Bad Samaritan (8 page)

I looked at her suspiciously. “You and Glenys haven’t decided to play detective, have you?”

“Don’t be silly. Paul has donated twenty thousand dollars to Glenys’s pet charity. The least she can do is invite him to dinner. So don’t you start on football with him, mister!”

“I promise you I will not start on
anything
with Paul Pontius. Get going on that drink—I want to take a shower.”

“I’ll make it. But before your shower, I want to hear about your day.”

I started with Nowicki and worked my way through Vista Court and lunch with Juanita to Peter Allis. I mentioned the visit to Danning Villwock’s mountain retreat, but eliminated the important thing he had told me.

“What does Juanita look like?” she asked me.

“She’s a big woman, but I suppose some might find her attractive. She’s about fifty years old. Her enchiladas are—well, almost up to yours.”

“You meant better.”

“Call it a draw.”

She sat there on our twenty-seven-hundred-dollar sofa, and said, “Three babies and a mother in one room without a tub or shower?”

“In Los Angeles, I’ve seen eight in one room with a public toilet down the hall. I imagine we could see a lot worse in India.”

“This isn’t India.”

“Not yet. Who else is going to be at the dinner?”

“Just Skip and June.”

“Hasn’t Glenys got a new man?”

“Not yet. But I’m helping her look.”

I thought about Glenys while I took my shower. A strange habit of mine, every time I take a shower my thoughts turn to women. It started in junior high school.

This Glenys was a tall, slim and elegant lady. The first and superficial impression one would get from her spinster attitudes on so many subjects was contradicted by her history.

She had been paired with some monumental studs when she lived in Beverly Hills, men who certainly weren’t after her money. The only fortune hunter in the succession was the only man she had ever married. That marriage had lasted two days (and one night).

Her sister, June, was more standard, the sunny outdoor girl, the cheerleader type. Skip must have been the personification of all the college heroes she had rooted for. A dozen times since we had moved up here, she had told me how wonderful I had been to keep Skip out of jail—for her.

He, too, must have remembered the debt. He was standing in the entry hall when the butler opened door. “I want to apologize, Brock,” he said. “But jeepers, when I saw you standing there with Vogel—”

“I understood and so did Vogel. We were both wrong about him, Skip.”

“One of us still is.” He punched my arm. “Did you give up golf?”

“Temporarily. I decided I was too young to retire.”

“Lay off, buddy. Each to his own. Anything new on Mrs. Marner?”

I shook my head.

“Why couldn’t it be suicide? She had cancer, you know.”

“According to the doctors. According to Maude it was gas, from all that Mexican and kosher food she was always eating.”

Then Glenys was coming to greet me. “My favorite vulgar person,” she said, and kissed me. “Don’t spill your cheap cigar ashes on my antique Kashan, shamus.”

I would have topped her—if I could have thought of something. We went into the intimate little forty-foot living room. June Lund was in there, tanned and trim and smiling. And Mr. and Mrs. Paul Pontius.

I remembered him as gray haired and fat. He was about as fat as an N.F.L. center. On sober reappraisal he was gray haired and
big.

He shook my hand and smiled. “Phyllis warned me not to mention football. But Skip told me you’re the famous Brock the Rock. Even when I was a 49er fan, I admired you, sir.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Now that you’ve moved down here you might change your allegiance. This is going to be a Ram year.”

“I’m afraid it is. You remember Phyllis, don’t you, my wife?”

I remembered Phyllis. I hadn’t been
that
drunk. She was red haired and statuesque, right out of the Folies Bergères, Las Vegas edition.

She gave me her glittering show-girl smile. “I remember you well, Brock,” she said sweetly. “I hoped to see you sooner.”

Two women in succession had left me without answers. “Thank you,” I said humbly.

We sat and drank and talked about this and that, nothing worthy of recording. We ate fine food and drank fine wine (I guess) and went back to the living room for more talk.

Toward the end of the evening I was sitting next to Pontius, remote from the others, when he said quietly. “Would you drop in at my house tomorrow morning, Brock? Si told me you are working with the police on his mother’s—on what happened.”

“Glad to.” I waited for more, for some clarifying statement.

None came. “Would nine o’clock be too early?” he asked.

