“So? Didn’t he work with Scarlatti? Isn’t Scarlatti a big wheel in the mob?”
“Scarlatti’s son,” I explained patiently, “was kidnapped. The kidnappers sure as hell didn’t want one of his hoodlums to act as intermediary. They asked for Puma. Would they ask for Joe if they thought he was in the mob?”
“I don’t know and you don’t know. But you should know me well enough by now to know I don’t leak juicy items to the press.”
“I’ll say it again. I’m sorry.”
“Okay. But you walk carefully on this. This is police business.”
“Yes, sir. I’ll be careful, sir.”
He went over to the uniformed men. I went back into the house.
Mrs. Puma was sitting on the couch again. “Don’t worry about that key,” she told me. “All Joe kept down there was meaningless stuff. I know, because I was his secretary his first year in town. His important files are here. Even I don’t know what’s in them.”
“Why didn’t you tell the police that?”
“It wouldn’t matter to me what they found there,” she said, “but we have a son. If Joe didn’t want me to know what was in there, I figure he wouldn’t want Joey to know.”
I said, “I’m sure there’s nothing there that would shock me. Joe and I walked the same dirty streets. Are the papers locked up?”
She nodded. “And I don’t have the key. But it’s only a one-drawer file. You could—” She broke off. “What am I talking about? You’re not going to get mixed up in this. Just because Joe was down there bailing out Joey and happened to run into you—”
“Bailing out Joey? What did he do?”
“Nothing serious. He didn’t even need bail. He was picketing out at that CANA protest at Point Mirage, and they hauled him in, along with about fifty of the others.” (Incident three, coincidence two.)
I asked, “Where’s Joey now?”
“He was running in that track meet down in Ventura. I finally got in touch with him. He’s on his way home now. I want to thank you for dropping in.”
“I’ll see you again,” I said. “Is that file cabinet light enough for me to carry to the car?”
4
SHE WAS CRYING, AND before I left she started to tremble. I said, “I could wait with you until Joey gets here.”
She shook her head. “I’m not going to break down again. That’s over with. But you—I mean—why should you waste your time? Joe’s dead. Does it matter if we know who killed him? How can that matter, compared with knowing that he’s dead?”
It was a question that I had often asked myself. I didn’t give her the answer I had arrived at—vindictive retribution. I said, “Maybe it will save somebody else. As for wasting my time, I’ve been doing that for three months.”
“It could be dangerous,” she said. “You don’t even carry a gun, do you? Joe didn’t.”
“That’s TV bilge,” I told her. “None of us carry guns. Let me put it this way; I don’t want the bastard who shot him to get away with it.”
She wiped her eyes with a tissue, and blew her nose. “I suppose you know I can’t pay you.”
“I wouldn’t take the money if you could. This is personal.” Personal is a much nicer word than vindictive. I asked, “Is there a doorway to the garage the neighbors can’t see? I don’t want any of them telling the police they saw me take a file cabinet out of here.”
“There’s a doorway from the kitchen,” she told me.
I drove my car into the garage and pulled down the overhead door. I carried the file out and put it into the trunk. I told her, “There might not be anything in there that can help us. I want you to think back on this past week. Try to remember everything Joe talked with you about.” I paused. “Tell Joey to do the same.”
She nodded. “Thank you, Brock. And bless you.”
I was charged up more than a decent man should have been on the drive home. I was back on the prowl, hunting an animal who ran both ways.
Does a man have to die to make you whole, you cheap peeper? Don’t try to give it moral overtones. Don’t call it justice or some noble knight’s crusade. You enjoy the hunt.
At home Jan asked, “What happened? I mean—how did it happen?”
“He was shot. His body was found in his car on a lot behind a deserted gas station out on Arroyo Road.”
“Do the police know when he was shot?”
“Not yet, probably. I didn’t talk with them much. Mrs. Puma told me what little I know.”
“You’d better have lunch,” she said. “We’re due at the rally at two o’ clock.”
I thought of the cabinet in the car. I had planned to open that this afternoon. But I didn’t want to give Jan further grounds for her suspicion that I didn’t belong in CANA.
The rally was not out at the plant site; it was held at the California league baseball park in town. I don’t know what the original name of the place was, but it had been renamed Lenny Devlin Field when the town’s most notable athlete had come home to die.
There would be short speeches by proponents of both sides before our many-sided governor would unleash his homilies.
The company was represented by a geologist today. CANA by a local citizen who had to be a statistician by trade. He had all the frightening figures.
These are the things I learned: Nuclear power provided less than five percent of California’s energy supply. Routine releases of radioactive gas had been proven to cause leukemia, cancer and genetic mutations. Wind-blown plutonium from the Rocky Flats nuclear plant was associated with a one-hundred-percent increase in various forms of cancer in the population downwind from the plant. And on and on. …
The man made me proud I had carried that dumb sign.
