Bad Samaritan (11 page)

“You a cop or something? I don’t see no red light.”

“I’m not in the red-light business. You’ve got exactly three seconds to save your hand.”

“Brock,” Jan whispered. “Please, Brock, let’s go.”

Locum grinned—and took his hand off the glass. “The little lady is right. Just go, whitey. This is a
mean
neighborhood.” He waved, and walked over to a gray Maserati parked at the curb.

The Mustang moved on. “You’re absolutely crazy!” Jan said. “He must weigh three hundred pounds!”

“Josh Leddy of the Green Bay Packers weighed three hundred and seven pounds. I put him out for the season with a broken leg.”

“Two hundred years ago. You’re crazy, completely crazy.”

I put a hand on her knee. “I know. It was crazy. But I hate men who deal in girls. Because I love girls. Maybe we could find that camper if we scouted around.”

“Take me home first and then do your damned scouting!”

Back to the freeway, back to Montevista, back to the fringe cottage with no further dialogue.

There, Jan said, “I’m going to bed. I’ve got a headache.”

“I’m sorry I acted so crazy.”

“It’s not that. I really do have a headache. I know it’s Saturday night and all, but—”

I kissed her forehead. “I believe you. Take some aspirin. I’m going to sit up and wait for Juanita’s phone call.”

I was sorry to see her go to bed without me. Up until the Locum confrontation, it had been an increasingly romantic evening. There was no way I would be able to get to sleep for a while, not with the anticipation I had been nursing through the last hour.

I turned on the tube, but it was all garbage. I phoned Juanita’s place to tell her about what had happened. In the street half a block from the restaurant, wanting to ask her if she knew who the man in the camper could have been.

But she had left for the night. Perhaps she would phone me from home.

I sat for an hour, sulking, before going to bed. I didn’t visit our connubial bed. I took a blanket out of the linen closet and slept on the couch in the den.

I could have headaches, too.

T
HE FAT SUNDAY
LOS
Angeles Times
was on the lawn, chewed by a neighbor’s dog. The local paper was unspoiled; this particular dog had a provincial hatred for the
Times.

I had thawed out some of the Danish pastry we had bought in Solvang and started the percolator before Jan came into the breakfast room.

She asked, “What time did Juanita call?”

“She didn’t.”

She stared at me doubtfully. “Do you think—” She didn’t finish.

“It’s possible she’s scared or she could have been busy. I’m sure nothing has happened to her. I’ll find out tomorrow. How’s your headache?”

“Gone. But I’m tense. I had some of the damnedest nightmares. I thought, when we moved up here, all those crazy things you got involved in down in Los Angeles would be behind us.”

“They are. Do you want me to quit?”

“I wouldn’t think of telling you what to do. Did you take the sweet rolls out of the freezer?”

“They’re on the kitchen counter. I warmed the oven. Jan, if it had been anybody but Maude—”

“All right, all right,” she said. “I’m too weary to argue. Did you get both papers?”

“Yes, ma’am. Go on with your household duties. I’m reading about my Rams.”

“Rah, rah, rah,” she said. “Sis, boom, bah!”

I read on, against the background noises of clink, clank, splash and gurgle. And then a silence. And then she was back in the breakfast room, glaring at me.

“How can you sit there and read about those dumb Rams when you haven’t the faintest idea of what happened to Juanita?”

“Sit down, emotional child,” I said, “and I will tell you about Juanita.”

She went to the kitchen to pour herself a cup of coffee and came back to sit down across from me.

“Do you remember,” I asked her, “when I had my only case in this town? Do you remember the trouble Skip was in, and how he went into hiding, and I had to come up here and talk some sense into him?”

She nodded.

“After I got Skip to come out of hiding, the local police tried to implicate him in a murder. That’s when I met Vogel. They almost did it, too. But I found the real murderer for them.”

“What does all this have to do with Juanita?”

“The real murderer was Juanita’s husband. And right in that bar where Locum stood last night, her husband tried to shoot me with a great big .45-caliber Colt. He would have, too.”

I took a deep breath, remembering.

“Go on!”

