Bad Samaritan (3 page)

“One moment, please.” He got up and left the room. When he came back to sit behind his desk again, he asked, “Is this a local case?”

“It’s a girl who is missing,” I said. “She lives in San Valdesto but the last knowledge of her whereabouts was in Los Angeles.”

His phone buzzed. He picked it up said, “Yes. I see. Thank you.”

He smiled at me. “There will be no need for a retainer, Mr. Callahan. If you’ll just give us what facts you have? It’s a runaway case, I presume?”

“More or less.” I gave him what facts I had, including Maude Marner’s address. I said, “I appreciate your trusting me.”

He didn’t even blush. He smiled and said, “Professional courtesy.”

Jan and I were married by a Unitarian minister in the formal garden of the Christopher acreage in Montevista a week later. A week after that, she found a little cottage in the same general area that she was just aching to redo, a little cottage of three bedrooms, den and three and a half baths. Because it was what is known in the real-estate trade as a “fixer-upper,” we were able to buy this gem for two hundred and eighteen thousand dollars.

Hard work, honest dealing, persistence, intelligence—and being Aunt Sheila’s nephew had finally earned me the financial security that is every American’s birthright.

I had always been told by my seniors that retirement can be boring, and I learned some new truths in the next couple of months. Golf should not be played seven days a week, unless you’re inclined to masochism. There are actually men with I.Q.’s over seventy who play gin rummy. There are otherwise rational people who think bridge is a serious game.

On the personal level I learned that raising my voice and drinking more didn’t make me any less dull.

“You’re bored,” Jan said, one morning at breakfast.

I had shared many breakfasts with Jan over the years. The moral novelty of having her sit there as a wife was still new. I nodded.

“You miss padding around in the smog, playing the Junior G-man,” she went on in a way she has. “You can’t get conditioned to success.”

“Success? An accident of birth, a chance marriage and then an inheritance—is that the road to success?”

“Many of the people we have met here inherited their money,” she explained patiently. “They’re not as unhappy as you seem to be.”

“Maybe they’re dumber. They’re certainly dull enough.”

“Because they aren’t always arguing or getting stoned?”

“Let’s not fight,” I said. “Why don’t we drive up to Solvang today and window-shop and eat some Danish food?”

“I’d love that. But Julie Marner is expecting me for bridge this afternoon and it’s too late for her to find a substitute. We’ll do it, though. Tomorrow, I promise.”

Julie’s husband, Six-Handicap Si, was over at the club, looking for a game when I got there.

“If you’re willing to play for small stakes,” I told him. “I know when I’m overmatched.”

“I’ll tell you what,” he offered. “We’ll play for the same stakes and I’ll give you one more stroke on each side.”

That was the way we did it; that was the way I lost. The man was a natural gambler, a legitimate tiger. If he needed a thirty-foot putt, he made it. If a two-footer didn’t matter, he missed it. I shot my best round ever on the course and he took me all three ways on the Calcutta, plus four presses.

At the nineteenth hole he reverted to his off-course decency and bought me a beer. I had decided to forego the hard stuff for at least one day.

“How’s your mother?” I asked him.

“I can’t be sure,” he said. “She’s become very secretive lately. She mentioned you this morning when I phoned her.” He shook his head. “She wanted to know if you were still a working detective.”

“Tell her I’m a nonworking bum.”

He frowned. “It can’t be that girl again, that one she was looking for a couple months ago?”

“I doubt it. The best agency in the country spent two weeks on that and came up with nothing. What do you think she’s onto? Some shenanigans?”

He stared at me blankly.

“You said she’s become secretive,” I explained. “She’s looking for a detective. Put those two facts together, Dr. Watson, and what do you come up with?”

“My nosy mother,” he answered. “I’ve told her a thousand times to keep her nose out of other people’s business. What did it ever get her.”

“What’s the medal the Chicanos in town give their most admired citizen?”

“The Good Samaritan medal.”

“That’s what it got her. Ever get one, Si?”

“Jesus,” he said, “a moral private eye. There’s a dichotomy for you.”

“For you, not for me. Of all the people I’ve met in this town, including you, she’s number one. As a matter of fact, she’s the only one I’ve met.”

“Only what?”

“The only citizen,” I said.

