The Delta Star (13 page)

“Good thing I got a clean uniform for television,” The Bad Czech said, warming up to the thought of it.

“I think maybe you ain’t crazy,” Cecil Higgins said. “I think maybe Fm crazy.”

“I wish you could be a hero too,” The Bad Czech said sincerely. “Damn, I sure hope they send that foxy little blonde from Channel Two!”

“When ya buy me my two drinks tonight, I want ya to explain it all to me,” Cecil Higgins said. “I wanna know what’s real and what’s really real. I think I’m ready to listen.”

Chapter S
even
THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING

The “offices” of
L
ester
B
eemer were not exactly what Mario Villalobos expected. The deceased private investigator didn’t cater to the carriage trade of Pasadena. His office was on Colorado Boulevard, near the black ghetto, the pawnshops and secondhand stores, an eyesore neighborhood trying to save itself through urban renewal.

Urban renewal had passed Lester Beemer by. He was a former policeman from Fresno who had settled in Pasadena when he was still a young man. Lester Beemer was sixty-six years old at the time of his death on Saturday, May 1. He had been a licensed private investigator for thirty-three of those years and, from the look of things, hadn’t been a total success.

The janitor admitted Mario Villalobos reluctantly. The office had been cleaned out. There were empty metal file cabinets. There were two 1950’s vintage desks of ugly limed oak. There was a tinny old sunburst clock, same era. There was a hat rack, a manual typewriter, a few green metal office chairs, and that was all.

Mario Villalobos next went to the apartment house where Lester Beemer had lived for the last nineteen years of his life. His bachelor apartment was already rented to another tenant, but Lester Beemer’s landlady, a surly hag with a whiskey voice, provided his epitaph: “He was a dirty old man but he always paid his rent.”

“Whadda you mean, dirty old man?” Mario Villalobos asked, glad to be standing on the steps outside the apartment house which reeked of wine and seemed to be occupied by young blacks and white pensioners.

“He liked young girls,” the landlady said. “Got a cigarette?”

She sucked half the cigarette inside her toothless mouth when Mario Villalobos held the match. She took two puffs and said, “He never had much money even when he was doing good. Reason is he drank too much and he screwed young girls. He always had some whore in his room. Whores he picked up in nigger bars in L. A. Sometimes he had white girls with whore written all over them. He liked niggers too.”

“Ever see this girl before?” Mario Villalobos asked, showing the landlady a mug shot of Missy Moonbeam, an earlier one when she wasn’t so ravaged.

“Yeah, could be,” she said. “Course they all look alike, those whores. But this one? Could be. I pretty much figured he’d go like he did, screwing himself to death in some whorehouse.”

Mario Villalobos asked a few more questions which didn’t provide helpful answers, and then he gave his business card to the landlady. “If you think of anything else, either about the blond girl or Lester Beemer, just give me a call.”

“He was a dirty old man,” the landlady said, taking the card.

“But he always paid his rent,” Mario Villalobos nodded.

The next stop was the residence of the part-time secretary of Lester Beemer, whose name appeared on the door sign at Lester Beemer’s former office: person to notify if emergency case.

She looked like an emergency case. Her name was Mabel Murphy. She had a red Hibernian face and drank a fifth of booze on an off-day. She was half bagged at four o’clock in the afternoon.

“Aw shit!” she said when Mario Villalobos showed her his badge. “I thought maybe you were an insurance man. I’ve been hoping old Lester left me a few bucks. Silly of me. The old geezer was always three days ahead of the light, gas and telephone companies.”

“How long did you work for him, Miss Murphy?” Mario Villalobos asked, looking around her sixty-year-old wood frame house, built at a time when most of the Pasadena blacks were servants to the rich, and lived in. Mabel Murphy’s house was now in the middle of a working-class black neighborhood.

“Off and on, fifteen years,” she said. “Lester wasn’t a bad guy. Drank too much”-and her eyes said Don’t we all? “About time for my first of the day.” She got up, waddled to the refrigerator, brought out half a quart of milk and poured it into a water glass which she topped off with Scotch.

“Ulcer?” Mario Villalobos asked.

“Iron stomach,” she said. “I just like milk-balls. Learned it from the colored people in the neighborhood.”

