Dead Pigeon

by William Campbell Gault

  “Maybe. I wonder if the Valley cops questioned him after Lars alerted them?”

  “Lars would know,” he said.

  “Let’s prowl for a while,” I said.

  He smiled. “Still on the outs with your buddy?”

  “No comment.”

  We drove back to the warehouse where Clauss had been holed up, to see if had left anything incriminating there. The odor that assailed us as we entered was not foreign to me. It was the same as the odor from our septic tank when the winter rains caused it to overflow.

  The water had apparently been turned off when the building was deserted. There was a concrete pit in one corner that could have been used for oil drains if this had once been a garage. It was now serving as a toilet.

  We found nothing that would help us in our short search before the odor drove us out.

  In the car again, I told Dennis what Peter Scarlatti had told me about attorney Winthrop Loeb.

  “Do you think Gillete has a Mafia connection?” he asked.

  “Not yet. But that could be why he dumped Tucker. Tucker wouldn’t be an asset to the mob, not these days.”

  He shook his head. “Clauss and Tucker I might be able to handle. But I don’t want to tangle with the big boys.”

  “We might not have to. Loeb is now being investigated by the Feds. That could include Gillete if they’re working together.”

  We stayed in the Venice and Santa Monica area, from the mean streets to the better ones and down all the alleys. The day was getting warmer and the car hotter.

  We were close to desperation time when we spotted the yellow pickup truck in the poorer section of Santa Monica. When we got closer we could read the license number. It was Tucker’s truck.

  It was parked on a pitted blacktop driveway in front of an ancient frame house badly in need of paint. A sign on the parched front lawn stated that the place was available for sale or rent.

  “I’ll take the front door,” I said. “If the place has a back door, you can watch that.”

  He studied me doubtfully for seconds before he nodded.

  There were two low and worn steps in front of the doorway. The door was ajar. There was no sound from inside. I pushed the door open a few more inches. The floor was uncarpeted in this, the probable living room. The air was musty. The window in the right-hand wall, which I could see, was almost opaque with dust.

  I stepped in. The only furniture in the room was an old mission oak sideboard, topped with a cracked mirror. The kitchen sink was visible through the opened doorway at the far end of the room. There was another doorway in the wall to the left.

  There was still no sign or sound of life. I moved along the left wall and peered in.

  It was a small room. There was an open sleeping bag on the floor in the center of the room and two unopened suitcases next to the far wall. Tim Tucker was lying on the floor in the center of the room, next to the sleeping bag. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing anything.

  I went out and through the kitchen to the back door. Dennis was standing next to a tall eucalyptus tree. “Get to a phone as quick as you can and call the police. Tucker is in here. He’s dead.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  DENNIS AND I WERE sitting in Lieutenant Slade’s office when a uniformed officer came in to tell him there was no identification on Tucker, no driver’s license, no credit cards, no wallet, nothing. The cause of death appeared to be poison but the medical examiner had not confirmed it yet. The officers had found an almost-empty pint bottle of whiskey in the room. It was being analyzed now.

  Slade said, “We already have identification. Let me know as soon as you have confirmation.”

  The officer nodded and left. Slade looked at me. “Sergeant Hovde told me you and Tucker had a fracas at some bar in Venice.”

  “We did. Lars was with me when it happened. We were working together. Did he tell you that?”

  “Don’t be insolent, Mr. Callahan.”

  “I won’t if you won’t. We phoned you to report a murder, not to confess. I hope you are giving this murder more attention than you did Mike Gregory’s.”

  He glared at me and turned to Dennis. “You work for Arden, don’t you?”

  Dennis nodded.

  “We don’t always get full cooperation from your office.”

  Dennis nodded again. “My boss has this strange theory that cooperation should be a two-way street.”

  Silence in the room.

  I asked, “May I phone my attorney now?”

  “Why?”

  “So we can get the hell out of here.”

  “You’re not being held and you’re not being charged. I assumed you’d want to wait for the report on the poison.”

  The uniformed man came in before I could answer. The whiskey, he told Slade, had been analyzed. It had been laced with arsenic.

  When he left, Slade said, “Okay, you two can go now. But stay available.”

  Outside, Dennis said, “No wallet? Does that mean no two thousand dollars? I’ll bet both of the cops who showed up are richer than they were when they got there.”

  “Easy, Dennis! The guy who aced Tucker probably took it. Let’s stop in at Bay’s house and give him the word.”

  A gardener was spraying the rosebushes in front of Bay’s house when we came up the driveway.

  Dennis said, “Do you think he’s using arsenic?”

  I didn’t answer. I had the feeling that his first choice for the man he wanted most to be put away was Turhan Bay. The kid was more on a mission than a hunt. He sat in the car; I went to the door.

  When Bay opened it, he asked, “Trouble?”

  I nodded. “Your cousin is dead.”

  “Dear God! What happened?”

  I told him the whole story.

  He said, “I can understand about the driver’s license. He probably didn’t have one. He had his license taken away from him several times in Chicago for drunk driving. But the money—?”

  “Anyone who can kill can also steal,” I said. “I didn’t tell the police about the money you gave him.”

