“That’s a lot of stuff to get out of old records.”
“Mostly Glenda. She’s fifty-six, has a big nose, and loves to talk.”
I said, “So Lila blows town, heads down to Mendosa, hides out with her old lady in a private sanitarium for a while, and when Guilfoyle moves on Mendosa, Lila slips down to L.A., gets a new ID, hikes her age up a bit, and becomes Verna Hicks.”
“I have to wonder two things,” Ski said. “If she was being paid off, why would she hide out twenty-five miles from here in a town run by Riker’s boy? Seems a little risky, wouldn’t you say?”
“You’re forgetting the time element,” I said. “Guilfoyle didn’t move into Mendosa until after Riker’s appeal, which was almost a year after the trial.”
“You’d think if she was a key witness against Arnie Riker, Culhane would have found her when Riker appealed the case,” Ski said. “Hell, if big-nosed Glenda knew who her mother was, Culhane certainly did.”
“Sometimes what seems obvious isn’t necessarily fact,” a voice drawled, and we turned to face Brett Merrill. “Mind if I join you?”
He looked larger when confined in a small place. He was probably six-two and a hundred ninety or two hundred pounds. He sat down before we had a chance to answer him.
“Some things are bothering us,” I said to Merrill. “Maybe you can help us out.”
“I can try,” he drawled pleasantly.
“Lila Parrish was your key witness in the Thompson case. It seems to us that you would have kept a leash on her-knowing Riker was sure to appeal his conviction.”
“Yeah,” Ski said. “And since her mother lives in Mendosa, you’d think Culhane would look for her there.”
“Lila Parrish didn’t live with her mother at the time of the murder,” Merrill said. “She lived with another girl in a shanty in Milltown. She left her mother when Ione married Fisher. They were on the outs. Our people interviewed Ione Fisher. I’m convinced she wasn’t hiding Lila down there.”
“She was your only eyeball witness. How hard did you really try to find her?” I said.
Merrill shrugged and said in his easy drawl, “Lila Parrish vanished the day after she testified. Her roommate worked at the mill. When she came home from work, Lila’s things were gone. Nobody’s seen her since.”
“And you couldn’t find her?”
“Look, boys, sometimes you have to play the hand you’re dealt. We had Riker dead-to-rights. He and his boat were covered with her blood. The Parrish girl had testified she saw Riker shoot Wilma Thompson and throw her in his car. Thompson’s blood was all over the car. Riker had spent ten days in jail for beating her up once and she ditched him. Plenty of motive for a guy with Riker’s reputation. And he had no alibi. He said he went to his boat that night, got drunk, and passed out. When he was arrested on the boat he was still wearing bloody clothes and there wasn’t a scratch on him. He was lucky they reduced the sentence to life without parole.”
I smiled. “Said like a true prosecutor.”
“It was a solid case. The legwork was first rate. Woods and Carney gave me a preponderance of evidence.”
“Where’s Carney?”
“Died of a heart attack five years ago.”
“When Woods shot Fontonio, why did you dead-docket the case against him?” Ski asked, suddenly changing the subject.
“I thought you were investigating an L.A. homicide,” Merrill said softly. The smile got a little cooler.
“Just curious,” Ski said.
“Making a case against Eddie Woods would have been a waste of time. There were no eyewitnesses. We had started a grand jury investigation against what was left of the Riker outfit and Eddie Woods went to Fontonio’s place to deliver a subpoena. He says Fontonio went for a gun and he shot him. There was a gun in Fontonio’s hand we couldn’t trace.”
“His wife and bodyguard said he never packed heat,” Ski said.
“C’mon, boys,” Merrill said, slowly shaking his head. “Would you go before a grand jury with a wife and a hoodlum as your only witnesses? The attorney general sent a man down from Sacramento to look into it. He looked over the evidence, said, ‘Thanks a lot for nothing,’ and went back to Sacramento. Then Eddie resigned.”
He finished his coffee and dabbed his lips with a napkin.
Ski asked, “You came here from someplace else, didn’t you? Just curious. Accents interest me.”
“Everybody in California came from someplace else,” Merrill answered. “I came from southern Georgia.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I had a little law firm and a partner named David Vigil, who had kept business alive while I was off fighting the war. There really wasn’t enough business for the two of us, and my brother and sister-in-law were barely scratching out a living on the family farm. One day I got a call from California, probably the longest long-distance call in the town’s history. It was Brodie. He said, ‘How’d you like to be D.A. of Eureka, California? I need some help out here.’ So I packed my valise, took the bus to Atlanta, and hopped the train west. We kept busy. A shooting every week or ten days. Once in a while somebody stupid would rob the bank. If Buck Tallman didn’t drop them in their tracks coming out the door, Brodie would ride them down. There was a lot of law but not much order.” He stopped and chuckled. “Probably a lot more than you wanted to know. Southerners tend to go on.”
“We’re still trying to get a handle on the five hundred a month Verna was getting,” I said, cutting off his monologue. “Somebody was paying her off for some thing.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Does Culhane know?”
“You’ll have to ask him,” he said, grabbing his hat.
He laid a quarter on the table.
“Pleasure meeting you, Ski,” he said, and strolled out, leaving us staring at the door.
After a minute or so I said, “Know what I think? I think we’ve run out of gas here. Nobody’s going to tell us a damn thing.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Ski answered. “I think Lila Parrish lied at Riker’s trial. Merrill didn’t have Thompson’s body because Riker fed her to the sharks. So somebody arranged for Parrish to testify she had witnessed the murder, then paid her to vanish.”
“Interesting theory, Ski. But why, after nearly twenty years, does she turn up dead in her bathtub?”
“If we knew that, we’d know who killed her.”
“Maybe Merrill was giving us the shoo-fly about Ione Fisher. Maybe she knows where her daughter went.”
“Maybe.”
“There’s only one person who might give us a straight answer,” I said.
“The mother.” Ski nodded. “And she’s right down the road.”
“Worth a shot,” I agreed, and we headed south.
CHAPTER 27
The neon sign spelled albacore point in startling red letters that burned the name into the fog. Under it: vacancies. At this time of year it should have said Full. Charlie Lefton apparently was too far off the beaten track to attract much trade. Or maybe he didn’t care. Maybe Charlie was happy to have his little place by the ocean. Maybe he was independently wealthy and reclusive and used the place as a tax dodge. All Moriarity had said was that Charlie would give us a good price if we wanted to stay the night. Lefton’s was perfect since it was on the way south to Mendosa.
We got to Lefton’s by driving down a hard dirt road that led from Route 7 west toward the ocean and then curved around at a two-story hospital and followed the shoreline south. About five miles past the hospital, a sign had pointed off to the east to Milltown and a half mile beyond that was the paper mill, a black silhouette against the darkening blue sky. It was an eerie, ugly giant, a noisy complex with stacks that spewed reeking smoke and ash into the air. Man-made clouds obliterated a fiery sun sinking toward the horizon.
As we passed the plant, an early fog had suddenly surged out of the gathering dusk, not on little cat feet as
