Smoked Out (Digger)

by Warren Murphy

  I’ll call Koko tomorrow, before her shift starts.

  Today’s expenses:

  Gasoline, out of pocket, $24. No, $25. I tipped the gas station man because he was so friendly and helpful.

  Greeting card, $4. Ballpoint pen, $1.

  Bar bill, $27. Eleven drinks at $2 each and a $5 tip. I know this sounds like a lot, but this was business. I had thought Dr. Welles hung out in the place and I wanted to see what I could find out. After eleven drinks, I learned he’d never been there. Oh, pain.

  Total, $57. Don’t worry, I’m saving the company a million. Room and meals by credit card.

  And so to bed.

  Chapter Four

  It was 9:00 A.M. on Monday, start of a new week, but Tom Langfill, the manager of the Los Angeles office of the Brokers Surety Life Insurance Company, already looked tired.

  "I’m Julian Burroughs. From the main office."

  Still sitting, Langfill pushed a Manila envelope across the desk toward Digger.

  "It’s all in there. Application, medical forms, et cetera, et cetera, everything you need."

  "Thanks. I need to know the owner of a car. Green Porsche. License plate IBW-1-something. Would you get it for me?"

  "Detective stuff already? Next you’ll be sending me matchbooks with fingerprints on them."

  "Probably."

  "Do you mind if I ask you why?"

  "No, of course not. I have this daughter by my first marriage, and she wants to be a criminologist. She’s trying to find out who stole a sandwich out of her locker. Peanut butter. She sends me clues and I have old Benevolent and Saintly check them out."

  "Mr. Brackler told me about you," Langfill said.

  "I’m sure he did. IBW-1-something. Please write it down before you forget. A green Porsche."

  Langfill wrote the number on the top sheet in a box of memo slips on his desk.

  "We think we’ve got a pretty good record in L.A.," he said. "Anything wrong with Mrs. Welles’s death, we would’ve known about it. I don’t know why—"

  "I don’t know why, either," Digger said. "Suggestion. Let’s call Mr. Stevens in New York. Right now. We can both ask him what I’m doing here. Did Kwash tell you that Mr. Stevens sent me?"

  "Kwash?"

  "Walter Brackler. The only known victim in North America of kwashiorkor, an African disease that stunts the body and shrivels the mind."

  "I didn’t know that."

  "Never mind."

  "Oh. Mr. Brackler did say that he did not think this investigation was really necessary. He thought it would be unproductive."

  "But I’m here, anyway, so that should tell you something, like Brackler doesn’t run the company and Frank Stevens does. Call Frank. If you’ve forgotten, Landfill, he’ll be glad to remind you."

  "Langfill. I don’t think that’s necessary. Of course, we’ll give you whatever help you need. We’re on the same side."

  "IBW-1-something," Digger said.

  "We’ll get right on it."

  "Thank you. I’ll call when I have anything else—fingerprints, bribes, extortion, et cetera, et cetera."

  Digger waited until he got back into his car to open the envelope and skim the material. Insurance application. With Dr. Welles as beneficiary. A medical examination and medical questionnaire. Like everyone who applied for insurance, Mrs. Welles would undoubtedly be the most perfect specimen of health who had ever lived in the world. He glanced at the application. Mrs. Welles conceded to having had German measles as a child. She had had no other diseases. In fact, she had obviously never suffered pain. She probably didn’t even have a cavity. What was the world coming to? When Digger was growing up, everybody he knew had tonsillitis for two weeks a month until the tonsils were ripped out by a doctor who needed the twenty bucks. They had measles and lay in a dark room for two weeks so they didn’t go blind. Didn’t anybody have tonsillitis any more? What happened to measles? Wasn’t anybody proud of having survived, against all odds?

  Before he had gone to work for Benevolent and Saintly, he had applied for insurance in a hypochondriac fit of paranoia. He had filled in every blank. Yes. He had had his tonsils removed. He had problems with his gums. He smoked four packs a day. He drank excessively, but, he added cheerily, he was going to stop any day. He had frequent headaches and unexplained stomach pains. His blood pressure fluctuated from near-death to oil burner. He had an uncorrected inguinal hernia, a trick knee and he had gained more than ten pounds in the previous five years.

