Eureka (13 page)

CHAPTER 3

I lived on Barker Avenue, a quiet road off Sunset near La Mirado. They hadn't paved the road in front of the house since the CCC came through in 1936, but I had learned to maneuver the potholes and ease over the six-inch ridge between the road and my driveway without breaking an axle. The driveway ended at the house. No garage. There was a weather-worn tin mailbox on an erect four-by-four beside a cement walk up to the front door, a couple of dusty oleanders under the windows, and a cyprus tree near the street. The front lawn was fairly respectable and was freshly mown. The kid three doors down made thirty cents every ten days cutting it for me.

All in all, a respectable family neighborhood without the desperate sense of community pride of Pacific Meadows. Nobody was trying to impress anybody. People minded their own business, and if you were a little on the eccentric side, and wanted to fill your yard with plastic purple doofus birds or cement over the grass and paint it chartreuse, nobody would give a damn.

I decided Rosebud needed a name change, so I was going to reprogram him simply by calling him Slugger from now on. When I was a kid, my first dog was a little white mutt with a black circle over one eye, kind of like the dog in the
Our Gang
comedies. I called him Skippy. My mother was always finding fault with him. “It's sinful the way that dog goes around wetting on the trees,” or “It's sinful the noise he makes when he drinks.” Everything Skippy did was sinful and ultimately he started answering to “Sinful” and ignoring “Skippy.” He lived until he was about thirteen and he was “Sinful” for most of his life.

I pulled up in the driveway, parked, got out, and went around to the other door and opened it.

“Okay, Slugger,” I said, “welcome home.”

He stared at me with his big tongue hanging out.

I stepped back, clapped my hands, and said, “Come on, Slugger, let's go.”

Nothing.

“You Slugger, me Zeke,” I said. “Let's go.”

He just looked at me.

“Damn it, Rosebud, I . . .”

He was out in a flash, walked straight to the mailbox and peed, then to the cyprus tree, then to a couple of the shrubs. Then he lay down in the middle of the lawn, rolled over, and began twisting to scratch his back. Then he got up, shook off with a great flapping of his big ears, walked to the front door, and sat down.

Reprogramming was going to take a while.

The house was a white bungalow with green trim that was built the year Calvin Coolidge was elected president. A nice living room, a kitchen with an alcove that protruded from the house and looked like it was an afterthought. It had a nice space under it where Slugger could get out of the sun or rain. The dining room could accommodate a table and about four people comfortably. Since I never had company anyway, I had turned it into an office, with a child's blackboard and several different-colored chalk sticks, and two erasers so I could slap them together to clean them. The bedroom was large enough to fit a double bed, a dresser, two bedside lamps, and an easy chair and lamp for reading. The bathroom had a good-size tub and a stall shower.

My record player was the most expensive thing in the house. It was in the corner of the living room and had record shelves made of orange crates on both sides of it.

Beside it was a battered bookshelf my father had left to me, filled with his eclectic collection of books:
Leaves of Grass
; James Joyce's
Ulysses
and
The Dubliners
;
Winesburg, Ohio
;
Moby Dick
;
The Collected Poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay
; Byron's
Don Juan
;
Poetry and Prose of William Blake
;
A Tale of Two Cities
and
David Copperfield
;
A Farewell to Arms
and
The Sun Also Rises
;
War and Peace
;
The Red Badge of Courage
; Conrad's
Lord Jim
and
Heart of Darkness
; two Dashiell Hammett novels,
The Glass Key
and
Red Harvest
; a collection of Shakespeare's works, Roget's Thesaurus and a Webster's dictionary, and his favorite,
The Great Gatsby
.

When I was a kid, he read aloud to me from all these books, although I didn't understand most of the words at the time. In his fading years, when the gas he had inhaled on the Western Front had taken its toll and breathing came hard to him, I took up the chore and read to him. It was an evening ritual. He sat in his rocking chair and I would read for an hour or two until he finally fell asleep. He slept sitting up; breathing was particularly difficult when he lay down. Sometimes I would simply open a book and start reading passages to him or he would ask me to read something in particular. He loved poetry, and would often stop me and correct my cadence.

Some quotes had stayed with me through the years, and sometimes after a particularly difficult day I would turn to the bookcase and read aloud to myself. Among his favorite verses were the opening lines of “The Dream,” which he often recited to my mom:

Love, if I weep it will not matter,

And if you laugh I shall not care;

Foolish am I to think about it,

But it is good to feel you there.

But I think his favorite was Shakespeare's sonnet:

When, in disgrace

With fortune and men's eyes

I all alone beweep my outcast state

And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries . . .

