to stand for an interview?”
“That would be a help.”
He had an old-fashioned stand-up phone and he pulled it over, lifted the receiver and dialed a number, and waited for a moment or two. “Gladys? It’s Charlie down at the Sentinel . . . Just fine, thank you, and you? . . . That’s just wonderful. Is Barney about? Would you please tell him there’s a gentleman here from the Los Angeles police who would like a word with him? Uh-huh. Alright, I’ll send him on over. His name is . . .” He looked at me and raised his eyebrows.
“Zeke Bannon.”
“Mr. Bannon. Thanks, dear.” He hung up and said, “He’s waiting for you.”
“I appreciate that, Charlie.”
“My pleasure,” he said with a smile.
For a newspaperman, he had a remarkable lack of curiosity.
I left the news office, walked half a block to a drugstore, and invested six bits in a pint of Jack Daniel’s Black Label. Then I crossed the street, walked down to the bank, and retrieved my car. There was no profit to be made trying to dodge my two shadows, so I started the car and waited until they drifted down past the bank. Then I pulled away and circled the block and pulled in behind them. I tailed them for ten or fifteen minutes as they tried to figure out how to get behind me again. Finally they pulled over and stopped. I pulled over and stopped. We sat for a while. I rolled a cigarette and lit up. I watched them, through their rear window, discussing the situation.
They decided to make their move. The Pontiac suddenly lurched ahead past the library and screamed around the corner to the right. I pulled up to the edge of the library and watched them through the trees. They drove up beside the park and turned right again at the next street. I gave them thirty seconds and then followed, pulled slowly down to the street they had turned into, and looked. They were turning back to the right, circling the block. I went straight ahead and turned left at the next street. I was on Third. I drove as hard as I could without endangering anyone. The next cross street was February.
I slowed down and stopped at the third house, a pleasant, one-story, wood-frame bungalow tucked into the quiet street three blocks off Ocean Boulevard. A black Olds that had seen better days was parked in the driveway, and a large collie lay in the front yard, sleeping in the shade of the oak tree it was leashed to. I went to the front door, and seeing no bell, opened the screen door and knocked on the glass. A moment later the door was opened by a pleasant little woman. She looked to be in her sixties with skin leathered by the sun and gray locks bunched in a hairnet.
“Mrs. Howland?”
“Yes; are you the gentleman from Los Angeles?”
I showed her my credentials. “I’m Bannon from the L.A. Police Department. Mr. Goodshorn called about me.”
“Is something wrong?” she said, stepping back and swinging the door wide.
“No,” I said, entering the foyer. “I’m working on a civil case involving a woman who may have lived here at one time.”
“Oh my, I rather doubt it. We’ve been in this house since before the war.”
“No, not here in this house, in San Pietro.”
She bunched up her shoulders and giggled. “How silly of me. It’s this way.” She led me down a narrow hall to a basement door, opened it, and called out, “Barnard, someone to see you.”
“Who is it?” he yelled back.
“A gentleman from the police in Los Angeles,” she answered, pronouncing Angeles with a hard g.
“Well, show him down, Gladys,” Howland answered in a gruff voice. “I’m not gonna come up there and carry him down.”
She nodded down a tight wooden staircase to the cellar, which was dark and smelled of mildew. Barnard Howland was sitting in a far corner, in a makeshift office. A desk, two chairs, a typing stand supporting an old, upright Royal, and half a dozen file cabinets lined up against the wall. A single light hung from the ceiling over the desk. A small, oblong window provided the only other light. Howland was a small man tucked into a wasted frame. The loose flesh of his face was creased by the years, and strands of white hair hung from under a green eyeshade pulled down
over his forehead. I guessed he had been a handsome man in earlier years, but time and booze had eroded his looks and now he just looked like a crotchety old curmudgeon. He was wearing a shapeless pair of wool tweeds, a white shirt buttoned to the top, no tie, and a vest that was hanging open. He peered up at me through indolent, brown eyes over the top of a pair of wire-rimmed half-glasses that had slid halfway down his nose.
“Barney Howland,” he said in a cracked and rheumy voice, and offered me a hand that trembled slightly. “Pardon me for not getting up. At my age, I’d rather not use up that much energy for formalities.”