“I’ll be there.”

I
T HAPPENED AROUND TWO
o’clock in the morning. The first warning was the rattle of a glass on the tile of the bathroom-sink tile counter, about twelve feet from my unpillowed ear.

A prowler?

From the living room came the thump of a picture, bouncing against the wall.

Two prowlers?

No! The bed began to sway gently, back and forth. From the kitchen came the sound of rattling china. My heart pounded in my ears, as Jan crowded over, reaching for me blindly in the dark, whimpering words I can’t remember now.

“Easy,” I said quietly. “It will pass.”

The bed stopped rocking and we untangled ourselves. I tried the bed-stand light. It worked. I snapped on the small radio to a flood of country music.

“No power lines down,” I said. “At least not ours. It probably wasn’t centered around here.”

“It was close enough for me. The next one could be worse. Should we go outside?”

“ Let’s wait for the report.”

The report interrupted the country music two aftershocks later. The quake had been centered off the coast of Oxnard, registering 4.7 on the Richter scale. No serious damage had been reported in the San Valdesto area; only scattered reports of broken windows had been received from Oxnard so far. The possibility of a tidal wave was imminent along the Oxnard shore.

Nothing like an earthquake to remind a man of his fragile mortality. We tried to get back to sleep, but it was a nervous sleep, with only a few snatches of oblivion.

We were up at six-thirty. “I’m not hungry,” Jan said. “How about you?”

“It’s too early. I think I’ll go over my notes. Why don’t you see if there’s anything on the tube about the quake?”

The local TV station was giving it the full treatment. They don’t get too much earth-shaking news in San Valdesto. Jan stayed with their repetitive coverage while I went over my Xerox copies, trying to find a pattern or a clue. Nothing.

At eight o’clock, over our French toast, I said, “Paul Pontius asked me to stop in and see him this morning. I told him I’d be there at nine o’clock.”

“Paul or Phyllis?”

I gave that the answer it deserved—silence.

“To put it in your vulgar terms, she’s a lot of mama, isn’t she?”

“She has to be. He’s a lot of man. Did you notice how polite I was with him last night?”

“I did. Why does he want to see you?”

“He mentioned Maude, so maybe it’s about that. He might be the attorney for the estate.”

“Joe Farini,” she said, “is the Marners’ attorney, and the Christophers’. Isn’t he the attorney who helped Skip that time?”

“He is. I thought he was strictly a criminal lawyer. He must have come up in the world.”

The day was overcast and gloomy. The road that led to the home of Paul and Phyllis Pontius wound through an area of high stone fences and iron gates, famous old estates now being unloaded on the new rich.

The Pontius place had been built years ago by a retired steel magnate. “Pittsburgh rococo” best described it. Every broken leaf, shell and scroll had been carefully restored.

I didn’t see the inside. Paul Pontius was waiting for me outside, sitting on a wrought-iron bench in a small garden in the side yard.

“I’m still shaking,” he said.

I sat on a wrought-iron chair near him. “I am, too. I get up at six-thirty.”

“Phyllis is sleeping,” he said. “She took some pills, but they’re not for me.” He paused. “Brock, in your line of work, I have to guess you know something about my background.”

“I read the
Los Angeles Times
, if that’s what you mean. A lot of people up here do. I didn’t usually check people’s backgrounds unless somebody paid me to do it.”

“But if you read the piece in the
Times
, you’ll remember that some of the men I defended had—doubtful connections.”

“Two of them,” I said, “were Mafia dons.”

He smiled at me. “Are we going to fight again?”

“Not if you have friends in the Mafia, we’re not.”

“Brock, I’m an attorney, not a hoodlum. You’ve got to believe that: because what I’m going to tell you will look suspicious unless you do.”

I returned his earlier smile. “Tell me and let me guess.”

“Jesus!” he said. “You—All right! Those two men you mentioned, those alleged dons, now live in town here. They’re old and they’re retired and they certainly don’t want any more trouble than they’ve already had with the law. But one of them told me something about a young friend who dropped in to see him when he was in town. The man was in town for a checkup at the Dolor Clinic here. He told my client about a prank he pulled for another friend in town, simply as a joke.”

