“As long as we’re on the subject, let’s talk about spoons.”
“What do you mean?” she said with a nervous laugh.
“Little silver spoons. The kind you use to snort coke with.”
“Let’s not,” she said coldly.
“Quentin’s mom told me about Russ Leonard,” I said.
“Told you what?”
“That you were feeding his habit.”
Helen stood up suddenly and turned to the open door. “Jack!” she shouted. “Get your ass in here!”
Moon didn’t move.
“Jack, goddamnit!”
“Sit down, Helen,” I said.
She whirled around. “What did you tell me to do?” she said. “When did you start giving me orders in my own hotel room?”
“Call a cop,” I said. “You need a quarter?” I fished one out of my pocket and held it up to her. “Here.”
She sat down slowly on the couch. “I think you must have lost your mind, Harry. Do you know who I am?”
I said, “Cut the crap, Helen. I’m not the police. But if you want to talk to them, I can arrange it.”
“You’d tell the police about this?” she said with alarm.
I said, “All I want to know is whether or not it’s true.”
She looked hurt—the way she had when Jack had raised his voice to her. “Russ was a sick man. A desperate man. I couldn’t just let him wander around the streets, could I? He would have gotten himself killed that way.”
“And you would have lost the head writer on your show.”
“That, too,” she admitted. “This is a business, Harry. And I’m responsible for seeing that it’s run efficiently.”
Unless something or someone goes amok, I said to myself, in which case there would always be another fall guy. I had the feeling that Walt was the next one on the list. Or maybe it would be Jack Moon—who hadn’t come running when she’d shouted for him.
“Then you did get the coke for Russ?”
Helen looked down at the floor, at the plush white carpeting. “I didn’t,” she said after a time. “Walt did.”
“You know I’m going to ask him, don’t you?”
“Walt got the stuff for him,” she persisted. “I knew about it. I just...I looked the other way.”
“Who paid for it?”
Helen squirmed on the couch. “What difference does it make?”
“You did?”
“All right,” she said, looking up at me. “I paid for it. So what? It was Walt who kept feeding him more and more of it. He was supposed to keep him on a maintenance dose—until we could get Russ some professional help. But Walt had other ideas. Russ’s habit went from two-fifty to a thousand dollars a day in less than six months. I simply couldn’t afford it at that point. When I cut him off, Russ threatened to kill me. He actually came to my home in Long Island and threatened my life.”
“Did Quentin know about this?”
She nodded. “That’s when I brought him on the show, when Russ’s drug habit started to get out of hand.”
“Was Quentin ever involved in buying the stuff for Russ?”
“Walt supplied it. He was the one with the connection.”
“All right,” I said and stood up. It was too late in the day to ask her about the ranch.
Helen looked at me disgustedly. “I was wrong about you, Harry. You’re not a heavy, you’re too naive. You’re Lenny with his rabbits.”
“If you say so, Helen.”
“You think Russ Leonard was a special case? You think you’re going to raise any eyebrows with this story?” She laughed bitterly. “‘Phoenix’ is my show. It’s my life. And I’m willing to do anything in order to keep it going. Anything. I don’t have to apologize for that—not to you or to Frank Glendora or to anyone else. But if you do tell Glendora about this, just remember that it’s your boy Jack’s ass, too.”
“I thought he didn’t come on the show until after Leonard was out.”
“There was a transition period. He was around for the end of it.”
“And he was involved in the drug transactions?”
“Why don’t you ask him, sweetie,” she said. “He always tells the truth, doesn’t he?”
******
I walked out of the room to the courtyard. Moon looked up at me, squinting into the sunshine.
“I heard her shouting,” he said.
I sat down beside him on the bench. “Jack, did you have anything to do with this cocaine thing?”
He laughed half-heartedly. “Did she tell you that I did?”
I nodded.
