“Sorry I’m late,” I said. “I met a new friend.”
“Oh yeah? Male or female?”
“Female.”
“She a looker?”
“Your jaw would hit the floor if you laid eyes on her.”
He gave me a nod of approval.
“Rich?”
“Her old man owns the bank-and she has an office that would make Marie Antoinette jealous.”
He beamed lasciviously. “Do I hear wedding bells?”
“Yeah, sure, Agassi. I met her three hours ago and rolled her a cigarette. That was my big trick for the day. One of her cigarettes cost more than my car.”
“Which would be what, thirty or forty cents?”
“Very funny. So, what kind of a day have you had?”
He finished the pie and pushed the dish aside like a kid finishing a vegetable plate.
“Well,” he said, “I didn’t find a lot about who she was. But I found a lot about who she wasn’t. I talked to everybody at the tax office. Talked to them privately. She told just about everybody there she was from Texas. One of them she told she was from Waco, another one from San Antone, then there was Dallas, and Wichita Falls, which I thought was in Kansas. She arrived on the scene as Verna Hicks in early 1924. Was very discreet about her private life. Nobody knew she was dating Wilensky until she got married. Nobody’s ever been to her house, in fact few of them even know where it is. She was an excellent worker, always punctual, never missed a day. An ideal employee according to her boss. She turned down promotions several times.”
“Probably because the money wasn’t worth the responsibility, considering she had that five C’s floating in over the transom every month.”
“My thoughts exactly. Anyway, I went back to the station house after I left there and called the Bureau of Records in Waco, San Antone, Dallas, and Wichita Falls, and then checked the state bureau in Texas. Guess what?”
“They never heard of her.”
“You got it. The DMV here says she originally gave an address on Highland. I checked it. The street number doesn’t exist and never did. She changed it to the Meadows address when she renewed the license. They don’t check those things unless you get stopped for something serious.”
“In other words, Verna Hicks doesn’t exist prior to 1924.”
“Exactly.”
“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“But why did she suddenly surface then?”
“Because she had to be somebody, Ski. Apparently when she moved here she decided to stay awhile. The net is, she could be anybody from anywhere, even her age could be a phony.”
Our meals arrived and he dug in.
“Your turn,” he said. “Did you come up with anything-besides Miss Vanderbilt?”
“I want to put it all together on the board. The checks came from a lot of different banks. Once or twice from here in town. But most of them seem to have come from up around San Pietro.”
He looked up sharply when I mentioned San Pietro.
“Hell, that’s Culhane territory,” he said.
“Culhane? He’s running for governor.”
“Not officially. He’s about to announce. He’s running against Claude Osterfelt and Dominic Bellini.”
“I read something about it in the paper but I didn’t take it seriously. Whoever heard of him?”
“The Times had a big spread on him last week. World War I hero. Racket-buster. Cleaned up his town, ran the gangsters out. It used to be called Eureka, which was like Frontier City, USA. Open gambling, prostitution. During Prohibition they served drinks over the bar. The sheriff was an old gunfighter named Buck Tallman. You have heard of him, right?”
“That was a long time ago. That’s history. Wasn’t he shot in a whorehouse or something?”
“Something like that. I’m thinking of running up to San Pietro. It’s only about a hundred miles up there.”
“The banks aren’t gonna tell you anything, Zee. All that stuff’s confidential.”
“I did pretty well this morning.”
“Ahhh, that’s because you rolled Little Miss Rich Britches a cigarette and showed her your heater.” He thought for a moment and added, “Are you hunching on this?”
“Can’t say.”
“I’m your partner. You think there’s more to this than just an accident, don’t you?”
“I don’t think Mrs. Wilensky was knocking down five hundred bucks a month for years and then slipped in the bathtub and got fried. That much coincidence makes me nervous. I’m not sure, but I think the check trail leads to San Pietro.”
“Moriarity’s gonna laugh you outta the office.”
“Hell, it’s worth a shot.”
“Moriarity’s gonna have a seizure.”
“I can con him into it.”
“Culhane’s a tough character, Zee.”
I shrugged. “We’re both lawmen. Maybe he’ll work with me.”
“Uh-huh. Maybe I’ll lose fifty pounds in my sleep tonight, too.”
CHAPTER 7
We split up again; Ski was going to check out the crime reporters at the downtown newsroom, some of the old-timers who might know more about San Pietro than what had been reported through the years. The newsies always had something in their back pocket. Stuff that was all rumor with maybe ten cents’ worth of truth in it. Stuff they couldn’t back up properly. Maybe they had a city editor who’d been sued once and was gun-shy of everything if they didn’t have pictures, sworn statements, three sources, and a sworn statement from God that it was on the level. Ski was good at tapping them. He’d been around seven years longer than me. He’d go in with a pint of Seagram’s Seven in his pocket, tell some jokes, give them a little piece of gossip they couldn’t use, then sneak around to the subject and take out the bottle.
“What are we looking for?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “Maybe just a word here and there.”
“It’s what, seventeen years ago?” he said. “And for all we know, she was on Mr. Somebody’s sleeve long before she showed up in Pacific Meadows.”
“I know it, I know it,” I said. “It’s worth an hour or two. Maybe something happened up there in the early twenties, some two-bit scandal not worth an inch of ink down here. Something that’ll give me more to go on than a bunch of bank names.”
Ski went his way and I went down to the main newsroom of the Times to look up Jimmy Pennington, who was one of the best reporters in town. We had started out at the same time, about two years after Verna Hicks Wilensky wandered into town with four grand in her girdle, a new name, a new house, and a new life except for somebody from the past who was underwriting her five C’s a month. I could feel the nudge in my gut. Maybe it was because I’ve known a lot of people who disappeared. Just vanished, click, like that. I was in Missing Persons for two years. But this was the first time somebody had appeared out of nowhere. No previous history. No birth certificate. No high school prom pictures. Zip. But she had to appear from someplace before she appeared in West L.A.
Pennington and I were both rookies at our respective jobs in those days and I helped Pennington out when I could, giving him a tip that put him an hour ahead of everybody else. In those days there were seven newspapers, including the gossip sheets. An hour is as good as a week in the life of a breaking story. In exchange, he mentioned my name whenever he could. One hand washing the other. Now he was the top-slot reporter. The only homicide he would be interested in was if the mayor knocked off his mistress in the presidential suite of the Bel Air Hotel. But he
