Smoked Out (Digger)

by Warren Murphy

"Neither is compassion, Too-Tall. What do you want?"

  "That green Porsche? Are you awake yet? Do you want to call me back when you’ve drunk a cigarette and smoked some coffee?"

  "No. Talk now. I’m passing into a coma. In a few minutes, I’ll have to call in dead."

  "You drink too much. Frank Stevens said so. You’ve got to watch that."

  "What about the green Porsche?"

  "It’s registered to an Earl Collins, twenty, of 2719 Lifton Avenue, Los Angeles."

  "Who’s he?"

  "Do you expect me to do everything for you? I don’t know who he is. He doesn’t have any police record, except for speeding."

  Digger fumbled in the end-table drawer and found the pen. He wrote on the back of the phone book. "Give me that again."

  Earl Collins. Twenty. Of 2719 Lifton Avenue, L.A. He drives too fast. You get those clippings I sent you?"

  "Yes, thank you. I know how you suffered to get them."

  "Anything for a friend…or a partner," Breslin said.

  Digger smoked a cigarette without moving. His body was sore, and when he touched his face it was swollen. But the part of his body that hurt the worst was his throat, raw from drinking and smoking strong cigarettes. When he stretched his neck, he felt pain in the tendons on the right side of his throat. The pain was chronic for him and frightened him, but he refused to see a doctor about it, under the assumption that what one doesn’t know might just as surely kill you, but at least that death need not be noisy and maudlin and well-announced.

  The cigarette did not improve his mood. He found his company phone book in the end table and looked up a number. His watch said 6:12 A.M. He dialed.

  "Hello," a voice growled.

  "Good morning," Digger said. "This is Julian Burroughs, Mr. Landfill. I just wanted to let you know that I traced the owner of that green Porsche, so you can call off your hounds."

  "Who? Who is this?"

  "Oh, I’m sorry. I do believe I woke you up. Burroughs."

  "Burroughs? Oh, yes. Burroughs. Yeah. Found green Porsche, did you?"

  "Yes, found green Porsche, did I. Thanks for trying. Everybody was pleased with your office’s effort. Even Mr. Stevens. I remember his exact words. He said, that Landfill can’t do shit, but he certainly tries. I do appreciate it. We both do."

  Digger tried to go back to sleep but soon got up, cursing a hypermetabolism that never rested, that lurked on the fringe of sleep, growling, poking a stick at sleep, waiting to spring into action if sleep dropped its guard just an inch. He was awake. Wake the world. Misery demanded company. Wake and the world wakes with you. Sleep and you sleep alone. Except last night. Sonje. He looked at the pile of clippings. He had glanced at them last night but couldn’t focus his eyes. He shoved them in a dresser drawer so the maid wouldn’t throw them out.

  He showered, then called Koko. She was home.

  "Don’t be mad at me," he said.

  "If I get sacks under my eyes because of this call, I’ll hate you."

  "I just wanted to tell you that I miss you," he said.

  "That’s it?" she said.

  "Yeah."

  "Thank you. I’m sorry I called you nonexistent."

  "That’s what I wanted to hear you say."

  "Did you really get beaten up last night?"

  "Yes. But not badly. I’m all right."

  "Digger, be careful. If somebody killed that woman, he’s not going to mind punching your ticket."

  "I know. Listen. In the back of the top shelf of my clothes closet, there’s a leather shaving kit. It’s got a little .25 caliber gun in it. It’s loaded. You remember; it’s the one you used that time we went out in the desert and I shot at bottles and you shot at sand."

  "Yeah."

  "Get it and put it in your purse and carry it around for a while. I don’t think anything’s liable to happen, but just do it."

  "If you want me to."

  "I do. So long."

  "Call me every night," she said.

  "If you’re home," he said.

  "Goodbye, Digger," she said frostily.

  Earl Collins lived on the top floor of a three-story apartment building that, if it had been a person, should have been told to get some rest, take it easy and eat a proper diet before his body runs down and can’t run back up.

  Before entering the building, Digger drove around the block until he saw the green Porsche parked half a block away. It was the car from the cemetery. The license numbers matched.

