Eureka

CHAPTER 23

I picked up Ski a little after seven in the morning and took the same route I had taken going up to San Pietro the first time. Ski spent most of the trip dead asleep, sitting straight up with his arms folded. He didn’t like long drives.

When we passed the fruit stand on 101, I looked up on the hill but the beautiful young girl on the pinto pony wasn’t there. Maybe it had been a vision. Maybe there wasn’t any girl on a pony dashing across the hilltop. Maybe it was subconscious. Maybe Millicent was the young girl and the pony was her baby-blue Phaeton. Maybe I was thinking too much.

At the turnoff I nudged my partner.

“Almost there,” I said. “Any time now a black Pontiac will probably drop in behind us.”

But it didn’t. I stopped at the overlook and gave Ski a quick visual tour of San Pietro, the Hill, and Grand View House. I looked out on the bay but the Grebe yacht was gone. We drove down into town.

I parked in front of the city hall. The maroon Packard was parked haphazardly a few yards farther on.

“That’s Culhane’s prowler,” I told Ski as we got out.

“Does very well for the sheriff of a county the size of a saltine,” Ski said.

“The county owns it,” I said. “I guess that makes it legal.”

Ski just snorted derisively. I left him to stroll around the park.

There was no sign of Culhane or Rusty, but I couldn’t imagine them being very far from his rolling office. I went in to the police station. Rosie was behind the counter. She recognized me when I walked through the door.

“Hi,” I said. “Remember me?”

She graced me with what might have passed for a smile and said, “He’s fishing. It’s Friday.”

“Ah. Wednesday everybody plays golf at noon, Friday morning they go fishing. When do they take their ballet lessons?”

“The captain wouldn’t know one end of a golf club from the other.” She looked at the Seth Thomas on the wall. “He should be in any time now.”

“I’ll just go down and wait by the pier.”

“It’s a free world,” she said, looking for something else to do. As I was headed for the door she mumbled, “He said you’d be back.”

I went back to the car, drove to the foot of the street, and parked next to a silver Duesenberg Murphy convertible, which was sitting in a diagonal parking strip between the park and the pier area. Ski wandered over munching on a snow cone.

“That’s a cute little buggy,” he said. “Must be fifty G’s worth of car, at least. Are you sure you’re allowed to park next to it?”

“That’s Gorman’s car,” I said.

“He’s the shy banker?”

“Shy or ill-mannered or maybe both. Take your pick.”

Along the length of the pier were several booths, capped with bright umbrellas, offering everything from hot dogs, soft drinks, and sandwiches to booze. Between them and the pier were patio tables with the same patterned umbrellas providing shade. Beyond the pier, the ocean stretched off to the horizon under a cloudless azure sky.

We sat down at one of the tables and checked out the harbor. To the north, on the public beach, a couple of kids were building a sand castle while their mother was stretched out on a canvas beach chair, reading a book. Farther down, four bobby-soxers were horse-wrestling in the water, the girls teetering on their boyfriends’ shoulders. I raised a pair of binoculars to look up the side of the cliff to the overlook and then on up to Grand View. Only its spires were visible above the trees. Then I pulled the glass down below the overlook to the ledge. From my angle I could just see the edge of the ledge and the tops of the pine trees, bent and flat-topped from the ocean winds. Something started gnawing at the back of my brain but I couldn’t sort it out.

“See anything interesting?” Ski asked.

“Not from this angle. There’s a ledge about halfway up that mean-ass road on the side of the cliff.”

“With the flat-top trees?”

“Yeah. There’s also what’s left of a 192 °Chevy on that ledge.”

“No kidding. What’s it doing there?”

“Some kid lost control of his car and went over.” I handed him the binoculars. “See the little spur up there with the stone wall around it?”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s foggy up there every night. Apparently he missed the curve. They put the wall around it after that. The road’s closed now.”

“Ain’t you the fountain of information,” Ski said. “You ought to apply for a job as a tour guide.” Then he said, “There’s somebody up there.”