As he neared death, his choices became more melancholy and he often asked me to recite the last lines of Millay's “To a Poet Who Died Young”:

Many a bard's untimely death

Lends unto his verses breath;

Here's a song was never sung:

Growing old is dying young.

My mother was never the same after his death. She kept the flag from his coffin, still so carefully folded by the honor guard at his funeral, on a night table beside her bed, sweeping her hand gently across it each evening as she said good night to him. Within a year of his passing, she had fallen into a deep depression. She died in the state hospital for the insane.

That experience—going to visit her, holding her hand as she stared bleakly and unspeaking at the ceiling, ignoring the occasional screams and hyena-like laughter of the other patients—still invaded my nightmares at times.

I opened up some windows to air the place out and let Rosebud into the backyard. The tenant before me had dogs, which accounted for the fenced-in backyard. The dogs also had dug up the yard until it looked like a bunch of archeologists had been digging for dinosaur skeletons back there, which accounted for the “no pets” edict. The landlord had made a halfhearted attempt to iron out the yard and had thrown some rye grass around, but now there were more weeds than grass. Near the back there were a yucca plant and a couple of shrubs, which would give Rosebud something to pee on.

I wasn't good about lawns. I didn't like cutting them, I didn't like watering them. And I didn't like sitting on them in a canvas beach chair reading dime novels. So basically, the backyard looked like a deserted battlefield from the Great War.

I let Slugger out and he immediately laid claim to the yucca plant, the shrubs, and everything else over six inches tall in the yard.

I went into the office and put my case on the table and emptied it, making neat stacks of things so I could find them easily, then went into the living room and piled a stack of ten records, randomly selected, on the player. The first to come up was Basie's “Sent for You Yesterday and Here You Come Today.” It got my blood running and I went in the kitchen, poured myself a slug of Canadian Club, dropped one cube of ice in it. I went back to my office and sorted through the check receipts, putting them in order, and then listed them by bank and date on the blackboard, looking for patterns. But there wasn't anything to really go on. It was like trying to play a tune on a piano with no black keys.

So I packed it in for the night, took a hot shower, sprinkled on a little talcum powder, got into my silk pajama bottoms, and went into the living room. Rosebud was sitting in front of the record player with his head cocked to one side, listening to Benny Goodman's “China Boy.” He looked like that cute little white RCA dog who had grown up and turned out to be a big ugly mutt.

I turned off the player, locked the doors, turned off the lights, and got in bed. Rosebud came up beside the bed, looked at me for a moment or two, then made that little circle like he was chasing his tail in slow motion, lay down, and snorted.

A minute after I turned off the light and arranged myself for sleeping, I felt him crawl onto the bed. He did it with sly caution. A leg, then another leg, then his back legs, then his body sliding across the covers. It took him about five minutes to make the journey. Then he crept around again in that little circle he made before lying down. He settled in, gave a big slobbery sigh, and he was out.

He snored.

CHAPTER 4

I awoke from a deep sleep to hear Rosebud scratching on the back door. A moment later he came into the bedroom, sat next to the bed, and growled at me. I opened one eye and stared at him.

“Don't you ever bark, Slugger?” I said.

I hip-hopped barefoot back to the kitchen, let him out and left the door cracked for him, fed him and filled his water dish. I went to my bathroom, shaved and showered, and put on my dark suit, the one I wear when I'm going to be talking to nice, decent, everyday people who are anxious to cooperate with the law and usually tell you more than you want to know. Muscle and blackjack not required.

I put another can of dog food in Rosebud's bowl, refilled the water dish, and put them outside in the little cave under the alcove.

He watched every move, and when I started back into the house, those dark eyes followed me to the door.

“Try not to bark or make a ruckus,” I told him. “Spend the day looking for Slugger.”

Fifteen minutes later I was tooting the horn in Ski's driveway. I picked him up every day. He had a brand-new Plymouth but his wife, Claire, used it to take kids to school, go shopping, and do whatever women do all day long to make life pleasant for the rest of the family.

My five-year-old used Olds needed new shocks, the fan belt squealed like a pig on the way to the slaughterhouse, and I had to stand on the brakes to slow down, not an easy thing to do since I had to move the seat all the way back to accommodate Agassi's frame and drive with the tips of my toes. There was a hole in the upholstery on the passenger side, which was covered by a blue embroidered pillow with a couple of palm trees framing yellow letters that said “Welcome to San Diego.” And it had that old-car smell, a mixture of oil, gasoline, cheap carry-out food, and an ashtray that hadn't been emptied since Hitler was selling hand-painted postcards on the streets of Vienna. It got me there, which was all that mattered.

