Charcoal Joe (19 page)

“Hello?” she said with the sleep still in her voice. It was 7:36 in the morning.

“Miss Devine?”

“Yes?” The sleepiness was laced with fear.

I almost hung up the phone. I almost did because I read the story behind Denise's tones. Her man had not been home for days. He hadn't called or told her where he was going. She probably had bags packed and ready for a journey he'd promised. Now all she could do was wait for that call telling her that the life she had been living was over.

“Ma'am, I have to talk with you about Mr. Boughman.”

“What is it?” she cried, her voice doubling in volume.

“I have to see you in person.”

“Peter told me never to tell anyone where we lived.”

“I already have the address, ma'am. I just wanted to call first. I didn't want to show up at your door unannounced.”

“What's happened to him?”

“I can be to you in forty-five minutes. I promise that I'll answer every question you have.”

“I don't know.”

“I can come there now,” I said. “I'm involved in a difficult, um, negotiation and later I can't promise that I'll be available.”

“What's your name?”

“Ted Waters.”

“Where is Peter, Mr. Waters?”

“I can come to your house or not. I can tell you the things you need to know or you can figure them out on your own. Those are your choices, Denise.”

I didn't exactly feel like a dog on the ride from my office into the canyon. Peter Boughman was one of the bad guys, like the men that bound and gagged me and promised a quick death. I didn't know his woman; maybe he didn't either. Maybe he thought she was all ignorant when really she chose him because she knew what he was and wanted to share his dirty money while feigning innocence.

Maybe.

The Coldwater Canyon address was just a mailbox surrounded by bushes and sapling trees. I pulled off the road as well as I could and picked my way along the slender trail that led from the mailbox up a steep, wooded incline.

I was breathing pretty hard when I came to the clearing maybe a hundred yards up from the road. The right cuff of my green-gray jacket was folded in at just the right angle to keep the snub-nosed .22 from falling out. All I had to do was curve my hand toward the wrist and the pistol would fall into it.

Not the best defense but probably unexpected.

The house was nothing to speak of, boxy and gray with few windows. It would have been a good starter home for a working-class family six or seven blocks deep on the wrong side of the tracks.

I reached for the buzzer but she opened the dull brown door first. Her dress was blood orange in color, loose with two big white pockets over the thighs. Her blond hair was stiff and brittle from too much washing and application of the dye. Maybe her natural color was black and so she had to double bleach before dyeing. But the face was lovely. White skin like some rose petals with red lips that were never far from a kiss. Her eyes were gray like Mouse's eyes.

The grimace on that fair apparition was something you'd expect to encounter on a mourner coming from the grave.

“You're black,” she said.

“I can't deny it.”

“Who are you?”

“Ted Waters.”

“What are you doing here?” She looked around as if she expected my confederates to descend upon her.

“I told you. I came to ask a few questions about Peter Boughman.”

“How did you find this address?” She was not going to let me past the front door.

“I found a note in his room at the Hotel Leonardo.”

The fact and fiction caused a quite lovely knitting mostly above her left eye.

“You're lying,” she said.

“If you say so. But here I am. Can I come in?”

Denise Devine produced a .25-caliber chrome-plated pistol from the right pocket and pointed it in the general direction of my diaphragm. I could have fallen to my left, grabbed my own gun, and killed her but I'm not the kind of guy who kills lovely young women in the deep woods.

“The gun isn't necessary,” I said. “I can just leave.”

“Where is Peter?”

“He's dead.”

Her own diaphragm wanted to genuflect, and when she wavered I snatched the gun from her hand. She grunted and reached for the piece but I held it away—out of her reach.

“We can stand out here and I'll answer your questions, Denise. And maybe you can answer one or two of mine.”

“Tell me what happened?” She accepted defeat with dignity. I liked her.

“He was found in a house down in Malibu,” I said. “Someone had shot him in the heart and the eye. Only good thing about it is that he couldn't have suffered much with either wound.”

“Why? Why would somebody kill Petey? He wouldn't hurt anybody.” I believed that she believed these words.

“You know what he did for a living, right?”

“He worked for a gambler named Rigby in Gardena. He was a floor manager in a poker parlor.”

That was the story Boughman told.

“Gamblers can be serious people,” I opined, using his lie to soften the blow. “Were you and Peter planning a vacation?”

I got the feeling that she got the feeling that I could read her thoughts.

“Why?”

“Where were you going?”

