I pulled into Escadero Drive doing around sixty, and left a foothill of rubber in the Adrian driveway as I floored the brake pedal. The Chrysler shrieked to a stop and I had to hold out a hand to avoid getting creased by the dashboard. I jumped from the car and ran toward the house. Only a dim light shone through a downstairs window, but the top story was bright and full of welcome. I went up the front stairs positively ballooning with dread, legs shaking as I rang the bell. I rang it twice in quick succession.
“Jack?” I heard Helen call from inside.
“Yeah!” My voice was as unsteady as my knees, which rattled from relief and weariness. I had given out.
She opened the door, alive and well.
“How was it?” she asked. I went inside and headed up the stairs, pretending not to hear. It was more than I could handle right now.
I started down the hall to the study, but Helen had moved my things into the master bedroom. When I entered her room, she handed me a towel.
“Check-out time at noon,” she told me.
I washed up quickly, whipped off my clothes, and tumbled into the sack, snuggling beneath the blanket like a child. Helen got in and wrapped herself tightly about me. We lay there like a pair of overgrown embryos.
“Missed you,” she whispered.
I grunted in reply and dug deeper beneath the blanket. My eyelids closed like stone weights and I was asleep before Helen had a chance to turn off the table lamp. Asleep before she had another chance to ask me about Dale Carpenter.
I broke the news to Helen the next morning, before she saw the paper. It seemed to me that she took it well.
“Oh Christ,” she said, then sighed. She stuck a thumbnail into her lovely mouth and chewed on it.
We were sitting in something called a breakfast nook, a sun-washed corner of the Adrian kitchen into which a red banquette had been built. Potted geraniums stood on the window ledges and a group of jays were having a small party in the garden outside. The sky was blue and generous and the sun warmed my back right through the window. It was a thoroughly magnificent morning. Helen in her flowered robe and I in my tan slacks and blue sports shirt, bent over porcelain cups, could have been posing for a feature spread in Better Homes and Gardens. Politely chewing our French toast-SNAP, discussing plans for the day-SNAP, turning to observe the musical cavorting of the jays-SNAP. A handsome couple, beneficiaries of America’s largesse, having found their literal place in the sun: a radiant California breakfast nook.
“You found him dead?” Helen asked.
“Uh-huh. But that’s between you, me, and the geraniums.”
“Did you call the police?”
“From a pay phone on Sunset, anonymously.”
Helen lowered her head and stared into her coffee. The sunlight made her fair skin almost opaque and turned her red hair into a virtual crown. A teardrop formed at the tip of her nose, hung tenuously for a second, then dropped soundlessly into her cup. She spread her hands over her face and wept. “Jack, this is so awful.”
It was that. I put my hand into the crook of her arm and squeezed as gently as I knew how. “It plain stinks, Helen. It’s rotten. Were you and Walter close to the guy?”
Helen kept her face covered but shook her head in the negative. I clammed up and let her cry it out. She stopped after another minute or two, removing her hands unapolo-getically and facing me with damp cheeks and glistening eyes. She blew her nose into a paper napkin, so noisily that it made the both of us smile.
“God, Jack,” she said, taking my hand. “What a time you’re having out here. It was nice of us to invite you.”
“It’s been some fish fry. I was getting bored in New York, but this has been a bit more than I anticipated.”
“Maybe things will calm down now.”
“Maybe. I wouldn’t bet on it.” I poured myself some more coffee. “Tell me about your relationship to Carpenter.”
“We weren’t very close to him. We’d see him with the others in the group, of course, but never individually. He wasn’t terribly bright; very earnest, but obvious, you know? Always discovering things that everybody else had known for years and making a big to-do over them. Like the power company was gypping people or some local politician was a crook. Stuff like that.”
“I know the type.”
“But he was a sweet guy, basically, very sincere. I’m not sure about his sex life. No one was, I think. But that’s par for the course out here, you don’t even give it a second thought.” She mulled that over. “No chance it was one of those kind of murders, is there, Jack?”
“You mean where a guy brings home a sailor who turns out to be a psycho? I don’t think so. The trip Carpenter made to Parker’s house, the way the house had been gone through, this thing …” I took out my wallet and removed the clipping about the Denver man named Pardee. “I found this in the hedges outside Carpenter’s place and I’m surmising, just for the hell of it, that it flew out of a manila envelope or folder being carried down the steps by the killer.”
Helen took the clipping and examined it carefully, turning it over, reading it twice, moving her lips. After studying it a third time, she looked up, her face registering no sale.
“What do you think it is?” she asked.