We stopped at Wally's coffeehouse, which is on the way, and got coffee in paper cups and a bag of sinkers, and Ski read the newspaper as he always did, running an occasional headline by me if it was something he thought I needed to know or a comical item like: escaped kangaroo kicks preacher to death at bus stop.

As we pulled away from the curb, a flatbed truck went by, going the other way. There were two large billboards on the bed. Red letters on a field of white:

buy bonds

keep America free

join the armed forces today

Two starlet types in red-and-white bathing suits were standing on a little perch to keep from falling out, waving blue high hats, while a loudspeaker over the cab was blasting Kate Smith's “God Bless America” loud enough to raise the dead.

Ski started grousing. “I hate Kate Smith,” he snapped. “I really hate hearing her bellow when I'm not fully awake yet.”

Smith wrapped her song and Irving Berlin's forlorn voice began moaning, “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.”

“I hate that, too,” he growled.

“Why should you care,” I said. “You're forty-two, you got a wife and three kids, and you're sixty pounds overweight. They'll be drafting blind men before they get to you.”

“Christ, you're thirty-four. They'll never get to you either. Besides, you're a cop. Immediate deferment.”

“That sounds unpatriotic,” I said.

“I think you
want
to go if we get into it with the Krauts,” he said. “Mr. Gung Ho.”

I started laughing and he finally broke up, too, and turned back to the paper.

“So what's the plan for the day?” he asked.

“I go to the bank, you check where she worked. We'll meet at the Kettle for lunch.”

“How about Moriarity?”

“What about him?”

“It's an accident. He's gonna want to know what the hell we're up to.”

“Let's see what we come up with. Then we'll worry about the lieutenant.”

“Great, just great,” Agassi moaned.

CHAPTER 5

The drive to the West Los Angeles National Bank took me past the entrance to Pacific Meadows. There was a small sign beside the road into the neighborhood that read:

Pacific Meadows

no solicitations speed limit 10

we have children

It was a nice touch, the kind of understated warning you usually find in snottier neighborhoods with a lot of flowers around the entrance gate, and private police who patrol in unmarked cars and make more in tips at Christmas than I make in a year. Across the main drag from the entrance was a strip of necessity stores: a candy store and newsstand, dry cleaners, drugstore, greengrocer, butcher shop—which I assumed was where Verna Wilensky got Rosebud's bones—a shoe cobbler, and a burned-out shop on the end, with an empty lot beside it.

A few blocks farther on was a small nameless village that was showing the signs of restoration. Freshly painted shops mingled with shuttered stores that were still waiting for tenants getting back on their feet from the Depression.

The West L.A. National was on the ground floor of a freestanding, three-story building that had professional offices on the upper floors. The entrance was in the middle of the block and had brass-trimmed, etched-glass doors and a small plaque next to it that told me the bank was founded in 1920 by Ezra Sutherland. It was cheerier than most old banks I was familiar with. The teller cages were mahogany. The high glass partitions, which had become popular when John Dillinger and his pals were fond of making sudden withdrawals from banks, had been removed. There was a long table down the middle of the room where depositors could fill in their slips. A vase of fresh flowers held down its center. On the right side, behind a hand-carved railing, were several desks where clerks made loans and did whatever else clerks do in a bank. All boasted freshly cut flowers in vases. Four towering cathedral windows lined the walls, providing warm sunlight to the big room. A large glass chandelier hovered majestically overhead.

In the far corner on the left was a stainless steel Standish- Wellington vault, its door standing open. In the center of the far wall was a door, which I assumed led to the president's office, and another, probably to a secretary's office. A pleasant-looking woman in her mid to late thirties occupied a large desk in front of the big shot's office. A single red rose, flared out in all its glory in a fluted bud vase, sat on a corner of her desk. It was a pleasant room, less threatening than most banks.

I took off my fedora and walked the length of the bank to the woman with the red rose. Her nameplate said she was Amy Shein, executive secretary, and a plaque on the door behind her told me the office was occupied by Rufus Sutherland, President.

“Good morning, Miss Shein,” I said and showed her my buzzer. “Sergeant Bannon, Los Angeles Police Department. Is Mr. Sutherland busy?”

She looked a bit alarmed when she saw the badge but got over it quickly and smiled.

“May I tell him what this is about?” she asked pleasantly.

“It's a routine matter,” I said. “Nothing serious. No crime has been committed.”

“Well, thank goodness for that,” she said, and went into the office. She was gone for less than a minute, then came out and stood at the door and motioned me in.