“Are you talking about a short, thin man who drives a yellow El Dorado?”

“I don’t know what the man looks like or what he drives. He threatened some waitress downtown. Jan mentioned to Julie Marner that the police might have connected the incident to the death of Mrs. Marner.”

“They’re checking it. What was he, a hit man or just a muscle?”

“I have no idea.”

The Dolor Clinic was popular with the Vegas boys. I asked, “Where was he from?”

“Nevada.”

“Does the man have a name?”

“I don’t know his name. And it’s not a question I’m going to ask my client.” He inhaled heavily. “Brock, believe me, there is only one reason I told you what I did. I want the police to find the murderer of Maude Marner as badly as you do. Si is probably my best friend. I told you this so the police won’t waste their time on a blind alley.”

“If they checked the Dolor Clinic, they could find out the man’s name.”

“Maybe. If he used his right name. We get a lot of Nevada patients at the Dolor Clinic, Brock.”

“You’re putting me in a bind,” I said. “I’m supposed to be working with the police, but I can’t reveal my source of this information. And you probably don’t want me to tell them about the Dolor Clinic.”

“I would appreciate that. I want to live here. I thought this was a favor I was doing you—and the police. I swear to you this man from Nevada had nothing to do with the death of Mrs. Marner. My client checked that out. The man was in Nevada the night Mrs. Marner was killed.

“But what about his friend in town? Why did he want the waitress threatened? You called that a prank. It was no prank to the waitress. She was frightened enough to tell the police about it—and she’s a part-time bookie.”

“Whoever the man in town was, he was a local. It’s highly probable he has a record. Perhaps they had better question that bookie-waitress again and find out who she usually pays off to.”

“She doesn’t pay. She’s free-lance. That’s why she was threatened.”

“Okay, there’s your case. Find the payoff man. I can guarantee you he’s local. My clients came here to die, not to operate.”

I sat there, thinking. “Okay, Paul,” I said finally. “I’ll take the police off that blind trail if I can. I won’t mention your name or the clinic. If things get sticky and I have to, I’ll come to you first and we’ll figure out how to do it.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “You have just made me a Ram fan.”

He might have honestly believed that hoodlum’s threat against Mary Serano. It was also possible that, like Si, his relationship to the mob was peripheral. He had told me some dangerous information, information that could get him into trouble. Which meant he had trusted me—or he was working a ploy. He was a lawyer.

Then again, if he had really been involved with the mob except as an attorney, he would probably have been disbarred by now. No, that was a naive thought. When would I grow up?

I drove out his gate and past the other gates, between the pines and the live oaks and the eucalypti, past the Montevista Country Club, back to the freeway and town.

Vogel was in Helms’s office, using his typewriter. Helms, he told me, would not be available this morning. And then he asked, “What’s this I heard about Mary Serano? I can’t find the report here.”

“Some creep threatened her.” I paused, trying to frame the right words. “He was from out of town. I don’t know his name. Don’t ask for my source.”

His smile was thin. “Your old friend Juanita, maybe?”

“Have you been checking my movements, Lieutenant?”

“Of course not. I didn’t even know you’d seen her. Did she tell you anything else?”

“She didn’t even tell me that. But she promised to keep an ear open. Though she is no Maude Marner fan.”

“I can guess. I’ve heard her on the subject of do-gooders. She’s a real free-enterprise woman, that Juanita. Supported herself and most of her family since she was twelve.” He lighted a cigarette. “And now for the question I’m not supposed to ask—who told you about the out-of-town man?”

“No comment.”

“A Vegas muscle, maybe?”

“Maybe worse. He wasn’t very muscular, according to Mrs. Serano.”

“He had a friend in town?”

I nodded.

“I can guess who the friend is, I’ll bet.”

“He had a couple of friends in town, but one name my source didn’t know and the other he wouldn’t give me. Let’s just assume the local friend could be the town payoff man. That’s why Mary was threatened, because she doesn’t pay off.”

“Sure, sure. Great theory, no facts.” He snuffed out his half-smoked cigarette in an ashtray. “You know where we are? We’re nowhere!”

“So far. We’re not quitting, are we?”

“Not according to Chief Harris. Back to the treadmill. Got any more names on the list of Marner’s?”