Convertible Hearse

by William Campbell Gault

“I wrote it down,” I said. “Whose home is this?”

  She looked at me suspiciously. “You’re not selling anything?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m a private investigator.”

  She expelled her breath. “Wait here, sir. I’ll see if Mr. Wilding knows about this.” She closed the door firmly and pointedly in my innocent face.

  In about two minutes, she opened the door once more. “Mr. Wilding would like to talk with you, sir. This way, please?”

  I followed her through a long entry hall, past the living room archway, past two closed doors to a study two steps below the level of the hall at its far end.

  There were maps on two walls and bookcases on the other. The rear wall was mostly windows, looking out on the hills behind and above the house. I could see the lights of other houses in the distance.

  Horace Wilding was tall and thin and his hair was bone-white. He looked younger than his hair and older than the lithe and obviously conditioned body he held so erectly. He was standing next to one of the maps.

  The woman left, and he said, “Sit down, Mr. Callahan, and tell me about this Tomsic business.”

  I sat in a leather chair near the fireplace. “There isn’t much to tell, sir. While I was out for dinner, my phone-answering service took a message from a Mr. George Tomsic, and the message stated explicitly that I was to meet him here at nine o’clock.”

  “George Tomsic?” He looked thoughtful. “He wouldn’t be a mechanic, would he? I knew a man in Pasadena by that name.”

  “Haven’t you been reading the papers, sir? George Tomsic is undoubtedly that mechanic who is missing.”

  He shook his head. “I haven’t been reading the papers. They’re a little too — frightening these days. The Tomsic I knew worked for Dunbar Buick in Pasadena. He took care of my car; I was driving Buicks then.”

  “And you lived in Pasadena then?”

  His smile was patronizing. “Yes. I would hardly have my car serviced in Pasadena if I lived here.”

  “That isn’t what I meant. I wondered if you knew Leo Dunbar when you lived in Pasadena.”

  “I did. Not well, but well enough to talk to. I knew his wife much better. I knew her before they were married.”

  “That would be his first wife, Dorothy Hartland Dunbar?”

  “Yes. Did he marry another?”

  I nodded.

  Wilding studied me. “What has all this to do with that phone call you received? I haven’t seen either of the Dunbars for years.”

  “You’ll never see Leo again,” I said. “He was murdered last Monday. And after that, George Tomsic went into hiding. And tonight I get a call from a George Tomsic. Don’t you see, sir, that it’s logical for me to assume it’s the same man?”

  He stared at me and nodded. “Of course it’s logical. But why should he use this address? Heavens, I haven’t seen him for an even longer time than the Dunbars. I started driving Cadillacs three years before I left Pasadena.”

  “I’ve no idea what it’s about, sir,” I said earnestly. “All I can go on is the phone call. Unless this Tomsic is a victim of partial amnesia and his memory stops with his Pasadena days. It could also help to explain his disappearance.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, yes. Leo Dunbar murdered.” He shook his head and expelled his breath audibly. “How did that happen?”

  “He was knifed,” I said. “He was found in an alley behind his garage.”

  For a moment he was startled and then his face took on a guarded look. Not much, he hadn’t read about Leo Dunbar. Why had he lied about that?

  He looked at me steadily and appraisingly. “Knifed. Horrible thing. Don’t you think we should inform the local police of this phone call of yours? Is your office in Los Angeles, Mr. Callahan?”

  I shook my head. “Right here in Beverly Hills. I’ll stop in there and talk to Lieutenant Remington about it. If he isn’t in tonight, I guess tomorrow would be all right. Of course, this whole thing could have been some kind of hoax. We occasionally get cranks who love to heckle us small operators.”

  He smiled. “Let’s hope it’s that. Not, you understand, that I want you to have the annoyance. But I’d rather you had that than I had a visit from a man in hiding. Especially a man who disappeared under such unusual circumstances.”

  I stood up. “If it is a prank, the prankster must have known about Pasadena. Perhaps there’s a lead in that the police can run down. Sorry to have troubled you, sir.”

