Bad Samaritan (6 page)

Si took a paper from his pocket. “There are some names here, mostly kids. Some she helped, some she turned in to the law. There might be some I’ve forgotten; I’m still checking. That last name, he’s a lawyer she worked with from time to time, one of those A.C.L.U. do-gooders.”

I took the list. I wanted to ask about Pontius, but how? He was only a name that troubled me. Mentioning him now might seem to connect him with the murder.

I took a side road. “Vogel’s a good cop, you think?”

He shrugged. “Don’t you? I don’t know about police work. I played poker with Bernie a couple of times and he struck me as a very sharp operator.”

“Last case I had in this town,” I explained, “he and I didn’t get along. We do now, and I think he’s sharp, as you said.” I took a sip of coffee. “How can he play your kind of poker on his pay?”

“He doesn’t play it often: When one of the regulars doesn’t show up, Paul calls him for a fill-in.”

“By Paul, do you mean Paul Pontius?”

“That’s the man. You and he almost came to blows at our house.”

“Oh, him? As I remember the evening, he was a very arrogant guy. And also stoned that night.”

“The pot,” Si said, “has just described the kettle. And he’s as big as you are, too. Don’t mess with him, Brock.”

“I’ll be careful. Where did you meet this oversized kettle?”

“At Vegas. He had some lots on the Strip I was dickering for.”

“ How did Vogel happen to meet him? Through you?”

“I think they knew each other before that. They probably met at some poker game somewhere.” He stared at his Scotch and then looked up to frown at me. “You really led me down that road, didn’t you? You’re thinking Paul Pontius could be a hoodlum front and Bernie Vogel might be involved with him?”

I shook my head.

There was some rasp in Si’s voice. “I’ve mingled with a few hoodlums, working where I did. We both know I’m not what San Valdestans refer to as ‘old money.’ Most of the people we know, we wouldn’t know if Julie hadn’t gone to school with Glenys Christopher.”

“Si, please—” Julie said.

I said, “I wouldn’t know
any
of them if Jan hadn’t decorated the Christopher home here and in Beverly Hills. I’m not getting your point, Si.”

“Maybe I don’t have any. Maybe all I have is resentment. My ma brought me up with this old-fashioned idea that real men earned their own way.”

I smiled and stood up. “You need another drink, tiger. I think we’re both off our natural terrain. We should have stayed on the other side of the tracks.”

“Men!” Julie said. “Do you understand men, Jan?”

“Rarely,” Jan said. “I think maybe it’s time for all of us to have another drink.”

“The same?” I asked.

They all nodded.

“Si,” I said, “you read me wrong. Pontius interests me, but I wasn’t trying to tie him up with Vogel.”

“Okay,” he said. “I was out of line and I apologize. Why should Pontius interest you? Because of the squabble you had with him?”

“Probably. I’ll make the drinks.”

The evening was strained after that. Jan was just waiting for them to leave so she could tell me off. Julie chattered on, trying to brighten the general mood. She achieved her goal finally—by leaving before her third drink.

When the door closed behind them, Jan said, “You’re more devious than I realized.”

“Only professionally.”

“In your devious way,” she pointed out, “you were cross-examining one of our friends. Wouldn’t you call that bad manners?”

“I’m not an expert on the subject of manners,” I told her. “I’m inclined to Maude’s philosophy; I’m more concerned with conduct. And there is one important fact we must not overlook, social butterfly. Maude Marner is dead. That is the only important fact I’m concerned with now.”

I
HAD NEVER HAD
a high opinion of lawyers, but Stanley Nowicki looked closer to a human being than most of the breed, a thin, intense young man with warm brown eyes.

In his storefront office on lower Main Street, I said, “Si Marner gave me your name as an attorney who worked with his mother from time to time.”

“I worked with Maude,” he admitted. “I’m surprised that her son would give you my name—he never approved of her working with me.”

I smiled. “I know. He called you one of those A.C.L.U. do-gooders.”

“How about you? Is do-gooder an obscene phrase to you, too?”

I shook my head. “I phoned you because I thought you might have something that would help me with—with what happened. I have a closer affinity with you boys than Si has. As you too often do, I’m working on this case without compensation.”

