Black Money la-13

by Ross Macdonald

  "And the killer got the money, is that right?"

  "Evidently. Whose money is it?"

  "I wouldn't know," he said with sudden vagueness.

  He got up and walked away from me the length of the long office, surveying the desert photo-murals on the walls. His footsteps were silent on the desert-colored rug. There was something a little female about his movements, and more than a little ominous, as if his huge belly was pregnant with death.

  "It wouldn't be your money, would it, Mr. Davis?"

  He turned and opened his mouth as it to yell, but produced no sound. Soundlessly he walked toward me, making a little sideways dance-step as he passed the horseshoe desk.

  "No," he whispered into my face. "It wouldn't be my money and I had nothing to do with knocking him off."

  He smiled and nudged me as if he was going to tell me a joke, but there was no humor in his smile. "In fact I don't know why you come to me with this spiel of yours."

  "You're Leo's partner, aren't you?"

  "Am I?"

  "And Cervantes was his boy."

  "How do you mean, his boy?"

  Davis nudged me again. His pleated shoulders opened and closed with the gesture, making it obscene.

  "I thought you'd be able to tell me, Mr. Davis."

  "Think again. I only saw Cervantes once in my life, and that was last year when he came here with Leo. I don't know what the deal was. Whatever it was, I don't want any part of it. I'm a legitimate businessman conducting a legal business, and incidentally Leo is not my partner. There's nothing on the record that says he owns any part of this casino. As for me, I want no part of him."

  It was a bold statement. Davis didn't quite strike me as a bold man. I was beginning to wonder if Leo Spillman was dead, too.

  "Where can I find Leo?"

  "I wouldn't know."

  "You send him money, don't you?"

  "He should send me money."

  "How so?"

  "You ask too many question. Beat it now, before you make me nervous."

  "I think I'll stick around. I need help with an income tax problem. Not mine, Leo's. And maybe yours."

  Davis leaned on the wall, sighing. "Why didn't you tell me you were Internal Revenue?"

  "I'm not."

  "Then you misrepresented yourself just now."

  "The hell I did. You can talk about income tax without working for the federal government."

  "Not to me you can't. You can't con your way into my office masquerading as a federal agent."

  He knew I hadn't, but he needed some point of focus for his anger. He seemed to have no focal point in himself. I'd known other front men like him in Vegas and Reno; barroom glad-handers who had lost their gladness, smilers who gradually realized that they were fronting for death and belonged to it.

  "The feds are looking for Leo. I guess you know that," I said.

  "I guess I do."

  "Why can't they find him? Is he dead?"

  "I wish he was."

  He snickered.

  "Did you have Cervantes shot?"

  "Me? I'm a legitimate businessman."

  "So you were telling me. It doesn't answer the question."

  "It wasn't a good question."

  "I'll see if I can frame a better one - the hypothetical kind they ask the experts in court."

  "I'm no expert, and we're not in court."

  "Just in case you ever are, it will be good practice for you."

  He didn't feel the needle, which probably meant he was feeling deeper pains. "How much black money did Leo siphon out of your counting room?"

  He answered blandly. "I don't know anything about it."

  "Naturally you wouldn't know about it. You're too legitimate."

  "Watch it," he said. "I've taken as much from you as I've ever taken from anybody."

  "Did he make discount deals with the big losers and use Cervantes to collect and stash the money?"

  Davis looked at me carefully. His eyes were dead but unquiet. "You ask the kind of questions that answer themselves. You don't need me."

  "We need each other," I said. "I want Leo Spillman, and you want the money he milked out of the business."

  "If you're talking about that money in L.A., it's gone. There's no way for me to get it back. Anyway, it's nickels and dimes. Our counting room handles more than that every day of the year."

  "So you have no problem."

  "None that you can help me with."

  Davis took another of his walks to the end of the room and back. He moved warily, with a kind of female stealth, as if his desert-colored office was actual desert, with rattlesnakes under the rug.

