The Galton Case

Chapter 14

I DROVE back across the ridge toward the last fading light in the sky. On the road that wound down to Luna Bay I passed an old man with a burlap bag on his back. He was one of the old-time hoboes who follow the sun like migratory birds. But the birds fly, and the men walk. The birds mate and nest; the old men have no nests. They pace out their lives along the roadsides.

I stopped and backed up and gave him the cake.

“Thank you very kindly.” His mouth was a rent in shaggy fur. He put the cake in his bag. It was a cheap gift, so I gave him a dollar to go with it. “Do you want a ride into town?”

“No, thank you very kindly. I’d smell up your car.”

He walked away from me with a long, slow, swinging purposeless stride, lost in a dream of timeless space. When I passed him, he didn’t raise his bearded head. He was like a moving piece of countryside on the edge of my headlight beam.

I had fish and chips at a greasy spoon and went to the sheriff’s substation. It was eight by the clock on the wall above Mungan’s desk. He looked up from his paperwork:

“Where you been? The Brown kid’s been looking for you.”

“I want to see him. Do you know where he went?”

“Over to Doc Dineen’s house. They’re pretty good friends. He told me that the doc is teaching him how to play chess. That game was always a little over my head. Give me a hand of poker any time.”

I went around the end of the counter and complied with his request, in a way:

“I’ve been doing some asking around. A couple of things came up that ought to interest you. You say you knew some of the hoods in these parts, back in the early thirties. Does the name Culligan mean anything to you?”

“Yeah. Happy Culligan, they called him. He was in the Red Horse mob.”

“Who were his friends?”

“Let’s see.” Mungan stroked his massive chin. “There was Rossi, Shoulders Nelson, Lefty Dearborn – all of them Lempi’s guns. Culligan was more the operator type, but he liked to hang around with the guns.”

“What about Shoulders Nelson?”

“He was about the hardest limb in the bunch. Even his buddies were afraid of him.” A trace of his boyhood admiration showed in Mungan’s eyes. “I saw him beat Culligan to a pulp one night. They both wanted the same girl.”

“What girl?”

“One of the girls upstairs at the Red Horse. I didn’t know her name. Nelson shacked up with her for a while, I heard.”

“What did Nelson look like?”

“He was a big man, almost as big as me. The women went for him, he must have been good-looking to them. I never thought so, though. He was a mean-looking bastard, with a long sad face and mean eyes. Him and Rossi and Dearborn got sent up the same time as Lempi.”

“To Alcatraz?”

“Lempi went there, when the Government took it over. But the others took the fall on a larceny charge. Highjacking. The three of them went to San Quentin.”

“What happened to them after that?”

“I didn’t keep any track of them. I wasn’t in law enforcement at the time. Where is all this supposed to be leading?”

“Shoulders Nelson may be the killer you want,” I said. “Would your Redwood City office have a dossier on him?”

“I doubt that. He hasn’t been heard of around here in more than twenty-five years. It was a state case, anyway.”

“Then Sacramento should have it. You could have Redwood City teletype them.”

Mungan spread his hands on the desk-top and stood up, wagging his big head slowly from side to side. “If all you got is a hunch, you can’t use official channels to test it out for you.”

“I thought we were co-operating.”

“I am. You’re not. I’ve been doing the talking, you’ve been doing the listening. And this has been going on for quite some time.”

“I told you Nelson’s probably our killer. That’s a fairly big mouthful.”

“By itself, it doesn’t do anything for me.”

“It could if you let it. Try querying Sacramento.”

“What’s your source of information?”

“I can’t tell you.”

“Like that, eh?”

“I’m afraid so.”

Mungan looked down at me in a disappointed way. Not surprised, just disappointed. We had had the beginning of a beautiful friendship, but I had proved unworthy.

“I hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I hope I do. You think about this Nelson angle. It’s worth going into. You could earn yourself some very nice publicity.”

“I don’t give a damn about publicity.”

“Good for you.”

“And you can go to hell.”

I didn’t blame him for blowing off. It’s tough to live with a case for half a year and then watch it elope with a casual pickup.

But I couldn’t afford to leave him feeling sore. I didn’t even want to. I went outside the counter and sat down on a wooden bench against the wall. Mungan resumed his place at his desk and avoided looking at me. I sat there like a penitent while the minute hand of the clock took little pouncing bites of eternity.

At eight-thirty-five Mungan got up and made an elaborate show of discovering me:

“You still here?”

“I’m waiting for a friend – a lawyer from down south. He said he’d be here by nine o’clock.”

“What for? To help you to pick my brains?”

“I don’t know why you’re browned off, Mungan. This is a big case, bigger than you realize. It’s going to take more than one of us to handle it.”

“What makes it so big?”

“The people involved, the money, and the names. At this end we have the Red Horse gang, or what’s left of it; at the other end, one of the richest and oldest families in California. It’s their lawyer I’m expecting, a man named Sable.”

