“I wouldn’t know,” Earl shrugs. He fingers a cigarette but doesn’t light it.
“You’re making me nervous.”
“I ain’t what’s making you nervous, Henry.” He giggles and goes back to humming “Bye-Bye Blackbird.”
The captain looks down at Henry and says, “Why don’t you go below, Mr. Dahlmus. Get out of sight.”
“I get seasick easy. It’s too hot down there.”
“Well, you’re too visible up here. They’re giving your description every five minutes on the radio.”
“Popular, ain’tcha, Henry.” Leo chuckles.
The pudgy man turns and edges his way down into the cabin. He wipes sweat from his brow with his shirtsleeve.
“Here he comes,” the captain’s harsh voice says, as a black limousine approaches the pier and stops. The man in the backseat gets out before the driver can come around and open the door. He walks up the gangplank, a man who swaggers when he walks, his shoulders bunched up.
“Let’s get outta here,” he says to the captain in a razor voice.
“Yes, sir.” The captain nods, and salutes with a forefinger.
The man turns to Leo.
“What are you so happy about?” he says to Leo.
Leo is taken aback. He shrugs. “You know,” he says with a tight smile.
“No, I don’t know. Sit down and relax.”
“Yes, sir.” Leo sits.
The cabin cruiser eases out of the bay toward open water.
The man with the tight shoulders climbs up on the bridge beside the captain.
“How are you, Jack?” he says, shaking hands with the captain.
“Doing okay, sir. Been a while.”
“Yeah, too long. You know what to do?”
“Yes, sir, just like the old days.”
“We got a situation.”
“I know. I been listening to the radio.”
“Everybody in town is listening to the damn radio. Open this thing up as soon as you can and get us into deep water.”
“Done. We have to keep an eye out for the Coast Guard, Mr. Riker.”
“So I’ve been hearing.”
Riker goes below. Henry Dahlmus is sitting on a couch. He jumps up when Riker comes down the stairs.
“Hi, Arnie.”
“Don’t ‘Hi, Arnie’ me.”
“Jesus, Arnie, I . . .”
“You fucked up royally.”
“Aw, c’mon, Arnie.”
“Just shut up.”
Dahlmus shrinks into himself like a tortoise pulling into its shell. Riker goes to the bar and pours himself a drink. He sits down opposite Dahlmus, sips the drink, and stares across the cabin at the chubby man. Sits, sips, and stares as the radio drones on:
“We interrupt the program in progress to bring you a special bulletin. The Los Angeles Police Department has an all-points alert for two men suspected in the triple murder of . . .”
“Why didn’t you just hire an airplane with a banner on the back and fly around town,” Riker says.
A full moon lights the sea, its shimmering reflection accenting every wave. The captain’s neck swivels as he looks for the telltale lights of other boats. So far, so good.
Below, Dahlmus is beginning to get sick. He can’t keep his eyes off a cabin light rocking rhythmically as the cruiser chops through the waves, its heavy engines roaring behind them.
“I think I’ll get some air,” Dahlmus says. “I ain’t much of a sailor.”
“You’re not much of anything,” Riker says. “Go ahead, go topside and take a couple of deep breaths.”
“Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.”
He weaves his way to the stairs and makes his way up to the deck, leaving his jacket and derby behind. Riker watches him go, his cold eyes watching every move.
On deck, Leo and Earl are sitting on the seat stretching the width of the stern. Earl has his hat in his hand, his hair snapping in the wind. Leo has his arms stretched out on the back of the seat, eyes closed, head back.
“Ain’t this the life,” he says. Earl has nothing to say.
Riker comes on deck. He is whirling Dahlmus’s derby on a forefinger. Dahlmus is leaning on the railing of the boat, eyes closed, gasping for breath.
Riker climbs up to the bridge.
“How we doin’?” he asks the captain.
“I got a shortwave from Guilfoyle. The Coast Guard is cruising around Mendosa Sound.”
“So what do we do?”
“My suggestion is we swing wide around the sound and go in at a fishing camp run by a guy named Lefton. We know him, do a lot of fishing trips with him.”
