The Monet Murders: A Mystery

by Terry Mort

  My next call was long distance to Youngstown, Ohio. That was where my FBI contact worked. He and I had put together a money-laundering sting against the local mafia, with me masquerading as a shady New York banker. As I’ve mentioned, I’d had a hidden agenda involving scooting off with a large chunk of the money myself, but it hadn’t worked out as planned, which turned out to be a good thing in the end. The FBI guy was named Marion Mott, and against all odds he actually went by that name. He was also a poster boy for the FBI—clean-cut, crew haircut, black suit, white shirt, black tie, black oxfords, and a perpetual expression that was a combination of eagerness, Christianity, and a Boy Scout’s seriousness of purpose. All told, he might as well wear a sign that said “Kiss me, I’m a Fed.” We had arranged a reasonably clever way for me to drop out of the sting before it went down—a matter of self-preservation, and Mott had agreed to hold off making the pinch for a month or two, so that there would be no connection between me and the arrests. That was the hope, at least.

  I hadn’t talked to him since then, and it had been three months.

  “Mott speaking, sir.” I guess he never knew when J. Edgar might want to call him.

  “Marion, it’s Riley Fitzhugh. How’s it going?”

  “Riley! Good to hear from you. I thought you changed your name.”

  “Only professionally.”

  “How’s California?”

  “Sunny.”

  “So I’ve heard. Some day, maybe. . . . So, what’s up?”

  “I’ve been wondering—how’s the scheme working out?”

  “Oh. That. Yes, well, we’re still building the case. Could take a bit more time than we anticipated. We want it to be airtight.”

  Well, that suited me just fine. The more time, the greater the distance between me and the sting. But I thought I detected a slight hesitation or nervousness in his voice. Could it be that the local hoods had somehow put Marion Mott on the payroll? That thought had occurred to me before, and although it seemed unlikely, it’s been known to happen. Well, that was none of my business. As I said, I had come to like some of those wise guys, and I felt a little sorry about setting them up.

  “I understand,” I said. “I really didn’t call about that. I was wondering if you could give me some information.”

  “If I can, sure.”

  “Do you guys know much about the market for stolen art?”

  “Not me personally, but I know we have a team working on that. I hear it’s a big business internationally.”

  “How about art forgeries?”

  “Same team. Apparently a lot of the underground buyers for this stuff are wealthy people—mainly Americans and Europeans—who think they’re buying the real thing. They think they’re getting stolen masterpieces at a deep discount when in fact they’re paying through the nose for a forgery. They’re the perfect suckers because they’re afraid to display the painting and just put it in a vault or a locked studio or something. And they don’t tell anyone about it, so the scam almost never gets exposed. One of our agents told me there were so many Whistler’s Mothers out there, they could start a maternity ward. Everyone thinks he’s got the real thing and that the one hanging in the museum is a fake. That’s the standard sales pitch in the con. That’s about all I know about it, though. Why do you ask?”

  “I’m working on a case.”

  “Of course. What’s your new name, again?”

  I told him.

  “Funny name.”

  “I agree. Are any of your guys working in L.A.—the art team, I mean?”

  “I don’t know, but I could make a few calls.”

  “That’d be great. And maybe you could find out if there’s an art expert out here—some professor at USC or UCLA or someplace—that could examine a painting to see if it’s real or a forgery. I assume the FBI would have some sort of contact in that line of work.”

  “I can ask.”

  “Thanks. How’s your mother these days?”

  “Oh, she’s fine. She often asks about you.” Marion still lived at home. “She’ll be pleased to hear that you called.”

  I gave him my phone number, and he said he’d get back to me as soon as he could.

  I glanced at my watch. It was only three in the afternoon. It didn’t seem to make sense to go out to the Lucky Lady at this hour. Better to wait until evening, when the crowds would be bigger. That might improve my chances of talking to Catherine without being observed.

