The Triple Shot Box (Goodey's Last Stand, Not Sleeping Just Dead & Fighting Back): Three Gritty Crime Novels

by Charles Alverson

  “Tony Scar?”

  “That’s right. Have you got any idea where I could find him?”

  Phillips stopped with his hand on the open door. Through it I could see part of a rich, colorful suite. “Sure,” he said. “Tony’s out at Laguna Seca. Has been for at least three or four years. What do you want to see him for?”

  “Marley, dear,” a fruity old woman’s voice called from the other room, “the soup is getting cold.”

  “Your soup’s getting cold, Mr. Phillips,” I said. “Thanks for the information.” I walked out into the antechamber. It still looked crummy, and it was still empty. It always would be.

  16

  Laguna Seca. As I drove southwest on Market Street toward the old people’s home beyond Twin Peaks, it occurred to me that this job had more old men in it than the Supreme Court.

  At the entrance to the home, I found a gatekeeper sitting in an outsized telephone booth with a Zane Grey novel in his shiny lap. He looked like a retired mess sergeant—too young to die, too lazy to do anything.

  “Sorry,” he said without looking the least bit sorry, “visiting hours are two to five pee-em. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.” That took care of me, he figured, so he let his heavy eyes fall back to the book.

  “This isn’t social,” I said. “It’s business.” I gave him a good look at the P.I. card. He must have had a firm grip on his chair because he didn’t fall out of it.

  “Visiting hours are still from two to five, stud,” he said. “Try tomorrow. Sunday’s a barrel of laughs around here.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m washing my hair tomorrow. Is there a court of special appeal around here? Can you use that instrument to call someone with a bit more weight?”

  I don’t know what surprised him more: the thought that there might be someone more important than he was or the presence of a telephone in his booth. When he’d recovered, he picked up the telephone, dialed, and asked someone if he could speak to Dr. Chapel. There was a half-beat pause.

  “Well, Christ on a fucking crutch,” he shouted down the phone, “find him.” He turned his head toward me. “Pardon my French,” he said. “Until last February I was a chief bosun’s mate, and it’s hard to lose the habit.”

  “Don’t tell me,” I said. “Tell the operator.”

  “That wasn’t the operator. It was the night head nurse. She—” Someone had come back on the telephone, and the chief slid his glass door closed so that they could have a private chat. While the gateman was working his jaws, I took a look around at what I could see in the darkness. Which wasn’t much. Beyond the guard’s booth in a grove of dead-black evergreens, pale towers of what must have been the Laguna Seca buildings stood out in shadowy relief against the moonless night. I felt glad I was going in for just a visit. That is, if I got in.

  My friend slid the door open again.

  “Can I see that card again, bud?”

  I handed it to him, and the door shut again. He read what was on it to the party on the other end. The door opened, and he gave me back my card.

  “Okay,” he said, “go on through. Just keep taking bends to the left, and you’ll see the main building on the left. Dr. Chapel will meet you there. Sorry it took so long. He was chewing my ass for being so rude to Mrs. Felony.”

  He read my expression.

  “Felony. That’s the name,” he said. “Anyway, I’m to be more polite to her in the future, and Dr. Chapel is waiting for you up at the ad building.”

  I admired his willingness to reform, thanked him, and got back into the Morris. He was right. A few left turns did find me coming into a half-moon drive in front of a dirty-white Victorian gingerbread mansion. A figure in crisp hospital whites was waiting for me on the bottom step of a short, wide flight of steps going to the main entrance. He came toward me as I got out of the car. He was taller than I, younger, handsomer, and no doubt richer. He walked bouncily as if he were dribbling a basketball.

  “Mr. Goodey,” he said, “I’m Dr. Chapel. What can I do for you?” We shook hands in a manly fashion, and I explained that I was there to have a short talk with Mr. Antonio Scarezza, a patient at the home. I started to add that unfortunately I couldn’t divulge the nature of my inquiry, when he cut me off.

  “Oh, I quite understand,” he said understandingly. “I know that detective work requires a certain amount of confidentiality. I’m fairly conversant with the—uh—modus operandi.”