“Lester Beemer’s landlady said he had a taste for prostitutes.” Mario Villalobos lit a cigarette after Mabel Murphy got seated.

“Taste for them? You bet,” she grinned. “All flavors. He wasn’t picky. Just so they were young.”

“Did you ever see this one?” Mario Villalobos asked, showing the mug shot of Missy Moonbeam.

She held it under a badly done Tiffany copy and said, “Pretty girl. No, I never saw but one or two of them. He didn’t bring them to the office very often. But I heard enough phone conversations to know that he spent plenty of money lining up working girls for himself and for clients.”

“For clients? What clients?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Most of the work I did was telephone answering, correspondence, checking account, bill paying. Stuff like that. His files were slipshod and that’s the way he wanted it. I don’t think he paid ten thousand dollars in income tax the whole time I worked for him. He was a secret old bugger. Not the soul of honesty, you understand. Always paid my salary on time though. I used to work Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. The rest of the time he used an answering machine.”

“What did he die of?”

“Heart,” she said. “Had open-heart surgery twice. The last time they installed a pacemaker. That didn’t stop him from enjoying his booze and cigars and it sure didn’t stop him from whoring around. I think he almost liked having a bad heart. He loved to tell everybody he was going to die before Christmas. Every Christmas for ten years. Got lots of sympathy that way. But I don’t think he got much sympathy from his whores. He was always having me get him cash to pay for services. In advance.”

“
How often would he want money that you figured was for prostitutes?”

“Thursday and Friday, usually. And from the withdrawal slips, I knew he’d do it at least one other night.”

“Apparently his heart wasn’t that bad,” Mario Villalobos said.

“As long as the machine kept going,” she said. “He always said the little machine in his chest was a child of the god of science. One night the child of the science god took a holiday and that was it.”

“Funny way to put it,” Mario Villalobos said. “Child of the science god. Did he have an interest in science?”

“Did he have an interest? He was a groupie. He wanted to belong to the Caltech Associates. A lousy little private eye with his dirty necktie and Timex watch, wanting to rub elbows with all those people who give endowments and grants and such. He must’ve subscribed to half a dozen scientific journals in America and a couple from other countries. It was one of his hobbies. Science, golf and whores.”

“Would he’ve taken a phone call at Caltech’s division of chemistry sometime? I found a phone number in the book of a Hollywood prostitute, along with the name Lester.”

“He might,” she said. “He went over there once in a while. He had a few golfing pals who were members of the faculty. Professors, I guess. Could’ve been chemists.”

“Know any names?”

“No, they never called him. Sometimes he’d just sit around Friday afternoons when he was bored and tell me about his golfing pals from Caltech who were hot candidates for big casino.”

“What’s big casino?”

“What else? The Nobel Prize. That’s what he called it.”

“Well, that does it,” Mario Villalobos said, with his sad and weary sigh. “My murder victim probably knew Lester Beemer as a customer. She wrote his name on her book. She called him at least once at Caltech’s chemistry division when he was visiting someone. Mystery solved.”

“Murder victim? Who killed her?”

“Pimp. Customer. Who knows? There’s one more thing. His credit card was found in a Korean restaurant near the neighborhood where the prostitute died. Did he ever mention someone stealing his credit card?”

“No, not as far’s I know.”

“Who collected his personal effects after his death?”

“His sister in Seattle, Louise Beemer. She was all he had left and she’s got one foot in the grave. There wasn’t much. The police were called because of the motel.”

“Which police? Which motel?”

“Pasadena. He was found in one of those no-tell motels on Colorado. His wallet was where he always kept it, in his sock. Old Lester wore garters. And he kept his moth-eaten wallet in his sock. Can you imagine?”

“Was his credit card in his wallet when he was found?”

“I have no idea.”

“How about the office files?”

“I destroyed everything. All files. All tapes. You have to do that in a confidential business like Lester’s. And like I said, Lester wasn’t the soul of honesty and discretion.”

Mario Villalobos stood and wiped his runny nose on a handkerchief and sneezed a few times as one of her cats ran across her slippered feet.

“Allergic to cats?”

“Uh huh,” he nodded. “Well, that about does it.”