“Juanita saved my life. She emptied both barrels of a twelve-gauge shotgun into her hubby’s stomach. He was never reassembled for the funeral. He had to be mopped up.”

She was staring at me now, glassy eyed.

“So you see,” I went on patiently, “it’s not the Juanitas of this world I worry about. It is all those fifteen- and sixteen-year-old runaways girls that Locum and his friends are probably converting into prostitutes. This is a tourist town, a convention town, and what is a convention without call girls?”

“I don’t want to hear any more.”

“Then I’ll shut up. But next time don’t ask me why I wanted to take my chances with a man as big as Otis Locum. I was
aching
to take my chances with that puke.”

“All right, all right.” She stood up. “I’ll get breakfast. The pastry should be warm enough by now.”

Over the pastry and scrambled eggs and coffee, she asked, “Did you plan to go to the match with me this afternoon?”

“What match?”

“At the tennis club. June’s in the county finals.”

“Honey! The Rams are playing an exhibition game with the 49ers, and it’s on the tube.”

“Okay. Skip will pick me up, then. I’ll go with him and June.”

Skip came to pick her up around noon. He was driving a brand-new camper, only a week old. He insisted I go out to admire it. He pointed out all the features that fascinated him and bored me, the ample propane stove and oven, the confortable beds, the fiberglass shower.

“It’s very nice,” I said. “I had dinner with one of your old friends last night.”

“Which one?”

“Juanita Rico. Seen her lately?”

He shook his head. “I don’t hang around that neck of the woods anymore. How is she doing?”

“Very well. She’s starting to get the carriage trade. You shouldn’t forget your old friends.”

“She was never that close a friend.”

“She saved my life,” I explained, “so I have a different relationship with her.”

He smiled. “Yes, Father Callahan. Do you know what you are? You’re an anachronism. You’re right out of one of those old Humphrey Bogart movies.”

“Probably. And you’ve become the playboy of the western world. At least I’m consistent.”

“A foolish consistency,” he said, “is the hobgoblin of little minds. Emerson, Ralph Waldo.”

Nothing from me.

“I grew up and faced reality,” he said.

“You certainly did. And it’s done wonders for your backswing.”

He laughed. “Brock, you’re crazy. I love you, but you’re crazy.”

He was probably right. How could I be so out of tune with so many people and still be sane. …

The camper went away, carrying my love, and I went back into the house. The Einlicher smiled at me, but I made myself a double martini and settled in front of the tube.

I watched the last quarter of the Jets-Patriots game from New York, and then went to the kitchen to fry some kosher weiners and get some olives. I consumed them with four slices of sourdough toast and three glasses of milk. I brought another martini back to the tube with me in time for the kickoff.

Every season, the Rams would play the 49ers three times, two official games, one exhibition. Almost every year, the Rams would win all three games. But the 49ers had taken two of the three last year, and were supposed to be even better this season.

This game reasserted the Rams’s dominance. This was a solid club. We now had a quarterback more concerned with moving the team than with getting quotes into the press.

We had a new owner and a new coach who knew football was played on the field, not in the news media. They had traded for some hard-nosed boys who had grown up to know that they weren’t getting their kind of pay to impress reporters.

It was still the third quarter, but the game was in the bag, when the phone rang.

It was Juanita. “I had nothing to tell you last night, so I didn’t call. And I have nothing now. My friends are also my customers. I want to talk with them first.”

“Okay. When I went out last night, Locum was up the block a ways, talking with somebody in a camper. Do you know who it could have been?”

“No.”

“Does Locum come into your place often?”

“Not often. He knows I don’t like him. Why do you ask?”

“Because I have a feeling he was only there because I was. It’s possible he went out to report my presence to the man in the camper. He used your phone a few minutes before he left.”

“It could be. Pancho, are you angry with me?”

“We all have to make a living. I am a little disappointed. I’ll keep in touch.”

She had a business now and was getting the gringo trade. She would be joining the Better Business Bureau one of these days. These were the sour thoughts I had, poisoned by the martinis. They always affected my chemistry. One I could handle. More than one turned me paranoiac.

I turned off the game and went to the bathroom to take a shower. Hot, hot and hotter, numbing the frayed nerve ends. No feminine fantasies today; I saw the smiling face of Otis Locum.