“Whatever you think.”
“We can dodge the C.G. and slip in there. It’s ten miles from town.”
“How long?”
“Another hour and a half.”
Riker goes back on deck. He walks to the stern and stands with his back to Dahlmus and says to Leo, “Slip me your piece.”
“I thought . . .”
“You’re not paid to think.” He holds out his hand and Leo hands him a .38. Riker drapes Dahlmus’s derby over it. He walks back and stands behind Dahlmus.
“Henry?”
Dahlmus turns and stands with his back to the sea. He sees his hat. Riker lifts the hat up and scales it out over Dahlmus’s shoulder.
“What the hell . . .” Dahlmus starts, and then he sees the gun.
“I should have known better than to trust a two-bit stick-up man to do these jobs.”
“I . . .”
“I told you, wait until she’s in the tub and drop the radio in with her, but you had to get fancy. You made it a murder case.”
Dahlmus began to whine. “I wanted to make sure . . .”
“Left your prints all over the place, you stupid bastard. And now that bulldog cop has tied you to me. But you’re the only one can tie me to you.”
He raises his gun hand straight out, a foot from the chest of Dahlmus. The gun barks twice, the bullets tearing into Dahlmus’s flesh, the sound whisked away in the wind.
Dahlmus cries out once, “Ohh . . . ,” and flips backward into the ocean. Riker watches as the body is caught in the wake of the cruiser, bobbing like a fishing cork in the moonlight.
Riker turns to Earl and Leo. He hands the gun back to Leo.
“Did you see that? No sea legs. Old Henry just fell overboard.”
I lost daylight just after I passed through Lompoc. I turned on the siren and bright lights and put the speedometer on seventy. There was hardly any traffic and what there was got out of my way in a hurry.
Back in L.A., the APB had uniform cops and detectives shaking up their informants and stopping every brown-and-black ragtop, which is the last car we could put Dahlmus in. The big problem was how to bring Riker and Dahlmus in without invading Mendosa.
Guilfoyle would be their point man.
I pulled into the courthouse, and Hernandez, the hard-boiled deputy I met when I first came to San Pietro, gave me a look that would have frozen the gates of Hell.
“Do you know where I could find the captain?” I asked as pleasantly as I could manage.
“He’s waiting for you, although I don’t know why he should,” she snapped. “Second floor at The Breakers.” And turned her attention back to the magazine she was reading.
I drove around to The Breakers. A kid in a valet’s jacket rushed up to the car and opened the door.
“Leave the car here,” I said, locking the door and taking the keys.
“But . . .”
I ignored him and went up the stairs to the lobby. The ballroom was on the second floor. As I passed the desk, the manager said, “Excuse me, sir, may I help you?”
“No,” I said.
I could hear music and voices, and followed them up the stairs. The ballroom entrance was right at the top. There were about a hundred people in formal dress gathered in the room. A banner across the stage said “Culhane for Governor.” Red, white, and blue balloons clung to the ceil
ing and a small band was playing a lively version of “Shorty George.” The mood was jovial, which surprised me. Two or three younger couples were off to one side doing the lindy hop. Waiters were cruising the room with trays of champagne, and there were two large food tables located on both sides of the dance floor. If the celebrants were concerned by the events of the day, you couldn’t tell it.
Brett Merrill was waiting near the entrance. As I walked toward him, someone grabbed my elbow. I turned to face a giant of a man, probably six-five or six-six, wearing a green jacket with a small badge that told me he was the hotel’s security officer.
“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “this is a private party.”
“It’s alright, Carl,” Merrill said as he walked up.
“He left his car parked and locked in front of the main entrance,” the security man said.
I leaned over close to Merrill and said, “There’s a shotgun under the dash and a .45 in the pocket.”
“It’s alright, Carl,” he said. “Mr. Bannon is a police officer and my guest.”
“Yes, sir,” Carl said, and vanished as quickly as he had appeared. Merrill nodded toward a small dining room adjoining the main ballroom.
