Eureka (16 page)

CHAPTER 8

I stopped at the grocery and picked up some tomatoes, a bottle of milk, and a pint of chocolate ice cream, and walked to the end of the block to Lupo's butcher shop. Lupo was about five-five and all muscle, one of those people without a neck. His head was shaped like a fat pumpkin, with skimpy black hair, and he had bull shoulders that bulged out just below his ears, and a torso that went straight down from under his arms. He could carry a side of beef between his thumb and forefinger. His apron was splattered with blood and he wore rubber boots folded over at the knee. I was afraid to bring up sensitive subjects like sanitary conditions when I was in the shop.

“How about a nice T-bone or porterhouse steak, Zee,” he said with a grin.

“Thirty cents for a pound of steak?” I said. “The cows must be on strike.”

“That's a good one.”

“How about some bones for my dog?”

“Since when you got a dog? What kind?”

“I don't know, Lupo, he doesn't have a birth certificate.”

“Another good one,” he chuckled. “How many bones you want?”

“How does six sound?”

“Six! He must be some big dog. What's this hound's name?”

I thought about that for a minute and finally I said, “His name's Rosebud.”

“
His
name?”

“He's a used dog, the name came with him. I tried to change it to Slugger but every time I call him that, he looks around to see who Slugger is.”

He wiggled a finger at me and I leaned toward him.

“He'll come to Rosie,” he said in a low confidential voice. “Anybody asks, tell him you named him after Slapsie Maxie.”

He was sitting under the yucca plant staring up at a mockingbird that was singing like a blue jay, when I walked out on the back porch.

“Hey, Rosie,” I called, “how about a bone?”

He came loping across the yard and leaned against me, and I scratched him behind the ears. We went inside and I dished out his can of food and put it on the floor, and he went at it like a hyena attacking carrion. Then I gave him a bone.

“You can eat that in here,” I said, but he walked to the screen door and waited for me to open it. “You're some creature of habit,” I said, and let him out.

I took out the clips Pennington had loaned me. Culhane's was a surface biography, no scandal attached. His picture showed a handsome man with a hard jaw and sun-creased skin. He was dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and a striped tie, and wearing a black fedora—mischievous pale eyes under the brim, and a vague smile. He was leaning against a wall, with his thumbs hooked in his belt. Beside it was a second picture of a younger Culhane, dressed in a workman's shirt and dark pants, with one of those round, peaked hats the cops wore back in those days and the puttees he probably had worn in the Marines. He was stern-faced and looked ill at ease in front of the camera. He had his foot on the running board of a four-door Ford ragtop. Beside him was the sheriff, Buck Tallman, who was sitting on a big roan. Tallman was a tall, erect man in a western shirt and a buckskin vest, who obviously ran the county from the back of a horse and used a .44 Peacemaker as a convincer. He had a ten-gallon hat pulled down over gentle eyes, and a proud smile under a handlebar mustache. It was a face that demanded respect, a face that concealed a harsh life on the frontier and a lot of history he probably wanted to forget or had rewritten through the years. He could have been fifty or a hundred and fifty. Together, they kept the peace, which, according to the story, was not as easy as it might sound. Eureka had been like a border town, wide open, noisy, and mean, a town where gambling, boozing, and whoring were the main occupations. Under those circumstances Tallman was not an anachronism, although he might have become one by the time the two of them had decided things were changing and it was time for San Pietro to change, too.

From the story, I learned that Culhane was born in 1884 in that wide-open, sin-ridden town. In 1900, at the age of sixteen, he lied about his age and joined the Marines, ending up on the Western Front, a sharpshooter who won a Silver Star, a Purple Heart, and the French Croix de Guerre in the last battle of the Somme. He came home in 1920 and went back to work as a deputy sheriff.

In 1921, Tallman was shot down in what the paper described as “the massacre at Grand View House, the town's most respectable fancy house.” A new county council immediately named Culhane the sheriff. A year later he was duly elected to the post on the promise that he would clean up San Pietro County and “make it a town and county we will all be proud of.” During the years that followed, he kept that promise. He drove out the mobsters and gentrified San Pietro. Now it was a thriving tourist town.

There was a sidebar relating to the 1922 arrest and conviction of a gangster named Arnie Riker for the murder of a young woman named Wilma Thompson. Riker, of course, had claimed he was framed by Culhane. Not surprising. I never met a hooligan yet who didn't cry “frame” when faced with the goods. He got the gas chamber, later commuted to life without parole on an appeal.

