Death in Donegal Bay (9 page)

We went into the same lofty living room; I sat in the same chair I had graced before. I said, “I came up to talk with your maid, Luther Barnum’s cousin.”

“Why?”

“Lieutenant Vogel, a friend of mine, feels that there might be something she would know about Luther’s background that could reveal a possible enemy. I’ve worked successfully with Lieutenant Vogel beforehand he knows that many of the officers in the San Valdesto Police Department are not overly concerned with what happened to Luther. He has … quite often embarrassed them in court by giving them evidence that turned out to be false.”

She frowned. “You mean he was a—a—”

“An informer,” I said.

“I see. I hate to sound inhospitable after you have driven all the way up here, Mr. Callahan, but Lucy has been so distressed since her cousin’s death that the doctor gave her a sedative. She’s resting now. Is it possible I could be of help?”

“Perhaps. First, for background, your former husband tried to cheat me when I was a much younger and dumber man than I am now.”

She nodded. “My father told me about that. Surely, though, neither you nor the police can suspect that Alan might have anything to do with—with what happened?”

“Maybe not directly, though even that is possible. Through a friend who plays cards with him, I learned that Alan and a disreputable attorney in San Valdesto have become rather close. And when I was last up here, I met a private investigator named Max Kronen who had come to see your father. Did your father hire him?”

“Definitely not! He is working for an attorney in your town, a man named Joseph Farini. Is that the disreputable attorney you mentioned?”

“That’s the man. And three years ago Max Kronen almost lost his investigator’s license for severely battering an informer who worked for him, and apparently double-crossed him. That, with the information your father gave me when I talked to him, might indicate that your former husband might be more than indirectly involved in Luther Barnum’s murder.”

“No,” she said. “Not Alan. When we were divorced, my father paid him a very substantial sum of money to get him out of my life. I guess he now claims he had dug up some information about my father, some scandal my father refuses to discuss with me. From the crumbs of information I’ve managed to gather, it’s a business scandal. My father, as I am sure you are aware, Mr. Callahan, has been pictured in the press as a ruthless business man. But not even his most vicious critics have ever claimed he was dishonest.” She was shaking when she finished. She stared at the floor, breathing heavily.

I said gently, “But you still don’t believe that Alan had anything to do with the murder?”

“No.” Her voice was soft. “He doesn’t have the—the stomach for that. You know, he is actually a very gentle man—though not really a gentleman, is he?” Her smile was sad. “I sound as if I’m still in love with him, don’t I?”

“Are you?”

“No. But I can understand him, though our thinking is poles apart. I wish he could have tried harder to understand my father. With Alan’s considerable gift of persuasion, he could have helped my father’s cause so much!”

I stood up. “You have been very cooperative. I am sure your father’s enemies will not prevail. Would it be possible for me to talk with Lucy at some later time?”

She was smiling now, the gracious lady. “Of course. I am almost sure she will, once the shock wears off. I’ll find an opportune time to ask her and then phone you if she agrees.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Give my best to your father.”

“I shall. I am sure he will regret having missed you. He was always a devoted Rams fan.”

Traffic was light on the way home; the heavy traffic was on the other side of the divider. We dawdled along at fifty-five miles an hour.

If Max was working for Farini, why had he been checking on Corey? Corey was working for Baker, and so was Farini. Alan and Felicia had gone to Farini’s office
together.

The bodyguard theory I had suggested was doubtful. Corey was too fragile for that role. But Corey, I reminded myself, had not been Baker’s first choice for the job. I had.

A con man, a crooked attorney, a greedy private eye; what rational mind could decipher the machinations of minds like those? All of their loyalties were temporary, except to their mutual god—money.

About twelve miles short of San Valdesto, a jerk in a Porsche came alongside and looked over with the scornful smile those pukes reserve for drivers of shoddy Detroit vehicles.

The road ahead was clear to the horizon. I bottomed my right foot and so did he. Four miles later, the Porsche was only a tiny red dot in my rearview mirror.

Didn’t the nitwit know that even the original Henry’s Model T had a bigger engine than his puddle-jumper?

