Authors: William Campbell Gault
The chief wasn’t grinning. “What exactly did you mean by that, Lieutenant?”
Vogel looked at his superior with the composure of a man sure of his pension and his skill at power. “Locum’s been asking for it. He’s been insolent to every officer who ever questioned him. He’s been harassing Mr. Callahan. A few nights ago he threatened him. I’m sure, sir, the department shouldn’t have any confusion about which man to support in a Callahan-Locum confrontation.”
Harris studied him wearily. “Maybe I’d better send
you
out on the lecture circuit and switch Helms to traffic.”
“I was on the debating team at college, sir.”
The chief’s face grew rosier. “Easy, Lieutenant. Don’t overplay your hand.”
Vogel smiled. “Not with you, Chief. It cost me eighteen dollars one night.”
Harris’s voice was calmer. “You got all the right words ready for Farini, too?”
“Has he called?”
“Not yet.”
“Would you like to wager my eighteen dollars that we won’t hear a peep out of that shyster?”
“All right, all right!” He looked at Lund. “You were gambling there, weren’t you, playing poker for money?”
“Penny-ante stuff,” Skip said. “There were no eighteen-dollar bets at
that
table.”
The chief looked us over, one man at a time. Then, “It’s too damned early in the day forbad comedy. You can all leave if you leave quickly. Go!”
In Vogel’s office, Skip asked, “Could we be friends, Lieutenant?”
Vogel smiled. “Any friend of Callahan’s is halfway there.” He held out a hand.
I asked. “Are we working today?”
“Today,” he told me, “we’re setting up a city-wide narcotics bust. We’ll need every officer we can lay our hands on, including Helms.”
Vogel picked up the phone and began to dial. I waved a goodbye and went out with Skip. The overcast was leaving, the temperature rising.
I asked Skip, “Still plan to go your own way?”
He nodded. “You’ve been seen around town with Vogel all week. That means fuzz to my former friends.” He grinned. “And you know something, Brock? Even though you’re not one, you look like a cop.”
“Thank you. Phone me tonight if you learn anything.”
The man from Vegas had been a red herring. At least, that’s the way he was cast in my revision of the chief’s script. I had promised to alert Pontius if I checked the man, but I decided the information Villwock had given me made the promise inoperative.
The Dolor Clinic was directly across the street from Valley Hospital, in the western section of town. I knew the director, a high-handicapper named Malcolm Prescott. That could be an entry, but I wasn’t sure how far the inviolate doctor-patient relationship extended.
Prescott was in his office, due right now, he informed me, at a staff meeting.
“A man from Nevada?” he said, frowning. “Around the eighth or ninth of this month?” He looked at me doubtfully.
“I’m working with the police,” I told him in a dignified and (I hoped) authoritative voice. “This information could help us find the man who murdered Si Marner’s mother.”
He glanced at his wrist-watch and frowned some more. “Nevada, you say? Las Vegas, I suppose. We get a lot of them.”
“Maybe not that week.”
He sighed. “Okay. I have to leave. I’ll tell Vickie to help you.”
Vickie was a well-shaped brunette in a well-fitted uniform, wearing Jan’s fragrance, Norell.
She riffled through some file cards and said, “Francis Martin, Las Vegas, August ninth. He’s the only one that week.” She shook her head and smiled. “He’s moved up in the world and changed his name.”
“You know the man?”
“I went to high school with him. He was Frank Martino then. Sexy little Italian. He had a Mafia uncle he used to boast about.”
“Do his folks still live in town?”
“No. They moved to one of those retirement horrors down there near San Diego. Nice people. Very active in the P.T.A.”
“Which high school was that?”
“The only one we had then, San Valdesto.”
“I don’t want to be indelicate, but how long ago was that?”
“I graduated in 1961,” she said demurely. “I look younger, though, don’t I?”
“I judged you to be no more than twenty-six,” I assured her. “Thanks, Vickie.”
I stood in front of the clinic, in the emerging sun, and stared across the street at the Valley Hospital. I went over, finally, planning to ask for Otis Locum’s room number. Not that I wanted to visit him, only to make sure he was still there, and not prowling the tree-shaded lanes of Montevista.
I didn’t need to inquire; I almost bumped into Joe Farini in the lobby.
