Cast the First Stone

by James W. Ziskin

He thought about it for a moment then added that the body had been bloated and was turning a greenish blue.

  “Smelled awful, too,” he concluded.

  “How was he dressed?”

  “Just regular clothes. Trousers and a shirt. And one of those froufrou scarves around his neck. You know like Europeans wear.”

  “An ascot?”

  “That’s it. One of those. He looked like a beaten-up fairy covered with mud.”

  “Was there any indication that he might have died before going over the railing?”

  Millard shook his head. “No way for me to say if he was already dead when he went down the hill.”

  Moira the waitress returned with our dinners. She overhead the last snatch of our conversation and made a face. Millard laughed and told her it was police business.

  I took a break from our conversation to pick at my dinner. Millard dug in with relish, alternatively stuffing his face with steak then lobster. Once he’d polished off his food and wiped the plate clean with bread, he sat back and slapped his stomach with satisfaction.

  “How about some dessert?”

  “I’m not very hungry,” I said.

  “You hardly ate anything. You sure are a cheap date.”

  Oh, no. Not that. Not a date, not a date.

  I wanted to push that thought aside as quickly as possible, so I resumed my questioning. “Can you tell me about the phone number you found in Wallis’s pocket? Off the record if you like.”

  He thought about it for a long moment, passing the time by probing his teeth with his tongue in attempts—I can only surmise—to dislodge the last scraps of his dinner and send them down the hatch.

  “I can’t tell you that,” he said after a long moment.

  “What if I give you a name? Can you confirm it if I’m right?”

  He laughed. “You’re funny, you know that? How would you know whose number it is?”

  “Was it an actor named Tony Eberle?” I asked, and he stopped laughing.

  Millard went all serious and leaned across the table. “How did you get that name?” he whispered. “I want to know who leaked it to you.”

  “No one leaked it to me,” I said. “I’ve been asking questions at the studio, and I learned that Bertram Wallis hired Tony Eberle personally for his picture. Then when Tony disappeared and Wallis turned up dead at the same time, I thought it just might be his number.”

  Millard sat back in his seat, his sweaty posterior producing a rude-sounding noise against the Naugahyde.

  “I don’t think we should be discussing this,” he said.

  “Can you confirm that Tony Eberle is a suspect in the murder?”

  He squirmed in his seat. “Well, I can’t very well say he isn’t. Not after we found his number on Wallis. And after a couple of witnesses claimed they saw him at the party that night. And that he had words with Wallis.”

  “Do you have any idea of where he might be hiding?”

  He pursed his lips and shook his head.

  Moira the waitress presented the bill, which Millard snatched up.

  “No, this is on me,” he said, smiling broadly, even though I’d made no move to grab the check.

  I waited at the table while he made his way to the register. I watched as he spoke in a low voice to the cashier. When he’d finished, she pushed off her stool and set out in search of the manager, who returned with her moments later. The pained expression on his face was hard to ignore. He tried to smile at the cop, who whispered something short and sweet into his ear, but gave up the pretense once Millard handed him the bill.

  “That’s awfully nice of you, Gary,” said Millard in a voice meant to be heard. “But next time you’ve got to let me pay. This is embarrassing.”

  In the car, I calculated how many minutes it would take to reach the hotel. Fifteen? Twelve if I was lucky? I just wanted to get away from Millard and never lay eyes on his greasy head again. As I retraced in my mind the route we’d taken to get to Norm’s, I became aware of something touching my left hand. Oh, God, it was Millard. Without thinking, I yanked it away.

  “Did I startle you?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said, inching across the seat toward the door. “You should keep both hands on the wheel, ten and two o’clock. You’re a cop. You should know that.”

  I watched his smile dim and his fingers tighten on the steering wheel. He grew quiet after that. Had I led him on? Been too friendly? I didn’t think so, but there was the flattery and ego stroking from earlier. Perhaps I never should have accepted his invitation in the first place. I certainly hadn’t wanted to dine with him. And the information I’d wrung out of him wasn’t all that helpful either. But whatever I should or shouldn’t have done, I was stuck now.

