The caretaker waved me vaguely off to the left on a weed- overgrown track. It didn’t take me long to spot the big pile of earth that had been moved to make room for Tina. I drove past it a discreet distance to leave space for the funeral procession. By the time I’d parked and had walked back, the hearse had stopped, and the driver and his boss were rolling Tina’s coffin down a little portable ramp.
The casket was draped with what looked like a million white gardenias sewn together into a blanket. The edges of the flowers scraped along the brown earth, leaving a little trail of petals to the edge of the freshly dug grave. The chauffeur then got busy untying the rest of the floral tributes from the top of the hearse.
Meanwhile, a door of the elongated Cadillac sedan had been eased open silently. Another chauffeur and a tall old gentleman in a tail coat were assisting a woman dressed entirely in black from the back seat. Her face was completely obscured by an opaque black veil, but from the size of her and a flash of a muscular calf, it looked to me as if she could have carried both of them and the casket. But just then she was blubbering too loudly and vividly to pull her own weight, so the old boy and his driver were edging her in the same direction as the casket.
The Rolls Royce had stopped too, and a back door was open. But nobody was getting out. I recognized the driver as one of the monkeys Fat Phil let hang around The Jungle. He was sitting behind the wheel, reading a magazine, with one foot cocked up on a window ledge. It was obvious that he was no mourner, just an honest citizen earning a buck.
I walked over to the open door of the Rolls and peered in.
Sitting square in the middle of the big back seat was Fat Phil, and it looked as though he needed a half-size bigger car. Despite the arctic blast of the air conditioner, sweat was rolling out of his low hairline, and he was moaning softly like a half-crushed puppy.
“Goodey,” he said when he could gather the strength, “I can’t make it. I thought I could, but I can’t.” He took a gasping breath. “And after I rented this car too. The best they had. Costing me a fortune.”
“It’s a business expense, Phil,” I said consolingly. “You can write it off. That is, if you live.”
“If I live,” he echoed. “I don’t know. Hey, did you see the blanket of gardenias? Great, hey? It set me back a packet, but nothing’s too good for Tina.”
I was going to tell him to take it out of Tina’s side of the profits, but then I felt someone tugging genteelly at my sleeve. It was the second chauffeur, an aging black with an old razor scar running down through one nostril.
“Sir,” he said without conscious irony, “the service is about to begin if you would like to join us.”
I thought about trying to help Fat Phil out of the Rolls, but he’d closed his eyes again and had gone back to breathing through his mouth. Turning with the chauffeur, I caught the scene at graveside. The big woman in black had been handed over to the younger undertaker and was rearing and bucking at the edge of the grave. It was all he and the other driver could do to keep her from toppling in after the casket. At the head of the open grave, the old gentleman with the white hair had a large book open, which I took for a Bible, and was looking up over it at me with disapproval. He also sneaked a look at a watch peeping out from his faultless white shirt cuff.
“No priest?” I asked my guide.
“Father Shearer,” he said through motionless lips, “wasn’t able to make it. In the commotion after the church service he was nicked by the fuzz. Mr. McDavitt will do the reading.” If he learned that style of talking any place but San Quentin, I’d misjudged my man.
Just as I was taking my place across the grave from the bereaved lady and her two anchors, a voice cried out: “Hold it!” A San Francisco taxi had come to a stop behind the Rolls, and four men came piling out. I recognized two of them as reporters. The other two had bulky press cameras.
McDavitt looked even more pissed off. One of the photographers ran around to the head of the grave and began badgering him to raise the casket again so that he could get a picture of it going down. McDavitt refused, copping another peek at his watch, and tried to calm everybody for the service, which, unless I was wrong, was going to be short and sweet The photographer settled for a high-angle picture of the casket in the grave, and the two reporters stationed themselves on either side of the lady mourner, ready to pounce as soon as the first shovel of earth hit the casket. The other photographer had fallen back for some long shots of this splendid little scene and was now zeroing in on Fat Phil’s rented Rolls for a bit of color.
