The Gremlin’s Grampa

Chapter 5

Wednesday — 11:10 p.m.

The Syndicate does not exist; it is a figment of the imagination. And, even if it had existed, it never had made the slightest foothold in the San Francisco Bay area. Still, there were people like Porfirio Falcone to explain...

Porfirio — Pete — Falcone had controlled all the organized prostitution in the San Francisco Bay area for the nonexistent Syndicate for many years. He had had a well-methodized system of recruitment that dovetailed and co-operated with similar non-existent organizations throughout the western part of the country from St. Louis to the Coast, as well as the northern states of Mexico, and which was sufficiently well regulated to both satisfy the custom — if not the Customs — and to avoid undue paid competition. Porfirio — Pete — had had his informants and paid representatives in the Homes for the Unmarried; he had received valuable tips from friends and co-workers such as Jerry Capp, who knew when women of all sizes, shapes and colors were in dire need of funds; he had heard from Ray Martin when a girl was foolish enough to go over her head at one of the gambling clubs. While he remained good friends with John Sekara, however, he had consistently refused to use any of the girls Johnny managed to hook on drugs, or to whom Sekara acted as supplier. It was not that conscience ever bothered Pete; it was simply that girls on the habit had a tendency to hold out money such as tips from the organization, and in addition they were usually selfish in bed.

Still, with all these efficient and effective means of arranging talent, Pete Falcone was not beyond personally inducting a new girl into the profession if the opportunity arose. It was one of the many reasons he preferred the Hotel Cranston as his residence, for the bar there seemed to attract an unusually large number of single girls not unwilling to accept a drink or visit a gentleman’s apartment — or to be impressed both by the decor and the view. Not all of these encounters resulted in a new employee, of course — in fact, few of them did — but even the failures furnished an interesting evening’s entertainment.

This particular evening, Pete Falcone had been sure he had struck gold. The girl seated a few stools down from him, alone in the dim, intimate bar, was, to his experienced eye, the perfect candidate. She was obviously not a hooker. First of all, Pete could spot a professional a block away with his eyes blindfolded, and that went for the expensive call girls as well; in addition, the management of the Cranston was very strict about things of that nature, and more than one bartender had lost a lucrative job because he had tried to make it even better paying by introducing girls into the cocktail lounge.

Pete had studied her a moment and then moved in. She had the kind of beauty that he, personally, favored: long, dark brown hair that half covered her face; a bit too much make-up, but not so much as to distract; a lovely full figure, a bit large in the bust, but nothing nine tenths of all women wouldn’t trade a padded bra for. She seemed to him to be fairly tall, although it was difficult to discern this fact when she was sitting; nor could he tell the color of her eyes since she was wearing dark glasses, a not uncommon scene at the Cranston bar, although how anyone could tell what they were drinking under those conditions remained a mystery to Pete Falcone. She was dressed in an ankle-length evening gown, tight about the neck, with a string of pearls draping her full bosom, and long white gloves coming nearly to her elbows, and she had poise — a most important characteristic in one of Pete’s girls — because she neither accepted his first offer of a drink, nor did she immediately give him the cold shoulder. Rather, she allowed him to move over and sit next to her, and she listened to his tale of loneliness as if it actually merited listening to. It must be admitted, however, that Porfirio Falcone had used the tale enough times to polish it to perfection, nor was his delivery amateurish in the least.

To make a long story short, he had been pleased to see she did not bolt her drink, which indicated to him she could hold her liquor — a vital point, since in the Falcone pleasure palaces there was no cold tea served in the guise of Chivas Regal — she was intelligent, with a sense of humor, and a deep, husky, almost mannish voice that made little icy fingers run up and down Pete’s spine. Nor was she at all unwilling to see the marvelous view from the heights of Pete’s fifteenth-floor bachelor apartment, even though the fog, unfortunately, was bound to be somewhat of a deterrent. Pete had signed the bar check with a slight flourish, winked at the bartender (and later at the elevator boy) and taken the young lady toward his apartment, while visions of sugarplums danced in his head.

Some fifteen minutes later the desk clerk at the Cranston Hotel had been rudely shocked by an angry passerby who came in and brusquely announced that some bloody fool — and he did mean bloody — had either jumped or fallen from one of the upper floors and had damned near brained him. The room clerk, forced against all his instincts to investigate, had pronounced the body to be that of Mr. Porfirio Falcone, after which he became violently sick to his stomach, and had to be escorted home.