Jack shut his eyes. “When I first came on ‘Phoenix,’” he said, “one of my jobs was to act as errand boy for Helen. I used to carry documents and breakdowns back and forth between New York and L.A. Once in awhile the documents were sealed in manila envelopes.” He opened his eyes and stared at me. “I wasn’t supposed to know what was inside them.”
“Did you know?”
He nodded. “It was an open secret. Sometimes it was money that Helen sent to Russ. Sometimes...” His voice died away. “I knew what I was doing and I did it, anyway. I was just too damn eager to please.”
I looked away from him. “How about Quentin? Was he involved?”
“He knew about it. I’m pretty sure of that. But he wasn’t involved.”
“O.K.,” I said. “Let’s forget it came up.”
“I tried to tell you the other night,” Jack said. “It’s my kind of sin—going along for the ride.”
“Not that bad, Jack,” I said.
Not a sin. More like an accident, I thought. Like grabbing a live wire and not being able to let go. The mistake was in the grabbing, not in holding on.
“You going to tell Frank?” he asked.
“No.”
“It’s O.K., Harry. I’ve had it with this business, anyway.”
“We’ll talk about it when I get back from Las Cruces.” I patted him on the shoulder. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Jack. Life’s too short.”
“At this moment,” he said, “it seems endless.”
I got up. “I’m going to pay a call on Walt Mack, then catch a plane to Las Cruces. I want you to do something for me while I’m gone.”
“What?”
“Get in touch with Goldblum—this afternoon, if possible. Tell him to locate a kid named Jerry Ruiz. He’s Mexican American, about twenty-two, good-looking. He used to work as a carhop here at the Belle Vista. Tell Goldblum to contact the desk clerk—she has his address. And if Sy does find him, tell him to hang on to him until I get back.”
“Why?” Jack said.
“Ruiz is connected to the Sanchez girl and to Quentin Dover. I’m pretty sure he’s the one who got Quentin the key to the gate.”
Jack got a small notepad out of his back pocket and wrote down Jerry’s name. “Anything else?”
“Keep yourself available,” I said. “I’ll let you know where I am in Las Cruces as soon as I can.” I looked at him. “You’re no worse than anyone else in the world, Jack. In most ways, you’re a lot better.”
He frowned at me. “If you say so.”
34
I CAUGHT a cab to Mack’s house and told the cabbie to wait for me in the little turnoff above the beach. He parked at the foot of the stairs, and I got out and walked up to the fenced compound. There was a row of buzzers and a two-way intercom built into the wall. I pressed the button with Mack’s name on it. After a moment I heard the intercom click on and someone said, “Yeah?”
“It’s Harry Stoner, Walt. I need to talk to you.”
There was a silence, then another buzzer went off. I pushed the gate and it opened at my touch. I let it fall shut behind me and walked over to Mack’s stoop. I could hear the surf booming behind me. The wind was up that day; it whipped at my hair and my shirt collar.
Walt didn’t look pleased to see me when he opened the door. “You’ll have to make this quick,” he said. “‘Days’ is running a new story line this
week, and I want to catch it.”
“To pick up some fresh, new ideas?”
He curled his lip. “What do you want?”
“It’s about Russ.”
Mack shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about that anymore. It took me a whole day to get over our last little chat. Russ Leonard is ancient history.”
“Quentin isn’t,” I said. “Did he know that you were feeding Leonard cocaine?”
Mack gasped, then made a coughing noise that sounded a bit like laughter. “What are you talking about?”
“You know what I’m talking about. Helen Rose gave you money to keep your boyfriend in coke.”
“She said that?” Mack said furiously. “She told you that?”
“Yes. She also told me that you kept feeding him more and more of it, until he fried his brains out.”
Mack turned to the wall with the mirror on it and pounded it with his fist. He hit it so hard that he dented the drywall. “That fucking bitch!” he screamed. Then he winced and grabbed his hand. He’d hurt himself and it made him even madder to have to show it. “Get out of here. I’ve got nothing to say to you.”
“Don’t make me go to the cops,” I said.
“You can go to hell,” Mack said. “Talk to my lawyer.”
