cuss out this guy, I don't know the dude-he just come in off the street-and Tony's started fights before, I don't want no busted furniture and bottles, I says to him, Cool it, Tony, but I see he's about to blow up, and I'm sorry, I don't want to get him in trouble, Tony's a right guy mostly-it's just he's got a temper on him. He's not drunk. You can see he's not drunk. I don't let guys get stoned in here. I run a quiet place.'
'All right, Mr.-'
'Perez, I'm Bob Perez.'
'Mr. Perez. What were they fighting about, do you know?' asked Grace.
Perez licked his lips. 'I'm an honest man,' he said irrelevantly. 'I don't run no clip joint, boys. It was just a little game of draw-nothing important.'
That, of course, spelled out the situation. Unrealistic as it might seem, it was against the law to gamble in public, except inside the racetrack-the only place it was legal around here was down in Gardena where all the cardrooms were located.
Aguilar raised his eyes from the handcuffs and said morosely, 'He was cheating. He had cards up his sleeve or something. He took every pot and Diego called him a cheat and quit the game. I was fool enough to stay in, but I'm not fool enough to let him get by with a royal flush when one of the high cards already got played, and I said-'
The dead man still had the knife in his chest, a big hornhandled jackknife.
'You shoulda listened to me, Tony,' said Perez mournfully. 'Now what's your wife gonna say? So he was a cheat, you didn't have to go and kill him, Tony.'
'I didn't mean to kill him, for God's sake.'
There were eight or ten other men there standing around watching. The squad-car man had a list of names. 'Does anyone know who this is?' asked Grace.
Perez shrugged. 'Who knows? He just come in off the street. Had three or four beers and got into the game.'
Palliser squatted over the corpse and felt in the pockets, came up with a billfold. There were eighty-four dollars in it and in the first plastic slot a driver's license for Alfredo Delgado. He'd been a moderately handsome man in the mid-thirties, and the address was Brooklyn Avenue in Boyle Heights.
They talked to the other three men who had been in the game, who told the same story.
'Diego who?' asked Grace. 'Diego Allesandro. He's a regular here. He left before it happened. He wasn't here,' said Perez. 'You going to lay a fine on me?'
Grace surveyed him amusedly, brushing his narrow mustache in unconscious imitation of Mendoza. 'I don't know, Mr. Perez. It would be up to the district attorney's office, but I don't suppose they'll bother.' The token fine, the unrealistic rules weren't going to stop the card games in bars or anywhere else.
'It was just a friendly little game,' said Perez uneasily.
'I mean it started out like that, see. The guys don't get to playing cards in here-I mean all the time, I mean it's not a regular thing. Just once in a while. You can tell them, can't you?'I
Grace exchanged a cynical look with Palliser, who shrugged. But it took the rest of the afternoon to clear it away. The morgue wagon came for the body and they took Aguilar down to the jail and booked him, went back to the office. Palliser set the machinery going on the warrant. It would get called murder two and might easily be reduced to plain manslaughter under the circumstances.
Grace typed the report and then they went over to Boyle Heights and talked to Delgado's landlady. He'd been renting a room in an old single-family house. The landlady's name was Bream and she didn't seem very much upset to hear about her roomer. 'Wel1, he wasn't here much. I never had much talk with him. Couldn't say if he had any relatives.' She agreed indifferently to let them see his room and they looked through drawers and pockets, but found no address book or letters. Delgado had probably been a drifter and somewhere there might be people concerned about him, but there was nothing to say so here. They let it go. And that took them nearly till the end of shift, and thankfully they both left early.
As Palliser drove home, he was thinking vaguely about the way the crime rate was up in Hollywood. But they had an equity in the house, and Trina was a good watchdog. Maybe when he got his next raise they could look somewhere farther out.
And Grace, easily shelving the routine job, was thinking fondly and fatuously about the new baby. The plump brown little boy who would be christened Adam John at the Episcopal Church next Sunday. He'd been worth waiting for.
It was Piggott's night off. Schenke and Conway drifted in together at eight o'clock to the big communal detective office that always seemed so much bigger and emptier at night than when it was full of busy men on day watch.
'What do you bet we'll have a busy night?' said Schenke. 'The heat building and the weekend coming up.'
The switchboard was shut down. Any calls would be relayed up from the desk downstairs.
Conway assented cheerfully. He had a date set up with his new girl, Marilyn, tomorrow afternoon. They were going to one of the few new movies worth seeing and out to an early dinner at that Italian place on the Strip. She was on the eleven-to-seven shift at Cedars-Sinai. He thought about Marilyn happily. A nice girl, no nonsense to her, perfectly happy to have the date without going all serious. He'd just met her last month when they had that rape case. After his latest couple of girls starting to talk suggestively about real estate prices and what good cooks they were, Marilyn was a joy-pretty, too, with her glossy brown hair and blue eyes. Conway was a good-looking man himself with his regular features and cool gray eyes, which he appreciated without undue vanity.
He was sitting at Higgins' desk and there were a couple of glossy eight by tens on the desk blotter. Conway looked at them appreciatively. He could see that the poor girl was dead, but she'd been a hell of a good-looker. 'I wonder what this is about,' he said.
Schenke, also a born bachelor, but not particularly a man for the girls, said indifferently, 'No idea.'
They got their first call at eight-fifteen, a heist at a liquor store on Third Street. The address rang a faint bell in Conway's mind. They both went out on it, and when they got there, the owner was mad as hell. 'It's the third time I've been held up in five months, goddamn it. I have had it. I have had it up to here, I've goddamned well had my fill of this goddamned business. My wife's been after me to retire and move up to Santa Barbara- Hell, who can afford to retire with the goddamned Social Security about to go down the drain, and I'm only fifty-five but these goddamned punks roaming around-'
He looked vaguely familiar to both Schenke and Conway. His name was Bernard Wolf and he was a short, stocky, dark fellow with an unexpected bass voice. Schenke said, 'Yeah, the latest one was back in July, wasn't it? We were both out on that then.'
'I remember you,' said Wolf. 'You goddamned well were, and goddamn it, you never picked up that bastard, he got away with a hundred and seventy bucks-it was a Saturday night. You had me down there looking at pictures of all the punks and I couldn't make any, all of these god-damned louts look alike-'
'Well, can you give us any description of this one tonight, Mr. Wolf?' asked Schenke patiently.
Wolf let out a long exasperated sigh of resignation. 'I don't know that I can, goddamn it. There'd be ten thousand punks look like him-all over this goddamned town. I was alone in the place-my wife's nervous about me being here at night, but the young guy I hired to come in, he's in the hospital with a leg in traction. Do I shut at six and miss all the business-the weekend coming up? There'd been a customer just left, the punk came in and showed me the gun and I gave him all the paper in the register and he went out-call it three minutes. All I can tell you, goddamn it, he was a spick.'
'Latin,' said Conway.
'Sure, maybe five ten, thin, black hair, little mustache, and he couldn't talk English so good, had a thick accent. He got maybe a hundred and fifty bucks. Goddamn it. God-damn it, I have had it. I can't afford to retire, but the hell with it. I'll get something for the business and maybe I can find a part-time job up in Santa Barbara. I have had it with this goddamned business and this goddamned town-'
'Did he touch anything in here?' asked Schenke.
'Nothing but the goddamned money,' said Wolf.