Of the lovely girl both the bartender and the elevator operator had seen accompanying Mr. Falcone toward his room, there was no sign.

Wednesday — 11:45 p.m.

Lieutenant Reardon stood in the middle of the large, beautifully appointed living room and studied the luxury about him, consciously comparing it with his own poor flat. Maybe Jan was right, he thought, studying the pictures, the sculpture, feeling the ankle-deep pile of the oyster-white rug beneath his feet; maybe the other half lives better and maybe police work not only is dangerous, but also it may not be the best profession through which to reach these heights. But would Jan agree to my doing what Pete Falcone did for a living? Highly dubious, he thought, and wiped away his smile, walking toward the large open window.

The view from the casement was, indeed, a lovely one, fog and all; in fact, the fog seemed to enhance it. The Golden Gate Bridge seemed to rise from the mist of the bay like a phantom structure, its cables shimmering mysteriously in the dim lights from the towers, all of the bridge independent of land, seemingly floating in the fog; below, the spaced street-lamps of the Presidio marked the winding tree-lined avenues with faintly glowing curves. It occurred to Reardon that the fog was clearing; from the height of the apartment the sky could be seen through the wispy haze, the moon brushing aside the mist, the stars picking holes through it. He sighed and turned to the man bent over the windowsill, dusting it for fingerprints.

“Anything yet, Charley?”

“Nothing yet, Lieutenant.”

The lab man was cheerful, but then, Reardon thought, he’s only been on duty several hours and not eighteen, like me. He wasn’t even sure why he had asked for this check; the girl, according to the elevator operator, had been wearing gloves, and in any event she hadn’t been the one to go through the window — Falcone had. And it would scarcely prove very much to find his own fingerprints in his own apartment. Still, there was always the possibility that Pete Falcone had not particularly wished to go through the window, and may have attempted to hold back, and the marks of desperate fingers scrabbling for purchase on the window’s edge could well support a charge of murder. On the other hand, Pete Falcone, while no giant, still was large enough to prevent a girl from tossing him to his death — or at least he should have been. Reardon watched the technician for a few more moments and then wandered through the rest of the apartment.

There had obviously been no time for Pete Falcone to put his vaunted skills into practice, and the bedroom quite logically remained pristine, its huge circular bed neatly made, the pillows puffed up beneath a brocaded spread. Reardon noted the inviting nudes that made up the pictorial presentation on the paneled walls, as well as the profuse use of reflective surfaces, and then walked on through to the bathroom. Again he found an unsullied room, the towels in the rack all neatly folded and hanging in place, even as the room maid had deposited them. The only conclusion Reardon could draw from this was that either (a) Falcone hadn’t washed his hands before dinner, which made him out to be a slob; or (b) the maid had cleaned up since, although in that case one would have thought she would also have turned down the bed; or (c) Falcone hadn’t been in his apartment before meeting the girl in the bar. Since none of the three made the slightest difference to the case that Reardon could see, he promptly put them out of his mind, returned to the hallway, and thence to the kitchen.

The only apparent use this room was ever put to was to furnish ice cubes, and an empty tray stood in a small puddle of water on the counter. Otherwise the tiny pullman-type room was clueless, or at least to Reardon at the moment. Maybe the answers are all here and I’m just too tired to see them, he said to himself, and yawned as if to excuse himself. A kitchen in a hotel apartment! Ah, well, who said crime doesn’t pay, or that the wages of sin were death? The sudden memory of the body on the sidewalk returned and he shook his head at his own obtuseness and went back to the living room.

The two glasses remained on the coffee table, where he had first seen them, flanked on one side by an open ice bucket with the dwindling cubes floating in their own juice, and on the other side by a series of bottles. There had obviously been time for Falcone to at least make a drink and begin his pitch, even if the best he had gotten out of it had been the worst. Reardon suddenly frowned and stared at the bottles; there was one each of scotch, gin, vermouth, brandy, Cointreau, and vodka. My God, he thought, I must be tired; I should have seen those before. Had it been a party? Still, there were only the two glasses, and the elevator operator had assured him that entrance to the floors, except through the medium of his cab, was impossible. The fire doors, he had sworn, could only be opened from the inside, and Mr. Falcone sure wasn’t going to be opening any fire doors to any stairwells to let in any strangers when he had a piece of meat with him like he had tonight! Then how account for the multiplicity of bottles? Had Falcone been showing off the full extent of his alcohol arsenal? But surely he must have many more: crème de menthe, bourbon, rye... He glanced in the direction of the window.