  “Thank you for that,” he said. He took a deep breath. “That crazy man. He always resented me for some strange reason. I could never understand why. I posted bail for him twice in Chicago. Thank you for stopping by.”

  In the car, as we drove off, Dennis said, “Do you remember what you told me at the beach, that Tucker would not be an asset to the mob?”

  “I do.”

  “Maybe Gillete had the same thought. Getting rid of Tucker would make Gillete more acceptable. Firing him wouldn’t be enough. Tucker could fink on him.”

  “That makes sense,” I agreed.

  “This case,” he said, “is getting a little heavy for me. And my wife is getting nervous.”

  “Do you want out?”

  “Not yet. But from now on, I’m carrying a gun. I’ve also got a nine millimeter Italian Galanti semiautomatic that holds twelve rounds if you want to borrow it.”

  “That’s mighty heavy artillery, Dennis.”

  “For credit checks and divorce cases, yes. But not for this.”

  “You win,” I said.

  When he dropped me off at the hotel, I headed for the bar. It had been a long time between drinks. The bar was cool and dim and filled with well-dressed people. I needed the change.

  Half an hour later, when I came to the desk for my key, the clerk told me Lars had phoned. He had asked that I phone him back if I came in before six.

  I phoned him from the room.

  “You and your young friend are in the clear,” he told me. “One of the neighbors saw the man go into that house carrying a bottle. From the description she gave us, I think we have a fix on the man. He’s out of Las Vegas. His sister owns the title to that house. She lives in Venice now.”

  “I’m glad we’re in the clear,” I told him. “And I want to thank you for telling Slade about that fuss in Tessie’s Tavern.”

  “Don’t be so fucking petulant! I thoug
ht it was funny.”

  “Okay, okay! Are you going to stake out the woman’s house? The man might be hiding there.”

  “You know Venice is not in our jurisdiction, Brock.”

  Mike was, I thought, but didn’t voice. I said, “Thank you for calling.”

  “You’re welcome. I’ll get this paperwork cleared up soon. I can understand why you’re pissed off at me. I’ll call you as soon as it’s cleaned up.”

  Considering the things I had learned about Mike since I came here, why was I so annoyed about Lars’s sex life? Mike had lied to me about Gorman, and Gorman had suffered because of the lie. And it was possible that Crystal had lied about Lars. Even if she hadn’t, being propositioned couldn’t have been a new experience for her.

  Joe Nolan had told me he had sorted out his priorities. It could be time for me to do the same. I had come here to avenge the death of the golden boy and learned he had turned into dross. It might be time for me to adjust to the real world. I had worked in the real world when I opened my office years ago down here.

  My father, too, had worked in the real world. And I remembered what he had told me in my adolescence—nobody should get away with murder.

  The killers kill and walk and kill again. That should not be.

  I recorded the events of the day. Terrible Tim Tucker had lost his last match, but not intentionally this time. The man the neighbor had seen going into the deserted house carrying a bottle was from Las Vegas. Had Gillete finally been welcomed into the Family? Peter Scarlatti would know if he had.

  I didn’t intend to ask him. If Gillete had been accepted as a member, he was now in the Family. I wasn’t.

  Clauss, Tucker, and Gillete: that connection we had. Tucker was now dead. One obstacle to mob membership had been removed. A man as erratic as Clauss could be another. He could learn that it’s easier to hide from the police than from the mob.

  Young Clauss had still not been warned about his father. I drove to his apartment house after dinner. There was no answer to my ring. I pressed another button and a woman answered.

  I told her I was a friend of Emil’s, that something important had come up and I needed to get in touch with him.

  He was visiting friends in New York, she told me, and would be gone for at least three months. He had sublet his apartment for that length of time.

  Maybe somebody else had warned young Emil.

  It was too nice a night to sit around in a hotel. I drove to Venice to learn if the boys from the West Side station were doing their duty, staking out the house of the killer’s sister.

  If they were, they were not in evidence. All the cars parked on the block were unoccupied, all of the houses were lighted except for one. That could be her house.

  From there to Tessie’s Tavern. There were three men at the bar, a man and woman sitting at one of the two tables in the place.

  “Mister Macho!” Tessie said. “Where’s your sparring partner?”

  “Dead,” I said. “Murdered.”

  She stared at me.

  “Today,” I added. “Did he come in here often?”

  She shook her head. “That day you had the fight with him was the first time I had ever seen him. Do the police know who did it?”

  “They think they do, a man from Las Vegas. His sister lives about a block from here.”

  “Julie Woggon?”

  “I don’t know her name.”

  “It must be Julie. Her brother is a school bus driver in Vegas.”

  Lars had said the man was “out of Vegas.” I had assumed from that, he had meant a hoodlum. He could be. It wasn’t likely that he would admit it to his sister.

  “Beer?” Tessie asked.

  I nodded. “I’ll have a glass of your best.”

  She filled it from a tap and set it in front of me. It was Becks dark. She asked, “Are you from out of town?”

  I nodded. “San Valdesto. Denny told me you’re a bowler.”

  “Yup. You a friend of his?”

  “For all the years I lived down here.”

