Dead Pigeon (12 page)

When Dennis came, he told me, “I brought the Galanti for you.”

“I doubt if we’ll need it on this trip,” I said. I gave him Julie Woggon’s address.

It was the same house that had been dark last night, as I had suspected, a small stucco house with a red tile roof. A thin gray-haired woman, wearing faded jeans and a sweat shirt, was watering some hanging plants on the small slat-roofed patio.

“More questions?” she asked as we came up the walk.

“We’re not the police,” I told her.

“Thank God for that! They questioned me for two hours yesterday and then the reporters came. Is that what you are?”

I shook my head. “I’m an investigator for the American Civil Liberties Union. One of the reporters who talked with you believes you were a victim of police harassment.”

“I certainly was and I told them that. I guess they think everybody who lives in Las Vegas is a criminal. My brother drives a bus there. He drove a school bus in Santa Monica for years when we lived there.”

“What’s his first name?”

“Robert. Robert Jules Woggon. Do you know if the police have talked with him?”

I shook my head. “They don’t confide in me.”

“Do you think I might have grounds for a harassment suit? Not that I need the money, but I would love to give them some bad publicity.”

“I doubt if you have grounds now,” I said. “But it’s possible your brother might have if he is falsely accused. I think it would be best if you waited for that.”

“Probably,” she agreed. “Thank you for your concern.”

In the car, Dennis said, “I loved that ACLU bit. When did you dream up that one?”

“It so happens,” I said coolly, “that I have been a member of the organization for over twenty years. Let’s go to the station. I want to talk with Lars.”

“Are you two buddies again?”

“Move it!” I said.

He parked on the shaded side of the station and stayed in the car. I went in.

Lars hadn’t lied; his desk was crammed with papers. I told him what Julie Woggon had told me.

He sighed. “I know Woggon was a bus driver here. He was also a compulsive gambler. It was the school board that fired him. But it was his creditors who drove him out of town.”

“Any word on him from the West Side station?”

“Yes. He left Vegas three days ago. He wasn’t running a bus there. We haven’t learned what he was doing, but he was living very high on the hog.”

“Do you have a picture of him?”

“No. But there’s one in the Santa Monica paper this morning.” He smiled. “Brock, if you run into him and he offers to buy you a drink, don’t take it.”

“You have a macabre sense of humor, Lars.”

“Whatever that means. Good hunting, buddy.”

“Anything new?” Dennis asked when I came to the car.

I told him what Lars had told me.

“There goes Julie Woggon’s harassment case,” he said. “Let’s pick up one of those pictures from the paper. I’ll have it Xeroxed at Arden and hand out copies to the rest of the boys. We can use a few brownie points with the SMPD.”

We picked up a paper at the rack in front of the station and drove to Arden Investigative Services, Inc. I didn’t go in with him. I was sure that he hadn’t told his boss that he was working with me.

When he came out again he brought a couple of enlarged copies with him. The picture in the paper had been only one column wide. This was clearer and it clearly wasn’t a picture of Clauss.

He said, “We know what most of them look like now, don’t we?”

“Most of whom?”

“The people we have talked with and questioned and seen. All but one, unless you’ve seen him.”

“Which one?”

“Gillete.”

“I’ve talked with him, but I’ve never seen him.”

“Don’t you think we should?”

“I suppose we should. For identification. But he knows my voice. You’ll have to handle it alone. And Tucker could have told him who I am. He knew I wasn’t what I claimed to be that first time I drove up there.”

“If I handle it alone,” he said, “I’ll know what he looks like, but you won’t. It’ll have to be a picture. I’ll be right back.” He left the car.

Five minutes later, when he came back, he was carrying a wide leather belt with a large silver buckle.

“What in the hell is that contraption?” I asked him.

“The buckle is a camera. I’ve used it before. The boss is a camera nut. He invented it.”

“I see. And you’ll be wearing it around your waist. That should give you a good picture of his belly.”

“The lens is angled upward,” he explained. “I don’t like to repeat myself—but I have used it before.”

“Okay. Let’s go.”

