The Galton Case

Chapter 18

I SPRUNG myself out of the hospital three days later, and assembled myself aboard a plane for San Francisco. From International Airport I took a cab to the Sussex Arms Hotel.

The room clerk, Farnsworth, was sitting behind the counter at the rear of the dim little lobby, looking as if he hadn’t moved in two weeks. He was reading a muscle magazine, and he didn’t look up until I was close enough to see the yellows of his eyes. Even then he didn’t recognize me right away: the bandages on my face made an effective mask.

“You wish a room, sir?”

“No. I came to see you.”

“Me?” His eyebrows jumped, and then came down in a frown of concentration.

“I owe you something.”

The color left his face. “No. No, you don’t. That’s all right.”

“The other ten and the bonus. That makes fifteen I owe you. Excuse the delay. I got held up.”

“That’s too bad.” He craned his neck around and looked behind him. There was nothing there but the switchboard, staring like a wall of empty eyes.

“Don’t let it bother you, Farnsworth. It wasn’t your fault. Was it?”

“No.” He swallowed several times. “It wasn’t my fault.”

I stood and smiled at him with the visible parts of my face.

“What happened?” he said after a while.

“It’s a long sad story. You wouldn’t be interested.”

I took the creaking new wallet out of my hip pocket and laid a five and a ten on the counter between us. He sat and looked at the money.

“Take it,” I said.

He didn’t move.

“Go ahead, don’t be bashful. The money belongs to you.”

“Well. Thanks.”

Slowly and reluctantly, he reached out for the bills. I caught his wrist in my left hand, and held it. He jerked convulsively, reached under the counter and came up with a gun in his left hand:

“Turn me loose.”

“Not a chance.”

“I’ll shoot!” But the gun was wavering.

I reached for his gun wrist, and twisted it until the gun dropped on the counter between us. It was a .32 revolver, a little nickel-plated suicide gun. I let go of Farnsworth and picked it up and pointed it at the knot of his tie. Without moving, he seemed to draw away from it. His eyes got closer together.

“Please. I couldn’t help it.”

“What couldn’t you help?”

“I had orders to give you that contact in Reno.”

“Who gave you the orders?”

“Roy Lemberg. It wasn’t my fault.”

“Lemberg doesn’t give orders to anybody. He’s the kind that takes them.”

“Sure, he passed the word, that’s what I meant.”

“Who gave him the word?”

“Some gambler in Nevada, name of Schwartz.” Farnsworth wet his mauve lips with his tongue. “Listen, you don’t want to ruin me. I make a little book, lay off the heavy bets. If I don’t do like the money boys say, I’m out of business. So have a heart, mister.”

“If you level with me. Does Lemberg work for Schwartz?”

“His brother does. Not him.”

“Where are the Lembergs now?”

“I wouldn’t know about the brother. Roy took off like I said, him and his wife both. Put the gun down, mister. Jeeze. I got a nervous stomach.”

“You’ll have a perforated ulcer if you don’t talk. Where did the Lembergs go?”

“Los Angeles, I think.”

“Where in Los Angeles?”

“I dunno.” He spread his hands. They had a tremor running through them, like dry twigs in a wind. “Honest.”

“You know, Farnsworth,” I said in my menacing new lockjaw voice, “I’ll give you five seconds to tell me.”

He looked around at the switchboard again, as if it was an instrument of execution, and swallowed audibly. “All right, I’ll tell you. They’re at a motor court on Bayshore, down by Moffett Field. The Triton Motor Court. At least, that’s where they said they were going. Now will you put down the gun, mister?”

Before the rhythm of his fear ran down, I said: “Do you know a man named Peter Culligan?”

“Yeah. He roomed here for a while, over a year ago.”

“What did he do for a living?”

“He was a horseplayer.”

“That’s a living?”

“I guess he hacked a little, too. Put the gun down, eh? I told you what you wanted to know.”

“Where did Culligan go from here?”

