Black Money

17

I drove back toward the harbor by way of the ocean boulevard, to spend what was left of the night at the Breakwater Hotel. One or both of the Hendrickses might turn up there, though I didn’t expect them to.

I found myself slowing down as I came near the hobo jungle. It was just as well as I did, or I might not have noticed Harry’s Cadillac. It was on a strip of grass on the ocean side, nosed into the trunk of a palm tree.

There had been a violent impact. The base of the tree was gashed. The Cadillac’s heavy bumper had been forced back into the radiator. The shatterproof windshield was blurred in one place by a head mark. I found some spatterings of blood on the front seat.

Whoever had taken and wrecked the car had left the keys in the ignition. I did what I should have done before: used them to open the trunk.

Harry lay there with his back to me. I put my hand under his head and turned up his face. He had been badly beaten. Until he moaned I thought he might be dead.

I got my arms under his shoulders and legs and lifted him out. It was like delivering a big inert baby from an iron womb. I laid him out on the grass and looked around for help.

The wind hissed in the dry palm fronds overhead. There was nothing human in sight. But I didn’t want to leave Harry. Somebody might steal him again.

I walked across the beach to wet my handkerchief in the water and got one of my feet wet, to no avail. Harry moaned when I wiped his face with the wet cloth, but he didn’t come to. When I lifted one of his eyelids, all I could see was white.

I calculated that he had been unconscious in the trunk for six or seven hours: there wasn’t much doubt in my mind that the blood on Martel’s heel was Harry’s blood: and I decided to get him to a hospital. I heaved him up in my arms again.

I was halfway to my car when a city patrol car with a red light on the roof drifted into sight. It stopped and an officer got out.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“This man was in an accident. I’m taking him to a hospital.”

“We’ll do that.”

He was a young officer, with a keen edge on his voice. He lifted Harry out of my clutches and deposited him on the back seat of the patrol car. Then he turned back to me with his hand on his gun butt.

“Looks to me like he was beaten.”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s see your hands. Come around in the headlights.”

I showed him my hands under the white beam. A second officer got out of the driver’s seat and come up behind me.

“I didn’t beat him. You can see for yourself.”

“Who did?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

I didn’t feel like going into the subject of Martel. “I saw the wrecked car and opened the trunk and he was in it. It’s his car. I think it was stolen.”

“You know him?”

“Slightly. His name is Harry Hendricks. We’re both staying at the Breakwater Hotel. You can reach me there later if you want to.”

I told them who I was. “Right now you better get him to a hospital.”

“Don’t worry. We will.”

“Which hospital?”

“It’ll be County, unless you want to pay for him. Mercy asks for a one-day deposit.”

“How much?”

“Twenty bucks, on the ward.”

I gave him twenty of Peter’s dollars. The officer said his name was Ward Rasmussen, and he would bring me a receipt from the hospital.

The lobby of the Breakwater Hotel was empty except for the ancient bellhop asleep on a settle. I touched him. He started and called out: “Martha?”

“Who’s Martha?”

He rubbed his bleared eyes. “I knew a girl Martha. Did I say Martha?”

“Yep.”

“Must have been dreaming about her. I knew her in Red Bluff. Martha Truitt. I was born and raised in Red Bluff. That was a long time ago.”

Eye-deep in time he trudged around behind the desk and let me register and gave me the key to room 28, which I asked for. The electric clock over his head said it was five minutes past three.

I asked the old man if the red-headed woman, Mrs. Hendricks, had come back to the hotel. He didn’t remember. I left him shaking his head over Martha Truitt.

I fell into bed and dreamed about nothing at all. The wind died just before dawn. I heard the quiet and woke up wondering what was missing. Gray light fogged the window. I could hear the sea thumping like a beggar at the bottom of the town. I turned over and dropped back to sleep.

The telephone woke me. The desk said a policeman wanted to see me. It was full morning, a quarter to eight, by my watch.

While I thought of it, I phoned Eric Malkovsky’s studio. He was there.

“Have you been up all night, Eric?”

“I get up early. I made some enlargements of that negative. Something came out on them that I want to show you.”

