The lettering on the pebbled glass door said edward woods, confidential inquiries and it was locked. The door to the adjoining office was open. I walked down to it and stood in the entrance. The lettering on this door said “Private.”
The office was neither flashy nor drab, small nor large. When I looked in, I faced a mahogany desk of average proportions. Against the right wall was a red leather sofa, beginning to show its age, as were the two matching leather chairs that bracketed it. Somebody had told Woods leather impressed people. They forgot to tell him less is better than more. There was a dark wooden hat tree in the corner near the door, and on the desk, a large glass ashtray that could have qualified as a deadly weapon, a leather-wrapped Ronson table lighter, a familiar green package of Luckies, and two phones, one a conventional black job with a handset, the other an old-time stand-up, which Woods was whispering into.
I stood in the entranceway and lightly tapped the glass in the door. He held up a finger without looking at me. A moment later he hung up, waved me in, stood up, and offered me his hand. Twenty years had changed him very little. He still looked younger than his age, still sported the pencil mustache, still had a full head of hair as well as a bronze beach tan and bit of a paunch. His jacket was hanging on the tree. He was wearing a white silk shirt with a thin, pale blue stripe, and an inoffensive tie, red suspenders, and no belt.
“Edward Woods,” he said with a practiced smile. “My secretary’s gone to lunch.”
“My name’s Bannon,” I said.
“Have a seat.”
I dropped my hat on his desk, and as I sat down he looked straight into my eyes. His memory was getting a nibble.
“I’m about to go to lunch, too,” he said.
“Nice fish,” I said, nodding toward a six-foot marlin mounted on the wall.
“Two hundred and sixty pounds and every ounce a fighter. Took me seven hours to land that baby. I quit going after game fish after that. Anything that will fight that hard to stay alive deserves to die of old age.”
“That’s an admirable philosophy.”
“Thanks. What can I do for you?”
“Ever heard of a woman named Verna Hicks? Or Verna Wilensky, which was her married name?”
His eyebrows drew together and his eyes went from interested to suspicious. He took a drag on his cigarette and blew out a couple of smoke rings.
“This a missing persons thing?” he asked. “You might do better starting with the police.”
“I know where she is. She’s down in the city morgue waiting for the state to bury her.”
A casual smile crossed his lips and his eyes became less intense. He nodded more or less to himself and chuckled.
“Sergeant Bannon, right? Central homicide.”
I nodded. “If we’ve met, you’ve got a better memory than I do.”
“You’ve been in the headlines a few times. This about the dame whose radio took a bath with her?”
“You heard about it?”
“It was in the Times. Just a couple of graphs. No name on her. Didn’t sound like a job for homicide.”
“You read every line in the paper?”
“Always looking for an angle,” he shrugged. “You’d be surprised what a guy can pick up if he keeps his eyes open and reads every page. I read the gossips, too.”
“There’s an angle in this one. She died with a lot of money in a savings account. I’m trying to locate survivors.”
“Well,” he said, standing up and walking to the tree to retrieve his suit jacket, “she’s no relative of mine.”
He slipped on the jacket and went back behind his desk but didn’t sit down. My eyes wandered to the photographs on the desk. One was a sepia tintype of Woods, Culhane, and Buck Tallman. The other was a tinted studio shot of Woods standing with his arms around the waist of a pretty, black-haired woman who looked to be in her late thirties.
“Very pretty woman,” I said, nodding at the picture.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll tell her you said so. That’s my wife, Hazel. We’re celebrating our tenth anniversary today. We check into a little hotel, have room service, put out the Do Not Disturb sign . . . a little tradition we have.” He looked at his watch and then back at me, and raised his eyebrows.
I stood up, too.
“The Hicks woman died with almost a hundred grand in the bank.”
It didn’t shake him one way or the other.
“Most of it came in the form of five-hundred-dollar cashier’s checks that showed up once a month over the last seventeen years. Most of them were sent from up San Pietro way.”
“Is that a fact?” He came around the desk, took my arm by the elbow, and led me toward the door. “Come on, I’ll go down with you.”
He was a very smooth character. If I was annoying him, he didn’t show it. He set the latch on the office door, pulled it shut, and tried it to make sure it locked. We walked down the marble stairs together.
“You see some connection between the checks and her radio jumping in the tub with her?” he asked on the way down.
“No. It just keeps gnawing at me. A woman with that much money in the bank, no will, and suddenly dead.”
“Happens all the time. Nobody thinks they’re gonna die. They put things off.”
“I suppose.”
As we walked out the front door, I turned around in front of him so he was facing the restaurant and stuck out my hand.
“Well, thanks for your time,” I said. “I was hoping since you left San Pietro about the same time the checks started, the name might ring a bell.”
“Sorry,” he said with a pleasant smile. “I don’t hear a thing.”
As he started to turn, I said, “How about Lila Parrish? Didn’t she disappear about that time?”
He stopped, and turned around. His eyes narrowed.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“She’s never turned up, has she?”
