Los Angeles Noir 2

SURF

BY JOSEPH HANSEN

Venice

(Originally published in 1976)

Lieutenant Ken Barker of the L.A.P.D. shared a gray-green office with too many other men, too many gray-green metal desks and file cabinets, too many phones that kept crying for attention like new life in a sad maternity ward. He had a broken nose. Under his eyes were bruises. He wore beard stubble. His teeth were smoky. He scowled across a sprawl of papers and spent styrofoam cups.

He said: “Yes, Robinson was murdered. On the deck of his apartment. In that slum by the sea called Surf. Shot clean through the head. He went over the rail, was dead when he hit the sand. There’s nothing wrong with the case. The DA is happy. What do you want to mess it up for?”

“I don’t.” Dave shed a wet trench coat, hung it over a chairback, sat on another chair. “I just want to know why Robinson made Bruce K. Shevel the beneficiary of his life insurance policy. Didn’t he have a wife, a mother, a girlfriend?”

“He had a boyfriend, and the boyfriend killed him. Edward Earl Lily, by name. With a deer rifle, a thirty-thirty. Probably Robinson’s. He owned one.” Barker blinked. “It’s weird, Dave. I mean, what have you got—an instinct for this kind of case?”

“Coincidence,” Dave said. “What does probably mean—Robinson was ‘probably’ killed with his own gun.”

Barker found a bent cigarette. “Haven’t located it.”

“Where does Lily say it is?”

“Claims he never saw it.” Barker shuffled papers, hunting a match. “But it’ll be in the surf someplace along there. Or buried in the sand. We’re raking for it.” Dave leaned forward and snapped a thin steel gas lighter. Barker said thanks and asked through smoke, “You don’t like it? Why not? What’s wrong with it?”

Dave put the lighter away. “Ten years ago, Bruce K. Shevel jacked up his car on one of those trails in Topanga Canyon to change a tire, and the car rolled over on him and cost him the use of his legs. He was insured with us. We paid. We still pay. Total disability. I’d forgotten him. But I remembered him today when I checked Robinson’s policy. Shevel looked to me like someone who’d tried self-mutilation to collect on his accident policy.”

“Happens, doesn’t it?” Barker said.

“People won’t do anything for money.” Dave’s smile was thin. “But they will hack off a foot or a hand for it. I sized Shevel up for one of those. His business was in trouble. The policy was a fat one. I don’t think paralysis was in his plans. But it paid better. The son of a bitch grinned at me from that hospital bed. He knew I knew and there was no way to prove it.”

“And there still isn’t,” Barker said. “Otherwise you could stop paying and put him in the slams. And it pisses you off that he took you. And now you see a chance to get him.” Barker looked into one of the empty plastic cups, made a face, stood up. “You’d like him to have killed Robinson.”

He edged between desks to a coffee urn at the window end of the room, the glass wall end. Dave followed. Through vertical metal sun slats outside, gray rain showed itself like movie grief. “I’d like Robinson to have died peacefully in bed of advanced old age.” Dave pulled a cup from a chrome tube bolted to a window strut and held the cup while Barker filled it. “And since he didn’t, I’d sure as hell like him to have left his money to someone else.”

“We interviewed Shevel.” Next to the hot plate that held the coffee urn was cream substitute in a widemouth brown bottle and sugar in little cellophane packets. Barker used a yellow plastic spoon to stir some of each into his coffee. “We interviewed everybody in Robinson’s little black book.” He led the way back to his desk, sat down, twisted out his cigarette in a big glass ashtray glutted with butts. “And Shevel is a wheelchair case.”

Dave tasted his coffee. Weak and tepid. “A wheelchair case can shoot a gun.”

Barker snorted. “Have you seen where Robinson lived?”

“I’ll go look. But first tell me about Lily.” Dave sat down, then eyed the desk. “Or do I need to take your time? Shall I just read the file?”

“My time? I’d only waste it sleeping. And I’m out of practice. I wouldn’t do it well.” Barker glanced sourly at the folders, forms, photographs on his desk, then hung another cigarette from his mouth and leaned forward so Dave could light it. “Lily is a trick Robinson picked up at the Billy Budd. You know the place?”

Dave nodded. “Ocean Front Walk.”

“Robinson tended bar there. The kid’s a hustler but way out of Robinson’s league. A hundred bucks a night and/or a part in your next TV segment, sir. But somehow Robinson managed to keep him. Eight, ten weeks, anyway—” The phone on Barker’s desk jangled. He lifted the receiver, listened, grunted, cradled the receiver. “—till he was dead. Lily ran, but not far and not clever. He was better at crying. You know the type. Muscles, but a real girl. Kept sobbing that he loved Robinson and why would he kill him?”

“And why would he?” Dave lit a cigarette.

Barker shrugged. “Probably hysteria. Toward the end they were fighting a lot. About money. Robinson had bought him fancy clothes, an Omega watch, a custom surfboard. They’d been pricing Porsches and Aston-Martins on the lots. But Robinson was broke. He’d hocked his stereo, camera, projector. He was borrowing from friends.”

“What friends?” Dave asked. “Shevel?”

“Among others,” Barker said. “Which kind of louses up your theory, doesn’t it? Shevel didn’t need to shoot anybody for their insurance money. He’s loaded.”

The boy who opened the door had dressed fast. He still hadn’t buttoned his white coverall with L.A. Marina stitched on the pocket. Under the coverall his jockeys were on inside out and backward. Below the nick of navel in his flat brown belly a label read Pilgrim. He was Chicano and wore his hair long. He looked confused. “He thought it would be the layouts.”

“It isn’t,” Dave said. “Brandstetter is my name. Death claims investigator, Medallion Life. I’m looking for Bruce K. Shevel. Is he here?”

“Brand—what?” the boy said.

At his back a dense jungle of philodendrons climbed a trellis to the ceiling. From beyond it a voice said, “Wait a minute, Manuel.” A pair of chrome-spoked wheels glittered into view, a pair of wasted legs under a lap robe, a pair of no color eyes that had never forgiven anyone anything. “I remember you. What do you want?”

