He shook his head. “I got six years’ seniority on you and I get to spend the last three hours in the records room with a sweet little old lady named Glenda, listening to gossip, and blowing dust off old files. You eat steak, meet the snotty set, and get a matinee.”
“Privileges of rank.”
“Find out anything while you were eating and slumming with the rich?”
We started a familiar routine. Exchanging ideas and building on the evidence in some kind of logical order, trying to make sense of all the information we were gathering.
“I think I know who brokered the checks,” I said.
“I’ll take a wild guess,” he answered, flipping through his notebook. No one, not even a cryptologist, could decipher Ski’s scrawl. He looked over at me. “Delilah O’Dell,” he said.
“You been snooping around the banks, too.”
He nodded. “At least one check was bought by a working stiff I assume could have been her Japanese gardener. The rest of them were bought by sexy young ladies nobody knew. I get the feeling nobody wants to admit that the local madam has a chauffeur of color driving her and her employees around in a Rolls-Royce.”
The man Merrill was talking to got up. They shook hands and the man left without so much as a glance at us.
“You think O’Dell was banking Lila Parrish?” Ski asked.
“No. I think she’s the front. Her girls go into L.A. on occasion as well as San Luis Obispo and other towns along the route. Easy for them to make a five-minute trip to a bank. What did the records department give up?”
“A few interesting items. Some may fit in, some are just local history. For instance, there’s a death certificate on an Eli Gorman Junior. He was born in Massachusetts in 1900, died September 1920. That’s from the record. Isabel Hoffman and Ben Gorman were his parents. They were married in Massachusetts. Gorman was going to Harvard and she went with him. She was seventeen at the time. That’s from Glenda.”
“The kid was killed the night of the Grand View massacre,” I told him. “He drove his car off the overlook. That was his mother we saw with the flowers up on the cliff.”
“Eli Gorman, Ben’s father, owned this whole valley at one time. The deeds are all on file.”
“He won it in a poker game with O’Dell.”
“Not all of it. O’Dell snookered him. He sold the deeds to the property that was then the town of Eureka to Riker the day of the game.”
“And started a war,” I said.
Ski thought about that for a moment or two.
“It probably started long before that,” he said. “The old-timer, Tallman? He put up with the town’s sins. After the shoot-out in Delilah’s place, Culhane turned up the heat on Riker.”
I finished the analysis. “And when Riker went up the river, and Fontonio was shot, Culhane ran Guilfoyle and the rest of the bunch out of town.”
“I think I got a surprise for you. I took a stroll through the cemetery and came across a tombstone that’s interesting.” He looked at his notes. “Jerome Parrish. Born 1869, died 1908. Loving husband and father.”
“The daughter was Lila Parrish,” I guessed.
He nodded. “She was born in the clinic here, in 1900. Which would make her forty-one, close enough to fit Verna. Her mother was divorced when the kid was four. She remarried and divorced again. Her name now is Ione Fisher. Here’s the kicker. Ione Fisher was, and still is, a nurse at the Shuler Institute, the sanitarium down in Mendosa. Very private. I understand Mrs. Fisher is head nurse now. She’s sixty-two.”
“That’s a lot of stuff to get out of old records.”
“Mostly Glenda. She’s fifty-six, has a big nose, and loves to talk.”
I said, “So Lila blows town, heads down to Mendosa, hides out with her old lady in a private sanitarium for a while, and when Guilfoyle moves on Mendosa, Lila slips down to L.A., gets a new ID, hikes her age up a bit, and becomes Verna Hicks.”
“I have to wonder two things,” Ski said. “If she was being paid off, why would she hide out twenty-five miles from here in a town run by Riker’s boy? Seems a little risky, wouldn’t you say?”
“You’re forgetting the time element,” I said. “Guilfoyle didn’t move into Mendosa until after Riker’s appeal, which was almost a year after the trial.”
“You’d think if she was a key witness against Arnie Riker, Culhane would have found her when Riker appealed the case,” Ski said. “Hell, if big-nosed Glenda knew who her mother was, Culhane certainly did.”
