Exploit of Death - Dell Shannon (28 page)

"Yes, I see what you mean," said Grace.
They set to work to compile a list of possible Grandfathers. And
adding insult to injury, they were all over the damn county. There'd
be mileage piled up on all their cars, and the only consolation was
that the heat wave seemed to be dying a natural death.

Then Lake buzzed him and said there were a couple of
Feds to see him, and Mendoza snarled. "And what the hell do you
want?" he asked the two big men who came in.

"Well, this bank job yesterday—"

"If it's any of your business," said
Mendoza. Time was the bank jobs had belonged exclusively to the Feds,
but these days they were left up to the locals.

"Now don't be so goddamned touchy, Mendoza.
We're just offering some friendly help," said the other Fed
mildly. "We got the word from a snitch up in Hollywood. Norm and
I have been on a big Narco case, there's some bunch bringing the
stuff in from Mexico pretty damn wholesale. We've been sniffing
around on it for a couple of months, and the snitch, who's a former
pusher just out on P.A., is evidently carrying a grudge. He tells us
that job was pulled by Angelo Morales and Tony Montez because they
needed the bread to make a payment on a new shipment."

"
Por Dios
,"
said Mendoza. "There were two men—both Latins by the
witnesses."

"Well, there you are," said the Fed. "By
what the pusher said, he got it on the grapevine that Morales dumped
a bundle at draw somewhere, and it was the stake for the shipment."

"
Es que ya me canso de
las estupideces
. I do get so damn tired of
all these stupidities. All right. Thank you both so much. We'll look
into it."

"We're just trying to be helpful," said the
first one plaintively. When they had left, Mendoza went out to see
who was in. Landers had just come back and Mendoza passed the
information on.

"You'd better check with Records— I assume
they've both got pedigrees—and see what comes of it."

"Oh, hell," said Landers. "More
legwork."

After lunch Mendoza and Grace started out separately
to look at Dobbses, but with all the driving, they only got to four
between them that afternoon and none of them was Grandfather.

But Mendoza had spent awhile poring over the County
Guide before he left the office, and on Sunday morning as he left the
house on the hill he didn't turn left to hit the east on-ramp of the
Golden State Freeway, the other way for the west on-ramp. Nine
o'clock found him on a narrow black-top road some little way north of
the town of San Fernando, and heading north. Behind him was the
teeming, crowded San Fernando Valley, one big city sprawl these last
twenty-five years. But up here it was all empty land. Gentle bare
little hills burned brown by the sun, a few scrub-oak trees. He drove
slowly around the various windings of Lopez Canyon Road and nearly
missed the little sign off to the right that said INDIAN CANYON ROAD.
That was even narrower and led him northeast past more bare land.
About half a mile up on the right was a house with a FOR SALE sign on
it. A quarter mile farther on the left was another house, or, he
amended, to himself, what had been one. Nobody had lived in it for a
long time. It had been a square frame house but the roof had fallen
in and the front porch was broken. There was a post which had held a
mailbox in front and the remains of the mailbox lying alongside it.
The post office hadn't delivered any mail here for years. Mendoza
parked the Ferrari on the shoulder, went back and looked at the
mailbox. There was no lettering visible on the uppermost side, but
when he turned it over with one foot, just decipherable were the
remains of a few once-white-painted letters. E-D-BS.

"
Alla va
,
" he said to himself. He turned the car and went back down the
hill to the other house. It had been maintained fairly well. There
was a wire fence around about half an acre of land. The realtors'
name on the sign was Hawley and Calkins in San Fernando.

"Oh, sure," said the salesman in that
office. "It's an old lady owns it. Got too old to live alone. I
don't suppose we'll sell it very easy, all the commercial growth is
west and it's not out far enough for a weekend cabin. Sure I can tell
you. Her name is Deeming. Harriet Deeming. It's an address in Van
Nuys."