And then it was the company geologist’s turn. “Two nights ago,” he told us, “I was scheduled to appear here at your meeting to debate the geological safety of the Point Mirage site. Due to an attack of the twenty-four hour flu, I was unable to appear. Unfortunately, the gentleman who replaced me, Stuart Engelke from our legal department, has no background in geology.” He paused. “Which your Professor Judson Barlow realized. However, we took the liberty of taping that meeting, and the tape has been sent to Boulder, to the Geological Society there. The absurd statements made by Professor Barlow at that meeting are a discredit to the man and his profession. Let me assure you this is not only a company view of it; any competent geologist will agree with what I’ve just told you. The media representatives here might suggest to the governor that he reexamine the credentials of any state university professor who—”
He never had a chance to finish. The boos poured down, the signs began to wave wildly, two tomatoes and one egg narrowly missed him. He stood there, as erect and defiant as his matador associate had, neither flinching nor ducking.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said to Jan. “They’re not going to let him finish. And my stomach isn’t strong enough to listen to the governor.”
“Five minutes?” Jan asked. “I want to hear if the governor’s on our side.”
The governor’s good friend, his host in town, had just been demeaned in front of this crowd. If there was a shred of loyalty in the man, now would be the time to show it.
But there was no anger in his voice, and no defense of his friend. He opened with his standard two-handed speech. On the one hand we must consider this, but on the other hand.…
I remembered from my youth that President Truman had suffered the same problem with his economic advisers. Old Harry had announced that what this country needed was a one-armed economist.
“That student was right about him,” I told Jan. “He’s not on our side. Let’s go.”
She looked at me suspiciously. “You’ve been champing to leave ever since we got here. Where do you plan to go?”
“Well, I—promised Mrs. Puma I’d do a few errands for her. Her and her boy—“
“Go,” she said. “I’ll get a ride home with Lois.”
I didn’t go home nor
over to the Puma house. I drove out to Arroyo Road, to visit the scene of the crime, as the newspapers love to call it.
It was a meandering road, roughly following the bends of the dry streambed that ran along its northern edge. At the far ocean end of it there were some sumptuous estates. At the beginning end, off Harvest Avenue, it was mostly avocado groves and deserted agricultural plots waiting for the spread of the city to make their owners rich.
The station had to be a relic of the 1930s, a small shack of imitation adobe blocks with a corrugated iron roof. A faded lopsided sign hanging by one hook near the doorway offered ethyl gasoline at six gallons for one dollar.
On the weed-filled gravel parking lot behind it, the remnants of a rust-eroded Model A Ford coupe body was lying on its side. A thin gray cat sat in the shade of the car, studying me carefully.
There was no house close enough to cause its occupants alarm at the sound of a shot in the night. I couldn’t believe Joe had been this dumb, meeting somebody with a gun in a spot as isolated as this. Joe had his faults, but stupidity hadn’t been one of them. The fact that he was found here, of course, didn’t automatically mean he had died here. The police would check that out.
The police, ah, yes, the police. … Here I was, at the scene of the crime, with some files they didn’t know about in the trunk of my car. The gray cat hadn’t moved, watching me warily.
It was still watching me when I drove away, heading for the Puma home.
A young man with his father’s blunt face and his mother’s thin figure opened the door to my ring.
“Joey?” I asked.
He nodded.
“I’m Brock Callahan. I was here this morning.”
“I know. Mom told me. Come in. She’s—resting. I’ll get her.”
“No need,” I said. “I just wondered if your father had a copying machine.”
He nodded again. “An old Xerox, but it works pretty well. It’s in the utility room.”
“I’ve been worrying about that file cabinet I carted away this morning. If the police should find out I have it, we could all be in a lot of trouble.”
“We sure as hell wouldn’t tell them.”
“But they could find out. So I thought I would copy the papers I need, and take them with me. But I’m not very good at picking locks, and if I pry it open, and they find it that way—”
“I know where the key is,” he said. “You’d better drive into the garage.”
He was waiting inside when I drove into the garage. He helped me carry the file cabinet into the utility room. There he reached under the soaking tub and brought out a key.
I handed him the papers one by one; he ran the machine. There weren’t many papers in this small cabinet, about fifty. Some of them simply notebook-size lined sheets with phone numbers and addresses on them.
When he’d finished, we put the original papers back and the cabinet back in its original resting place.
“Want to talk for a few minutes?” I asked him.
“Sure. Could you use a beer? Pop always kept a six-pack in the fridge.”
“I know. It was his favorite beverage. I’d appreciate one.”
“We could sit in the backyard,” he said. “It’s cooler out there and we won’t disturb mom.”
The backyard was fenced with six-foot redwood boards, its borders bright with flowers, of all the colors that bloom in May. We sat on the steps of the utility-room porch.
“Track man?” I asked him.
“Right. The four-forty and the half mile. But you don’t get track scholarships in law school. Goodbye law school.”
I said nothing.
“About a week ago,” he went on, “pop told me it was in the bag. He told me not to tell mom, but he was on a case that would earn him thirty grand.”
“Thirty thousand dollars! For an investigation? Didn’t that seem strange to you?”
“It sure did. And not telling mom? But I didn’t question him. I didn’t give a damn, I guess. Maybe, if I had—” His voice broke.