“He wouldn't say. He just told me to get a passport and pack, and pack my bags.”

“Doesn't that sound like he was expecting a windfall?”

“He might have saved the money.”

“You don't believe that.”

“Is that why you're here? Are you looking for some money? Is that why you want to come in my house?”

All very good questions. Maybe there was a fortune on the top shelf of the closet or buried under the flagstone before the dull brown door.

“Found money can be good,” I said. “Getting dealt blackjack at a card table or an uncle you never knew about who leaves you a coffee can filled with gold doubloons. But the kinda money Peter was after belonged to some very bad men. And those men are on the warpath.”

The bottle blonde sneered at me. She was trying to make sense of what I was doing at her door, why her man was dead, and if his death meant that she was now in danger.

“I don't have any money,” she said.

“Well I hope you have some family somewhere because you know you are no longer safe in this house or this city.”

“Why not?”

“Because your man was plotting against people that will kill anyone that gets in their way. Because the money he was after is missing from their pockets and they will not rest until it's found.”

“I don't have any money,” she said again.

“Listen, honey, the man looking for this money told me that he'd kill somebody if he even thought that they might know one thing that could get him closer to getting it.”

The lady farted. She was so scared that this bodily function didn't even embarrass her. Tears were coming from her eyes, and tremors traveled up and down her limbs. In the days alone in the house in the woods she had worked out that Peter wasn't coming back, that the trouble he was in might come back on her.

My information just proved her suspicions.

“I don't know what to do,” she admitted.

“Do you have a car?”

“No.”

“You just stay up here and wait for Peter to come?”

“The market at the bottom of the hill makes deliveries.”

“Do you have a friend?”

“Peter and I live pretty much separated from our old lives. He does business and goes to work but we don't socialize. I used to have friends.”

“Anybody you still talk to?”

“There's one man I used to know. I call him now and then when Peter's gone for a long time.”

“Can you trust this guy?”

“He doesn't know anything about Peter, not even his name. We had a thing before and, and I think he still wants something.”

“Call him now. Tell him to pick you up at the art museum parking lot and I'll drop you off there. Go through your suitcases and take only what's necessary. This will not be a vacation.”

I waited outside while she did as I asked. She might have had another gun in there. She might have called the police. But I wasn't worried. Women in her position knew when they were looking at their last chance.

“Why are you helping me?” she asked as we crossed Sunset Boulevard.

“Why do you believe that what I'm telling you is true?”

“Because Peter promised me that he'd be home last Sunday night. Because if he didn't come he would have at least called.”

“I'm helping you because it's the right thing to do and if you feel like I'm okay you might tell me something.”

“What?”

“Is there anywhere other than your house and the hotel that you could get in touch with Peter?”

“I'm just wondering why a black man would go out of his way to help a white woman,” she said.

I had all kinds of answers for that question but they didn't seem worth voicing. So we drove on in silence.

When I pulled into the parking lot of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, she reached into the backseat to take her small suitcase. I pulled into an empty space and waited for her to garner her resources.

She opened the door and put one foot on the asphalt.

“What happened to Peter, Mr. Waters?”

“He tried to rob his bosses but before he could get away with it another thief killed him,” I said. It was as close to the truth as I had come.

A sob escaped her throat.

I put a hand on her shoulder.

“And what do you care about it?” she asked.

“The police have blamed a young man for the killing. I'm trying to get him off.”

“Did this, this young man kill my Peter?”

“Not a chance.”

“I met him when I was waiting for standby tickets for
The Magic Flute,
” she said, one foot in the car and the other on the tarmac.

“The opera?”

“He loved opera. He had a box. He offered to, to let me sit with him. I had come to L.A. from Omaha with a boyfriend. He left for work one day and didn't come back. I was really lost and Peter was a perfect gentleman.”

“What about the guy you're meeting?”

“He's a good guy but he doesn't make any money. He wanted me to live with him so I could help pay three months' back rent. Peter paid my rent and took me to the opera four weeks in a row. One time we flew up to San Francisco. He was good to me.”

I stayed silent.

“I didn't have any other way of getting in touch with him,” she said. “But one time, maybe eight months ago, he left a package with me and said that I should wait a few days and then have the people at the market put it in the mail.”

“Big package?”

“No. Small, but it was heavy.”

“Do you remember the address?” I was hoping that it was something simple that stuck in her head.

“No, but I remember that it was addressed to Beulah Edwards. I remember because I wondered if she was a lover. He told me that I didn't have anything to worry about so I didn't.”