But it didn’t quite do it. Mario Villalobos was no longer a slave to a completeness compulsion, as he had been in former times, when he couldn’t put a case away and do the “arrest is imminent” follow-up gags if there was a strand still dangling. In the old days he was not one who could gladly turn a back-shot victim into a suicide with a bizarre theory (which actually happened in another division) thereby closing a sticky case.

He was a different man these days. He was tired as dust. All the time. He would have been more than happy to call Missy
Moonbeam’s death a suicide if he thought he could persuade his lieutenant that she simply lost a few fingernails and a patch of panty hose while strolling toward her swan dive. In fact, he had no idea why he was fretting over this one. Could it simply be megaboredom? Was he so bored and weary, unaccountably scared these days that he felt compelled to do something? Something nostalgic? Like police work?

The credit card bothered him. He knew a little about the Pusan Gardens, where The Bad Czech found the card. The vice sergeant told him that the restaurant proprietor regularly engaged Asian and round-eyed B-girls to solicit drinks from customers. He knew that the Missy Moonbeams of this world were usually able to earn more money from Asian customers than they could get from white men or black. Maybe Missy Moonbeam simply knew Lester Beemer from the streets of Hollywood. It wasn’t inconceivable that she drove or cabbed it to Pasadena from time to time to service the old boy. And that she and Lester had their last fling in the no-tell motel where his body was found.

But why a motel? Why not in Lester’s apartment-to save money if nothing else? Lester Beemer was hardly worried about what the neighbors might think. The biggest why was the scribbling of the name on her trick book, the name of a dead man, along with manic doodling, decorated with scrolls and lines like daggers. And the number of the division of chemistry at the California Institute of Technology? If she wasn’t calling the dead man, who was she calling about the dead man?

“Goddamnit!” Mario Villalobos said aloud, turning off the freeway, to get back on again and drive north to Pasadena. He wouldn’t let it go just yet.

Fifteen minutes later he was standing inside Llewelyn Brothers Mortuary on Lake Avenue in Altadena, talking with the man who had collected the body.

“Of course it wasn’t a coroner’s case, Sergeant,” the mortician said.

He didn’t look like Hollywood’s version of an undertaker. He looked like a bodybuilder, which he was. Since the family business was located in what was now a black neighborhood, the scion of the mortuary thought it prudent that the Llewelyn boys keep themselves in shape. Twice in the past year thugs had tried to rob the mortuary, just as bandits traditionally robbed liquor stores. The genteel old days of Altadena were long gone.

“I take it that a doctor signed a death certificate,” Mario Villalobos said.

“Absolutely,” the mortician said. “Wouldn’t have touched him otherwise, in a motel like that. As soon as the police found the pacemaker identification bracelet with the name of his physician, they called him. And he later told me he wasn’t the least bit surprised that Mr. Beemer died the way he had, in a sleazy motel.”

“Was it obviously his heart?”

“Obviously. Probably during foreplay because he was fully clothed. He was just lying there in bed. Naturally the girl had run off, whoever she was.”

“Is the physician local?”

“Dr. Trusk? Been around here for years. Elderly man. Very competent. Knew Mr. Beemer well.”

“The police had no doubts whatever?”

“I don’t even get near a coroner’s case, I assure you. I learned that at my father’s knee.”

“Was there a wallet on the body?”

“At first the police thought there wasn’t. Then I found it in his sock.” The burly mortician smiled. “He wore garters. I haven’t seen garters like that in years.”

“Was there money in the wallet?”

“No, but the identification was intact. He had a few dollars in his pocket and some change.”

“Were there credit cards in the wallet?”

“Credit cards? No, no credit cards. I sent his personal effects to his sister. An elderly woman from … Portland.”

“Could it be Seattle?”

“Yes, that was it, Seattle. She requested cremation. She was without funds and his insurance was minimal-veteran’s insurance, actually.”

This time Mario Villalobos decided that nothing was going to stop him from staying on the Pasadena Freeway and heading for the station. If his partner Maxie Steiner were with him none of this would be happening. Maxie wouldn’t have put up with this kind of dumb chasing around. It wasn’t as though he didn’t have enough to do, what with babysitting Chip Muirfield and Melody Waters.