All in all, a favorable piece without a hint of the kind of scandal and corruption that must have been rife during the early days, and one that gave no hint of the stuff I had been hearing from Ski and others about Culhane, except for one thing. When asked about his political platform, Culhane told the reporter, “You'll find out when I'm good and ready to tell you.”

That
sounded like the Culhane I was expecting to meet.

CHAPTER 9

Lieutenant Moriarity gave me the deadeye when I tapped on his door. Moriarity was a short, bulky, almost bald guy, with eyes like a ferret and a voice an octave lower than an opera basso. He had been a cop so long he didn't remember that early in his life he had been a bouncer in a speakeasy where drinks were served in shot glasses and you got a dirty look if you asked for water on the side. That had been twenty-five years ago, when he was twenty-one years old with no plans for the future. The war had changed that. When he came home in 1918 with a couple of medals and a machine-gun hole in his side, a captain he had served with suggested he take a shot at being a cop.

He had been on the P.D. ever since, understood the politics of working in a city where the real rules weren't written in any book and where his main job was to keep his captain happy, which meant a minimum of annoyance. The best way to keep Moriarity happy was to “keep it all minimum,” which was his way of saying don't rock the boat, don't look for headlines, solve your cases as fast as you can, and stay out of what little hair he had left. With that in mind, he didn't get too upset if occasionally you beat on some bohunk's head to get a piece of important information or gentled a confession out of some obstinate lowlife with a few swift, well-aimed kicks where it hurts most. He called it the glove option, as in “always use a glove if you gotta get rough. I don't wanna see some riffraff on the front page looking like he walked into a waffle iron.” He also believed that the best crime reports were those that stayed as close to the bone as possible, his theory being that the less said, the less the ambulance chasers had to go on. “The guy's dead, he has a hole in his head, he was lying in the gutter, period. Don't get poetic, save that for the D.A.”

Violating the basics could earn you a serious talk with the boss, which meant a chewing-out people someplace in Idaho could hear. A couple of years ago, some of the boys sneaked into his office one night and nailed leather straps to the armrests and legs of one of the chairs in his office and affixed a pot to the backrest. It was a pretty good parody of the hot seat. Instead of having a stroke, Moriarity loved it. He put it in the corner of the office, which was pretty barren except for his desk and chair, a coatrack, a small conference table in the corner, a couple of real chairs, a framed picture of FDR on the wall behind him, and an American flag in a wooden holder on the corner of his desk. If he pointed to the hot seat when he called you forth, he was planning to rearrange your ass.

On that morning, he was drinking black coffee and scanning the morning
Times
when I tapped on the door. He waved me in. I stood in front of him and rolled a cigarette.

He looked me up and down. I was wearing my best off-the-rack Bond blue suit, a white shirt, and a reasonably decent tie.

“Where's the funeral?” he asked.

I took that as an invite and sat in the chair across from him.

“So what's on your mind, Bannon. And I'm hoping deep down inside it isn't going to make me dyspeptic.”

“The Verna Wilensky thing,” I said, lighting the butt.

“The one got fried in her tub?” he said, surprised.

“That's not the problem.”

I ran the litany on her, finishing with, “She didn't have any birth certificate, no insurance policies, nothing like that. Five hundred a month for seventeen years. That's uh . . .”

He gave me the deadeye. “A hundred and two grand. What's the matter, drop out of school before they got to math?”

“Ho, ho, ho.”

“Hell, she probably had a sugar daddy. Who cares? She drowned in the bathtub, for crissakes, what else do you need to know? And keep that crap about her lollipop money outta the report. It's distracting.”

“I'm curious about something.”

“You ain't got enough to do? I can fill your plate if you're bored.”

“You know me, I like to bundle 'em up nice and neat. She was in her forties, all alone, her husband got waxed in a car wreck four years ago. No survivors and no will. Maybe we can find some relatives who'll give her a decent burial and a headstone.”

“We're cops, Bannon, this ain't the bleeding hearts club. Tell it to the Red Cross.”

“They're only interested in the living.”

He dug a Tampa Nugget out of his desk drawer and lit it. It smelled like he was smoking a Hershey's bar. He stared at me for a minute or two.

“This isn't one of those nudges you get, is it, Bannon?”

