Eureka

CHAPTER 15

It was five o’clock when I left Howland’s house. The black Pontiac wasn’t waiting for me. The maroon Packard was.

The heavyset chauffeur was leaning on the front fender, rolling a cigarette as usual. When he saw me come out, he wiggled a finger at me and opened the rear door. I walked over to the car and looked in at Culhane.

“Hello again,” he said in a gravelly but pleasant voice. “Hop in.”

I looked around. The streets were empty.

“Don’t worry, I won’t shoot you.” He laughed.

“What about my car?”

“Couldn’t be safer,” he said. “Nobody’s gonna heist it, not in this town.”

I crawled in and sank to my hips in an elegant, maroon velvet backseat. The plush floor carpeting belonged in somebody’s living room. The car had push-button windows, a radiophone, an Atwater-Kent radio built into the back of the front passenger seat with four loudspeakers in back and two in the front, and a small cubbyhole, which held a bottle of Irish Mist, four highball glasses, and a small, hammered silver ice bucket.

“Very plush,” I said patting the seat. “Where’s the bathtub, in the trunk?”

He chuckled. Okay, pal, I thought, just what is your game? It didn’t take long to find out.

“We got off on the wrong foot,” he said. “I’m sorry; you’re just doing your job.”

“What about all that paranoia: I’m snooping for your competition, I’m trying to set up my own grift…?”

“Forget I said it.”

“Okay, it’s forgotten.”

“I got an hour to kill,” he said, “I thought I’d give you the twenty-five-cent tour.”

“Where are we going?”

“You’ve seen the village. We’re going up on the Hill.”

“What’s the Hill?”

“It’s where the money hides,” he said.

He rested his right ankle on his left knee and took out an old-fashioned gold pocket watch. Culhane snapped it open and checked the time, and said to the driver, “We got some time, Rusty, take the scenic route.” And to me, “You don’t have an appointment right now, do you?”

“I don’t know, my date book’s back in the car.”

Culhane laughed. “You got one for every occasion, don’t you, Cowboy.”

We drove around the park. Two small kids were on the swings. They were swinging in opposite directions and ducking every time they passed each other. An elderly gent was standing next to the slide, gently trying to coax his granddaughter, who was sitting on the top rung and hanging on for dear life, into sliding down. More Norman Rockwell stuff. Cheery little robots having the time of their lives.

“By the way, are my boys doing any better?” Culhane asked. “I had a talk with them.”

“I got behind them and dogged the Pontiac for a while,” I said. “In case you’re interested, I’m not planning to litter the sidewalk or rob a bank. Why the hell am I getting the squeeze?”

“You’ve had a curious effect on some of our most substantial citizens.”

“You’ve already told me that. I’m just doing my job.”

“You sticking with that story about burying the widow?”

I sighed. “What would suit you better: I needed a day out of town because the weather’s been awful? Incidentally, speaking of banks, I find it interesting that there are four of them in a town this size. I would think one, two at the most, would be sufficient.”

“A lot of very rich people live up here,” he said as we approached the Hill. “They like to own a piece of the institution they bank with.”

“And if there aren’t enough pieces they start their own?”

“That’s the way it plays.”

We slowed down as we approached a steel gate as imposing as the Great Wall of China. The uniformed gateman stooped over and saluted Culhane as we drove through to enter a natural greenhouse. Trees shouldered the road and formed a wall between the street and the residences, all of them shielded by the foliage.

“I’m sorry I can’t help you with that bank thing,” he said. “I called a couple of bank people and they are adamant about not showing those checks without a subpoena.”

“I didn’t have any trouble in L.A.”

“You’re more sophisticated down there. We’re just country folks.”

He said this as we passed mansions and estates, hidden back from the road among pines, live oaks, cypress trees, and eucalyptus. The lawns were manicured and bordered with flowers, all open in all their glory: yellow daffodils, roses, sword lilies, begonias, daisies as big as a spare tire. Occasionally, there was a car parked under a porte cochere or sitting in the driveway. Through the foliage I spotted a four-seat Mercedes convertible, a Rolls, two Lincoln touring cars, and a Stutz. The houses were even more impressive. No two were alike; every kind of architecture imaginable was represented in this discreet but elegant neighborhood.