  The ride back to the McCadden took exactly seventeen minutes. I checked my watch. The Friday night traffic, made worse by the rain, had slowed us and marooned me in the passenger seat next to Sergeant Millard for longer than I’d promised myself.

  At the curb in front of the hotel, he leaned over and tried to put an arm around me. I was trapped against the door and feared the worst. But then the door opened, and I nearly tumbled into the street.

  “So sorry, Miss Stone,” said Marty as he caught me in his arms.

  “What the hell are you doing?” demanded Millard.

  “Just opening the car door,” stammered Marty. “It’s my job.”

  “I’m all right,” I said, righting myself on the curb. “Thank you again for dinner. It was lovely.”

  Like a child gaping in disbelief as the scoop of ice cream falls from his cone to the ground, Millard watched me climb the stoop and disappear inside with Marty on my heels.

  I phoned Andy and Gene to tell them about Barstow. They both liked my plan and were eager to accompany me the following morning, Andy in particular. I think he’d had a few drinks, judging from the slurred speech and the overly familiar tone he took with me. He asked me to come over to his place, and when I told him that wasn’t a good idea, he reminded me of the photographs he’d taken Monday night outside Wallis’s party.

  “I’m not going out at this hour,” I said.

  “I can come over to your hotel, then.”

  Reluctantly I agreed, but made sure to meet him in the lobby. He’d been drinking all right. His skin was red, lips chapped, and eyes bloodshot. Completing the tableau, he was oozing the stale odor of alcohol as if he’d been soaking in a tub of gin. He was genuinely disappointed that we weren’t going to review the photographs in my room, but I managed to steer him into one of the lobby armchairs.

  Andy produced a large envelope with a dozen three-and-a-half-by-five black-and-white prints. He handed them to me and drew a drunken sigh. I shuffled through the pictures quickly. There wasn’t much to see. Except one man who resembled Tony Eberle. I groaned as I looked more closely. Yes, it might just have been him. Hard to tell, as he only appeared in one shot and he was partially obscured by another man. The rest of the attendees were nondescript, handsome young men climbing out of taxis, roadsters, and other vehicles. Then there was the odd female arriving, dressed to the nines, always on the arm of an older gentleman whose shifting glances made clear he was acutely aware of the scrutiny a young lovely invites when accompanied by someone’s wealthy grandfather. He held the cash; she had the beauty. A shame, I thought. For now, she’s getting what she needs. Later that night, he’ll get what he wants. In the morning, he’ll move on to the next aspiring starlet. Excelsior. And she, poor thing, will be that much less desirable, on the make for another patron, probably not as rich or handsome. Eventually she’ll hit bottom and give up on her dream of stardom. She’ll settle for a kindhearted Joe who’ll marry her despite her past and take her away to Bakersfield or Palmdale or Fresno, wherever failed beauties go to wither.

  I glanced at the last few photos, thinking what a wasted trip Andy had made, when I noticed one person I knew.

  “Isn’t that Gene?” I asked.

  He leaned closer to see, and I got a
snootful of his eighty-proof breath. Risking an explosion, I lit a cigarette to counter the effects.

  “Yeah. He was there,” he said, staring at the figure in the background. “He’s always on the prowl for a story.”

  I’d seen all I needed to see, and the hour was late. I yawned and tried to excuse myself for bed, but Andy wasn’t ready to throw in the towel. He jumped to his feet and made an awkward pass at me, reaching with both arms as he tried to plant a wet kiss on my face. When it rains it pours, I thought. Why couldn’t some handsome Hollywood star blow in my ear instead of a surly cop and a drunken photographer? And both in the same evening. Where was William Hopper when I needed him?

  I loosed a minor scream, and Marty arrived to investigate.

  “Is everything all right, Miss Stone?” he asked, glaring at Andy.

  “I’m fine, Marty. Just going to bed.”

  “Sorry. Sorry,” slurred Andy, holding his hands up as if to surrender.

