Black Money

29

The city of Santa Teresa is built on a slope which begins at the edge of the sea and rises more and more steeply toward the coastal mountains in a series of ascending ridges. Padre Ridge is the first and lowest of these, and the only one inside the city limits.

It was a fairly expensive territory, an established neighborhood of well-maintained older houses, many of them with brilliant hanging gardens. The grounds of 1427 were the only ones in the block that looked unkempt. The privet hedge needed clipping. Crabgrass was running rampant in the steep lawn.

Even the house, pink stucco under red tile, had a disused air about it. The drapes were drawn across the front windows. The only sign of life – was a house wren, which contested my approach to the veranda.

I lifted the lion’s-head knocker and let it drop, hardly expecting an answer. But after a while soft footsteps came from the back of the house. The door was opened, minimally, by a hefty middle-aged woman in a wet blue cotton bathing suit.

“My name is Archer. Is Mrs. Ketchel home?”

“I’ll see.”

The woman stepped out of the puddle that had formed on the tile around her bare feet, and disappeared into the back of the house. I pushed the front door wide open and walked in, conscious of the gun bulging like a benign tumor in my armpit.

There were several closed doors in the hallway, and an open door at the end. Through it I could see across a room, through sliding glass, to the dappled blue water of a swimming pool.

Kitty came out of the water dripping. She crossed the room, leaving wasp-waisted footprints on the rug, and faced me in the doorway. She had on a white elastic bathing suit and a white rubber cap shaped like a helmet which made her look like an Amazon sentinel.

“You get out of here. I’ll call the cops.”

“Sure you will. They’re combing the state for Leo as it is.”

“He hasn’t done anything wrong.” She hedged. “Not recently.”

“I want to hear him tell me that himself.”

“No. You can’t talk to him.”

She stepped forward, pulling the door shut behind her, moving so abruptly that she blundered into me. She put her hands on my shoulders to regain her balance, and recoiled as if I was very hot or cold.

She must hive felt the holster under my jacket. Her fear came back. It made her face work as if she had swallowed poison.

“You came here to kill us, didn’t you?”

“You and I have been through all this before. You seem to have killing on your mind.”

“I’ve seen too many–” She caught herself.

“Seen too many people die?”

“Yeah. In traffic accidents and stuff like that.”

She tried to put on an innocent expression. With her paint removed, and her garish hair covered, she looked younger and realer. But not innocent. “What do you want from us? Money? We have no money.”

“Don’t try to snow me, Kitty. This is the head office of the money factory.”

“It’s true what I tell you. That cat who calls himself Martel eloped with our ready cash, and we can’t realize on our investments.”

“How did he get his hands on the cash?”

“He was supposed to be bringing it to Leo. Leo trusted him. I didn’t, but Leo did.”

“Martel was shot to death in Los Angeles yesterday. Another accident for your memory book. He had a hundred thousand dollars in cash with him.”

“Where is it?”

“I thought it might be here. It was black money, wasn’t it, Kitty?”

She flung up her arms in a jagged movement, bringing her fists to her shoulders, then flung them down again. “I’m not admitting anything.”

“It’s time you did some talking, don’t you think? There’s such a thing as buying immunity with information, especially on an income tax rap.”

Though it wasn’t cold in the hall, she had begun to shiver.

“On a murder rap,” I said, “it isn’t so easy. But you can’t afford to hold back. Did Leo or one of his boys knock off Martel?”

“Leo had nothing to do with it.”

“If he did, and you know he did, you better tell me. Unless you want to go on trial with him.”

“I know he didn’t. He hasn’t left this house.”

“You have.”

She was shivering violently. “Listen, mister, I don’t know what you’re trying to do to us–”

“You’ve done it to yourselves. What you do to other people you do to yourself – that’s the converse of the Golden Rule, Kitty.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Three murders. Martel yesterday. Marietta Fablon the night before, when incidentally you were in Montevista. And Roy Fablon seven years before that. Remember him?”

She nodded jerkily.

“Tell me what happened to Fablon. You were there.”

“Let me get some clothes on first. I’m freezing. I’ve been in with Leo for about an hour.”