I stared into that boyish face. “You’re a real sweetheart, aren’t you, Walt? Did you think that getting Russ high would land you his job?”
I thought he was going to throw another punch—this time, at me. I was kind of hoping he would try. But he thought better of it in a second. “Did you ever live with a man with a nose jones?” he said between his teeth. “Until you do, don’t tell me why I did what I did, you stupid son-of-a-bitch. Now get the fuck out of my yard.”
He slammed the door in my face.
******
I had the cabbie drive back to the Marquis. I hadn’t accomplished much with Helen and Walt, except to confirm what Connie Dover had told me. If she had the proof she said she had, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. As far as Quentin’s possible connection with the cocaine trade went...it was just one possibility among many, and the only way I could narrow the field was to go to Las Cruces and pick up Dover’s trail.
Once I got back to the hotel, I packed my overnighter and called LAX. There were no flights out to El Paso until Tuesday morning, but the ticket agent told me she could get me to Albuquerque that afternoon. I booked the flight and arranged to rent a car at the Albuquerque terminal. The drive to Las Cruces would take two or three hours. I figured I could find a motel room once I got there. Before I left for the airport, I called Marsha Dover. I wanted to get Jorge Ramirez’s phone number and address. I also wanted to see if she was all right. I let the phone ring ten times. On the tenth ring, I told myself I’d have to find Ramirez on my own.
I took another cab to LAX and spent a half hour in one of the little bars scattered around the terminal. About four-thirty I made my way to the boarding gates. There weren’t as many people going to Albuquerque as had been going to Cincinnati. I couldn’t make up my mind whether that was a good omen or not. I handed my pass to the stewardess and experienced a moment of panic as I stepped into the plane. I felt like I was stepping into a well. But once I settled down in one of the seats, the panicky feeling went away. Ten minutes later, we were airborne. And an hour and a half after that, we were landing in the New Mexico desert.
It was about eight, Mountain time, when I got off the plane. I wandered down to the Hertz stand in the Albuquerque airport and picked up the keys to a Mustang. Then I went outside and waited for one of the parking attendants to drive the car around to the front of the terminal. It was a beautiful desert evening. The sun was setting in bands of violet and orange light, and overhead the stars were beginning to shine—the ones that you don’t get to see through the haze of pollution and city lights. Albuquerque is high up in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The ride to Las Cruces would take me down, due south along the Rio Grande, through Socorro, Sierra, and Dona Ana counties to the Mexican border. I was looking forward to the drive. The desert would be cool at night, as sculpted and placid as the bed of the ocean it once was.
******
Half an hour out of Albuquerque and I was the only car on the road. For miles and miles around me, the desert glistened in the moonlight. Solitary buttes and flat-topped mesas grew out of the vacant earth, like great stone plants.
Around eleven I reached the outskirts of Las Cruces. I drove through a notch in the El Capitan mountains and there it was—a little cluster of lights on the black desert floor. I took the first exit off the expressway and pulled up at a Holiday Inn. I parked the Mustang in the large lot, took my overnighter out of the trunk, and went into the lobby. A pretty, black-eyed Mexican girl sitting behind the front desk smiled at me as I walked up to her.
“Can I help you?” she said.
“I need a room. For at least one night. Possibly longer.”
I gave her a credit card and while she was making out the bill, I took a look around. The lobby was large and crowded. There was an indoor pool on one side of it, with a passel of kids splashing around in the water. On the other side, a little restaurant was set up like an outdoor cafe. The lobby formed a kind of courtyard, with the hotel rooms opening onto it on each side through handsome French doors built into the walls. A balconied second floor looked down on the pool and cafe; it, too, was lined with French doors. It was a pretty ritzy little place for Las Cruces.
The girl came back with my charge slip and I signed it. She gave me a key.
“You’re in ‘Maximilian,’” she said, pointing to a mahogany staircase leading up to the balcony.
“Where’s ‘Carlotta’?” I asked.
She grinned. “Right beside you. Where else?”
