JO03 - Detour to Murder

by Jeff Sherratt

  I sighed. Way to go, Sol. What a smooth way to sneak Roberts into the conversation. I should take lessons.

  Byron scratched his chin. “Doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Are you sure?” I said. “I think I read about it somewhere in the archives. Yeah, that’s it; Paul Coates of the Mirror wrote an article, said you personally handled the Alexander Roberts plea bargain. Said you did a hell of a job.”

  “I told you I don’t recall anyone named Roberts.” There was a noticeable edge in Byron’s voice. We’d hit a nerve. Now I’d dig a little deeper.

  “Back in ’45, didn’t you cut a deal with Roberts: life instead of extradition to Arizona on a murder-one rap?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just want to give the readers the truth.”

  “Gentleman, I’m afraid my time is up. You’ll have to excuse me.”

  “Another minute, please, Mr. Byron,” I said.

  I pulled a paper from my pocket, a Xerox copy of the signature page from the parole board report he’d signed regarding the Roberts plea agreement. “Maybe you’ll want to see this.” I stood and dropped the paper on his desk.

  He whipped out a pair of reading glasses from his shirt pocket and studied the document for a few seconds. Was it my imagination, or did his hand tremble slightly when he handed it back to me?

  “What is this?” he said, scowling.

  Sol jumped in. “It’s the deal you made with Roberts when you conned him into confessing to the woman’s murder. Told him he would die in the gas chamber in Arizona for killing Charles Haskell, Jr. if he didn’t cop a plea. There was no murder charge against Roberts in Arizona. Haskell had died of a heart attack. But you knew that, Frank. Didn’t you?”

  Byron sat there in silence, his anger building. He knew he’d been ambushed, but he’d spent his life as a lawyer and he knew how to control himself. He didn’t want to explode and tip his hand.

  “This is absurd. I may have signed off on the plea agreement—routine. But I wouldn’t have been involved in negotiations with the defendant. No, I wouldn’t have done that.” Byron shook his head. “I wouldn’t have had my hand in any of this, not an insignificant murder of a woman in a sleazy motel room. I was an administrator, not a litigator.”

  Sol stood. The ash from his cigar fell to the antique Navajo rug.

  “Use the ashtray, goddammit,” Byron snapped. “That rug cost real money.”

  “I bet it did,” Sol said. “Money you got from the Haskell Foundation.” Sol moved toward the desk.

  Byron scooted his chair back. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “Haskell, Jr. was on his way to L.A. to collect his inheritance when he mysteriously died of a heart attack after picking up a hitchhiker, Al Roberts,” I said. “Roberts takes the fall. No public trial, no prying eyes looking into the skeletons buried in the Haskell family closet.”

  “Convenient for the younger brother, Raymond Haskell, the guy who gave you the big consulting contract that allowed you to retire and live like a cowboy plutocrat,” Sol added.

  “I’ve heard about enough of this.”

  “What exactly did you do for the Haskell Foundation?” Sol kept moving closer to Byron, “Other than bury an innocent man behind bars, that is, so no one would investigate the rightful heir’s strange, but timely death. Nothing about the Haskell family’s business affairs or political connections would ever see the light of day. Isn’t that so, Mr. Noble Public Servant?”

  Byron pushed back away from his desk as far as his chair would go. “You’re outta line here, Buster, with those insinuations.”

  “You rang, sir?” Oliver, the valet, stood in the doorway.

  Byron jumped out of the chair. “Yes, I did! These gentlemen are leaving. Show them out, now!”

  Sol and I brushed Oliver aside and started to leave. We got what we came for. There was no doubt that Byron had lied to us. Nowhere on the last page of the report did it say anything about the woman being murdered in a sleazy motel room. All of the information detailing Vera’s death was in the first few pages of the report. Yes, Byron had put Roberts behind bars by concealing the truth from him back in 1945, and he was still attempting to cover it up after all these years. The sixty-four thousand dollar question was why?

