Darkest Hour

by Nielsen, Helen

  “Now, why didn’t I think of that?” Simon murmured and left to make the next stop.

  He found Willows in a mellow mood. His funeral schedule was clear for the week. He had time to recall the condition of Sam Goddard’s body when it was delivered.

  “I’m not a coroner, mind,” he said. “Doc Moore up at Dover Point did the pathology work. I can tell you pretty much what he found. Goddard rode the Porsche down the ravine, but not all the way. His body was found nearly twenty feet above the wreckage where there’s a wall of solid rock. He was lucky; he must have died instantly. He had some fractured ribs and a lot of bruises, but it was the blow on the head that killed him. He must have died instantly. Anyway, that’s what Doc Moore told Miss Raymond, and he’s not a soft-soaper. He’s seen too much to be very delicate in his speech.”

  “A blow on the head,” Simon mused. “Could he have sustained the same injury if a rock had hit him instead of him hitting the rock?”

  The idea intrigued Willows. “It could be done,” he said slowly. “Yes, it could be done if it was a hard blow at close range. But no! That’s a silly thought. A motorist saw the accident and reported it to the police.”

  “That’s news to me,” Simon said, surprised. “Who was the motorist?”

  “Don’t ask me. Ask the highway patrol. They answered the call.”

  It was a reasonable suggestion and Simon decided to act upon it at his earliest convenience. He left the mortuary and took the Coast Highway back along the route Sam traveled to his death. There was no fog to contend with this trip, only the heavy gray sky that seemed to melt into the crumpled silver of the sea. It was off season for tourists and traffic was surprisingly light; it would have been lighter on a Monday afternoon. Simon drove at a moderate speed trying to simulate the rate Sam might have held in a heavy fog and soon reached the stretch of highway divided by a steel wire fence so tautly stretched that the little Porsche might well have bounced against it without leaving noticeable damage. Simon wasn’t certain where the accident had occurred, but when he saw a black and white highway patrol car and a bevy of motorcycles parked on the shoulder, he swung over to the outer lane and parked just behind them. The Enchanto police had wasted no time. Simon crawled out of the XK-E and approached the scene. Only one lawman was immediately visible: a uniformed deputy who was carefully inhaling from a bottle of nose drops while staring down at the ravine beyond the edge of the shoulder. Simon followed his gaze. Three other deputies were searching the bottom of the rocky area where some damaged brush and a small tree with a splintered branch indicated recent violence.

  “Lose somebody?” Simon asked.

  The deputy lowered the nose drops and transferred his stare to Simon. “Maybe,” he said.

  “I’m a lawyer—” Simon began.

  “Sorry, no ambulance case this time.”

  “—who was a friend of Sam Goddard,” Simon added. “I’m curious. Is this the place where his body was found?”

  The deputy raised the nose drops to the other nostril and inhaled. “This is the place,” he admitted.

  Simon looked back down the highway he had just traversed. It was a stretch free from curves or hills and afforded no approach that would provide a view of the ravine on a clear day—let alone in a heavy fog. Willows’ information might have been gossip. He decided to play it dumb.

  “It was a foggy day,” he said. “How did you fellows find the wreck if you didn’t know where to look?”

  The deputy took the bait.

  “We didn’t find it. We got a call from a motorist who saw the car go over. He stopped his car and tried to get down to the wreck, but he was afraid of getting trapped himself and drove up the highway a couple of miles to a gas station with a pay phone.”

  “That was lucky,” Simon admitted. “Who was the motorist? Somebody from Enchanto?”

  “We don’t know who he was. He didn’t give a name. He called in and said there was a wrecked car in the ditch two miles south of the Sampson Road intersection. I came out on the call myself. Checked out the station owner and he told me the fellow drove on north as soon as he put in the call.”

  “It’s a wonder he wasn’t curious about the wreck.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t a lawyer,” the deputy said wryly, “and being a lawyer you should know how little citizens like to volunteer accident information. Surprising he called in at all. Hey, down there. Find anything?” The deputy stepped closer to the edge of the cutoff and watched one of his partners claw something out of a crevice between two boulders. It glinted brightly for an instant and then clattered down to the floor of the ravine as the finder tossed away a twisted beer can.