June Lund had won her match. She was now the champion female player of San Valdesto County. That might not seem monumental to a citizen of Peru, but she was the only person in the world who could officially make that statement.

She and Skip, Glenys and some man whose name I have forgotten, came home with Jan to celebrate the victory. The martinis had already poisoned me; I nursed an Einlicher through the bedlam.

Chitchat, persiflage, gossip and merriment, filling the void of the days before the big sleep.

They left around nine o’clock, and Jan asked, “Well, hermit, what did your Rams do?”

“I’m sure they won. I didn’t see the finish. Juanita phoned. She wants more time with her list.”

“Do you think that man, that Locum, frightened her?”

“I don’t know. She told me her friends are her customers. It could be a purely business decision.”

Jan nodded without interest and began picking up ashtrays and glasses carrying them back to the kitchen. When she returned, to the living she seemed dispirited.

“What’s wrong?”

“I feel so—so useless. Everybody here can play tennis or golf or sail boats or ride horses. I feel so useless—physically.”

“I could teach you to wrestle,” I offered. “Why don’t we go into the bedroom and I’ll teach you how to wrestle?”

“Let’s go,” she said.

T
HE WIND HAD SHIFTED.
The sun came up glaring on Monday morning. Sergeant Helms was in his office, staring out the window.

“Do you know a man named Otis Locum?” I asked him.

“I do. He’s been picked up more times than a girl hitchhiker. But we could never make anything stick. Where did you hear about him?”

I related my Saturday-night adventure.

“Get the license number of the camper?”

I shook my head.

“What color was it?”

“I couldn’t tell for sure. It was light colored. I’m a little color blind between blue and green. It might have been either. From a distance it looked like one of those conversions on a pickup truck.”

He studied me sourly. “You weren’t going to tangle with Locum unarmed, were you?”

“You’re making noises like my wife. I’ve crippled bigger men and they were wearing pads. If you remember Josh Leddy of the Packers—”

“Never heard of him, footballer. And there’s no referee on the field where Locum plays.” He turned back to the window and stared out again.

“You look unhappy, Sergeant.”

“I didn’t enjoy the chief’s lecture. I’ve been wondering if there isn’t an easier way to earn fifteen hundred and twelve dollars a month.”

“Take-home pay?”

“Huh! I take home enough for a pound of ground meat. What were you doing down at Chickie’s?”

“Eating Mexican food and introducing Juanita to my wife. Locum’s a pimp, the way I heard it.”

“Locum’s anything that will turn a dirty buck. But try to prove it. You know what one of those Maseratis costs?”

“More than fifteen hundred and twelve dollars, I’m sure. Is he the big man in town?”

“This town is full of big men. I guess he’s about the biggest crooked man in town, at least down there.” He went to his desk, opened a drawer and took out a package of cigarettes. “I’ve got to give a talk at Marquez High summer school this morning. You’ll probably work with Vogel. He’s in with the chief now.”

“You should get a bonus,” I told him, “for all the public relations work you do.”

“Start a petition,” he said. “See you later.”

Saturday’s
Times
was still on his desk. I had read today’s sports pages at breakfast. I turned to the financial pages to see what those sharpies on Wall Street had done to my money. They had kept me even for Friday, a new record. The D.J.I. had gone up almost eight points; I had only broken even.

I was still doodling on a scratch pad when Vogel came in. He looked at the doodles, at the financial page, and said, “Put your money into the Savings and Loan. Those New York bastards will destroy you.”

“You’ve been burned,” I guessed.

“All the ways there are. Helms gone?”

“He had a lecture date. Where do we go today?”

“We’ll follow the chief’s script until we get a better one. We could start with Nowicki. Did you talk with him Saturday?”

“No. He wasn’t there.”

“Maybe,” Vogel suggested, “you could go in alone. Nowicki and I have this mutual animosity pact. I don’t think he’d tell me which side he dresses on.”

“With his politics? He’d have to dress on the left.”

“Clever! Let’s go.”

I told him about Locum as we rode down Main Street and he said, “That could be an angle. Maude worried about her girls more than she did about boys. And girls are Locum’s big business.”