The Delta Star (19 page)

Chapter T
en
MADONNA OF THE WOGS

Mario
V
illalobos was awakened at 6:00
a.m.
by the telephone. It was something that detectives got used to if they wanted to work homicide. It was what made most detectives choose to work burglary or robbery or auto theft, which were rarely considered important enough to get a detective out of bed. But homicide investigation was the only thing left in the world that occasionally stimulated his few still-living neurons. It was one of the few things left in life that gave him a little pleasure. Aside from an occasional baseball game, or pop music from the forties and fifties which lately made him miserable by reminding him of his hopeful youth.

He always felt exactly the same these days whether he slept a lot or a little: exhausted. He had seen the symptoms in other cops. He knew he was in trouble.

The detective let the telephone ring seven times as he always did when he was awakened bone-weary out of a sound or fitful sleep with news of another shooting, stabbing, strangling or mutilation. Seven rings gave him just about enough time to become partially alert.

A familiar voice exploded in his ear, “Sergeant Villalobos!”

“Jesus Christ, Dagmar!” Mario Villalobos yelped, jerking the phone away from his face.

“Sergeant!” Dagmar Duffy cried. “I just got home and discovered that you ain’t been the only one looking for me! There was a guy with glasses and black hair and a moustache asking about me at the Adonis Club last night.”

Now Mario Villalobos snapped his eyes open. “Yeah, what happened?”

“The stupid fucking bartender, some bitch I used to go with named Samson, told him where I lived!”

“Where’re you now?”

“I’m home. I couldn’t sleep with Howard so I came home. And somebody broke in my apartment!”

“I’ll be right there,” Mario Villalobos said. “Gimme thirty minutes.”

“I got my door locked! If anybody tries to get in, they’ll hear me screaming in Malibu. The guy had a thick moustache, I heard. Just like Joseph Stalin!”

Dagmar Duffy lived near Santa Monica and Normandie, not far from the Wonderland Hotel. He had a lovely view of a muffler shop and a Charlie Chicken take-out. Mario Villalobos practically had to give a recital to get in.

“Dagmar, it’s Mario Villalobos,” he said for the third time. “Open the goddamn door!”

Finally the door was cracked open and Dagmar Duffy said, “I’m getting crazy. I started to think that maybe the Russians knew about you and were impersonating your voice.”

The sun was just rising on yet another overcast day. Mario Villalobos was unshaven, had his necktie in the pocket of his suit coat, and looked almost as haggard as Dagmar Duffy. The detective entered the apartment and peeked out the window at the three-story drop. He looked at the dead-bolt lock and the untouched doorjamb. He couldn’t see any sign of forced entry.

“I leave my door unlocked,” Dagmar Duffy said sheepishly. “I know it’s dumb, but I have this old boyfriend Arnold. Sometimes he likes to surprise me and I find him in bed when I get home.”

“So then how do you know the Russians were here?”

“Things were moved!”

“
Puh
-leese, Dagmar,” Mario Villalobos sighed wearily, eyeballs sliding up at the ceiling. “You interrupted my wet dream for this? How do you know Arnold or Howard, or Manny, Moe and Jack didn’t come? Christ, you have more boyfriends than Linda Lovelace.”

“I know none a my boyfriends did it. When they come in they leave everything all messed up. They’re a bunch a pigs except for Howard and he was with me. Look, somebody opened every drawer and moved my things!”

Mario Villalobos stepped over to the veneer mahogany chest in the neat little one-bedroom apartment. There were ten pair of bikini briefs meticulously folded in the drawer. “Everything looks okay to me.”

“No, no!” Dagmar Duffy cried. “I keep the persimmon ones on the left. I keep the plum on the right. They’ve been reversed. Someone picked them up to look under them!”

“
Puh
-leese, Dagmar,” Mario Villalobos said. “I don’t get many wet dreams at my age.”

“I’ll show you something else,” Dagmar Duffy said. “Look!” And he opened his closet revealing two rows of clothes poles bearing several pair of size 28 shorts and jeans, T-shirts, and two Members Only jackets, rose and powder-blue.

“It all looks okay to me,” Mario Villalobos sighed.

