“No, I said it.”
“You want the story or not, Jimmy?”
“I got the story. Question is, what am I gonna do with it? And how are you going to tie this to Culhane?”
“You’re beginning to sound like Moriarity.”
“I’m sounding like my editor. Can I quote you that you’re looking for a connection up in the San Pietro area?”
I juggled that around for a minute. Before I could answer, he said, “And how do you plan to tie Woods into this? So he lives in Los Angeles, so do a million and a half other people. And what’s the connection with Mendosa?”
“Let’s talk about that for a minute. What’ve you got for me?”
He slid the envelope over, opened the clasp, and pulled out a sheaf of clippings. “Most of this stuff was written by Matt Sorenson, who covered state news,” he said.
“Where is he now?”
“The big time lured him to New York. But he used to talk about Mendosa. He wanted to blow the roof off the town, but it’s outside our circulation area and the publisher squeezes every nickel so hard the buffalo gets a hernia. Most of what Matt wrote was what he could get over the phone, mixed with AP and UPI reports.”
“You need these back?” I asked, lifting a handful of clippings.
“Yeah, but there’s no rush.”
“Tell me what you know about Mendosa.”
He finished his beer and ordered another.
“Since when did you start drinking on the job?” I said.
“I’m through for the day. I’m gonna take full advantage of your tab.” He lit a cigarette and started: “When Culhane got rid of Riker and Fontonio, the number-three man in the mob was Guilfoyle. He took a powder. He moved down south to Mendosa. It’s in Pacifico County. It wasn’t much of a town, a lazy little place. Its main claim to fame is a sanitarium, mostly a spill for drunks, druggies, and senile old folks their kids want to dump. Guilfoyle didn’t have much trouble taking over and turning it into another Eureka. It wasn’t quite as wide open but the town turned dirty from head to toe.”
Pennington rooted around in the clippings and found a photograph. “Take a gander at Guilfoyle. He’s a real package.” He slid it across the table to me. I held it under the anemic light and saw a tall, beefy mutt in a light suit, uglier than a cross-eyed moose. He had thick features over a bull neck and two hundred pounds of muscle and flab. A cigar was tucked in the corner of his mouth and he wore a derby low over weasel eyes. His lips were curled into a smile that was closer to a sneer.
“Straight out of central casting,” I said.
“So what’s your interest in Mendosa?”
“One of the checks came from a bank up there.”
“If you think you had trouble with Culhane, I’d steer clear of Mendosa. Guilfoyle could get you two years for disturbing the peace if you sneezed in town.”
“Let me try something else on you. Supposing when Lila Parrish vanished she went down the road and hid out in Mendosa for a while. Then migrated down to L.A. and changed her name.”
“You think Verna Hicks was Lila Parrish?”
“Think about it. All these events happened within about eighteen months, starting with Riker’s trial in late 1922 and ending with the Fontonio hit in 1924, the same year Verna showed up in L.A., telling people she was from everyplace in Texas.”
“That’s another stretch, Zeke. Supposing Lila Parrish is living with her husband and family in Dubuque? Does the word slander mean anything to you? Do you have anything other than a hunch leading you there?”
I decided to play my hole card. “Can we go off the record a minute?” I said.
He pondered that. Reporters hate to go off-record for anything.
“Is it important, or one of your Canadian Club dreams?”
“It’s fact.”
“Okay, but I get it first when you’re ready to go public.”
“It’s your story all the way.”
“What a sweetheart. Okay, let’s hear it.”
“One of the more recent checks sent to Hicks was bought and mailed from here in town. The buyer was Eddie Woods.”
That perked him up a bit. “You can prove this?” he said.
I nodded. “The teller who sold him the check ID’d him to me over lunch.”
“It’s still a stretch.”
“Look, I’ve given you all the background we have on Hicks. You can point out that she showed up down here after Lila Parrish vamoosed. The dates are more than coincidental.”
“How about the checks. Can I get photos of them?”
