Eureka

by William Diehl

  I stopped in the coffee shop on the corner, got two cups of black coffee, and took the elevator to the third-floor newsroom. I found Jimmy, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, talking into two phones at the same time, one cradled between his ear and his shoulder. With his free hand he was taking down notes. He was short, five-seven, but husky, had curly blond hair, and loved the ladies.

  I sat on the corner of his desk, put a coffee in front of him, and rolled a cigarette. He mouthed, “Light that for me,” which I did. I stuck it between his lips and he kept writing and talking at the same time, the butt bobbing between his lips like the cork on a kid’s fishing line. He finally hung up one of the phones and wrapped his hand around the mouthpiece of the other.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “Want to pick your brains a little.”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’m covering two stories at once and I got a deadline in two hours.” He held up a finger and said, “Okay, Ned, I need all you can get me in one hour, got that? Sixty minutes. The beast is breathing down my neck. Thanks.” He hung up the phone and flopped back in his chair like a man who had just suffered a coronary.

  “I don’t have a brain left to pick right now.”

  “What do you know about Thomas Culhane?”

  “Jesus, Zee, don’t you ever read the papers? There was a three- column profile on him last week, second section front.”

  “I mean the stuff that wasn’t in the papers.”

  His eyes narrowed. “What’re you on to?”

  “Nothing. I have to go up there on a civil matter. I hear he’s a tough cookie.”

  “You’re in homicide, what’re you doing chasing a civil matter?”

  “It’s an accidental death. I need to find a survivor to close out my report.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “That’s all there is to it,” I said, which at that point was true.

  “He likes cops. He’s been one most of his life.” He paused and took a sip of coffee. “Why would Culhane get tough with you?”

  “Who says he’s gonna get tough? You know me, I just like to have a leg up.”

  “What kind of civil affair is this, again?”

  I could see his nose twitching.

  “I’m looking for a family member. It’s an accidental death and I don’t want to file the report until I notify the survivors.”

  “That’s why Bell invented the telephone. That’s this gadget here.” He pointed to one of his phones.

  “Ski told me Culhane was bad news, but you know Ski. He can make a federal case out of a hard sneeze. I happened to be in the neighborhood and I thought I’d get your take on him.”

  He opened a desk drawer, which was his filing cabinet, and rooted around in the cloud of clippings that puffed up out of it. He finally found what he was looking for, snapped it out of the pile, and slammed the drawer with his knee.

  “Here. That’s thirty inches on Culhane. Three pictures. He’s running for governor, you know, or did that get by you, too?” His face screwed up like he had just swallowed a tumbler full of white vinegar. “Jesus, what are you smoking these days?” he said, looking at the cigarette I had rolled him.

  “You heard the one about beggars being choosers?”

  “I ran out of Camels an hour ago and I haven’t been off the phone since.” He took another drag. “I don’t think Culhane has any secrets in his closet. He’s tough; hell, he had to be to clean up Eureka, which was what the town was called before they dolled it up and started calling it San Pietro. It used to be the meanest town in central California. Now it’s a playground for people with real money, the kind that tip with Ben Franklins and give their kids Cadillacs when they pass the fifth grade. But he runs the county with an invisible whip. You get out of line and crack! you got a welt on your back and you don’t have any idea where it came from. On the other hand, he can be a charmer. He can get a smile out of a dead cat. You won’t have any trouble with him. Like I said, he loves cops. Hates reporters, loves cops.”

  “How come he hates reporters?”

  “He played rough back when. One of his cops . . . what was his name? . . . it’ll come to me . . . anyway, the cop knocked off a mobster named Fontonio, who was taking over the mobs up there. You know, starting a gangster’s union—everybody joins up or they end up floating facedown to Hawaii. Woods, that was the cop’s name, Eddie Woods. He claimed self-defense, there was a gun in Fontonio’s hand; except everybody who knew the man, including his wife and bodyguards, said Fontonio was afraid of guns. Didn’t carry one, didn’t have one in the house. That’s what bodyguards are for. Then they couldn’t trace the heater. The boys up in Sacramento were about to look into it when Woods resigned, the D.A. dead-docketed the case, and that was the end of that.”