  But his eyesight was excellent. He took pains to point this out on the application. And so was his hearing.

  His application was rejected. Truth might be beauty and beauty truth, but they both closed on Saturday night. When he later went to work for BSLI, Brackler, as head of the claims division, had sent him an insurance application. The company, Brackler said, paid for fifty thousand dollars worth of free insurance on each employee. One of the fringe benefits. Digger sent the application back blank. He told Brackler that he wouldn’t give $50,000 to the people he knew who needed it; and the ones he would give that money to didn’t need it. Brackler had not thought this was funny. Neither had Digger.

  Brackler had insisted and Digger finally filled out the form. He left the fifty thousand dollars to the Westminster Kennel Club, with a stipulation that it be used for improving the breed of Great Pyrenees. "They’re a little too high in the shoulder," he told Brackler. Brackler said, "You’re sick."

  "That’s why I shouldn’t be allowed to have insurance," Digger had said. Logic had gotten him nowhere, however, and the Westminster Kennel Club was just waiting for him to die. Along with his ex-wife. And maybe everyone else who knew him.

  He read carefully the police department reports on Mrs. Welles’s accident. There was a report, complete with diagram, signed by Patrolman Romeo Rocca. It was countersigned by Lt. Peter Breslin, Detective Bureau, Acting Commander.

  Lt. Peter Breslin was young and handsome. He had a square jaw, clear blue eyes, a suit that Digger could not have afforded and four books of criminology on his desk which, Digger was glad to see, Breslin had never opened. Digger never trusted cops who read books. His father had told him: "Those cops couldn’t find a bass drum in a phone booth. And then when you need them, if you’re in a pinch, they’re always off somewhere telephoning their college to find out what their final marks were. Stay away from them."

  Breslin looked at Digger’s business card.

  "All right, Burroughs, what can I do for you?"

  "I’m looking into the death of Jessalyn Welles."

  "You got any ideas?"

  "No. Routine kind of thing. Big claim, check it out."

  "You use to be a cop?"

  "No."

  "Most your kind of guys are. Ex-cops. Get bad backs or get tired of worrying about somebody trying to give them an extra eye in the middle of their head, they quit. Go to work for an insurance company. Maybe I’ll do that. Money any good?"

  "You’ll probably wind up police commissioner first," Digger said. "The money sucks. How long you been on the job?"

  "Nine years. I know. I look younger than that. That’s part of my Irish charm. Hollywood cop. I took the job and went and got my teeth capped. Around here you never know when you’re going to be discovered. Anyway, that’s what I thought. But it turns out that producer that you arrest for killing this week’s nookie because she’s been screwing some horseback rider isn’t in the mood to hire anybody. Frame of mind is wrong. Anyway, I got good teeth out of it. I’m too short, anyway. You know that goddamn Clint Eastwood is six-feet-four? I stood next to him once. He’s like a fucking tree. And he’s got a chipped tooth. There’s no justice. What about Mrs. Welles?"

  Digger said, "So far, routine. But it’s a big policy I read the accident report. You were at the scene?"

  "Yes. The cops called the detectives in and they called me."

  "You see anything?"

  "No. You never know, so you always look. But there wasn’t anything. By the neighborhood
, you’d say some drunk ran off the road. But at 6:00 A.M.? If you’re that drunk at six in the morning, you’re sleeping, not going to work."

  "Who told you she was going to work?" Digger asked.

  "Girl at the store. Lurene or Norelle…"

  "Lorelei Church?"

  "Right. She said Mrs. Welles was coming in early all week. Probably bored with her husband out of town. Just some kind of accident."

  "She wasn’t drunk?"

  "They sliced her afterwards. No booze," Breslin said.

  "You have a copy of the autopsy report?"

  "Yeah, but I can’t give it to you without a court order. Rules."

  "Anything in it I should know?"

  "No. Just somebody who ran off the road. No drugs, no booze and no breakfast. Nothing in her purse. I thought about the booze, like I said. I thought about it in the house."

  "You went into her house?" Digger asked.