  The top-side deputy screwed the cap on the nose drops and looked suspiciously at Simon. “What kind of lawyer are you—insurance?”

  “Maybe,” Simon said.

  “Well, if you really want to question that motorist maybe you can find him for us. The station owner said he was driving a dark green Cougar. He didn’t see the plates. He thought there might have been one or two other people in the car, and maybe it was black instead of dark green, and maybe it was a Barracuda or a T-Bird. Would you like my job, mister?”

  “Not particularly,” Simon said. The search at the bottom of the ravine had resumed, but he was more interested in the surface of the shoulder. It wasn’t paved and there were rocks within reach large enough to crack the toughest skull. Simon kicked one loose and watched it roll a few feet, and then he noticed something shining in the dust and stooped to pick up a cartridge shell. He turned it over and read the markings: .38 Special center fire.

  “Find something?” asked the deputy.

  “Just a bottle cap,” Simon lied. “But I’ll give you a tip for what it’s worth. I don’t think you’re going to find Goddard’s gun in that ravine.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Eve Necchi’s murder brought the reporters and mobile TV units back to Marina Beach, and Duane Thompson, seeing an opportunity to improve his image, occupied most of the evening newscast. He was handsome, suave and genial; the smiling district attorney of Marina Beach who dreamed of a governor’s mansion by and by.

  “We have several definite clues and a suspect who, for obvious reasons, can’t be named until my office has attained sufficient evidence to make an arrest. Meanwhile, citizens of this area need have no fears. This murder wasn’t the work of a psychopath who might endanger the community. This was a crime of passion—”

  Simon flicked off the TV. Hannah, seated beside him on the lounge in the den, seemed fascinated by the inactive tube.

  “He keeps smiling like the Cheshire cat,” she observed. “The commentary was all right, but the commercial was too long.”

  “And the conclusion is wrong, as usual,” Simon said.

  “Do you mean that the murder wasn’t a crime of passion?”

  “Right. Thompson’s probably got a search going for the Marine—”

  “What Marine?”

  “One on some snapshots taken with Eve Necchi—love in bloom, 1959. He should have checked with Franzen before he made that statement about a crime of passion. Any good homicide cop could have told him that Eve wasn’t killed by any man who had ever been in love with her. The body was stuffed in a steaming shower in a deliberately vulgar position. Any one who had loved her, even if he killed in hatred, would cover the body or arrange it in a more compassionate manner. That’s the difference between love and lust, homicide style.”

  “Then it may have been a psychotic killer,” Hannah reflected.

  “As to his mental health, I wouldn’t care to commit myself. But this killer wasn’t acting under compulsion; he knew what he was doing, who he was killing, and why.”

  “Why?” Hannah demanded.

  “I’m guessing now, but when Eve got those film strips out of my wallet she must have realized what they were and become frightened. She left the hotel about half an hour after she left my room. I think she met someone, talked it over, and then decided to come down here
and lure me to that motel.”

  “Motivation blackmail?”

  “That’s what she said. It might have been a come-on to find out how much more I might know about Kwan’s murder. It’s the motivation for Eve’s murder that disturbs me the most. She was the expendable type. It’s possible she was killed to implicate me.”

  Hannah was following closely. “Keep talking,” she said.

  “All right. Here’s what I know. Eve telephoned me last night from the pay phone outside the motel office. She wrote my name and telephone number on the cover of the telephone book. Why, I don’t know.”

  “She might have forgotten it and written it out to see if it looked right. I often do things like that.”

  “All right, I’ll buy that. But Franzen’s got that cover now. He said that he wouldn’t show it to Thompson, but if Thompson does get it and traces it to Eve and then traces Eve to the Balboa Hotel the same night I was registered in the hotel … no, wait. I get a reprieve. Eve signed in as Eve Potter.”