  “So why does Culhane hate reporters?”

  “Some of the muckrakers implied Culhane had Woods do the job. It did look pretty fishy. But Culhane said he had nothing to do with it. Then Woods said Culhane had nothing to do with it. And when Woods quit, the case went bye-bye. Culhane never forgot that. He said the press tried to ruin his reputation and, as far as I know, he’s still got a hard-on about it. He’s Irish just like you: you don’t get mad, you get even. Culhane gets mad and even. That isn’t in the story. It’s irrelevant now.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “I vaguely remember it. We’re talking mid twenties, thereabouts. I was just finishing college at the time and you were one of the Dead End kids. You know me. I remember weird stuff but I can’t remember what I had for lunch.”

  “What happened to Woods?”

  He shrugged. “Hell, I dunno. I heard he was a P.I. down here, but that was a long time ago.”

  “I have great respect for your memory, Jimmy.”

  “It’s a gift. My old man was a card shark. He could count cards in his sleep. Must be in my blood.”

  The phone started ringing again. He snatched it up and snapped, “Pennington; hold on a minute.” He cupped the mouthpiece.

  “No kidding, what’s your interest? Are you on to something?”

  “Like I said, it’s a civil thing. If it works out, it wouldn’t rate more than three lines on page twenty-two.”

  “You wouldn’t shit me after all we’ve been to each other?”

  “When did I ever shit you?”

  “This got something to do with that lady who took a bath with her radio?”

  “How’d you hear about that? I haven’t even filed a report yet.”

  “Scuttlebutt.”

  “I’m trying to locate a relative so I can let the family know before it hits the obit page.”

  “Oh.”

  I don’t think he believed me, but the other phone started ringing again and the clock ticked closer to his deadline and he got busier than a centipede running across a hot rock. I thanked him, took the clipping, and got out of there before he got any nosier.

  CHAPTER 8

  I stopped at the grocery and picked up some tomatoes, a bottle of milk, and a pint of chocolate ice cream, and walked to the end of the block to Lupo’s butcher shop. Lupo was about five-five and all muscle, one of those people without a neck. His head was shaped like a fat pumpkin, with skimpy black hair, and he had bull shoulders that bulged out just below his ears, and a torso that went straight down from under his arms. He could carry a side of beef between his thumb and forefinger. His apron was splattered with blood and he wore rubber boots folded over at the knee. I was afraid to bring up sensitive subjects like sanitary conditions when I was in the shop.

  “How about a nice T-bone or porterhouse steak, Zee,” he said with a grin.

  “Thirty cents for a pound of steak?” I said. “The cows must be on strike.”

  “That’s a good one.”

  “How about some bones for my dog?”

  “Since when you got a dog? What kind?”

  “I don’t know, Lupo, he doesn’t have a birth certificate.”

  “Another good one,” he chuckled. “How man
y bones you want?”

  “How does six sound?”

  “Six! He must be some big dog. What’s this hound’s name?”

  I thought about that for a minute and finally I said, “His name’s Rosebud.”

  “His name?”

  “He’s a used dog, the name came with him. I tried to change it to Slugger but every time I call him that, he looks around to see who Slugger is.”

  He wiggled a finger at me and I leaned toward him.

  “He’ll come to Rosie,” he said in a low confidential voice. “Anybody asks, tell him you named him after Slapsie Maxie.”

  He was sitting under the yucca plant staring up at a mockingbird that was singing like a blue jay, when I walked out on the back porch.

  “Hey, Rosie,” I called, “how about a bone?”

  He came loping across the yard and leaned against me, and I scratched him behind the ears. We went inside and I dished out his can of food and put it on the floor, and he went at it like a hyena attacking carrion. Then I gave him a bone.