“So what? I get down on my knees? I give everybody an even shake, treat ‘em all alike.”

“Mr. Sable may be able to identify those bones of yours.”

Mungan couldn’t repress his interest. “He the one you talked to on the phone?”

“He’s the one.”

“You’re working on this case for him?”

“He hired me. And he may be bringing some medical data that will help us identify the remains.”

Mungan went back to his paperwork. After a few minutes, he said casually:

“If you’re working for a lawyer, it lets you off the hook. It gives you the same rights of privacy a lawyer has. You probably wouldn’t know that, but I’ve made quite a study of the law.”

“It’s news to me,” I lied.

He said magnanimously: “People in general, even law officers, they don’t know all the fine points of the law.”

His pride and his integrity were satisfied. He called the county courthouse and asked them to get a rundown on Nelson from Sacramento.

Gordon Sable walked in at five minutes to nine. He had on a brown topcoat and a brown Homburg, and a pair of yellow pigskin driving gloves. The lids of his gray eyes were slightly inflamed. His mouth was drawn down at the corners, and lines of weariness ran from them to the wings of his nose.

“You made a quick trip,” I said.

“Too quick to suit me. I didn’t get away until nearly three o’clock.”

He looked around the small office as if he doubted that the trip had been worth making. Mungan rose expectantly.

“Mr. Sable, Deputy Mungan.”

The two men shook hands, each of them appraising the other.

“Glad to meet you,” Mungan said. “Mr. Archer tells me you’ve got some medical information about this – these remains we turned up last spring.”

“That may be.” Sable glanced sideways at me. “How much more detail did you go into?”

“Just that, and the fact that the family is important. We’re not going to be able to keep them anonymous from here on in.”

“I realize that,” he snapped. “But let’s get the identification established first, if we can. Before I left, I talked to the doctor who set the broken arm. He did have X-ray pictures taken, but unfortunately they don’t survive. He has his written record, however, and he gave me the – ah – specifications of the fracture.” Sable produced a folded piece of paper from an inner pocket. “It was a clean break in the right humerus, two inches above the joint. The boy sustained it falling off a horse.”

Mungan said: “It figures.”

Sable turned to him. “May we see the exhibit in question?”

Mungan went into the back room.

“Where’s the boy?” Sable said in an undertone.

“At a friend’s house, playing chess. I’ll take you to him when we finish here.”

“Tony was a chess-player. Do you really think he’s Tony’s son?”

“I don’t know. I’m waiting to have my mind made up for me.”

“By the evidence of the bones?”

“Partly. I’ve got hold of another piece of evidence that fits in. Brown has been identified from one of Tony Galton’s pictures.”

“You didn’t tell me that before.”

“I didn’t know it before.”

“Who’s your witness?”

“A woman named Matheson in Redwood City. She’s Culligan’s ex-wife and Galton’s ex-nurse. I’ve made a commitment to keep her name out of the police case.”

“Is that wise?” Sable’s voice was sharp and unpleasant.

“Wise or not, it’s the way it is.”

We were close to quarreling. Mungan came back into the room and cut it short. The bones rattled in his evidence box. He hoisted it onto the counter and raised the lid. Sable looked down at John Brown’s leavings. His face was grave.

Mungan picked out the arm bone and laid it on the counter. He went to his desk and came back with a steel foot-rule. The break was exactly two inches from the end.

Sable was breathing quickly. He spoke in repressed excitement: “It looks very much as if we’ve found Tony Galton. Why is the skull missing? What was done to him?”

Mungan told him what he knew. On the way to the Dineen house I told Sable the rest of it.

“I have to congratulate you, Archer. You certainly get results.”

“They fell into my lap. It’s one of the things that made me suspicious. Too many coincidences came together – the Culligan murder, the Brown-Galton murder, the Brown-Galton boy turning up, if that’s who he is. I can’t help feeling that the whole business may have been planned to come out this way. There are mobsters involved, remember. Those boys look a long way ahead sometimes, and they’re willing to wait for their payoff.”

“Payoff?”

“The Galton money. I think the Culligan killing was a gang killing. I think it was no accident that Culligan came to work for you three months ago. Your house was a perfect hide-out for him, and a place where he could watch developments in the Galton family.”

“For what possible purpose?”

“My thinking hasn’t got that far,” I said. “But I’m reasonably certain that Culligan didn’t go there on his own.”

“Who sent him?”

“That’s the question.” After a pause, I said: “How is Mrs. Sable, by the way?”

“Not good. I had to put her in a nursing home. I couldn’t leave her by herself at home.”

“I suppose it’s the Culligan killing that got her down?”

“The doctors seem to think it’s what triggered her breakdown. But she’s had emotional trouble before.”

“What sort of emotional trouble?”

“I’d just as soon not go into it,” he said bleakly.