“Is he out by the pool?”

“Yes, he’s working with his physiotherapist. Don’t say anything in front of her, will you? She’s a square.”

Kitty peeled off her rubber cap. Her red hair blossomed out. When she opened one of the closed doors, I caught a glimpse of a tousled pink female bedroom with a mirror in the ceiling over the king-sized bed, alas.

I went outside. A wheelchair stood among the poolside furniture. The woman in the blue bathing suit was standing breast-deep in the water with a man in her arms. His face was moon-shaped and flaccid, his body loose. Only his black eyes held some measure of controlled adult life.

“Hello, Mr. Ketchel.”

“I’ll say hello for him,” the woman said. “Mr. Ketchel had a little cerebral accident about three months ago and he hasn’t said a word since. Have you, honey?”

His sad black eyes answered her. Then they shifted apprehensively to me. He smiled placatingly. Saliva dripped from one corner of his mouth.

Kitty appeared at the sliding glass doors and beckoned me inside. She had put on sequined slacks, which winked suggestively, a high-necked angora sweater, a hasty paint job which reduced her face to meaninglessness. It was hard to tell what she had in mind for me.

She took me into a small front room, out of sight of the swimming pool, and opened the drapes. She stood at the window competing with the view. Beside the bulbs and hollows of her body, the sails on the sea looked dinky and remote, like cocked white napkins on a faded blue tablecloth.

“You see what I’ve got on my hands?” she said with her hands out. “A poor little sick old man. He can’t walk, he can’t talk, he can’t even write his name. He can’t tell me where anything is. He can’t protect me.”

“Who do you need protection from?”

“Leo made a lifetime of enemies. If they knew he was helpless, his life wouldn’t be worth that.” She snapped her fingers. “Neither would mine. Why do you think we’re hiding out in the tules here?”

To her, I thought, the tules meant any place that wasn’t on the Chicago-Vegas-Hollywood axis. I said: “Is Leo’s partner Davis one of the threats?”

“He’s the main one. If Leo dies or gets knocked off, Davis has the most to gain.”

“The Scorpion Club.”

“He already owns it on paper: the Tax Commission made Leo give it up. And he has a beef against Leo.”

“I talked to Davis last night. He offered me money to tell him where Leo is.”

“So that’s why you’re here.”

“Stop jumping to conclusions. I turned him down.”

“Realty?”

“Really. What’s his beef against Leo?”

She shook her head. Her hair flared out in the sunlight. Oddly it reminded me of the orange-pickers’ fire in the railroad yards. The queer forced intimacy of that night still hung as a possibility between me and Kitty.

“I can’t tell you that,” she said.

“Then I’ll tell you. Internal Revenue is after Leo for the money he took off the top. If they can’t find him and the money, maybe even if they can, they’ll pin the rap on Davis. At the very least he’ll lose his license for fronting for a concealed interest. At worst he’ll go to the federal pen for the rest of his life.”

“He isn’t the only one.”

“If you mean Leo, the rest of his life isn’t worth much.”

“What about the rest of my life?”

She touched her furred angora breast. “I’m not even thirty yet. I don’t want to go to prison.”

“Then you better make a deal.”

“And turn Leo in? I will not.”

“They won’t do anything to him, in his condition.”

“They’ll lock him up. He won’t get his therapy. He’ll never learn to talk or write or–” She stopped herself in mid-sentence.

“Or tell you where the money is?”

She hesitated. “What money? You said the money was gone.”

“The hundred grand is. But my information is that Leo took millions off the top. Where is it?”

“I wish I knew, Mister.”

Through her composed mask I could see the calculation going on behind her eyes. “What did you say your name was?”

“Archer. Does Leo know where the money is?”

“I think so. He still has some of his brain left. But it’s hard to tell how much he understands. He always pretends to understand everything I say. So the other day I tried him on some gibberish. He smiled and nodded just the same.”

“What did you say?”

“I wouldn’t want to repeat it. It was just a lot of dirty words about what I’d do for him if he’d learn to talk. Or even write.”

