Come Die with Me (17 page)

I dozed for an hour, perspiring and restless. Old Joe Culver had the right idea: get out of town, go to one of those sleepy beach towns and leave the bedlam behind. Only that took money.

I wasn’t milking my trade as I could; there was a hell of a lot more money in my profession than I was taking out of it. I didn’t play it cute enough.

I rose and bathed my face. I took off my shirt and bathed the whole upper part of my body and felt a little better. At the motel office the manager gave me a couple of aspirin and a glass of water.

Less than a block away, he told me, there was an inexpensive steakhouse and a half a block beyond that a first-class Mexican restaurant. I chose the steakhouse. Though I loved Mexican food, my stomach wouldn’t take it tonight.

The evening was turning cool and the fresh air helped. The restaurant, too, was cool and quiet. With the steak, I had a tiny bottle of red wine.

Back in town now, the preparations would be going on for Harry Adler’s funeral. His sons would be coming home from Columbia and his sister Bertha would be talking with all the relatives, long-distance. And would the boys at Heinie’s mourn him? Would they pause for a moment in the incessant pinochle game to shed one small tear for the late Harry Adler?
Chin up. Brock Callahan; you’re still alive.

I went back to the motel feeling better than I had when I’d left it. In the parking area I saw the Cad and had a moment’s apprehension, but decided that it didn’t have to be my tormentor’s car. Though it figured they would be using the Cad again, now that the police had cleared them, with Lily Chen’s help.

In my unit I kept the lights out and the drapes open. The parking area was illuminated and I’d be able to see anyone who came to the door.

In about two minutes I saw both of them. They came out of the doorway of a dark unit and headed my way.

I turned on my lights, closed the drapes, unlocked my door and sat facing it, my .38 in my hand.

I heard the knock and said, “Come in.”

T
HE REDHEAD, CALAVO, WAS
in front. He opened the door and looked into the muzzle of my .38.

He backed off and Jessup said, “What the hell’s going on?” Calavo was blocking his view.

“Come in,” I said again. “Don’t tell me you boys are scared of me.”

“We didn’t come for trouble,” Calavo said hoarsely. “We’re on the same side, Callahan.”

“Never,” I said. “Come in. I’m not going to shoot you unless I have to.”

“We didn’t follow you,” he explained. “We just happened to hit this spot and then we saw your car.”

“We’re on the same trail, probably,” I said. “Are you coming in or aren’t you?”

Calavo stared for a moment, and then said, “You don’t need the gun.”

I said nothing.

Behind him Jessup said, “He’s not going to shoot. Let’s get in or out, Monte. We can’t stand in the doorway all night.”

Calavo came in slowly, his fat partner behind him. Jessup closed the door and I nodded at the bed. They both went over to sit on it. Jessup looked at my cast, into my face, and away.

“You meant to kill me,” I said, “you bastard.”

He shook his head, his eyes on my gun.

Calavo said quickly, “Checking Selina Stone?”

“Maybe,” I admitted.

“So are we,” Calavo said. “Just to clear Frank’s name, just so his niece will believe he had nothing to do with bumping Malone. And that’s the truth, Callahan.”

“Go home,” I said. “Stay away from the case. I don’t want you slobs messing around Selina Stone.” I looked at Jessup. “It would give me great pleasure to have an excuse to shoot you.”

Jessup put a smile on his face, though it was strained. “You wouldn’t kill me. You only killed one guy in your life and then you puked for two hours.”

I said nothing.

Calavo said, “We check out everything, Callahan. Do you know Giovanni’s clean now?”

I shook my head. “But if he is on this, he’ll have nothing to fear from me. I’m not a vigilante.”

Calavo stared. “Fear from
you
…? What do you mean? You’re talking about Frank Giovanni, man.”

“He has his vulnerabilities,” I said. “One of them visited me this morning, at my apartment, Miss Gina Ronico, his beloved niece.”

Jessup muttered something. Calavo’s face tightened.

I said, “She wanted me to check on her uncle’s whereabouts the night Malone was killed. She felt certain that he was not in Las Vegas and she was willing to take my word on where he was. I know where he was, at Lily Chen’s.” I paused. “But I didn’t tell her that.”