  Marty showed him to the door, and I tipped him another quarter.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1962

  I rose early Saturday, bathed and dressed, before skipping down the stairs and out the door by seven. Marty called after me as I opened my bent umbrella against the rain. Did he ever take a day off?

  “Another wire for you,” he said, extending an envelope to me on the stoop.

  I dug into my purse but came up empty-handed. No more quarters. Reluctantly I slipped him a dollar.

  “Thanks,” he said. “I was wondering if you’d ever pull something more than a quarter out of there.”

  After his double heroics of the night before, I couldn’t very well hold his nerve against him. And I was growing fond of the rumpled bellhop. I told him he could expect nothing but nickels from now on.

  He smiled. “You have a nice day, Miss Stone.”

  I hurried around the corner and down the block to Hody’s, where I sat in a booth and ordered an English muffin and coffee. I opened the telegram and groaned.

  ELLIE,

  SHORT WORRIED. SAYS YOU HAVE THE WEEKEND TO FIND EBERLE OR WILL SEND WALSH TO LA. ADVISE AT EARLIEST.

  CHARLIE

  I thought of how I’d have liked to answer Charlie’s wire, but I doubted Western Union would deliver such explicit instructions. There was no time to send a response anyway. I was on a tight schedule. I intended to drive out to Barstow, nearly a hundred miles east of Los Angeles, and make it back to Hollywood in time to talk to Mickey. At fifty miles an hour, I might reach my destination in two hours. But I had no idea what I would find when I got there. I knew April Kincaid had once worked at the Charlie Horse, but when I phoned the diner from the hotel the previous night, they said she’d left five months earlier. Lucky for me I wasn’t in the habit of being thwarted by shushing librarians. I’d pinched the Barstow phone directory from the Central Library, and in it I found a listing for “Kincaid, Gordon” on Bradshaw Drive. When I dialed it, an operator informed me it had been disconnected several months earlier. I was playing a hunch, but if I was right, Gordon Kincaid was April’s father. And he was deceased.

  I unfolded a road map I’d found in the glove compartment of my rental, and spread it out on the table before me, anchoring it with my coffee mug, the milk pitcher, and my plate. I plotted the best route to Barstow.

  Gene Duerson slipped into the booth. He told me Andy had phoned him that morning to beg off the journey.

  “What happened? Hung over?”

  “Possibly. But he got an assignment today to cover some of the rain damage for the Times. They’re sending him to Griffith Park to take pictures of mud.”

  “It’s just you and me, then,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “Want some coffee?”

  “I’ll take it for the road.”

  We took my car. He said his would never make it to Barstow and back.

  “It’s an old DeSoto,” he explained as we made our way east on Route 66. “I’ve been meaning to get the transmission fixed, but since I got laid off I can’t swing it.”

  He told me his life’s story. Born in 1912, he’d grown up the second of four children on a small farm outside Dallas. When his father died in a harvester accident, Gene left school and went to work. He was fifteen. He supported his three sisters and mother until the girls were married off, none older than eighteen. His mother remarried after that. Gene enlisted in the army in 1933 and served for six years, finally leaving to work as a copyboy for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram at the ripe age of twenty-seven.

  “It was the Depression, and the pay was lousy,” he said as he gazed out the window into the rain and desolate landscape of the desert. “Then they let me go. I did various jobs for a few years, trying to keep my head above water. And I was writing, too. I loved to tell stories, even as a kid. I used to make up wild yarns about the Texas Rangers and Mexican bandits in 1915. Scared the heck out of my sisters.”

  “Why did you give it up?” I asked.

  He made a face. “No money in stories about bloody border wars. I worked for a while on an oil rig in Oklahoma. Then the Japs attacked Pearl Harbor, and I got called up again.”

  “I see.”

  “It was a steady paycheck,” he said. “And I landed a job with Stars and Stripes. They taught me how to be a newspaperman.”

  I smiled, clutching the steering wheel. “Then it all worked out for the best. The war, I mean.”

  He chuckled. “Yeah, the war was good to me.” His mien darkened. “Not so good for some of my pals, though.”

  “Were you in Europe or the Pacific?” I asked.