“The pockets on two pair of jeans are inside out. I would never hang my jeans like that!”

“How do you know that Arnold didn’t…”

“Here’s how I know!” Dagmar Duffy pulled one of the jackets off the hanger. It was the powder-blue, which exactly matched his eyes. There was a roll of bills in the pocket. “My money’s all here. Every boyfriend knows where I keep it. I tell them it’s there so they don’t have to tear up my apartment if they need money. I think that someone was looking for something else: film, tape, papers. This place was searched real careful. The way the Russians do it!”

Mario Villalobos conceded there was a remote possibility that Dagmar Duffy was right about the intruder. But it may have been an ordinary money burglar who missed the blue jacket. And it could have been a coincidence about a black-haired man with a moustache. Maybe.

“Okay, okay,” Mario Villalobos said. “I’ll have a fingerprint man come over this morning and dust for prints. Don’t touch anything else.”

“I’m not staying here alone!”

“Look, I have to admit there might be something to this, but I think you’re safe.”

“I want police protection. I’m a taxpayer. I mean, I used to be a taxpayer.”

“Dagmar, I don’t think I could explain you to my landlady.”

“I’m not staying here. I’m moving in with Howard.”

“Okay, just stay long enough for the fingerprint…”

“I’m not staying here one minute alone. Why can’t I come with you? I can come back when the fingerprint guy gets here, and then I’ll move my clothes out.”

“Okay,” the detective sighed. “Come with me to the station. We’ll call prints and then we’ll come back here and I’ll stand by while you move your stuff. But with your dance card as full as it is, I don’t expect we’ll find any suspect’s prints that we can work with.”

The detective lieutenant at Rampart Station, who was drinking coffee and wondering if the Dodgers could ever pull out of their slump, gave more than a passing glance when Mario Villalobos came into the squad room leading a man with a golden perm and plucked eyebrows, in boy’s size jeans and a Hollywood YMCA T-shirt.

“I see you weren’t jiving about barhopping in Hollywood,” he said to Mario Villalobos. “When’s the wedding?”

“This is a witness,” Mario Villalobos said, collapsing in a chair. “The Missy Moonbeam murder case is getting out
t
a hand. I just gotta work on it for a few days. How about Chip and Melody taking over everything else for me?”

“Might as well,” the lieutenant said. “Keep them from groping each other all day. I swear, a cold shower’d do them both good. Wouldn’t be surprised if Melody’s old man doesn’t get accidentally shot some night when she mistakes him for a burglar.”

“Have a seat over at that table, Dagmar,” Mario Villalobos said. “I’ll call latent prints.”

There was a burly man with long sideburns and a macho moustache sitting at one of the long tables. He had on a burnt-orange sportcoat with a brown and red check pattern, and a fat blue print necktie, and brown doubleknit pants held up by a big belt with a cowboy buckle. In short, he looked pretty much like what he was, a burglary detective. The burglary detective did a double take when he looked up at the Hollywood YMCA T-shirt.

Dagmar Duffy batted his lashes shyly, offered his hand palm down and said, “Hi. Mind if I join ya? I’m working on a murder case!”

***

The Bad Czech and Cecil Higgins were in the police parking lot when they spotted the K-9 cop lurking around behind the radio cars. Cecil Higgins had already spread the news to The Bad Czech about poor Hans’ P. E. problem. The K-9 cop looked as though he hadn’t slept a wink. He was a nervous wreck.

“You wanna give up being a doggie cop, you can jist transfer over here to Rampart,” Cecil Higgins said, startling Hans when he walked up behind him.

“I’m just waiting for Dolly,” Hans said miserably.

“Got somethin on your mind?” Cecil Higgins asked, knowing perfectly well what Hans had on his mind.

“I just need to straighten something out,” Hans said. “I hope you didn’t believe what that lying bitch said about me last night?”

“Ain’t my business,” Cecil Higgins said.

“I never had a sex problem in my life. You didn’t believe her, did you?” Hans asked, getting white around the mouth.

“Ain’t my business,” Cecil Higgins said.

“I know Dolly wouldn’t believe such a dumb thing,” Hans said.

“You coming to Leery’s tonight? You can catch Dolly there for sure.”