Neither of them said a word, staring at me quietly.

“You get off this trail,” I said, “and Miss Ronico will never get the word from me. You ask Giovanni if that isn’t a good bargain.”

Jessup said, “That Stone dame’s car was in front of the house the night Malone died.”

I nodded. “She admitted that to me.”

Calavo said, “And you’re going to cover for her? You must have your reasons, peeper.”

“They’re not reasons you could understand,” I told him. “I covered for Miss Ronico, in a way, too. I didn’t tell Malone’s widow about her.”

“But you told the law.”

“I work with the law,” I said.

Jessup snorted, and I lifted the gun. I asked quietly, “What was that comment, lard-ass?”

His beefy face tightened and he seemed to lean forward on the edge of the bed.

Calavo said, “We didn’t come here for trouble. Frank told us to lay off you.”

“And I’m telling you to go home. I’ll talk with Lopez in the morning and get the story. You call Giovanni and ask him if that isn’t what he wants. Tell him what I told you.”

They were quiet for seconds, and then they stood up. Calavo said, “We’ll go home right now. I don’t want to talk to Frank over a phone.”

“Okay,” I said. “Drive carefully. I wouldn’t want you to wreck that expensive car.”

Calavo smiled. “You don’t care what happens to us, huh?”

“I care,” I said, “but I haven’t enough stomach to do it to you. Good night, killers.”

They went out and the gun wavered in my hand and gas rumbled in my stomach. I turned out the lights again and opened the drapes, and in a few minutes I saw the Cad pulling out of the parking area.

I drank two glasses of water and turned on the television and tried to forget Giovanni and his many friends.

By ten o’clock I could no longer focus my eyes on the set. I went to bed and was asleep in minutes.

The morning was clear and cool, with a breeze from the ocean. In the courtyard, under the rice-paper trees, the management was serving free sweet rolls and coffee, and that was my breakfast.

A little after nine o’clock I was at the office of the Valencia Entertainment Agency, and Juan Lopez was in. He had the face of a scholar, narrow and gaunt, and the body of a peasant, muscular and thick.

“Selina Stone?” he said, and his brown eyes were reminiscent. “She’s going up in the world, isn’t she? She was a strange child.”

“How …?”

“Independent. Resentful.” He shrugged. “I make it sound as though I didn’t like her, and that’s not true. A reporter, are you?”

“More or less,” I said. “I’d like the real story, though, not some rags-to-riches hogwash.”

He smiled. “After she had earned her first dollar, she never wore rags again. And she earned her first dollar when she was eleven, at least her first dollar from me. She always had good taste. She certainly didn’t get it from her mother.”

“She opens at the Hilton next week,” I said, “and goes from there into the finest room in New York. I guess you started it all, didn’t you?”

He shook his head. “Nobody starts them. Nobody makes them. If I took credit for her, who’d take the blame for all my lemons?” From his desk he picked up a soft white Panama hat. “Come along; I’ll show you where she lived.”

We rode in his car, an Imperial. Through the Mexican district, and every place he turned his eyes, someone waved at him.

“You should run for mayor,” I told him.

He smiled. “No money in it. Money, money, money—that’s what I need. It feeds my soul. It never snubs you, it never betrays you; it is truly man’s best friend.”

I figured he had been snubbed in this bigoted world. But I wondered who had betrayed him. The Imperial went whispering along, from the Mexican district into more open country, and along the train tracks to a leaning shack sheltered by four tall and tattered eucalyptus in a field near the city dump.

He stopped the big car and said, “Her birthplace. No doctor, just a midwife.”

“Vacant now, huh?” I said absently.

He shook his head. “Because there are no curtains? Would a person who could afford curtains live in a place like that?”

And now, at the side of the shack, I saw a little red headed girl playing house in a lean-to of packing case lumber.

“America,” Juan Lopez said. “The year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and fifty-nine.”

“Mmmm-hmmm,” I agreed. “What did this Imperial set you back?”

He smiled. “Now I’ll take you to her mother.”

Past the mission the Imperial whispered and down a hill to a small graveyard in a grove of brightly budding live oak. He helped me out of the car and we went up a narrow walk to the top of the slope. Here was the biggest tombstone in the place, white marble, the tombstone of Selina’s mother.