  Digger rang Collins’s bell fourteen times before there was a short, sharp burst in response. One angry jab on the bell from upstairs. Digger pushed the door open and walked upstairs.

  Collins was standing in the open doorway. He wore jockey shorts and no shirt. His thick, blonde, curly hair was matted and his eyes were red with sleep. Looming at the top of the stairs over Digger, he looked like an Anglo-Saxon rendition of The Incredible Hulk. Sloping mounds of muscle ran from just below his ears to the tops of his shoulders. The size of his pectorals would have been the envy of most women. Digger wondered how he could get the normal complement of intestines into a waist so small.

  Collins scratched his belly as Digger arrived on the landing.

  "Aren’t you glad I’m not the Avon lady?" Digger said.

  "Better the Avon lady than Rodney Dangerfield at this hour. Who are you?"

  "My name is Julian Burroughs. I’m working with Lt. Breslin of the L.A. Police on an investigation."

  "I didn’t do anything. Why are you persecuting me?"

  "All right, Jean Valjean, stop the bullshit. I haven’t come to look at your candlesticks. I want to talk to you. Either let me come in or go put on some pants."

  "Come on in. I’m not into clothes."

  The apartment was less dirty than Digger had expected. Makeshift bookshelves had been slapped against the walls all around the single room. Digger glanced at the titles. They were a compendium of every bad idea promulgated during Earl Collins’s twenty years of existence on earth, ranging from Marcuse to Rubin and all the way down to the pits of Eldridge Cleaver and Angela Davis.

  "You read these books or are you a fence for hot literary properties?"

  "I read them. All the time."

  "Do you work?"

  "When the mood hits me."

  Collins sat at the folding card table, which was both dining room and kitchen ensemble. Apparently, he had held an anarchist’s state banquet the night before because there were two half-eaten Big Macs on the table and a half-dozen other Big Mac wrappers crunched up and left on the table.

  "When the bomb-throwers take over, the only place to hide will be a MacDonald’s hamburger stand," Digger said. "It’s the only thing you don’t want to burn down."

  "Colonel Sanders, too. Man does not live by beef and cellulose alone," Collins said. "What can I do for you? You a narc?"

  "No. This is a homicide matter."

  "Wait, wait, wait a minute. Not me, pal."

  "You don’t even know what I’m talking about and you’re denying it."

  "I know, and in your cop eyes, that makes me a suspicious character."

  "Time will tell," Digger said.

  "Time shall unfold what plaited cunning hides;…"

  "…Who covers faults, at last shame them derides," Digger completed.

  "Cops aren’t supposed to know Lear."

  "Neither are murderers. Where’s your car?"

  "Car?"

  "Green Porsche. One of Germany’s greatest inventions. A hundred new Porsches can keep five-thousand repairmen working full time forever."

  "It’s parked around the corner. If it’s not, I want you to take a report on a car theft."

  "It’s there, I looked. Where was it Sunday?"

  "Sunday? Sunday? With me. I worked Sunday."

  "Where do you work?"

  "I’m a free-lance gardener. I work for different people."

  "Which different person did you work for on Sunday?"

  "Sunday is Mrs. Walker’
s day. I worked for her."

  "What Mrs. Walker is that?"

  "Don’t you take notes?"

  "I have a terrific memory. Note-taking inhibits people, particularly the open friendly ones like you. Which Mrs. Walker?"

  "Mrs. Moira Walker. She lives at 900–666 Lloyd Place, off Sunset Boulevard."

  "You’re her gardener?"

  "No. She does her own work. But I carry around the heavy stuff. She’s got money. She likes to get her hands dirty as long as she doesn’t have to, like most of the rich. But I carry around the bags of lime and peat moss."

  "Don’t resent it. Voltaire liked to work in his garden, too. You drove your car to work Sunday?"

  "Only after he finished Candide. Yes."

  "And you had the car all day?"

  "Yes. Wait. No."

  "Ahah, the guilty knowledge doth stumble clumsily from his lips."

  "Not quite. Mrs. Walker asked me in the afternoon if she could use my car for a while. I told her she could. Did she go and hit somebody with my car?"

  "No. About what time was that?"