  “You can eat that in here,” I said, but he walked to the screen door and waited for me to open it. “You’re some creature of habit,” I said, and let him out.

  I took out the clips Pennington had loaned me. Culhane’s was a surface biography, no scandal attached. His picture showed a handsome man with a hard jaw and sun-creased skin. He was dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and a striped tie, and wearing a black fedora—mischievous pale eyes under the brim, and a vague smile. He was leaning against a wall, with his thumbs hooked in his belt. Beside it was a second picture of a younger Culhane, dressed in a workman’s shirt and dark pants, with one of those round, peaked hats the cops wore back in those days and the puttees he probably had worn in the Marines. He was stern-faced and looked ill at ease in front of the camera. He had his foot on the running board of a four-door Ford ragtop. Beside him was the sheriff, Buck Tallman, who was sitting on a big roan. Tallman was a tall, erect man in a western shirt and a buckskin vest, who obviously ran the county from the back of a horse and used a .44 Peacemaker as a convincer. He had a ten-gallon hat pulled down over gentle eyes, and a proud smile under a handlebar mustache. It was a face that demanded respect, a face that concealed a harsh life on the frontier and a lot of history he probably wanted to forget or had rewritten through the years. He could have been fifty or a hundred and fifty. Together, they kept the peace, which, according to the story, was not as easy as it might sound. Eureka had been like a border town, wide open, noisy, and mean, a town where gambling, boozing, and whoring were the main occupations. Under those circumstances Tallman was not an anachronism, although he might have become one by the time the two of them had decided things were changing and it was time for San Pietro to change, too.

  From the story, I learned that Culhane was born in 1884 in that wide-open, sin-ridden town. In 1900, at the age of sixteen, he lied about his age and joined the Marines, ending up on the Western Front, a sharpshooter who won a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and the French Croix de Guerre in the last battle of the Somme. He came home in 1920 and went back to work as a deputy sheriff.

  In 1921, Tallman was shot down in what the paper described as “the massacre at Grand View House, the town’s most respectable fancy house.” A new county council immediately named Culhane the sheriff. A year later he was duly elected to the post on the promise that he would clean up San Pietro County and “make it a town and county we will all be proud of.” During the years that followed, he kept that promise. He drove out the mobsters and gentrified San Pietro. Now it was a thriving tourist town.

  There was a sidebar relating to the 1922 arrest and conviction of a gangster named Arnie Riker for the murder of a young woman named Wilma Thompson. Riker, of course, had claimed he was framed by Culhane. Not surprising. I never met a hooligan yet who didn’t cry “frame” when faced with the goods. He got the gas chamber, later commuted to life without parole on an appeal.

  All in all, a favorable piece without a hint of the kind of scandal and corruption that must have been rife during the early days, and one that gave no hint of the stuff I had been hearing from Ski and others about Culhane, except for one thing. When asked about his political platform, Culhane told the reporter, “You’ll find out when I’m good and ready to tell you.”

  That sounded like the Culhane I was expecting to meet.

  CHAPTER 9

  Lieutenant Moriarity gave me the deadeye when I tapped on his door. Moriarity was a short, bulky, almost bald guy, with eyes like a ferret and a voice an octave lower than an opera basso. He had been a cop so long he didn’t remember that early in his life he had been a bouncer in a speakeasy where drinks were served in shot glasses and you got a dirty look if you asked for water on the side. That had been twenty-five years ago, when he was twenty-one years old with no plans for the future. The war had changed that. When he came home in 1918 with a couple of medals and a machine-gun hole in his side, a captain he had served with suggested he take a shot at being a cop.