“I don't like coincidence. There's a lot of it here.”

“That ain't what this is about. You're lookin' for something else here, I can feel it in my bones.”

He growled, and gnawed on his cigar.

“We dug up some things,” I said, and gave him a report on what Ski and I had learned the day before, including Wilensky's shadowy past and the mysterious cashier's checks. I left out the background check on Culhane.

“I'd like to take one more day and run up the coast.”

He squinted his eyes and looked at me suspiciously.

“Where up the coast?”

“San Pietro.”

“San Pietro? That's Culhane territory.”

“So I've heard.”

“The same Culhane who's running for governor against Osterfelt and Bellini.”

“The same.”

He gave me the deadeye.

“So, what about Culhane?” I asked innocently.

He responded as only Moriarity can. He was a product of what I call the bureaucratic system of ambiguous response. Moriarity could be standing knee-deep in a pouring rainstorm and if you asked him if it was raining out, he would probably respond with something like, “It's hard to say” or, more likely, “I think Gary Cooper shoulda played Rhett Butler.” In the bureaucracy, the less specific you get, the safer you are. So when I asked about Culhane, he thought a minute, and said that he had heard that Culhane was everything from a demagogue to a commie; from dangerous, tough, heartless, corrupt, merciless, and a cold-blooded murderer to heroic, compassionate, charming, and, as far as the citizens of San Pietro, California, were concerned, “Joan of Arc with a pecker.”

“What do
you
think?” I asked.

He thought for a minute and said, “I think God has a great sense of humor.”

I smiled and waited, but he didn't have any more to say on the subject.

“So, why get so excited about Culhane? I'm going up there to talk to a couple of banks.”

“Thomas Brodie Culhane. His friends call him Brodie, everybody else calls him Captain. Nobody calls him Tommy or Thomas or anything kin to it.”

“How come?”

“How would I know? Maybe he doesn't like the name.”

“Well, he's stuck with it.”

“Not if he doesn't say so.”

“That's the way he is, then?”

“That's the way he is.”

“What's he captain of?”

“He was in the Marines in the war.”

“Sounds like a real bulldog.”

“If God's a bulldog, that's what Culhane is. If you're going up there to snoop around, dance on your tiptoes.”

“I'll avoid him.”

“He'll know you're there before you do.”

“Maybe I should make a courtesy call.”

“If he doesn't beat you to it.”

“Hell, all I want to know is who's been supporting Verna Wilensky for all those years.”

“Read about it in the scandal sheets.”

“It's not a hundred miles. I can be back late tomorrow night.”

“I suppose you wanna take Agassi up there with you?”

I didn't want to push my luck, so I told him I thought I could handle it alone. “I'm just gonna check a couple of banks and see what they can tell me.”

“I suppose you want a car and some play money?”

“That'd be nice. I don't trust my heap for more than twenty miles at a clip.”

He sighed, opened his desk drawer, and took out a pad of expense forms and car chits. “Why don't you get rid of that junk pile. Get yourself something decent. Hell, you just got a raise.”

“Is that what that was? I thought it was a tip.”

“Funny. Hell, you can get a brand-new Pontiac coupe for eight hundred bucks at Nordstrom's showroom over on Welch Avenue. I just saw the ad. Tell 'em you're a cop, maybe they'll give you a break on the price and arrange a little loan.”

“Maybe in your world; not the world I live in.”

“Christ, what a hard head you got.”

I didn't say anything. He glared up at me for a second and shook his head while he scribbled things on the two pads.

“Here's for the car, tell them to fill it up. And you can draw ten bucks for meals. Keep the receipts.”

“Gee,” I said, looking at the chits, “I may just lam it down to Mexico and retire.”

“Send me your address, I'll put you on my Christmas card list.”

“Thanks.”

“Stay outta trouble up there.”

“Don't worry.”

“I've heard that line before. I'm still remembering the time you went up to Tahoe to pick up that firebug and ended up in the hoosegow for smacking an undercover cop.”

Before I could say anything else, Moriarity shook his head. That meant he was tired of our banter. And tired of me.

“Get outta here,” he said. “If you get hung up, there's a fishing camp right on the water about ten miles south of town. A buddy of mine, Charlie Lefton, owns it. Tell him I sent ya.”

“Thanks.”

“But don't.”

“Don't what?”

“Get hung up.”