The skinny K-9 cop shrugged, and felt his jaunty grin cracking like an egg and thought that he was never going to that miserable fucking saloon as long as he lived, and hoped that a police helicopter would fall on Rampart Station and incinerate everyone who was there last night when that vicious bitch he intended to kill told them about the P. E. trait he had picked up from Ludwig. And which he intended to discuss with the department psychologist this very afternoon. If ever there was a justification for a stress pension, this was it, Hans thought ruefully. He sure contracted his problem while doing police work.

But as it turned out, Hans was going to be unable to escape the company of The House of Misery losers. The K-9 cop was about to find himself in the middle of a homicide investigation. It happened because of another tiny vagary of fortune. Something nearly as insignificant as a chopstick in a shoe.

***

“Just what I need,” Mario Villalobos said. “A flat tire.”

He was standing with Dagmar Duffy beside his detective car intending to meet the latent-prints specialist who was to be at Dagmar Duffy’s apartment house in ten minutes. Then he spotted a few of his House of Misery fellow sufferers.

The Bad Czech was getting in his car, preparing to drive down to the foot beat, when Mario Villalobos yelled, “Hey Czech, do me a favor? Drive this guy over to Santa Monica and Normandie, will you? There’s a latent-prints guy on the way there and I gotta get my tire changed.”

The Bad Czech looked doubtfully at Dagmar Duffy, who was flushed and beaming from all the attention and the undeniable thrill of being a potential homicide victim.

“What am I, a taxi?” The Bad Czech grumbled.

“I’ll be there in ten minutes. Am I asking a lot?”

“Aw right,” The Bad Czech muttered. “Come on, Cecil, we gotta give this little … person a ride home.”

While the beat cops were delivering their little person, Mario Villalobos went looking for a garage attendant to change his tire, but the garage attendant was delivering a car to Parker Center. Another was off sick. A third, who had three police cars waiting for gas, suggested that the detective could consider changing it himself if he needed it right away.

It was when he was stalking back to his car, exhausted and grouchy, that Mario Villalobos saw Hans and Ludwig driving out of the parking lot. “Hans!” Mario Villalobos yelled. “Give me a lift to Santa Monica and Normandie, will you?”

Meanwhile, The Bad Czech couldn’t get rid of the little person in the back seat of the police car.

“Whaddaya mean ya ain’t gettin out!” The Bad Czech bellowed, turning around in the driver’s seat and showing his demented gray eyes to Dagmar Duffy.

“I can’t be alone!” Dagmar Duffy cried. Then he added, “I’m a possible murder victim.”

“You’re for sure a fuckin murder victim, you don’t get outa this car!” The Bad Czech said, while Cecil Higgins rested his bald head against the doorpost and tried to shut out all the sound and fury.

“Czech, you wasn’t at Leery’s last night,” Cecil Higgins said. “Have a little consideration for my poor head and stop yellin.”

“Can’t you wait till Sergeant Villalobos gets here?” Dagmar Duffy cried.

“He didn’t say I hadda babysit,” The Bad Czech said. “Where the hell is he, anyways?”

“He’ll be here in a few minutes,” Dagmar Duffy said. “I can’t go in that building alone. There might be a man waiting for me!”

The Bad Czech took a gander at the blond perm and the plucked eyebrows and the Hollywood YMCA T-shirt, and said, “Yeah, a Roto-Rooter man, no doubt. And not for your sink. Now get outa my car, junior!”

Just then Dagmar Duffy was saved by the appearance of Unit K-9-2, delivering the frustrated detective to the apartment house.

“Did the prints man get here?” Mario Villalobos asked The Bad Czech when he got out of the K-9 car.

“Hey, Mario, this guy wants to marry me or somethin,” The Bad Czech said. “I can’t get rid a him!”

Hans, who was still considering drinking hemlock, leaped out of the K-9 car while Ludwig snoozed as peacefully as Cecil Higgins, and with a forced smile said, “Czech, I guess you heard about the lie that bitch told about me last night at Leery’s? Pretty funny, huh?”

“You guys can split,” Mario Villalobos said. “I’ll get a ride back to the station with the prints man when he shows up.”