  He smiled again. “No trouble at all. Can you find your way out all right?”

  I told him I could and went out, almost certain the man had lied to me, but knowing not I nor the police could ever prove that. A man who had been active in public affairs as long as Horace Wilding didn’t stop reading the papers completely. And if he remembered Leo Dunbar, he would have read about the case. His lie had been the transparent and contemptuous lie of the invulnerable.

  I had probably made a foolish move; my visit could act as a warning. Unless Tomsic was actually hiding from the mob, in which case my visit might stir up some action. And without action from the the other side, I had no port of entry into this plastic puzzle.

  From home I phoned Dorothy Dunbar and asked her if she remembered Horace Wilding from her Pasadena days.

  She said she did, and asked, “Has he anything to do with what happened to Leo?”

  “I’m not sure, and please don’t mention his name to anyone. What kind of a man was he, in Pasadena?”

  “A social climber. Leo never liked him; he didn’t trust him. I’d always thought of him as rather charming, if insubstantial. It’s only a rumor, you understand, but a persistent one, that he had a bad credit rating.”

  I wished the patronizing Horace Wilding could have heard the patronage in the voice of Dorothy Dunbar. There is something about the Pasadena and Santa Barbara money that makes all the other California money look a little dirty. Dorothy Hartland Dunbar had been adulterous, but she had never been guilty of a bad credit rating.

  I thanked her and hung up. I sat by the phone for a moment, musing on the various forms snobbery can take in our democratic civilization and then went to the refrigerator for a bottle of Einlicher.

  There is nothing like a bottle of Einlicher to rekindle one’s faith in his fellow men. A warm shower on top of that and I went to bed to sleep without dreams, in the room where Louis Reno died.

  I had a visitor in the morning at my office. It was Lieutenant Haskell Ryerson from downtown, the ace man in the Auto Theft Division.

  “That’s some name you picked out of the hat,” he said smilingly. “Where did you get it?”

  “I told Pascal I couldn’t tell anyone that.”

  Ryerson continued to smile. “And Pascal told me. But I had to make the try.” He looked past me thoughtfully. “We usually average about seven thousand stolen cars a year and recover almost ninety-seven percent of them.” He looked back at me. “This year it will probably run to nine thousand cars. And I can guess that eighteen hundred of them will never be recovered. What does that spell to you?”

  “A well-organized mob. With plenty of outlets.”

  He nodded. “A lot of the cars have disappeared into Mexico, and others have been found in all the states this side of the Rockies. Looks local, doesn’t it?”

  “I suppose, Lieutenant.” I hesitated, and then told him what I’d done last night.

  He frowned, saying nothing.

  “Dumb?” I asked.

  “Maybe. How well do you stand with the local Department?”

  “As well as any private man ever can. I guess I don’t have to tell you that isn’t too well.”

  “Who’s your best contact there?”

  “Lieutenant Remington, I guess. And I told Wilding I was going to check in there last night. I didn’t.”

  “You should have.”

  “Well, I — wanted to give Wilding the impression I could be bought. I figured my only hope was some offer from him I can’t go bulling in, you know, like yo
u fellows can. Deception is my business.”

  He looked at me bleakly. “You know where that can lead.”

  I nodded. “I’m aware of it every minute of the day and some nights. It occasionally almost sends me into another line of work.”

  He looked at my desk top. “You — ah — haven’t actually been in communication with George Tomsic?”

  I thought of Mary Macarty briefly, and said, “No, I haven’t.”

  He stood up. “Well, I’ll talk to Lieutenant Remington.” He shook his head anxiously. “I wish Louis Reno had lived.”

  “You don’t wish it as much as I do. Build me up, when you see Remington, won’t you, Lieutenant?”

  He smiled again. “I’ll do my best. Carry on, Callahan. And keep your nose clean.”

  “That’s not easy, Lieutenant, but I mean to try.”

  He went out and I went to work on my reports. We didn’t have a morning overcast this morning; the office was sunny and dryly warm. The boys would be playing Detroit this Sunday, at Detroit. They were probably boarding the plane right now.

