Around ten thirty that same morning, I entered at Westwood Boulevard and Le Conte Avenue, rolling in my rental Ford through a lushly terraced campus perched on a knoll overlooking valleys, plains and hills. The buildings were terra cotta, brick and tile in a Romanesque motif.
I asked a cute coed for directions to the student union, and was sent to Kerckhoff Hall, an imposing building of Tudor design with a pinnacled tower. I was further directed to a sprawling high-ceilinged room where college kids played ping pong or played cards or sat in comfy chairs and couches and drank soda pop and smoked cigarettes. Among sweaters and casual slacks and bobby socks, I stuck out like the thirty-eight-year-old sore thumb I was in my tan summer suit; but the kids were all chatty and friendly. My cover was that Bud had applied for a job-what that job was, of course, I couldn’t say-and I was checking up on him for his prospective employer.
Not everybody knew Bud Gollum or Louise Overell, of course-too big a campus for that. But a few did.
Bud, it seemed, was a freshman, going to school on Uncle Sam. Other first-year fellas-younger than Bud, probably nineteen-described him as “a good guy, friendly, and smart,” even “real smart.” But several didn’t hide their dislike of Bud, saying he was smart-alecky, writing him off as a “wiseguy.”
A mid-twenties junior with an anchor tattooed on his forearm knew Bud as a fellow Navy veteran, and said Bud had been a Radio Man First Class.
“Listen,” the husky little dark-haired, dark-eyed ex-gob said, “if you’re considering him for a job, give him a break-he’s smarter than his grades make him look.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, when you see his transcripts, you’re going find him pulling down some low junk, so far this year…but it’s that little skirt’s fault. I mean, they don’t let dummies into pre-med around here.”
“He’s got a girl friend distracting him?”
The gob nodded. “And it’s pretty damn serious-she’s a young piece of tail, pardon my French, built like a brick shithouse. Can hardly blame him for letting his studies slide.”
“Well, I hope he wouldn’t be too preoccupied to do a good job-”
“No, no! He’s a right fella! Lives at home with his mom and stepdad-he’s an assistant scout master, for Christ sakes!”
“Sounds clean cut.”
“Sure-he loves the outdoors, always going hiking in the mountains up around Chatsworth, backpacking out into the desert.”
“His girl go in for that?”
“They go everywhere together, joined at the hip…don’t give me that look, buddy! I mean, haven’t you ever had a female lead you around by the dick?”
“No,” I said, and when he arched an eyebrow, I added, “Does my wife count?”
He grinned at me. “Does mine?”
A table of girls who were smoking and playing pitch allowed me to pull up a chair for a few questions; they weren’t very cute, just enough to make me want to bust out crying.
“I don’t know what a neat guy like that sees in ol’ Stone Face,” a blonde with blue eyes and braces said. I liked the way she was getting lipstick on her cigarette.
“Stone Face?”
“Yeah,” a brunette said. She wasn’t smoking, like her friends, just chewing and snapping her gum. “That gal’s got this round face like a frying pan and’s got about as much expression.”
“Except when she giggles,” a redhead said, giggling.
All the girls began to giggle, the blonde saying, “Then she really looks like a dope!”
“She laughs at everything that idiot says,” the brunette said. “They hang onto each other like ivy-it’s sickening.”
That was all I learned at the college, and the effort took about three hours; but it was a start.
Pasadena was the richest city per capita in the nation, and the residential neighborhood where the Overells resided gave credence to that notion-mansions with sunken gardens, swimming pools and tennis courts on winding, flower-edged, palm-flung streets. The white mission-style mansion at 607 Los Robles Drive, with its well-manicured, lavishly landscaped lawn, was no exception.
Mrs. Overell was younger than her husband by perhaps ten years, an attractive dark-blonde woman whose nicely buxom shape was getting a tad matronly. We sat by the pool watching the mid-afternoon sun highlight the shimmering blue surface with gold. We drank iced tea and she hid her feelings behind dark sunglasses and features as expressionless as the Stone Face with which those coeds had tagged her daughter.
“I don’t know what I can tell you, Mr. Heller,” she said, her voice a bland alto, “that my husband hasn’t already.”
“Well, Mrs. Overell, I’m chiefly here for two reasons. First, I can use a photo of your daughter, a recent one.”
“Certainly.” A tiny smile etched itself on the rigid face. “I should have thought of that-Walter carries a photo of Louise when she was still a child. He’d like to keep her that way.”
“You do agree with this effort to break off Louise’s relationship with this Gollum character?”
“Mr. Heller, I’m not naive enough to think that we can succeed at that. But I won’t stand in Walter’s way. Perhaps we can postpone this marriage long enough for Louise to see through this boy.”
“You think he’s a male golddigger, too?”
She shrugged. “He doesn’t come from money.”
“You know where he lives? Have an address?”
“He’s here in Pasadena.”
I couldn’t picture a wrong side of the tracks in this swanky burg.
“No, I don’t have an address,” she was saying, “but he’s in North Fair Oaks…where so many coloreds have moved in.”
I had been met at the door by a Negro butler, who I supposed had to live somewhere.
But I didn’t press the subject. I sipped my tea and offered, gently, “If your daughter is willing to wait to marry this boy till her eighteenth birthday…which I understand is many months from now…perhaps what you ought to do is humor her, and hope this affair cools off.”
The blue and gold of the sun-kissed pool shimmered in the dark lens of her sunglasses. “I would tend to agree with you, Mr. Heller. In time she might come to her senses of her own volition. But Walter is a father who has not adjusted to losing his little girl…she’s our only child, you know…and I do share his concern about the Gollum boy.”
“That’s the other reason I wanted to speak with you, directly,” I said, and-delicately-I filled her in on my notion to catch the two in flagrante delicto. I wanted to make sure she wouldn’t mind putting her daughter through the public embarrassment a statutory rape accusation would bring.
Another tiny smile etched itself. “We’ve gotten quite used to Louise embarrassing us, Mr. Heller.”
Mrs. Overell thought I might have trouble catching them, however, since they so often went hiking and camping in the West San Fernando Valley-like today. That would be tough: I was used to bagging my quarry in backseats and motel rooms.
As it turned out, Mrs. Overell was able to provide a snapshot, filched from her daughter’s room, of both Louise and her beau. They were in swimsuits, at the beach on towels, leaning back on their elbows smiling up at the camera.
Louise had a nice if faintly mocking, superior smile-not exactly pretty, and indeed round-faced, but not bad; and she was, as that ex-gob had so succinctly put it, built like a brick shithouse. This girl had everything Jane Russell did except a movie contract.
As for Bud, he was blond, boyish, rather round faced himself, with wire-rimmed glasses and a grin that somehow lacked the suggestion of cunning his girl friend’s smile possessed. He had the slender yet solid build so often seen in Navy men.
I spent another hour or so in Pasadena, which had a sleepy air of prosperity spawned by the many resort hotels, the formidable buildings, the pretentious homes, the bounteous foliage. The North Fair Oaks section did seem to have more than its share of colored residents, but this was still nicer than anywhere I’d ever lived. With the help of a service station attendant-the private detective’s best friend in a strange city-I located the home of Dr.