  Uh-oh. One of those. An amateur detective, or at least a wishful one. I wondered if I’d get to see his diploma from the Ajax College of Scientific Detection. I hoped not. But I know how to play the game, so I adopted a confidential tone of voice and leaned a little toward him.

  “I greatly appreciate that, Doctor,” I said man to man. “So often people misunderstand the nature of police work. You weren’t by any chance a detective once yourself?”

  “Oh, no,” he said, more pleased than if I’d hung the Nobel Prize for Medicine around his neck. “When I was younger, I—well, I’d hoped—I’d wanted to major in criminology at college, but my father was a doctor, and—”

  “Of course, of course,” I said. “But you have kept up a keen interest in the profession, I imagine?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, digging eagerly for his wallet and flapping it open to show me a Sheriff’s Auxiliary shield, one of the toys the SF County Sheriff’s office likes to hand out to law-and-order fans. They carry all the authority of a Chicken Inspector’s badge. “I’ve worked quite closely with Sheriff Hallam. You know him, of course.”

  Of course. I’d once stepped on his foot in a City Hall elevator. We were old pals.

  I tried to imply that with a look and came right to the matter at hand. Antonio Scarezza. “You’re aware, of course, of Mr. Scarezza’s background?” I said.

  “Certainly, Mr. Goodey. We keep a fairly complete dossier on our—uh—residents here. You don’t suspect, do you, that Mr. Scarezza has—er—retained his criminal connections even here at Laguna Seca?”

  I put a mental finger alongside my nose and gave him a knowing look. “Let’s just say, Doctor, that I’m pursuing a certain line of investigation. Is it possible for me to see Scarezza now?” I dropped the “Mr.” purposely so that Dr. Chapel and I could enjoy a quiet moment of superiority over our unknowing quarry.

  “I’m sure it is,” he said agreeably, snapping a smart look at a gold watch in the dim light of a high, Victorian street lamp over our heads. “It’s now the quiet hour in the wards, and pre-sleep drinks won’t be served for about thirty-five minutes. Will that give you enough time?”

  “I’m sure it will, Doctor,” I said, shifting my weight toward the door in an effort to set him in motion, “if we can get to Scarezza pretty quickly.” He must have been a basketball player once, because my feint set him in fluid, long-legged motion, and he was past me and heading for the stairs before I could move.

  I caught up with Chapel at the top of the steps, and we went in through the tall doorway in a dead heat. The foyer was all marble, thick Persian carpets, and paintings by obscure nineteenth-century artists with a penchant for seascapes. But I didn’t have time to study them because Chapel cut sharply to his left and headed for a spiraling flight of carpeted marble steps. It was either go with him or foul him.

  Midway up the first curve, just as I was beginning to feel the first inklings of oxygen starvation, Chapel resumed his just-between-us-detectives line. “I know Scarezza pretty well, Mr. Goodey,” he said. “If you’d like, I could sit in on your interrogation.” He flicked his eyes over at me shyly. “We could even work together, perhaps. I mean—what you call double-team him.”

  Yeah, I knew what he meant. He, the kindly, trusted physician, would be Dr. Nice. And I, the stranger, would be Mr. Nasty. Between us we’d wring the old man out like a bar rag.

  “Thanks very much, Doctor,” I said, trying to put a lot of regret in my voice, “but my client…well, you know how clients are.” He knew, all right, just as I know all about o
ld ladies too rich and too stubborn to die. He nodded conspiratorially, and his eyes told me he wasn’t holding it against me personally.

  On the elbow of the third upward twist of the stairs, we found ourselves facing a massive set of double doors with a sign over them reading “Norton Ward.” Sitting at a small table to the side of the doors, reading an anatomy textbook, was a thin youth in a University of California letterman’s jacket. We were all jocks around here. As we approached, the boy got up, but he didn’t break his neck.

  “Thompson,” said the doctor, “this is Mr. Goodey. He has permission to see Mr. Scarezza until pre-sleep drinks are served. Will you take him in?” Chapel turned to me. “Good luck, Mr. Goodey. If I can be of any further help, I’ll be downstairs in my office. Thompson will see that you find it.” I could tell that he’d be lonesome if I didn’t drop in, but I just smiled a bit grimly and gave him a firm handshake.