I nodded. “I’ll list the number of checks and how many came from the San Pietro–Mendosa area. I can’t give you the stats of the original checks because there may be some question about how I got them without a search warrant. I don’t want to get anybody in trouble over this.”
“How about her checks?”
“Fair game, they were in her safety box at home. I can also make the deposit books available to you.”
“Exclusively?”
“Until the story breaks. Then anything in the report is fair game.”
He laughed. “You’ll be all over the papers again.”
“I won’t be here.”
“Where will you be?”
“Up north,” I said.
“Anything you get, I get first. That’s part of the deal.”
“Must be nice,” I said. “Having me do your work for you.”
“Works both ways, pal,” he said, and then with a leer added: “By the way, mind if I mention that pansy dog of yours in the story?”
“Where did you hear about the dog?”
“I can’t tell you that,” he said. “It’s privileged.”
I had a different feeling going to the house in Pacific Meadows this time. Murder changes everything. Just knowing it happened is sobering. But inside the house, Ski was jubilant, as was Bones.
“Progress,” Bones said. “We’ve got enough fingerprints from this place and the empty house next door to keep the F.B.I. busy for a month.”
“I don’t have a month. I don’t have a week. Every day, this case slips further away.”
“We’ve made some progress,” Ski said casually.
“All talk and theories. I need some hard evidence.”
“Oh,” Ski said sardonically. “Well, how about this. The killer is about your size, maybe a little shorter, ten pounds heavier. He was wearing dark pants, a dark shirt, and a bowler. He cased the neighborhood for an hour or so the day before he killed her. At about 6:00 a.m. the day of the killing, the killer parked his car in the empty lot at the end of that strip of stores up on Main. He walked down six blocks to the house next door, after ascertaining that nobody was home from the papers gathering on the porch and possibly calling once or twice. He sat at a table near the front door for the whole day. Actually, he ate a sandwich, which he probably brought with him, and took the refuse with him when he left.”
I sat there entranced as Ski painted a verbal portrait of the killing. And he was almost as good at it as Bones.
“When Verna went inside, the killer went out the back door, went to the side of her house, and watched her until he heard her drawing a bath. He wouldn’t have used the front door, too chancy, but none of the windows were locked either. He went in, took off his gloves, went straight into the bathroom, and about 9:18 p.m. he shoved her underwater. He held her under for about five minutes. Then he noticed the radio, pulled down the shelf, and let it drop in the tub with her. He went out the same way he came in, walked back up to his car, and at about 9:50 he drove away.”
“How do you know all this?” I asked.
“An old man two blocks over had a stroke six months ago. He sits on the front porch swing all day, every day. He saw the guy drive by four or five times. Tan-and-black ragtop. He thinks a Ford. A kid left his baseball mitt up at the ball diamond. He went up there on his bike to get it when he got up about 6:15 a.m. He was riding slow because he had a flashlight in one han
d to see where he was going. When he passed the house, he saw the guy we described jimmy open the door. The guy had a small penlight in his mouth and the kid got a good shot of his hands. He was wearing black gloves. Gloves in May?”
Bones picked up the story: “He sat there all day, waiting for it to get dark. He sat by the front door so nothing would surprise him, even brought a sandwich, and ate it there. We know Verna never locked her windows. We found some threads under the bottom sill; he probably tore his jacket coming in. He went in the bedroom, saw her in the tub, took off the gloves so he wouldn’t have to carry them away wet, then he rushed her, shoved her head underwater, and you know the rest. He left the same way, walked back up to the stores, and drove off into the night. We know that because a druggist and his wife were doing inventory, and they saw a guy in a bowler come out of the Meadows about 9:50 and drive off in the brown-and-black ragtop that was parked at the end of the strip all day.”
“No facial description?” I asked Ski.
“No.”
“License number?”
“No.”
“Have you put out an APB on the car?”
“Yeah, but they can’t stop every black-and-brown Ford in the county.”
