Eureka

CHAPTER 26

Ski was in the diner when I got back there a little after three. He had commandeered a large booth in one corner and was leafing through his little black notebook.

Brett Merrill was sitting across the room in seersucker, a white shirt, and a blue tie, talking to a well-dressed gentleman who didn’t look like he belonged in a diner. Neither of them did.

“The big guy in seersucker talking to the older fellow is the D.A., Brett Merrill,” I told Ski.

“Ex-D.A.,” Ski corrected. “He retired. He’s Culhane’s campaign manager now.”

“So, how’d you do?” I asked.

“Not bad.”

That was encouraging. Ski, who had been in the bureaucracy six years longer than I had, was a master of the noncommittal, having learned the trick from Moriarity. His responses ranged from “not much” to “not bad.” Nothing less, nothing more. “Not bad” held promise.

“How’d you do?” he asked.

“Well, I had a steak sandwich and traded pedigrees with Culhane, met the Gormans, scored some points at a couple of banks, and then went to a whorehouse.”

He shook his head. “I got six years’ seniority on you and I get to spend the last three hours in the records room with a sweet little old lady named Glenda, listening to gossip, and blowing dust off old files. You eat steak, meet the snotty set, and get a matinee.”

“Privileges of rank.”

“Find out anything while you were eating and slumming with the rich?”

We started a familiar routine. Exchanging ideas and building on the evidence in some kind of logical order, trying to make sense of all the information we were gathering.

“I think I know who brokered the checks,” I said.

“I’ll take a wild guess,” he answered, flipping through his notebook. No one, not even a cryptologist, could decipher Ski’s scrawl. He looked over at me. “Delilah O’Dell,” he said.

“You been snooping around the banks, too.”

He nodded. “At least one check was bought by a working stiff I assume could have been her Japanese gardener. The rest of them were bought by sexy young ladies nobody knew. I get the feeling nobody wants to admit that the local madam has a chauffeur of color driving her and her employees around in a Rolls-Royce.”

The man Merrill was talking to got up. They shook hands and the man left without so much as a glance at us.

“You think O’Dell was banking Lila Parrish?” Ski asked.

“No. I think she’s the front. Her girls go into L.A. on occasion as well as San Luis Obispo and other towns along the route. Easy for them to make a five-minute trip to a bank. What did the records department give up?”

“A few interesting items. Some may fit in, some are just local history. For instance, there’s a death certificate on an Eli Gorman Junior. He was born in Massachusetts in 1900, died September 1920. That’s from the record. Isabel Hoffman and Ben Gorman were his parents. They were married in Massachusetts. Gorman was going to Harvard and she went with him. She was seventeen at the time. That’s from Glenda.”

“The kid was killed the night of the Grand View massacre,” I told him. “He drove his car off the overlook. That was his mother we saw with the flowers up on the cliff.”

“Eli Gorman, Ben’s father, owned this whole valley at one time. The deeds are all on file.”

“He won it in a poker game with O’Dell.”

“Not all of it. O’Dell snookered him. He sold the deeds to the property that was then the town of Eureka to Riker the day of the game.”

“And started a war,” I said.

Ski thought about that for a moment or two.

“It probably started long before that,” he said. “The old-timer, Tallman? He put up with the town’s sins. After the shoot-out in Delilah’s place, Culhane turned up the heat on Riker.”

I finished the analysis. “And when Riker went up the river, and Fontonio was shot, Culhane ran Guilfoyle and the rest of the bunch out of town.”

“I think I got a surprise for you. I took a stroll through the cemetery and came across a tombstone that’s interesting.” He looked at his notes. “Jerome Parrish. Born 1869, died 1908. Loving husband and father.”

“The daughter was Lila Parrish,” I guessed.

He nodded. “She was born in the clinic here, in 1900. Which would make her forty-one, close enough to fit Verna. Her mother was divorced when the kid was four. She remarried and divorced again. Her name now is Ione Fisher. Here’s the kicker. Ione Fisher was, and still is, a nurse at the Shuler Institute, the sanitarium down in Mendosa. Very private. I understand Mrs. Fisher is head nurse now. She’s sixty-two.”

“That’s a lot of stuff to get out of old records.”

“Mostly Glenda. She’s fifty-six, has a big nose, and loves to talk.”

I said, “So Lila blows town, heads down to Mendosa, hides out with her old lady in a private sanitarium for a while, and when Guilfoyle moves on Mendosa, Lila slips down to L.A., gets a new ID, hikes her age up a bit, and becomes Verna Hicks.”

“I have to wonder two things,” Ski said. “If she was being paid off, why would she hide out twenty-five miles from here in a town run by Riker’s boy? Seems a little risky, wouldn’t you say?”

“You’re forgetting the time element,” I said. “Guilfoyle didn’t move into Mendosa until after Riker’s appeal, which was almost a year after the trial.”

“You’d think if she was a key witness against Arnie Riker, Culhane would have found her when Riker appealed the case,” Ski said. “Hell, if big-nosed Glenda knew who her mother was, Culhane certainly did.”