  “I’ll do that, Doctor,” I said vaguely. “Thanks for all your help.” He started back down the staircase like somebody’s kid brother being left out of the big boys’ games.

  Thompson pulled open one side of the door. “This way, Mr. Goodey.” The hallway we entered was wood paneled and lit discreetly. It wasn’t much like a hospital, but it smelled of old men and bad chests and death.

  “Nice place you’ve got here,” I said, just to pass the time. “You planning to specialize in geriatrics?”

  “Not me,” he said without a smile. “I’m at the other end of the business—pediatrics. You meet a better class of young mothers, and your patients very seldom end up forgotten and drowning in their own spit. This is just a way of working my way through med school.” As we passed a closed doorway on the left, a loud, monotonous murmur droned through the thick-looking door. Thompson checked his step and cocked an ear. So did I, and I heard a thick, strangled, old-man’s voice warning someone called Madeline against the attentions of Mr. Battenborough. The drift of the monologue was that Mr. Battenborough was only after her fair white body and money, and she’d best listen to Dad and stay clear. The voice dropped to a muffled wheeze, and we moved on.

  “What happened to Madeline?” I asked.

  “She married Battenborough,” Thompson said, “went through his money and the old man’s, and ran away with a real estate man down in Menlo Park. I’ve never seen her, but Battenborough comes to see the old man twice a week.”

  As he said this, Thompson stopped in front of a door on the right and knocked softly. There was no answer, so he rapped more sharply.

  “It’s open,” said a thin but unwavering voice.

  Thompson turned the knob, and the door swung inward, revealing a fair-sized bedroom tricked out like a rich man’s study. Flanking both sides of the large windows were library shelves loaded with thick volumes. A long desk with an extending-arm lamp commanded one wall, shoving a single bed into one corner as if it had been left there by mistake. The bed was unmade. Its usual occupant sat in a leather chair beneath a standing lamp, looking up at me with a sour expression.

  He was a compact little guy. He looked hard but resilient, as if something hitting him would bounce back faster than it came. He had yellowish white hair, cut Jimmy Hoffa-style, and held in his hand a pair of tortoise half glasses that had been on his nose when the door opened.

  His eyes weren’t friendly, and they didn’t melt much when Thompson said, “Mr. Scarezza, there’s somebody here who would like to talk with you for a moment.” He turned back to me. “Mr.—?”

  “My name’s Joe Goodey, Mr. Scarezza,” I said. “I’m a detective, and…”

  “Copper?” he said, his old face softening a bit with surprise.

  “Ex. I’m private now. I…”

  “Why should I want to talk to you?” he asked sharply. I was beginning to feel like a dog turd on his carpet.

  So much for reverence for age, I thought, and put a bit of cutting edge on my voice. “You will when I tell you what I’ve come about. Do you want me to tell you or you and Dr. Kildare here?”

  His dark gray eyes brightened a bit at that. Maybe nobody here bothered to get sharp with him. If I’d grabbed him by the front of his tweed robe and belted him in the chops, Scarezza would probably have given me a smile.

  “Okay, Thompson,” Scarezza said. “You can leave him here.” He sounded as if he were talking about a box of groceries.

  “Right, Mr. Scarezza,” said Thompson. “Pre-sleep drinks will be around in twenty-five minutes.”

  “I don’t sleep, Thompson,” the old man said. “You know that.”

  Thompson nodded professionally and beat it. He closed the door quietly behind him. I walked over to the desk, pulled a swivel chair out of the desk well, and sat on it facing Scarezza.

  “It’s true,” he said, his voice a bit querulous in spite of himself. “The worst damn thing about getting old is you can’t sleep. If it weren’t for my books, I’d go nuts.” He patted his book as if it were a favorite spaniel. Reading upside down, I could see that it was The Dialogues of Plato. I’d expected a bound volume of Spicy Tales.

  “It all started the first year I was here,” he said as if I’d asked him, “when some old broad of a night nurse saw that I couldn’t sleep. She lent me her copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking. I was never much of a reader, but I got through it during that night. And it was such incredible bullshit that I thought I’d better see what else was going in philosophy. And that led to this.” He waved a hand at the book shelves, and my eye caught the names Descartes, Socrates, Sartre, Hegel. Not a Spillane in the lot.