And while Mario Villalobos and Dagmar Duffy entered the apartment house and took the elevator up to the third floor to await the latent-prints specialist, a man in a pinstripe suit, with black hair and a thick black moustache and horn-rimmed glasses, came down the stairway. He paused in the lobby for a moment, looked at his watch, and walked out the front door. He almost ran right into two cops-one in a blue jumpsuit covered with dog hair, the other a monster cop in a regular blue uniform-who were standing on the sidewalk talking about miserable bitches who love to tell lies about real men.

The man looked as though he might start running. He stopped for an instant, reassured himself that this had nothing to do with him, and continued down the sidewalk. He was forced to pass between the two cops, since one of them was so huge he took up most of the sidewalk.

Both cops hardly glanced at him when he said, “Pardon me, please.”

When Mario Villalobos and Dagmar Duffy were unlocking the door, Dagmar Duffy’s neighbor across the hall popped her head out. She worked in the typing pool at Paramount Studios and lived close enough to come home for lunch on days that she worked. Today she had blue rollers in her hair. She said, “Oh, Dagmar, there was a man looking for you.”

“Damn,” the detective said. “The prints man got here faster than I thought.”

But there was no police business card in the door.

“What did the man look like?” Mario Villalobos asked.

“This is a detective,” Dagmar Duffy explained. “Someone broke in my place last night.”

“Really?” the girl said. “Well this man didn’t look like a burglar. He wore a business suit like you,” she said to the detective. “With pinstripes.”

“Did you see his face?” Mario Villalobos asked.

“No,” she said. “Just the back of him. He was sorta big and had black hair.”

“Dagmar,” Mario Villalobos said, “after we dust this apartment for prints, maybe you oughtta stay with Howard until I tell you to go home.”

There were no readable prints that were not Dagmar Duffy’s, but one hour later The Bad Czech, Hans and Ludwig were sitting in the Rampart coffee room, bitching loud enough to blister paint.

The detective lieutenant had made calls to Hans’ commanding officer and talked personally with The Bad Czech’s watch commander.

“Look, there’s nothing to get excited about,” Mario Villalobos assured them. “I only want you both available if I need you. Is that so tough to do?”

“But, Mario, available to a homicide dick means twenty-four hours a day,” Hans griped. “I got a date tonight in Chinatown. I can’t be on call!”

“Yeah, I got somethin to do tonight too,” The Bad Czech griped. “What if I have to stop what I’m doin and come runnin to be your witness?”

“You, I know where to find every night,” Mario Villalobos said to The Bad Czech. “Look, you two saw what the guy looked like. The only others that’ve seen him are a hotel clerk and a hooker. They’re not nearly as reliable as two policemen. In fact, being as they’re shorties, they say he’s a tall guy. You two say he’s not particularly tall.”

“I also said I might recognize him,” The Bad Czech said.

“Me too,” Hans said. “He’s maybe fifty or fifty-five. And now you say the black hair and moustache might be phony. I don’t know if I’d recognize him or not.”

“Look,” Mario Villalobos said. “First I have to find somebody for you to recognize. I might not be able to do it, so you got nothing to worry about right now.”

“I just hope my big night in Chinatown don’t get interrupted,” Hans whined. “I gotta find a new
girlfriend
.”

Mario Villalobos drove straight to the motel where Lester Beemer died. It was a no-tell motel all right. It offered closed-circuit television with X-rated shows. It promised a water bed in each room, but didn’t deliver. The promises were on a marquee over the motel roof, which looked like it would leak buckets in a rain. The manager was no more happy than could be expected.

“I can’t remember every guy that comes in,” he said to Mario Villalobos. “Especially a month ago.”

“It was a bit unusual to have one of your tenants die, wasn’t it?”

He was a transient type who didn’t own the place and stole only a modest amount from the cash he took in, thus was slightly more honest than the last five managers the owner had employed.

‘The cop that came by when I found the body already asked me everything.”

“And you gave him the same answers?”

“Yeah. I only remember an old guy renting the room in the afternoon. I was busy and he filled out the card. Gave the name a Lester Beemer and wanted the room for one night and that was it.”

“You didn’t see another person with him? Not a man nor a woman?”