She had died in June of 1943.

I asked, “New stone?”

He nodded. “Two years old.”

“What good does it do
now
?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Then she went to live with an aunt for a year and the aunt died. She was buried back east.” He took a breath and looked at me. “I read the papers, all the Los Angeles papers. You’re not a reporter.”

“In a way I am. I make out reports.”

He shook his head. “I know what you are and who you are. Is she in trouble? Is Selina in trouble? That Malone business?”

“Mr. Lopez,” I said solemnly, “I am trying to keep her out of trouble. I am probably going to wind up in jail keeping her out of trouble.”

“I see,” he said. “You are working for her?”

“No. I work for all the lambs, no matter who pays me. Essentially she’s a lamb, isn’t she?”

He nodded. “But lambs have killed.”

“They’re forced to, at times. In order to survive. Those were the war years, when Selina went on her own. Lambs killed in those years.”

We went down the slope again to his car and he helped me in and we drove slowly back to his office. He talked all the while, softly and sadly, and the picture became clear and the reason for her independence became plain.

At his office I thanked him and he assured me it was nothing and he gave me one of his business cards in case I should ever need any entertainment of any kind whatsoever. He had all the kinds there were, some with guitars.

He helped me into the flivver and I turned her toward home, about forty-five miles down the coast.

“… upon this rock I will build my Church …” It had tried to bite me that first day, and why was that? The resemblance? Some omniscience peculiar to the Irish?

The Department has the men. All the private investigator has are the lies he is told. The smart killer admits everything but the murder, because small lies revealed indicate the big lie could have been told. There are all kinds of lies. Silence is often a lie.

The sun was out. The ocean was blue and the hills green. The flivver chugged past Malibu, past the turnoff that led to Topanga. At the end of Sunset Boulevard, I turned up toward town.

I was going past the supermarket at the west end of the Palisades when I first became conscious of the red light flashing from behind. I slowed, just as the first warning whine of his siren sounded.

It was a young officer, grim and businesslike. “Mr. Brock Callahan?” he asked.

“At your service,” I said.

“The call’s been out for you for twenty-four hours. My partner will ride with you. Follow my car.”

“Now what?” I asked. “Whose silly idea was this?”

“Captain Apoyan at the West Side Station wants to talk with you. And Lieutenant Trask.”

I sighed. “And not Sergeant Pascal? He go on vacation, or something?”

The young officer didn’t smile. He said. “Follow me.”

I told myself I couldn’t be in very serious trouble, or else they’d have taken me down in the police car. I should have told Pascal I was leaving town yesterday. I hoped against hope it wasn’t the discovery of Selina Stone that had put them onto me. She could put me into hot water. I still wasn’t sorry I hadn’t given them her name.

The officer who rode with me wasn’t quite as grim as his partner. He was a Ram fan and he assured me it was probably just some little discrepancy that could be cleared up in a few minutes.

Maybe, he suggested, it wasn’t trouble at all. Maybe the boys at the West Side Station had become worried about me because I hadn’t slept at home last night. Maybe they had sent out the call because they had feared for my safety. And maybe not.

At the West Side Station the man at the desk told me to be seated. Captain Apoyan was busy at the moment. The grim officer went out without looking at me; the other one patted my arm.

“Luck,” he said. “Keep smiling.”

What about?

I sat down slowly, hamming the crutch a bit, looking for sympathy. The man at the desk didn’t even notice.

In about three minutes Pascal came out and over to me. “Captain Apoyan is clear now,” he said. “Follow me.” He didn’t smile.

“Take it slowly,” I said. “This leg is acting up again.”

He showed as little compassion as the officer at the desk. I limped after him into the Captain’s office.

Even the round and usually genial face of Captain Apoyan was grim today. He nodded to a chair and said “You’ve got a lot of explaining to do, Callahan.” He lifted some sheets of paper. “There are some really serious lapses in your reports.”

I shook my head and sat down.

“Don’t lie to me,” he said. “There’s a woman you’ve been covering up, a woman who was at Malone’s lake place the night he died.”

“No kidding?” I said. “What’s her name?” I leaned forward to put my crutch against his desk.

“That’s what
I
want to know,” he said roughly. “Right now!”