Then Lake buzzed him and said there were a couple of Feds to see him, and Mendoza snarled. 'And what the hell do you want?' he asked the two big men who came in.
'Well, this bank job yesterday-'
'If it's any of your business,' said Mendoza. Time was the bank jobs had belonged exclusively to the Feds, but these days they were left up to the locals.
'Now don't be so goddamned touchy, Mendoza. We're just offering some friendly help,' said the other Fed mildly. 'We got the word from a snitch up in Hollywood. Norm and I have been on a big Narco case, there's some bunch bringing the stuff in from Mexico pretty damn wholesale. We've been sniffing around on it for a couple of months, and the snitch, who's a former pusher just out on P.A., is evidently carrying a grudge. He tells us that job was pulled by Angelo Morales and Tony Montez because they needed the bread to make a payment on a new shipment.'
' Por Dios,' said Mendoza. 'There were two men-both Latins by the witnesses.'
'Well, there you are,' said the Fed. 'By what the pusher said, he got it on the grapevine that Morales dumped a bundle at draw somewhere, and it was the stake for the shipment.'
' Es que ya me canso de las estupideces. I do get so damn tired of all these stupidities. All right. Thank you both so much. We'll look into it.'
'We're just trying to be helpful,' said the first one plaintively. When they had left, Mendoza went out to see who was in. Landers had just come back and Mendoza passed the information on.
'You'd better check with Records- I assume they've both got pedigrees-and see what comes of it.'
'Oh, hell,' said Landers. 'More legwork.'
After lunch Mendoza and Grace started out separately to look at Dobbses, but with all the driving, they only got to four between them that afternoon and none of them was Grandfather.
But Mendoza had spent awhile poring over the County Guide before he left the office, and on Sunday morning as he left the house on the hill he didn't turn left to hit the east on-ramp of the Golden State Freeway, the other way for the west on-ramp. Nine o'clock found him on a narrow black-top road some little way north of the town of San Fernando, and heading north. Behind him was the teeming, crowded San Fernando Valley, one big city sprawl these last twenty-five years. But up here it was all empty land. Gentle bare little hills burned brown by the sun, a few scrub-oak trees. He drove slowly around the various windings of Lopez Canyon Road and nearly missed the little sign off to the right that said INDIAN CANYON ROAD. That was even narrower and led him northeast past more bare land. About half a mile up on the right was a house with a FOR SALE sign on it. A quarter mile farther on the left was another house, or, he amended, to himself, what had been one. Nobody had lived in it for a long time. It had been a square frame house but the roof had fallen in and the front porch was broken. There was a post which had held a mailbox in front and the remains of the mailbox lying alongside it. The post office hadn't delivered any mail here for years. Mendoza parked the Ferrari on the shoulder, went back and looked at the mailbox. There was no lettering visible on the uppermost side, but when he turned it over with one foot, just decipherable were the remains of a few once-white-painted letters.
E-D-BS.
' Alla va, ' he said to himself. He turned the car and went back down the hill to the other house. It had been maintained fairly well. There was a wire fence around about half an acre of land. The realtors' name on the sign was Hawley and Calkins in San Fernando.
'Oh, sure,' said the salesman in that office. 'It's an old lady owns it. Got too old to live alone. I don't suppose we'll sell it very easy, all the commercial growth is west and it's not out far enough for a weekend cabin. Sure I can tell you. Her name is Deeming. Harriet Deeming. It's an address in Van Nuys.'
It was an attractive beige stucco house on a good residential street, and the woman who opened the door looked in surprise at the badge. 'Well, I can't imagine what the police want with Mother Deeming, but she's always pleased to talk to anyone. Come in.' She took him into a pleasant living room and introduced him to a little old woman in a clean cotton housedress sitting in a rocking chair knitting, a cane propped at her side. She had white hair and bright brown eyes, sharp and intelligent on him. Mendoza sat down and asked, 'When you lived in that house up on Indian Canyon Road, did you ever know Elias Dobbs?'