  So, what to do until then? I could toss playing cards into my hat, read an improving book, or maybe take a pleasant drive up the coast to Malibu.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Myrtle wasn’t at home when I got there. I used the spare key she had given me and went inside to wait for her. There was a note on the table that said she was at the studio but would be back around six. There was cold beer in the fridge and some chicken salad. I was to make myself at home. There was lots to tell me. Three exclamation points followed by the standard hieroglyphics indicating kisses and hugs. She was obviously in a very good mood. Well, she deserved it.

  Myrtle’s note sounded so happy that I have to admit to feeling a little guilty about my morning with Rita. I resolved that Rita would be a one-morning stand and would remain only a fond memory, although I didn’t throw away the scrap of paper she’d given me with her phone number and the inevitable words “call me.” Well, I’d have to stay in touch with her just to see how her screen test turned out. Besides, Myrtle and I had been straightforward with each other and had not made any binding agreements. Even so, I felt a little funny about the morning.

  Right at six, a car pulled up in front of the beach house. It was an open red-and-silver two-seater Duesenberg driven by a guy with shiny black hair parted in the middle and a Mediterranean complexion, meaning a combination of well-tanned and natural olive. He was wearing a white tennis sweater, white flannels, and an expression of self-satisfaction, like a man who had straight teeth and money in the bank. Well, who could blame him, driving a fancy car with Myrtle at his side. He was also, I have to admit, an extremely handsome young man, which meant he was on the acting side of the business, not the business side of the business.

  I also have to admit to a sudden pang of jealousy. It was unfair, of course, but who cares about fairness when it comes to, well, whatever it was between Myrtle and me? Maybe this was the kind of character who might be the one Myrtle could fall completely in love with. You couldn’t throw a brick in this town and not hit someone beautiful, male or female. And Myrtle would have to be a little susceptible, given her truly stunning change of fortunes. Anyone would be. Morally, of course, I didn’t have a leg to stand on, given my morning romp with Rita. But that didn’t matter just then. I’ve been morally legless before, and it didn’t change the way I felt then, and it didn’t change the way I felt now.

  I opened the front door and went out to the car. It was an obvious, too-obvious, declaration of possession, and I knew it was kind of a low trick, but I did it anyway. Myrtle did not seem the least bit flustered when she introduced me.

  “This is Rex Lockwood,” she said, after introducing me. Lockwood smiled and displayed his, yes, perfect smile. “Glad to meet you, old sport.”

  Very lame, I thought—another guy modeling himself on Gatsby. He didn’t look like what I thought of as Gatsby, but he did look familiar, somehow. That wasn’t surprising, though; every young would-be actor these days was fashioning himself after someone who had already made it. Ramon Navarro was a popular model just then, and this Lockwood was doing his best to imitate him. No doubt somewhere Navarro was sincerely flattered.

  “Rex Lockwood, eh?” I said. “What was it back in Topeka?”

  “Chicago, you mean. But I’ll never tell,” he said, laughing. “What about you?”

  “A dark secret.”

  Myrtle jumped out of the car, kissed me on the cheek, and danced into the house, pausing only briefly to wave good-bye to Rex as he reversed his astonishing car and headed back to wherever he’d
come from. Central casting, most likely.

  “Who was that?” I asked Myrtle, once she had finished kissing me, which took a while.

  She smiled slyly and tilted her head coquettishly, something she had apparently picked up very recently. “Jealous?”

  “Of course. I’ve always wanted a Duesenberg.”

  “Don’t be jealous—that’s not his car; it’s his father’s. We’re in acting class together.”

  “You and Rex’s father?”

  “No, silly. It’s every day between one and five.”

  “That sounds like fun.” And it did, in a way. “How long will that go on?”

  “Until I know what I’m doing, I suppose.”

  “That won’t take long.”

  “Thank you, darling. Do you like me to call you darling? Everyone at the studio says it all the time.”

  “Well, then, it’s not so special, is it?”

  She thought about it for a moment.

  “No, I suppose it isn’t. I know. I will call you ‘miljenik.’ That’s Croatian for ‘darling.’ How do you like that?”

  “Better.” But to be honest, most Croatian sounded like a hysterical fundamentalist speaking in tongues. I did like listening to her talking it in her sleep, but that was because I liked listening to her talking in her sleep. Esperanto would have been equally appealing.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “Afterwards.”