“Sometimes what seems obvious isn’t necessarily fact,” a voice drawled, and we turned to face Brett Merrill. “Mind if I join you?”
He looked larger when confined in a small place. He was probably six-two and a hundred ninety or two hundred pounds. He sat down before we had a chance to answer him.
“Some things are bothering us,” I said to Merrill. “Maybe you can help us out.”
“I can try,” he drawled pleasantly.
“Lila Parrish was your key witness in the Thompson case. It seems to us that you would have kept a leash on her—knowing Riker was sure to appeal his conviction.”
“Yeah,” Ski said. “And since her mother lives in Mendosa, you’d think Culhane would look for her there.”
“Lila Parrish didn’t live with her mother at the time of the murder,” Merrill said. “She lived with another girl in a shanty in Milltown. She left her mother when Ione married Fisher. They were on the outs. Our people interviewed Ione Fisher. I’m convinced she wasn’t hiding Lila down there.”
“She was your only eyeball witness. How hard did you really try to find her?” I said.
Merrill shrugged and said in his easy drawl, “Lila Parrish vanished the day after she testified. Her roommate worked at the mill. When she came home from work, Lila’s things were gone. Nobody’s seen her since.”
“And you couldn’t find her?”
“Look, boys, sometimes you have to play the hand you’re dealt. We had Riker dead-to-rights. He and his boat were covered with her blood. The Parrish girl had testified she saw Riker shoot Wilma Thompson and throw her in his car. Thompson’s blood was all over the car. Riker had spent ten days in jail for beating her up once and she ditched him. Plenty of motive for a guy with Riker’s reputation. And he had no alibi. He said he went to his boat that night, got drunk, and passed out. When he was arrested on the boat he was still wearing bloody clothes and there wasn’t a scratch on him. He was lucky they reduced the sentence to life without parole.”
I smiled. “Said like a true prosecutor.”
“It was a solid case. The legwork was first rate. Woods and Carney gave me a preponderance of evidence.”
“Where’s Carney?”
“Died of a heart attack five years ago.”
“When Woods shot Fontonio, why did you dead-docket the case against him?” Ski asked, suddenly changing the subject.
“I thought you were investigating an L.A. homicide,” Merrill said softly. The smile got a little cooler.
“Just curious,” Ski said.
“Making a case against Eddie Woods would have been a waste of time. There were no eyewitnesses. We had started a grand jury investigation against what was left of the Riker outfit and Eddie Woods went to Fontonio’s place to deliver a subpoena. He says Fontonio went for a gun and he shot him. There was a gun in Fontonio’s hand we couldn’t trace.”
“His wife and bodyguard said he never packed heat,” Ski said.
“C’mon, boys,” Merrill said, slowly shaking his head. “Would you go before a grand jury with a wife and a hoodlum as your only witnesses? The attorney general sent a man down from Sacramento to look into it. He looked over the evidence, said, ‘Thanks a lot for nothing,’ and went back to Sacramento. Then Eddie resigned.”
He finished his coffee and dabbed his lips with a napkin.
Ski asked, “You came here from someplace else, didn’t you? Just curious. Accents interest me.”
“Everybody in California came from somep
lace else,” Merrill answered. “I came from southern Georgia.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I had a little law firm and a partner named David Vigil, who had kept business alive while I was off fighting the war. There really wasn’t enough business for the two of us, and my brother and sister-in-law were barely scratching out a living on the family farm. One day I got a call from California, probably the longest long-distance call in the town’s history. It was Brodie. He said, ‘How’d you like to be D.A. of Eureka, California? I need some help out here.’ So I packed my valise, took the bus to Atlanta, and hopped the train west. We kept busy. A shooting every week or ten days. Once in a while somebody stupid would rob the bank. If Buck Tallman didn’t drop them in their tracks coming out the door, Brodie would ride them down. There was a lot of law but not much order.” He stopped and chuckled. “Probably a lot more than you wanted to know. Southerners tend to go on.”