“Zeke Bannon,” I said with my friendliest smile, and showed him my credentials. He pulled my wallet a little closer and stared at it through the glasses.
“Sergeant, eh? Homicide yet. Well.” His eyes brightened a bit, and he straightened up slightly and waved me to the other chair. “What’s goin’ on? We don’t have many homicides up here anymore, not since the good old days. Now it’s silly stuff, y’know. Wives hitting their husbands over the head with a skillet for fartin’ at the dinner table.” He leaned forward and said with confidentiality, “A love-nest slaying occasionally. Wrong shoes under the bed; know what I mean?” He winked.
“It does seem like a well-mannered town,” I said.
“Well-mannered,” he sniffed contemptuously. “I like that. Hell, you can get a ticket for not cutting the goddamn lawn often enough. Now back in the twenties when it was Eureka, it was one hell of a place. Wide-open gambling, whores wiggling their little asses up and down Ocean Boulevard, loan sharks, bookies, bad boys running the town. Hell, we had a shooting a week, sometimes a couple. It was like Dodge City, for crissakes. Ever hear of Buck Tallman? Deputy for Wyatt Earp back when the West was the West. He was our sheriff. Wore a gun belt down on his hip with a .44 Peacemaker, a Stetson with sweat stains around the brim. Hah, now there was a real man. Nobody screwed with old Buck. Why, it took four two-bit gangsters to bring him down and all four went down with him.”
As he spoke, my eyes grew accustomed to the limited light. Behind him on the wall were several framed Sentinel front pages, streaked and yellowed with age.
“I’ve heard about him,” I said. “Wasn’t he killed in the Grand View House massacre?”
“Heard about that, have ya?” He puffed out his chest as much as he could, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the framed mementos. “That was my story. I covered all the good ones. Shot my own pictures, too. Had a darkroom back there behind the furnace. There’s my old four-by-five.” He pointed to a battered Speed Graphic sitting on a Coca-Cola crate in the corner. “Old Snapper never failed me.”
I got up, walked over to the framed pages, and strained my eyes to read them. The old man stood up and swung the light toward the wall. There were three of them.
The lamp threw a slash of light across the yellowed front page of one of the papers. A teaser line said: a tragedy at grand view.
Under it, the headline: sheriff tallman, deputy, slain in gunfight.
And under it, the subhead: four mobsters also die in hail of lead.
A four-column photograph accompanied the story, showing hospital attendants wheeling a sheeted body from the Victorian mansion; and beside it, a two-column vertical shot of the slain lawman.
On the other side, a three-column story headlined:
Sacco and Vanzetti
guilty of murder
Under it, another story about an auto wreck and some other stories.
The photo of Tallman showed him hands on hips, handlebar mustache accenting a hawk nose, tight belly cinched in by the gun belt slung from his hip, cowboy boots adding two inches to his height. He looked every bit the photos and drawings of gunfighters I had pored over in dime novels when I was a kid.
“So that’s Buck Tallman,” I said.
“Every inch a man,” Howland said in his creaky voice. “Loved the ladies, loved children, hated the black hats. Every Fourth of July he’d have a showdown on the beach. Quick-drawing, keeping tin cans hopping in the air. The kids’d crowd around him getting autographs, and he with that smile would make flowers bloom. Hell, I still miss him after all these years.”
“That was what year, the year of the shooting?”
“September of 1920.”
“Culhane was involved in that, wasn’t he?”
“Got in at the end of it. Him and Buck shot the last one down and then Buck fell dead.”
I went back to my chair, took out the pint of Jack Daniel’s, and put it on the desk in front of him. His eyes got young for a moment. He chuckled, and stared at the bottle.
“You must be psychic.”
“I never knew a good newshound who didn’t appreciate a taste now and then,” I said.
He looked at me and his eyes narrowed a hair.
“So what is it you want?”
“I want to know what wasn’t in the papers.”
“You’re not working for one of those crooks running against Brodie, are you, son? Looking under beds and what have you?”
“No, sir. I’m trying to get a line on a woman named Verna Hicks, who may have lived here back in the twenties.”
“What for?”
“She died night before last. Slipped getting out of the bathtub and her radio fell in with her and cooked her. I’m trying to locate a relative or somebody who might have known her. She was a widow, no kids.”