He laughed. “Jan warned me about you. Brock the Rock, the righteous Ram.”

“I wish somebody had warned me that you were here today. I would have left my money at home. You tell your ma if she needs me, I’m available. Tell her it’s free—if you can pronounce the word.”

“You sure lose hard. How about tomorrow? I can arrange for transportation if you need it?”

“Find another sucker. I’m going up to Solvang with my bride.”

“What’s in Solvang?”

“Danish beer. Thanks for the game, Si.”

“Thanks for the money. I’ll tell my mother you’re still available.”

Jan was home when I got there. She had won almost three dollars at bridge, she informed me proudly. She had been a dollar and twelve cents in the red and then made a grand slam, doubled and vulnerable.

I put my hand on the wall for support. I stared at her in trembling disbelief. “You’re lying! Nobody has ever done that!”

She looked at me coolly.

“A joke,” I explained.

“With a touch of rancor,” she added. “You’re not happy, are you?”

I thought about that for a second or two, and decided, “I’m happier than I was in Los Angeles. I think my trouble is, I’m not as happy as I expected to be. Let’s go out for dinner, just the two of us.”

“Okay. But let’s talk about you, first. Maybe it’s not working that bothers you. You’ve always had this middle-class hang-up about the evil idle rich, haven’t you?”

“I guess. Don’t fret about me. I’ll think of something productive to do, eventually. Matter of fact, Si told me today Maude’s been suggesting she might need a detective.”

“Oh? You like her, don’t you?”

“Very much. A real down-to-earth woman. Maybe we ought to phone her and ask her if she wants to go up to Solvang with us tomorrow? She loves that Santa Ynez Valley.”

“Some other time. I think we ought to be alone for one day.”

I didn’t press it. I should have, and maybe. … Maybe, hell: I have enough sins of omission on my conscience without adding one postfact guilt about an omission as innocent as that one.

We didn’t go to a fancy restaurant. There was a pizza parlor in town that served Einlicher. We ate there, piling up the calories, loving every bite.

And then a good night in the hay. It was Shaw who said it, I think: the nicest thing about marriage is that it combines the ultimate in temptation with the ultimate in opportunity.

The upper-class citizens of the Santa Ynez Valley didn’t play golf and drink and play bridge. They rode horses and drank and played bridge. The more photogenic inhabitants stood around horse shows in elegant clothes, affording newspaper photographers glossy groupings for the Sunday society pages.

But their country was pastoral and peaceful, soothing the nerves, quieting the doubts. And the shops of Solvang offered the imported china, silver and fabrics that stirred the refined love of beauty in my bride, and triggered her vulgar acquisitiveness.

We came back down the San Marcos pass considerably poorer but happier, Jan with a deck full of gewgaws, me with a belly full of Danish beer. The lights of our town were spread out below us all the way to the sea.

“It’s not a bad town,” Jan said. “Too much happened to us too soon. We got—disoriented.”

“It’s a great town,” I said. “Now that we’re friends again, who was it that doubled you when you made the grand slam, vulnerable?”

“Julie Marner. She’s very competitive.”

“So is her husband. Nobody is perfect, Jan.” That was the beer talking.

“People don’t have to be perfect. But they could have some compassion and some awareness and a rational sense of values and an open mind.”

“Wouldn’t that be wonderful?” the beer said. “Then they’d be just like us!”

T
HERE WAS NO LOCAL
morning paper in our town, and the
Los Angeles Times
had gone to press too early to cover the story. We got the news of Maude Marner’s death on the local radio while we were eating breakfast the next morning.

She had been discovered by an occupant of the trailer court where she lived, slumped in the front seat of her Volkswagen, a victim of carbon monoxide.

There had been a long vacuum cleaner hose stretching from the tail pipe through the stuffed vent of a front window. The engine was still running when she had been found. The noise of the engine, at three in the morning, had finally disturbed her sleeping neighbor and he had gone out to investigate. According to the police, she had apparently been a suicide.

Not Maude Marner. No way!

Jan stared at me. “Yesterday, you suggested she—Maybe, if we had invited her to go along …?”

“No!” I said harshly. “Don’t say it, don’t think it.”

“We might have talked her out of it, Brock.”