I looked up, but the overlook was too far away to tell anything with the naked eye.

“It’s a woman,” he said. “Rich; she’s wearing a hat and gloves. Carrying flowers.”

I took the glasses. Ski was right, she was rich. You can always tell. Even when a rich woman dresses down, she’s dressed up.

She walked to the edge of the wall, looked out over the ocean for a minute or two, then down at the ledge, and threw the bouquet over the side. I watched it tumble end over end, catch the updraft, and skewer out flat before it fell off the wind stream and dropped almost straight down. It caught for a minute on one of the trees then vanished, cut off by the angle of my view. When I swung the glasses back up to the overlook, the rich woman was gone.

I pulled down the glasses and stared up the side of the cliff without focusing on anything. The nibble in my brain became a big bite.

I looked back out at the bay but there was still no sign of a power boat.

“I just thought of something,” I said. “Have a hot dog; I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

“Are you embarrassed to take me?” he asked, feigning hurt feelings.

“Uh-huh,” I said.

I got in the car and drove down the main drag to February Street and grabbed a right, followed it down to Third Street. Nothing had changed at the Howland house. The collie was still sleeping in the front yard and he didn’t open an eye as I walked past. Mrs. Howland answered after my first knock.

“Remember me?” I asked. “Sergeant Bannon, L.A. police.”

“Oh yes. My goodness, and I’m just a mess.”

“Is Barney here? I won’t be but a minute, I need to ask him a question.”

“Yes. Come in.” She led me to the staircase and called down to him.

“Barney, that nice young fellow from Los Angeles is back. Should I send him down?”

“Mr. Bannon? Of course,” he yelled back.

I went down the steps and he was pecking away at his Royal.

“I have a question, Barney,” I said as we shook hands. I walked over to the framed front pages and found the one I was looking for. The story in the right-hand lower column with the picture of a ruined car, which I had breezed over the first time. The headline read: eli gorman jr. dies as car plunges off overlook

I remembered Culhane telling me his life had changed one night at the overlook.

“Who was Eli Gorman?” I asked.

“The kid’s grandfather. The dead boy was Ben’s son, named after Mr. Eli. Mr. Eli owned the whole valley. He won it in a poker game with his partner, Shamus O’Dell.”

“Of the Grand View O’Dells?”

“Yeah.”

I looked back at the framed front page.

“The car wreck. What happened?”

“Eli Junior was goin’ down to see a silent movie. He was a young hell-raiser, all those young-uns up there were always doing crazy things. He should never have gone down Cliffside; it was so foggy you couldn’t see the end of your nose. He missed the first curve and went right off the overlook. The car burned but of course nobody even noticed that. They didn’t spot it until the next day.”

“What do you mean, nobody noticed it?”

“That was the same night Buck Tallman was killed.”

When I got back to the park, Ski was still scanning the bay with the binoculars. A big Chris Craft with a mile-high flying bridge was entering the mouth of the harbor.

“This is probably our boy now,” he said. Then, “How’d the quickie go?”

“I just got another chapter in the history of San Pietro.”

“Ahh. Enlighten me.” He lowered the glasses.

“That car wreck up on the overlook?”

“Yeah.”

“It was Ben Gorman’s son. The wreck happened the same night as the Grand View shoot-out.”

“You ought to write a book.”

“A lot of action for one night in the life of a small town.”

“They happen that way. In threes. Something else big probably happened that night. Somebody’s cat got run over. Somebody’s Mercedes got a flat tire.”

I looked back up the cliff. “I’ll bet that was his mother. Or sister,” I said.

“Makes sense,” Ski said. “So what?”

“I don’t know. So something.”

“So why don’t you ask old man Gorman. That’s probably his boat.”

“I’ve got better things to ask him.”

“We going to ambush him when they come up?”

“We’ll ambush both of them.”

“My favorite endeavor,” he said with a smile.