“Wait in there, I’ll get him.”
I went into the room and rolled a cigarette. It was a pleasant little parlor, with dark green wallpaper, paintings of famous horses on the walls. Before I could light my cigarette, Merrill returned with Culhane and the omnipresent Rusty.
“Let’s sit down,” he said. “I been standing up for two hours.”
He sat at a table near the door and I sat across from him. Brett Merrill stood behind a chair but didn’t sit. Rusty stood by the door with his arms crossed and looked out a window.
“You sure got busy after you left here,” Culhane said.
“Look, if it had been my choice they would have gassed Riker nineteen years ago,” I said.
He looked surprised. “I thought you were a stickler for the law. You saying you think they should have gassed an innocent man?”
“The law’s one thing, justice is another,” I said.
Merrill, who was looking down at me, stared off in the corner, thought for a minute, raised his eyebrows, and nodded approvingly.
“I’ve got my whole force on alert,” Culhane said. “So far the Coast Guard hasn’t picked them up. They have Mendosa’s port bottled up. With any luck, they’ll nail Riker before we do.”
“Right now, I’m more interested in Dahlmus,” I answered. “If he’s on the boat with Riker, he’s dead already.”
“And if he was in Mendosa, Guilfoyle’s taken him fishing by now,” Culhane answered.
“So what’s the plan?”
“We have to get past Guilfoyle’s bunch and shake down Shuler’s place. If Riker’s there, we’ll bring him in and let the state court deal with him.”
“Can we do that?”
Merrill made a temple with his fingers and said sagely, “I hope Dahlmus is still alive and we get him, then we make a deal with him to turn up Riker. Otherwise he’s looking at the gas chamber.”
“And if Dahlmus is dead?”
“Then my hope is Riker will put up a fight,” Culhane said with ice in his tone. “We have to sucker Guilfoyle out of Mendosa. Get him out in the open, then end-run him, and exercise our search warrant.”
“How do you plan to do that?”
A phone call answered that question.
There was a knock on the door and the security man stuck his head in the room.
“Excuse me, Captain, you have an urgent phone call. They’re patching it in here.”
A moment later the phone rang. Culhane pointed to an extension. I kept my hand over the mouthpiece when we picked up.
“Captain, it’s Charlie Lefton.” His quiet voice was laced with fear. “I got a boat docking in here and I think . . .” Then there was a sound like a chair falling over and the line went dead.
Culhane slammed down the phone. He turned to Merrill. “Brett, keep everybody here happy.” And then to me, “Let’s go, Cowboy.”
There were four cars waiting in front of the county building by the time we arrived. Big Redd, Max, Lefty, and Rusty were there, with four other deputies who were strangers to me. Culhane made fast introductions: Bobby Aaron, a man in his early fifties about my size, with the crafty look of a fox; Hank Foster, a well-built youngster with brown hair and a cockeyed smile on his face; a hard case named Joe Brady, who could have been anything from forty to fifty, with the face of a leather-tanned wrangler, and who just nodded at me; and another younger man named Randy Oldfield, who looked like an ex–football lineman.
Culhane had spread a county map on the hood of the Packard. The road south to Mendosa followed the shoreline, bowed out and curved around Lefton’s, then back to the shoreline again. It was thickly forested for a half mile or so on either side of the fishing camp.
“Okay, here’s the play,” Culhane began. “We think Riker has landed by boat at Lefton’s place. It’s foggy down there so move carefully. Bobby, you and Brady take one of the cars down past Lefton’s and see if you see anybody down there. Then pull off the road and park here, on the dirt road past the fishing camp.”
Bobby Aaron, I would learn later, was an Apache Indian who had once been on the reservation police and had tailed a maverick Indian all the way from Arizona, catching him in a bar in Eureka, before it became San Pietro. Culhane was so impressed he hired him on the spot. Joe Brady was what he looked like, an ex-cowpoke.
“Big Redd, take one of the walkie-talkies and go down through the woods on the ocean side. Check the place out . . .”
“I’ll go with him,” I said. “I’m in on this, too.”
