A Savage Place (19 page)

“Tinsel Town,” I said. “Glamor.”

Samuelson looked at me. “Land of dreams,” he said. On the tube Frederics was summarizing the events that culminated in Candy’s death.

“You ever notice that they never get it quite right,” Samuelson said.

“Not even this one,” I said.

“You want any more coffee?” Samuelson said.

“No.” I felt a little sick from all that I’d drunk that day. I hadn’t eaten in nearly as long as I hadn’t slept. Samuelson got up and turned the sound down on the television so that Frederics was reduced to pantomime. “You want to know what we got?” Samuelson said.

“Yeah.”

“Okay. We got lucky. Brewster couldn’t wait to blame Simms for everything. We read him his rights and warned him about using what he said and told him he needn’t talk without his lawyer, but he was in such a goddamn sweat to get it on record that Simms was the one who did everything, that he just kept right on bleating, and Simms got mad and started replying, and we got about everything they had. They might have been a little punchy from having been forcibly apprehended.”

I nodded.

“Anyway,” Samuelson said, “we got the files out on Simms, and he’s got a yellow sheet, looks like it belongs to Attila the Hun. He’s a Mob enforcer. Brewster’s tied into the Mob and that means they’re tied into him. They put Simms into Oceania to keep an eye on things.”

“Can you use what you got in court?” I said.

Samuelson shrugged. “Ain’t my department. D.A.‘s guys say maybe. But you know how it goes. There’s going to be expensive lawyers defending Brewster. They’ll say he was coerced by you. They’ll say he was not competent when he spoke without a lawyer. They’ll mention the fundamental concepts of American justice. Our side will be argued by some kid two years out of U.S.C.” Samuelson shrugged again.

“Start earlier,” I said. “Why did Franco kill FeIton?”

“Franco was a collector. Most recently for Ray Zifkind. About five, six years ago, Summit Studios was going down the chute, and Ray Zifkind bailed them out. That put the head of Summit, guy named Hammond, in the Mob’s pocket.”

“I know Hammond,” I said. “Zifkind the stud duck out here?”

“Yeah. Anyway, one thing led to another, Brewster got in on it. The way you might if you were playing cards and caught a guy cheating. Instead of blowing the whistle, you play along with him. Let him make you money too. You ever play cards?”

“Yeah. I get the idea.”

“Pretty soon Summit Pictures and Oceania products were getting the edge in the marketplace, and Zitkind was making dough and Brewster was making dough, and Summit was making dough. Now and then some theater owner in Omaha would get roughed up, or a lumber wholesaler in Olympia, Washington, would have his warehouse burned, but that’s business, and everything seemed jake to everybody-except maybe the lumber wholesaler or the movie theater guy in Omaha-until Candy Sloan comes along.”

On the silent TV screen Frederics had stopped speaking. The camera zoomed back and held for a long shot of the whole newsroom, then the screen went gray. I got up and turned it off.

Samuelson kept on talking. “Some of this I picked up here and there-we been looking into this for a while ourselves. We picked Hammond up this afternoon-some of this I got from the two crooners downstairs. She talks to Felton, and Felton gets nervous and tells Hammond, and Hammond bucks it along to Brewster, and so forth, and eventually Franco Montenegro gets sent out to slap Sloan around a little and scare her off. They don’t want to burn a reporter if they can help it.”

“I still don’t know why Franco burned Felton.”

“Patience,” Samuelson said. “I’m getting to that. What me and you don’t know is that Felton has been the conduit for profits from Summit to Zifkind. And what nobody knows, including Brewster and Hammond and Zifkind, is that Felton is skimming. But Franco knew.”

If I’d been a cartoon character, a light bulb would have appeared in a balloon above my head. “And Franco cut himself a piece,” I said.

“Smart,” Samuelson said. “Smart eastern dude. You go to Haavahd?”

“I have a friend who’s taking a course there,” I said.

“Must rub off,” Samuelson said. Through the clear glass door of his office I could see a wall clock in the squad room. It said eleven thirty-eight. “So Felton and Franco are nibbling some vigorish of their own off the Mob’s vig. And nobody knows this.”

“And when we got so close to Felton that he was sure to take the fall, Franco had to kill him,” I said. “‘Cause if the Mob found out what they were doing, it-”

Samuelson nodded. “Yes,” he said, “slow, painful and certain. The part I like is that Felton puts in a call to Franco to come bail him out and of course invited in his own killer.”

“Franco was right,” I said. “Felton didn’t have the stuff. He’d have told everything he knew to everybody who asked him about thirty seconds after you got him in here.”

“The thing is that what Sloan’s boyfriend-what’s his name?”

“Rafferty,” I said, “Mickey Rafferty. But he wasn’t her boyfriend.”

“What Rafferty saw when Felton gave Franco some dough wasn’t what they and you and me thought it was. It was just Franco’s private little gig with Felton. But it got the whole thing rolling, and it got Hammond scared and Brewster and, I suppose, eventually Ray Zifkind, but we’ll never get close to him.”

“And Brewster,” I said. I felt as if I would never leave the chair I was in. As if I were slowly fossilizing, the living part of me dwindling deeper and deeper inside. All my energy was focused on listening to Samuelson. “Franco try to shake him down?”