“Beulah Edwards.”

She nodded and climbed out of the car.

Miss Edwards was in the West L.A. directory. She lived on Cushdon, near Westwood Boulevard.

It was Sunday and I could have taken Feather to Marineland, Knott's Berry Farm, or even Disneyland. I wanted to relax and see my daughter but Denise Devine might have the same thoughts I did, or maybe her on-again boyfriend would help her with the white pages. I drove to the address, then around the block, and parked. I walked up the street and to the front door, which, like many L.A. homes, had the doorway secluded by a trellis grown over by a few dozen sweet pea vines.

The flowering creepers reminded me of Bonnie's abandoned home, and of the crippled hero Joguye Cham.

No one answered my knocks or the buzzer. The mailbox was overflowing with junk mail. Local newspapers, menus, and various flyers littered the welcome mat.

I considered lighting a cigarette but decided against it; that was my optimism operating.

I had brought with me two detective and/or burglar tools: the loaded .22 and a twelve-inch gooseneck crowbar that fit uncomfortably under my jacket.

The crowbar could be used as a defensive tool if Beulah turned out to be a big bruiser instead of a fat grandma. But if, as I suspected, the house was abandoned, then I could pry my way through the front or back door and see what evidence I might find.

The windows all had pink-painted iron bars over them, and the doorjamb was reinforced with two long metal slats.

But I persisted.

It took longer than it might have because I was trying to keep the racket down.

Half an hour and I'd made it inside.

It was a house but not a home. There was very little furniture anywhere, and the only light came through shaded windows and from electric lamps set here and there on the floors of the small empty rooms.

No tables, one straight-back chair, a few empty cartons of Chinese and Mexican food, and six very big sack-like leather bags sitting on the otherwise empty bedroom floor.

The denominations were twenties, fifties, and hundreds neatly wrapped for easy counting. The smallest bag contained $175,000. I didn't count the rest. The total was probably more than one million; less than one-point-five. It was enough so that I felt a trickle of sweat run down my cheek.

If Feather wasn't in my life I would have been out of L.A. that night.

But she loved her Ivy Prep and had had enough pain in her thirteen years.

I was doing okay; and starting up a new life at the age of forty-eight, like Bonnie and Joguye were doing, didn't have the appeal it might have in the younger years.

The telephone had been disconnected. There was no radio or TV, no book or even a magazine. The house was so barren that not even a black ant was bumbling around. I went to the front door, tried to make it look unmolested, and then picked up a copy of a local paper, the
Pico Post
.

There were various notices and ads, the local police blotter, and an article about some oil wells that had been drilled up and down Pico. The derricks were camouflaged by big aluminum structures made to look like windowless buildings. A neighborhood artist, Pepe Hernandez, had offered to paint giant murals on them but the four town councils concerned had turned him down.

Again I was like the little ant at Seymour's apartment. I had found a morsel so large that I couldn't move it and there were no fellow colonists around to help me out.

And so I waited. I read the paper, four menus, and flyers about everything from fortune-telling to department store sales.

At one point I lay down on the floor, placing my head on a hundred-thousand-dollar pillow.

My sleep was unsettled but it was a way to kill time.

When I woke up the sun was going down.

I walked around the gangster's hideaway wondering what mischief beyond the stolen cash had gone on there.

I considered going out back to see what might be hidden in his garage but decided that I had enough to keep me occupied. So I sat in the straight-back chair with all the electric lamps turned off and waited—for hours. That was the real discipline of the private detective.

When my watch said that it was 10:17 I went around the block, picked up my car, and backed into Miss Beulah Edwards's driveway.

On the eastward drive I tried to think of someone who might keep the cash while I finished my job.

I couldn't think of a soul who would be able to resist the temptation of a million dollars that would never be reported stolen. Not Mouse or Jackson, not John the Bartender, and certainly not Milo Sweet. Jean-Paul of P9 wouldn't be impressed, but getting to him would take time. Loretta might have taken it but I saw no reason to put her in harm's way. Fearless alone would have been trustworthy, but he had Seymour in tow and I know nothing about him.

So I drove home, parking my Dodge in the garage. The trunk of that car would be my bank vault.

I stayed awake all night long with a .45 on my lap.

It occurred to me at 3:07 a.m. that this was how all wealth had to be treated: with fear of loss and eternal vigilance. It was the first time that I understood that being rich was not necessarily an enriching experience.