  Simon got up from the divan and cleared off the coffee table. Then he went to his room and returned with the file of photographs he had taken from Sam Goddard’s darkroom, and the copy of Chic magazine, and spread them out on the table. Hannah hunched up closer to the display. She was interested, but still hung up on Eve’s murder.

  “You weren’t seen at the motel last night, were you?”

  “I don’t think so. Gusik didn’t see me, that’s for sure. I think Franzen would have told me if he had an eyewitness or anything at all against me other than that telephone book cover, but he could be playing cat and mouse.”

  “How long will it take Duane Thompson to learn that Necchi and Potter are one and the same?”

  “Knowing Duane, a lifetime. But if Franzen decided to one-up-manship him and conduct his own investigation, I could be in trouble.”

  “Then you don’t have much time to find the killer, do you?”

  It was a quadrangle. It began at San Diego with a Eurasian named Kwan who made habitual stopovers at hotels and motels to do special work—but why did he take a room in a hotel with the balcony over a piano bar where the nightly trade could play havoc with concentration? There were motels out on Mission Bay that provided enough privacy for Robinson Crusoe. There was an obvious reason which might, or might not, be the right one. The Balboa was centrally located and easily accessible to public transportation. It could have been a meeting place. Simon left Hannah’s question unanswered and opened the pages of the magazine to the Max Berlin story. Then he picked up the group study from Goddard’s file and placed it beside one of the more striking photos of Berlin.

  “I got these photos out of Sam Goddard’s darkroom,” he said. “Do you see anyone you know?”

  Hannah donned her tinted bifocals and leaned closer to the table.

  “Max Berlin—” she said slowly. “Where was this taken?”

  “His south-of-the-border salon.”

  “And there’s Monte! What do you suppose—? Why, that old hypocrite was getting beauty treatments! So that’s how he kept that handsome, unsagging profile!” Her fingers flew among the photographs. She found the blowups of two of the men in the group photo and the two closeups of the bandaged faces. “And surgery,” she said.

  “Face lifting?”

  “Oh, it has a much fancier name. Don’t you see, it says in the write-up that Max Berlin’s father was a surgeon in Germany.”

  “Do you believe everything you read?”

  “Why not believe this? Little Max, or whatever his real name might be, followed in Papa’s footsteps—but he’s smarter than Papa. He commercialized his art.”

  “So we have an added feature of the establishment,” Simon mused. “Vera Raymond told me that Goddard had considered doing a feature on Max Berlin and then dropped the project. Maybe it was just too hot to handle. Why do you suppose he included these closeups and the blowups?”

  “Before and after?” Hannah suggested.

  “Possibly. But which is before and which is after?”

  Hannah scanned the blowups again. Neither of the men was handsome; the blunt-featured one looked like a thug, and the aesthetic one was flabbily foppish. Compared to Max Berlin’s tan, both were pale. “If the group photo isn’t before they should get their money back,” she said.

  “That’s what I was thinking. And if that’s true, then Sam didn’t get any after shots and we don’t know how the boys look today.”

  “Oh, they should be recognizable—unless you mean plastic surgery instead of face lifting.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But why?”

  “What else do you see in the group photo?”

  “There’s an Asiatic.”

  “N. B. Kwan.”

  “Kwan? The man murdered at the Balboa?”

  “The same. Now that widens the vision, doesn’t it? That expands the mind. What kind of trip are you having, Hannah?”

  “Interesting,” she said. “Do you suppose Monte knew Sam took this shot?”

  “That I couldn’t say.”

  “But two of the men in the picture are dead now—and so is Goddard! Simon, are you sure Sam Goddard died in an accident?”

  “At this point I’m not sure of anything, but it won’t be easy to prove otherwise. His body was cremated. I do know that he was on his way to Santa Monica when the accident occurred because that’s what he told Vera, and I found a highway map in the car Monterey rented that had been given to him by the Palms Hotel in Santa Monica. I think we can assume that Goddard had an appointment with Monterey, and that the business on the agenda concerned the gentleman he had photographed impaled on the balcony railing.”