Bones said, “We got a fresh print off the shelf the radio was on. Another one off the commode trigger, like Ski suggested. We also picked up several prints off the table next door. Nobody eats with gloves on. We’ll isolate the prints in Wilensky’s bathroom and compare them to the ones on the table. If they match, and we can find the guy, we got our case.”
“How soon will you know whether they match?”
He pursed his lips and thought about the question for a minute. “Five days?”
“Five days!”
“It’s gotta go to Washington and then go through the F.B.I. process.”
“Three days.”
“I’ll push for four. And that’s fast.”
I nodded. Then Ski threw one in from the deep outfield.
“I think this bird’s an ex-con,” he said.
Bones looked at him with surprise. “How do you figure?” he asked.
“Who else would set up a job where he has to sit in one spot all day but a guy who’s spent a couple of years sitting in an eight-by-ten cell day in and day out.”
Bones smiled. “If he is, his prints could be on file here in the state.”
“It’s too easy,” Ski said. “We ain’t gonna get that lucky. This guy’s a pro. Casing the job, figuring out how to do it, noticing the papers on the porch so he knew there was nobody home. He had it all figured out.”
“Yep,” Bones agreed. “But even pros make mistakes. If he had just thrown the radio in the tub without drowning her first, she would have been killed instantly, and we would never have known the dif. Ironic, isn’t it? That blunder may just get him a noseful of gas.”
Me? I was wondering what kind of car Eddie Woods was driving these days.
CHAPTER 22
I was high up on Beverly Drive when I found Boxwood. I could see why Millie asked me if I wanted directions. It wasn’t much of a street—barely two lanes wide and unpaved. The sign was lost among shrubs and trees. I made the sharp turn and followed the bumpy road around several curves. There was an occasional mailbox but the area was so heavily forested you could hardly see the houses from the road. Then the woods to the south began to thin out and I could catch fleeting glimpses of Beverly Hills and to its right, in the early evening haze, the sprawling Twentieth Century–Fox lot. I could see the big arc lights occasionally streaking into the evening sky from the sets where Tyrone Power or Gene Tierney or Don Ameche, the reigning monarchs of the studio, were probably shooting a scene in New York or Singapore, courtesy of the designers and carpenters who created movie magic.
I came on the property suddenly. The forest closed in on me again, I went around a shallow curve, and there it was. A stone wall about three feet high enclosed several acres of woods. The mailbox was imbedded in the wall. I could see the house flickering past through the trees, about two hundred or three hundred feet back in the woods. I turned in an open gate and drove down the dirt road that wound lazily around trees and wild bushes to the house.
It was a surprise. In my mind I had pictured one of those big Beverly Hills mansions, but this house was rustic, a high-peaked, one-story built of stone and wood. Cedar shingles surrounded an enormous chimney that was in the center of the structure. I drove past the carport, its door raised and the Pierce-Arrow Phaeton parked inside, up to a massive teakwood front door.
I was wearing my best suit, the blue linen double-breasted, with a pale blue French-cuffed shirt, a yellow tie with little blue dingbats, my best cordovan wing tips, and the small gold cuff links that, with $784, were my inheritance from my father. I had sixty-five bucks in my wallet including another ten Moriarity had given me for expenses. I was dressed to the nines and why not. I was going to take a Coldwater Canyon princess to the deli for dinner and to a free movie.
Chimes rang softly somewhere inside. The door opened immediately and she was standing there, her grin as wide as Sunset Boulevard and her eyes sparkling as they caught the rays of sun filtering through the trees.
“Hi,” she said. “Any trouble finding the place?”
“Came right to it.”
“I know, you’re a cop,” she said. “You can find any street in town and you remember phone numbers.”
She took my hand and led me into the house, stepping aside as she did. The dog sat behind her. A pure white German shepherd, larger than Rosie, his pointed ears straight up on alert, his eyes, coal black at the center ringed with flecks of yellow, looking straight at me.