“Mr. Sutherland, this is Lieutenant Bannon from the police department,” she told the boss.

“Sergeant,” I said. “But thanks for the promotion.”

Sutherland smiled from behind a teak desk that wasn't quite as big as a basketball court and just as barren: a leather blotter holder, a pen and pencil set, and a telephone. There were two large, framed Audubon originals on the wall behind his desk. One was an eagle. I didn't recognize the other bird which was red and black and quite a bit smaller. Behind him, on top of a cabinet that matched the desk, were a dozen framed photographs of all sizes, family pictures. Otherwise the room was as impersonal as a form letter.

Sutherland was a tall, erect man in a blue summer suit with a white breast-pocket handkerchief. His salt-and-pepper hair was a little too long for a banker's and he had a tennis player's tan, manicured fingers, and brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses.

“Rufus Sutherland,” he said, extending his hand. We shook and I took the chair he motioned to. I could feel tension in his hand.

“I hope this isn't something serious,” he said. “My daughter . . .”

“Nothing like that,” I interrupted. “It has to do with a customer of yours. Verna Wilensky.”

He seemed relieved and then: “Is something wrong with Verna?”

Obviously the news had not reached the bank yet.

“I'm sorry to tell you this,” I said. “Mrs. Wilensky is dead. An accident at her home.”

“Oh my God,” he said, sitting up even taller in his chair. “What happened?”

I gave him as much information as was necessary without getting into bloated faces floating under bathwater and other lurid details. I could tell the news upset him.

“She was one of our most dependable depositors, certainly the most loyal,” he said. “Came in once a month to go over her statement. Never complained. A lovely lady with more than her share of bad luck. I assume you heard about her husband.”

I nodded. “Are you familiar with her account, Mr. Sutherland?”

“Well, no more than for most of our depositors. The tellers and secretaries handled her everyday affairs. But she always stopped in to say hello. Used to come in with that big dog of hers.” He leaned forward and a smile played the corners of his mouth. “Big old stud named Rosebud, can you imagine?”

“We've met,” I said with a smile.

“Well, what can I do for you, sir?”

I picked up my briefcase, sat it on a corner of the massive desk, and snapped it open.

“We found these papers in her desk. Mostly banking things. She has quite a sum of money on deposit and we haven't been able to locate a will.”

“Oh my goodness,” he said. “Hard to believe she was intestate, she was meticulous in all her dealings.”

“Apparently both she and Frank Wilensky were only children. I'd like to locate survivors if there are any, before the state gets its greedy hands on her estate: life savings, house, car, et cetera.”

“That's very considerate of you.”

“I understand she came here from Texas.”

“Well, I'm not real sure. It's been a long time. My father was director at the time. That was back in the early twenties. He died several years ago and after that Millie . . . Miss Harrington . . . handled her affairs.”

“The thing is this,” I said. “She accumulated a rather large amount of money, apparently from a five-hundred-dollar-a-month stipend. But we haven't found anything to indicate where that money came from. I am hoping the bank might give us a lead. It could be a member of the family, a child, relative. Would it be possible for us to go over her accounts and see the checks that were deposited?”

The request made him nervous. He stroked his chin and cleared his throat.

“That is, of course, confidential. Do you have a court order . . . ?” He said it tentatively, as though unsure of himself.

“I can get one but considering the nature of her sudden death and the very real prospect of the state stepping in to take over, I was hoping we could do this right away. Better than having the state boys trooping in here waving subpoenas in everybody's face. They aren't known for their manners.”

“I see.”

“All I want to do is go back through her records and see if there are any names, addresses, anything that we can follow up on. I'll of course keep this all on the Q.T. An hour or two is all it should take.”

He thought about all of that for a minute or two. He seemed a little nervous about circumventing the court. I took out my badge and ID and laid them in front of him to reassure him. He perused them, then looked up sharply.

“Homicide division?” he said.

I gave him my most reassuring smile. “Just routine, Mr. Sutherland. Anytime there's an unwitnessed death, we have to investigate. She was dead for almost twenty-four hours before her neighbor found her.”

“I see,” he said. He took off his glasses, folded them, and tapped them on his desk for a moment, then reached under the ridge of the desk and pressed a button.

A moment later, a handsome woman came in through a side door. She was tall, five-seven probably, late twenties, with ebony-black hair down to her shoulders, severe black eyebrows over gray eyes, and million-dollar legs sheathed in sheer silk, at least from the knee down. She was wearing a tailored, double-breasted charcoal-gray suit with a small diamond-and-ruby pin in the shape of a dolphin on her lapel, and an oyster-white, high-necked silk-and-lace blouse. She stood as straight as a Marine topkick. Pure elegance. She also had a million-dollar tennis tan like the boss.