“Hey, Charley — you checked these glasses, didn’t you?”

“Sure, Lieutenant. First thing I checked. They’re clean.”

Reardon stared. “Both of them?”

“That’s right, Lieutenant. They’ve been wiped off good.”

Reardon looked around, searching for a towel or a cloth of some sort which might have been used and discarded, but there was nothing in the room that looked as if it might have served the purpose. And the towels in the bathroom, he recalled, were all neatly in place and unwrinkled, and the kitchen hadn’t had a towel. If the glasses had been wiped, then, the chances were the young lady had done it with her gloves or a handkerchief, or — if with anything else — she had removed it herself.

But why? Why on earth would she wipe the glasses? Wearing gloves, her fingerprints wouldn’t have been on them, and it would have been expected for Falcone to leave his own prints on his glass. Unless there really had been another man there? Could it be that the girl had opened the fire door in the hallway to let in an accomplice who had climbed the fifteen floors on foot? And if so, what had Falcone been doing at the moment? Cheerfully mixing drinks for the two and forgetting to make one for himself? Mysteriouser and mysteriouser, he thought, and reached for one of the glasses. A mickey, of course, could explain much.

He brought the glass to his nostrils and then took it away, staring through it. Whoever had wiped the outside had not bothered with the inside — possibly, he surmised, because a young lady is a bit more fastidious with gloves where smelly liquids are concerned, than with mere dry fingerprints. He looked thoughtful; that, at least, seemed to indicate an amateur, and while amateurs usually ended up getting caught more quickly than professionals, amateurs rarely knocked off top mob people.

He brought the glass back to his nose and sniffed. Scotch in this glass; good, plain scotch taken straight as good scotch — as opposed to gin — should be taken. If there was any chloral hydrate or any other knockout in this, its odor escaped him. Still, that’s what the lab was for, if the remaining few drops were sufficient for the purpose. Although, of course, there was always Pete Falcone’s stomach to play with; that should tell them something. He set the glass down and picked up the other; this one still had a major portion of its contents intact. He brought it to his nose, sniffing, and then wrinkled his face at the odor. Good God, there ought to be a law against ruining good liquor! There was the faintest touch of gin discernible behind the stronger brandy odor and the sweetness of the Cointreau; the vodka and the vermouth, naturally, would have been hidden in such a conglomeration. And anyone who would drink this bomb, of course, would be able to be given any number of mickeys without tasting them. But, damn it, don’t tell me that Falcone drank this perfumed garbage, the lieutenant thought, and that the girl took her scotch straight! Well, if he didn’t find out sooner, the autopsy would tell. If Falcone was the one with the weird taste in drinks, Reardon felt sorry for the autopsy pathologist; he was probably going to get a secondhand jag when he sliced open the corpse. He set the glasses back on the table and turned to the lab man.

“How you doing?”

“All done, Lieutenant.” The man was packing his kit. “Clean as a whistle. If he tried to hold back, somebody cleaned up after him.” He sounded almost happy about it, as if admiring that someone’s forethought.

“These glasses,” Reardon said. “I’d like you to take them down to the lab with you. I want an analysis of the contents. There’s plenty in this one, but the other only has a drop or two, if that’s enough for you people.”

“More than enough,” the lab man said happily. “With the modern stuff we have now, we could probably have gotten a good idea even if they’d been wiped clean inside, too. Spectographic—”

“Just so we find out,” Reardon said shortly. He was in no mood for a lecture on forensics, and besides, he wasn’t so sure he was happy with all the new, modern equipment they had in the laboratory these days. The way they were developing new gadgets, pretty soon they wouldn’t even be needing lieutenants. Not that that would make Jan unhappy. He looked around the large room one last time before leaving; the room looked back at him calmly, neatly.

Why in the hell hadn’t there been a struggle?

Thursday — 12:10 a.m.

“So she was a doll,” Reardon said patiently. “What kind of a doll do you mean? I mean, did she say ‘mama’ — or, rather, ‘papa’ — when some guy picked her up? What I’m really getting at is, what did she look like, for instance?”

“I’m telling you.” The bartender in the Cranston cocktail lounge looked aggrieved. He stopped drying the glass in his hand, inspected it against the brighter light beneath the counter, and then carefully set it in its place on the shelf there. “She was a doll.”