“I keep running into dogs every time I go through a door,” I said.
“This is Montana,” she said. “He’s very well trained and very friendly, as long as you don’t do something stupid.”
“Is that supposed to reassure me?”
“He’s a dear. You’ll grow to love him, just like Rosebud.”
“I’m calling him Rosie, after a prizefighter.”
“I know who Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom is,” she said with fake exasperation.
“How come you call him Montana?”
“Because that’s where he came from. Dad has a little spread out there, uses it for hunting. His caretaker’s dog had pups and I got the pick of the litter.”
A little spread. For hunting. With a caretaker. In Montana. What am I doing here?
I walked past her into a wide hallway that went all the way through the house. There was a staircase on the right side that curved around to the second floor, where what looked like two rooms were tucked into the eaves of the otherwise A-frame structure.
“I’ll be ready in five minutes,” she said, trotting up the steps. “Make yourself at home.” She stopped about halfway up, leaned over the banister, and pointed out directions to me. “The bar’s to your left at the end of the hall, sitting room to the right, terrace straight ahead. Montana will show you around.”
And she disappeared.
Montana stood up and walked slowly toward the rear of the house as if he understood every word. I followed him.
There were archways on both sides of the hall. To my left was the kitchen and to the right, a library, which smelled of leather, its shelves jammed with books. One chair, enormous with an equally enormous ottoman, held down a corner of the room, with a coffee table on one side of it, an unruly stack of magazines on the other side, a floor lamp behind it. The record player and her records filled almost an entire bookshelf behind the chair.
The main room was at the end of the hall and ran the full width of the place. It was huge. The fireplace, an island of brick and brass, served as a room divider, separating the barroom on the left from the sitting room on the right. The ceiling soared above, forming the back side of the A-frame. Skylights made both rooms bright and inviting.
The sitting room was furnished with white goose down sofas and chairs. It was a room decorated for comf
ort. On a table at one side of the living room were a dozen or so photographs: pictures of Millicent as a child in riding clothes on a black horse; family groups; Millicent on graduation day with her father standing proudly beside her. And one photograph of a roguish-looking young man in an RAF uniform with the insignia of the Eagle Squadron—a group of Americans who, in 1940, had formed their own flying squad within the British Air Force. Scrawled across the bottom was: “To my dear heart, Mill the Pill. Keep the faith. Hugh. 11/14/40.”
An enormous window faced the terrace, with French doors on either side.
And what a terrace.
I followed Montana onto a length of neatly mowed lawn, twenty feet I guessed, up to the swimming pool, which stretched the length of the terrace and looked at first like a reflecting pond. I walked around one end of it out to the edge of the terrace and watched a broad facade of water, almost as long as the pool itself, pouring like a solid sheet straight down on rocks a dozen feet below and, in turn, running into a small pond surrounded by wildflowers. Then there was a tennis court, and beyond it the forest sloped down to a natural stream that tumbled down the hillside. The stone wall ended five feet from the stream, with a gate at its center. On the other side of the creek, nothing but trees. A sudden breeze took the heat out of the air and brought with it a guarantee of rain.
I was in a place far, far away from the L.A. I knew.
“So this is where Adam bumped into Eve,” I said to Montana.
“I assume from that remark you like it,” Millicent said, behind me.
I turned and walked back to the doorway. She was dressed in a pastel blue, lightweight cashmere blazer, white blouse, a pleated yellow silk skirt, and a matching silk scarf around her long, aristocratic neck. She was so chic she embarrassed the word.
“If Eve looked as good as you, Adam wouldn’t have been interested in apples,” I said.
She blushed, her lips parted slightly, and she stared up at me for several seconds. Then she smiled and said, “Wasn’t it Eve who was interested in apples?”
We stood a foot apart, staring at each other, until she broke the spell. “Come on, we’ll be late,” she said. And to Montana, “Alert, Monty.” His attitude changed. He suddenly got serious. He pranced around one corner of the pool and off into the woods.