Tensely, she clasped her arms across her chest, “It drives me crazy when I think of what I went through in the hopes of a little peace and security. The beatings he handed out, and the other stuff: Don’t think I didn’t have other chances. But I stuck with Leo. Stuck is the word. Now I’m stuck with a cripple and it’s costing us two grand a month to live – six hundred a month just for doctors and therapy – and I don’t know where next month’s money is coming from.”

Her voice rose. “I’d be a millionaire if I had my rights.”

“Or your wrongs.”

She tossed her head. “I earned that money, I ground it out like coffee over the years. Don’t tell me I’ve got no right to it. I’ve got a right to a decent living.”

“Who told you that?”

“Nobody had to tell me. A woman with my looks – I can pick and choose.”

It was childish talk, self-hypnotic and pathetic. It gave me a hint of the self-enclosed fantasy that had paired her off with Leo Spillman and kept her with him, insulated from life by his larger fantasy.

“You mean you get picked and chosen. Why don’t you go out and hustle? You’re a big strong girl.”

She was still on her adolescent high horse. “How dare you? I’m not a prostitute.”

“I don’t mean that kind of hustle. Get a job.”

“I’ve never had to work for a living, thank you.”

“It’s time you did. If you keep dreaming about those vanished millions you’ll dream yourself into Camarillo or Corona.”

“Don’t you dare make threats to me!”

“It isn’t me threatening you. It’s your dreams. If you won’t lift a finger to help yourself, go back to Harry.”

“That feeb? He couldn’t even stay out of hospital.”

“He gave everything he had.”

She was silent. Her face was like a colored picture straining in agony to come to life. Life glittered first in her eyes. A tear made a track down her cheek. I found myself standing beside her comforting her. Then her head was like an artificial dahlia on my shoulder, and I could feel the sorrowful little movements of her body becoming less sorrowful.

The therapist tapped on the door and opened it. She had changed into street clothes. “I’m leaving, Mrs. Ketchel. Mr. Ketchel is safe and snug in his wheelchair.”

She looked at us severely: “But don’t leave him out too long now.”

“I won’t,” Kitty said. “Thank you.”

The woman didn’t move. “I was wondering if you can pay me something on last week, and for staying Monday night. I have bills to meet, too.”

Kitty went to her bedroom and came back with a twenty-dollar bill. She thrust it at the woman. “Will this take care of it for now?”

“I guess it will have to. I don’t begrudge my services, understand, but a woman has a right to honest pay for honest work.”

“Don’t worry, you’ll get your money. Our dividend checks are slow in arriving this month.”

The woman gave her disbelieving look, and left the house. Kitty was rigid with anger. She rapped her fists together in the air.

“The old bag! She humiliated me.”

“Are there any dividends coming?”

“There’s nothing coming. I’m having to sell my jewels. And I was saving them for a rainy day.”

“It looks like a wet summer.”

“What are you, a rainmaker?”

She moved toward me, humming an old song about what we’d do on a rain-rain-rainy day. Her breast nudged me gently. “I’d do a lot for any man who would help me find Leo’s money.”

She was being deliberately provocative now, but our moment had passed.

“Would you tell me the truth, for instance?”

“What about?”

“Roy Fablon. Did Leo kill him?”

After a long thinking pause, she said: “He didn’t mean to. It was an accident. They had a fight about– something.”

“Something?”

“If you have to know, it was Roy Fablon’s daughter. The older Leo got, the more he went for the young chicks. It was embarrassing. Maybe I shouldn’t have done what I did, but I passed the word to Mrs. Fablon about Leo making a deal for the girl with Fablon.”

“You told Mrs. Fablon?”

“That’s correct. I was acting in self-defense. Also I was doing the girl a favor. Mrs. Fablon straightened her husband out, and he said nix to Leo.”

“I can’t understand why he didn’t say nix in the first place.”

“He owed Leo a lot of money, and that was all the leverage Leo ever needed. Also Fablon pretended not to know what the deal meant. You know what I mean?”

“I know what you mean.”