  “You learn anything from all that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know yet. A lot of it is garbage too, but it helps pass the time. Which is what we’re wasting right now. What do you want from me, Goodey?”

  “I’m looking into who killed Tina D’Oro.”

  That got a reaction, all right, but it wasn’t one that I could catalogue. Maybe what I saw was the ripple of a memory coming to the surface from someplace deep and nearly forgotten. It didn’t drag a lot of obvious pain with it.

  “Yeah, Olga,” he said, as if speaking of a childhood friend. “I read about it in the papers. Who put you onto me?”

  “The old lady—her mother. She calls herself Mrs. Barton now and lives with some old geezer on the Contra Costa Canal. I ran into her today at Tina’s funeral. She’d copped a couple of the letters you used to write Tina and had them stored away.”

  “How much did you give her for my name?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That doesn’t figure,” he said, “but then maybe she’s changed. When I first met Maggie she’d have taken your shirt and tried to sell you back the buttons.”

  “She’s a little mellower now,” I said, “but not much. I had to apply a little pressure.”

  “Cutting up old acquaintances is fun,” he said, with his fingers gently drumming on his book, “but what do you want from me?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe…”

  “Maybe nothing,” he said. “I haven’t seen Olga to talk to for at least eleven years, and I’ve been here for nearly six. I knew she’d changed her name, got her tits done, and was go-go dancing, but that’s all. You know more about her than I do. I could tell you about the Olga Dombrowitz of sixteen or seventeen years ago—if I wanted to—but Tina D’Oro I know nothing about. I—”

  There was a sharp, just-for-the-hell-of-it knock on his door, and a big, dun-haired nurse barged into Scarezza’s room dragging a wheeled cart loaded with glasses and aluminum jugs. She had a face full of misdirected energy and cat’s-eye glasses, which made her look slightly satanic.

  “Evening, Antonio,” she said briskly. “What’ll it be: hot milk, cocoa, or Ovaltine? If you’re a good boy, I could let you have some decaffeinated coffee.”

  I could tell from Scarezza’s face that his idea of being a good boy would be to tap dance on her windpipe, but she hovered blithely over the pre-sleep drinks like a magician about to produce
a pink rabbit.

  “Hot milk,” said Scarezza in the voice of someone dealing with a natural enemy. “Two hot milks. Put the other one on my bill.”

  “Oooh, big spender,” she said with the mocking good humor of someone who doesn’t know she’s hated. She poured out two tall glasses of steaming milk and put them on a small round table at the side of Scarezza’s chair. “Well, ta, then, Antonio,” she said cheerfully, bumping the cart out of his door into the hallway. “Sweet dreams!” The door closed behind her.

  “Sometimes I think that’s why I don’t sleep,” Scarezza said, “because she says ‘sweet dreams’ every night.” He reached down beside the overstuffed cushion of his chair and came up with a flat, heavily embossed pint bottle of expensive Scotch whiskey. He poured a nice amount into each of the milk glasses and handed one to me.

  “Here’s to a painful death for Mrs. Monahan,” he said, downing half of his milk and whiskey. I sipped mine and found it was better than I’d expected.

  “Where was I?” he asked, wiping away a slight mustache of milk from his clean-shaven upper lip.

  “You don’t know anything about Tina D’Oro,” I said wearily, feeling the familiar energy drain of wasting time and effort.

  “That’s right,” Scarezza said with geriatric self-righteousness. “I don’t.” He drank most of the other half of his milk and relaxed a bit. His grooved forehead smoothed out considerably, and his left hand lay at peace on his book. “I don’t see how you could have expected me to,” he added, “what with me not having seen her for so long.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I admitted. “When Maggie Barton told me about you and Tina and the kid, I just thought—”

  “Kid?” said Scarezza, his brow furrowing again and looking at me as if I’d started speaking Urdu.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but the word suddenly sank in. “Kid!” said Scarezza, coming out of his chair on a spring and throwing the rest of his milk all over my pants legs and shoes. “What kid? What kid is that?” The contortions of his old face somehow made him look younger. Or maybe it was the surge of adrenaline.