“Out of what? Jesus, you don’t believe that bilge about suicide, do you? Maude Marner?”

“The police—” she started to say.

“I have met the police in this town,” I reminded. “Skip Lund would still be in jail if we had relied on the police in this town.”

She said nothing.

“What do we do?” I asked her. “If we phoned the Marners, I wouldn’t know what the hell to say.”

“Don’t phone now. There’s nothing you can say now. But murder, Brock? With the neighbors as close as they must be down there, could she be killed that way? How long could the engine run before neighbors became suspicious?”

“I don’t know. I plan to run down to Kelly’s Kourt this morning to find out.”

“Do it,” she said.

Kelly’s Kourt started with the mobile homes fronting on Rivera Street and seemed to go on forever, down a long driveway to the trailers, to the half dozen or so remnants of the original, ancient tourist cabins at the far end.

The complexions darkened along the route. I passed through the pasty whites of the mobile homes, through the light brown of the trailers, and almost to the coal-black inhabitants of the age-old leaning cabins. It was an integrated neighborhood, poor, poorer, poorest.

Maude Marner’s residence was among the cheaper trailers, and glaringly out of sequence: a forty-foot aluminum Hashua. She probably needed the room; she had housed many an adolescent runaway.

There was a police car parked in front of it. A uniformed officer was talking with a man I recognized—Detective Sergeant Bernard Vogel.

This was the officer who had tried to railroad Skip. At least, that had been my possibly prejudiced view of him. The feeling I had then, and still harbored, was that Sergeant Vogel was a stubborn champion of the upper dog, a toady for the powerful.

He recognized me as I got out of my car, and muttered under his breath to the uniformed man. When I came closer he said, “Callahan, isn’t it? I read in the paper that you had moved up here, in the society pages. Marry money, peeper?”

“Don’t flex your muscles, Sergeant,” I said. “I’m here because Maude Marner was a friend of mine. I hope you aren’t the officer who came up with that silly suicide theory?”

“It’s Lieutenant Vogel now,” he said stiffly.

“Congratulations!”

He glared at me. The uniformed man glared at me. When you’ve been glared at by N.F.L. linemen, all cops look like midgets, but I was not here to rekindle old grudges.

“Could we start over?” I suggested. “I’m a local citizen now, and Maude Marner was a woman I admired very much.”

“Name me somebody who didn’t. Okay, we’ll start over. Anybody hire you for this?”

“Nobody. I’m retired, Lieutenant. I played golf with her son the day before yesterday and he more or less told me his mother was onto something. I heard the news of her death on the radio an hour ago.”

“Silas Marner told you his mother was onto something? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He told me she had become secretive lately. And she had asked him if I was still a working detective. So I put two and two together, and guessed she had to be investigating some shenanigans, somewhere.”

“Maybe she had learned something about her son, or maybe somebody got to her because of him. Did you think of that?”

“I’m not following you, Lieutenant.”

“Silas Marner,” he said, “got his big start in the construction business in Vegas and around La Costa. That’s where he made most of his money. Now, if the syndicate hoodlums had a reason to want to scare him—”

“You’re reaching, Lieutenant. I think you just went over the cliff. Marner worked for the legitimate hotel chains in Vegas.”

“Sure. You opened the line, not me. We had it pegged as suicide.” He told the uniformed man, “Take that stuff back to Sergeant Helms. Tell the chief that I’ll be in for the conference at two o’clock.”

The uniformed man nodded, took one last malignant look at me and went away.

Vogel took a deep breath. “Now that you’re an establishment figure, Callahan, you don’t have to hate cops anymore.”

“I never did. Only the bad ones.”

He stared at me. “Was that personal?”

“In no way. I think, when we worked on opposite sides of that mess Skip Lund got into, we didn’t part as friends, but we had developed more respect for each other.”

He shrugged.

“Be fair, Lieutenant. You had something personal against Lund.”

“Maybe. I’ve lived in this town all my life and seen a lot of poor but handsome gents find rich wives to keep them from working. Lund hadn’t married money then, but he sure was hanging around with the girls who had it.”

“I wish Skip would go back to work. He worked like hell at that crummy station he was running. For your information, I didn’t marry money. I inherited it. We’re on the same side of the law now, Lieutenant. Should we start over?”