“The safe in the office,” said the uniform, pointing to the far back side of the kitchen.
The office door was open and I stepped in. There was a desk and a black leather couch and a small fridge and microwave, pictures of near-naked dancers on the walls, along with a Chargers calendar and Padres pendants.
There was also a big floor safe that was open but not empty. I squatted in front of it and saw the stacks of cash and some envelopes.
The officer and janitor stood in the office doorway.
“Why kill a man for his money then not take it?” asked the uniform. His name plate said Peabody.
“Maybe he freaked and ran,” said the janitor, whose name patch said Carlos.
“Okay,” said Peabody. “Then tell me how Joey got ten feet up in the air and hung over a beam. And don’t tell me he did it to himself.”
Carlos looked up at the body and shrugged but I had an opinion about that.
“What time do you start work?” I asked him.
“Two. That’s when they close.”
“Is Joey usually here?”
“One of the managers is always here. They count the money every third night. Then they take it to the bank.”
“So tonight was bank night?”
“Was supposed to be.”
I drove fast to Vic’s hotel room downtown but he didn’t answer the door. Back downstairs the night manager, speaking from behind a mesh-reinforced window, told me that Vic left around eight-thirty—seven hours ago—and had not returned.
I made Farrel’s place eleven minutes later. There were no cars in the driveway but lights inside were on. I rang the bell and knocked then tried the door, which was unlocked. So I opened it and stepped in.
The living room looked exactly as it had two nights ago, except that the beer cans were gone and the pile of black binders had been reduced to just one. In the small back bedroom the stroller was still in place and the plastic doll was snugged down under the blanket just as it had been. I went into the master bedroom. The mattress was bare and the chest of drawers stood open and nearly empty. It looked like Farrel had stripped the bed and packed her clothes in a hurry. The bathroom was stripped too: no towels, nothing in the shower or the medicine chest or on the sink counter. The refrigerator had milk and pickles and that was all. The wastebasket under the sink had empty beer cans, an empty pretzel bag, various fast-food remnants swathed in ketchup, a receipt from a supermarket, and a wadded-up agreement from Rent-a-Dream car rentals down by the airport. Black Beamer 750i, of course.
Back in the living room I took the black binder from the coffee table and opened it to the first page:
THE SOPRANOS
Season Four/Episode Three
I flipped through the pages. Dialogue and brief descriptions. Four episodes in all.
Getting Sal’s lines right, I thought.
Vic didn’t show up for work for three straight nights. I stopped by Skin a couple of times a night, just in case he showed, and I knocked on his hotel room door twice a day or so. The manager hadn’t seen him in four days. He told me Vic’s rent was due on the first.
Of course Farrel had vanished too. I cruised her place in La Mesa but something about it just said she wasn’t coming back, and she didn’t.
On the fourth afternoon after the murder of Joey Morra, Vic called me on my cell phone. “Can you feed my scorpion? Give him six crickets. They’re under the bathroom sink. The manager’ll give you the key.”
“Sure. But we need to talk, Vic—face to face.”
“I didn’t do it.”
“Who else could throw Joey up there like that?”
Vic didn’t answer.
“Dom and his people are looking for you, Vic. You won’t get a trial with them. You’ll just get your sentence, and it won’t be lenient.”
“I only took what she needed.”
“And killed Joey.”
“He pulled a gun, Robbie. I couldn’t thinka what else to do. I bear-hugged and shook him. Like a reflex. Like when I threw you.”
“I’ll see you outside Higher Grounds in ten minutes.”
“She met me at Rainwater’s, Robbie. I walked into Rainwater’s and there she was—that beautiful young woman, waiting there for me. You should have seen her face light up when I gave her the money. Out in the parking lot, I mean.”
“I’ll bet,” I said. “Meet me outside Higher Grounds in ten minutes.”
“Naw. I got a good safe place here. I’m going to just enjoy myself for a couple more days, knowing I did a good thing for a good woman. My scorpion, I named him Rudy. Oh. Oh shit, Robbie.”
Even coming from a satellite orbiting the earth in space, and through the miles of ether it took to travel to my ear, the sound of the shotgun blast was unmistakable. So was the second blast, and the third.
A few days later I flew to Little Rock and rented a car, then made the drive north and west to Center Springs. Farrel was right: it wasn’t on the rental-car company driving map, but it made the navigation unit that came in the vehicle.
The Ozarks were steep and thickly forested and the Arkansas River looked unhurried. I could see thin wisps of wood stove fires burning in cabins down in the hollows and there was a smoky cast to the sky.
The gas station clerk said I’d find Farrel White’s dad’s place down the road a mile, just before Persimmon Holler. He said there was a batch of trailers up on the hillside and I’d see them from the road if I didn’t drive too fast. Billy White had the wooden one with all the satellite dishes on top.
The road leading in was dirt and heavily rutted from last season’s rain. I drove past travel trailers set up on cinder blocks. They were slouched and sun-dulled and some had decks and others just had more cinder blocks as steps. Dogs eyed me without bothering to sit up. There were cats and litter and a pile of engine blocks outside, looked like they’d been cast there by some huge child.