Old McDavitt got his pretty white teeth into a text which began: “We gather today to say farewell to this child. For child she was, as are we all in the eyes of God...” It wasn’t a bad start, but I couldn’t hear any of the rest of it for the wailing that commenced from the old party across the grave.
Undeterred, McDavitt plowed on with the text, mouthing the words as eloquently as if he were burying a queen. When he closed the big book there were tears in his watery blue eyes. He dropped a signal, and the black driver lofted a big spadeful of dirt down into the grave.
The dirt hit the box with a muffled thud.
With that sound the wailing and moaning across the way suddenly stopped. A dusty silence fell over our little funeral party, and even the photographers stopped snapping for a moment. Then the lone mourner raised two muscular arms tipped with black gauntlets and lifted her veils revealing thick coils of copper-wire hair and a face like a retired fullback.
She couldn’t have been less than sixty years old, and every one of those years had been a hard one, judging by the souvenirs they’d left on her old mug. One incisor was missing, and she had three chins making inverted stairsteps down to the high ruching at the neck of her black dress.
Her complexion was that of an old wineskin that had been dipped in the flour barrel, and her eyes were hollow and cried out. The two reporters converged on her like freeloaders after the last cocktail sausage.
“Mrs. Barton,” said the big one, an ex-police reporter named Royster I’d often seen sleeping on a sofa at police headquarters, "would you…”
The little one, a lad who looked like a new cub on a high-school paper, tried to sneak under Royster’s arm and get at the old woman. “I’m from the Examiner, Mrs. Barton,” he said, “and I wonder if...”
The woman wheeled on them like a battered old lioness, worn out but still dangerous.
“Piss off the both of you,” she snarled. “I’ve got nothing to say to the press. All you did when my poor girl was alive was hound her and write lies about her. Leave me alone.”
This set the kid from the Examiner back on his heels, but Royster had badgered too many bereaved survivors in his day to let her off that easily. “Hell, Maggie,” he insisted, “all I want—”
My eye was caught by something big and white going away. It was Fat Phil in his rented Rolls. I looked to see if he had taken back his blanket of gardenias, but it was still at graveside. I suppose there’s not much of a market for used gardenia blankets.
The drivers were putting away their equipment while the two undertakers were standing discreetly at a distance, waiting to get a word in with Mrs. Barton. Maybe they wanted to hand her the bill. I couldn’t wait to witness that encounter.
But then I saw something else more interesting. Far across the cemetery, trying to look invisible in the shelter of one of the few large monuments, was yet another funeral guest. But one too shy to mix it up at graveside. It occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to interview this retiring mourner. But at that moment he spotted me spotting him and started making toward a late-model sedan parked near the cemetery gate.
I’m no speed merchant, but he must have been way out of training. I beat him by several dozen noses and was leaning against the car door when he came puffing up. He was a little guy in a dapper tan summer suit and dusty perforated brown shoes. He couldn’t have been much over thirty, but his indeterminate brown hair was withering on top like last summer’s
rutabaga patch, and he’d soon be bald. His pale, shoe-shaped face was pleasant, but just then it wasn’t helped much by the streams of tears running from his red-rimmed eyes. He was obviously suffering, and I felt like a heel bothering him. But I did anyway.
“Excuse me,” I said, flashing my private buzzer quickly. “I’m a detective. Did you know Tina D’Oro?”
That must have been exactly the wrong question. It doubled him over with sobbing and had him clawing for a big, white handkerchief from an inside pocket. The monogram was “F.I.” That rang a bell from Tina’s diary.
“I can’t talk to you now,” he gasped through the hanky. His free hand dipped into a coat pocket and shoved a small, white card at me. “Please, please,” he said, “come see me this evening. The address…the address…
He broke down again, and I got out of his way fast. I can’t take too much crying. If he was faking it, he deserved an Oscar, and would be too clever for me to handle anyway. He grabbed blindly for the car-door handle, stumbled behind the wheel, and the car lurched through the gates and disappeared.
Now that the danger of being run down by suicidal mourners had lessened considerably, I took a look at the card he’d given me. “Fletcher Irving, M.D.,” it said in fine capitals. The address was out on Ocean Avenue near City College. Dr. Irving wouldn’t be hard to find if the card was legitimate. If it wasn’t, I was a prize-winning sucker.
