There was a rich smell of flowers in the dark air as we went down Beverly Drive. It made me think of funerals. We crossed Wilshire, then Olympic, and pulled in under the entrance portico at the Hillcrest. There was a man to take the car. Duty before sleep. No music filtered down from the rooftop. Candy went into her room and locked the door behind her without a word. I went into mine. It was hot. I turned on the air conditioner and undressed in the dark. When I put my gun on the end table, I could still smell the faint odor of spent ammunition. I didn’t like it. Bubba probably hadn’t liked it either. If he’d smelled it. Which he probably hadn’t.
Chapter 18
WITH A LITTLE computer magic we I.D.‘d Franco in about five minutes. They had all the mug shots cross- indexed by names and pseudonyms and in various other ways, and when we fed in the various things we knew, the computer spit out five names. We looked at the five pictures and the third one was Franco. His full name was Francisco Montenegro. His last address was in Hollywood on Franklin Avenue. He was forty-one years old and had been busted six times, two jail terms. All his arrests were for muscle stuff: assault, extortion, twice for murder.
We talked with Samuelson and a detective named Alvarez in Samuelson’s office.
“I know Franco,” Alvarez said. “He is bad news. He used to be a collector for a loan shark named Leon Ponce, maybe still is. He’ll kill people for you, if you’ll pay him. Or break bones.” He looked at me. “You know the score, don’t you? He’s like a hundred other guys in this town or yours. Except he’s badder than most of them. You’re lucky. Most people bang up against Franco, they don’t come out ahead.”
The phone rang on Samuelson’s desk. He answered, listened, said “Okay,” and hung up.
“Franco don’t live on Franklin anymore,” he said. No one seemed surprised. “I called Boston this morning,” Samuelson said. “Talked to a homicide sergeant named Belson. He tells me you’re legitimate.”
“Gee whiz,” I said.
“I told him we probably had a case on you for suppressing evidence and asked him what he thought about prosecuting you. He said if it was him, he wouldn’t. Said you probably did the world more good outside than inside, but only barely.”
“And what did the prosecutor’s office say?”
Samuelson grinned. “Said they were too goddamn busy.”
“So you’re taking Belson’s endorsement.”
“Yeah.”
The phone on Samuelson’s desk rang again. Samuelson said, “Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that figures. Okay, I’ll come out. Yeah.” He hung up and said, “They found Felton. In a Dumpster back of a Holiday Inn out in Westwood.”
Candy said, “Dead?”
Samuelson nodded. “I’m going out there now,” he said. “You’re a reporter. Want to come along?”
Candy said, “Let me call the station for a cameraman.”
Samuelson indicated his phone. “Dial eight,” he said. He looked at me. “That means you’ll be along too, huh?”
I nodded.
“If we see a clue anywhere, try not to step on it, okay?”
“I’ll just be grateful to watch,” I said. “Try to learn a few advanced police techniques.”
Candy got off the phone and off we went.
The five levels above the lobby at the Westwood Holiday Inn, on Wilshire, are parking levels, open to the pleasant smell of flowers, with a waist-high wall around each level. You drive down an alley beside the hotel and up a ramp, and there you are. There is no attendant, no limitation on who can drive in. Behind the hotel was a small courtyard with a large Dumpster.
Beyond the Dumpster was a high concrete wall, and beyond that, neat, tile-roofed, mostly stucco houses stretched away down to Santa Nionica and beyond. From any of the levels on the back of the hotel, you could see the tower of the Mormon temple building on Santa Monica with the statue of a guy on top of it who was either Joseph Smith or the angel Moroni. It could have been the last thing Sam Felton ever saw.
Felton was where they had found him, spreadeagled, facedown in the Dumpster, dressed as we’d seen him, with some blood dried in the long hair at the back of his head. He was half submerged in trash.
A black detective with a gray-tinged natural and a mustache talked with Samuelson. “I figure he was shot somewhere else, maybe up on one of the parking levels, and dumped in here. If I had to guess, I’d say he got thrown over the edge up there above the Dumpster. He’s sunk in pretty good. He must have landed with some impact.” The cop looked familiar to me, until I figured out he looked like Billy Eckstine.
“Had a chance to talk with anybody yet?” Samuelson asked.
“Hotel manager says no one reported anything unusual. He wasn’t on last night. The night man’s on his way in. Haven’t talked with the guests yet. Man:ycr sort of doesn’t want us to.” It couldn’t be Billy Eckstine, the voice was all wrong. Maybe if he sang a couple of lines of “I Apologize.” I decided not to ask. Nobody was that fond of me here to start with.
“Don’t blame him,” Samuelson said. “We’ll do it anyway. Have the two guys from the black and white start at the top floor. You and your partner start at the bottom. Keep track of the rooms where no one’s there. We’ll want to see if they’ve checked out or if they’re coming back.”
The black detective nodded and went off. A cameraman had showed up to meet Candy. He had a shoulder mounted camera and a big black shoulder bag and was dressed like he was on his way to a soup kitchen. Except for the on-camera people, I’d never seen anyone in television who didn’t dress like they got a discount at Woolworth’s.
I followed Samuelson up to the first parking level while he began walking around looking at the parapet and the
