A Death in California

by Barthel, Joan;

  After he’d talked with Hope, though, Gene wasn’t sure he wanted the job. “Extremely bizarre and highly unlikely,” Gene pronounced her story, at the outset. “Being a policeman as long as I have, and having worked as many murders as I have, having heard as many bizarre stories as I’ve heard—stories that later turned out to be nowhere close to the truth—I’m now supposed to just sit there and believe her?” he demanded of Tom. “No way.

  “I ask her a simple question and it takes her thirty minutes to tell me absolutely nothing,” Gene complained. “She rambles on, I can’t shut her up, and by the time I get an answer, if in fact I ever get an answer, I’ve forgotten what I asked her.

  “Attorneys have a different outlook,” Gene reminded Tom. “You take that damned Hippocratic oath or whatever, so you’re bound by ethics to defend a client to the fullest. If somebody says to you, ‘I didn’t do it,’ and never tells you different, then you have to believe her and defend her. But me, I don’t have to do that, and personally, I don’t want to work for a client who’s lying to me, because somewhere down the line, it’s going to make me look foolish, and I don’t need that. I don’t need the money that bad, and I don’t need the headaches.”

  Gene Tinch didn’t really believe Hope Masters had pulled the trigger on the gun that killed Bill Ashlock, but neither did he really believe her rambling story of the intruder in the night, the man with the goatee, possibly Mexican, sent by the Mafia. “Mafia are out for connections, or for money, or for dope or something,” Gene said. “They’re not just out to cause trouble for some little girl.” Gene had a gut feeling that something was wrong here. But whatever it was, he admitted to himself, it was interesting, so he decided to stick with the case for a while and maybe find out what it was.

  Sergeant Babcock and Detective Tucker checked into the Mayfair, downtown, where police officers got a good rate; then they reported in to the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office on West Olympic Boulevard. A little after midnight on Thursday, they drove over to Tom Masters’s apartment.

  Sergeant Babcock spoke first. “Now, Tom, I’m going to read you your rights. I want you to listen to them. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you, in a court of law. You have the right to talk to a lawyer before you are questioned and to have him present with you while you are being questioned. If you cannot afford a lawyer and if you want one, you have the right to have a lawyer appointed to represent you before any questioning. Now, Tom, did you understand what I read to you?”

  “Yes, I did,” Tom Masters said.

  “All right. Now, do you wish to continue this interview? Do you wish to talk to us?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  Sergeant Babcock had Tom sign a waiver, then he came right to the point. “I earlier told you that your wife, who is in custody, had advised us that you were responsible for this homicide. Is that so?”

  “No, it is not,” Tom said.

  “I told you that, though?”

  “You did tell me.”

  “Do you know of any reasons why she would say this?”

  “No, it’s incomprehensible to me,” Tom said. “I do not know the reason why she would say that. I do not know.”

  Tom told the police that he had been to the ranch about five times altogether, most recently about nine or ten months earlier, with Hope and another couple. He said he and Hope usually spoke to each other about twice a week, but that he hadn’t spoken with her in person since the previous Thursday, when he brought K.C. back to the Drive about 7:30 in the evening, the night Tom and his girlfriend Nadine later went to the premiere of Walking Tall. He said he had met Bill at Hope’s house five or six times, and he knew Bill drove a little green Triumph or Spitfire. Hope had told him Bill was forty years old.

  “What type of relationship did she have with this Bill?” Babcock asked. “Was it platonic? Was it a boyfriend type thing, or what?”

  “Yeah, I mean, it’s—uh, as best I can recollect—I’ve kind of divorced myself from her personal life only because I’ve found that I was even happier when she was involved with somebody, because it did mean she didn’t hassle me—uh, she was involved with a man named Lionel, I don’t remember his last name, who’s now in London, before that. It seems that every man she meets, she does have kind of a—they both get all involved. I know I did when I met her four years ago, and this guy, uh, as best I could recollect, I believe if he wasn’t living there full time for the past month or so, he was at least there most of the time.”

  “How old of a man was Lionel?”

  “Lionel? He was probably about the same age, maybe a little bit older.”

  “Remember his description?”

  “Yes, he was probably about five foot ten, weighed one hundred fifty, one hundred fifty-five, and he’s a television producer. At least that’s what he said he was.”

  “Hair color?”

  “Brown. Dark brown. British guy.”

  “British accent?”

  “No, not an accent, but, uh, kind of a world traveler, European type of guy.”

  “Sophisticated type?”

  “Yeah, yeah, quite sophisticated. He was working in connection with Winters-Rose Productions, which is a big television production firm here in town.”

  “What kind of a car did he drive?”

  “He rented a car all the time, a Pinto or something like that, because he really lived in Europe and he’d come over here for three or four months at a clip.”

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “He’s been gone—I think he left just before Christmas, as a matter of fact.”

  “What broke up their relationship?” Babcock asked bluntly.

  “Uh, I don’t know,” Tom said. “I don’t really know, but I know that he went—she told me—this is all through Hope—she told me that he went over to Europe, to London, to do a special Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or something. I know the production company he said he was with did produce, you know, a television picture over there called that.”