“Arthur Thomas Robinson is dead,” Dave said.

“I’ve already told the police what I know.”

“Not all of it.” Wind blew cold rain across the back of Dave’s neck. He turned up the trench coat collar. “You left out the part that interests me—that you’re the beneficiary of his life insurance.”

Shevel stared. There was no way for his face to grow any paler. It was parchment. But his jaw dropped. When he shut it, his dentures clicked. “You must be joking. There’s got to be some mistake.”

“There’s not.” Dave glanced at the rain. “Can I come in and talk about it?”

Shevel’s mouth twitched. “Did you bring the check?”

Dave shook his head. “Murder has a way of slowing down the routine.”

“Then there’s nothing to talk about.” The wheelchair was motorized. It started to turn away.

“Why would he name you?” Dave asked.

Shrug. “We were old friends.”

Dave studied the Chicano boy who was watching them with something frantic in his eyes. “Friends?”

“Oh, come in, come in,” Shevel snarled, and wheeled out of sight. Dave stepped onto deep beige carpeting and the door closed behind him. But when he turned to hand the trench coat over, there was no one to take it. Manuel had buttoned up and left. Dave laid the coat over his arm and went around the leafy screen. A long, handsome room stretched to sliding glass doors at its far end that looked down on a marina where little white boats waited row on row like children’s coffins in the rain. Shevel rattled ice and glasses at a low bar. “I met Robbie in the hospital,” he said, “ten years ago.” He came wheeling at Dave, holding out a squat studded glass in which dark whiskey islanded an ice cube. “Just as I met you.” His smile was crooked. “He worked there. An orderly.”

“And you brought him along to look after you when the hospital let you go.” Dave took the drink. “Thanks.”

“Robbie had good hands.” Shevel aimed the chair at the planter. From under it somewhere he took a small green plastic watering can. He tilted it carefully into the mulch under the climbing vines. “And patience.”

“Who took his place?”

“No one. No one could. This apartment is arranged so that I don’t need day-to-day help.” Shevel set the watering can back. “The market sends in food and liquor.” He drank from his glass. “I can cook my own meals. I’m able to bathe myself and so on. A cleaning woman comes in twice a week. I have a masseur on call.”

“Manuel?” Dave wondered.

“Not Manuel,” Shevel said shortly and drank again.

“You publish a lot of magazines,” Dave said. “How do you get to your office? Specially equipped car?”

“No car,” Shevel said. “Cars are the enemy.” He purred past Dave and touched a wall switch. A panel slid back. Beyond gleamed white wet-look furniture, a highgloss white desk stacked with papers, a white electric typewriter, a photocopy machine. Blow up color photos of naked girls muraled the walls. “I don’t go to the office. My work comes to me. And there’s the telephone.” He swallowed more whiskey. “You remember the telephone?” He touched the switch and the panel slid closed.

“Dave asked, “When did Robinson quit you?”

“Eight months, two weeks, and six days ago,” Shevel said. He said it grimly with a kind of inverse satisfaction, like counting notches in a gun butt.

“Did he give a reason?”

“Reason?” Shevel snorted and worked on his drink again. “He felt old age creeping up on him. He was all of thirty-two. He decided he wanted to be the one who was looked after, for a change.”

“No quarrels? No hard feelings?”

“Just boredom.” Shevel looked at his glass but it was empty. Except for the ice cube. It still looked new. He wheeled abruptly back to the bar and worked the bottle again. Watching him, Dave tried his drink for the first time. Shevel bought good Bourbon with Medallion’s money. Shevel asked, “If there’d been hard feelings, would he have come back to borrow money?”

“That might depend on how much he needed it,” Dave said.

“Or thought he did. I hear he was desperate.”

Shevel’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”

“Trying to keep a champagne boy on a beer income.”

“Exactly.” Shevel’s mouth tightened like a drawstring purse. “He never had any common sense.”

“So you didn’t lend him anything,” Dave said.

“I told him not to be a fool. Forty-nine percent of the world’s population is male.” Shevel’s chair buzzed. He steered it back, stopped it, tilted his glass, swallowed half the new drink. He looked toward the windows where the rain was gray. His voice was suddenly bleak. “I’m sorry he’s dead. He was life to me for a long time.”

“I’ll go.” Dave walked to the bar, set down his glass, began shrugging into the trench coat. “Just two more questions. Manuel. Does he take you deer hunting?”

Shevel looked blank.

Dave said, “Your thirty-thirty. When did you use it last?”

Shevel squinted. “What are you talking about?”

“A deer rifle. Winchester. Remington.”

“Sorry.” His bony fingers teased his white wig. He simpered like a skid row barroom floozy. “I’ve always preferred indoor sports.” He was suddenly drunk. He looked Dave up and down hungrily. “Next question.”

“Those magazines of yours,” Dave said. “The new Supreme Court decision on obscenity. You’re going to have to do some retooling—right?”

Shevel’s eyes got their old hardness back. “It’s been on the drawing boards for months. A whole new line. Home crafts. Dune buggies. Crossword puzzles. And if you’re suggesting I shot Robbie with his rifle in order to get the money to finance the changeover, then you don’t know much about publishing costs. Ten thousand dollars wouldn’t buy the staples.”

“But you do know how much the policy paid.”

The crooked smile came back. “Naturally. I bought it for him. Years ago.” The smile went away. “How typical of him to have forgotten to take my name off it.”

“And the thirty-thirty. Did you buy that too?”

“I paid for it, of course. He had no money.”

“I’ll just bet he didn’t,” Dave said.

The development may have looked sharp to start with but it had gone shabby fast. It was on the coast road at the north end of Surf, which had gone shabby a long time ago. You couldn’t see the development from the coast road. You had to park between angled white lines on the tarmacked shoulder and walk to a cliff where an iron pipe railing was slipping, its cement footings too near the crumbling edge.