“So why do you want to know about Grand View?”
“You shook my curiosity. You know cops, we just naturally want to know the backside of the story.”
He turned the bottle of Jack Daniel’s slightly so he could read the label, and studied it with the kind of affection one usually associates with a grandfather looking at his granddaughter for the first time. His tongue swept his lower lip. He opened the bottom drawer of his desk and took out two old-fashioned glasses. They were dusty, with streaks of dried amber on the bottom.
“Hope you don’t mind a dirty glass,” he said. “My wife’s temperance. Be chancy taking them up to the kitchen to wash them.”
“I’m sure old Jack’ll kill anything that might be lurking in those two glasses.”
He worked the top off the bottle, splashed a generous slug in both glasses, and slid one across the desk to me.
“Here’s to Bucky,” he said, offering his glass. I clinked it and took a sip, trying to avoid a dead fly that floated to the top. Howland took a long whiff of the whiskey, then drained half his glass and let it linger in his mouth for a few seconds and pursed his lips before swallowing it, then leaned his head back, stared at the ceiling, closed his eyes, said, “godamighty damn,” and sighed passionately. He sat back up, stared at the half-full glass, nodded slowly, and said with awe, “The hell with you, Seagram’s Seven.”
He put the top back on the bottle and slid it to me.
“It’s yours,” I said.
His smile was all the thanks I needed. He opened the bottom drawer and slid the bottle under a telephone book.
“What was that lady’s name again?” he asked.
“Her married name was Verna Wilensky. You might have known her as Verna Hicks. Would have been in her mid twenties in 1920. Brown hair, little on the plump side, five-two or five-three. Probably good with numbers; she was in the tax assessor’s office down in L.A.”
I took out the two pictures and showed them to him. The blown-up shot from the newspaper was too grainy and unfocused to be of much use, and the shot from Bones’s lab was grotesque at best. He took a look and then stared at me. “I couldn’t recognize my mother from these,” he said. “That’s a long time ago, son.”
He took the phone book out, flicked through the pages to the h’s, and ran his finger down the page. “No Hicks listed. And the name doesn’t ring a bell.”
“It narrows the field to none.”
His laugh turned into a cough. He took out a handkerchief and wiped his mouth. “So you wanna know about that night at Grand View, huh? Well, Bucky was sheriff and Brodie was
his chief deputy. Bucky and Culhane were good friends. Brodie was a hero in the big war. I think he was born about 1882 or ’83, thereabouts, so he was in his thirties. Bucky was probably sixty although nobody but Buck knew how old he really was. Older’n God.
“Like I said before, the town was wide open back then. Through the years, all the action had attracted the bad element. Arnie Riker ran the criminal side of things. His sidekick was Tony Fontonio. Both of them nasty to the core. Culhane was for facing-off with them, running them out of town; but Bucky was more the live-and-let-live kind. He figured you keep your finger on them, slap ’em in the cooler if they got out of hand, things’d be alright. See, a lot of people were making money off the trade, and Bucky, he had worked the law in places like Tombstone and Silver City. Hell, he was used to dealing with gunslingers, rustlers, back shooters; Riker was a pansy in his book.”
He rambled on, about how Bucky and Culhane controlled the bootlegging to make sure the town got decent hooch during Prohibition; how Culhane hated Riker and Fontonio with a passion; how Riker walked a thin line to keep on the good side of Buck Tallman.
“The trouble came when Riker decided to take a cut of the Grand View House action. You been up there?”
I shook my head.
“Delilah O’Dell owns it. It was in her family. Delilah went to Europe, to the best schools, had it in gold. Then Shamus and Kate O’Dell went down on the Lusitania. Delilah was always a heller. Favored her father in that respect. She came back and opened up a fancy house. I guess you knew that.”
“I heard.”
He took a sip of whiskey, savored it for a minute, and went on.
“A very fancy house. Movie stars came up there, still do. Tom Mix and Buck Jones were regulars. I hear Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Errol Flynn, David Niven, all that bunch still come up for a breather between pictures. There’s a little gambling parlor on the first floor in the back. Poker pots can run as high as a thousand bucks. Delilah runs it like it’s the Ritz. Beautiful women, great food, the best of everything. Some of our leading citizens occasionally slipped through the side door. And still do.”