“What is it?”

“I’d rather you saw them for yourself and drew your own conclusions.”

“Can you bring them to the Breakwater Hotel?”

He said he could.

“I’ll be either in room 28 or in the coffee shop.”

I pulled on my clothes and went down to the lobby. The young officer, Rasmussen, was carrying Harry’s pearl-gray hat. He handed me a receipt for twenty dollars.

“I hate to get you up so early,” he said, “but I’m going off duty.”

“It’s time I was up. How’s Harry?”

“He’s coming out of it. They’ll be shunting him off to County unless you deposit more money today.”

“Does that make sense?”

“It’s the way the hospital runs its business. I’ve seen people die on the way between Mercy and County. I don’t mean that your friend is liable to die,” he added carefully. “The doctor says he’ll be okay.”

“He isn’t my friend, exactly.”

“He must be twenty dollars’ worth of a friend. Incidentally, if you’re going out to the hospital you can give him his hat. I took it out of his car before the wreckers towed it away. It’s a good hat, and he’ll want it back.”

He gave me the hat. I didn’t bother pointing out that it had the wrong name in it. I was wondering who L. Spillman was, and how Harry got his hat.

“The car’s totaled out.” Rasmussen said. “It wasn’t worth much, but auto theft is auto theft. We picked up three suspects, by the way. They made it easy for us. One of them got a cut head in the accident, and his buddies brought him to the emergency ward.”

“The orange-pickers?”

“Pardon?”

“A white man and a couple of darker brothers?”

“You saw them, did you?” Rasmussen said.

“I saw them. What are you going to do with them?”

“It depends on what they did. I haven’t figured it out yet. If they locked your friend in the trunk and drove him someplace, it’s technically kidnapping.”

“I don’t think they knew he was in the trunk.”

“Then who beat him up? The doctor said he took quite a clobbering, that he was beaten and kicked.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“Do you have any thoughts on who did it to him?”

“Yes, but it will take time.”

He said he had plenty of time, all day in fact. I bought him breakfast, over his objections, and with his ham and eggs and coffee I made him the dubious gift of a piece of the Martel case.

Rasmussen listened intently. “You think Martel beat up Hendricks?”

“I’m morally certain he did – caught him spying on his house and let him have it. But there’s not much point in speculating. Hendricks can tell us about it when he’s able to talk.”

Rasmussen sipped his coffee and made a bitter face. “How did Hendricks’s car get down on the boulevard?”

“I think Martel drove it there, with Hendricks in the trunk, and left it where it would be liable to be stolen.”

Ward Rasmussen looked at me sharply over his coffee cup. His eyes had the blue intensity of Bunsen flames. With his square jaw and disciplined young mouth it gave him a slightly fanatical look. “Who’s this Martel? And why would Virginia Fablon marry him?”

“That’s the question I’m working on. He claims to be a wealthy Frenchman who’s in trouble with the French government. Hendricks says he’s a cheap crook. Martel may be a crook, and I suspect he is, but he isn’t a cheap one. He’s traveling with a hundred grand in cash, in a Bentley, with the prettiest girl in town.”

“I knew Virginia in high school,” Rasmussen said. “She was a beautiful girl. And she had a lot on the ball. She made it to college when she was sixteen years old. She graduated from high school a whole semester ahead of the class.”

“You seem to remember quite a lot about her.”

“I used to follow her down the street,” he said. “Just once I got up the nerve to ask her to go to a dance with me. That was when I was captain of the football team. But she was going with Peter Jamieson.”

A shadow of envy moved across his eyes. He lifted his crewcut head as if to shake it off. “It’s funny she’d turn around and marry this Martel. You think he came to town to marry her?”

“That’s what happened, anyway. I don’t know what his original plans were.”

“Where did he get the hundred thousand?”

“He deposited it in the form of a draft on a bank in Panama City, the Bank of New Granada. It fits in with his claim that his family has holdings in various foreign countries.”

Rasmussen leaned across the table, elbowing his empty cup to one side. “It fits in equally well with the fact – the idea that he’s a crook. A lot of criminal money gravitates to Panama, on account of their banking laws.”