People scurried around us on the sidewalk. The street was full of cars going places during the lunch hour. A horn or two beeped. He walked over very close to me and said, “There’s a lot of funny ideas in that question.”
“I don’t get you,” I said.
“Sure you do. You tell me this Hicks dame was on somebody’s pad for five bills a month. Then you tell me the checks came from San Pietro. Then you ask about the other broad, Parrish, who was a witness in one of my cases. I could hop about two feet and make something out of all that. Parrish skipped out, pal. Nobody knows where. I, for one, haven’t seen her since the trial. Nobody else I know has either.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“You know what I think, Bannon?”
“Nope.”
“I think you’re more interested in finding out who was sending money to that lady than finding her family.”
“I’d like to see her get a decent send-off, that’s all.”
“Then pass the hat around the station house, you ought to be able to pick up twenty bucks. Here . . .” He reached in his pocket and took out a small roll of cash, peeled a five off it, and slapped it in the breast pocket of my jacket. “That’ll get it started.”
He turned and disappeared in the river of pedestrians.
I jaywalked back across the street to the restaurant. When I got to the table, Patty North was so excited she was bouncing in her chair.
“It’s him,” she said. “He’s the one. How did you know that?”
“I’m a detective, remember?” I said, sitting down at the table. “That’s what I’m supposed to do.”
I reached in my pocket, took out the crumpled five-spot and dropped it on the table.
“What’s that?” Millicent asked.
“He just started a fund to bury Verna.”
“What a wonderful idea!” Her eyes brightened and she said excitedly, “We can go back to the bank after lunch and open an account. I’ll put in fifty.”
I laughed. “Millie, with fifty bucks we can lay her away in a soli
d silver coffin, with the Philadelphia Symphony playing ‘Goodnight, Irene.’ ”
The waiter brought our meals and we dug in.
“Now, Patty,” I said, “you are sure that’s the guy who bought the check for Verna Hicks, aren’t you?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she said, nodding her head emphatically. “There’s no question about it.”
“You did a great job,” I said. “Thanks.”
We finished lunch and I dropped Patty North off at her bank with more thanks.
On the way back to the West L.A. bank, Millicent said, “He’s the one you’ve been looking for, isn’t he?”
“Yes and no,” I said.
“I don’t understand.”
“His name is Eddie Woods. He was a cop up in San Pietro, got in some trouble, and left about the time Verna Hicks showed up down here. Now we know for sure he bought at least one of the checks. The next question is, who gave him the money to buy it.”
“He didn’t buy it himself?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He wouldn’t have had that kind of dough back in the late twenties and early thirties. Whoever made that deal with Verna was wealthy. He knew he could pay off for as long as it took. Woods wouldn’t have driven all the way back to San Pietro to buy the other checks, everybody there knew him. I think his was probably a one-shot deal. I goofed.”
“How?” Millicent asked.
“By looking for a single buyer. Obviously the checks were bought by different people through the years. Whoever was paying off Verna probably brokered the buy through a middleman. And that’s going to make it even harder to trace them back to the number one.”
“I’m sorry,” a crestfallen Millicent said.
I smiled at her. “Don’t be. It was a great break. She’s a regular Charlie Chan. One thing I am sure of, thanks to her. Eddie Woods knows who the number one is.”
“How do you know that?”
“He was too far up in the hierarchy not to. Maybe he is the middleman. I have to go back up to San Pietro tomorrow. I think I can get some answers now.”
“If we have the money to bury Verna, can’t you just forget it?”
“Not anymore.”
“I don’t understand.”
I got very serious. “You’ve got to keep what I’m going to tell you under that cute little hat of yours for the next day or two. You can’t even confide in your father.”
“Alright, what is it?”
“Verna Wilensky was murdered. She was drowned, and whoever did the trick dropped the radio in the tub with her to make it look like an accident.”
“Oh my God!” She covered her mouth with her hand. Tears suddenly gathered in her eyes.
“Now it’s a homicide, and I’ve got to find out who killed her.”
“Can’t you ask Woods?”
I tried to smother a laugh. “I don’t think that would work with Mr. Woods. He’s not going to give up that information, not after all these years of covering it up. I may be able to hammer information out of him but I’ll save him for later. First I want to see Culhane’s face when I tell him this is now a homicide case and they’ll have to stop playing coy.”
I pulled up in front of her bank and struggled out of the car.
“Please don’t get out,” she said.
“They kicked in my ribs; they didn’t kick my manners out of me.”
I walked around the car and helped her out. As she stepped by me, she brushed my cheek with her lips.
“We still on for tonight?” I asked.
“We better be.”
“I thought we might drop by the C-Note after the show.”
She tossed me one of her million-dollar smiles. “I’d love that,” she said. “Wherever it is.”
I stood there and watched her disappear into the bank. And I thought to myself, So that’s what they mean by the luck of the Irish.
CHAPTER 21
I made a call to Ski at the Wilensky house and got one of the forensics men. After I identified myself, he confided Ski was out in the neighborhood.
“Anything new?” I asked.
“Ski thinks whoever iced the lady laid up all day in the house next door and then went after her when she got in the tub.”
