Eureka

CHAPTER 11

It was an easy drive. The traffic was light and after I passed Santa Barbara, the two-laner was almost deserted. Occasionally a truck would rumble past going south with a load of produce, the driver giving me a friendly wave. A yellow Lincoln limo passed me as I was leaving Santa Barbara. The chauffeur was stiff as a mannequin and was hanging on to the wheel as if he was afraid he’d blow out of the car if he let go. Four kids, all of whom looked to be under six, were playing tag in the backseat. One of them looked out the window as they cruised by and stuck her tongue out at me. I smiled at her and she looked as startled as if she had walked in on Mommy and Daddy having a nooner.

I thought a lot about Millie, then my mind went to work, back to the list Jane at the bank had prepared for me. The night before, I had sorted through the bank names on that list. Then on my blackboard I had listed in different colors the ones with the most checks to their credit and, vertically under them, the dates the checks were received. It boiled down to four banks in San Pietro, one in Mendosa, a little town south of San Pietro, and a bunch of banks in nearby towns like San Luis Obispo and Chino. And there was a smattering of other banks: a couple in L.A., a couple in San Diego, one in San Francisco, probably mailed when the sender was on a business trip. Then I rearranged them by dates and ended up with a chart.

A pattern had begun to emerge. No two checks were ever sent from the same bank back-to-back. They were spaced evenly, with the oddball dropping into the mix occasionally. But basically it was Bank A, Bank B, Bank C, Bank D, Bank E, Bank F, and so on. There were seven main feeders and the other three were spaced in here and there.

A check every eight or nine months, not often enough to raise any suspicions at the banks.

Somebody was being very cautious about the five hundred a month. A lot of work went into the plan, somebody was keeping track. Somebody had a little book with all this data neatly written out, the dates probably projected ahead for six months or six years. And it had been going on for at least sixteen years, probably longer than that considering she was four grand ahead when she checked into the West L.A. National and the modest house in the Meadows.

Using cashier’s checks and moving from bank to bank was clever. If this was blackmail, the money trail would be almost impossible to follow-unless the blackmailer meticulously kept a list of every check, year after year. If Verna Wilensky had been blackmailing someone all these years and kept such a list, why wasn’t it in a safe deposit box somewhere instead of in a desk at home where it would be easy to snatch? Perhaps Verna Wilensky was simply a fastidious record keeper. Clever or meticulous? I wondered which applied to Verna.

One thing was certain, whoever had been paying her five hundred bucks a month for all those years was either rich or corrupt.

Or both.

Five hundred dollars is a lot of money now. It was really a lot of money in the heart of the Depression. But the checks came like clockwork on the third of every month.

Why? What did she have on this person, if that’s what it was?

I thought about the picture of Verna Wilensky, the one from the newspaper. A dumpy little middle-aged brunette in a cotton dress, staring off-camera with a shy grin. She didn’t look like a woman who had done something nearly two decades ago that had kept her in niceties for all these years.

But then, they never do. When I was in Missing Persons I had a case involving a Beverly Hills banker who was as clean as fresh bedsheets: a deacon in the church, beautiful wife, three kids, perfect health, president of the Rotarians, never played around or even flirted with another woman. Mr. Wonderful. His name was Rupert Archman. Archman vanished one day and so did fifty thousand of the bank’s dollars. Poof, just like that. Three months went by. Then a car drove in front of a fast-moving freight out in Burbank one afternoon. The driver was welded into the wreckage. We had to check his teeth to determine who he was.

It was Archman. Eventually we traced his footsteps. They started in Reno, where he picked up a naked dancer seventeen years old, took her down to Tijuana, blew the fifty on booze, gambling, and little brown cigarettes, and when he ran out of dough she ran out on him. So he came back to L.A. and drove his car in front of a train. No note, no nothing. He wasn’t even wearing his wallet.

I always liked my partner’s take on it: “Hey, two months living it up with a seventeen-year-old punch. What else could ever live up to that?”

Why? I had no idea. What did I know? I was twenty-four at that time, three years on the force. You have to be a lot older than that to crawl into somebody’s brain and trace its scars with your fingertips. Maybe you never get that old.