  "If you do catch up with Leo," he said, "you might let me know. I'm willing to pay you for the information. Say five grand, if it's exclusive."

  "I wasn't planning to hire myself out as a finger."

  "Weren't you?"

  He took another good look at my suit. "Anyway, the offer stands, bud."

  He opened the door for me. The man with the wide shoulders and narrow head was waiting to accompany me downstairs. The girl who reminded me of Ginny was at one of the crap tables with a different escort. Everything that happened in Vegas seemed to be a repetition of something that had happened before.

  I caught a plane back to Los Angeles and slept in my own bed.

  27

  A JAY WHO LIVED In my neighborhood woke me up in the morning. He was perched on a high limb outside my second-story apartment window, and he was yelling his head off for salted peanuts.

  I looked in the cupboard: no salted peanuts. I scattered some wilted cornflakes on the windowsill. The jay didn't even bother to come down from his perch. He cocked his head on one side and looked sardonically at the last of the big spenders. Then he dove off the limb and flew away.

  The milk in the refrigerator was sour. I shaved and put on clean linen and my other suit and went out for breakfast. I read the morning paper over my bacon and eggs. The killing of Martel was on the second page, and it was handled as a gang killing. The killing of Marietta Fablon was buried back in the Southland News. No connection was drawn between the two crimes.

  On the way to my office on Sunset Boulevard I took a long detour to the Hall of Justice. Captain Perlberg had a preliminary report from the Crime Laboratory. The slug which Dr Wills had removed from Marietta Fablon's chest had almost certainly come from the same gun as the slug that killed Martel. The gun itself, which was probably an old .38-caliber revolver, had not been found, and neither had the person who fired it.

  "Got any ideas on the subject?" Perlberg asked me.

  "I know a fact. Martel worked for a Vegas casino owner named Leo Spillman."

  "Doing what?"

  "I think he was Spillman's courier. Recently he went into business for himself."

  Perlberg gave me a melancholy look. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at me across his cluttered desk. He wasn't hostile or aggressive, but he had a kind of enveloping Jewish force.

  "Why didn't you mention this yesterday, Archer?"

  "I went to Vegas last night and asked some questions. I didn't get very good answers, but I got enough to suggest that Martel was co-operating with Spillman in a tax-evasion dodge. Then he stopped co-operating. He wanted the cash for himself."

  "And Spillman gunned him?"

  "Or had him gunned."

  Perlberg puffed on his cigarette, filling the small office with the fumes, as if smog was the native element in which his brain worked best.

  "How does Mrs. Fablon fit into this hypothesis?"

  "I don't know. I have a theory that Spillman killed her husband and she knew it."

  "Her husband was a suicide, according to the Montevista people."

  "So they keep telling me. But it isn't proven. Say he wasn't."

  "Then we have three unsolved killings instead of two. I need an extra killing like an extra hole in my head."

  He stubbed out his cigarette violently. It was the only show of impatience he permitted hims
elf. "Thanks for the information, though, and the ideas. They may be helpful."

  "I was hoping for a little assistance myself."

  "Anything, if it don't cost the taxpayers money."

  "I'm trying to find Leo Spillman-"

  "Don't worry. I'll be on it as soon as you leave this office."

  It was an invitation to depart. I lingered in the doorway. "Will you let me know when you locate him? I'd give a lot for a chance to talk to him."

  Perlberg said he would.

  I drove across town to my own office. There was a sheaf of mail in the letterbox, but nothing that looked interesting. I carried it into the inner office and filed it on top of my desk. A thin film of dust on the desk reminded me that I hadn't been there since Friday. I dusted it with a piece of Kleenex and called my answering service.

  "A Dr Sylvester has been trying to get you," the girl on the switchboard said.

  "Did he leave a number?"

  "No, he said he had to make some hospital calls. He'll be in his office after one o'clock."

  "What did he want, do you know?"

  "He didn't say. He sounded as if it was important, though. And last night you had a call from a Professor Tappinger. He did leave his number."