Such morbid thoughts were disturbed by an enfilade of gravel against my pants leg from the hearse as it passed at a fair clip through the big gates. Following it was the limousine with old McDavitt sitting erect and composed in the back seat. He didn’t even give me a nod, but I didn’t have much time to nurse my wounded pride. The taxi from San Francisco was hot on the Caddy’s tail, and Royster was hanging out of one back window, shaking his fist and shouting: “Get laid, you old bag! They ought to bury you, too!”
Which I thought was pretty rude, since he was addressing the mother of the deceased.
13
That same old person was coming toward me right then at a pace only slightly slower than a good half-miler on a straight stretch. She had her long, black dress held up around her knees, and she was eating up ground at about two yards a stride. I was between her and the gate. My two choices were either to get out of her way or get run down.
I took the coward’s way out and cut slightly to the left, at the same time saying, “Mrs. Barton?”
She wheeled around at me, causing a small dust storm with her upraised skirts. “You a reporter too?” she demanded.
If I had been, I wouldn’t have admitted it. But I could tell the truth. “No,” I said, bringing out the buzzer again. “I’m a detective.” That didn’t seem to impress her either.
“You sure?” she said. “You don’t look like any cop to me. Those reporters,” she added, “I wouldn’t piss on the best part of them. They ask you a whole lot of stupid questions, and then they go off and leave you at the end of creation. Bastards, they are. Real bastards. And McDavitt’s no better. He demands payment in advance and then claims to have an urgent call to make in Hillsborough. Hillsborough!” she repeated, spitting on the toe of my shoe.
“So you’re stuck,” I said, cutting to the heart of the matter.
“Son,” she countered, “I’m never stuck as long as I’ve got these.” She held up a fair-sized foot in what looked like a badly dyed bowling shoe. The sole was already beginning to curl back at the toe. She’d be barefoot before she got a mile. “And this.” She stuck a thumb like a small baked potato in front of my face. “I’ll be back in West Pittsburg before you could finish eating a banana split.”
“West Pittsburg?” West Pittsburg was a godforsaken little town at least fifty miles away over on the other side of the bay at the mouth of the Sacramento River. Somehow I could imagine her in dusty mourning weeds hitching all that way.
“Close enough to it,” she said. “I’ve got a little place on the Contra Costa Canal.” She fixed me with a narrow gaze. “You wouldn’t be going out in that direction, would you?”
“Not intentionally,” I said, “but I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you a ride home if you’ll tell me a bit about your daughter.”
She gave me a bit more of the deadeye, thought it over, and then looked down at her feet. “You sure you’re a cop?”
“Ex,” I said, giving her a closer look at the buzzer. “And I don’t like reporters any better than you do.” That went down well with her, so she decided to take a chance.
“Where’s your car?”
I pointed to the Morris, and her face dropped a bit. Maybe she’d expected a Cadillac like the one she’d come in. Tough luck. Watching her face, I could see that she was weighing her chances of getting a better ride hitching. Then she shrugged.
“Okay, Goodey,” she said. “But could you put the top up? The sun gives my complexion fits.”
I doubted whether anything short of a flame thrower could do that, but I wrestled the fragile old top up and we set off for the Bayshore Freeway and West Pittsburg via San Francisco. Behind us the caretaker was struggling to shut the gates.
Before I could start asking questions, she undid a couple of buttons, loosened something around her middle, kicked off the bowling shoes, sighed contentedly, and asked me, “Why do you care who killed my daughter?”
She looked tough enough to stand a little truth, so I said: “I don’t really, but the person I’m working for would like to know. He has his reasons.”
“Who’d that be?”
“Nobody you would know,” I said. “I’m supposed to be asking the questions here. Are you sure you’re not a newspaper reporter?”
That tickled her, and after a crackly laugh she said: “I’ll tell you one thing for sure. Her name wasn’t really Tina D’Oro.”
“I figured as much,” I said. “What was it?”
“If you know so damned much,” she said acidly, “figure that out, too.” She didn’t like smart alecks.