The road wound its way to the top of the foothill, where it traveled along the ridge with the town spread out below us. A silver Duesenberg roared past. I glimpsed the driver, a dark-haired fellow wearing a navy blue golfer’s tam cocked over one eye. A mile later, as the road turned back into the trees, we passed a gate that led to a Tudor-styled, three-story, brick-and-beamed manor. It dominated the ridge and was about two hundred yards back from the road, sitting on about twenty acres of property. The third floor had steepled and stained-glass windows. The gate was open and a black Pierce-Arrow was sitting beside the house, in front of the matching garage, in a turnaround as big as a baseball diamond. The hired man slowly rubbed wax deep into its already sparkling finish. Behind the house, the crest rolled down and away from the house to a paddock and pasture, and half a mile or so beyond it, at the foot of the cliffs, was the Pacific Ocean, looking as serene and placid as a fish pond.

“Nice little place,” I said.

“That’s the Gorman estate,” he answered.

“He’s the one who wasn’t at the bank when I went calling, then walked out after I left, and drove off in that Pierce-Arrow.”

“He plays golf every afternoon,” Culhane said, and not apologetically. “That was him in the Duesenberg on his way to the club.”

“He’s got lousy manners.”

“Nobody invited you to go in his bank,” Culhane said, snuffing out his cigarette.

“He doesn’t strike me as the sort who would worry too much about the confidentiality of a bunch of checks that were addressed to a woman who is now dead.”

“You have to get to know this community,” Culhane said. “Then maybe you’ll understand.”

“You mean they’re all so goddamned rich they’re innately rude?”

He threw me a sideways glance but made no response to that.

“What are we doing up here, Captain?”

“I just told you; I’m introducing you to San Pietro. The part the tourists never see.”

“You invited me to leave town two hours ago.”

“It was a dumb thing to do. I was a little paranoid. Osterfelt and Bellini are both bottom-feeders. They’ve got their hands in most of the pockets in Sacramento. I wouldn’t put anything past them.”

“Is that why you’re running for governor?”

“I’m running for governor so I can get out of here. Except for my years in the Marines, I’ve been in San Pietro all my life. If I don’t move on now, I never will. I’m almost sixty.”

“I can understand that. It’s a cute little spot but I can see how it could get very boring after an hour or two.”

“I can beat those two bums,” he said with a touch of bitterness. “Sometimes you need leadership that hasn’t been tainted by longevity.”

“You think you can change anything up there?”

“Probably not,” he said, and grinned, “but I can sure drive the bastards crazy.”

I laughed along with him. “Hell, that makes it worthwhile, then. What makes you think you can whip a couple of ward heelers like those two?”

“Numbers,” he said. “Right now, no one’s calling the game; it’s close to fifty-fifty, with Bellini getting the edge. But those voting for Osterfelt are doing so because they think Bellini is a bigger crook. And vice versa for the Bellini voters. All I need to do is get forty percent of the voters who want an honest man, no matter who he is.”

“That’s pretty cynical.”

“That’s politics: cynicism and hypocrisy. It doesn’t require anything but a quick tongue and a big grin. It certainly doesn’t require intelligence or honesty.”

As we came around a bend in the road, the trees thinned out and I saw a house two hundred feet back on the right. It was a three-story, classic Victorian, at the end of a pebbled drive lined on both sides with sandford hedges. There were a scattering of avocado trees interspersed with tall, slender Roman pines behind the hedgerow. I couldn’t tell what was to the right of the drive behind the hedgerow, but there was a lot of land back there.

The gate was ornate and impressive, ten feet of black iron, with curlicues and spirals to make it seem less imposing. They didn’t work. The gate said “keep out” in no uncertain terms, but just in case the message didn’t come across, the fence adjoining it was an eight-footer with spikes at the top of the stanchions. A guardhouse at one corner of the fence completed the picture. The gates were open.

“Can we slow down a minute?” I asked.

Rusty stopped the car and I lowered the window on my side.

The house was white with pale blue trim and had five towering gables across the front. There was a twelve-foot, arched porte cochere, with beveled supports, over the entrance. The door was leaded glass. Even at two hundred feet, its facade shimmered with prismed light. The drive separated about seventy-five feet from the entrance and circled into it, forming a grass island, in the center of which was a small nude statue of a Greek goddess holding a tilted jar. Water poured from it into the small pond at her feet. There was an adjunct to the road that led straight from the covered entrance into what I assumed was a parking lot south of the mansion.

I had seen the place from the other side of the basin and knew it had a broad lawn in the rear that ended at the edge of cliff that dropped straight into the Pacific.

I was guessing there were at least fifteen bedrooms above the first floor. The main floor probably had a library, billiard room, dining room, living room, and whatever other cubbyholes were necessary to let rich people know the owner was richer. Behind the mansion, far out over the Pacific, the sky was black with storm clouds forming on the horizon. About halfway down the drive a gray rabbit stuck its head out of the hedge, looked around, and started to hop to the other side. It stopped suddenly, turned, its feet kicking up stones, and bolted back to safety moments ahead of a speckled hawk that swept across the road, its claws distended, and then pulled up sharply over the hedgerow.