“I didn’t notice. I called the cops soon as I found the guy dead in the morning. I thought he checked out without turning in the key. He checked out all right.”

“Lemme see the other register cards for that day,” the detective said.

“Gimme a break. I’m busy.”

Mario Villalobos glared at the manager who always kept his head down and crawled through life. Finally the manager said, “Aw right. Here, you go through them. I gotta clean up two rooms before three o’clock.”

He left Mario Villalobos in the motel office and the detective sat and smoked and went through the stack of register cards. He supposed that one room could be rented four times on a good day with three of those day-rates going into the manager’s pocket. Most of the customers gave obviously phony names and addresses and wrote fictitious license numbers.

There were eleven rooms rented on the day that Lester Beemer checked in using his true name, address and car license number. There no doubt were more than that, but he didn’t expect the manager to tell him about the cards that got thrown away when he was stealing from the boss.

Three looked fairly legitimate. Two were out-of-state guests and the area codes on the phone numbers at least checked with the state given on the license. One was local and he decided to use the pay phone outside the motel and give it a try.

The male voice that answered the phone couldn’t have surprised Mario Villalobos more if he had confessed to murder. What he did was to cooperate fully with a man who spent his life talking to people who lied when the truth would save them.

“Sure, I was at the motel that night,” the man said. “Took my
girlfriend
for a naughty birthday treat. Kind of a tacky motel, though. Wasn’t what we expected.”

“Tell me,” Mario Villalobos said, “were you there when the police showed up the next morning?”

“No way,” the man said. “A few hours in that tacky place was enough for us. We left about midnight, maybe earlier.”

“Did you see an older man who rented the room next to you?”

“No, I saw the girl though.”

“What girl?”

“When I went out to the car to get our second bottle of champagne, I saw a skinny blonde running out of the room.”

“Running?”

“Almost,” he said. “She was in a hurry. Rushed out onto Colorado Boulevard and disappeared.”

“Would you recognize a picture? Did you see her face?”

“Not really. Just a skinny blonde with long straight hair. Tacky-looking girl.”

“Tacky how?”

“Cheap-looking and flashy. Like a hooker. She wore yellow boots that went nearly up to her shorts. Don’t see that around Pasadena too often.”

Mario Villalobos was able to secure quite a bit of information at Caltech without having to reveal that he was a cop. The last thing he wanted at this stage of a fruitcake investigation, which was spreading like spilled mercury, was to tell anyone at the university that he was investigating a murder or two.

Caltech was not a large university, some eighty acres, including playing fields. There were about seventy buildings, mixed rather capriciously as to architectural style. Some were old Californian, with tile roofs and Moorish arches. Others were contemporary, of concrete and glass. The male students outnumbered the females eight to one. There were only 1,700 students in all. The impressive off-campus facilities included the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

He read the catalogue and learned that the professorial faculty numbered 266 with nearly an equal number of research faculty. There might be over a hundred visiting professors during any semester, he was told. And of course he knew that it was upon the faculty that he must concentrate his attention, particularly the chemists.

Mario Villalobos had known about as much as the average citizen knows about the handful of first-rate scientific institutes in America. That is, he had known next to nothing. He could see by the literature in the college office that virtually everyone had a Ph. D. after his name, which was to be expected. He learned that an extraordinary number of Nobel Prizes had been awarded to Caltech alumni and faculty, and that this small faculty had a higher percentage of members elected to the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering than any educational institution in America. There were always Nobel laureates among the active faculty and in such a place it was to be expected that there were many more who had hopes and dreams of becoming one.

After reading the literature available to anyone who asked for it, Mario Villalobos walked outside and sat in the little amphitheater near a newly constructed chemistry laboratory. He watched the students come and go. He smoked, and enjoyed the little bit of sunshine the day offered. And he thought things over.

So far, he had one murdered hooker. He had one second-rate private eye who died in a motel he had shared with the now-murdered hooker. Why a motel, he had no idea. Maybe they liked dirty movies.

He had one “foreigner” who tricked with his murdered hooker, and a crazy pansy who believed that the murdered hooker and her private eye may have set up the “foreigner” for blackmail.