His eyebrows drew together and his eyes went from interested to suspicious. He took a drag on his cigarette and blew out a couple of smoke rings.
“This a missing persons thing?” he asked. “You might do better starting with the police.”
“I know where she is. She’s down in the city morgue waiting for the state to bury her.”
A casual smile crossed his lips and his eyes became less intense. He nodded more or less to himself and chuckled.
“Sergeant Bannon, right? Central homicide.”
I nodded. “If we’ve met, you’ve got a better memory than I do.”
“You’ve been in the headlines a few times. This about the dame whose radio took a bath with her?”
“You heard about it?”
“It was in the Times. Just a couple of graphs. No name on her. Didn’t sound like a job for homicide.”
“You read every line in the paper?”
“Always looking for an angle,” he shrugged. “You’d be surprised what a guy can pick up if he keeps his eyes open and reads every page. I read the gossips, too.”
“There’s an angle in this one. She died with a lot of money in a savings account. I’m trying to locate survivors.”
“Well,” he said, standing up and walking to the tree to retrieve his suit jacket, “she’s no relative of mine.”
He slipped on the jacket and went back behind his desk but didn’t sit down. My eyes wandered to the photographs on the desk. One was a sepia tintype of Woods, Culhane, and Buck Tallman. The other was a tinted studio shot of Woods standing with his arms around the waist of a pretty, black-haired woman who looked to be in her late thirties.
“Very pretty woman,” I said, nodding at the picture.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’ll tell her you said so. That’s my wife, Hazel. We’re celebrating our tenth anniversary today. We check into a little hotel, have room service, put out the Do Not Disturb sign… a little tradition we have.” He looked at his watch and then back at me, and raised his eyebrows.
I stood up, too.
“The Hicks woman died with almost a hundred grand in the bank.”
It didn’t shake him one way or the other.
“Most of it came in the form of five-hundred-dollar cashier’s checks that showed up once a month over the last seventeen years. Most of them were sent from up San Pietro way.”
“Is that a fact?” He came around the desk, took my arm by the elbow, and led me toward the door. “Come on, I’ll go down with you.”
He was a very smooth character. If I was annoying him, he didn’t show it. He set the latch on the office door, pulled it shut, and tried it to make sure it locked. We walked down the marble stairs together.
“You see some connection between the checks and her radio jumping in the tub with her?” he asked on the way down.
“No. It just keeps gnawing at me. A woman with that much money in the bank, no will, and suddenly dead.”
“Happens all the time. Nobody thinks they’re gonna die. They put things off.”
“I suppose.”
As we walked out the front door, I turned around in front of him so he was facing the restaurant and stuck out my hand.
“Well, thanks for your time,” I said. “I was hoping since you left San Pietro about the same time the checks started, the name might ring a bell.”
“Sorry,” he said with a pleasant smile. “I don’t hear a thing.”
As he started to turn, I said, “How about Lila Parrish? Didn’t she disappear about that time?”
He stopped, and turned around. His eyes narrowed.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“She’s never turned up, has she?”
People scurried around us on the sidewalk. The street was full of cars going places during the lunch hour. A horn or two beeped. He walked over very close to me and said, “There’s a lot of funny ideas in that question.”
“I don’t get you,” I said.
“Sure you do. You tell me this Hicks dame was on somebody’s pad for five bills a month. Then you tell me the checks came from San Pietro. Then you ask about the other broad, Parrish, who was a witness in one of my cases. I could hop about two feet and make something out of all that. Parrish skipped out, pal. Nobody knows where. I, for one, haven’t seen her since the trial. Nobody else I know has either.”
“Fair enough,” I said.
“You know what I think, Bannon?”
“Nope.”
“I think you’re more interested in finding out who was sending money to that lady than finding her family.”
“I’d like to see her get a decent send-off, that’s all.”
“Then pass the hat around the station house, you ought to be able to pick up twenty bucks. Here…” He reached in his pocket and took out a small roll of cash, peeled a five off it, and slapped it in the breast pocket of my jacket. “That’ll get it started.”
He turned and disappeared in the river of pedestrians.
I jaywalked back across the street to the restaurant. When I got to the table, Patty North was so excited she was bouncing in her chair.
“It’s him,” she said. “He’s the one. How did you know that?”
“I’m a detective, remember?” I said, sitting down at the table. “That’s what I’m supposed to do.”
I reached in my pocket, took out the crumpled five-spot and dropped it on the table.
“What’s that?” Millicent asked.
“He just started a fund to bury Verna.”
“What a wonderful idea!” Her eyes brightened and she said excitedly, “We can go back to the bank after lunch and open an account. I’ll put in fifty.”
I laughed. “Millie, with fifty bucks we can lay her away in a solid silver coffin, with the Philadelphia Symphony playing ‘Goodnight, Irene.’ ”
The waiter brought our meals and we dug in.
“Now, Patty,” I said, “you are sure that’s the guy who bought the check for Verna Hicks, aren’t you?”
“Oh, absolutely,” she said, nodding her head emphatically. “There’s no question about it.”
“You did a great job,” I said. “Thanks.”
We finished lunch and I dropped Patty North off at her bank with more thanks.
On the way back to the West L.A. bank, Millicent said, “He’s the one you’ve been looking for, isn’t he?”
“Yes and no,” I said.
“I don’t understand.”
“His name is Eddie Woods. He was a cop up in San Pietro, got in some trouble, and left about the time Verna Hicks showed up down here. Now we know for sure he bought at least one of the checks. The next question is, who gave him the money to buy it.”
“He didn’t buy it himself?”
I shook my head.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “He wouldn’t have had that kind of dough back in the late twenties and early thirties. Whoever made that deal with Verna was wealthy. He knew he could pay off for as long as it took. Woods wouldn’t have driven all the way back to San Pietro to buy the other checks, everybody there knew him. I think his was probably a one-shot deal. I goofed.”
“How?” Millicent asked.
“By looking for a single buyer. Obviously the checks were bought by different people through the years. Whoever was paying off Verna probably brokered the buy through a middleman. And that’s going to make it even harder to trace them back to the number one.”