Below, along a narrow rock and sand curve of shore, stood apartment buildings. The tinwork vents on the roofs were rusting. Varnish peeled from rafter ends and wooden decks. The stucco had been laid on thin. It was webbed with cracks. Chunks had broken out at corners showing tarpaper and chickenwire underneath.

Dave saw what Ken Barker had meant. The only access to the place was down cement steps, three long flights against the cliff face. There’d been too much sand in the cement. Edges had crumbled. Today rain washed dirt and pebbles across the treads and made them treacherous. No—no wheelchair case could get down there. He was about to turn back when, the way it will sometimes for a second, the surf stopped booming. It charged and fell heavily, like a big, tired army under one of those generals that never gives up. But it breathed.

And in the sudden silence he heard from below a voice, raised in argument, protest, complaint. He went on down. The iron rail was scabby with corrosion. His hand came away rusty. He left cement for a boardwalk over parts of which sand had drifted, sand now dark and sodden with rain. He passed the backs of buildings, slope-top metal trash modules, the half-open doors of laundry rooms. The voice kept on. He turned between two buildings to walk for the beach front.

The voice came from halfway up wooden steps to a second-story deck. A small man stood there under a clear plastic umbrella. He was arguing up at the legs of a young black police officer above him on the deck. The officer wore a clear plastic slicker.

The little man shouted, “But I’m the goddamn owner of the goddamn place! A taxpayer. It’s not Chief Gates that pays you—it’s me. You know what the taxes are here? No—well, I’m not going to tell you because I hate to see a strong man cry. But they got to be paid, friend, if I rent it or don’t rent it. And have you looked at it? I was screwed by the contractor. It’s falling apart. Nineteen months old and falling apart. I’m suing the son of a bitch but the lawyers are breaking me. Not to mention the mortgage. A storm like this, carpets get soaked, plaster falls down. Could be happening in there right now. Why do you want to make things worse for me?”

Dave climbed the steps. When he’d come up to the little man, the officer said, “Mr. Brandstetter. That make three. This one. Robinson’s ex-boss. Now you.” His grin was very white. “This a real popular spot this morning.”

“Turning people away, right?” Dave said. “Because the apartment’s sealed, waiting for the DA?” He looked past the little man. Up the beach, a clutch of slickered cops was using a drag with deep teeth on the sand. Plastic wrapped their caps, their shoes. Nothing about them looked happy. It was work for tractors. But there was no way to get tractors down here.

The black officer said, “DA been and gone.”

“Yeah.” The little man goggled at Dave through big hornrims. “They talk about human rights. What happened to property rights? I own the place but I get treated like a thief. I can’t get in till Robinson’s brother comes and collects his stuff.” His nose was red. And not from sunburn. There hadn’t been any sun this month. “You’re not his brother, are you?”

“Not the way you mean,” Dave said. And to the officer, “Flag me when he comes, will you?” He went down the stairs and down the rain-runnelled beach. The sergeant he talked to wore plainclothes and no hat. His name was Slocum. Rain plastered strands of pale red hair to his freckled scalp. Dave said, “What about the surf?”

“Running too high. You can’t work a launch on it. Not close in where we have to look. Keep washing you up all the time.” He glanced bitterly at the muddy sky. “Storm doesn’t quit, we’ll never find it.”

“The storm could be your friend,” Dave said. “Ought to wash anything ashore—all that power.” And fifty yards off a cop yelled in the rain, bent, picked something out of the muddy surf, came with it at a trot, waving it above his head like a movie Apache who’d got the wrong room at Western Costume. “See?” Dave said.

“No wonder you’re rich,” Slocum said. It was a rifle. The cop offered it. Slocum shook his head. “You’ve got gloves, I don’t. You hold it. Let me just look at it.” He stared at it while the cop turned it over and it dripped. “Thirty-thirty Remington,” Slocum said. “Eight years old but like new. Won’t act like new—not unless they get the seawater out of it right away.”

“Seawater doesn’t erase prints,” Dave said, and turned back toward the apartments because he heard his name called above the slam of surf, the hiss of rain. The black officer was waving an arm from the deck. A bulky man was with him. Dave jogged back. The landlord was yammering to a girl with ragged short hair in a Kobe coat at the foot of the stairs, but there wasn’t any hope in his voice now. Dave went up the stairs.

“Reverend Merwin Robinson,” the black officer said. “Mr. Brandstetter. Insurance.”

“Something wrong with the insurance?” The reverend had a hoarse voice. The kind you get from shouting—at baseball games or congregations. A thick man, red-faced. A big crooked vein bulged at one temple.

“What’s wrong with it is the beneficiary,” Dave said.

Robinson stiffened, glared. “I don’t understand.”

“Not you,” Dave said. “Bruce K. Shevel.”

Robinson blinked. “You must be mistaken.”

“That’s what Shevel said.”

“But I’m Arthur’s only living relative. Neither of us has anyone else. And he’d left Shevel. Said he never wanted to see him again.”

“He saw him again,” Dave said. “Tried to borrow money from him. I gather he saw you too.”

The minister’s mouth twitched. “Never at my invitation. And years would go by. He knew my stand. On how he lived. The same saintly mother raised us. He knew what the Bible says about him and his kind.”

“But lately he tried to borrow money,” Dave said.

“He did.”

The black officer had opened the glass wall panel that was the apartment door. Robinson saw, grunted, went in. Dave followed. The room was white shag carpet, long low fake-fur couches, swag lamps in red and blue pebbled glass.

“Of course I refused. My living comes from collection plates. For the glory of God and His beloved Son. Not to buy fast automobiles for descendents of the brothels of Sodom.”

“I don’t think they had descendents,” Dave said. “Anyway, did you have that kind of money?”