“Like Leo was a philanthropist or something. He’d sell his sick mother’s blood for ten dollars a pint and take a deposit on the bottle, Leo would. But he was going to send the girl to school in Switzerland, to improve her mind. And Fablon thought that would be great, until his wife got wind of it. Frankly I think that Fablon hated the girl.”

“I thought he was crazy about her.”

“Sometimes there isn’t much difference between the two. Ask me, I’m an expert. Fablon turned against her when she got pregnant by some fellow, apparently, and Fablon would go to any lengths to get her away from him.”

“Who was he?”

“I don’t know. Mrs. Fablon didn’t know, either, or else she didn’t want to tell me. Anyway, Fablon came to the cottage that night and called the whole deal off. Leo and him had a big fight, and Fablon took quite a beating. Leo used to be terrible with his fists, even when he was sick. Fablon stumbled out of the cottage in bad shape. He lost his way in the dark and fell in the pool and drowned.”

“Did you see him?”

“Cervantes did.”

“He must have been lying. According to the chemical evidence, Fablon drowned in salt water. The pool is fresh.”

“Maybe it is now. It was salt in those days. I ought to know. I swam in it every day for two weeks.”

Her voice lingered on the memory. Maybe she was running into rainy days, and having to sell her jewelry. But she had spent two weeks in the Tennis Club sun.

“What did Cervantes have to say about it, Kitty?”

“He found Roy Fablon in the pool, and came and told Leo. It was a bad scene. Leo was committing a felony just by using his fists. When Fablon drowned it was technically murder. Cervantes suggested he could chuck the body in the sea and fake a suicide. He’d been sucking around Leo before, and this was his chance for an in. When we left town the next day or so, we took him along. Instead of sending the Fablon girl to school in Switzerland, Leo sent the Cervantes boy to college in Paris, France.

“I told Leo he was nuts. He said the reason he was a success was because he looked years ahead. He had a use for Cervantes, he said, and he knew he could trust him, after the Fablon business. That was one time he was wrong. As soon as Leo got sick this last time, Cervantes turned on him.”

Her voice deepened. “It’s funny about Leo. Everybody was afraid of him, including me. He was the big shot. But as soon as he got really sick, he was just a nothing man. A flunky like Cervantes could take him for everything he had.”

“At least it was a switch. How did Cervantes get hold of the money?”

“Leo turned it over to him, a piece at a time, over the last three-four years. Cervantes got some kind of a government job, and he could cross the border without being searched. He stashed the money someplace out of the country, maybe Switzerland, in one of those numbered bank accounts they have.”

I didn’t think the money was in Switzerland. There were numbered accounts in Panama, too.

“What are you thinking?”

“I was wondering,” I said, “if Mrs. Fablon was blackmailing Leo for killing her husband.”

“She was. She came to see him in Vegas after the body was found. She told him she protected him at the inquest, and the least he could do was help her out a little. He hated the hell to do it, but I think he sent her payments from then on.”

She paused, and looked at me sharply. “I’ve told you everything I know about the Fablons. Are you going to try to trace that money for me?”

“I’m not saying no. Right now I have another client, and two other murders to work on.”

“There’s no money in that, is there?”

“Money isn’t the only thing in life.”

“That’s what I used to think, until this. What are you, a do-gooder or something?”

“I wouldn’t say so. I’m working at not being a do-badder.”

She gave me a puzzled look. “I don’t get you, Archer. What’s your angle?”

“I like people, and I try to be of some service.”

“And that adds up to a life?”

“It makes life possible, anyway. Try it some time.”

“I did,” she said, “with Harry. But he didn’t have what it takes. I always get stuck with feebs and cripples.” She shrugged. “I better see how Leo is doing.”

He was waiting patiently in the cross-hatched shadow of a latticework screen. His shirt and trousers were loose on his shrunken body. He blinked up at me when we approached him, as if I planned to hit him.

“Cowardy custard,” Kitty said cheerfully. “This is my new boyfriend. He’s going to find the money and take me on a trip around the world. And you want to know what’s going to happen to you, you poor old clown? We’ll put you in a ward in the country hospital. And nobody will ever come to see you.”

I walked out.