got his attention. I continued with my trip to San Pietro, how the bankers were giving me the cold shoulder, left out the encounter with the two cops, and then dropped the second shoe: Bones’s reanalysis of the situation. He stopped writing and took a long swig of his beer when he realized he was on top of a murder case.
I then recounted the Wilma Thompson murder case, the appeal, and the missing witness, Lila Parrish; Eddie Woods’s probable assassination of Fontonio, his connection with both cases; and finally the fact that most of the checks came from San Pietro. I didn’t tell him I knew Eddie Woods had sent at least one of the checks; I kept that for my hole card.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“For Christ sake, you want me to write it for you?”
“You’re trying to tie this to Culhane’s tail,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
“I can’t tell you that, it’s privileged.”
He chuckled. “The hell you say.”
“You didn’t get to be top-slot reporter on the Times by having somebody else do your thinking for you,” I said.
He tapped his pencil on the table several times and stared at me, then said, “You want me to grease the tracks for you.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t act dumb. You’re going up against Brodie Culhane and you want me to point the finger in his general direction.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No, I said it.”
“You want the story or not, Jimmy?”
“I got the story. Question is, what am I gonna do with it? And how are you going to tie this to Culhane?”
“You’re beginning to sound like Moriarity.”
“I’m sounding like my editor. Can I quote you that you’re looking for a connection up in the San Pietro area?”
I juggled that around for a minute. Before I could answer, he said, “And how do you plan to tie Woods into this? So he lives in Los Angeles, so do a million and a half other people. And what’s the connection with Mendosa?”
“Let’s talk about that for a minute. What’ve you got for me?”
He slid the envelope over, opened the clasp, and pulled out a sheaf of clippings. “Most of this stuff was written by Matt Sorenson, who covered state news,” he said.
“Where is he now?”
“The big time lured him to New York. But he used to talk about Mendosa. He wanted to blow the roof off the town, but it’s outside our circulation area and the publisher squeezes every nickel so hard the buffalo gets a hernia. Most of what Matt wrote was what he could get over the phone, mixed with AP and UPI reports.”
“You need these back?” I asked, lifting a handful of clippings.
“Yeah, but there’s no rush.”
“Tell me what you know about Mendosa.”
He finished his beer and ordered another.
“Since when did you start drinking on the job?” I said.
“I’m through for the day. I’m gonna take full advantage of your tab.” He lit a cigarette and started: “When Culhane got rid of Riker and Fontonio, the number-three man in the mob was Guilfoyle. He took a powder. He moved down south to Mendosa. It’s in Pacifico County. It wasn’t much of a town, a lazy little place. Its main claim to fame is a sanitarium, mostly a spill for drunks, druggies, and senile old folks their kids want to dump. Guilfoyle didn’t have much trouble taking over and turning it into another Eureka. It wasn’t quite as wide open but the town turned dirty from head to toe.”
Pennington rooted around in the clippings and found a photograph. “Take a gander at Guilfoyle. He’s a real package.” He slid it across the table to me. I held it under the anemic light and saw a tall, beefy mutt in a light suit, uglier than a cross-eyed moose. He had thick features over a bull neck and two hundred pounds of muscle and flab. A cigar was tucked in the corner of his mouth and he wore a derby low over weasel eyes. His lips were curled into a smile that was closer to a sneer.
“Straight out of central casting,” I said.
“So what’s your interest in Mendosa?”
“One of the checks came from a bank up there.”
“If you think you had trouble with Culhane, I’d steer clear of Mendosa. Guilfoyle could get you two years for disturbing the peace if you sneezed in town.”
“Let me try something else on you. Supposing when Lila Parrish vanished she went down the road and hid out in Mendosa for a while. Then migrated down to L.A. and changed her name.”
“You think Verna Hicks was Lila Parrish?”
“Think about it. All these events happened within about eighteen months, starting with Riker’s trial in late 1922 and ending with the Fontonio hit in 1924, the same year Verna showed up in L.A., telling people she was from everyplace in Texas.”
“That’s another stretch, Zeke. Supposing Lila Parrish is living with her husband and family in Dubuque? Does the word slander mean anything to you? Do you have anything other than a hunch leading you there?”
I decided to play my hole card. “Can we go off the record a minute?” I said.
He pondered that. Reporters hate to go off-record for anything.
“Is it important, or one of your Canadian Club dreams?”
“It’s fact.”
“Okay, but I get it first when you’re ready to go public.”
“It’s your story all the way.”
“What a sweetheart. Okay, let’s hear it.”
“One of the more recent checks sent to Hicks was bought and mailed from here in town. The buyer was Eddie Woods.”
That perked him up a bit. “You can prove this?” he said.
I nodded. “The teller who sold him the check ID’d him to me over lunch.”
“It’s still a stretch.”
“Look, I’ve given you all the background we have on Hicks. You can point out that she showed up down here after Lila Parrish vamoosed. The dates are more than coincidental.”
“How about the checks. Can I get photos of them?”
I nodded. “I’ll list the number of checks and how many came from the San Pietro-Mendosa area. I can’t give you the stats of the original checks because there may be some question about how I got them without a search warrant. I don’t want to get anybody in trouble over this.”
“How about her checks?”
“Fair game, they were in her safety box at home. I can also make the deposit books available to you.”
“Exclusively?”
“Until the story breaks. Then anything in the report is fair game.”
He laughed. “You’ll be all over the papers again.”
“I won’t be here.”
“Where will you be?”
“Up north,” I said.
“Anything you get, I get first. That’s part of the deal.”
“Must be nice,” I said. “Having me do your work for you.”
“Works both ways, pal,” he said, and then with a leer added: “By the way, mind if I mention that pansy dog of yours in the story?”
“Where did you hear about the dog?”
“I can’t tell you that,” he said. “It’s privileged.”
I had a different feeling going to the house in Pacific Meadows this time. Murder changes everything. Just