  C H A P T E R 9

  The next morning I drove to my office, skipping breakfast. After giving a cheery greeting to Mabel and receiving a grunt in return, I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down at my desk. I dialed Sol’s private number. Joyce, Sol’s secretary, answered and after a few pleasantries she asked, “How can I help you, Jimmy?”

  “I know Sol isn’t in this early, but could you have him give me a call when he arrives? I have an idea about Byron and Raymond Haskell and wanted to bounce it off of him.” I wanted to know if Raymond Haskell’s family had any dealings with the District Attorney’s Office prior to his brother’s death in 1945. Just a hunch. I don’t know how, but Sol had ways of digging out information like that.

  I hung up just as Rita walked in and placed a pink paper bag on my desk. A hint of her flowery perfume along with the pleasant aroma of donuts hung in the air. “Good morning, boss. Brought the donuts. They have a new kind. Made with soybeans, supposed to be healthy. Less fat, too. A diet donut.”

  I let out my first groan of the day.

  She winked. “Just kidding.” She reached in the bag and pulled out a jelly donut about the size of a basketball.

  “Ah, breakfast. The most important meal of the day.”

  I took a huge bite and washed it down with coffee. Rita nibbled on a French cruller, set it down and wiped her hands with a napkin.

  “Boss, the word’s going around: you stepped out on a limb with the Roberts case. First the thing with Judge Balford, now this.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I met Pamela Young, from the DA’s office, last night at the Regency for a couple of drinks.”

  “Isn’t she prosecuting Geoff, your DUI client?”

  “I was hoping to cut a deal, reduce it to reckless and plead it out. Didn’t fly, too many priors. But anyway, she heard through the grapevine that you and Sol took a little trip north to Rancho del Honcho.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Byron’s big time, a legend in the District Attorney’s Office, Jimmy. Not only that, he’s a huge contributor to Rinehart’s campaign.”

  Joe Rinehart, the current DA, was looking at a bitter re-election fight coming up in two years. One of his deputies had made a name prosecuting a big time Mafia boss and was planning to make a run for the office.

  “Yeah, so?”

  “Pamela said you pissed him off. The minute you guys left his ranch, Byron called Rinehart personally. Wanted to press charges—impersonating a journalist.”

  “What?” I laughed. “That’s not a crime.”

  “He said you acted in a threatening manner. Shoved a paper in his face and demanded that he read it.”

  “OK, maybe Sol got a little aggressive. You know how he is. But we just confronted him with a few facts. That’s all.”

  “Rinehart, according to Pamela, told Byron that the DA’s office would keep an eye on you. I think Pamela enjoyed watching me squirm.”

  “Keep an eye on me? What the hell is that supposed to mean? For Christ’s sake, I’m just defending my client. I don’t need this crap.”

  “Hey, I’m on your side.” A gleam flashed in Rita’s eyes. “Jimmy, I think you might have stumbled onto something and I want to be in on this one.”

  “Aren’t you too busy?”

  “No.”

  “What about Geoff? You said you were working on his case full time.”

  “Done deal, four weekends in the slammer. And he has to take Antabuse during that time. So, it will be at least a month before he’s caught drinking and driving again.”

  “But haven’t you got anything else cooking?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, maybe you can help out a little, but just until
we get a paying client. The Roberts case is pro bono—in other words, he’s broke. But we need to get some cash flowing in; the rent, utilities, phone—”

  “Spare me the details, Jimmy. Mabel harps about that every morning when I walk in the door. But hey, we’ve been in tight spots before and we’ve always made it. Now, what can I do to help?”

  “How about a little investigative work? I hate to keep leaning on Sol for stuff we can do ourselves.”

  “Just call me the Girl from U.N.C.L.E.”

  “Now that you mention it, you do look a little like Stefanie Powers.”

  A pout appeared. “She’s a lot older than me.”

  “Couple of years, maybe. But she’s a knockout.”

  The billion-watt smile returned. “Why thank you, boss.”

  “I mean, both of you have nice, ah… features.”

  She gave me a demure look. “Features?”

  “Rita, cut it out. You know what I mean.”