Or maybe it was something simpler with Verna. Maybe she had an illegitimate child, couldn’t take care of it, and sold it to some rich couple who couldn’t have children. It wasn’t that unheard of in the early twenties, even less unusual during the Depression. I was hoping it would be an answer like that, something with a little heartbreak attached. A story the sob sisters would give an arm and a leg to get exclusively: mother who sold baby drowns in bizarre bathtub accident

But deep down in my gut I knew better.

A few miles on, I approached a dilapidated roadside fruit stand and pulled off the highway onto the crumbled macadam of the shoulder, its ground-up pieces showering the underbelly of the Chevy like shotgun pellets. The ramshackle stand looked like it had been built from washed-up beach lumber. It was at the bottom of a hill. Rows of orange trees lined the crest. There was a small picnic table beside the stand, with sagging seats and a mildewed beach umbrella that shielded one side of it from the sun. I was attracted by the hand-painted sign that told me I could get fresh orange juice for a nickel. My mouth was dry. I stared over a shelf the width of the shack, covered with oranges the size of melons, at a small, round Mexican woman the color of a pecan nut, who sat forlornly on a rickety stool in a corner of the small shack. She was reading the Spanish edition of a dog-eared paperback with a lurid cover: A well-endowed woman with her dress ripped in shreds was looking saucer-eyed at a large Chicano gent who had either murder or amour on his mind, it was hard to tell which. Behind her were several shelves holding straw baskets of apples, papayas, and some anemic-looking strawberries.

She gave me a smile that revealed two missing teeth in the center of her mouth. I learned quickly from the little woman that five cents was for the small size, indicated by a paper cup she held up that was roughly the dimensions of a Dixie cup. The only other size was big enough to hold a keg of beer. My Spanish was negligible so I took the bigger cup and pointed to a spot about halfway to the top.

“Quanto?” I asked.

“Fi’teen?” she answered, making it a question.

“Sure,” I nodded.

She picked five of the prettiest oranges from the shelf, took them to a small table near the back of the shack, sliced them with a machete which she then buried in the side of the table, and started squeezing them; the juice, golden and sweet-smelling, poured into the base of the squeezer, which she then emptied into the cup. I put two dimes on the counter and told her to keep the change.

She had no trouble understanding that. She flashed her toothless smile and returned to her stool and her book.

I took a seat near the end of the picnic table under the umbrella. The juice was warm but sweet as sugarcane and I took it down in small sips, letting it wash the inside of my mouth before swallowing it. I stared up the hill behind the stand as I drank. Near its top, a young woman in a white silk shirt and jodhpurs was riding a black-and-white pinto stallion. Her jet-black hair was tied in a ponytail that snapped in the wind. She knew what she was doing. She traversed part of the hill and then wheeled the horse around as expertly as a cowboy dogging a steer and went at full gallop back the way she had come, leaning forward in the stirrups, her rump barely touching the saddle, like a jockey steaming down the homestretch. Then she pulled him around and trotted over the crest of the hill and vanished into the orange grove.

I was a long way from L.A.

I finished my juice, threw the cup into a battered garbage pail filled with sour-smelling refuse, got in the car, and went on my way.

A mile or two on the other side of Santa Maria, I saw a forest-green sign with bright yellow letters that read san pietro 2 miles. I turned onto State Road 7. It was a narrow but well-paved road on the crest of a foothill. Pine trees shouldered up close to the road and hid the ocean from view. About a mile later, the road curved through a draw in the hillside and suddenly San Pietro lay before me. A small sign pointed south to Milltown and Mendosa. I stopped, got out, and leaned against the front fender while I took in the scene that spread out in front of and below me.

It looked as if a fist the size of a mountain had slammed into the foothill that petered out at the sea, forming a secluded bowl where the town sat as though resting in the palm of that giant hand. On three sides, the foothill sloped up for perhaps a mile. The ocean formed the other side of the village.

It was hard to imagine that the peaceful town that lay at the foot of the hill had once been one of the toughest towns in the county. I wondered how the corruption and violence had affected young Culhane, who grew up with such a spectacle representing his future. Why had he come back to a place like that after the war? Was it anger that had motivated him to go nose-to-nose with the lawless element that ran the town? Or was it greed? Was Culhane a product of under-the-table politics? Had he really cleaned up the town? Or had he merely exchanged one form of corruption for another? And was he a keeper of the law? Or was he above it?