  She recited it, and I dialed Tappinger's house direct. Bess Tappinger answered.

  "This is Lew Archer."

  "How lovely," she said in her little-girl voice, her statutory rape voice. "And what a coincidence. I was just thinking about you."

  I didn't ask her what she had been thinking. I didn't want to know.

  "Is your husband there?"

  "Taps is teaching all morning. Why don't you come over for a cup of coffee? I make a very good Italian coffee."

  "Thanks, but I'm not in town."

  "Oh, where are you?"

  "In Hollywood."

  "That's only fifty miles. You could still get here before Taps comes home for lunch. I want to speak to you, Lew."

  "What about?"

  "Us. Everything. I was up most of the night thinking about it - about the change in my life - and you're part of it, I mean it, Lew."

  I cut her short: "I'm sorry, Mrs. Tappinger. I've got a job to do. Counseling discontented housewives isn't my line."

  "Don't you like me at all?"

  "Sure I like you."

  I was the last of the big spenders; I couldn't refuse her that.

  "I knew you did. I could tell. When I was sixteen I went to a gypsy fortune-teller. She said there'd be a change in my life in a year, that I'd meet a handsome clever man and he would marry me. And that's the way it worked out. I married Taps. But the fortune-teller said there'd be another change when I was thirty. I can feel it coming. It's almost like being pregnant again. I mean it. I thought my life was over and done with-" "All this is very interesting," I said. "We'll go into it another time."

  "But it won't wait."

  "It will have to."

  "You said you liked me."

  "I like a lot of women."

  It was an oafish remark.

  "I don't like many men. You're the first since I" The sentence died unfinished. I didn't encourage her to resurrect it. I didn't say a word.

  She burst into tears, and hung up on me.

  Bess was probably schitzy, I told myself, or addled on bedroom novels, suffering from cabin fever or faculty-wife neurosis or the first untimely hint of middle age, like frost on the Fourth of July. Clearly she had troubles, and a wise man I knew in Chicago had said once and for all: "Never sleep with anyone whose troubles are worse than your own."

  But Bess was hard to put out of my mind. When I got my car out of the parking lot and headed south on the San Diego Freeway, she was the one I felt I was driving toward, even though it was her husband I was going to see.

  At noon I was waiting outside his office in the Arts Building. At one minute after twelve he came down the corridor.

  "I could set my watch by you, professor."

  He winced. "You make me feel like a mechanical man. Actually I hate being on this rigid schedule."

  He unlocked the door and flung it open. "Come in."

  "I understand you found out something more about Cervantes."

  He didn't answer me until we were sitting facing each other across his desk. "I did indeed. After I left you yesterday I decided to throw the schedule overboard for once. I canceled my afternoon class and drove up to Los Angeles State with that picture you gave me of him."

  He patted his breast pocket. "His name is Pedro Domingo. At least he was registered at L.A. State under the name. Professor Bosch thinks it's his true name."

  "I know. I talked to Bosch yesterday."

  Tappinger looked displeased, as if I'd gone over his head. "Allan didn't tell me that."

  "I called him after you left. He was busy, and I got very little from him. He did say that Domingo was a native of Panama."

  Tappinger nodded. "That was one of the things that got him into trouble. He'd jumped ship and was in this country illegally. It's why he changed his name when he came here to us. The Immigration officials were after him."

  "When and where did he jump ship?"

  "It was sometime in 1956, according to Allan, when Pedro was twenty. He came ashore at San Pedro. Perhaps he thought the place would be lucky for him. Anyway, he practically stepped off the boat into a classroom. He attended Long Beach State for a year - I don't know how he got the college to accept him - and then he shifted to Los Angeles State.

  "He was there for two years, and Allan Bosch got to know him fairly well. He struck Allan in very much the same way he struck me - as a highly intelligent young man with problems."

  "What kind of problems?"