“I heard he got a job in Reno.”

“Working for Schwartz?”

“Could be. He told me once he used to be a stickman.”

I dropped the gun in my jacket pocket.

“Hey,” he said. “That’s my gun. I bought it myself.”

“You’re better off without it.”

Looking back from the door, I saw that Farnsworth was halfway between the counter and the switchboard. He stopped in mid-motion. I went back across the lobby:

“If it turns out you’re lying, or if you tip off the Lembergs, I’ll come back for you. Is that clear?”

A kind of moral wriggle moved up his body from his waist to his fish-belly face. “Yeah. Sure. Okay.”

This time I didn’t look back. I walked up to Union Square, where I made a reservation on an afternoon flight to L.A. Then I rented a car and drove down Bayshore past the airport.

The hangars of Moffett Field loomed up through the smog like gray leviathans. The Triton Motor Court stood in a wasteland of shacks on the edge of the flight pattern. Its buildings were a fading salmon pink. Its only visible attraction was the $3.00 Double sign. Jets snored like flies in the sky.

I parked on the cinder driveway beside the chicken-coop office. The woman who ran it wore a string of fake pearls dirtied by her neck. She said that Mr. and Mrs. Lemberg weren’t registered there.

“They may be going under their maiden name.” I described them.

“Sounds like the girl in seven, maybe. She don’t want to be disturbed, not in the daytime.”

“She won’t mind. I have no designs on her.”

She bridled. “Who said you had? What kind of a place do you think this is, anyway?”

It was a tough question to answer. I said: “What name is she going under?”

“You from the cops? I don’t want trouble with the cops.”

“I was in an accident. She may be able to help me find the driver.”

“That’s different.” The woman probably didn’t believe me, but she chose to act as if she did. “They registered under the name Hamburg, Mr. and Mrs. Rex Hamburg.”

“Is her husband with her?”

“Not for the last week. Maybe it’s just as well,” she added cryptically.

I knocked on the weathered door under the rusted iron seven. Footsteps dragged across the floor behind it. Fran Lemberg blinked in the light. Her eyes were puffed. The roots of her hair were darker. Her robe was taking on a grimy patina.

She stopped blinking when she recognized me.

“Go away.”

“I’m coming in for a minute. You don’t want trouble.” She looked past me, and I followed her look. The woman with the dirty pearls was watching us from the window of the office.

“All right, come in.”

She let me come in past her, and slammed the door on daylight. The room smelled of wine and smoke, stale orange-peel and a woman’s sleep, and a perfume I didn’t recognize, Original Sin perhaps. When my eyes became night-adapted, I saw the confusion on the floor and the furniture: clothes and looped stockings and shoes and empty bottles, ashes and papers, the congealed remains of hamburgers and french fries.

She sat in a defensive posture on the edge of the unmade bed. I cleared a space for myself on the chair.

“What happened to you?” she said.

“I had a run-in with some of Tommy’s playmates. Your husband set me up for the fall.”

“Roy did?”

“Don’t kid me, you were with him at the time. I thought he was a straight joe trying to help his brother, but he’s just another errand-boy for mobsters.”

“No. He isn’t.”

“Is that what he told you?”

“I lived with him nearly ten years, I ought to know. He worked one time for a crooked car-dealer in Nevada. When Roy found out about the crookedness, he quit. That’s the kind of guy he is.”

“If you mean Generous Joe, that hardly qualifies Roy as a boy scout.”

“I didn’t say he was. He’s just a guy trying to get through life.”

“Some of us make it harder for the others.”

“You can’t blame Roy for trying to protect himself. He’s wanted for accessory in a murder. But it isn’t fair. You can’t blame him for what Tommy did.”

“You’re a loyal wife,” I said. “But where is it getting you?”

“Who says I want to get any place?”

“There are better places than this.”

“You’re telling me. I’ve lived in some of them.”

“How long has Roy been gone?”