“My church is seventy years old. We’ve had half a dozen fires from faulty wiring. The neighborhood the church serves is just as old and just as poor.” Robinson glanced at a shiny kitchenette where a plaster Michaelangelo David stood on a counter with plastic ferns. He went on to an alcove at the room’s end, opened and quickly closed again a door to a bathroom papered with color photos of naked men from Playgirl, and went into a room where the ceiling was squares of gold-veined mirror above a round, tufted bed.

Dave watched him open drawers, scoop out the contents, dump them on the bed. Not a lot of clothes. A few papers. He slid back closet doors. Little hung inside. He took down what there was, spilling coat hangers, clumsily stooped, pushed the papers into a pocket, then bundled all the clothes into his arms and turned to face Dave. “That ten thousand dollars would have meant a lot to my church—new wiring, shingles, paint, new flooring to replace what’s rotted—” He broke off, a man used to having dreams cancelled. He came at the door with his bundle of dead man’s clothes and Dave made way for him. “Well, at least these will keep a few needy souls warm for the winter.” He lumbered off down the length of the apartment, onto the deck and out of sight.

Dave looked after him. The view was clear from this room to the deck—maybe forty feet. Lily could have stood here with the thirty-thirty. At that distance the bullet hole wouldn’t be too messy. Dave went for the door where cold, damp air came in. Also the little man who owned the place. He collided with Dave.

“Your turn,” Dave said.

“It rents furnished,” the little man said. “A preacher, for God sake! Crookeder than a politician. Did you see? Did he take kitchen stuff? I saw that bundle. Anything could have been in it. All the kitchen stuff stays with the place. Sheets, towels? All that’s mine.” He rattled open kitchen drawers, cupboards, slammed them shut again, dodged into the bathroom, banged around in there—“Jesus, look what that fag did to the walls!”—shot out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. Merwin Robinson had left the chest drawers hanging. From the doorway Dave could see their total emptiness. The little man stopped in front of them. His shoulders sagged. In relief or disappointment?

“All okay?” Dave asked.

“What? Oh, yeah. Looks like it.” He didn’t sound convinced.

Downstairs, Dave pressed a buzzer next to a glass panel like the one directly above that had opened into Arthur Thomas Robinson’s apartment. While he’d talked to the dead man’s brother and the black officer, he’d looked past their wet shoes through the slats in the deck and seen the short-haired girl go into this apartment. She came toward him now with Daily Variety in her hand, looking as if she didn’t want to be bothered. She still wore the Kobe coat but her hair wasn’t short anymore. She had on a blonde wig out of an Arthur Rackham illustration—big and fuzzy. She slid the door. A smell of fresh coffee came out.

“Were you at home when Robinson was killed?”

She studied him. Without makeup she looked like a ten-year-old boy dressed up as the dandelion fairy. “You a cop?”

He told her who he was, gave her a card. “The police like to think Lily killed him because it’s easy, it will save the taxpayers money. I’m not so sure.”

She tilted her head. “Whose money will that save?”

“Not Medallion’s,” he said. “I’d just like to see it go to somebody else.”

“Than?” She shivered. “Look—come in.” He did that and she slid the door to and put the weather outside where it belonged. “Coffee?” Dropping Variety on a couch like the ones upstairs, she led him to the kitchenette, talking. “Who did Robbie leave his money to?” She filled pottery mugs from a glass urn. “It’s funny, thinking of him having money to leave when he was hitting on me and everybody else for twenty here, twenty there.” She came around the counter, pushed a tall, flower-cushioned bar stool at Dave and perched on one herself. “He was really sick.”

“Sick?” Dave tried the coffee. Rich and good.

“Over that Eddie. Nothing—beautiful junk. Like this pad. Robbie was nice, a really nice, gentle, sweet, warm human being. Of all things to happen to him!” She took a mouthful of coffee, froze with the cup halfway to the countertop, stared, swallowed. “You don’t mean Robbie left Ed Lily that money?”

“That would be too easy,” Dave said. “No—he left it to Bruce K. Shevel.”

“You’re kidding,” she said.

Dave twitched an eyebrow, sighed, got out cigarettes. “That’s what everybody thinks. Including Shevel.” He held the pack for her to take one, took one himself, lit both. He dropped the lighter into his pocket. “Was Shevel ever down here?”

“How? He was a wheelchair case. Robbie told me about him. It was one of the reasons he chose this place. So Shevel couldn’t get to him. The stairs. Why would he leave Shevel his money?”

“An oversight, I expect. After all, what was he—thirty-two? At that age, glimmerings of mortality are still dim. Plenty of time to make changes. Or maybe because Shevel had bought him the policy, he thought he owed him something.”

“Robbie owed him? That’s a laugh. He used him like a slave for ten years. If anything, it was the other way around. Shevel owed Robbie. But he wouldn’t shell out a dime when Robbie asked for it.”

“So I hear,” Dave said. “Tell me about Lily.”

She shrugged. “You know the type. Dime a dozen in this town. They drift in on their thumbs, all body, no brains. If they even get as far as a producer, they end up with their face in his pillow. Then it’s back to Texas or Tennessee to pump gas for the rest of their lives. Only Eddie was just a little different. Show business he could live without. Hustling was surer and steadier. He always asked for parts in pictures but he settled for cash. A born whore. Loved it.

“I tried to tell Robbie. He wouldn’t listen. Couldn’t hear. Gone on the little shit, really gone. You want to know something? Eddie hadn’t been here a week when he tried to get me into the sack.” Her mouth twitched a half grin. “I told him, ‘I don’t go to bed with fags.’ ‘I’m not a fag,’ was all he said. As if I and every other woman in the place didn’t know that. Woman. Man. Everybody—except Robbie.” She turned her head to look down the room at the glass front wall, the gray rain beyond it, the deserted beach, the muddy slop of surf. “Poor Robbie! What happens to people?” She turned back for an answer.

“In his case,” Dave said, “murder.”

“Yeah.” She rolled her cigarette morosely against a little black ashtray. “And he never said a wrong word to Eddie. Never. Eddie was all over him all the time—I want this, I want that. You promised to introduce me to so-and-so. Take me here, take me there.”