  "Yeah. See if anybody was there or what. Nobody there. No signs of a party. Bed was half-made. Like she slept in it, got up and didn’t have time to fool with it but just pulled up the spread to make it decent. A bachelor bed. You know. I nosed around. Even though that we’re not supposed to, but there wasn’t anything there that you wouldn’t find in a normal Hollywood doctor’s house."

  "Except a maid," Digger said.

  "She showed up later. It was her day off."

  "Mary Beckwith?"

  Breslin nodded. "You’ve done your homework." He shrugged. "Just another accident."

  Digger said, "Can we talk? Really talk?"

  "We can try."

  "How sure are you about that? Just an accident?"

  "What else would it be?" Breslin lit a small filter-tipped cigar.

  "Well, try suicide."

  "No. There was no suicide note. Mrs. Welles wasn’t depressed. Anyway, it’s not the way people commit suicide."

  "What way do people commit suicide?" Digger asked.

  "There’s two ways. Fakers…the ones who don’t mean to die…they take a few pills, call for help, then take a few more. They don’t take a chance until they’re sure that help is on the way. Real suicides kill themselves. They jump off big buildings because there’s no changing your mind on the way down. They take a lot of poison. They climb inside their ovens. They rearrange their brains with bullets. What they do not do is drive off cliffs, particularly low cliffs. That’s messy, painful and risky. You’ve got just as good a chance of being turned into an artichoke as you do of killing yourself." He blew a smoke ring and seemed very proud of it. "Scratch suicide."

  "All right," Digger said. "Murder."

  "Who’d murder her?"

  "Dr. Welles."

  "I talked to him less than an hour after the accident. He was in San Francisco at some horseshit seminar or something, four hundred miles away from here."

  "Maybe he monkeyed with the brake cables or whatever you call those things?" Digger said. "It always worked for Humphrey Bogart."

  "With a four-hundred-mile-long pair of scissors?" Breslin said. "This isn’t a murder. It was an accident. There was even a witness, some old guy who lives on the same street. He saw her leave her house. They talked. She was fine and cheerful. Then she drove off the cliff. Sorry, Burroughs. It was an accident. Maybe not your normal garden variety kind of accident, but an accident anyway."

  Digger sighed. Nothing was ever simple. He had been hoping for a clean, ordinary million-dollar murder. "All right," he said. "The car was okay?"

  "New Mercedes. Perfect condition. You live around here?"

  "Las Vegas. You interested? They’re always looking for cops."

  "Naaah. Too much temptation with all that money. I’d wind up shot or indicted. I’d rather wait here and be discovered. How are the chickies?"

  "Next to your town, the best-looking in the world and not a square pair of heels inside city limits."

  "I love it. I didn’t know anybody lived in Las Vegas."

  "Nobody does. We’re all passing through, on our way from nowhere to noplace. You a gambler?"

  "Blackjack, small stakes. You don’t look like a degenerate," Breslin said. "I figured only degenerates spent a lot of time in Las Vegas."

  "I was a degenerate when I moved there. When I straightened out, I stayed to take the waters," Digger said.

  "Maybe you’ll show me around some time. Anything else I can do for you?"

  "Anytime. The car? Where would it be now?"

  "Rizzioli’s Garage. That’s on Ventura Boulevard. You know where it is?"

  "Yeah. I’m staying there."

  "He contracts with the police as a pound. When we got the car up from off that goddamn hill, we sent it over there. Then one of our mechanics went over it. Nothing wrong. It stays at Rizzioli’s for ninety days, then it goes back to Dr. Welles to do whatever he wants with it. He can junk it. Goddamn thing looks like it went through a trash compactor."

  "Okay to mention your name at Rizzioli’s?"

  "Sure. Why don’t you put your home number on your card?" Breslin asked. "If I ever get to Las Vegas, maybe you can show me around. How tall are you, anyway?"

  "Six-feet-three."

  "Lucky prick. Like Eastwood. If he was my size, he’d still be digging swimming pools. I hate the bastard."

  "He always speaks highly of you," Digger said.

  Digger sadly decided that Alphonse Rizzioli represented the final degradation of the gene pool which had produced Galileo, da Vinci, Michelangelo, Fermi and Caruso.