It was his turn to smile. “In the interests of justice?”

“Probably not. Call it …” I shrugged.

“Being a citizen?” he suggested. “I’ve been thinking of all I knew about Maude since you phoned. I’ve been checking her connections and interests—and come up with nothing. Could you call back this afternoon? I’m due in court in half an hour.”

“Okay.” I looked around his office. “I suppose you don’t get much carriage trade here?”

He smiled again. “We don’t refuse it. Were you contemplating a substantial retainer?”

“A donation,” I said. I sat at his desk and wrote him a check.

He stared at it. “A thousand dollars? This could make you a lifetime member of A.C.L.U.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “You use it where it will do the most good. I’m not a joiner.”

“Neither was Maude,” he said sadly. “Thank you very much.”

I went out with banners flying, with the sound of distant trumpets in my ears, out into the sunny morning on lower Main Street, the Mexican end of it, studded with minority-owned restaurants and Anglo-owned loan offices.

Up this mean street I walked to the next corner, turned left toward Aqua Street and there found an eating place less likely to be infested with cockroaches.

I consumed two Egg McMuffins there with two cups of coffee and the
Los Angeles Times.
Our new coach had been hired, I read. He would bring the Rams back to glory. There was still hope for civilized man.

The stockbrokers had been working for hours, even the fat-cat lawyers were probably driving to their offices, when I arrived at headquarters.

Vogel wasn’t there. I showed the list Si had given me to Joe Helms. He kept nodding as his eyes scanned the names, then looked up and said, “I know most of them. I’m not sure these addresses are current. These kids move around a lot.”

“You think they’re worth checking out?”

He snorted. “With a case as crazy as this one, who knows?”

“Want to go along, or do I work with Vogel today?”

“Vogel’s got to go to court this morning. And I’m going to try to smoke out that punk who scared Mary Serano. Why don’t you take it alone? If you get any kickback on your authority, tell them to phone us here.”

The first name on the list was Danning Villwock. He wasn’t one of Maude’s kids on either side of the ledger. He was a retired probation officer she had worked with while he was still active.

I couldn’t call him to arrange a meeting; he had no phone. I drove up into the hills, the gray, tinderbox late-summer hills, along a narrow winding road, climbing all the way.

The rutted road that led in from his mailbox was worse, designed for vehicles with four-wheel drive. My groaning steed almost made it. I walked the last two hundred yards to a cabin built of railroad ties, shaded by a grove of eucalypti.

There was a jeep in the side yard. In the small front yard, a man of about fifty in knee-length cutoff jeans and no shirt lounged in a deck chair with a can of beer in one hand, dreaming out at his impressive view.

He got up as I approached. “Morning, stranger.”

“Good morning. Are you Mr. Villwock?”

He nodded, frowning. “I’ve met you somewhere. Or seen you.”

“My name is Brock Callahan.”

“Hell, yes! That Lund business. Didn’t I read somewhere that you live in town now?”

“Since April. Si Marner gave me your name.”

He nodded. “Maude’s boy. You working on that? I heard you’d retired when you got all that money.”

“Charity work,” I explained. “Some view you’ve got.”

“Today,” he admitted, “You can see the islands. You can see it all today.”

The city stretched out below, seventy thousand bugs in a snug rug. Beyond it was the sea, and the Channel Islands. You could see our famous Mission from here and our more famous courthouse and the state university buildings of the U.C.S.V. campus. You could see all the gray, dry hills around us, waiting for one careless match.

“Maude used to sit here with me,” he said quietly, “and smoke a little pot and complain about the state of the world.”

“Maude Marner? Pot?”

He nodded. “I doubt if she smoked it in front of her runaway kids. I smoke it only when things get sticky. Want some?”

“No, thanks. I have enough bad habits now. Wasn’t that kind of phony of Maude, telling the kids one thing while she did another?”

“I don’t make those kind of judgments,” he said. “We all have our masks. If it was a flaw in Maude, it was a flaw she shared with most of those kids’ parents.”

“But Maude, with her Puritan ethic—”

“I repeat, I don’t make judgments. Want a beer?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” I said.