Dave looked at the ceiling. “Soundproofing another thing they cheated the owner on?”

“I got pretty familiar with Robbie’s record collection. Sure, I could hear damn near every word. And a lot that wasn’t words. The bedroom’s right over mine too.”

“Was that where the shot came from?” Dave asked.

“I wasn’t here. Didn’t I tell you? I was on location in Montana. Up to my elbows in flour in a tumble-down ranch house with little kids tugging at my skirts and my hair hanging over one eye. Twenty seconds on film. All that way on Airwest for twenty seconds.”

“Too bad,” Dave said. “Were you ever up there?”

“Robbie’s? Yeah, for drinks. Now and then.”

“Ever see a rifle?”

“They found it, didn’t they?” She jerked the big fuzzy wig toward the beach. “Talking to Dieterle, I saw the cop fish it out of the kelp and run to you with it. You brought them luck. They were raking for it all day yesterday too.”

“But did you ever see it in the apartment?”

She shrugged. “It was probably in a closet.” She drank some coffee and frowned. “Wait a minute. I helped Robbie move in. No, I didn’t know him. I parked up at the cliff edge and there he was with all this stuff to carry. I just naturally offered to help. And I hung around helping him settle in and we had a drink.”

“Easy to know.”

“A bartender,” she said. “Had been since he was a kid, except for that period with Shevel. Easy friendliness is part of a bartender’s stock in trade—right? Only he didn’t fake it. He honestly liked people. Those old aunties Lauder and White fell all over themselves to get him back. Business has doubled since he took over. If he owned his own place he’d make a bundle.” She remembered he was dead and sadness happened in her face. “Except for one thing.”

Dave worked on his coffee. “Which was?”

“He also trusted people. And that’s for losers.”

“About the rifle?” he prompted her.

“He didn’t own one,” she said flatly. “I’d have seen it while we were putting away his stuff. No rifle. But I can tell you one thing. If there’d been one, Eddie could have used it. He used to talk about hunting rabbits when he was a kid back in Oklahoma.”

“Thanks.” Dave tilted up the mug, drained it, set it on the counter, got off the stool. “And for the coffee.” He checked his watch. “But now it’s out into the cold rain and the mean streets again.”

“Aw,” she said.

Climbing the gritty stairs up the cliff face, he still heard the surf. But as he neared the top there was the wet tire sibilance of traffic on the the coast road and the whine of a car engine that didn’t want to start. At the railing, the little landlord, Dieterle, sat in a faded old Triumph, swearing. Dave walked over and wondered in a shout if he could help. Dieterle, with a sour twist of his mouth, gave up.

“Ah, it’ll catch, it’ll catch. Son of a bitch knows I’m in a hurry. Always acts like this.” Rain had misted the big round lenses of his glasses. He peered up at Dave through them. “You’re some kind of cop, no? I saw you with them on the beach. I heard you tell Bambi O’Mara you didn’t think Lily killed Robinson.” Dieterle cocked his head. “You think Bambi did it?”

“Why would I think that?”

“Hell, she was in love with Robinson. And I mean, off the deep end. Weird, a smart chick like that. Not to mention her looks. You know she was a Playboy centerfold?”

“It’s raining and I’m getting wet,” Dave said. “Tell me why she’d kill Robinson so I can go get Slocum to put cuffs on her.”

Dieterle’s mouth fell open. “Ah, now, wait. I didn’t mean to get her in trouble. I figured you knew.” He blinked anxious through the glasses. “Anybody around here could have told you. She made a spectacle of herself.” Maybe the word reminded him. He took off the horn-rims, poked in the dash for a Kleenex, wiped the rain off the lenses. “I mean, what chance did she have?” He dropped the tissues on the floor and put the glasses back on. “Robinson was a fag, worked in a fag bar. It didn’t faze her. So many chicks like that—figure one good lay with them and a flit will forget all about boys. Except Bambi never got the lay. And Robinson got Ed Lily. And did she hate Lily! Hoo!”

“And so she shot Robinson dead.” Dave straightened, looked away to where rain-glazed cars hissed past against the rain-curtained background of another cliff. “Hell hath no fury, etcetera?”

“And framed Lily for it. You follow?”

“Thanks,” Dave said. “I’ll check her out.”

“Any time.” Dieterle reached and turned the key and the engine started with a snarl. “What’d I tell you?” he yelled. The car backed, scattering wet gravel, swung in a bucking U, and headed down the highway toward Surf. Fast. Dave watched. Being in a chronic hurry must be rough on a man who couldn’t stop talking.

Nobody ate at The Big Cup because it was an openfront place and rain was lashing its white Formica. It faced a broad belt of cement that marked off the seedy shops and scabby apartment buildings of Venice from the beach where red dune fences leaned. Dave got coffee in an outsize cup and took it into a phone booth. After his first swallow, he lit a cigarette and dialled people he knew in the television business. He didn’t learn anything but they’d be able to tell him later.

He returned the empty mug to the empty counter and hiked a block among puddles to the Billy Budd, whose neon sign buzzed and sputtered as if rain had leaked into it. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes ago it had been noon. A yellowed card tacked to the black door said in faded felt pen that the hours were 12 noon to 2 a.m. But the door was padlocked.

He put on reading glasses and bent to look for an emergency number on the card and a voice back of him said: “Excuse me.”

The voice belonged to a bony man, a boy of fifty, in an expensive raincoat and expensive cologne. He was out of breath, pale, and when he used a key on the padlock, his hands shook. He pushed open the door and bad air came out—stale cigarette smoke, last night’s spilled whiskey. He kicked a rubber wedge under the door to hold it open and went inside.