  I missed Perry’s seven o’clock run, but I caught up with him at nine. I gave him a wink as I stepped aboard and joined a couple dozen eager gamblers. Perry acted as though he’d never laid eyes on me, and we shoved off for the Lucky Lady.

  It took about fifteen minutes to cover the three miles to where the ship was anchored, fore and aft, as Perry would no doubt say. We could have gone faster, but there was a choppy sea that would have sprayed the gamblers despite the canvas coverings. The Lucky Lady was lighted up like the proverbial Christmas tree. The ship had started life as a four-masted merchantman, but the gambling investors had torn away all the masts and superstructure and replaced them with a three-hundred-foot deckhouse—not that they did the work themselves. It took several months in the shipyard. They also widened the main deck by building platforms all around the ship, so that sports could walk around the outside of the deckhouse, bemoaning their luck or getting some fresh air or thinking about putting an end to it all. With its rounded roof, the deckhouse itself looked like an airplane hangar. The name LUCKY LADY was on the side facing the beach, in neon red. There was a row of lifeboats hanging from davits, and it occurred to me that there weren’t nearly enough of them to accommodate a capacity crowd. And three miles is a long swim, especially when the tide’s going out.

  The upper deckhouse had eleven roulette wheels, eight craps tables, and a dozen or so blackjack, faro, and chuck-a-luck tables. Chuck-a-luck was a dice game in which three dice were rotated in an hourglass-shaped wire cage. It was almost impossible to win, but it was easy to understand and bet—a real sucker play. You had to pick the correct sequence of three dice. You figure the odds.

  There was a long bar at one end of the room and slot machines, a hundred and fifty of them, along the other. Off to one side was a dining room complete with dance floor and seven-piece band. The dining room was packed. The twenty-five-cent taxi fare also bought you a free meal, as long as you ordered turkey. If you wanted something else, it cost extra, and there were more than a few down-and-almost-outers who came there solely for the free food, although inevitably many of them were drawn to the slots or the card tables even though they couldn’t afford it.

  For those who could afford it, there was a private card room for high rollers. A lot of Hollywood big shots were in that room each night, and no doubt those were the people Manny Stairs was worried about: he did not want them to know about his obsession for Catherine Moore.

  When the investors remodeled the ship, they had also cleared out the lower deck and put in a bingo parlor that could seat five hundred. You wouldn’t think there’d be five hundred people in the entire city who were so starved for entertainment that they’d turn to bingo, but you’d be wrong.

  All told, the Lucky Lady was quite an operation and could accommodate up to two thousand losers at a time. And there must have been almost that many there that night. There were three hundred and fifty employees, including waiters, musicians, dealers, bartenders, bouncers, and, yes, cigarette girls. Since the Lucky Lady was open for business twenty-four hours a day, they needed that many employees to work the various shifts. Almost all of these except the crewmen who operated the ship’s power plant commuted to shore after their shift, although Tony Scungilli and a platoon of goombahs stayed aboard most of the time. There was too much money on board at any one time to take any chances. They made daily runs to the bank, of course, but when you’re running a twenty-four-hour operation, the money keeps flowing in like water through a leak. The ship had no engines—they’d been removed—but it had gasoline-powered generators that provided light and electricity.

  Presiding over this floating empire was Tony the Snail Scungilli. Behind him were the investors. It was no surprise that they were also experienced bootleggers. That was convenient, because they had well-established sources of supply. They ran supply ships down from Vancouver, where they bought liquor from a consortium of distilleries. Booze and gambling made a combination that would attract any enterprising mobster. All that seemed to be lacking to make a perfect trifecta was prostitution, but, as Perry told me, there were lots of cabins on the lower decks of that ship. No doubt things could be arranged. Loans could also be arranged for the unlucky, and the word was that the ship’s cash room had a safe filled with expensive watches and jewelry that had been turned in by people who were positive the next card would win them a fortune, and were wrong. There was also plenty of cheap stuff that any hock shop would be pleased to put in their dusty display cases. Whether this sort of business fell into the loan-sharking category, I didn’t know, but I had a pretty good guess. So there in the shape of one former merchantman, you had the essence of gangster enterprise—gambling, loan-sharking, booze, and prostitution, the latter being informally organized.