It was an attractive beige stucco house on a good
residential street, and the woman who opened the door looked in
surprise at the badge. "Well, I can't imagine what the police
want with Mother Deeming, but she's always pleased to talk to anyone.
Come in." She took him into a pleasant living room and
introduced him to a little old woman in a clean cotton housedress
sitting in a rocking chair knitting, a cane propped at her side. She
had white hair and bright brown eyes, sharp and intelligent on him.
Mendoza sat down and asked, "When you lived in that house up on
Indian Canyon Road, did you ever know Elias Dobbs?"

"Now you do bring back some old times to me,"
she said interestedly. "Indeed we did."

"What can you tell me about him and do you know
where he lives now?"

"Not exactly, no. My, how I did hate that man
one time. But I've got past that now. I could tell you this and that
about him." She didn't ask why he wanted to know. "He was a
hard man, a regular miser. Frank and I bought that old place, well,
paying on it, you know, in nineteen-thirty, we were both raised in
the country and thought we could grow a lot of our own food there.
Times were awful bad then and we had it pretty tough, Frank out of
work and the baby coming. Dobbs lived up the road, and I always felt
sorry for his family. There were three kids by the end of the war—a
girl and two boys. We didn't know him so well then when we moved
there, and when he offered to lend us that money, well, we didn't
like to borrow but we had to—and goodness, he was around to collect
the interest right on the dot till we managed to pay it back. How
that man loved money—well, he got it. All he could use in the end,
and I wonder what good it ever did him. One thing life's taught me,
Mr. Mendoza, is that all you need is enough. You can't eat more than
one meal at a time—and life goes so quick. Seems yesterday I was
hoeing that garden and Tommy just a toddler, and here I am coming to
the end and Tommy with grown-up kids of his own and their kids coming
along, and he's got that good hardware business. We had it rough back
there, but we made out. And when the war came along, Frank got that
good job at the assembly plant and everything was better. But we went
on living there because it was home then, and we got it paid off. I
guess I was stubborn about it, I stayed there too long after Frank
went, ten years back. Tommy and Faye at me to move in with them, but
I like to be independent. It wasn't until I had that bad fall a few
months back I saw it was only sensible. When we were first there,
there wasn't a house around for quite a ways, real country. But then
you know how the valley started to build up after the war—the
freeway coming through and houses and businesses getting built all
over. It's all just like one big city now—and that's where Dobbs
got all his money, it seems he owned thousands of acres out there. He
got left some and I guess he bought up a lot more when it was just
wasteland at ten cents an acre or something. Right where the freeway
came through and all around."

A great flood of enlightenment hit Mendoza. "What
did he do with the money, do you know?"

"That was back in the early fifties," she
said. "Thirty years ago. He started his own big real-estate
company. He called it the Golden D. He went on living there awhile,
that tumble-down old house. His wife was dead and the girl off
somewhere, but about twenty years back he moved out. The boys, they
were helping to run the business then. Goodness, they'll both be in
the forties now, doesn't seem possible."

"There was a letter for him about six months
ago—"

She looked at him over the top of her spectacles.
"Oh, you know about that. Yes, it was funny. The mail carrier
asked about the name, he'd never heard it—and I told him to send it
to the business." So Juliette's letter, fatally, had got sent
on.

"That's all very interesting," he said.

"People, they're mostly interesting," said
Mrs. Deeming.

He found the nearest
public phone and looked up the address, and swore. It wasn't a realty
company, which would be open on Sunday. It was the Golden D
Management Corporation, with an address out on Sunset in Beverly
Hills.

* * *

ON MONDAY MORNING he landed there with Hackett at
nine o'clock. The office occupied three floors in a new high-rise
building. The top floor contained the managers' offices. It was all
expensively and lavishly furnished. They talked to a svelte
receptionist with lacquered blond hair and Mendoza asked for Mr.
Elias Dobbs. "Oh, the old gentleman isn't in the office
regularly, sir. Mr. David Dobbs won't be in until this afternoon, but
Mr. Robert Dobbs should be in this morning."

"It's rather important that I see Mr. Elias
Dobbs," said Mendoza. "Could you give me his address?"