Billy answered my knock with a sudden yank on the door then studied me through the screen. He was mid-fifties and heavy, didn’t look at all like his daughter. He wore a green-andblack plaid jacket buttoned all the way to the top.
“I’m a San Diego cop looking for your daughter. I thought she might have come home.”
“Would you?”
“Would I what?”
“Come home to this from San Diego?”
“Well.”
“She okay?”
“I think so.”
“Come in.”
The trailer was small and cramped and packed with old, overstuffed furniture.
“She in trouble?”
“Farrel and her boyfriend hustled a guy out of some money. But he had to take the money from someone else.”
Billy handed me a beer and plopped into a vinyl recliner across from me. He had a round, impish face and a twinkle in his eyes. “That ain’t her boyfriend. It’s her brother.”
“That never crossed my mind.”
“Don’t look nothing alike. But they’ve always been close. Folks liked to think too close, but it wasn’t ever that way. Just close. They understood each other. They’re both good kids. Their whole point in life was to get outta Center Springs and they done did it. I’m proud of them.”
“What’s his name?”
“Preston.”
“Did they grow up in this trailer?”
“Hell no. We had a home over to Persimmon but it got sold off in the divorce. Hazel went to Little Rock with a tobacco products salesman. The whole story is every bit as dreary as it sounds.”
“When did Farrel and Preston leave?”
“Couple of months ago. The plan was San Diego, then Hollywood. Pretty people with culture and money to spend. They were going to study TV, maybe go start up a show. San Diego was to practice up.”
“The scripts.”
“Got them from the library up at Fayetteville. Made copies of the ones they wanted. Over and over again. Memorizing those scripts and all them words. They went to the Salvation Army stores and bough
t up lots of old-time kinda clothes. They both did some stage plays at the junior college but they didn’t much care for them. They liked the other kind of stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Crime stories. Bad guys. Mafia. That was mainly Preston. Farrel, she can act like anything from the Queen of England to a weather girl and you can’t tell she’s acting.”
“Have they called lately?”
“Been over a week.”
“Where do you think they are?”
“Well, Center Springs is the only place I know they ain’t. I don’t expect to ever see them out this way.”
I did the simple math and the not-so-simple math. Eight grand for two months of work. Farrel dancing for tips. Preston delivering pizza and working his end of the Vic hustle. Vic caught between Farrel’s good acting and his own eager heart. And of course betrayed, finally and fatally, by his own bad temper.
I finished the beer and stood. “Two men died because of them. Eight thousand bucks is what they died for. So the next time you talk to Farrel and Preston, you tell them there’s real blood on their hands. It’s not make-believe blood. You tell her Vic was murdered for taking that eight thousand.”
“I’ll do that.”
“Thanks for your time.”
“I can come up with a couple a hundred. It’s not much, but …”
I saw the orange triangles bouncing in the air between us. I thought about those triangles as I drove away. Orange triangles denote pity and sometimes even empathy. All this for Vic Primeval, as offered by a man he’d never met, from his vinyl chair in his slouching home in the Ozarks. Sometimes you find a little speck of good where you least expect it. A rough diamond down deep. And you realize that the blackness can’t own you for more than one night at a time.
THE HOME FRONT
BY DIANE CLARK & ASTRID BEAR
Sherman Heights
The sailor sat in the wooden chair across from the desk, twisting his white cap. His hair was white-blond, his face tanned to walnut. He was young. They all were. San Diego was full of young sailors in their crisp blue uniforms.
“It’s my sister. She came out to work for Consolidated. They trained her as a riveter. She was real good, just loved it. She shared a house with a bunch of girls but got tired of the noise and late nights, so she moved to a boardinghouse on K Street. About a week later, she didn’t show up for work. No one’s seen her since. I went to the police. They asked around some but couldn’t find out anything. They said there’s no law against someone going missing, but it’s just not like her. Can you help?”
Mike McGowan had called that morning to say he had a case for me. “Sailor. Missing kid sister—probably ran off with a jarhead—let him off easy, okay, Laura? The boy’s shipping out soon and wants to know what happened to her.”
Ever since my husband Bill got called up by the navy and left me in charge of the agency, his friends in the police department had been pretty good about sending work my way. I liked the work, and when Bill came back, I was planning to tell him we needed to change the name to Taylor & Taylor Investigations.
I pulled open a drawer and took out a notebook. The pen was resting in a leather cup, along with some of Bill’s chewed-up pencils. “Okay, Navy, let’s get some details. What’s your name?”
“I’m Joseph Przybilski. My sister’s Magda, but she went by Mary once she came out here.”
“Got a picture?”
He fished a photo out of his jumper pocket, a little crumpled at the corners. It showed a pretty, slight blonde, standing with a dour-looking old man and woman on the steps of an aggressively neat house. “That’s her with our mama and papa—I took that picture on the day I left for the navy. They weren’t too happy with me for going.”
“I see that.” I examined the girl’s face. She looked eager, excited. “Your sister seems happy.”