  But he was only too glad to do Digger a favor, particularly since Digger had mentioned Lt. Breslin’s name. Rizzioli was one of those who always did favors for policemen, since he knew, as a certainty, that there would be a day in his life when he would need a policeman to do him a favor.

  He took Digger to Mrs. Welles’s car, a twisted mass of metal. The front was caved in, one of the passenger doors had been ripped off and the trunk section had been accordion crumpled. Apparently the auto had gone off the cliff, then bounded over, end over end, like a Slinky going downstairs.

  "Pile of junk," Alphonse Rizzioli said.

  "It takes death to teach some people to fasten their seat belts."

  "Naaaah. Belts don’t make no difference when it’s like this. This is a Mercedes, too. Imagine with one of them shit cars. It’d be like a stain on the rocks. You should see some of the Detroit numbers what gets in accidents. You can’t even tell what kind of cars they are."

  "Must be fascinating."

  "Yeah. I mean, a car like this goes for Thirty-Nine-Five. That’s a lot of money. Doctors got a lot of money. You think of all the money wasted, smash, bang, gone."

  "Were you here, Alphonse, when the police mechanic looked the car over?"

  "You can call me Al. Yeah, I was here. What’s your name again?"

  "Borose. You can call me Mr. Borose. That’s what Lt. Breslin calls me. What kind of job did the mechanic do?"

  "What mechanic?"

  "The police mechanic we’re talking about. The one who looked the car over."

  "Some of these guys they hire. They don’t know shit. Civil Service. You give a guy Civil Service and put him on that tit and he don’t want to work no more. It’s our tax money that’s paying for it, too."

  "That’s true," Digger said. "We should be able to send our tax money to whatever department of government we want. You could send yours directly to the probation department. What kind of job did he do?"

  "He looked it over. Got under it, crawled around awhile and said there wasn’t anything wrong with the car."

  "What could go wrong with a car to cause that kind of accident? You know, straight ahead, off a cliff," Digger asked.

  "A lot of things. Steering linkages, busted cables, jammed throttle. The brakes could have been gone. Power steering not working. A lot of things. Maybe a blowout."

  "All those things," Digger said. "You could still check them?"

  "I guess. Anything that isn’t ripped out. Why? You think there’s something funny wi
th the car? How’s this involve you, Mister…?"

  "Borose. Mister Borose. Some of the boys sent me here to check it out. They think maybe there’s something wrong with the car. It’s the only way to explain the accident. That’s what the boys think." He winked at Rizzioli when he mentioned "the boys."

  "Maybe. But it was one of them rich bitches. They’re always drunk and partying. Probably just fell asleep at the wheel. Serves ’em right. Was they working, that wouldn’t happen. Was they having to get up in the morning, they wouldn’t always be running off cliffs, killing themselves."

  "I hadn’t realized till now how epidemic it was," Digger said. "You could inspect the car again?"

  "I could. But I got a big place to run here." He waved his hand around at the dozens of wrecks which constituted his legacy.

  "Well, the boys would want to make it worthwhile for you. We wouldn’t use your time for free. How about a hundred dollars? I know what a busy man you are."

  "A hundred dollars. Sure. I can look at it."

  "Here’s what we want. We want you to check anything that could go wrong to make a car go off the road that way. Steering, brakes, link-em-ups, whatever you call it. Jammed thingamajig. Check everything. Don’t leave anything out. If you find something, there might…well, you never know. The boys can be generous. How fast can you have it done?"

  "I’ll work on it today."

  "All right. I’m at the Sportsland Lodge. Call me there. Room 300. If I’m not there, leave your number and I’ll call you back."

  Digger gave him twenty dollars. Rizzioli asked, "When do I get the other eighty?"

  "You don’t think the boys are good for it?"

  "No, no. Just wondering, is all."

  "I’ll stop by tomorrow and pay you the rest. There could be more where that came from. And we don’t have to tell anybody about it. This is cash. Between me and you. No IRS reports…you know what I mean."

  "Sure I do, Mister Borose. I’ll phone you as soon as I’m done."

  "Thank you, Alphonse. This is a fine thing you’re doing. Our people won’t forget you. And they can do you some good. I’m going to tell them how you cooperated with us. I don’t have to tell you that you must keep this quiet, right?"