Sandburg would have it but like a broiling storm cloud that had been grounded. Driving into it was like driving into a swirling, gray tunnel. The headlights reflected off it and were swallowed up. I switched to low beam and it gave us maybe ten feet of grace on the road. I was driving fifteen miles an hour when I spotted the red sign and slowed down, looking for the driveway into Lefton’s place. I found it under the neon sign and turned onto a shell drive, the tires crunching beneath us as I eased down it.
“I hope the ocean isn’t anywhere near here,” I said. “If we roam off the road, we could end up in the drink.”
After a moment, Ski said, “I can’t swim.”
I laughed at him. “Hell, you couldn’t sink if you tried.”
A sign jumped out of the fog at us, an arrow cut from a two-by-four, painted white with black letters: office. I felt disoriented, isolated in the middle of nowhere, with visibility of about five feet. I stepped out of the car and yelled, “Anybody around?”
My words sounded lifeless, without resonance, as the mist swallowed them up. Then a voice came back just as flat, “Who wants to know?”
“Customers,” I yelled back.
A spotlight blinked on, a blurred orb somewhere off to our left. A shimmering image came toward us, a rail- thin six-footer, his face leathered and tanned by sun and wind, his windblown black hair in need of a trim, and his face covered with four or five days’ growth of graying beard. He was wearing denim work pants, a clean white sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and what was left rolled up over his shoulders, and light blue canvas deck shoes. There was a tattoo on his left biceps, a knife piercing a waving banner on which were the words death before dishonor.
“Charlie Lefton?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m Lefton,” he said in a voice so quiet it was almost a whisper.
“I’m Zeke Bannon, this is my partner Ski Agassi. We work for Dan Moriarity. He said you might have room for us.”
“Homicide cops, huh?”
I nodded.
“Follow me up to the lodge. Can’t see shit in this soup.”
We followed him down a slight embankment and into the arena of light formed by the searchlight. I could hear water beating against something.
“We close to the ocean?” I asked.
“About a hundred yards to your right,” he answered. A moment later a small wooden bridge appeared through the fog. It led to the lodge, as Lefton called it, a strip of eleven rooms. The office was in the middle, five rooms on each side. A narrow walk surrounded the primitive billet and below it, a grid of four-by-fours supported it about five feet off the ground. Nearby, just out of the light’s perimeter, I could hear a boat groaning against its tie lines, and much farther away, almost out of earshot, the ocean smacking against rocks.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked as we walked down to the office.
He pulled open a squeaky screen door and flicked on the office light and pointed to a map on the wall. It was a sectional of the coastline. We were on the back side of a narrow cove, like a finger pointing inward from the Pacific. Lefton’s lodge was built on stilts in the event of an extremely high tide.
“Been here since ‘32 and never got a drop of water under the place,” Lefton said. “Always have been a little too cautious for my own good.”
The office barely earned the name. There was a scarred-up old desk against one wall, three straight-back wooden chairs, and a gray metal three-drawer file cabinet facing the desk on the opposite wall. An upright telephone, a small desk lamp, and a hot plate with a percolator held down the desk, and a 1939 calendar from a tackle shop adorned the wall.
“You guys just spending the night?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll by pulling out about seven.”
“Well, I brew up coffee at 6:30 if you need a jump start to get moving. Got some sugar and cream in my room, which is next door.”
“You live here?” Ski asked.
“Here and on my boat. She can hold eight. I like to sleep on her. She rocks me to sleep.” He spoke in that low voice, almost without modulation. I had the feeling you could set off a load of TNT in the next room and he wouldn’t blink.
“Why don’t you take 1 and 2,” he said. “They got an adjoining door. They’re open. Keys are in the top dresser drawers. You can settle up when you leave. Two bucks apiece sound fair?”
“More than fair,” I said.
“Hell, they’d go empty anyways. Just gotta show a little profit. There’s an ice chest filled with Mexican beer on the back side. Twenty cents a bottle. Throw the money in the tin can on the side.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“Come down from Pietro?” he said, making conversation.
I nodded.
“Where you heading this evening?”
“Mendosa.”
Lefton seemed genuinely surprised.
“Jesus, why?” he asked.
“We have to interview somebody.”
“Hmm. Well, don’t mention the captain down there. You know the story about the feud between him and Guilfoyle?”
I nodded.
“Worst case of bad blood I ever saw. I’d walk light down there; your badge ain’t worth a damn. One thing Guilfoyle really hates is big-city cops. He’s mean as a constipated skunk but he’s not as dumb as some think and he’s got a real short fuse.”
“So we’ve heard.”
“He wouldn’t get homicidal with a couple of out-of-town cops, would he?” Ski said with a smile.
“You seen the fog we got here. You could disappear into the Pacific and nobody would ever find you. It’s happened a lot more often than you might think.”
“To cops?” I asked.
“To anybody he gets a hard-on for.”
“Great,” Ski said dismally.
“How come Culhane doesn’t go down there and clean the whole bunch out?” I asked.
Lefton shrugged. “It’s a Mexican standoff. The captain doesn’t give a damn, long’s Gil stays on his side of the county line, which is about ten feet from here.”
“You know Guilfoyle pretty well?” I asked.
“He brings a fishing party down here once a month or so. Doesn’t like his guests to spend too much time in the daylight in Mendosa, if you know what I mean.”
“Not exactly.”
“They’re his guests. Hard cases, I’d say; sounds like they’re usually from back East somewhere. They fill up the place for a week. Or a month. Pay good, tip big. I don’t ask questions.”
I remembered what Jimmy Pennington said about Mendosa being called ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ after the Montana hangout of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
“Well, we’re not planning to spend a lot of time there. Grab a bite to eat, gas up the jalopy, do our work, and come back.”
“Mendosa’s straight down the road about fifteen miles, just past the icehouse. Probably take you half an hour in this fog.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
“Glad to do it,” he answered. “Anything I can do for Dan.”
That’s all he said, although I was sure there was more to that story than he cared to tell. He walked in front of the car with a flashlight and guided us through a turnaround and back up to the main road.