No other name but Grand View would have fit.

It made the Gorman place look like a dollhouse.

“Now that’s a sight,” I said.

But in my mind I imagined gunshots in the night; Culhane charging through these gates in his 1920 Ford; a thug named McGurk staggering out of the house and blowing out the windshield before Culhane dropped him into the hedgerow with a single shot in the eye. I imagined Culhane rushing the living room. Three more shots. A woman’s scream.

And I wondered who shot whom when those last three gunshots rang out in the night.

I sat back in the car seat.

“I’ll bet the inside of that joint would give John Jacob Astor a start,” I said.

“Cost you five bills to find out.”

“Not likely.”

He handed me one of Rusty’s freshly rolled cigarettes and we lit up. Rusty dropped the Packard into gear and pulled away. The window slid quietly up as if someone in the house had prompted it.

About twenty yards ahead of us, a road curved off to our right and then dipped sharply down and curved around the cliff and out of sight. The ocean was in front of and below it. Another spectacular view. A bright red sawhorse with lanterns on both ends of it blocked the road.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s Cliffside Road. We closed it several years ago; too dangerous.” He tapped Rusty on the shoulder. “Let’s take Cliffside down,” he said. If that made the driver nervous he didn’t show it. He stopped, got out, swung the sawhorse out of the way, got back in the car, drove a dozen feet beyond it, then got out and moved the sawhorse back in place. We started down a narrow, steep, curvy, precipitous road in first gear. There was no guardrail. Four feet from the road, the cliff made a dead drop two hundred feet straight down to the rocks and the ocean. Three feet on the other side, it went straight up. The Packard hugged the safe side of the road, rocks and pebbles spitting under the wheels. About a hundred feet along, we rounded a sharp curve and came on a wide shoulder in the road, big enough to handle six or seven cars. There was a waist-high stone wall around its entire perimeter and an old, crumbling stone bench on one side.

Without being told, Rusty pulled off on the shoulder and parked. He pulled on the hand brake and turned off the ignition with the car in gear.

“Better leave your hat in the car,” Culhane said, tossing his black fedora on the seat. I did the same and followed him out on the shoulder, trying to conceal my terror. A hard wind rose swiftly up the side of the mountain from the ocean, whipping Culhane’s hair around his ears. I don’t like heights. I don’t like narrow roads and steep cliffs. I also don’t like drop-off shoulders on those narrow roads.

“It’s perfectly safe,” he said, walking to the edge and standing with one foot on the stone wall.

“You’re giving me the creeps,” I managed to tell him.

“It’s okay,” he said. “This is the safest spot on the road. Don’t look down, you’ll be fine.”

I walked slowly to the stone wall. When I got to it, I reached down and grabbed it with both hands. I looked straight out at the Pacific. Black storm clouds broiled far out to sea and I could see the rain line sweeping across the ocean. A white pontoon plane with a blue stripe down the side banked into the mouth of the bay a mile away and circled toward us, flying parallel to the cliff. It circled all the way around the basin and swept in over the sailboats, then settled down slowly. The two pontoons smacked into the bay and churned twin wakes behind them. It turned and taxied slowly toward the pier.

“That big house on top of the hill is the O’Dell estate,” Culhane said. “He and Eli Gorman started all this. They were partners in the railroad. One was a gruff old Irishman who mostly gambled for a living, the other was an orthodox Jew and all business. They were always at each other’s throats. O’Dell wanted to sell the bottomland by the ocean for a paper mill. Gorman said he wasn’t going to live with a stinking paper mill in his backyard. They put the deeds for all this property on the table, each of them put up ten grand, they played poker for the whole thing. Winner take all. O’Dell lost, and left and never came back. He and his wife died when the Lusitania was sunk. A caretaker kept the house up until Delilah, their daughter, inherited the house and his bankroll.”

“Pretty fancy for a whorehouse,” I said.

“That’s a misnomer,” he said. “It’s a private club, and way too rich for your blood-or mine. Five hundred to join on a one-night basis, plus the cost of the entertainment. A lifetime membership is ten thousand.”

I whistled through my teeth.

“You’d be surprised if I told you the names of some of the full-timers.”

“Why did Delilah O’Dell do that?”

“People here despised her because she was an O’Dell, rich as Croesus and a smart businesswoman to boot. They snubbed her, so she got even, and turned Grand View into the classiest whorehouse on the West Coast, probably in the whole country.”

“Prostitution is against the law,” I reminded him.

“Not in this county. Neither is gambling. And neither was drinking during Prohibition.”

“How do you justify that?”