  “Does Lincoln Continental mean anything to you?”

  “Very interesting you should say that,” Tom mused. “Uh, probably a white Lincoln Continental.”

  Babcock seemed to hedge. “Well, we could say a light color, in a way.”

  “Okay, well, uh, the only Lincoln Continental that means anything to me would be Hope’s mother’s car,” Tom said. “She’s got a Lincoln Continental, dark blue one, I think a black vinyl top maybe. She had a dark blue one.”

  “How new is it?”

  “Brand new. I think last year’s, ’72. A four-door Continental, not a Mark IV type like you see, but the more sophisticated Establishment-type car.”

  Tom said when he’d brought K.C. home on Sunday, he saw a white Continental in Hope’s driveway, it looked just like Honey’s except it was white.

  He gestured slightly toward the young woman with him now. “The reason why Nadine is really here is that she was with me all weekend, so she can substantiate a lot of this, and I thought it probably would be good that she was here.” Babcock agreed that it was a good thing. “Plus, I wanted somebody to talk to,” Tom said.

  He said Nadine hadn’t been with him when he took K.C. on Saturday, because Nadine worked Saturdays, but she was with him on Sunday when they picked K.C. up around one o’clock and took him down to the beach, near Nadine’s apartment in Playa del Rey. She was with him when they brought K.C. back, around six o’clock.

  “Was the lady with you then also?” Babcock asked.

  “Yes,” Tom said.

  The detective turned to Nadine. “Can you confirm that, ma’am?”

  “Yes,” Nadine said.

  Tom said he knew that Hope and Bill had gone to the ranch because he saw Bill’s car in the driveway on Saturday, and again on Sunday, when he’d also seen the white Lincoln.

  “I made a remark of it,” Tom explained, “only because I thought, gee, you know, we’ve gone to the ranch before and you never get back a
t six o’clock. It’s about a three-hour drive, I guess, from Porterville to here, and we always got back around eight or nine. And I thought to myself, gee, I knew they had taken her car to the ranch—only assumed that because it was gone on Saturday, and it’s a station wagon so they could carry supplies in it.”

  “Any other men friends of your wife’s that might drive a Lincoln Continental?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Tom said. “I know she’s got a friend who she kind of goes out with in between relationships or something. His name is Michael Abbott, he’s an attorney, he’s just out of law school, and he’s just—”

  “Young,” Babcock supplied the word.

  “Young,” Tom agreed. He said he didn’t know whether Michael drove a Continental, he just knew that Hope saw Michael quite often, and that she also saw an attorney and stockbroker named Gary. “These are wealthy people,” Tom pointed out.

  “Does the name Taylor mean anything?’ Babcock asked.

  “You have a first name?”

  “No,” Babcock said.

  “No, Taylor doesn’t mean a thing.”

  “Tyler?”

  “Tyler, Tyler,” Tom repeated. “No.”

  “Sumner?”

  “No.”

  “How about newspaper reporters, photographers?”

  “Newspaper reporters, photographers,” Tom repeated.

  “Authors, free-lance type?”

  “It’s funny that you say this now,” Tom said again. “This is when her husband—her boyfriend, Bill—he worked for an advertising agency. I don’t know which one, but one in town here. Now on Thursday I believe it was, or could it have been Friday now, damn it, she had called me—I can’t remember. I know the last time I spoke to her in person was Thursday night, now she might have called me Friday morning. I can check with my answering service to find out if they took the call, exact date and time, but she—Very interesting, you know, in my business I handle most of the entertainers. I do their public relations, promotions, publicity, but I also handle some restaurants on occasion, and she called me and she said to me, ‘You know,’ she said, ‘there’s the L.A. Times or some writer going to interview Bill as one of the town’s clean young bachelors, and they’re going to do some posing—”

  Again Babcock cut in. “What day was this?”

  “I can’t say exactly. I can find out. Thursday or Friday.”

  “Thursday or Friday for sure?”

  “Right, right.”

  “About what time?”

  “Uh—let me say, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday. I—I, you know, I get confused on the dates now that she’s—It was in the afternoon, probably, around three, but I can’t say for sure.” Tom said Hope hadn’t told him the reporter’s name, only that he was from the Los Angeles Times, and she’d asked Tom if he wanted any restaurants mentioned that he handled, for the publicity value, or so they might get a free dinner out of it. “I don’t like to get involved with her in business at all, naturally, for obvious reasons,” Tom said. “So I said, ‘No, I don’t know of any. I don’t think anybody would go for it.’ And that was all. I dropped it.”

  “Do you know of any middle-aged men, fifty-ish, she might have gone out with, to your knowledge?”

  “No, I know that on occasion she tells me, you know, ‘I met a guy who is too old for me, or wants to take me to dinner,’ but I don’t know any names. I just try not to get into that with her.”

  “Do you own a weapon?” Babcock asked suddenly.