Vogel usually went home early on Fridays. I phoned him there when I got home. I told him I had learned it was Farini that Max was working for.

“Where did you learn that?”

“Up at Veronica Village about an hour ago.”

“I thought you were going to play golf.”

“Get off that tired kick! What’s new at your end?”

“We have a partial print off the cognac bottle that doesn’t match Luther’s. What were you doing in Veronica Village?”

“I was having a conversation with Joan Allingham. Luther’s cousin was resting under sedation and incommunicado. Joan thinks Baker is threatening her father with revealing some old business scandal. She also told me that Max Kronen is working for Farini. If you get a make on that print, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”

“Yes. Thanks for the info. Farini was in with the chief this afternoon, screaming harassment.”

“Let’s hope the chief doesn’t buy it.”

“Even if he does, we’ve always got you,” he told me.

Another day of pretense, playing a role of somebody I wasn’t. Cyrus would probably send my name to his multifarious mailing lists. Our mailbox would be flooded with the super-WASP, superpatriot idiocies those organizations considered to be the only acceptable Americanism.

I had nobody to blame but myself; I could have played golf.

“Down?” Jan asked when she came home.

“A little. You don’t look too up, yourself.”

“Tedium,” she said. “Trivia. Chasing a dollar I don’t need.”

“There is one thing we must not forget,” I pointed out. “We were even more bored before we went back to work.”

I was adding today’s revelations to my journal when the phone rang.

It was Duane Detterwald. He was phoning from the Biltmore Hotel in town. Would it be possible, he asked, for Jan and me to join him and his wife for dinner there tonight?

When I asked Jan, she said, “Tell them to come here. We have a leg of lamb and there’ll be plenty for all. Duane will pep us up. He was always a positive thinker.”

They came early enough for a drink. Duane had done well by himself; his wife, Daphne, was a pert and sassy imitation blonde only a few inches taller that he was.

She made points with Jan the moment she entered the living room. She looked around and sighed. “This is what I have always wanted, a house decorated by Jan Bonnet! But I suppose you’re retired now?”

“Not yet,” Jan said. “Let me show you the other rooms.”

They left, and it was Duane’s turn to sigh.

“Don’t fret,” I said soothingly. “For an old friend like you, Jan will probably cut her markup to a hundred percent. And you can always sell another ranch. Drink?”

“Scotch on the rocks,” he said.

He was sitting on the couch when I brought his drink. I asked, “Why the Biltmore? I should think you would stay with the Bakers when you came to town.”

“Daphne can’t stand Alan,” he explained, “and neither can I. What’s going on, Brock?”

I sat down next to him. “I wish I knew. My first thought was that Baker was having Felicia followed because he was jealous of Mike. But then Cyrus Allingham got mixed up in it, and Luther Barnum was murdered here in town, and—”

“That man who was murdered? How does he tie in?”

“His cousin is a maid at the Allinghams’. And I guess you know that Baker was married to Joan Allingham.”

He nodded. “And now Felicia’s worried about Mike but won’t confide in me. She might be seeing Mike on the sly. I’m going to check
that
out!”

“Let me know what you learn.”

“I sure as hell will. You’re one man I can trust.” He laughed. “Greg Hudson! You’re like me, Brock. You’re too dumb to be crooked.”

I
T WAS A SOUL-RESTORING
evening, trivia without tedium. Duane related the complicated handicapping system that he and a friend with access to a computer had worked out during his gambling days. It was too sophisticated for me to understand all of it. Apparently, it had also been too sophisticated for the computer. They ran their original kitty of eighteen thousand dollars down to nothing in sixteen days of racing.

Daphne related the comic joys and transient sorrows of her brief career as an exotic dancer at a less-than-exclusive nightclub called Beauty In The Buff, in Hollywood’s shadowland.

When they left, Jan said, “Duane and Daphne Detterwald—do you think it was alliteration that brought them together?”

“Maybe. Whatever it was, it was certainly lucky for both of them. They belong together.”

“They do. They are both darlings. We belong together, too, don’t we, Brock?”

“There’s a way to find out,” I suggested.