Up the road to the Valley again. An illuminated neon sign on the roof of a savings and loan building on Ventura Boulevard informed the passersby that the temperature was now ninety-eight degrees, the humidity seventy-two percent.

Dennis parked in the shade of a high shrub when we arrived at Gillete’s house. It also served to screen the car from the view of anyone in the house. He buckled on the belt and left.

I got out of the car and went down beyond the far end of the shrubbery, hoping to catch some breeze from below.

There was no breeze and the sun’s rays were higher than the shrubbery. I went back to stand next to the car.

He was smiling when he came down the road five minutes later.

“You lucked out,” I guessed.

He nodded. “I told him Tucker was a friend of mine and that his funeral would be tomorrow. I suggested that he say a few words at the mortuary. He told me he was busy tomorrow.”

“Good work. That completes the cast, doesn’t it?”

He shook his head. “I forgot one—that lawyer, Winthrop Loeb. All we have is his license number.”

“Loeb next,” I said. “Let’s go.”

We stopped for gas in the Valley. While he filled the tank, I looked up Loeb’s office in the station phone book. It was in Beverly Hills.

“Have you dreamed up a story to tell Loeb?” I asked.

“Some of it. I think better on my feet.”

Tiger, tiger, burning bright … He was making me feel like an anachronism.

The office was in a recently remodeled five-story building on Sunset. When he parked on the lot I suggested that I go in with him.

He shook his head. “I plan to use a phony name.”

“I’ve got a lot of those,” I said.

“And a famous name. I’ll bet that half of the men and all of the sports fans in this county remember you from when you were with the Rams. Loeb could be one of them.”

“That’s nonsense,” I said.

“Trust me,” he said. “Even my mother-in-law remembers you.”

“You win,” I said.

He went to the office. I went shopping. I was running out of clean shorts and socks.

I was back in the car a few minutes before he returned. He was smiling again. Loeb’s secretary, he told me, had been very uncooperative at first, but when he mentioned that it was Gillete who had suggested that he come to get advice from her boss, she had relented.

“Advice?”

“Right! I fed him a story about these rich friends of mine from San Francisco who want to invest in redevelopment property down here. We have an appointment for tomorrow morning at nine o’clock.”

“Dennis,” I said, “Loeb probably phoned Gillete right after you left the office. I hope to hell you don’t plan to show up for the appointment.”

“Of course not! But it should throw both of them off balance, shouldn’t it? You know—keep ’em discombobulated.”

“Smart move,” I said. That had always been one of my ploys. Maybe I wasn’t an anachronism.

Arden had their own photo-processing equipment. It was close to noon when we got there. We waited on the lot until we saw his boss leave for lunch.

“He’d probably charge me for the photos,” he explained. “He wanted to charge me for borrowing the camera. But his wife was in the office and she shamed him out of that.”

He handed me the pictures when he returned to the car. “The one who looks human is Loeb,” he said. “The other is Gillete.”

Loeb’s face was aquiline, adorned with a trim Vandyke beard and piercing dark eyes. He would have been successful, I was sure, at selling junk bonds to gullible widows. Gillete could have been a club fighter. He was swarthy, partially bald, scowling, with a shadow of a beard no razor could erase, à la Richard Nixon.

It seemed clear to me he was not what the family would welcome in their current period of enlightenment. That was a comforting thought.

“Where now?” Dennis asked.

“Let’s go to the station to find out if Lars has anything new to tell us. We can stop at the sandwich shop on the way.”

Lars was at the shop, alone in a booth. We sat down across from him. “Anything new on Woggon?” I asked.

He shook his head. “And what have you two been doing?”

I told him where we had been and what we had done since we left the station.

“Jesus!” he said. “The way you guys operate.”

“We don’t have jurisdiction problems,” I explained.

He scowled. “Was that a shot?”

“No. It was an explanation. Neither of the men we talked with today are in your jurisdiction. Tucker was. And who found him for you?”

“Okay, okay!” He finished his sandwich and drank the rest of his coffee and stood up. “As soon as I learn anything, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Thanks, Lars,” I said.

He nodded and went out, still scowling.