He backed off and glared at me. “If you plan to question my client, I intend to go up with you. You’ll be hearing from us, eventually, about last night’s attack.”
“Don’t threaten me, Joe. You’re even smaller than he is. Why don’t you go down to the station bullpen and rustle up some new clients?”
He glared and glared—and walked away.
I waited until he was out of sight before going back to my car. A remark of Mary Serano’s stirred in my memory, that remark about her daughter’s picture in the high-school annual. I headed for the school.
The vice-principal, a man named Alger Luplow, was in charge of the summer session. His body followed the same general penguin contours as Chief Chandler Harris’s, but his face was kinder.
“That’s an interesting concept,” he agreed. “San Valdesto graduates of the sixties and what they’re doing today. Are you a writer, Mr. Callahan?”
“I’m working on a script,” I admitted. “I’m not sure it will sell.”
“Persistence,” he told me gently, “is the writer’s strongest ally. We have a full file of annuals in the school library. Mrs. Vogel, our summer-session librarian, will only be only too happy to help you.”
“I can’t win any,” Vogel had said. “My wife is a part-time librarian.”
She was a trim, slim little woman, a Maude Marner thirty years younger. “Mr. Callahan!” she greeted me. “We finally meet. Bernie has told me so much about you. Is he with you?”
“He’s deserted me today,” I said.
“What’s this business about graduates of the sixties? Mr. Luplow wasn’t very clear about it.”
“It was a little fantasy I told him to brighten his day. What I’m really looking for is a picture of a man named Frank Martino. He graduated in the early sixties.”
“I wasn’t here then,” she said. “I was up in Berkeley, trying to get my hooks into Bernie.” She led me to the section where the annuals were stored.
They were in a two-shelf section. I started with the 1960 edition and worked my way through 1961 to 1962. There they were, both of them, 1962 graduates. One had three years of football to his credit, two years of basketball. The other had followed a different route, as junior prom chairman, the glee club, senior prom chairman.
I had guessed it would be one of my new friends. I hadn’t been sure of which one until now.
Mrs. Vogel came over to ask, “Did you locate your Frank Martino?”
“I did. And the name of his local friend I needed. Thank you for your help, Mrs. Vogel.”
“I was glad to do it,” she said. “I do hope Bernie will have you over to the house for poker some night.”
That would be the day—or night. I smiled, thanked her again and left.
W
HAT I HAD WAS
a name. What I didn’t have was a case.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the evidence that has been presented here clearly proves that X went to high school with Y. Can there now be any reasonable doubt left in your minds that Y is the murder of Mrs. Marner?
No prosecutor would consider what I had learned even a sensible approach to a conviction. The court did not deal in theories or scenarios. The court dealt in facts.
The sun was out in all its fury now. My Detroit junker waited patiently on the school parking lot for further instructions.
Mary Serano might have some answers, but I didn’t relish meeting her husband again so soon. The school was close to the underprivileged area of town; I headed down into it, searching for a red Porsche. Maybe Skip had come up with something.
No Porsche, no Skip, no luck.
It was a slow morning at Trinity Liquors. Moses and his son were playing darts.
“If you shoot baskets like you throw darts,” Moses was telling his son, “you’re gonna end up in the liquor business.”
He turned his head to smile at me. “You come to open a charge account?”
“Not today. I want to use your phone book.”
I looked up the name. The address was Ellis Lane.
“Where is Ellis Lane?” I asked.
Moses shrugged, still throwing darts.
His son said, “It’s a little goat path that leads off Chapparal Road, about a quarter of a mile beyond Avalon Avenue.”
That was up in the hills, but less than a mile from Kelly’s Kourt.
Moses said, “I hear around you got Barney Leeds sweating. You didn’t use my name, I hope?”
“No. I fed him a Tishkin lead. Do you think Barney might break?”
“It wouldn’t take much bending to break him. If he had any guts, he wouldn’t be paying off, would he?” He hit a bull’s-eye and bowed to the nonexistent acclaim. “You know anything more about what happened to Mrs. Marner?”
“A little. But not enough to take into court. Moses, thank you again for last night. And you, too, Jerry.”
“Anytime,” Moses said. “Anytime you need muscle, here’s the place to come for it. Booze, too. We deliver all over town.”
“I’ll bet you don’t stock Einlicher.”