“I know. Grappling. Let’s go!”

A happy finish to a disspiriting day. No dreams that night, no tossing, no turning. Jan worked on Saturdays; she was gone when I woke up.

The previous evening’s edition of the local paper had carried three paragraphs on the death of Luther Barnum. The morning’s
Times
held no mention of it. Unmourned and little noticed—thus ended the undistinguished life of Luther Barnum.

At ten o’clock I went to the club to play with the foursome I had been neglecting. They made me pay for my unauthorized absence and lack of practice. Camaraderie
but not compassion,
that is the creed of the devout golfer.

In a mixed foursome on Sunday, I fared better. Jan helped me to get some of my money back, suggesting a press to our opponents on the short holes she knew she could handle, not suggesting it on the long holes she knew I would blow.

We topped the day with an Alan Aida movie and awakened on Monday morning ready for the real world again.

On the phone, after breakfast, Bernie told me the approximate time of death had been between eleven o’clock and midnight. The night clerk had seen no stranger go up the stairs at that time. “But,” he added, “there is also a back stairway that goes to the second floor. Those are the stairs that the resident hookers use.”

“How about the fingerprint?”

“Nothing yet. We sent copies to Washington and Sacramento. We should hear soon. The chief put a stop to our surveillance on Farini. Are you busy?”

“Too busy for that kind of peon labor. Duane was at our house last night. He thinks that Felicia Baker might be messing around with a former boyfriend in Donegal Bay. He’s going to check it out.”

“Information which you will relay to me, of course.”

It was outside his jurisdiction, but I decided not to mention that. I said, “Of course.”

I went back to finish reading the paper, but I couldn’t concentrate. There was another resident of the Travis Hotel I knew who might have more information on the life and death of Luther Barnum than was stored in the police department files. His name was Wallace Stanton, but on lower Main Street he was known as The Judge.

It was ten o’clock now; he wouldn’t be at the hotel. He would be holding court at Rubio’s Rendezvous.

Rubio’s was a narrow bar between a deserted former pawnshop and an active massage parlor on Front Street, half a block north of lower Main Street. Only Rubio, The Judge, and a small, thin dozing man at one of the tables in the room were in attendance when I entered.

Stanton sat at the bar, wearing his funereal black suit and white shirt and string tie. His enormous buttocks sagged over the edges of the steel stool.

“The footballer!” he greeted me.

Rubio held out a hand across the bar. “Pancho! It’s been a long time, amigo.”

I shook his hand and said, “I just thought I’d come down and buy you boys a drink.”

The Judge smiled. “I’ll have cognac.”

Rubio scowled. “That was not funny!”

“I know,” Stanton admitted. “But that’s why he’s down here.” He looked at me. “Isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“Was Luther a friend of yours?”

I shook my head.

“Then why are you down here?”

“Because he’s dead. I apologize for the intrusion.” I turned toward the door.

“Wait!” Rubio said. “This is
my
place, and you are not intruding.”

“I apologize, too,” Stanton said. “But it annoyed me, that part about coming down just to buy us a drink. Why would you need to be phony with us?”

I said, “It must be a hangover from those days when I needed to be phony.”

“Sit,” he said, “and we’ll talk. Rubio and I have been discussing the case. I’ll have a small glass of ale.”

“I’ll have the same,” I said.

Rubio had coffee. I sat on the stool next to The Judge.

He said, “The way we see it, the killer could not have gone up those front steps. The night clerk is very watchful about more than one person sleeping in a room where the occupant is paying single-room rates. He knows all the tenants.”

He took a sip of ale. “The killer must have used the back stairs, which serve only the second floor. The rooms on the second floor are restricted to tenants the manager has learned to trust.” He paused. “Four of the rooms on that floor are occupied by the girls for their commercial purposes. They are the unofficial guardians of the back door and the back stairs.”

“They could have been working in their rooms when the killer came in,” I pointed out.

“All four at the same time?” The Judge shook his head. “Their business isn’t that good. They are street solicitors with a few steady customers. When they are working the street, they stay close to the door. That’s where their customers know they can find them.”