“We’re still trying to get a handle on the five hundred a month Verna was getting,” I said, cutting off his monologue. “Somebody was paying her off for something.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Does Culhane know?”
“You’ll have to ask him,” he said, grabbing his hat.
He laid a quarter on the table.
“Pleasure meeting you, Ski,” he said, and strolled out, leaving us staring at the door.
After a minute or so I said, “Know what I think? I think we’ve run out of gas here. Nobody’s going to tell us a damn thing.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Ski answered. “I think Lila Parrish lied at Riker’s trial. Merrill didn’t have Thompson’s body because Riker fed her to the sharks. So somebody arranged for Parrish to testify she had witnessed the murder, then paid her to vanish.”
“Interesting theory, Ski. But why, after nearly twenty years, does she turn up dead in her bathtub?”
“If we knew that, we’d know who killed her.”
“Maybe Merrill was giving us the shoo-fly about Ione Fisher. Maybe she knows where her daughter went.”
“Maybe.”
“There’s only one person who might give us a straight answer,” I said.
“The mother.” Ski nodded. “And she’s right down the road.”
“Worth a shot,” I agreed, and we headed south.
CHAPTER 27
The neon sign spelled albacore point in startling red letters that burned the name into the fog. Under it: vacancies. At this time of year it should have said Full. Charlie Lefton apparently was too far off the beaten track to attract much trade. Or maybe he didn’t care. Maybe Charlie was happy to have his little place by the ocean. Maybe he was independently wealthy and reclusive and used the place as a tax dodge. All Moriarity had said was that Charlie would give us a good price if we wanted to stay the night. Lefton’s was perfect since it was on the way south to Mendosa.
We got to Lefton’s by driving down a hard dirt road that led from Route 7 west toward the ocean and then curved around at a two-story hospital and followed the shoreline south. About five miles past the hospital, a sign had pointed off to the east to Milltown and a half mile beyond that was the paper mill, a black silhouette against the darkening blue sky. It was an eerie, ugly giant, a noisy complex with stacks that spewed reeking smoke and ash into the air. Man-made clouds obliterated a fiery sun sinking toward the horizon.
As we passed the plant, an early fog had suddenly surged out of the gathering dusk, not on little cat feet as Sandburg would have it but like a broiling storm cloud that had been grounded. Driving into it was like driving into a swirling, gray tunnel. The headlights reflected off it and were swallowed up. I switched to low beam and it gave us maybe ten feet of grace on the road. I was driving fifteen miles an hour when I spotted the red sign and slowed down, looking for the driveway into Lefton’s place. I found it under the neon sign and turned onto a shell drive, the tires crunching beneath us as I eased down it.
“I hope the ocean isn’t anywhere near here,” I said. “If we roam off the road, we could end up in the drink.”
After a moment, Ski said, “I can’t swim.”
I laughed at him. “Hell, you couldn’t sink if you tried.”
A sign jumped out of the fog at us, an arrow cut from a two-by-four, painted white with black letters: office. I felt disoriented, isolated in the middle of nowhere, with visibility of about five feet. I stepped out of the car and yelled, “Anybody around?”
My words sounded lifeless, without resonance, as the mist swallowed them up. Then a voice came back just as flat, “Who wants to know?”
“Customers,” I yelled back.
A spotlight blinked on, a blurred orb somewhere off to our left. A shimmering image came toward us, a rail-thin six-footer, his face leathered and tanned by sun and wind, his windblown black hair in need of a trim, and his face covered with four or five days’ growth of graying beard. He was wearing denim work pants, a clean white sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and what was left rolled up over his shoulders, and light blue canvas deck shoes. There was a tattoo on his left biceps, a knife piercing a waving banner on which were the words death before dishonor.
“Charlie Lefton?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m Lefton,” he said in a voice so quiet it was almost a whisper.
“I’m Zeke Bannon, this is my partner Ski Agassi. We work for Dan Moriarity. He said you might have room for us.”