  “OK. What do you want me to do? About the Roberts case, I mean?”

  I smiled inside and said, “I’ve been thinking. When it all started for Roberts, he was coming to L.A. to find some girl by the name of Sue Harvey, a singer in the New York nightclub where he played the piano. She came west to break into the movies. But get this: he said that when he finally got to town, he never spoke to her. That doesn’t sound right. Traveling all that way, then not even calling her.”

  “Maybe he wanted to keep her out of it,” Rita said.

  “Yeah, that’s what I think. But it’s possible she might know something that would help.”

  “You want me to track her down? My God, Jimmy, that was thirty years ago.”

  “Stefanie Powers could’ve found her.”

  “She had better writers than I do.”

  C H A P T E R 10

  That afternoon I drove to the Los Feliz District, near Griffith Park area. I looked in the phone book and found the name of the motor court where Vera had been murdered. To my amazement it hadn’t been torn down and replaced by one of the ubiquitous strip malls that were popping up and spreading like fungus all over the Southland. When I called the place, an elderly woman named Mrs. Hathaway answered. After introducing myself—sticking with my story about being a journalist doing a history of Los Angeles in the forties—she told me that she had owned the motor court since before World War II and had been managing it alone ever since her husband, Dink, had died in the late fifties.

  “Of course I remember the murder,” she said after I asked her about that day in 1945. “How could I forget? People don’t get knocked off in one of my bungalows every day, you know. I don’t run that kind of place.”

  I knew I had to take a look at the murder scene, if nothing else, to verify the facts stated in the police report. But I also knew it could turn out to be a few hours wasted. After almost thirty years there couldn’t be much about the motor court that was the same.

  Dink’s Hollywood Oasis, “Comfy beds, Cool rooms,” consisted of ten separate clapboard cabins rimming a pea gravel parking lot located on Los Feliz Blvd, close to Vermont Ave. The office occupied the first cabin to the left as I turned off the boulevard into the lot.

  Mrs. Hathaway stood behind a wooden counter when I entered the office. A door behind her led to her private quarters, I assumed. She had to be in her seventies and wore a high-neck dress with black and white polka dots. The shoulders were padded, giving her a broad and square posture.

  I introduced myself and she started in, telling me about the beef she had with the District Attorney’s Office and cops who investigated the murder back then. “Goddamn fingerprint powder all over the place. Took hours to clean it up. Not only that, we couldn’t rent the bungalow for several days after the murder. The bastards had it all tied up. Who’s going to pay for that, I asked Dink.”

  “Yeah, murder can be a problem,” I said.

  “I called the authorities, told them if they don’t pay for the damages I’d sue.”

  “Can you tell me anything about the murdered woman?” I asked. “Her name was Vera, but that’s all I know.”

  “A tramp. Said they were married. But they didn’t fool me none. Signed the register with different last names. But hell, I didn’t care. I got money up front. The woman paid. The weasel she was with just stood there with his hands in his pocket. Playing with his pecker, for all I know. He was no good. He killed her, you know.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to find out. Did you see or hear anything suspicious that day?”

  “Didn’t see a thing. But that Roberts guy did it, all right. I could tell. Those eyes of his, shifty.”

  “How about letting me take a look at bungalow number 2, the murder scene?”

  “All right, but we’ll have to make it snappy. My weekly mah-jongg circle meets this evening.”

  “Mah-jongg?”

  “Yeah, our group gets together and we play mah-jongg every Friday night.”

  What the hell is mah-jongg? I wondered.

  “You play mah-jongg, Mr. O’Brien?”

  “Just in Vegas.”

  “They don’t play mah-jongg in Vegas.”

  “Oh, yeah. Must’ve been roulette.”

  She gave me a funny look, then grabbed a key from a hook on the wall. We marched across the parking lot and entered the bungalow. Stepping into the living room, I glanced around. The room was clean but musty. The furniture consisted of a well-worn couch, coffee table, and two overstuffed armchairs. A couple of generic still-life prints hung on the walls.

