I took the gun out of one hand and her purse out of the other. I put the gun back where it had come from and held onto both. “Yes. I saw his work yesterday and it was much worse than this.”
She looked back at her brother. “He had no more options.”
“Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t. Maybe he would have gone to the police or gotten some help. Maybe he would have snapped out of it. It doesn’t matter. He has no options now.”
“I had no more options. And now...”
“Don’t say it. Don’t say anything else. I’m working for your father, so I’m helping you out of a jam, but if I were to know otherwise we’d have to have some law in it. You understand?”
She nodded her head.
I checked the window again and saw a black-and-white parking silently across the street. I pulled her arm again. “Come on. We’re out of time.”
There was the sound of car doors slamming. She was pliant now, and I dragged her into the kitchen, her high heels clicking on the floor behind me. When the police walked in, they would see a poor slob who had written his own ticket. Merton could fix anything else that needed fixing himself. Except for Mandy Ehrhardt. She had been a cold one, but that didn’t change what happened to her. It was better that Tommy got his own.
We went out the back door in the kitchen. I pushed her ahead of me and closed the door behind us. The backyard was a slab of concrete with overflowing metal garbage cans tucked up against the house. A small chain fence enclosed the slab with an opening that let into an alley. When they got no answer, one of the cops would come back here. I wanted to be out of the alley before then.
I hurried us down the narrow path between the slabs of concrete. There were fences all the way, creating a wall that separated people’s private garbage from the public trash. “Where’s your car?” I asked again.
“I parked on Front Street, one block over.” There were no tears in her voice now, and some of her self-assurance had returned.
I let go of her arm and she stayed with me. “Good. Go to your car and get out of here.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Does it matter?”
She didn’t answer. We were at the end of the alley now, stepping onto the adjoining street. She took her purse from me, and left without a word. I went the opposite way to come back around to West Market. I crossed the street and hurried along to my car. If I were just getting here, I would be coming from my car.
THIRTY-TWO
Both uniforms were still at the door. Or maybe they had already checked the rear and had come back around to the front. They pounded on the door again, loud enough that I could hear them halfway down the street. The summer night sounds of the neighborhood had died away, killed by the police cruiser.
Once they went inside, I could pull away. But before I could get in my battered Packard, an obvious unmarked pulled up and double-parked along the marked car. I waited a moment and then started up the middle of the street for it. Samuels got out. He was by himself. He saw me coming and said as I reached him, “You call the law?”
“No,” I said. “Just you.”
“What’s going on?”
“I think this guy is your man. Other than that I don’t know any more than you do.”
Samuels led the way up the walk. We were friends again. “Officers,” he said to the other cops, “Detective Samuels with Robbery/Homicide. What’s the trouble?”
“Call about a possible prowler. Nobody’s home.”
I liked the call about the prowler as much as I liked having my teeth kicked in.
“Step aside,” Samuels said, and stepped between them and banged on the door with his fist. He turned back to me, still standing on the path. “How sure are you about this?”
“Sure,” I said.
“We’ll get a warrant later,” Samuels said, and opened the screen door and tried the knob, which opened for him as well as it had for me. He stepped inside and the lights came on. The officers followed after him, and I followed behind. The scene was just as stunning the second time. “Damn it!” Samuels said. He turned on me. “Okey, spill. Wait a second.” He turned to the officers. “This was your call. You call it in, and wait outside for the dusters to get here.” Once the two policemen, one ashen faced, the other red, were gone, Samuels turned on me again. “That’s Daniel Merton’s kid. You going to tell me something now?”
“Remember the other case, the one before Christmas? Merton had the story quashed. There’s another one a couple years back. Merton probably killed that one too, because it never went anywhere. When I looked into it, a couple of Hub Gilplaine’s stooges used me for a punching bag. They tried to prevent me from seeing Merton earlier today too. I’m guessing Gilplaine was blackmailing the old man, and it wasn’t worth anything if other people knew. I managed to check in with the old man anyway and he gave me this address. I called you and you know the rest.”
He looked at me with narrowed eyes. “I don’t like it.”
I shrugged and kept my mouth shut.
“You’re claiming that Thomas Merton killed at least three girls and that his father has covered it up for him? Do you know who Daniel Merton is?”
“Sure,” I said.
He looked back at the stiff. “I don’t like it. But I guess I’ll take it. What did Merton senior say when you talked to him?”
“He said that it was okay if his kid killed a couple of girls as long as nobody noticed. I guess killing a girl who’s going to be in a picture gets noticed. And so we have it.”
“He told you that?”
“Not in those words.”
“Well, you keep a lid on this thing. We’ll figure something out.”
“You always do, detective,” I said.
He gave me another squinty-eyed look and then dismissed the comment with a wave of his hand.
“There’s more,” I said.
