beside the park and turned right again at the next street. I gave them thirty seconds and then followed, pulled slowly down to the street they had turned into, and looked. They were turning back to the right, circling the block. I went straight ahead and turned left at the next street. I was on Third. I drove as hard as I could without endangering anyone. The next cross street was February.
I slowed down and stopped at the third house, a pleasant, one-story, wood-frame bungalow tucked into the quiet street three blocks off Ocean Boulevard. A black Olds that had seen better days was parked in the driveway, and a large collie lay in the front yard, sleeping in the shade of the oak tree it was leashed to. I went to the front door, and seeing no bell, opened the screen door and knocked on the glass. A moment later the door was opened by a pleasant little woman. She looked to be in her sixties with skin leathered by the sun and gray locks bunched in a hairnet.
“Mrs. Howland?”
“Yes; are you the gentleman from Los Angeles?”
I showed her my credentials. “I’m Bannon from the L.A. Police Department. Mr. Goodshorn called about me.”
“Is something wrong?” she said, stepping back and swinging the door wide.
“No,” I said, entering the foyer. “I’m working on a civil case involving a woman who may have lived here at one time.”
“Oh my, I rather doubt it. We’ve been in this house since before the war.”
“No, not here in this house, in San Pietro.”
She bunched up her shoulders and giggled. “How silly of me. It’s this way.” She led me down a narrow hall to a basement door, opened it, and called out, “Barnard, someone to see you.”
“Who is it?” he yelled back.
“A gentleman from the police in Los Angeles,” she answered, pronouncing Angeles with a hard g.
“Well, show him down, Gladys,” Howland answered in a gruff voice. “I’m not gonna come up there and carry him down.”
She nodded down a tight wooden staircase to the cellar, which was dark and smelled of mildew. Barnard Howland was sitting in a far corner, in a makeshift office. A desk, two chairs, a typing stand supporting an old, upright Royal, and half a dozen file cabinets lined up against the wall. A single light hung from the ceiling over the desk. A small, oblong window provided the only other light. Howland was a small man tucked into a wasted frame. The loose flesh of his face was creased by the years, and strands of white hair hung from under a green eyeshade pulled down over his forehead. I guessed he had been a handsome man in earlier years, but time and booze had eroded his looks and now he just looked like a crotchety old curmudgeon. He was wearing a shapeless pair of wool tweeds, a white shirt buttoned to the top, no tie, and a vest that was hanging open. He peered up at me through indolent, brown eyes over the top of a pair of wire-rimmed half-glasses that had slid halfway down his nose.
“Barney Howland,” he said in a cracked and rheumy voice, and offered me a hand that trembled slightly. “Pardon me for not getting up. At my age, I’d rather not use up that much energy for formalities.”
“Zeke Bannon,” I said with my friendliest smile, and showed him my credentials. He pulled my wallet a little closer and stared at it through the glasses.
“Sergeant, eh? Homicide yet. Well.” His eyes brightened a bit, and he straightened up slightly and waved me to the other chair. “What’s goin’ on? We don’t have many homicides up here anymore, not since the good old days. Now it’s silly stuff, y’know. Wives hitting their husbands over the head with a skillet for fartin’ at the dinner table.” He leaned forward and said with confidentiality, “A love-nest slaying occasionally. Wrong shoes under the bed; know what I mean?” He winked.
“It does seem like a well-mannered town,” I said.
“Well-mannered,” he sniffed contemptuously. “I like that. Hell, you can get a ticket for not cutting the goddamn lawn often enough. Now back in the twenties when it was Eureka, it was one hell of a place. Wide-open gambling, whores wiggling their little asses up and down Ocean Boulevard, loan sharks, bookies, bad boys running the town. Hell, we had a shooting a week, sometimes a couple. It was like Dodge City, for crissakes. Ever hear of Buck Tallman? Deputy for Wyatt Earp back when the West was the West. He was our sheriff. Wore a gun belt down on his hip with a. 44 Peacemaker, a Stetson with sweat stains around the brim. Hah, now there was a real man. Nobody screwed with old Buck. Why, it took four two-bit gangsters to bring him down and all four went down with him.”
As he spoke, my eyes grew accustomed to the limited light. Behind him on the wall were several framed Sentinel front pages, streaked and yellowed with age.
“I’ve heard about him,” I said. “Wasn’t he killed in the Grand View House massacre?”
“Heard about that, have ya?” He puffed out his chest as much as he could, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the framed mementos. “That was my story. I covered all the good ones. Shot my own pictures, too. Had a darkroom back there behind the furnace. There’s my old four-by-five.” He pointed to a battered Speed Graphic sitting on a Coca-Cola crate in the corner. “Old Snapper never failed me.”
I got up, walked over to the framed pages, and strained my eyes to read them. The old man stood up and swung the light toward the wall. There were three of them.
The lamp threw a slash of light across the yellowed front page of one of the papers. A teaser line said: a tragedy at grand view.
Under it, the headline: sheriff tallman, deputy, slain in gunfight.
And under it, the subhead: four mobsters also die in hail of lead.
A four-column photograph accompanied the story, showing hospital attendants wheeling a sheeted body from the Victorian mansion; and beside it, a two-column vertical shot of the slain lawman.
On the other side, a three-column story headlined:
Sacco and Vanzetti guilty of murder
Under it, another story about an auto wreck and some other stories.
The photo of Tallman showed him hands on hips, handlebar mustache accenting a hawk nose, tight belly cinched in by the gun belt slung from his hip, cowboy boots adding two inches to his height. He looked every bit the photos and drawings of gunfighters I had pored over in dime novels when I was a kid.
“So that’s Buck Tallman,” I said.
“Every inch a man,” Howland said in his creaky voice. “Loved the ladies, loved children, hated the black hats. Every Fourth of July he’d have a showdown on the beach. Quick-drawing, keeping tin cans hopping in the air. The kids’d crowd around him getting autographs, and he with that smile would make flowers bloom. Hell, I still miss him after all these years.”
“That was what year, the year of the shooting?”
“September of 1920.”
“Culhane was involved in that, wasn’t he?”
“Got in at the end of it. Him and Buck shot the last one down and then Buck fell dead.”
I went back to my chair, took out the pint of Jack Daniel’s, and put it on the desk in front of him. His eyes got young for a moment. He chuckled, and stared at the bottle.
“You must be psychic.”
“I never knew a good newshound who didn’t appreciate a taste now and then,” I said.
He looked at me and his eyes narrowed a hair.
“So what is it you want?”
“I want to know what wasn’t in the papers.”
“You’re not working for one of those crooks running against Brodie, are you, son? Looking under beds and what have you?”
“No, sir. I’m trying to get a line on a woman named Verna Hicks, who may have lived here back in the twenties.”
“What for?”
“She died night before last. Slipped getting out of the bathtub and her radio fell in with her and cooked her. I’m trying to locate a relative or somebody who might have known her. She was a widow, no kids.”
“So why do you want to know about Grand View?”
“You shook my curiosity. You know cops, we just naturally want to know the backside of the story.”
He turned the bottle of Jack Daniel’s slightly so he could read the label, and studied it with the kind of