  “The Palms!” Hannah exclaimed. “Is that hotel still open? But I suppose they’ve remodeled it like everything else. It was quite a gay place long, long ago.”

  “Then it’s a name Monterey would have remembered—just as he remembered the Seville Inn.”

  Hannah was frowning. “Simon, I don’t understand one thing. If Monte killed Kwan—and if he did, it must have been in a towering rage, because Monte wasn’t a killer—and then told Sam Goddard about it, why didn’t he go to Sam’s house? Enchanto is on the way to Santa Monica.”

  “If he killed a man who was involved in vice activity—someone whose death might call for a vendetta—he was in too big a hurry to stop anywhere. Besides, he had a receipt for a car rental in his pocket from Able Rentals in Santa Monica, and that would indicate that he didn’t drive up the coast. He probably flew right after calling Sam. Use your imagination, Hannah. Think of the pressure a man would be under who had just killed in the manner Kwan was killed. I think we can dust off Duane Thompson’s purple prose and call it a crime of passion. I don’t know what Kwan was mixed up in, but I think he was doing a lot more than his homework in that hotel room. Whatever it was, Monterey was in it too.”

  “And Max Berlin?”

  “It would appear that way. You’re good at expressions, Hannah. You told me that Monte was in a state of panic. In this photograph he’s relaxed. How does he look to you?”

  Hannah had pushed her glasses to the tip of her nose. She pulled them up into place. “Tired,” she said.

  “But he’s relaxing poolside.”

  “He still looks tired—tense. Maybe that’s a better word. Relaxed he isn’t, Simon.”

  “And Kwan? What do you see in his face?”

  “Intelligence. Confidence. Yes, he’s relaxed. The other two—we might call them Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—”

  “It’s not original, but go on.”

  “They look—” Hannah picked up the photograph in her hands and studied the men carefully. “They look smug. They’ve eaten the canary, feathers and all, and found it delicious. I don’t like them at all. They aren’t actors.”

  “I hardly think so.”

  “They look like gangsters.”

  “You’re still thinking of that bomb.”

  “Of course I am. I had Chester drive the Rolls
down to Meyers Garage today. Meyers Senior telephoned me later and said he would keep it locked up until the parts come in, or until he can have them made. I know it will be expensive. I can borrow from the bank, but every time this country has a moral reformation the interest rates go up.”

  “I’ll pay for it,” Simon said. “Where’s Chester now?”

  “He’s gone to a black-power meeting, I think. I encourage him to be civic-minded.”

  “So you’ve been here alone all afternoon?

  “Alone with Rover. And his name isn’t Rover. I called the agency and they told me that his name is Zorba. Isn’t that terrible? A German dog named Zorba?”

  “I like Rover,” Simon said. “Now, tell me what you see in Max Berlin’s face.”

  Hannah took several minutes to study all the poses of Berlin. He was handsome, striking, domineering and aristocratic. “He’s a tough cookie,” she announced. “He’s beautiful—see those high cheekbones. See those eyes. He’s almost delicate, but he’s not effeminate. No, very masculine. Very tough, indeed. He had to be to survive.”

  “The story says that he never married.”

  “Of course not! Why should he? Can’t you just see those oversexed neglected businessmen’s wives throwing themselves at him, and can’t you see him having his fun discarding them with contempt. Oh, they will love it! ‘Hurt me! Hurt me! Give me a thrill!’ I know the type. Garbage!”

  “Not your style?”

  “Good Lord, no! I’ve had my lovers, Simon. I’ve had my thrills. But I would have been too much for Max Berlin! His type has a fatal flaw: they can’t give love. It has to be a conquest—never a yielding or sharing. Centuries ago he might have worshipped a queen from afar, dallied with a dancer and ended up founding a monastic order. A hundred years ago—”

  “What about thirty years ago?”

  Hannah fell silent. She was listening to the sounds of the past: the boots crashing on cobblestones, the young voices singing exuberant marching songs that turned to hysterical shouts— “Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!” The sounds of madness. Shuddering, she pushed the magazine aside.