money you want.”
“For Pete’s sake. You’ve already given me more than I’d keep. It isn’t money I want. It’s some sort of understanding of what the hell I’m doing and why. You must have heard of professional ethics. Some shreds of them still stick to me. Are you my client?”
“Yes. I give up. They all give up to you in the end, don’t they?”
“Far from it. I get pushed around plenty.”
I got the folder of traveler’s checks out of my pocket and put a pencil flash on them and tore out five. I refolded it and handed it to her. “I’ve kept five hundred dollars. That makes it legal. Now tell me what it’s all about.”
“No. You don’t have to tell anybody about that man.”
“Yes, I do. I have to go to the cop house just about now. I have to. And I have no story to tell them that they won’t bust open in three minutes. Here, take your goddamn checks—and if you ever push them at me again, I’ll smack your bare bottom.”
She grabbed the folder and tore off into the darkness to the hotel. I just stood there and felt like a damn fool. I don’t know how long I stood there, but finally I stuffed the five checks into my pocket and went wearily back to my car and started off to the place where I knew I had to go.
20
A man named Fred Pope who ran a small motel had once told me his views on Esmeralda. He was elderly, talkative, and it always pays to listen. The most unlikely people sometimes drop a fact or two that means a lot in my business.
“I been here thirty years,” he said. “When I come here I had dry asthma. Now I got wet asthma. I recall when this town was so quiet dogs slept in the middle of the boulevard and you had to stop your car, if you had a car, and get out and push them out of the way. The bastards just sneered at you. Sundays it was like you was already buried. Everything shut up as tight as a bank vault. You could walk down Grand Street and have as much fun as a stiff in the morgue. You couldn’t even buy a pack of cigarettes. It was so quiet you could of heard a mouse combin’ his whiskers. Me and my old woman—she’s been dead fifteen years now—used to play cribbage in a little place we had down on the street that goes along the cliff, and we’d listen in case something exciting would happen—like an old geezer taking a walk and tapping with a cane. I don’t know if the Hellwigs wanted it that way or whether old man Hellwig done it out of spite. In them years he didn’t live here. He was a big shot in the farm equipment business.”
“More likely,” I said, “he was smart enough to know that a place like Esmeralda would become a valuable investment in time.”
“Maybe,” Fred Pope said. “Anyhow, he just about created the town. And after a while he came to live here—up on the hill in one of them great big stucco houses with tile roofs. Pretty fancy. He had gardens with terraces and big green lawns and flowering shrubs, and wrought iron gates—imported from Italy, I heard, and Arizona fieldstone walks, and not just one garden, half a dozen. And enough land to keep the neighbors out of his hair. He drank a couple bottles of hooch a day and I heard he was a pretty rough customer. He had one daughter, Miss Patricia Hellwig. She was the real cream and still is.
“By that time Esmeralda had begun to fill up. At first it was a lot of old women and their husbands, and I’m tellin’ you the mortician business was real good with tired old men that died and got planted by their loving widows. The goddamn women last too long. Mine didn’t.”
He stopped and turned his head away for a moment, before he went on.
“There was a streetcar from San Diego by then, but the town was still quiet—too quiet. Not hardly anybody got born here. Childbearing was thought kind of too sexy. But the war changed all that. Now we got guys that sweat, and tough school kids in Levis and dirty shirts, and artists and country club drunks and them little gift shops that sell you a two-bit highball glass for eight-fifty. We got restaurants and liquor stores, but we still don’t have no billboards or poolrooms or drive-ins. Last year they tried to put in a dime-in-the-slot telescope in the park. You ought to of heard the town council scream. They killed it for sure, but the place ain’t no bird refuge any more. We got as smart stores as Beverly Hills. And Miss Patricia, she spent her whole life working like a beaver to give things to the town. Hellwig died five years ago. The doctors told him he would have to cut down on the booze or he wouldn’t live a year. He cussed them out and said if he couldn’t take a drink when he wanted to, morning, noon or night, he’d be damned if he’d take one at all. He quit—and he was dead in a year.
“The docs had a name for it—they always have—and I guess Miss Hellwig had a name for them. Anyway, they got bumped off the staff of the hospital and that knocked them loose from Esmeralda. It didn’t matter a whole lot. We still got about sixty doctors here. The town’s full of Hellwigs, some with other names, but all of the family one way or another. Some are rich and some work. I guess Miss Hellwig works harder than most. She’s eighty-six now, but tough as a mule. She don’t chew tobacco, drink, smoke, swear or use no make-up. She give the town the hospital, a private school, a library, an art center, public tennis courts, and God knows what else. And she still gets driven in a thirty-year-old Rolls Royce that’s about as noisy as a Swiss watch. The mayor here is two jumps from a Hellwig, both downhill. I guess she built the municipal center too, and sold it to the city for a dollar. She’s some woman. Of course we got Jews here now, but let me tell you something. A Jew is supposed to give you a sharp deal and steal your nose, if you ain’t careful. That’s all bunk. A Jew enjoys trading; he likes business, but he’s only tough on the surface. Underneath a Jewish businessman is usually real nice to deal with. He’s human. If you want cold-blooded skinning, we got a bunch of people in this town now that will cut you down to the bone and add a service charge. They’ll take your last dollar from you between your teeth and look at you like you stole it from them.”
21
The cop house was part of a long modernistic, building at the corner of Hellwig and Orcutt. I parked and went into it, still wondering how to tell my story, and still knowing I had to tell it.
The business office was small but very clean, and the duty officer on the desk had two sharp creases in his shirt, and his uniform looked as if it had been pressed ten minutes before. A battery of six speakers on the wall was bringing in police and sheriff’s reports from all over the county. A tilted plaque on the desk said the duty officer’s name was Griddell. He looked at me the way they all look, waiting.
“What can we do for you, sir?” He had a cool pleasant voice, and that look of discipline you find in the best ones.
“I have to report a death. In a shack behind the hardware store on Grand, in an alley called Polton’s Lane, there’s a man hanging in a sort of privy. He’s dead. No chance to save him.”
“Your name, please?” He was already pressing buttons.