She shrugged, incurious. "He's in one of our
condos in Santa Monica—Carlyle Terrace."

In the car, Hackett said, "You took a shortcut,
all right."

"Just following my nose. And here," said
Mendoza in satisfaction, "is the money. In spades. And I have a
small hunch we've been maligning Grandfather. I think I see a glimmer
at the end of the tunnel, Art.".
 
The
condominium was high up in another tall building on a quiet street,
and the man who opened the door was about thirty-five, with a
Scandinavian look to him, light hair and a round genial face. He
said, "Oh, I'm sorry, sir. Mr. Dobbs is in the hospital, just
since yesterday." He looked at the badge and gave them a curious
stare.

"We'd like to ask you some questions," said
Mendoza. "What's your name? Do you live here‘?"

"Brant. Bernard Brant." He lost a little of
the punctilious manner. "Yes, I've been looking after the old
gentleman for a couple of years, since he broke his hip. I've been a
male nurse ten years, and I like the work fine, but this was the
easiest job I ever had. He didn't really need nursing, just a little
help. All there was to do was get his meals, drive him wherever he
wanted, like that. He got back on his feet again after they put a pin
in his hip, and he was sharp as a tack, mentally, you know. What's
this all about?" He had stepped back to let them in. The living
room was elegantly furnished with a big T.V. console in one corner.

"About his granddaughter," said Mendoza.
"The girl from France. Did you know about her?"

"Oh, sure. Everybody did," said Brant. "Mr.
Dobbs was excited about her coming. He liked getting letters from
her. I really think it was the reason he just went downhill the last
month, after he got the letter to say she couldn't come after all. It
was a big disappointment to him. I think it sort of contributed to
his having the stroke yesterday."

"Oh," said Hackett. "She wrote to say
she wasn't coming?"

"Yes, and he took right against her when he got
that letter. He'd been so interested in her, he had her picture
beside his bed, he was always telling me how much she looked like her
mother and she was just as smart, too. He was proud of her. He wanted
to see her and show her off to people. And you know, I think that
girl made a big. mistake not coming," said Brant reflectively.
"Because he said to me more than a few times that Juliette would
get a surprise when he died, he was going to make a new will and
leave her a lot of money—make it up to her for how he'd treated her
mother. One time when he was mad at his two sons he said, by God,
he'd leave her the whole kit and caboodle."

"That's interesting," said Hackett.

"But when he got that letter, he turned right
against her. She said that fellow she's engaged to wouldn't let her
come, didn't want her leaving France—and she didn't send back the
money Mr. Dobbs had sent her to get the plane ticket. He was mad
about that." Mendoza laughed. "He said, like mother, like
daughter, and he tore up her letters—he used to read them over—and
her picture."

"I see," said Mendoza. "Did his sons
come to visit him often?"

Brant grinned. "From what I heard they had to.
He was sharp as a tack like I say and he was still active in the
business. He'd kept all the reins in his own hands like they say.
Those two, they had to bring all the papers for him to sign. He knew
everything that was going on at the office. Why in hell are the
police interested in all this?"

"You may be reading about it in the
Times
,"
said Mendoza.

At the curb beside the Ferrari he said reverently,
"But it's beautiful, Arturo. So simple and so beautiful. The old
man getting sentimental in his old age, besotted about the pretty
granddaughter—and his mind still sharp. The business still in his
own hands. So there'd be no hope of getting him declared incompetent.
There are a hell of a lot of bribable people in the world, but not
many of them will be reputable psychiatrists. David and Robert Dobbs
stand to inherit everything, and that business must be grossing
millions. God knows what they own all over the country. And I haven't
any doubt that if the old man said it to Brant he'd said it to them,
leave her everything, maybe. They wouldn't remember much about the
older sister who went to France. And here's this upstart of a girl
going to rob them of everything they had—everything they'd sweated
for. He can't have been an easy man to deal with. They'll have had to
kowtow to him—yes, Father, no, Father. And the strange girl
stepping in to take the whole kitty because she reminded him of her
mother and wrote the friendly letters."