“We’ve established that.” Reardon’s patience was not endless and his tone indicated it. “Tell me different things about her, like how tall she was, and did she have two heads, and was her left leg in a cast? Things like that.” He leaned forward confidentially. “We’d like to find her and talk to her, you see? A description would help. Unless,” he added brightly, “you happen to know her name and address.”

The bartender reached for another dirty glass and swished it in the soapy water of the bar sink. When he spoke he sounded slightly offended, as if his judgment in women had somehow been impugned.

“No, I don’t have her name and address on account of I never seen the dame before, but like I’m trying to tell you, she was a real dish. Tall? Hard to say, she come in when I was at the other end, and when she and Mr. Falcone left, I was ringing something up. But you can get an idea just from how they sit, and I’d put her as pretty tall. Maybe five-six, or even five-seven. And the one head she had was plenty, she didn’t need no two. Long dark brown hair, the kind that sort of swishes when she turns her head quick — like in those TV shampoo ads, you know. Hair half over her face — remember Veronica Lake? And a cute nose. Wearing cheaters, so I couldn’t see her eyes, but my guess is they’re dark, same as her hair, you know. Good teeth, I remember them. Big-chested babe, too. Built like a brick pool table.”

“You’d know her if you saw her again?”

“Know her? Would I know Elizabeth Taylor if she come walking in the door? You don’t forget a babe like that. They’re too few and far between.” He suddenly frowned, the glass in his hand temporarily forgotten. “Why? You cops think she pushed Mr. Falcone out that window?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Reardon said. “It’s customary in the police department, though, to want to talk to the last person to see a future corpse. I’m just following the practice.” He looked at the man curiously. “Why? Do you think he jumped?”

“Who? Mr. Falcone? Why should he jump? Especially with a babe like that in his apartment?”

“Maybe she didn’t go along with his ideas,” Reardon suggested.

The bartender stared at him in amazement. “A babe who goes to his pad this hour of the night? Besides, what if she changes her mind, a guy jumps out the window over this? Especially a guy like Mr. Falcone, he can get all the dames he wants, anytime? Sure, this was a dish, but she wasn’t the last dish in the world.”

Stan Lundahl was seated on the next stool, quietly taking notes. He had seen to the loading of the body into the meat wagon while the lieutenant had been upstairs. He paused while the bartender put down the glass he was drying and went to attend to the drink order of one of the waitresses and then prepared to continue with his notes as Reardon got back to his questioning.

“What I’m trying to get at,” Reardon said evenly, “is would you know this dish of yours if she came in here with flats on, instead of four-inch spike heels, and if she wasn’t wearing a wig, or didn’t have all that padding in her bra? And if she took off those dark glasses and her eyes were polka-dot instead of brown?”

For several moments the bartender stared at him; then he sighed.

“I ain’t saying you’re wrong,” he said, and there was genuine sorrow in his voice that such things could be. “I seen a couple of babes, you take off the store-boughten stuff and they’d scare a crocodile to death. But this babe was a looker, I tell you, even if all that junk was put on. You can tell.” He thought of a better argument. “Mr. Falcone picked her up, didn’t he? And he never picked up no pigs.”

“I imagine not,” Reardon conceded. “How old was this beauty?”

“Twenty-five, maybe,” the bartender said. “Maybe less, maybe more. Maybe thirty.”

“Thanks for the latitude.”

“Well,” the bartender said defensively, “these days they look younger than they used to. I seen a couple of college kids on a TV quiz show the other day, and so help me, they looked like they should still be in junior high. Man, believe me it makes it tough when they come in here. You ever ask some dame married five years for her ID card?”

“Never,” Reardon said truthfully. “What was this lovely wearing?”

“Wearing?” The bartender frowned. “Some kind of dress; I don’t remember. Up to her chin, I remember that, but that didn’t hide them boobs, believe me. She had on some beads, lay on those tits like on a shelf. I didn’t see what kind of skirt she had on. Maybe even pants. I was ringing something up when she left with Mr. Falcone.”

Reardon sighed. He didn’t seem to be getting very far in pinning down a definitive description of the girl, but how in the devil did you describe any girl these days? Except Jan, of course. They all tried to copy one another and ended up looking like store dummies, or at least ninety-nine per cent did. Damn! If only the unknown girl had had two heads, or a cast on her left leg — or both — then maybe they could put out an all-points on her and locate her inside of a year or so. But probably not even then, he thought with an inner grin, and remembered something else: the strange case of the multiple bottles on the coffee table upstairs.

“What did Falcone usually drink?”