“Homicide cops, huh?”
I nodded.
“Follow me up to the lodge. Can’t see shit in this soup.”
We followed him down a slight embankment and into the arena of light formed by the searchlight. I could hear water beating against something.
“We close to the ocean?” I asked.
“About a hundred yards to your right,” he answered. A moment later a small wooden bridge appeared through the fog. It led to the lodge, as Lefton called it, a strip of eleven rooms. The office was in the middle, five rooms on each side. A narrow walk surrounded the primitive billet and below it, a grid of four-by-fours supported it about five feet off the ground. Nearby, just out of the light’s perimeter, I could hear a boat groaning against its tie lines, and much farther away, almost out of earshot, the ocean smacking against rocks.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked as we walked down to the office.
He pulled open a squeaky screen door and flicked on the office light and pointed to a map on the wall. It was a sectional of the coastline. We were on the back side of a narrow cove, like a finger pointing inward from the Pacific. Lefton’s lodge was built on stilts in the event of an extremely high tide.
“Been here since ‘32 and never got a drop of water under the place,” Lefton said. “Always have been a little too cautious for my own good.”
The office barely earned the name. There was a scarred-up old desk against one wall, three straight-back wooden chairs, and a gray metal three-drawer file cabinet facing the desk on the opposite wall. An upright telephone, a small desk lamp, and a hot plate with a percolator held down the desk, and a 1939 calendar from a tackle shop adorned the wall.
“You guys just spending the night?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll by pulling out about seven.”
“Well, I brew up coffee at 6:30 if you need a jump start to get moving. Got some sugar and cream in my room, which is next door.”
“You live here?” Ski asked.
“Here and on my boat. She can hold eight. I like to sleep on her. She rocks me to sleep.” He spoke in that low voice, almost without modulation. I had the feeling you could set off a load of TNT in the next room and he wouldn’t blink.
“Why don’t you take 1 and 2,” he said. “They got an adjoining door. They’re open. Keys are in the top dresser drawers. You can settle up when you leave. Two bucks apiece sound fair?”
“More than fair,” I said.
“Hell, they’d go empty anyways. Just gotta show a little profit. There’s an ice chest filled with Mexican be
er on the back side. Twenty cents a bottle. Throw the money in the tin can on the side.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Come down from Pietro?” he said, making conversation.
I nodded.
“Where you heading this evening?”
“Mendosa.”
Lefton seemed genuinely surprised.
“Jesus, why?” he asked.
“We have to interview somebody.”
“Hmm. Well, don’t mention the captain down there. You know the story about the feud between him and Guilfoyle?”
I nodded.
“Worst case of bad blood I ever saw. I’d walk light down there; your badge ain’t worth a damn. One thing Guilfoyle really hates is big-city cops. He’s mean as a constipated skunk but he’s not as dumb as some think and he’s got a real short fuse.”
“So we’ve heard.”
“He wouldn’t get homicidal with a couple of out-of-town cops, would he?” Ski said with a smile.
“You seen the fog we got here. You could disappear into the Pacific and nobody would ever find you. It’s happened a lot more often than you might think.”
“To cops?” I asked.
“To anybody he gets a hard-on for.”
“Great,” Ski said dismally.
“How come Culhane doesn’t go down there and clean the whole bunch out?” I asked.
Lefton shrugged. “It’s a Mexican standoff. The captain doesn’t give a damn, long’s Gil stays on his side of the county line, which is about ten feet from here.”
“You know Guilfoyle pretty well?” I asked.
“He brings a fishing party down here once a month or so. Doesn’t like his guests to spend too much time in the daylight in Mendosa, if you know what I mean.”
“Not exactly.”
“They’re his guests. Hard cases, I’d say; sounds like they’re usually from back East somewhere. They fill up the place for a week. Or a month. Pay good, tip big. I don’t ask questions.”
I remembered what Jimmy Pennington said about Mendosa being called ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ after the Montana hangout of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.