“Easy, Joey,” I said quietly. “It could have been perfectly legitimate.”
“Oh, yes! But don’t tell mom.”
“That doesn’t have to mean it was crooked. If it was dangerous, he wouldn’t want her to know, either, would he?”
“Mr. Callahan, I’m not a baby. At a hundred and twenty dollars a day, plus expenses, thirty thousand dollars in one week is not a fee, it’s a payoff.”
“Not always. Some clients pay by the job, some by the day. And there’s bounty money, too. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”
“Okay, okay. Mom said you were going to work on—on this.”
“I plan to.”
“We appreciate it,” he said. “Pop always said you were the greatest.”
“Well,” I said modestly, “there are a few pretty sharp investigators I could name you who—”
“He didn’t mean investigator,” Joey told me. “He meant the greatest lineman the Rams ever had.”
5
JAN WAS IN THE DEN WHEN I got home, nursing a martini on the rocks and watching an educational TV show on the Mayan civilization. She had been trying to improve her mind the last couple of months. Boredom, I guess.
“Any violence at the rally after I left?” I asked her. “Or did our friends run out of tomatoes?”
“That’s not funny,” she said. “It’s cheaply cynical. What are those papers?”
“I picked them up at Puma’s house. Did the paper come?”
She gestured toward the coffee table where the local evening paper was still folded. “Brock, you’re not going to get involved in that murder, are you?”
“Not seriously. But if I can learn anything that would help the police—”
“You’re lying,” she said. “I’m not going to argue with you, but I don’t like it.” She looked at her empty glass. “I wonder if I should have another? We’ll be drinking at the Vaughans’—”
“The Vaughans’?”
“Have you forgotten? We’re going there for a buffet dinner. Mostly CANA people.”
“Alan will love that.”
“Alan better not complain too much. You don’t think the Vaughans could live the way they do on a judge’s salary, do you?”
“So that’s the picture. She has the money. I was wondering why he would marry such a fat woman.”
“Stop it!”
“You need another drink,” I said soothingly. “Make me one while you’re up, and then we’ll compare our afternoons.”
She went out to get more ice cubes. I picked up the paper.
Joe had made the front page, a full-column story with three pictures. One picture was of Joe, one of the gas station, and one of his car on the lot behind it.
He had been shot with a .32 caliber weapon in the right eye at close range. So far as the coroner could determine, he had died on the night before last between midnight and two o’clock. The car had been seen on the lot by several passersby since that time, but none had reported it. A prowl-car officer had discovered it after receiving the missing-person report.
Joe was identified as a private investigator who had moved up here two years ago and become active in community affairs, including Rotary and the American Legion. There was no mention of his part in the Scarlatti kidnapping. There would be no funeral. He had belonged to the local memorial society and his prearranged choice of cremation would be handled by them.
Jan brought me my drink. “I couldn’t read about it. It would remind me of the risks you used to take.”
“Honey, for all we know, Joe was killed by a jealous husband.”
“You mean he was that kind of man? That isn’t the picture I got from you.”
I didn’t argue with her. Jan wouldn’t think of wearing a dress that was two months out of style, but her sexual attitudes were seventeenth-century Puritan.
It had been an orderly rally, she told me, mollified by our governor. He had promised in his quiet and apparently sensible way that both
sides of this very serious controversy would be studied by him, after consultation with both environmental and scientific experts. However, he had pointed out, if we had all been more careful with our use of the available energy supply, this dangerous search for alternatives could have been avoided.
“I guess he meant until he is president,” Jan said. “He’s a fink!”
She had voted for him and I hadn’t. I didn’t point this out.
“And now,” she said, “what have you been doing since you deserted me?”
I told her most of it, all except the part about my having had the file cabinet in my car and having the papers Xeroxed.
“Thirty thousand dollars?” she said. “Maybe he wasn’t an adulterer. Maybe he was only a blackmailer.”
I shrugged. “I’m going to take a shower.”
The Vaughan estate was high in the hills above Montevista. It could be called a home, but four manicured acres made it an estate to me.
The parking lot was half-filled with cars when we got there, most of them small and foreign. These earnest young people who were trying to save America made their major purchases abroad.
Though the buffet was set up in the back, on the patio overlooking the pool, the clatter of conversation could be heard long before we reached the front door.
“Yakety yakety-yak!” Jan said. “Everybody talking, nobody listening.”
“Don’t be a summer soldier,” I said. “We can leave early.”
The young people were jammed around the buffet tables, the older citizens in small groups, drinking. Lois took Jan away to introduce her to somebody she “just had to meet”; her husband told me: “Grab those two chairs down by the shade garden. I’ll bring you a drink. Bourbon, isn’t it, bourbon and water?”
“That’s it. Light on the water.”
He must have had a hot round today and he was going to tell me about it stroke by stroke.
I had guessed right. I listened patiently, uttering an admiring ejaculation from time to time, feigning great interest all the way to the fourteen-foot downhill putt on the eighteenth green that had earned him his impressive seventy-nine.
Cana Diversion Page 3