“I stock it and I drink it. And for the man who put Locum in the hospital, I’ll sell it to you at cost.”
“I’ll pay the regular markup. Deliver a couple of cases to my house. If nobody’s home, leave them in the garage.” I gave him my address and went out.
Padilla to San Valdesto Street, on that all the way to the home of Mary Serano, waitress, bookie, doting mother. The car was an oven; it was a relief to get out of it. Her Cadillac was in the driveway. The Camaro wasn’t in sight.
“You look beat,” Mary said. “Come in.”
“I hope your happy-go-lucky hubby isn’t home,” I said.
“That slob is now in Phoenix,” she said. “He’s back in the welding business with his idiot brother. I gave him enough to buy a half interest and told him if he ever showed up in this town again, I’d turn my cousins loose on him.”
“A wise decision,” I said.”I’ve come for help.”
“Come in, come in. I have news from down south about Patty. She went to see my brother down there and his wife phoned me.”
“Great! Maybe if she learns you have dumped smiley, she’ll be more eager to come home.”
“That’s what I want to talk with you about,” she said. “A nice cold beer, maybe? I bought some better stuff than that swill Pete drank.”
“Not Einlicher, by any chance?”
“No. Is that good? This is Bechtel’s Bavarian. It was more than two dollars a bottle, but I thought you might drop in.”
We were in the living room now. “You thought I might drop in and you could talk me into going down to Los Angeles?”
“I’ll get the beer,” she said.
When she brought it, I asked, “Why don’t you go down and get her?”
“They don’t know where she is. She didn’t tell them much.”
“That national firm that looked for her this spring,” I said, “is much better equipped to find her than I am.”
“They didn’t find her, did they?”
“She probably wasn’t down there then.” I sipped the beer. It was delicious, very close to Einlicher.
“Don’t just stand there,” she said. “Sit down and drink your beer and we’ll talk.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said humbly. “I don’t want to wind up as a welder in Phoenix.” I sat down.
“I have enough to retire on now,” she told me. “You tell Patty when you find her that I’ll travel with her, this time. You tell her we’ll go to Europe together, or any other place she wants to go.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I don’t care what your fee is, understand? I’ll pay it.”
“No fee,” I said, “if I decide to go.”
“And when you come back,” she said, “we’ll go together to visit my friends in town who might help you find the person who killed Mrs. Marner. They all owe me. And they all know my cousins know they owe me.”
“Did your cousins ever mention a man named Frank Martino?”
“Never. Well, Mr. Callahan?”
“Call me Brock,” I said. “I’ll go.”
She gave me her brother’s name and address. If I needed the addresses of her other relatives in that area, he would have them. All she had was their names. Her brother also had a lot of pictures of Patty.
Jan wasn’t home when I got there. I left her a note, explaining that I had to make a hurried trip to Los Angeles on business. I would phone her. And then I thought of Otis Locum—and added that it might be wise for her to stay with the Lunds until I got back.
I threw some socks and shirts and shorts into a small grip, and took an extra pair of slacks and a jacket on a hanger. I stopped at the bank for money enough, and headed for the combination frontage road and ramp that led into Highway 101.
This was not the wanderers’ way station that the Main Street intersection was, but there was a pair of them standing on the side of the road waiting for a ride. Their sign read L.A.
I stopped and waved for them to come.
The boy was slim and tall and clean. The girl was not as tall, but slimmer and cleaner. “How far are you going?” the boy asked.
“All the way to L.A. Hop in.”
They threw their knapsacks in the back and the girl got in to sit next to them. The boy sat in the bucket seat next to mine.
“Nice,” he said. “Sixty-five, sixty-six?”
“Early sixty-five.”
“Two hundred and eight-nine cubes?”
I moved into gear and out into the traffic of the freeway. “You called it right. With Dalton four-barrel carb and Spelke high-turbulence heads. And old Norman Spelke himself personally reground the cams.”
“Nice,” he said again.
They seemed to be nice, too. “Where are you from?” I asked.
“Mill Valley.”
“Both of you?”
He nodded. “My name is Don. My friend’s name is Dianne.”
“My name is Callahan,” I said, “Brock Callahan. Glad to meet you. That’s beautiful country around Mill Valley. Is this your first trip to Los Angeles?”