I grinned back at her, took my key, and walked upstairs to “Maximilian.” It was a nice room—motel Spanish traditional, with heavy carved chairs and a stout four-poster and a TV in an elaborate stained cabinet. I flopped down on the mattress and reached for the phone book, sitting on a nightstand by the bed. The nightstand looked like a melted black candle; but then most Spanish traditional furniture looked that way to me. I flipped the phone book open and searched for Jorge Ramirez’s name. I found it in the Mesilla section. According to the Chamber of Commerce brochure tucked in the front of the phone book, Mesilla was the old Spanish mission town—the original settlement from which Las Cruces had been born.
I pulled the phone onto the bed and dialed Ramirez’s number. Someone picked up on the fourth ring.
“Yes?” a man with a Mexican accent said.
“Jorge Ramirez?” I said.
“Yes?”
“Mr. Ramirez, my name is Stoner. I’ve just got in from L.A. and I was hoping we could get together. I have some questions I’d like to ask you about Quentin Dover.”
“You are a friend of Señor Dover?” he said.
“Not exactly. I’ve been hired by the company he worked for to look into his death.”
“It was an accident, no?”
“That’s what I’m trying to find out.”
“Señor Dover was a good friend,” Ramirez said. “I woul’ be happy to help you. When woul’ you like to talk?”
“Tomorrow morning, I guess. I just drove in from Albuquerque and I’m a little tired.”
“Tomorrow woul’ be O.K. Where are you staying at?”
“The Holiday Inn. But I have a car. I can meet you.”
“You can find the town square in Mesilla?”
“I’m sure I can.”
“Good. I meet you there tomorrow morning at nine. In front of the church.”
I told him that would be fine.
35
I ORDERED a Scotch from room service, then phoned Jack Moon at the Marquis.
“I’m glad you called,” he said. “Where are you staying in Las Cruces?”
I gave him the number of the hotel and of my room. I could hear him writing them down.
“Now what hav
e you got for me?” I said.
“Goldblum called me early this afternoon, right after you left. He found the charter service that flew Quentin to Las Cruces. Apparently Quentin didn’t use his real name, but the charter guy recognized him from Sy’s description. Dover left L.A. at eight thirty-five P.M. on Friday night and got into Las Cruces at eleven forty Mountain time. He came back to L.A. at two-thirty A.M. on Sunday morning. By the way, Dover left his car in the charter service’s lot.”
“Did anyone notice who picked it up? Or who picked up Dover on Sunday morning?”
“There was nobody on duty when Quentin got back from Las Cruces. But someone did see a kid pick up the rental car at around twelve-fifteen A.M. on Sunday morning. The kid was driving a jalopy and he had a girl with him. Dover had left word that the car was going to be picked up, so nobody gave the kid any trouble.”
“Did Sy get his description?”
“Goldblum thinks it was Jerry Ruiz,” Jack said.
“I’ll be damned,” I said.
It was certainly possible. Jerry himself had told me that he’d gotten off duty at eleven-thirty or a quarter of twelve. That would have allowed him more than enough time to make it out to the airport by twelve-fifteen. It would also have given him a better reason to be nervous about Quentin’s key. He’d apparently played a larger part in Dover’s plans than I’d thought. It made me that much more certain that Quentin was desperate to score. Otherwise he wouldn’t have taken a chance on a venal kid like Jerry.
“How about the girl in the car with Ruiz?” I said. “Any I.D. on her?”
“Goldblum thinks it was Maria Sanchez,” Jack said. “She was seen leaving the hotel with the Ruiz boy late Friday night. And when Goldblum got in touch with the Pacoima police about him, it turned out that they were interested in Jerry for their own reasons.”
“In connection with the murders?”
“I’m not sure. I do know that Jerry is a bad boy. Goldblum told me to tell you that. He’d been charged with several unsavory crimes, although he hadn’t been convicted on any charges.”
“Was Ruiz ever busted for pushing drugs?”
Natural Causes Page 21