“Yep. Needed the dough, I suppose, to get out of here and away from Zifkind and us.”

“And Brewster figured Candy was getting too close?” I said.

“Yeah. He didn’t believe she was as taken with him as she acted.”

“So he got Simms, and maybe somebody else-anybody else?”

“Yeah, soldier named Little Joe Turcotte. We’re looking around for him now.”

“So he got Simnxs and Little Joe to go out early and wait for Franco, and when Franco showed up, they gunned him. One of them used an automatic.”

“Turcotte,” Samuelson said.

“And they killed both of them while I was wandering around in the oil field.”

“Don’t make you happy, I guess,” Samuelson said.

“Nope. I haven’t been right since I got here.”

“Can’t see how you could have done much better,” Samuelson said.

I didn’t say anything.

“She was going to keep at it,” Samuelson said. “No way you could have kept her from it.”

“The thing is,” I said. My voice didn’t seem to be very closely connected to me. I paused and tried to think what I wanted to say. “The thing is,” I said, “that she did what she did because she didn’t want to be just another pretty face in the newsroom, you know. Just a broad that they used to dress up the broadcast. She wanted to prove something about herself and about being a woman, I guess, and what got her killed-when you come down to it-was, she thought she could use being female on Brewster. When it came down to it, she depended on-” I stopped again. I couldn’t think of the right phrase.

“Feminine wiles,” Samuelson said.

“Yeah,” I said. “Feminine wiles. And it got her killed.”

THE PHONE RANG on Samuelson’s desk. The clock in the squad room said twelve twenty-five. I sat almost insentient while Samuelson listened to the phone. He said “Mmm” two, maybe three times, then listened some more. Then hung up without saying anything else.

“D.A.‘s office wants to prosecute you,” Samuelson said.

I nodded.

“Charges include resisting arrest, assault and battery on the Oceania security people, and being a bushleague fucking hot dog.”

“They been talking to your chief of detectives,” I said.

“They were toying with a kidnapping charge, but since the two guys you held were murder suspects, they don’t think it will stand up. But they also got some new hostage laws they want to try out, and they’ll probably charge you under one of them.”

“Good chance for them to practice,” I said.

“Yeah.”

We were quiet. The squad room behind us was nearly empty. Samuelson rubbed the back of his neck with his right hand.

“They want me to bring you down and book you.” The air conditioner under the window behind Samuelson cycled on with a small thump and a sound of air blowing.

“You got an airline ticket?” Samuelson said.

“In my wallet.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”

We went out of his office. He shut off the lights and closed the door carefully behind him. We walked through the squad room and out of the corridor and took the elevator down to the first floor.

“This way,” Samuelson said.

We walked out the front door and down the steps. The rain had stopped but the dampness still hung in the air. The night was hot and steamy. And you knew it would rain again soon. We walked around the corner and got into an unmarked Chevy sedan. Samuelson drove. We went onto the Harbor Freeway and headed south.

I had my head back against the seat, almost asleep. “You going to book me in Long Beach?” I asked.

“No.”

We turned off the Harbor Freeway at the Santa Monica Freeway and went west.

There was no traffic and Samuelson drove fast. In a few minutes we were in West L.A. We turned off the Santa Monica and onto the San Diego Freeway around a big involute cloverleaf. We went south toward the airport.

It was ten of one when Samuelson headed down Century Boulevard toward the L.A. airport.

“What airline you got a ticket for?” he said.

“American.”

The airport was brilliantly lighted, the lighting making an orange-yellow blur in the mist that seemed to hover over it about twenty feet up. It had the feel of a bright emptiness that a shopping mall has after hours. A single yellow cab rolled past us, going toward L.A. Two airline types in uniform waited at a bus stop in front of the international terminal.

SamueIson parked in front of American and we went in. There was a flight at I:20 for Dallas/Fort Worth that connected for Boston. It was boarding at Gate 46. Samuelson showed his badge to the cop at the security check, and they didn’t make a fuss when the metal detector buzzed at Samuelson’s gun. Mine was back somewhere in a drawer at the homicide bureau.

At Gate 46 Samuelson said to me, “Get on. Go to Boston. When it’s time to testify, I want you back.”

“I thought you were supposed to book me,” I said.

“You escaped as I was bringing you down,” Samuelson said.

“This won’t get you promoted to captain,” I said.

“I flunked the captain’s exam twice already,” Samuelson said. “Just be sure to come back when it’s time to testify.”

“I’ll come back,” I said.

“Yeah,” Samuelson said. “I know.”

I was swaying slightly as we stood there. It was one fifteen. I put out my hand. Sarnuelson shook it. “You did what you could for that broad, Spenser,” Samuelson said. “Including what you did at Oceania afterward.”

I nodded.

“D.A. don’t understand that,” Samuelson said. “Neither does the chief.”

I nodded again.

Samuelson said, “Nobody’s perfect.”

“That’s for goddamn certain,” I said.

I was asleep in my seat before we took off. Except for a half-conscious plane change in Dallas I slept straight through to Boston and dreamed of Susan Silverman all the way home.