Dave followed. The place was dark but he found the bar that had a padded leather bevel for the elbows and padded leather stools that sighed. Somewhere at the back, a door opened and fell shut. Fluorescent tubing winked on behind the bar, slicking mirrors, glinting on rows of bottles, stacks of glasses. A motor whined, fan blades clattered, air began to blow along the room. The man came out without his raincoat, without his suit coat. The shirt was expensive too. But he’d sweated it.

“Weather, right? What can I get you?”

“Just the answer to a question,” Dave said. “What did you want at Arthur Thomas Robinson’s apartment in Surf this morning?”

The man narrowed his lovely eyes. “Who are you?”

Dave told him. “There are details the police haven’t time for. I’ve got time. Can I have your answer?”

“Will you leave without it? No—I didn’t think so.” The man turned away to drop ice into glasses. He tilted in whiskey, edged in water. He set a glass in front of Dave, held one himself. The shaking of his hand made the ice tinkle. The sound wasn’t Christmasy. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see if I can shock you. Ten years ago, Arthur Thomas Robinson and I were lovers.”

“You don’t shock me,” Dave said. “But it’s not responsive to my question.”

“I wrote him letters. I wanted those letters back before his ohso-righteous brother got his hands on them. I didn’t know how to go about it. I simply drove over to Robbie’s. I mean—I never see television. What do I know about police procedure?”

“Ten years ago,” Dave said. “Does that mean Robinson left you for Bruce K. Shevel?”

“That evil mummy,” the man said.

“Clear up something for me.” Dave tried the whiskey. Rich and smooth. They didn’t serve this out of the well. “Shevel said he’d met Robinson in the hospital. Robinson was an orderly. A neighbor named Bambi O’Mara says Robinson was a barkeep all his life.”

The man nodded. “I taught him all he knew. He was eighteen when he drifted in here.” The man’s eyes grew wet. He turned away and lit a cigarette. “He’d never had another job in his life. Orderly? Be serious! He fainted at the sight of blood. No, one sinister night Bruce Shevel walked in here, slumming. And that was the beginning of the end. An old man. He was, even then. He must be all glamour by now.”

“You know that Robinson kept your letters?”

“Yes. He was always promising to return them but he didn’t get around to it. Now he never will.” The man’s voice broke and he took a long swallow from his drink. “That damn brother will probably have apoplexy when he reads them. And of course he’ll read them. His type are always snooping after sin. Claim it revolts them but they can’t get enough. And of course he hated me. Always claimed I’d perverted his baby brother. We had some pretty ugly dialogues when he found out Robbie and I were sleeping together. I wouldn’t put it past him to go to the liquor board with those letters. You’ve got to have unimpeachable morals to run a bar, you know. It could be the end of me.”

“I don’t think he’s that kind of hater,” Dave said. “Are you Lauder?”

“I’m White, Wilbur White. Bob Lauder and I have been partners since we got out of the Army—World War II. We’ve had bars all over L.A. County. Fifteen years here in Venice.”

“Where is he now?”

“Bob? He’ll be in at six. Today’s my long day. His was yesterday. It’s getting exhausting. We haven’t replaced Robbie yet.” He tried for a wan smile. “Of course we never will. But we’ll hire somebody.”

“You live in Venice?” Dave asked.

“Oh, heavens, no. Malibu.”

It was a handsome new place on the beach. Raw cedar planking. An Alfa Romeo stood in the carport. Dave pulled the company car into the empty space beside it. The house door was a slab at the far end of a walk under a flat roof overhang. He worked a bell push. Bob Lauder was a time getting to the door. When he opened it he was in a bathrobe and a bad mood. He was as squat and pudgy as his partner was the opposite. His scant hair was tousled, his eyes were pouchy. He winced at the daylight, what there was of it.

“Sorry to bother you,” Dave said, “but I’m death claims investigator for Medallion Life. Arthur Robinson was insured with us. He worked for you. Can I ask you a few questions?”

“The police asked questions yesterday,” Lauder said.

“The police don’t care about my company’s ten thousand dollars,” Dave said. “I do.”

“Come in, stay out, I don’t give a damn.” Lauder flopped a hand and turned away. “All I want is sleep.”

It was Dave’s day for living rooms facing the Pacific. Lauder dropped onto a couch and leaned forward, head in hands, moaning quietly to himself.

“I’ve heard,” Dave said, “that Robinson was good for business, that you were happy to get him back.”

“He was good for business,” Lauder droned.

“But you weren’t happy to get him back?”

“Wilbur was happy.” Lauder looked up, red-eyed. “Wilbur was overjoyed. Wilbur came un-goddam-glued.”

“To the extent of letting Robinson take what he wanted from the till?”

“How did you know? We didn’t tell the police.”

Dave shrugged. “He was hurting for money.”

“Yeah. Wilbur tried to cover for him. I let him think it worked. But I knew.” He rose and tottered off. “I need some coffee.”

Dave went after him, leaned in a kitchen doorway and watched him heat a pottery urn of leftover coffee on a bricked-in burner deck. “How long have you and Wilbur been together?”

“Thirty years”—Lauder reached down a mug from a hook—“since you ask.”

“Because you didn’t let the Arthur Thomas Robinsons of this world break it up, right? There were others, weren’t there?”

“You don’t look it, you don’t sound it, but you have got to be gay. Nobody straight could guess that.” Lauder peered into the mouth of the pot, hoping for steam. “Yes. It wasn’t easy but it was worth it. To me. If you met Wilbur, you’d see why.”

Dave didn’t. “Do you own a hunting rifle? Say a thirty-thirty?”

Lauder turned and squinted. “What does that mean? Look, I was working in the bar when Robbie got it. I did not get jealous and kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking. Or did I do it to stop him skimming fifty bucks an evening off the take?”

“I’m trying to find out what to think,” Dave said.

“Try someplace else.” Lauder forgot to wait for the steam. He set the mug down hard and sloshed coffee into it. “Try now. Get out of here.”

“If you bought a rifle in the past five-six years,” Dave said, “there’ll be a federal registration record.”

“We own a little pistol,” Lauder said. “We keep it at the bar. Unloaded. To scare unruly trade.”