“When Ski gets back, tell him I’ve got a call to make and then I’ll be on over.”
“Sure,” he said, and we hung up.
I made one more call and then drove across town to a little bar called Murphy’s Eight Ball, which was a hangout for off-duty cops and newsies. It was 3:30, too early for any action. The bartender was unloading bottles of beer in a cooler behind an empty bar. In the rear, a tall, rangy guy chewing on a wooden match was practicing side-pocket bank shots at one of the two pool tables. Up front, the dozen tables and booths all were empty. Jimmy Dorsey’s “Amapola” was muttering from the jukebox, its volume turned down to a whisper. The bartender looked up through bored eyes and gave me half a smile.
“Zee,” he said with a nod. “Little early for you, isn’t it?”
“I’m meeting Jimmy Pen,” I said. “Draw me one, will you?”
He took a frosted mug from the refrigerator and tilted it under the beer spigot and jimmied the glass full without putting too much head on it. I picked up a rumpled copy of the early Times edition and retreated to a booth as far away from both men as possible. Under a wall lamp that put out about as much wattage as a penlight, I read the banner head: bismarck attacked. The lead graph told me all I needed to know: the British Navy had hunted down the German juggernaut, which had sunk the HMS Hood and all its hands three days earlier. A battle royal was going on somewhere in the North Atlantic. I leafed back to the obits but there was no follow-up on the Wilensky story.
The door opened and a shaft of sunlight cut through the dark interior as Jimmy Pennington strolled in, hat on the back of his head and a newspaper folded and stuffed in his jacket pocket. He was carrying a brown nine-by-twelve envelope. The door swung shut behind him and he peered around the room until he spotted me.
He pointed to my glass and said to the barkeep, “Hey, Jerry, gimme one of these, will you please?” as he sat down, dropped his hat on the seat beside him, and laid the envelope by his elbow. Then to me, “I don’t believe it, you can actually read,” as he pointed to the dog-eared early edition.
“I can count all the way to ten, too, if I take my shoes off,” I said.
“You must want something awful bad to offer to buy me a drink.”
“I’m going to do you a favor, pal,” I said.
“And pay for my drink? You don’t believe I believe that, do you?”
“Why are all you newsies such cynics?”
“If I am, I learned it from you. So what’s the scam for today?”
“No scam. I’m offering you a trade.”
“Uh-oh.”
Jerry brought the reporter his beer and a dish of pretzel sticks. I told him to put it on my tab.
“The last time a cop bought me a drink, we still had Prohibition.”
“That’s worth an item right there.”
“I assume all this has something to do with the stuff you asked for.”
“A reasonable assumption.”
“What the hell are you interested in Mendosa for? It’s off your beat by about a hundred miles.”
“I’ll get to that. First, I’m going to offer you an exclusive story. Your end is, you can’t break it until the five-star tomorrow afternoon.”
“How big a story?”
“It’ll put a smile on your face.”
“Front page?”
“Hell, I’m not an editor, I . . .”
“Don’t hand me that shit, Zee. After fifteen years you know a banner story when you see one. Above the fold or below it?”
“What do I know about folds? Do we have a deal?”
“It’s a pig in a poke. What’s your angle?”
“You’ll understand when I finish. After we’re through talking, I’ll go back an
d write my report, which will back up everything I tell you. You can write the story ahead of time but you have to hold it until 4:00 tomorrow. I’ll file the report then, and that’ll give you a scoop.”
He thought for a minute and said: “Make it 5:00. We hit the street at 5:30 and all the competition’ll be off and drunk by then.”
“I can work that.”
“This some kind of undercover job you’ve been working on?”
“You want to listen or play twenty questions?”
He took a sip of beer, took out a little green pad and the stub of a Ticonderoga pencil, and stared at me.
I gave him a pretty straightforward rundown on how we found Verna Hicks Wilensky, Bones’s initial reaction, then got into the stuff in the strongbox, and finished with the five-hundred-a-month and the cashier’s checks. That got his attention. I continued with my trip to San Pietro, how the bankers were giving me the cold shoulder, left out the encounter with the two cops, and then dropped the second shoe: Bones’s reanalysis of the situation. He stopped writing and took a long swig of his beer when he realized he was on top of a murder case.
I then recounted the Wilma Thompson murder case, the appeal, and the missing witness, Lila Parrish; Eddie Woods’s probable assassination of Fontonio, his connection with both cases; and finally the fact that most of the checks came from San Pietro. I didn’t tell him I knew Eddie Woods had sent at least one of the checks; I kept that for my hole card.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“For Christ sake, you want me to write it for you?”
“You’re trying to tie this to Culhane’s tail,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
“I can’t tell you that, it’s privileged.”
He chuckled. “The hell you say.”
“You didn’t get to be top-slot reporter on the Times by having somebody else do your thinking for you,” I said.
He tapped his pencil on the table several times and stared at me, then said, “You want me to grease the tracks for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t act dumb. You’re going up against Brodie Culhane and you want me to point the finger in his general direction.”
“I didn’t say that.”