We drank lemonades-“fresh squoze,” Ski informed me-and watched the big boat cruise up beside one of the docks. The engine growled as it went into reverse and the sea boiled up behind it like water boiling in a pot. Then Rusty appeared from behind us somewhere and strolled down to meet it. He was dressed, as always, in a dark suit, white shirt, and tie. He didn’t acknowledge me. A deckhand grabbed the tie line, wrapped it around a cleat, and drew the bow in tight against some rubber tires attached to the side of the dock.

Culhane stepped off the cruiser as Rusty reached behind an ear and came up with a cigarette. Culhane lit it, then Rusty jerked a thumb back toward us. Culhane stared at us through dark amber sunglasses. He was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, baggy khaki pants, and white deck shoes. He turned back toward the boat, and the cigarette bobbed in his lips as he said something to somebody I couldn’t see. Then he came toward us with that loping, casual step of his. We held our chairs down. Rusty disappeared around the car and got in on the driver’s side, to roll another cigarette, I assumed.

He came up to the table and said with a crooked smile, “You’re a real bad penny, Cowboy. I see you brought the whole riot squad with you this time.”

“Captain,” I said with a nod. “This is my partner, Ski Agassi.”

Culhane pulled his sunglasses down an inch and stared over them at me. He nodded at Ski, who sat as he usually does, straight-backed, with his melon-sized hands on his knees. Culhane went to the booth and ordered a lemonade.

“It really wasn’t necessary; you made your point the other night,” he said as he came back to the table and sat down. “I owe you an apology about that. There was some… miscommunication between the boys and me. I assume you didn’t get mussed up too much, considering the outcome.”

“The one with the one eye kicks like a mule. Did he locate it, by the way?”

He nodded. “It was okay after he washed the mud off. That was some fancy footwork you showed Max and Lenny.”

“The one with two arms should have grabbed me.”

“That would be Max. Lenny hits harder.”

“Lenny hits very hard. I’ve still got a couple of very sore ribs. Out of curiosity, are all your cops walking-wounded?”

He looked over at me and said, “Lenny lost his arm and Max lost his eye in the same battle. And the reason Rusty doesn’t say much is he caught shrapnel in the throat at the same time. It missed his jugular but took out his voice box.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that so I kept my mouth shut.

“Three damn good cops nobody else will have,” he said. “There’s a couple more around. You’ll probably meet them if you make this a habit.”

“That the fight you won the Silver Star and Purple Heart in?”

“You been doing your homework.”

“It was in the Times. That’s the kind of juice they always salvage from canned resumes. Which reminds me, Max broke the car’s window with his head. It cost the city eleven bucks to fix.”

“Did you have to pay for it?”

“No, thank God. On my salary that’s a significant sum of money.”

“Two and a quarter a month plus another fifty after you put in your first ten years.”

“You been doing a little homework yourself.”

“Public record. I’m a taxpayer; they have to tell me.”

“What else do you know about me?”

“You made detective after only five years on the force and got kicked up to sergeant three years later. That says a lot about your capabilities. Got a bit of a temper, which gets you in hot water on occasion. You drive a four-year-old Olds, which cost you a hundred bucks used, live in a one-bedroom house. No debts to speak about. You’re unmarried, thirty-four years old, went to college for a coupla years, California State, then dropped out to become a cop. Why, I don’t know.”

“I ran out of money,” I said. “And got tired of slinging hash in the White House hamburger joint on Sepulveda for fifteen cents an hour when everybody else was getting rich playing the stock market.”

“They all went broke two years later.”

“Yeah. And I had a guaranteed job with a pension and a health policy.”

“Somehow I don’t think the amenities had a lot to do with it.”

“What gives you that idea?”

“I told you before, I been around cops all my life. The best and the worst. I can read ’em all. You’re the most dangerous kind.”

“Dangerous?” I laughed.

“Yeah. You’re a bulldog. When you’re on to something, you bite it in the ass and don’t let go, even when it’s the wrong something.”

“Is there supposed to be a message somewhere in all that?”

“You’ll figure it out.”

I let that go and backed up a few sentences. “Those amenities you were talking about get more and more important as time goes by,” I said.