“Sometimes what seems obvious isn’t necessarily fact,” a voice drawled, and we turned to face Brett Merrill. “Mind if I join you?”

He looked larger when confined in a small place. He was probably six-two and a hundred ninety or two hundred pounds. He sat down before we had a chance to answer him.

“Some things are bothering us,” I said to Merrill. “Maybe you can help us out.”

“I can try,” he drawled pleasantly.

“Lila Parrish was your key witness in the Thompson case. It seems to us that you would have kept a leash on her-knowing Riker was sure to appeal his conviction.”

“Yeah,” Ski said. “And since her mother lives in Mendosa, you’d think Culhane would look for her there.”

“Lila Parrish didn’t live with her mother at the time of the murder,” Merrill said. “She lived with another girl in a shanty in Milltown. She left her mother when Ione married Fisher. They were on the outs. Our people interviewed Ione Fisher. I’m convinced she wasn’t hiding Lila down there.”

“She was your only eyeball witness. How hard did you really try to find her?” I said.

Merrill shrugged and said in his easy drawl, “Lila Parrish vanished the day after she testified. Her roommate worked at the mill. When she came home from work, Lila’s things were gone. Nobody’s seen her since.”

“And you couldn’t find her?”

“Look, boys, sometimes you have to play the hand you’re dealt. We had Riker dead-to-rights. He and his boat were covered with her blood. The Parrish girl had testified she saw Riker shoot Wilma Thompson and throw her in his car. Thompson’s blood was all over the car. Riker had spent ten days in jail for beating her up once and she ditched him. Plenty of motive for a guy with Riker’s reputation. And he had no alibi. He said he went to his boat that night, got drunk, and passed out. When he was arrested on the boat he was still wearing bloody clothes and there wasn’t a scratch on him. He was lucky they reduced the sentence to life without parole.”

I smiled. “Said like a true prosecutor.”

“It was a solid case. The legwork was first rate. Woods and Carney gave me a preponderance of evidence.”

“Where’s Carney?”

“Died of a heart attack five years ago.”

“When Woods shot Fontonio, why did you dead-docket the case against him?” Ski asked, suddenly changing the subject.

“I thought you were investigating an L.A. homicide,” Merrill said softly. The smile got a little cooler.

“Just curious,” Ski said.

“Making a case against Eddie Woods would have been a waste of time. There were no eyewitnesses. We had started a grand jury investigation against what was left of the Riker outfit and Eddie Woods went to Fontonio’s place to deliver a subpoena. He says Fontonio went for a gun and he shot him. There was a gun in Fontonio’s hand we couldn’t trace.”

“His wife and bodyguard said he never packed heat,” Ski said.

“C’mon, boys,” Merrill said, slowly shaking his head. “Would you go before a grand jury with a wife and a hoodlum as your only witnesses? The attorney general sent a man down from Sacramento to look into it. He looked over the evidence, said, ‘Thanks a lot for nothing,’ and went back to Sacramento. Then Eddie resigned.”

He finished his coffee and dabbed his lips with a napkin.

Ski asked, “You came here from someplace else, didn’t you? Just curious. Accents interest me.”

“Everybody in California came from someplace else,” Merrill answered. “I came from southern Georgia.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I had a little law firm and a partner named David Vigil, who had kept business alive while I was off fighting the war. There really wasn’t enough business for the two of us, and my brother and sister-in-law were barely scratching out a living on the family farm. One day I got a call from California, probably the longest long-distance call in the town’s history. It was Brodie. He said, ‘How’d you like to be D.A. of Eureka, California? I need some help out here.’ So I packed my valise, took the bus to Atlanta, and hopped the train west. We kept busy. A shooting every week or ten days. Once in a while somebody stupid would rob the bank. If Buck Tallman didn’t drop them in their tracks coming out the door, Brodie would ride them down. There was a lot of law but not much order.” He stopped and chuckled. “Probably a lot more than you wanted to know. Southerners tend to go on.”

“We’re still trying to get a handle on the five hundred a month Verna was getting,” I said, cutting off his monologue. “Somebody was paying her off for some thing.”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“Does Culhane know?”

“You’ll have to ask him,” he said, grabbing his hat.

He laid a quarter on the table.

“Pleasure meeting you, Ski,” he said, and strolled out, leaving us staring at the door.

After a minute or so I said, “Know what I think? I think we’ve run out of gas here. Nobody’s going to tell us a damn thing.”

“I’ll tell you what I think,” Ski answered. “I think Lila Parrish lied at Riker’s trial. Merrill didn’t have Thompson’s body because Riker fed her to the sharks. So somebody arranged for Parrish to testify she had witnessed the murder, then paid her to vanish.”

“Interesting theory, Ski. But why, after nearly twenty years, does she turn up dead in her bathtub?”

“If we knew that, we’d know who killed her.”

“Maybe Merrill was giving us the shoo-fly about Ione Fisher. Maybe she knows where her daughter went.”

“Maybe.”

“There’s only one person who might give us a straight answer,” I said.

“The mother.” Ski nodded. “And she’s right down the road.”

“Worth a shot,” I agreed, and we headed south.