  “No,” Tom said. “I do in Massachusetts, where I come from—mainly hunting, you know, but I own nothing out here at all whatsoever.”

  “To your knowledge, does your wife have a firearm?”

  “No, I don’t know her to have one, and never have,” Tom replied.

  “She’s not familiar with firearms?”

  “Not to my knowledge, not at all, not at all.”

  “Has your wife ever used narcotics?”

  “She’s smoked marijuana that I know of.”

  “Any hard narcotics?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Barbiturates? Amphetamines?”

  “Well, she takes quite a few sleeping pills, and I know she’s got a bad back problem and she takes drugs, but these were all prescribed by a couple of doctors that she has.”

  Babcock turned to his partner. “Detective Tucker, you got anything I’m missing here?”

  Ralph Tucker had something. “Your financial status?” he said inquiringly to Tom.

  “What do you want to know about it?”

  “What do you make?”

  “What do I make?” Tom repeated. “I—I—uh, it’s hard for me to say, exactly. Last year I grossed twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “How hard would it be for you to come up with thirty-five hundred dollars?”

  “Pretty difficult,” Tom said.

  “At this time?”

  “Extremely difficult, right. I have a business manager who could show you my books for the past year, the past three years, so you could substantiate that.”

  Tucker was not deflected. “Where do you bank at?”

  “Well, he banks,” Tom said. “I have a business manager. The man’s name is Mr. Lou Grant, and they have a business managing firm named Zulk, Grant, and Zulk, and all their clients’ money is in one trust account, which mine is involved in. And I believe it’s the Security-Pacific Bank at Fulton and Riverside in, uh—”

  “Can you write checks on this?”

  “No I cannot.”

  “Do you have a savings account?”

  “Yes, we do, but it’s involved again with this same trust situation. I mean, I cannot write a check. They have total power of attorney.”

  “And you have no way that you could get hold of any money?”

  “Not unless, I suppose, I went to a friend and asked for thirty-five hundred dollars,” Tom said. “That’s the only way I know of how I could get hold of it.”

  There was only a slight pause.

  “Getting back to this gentleman from England. What—”

  “Lionel,” Tom said. “I know him as Lionel.”

  “Was he clean-shaven?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he smoke a pipe?”

  “Seems like he did,” Tom said.

  “A great big pipe? Have you ever seen him with a—”

  “No, no,” Tom corrected himself. “He seems like the type who—would smoke a pipe, though, from the sophisticated air about him.”

  “Clean-cut, neat?”

  “Clean-cut, very neat, yeah. Meticulous.”

  “Do you know if Bill has guns?”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “Is there a gun stored at the ranch?”

  “No, uh, no,” Tom said. “And this is what I can’t understand. I just don’t think Van, her father, would allow that, because there are different families that go up there for weekends with kids.”

  Speaking of the ranch, the police brought up Jim Webb. “Do you know of any possible trouble between the foreman and your wife or Bill or anything like this?”

  Not between those people, Tom said, but he told of a problem Van had once had, when he’d ordered ten or twenty dead orange trees cut down, and the foreman, by mistake, had the tree removers wipe out the entire grove, one hundred fifty trees or so. Tom said Van had been very, very upset.

  “When your wife went up there, or any members of the family, did they go to any bars, any restaurants, any places they hung out at?”

  Tom recalled a restaurant near Lake Success where he and Hope had once had dinner, and he remembered a little grocery store in Springville, where they still sold ice by the chunk. At a little beer bar in the center of town, with a pool table, an Indian had once made a remark about Tom’s long hair. The Indian was carrying a snake, and he was in a group of about six Indians, while Tom only had one friend with him, so Tom just said “Peace,” and left.

  “Does your wife use credit cards?”


  “No, except for a Union Oil card,” Tom said. “For gas. Cash only, or writes a check.”

  “How about Bill?”

  “I don’t know anything about him,” Tom said, more emphatically. “I know that she always told me—that, uh, he bought her things and took her to dinner but—but—was never going to make much money, something like that, referring to the fact that in my business I can make twenty-five thousand dollars one year and one hundred thousand dollars the next, if I get lucky with a couple clients. In his business he was more or less in a salary position.”

  “What type of nature does your wife have? Is she a violent person? Like, say, say if she’s intoxicated or she’s feeling good, would she be violent?”

  “I have never known her to be,” Tom said. “I have never known her to be absolutely violent. I know that when she does get a little drunk, I’ve always had a problem with her.”

  The detectives were very interested. “What kind of a problem?”

  “Well, just that she would be very silly and incoherent and, uh, would drink, even though she knew she shouldn’t drink any more and would—uh, uh, uh—would swear, and cause a lot of problems. For instance, many times we double-dated with my business manager and his wife, when Hope and I were married and living together, and one night with them she had three or four drinks. Evidently the combination of this medication she was taking, and the drinks—she never realized it affected her. I would have to physically put her in the car and take her home, or carry her into the bedroom and then she’d pass out. Never really a streak of violence, just incoherent and, like, a who-gives-a-hell type of attitude. This I’ve noticed.”