Big Redd looked at Culhane and shook his head slightly. Culhane thought for a moment, then said, “Okay. Stay behind Redd and do what he tells you. Use hand signals so we don’t tip off anybody who might be down there. Take the walkie-talkie and keep in touch when you can.”
He turned to the rest of his crew.
“The rest of us lay back here,” he pointed to a spot on the map about a mile from the camp. “We wait until Redd and Bannon reconnoiter the place. If it’s clear, we move down across the county line and I’ll try to lure Guilfoyle down there. If he bites, Bobby will pull behind his cars and box him in. I have a warrant for his arrest for harboring a felon. I’ll serve it on him, then we’ll play it by ear from there. Any questions?”
There weren’t any.
“Okay, let’s get on with it.”
Aaron got in a Pontiac sedan and cranked it up.
Big Redd earned his nickname. He was at least six-four and built like a tank. Dark skin, dark hair, wary eyes. He was wearing a .38 in a shoulder holster and in his belt a cased bowie knife big enough to slaughter a bull.
We drove down the road in my car until we hit fog, then pulled off into the trees and started our trek through the forest.
CHAPTER 38
Redd moved soundlessly through the woods. I literally tried to follow in his footsteps to keep from making a sound. He would stop occasionally, kneel down, and just listen. Then we’d be off again. It took about fiften minutes to get to the clearing. The lodge was deadly quiet. There was one light on in the office. As we crouched in the undergrowth, Redd saw something. He crawled to the right, toward the sea, and stopped again. He lay there motionless and beckoned me on. I crawled up beside him.
Down below us, in the small inlet that washed up to the edge of the lodge, Charlie Lefton was floating facedown, his back blown apart by a shotgun blast.
My jaw tightened so hard it hurt.
The office door opened and a man came out. He stood in the shadows outside the periphery of light from the office door and lit a cigarette. Then a second man came out and stood beside the first. They spoke back and forth for a minute or two, but we couldn’t hear them clearly.
The first one was dressed in a gray suit. The other one looked like a clown. The guy in the suit was short, slender, and ferret-
faced, and was wearing a fedora. The other one was wearing slacks and a loud sports shirt, and had curly red hair. The lean one was calm as a lake. The clown was jumpy, wired. The lean one pointed toward the office and they went back inside.
Neither one of them was Henry Dahlmus.
I pointed to myself and then to the grid of supports under the lodge, and indicated I wanted to go under there, come up on the other side of the office, and kick in the door. Redd would wait at the bottom of the steps leading to the walkway around the lodge and charge the door when he heard me kick it open.
Redd shook his head. Those weren’t his instructions.
I pointed down at Lefton and then toward the two men in the office. He got my meaning. I offered a compromise. As soon as I hit the door, Redd could call Culhane and tell him to come in like the cavalry.
I didn’t give Redd a chance to argue. I rolled through the weeds and made a run for the underbelly of the lodge. When I got there, I crawled through the crisscross of four-by-fours. A rat ran soundlessly away from me along one of the supports. I brushed spiderwebs away from my face. To my right, out in the bay somewhere, a fish jumped. I hesitated, waiting for a reaction from the pair above me. I heard the wired one say, “Just a fuckin’ fish.” And a moment later, “I don’t think anybody’s comin’ down here.”
No answer. I waited a little longer, then climbed carefully up the supports to the deck of the lodge and looked over. The door on my side of the office was closed. I climbed over the railing and fell against the outside wall of the office, drew my Luger, and wondered where Redd was. Then I counted to three and jumped into Lefton’s office.
The two thugs were startled as I burst into the room. The lean, rat-faced little man with receding black hair had the smallest eyes I’ve ever seen on a human being. The wired clown in the noisy shirt and baggy pants was as nervous as a jumping bean.
He had a .38 in his hand.
It was a Mexican standoff. Rat Face just stood like a spectator.
Nobody did anything.
“Where’s Dahlmus?” I said to Rat Face, ignoring the clown who was holding his pistol in both hands and aiming it at me.
Still no comment.