Where Los Santos Canyon did a crooked fall out of tree-green hills at the coast road, there was a cluster of Tudor-style buildings whose 1930 stucco fronts looked mushy in the rain. Between a shop that sold snorkles and swim-fins and a hamburger place Dave remembered from his childhood, lurked three telephone booths. Two were occupied by women in flowered plastic raincoats and hair curlers, trying to let somebody useful know their cars had stalled. He took the third booth and dialled the television people again.

While he learned that Bambi O’Mara had definitely been in Bear Paw, Montana at the time a bullet made a clean hole through the skull of the man she loved, Dave noticed a scabby sign across the street above a door with long black iron hinges. L. DIETERLE REAL ESTATE. He glanced along the street for the battered Triumph. It wasn’t in sight but it could be back of the building. He’d see later. Now he phoned Lieutenant Ken Barker.

He was at his desk. Still. Or again. “Dave?”

“Shevel is lying. He wouldn’t lie for no reason.”

“Your grammar shocks me,” Barker said.

“He claims he met Robinson when he was in the hospital. After his so-called accident. Says Robinson was an orderly. But at the Sea Shanty they say Shevel walked in one night and met Robinson. According to a girlfriend, Robinson was never anything but a bartender. You want to check Junipero Hospital’s employment records?”

“For two reasons,” Barker said. “First, that rifle didn’t have any prints on it and it was bought long before Congress ordered hunting guns registered. Second, an hour ago the Coast Guard rescued a kid in a power boat getting battered on the rocks off Point Placentia. It wasn’t his power boat. It’s registered to one Bruce K. Shevel. The kid works at the Marina. My bet is he was heading for Mexico.”

“Even money,” Dave said. “His name is Manuel—right? Five foot six, a hundred twenty pounds, long hair? Somewhere around twenty?”

“You left out something,” Barker said. “He’s scared to death. He won’t say why, but it’s not just about what happened to the boat. I’ll call Junipero.”

“Thanks,” Dave said. “I’ll get back to you.”

He left the booth and dodged rain-bright bumpers to the opposite curb. He took a worn step up and pushed the real estate office door. Glossy eight-by-tens of used Los Santos and Surf sidestreet bungalows curled on the walls. A scarred desk was piled with phone directories. They slumped against a finger-smeared telephone. A nameplate by the telephone said, L. Dieterle. But the little man wasn’t in the chair back of the desk.

The room wasn’t big to start with but a Masonite partition halved it and behind this a typewriter rattled. A lumberyard bargain door was shut at the end of the partition. Tacked to the door was a pasteboard dimestore sign, NOTARY, and under it a business card. Verna Marie Casper, Public Stenographer. He rapped the door and a tin voice told him to come in.

She’d used henna on her hair for a lot of years. Her makeup too was like Raggedy Ann’s. Including the yarn eyelashes. She was sixty but the dress was off the Young Misses rack at Grant’s. Glass diamonds sparked at her ears, her scrawny throat, her wrists, the bony hands that worked a Selectric with a finish like a Negev tank. She wasn’t going to, but he said anyway: “Don’t let me interrupt you. I just want to know when Mr. Dieterle will be back.”

“Can’t say,” she said above the fast clatter of the type ball. “He’s in and out. A nervous man, very nervous. You didn’t miss him by long. He was shaking today. That’s a new one.”

“He thinks the storm is going to knock down his apartments in Surf,” Dave said. “Will you take a message for him?”

“What I write down I get paid for,” she said. “He was going through phone books. So frantic he tore pages. Really. Look”—suddenly she stopped typing and stared at Dave—“I just sublet this space. We’re not in business together. He looks after his business. I look after mine. I’m self-sufficient.”

“Get a lot of work, do you?”

“I’m part of this community,” she said and began typing again. “A valued part. They gave me a testimonial dinner at the Chamber of Commerce last fall. Forty years of loyal public service.”

“I believe it,” Dave said. “Ever do anything for a man named Robinson? Recently, say—the last two weeks or so? Arthur Thomas Robinson?”

She broke off typing again and eyed him fiercely. “Are you a police officer? Are you authorized to have such information?”

“He wanted you to write out an affidavit for him, didn’t he? And to notarize it?”

“Now, see here! You know I can’t—”

“I’m not asking what was in it. I think I know. I also think it’s what got him killed.”

“Killed!” She went white under the circles of rouge. “But he only did it to clear his conscience! He said—” She clapped a hand to her mouth and glared at Dave. “You! You’re trying to trick me. Well, it won’t work. What I’m told is strictly confidential.”

Dave swung away. His knuckles rapped the Masonite as he went out of her cubbyhole. “Not with this partition,” he said. “With Dieterle on the other side.”

Past batting windshield wipers, he saw the steeple down the block above the dark greenery of old acacia trees. Merwin Robinson had told the truth about the neighborhood. Old one-story frame houses with weedy front yards where broken-down autos turned to rust. Stray dogs ran cracked sidewalks in the rain. An old woman in man’s shoes and hat dragged a coaster wagon through puddles.

CHURCH OF GOD’S ABUNDANCE was what the weathered signboard said. God’s neglect was what showed. Dave tried the front doors from which the yellow varnish was peeling. They were loose in their frame but locked. A hollow echo came back from the rattling he gave them. He followed a narrow strip of cement that led along the shingled side of the church to a shingle-sided bungalow at the rear. The paint flaking off it was the same as what flaked off the church, white turning yellow. There was even a cloverleaf of stained glass in the door. Rev. Merwin Robinson in time-dimmed ink was in a little brass frame above a bell push.

But the buzz pushing it made at the back of the house brought nobody. A dented gray and blue sedan with fifties tail fins stood at the end of the porch. Its trunk was open. Some of Arthur Thomas Robinson’s clothes were getting rained on. Dave tried the tongue latch of the house door and it opened. He put his head inside, called for the preacher. It was dusky in the house. No lights anywhere. Dave stepped inside onto a threadbare carpet held down by overstuffed chairs covered in faded chintz.