“Millicent, this is Sergeant Bannion from the police department. Sergeant, this is our vice president, Millicent Harrington.”

“It's
Bannon,
no
i
,” I said, taking her hand. She had a sturdy tennisplayer's grip and a smile most women would kill for. I hadn't been as close to a woman this aristocratic since I brushed against Katharine Hepburn at a premiere at Grauman's a year or so ago. She was the star of the picture. I was picking up some after-hours change spotting dips for the manager of the theater.

Then my mind started working overtime. She had the same tan as Sutherland, her stockings cost more than my entire wardrobe, and the pin in her lapel spelled Tiffany. And a vice president. Sometimes I hate being a cop.

“I have some bad news,” Sutherland said. “Verna Wilensky is dead.”

Her reaction was immediate and profound. She gasped and pressed the fingers of one hand against her lips. Her eyes widened to the size of silver dollars and then began to tear up. She sat, keeping her knees locked together, and seemed to sag into her suit. Sutherland whipped the handkerchief from his breast pocket and handed it to her.

“Sorry to be so abrupt,” he muttered, and sat back in his chair.

Her backbone stiffened again. “What happened?” she said after dabbing her eyes.

“She slipped in the bathtub and drowned,” I explained. “I'm sure it was painless. She was kayoed . . . knocked out instantly.”

“Poor Verna,” she said sorrowfully. “She had so much going for her. Then she loses Frank, now this.”

“She died intestate,” Sutherland said. “Sergeant Bannion is hoping we can find something in her file that will lead him to a relative or some legitimate kin. Would you help him, please? Whatever he needs.”

I didn't bother to bring up the
i
he insisted on putting in my name.

“Of course,” she said, and laid Sutherland's handkerchief on the corner of the desk.

“Thanks a lot,” I said, shaking his hand, and followed Miss Harrington into her office.

“You might want to open a window,” she said. “It's a bit stuffy in here.”

I slid the window up and looked down in the parking lot behind the building. There were two cars near the back door, a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith and a yellow Pierce-Arrow convertible with leather seats the color of the sky on a clear day.

It completed the package, as did the office—right down to the pale yellow silk drapes and sky blue carpeting that tickled my ankles. Pretty cushy, I thought. A gorgeous woman, a million-dollar office, a Pierce-Arrow ragtop. Sutherland was keeping this lady in grand style.

I looked around at the paintings on the wall, the antique furniture, the Mueller radio built into the wall. On her desk there was an eight-by-ten photo mounted in a sterling silver frame with its back to me and an elegant, hand-painted pencil holder that looked like it could have been a gift from the King of England.

“This is very impressive,” I said.

She was smart, too, to go along with everything else. Her eyes narrowed ever so slightly and one corner of her mouth turned up in what was almost a sneer.

You blew it,
I thought.
She knows you're on to her. Get back to business.

She picked up the handpiece of a white phone, dialed a couple of numbers, then, “Jane, bring me the Wilensky file, please . . . yes, everything.” She hung up.

“So, Sergeant Bannon, what exactly are you looking for?”

I decided to play it straight up.

“As you know, the state is going to get the estate if we can't find a family member with a legitimate claim. Mrs. Wilensky had almost a hundred gra . . . a hundred thousand dollars in her savings account, most of which came from a, uh, stipend of some kind she got every month.”

Jane, a mousy young woman with dirty-blond hair, came in with a large accordion folder, put it on the corner of her desk, and left without a word.

“Five hundred dollars,” she said with a nod.

“I was hoping we can get a lead off the cashier's checks. You do keep a record of them, don't you?”

“No, bank checks go back to the issuing bank when they're cashed. We do make photocopies, although I doubt it will be much help to you.”

“How come?”

“They were always cashier's checks. No names, just the issuing bank.”

My disappointment was palpable.

“Can we look them over anyway?” I asked.

“All of them?”

“I'm sorry, I know you must be awfully busy, but sometimes the smallest thing . . .” I shrugged and let the sentence die.

“All the way back to the beginning?”

I nodded. “Nineteen twenty-four, I think.” I leaned down to get my briefcase and my jacket flopped open. As I sat up, I saw her eyes fixed on the Luger under my arm.

“Will it make you more comfortable if I put this in my pocket?”

“I'm sorry. I'm well accustomed to firearms, I'm a member of the Bel Air Skeet Club. I've just never seen a hidden weapon except in gangster movies.”

“It's concealed.”