“Sorry,” I said.
After a long pause to let me know I was on probation, she sniffed loudly and said: “Olga. Olga Dombrowitz. The Olga was after a dancer I once saw in a show over in Concord. Olga Samovar, it was. Did a little bit from Swan Lake.”
“Funny how your Olga turned out to be a dancer too.”
“You may call standing up on a bar jiggling your tits dancing,” she said sharply, “but I don’t. No, Olga could have been a dancer, but she was too lazy. Bone idle.”
“Where’d the Dombrowitz come from?”
“Mr. Dombrowitz,” she said, “was my first husband but one. He was the headwaiter on a boat that used to go up and down the river between Sacramento and San Francisco. He knew every member of the state legislature by his front name. We lived in Pittsburg then, and I used to take Olga down to the dock so that she could wave at her daddy. The captain would do the old ‘Shave and a haircut—two bits’ on the steam whistle for her.”
“What happened to Mr. Dombrowitz?”
“World War II. He was too old for the army so the damned fool signed on with the merchant marine. Ran into a torpedo someplace out in the Atlantic, and there wasn’t enough left to send home. That was early in 1943.”
As sad as the demise of Mr. Dombrowitz was, I couldn’t help noticing something that didn’t seem to jibe. “Nineteen forty-three?” I said. “How—”
“You’re surprised, aren’t you? How old did you think Olga was?” “Twenty-five,” I said, “maybe twenty-six.”
“Wrong!” she said triumphantly. “Olga would have been thirty-five come this November. The seventeenth. She fooled everyone, she did. Did you see her laying in that fancy coffin at the church?” I said I’d missed that experience.
“Well, I’m telling you right now she could have passed for a girl of twenty and one. She never looked so good in her life. Whatever that McDavitt did to her, he did the right thing. Downright beautiful. That’s what got me to howling there at the grave. I’m a pretty hard old devil…” She
took a sideways look at me to see if I was going to contradict her, then she shrugged. “But when I saw her looking almost as young as she did when she graduated from John C. Fremont Junior High, I just went to pieces.”
She rummaged through a handbag that had cost the lives of at least two alligators and brought out a tattletale-gray man’s handkerchief just in case she had another attack. But it didn’t come.
“Mrs. Barton,” I suggested, “why don’t you just go back to the time Tina—somehow, I can’t get used to calling her Olga—graduated from junior high school and take it right up to the present. I’ll ask you a question or two if some occur to me.”
She wasn’t too happy about me calling the shots, but the old lady wriggled herself into a more comfortable position, took something fuzzy with lint from the bottom of her purse, stuck it in the side of her jaw, and started talking. At the Bay Bridge toll booth she opened the big purse again and dived in for a good rummage until I’d paid the toll, but mostly she just talked. She’d had some practice; I could tell.
Leaving out the more convoluted subplots and tortured rhetoric, the truth seemed to be that Tina was born on the outskirts of Pittsburg a couple of years before the war. After Mr. Dombrowitz was torpedoed, a series of “stepfathers” came and went. Mrs. Barton seemed to remember most of them and recited their names with some relish: Mr. Roper, Mr. Hawkins, Mr. Hufnagel, that son of a bitch Charlie Ramond, Mr. Gilliam. But Tina grew up just like other little girls in the East Bay until she graduated from junior high school.
That was the extent of her formal education, and it qualified Tina for a choice spot behind the candy counter at Kress’s in Antioch. P. D. Zimmerman, the manager, gave her in fairly rapid sequence a promotion to lipsticks, a ten-cents-an-hour raise, a baby, and enough money to go to San Francisco for an abortion.
Tina never came back, at least not for any amount of time. Oh, a couple of years later she did come home to stay long enough to have a baby. It seemed that her first experience with an abortionist had put her off that gentle art for life. But then as soon as the stitches were removed and the baby was hooked on the bottle, Tina—she was still calling herself Olga—had gone off again, leaving behind the baby, a hundred and ten dollars in cash, and an expensive pigskin suitcase.
Goodey's Last Stand: A Hard Boiled Mystery (Joe Goodey) Page 10