“Reverend Robinson?”

No answer. He moved past a room divider of built-in bookcases with diamond-pane glass doors. There was a round golden oak dining room table under a chain-suspended stained-glass light fixture. Robinson evidently used the table as a desk. Books were stacked on it. A loose-leaf binder lay open, a page half filled with writing in ballpoint. Am I my brother’s keeper? Sermon topic. But not for this week. Not for any week now.

Because on the far side of the table, by a kitchen swing door his head had pushed ajar when he fell, Merwin Robinson lay on his back and stared at Dave with the amazed eyes of the dead. One of his hands clutched something white. Dave knelt. It was an envelope, torn open, empty. But the stamp hadn’t been cancelled. He put on his glasses, flicked his lighter to read the the address. City Attorney, 200 Spring St., Los Angeles, CA. Neatly typed on an electric machine with carbon ribbon. Probably the battered IBM in Verna Casper’s office.

Which meant there wasn’t time to hunt up the rectory phone in the gloom, to report, to explain. It didn’t matter. Merwin Robinson wouldn’t be any deader an hour from now. But somebody else might be, unless Dave got back to the beach. Fast.

Wind lashed rain across the expensive decks of the apartments facing the Marina. It made the wet trench coat clumsy, flapping around his legs. Then he quit running because he saw the door. He took the last yards in careful, soundless steps. The door was shut. That would be reflex even for a man in a chronic hurry—to shut out the storm. And that man had to be here. The Triumph was in the lot.

Dave put a hand to the cold, wet brass knob. It turned. He leaned gently against the door. It opened. He edged in and softly shut it. The same yammering voice he’d heard earlier today in Surf above the wash of rain and tide, yammered now someplace beyond the climbing vines.

“—that you got him to help you try to rip off an insurance company—accident and injury. By knocking your car off the jack while one wheel was stripped and your foot was under it. And he told you he was going to spill the whole story unless you paid out.”

“I’m supposed to believe it’s on that paper?” Shevel’s voice came from just the other side of the philodendrons. “That Robbie actually—”

“Yeah, right—he dictated it to the old hag that’s a notary public, splits my office space with me. I heard it all. He told her he’d give you twenty-four hours to cop out too, then he’d mail it. But I didn’t think it was a clear conscience he was after. He was after money—for a sports car for that hustler he was keeping.”

“I’m surprised at Robbie,” Shevel said. “He often threatened to do things. He rarely did them.”

“He did this. And you knew he would. Only how did you waste him? You can’t get out of that chair.”

“I had two plans. The other was complicated—a bomb in his car. Happily, the simpler plan worked out. It was a lovely evening. The storm building up off the coast made for a handsome sunset. The sea was calm—long, slow swells. I decided to take an hour’s cruise in my launch. I have a young friend who skippers it for me.”

“You shot him from out there?”

“The draft is shallow. Manuel was able to steer quite close in. It can’t have been a hundred fifty yards. Robbie was on the deck as I’d expected. It was warm, and he adored sunsets with his martinis. Manuel’s a fine marksman. Twenty-four months in Vietnam sharpened his natural skills. And the gun was serviceable.” Shevel’s voice went hard. “This gun is not, but you’re too close to miss. Hand over that paper. No, don’t try anything. I warn you—”

Dave stepped around the screen of vines and chopped at Shevel’s wrist. The gun went off with a slapping sound. The rug furrowed at Dieterle’s feet. Shevel screamed rage, struggled in the wheelchair, clawed at Dave’s eyes. Dieterle tried to run past. Dave put a foot in his way. He sprawled. Dave wrenched the twenty-two out of Shevel’s grip, leveled it at them, backed to a white telephone, cranked zero, and asked an operator to get him the police. Ken Barker had managed a shower and a shave. He still looked wearier than this morning. But he worked up a kind of smile. “Neat,” he said. “You think like a machine—a machine that gets the company’s money back.”

“Shevel’s solvent but not that solvent,” Dave said. “Hell, we paid out a hundred thousand initially. I don’t remember what the monthly payments were. We’ll be lucky to get half. And we’ll have to sue for that.” He frowned at a paper in his hands, typing on a police form, signed in shaky ballpoint—Manuel Sanchez. It said Shevel had done the shooting. He, Manuel, had only run the boat. “Be sure this kid gets a good lawyer.”

“The best in the public defender’s office.”

“No.” Dave rose, flapped into the trench coat. “Not good enough. Medallion will foot the bill. I’ll send Abe Greenglass. Tomorrow morning.”

“Jesus.” Barker blinked. “Remind me never to cross you.”

Dave grinned, worked the coat’s wet leather buttons, quit grinning. “I’m sorry about Robinson’s brother. If I’d just been a little quicker—”

“It was natural causes,” Barker said. “Don’t blame yourself. Can’t even blame Dieterle—or Wilbur White.”

“The bar owner? You mean he was there?”

“Slocum checked him out. He had the letters.”

“Yup.” Dave fastened the coat belt. “Twenty minutes late to work. White, sweaty, shaking. It figures. Hell, he even talked about apoplexy, how the reverend hated him for perverting his brother.”

“The man had horrible blood pressure,” Barker said. “We talked to his doctor. He’d warned him. The least excitement and”—Barker snapped his fingers—“cerebral hemorrhage. Told him to retire. Robinson refused. They needed him—the people at that run-down church.”

“It figures,” Dave said. “He didn’t make it easy, but he was the only one in this mess I could like. A little.”

“Not Bambi O’Mara?” Barker went and snagged a topcoat from a rack. “She looked great in those magazine spreads.” He took Dave’s arm, steered him between gray-green desks toward a gray-green door. “I want to hear all about her. I’ll buy you a drink.”

But the phone rang and called him back. And Dave walked alone out of the beautiful, bright glass building into the rain that looked as if it would never stop falling.