  All of this sinful fun was highly exasperating to the local keepers of city morality—Methodist preachers and some of their congregations, ladies’ temperance groups, and assorted politicians and officials—the ones who weren’t taking bribes, which probably put them in the minority. Every once in a while they tried to interrupt the action. The cops had no jurisdiction on the high seas, so they hassled the water taxis, but since those taxis had long been a staple of the various communities, taking people from town to town or to places like Catalina Island, they provided a legal and useful service. As a result, the hassles didn’t last long enough to interrupt the mostly one-way flow of money from the gamblers to the gambling ship operators. Most of the cops didn’t have their hearts in it anyway. A lot of them were on Tony’s payroll.

  There were a few decent-looking women on the ride out there. One or two fluttered their eyes at me—I don’t mean to be egotistical, just honest. But the guys they were with pulled on their elbows and looked peeved. They shot a few glances at me, but I ignored them.

  Perry pulled alongside the Lucky Lady’s landing platform, and two greeters helped the sports off the taxi and made sure they were able to climb the stairway to the main deck without falling overboard.

  I was the last one off.

  “See you later, Perry.”

  “Good luck,” he said.

  When I walked into the main salon, the air was heavy with cigarette smoke and the noise. It was a cacophony of screams of joy and groans and laughter—roulette dealers saying “place your bets,” and craps players shouting orders to the dice, and other people yelling drink orders to the wandering waitresses, and the orchestra playing and a girl singer warbling into the stand-up microphone, while a hundred or so diners scraped plates and clinked glasses, and at the far end the sound of a hundred and fifty
slot-machine arms being cranked and occasionally paying off with a cascade of coins, mostly nickels. It was an unholy din. Only the blackjack players were quiet, being satisfied with a tap on the cards to substitute for “hit me.”

  Contrary to what Della had implied, the gamblers there were not particularly stylish. There were very few tuxedos in evidence, and ninety-five percent of the women were not in evening gowns. It was more like an Elks convention than a night at the Trocadero. Most of the men were wearing hats, straws, fedoras, flat cloth caps. There were quite a few sailors scattered around—up from the base at Long Beach. Apparently Tony Scungilli was smart enough to realize that a more relaxed atmosphere would attract a wider audience, and if the swells resented mixing with the hoi polloi, they had very little in the way of alternative places to gamble and drink. There were several other ships out there, but they too followed Tony’s lead in encouraging a come-one, come-all style. Besides, most of the swells in that town were in the movie business and had started life in very different circumstances, whether in the garment district of New York or the farms in Kansas and such places. Even the smattering of actors with British accents sprang from vaudeville or the circus. There wasn’t enough blue blood in Hollywood to fill a milk jug, so there was surprisingly little snobbery, even among the newly rich—which covered just about everyone with money in that town. Oh, some of the women, wives or actresses, would swank around and call each other “dahling,” but deep down they didn’t have the self-confidence to be real snobs. They were all “nouveau,” and those who weren’t yet “riche” were trying like hell to get there.

  At first I thought it might be hard to find Catherine Moore in such a place, but the main salon was really just one gigantic room, as long as a football field. I didn’t think she’d be hanging around the bingo parlor, so I stayed in the main room, walking around and keeping my eyes open. There were cigarette girls here, there, and everywhere. They wore short, satiny dresses with plunging necklines, and fishnet stockings, and they walked through the crowds with smiles pasted on their faces, carrying their trays before them and singing their mantra—“Cigars, cigarettes, cigarillos.” Needless to say, they were all good-looking women, although they wore too much makeup, and most of them had a shade of hair color unknown in nature. I thought about asking one of them if she knew Catherine but decided against it. I felt sure that Tony had the whole crew on a pretty short leash, and any one of them would be pleased to tell the boss that someone—“that guy over there”—was asking about his new girlfriend. Anonymity was the better part of valor.