“Mr. Falcone? Catto’s scotch. The best. Straight. No water, sometimes ice. All the time, it’s all he ever drank.” The bartender looked and sounded proud of the excellent taste of his ex-patron. He inspected the glass he had been working on, set it in place, and reached for another all in one practiced motion.

“How about this doll we’re talking about?”

The proud look on the stubby bartender’s face turned to a rueful grin. He put the dirty glass back until he got what was troubling him off his chest.

“Believe it or not, mister, she stuck me. There was a time when the house, here, bought the first drink for anyone knew of a drink I couldn’t make, but then guys started to lie, you know, making up all sorts of screwy names out of their heads. Chiselers, see? Dames did it, too, so we had to stop it.” He shook his head at the thought of the chicanery so natural to people.

“I know,” Reardon said sympathetically. “About her drink — you were saying?”

“Oh, yeah.” The bartender picked up the dirty glass again, beginning to rinse it. “She asks for a Gremlin’s Grampa. I never heard of it, so she tells me how to make it. Half a jigger of gin, half a jigger of brandy, a touch of vermouth—”

“Some Cointreau and some vodka.”

The bartender’s mouth fell open. “You heard of it! I’ll be double-dipped! I’d of bet my shirt she was making it up!” He leaned over the bar, curious. “What’s it taste like?”

“Like it sounds, I imagine,” Reardon said. “I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot swizzle stick myself.”

“That’s what I figured,” the bartender said, and nodded, satisfied. “She didn’t barely drink it herself.”

“Which just proves we’re up against a superior intelligence,” Reardon said. He thought a moment and then came to his feet. Lundahl slid from the adjoining stool and stood waiting, towering over the lieutenant. “Well,” Reardon said to the bartender, “thanks for the help. If you see the girl again, you know where to get in touch.”

“Sure, Lieutenant.” The bartender finished polishing the glass, blew some fluff from the towel off it, and set it beneath the counter. “Gremlin’s Grampa, eh? I’d of sworn she made the thing up out of her head...”

The two detectives walked into the hotel lobby; Reardon found a telephone booth and squeezed himself into it, closing the door behind him. A few minutes’ conversation with the Homicide desk at the Hall of Justice and he hung up and managed to escape the confining cage.

“Captain Tower’s smart, which is probably why he made captain. He’s gone home and gone to bed. Which is what I’m going to do.” He yawned deeply and stretched, after which he headed in the direction of the front door and the street. Lundahl caught up with him.

“Hey, Lieutenant, what do we do about the dame?” He paused a moment. “I’ll put her make out on the town — such as it is — but, well, you want me to put the word around, maybe to some of the bars, for them to keep an eye open for anyone asking for a — what did she call it?”

“A Gremlin’s Grampa.” Reardon grinned. “I think you’d be better off checking the DT wards of the local hospitals. Nobody can knock down very many of those without starting to see little green men.” His smile suddenly faded; he checked his watch. “As a matter of fact, Stan, there is something you can do. Jerry Capp got knocked off earlier tonight in a bar down on the Embarcadero—”

“Yeah. I heard.”

“Well, just before he got it, some girl came into the bar asking for directions. The bartender couldn’t give a decent description, but maybe he’d recognize the one we got just now. It’s worth a try, anyway. We don’t have much of anything else to try. It’s on the corner of Berry — Seven twenty-eight Embarcadero.” He looked at his watch again. “They ought to still be open down there.”

“They’re open down there practically all the time,” Lundahl said. “They sweep from under guys. I’ll get right down there.” He paused. “Say, Lieutenant, she didn’t ask for any of that Gremlin’s Grampa stuff down there, did she?”

“No, just directions. No Gremlin’s Grampas.” Reardon smiled. “I suppose we should be thankful she didn’t order martinis. If we had to put a check on every dame in town who drinks martinis, we’d really have our hands full.”

Or guys, either, he thought, as he waved good night and climbed into the Charger. Speaking of martinis, exactly why had he thought it so absolutely vital to take that third martini tonight at dinner? He hadn’t really wanted it; he was just looking for an excuse to fight with Jan about the marriage bit, and as usual he’d found it. He smiled wryly as he started the engine and pulled out into the deserted street. Maybe when they found the girl who had been with Pete Falcone when he so unfortunately met his end, he’d start dating her instead of Jan. There certainly shouldn’t be any argument about his drinking — not with anyone who put down that concoction!

He yawned, settled himself behind the wheel, and headed for home.