“We’re starting to get the connections between all of the suspects, aren’t we?” Dennis asked while we ate our own lunch.

“So far.”

“It’s costing you a lot of money.”

“Yes. But I’m not quitting.”

“Because Gregory was your friend?”

“That’s why I came here. It’s not why I’m staying.”

It
was
costing me money. Mike’s mortuary bill and all the expenses I had incurred since then added up to more money than I had earned in six months when I was working my trade in Beverly Hills.

And it was probably a lack of money that had got Mike killed, either through a blackmail attempt or trying to lure new customers to support his own talent. Drugs were no big business in this country, as liquor had been in the long-gone prohibition days. In both periods, the pros resented competition. The man who had killed my father had been a dealer. Urban kids were dropping out of school to act as couriers for this scum. The kids usually wound up in jail, the dealers too rarely. They could afford expensive lawyers. The kids couldn’t.

“What are you thinking about?” Dennis asked.

“About what one of Bay’s followers told me about his philosophy. She told me he believed this planet of ours can’t be the only planet in the universe. There have to be some planets where the citizens have advanced beyond lust for money and constant wars. Does that make sense to you?”

“I’ve been thinking along the same line,” he said. “At least about the money. My dad went through the Depression. That was supposed to be a bad time. But he looks back on it with fondness now.”

I stood up. “Let’s go back and talk with Julie Woggon. Maybe she’s heard from her brother.”

She was still out on her patio, varnishing two redwood benches and a redwood picnic table.

She smiled at me. “If you’ve come to talk with my brother, he should be here soon. He’s at the Santa Monica police station now. But one of your people phoned a few minutes ago to tell me he would soon be released.”

“My people?”

She nodded. “From the ACLU. He thinks we might have a harassment case. You know, putting Robert’s picture in the paper and bothering me.”

“What happened?”

“He was visiting my father in Eureka. My father is a deputy sheriff up there. And he was there when that Tucker person was killed.”

“That’s great news,” I said.

“Do you still want to talk with Robert?”

I shook my head. “There’s no need to now.”

“Well, I do want to thank you for all the help you’ve given me. I phoned the ACLU right after you left this morning.”

“Good luck on the harassment case,” I said. And thought:
I’ll hold my thumbs
.

D
ENNIS WAS SMILING AS
we walked to the car. “Cowboy Hovde now has egg all over his ugly face. I wish I had been there to see it.”

I held my tongue.

“Another dead end,” he said.

“Dennis,” I explained to him patiently, “most of the murder cases I worked on were
loaded
with dead ends. They are not credit checks or divorces or guard duty, like Arden handles. They are dead ends and blind alleys.”

He said nothing.

“Don’t sulk,” I said. “That will be your lecture for today.”

“I think I’ll go home,” he said wearily. “I’ve cost you too much and delivered too little.”

“That’s not true. You’ve been a big help. Back to credit checks now?”

He shook his head. “I still have a few days of vacation left. If you need me, holler.”

It was a quiet trip to the hotel. When I reached into the backseat for my purchases, he said, “Take the gun, too. Consider it a present from my wife. She insisted that I get rid of it. One of my macho uncles gave it to me when I started to work at Arden.”

“Thanks,” I said.

I also had gone the Arden route for eating money during my days down here. Murder investigations paid for by wealthy clients paid a lot better, despite the fact that they brought me into trouble with the police. Neither had paid enough for me to marry Jan. I had to wait for my uncle to die before I could afford her.

It had been different when I moved to San Valdesto; they could use free help. That was my edge there.

The desk clerk told me a man had phoned around noon and asked that I call him back. He hadn’t given his name, only his phone number.

I knew the number; it was Peter Scarlatti’s. I phoned him from the room.

He had, he told me, done some research on Gillete after my visit and my phone call. “He’s got a man named Clauss working for him now. Watch out for him! He’s a real psycho.”

“I know that. But I didn’t know you cared.”

“Don’t be cute. If it hadn’t been for Puma, I’d have died in my youth. And I remember what you did for his wife and kid.”

“Be sure you don’t tell the Feds that. Is there anything else you can tell me about Clauss?”