  She sighed. “That little bastard keeps hounding me to run a book here, like he does. But he gets the cop trade. I don’t.”

  She went down to serve another customer. I sipped my beer.

  When she came back, she asked, “Are you a friend of Sergeant Hovde’s, too?”

  I smiled, “Off and on. He’s not easy to get along with.”

  “Off is the word for him,” she said, “as in off limits. He spends more time down here than he does in his own town. I suppose it’s because there are more whores down here.”

  “That could be,” I agreed.

  She went away again to serve another customer and got into a heated discussion with him. I finished my beer and left.

  In my room I turned on the set for the local newscast, hoping there might be some new information on the death of Tim Tucker. There was none. Two-thirds of the half hour were devoted to the juvenile gang wars going on in central Los Angeles. Three of the gang members had been killed. A four-year-old girl had been killed in a drive-by shooting. There had been a witness who had taken down the license number of the car and informed the police. The youth had been caught. He had told the police it was all a mistake. He had been aiming at the infant’s brother.

  I recorded what I had learned tonight but didn’t search for a pattern. I went to bed. A siren wailed from the street below. A noisy party was going on in the suite next door to me. But it had been an exhausting day. I slept.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE TIMES IN THE morning had a couple of paragraphs on the murder of Tucker in one of its inside pages. It mentioned his former career as a wrestler but nothing about the man who was suspected of killing him. The West Side station had apparently decided to give out this minimum information so as not to alert the man from Vegas. The Times had a lot of readers in Vegas.

  Tucker had told his cousin he had to get out of town. Bay felt sure he had lied about that. Somebody had seen to it that if he had planned to leave town, he hadn’t.

  I looked up Julie Woggon in the phone book. The listing was in the name of J. Woggon. J. Woggon could be either male or female. Even in smug, snug San Valdesto, many of the widows and single women are so listed. Rapists rarely attack men. Women and children are their victims.

  When Dennis came, he told me, “I brought the Galanti for you.”

  “I doubt if we’ll need it on this trip,” I said. I gave him Julie Woggon’s address.

  It was the same house that had been dark last night, as I had suspected, a small stucco house with a red tile roof. A thin gray-haired woman, wearing faded jeans and a sweat shirt, was watering some hanging plants on the small slat-roofed patio.

  “More questions?” she asked as we came up the walk.

  “We’re not the police,” I told her.

  “Thank God for that! They questioned me for two hours yesterday and then the reporters came. Is that what you are?”

  I shook my head. “I’m an investigator for the American Civil Liberties Union. One of the reporters who talked with you believes you were a victim of police harassment.”

  “I certainly was and I told them that. I guess they think everybody who lives in Las Vegas is a criminal. My brother drives a bus there. He drove a school bus in Santa Monica for years when we lived there.”

  “What’s his first name?”

  “Robert. Robert Jules Woggon. Do you know if the police have talked with him?”

  I shook my head. “They don’t confide in me.”

  “Do you think I might have grounds for a harassment suit? Not that I need the money, but I would love to give them some bad publicity.”

  “I doubt if you have grounds now,” I said. “But it’s possible your brother might have if he is falsely accused. I think it would be best if you waited for that.”

  “Probably,” she agreed. “Thank you for your concern.”

  In the car, Dennis said, “I loved that ACLU bit. When did you dream up that one?”<
br />
  “It so happens,” I said coolly, “that I have been a member of the organization for over twenty years. Let’s go to the station. I want to talk with Lars.”

  “Are you two buddies again?”

  “Move it!” I said.

  He parked on the shaded side of the station and stayed in the car. I went in.

  Lars hadn’t lied; his desk was crammed with papers. I told him what Julie Woggon had told me.

  He sighed. “I know Woggon was a bus driver here. He was also a compulsive gambler. It was the school board that fired him. But it was his creditors who drove him out of town.”

  “Any word on him from the West Side station?”

  “Yes. He left Vegas three days ago. He wasn’t running a bus there. We haven’t learned what he was doing, but he was living very high on the hog.”

  “Do you have a picture of him?”

  “No. But there’s one in the Santa Monica paper this morning.” He smiled. “Brock, if you run into him and he offers to buy you a drink, don’t take it.”

  “You have a macabre sense of humor, Lars.”

  “Whatever that means. Good hunting, buddy.”

  “Anything new?” Dennis asked when I came to the car.

  I told him what Lars had told me.

  “There goes Julie Woggon’s harassment case,” he said. “Let’s pick up one of those pictures from the paper. I’ll have it Xeroxed at Arden and hand out copies to the rest of the boys. We can use a few brownie points with the SMPD.”

  We picked up a paper at the rack in front of the station and drove to Arden Investigative Services, Inc. I didn’t go in with him. I was sure that he hadn’t told his boss that he was working with me.

  When he came out again he brought a couple of enlarged copies with him. The picture in the paper had been only one column wide. This was clearer and it clearly wasn’t a picture of Clauss.

  He said, “We know what most of them look like now, don’t we?”

  “Most of whom?”

  “The people we have talked with and questioned and seen. All but one, unless you’ve seen him.”

  “Which one?”

  “Gillete.”

  “I’ve talked with him, but I’ve never seen him.”