“She was excited for me to be leaving the farm, going off to see the world. She really wanted to get away too. We’d talked about it, and she’d already decided to leave as soon as she could. When Papa arranged to get some German POWs to work for him, she skedaddled out west. She never wanted to look another chicken in the eye again!”
“Can I keep this?”
He nodded.
“And when did she get here?”
“In May. She got taken on right away at Consolidated, and they put her on the PBY assembly line as soon as she finished her training. Flying boats.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“They had her working tail, cause she fits into small places.” He grinned shyly. So young and cute. “Her last letter said she got to see the first flight of a plane she made. She was so proud!”
I could imagine that slim girl creeping into the cutaways and nooks in the rear of the fuselage, toting her rivet gun, snaking the air hose along and avoiding sharp edges and snags, then getting to work, the staccato slap-choo of the gun echoing in the tiny space. Tending chickens somehow didn’t seem so bad compared to that, but I hadn’t grown up with them.
“Any boyfriends?”
“Not that she told me about. There was a boy at home who was sweet on her during high school, but I don’t think they stayed in touch.”
I got the details of Mary’s workplace and the address she’d moved to and told Przybilski I’d see what I could do. He gave me two dollars for my retainer and left.
I decided to check out where Mary had been living. I locked the office and walked downstairs to India Street. It was a typical San Diego September day, sunny and warm with a gentle breeze ruffling the bay. The water sparkled with heartless beauty. I caught a streetcar heading south, then transferred to a bus. I got off at Market and 20th.
I looked down 20th toward K Street. Three blocks away, I saw a red-roofed tower lording it over the small bungalows that made up the neighborhood. It was the Jesse Shepard House, a mansion built by rich men for an eccentric musician in the 1880s in the hopes of bringing culture to their dusty town. With a start, I realized that it had been converted into the boarding house that Mary had moved to. It was a jumble of architectural features and finishes punctuated by stained-glass windows. Wrought-iron panels topped a low concrete fence that rose up from the sidewalk. The whole effect was of a cut-and-pasted Victorian Sears catalog.
As I came closer, it was clear that this grand building, once the pride of San Diego, had been thoroughly humbled by the needs of wartime. The white paint had cracked and peeled into loose flakes. Blackout curtains framed the panels of stained glass. Wide windows showed the edge-on shadows of partitions. Formerly spacious rooms had been roughly subdivided.
I crossed the street to a corner market and bought a soda.
“Pretty fancy building over there,” I commented to the clerk, an older woman with her gray hair in a tidy bun.
“Just a shame what they’ve done to it since the Lynches died. I know people need places to live, what with the housing shortage and all, but it’s too bad they had to turn that fine old place into a boarding house. Can I open that for you?” she asked, gesturing to the bottle.
“Sure!” I took a sip of the fizzy cold Coke and leaned against a vegetable bin. “So they’ve got a lot of folks living there now?”
“They put up so many partitions to make rooms, they must have twenty people staying there. All girls, they don’t take men. Each girl gets her own personal cracker box. They mostly work at the aircraft factories.”
“Must be a nice bit of extra business for you, with so many girls around.”
“Well, they’re gone all day and they hardly cook, but we make sandwiches to sell for their lunch pails, so we’re doing okay. Sometimes a few girls will get together and buy some stew meat and vegetables to make dinner on the weekend, but the owners are pretty stingy with kitchen privileges. It’s almost like they don’t want them to have a good time when they get a chance.”
I pulled Mary’s picture out of my handbag. “I think a friend of mine might have been staying there—have you seen her?”
>
The woman peered at the photo. “I couldn’t say. Some of those girls come and go so fast, I just can’t keep track. There’s a group of them that’ve been there for a while, but sometimes I’ll no sooner see one than she’s gone. With all the girls coming to take jobs at the plants, those rooms don’t stay vacant but hardly a day.”
I finished my Coke and put the bottle in the return rack. Another customer came. Her eyes shifted to him, narrowed, and she shook her head slightly at him. I took the opportunity to wave goodbye and head back down the street.
A group of Mexican boys, pachucos, were leaning against the wall of the next building. Their wide-lapeled zoot suits were elegantly draped but frayed at the edges. Their dark eyes gave me the once-over. One let out a piercing wolf whistle, another made a remark in rapid-fire Spanish. They all laughed, with a bit of a nasty edge to it. I sped up my stride and grabbed my purse more tightly with suddenly sweaty hands.
I mentally turned over questions to ask the landlords. In the shadow of the big house’s tower, I mounted the ornate steps and paused before a sign: Room for Rent.
What if I did more than just ask questions? Bill always said that it was important to get first-hand information and really understand the scene of a possible crime. And what could be more first hand than living there?
A prickle of worry started in my stomach as I thought about this, followed by excitement. I damped both feelings down as I smoothed my skirt and finished walking up the front steps.
I knocked at the elaborately milled door. Almost immediately a tall, wiry woman opened it. Her black hair parted in the middle and coiled into a smooth knot resting on the nape of her neck. Her hands were large and strong-looking, with a man’s knobby fingers and closely trimmed nails. No polish. I swallowed. “The sign said you have a room for rent?”
San Diego Noir Page 3