  "She borrowed the car around one. I guess she had it back around three."

  "Did she say why she needed your car?"

  "No. She’s creepy. She doesn’t talk much."

  "How long have you worked for her?"

  "Just a month."

  "You ever hear her mention a Doctor Welles? Or Jessalyn Welles?"

  "No."

  "Okay." Digger stood up and walked toward the door.

  "That’s it?"

  "That’s what?"

  "No explanation of what this is all about?"

  "Of course not. It’s part of the way we break you down psychologically. Two more weeks of these middle-of-the-night visits and I’ll have you confessing to the murder of Richard’s nephews."

  "Another police frame, another innocent victim," Collins said. "Richard got a bad press from Shakespeare. He didn’t kill those kids."

  "Doesn’t matter. If I had worked the case, I would have got a confession."

  "Listen, you’re not a bad sort for a cop."

  "Thank you. You’re not a bad sort for a criminal degenerate."

  "If you ever want to come up and talk about books or anything, come on up."

  "Maybe I will. But if I do, you’ve got to get rid of all those roaches in the ashtray."

  Collins looked at the ashtray quickly, guiltily.

  "It’s empty," he said. "I flushed it before I answered the doorbell. ‘Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation.’ Even if it’s only a doorbell."

  "I still prefer Lear," Digger said. " ‘Tremble, thou wretch, that has within thee undivulged crimes.’ You’re twenty years old?"

  "Yes. Why?"

  "Kids weren’t that smart when I was young."

  "There wasn’t that much to read in the Cro-Magnon era."

  "You’re sweet," Digger said. "You’ll never see me again. Unless, of course, you’ve been lying to me."

  "What’ll you do then?" Collins asked. "Hit me with your face, like you must have done to the last guy?"

  "Be careful, smartass, or I’ll let the air out of your muscles."

  Moira Walker. That name meant something to him, but what? Who was she? Why had she chosen to watch Mrs. Welles’s funeral from inside a parked automobile forty feet away from the graveside?

  Digger looked up and glanced in his rear-view mirror. It was there again. The yellow car; staying two cars behind him, but following him.

  Two blocks ahead, Digger found what he was looking for. He made a quick right-hand turn, then jumped onto the gas pedal, drove down another fifty feet and pulled into a driveway.

  A few seconds later, the yellow car drove by him. Digger backed out of the driveway and followed the yellow car down the block. When the driver of the other car realized he was on a dead-end street, he started to make a K-turn to go back. Digger parked the white Mazda crossways in the street to block the exit.

  He got out and walked over to the other car, opened the passenger door and got inside.

  Ted Dole looked at him with an expression of pain on his face. It was hard to tell if it was caused by embarrassment or fright.

  "If I had wanted tennis lessons," Digger said, "I would have signed up at the club."

  "Very funny, Kelp."

  "So I guess we ought to talk," Digger said.

  Dole’s hands were clenched tightly on the steering wheel of the small Japanese sedan. He sighed heavily.

  "Okay. You want to go somewhere? Maybe we should get a drink?"

  "It’s time," Digger said. "Park and we’ll take my car."

  Dole was quiet while Digger drove a half-dozen blocks to a cocktail lounge that advertised early lunches. Finally, the tennis pro said, "I don’t know what we’re doing here."

  "You’re going to tell me why you’re following me," Digger said.

  "No law says I have to. I can drive anywhere I want," Dole said sullenly.

  "That’s true," said Digger. "And I’ll tell my friends at the L.A.P.D. about it, and maybe they’ll be very interested in you."

  "That doesn’t worry me," Dole said.

  "Try this," Digger said. "I got beat up last night. I am of a mind to bust your fucking head."

  "I didn’t have anything to do with whatever happened to you."

  "Then I could bust your fucking head just on general principles. We’ll talk inside."

  Digger turned off the motor and went into the brightly lighted cocktail lounge. Dole, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and bright green slacks, glumly followed him.

  They sat at the bar. Digger brushed off the attempts of the bartender to talk to them. When he left, Digger said, "So what’s it all about?"

  "When you talked to me, I didn’t believe your bullshit story about being a public relations man."