“I know. That’s why I mentioned it. There’s another thing. The woman who was shot last night, Virginia Fablon’s mother, had an income from the same bank.”

“How much of an income?”

“I don’t know. You may be able to get the details from her local bank, the National.”

“I’ll give it a whirl.”

He took out a new-looking notebook.

While he was making some shorthand notes, Eric Malkovsky arrived, carrying a manila envelope. I introduced the two men. Then Eric got his enlargements out of the envelope and spread them on the table.

They were about six-by-eight inches, fresh and clear as though they had been taken the day before. I could see every line on Ketchel’s face. Though he was smiling, sickness lurked behind his smile. The lines around his mouth might just as well have meant dismay. He had the look of a man who had fought his way to the top, or what he considered the top, but took no pleasure in that or anything else.

In the enlargement, the meaning of Kitty’s face had changed a little. Her eyes seemed to hold a faint suspicion that she was a woman who could do something better than just wear clothes, but in the Kitty I had met last night, here in the Breakwater Hotel, the suspicion seemed to have died and left no trace.

“You did a good job, Eric. These pictures will be a big help.”

“Thanks.”

But he was impatient with me. He reached across me and stabbed at the top picture with his forefinger. “Take a good look at the man in the background, the one holding the tray.”

Almost immediately I saw what he meant. Behind the busboy’s wide black mustache I recognized a younger version of Martel.

“He was nothing but a waiter at the club,” Malkovsky said. “Not even a waiter. A busboy. And I let him walk all over me.”

Rasmussen said politely: “May I see one of those?”

I handed him the top picture, and he studied it. The waitress came to the table with a pot of coffee and a breakfast menu spotted with samples of past breakfasts. The waitress herself wore visible clues to her history, in her generous mouth and disappointed eyes, her never-say-die blonde hair, her bunion limp.

“You want to order?” she said to Eric.

“I’ve already eaten breakfast. I’ll have some coffee.”

I said that I would, too. The waitress noticed the picture in front of me when she was pouring it.

“I know that girl,” she said. “She was in here last night. She changed the color of her hair, didn’t she?”

“What time last night?”

“It must have been before seven. I went off at seven. She ordered a chicken sandwich, all white meat.”

She leaned above me confidentially. “Is she a movie star or something?”

“What makes you think she’s a movie star?”

“I dunno. The way she was dressed, the way she looked. She’s a very lovely girl.”

She heard her own voice, raised in enthusiasm, and lowered it. “Excuse me, I didn’t mean to be nosey.”

“That’s all right.”

She limped away, looking slightly more disappointed than she had. Rasmussen said when she was out of hearing: “It’s a funny thing, but I think I know her, too.”

“You may at that. She says she was raised here in town, somewhere in the neighborhood of the railroad tracks.”

Ward Rasmussen scratched his crewcut. “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her. What’s her name?”

“Kitty Hendricks. She is, or was, Harry Hendricks’s wife. According to her, she’s still married to Hendricks, but they haven’t been living together. Seven years ago she was living with the man in the picture there – his name is Ketchel – and she probably still is. She fed me an elaborate story about being private secretary to a tycoon that Martel stole some securities from. But I don’t put much stock in that.”

Ward took some notes. “Where do we go from here?”

“You’re in this, are you?”

He smiled. “It beats citing people for jaywalking. My ambition is to do detective work. Incidentally, may I keep a copy of this picture?”

“I want you to. Remember she’s seven years older now, and redheaded. See if you can track down her family and get a line on her whereabouts. She probably knows a lot more than she told me. Also, she’ll lead us to Ketchel, I hope.”

He folded the picture into his notebook. “I’ll get right on it.”

Before he left, Ward wrote his address and telephone number on a page of his notebook. He was still living with his father, he said, though he hoped to get married soon. He handed me the torn out page, and strode out of the coffee shop, eager even on his own time.

My heart went out to the boy. More than twenty years ago, when I was a rookie on the Long Beach force, I had felt very much as he did. He was new to the harness, and I hoped it wouldn’t cut too deep into his willing spirit.