  Fearless Fosdick … With holes in my head. So, it was better than driving a truck. What was I trained for; what had I learned? To make a hole, to protect a passer. And, at Stanford, to run interference. My mother had taught me politeness and my dad had taught me to take lip from no man.

  My dad had been killed by a hoodlum, taking no lip.

  I finished the reports and stood up and stretched. A typewriter can really take it out of you.

  My phone rang, and it was Remington. His voice was gruff. “Lieutenant Ryerson was just in here, Callahan.”

  “He told me he would be,” I said politely.

  “All right, one question. Who’s your client?”

  I smiled to myself and held my shoulders back and said distinctly, “Dorothy Hartland Dunbar. She was Loony Leo’s wife. And before that she was one of the Pasadena Hartlands.”

  A silence. Fairly long, and, I felt, respectful. Then once more his gruff voice: “Okay. You keep in touch with us, though.”

  “Always, Lieutenant,” I said humbly. “Sergeant Gnup and I have worked together before, to our mutual advantage.”

  “I’m remembering that,” he said. “That’s why you’re still in business.”

  I could have reminded him that the state issued my license, not the Beverly Hills Police Department. But my mother had taught me politeness. I said, “I’ll keep in touch with him regarding everything that takes place in Beverly Hills, Lieutenant.”

  He hung up and I hung up and I filed my reports. I did some knee bends to test my bad knee and three was all I could achieve. I stood by the window, looking out at the bright day and wondering if any wheels were turning on the other side of the law.

  I couldn’t just sit here. I phoned the West Side Station and got Caroline. I asked him if he had an address for Hans Deutscher.

  He told me to hang on; he would look it up. In a minute, he came back to the phone and gave it to me. It was a Hollywood address; I wrote it on a card and thanked him.

  Then he asked, “Has Lieutenant Ryerson contacted you, yet?”

  “He was here this morning.”

  “Good. That name looks less crazy every minute, Callahan.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “These social climbers must be kept in their places, right?”

  “Wh-a-a-a-t?”

  I thanked him again and hung up. I had never previously enjoyed such genial Department coöperation; it made me uncomfortable.

  Hollywood has the rich and the poor and the harassed middle class. The neighborhood Hans Deutscher lived in was not the best, nor completely the worst.

  It was a four-unit apartment with a littered back yard and the grass turning gray in the front. The stucco was cracked and chipping away, the paint was faded and peeling. The neighborhood had a — defeated air.

  Deutscher’s business card was thumbtacked over a bell button serving the rear apartment on the right. I was reaching for it when I heard voices through the thin door.

  “You’d think the son-of-a-bitch would keep records some place, wouldn’t you?”

  “Sure, but where, where, where …? What I’d like to know is who gave him all his information? Well, we’ll get that out of him before we dump him.”

  There was the sound of furniture being moved and I started back the way I’d come. A phone was what I wanted.

  The door opened in the front apartment on the right and an elderly man said nasally, “Looking for the Holtz’s, mister? They moved over a month ago.”

  “I’m looking for a phone,” I said quietly. “Or better yet, perhaps you could phone the police.”

  “Don’t whisper,” he said crankily. “My hearing ain’t what it was. What’d you say about the police?”

  I put my finger to my mouth, and beckoned him closer. Then, as he inclined his head toward me, I whispered in his ear, “Some hoodlums are ransacking Deutscher’s apartment. Phone the police, but keep your voice low. These walls are thin, remember.”

  His eyes widened and he stared at me in conspiratorial glee. Then he put his finger to his lips, nodded, and closed the door.

  And a voice behind me said, “All right, Callahan. This way. Don’t make a bad move; I’d get a bonus if I brought you in dead.”

  The walls were thinner than I thought. I turned at the prodding of his gun and faced down the hall. A thin and ugly little man in a brown tweed suit was standing in the doorway to Deutscher’s apartment. I had a feeling the man behind me could be Louis Reno’s former partner.

  The little man asked, “This the guy bumped Reno?”