Whatever had motivated Culhane, it had worked for the town once known as Eureka. San Pietro was now a town that might have popped off a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. The downtown section was twelve blocks long and as many blocks wide. The storefronts were white and trimmed in grays and light blues and reds. At the south end of the town, dominating a low, flat shoulder of the foothill that ran out at the sea, was a large U-shaped hotel. The open side of the U faced the ocean. An Olympic-size swimming pool surrounded by beach umbrellas and cabanas and emerald grass was embraced by the sides of the two-story resort. On the south side of the building were four tennis courts, with canvas panels facing the sea to cut the ocean’s wind. Across the street was a large parking lot half-filled with Packards, Maxwells, Caddies, Pierce-Arrows, and a smattering of Rolls-Royces. A Ford or Chevy would have been as out of place in that lot as a three-hundred-pound girl in the Miss California contest.

Separating it from the rest of town was a large public park with a fountain at its center. On one side of the park was a large three-story building built in the Mexican style, with an orange tiled roof and pale yellow walls and a United States flag flying from the spire of the tower that dominated it. Facing it on the other side of the park was a movie house. On the ocean side of the park were the public docks.

Sailboats rocked serenely at its piers. Others were anchored nearby, captained by rugged individuals who preferred anchoring free of land. Farther out in the bay, a white Grebe yacht trimmed with teak drifted idly at anchor. It looked as big as a football field and sat low in the water. I reached in the car pocket, retrieved my binoculars, and focused on the yacht, sweeping the deck slowly from the stern. The brass fittings were buffed and spotless, the hardwood decks glittered in the bright sunlight, the portholes and windows were as immaculate as a Florentine mirror. I moved the glasses a little farther. A woman lay on the large front deck facing the sun, on a beach blanket that would have covered my living room. She was stark naked. A few feet away, a white-haired man in white ducks, canvas shoes, and a red-and-white-striped shirt was sitting with his feet on the rail, drink in hand, staring out to sea as though she didn’t exist. I suppose if you can afford a setup like that, you take everything for granted. I hoped I never got that rich.

Moving in from the sea and surrounding the village on the north and west were tree-lined streets, where I assumed the common folk lived in pleasant bungalows. Beyond the residential section, the hill rose up sharply. A wide, sweeping ridge swept around the bowl, forming a broad mesa. I was parked on one side. A golf course consumed most of the ridge to the east and north. Facing me, hidden among pines and water oaks, was where the rich obviously lived.

The roofs of mansions peeked above the foliage spotting the hillside as it rose to the crest of the foothill. A two-lane road curved up the side of the hill and vanished into the thick trees. A strip of stores a couple of blocks long wound through the trees and then, a few city blocks farther on, the ridge ended on a cliff overlooking the ocean. A three-story Victorian mansion sat as close to the edge of the cliff as was safe. From it, a narrow road tortured its way along the cliff a mile or so down into the village. It was like Olympus, where the gods of this sequestered community could look down on the common folk and dictate the mores, morals, and standard of living of mere mortals.

So this was it? A town of maybe two thousand people? A town so serene and peaceful a lizard sitting in the sun would probably die of boredom. A town which, like all small towns, probably harbored secrets darker than a pedophile’s soul. A town that had nurtured and reared the man who might become the next governor of the state.

As I was standing there, binoculars in hand, a black Pontiac came down the road on my side and slowed almost to a stop. The car drifted past me and a roughneck as big as a billboard gave me a hard stare out of his one good eye. The other eye was frozen in one position and stared straight ahead, while the serviceable one stayed on me until the car was well past. Then it picked up speed again. The license plate read sp 3 and the attitude told me they were cops. Small-town cops. Cops with muscle who wrote their own rule books and, for nothing at all, could give you more grief than a broken back.

Moriarity was right. They knew I was there before I did. It was time to move on. I rolled down my sleeves, pulled up my tie, put on my suit jacket and gray fedora, and headed down into Culhane Land.