He shook his head without even looking at me. “You’re going to tell me this other stiff under the boardwalk was Merton’s too.”
“You’re pretty good at this,” I said.
“I’m also good at using my gun as a club without knocking it out of line. You want me to show you that trick too?”
“You said you like it straight.”
“Like it? I don’t like it one bit.” He sighed. “Give it to me short. We’ll go back to the station and you can tell it as long as you want.”
“Tommy and Greg Taylor were friends. They were both out, looking to get high. I’m guessing Tommy killed Ehrhardt on the way. When he realized Taylor could be a witness, he took care of him also.”
He looked at me. “This isn’t the world we were born into,” he said. “It wasn’t like this when we were kids. If a man killed you, he did it looking you in the eyes and he had a good reason, and everyone slept all night.”
“You believe that?”
“Not for a second,” he said, and went back outside.
I followed, leaving the door open.
THIRTY-THREE
At the station, I gave the police my story, leaving out Daniel Merton at Detective Samuels’ suggestion. I then went home and gave the story, leaving in everything, to Fisher. Then I collapsed on my bed. When I came to, the sun was shining, and I went out for a newspaper in the same clothes I had on.
There was no mention of Merton on the front page—not the father, not the son. I took the paper back home and read through every article, but there wasn’t one on the Mertons or on the Ehrhardt killing. I went back down to the newsstand at the corner and bought three other papers and took those back upstairs and read through every article in those too. Nothing. The fix was in. That left me a loose end.
I considered the house visits I needed to make while deciding if I should change my clothes. In the end I left without changing. At the studio, my name was on the list. When I got up to the secretary’s desk, she picked up her phone at the sight of me and had it back on the receiver by the time I was in front of her.
“You�
��re to go right in,” she said, without a hint of expression.
I went through the door. The curtains were open this morning. It made the office feel grand and light. Merton was at his desk with a folder open in front of him and three more to the side. Two telephones had appeared on the desk as well. Maybe he locked them up at night.
He looked up. His face was stern.
“Aren’t you in mourning?” I asked.
“I still have to eat,” he said.
We looked at each other, holding eye contact for half a minute before I decided there was nothing in it and looked away.
“I hope you know I didn’t expect that murder rap to stick on you,” he said.
“Sure, suicide plays just as well, and it’s easier to keep it out of the papers.”
“I can keep anything out of the papers I damn well want to.”
“I’ve noticed that.”
He leaned back in his chair and the bluster drained away. An old man looked back at me. “It had to stop. He was getting too hard to control.”
“I’ve got no problem with what you did.”
“Not me,” he said.
And then I flashed on it. That’s why she had been sitting in the dark.
“Some family you’ve got,” I said.
“It’d make a great picture,” he said. “Too bad I can’t make it.” Then he leaned back over the open folder. “My secretary has a check for you. I filled in an amount, but if it’s wrong, she can write you another one.” He turned a page in the file. I was dismissed.
The secretary gave me my check without any comment. It was for $2,500. I considered tearing it up and walking out, but that wouldn’t do anybody any good. I went down to my car to make my final stop.
The Enoch White Clinic was housed in two adjoining mansions and five outbuildings that had been built by oil men in the years before the pictures came to southern California. Signs along the long drive pointed the way through the acres of grass and trees to a parking lot that had been poured in front of the eastern of the two main houses. The door displayed a brown placard with businesslike letters that read RECEPTION.
The front hall was two stories high, a large bank of arched windows at the rear displaying the grounds behind the house. It was a peaceful view that suggested that the city was far away or maybe that there was no city at all. It was the kind of view that you could grow to love until it made you lonely and became stifling. The reception desk was to the right facing away from the window. I had to sign my name on a clipboard and they asked me to take a seat in one of the chairs that were provided for visitors. I was the only one there. The house was silent. They kept the crazies under wraps here. Screaming was bad for business.
When a nurse came to get me, I followed her down a wood-paneled hallway that had large gilt-framed portraits showing men in collars and robes in between every two doors. At the end of the hall, we turned into another hall just like it. Shem Rosenkrantz was leaning against a doorframe, drinking from a flask.
“I ought to kill you,” he said.
The nurse looked flustered and turned and left without saying anything or pointing out which room belonged to Chloë Rose. I think I had an idea.
“The doctors say Clotilde is sick. They won’t let her go. They say she’s got a nervous constitution. That she may never be able to leave. They say she’s a danger to herself. They know her better than I do. They know her better than she knows herself.”
“It’s a private clinic. You could take her out of it at any time.”
He brought up the flask, but it didn’t make it to his mouth. His face collapsed and a sob escaped him. “She wanted to die. She wanted to leave me.”
“And you didn’t give her any reason.”
The anger took over again. “I was all she had and she was everything to me.”
“You had a funny way of showing it.”