'Now you do bring back some old times to me,' she said interestedly. 'Indeed we did.'
'What can you tell me about him and do you know where he lives now?'
'Not exactly, no. My, how I did hate that man one time. But I've got past that now. I could tell you this and that about him.' She didn't ask why he wanted to know. 'He was a hard man, a regular miser. Frank and I bought that old place, well, paying on it, you know, in nineteen-thirty, we were both raised in the country and thought we could grow a lot of our own food there. Times were awful bad then and we had it pretty tough, Frank out of work and the baby coming. Dobbs lived up the road, and I always felt sorry for his family. There were three kids by the end of the war-a girl and two boys. We didn't know him so well then when we moved there, and when he offered to lend us that money, well, we didn't like to borrow but we had to-and goodness, he was around to collect the interest right on the dot till we managed to pay it back. How that man loved money-well, he got it. All he could use in the end, and I wonder what good it ever did him. One thing life's taught me, Mr. Mendoza, is that all you need is enough. You can't eat more than one meal at a time-and life goes so quick. Seems yesterday I was hoeing that garden and Tommy just a toddler, and here I am coming to the end and Tommy with grown-up kids of his own and their kids coming along, and he's got that good hardware business. We had it rough back there, but we made out. And when the war came along, Frank got that good job at the assembly plant and everything was better. But we went on living there because it was home then, and we got it paid off. I guess I was stubborn about it, I stayed there too long after Frank went, ten years back. Tommy and Faye at me to move in with them, but I like to be independent. It wasn't until I had that bad fall a few months back I saw it was only sensible. When we were first there, there wasn't a house around for quite a ways, real country. But then you know how the valley started to build up after the war-the freeway coming through and houses and businesses getting built all over. It's all just like one big city now-and that's where Dobbs got all his money, it seems he owned thousands of acres out there. He got left some and I guess he bought up a lot more when it was just wasteland at ten cents an acre or something. Right where the freeway came through and all around.'
A great flood of enlightenment hit Mendoza. 'What did he do with the money, do you know?'
'That was back in the early fifties,' she said. 'Thirty years ago. He started his own big real-estate company. He called it the Golden D. He went on living there awhile, that tumble-down old house. His wife was dead and the girl off somewhere, but about twenty years back he moved out. The boys, they were helping to run the business then. Goodness, they'll both be in the forties now, doesn't seem possible.'
'There was a letter for him about six months ago-'
She looked at him over the top of her spectacles. 'Oh, you know about that. Yes, it was funny. The mail carrier asked about the name, he'd never heard it-and I told him to send it to the business.' So Juliette's letter, fatally, had got sent on.
'That's all very interesting,' he said.
'People, they're mostly interesting,' said Mrs. Deeming.
He found the nearest public phone and looked up the address, and swore. It wasn't a realty company, which would be open on Sunday. It was the Golden D Management Corporation, with an address out on Sunset in Beverly Hills.
ON MONDAY MORNING he landed there with Hackett at nine o'clock. The office occupied three floors in a new high-rise building. The top floor contained the managers' offices. It was all expensively and lavishly furnished. They talked to a svelte receptionist with lacquered blond hair and Mendoza asked for Mr. Elias Dobbs. 'Oh, the old gentleman isn't in the office regularly, sir. Mr. David Dobbs won't be in until this afternoon, but Mr. Robert Dobbs should be in this morning.'
'It's rather important that I see Mr. Elias Dobbs,' said Mendoza. 'Could you give me his address?'
She shrugged, incurious. 'He's in one of our condos in Santa Monica-Carlyle Terrace.'
In the car, Hackett said, 'You took a shortcut, all right.'
'Just following my nose. And here,' said Mendoza in satisfaction, 'is the money. In spades. And I have a small hunch we've been maligning Grandfather. I think I see a glimmer at the end of the tunnel, Art.'.