  "Social and cultural problems. Historical problems. Allan described him as a kind of tropical Hamlet trying to cope with contemporary reality. Actually that description applies to most of the Central and South American cultures. Domingo's problems weren't just personal, they belonged to his time and place. But he yearned for the luminous city."

  Professor Tappinger seemed to be on the brink of a lecture. I said: "The what?"

  "The luminous city. It's a phrase I use for the world of spirit and intellect, the distillation of the great minds of past and present."

  He tapped the side of his head, as though to claim membership in the group. "It takes in everything from Plato's Forms and Augustine's Civitas Dei to Joyce's epiphanies."

  "Could you take it a little slower, professor?"

  "Forgive me."

  He seemed confused by my interruption. "Was I talking academic jargon? Actually Pedro's dilemma can be stated quite simply: he was a poor Panamanian with all the hopes and troubles and frustrations of his country. He came out of the Santa Ana slums. His mother was a Blue Moon girl in the Panama City cabarets, and Pedro himself was probably illegitimate. But he has too much gumption to accept his condition or remain in it.

  "I know something of what he must have felt. I wasn't a bastard, but I worked my way up out of a Chicago slum, and I knew what it was to go hungry in the Depression. I'd never have made it through university without the G.I. bill. So you see, I can sympathize with Pedro Domingo. I hope they won't punish him too severely when they catch him."

  "They won't."

  He noticed the finality of my tone. Slowly his eyes came up to mine. They were sensitive, rather feminine eyes, which had probably been fine-looking before strain reddened the whites. "Has something happened to him?"

  "He's dead. A gunman shot him yesterday. Don't you read the papers?"

  "I have to confess that I very seldom look at them. But this is dreadful news."

  He paused, his sensitive mouth pulled out of shape. "Do you have any notion who killed him?"

  "The prime suspect is a gambler named Leo Spillman. He's the other man in the picture I gave you."

  Tappinger got it out of his pocket and studied it. "He looks dangerous."

  "Domingo was dangerous, too. It's fortunate for Ginny that she got out of this alive
."

  "Is Miss Fablon all right?"

  "She's as well as can be expected, after losing her mother and her husband in the same week."

  "Poor child. I'd like to see her, and comfort her if I could."

  "You better check with Dr Sylvester. He's looking after her. I'm on my way to see him now."

  I rose to go. Tappinger came around the desk. "I'm sorry I can't invite you to lunch today," he said with a kind of aggressive fussiness. "There isn't time."

  "I don't have time, either. Give my regards to your wife."

  "I'm sure she'll be glad to have them. She's quite an admirer of yours."

  "That's because she doesn't know me very well."

  My attempt to treat it lightly didn't come off. The little man looked up at me with strained and anxious eyes.

  "I'm concerned about Bess. She's such a dreamer, so addicted to Bovarysme. And I don't think you're good for her."

  "Neither do I"

  "You won't take it personally, Mr. Archer, if I suggest that perhaps you'd better not see her again?"

  "I wasn't planning to."

  Tappinger seemed relieved.

  28

  ON MY WAY into town I stopped at a gas station with an outside telephone booth and called Christman in Washington. He was still out to lunch. The operator transferred my call to the restaurant where he ate, and eventually I heard him say: "Christman here. I've been trying to get you, Lew. You're never in your office."

  "I haven't been in for the last few days. Do you have anything more on our friend?"

  "A little. Until a few months ago he was a second secretary at the Panamanian Embassy. He was fairly young for the job, but apparently he's very highly qualified. He has an advanced degree from the University of Paris. Before they transferred him to Washington he held the post of third secretary in Paris."

  "Why did he leave the diplomatic service?"

  "I don't know. The man I talked to said he resigned for personal reasons. He didn't explain what he meant by personal reasons. But Domingo didn't leave under a cloud, so far as I could ascertain. Do you want me to dig some more?"

  "There wouldn't be much point," I said. "You might tell whoever you talked to in the Embassy that their boy was shot in Los Angeles yesterday."