  “Neither. CBI. China Burma India Theater. Burma mostly. It was quite an education for a Texas boy, I can tell you. But I made a lot of great friends. Yanks, Brits, even Indians and Burmese. You might not think it, but they’re good guys under the brown skin and sweat and smell. Real good guys.”

  I threw a glance his way, but he didn’t notice. He was still looking out the window at the rain.

  “It used to rain like this only worse in Burma,” he said. “Monsoons. It felt like you were taking a shower for three months straight. Or a steam bath. And despite the heat, you were cold. Rain does that to you.”

  At length, Gene left his past behind, and we discussed the details of our collaboration. We’d agreed the night before to share all information and write the story together for the Los Angeles news market, that was if the story panned out at all. Gene left New Holland to me. We also decided to share the credit if the national press picked up on the news of Bertram Wallis’s murder.

  “What about Andy?” I asked.

  Gene shrugged. “If you want to let him take the pictures, I’m okay with it. But you’ve got your own camera. And you’re a sight better shooter than he is, too.”

  “Let’s see how it goes,” I said.

  Gene sniffed and looked off into the gray. “Fine by me. But we might finish this today, and Andy’s shooting mud in Griffith Park.”

  We drove on through the rain for a couple of miles without speaking. Then I asked him if he’d been at Bertram Wallis’s house for the party on Monday night.

  “Yeah, I was there,” he said. “I’ve been working on a scandal piece about him. I hang around outside whenever he throws a party just in case something happens or someone famous shows up.”

  “Anything interesting that night?”

  “Not really. Just a lot of waiting.”

  “Anyone famous?”

  “Only if you consider Bobby Renfro famous.”

  “Bobby Renfro was there that night?”

  “Yeah. I’ve seen him there before, too. He’s a regular.”

  “Are you saying he’s queer?”

  Gene shook his head. “Not Bobby Renfro. He’s always with a pretty young thing who thinks her ship’s just come in. Some fellows have all the luck. Good looks, money, and disposable girls.”

  “Disposable girls?”

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said by way of an apology. “These boys
and girls are hired for a night or two. Sometimes just for an hour.”

  “Andy mentioned someone the other day.”

  “Skip Barnes. He’s a procurer. He finds handsome young actors and beautiful actresses for people like Wallis. Then he hires them out to his friends.”

  “Is that the scandalous story you were writing on Wallis?”

  “It was easier than finding something else.”

  “I thought the studios paid off the scandal sheets to keep those stories out of the papers.”

  “Exactly,” he said without even the hint of a smile.

  We arrived in Barstow a little after ten thirty. My map didn’t show Bradshaw Drive, but a waterlogged man waiting at a lonely bus stop pointed the way. We followed his directions and located the street in short order. Meandering alongside the railroad tracks on the north side of Barstow, Bradshaw Drive was a muddy stretch of road, home to dilapidated ranch houses, wheelless wrecks on blocks in the drive, and empty fields of scrub plants.

  “This is high desert,” said Gene as we pulled to a stop in front of a small house near the intersection with Santa Fe Drive. “Normally this would all be dry and dusty. Now it’s a swamp.”

  I gazed out the windshield. “Kind of a sad place. Has that end-of-the-earth feel to it, don’t you think?”

  “Not at all. It’s more like the back of beyond.”

  I smiled. He didn’t. He rarely did, especially when he was being funny.

  “Come on,” he said, reaching for the door handle. “Let’s see if your hunch was right.”

  “It was right.”

  “How do you know?”

  “See that car parked in front?” I asked. Gene grunted yes. “That’s the Rambler I followed up Nichols Canyon Road Wednesday night.”

  Gene nodded knowingly and popped open the door.

  We approached the house, a single story affair, probably hammered together in the thirties by a do-it-yourselfer. No frills. Just wooden slats whose paint had been sand-blasted off by harsh winds and a baking sun. The roof was wooden shingles with a tarp stretched over the eastern half, probably to cover a leak. The porch was all two-by-fours, warped and weathered, with a couple of old chairs and a retired boiler full of dents for patio furniture.