  He had been on the P.D. ever since, understood the politics of working in a city where the real rules weren’t written in any book and where his main job was to keep his captain happy, which meant a minimum of annoyance. The best way to keep Moriarity happy was to “keep it all minimum,” which was his way of saying don’t rock the boat, don’t look for headlines, solve your cases as fast as you can, and stay out of what little hair he had left. With that in mind, he didn’t get too upset if occasionally you beat on some bohunk’s head to get a piece of important information or gentled a confession out of some obstinate lowlife with a few swift, well-aimed kicks where it hurts most. He called it the glove option, as in “always use a glove if you gotta get rough. I don’t wanna see some riffraff on the front page looking like he walked into a waffle iron.” He also believed that the best crime reports were those that stayed as close to the bone as possible, his theory being that the less said, the less the ambulance chasers had to go on. “The guy’s dead, he has a hole in his head, he was lying in the gutter, period. Don’t get poetic, save that for the D.A.”

  Violating the basics could earn you a serious talk with the boss, which meant a chewing-out people someplace in Idaho could hear. A couple of years ago, some of the boys sneaked into his office one night and nailed leather straps to the armrests and legs of one of the chairs in his office and affixed a pot to the backrest. It was a pretty good parody of the hot seat. Instead of having a stroke, Moriarity loved it. He put it in the corner of the office, which was pretty barren except for his desk and chair, a coatrack, a small conference table in the corner, a couple of real chairs, a framed picture of FDR on the wall behind him, and an American flag in a wooden holder on the corner of his desk. If he pointed to the hot seat when he called you forth, he was planning to rearrange your ass.

  On that morning, he was drinking black coffee and scanning the morning Times when I tapped on the door. He waved me in. I stood in front of him and rolled a cigarette.

  He looked me up and down. I was wearing my best off-the-rack Bond blue suit, a white shirt, and a reasonably decent tie.

  “Where’s the funeral?” he asked.

  I took that as an invite and sat in the chair across from him.

  “So what’s on your mind, Bannon. And I’m hoping deep down inside it isn’t going to make me dyspeptic.”

  “The Verna Wilensky thing,” I said, lighting the butt.

  “The one got fried in her tub?” he said, surprised.

  “That’s not the problem.”

  I ran the litany on her, finishing with, “She didn’t have any birth certificate, no insurance policies, nothing like that. Five hundred a month for seventeen years. That’s uh . . .”

  He gave me the deadeye. “A hundred and two grand. What’s the matter, drop out of school before they got to math?”

  “Ho, ho, ho.”

  “Hell, she probably had a sugar daddy. Who cares? She drowned in the bathtub, for crissakes, what else do you need to know? An
d keep that crap about her lollipop money outta the report. It’s distracting.”

  “I’m curious about something.”

  “You ain’t got enough to do? I can fill your plate if you’re bored.”

  “You know me, I like to bundle ’em up nice and neat. She was in her forties, all alone, her husband got waxed in a car wreck four years ago. No survivors and no will. Maybe we can find some relatives who’ll give her a decent burial and a headstone.”

  “We’re cops, Bannon, this ain’t the bleeding hearts club. Tell it to the Red Cross.”

  “They’re only interested in the living.”

  He dug a Tampa Nugget out of his desk drawer and lit it. It smelled like he was smoking a Hershey’s bar. He stared at me for a minute or two.

  “This isn’t one of those nudges you get, is it, Bannon?”

  “I don’t like coincidence. There’s a lot of it here.”

  “That ain’t what this is about. You’re lookin’ for something else here, I can feel it in my bones.”

  He growled, and gnawed on his cigar.

  “We dug up some things,” I said, and gave him a report on what Ski and I had learned the day before, including Wilensky’s shadowy past and the mysterious cashier’s checks. I left out the background check on Culhane.

  “I’d like to take one more day and run up the coast.”

  He squinted his eyes and looked at me suspiciously.

  “Where up the coast?”

  “San Pietro.”

  “San Pietro? That’s Culhane territory.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “The same Culhane who’s running for governor against Osterfelt and Bellini.”

  “The same.”

  He gave me the deadeye.