  "Why not? I thought I was a pretty convincing liar."

  "Yeah. Well, you told me you were at the Sports-land Lodge, so I called there and they didn’t have anybody registered named Tim Kelp."

  "I slipped up," Digger confessed. "So why were you following me?"

  "I don’t know. I just, well, I just wanted to know who you were and what you were up to."

  "And what’d you find out?"

  "Nothing. You drive around and talk to a lot of people, and I still don’t know what you’re up to."

  "Suppose I told you I don’t think Jessalyn Welles died in an accident."

  Dole looked over at him sharply. "No?"

  "Suppose I said that maybe a jealous lover that she tossed over couldn’t take it and helped stage her accident?" Digger said.

  "Hold on. You talking about me?"

  "You know any other of her jealous lovers?"

  "You’re not as stupid as I thought you were, Kelp."

  "That’s not much of a compliment, but I guess it’ll do."

  Dole suddenly drained his glass in one large gulp. "Okay," he said. "Jess and I were having an affair."

  "I know that. What ended it?"

  "I don’t know. Seven, eight months ago, she told me it was over. Right after her father died. I don’t know why."

  "And you’re still carrying a torch after all those months?"

  "I really loved that woman, Kelp. She was…something different in my life."

  "So why follow me?"

  "Because you just didn’t ring true. I wanted to know who you were. And why you were interested in her. Do you think there was something fishy about her accident?"

  "I don’t know," Digger said. "Do you?"

  "I didn’t until now," Dole said.

  "Why don’t you like Dr. Welles?"

  "Because he’s a snake. He had a woman like that and he was out screwing anything that walked."

  "Did his wife know?"

  "No. She never did. When he was a member at the tennis club, he hit on every woman in the place. She just didn’t ever know. She was one of those trusting people."

  "And you never told her?"

  "I didn’t h
ave the heart. She loved me, Kelp, but she loved him, too. I just didn’t want to see her hurt, even over that bastard."

  "You didn’t send anybody to work me over last night?"

  "Why should I? No, I didn’t."

  "Who’s Moira Walker?"

  "Jess’s best friend. They used to take tennis lessons together."

  "Where is she now?"

  Dole shrugged. "I don’t know. She had some kind of an accident. Her husband was killed, then she stopped coming around. Jess didn’t talk about her. Who the hell are you?"

  "Did you know that Welles gets a million dollars from his wife’s death?"

  "You’re an insurance snoop," Dole said.

  "That’s right. He gets a million dollars."

  "If he had anything to do with Jess’s death, he won’t ever get a chance to spend it," Dole said grimly.

  Digger turned back to his drink.

  "I believe you," he said. "But it was probably an accident."

  Dole turned down Digger’s offer of a ride back to his car. He said he wanted to drink alone for a while.

  Back in his hotel room, Digger looked through the pile of clippings. They went back over ten years, and Moira Walker was in them almost as much as Jessalyn Welles. The two women apparently had been inseparable. They were photographed leaving together on a cruise, working together on a fund-raising committee for America’s Faceless Poor, opening the annual blood drive of the Hospital in the Hills, presenting the awards at the annual philanthropic awards banquet. And then, eight months ago, no more Moira Walker. Dole had said she was in an accident and her husband was killed. Perhaps the woman had been badly injured, Digger thought, and her movements restricted. But if she could drive to a cemetery to watch a funeral service, why couldn’t she get out of the car like everybody else and stand at graveside? Time to ask.

  In the suburbs of the Northeast, Moira Walker’s home would have been pleasantly upper-middle class. On Lloyd Avenue in Beverly Hills, it rated somewhere between well-off and very wealthy. A maid answered the doorbell, took Digger’s card, looked at it suspiciously as if it contained the key to the German High Command’s code, then vanished, leaving him standing on the front steps.

  She came back in three minutes, apologized for leaving him there and escorted him inside. The house had a four-person-wide curved central staircase to the second floor. The front hall surrounded the stairway on both sides. The maid led him to the last room on the right, a large study with a piano. The room was blackened with heavy drapes covering one whole wall. Digger could see a faint shard of sunlight from under one of the drapes. There were no lights on in the room.