“I don’t have to. Buck Tallman said it best. ‘You can’t stop folks from drinkin’, gamblin’, and whorin’ around. The best you can do is make it safe and pleasant for them. They pay the bills.’ Does that offend your sensibilities?”

“Not a bit,” I said. “I happen to work under a different set of laws.”

“Hell, you know you can find a game or get laid in L.A. any time of the day or night. As long as the right palms are greased, everybody looks the other way.”

I couldn’t argue with that so I changed the subject. “You know, maybe I prefer old man O’Dell’s vision for this place. He was out in the open about it. Put it right on the table. Soak ’em for the land, let them build a mill. Let ’em stink up the air, poison the ground, ruin the water, cut down all the trees, and sit back and count their money. Gorman made a playpen for people with big bank accounts, charged them three or four times what they’d pay anyplace else, and made loans to all the peons who work for a living. Now he probably acts like a humanitarian.”

Culhane looked surprised. “Jesus, who stepped on your jewels?” he said.

“If I have to make a choice, maybe I prefer greed over hypocrisy. I’m giving it some thought.”

I could see him staring at me from the corner of his eye, a somewhat bemused expression on his face. He was trying to figure out if I was for real or just being contrary. He looked back at the bay.

“That’s Rudy Shaeffer,” Culhane said, pointing at the pontoon plane. “He works three days a week and then flies up on Wednesday and spends four days at the Grand View.”

“How does he make his money?”

“I never asked.”

When my stomach calmed down, I cautiously looked over the side, and immediately got that queasy feeling again. Below us, halfway down the precipice, was a small shelf covered with half a dozen pine trees. Something glittered in the rubble that surrounded the trees. I looked closer and made out what looked like a large, rusted bedframe. Near it, a semicircle of steel seemed to grow out of a pile of dead branches.

“There’s something down there,” I said.

“It’s a 192 °Chevrolet coupe,” he said, without looking down. “It gets so foggy up here at night you can’t see your feet. Some nervy kid was going downtown. He lost control of the car, didn’t make the curve, went straight over the side, and caught fire. We didn’t find him until the next morning. The road was twice as wide in those days and it had a guardrail. It’s eroded away through the years.”

“Did you know him?”

“I knew everybody in town then, and I still do.”

“You didn’t know Verna Hicks.”

“Then she never lived here.”

I reached into my inside pocket and took out the five-by-seven shot of Verna from the newspaper. I pointed to Verna Wilensky. The wind rattled the photograph and he held it with two hands. He stared at it and looked at me with one eyebrow cocked.

“And which one would she be?”

I pointed to the blowup and he laughed.

“I’m supposed to recognize this lady? All I can see is the top of her head and her nose. And the picture looks like it was shot at the bottom of a canal.”

I showed him the original and he just shook his head. Then I gave him a look at the morgue shot.

“Jesus!” he snapped. “I hope to hell you don’t show that to anybody. They’ll puke on your shoes.” He shoved the shot back at me.

“Why did you come down this way?” I asked. “Just to give me the willies?”

“I didn’t know you had a problem with high places. My life changed forever one night, on that stone bench right over there.”

“How?”

He didn’t answer, just looked off at the horizon and tilted his head up at the sky. “Storm’ll be here soon,” he said.

The rest of the trip was uneventful. As we neared the Howlands’ house, the first big drops of rain splattered against the windshield. Rusty pulled up behind my car and stopped. He leaned back with a sigh, his hands locked behind his head.

Culhane said, “You’re a smart cop, Bannon. I appreciate that. But I say again, there’s nothing here for you to learn. You ought to head back before the rain gets serious.”

“Why did you take me on that little cruise?” I asked. “To let me know that there are a lot of rich people on the Hill with connections all the way to the governor’s mansion and probably to the White House?”

“I don’t want you to have the wrong impression about San Pietro.”

I understood the veiled warning in his remark.

“I don’t,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “I’ve put up with politics and money in my time.”

I started to get out of the car. “I think I’ll grab a bite before I head back to L.A. Where’s the best steak in town-that I can afford?”

“The diner. A buck and a quarter. I’ll give them a call; it’s on the county.”

“No thanks. I have ten bucks expense money. If I don’t spend it Moriarity will cut me back to five the next time out.”

“I’ve been a cop almost all my life,” Culhane said. “I know about cops. I’ve known good ones, bad ones, crooked ones, stupid ones, and some so rotten it would make you sick to your stomach you ever put on a badge. You’re a bloodhound. You stick your nose up in the air and get a whiff of something and then you bite it and don’t let go. Just be careful, Cowboy. Don’t get your nose stuck up the wrong dog’s ass.”

And they drove away.