“Nearly two weeks, I guess. I don’t keep track of the time. It goes faster that way.”

“How old are you, Fran?”

“None of your business.” After a pause she added: “A hundred and twenty-eight.”

“Is Roy coming back?”

“He says he is. But he always sides with his brother when the chips are down.” Emotion flooded up in her eyes, but drained away again. “I guess I can’t blame him. This time the chips are really down.”

“Tommy’s staying in Nevada,” I said, trying to find the wedge that would open her up.

“Tommy’s in Nevada?”

“I saw him there. Schwartz is looking after him. And Roy, too, probably.”

“I don’t believe you. Roy said they were leaving the country.”

“The state, maybe. Isn’t that what he said, that they were leaving the state?”

“The country,” she repeated stubbornly. “That’s why they couldn’t take me along.”

“They were stringing you. They just don’t want a woman in the way. So here you sit in a rundown crib on Bayshore. Hustling for hamburgers, while the boys are living high on the hog in Nevada.”

“You’re a liar!” she cried. “They’re in Canada!”

“Don’t let them kid you.”

“Roy is going to send for me as soon as he can swing it.”

“You’ve heard from him, then.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard from him.” Her loose mouth tightened, too late to hold back the words. “Okay, so you got it out of me. That’s all you’re going to get out of me.” She folded her arms across her half-naked breasts, and looked at me grimly: “Why don’t you beat it? You got nothing on me, you never will have.”

“As soon as you show me Roy’s letter.”

“There was no letter. I got the message by word of mouth.”

“Who brought it?

“A guy.”

“What guy?”

“Just a guy. Roy told him to look me up.”

“He sent him from Nevada, probably.”

“He did not. The guy drove a haulaway out from Detroit. He talked to Roy in Detroit.”

“Is that where Roy and Tommy crossed the border?”

“I guess so.”

“Where were they headed?”

“I don’t know, and I wouldn’t tell you if I did know.”

I sat on the bed beside her. “Listen to me, Fran. You want your husband back, don’t you?”

“Not in a convict suit, or on a slab.”

“It doesn’t have to be that way. Tommy’s the one we’re after. If Roy will turn him over to us, he’ll be taking a long step out of trouble. Can you get that message to Roy from me?”

“Maybe if he phones me or something. All I can do is wait.”

“You must have some idea where they went.”

“Yeah, they said something about this town in Ontario near Windsor. Tommy was the one that knew about it.”

“What’s the name of the place?”

“They didn’t say.”

“Was Tommy ever in Canada before?”

“No, but Pete Culligan–”

She covered the lower part of her face with her hand and looked at me over it. Fear and distress hardened her eyes, but not for long. Her feelings were too diffuse to sustain themselves.

I said: “Tommy did know Culligan, then?”

She nodded.

“Did he have a personal reason for killing Culligan?”

“Not that I know of. Him and Pete were palsy-walsy.”

“When did you see them together?”

“Last winter in Frisco. Tommy was gonna jump parole until Roy talked him out of it, and Pete told him about this place in Canada. It’s sort of an irony of fate like, now Tommy’s hiding out there for knocking Pete off.”

“Did Tommy admit to you that he killed Culligan?”

“No, to hear him tell it he’s innocent as an unborn babe. Roy even believes him.”

“But you don’t?”

“I swore off believing Tommy the day after I met him. But we won’t go into that.”

“Where is this hideout in Canada?”

“I don’t know.” Her voice was taking on an edge of hysteria. “Why don’t you go away and leave me alone?”

“Will you contact me if you hear from them?”

“Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.”

“How are you fixed for money?”

“I’m loaded,” she said. “What do you think? I park in this crib because I like the homey atmosphere.”

I dropped a ten in her lap as I went out. Before my plane took off for Los Angeles, I had time to phone Sheriff Trask. I filled him in, with emphasis on Culligan’s probable connection with Schwartz. In the rational light of day, I didn’t want Schwartz all to myself.