“Go back to L.A. You think anybody up here will give you a nickel’s worth of news? There’s not a man in that picture wouldn’t lie, kill, or die for Culhane. And you can include me in the club.”
“I didn’t say anything specific about Culhane.”
“I think you’re dancing with the idea.”
“I think some of your girls have information that can help me. You want to do it the hard way?”
“Oh? And how would that work?”
“The scenario would go something like this: I send the black wagon up here from L.A. I come in with a fistful of warrants, and we haul a dozen of your ladies down to the city and go in the little room with the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling and get real serious. All we want to know is where they got the bucks to buy some cashier’s checks.”
“You’d have to wade through a couple of lawyers who make more money while they’re taking a leak than you do in a year.”
“I’ve done rounds with the best. Lawyers don’t rattle me, although being in the same room with them usually gives me a rash.”
“You’re an arrogant son of a bitch.”
“I’ve been called a lot worse.”
“I’m sure you have,” she said, standing up. “Well, that’s what you’re going to have to do, so you may as well trot on home and get your warrants.”
“I think you’ve told me enough already.”
“Don’t bang your head on the wall, Sergeant. A couple of dozen very well heeled, very well connected gentlemen come through here every week. Any one of them could have slipped one of the girls some Ben Franklins and asked her to do that little chore. The girls don’t know any of them by name.”
“Then why are you getting wrinkles in your corset?”
“It’s bad for business.”
“So’s murder.”
“I think you should finish your drink and toddle along. You can take the cigar with you.”
She walked across the room and opened the door.
“Swell,” I said. “And I was hoping we’d get along.”
“Save up your money for about ten years and come back; you’ll find out how pleasant I can be,” she answered.
“So long, Delilah,” I said. “Thanks for the drink and the cigar.”
The big colored guy was waiting for me at the front door with my hat.
“Good day, sir,” he said.
“It could have been better,” I told him.
I walked back toward the parking lot. I was guessing that the discreet side door hidden behind the hedgerow probably led to a private room for the locals.
Or maybe it was where the milkman made his morning delivery.
CHAPTER 26
Ski was in the diner when I got back there a little after three. He had commandeered a large booth in one corner and was leafing through his little black notebook.
Brett Merrill was sitting across the room in seersucker, a white shirt, and a blue tie, talking to a well-dressed gentleman who didn’t look like he belonged in a diner. Neither of them did.
“The big guy in seersucker talking to the older fellow is the D.A., Brett Merrill,” I told Ski.
“Ex-D.A.,” Ski corrected. “He retired. He’s Culhane’s campaign manager now.”
“So, how’d you do?” I asked.
“Not bad.”
That was encouraging. Ski, who had been in the bureaucracy six years longer than I had, was a master of the noncommittal, having learned the trick from Moriarity. His responses ranged from “not much” to “not bad.” Nothing less, nothing more. “Not bad” held promise.
“How’d you do?” he asked.
“Well, I had a steak sandwich and traded pedigrees with Culhane, met the Gormans, scored some points at a couple of banks, and then went to a whorehouse.”
He shook his head. “I got six years’ seniority on you and I get to spend the last three hours in the records room with a sweet little old lady named Glenda, listening to gossip, and blowing dust off old files. You eat steak, meet the snotty set, and get a matinee.”
“Privileges of rank.”
“Find out anything while you were eating and slumming with the rich?”
We started a familiar routine. Exchanging ideas and building on the evidence in some kind of logical order, trying to make sense of all the information we were gathering.
“I think I know who brokered the checks,” I said.
“I’ll take a wild guess,” he answered, flipping through his notebook. No one, not even a cryptologist, could decipher Ski’s scrawl. He looked over at me. “Delilah O’Dell,” he said.
“You been snooping around the banks, too.”
He nodded. “At least one check was bought by a working stiff I assume could have been her Japanese gardener. The rest of them were bought by sexy young ladies nobody knew. I get the feeling nobody wants to admit that the local madam has a chauffeur of color driving her and her employees around in a Rolls-Royce.”
The man Merrill was talking to got up. They shook hands and the man left without so much as a glance at us.
“You think O’Dell was banking Lila Parrish?” Ski asked.
“No. I think she’s the front. Her girls go into L.A. on occasion as well as San Luis Obispo and other towns along the route. Easy for them to make a five-minute trip to a bank. What did the records department give up?”
“A few interesting items. Some may fit in, some are just local history. For instance, there’s a death certificate on an Eli Gorman Junior. He was born in Massachusetts in 1900, died September 1920. That’s from the record. Isabel Hoffman and Ben Gorman were his parents. They were married in Massachusetts. Gorman was going to Harvard and she went with him. She was seventeen at the time. That’s from Glenda.”
“The kid was killed the night of the Grand View massacre,” I told him. “He drove his car off the overlook. That was his mother we saw with the flowers up on the cliff.”
“Eli Gorman, Ben’s father, owned this whole valley at one time. The deeds are all on file.”
“He won it in a poker game with O’Dell.”
“Not all of it. O’Dell snookered him. He sold the deeds to the property that was then the town of Eureka to Riker the day of the game.”
“And started a war,” I said.
Ski thought about that for a moment or two.
“It probably started long before that,” he said. “The old-timer, Tallman? He put up with the town’s sins. After the shoot-out in Delilah’s place, Culhane turned up the heat on Riker.”
I finished the analysis. “And when Riker went up the river, and Fontonio was shot, Culhane ran Guilfoyle and the rest of the bunch out of town.”
“I think I got a surprise for you. I took a stroll through the cemetery and came across a tombstone that’s interesting.” He looked at his notes. “Jerome Parrish. Born 1869, died 1908. Loving husband and father.”
“The daughter was Lila Parrish,” I guessed.
He nodded. “She was born in the clinic here, in 1900. Which would make her forty-one, close enough to fit Verna. Her mother was divorced when the kid was four. She remarried and divorced again. Her name now is Ione Fisher. Here’s the kicker. Ione Fisher was, and still is, a nurse at the Shuler Institute, the sanitarium down in Mendosa. Very private. I understand Mrs. Fisher is head nurse now. She’s sixty-two.”