“You don’t let up, do you? The only reason I don’t sock you is that you’re right.” He drank then. “You bastard.” His eyes were red. “You can go in,” he said.
I walked around him and opened the door. She was sitting in a cane rocking chair by the window, looking at the same beautiful view I had admired in the front hall. She didn’t turn when I walked in. She kept her eyes forward. She rocked herself ever so slightly with her slippered foot.
I went around the bed and put myself in front of her, but she didn’t look up. Her eyes were glassy, the reflection from the window casting them white. She was well drugged. They had taken a pretty French girl and put her in the movies to be in all of our dreams. Now she was tucked away in her own dreams. The life in between was nothing but infidelities, lies, heartache, and death. The solution was the same for the victim as it was for the perpetrator. She had just gotten the order reversed: cut her wrists first, and now she was getting high.
I left without speaking. Rosenkrantz was crying into his flask. At the front desk I asked for a pen. I brought out my check from Merton and I wrote it over to Chloë Rose. She must have had money in the bank, but that money would run out with no more coming in. I handed it to the nurse, and told her to credit it to Chloë Rose’s account, and to make sure she wasn’t taken out of there before it ran out.
Outside in the sun, I watched the gardener play with his flowerbed, cutting away dead stalks and weeds. I went to my beaten car and got in, thinking that the casualties are often bigger than could be understood. That’s why the movies never made any sense. The screen’s not big enough to hold everyone in it.
POLICE at
the FUNERAL
in memoriam J.T. with apologies
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
1.
I sat on the edge of the hotel bed trying to convince myself that I didn’t want a drink. The argument that it had been three months since my last drink—and that had only been one Gin Rickey—and almost seven months since my last drunk wasn’t very convincing. I tried the argument that I would be seeing Joe for the first time in four years, and Frank Palmer, Sr., the lawyer, and probably Great Aunt Alice too, so I should be sober when I saw them. But that was the reason I wanted a drink in the first place.
I glared at the mirror attached to the front of the bathroom door. I knew it was me only out of repeated viewing, but now, about to see my son, I saw just how broken I looked. My hair was brittle, more ash-gray than straw, and my face was lined, with crow’s feet at the corners of my eyes, sunken cheeks, and broken blood vessels across the bridge of my nose. I looked worse than my father did when he died, and he was almost ten years older then than I was now.
“You don’t want a drink,” I said to my reflection. Then I watched as I sighed, exhaling through my nose, and my whole body sagged.
Why the hell was I back in Maryland, I asked myself, back in Calvert City?
But I knew why. It was time to pay Clotilde’s private hospital again. And I owed money to Hank Auger. I owed money to Max Pearson. I owed money to Hub Gilplaine. And those were just the big amounts, the thousands of dollars. There were all kinds of other creditors that wouldn’t be too happy to know I was three thousand miles from S.A. There had to be money for me in Quinn’s will. Otherwise Palmer wouldn’t have called me.
The door from the hall opened in the front room. It crashed shut and Vee appeared in the mirror, framed by the square arch that separated the rooms. “Don’t you just l
ove it?” she said.
She was in a knee-length sable coat with a collar so big it hid her neck. She wasn’t bad to look at normally, deep red hair, unmarked white skin, and what she was missing up top was made up down below. In the fur and heels she looked sumptuous.
“It’s the wrong season for that,” I said.
She came forward. “He’d been saving it.”
“I hope he’s planning to p—to give you more than a fancy coat.”
“He’s paying for the suite.” She opened one side of the coat, holding the other side across her body, hiding herself. But I could see that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath anyway. She slid onto the bed behind me, putting her hands on my shoulders. In the mirror, a line of pale skin cut down her front between the edges of the fur.
“He didn’t wonder why you weren’t staying with him?”
She faked shock, raising a hand to her mouth in the perfect oops pose. “I’m not that kind of girl,” she said, and then she made herself ugly by laughing, and flopped back on the bed, her whole naked body exposed now, her arms outstretched, inviting me to cover her.
“You were just with him,” I said.
“But now I want you. That was just business anyway.”
I shook my head, my back still to her, although I could see her in the mirror.
She dropped her arms. “What’s wrong with you?”
“I want a drink,” I said.
“Then have one.”
“I can’t.”
“Forget what the doctors say.” She was losing her patience. “You’d feel a lot better if you took up drinking again instead of always whining about it. Now come here. I demand you take care of me.”
I looked back at her. She should have been enticing, but she was just vulgar. “I’ve got to go.” I stood up.
“Like hell you have to go,” she said, propping herself up. “You bastard. You can’t leave me like this.”
“The will’s being read at noon. As it is I’ll probably be late. That’s what we’re here for in the first place, remember?”
“You pimp. I’m just here to pay for you. I should have stayed with him upstairs. At least he knows he’s a john, you pimp.”
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