  “Sure is hot and stuffy in here,” Mrs. Hathaway said as she opened the window looking out at the parking lot. She turned and pointed to the right. “Kitchenette.” Then she nodded toward a door facing us. “That’s the bedroom,” she said in a low voice.

  We both remained silent for a moment.

  I noticed a telephone with a rotary dial and a long cord resting on a small end table placed close to the door.

  “They say she’d been strangled with the telephone cord,” Mrs. Hathaway said.

  “That’s the way it looked in the crime scene photos, but actually, there were bruises on her throat that indicated someone had strangled her with his bare hands.”

  Opening the bedroom door, I slipped in quietly and surveyed the room; a double bed covered with a thin bedspread and a dressing table with a hinged mirror were the only pieces of furniture present. As Vera died, blood had seeped from her mouth onto the bedspread, but I didn’t see any stains on the bed, only in my mind.

  “Everything’s almost the same,” Mrs. Hathaway said from the other room.

  I turned, “What did you say, Mrs. Hathaway?” She had a solemn look on her face.

  “Not much has changed since that day. New sheets and blankets. That’s about it.” She sounded a little down, like her past was catching up with her.

  “Yeah, human nature hasn’t changed much either.”

  The murder occurred in the forties, no credit cards in those days; everything was paid for in cash or by check. “When she registered, she didn’t happen to pay for the bungalow with a check, did she?”

  She gave me one of those oh brother looks that my ex-wife had perfected during our short but memorable marriage. “Afraid not. In God we trust, all others pay cash.”

  “Yeah, I guess it was a dumb question,” I said.

  “Dink was the dumb one. He didn’t get a deposit for all those phone calls she made.”

  “Phone calls?”

  “That woman made a lot of calls, long distance. Roberts skipped, didn’t pay up. But I included the charges in my lawsuit.”

  “You sued the county?” I asked.

  “Yeah. At first the assholes in the DA’s office just laughed, but I collected. You’d better believe it. Dink said just let it go. But I showed him. The bastards coughed up the dough-ray-me. Took a little time, but they paid.”

  “What about the phone calls? How many did she make?”

  “You sure ask a lot of questions.”

>   “Just trying to get the facts straight. You don’t happen to know who she called, do you?”

  “How could I remember names from thirty years ago?” she asked.

  “Yeah, that’s what I figured.” I turned to leave. There was nothing here that would provide any information that wasn’t already in the arrest report.

  “Have the phone numbers, though.”

  I turned back. “What?”

  “I kept the phone bill, over a hundred dollars. Kept receipts of everything that I’d included in my lawsuit.”

  My heart raced. “You kept all that stuff for almost thirty years?”

  “When they paid up, Dink said I’d better keep everything. Said they might want to see the proof someday.”

  “Do you have the phone bill and records somewhere here at the motor court?”

  “In the tool shed out back with the rest of my junk. But I know what you’re thinking. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to dig through all that stuff. It’d take forever.”

  A ten-dollar bill appeared in my hand.

  “Well, maybe not that long,” she said as she reached out and snatched the sawbuck. “C’mon, you can help.”

  She walked me to a corrugated tin shed standing behind bungalow number 6 at the back edge of her lot. After unlocking a rusty old padlock she yanked the door. It opened with a creak and a groan. She waved away the cobwebs and stepped in, inviting me to follow. It felt like a furnace inside, a dirty, dry oven with the only light spilling in from the open doorway.

  Used cardboard cartons, which long ago had held canned goods and soaps, were stacked haphazardly, taking up most of the space. Someone, probably Dink, had built a half-assed workbench and lined it up along the west wall. Old and beat-up carpentry tools, a brace and bit, rusty saw, and a hammer with a broken handle littered the bench top.

  Mrs. Hathaway plowed through the junk cluttering the area and went straight to a stack of cartons in the back. She took the top one down and handed it to me. “Put it aside, that’s not the one I’m looking for,” she said.

  After moving several more she came to a carton that once held White King soap. “I think this is it,” she said, passing the box to me. “Put it on the workbench.”