“I keep telling you, there’s nothing to be learned about that dead woman up here.”
“Yeah, you keep telling me. You aren’t trying to oil me, are you, Captain?” I said, smiling.
“I’d know better than to try.”
“Wouldn’t do you much good this time,” I said.
“Oh? How come?”
“Ski?” I said, and the big man took two folded documents from his inside pocket, then laid them on the table in front of Culhane. He spread them apart with the flat of his hand and eyed them for a minute.
“Search warrants,” I said. “For all the banks. One gives us access to the bank records, the other to safe deposit boxes at our discretion. Moriarity got them from Judge Weidemeyer down in district court.”
He stared at the two folded warrants without speaking. A lot of things kneaded through his tough face. He shook his head ever so slightly, then he suddenly stood up. “I’m going to take a shower,” he announced.
“I’d like to take a gander at the public records,” Ski finally said. “Will that be a problem?”
“Nope.” Culhane didn’t bother turning around. “Second floor, records department. Ask for Glenda, she runs the department. Tell her I sent you.”
With that, he got in his car. It made a U-turn, drove past the city hall, and turned right, toward the Breakers Hotel. Ski went up to City Hall. Me? I sat there by myself and stared at the Duesenberg.
CHAPTER 24
I’d been nursing my lemonade for about ten minutes when Rusty pulled up in the Packard. He gave the horn a toot, got out, came around and opened the back door, and wiggled a finger at me. I went over and got in, then he drove me around the corner and up three blocks to the front of the Breakers Hotel.
I followed him into the lobby, which was as quiet as a cemetery and as elegant as a tiara. It was about a hundred feet across the lobby to the French doors that opened onto the gardens, swimming pool, and a small outside cafe. The grass was so even I imagined a Japanese gardener on his hands and knees clipping it with a pair of fingernail scissors. Beyond all that, the Pacific Ocean graced anyone who could afford to stay in the place.
The front desk and the concierge’s desk were pure mahogany, as was all the exposed wood in the room. The desk clerk and the concierge were both dressed in navy blue jackets with coats of arms on the left breast. About ten square miles of Persian rug covered hardwood floors. The chairs and sofas were plentiful, conservative, and expensive. To my left was a step-down bar, with about two dozen tables and a French slate bar on the far side. On the opposite side of the room from it was a cafe, with perhaps a dozen tables. The bartender was polishing a pebbled Waterford old-fashioned glass. He held it up to the recessed light behind the bar to make sure he hadn’t missed any smudges, then stacked it on a small shelf behind him. In the restaurant, a waitress in a dark green uniform was arranging the sterling silverware on the linen tablecloths.
Nobody spoke above a whisper, if they spoke at all.
Rusty led me down a long hall, which was to our left and at right angles to the lobby. On the left side of the hallway, more French doors leading to the tennis courts. On the right were the rooms. The hall ended in a T, which was Culhane’s suite. Rusty tapped on the door, then opened it with a key, and ushered me in. I heard the door close quietly behind me and I was alone.
A large room. New carpeting, expensive hotel furniture but hotel furniture nonetheless, more French doors facing the ocean. A fireplace in one corner, with a copper screen, and over it a large piece of what appeared to be a hunk of very faded, red driftwood mounted on the bricks. Beveled paneling stained the color of sun-blanched wood. Light-colored curtains and drapes. Against the right wall, an old rolltop desk with three framed photos on its flat top. A deep-piled white sofa about eight feet long, with matching chairs on both sides, facing the ocean. Bedroom and bath to the right and back toward the lobby. On the left, an alcove with a wet bar facing the living room, and behind it, a small kitchenette. A floor-model RCA radio in the corner adjacent to the desk with a record changer on top of it, which was playing Edith Piaf’s “L’Etranger.”
It was a bright, cheerful suite of rooms with a spectacular view, and a surprise to me. I was expecting dark wood and masculine furniture, with a stuffed marlin over the fireplace and a gun rack in the corner. I was expecting a dirty shirt thrown over the sofa, ashtrays running over with cigarette butts. A glass ring or two on the wooden table. Then I remembered it was a hotel, decorated by the hotel’s interior designer. The few personal touches and the photographs were as out of place as a waiter’s thumb in a bowl of soup.
I walked over to the desk and saw what was apparently part of a leg cast. There was a small gold lieutenant’s bar pinned to it. It was the only visible souvenir of his remarkable war record anywhere in the room.
I checked the piece of driftwood. It appeared to be off the stern of a boat. The black lettering, which was cut off by the shattered wood, said Dool… and under it Prin… Both were faded by sun and sea, and were barely legible.
“That’s what’s left of my old man’s fishing boat,” Culhane’s voice said behind me.
I turned. He was standing in the doorway that led to his bedroom, wearing a dark blue terry-cloth robe and scrubbing his hair with a white towel. He threw the towel over his shoulder and went behind the bar.
“Irish Mist suit you?”
“Doesn’t get any better.”
“Straight up, one cube of ice?”
“That’s a good guess.”
“It’s my drink.”
He filled two highball glasses with more than generous slugs and dropped one ice cube in each. It was a little early for me but I wasn’t going to pass up a glass of Irish whiskey.
“Tommy was a fisherman,” Culhane said, handing me my drink. “He and Kathleen Brodie came over from Doolin, County Clare. She was fifteen when they married.”
“When was that?”
“Eighteen eighty-four. They raced the stork all the way across the Atlantic. They were determined I’d be born on American soil and they just made it. I was born on Ellis Island in the physical examination clinic.”
“How’d they end up out here?” I asked.
“No fishing in New York City. So they bundled me up and headed across the country to this ocean. Fishing was all he knew. He hired out until he saved enough money to buy his first boat, called her Doolin Princess after my mom, and painted her bright red, Mom’s favorite color.”
“I mean how did they end up in San Pietro?” I asked.
“Back in those days this was a fisherman’s community. The natural bay, great fishing waters ten miles out there.” He waved vaguely toward the Pacific. “Hell, there used to be an icehouse just about where you’re sitting, ice to keep the fish fresh until they got back on the Hill. So this is where they settled. We lived in a little shack up in the village, when it was called Eureka.”
“And you use your mother’s maiden name instead of your father’s first name?”
“That was his idea. He said one Tommy in the family was enough.”
He turned and held his glass up to the piece of wood.
“Here’s to both of you,” he said.
“They’re both dead?” I asked, joining the toast.
“Yeah. Tommy went out one day with his three-man crew. A heavy blow came up and we never saw him again. Couple of months later a guy down in Milltown who knew me saw that on the rocks. That’s all we found. No other wreckage, no bodies. The Pacific has an ironic name. It can be damn unforgiving.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“He was okay, Tommy Culhane was. Good husband, good father, and one hell of a fisherman. Nothing breathing scared him.” He chuckled, and added, “Loved a good brawl as long as it wasn’t over anything serious.”
“How old where you?”
“Eleven. My mom died two years later. In the state hospital, of pneumonia.”
I knew about institutions like that. My mother had spent two years in and out of such dismal places, ending