  The man behind must have nodded, for the little man said, “Don’t get sentimental, now. We need him alive for a while. We can take him out the back way.”

  There was a door at the end of the hall, and the little man opened it. Keeping his gun in my back, the other man slid his hand over my shoulder and relieved me of the .38. Then he prodded me forward.

  The door opened onto an alley; an Imperial was parked on a deserted lot across the alley. Traffic was visible at both ends of the alley, but nothing alive was visible in the immediate area. They had me, real cute.

  The little man went ahead to open the back door of the Imperial and my guardian said quietly, “Lay down on the floor in back. You try to look out, we’ll fix you so you can’t see anything, any way. Got it?”

  I nodded. I climbed into the back and pulled my legs up and lay on my side. Now I could see the bigger man and it was Reno’s ex-partner. He said to the other man, “There’s a blanket in the luggage compartment. Get it.”

  In a minute that was thrown over me, and both of them got into the front seat. The bigger one said, “My arm’s hanging over the back here, Callahan, and there’s a gun in my hand. It’s a .45 and it could make a hole in you big enough to hold an orange. So be real good, won’t you?”

  “I will,” I said.

  “So that’s the guy bumped Reno,” the little man said musingly, and the engine started.

  One thought I hung onto desperately — if they intended to kill me, they wouldn’t have needed to keep me down where I couldn’t see their route. They were going to some hideaway, and they didn’t want me to know where it was so I could tell the police later.

  It could have been just something I wanted to believe.

  NINE

  THE BLANKET WAS dusty and my nostrils seemed dry and gritty. My knee ached and my heart pounded and the Imperial moved over the bumpy surface of the alley to the street.

  We turned right and I tried to remember the area, in an attempt to get some clue to our route by the increased sound of traffic at crossings.

  But this was a part of Hollywood with which I wasn’t familiar, and I noticed no increased sound of engine noises at the crossings. It was a heavy car, with heavy doors, and the blanket helped to muffle the outside sounds.

  If we went toward the ocean, I might be able to smell the sea, though even that was doubtful. Damn that old m
an and his bad hearing….

  I heard the sound of a siren and thought I heard one of the men in front chuckle. The siren went by, going the other way.

  The old man would describe me and they’d find my car in front, but the old man wouldn’t know about this car, parked off the alley. The police would have no way to trail me, none at all.

  I thought of Leo Dunbar, now ashes. I thought of Louis Reno and I thought of my father. Was this all in the pattern?

  I saw Crazylegs going up for a pass and Waterfield coming in that day at Milwaukee when he’d driven the Packers insane. Twelve minutes to go and we were losing by twenty-eight to six and he won it, thirty to twenty-eight. One of the great ones, old Waterbuckets.

  I thought of my father.

  The Imperial hummed along, quiet as a hearse.

  All this because Jan had wanted to watch Loony Leo on television. No, that wasn’t fair. I didn’t have to check on that Cadillac and I didn’t have to accept Dorothy Dunbar as a client.

  The big car turned right and its speed increased. We couldn’t be out of the heavy traffic by this time unless we were heading west. I shifted my bad knee, trying to get it into a more comfortable position.

  They must have Hans Deutscher, too. The conversation I’d heard behind the thin door of his apartment indicated that. So Deutscher hadn’t been working for them. Who, then …?

  Maybe being captives of the same enemy would make Dutch a confidant of mine and he would tell me who he was working for. If either of us lived long enough. I remembered they’d said they’d get the information they wanted out of Dutch before they “dumped” him. What had they meant by that? It didn’t necessarily mean “kill,” I told myself.

  The Imperial went over some tracks and tracks are rare in my town. I tried to guess which they could be. The motor hum rose and it seemed to me we were really moving now.

  I could taste the dust of the blanket, and I tried to push it gently away from my nose.

  The man in front said, “Easy, Callahan; I’m watching you.”

  “This blanket’s dusty,” I said. “It’s hard to breathe under it.”

  “I could fix you so you wouldn’t have to breathe. Would you rather have that?”