“The way you play the game, I’d take the short-end odds you won’t be around to collect that pension.”

I gave him a long stare and said, “You keep saying things that sound like you mean something else.”

He chuckled. “Nah, just a guess. You like to play just off the edge, don’t you?”

“Like how?”

“Like coming up here, announcing your arrival, annoying a lot of leading citizens, then going right back at it after I tell you there’s nothing to be learned. You take down two boys twice your size and give me the message in a paper bag.”

“Is that why you had your boys work me over?”

He looked out over the bay and sipped his lemonade before answering.

“My friend Brett Merrill once told me I should never make a wish out loud, there are people around who might believe me and make it happen. I do that. Something happens, I get a little pissed, maybe I say something like, ‘I wish a piano would fall off a tall building on that guy,’ something like that. I don’t mean it, I’m just bitching out loud. Next thing I know, a Steinway lands on somebody.”

“Lenny hits like a Steinway.”

“You do a pretty good job taking care of yourself. Playing the edge. That’s why you’re a sergeant when most guys your age are still wearing out their shoe soles on a beat out in the boondocks somewhere. I’m not criticizing, mind you. In my book it calls for a certain amount of admiration.”

I changed the subject suddenly. “You didn’t tell me the victim in that car wreck at the overlook was Ben Gorman’s son,” I said.

He gave me the hard eye and said, “You didn’t ask.”

“It wouldn’t have occurred to me.”

“Me either. It was a car wreck. A young man we all loved was killed. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“It happened the night of the Grand View massacre.”

“Well, we didn’t find the car until the next morning. Somebody coming up Cliffside spotted it.”

“That was some night.”

“It was the saddest night in my life,” he said. “I lost Buck Tallman and my godson, back-to-back.”

“He was your godson?”

“Ben Gorman is my best friend.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to sound…”

“Suspicious?”

“No. Unfeeling.”

“That’s a decent thought. Thank you.”

“Is that what you meant by your life changing forever on the stone bench up there?”

“Isabel and Ben never got over it. Neither did I.”

“I think we saw her about a half hour ago.”

“Isabel Gorman? Where?”

I looked up the cliffside. “Up there. Dressed to the teeth. She threw some flowers down the side.”

He stared up at the overlook for several seconds and then nodded. “She does that once a week. Has for over twenty years,” he said, and there was a deep sadness in his voice.

Ski didn’t say a word. He sat there with his hands on his knees, watching through eyes that revealed neither boredom nor interest. But he wasn’t missing a thing.

Nobody said anything now. I looked back out in the harbor. The big cruiser was tied down at the end of the pier. Gorman was nowhere to be seen. The Duesenberg was still sitting there.

“So old Ben’s going to give me the dodge again,” I said finally.

“I keep telling you, there’s nothing to be learned about that dead woman up here.”

“Yeah, you keep telling me. You aren’t trying to oil me, are you, Captain?” I said, smiling.

“I’d know better than to try.”

“Wouldn’t do you much good this time,” I said.

“Oh? How come?”

“Ski?” I said, and the big man took two folded documents from his inside pocket, then laid them on the table in front of Culhane. He spread them apart with the flat of his hand and eyed them for a minute.

“Search warrants,” I said. “For all the banks. One gives us access to the bank records, the other to safe deposit boxes at our discretion. Moriarity got them from Judge Weidemeyer down in district court.”

He stared at the two folded warrants without speaking. A lot of things kneaded through his tough face. He shook his head ever so slightly, then he suddenly stood up. “I’m going to take a shower,” he announced.

“I’d like to take a gander at the public records,” Ski finally said. “Will that be a problem?”

“Nope.” Culhane didn’t bother turning around. “Second floor, records department. Ask for Glenda, she runs the department. Tell her I sent you.”

With that, he got in his car. It made a U-turn, drove past the city hall, and turned right, toward the Breakers Hotel. Ski went up to City Hall. Me? I sat there by myself and stared at the Duesenberg.