We all have our masks. … I sat in the deck chair next to his while he went into the cabin, a tall, sinewy and apparently adjusted man. But we all have our masks.

He came back with four cans of Olympia in a rusty bucket of ice cubes. He handed me a can and took his seat again. “Who put out that suicide story down at headquarters?”

“It wasn’t official. The uniformed officer who answered the call made some casual remark about it looking like suicide. It still does, technically. But not psychologically.”

“And that’s why you’re here?”

I nodded.

He put the cold can of beer to his sweaty forehead. “She was up here two days before she died. Something big was troubling her this time, something bigger than runaway kids or mistreated Chicanos. Usually, when she had her long nose in somebody else’s business, she confided in me. But not this time.”

“Maybe she was having personal problems.”

“Maybe. I was never a man for investigative police work. Parole and probation, that was my bag. When I worked with Maude, before I retired, it was usually about cutting down some kid’s probation period. She was sharp about the ones we could save.”

“You retired young,” I said.

He smiled. “Is that an accusation? I was never on the take, if that’s what you mean. I’m single and a man of simple tastes and I invested my pennies wisely. Is Vogel working with you?”

“For a couple days, according to the chief. Sergeant Helms will stick with it after that, I guess.”

“Good combination. Vogel’s got the brains and Helms knows the people. Helms grew up with the people he’s now putting into the clink.” He smiled. “Or else he’s lecturing to them. The new cop image, that’s our Sergeant Helms.”

I said nothing.

“Getting along all right with Vogel?” he asked. “You two tangled once, didn’t you?”

“We did. I get along with him now. I get the feeling Helms doesn’t like him much.”

“A lot of the boys down there don’t. Vogel can read without moving his lips and some cops are suspicious of that. And they might wonder about him playing poker with Pontius.”

“Paul Pontius? Why does that name seem famous to me?”

“You don’t remember? The L.A.
Times
gave it half a page when the story broke. They do love to put the rap on anything that happens in Miami.”

Miami, that was the trigger word. “I remember now,” I said. “It was that real-estate investment trust the S.E.C. was investigating, and the Justice Department, too. A Mafia front outfit, wasn’t it? They bilked a lot of rich men out of some big money.”

“Right. And who came down from San Francisco to defend them? What big-shot attorney got all seven of them off scot-free?”

“Paul Pontius.”

He nodded and took a deep breath. “There are some things I could tell you about this town, but maybe I’d better keep my big mouth shut.”

“Whatever you tell me will stay with me,” I said. “I’m not a cop, and I can keep a secret. And maybe what you tell me will find us the bastard who killed your good friend Maude.”

“Okay. Another beer?”

“I’m ready for it.”

He tossed me a can. “That new condominium development out near the university, that’s
all
mob front money. So is that new hotel down near the beach, and a number of apartment houses in town. You see, this is a retirement town. And all kinds of people retire here, including several mob big shots who are getting long in the tooth.”

“Do you have some names?”

“Not at the moment. If your investigation leads you along that route, I might change my mind.”

“The local police aren’t worried about syndicate infiltration in this town?”

“It’s not an infiltration, it’s a residency. Look, these old Mafiosi didn’t care how much blood ran in the gutters when they lived in Detroit or Chicago or Brooklyn or Newark. But they’re
retired
here. This is their sanctuary. The dirty money they could pick up in this town is small change compared with what they’re making in real estate.”

He sipped his beer. “They know that. And they know if the small-time hoodlums here ever get organized, they might be retired in another Detroit or Newark. They don’t want that. They’ve done the department a favor several times when I was working down there.”

“They worked together, the department and the Mafia?”

“Never. That’s a fairly honest department, Callahan. Better than most, I’d judge.”

“So what was the favor?”

“If some bush-league hoodlum down there got too big for his britches and started to organize his brother hoodlums, he would suddenly be found dead. That happened twice while I was with the department.”

“I suppose, to complete this cynical story, the department didn’t give those cases any extra effort?”

“Would you? There are too many decent people getting killed and robbed and raped and assaulted. There are so many hours in a working day. What would your priority be?”