“God knows. I’m assuming it’s a lead until I find out different.”
“That’s how detectives work?”
“That’s how I work.” I was showing off and Helen knew it. She smiled.
“My little Sherlock Holmes.”
She took my hand and kissed it. That hadn’t happened in a long, long while. I liked it very much.
We sat holding hands in the breakfast nook and all I really wanted to do was toss Helen Adrian over my shoulder and take her home to Sunnyside. Then the telephone started ringing and my day began sliding downhill.
Helen got up and answered the phone.
“Yes, he is.” She pointed at me. “I’ll see if I can get him.” She put the phone down on the counter and whispered, “Police.”
“Ah, shit.” I couldn’t get a break.
“You want me to tell them you left for the day?”
I thought about it. “The hell with it,” I finally said, getting up. “I’ll have to talk to them sooner or later.”
“About Dale?”
“Sure. I just hope they keep it short.”
My pal Wynn was at the other end.
“Hate to bother you on such a beautiful morning, LeVine.”
“That’s okay. I was starting to think you didn’t like me anymore.”
“Seen the papers yet?”
“Nope. I was just having breakfast with Mrs. Adrian. How’d you know I was here?”
“We’re the police. We know things.”
“I’m not sure I follow your logic.”
“I’ll laugh some other time. Listen, LeVine, Dale Carpenter, the actor, has been murdered.”
I silently counted to five.
“Christ almighty. When?”
“Sometime yesterday evening. That’s what the coroner says. We got a tip last night around midnight and found him dead next to his swimming pool.”
“No suicide this time?”
“Not so funny. We’d like to talk with you this morning.”
“Who’s ‘we’?”
“People. You’re the one who was selling murder in the Adrian case. This appears to be a related matter, although that’s strictly between us. Strictly. Actually I’m surprised one of Mrs. Adrian’s friends didn’t call her when they saw the paper. Very surprised.”
“Could be her friends don’t want to bother her. Day after the funeral and all.”
“What happened, Mr. LeVine?” Helen called out to me, her long fingers cradling her coffee cup. She was really something.
“In a minute, Mrs. Adrian,” I called back. “Listen, Wynn, let me off. This isn’t going to be any fun. When do you want me?”
“It’s 9:15 now. Be here by ten.”
“Thanks. I thought you were going to
rush me.”
“Stop being a pain in the ass. Quarter past ten the latest.”
He hung up. Helen beamed at me.
“Was that a good thing to do?” she asked.
“You’re full of surprises.” I sat down beside her. “That was our friend Lieutenant Wynn. He couldn’t believe we hadn’t heard about Carpenter. Maybe he still can’t, but thanks for trying.”
“You think you might take me in as a partner, Jack?” Helen smiled as she said it, but the question was a mile-long freight train, hauling doubts, hesitations, and hopes across a strange new landscape. I remembered again that this was a woman whose husband had died two and a half days ago.
I stroked her cheek.
“You want to be a detective?”
She shrugged. “I think I’d like to spend some time with you, but I’m confused.”
“Me too. So let’s just let things ride, okay?”
“Okay.” She caught my hand and squeezed it.
The doorbell rang and Helen got up. “That’ll be the Wohls,” she said. “They’re going to spend the day with me. You want to see them?”
“Not right now.”
“Then go out through the back. If they ask, I’ll say the police wanted you.”
She gave me a wifely peck on the brow and went to the front. I headed out the kitchen door into the garden. It looked and smelled as rich and clean as the day the first primordial creatures slid, swam, and waddled their way to the muddy banks of the earth and began screwing things up. I waited a couple of beats, then walked around the path to the front, where I got into the Chrysler and started off. I was curious to find out exactly what the cops were figuring. In exchange, I was prepared to tell them not a solitary thing.
10
They wanted me there at 10:15 sharp in order to keep me waiting on a green bench for an hour. I loathe cops. It’s a blanket indictment, I know, and people tell me that there are plenty of decent guys walking neighborhood beats, helping old women up that last step, letting small children play with their nightsticks, and I’ve even met one or two. Joe Egan, of my local Sunnyside precinct, is a fine and witty gentleman; given a few minutes, I might come up with a dozen more names. But for sheer calculated rudeness, for pomposity and self-importance, for imbecility, for toadying to superiors and kicking the pants of inferiors, you have to go a long way to beat the officers of the law. In twenty years of private sleuthing, I’ve had so goddamn many unpleasant, underhanded, and depressing encounters with homicide dicks and robbery squads that I’m beyond the point of retrieval. And I still can’t get used to the lack of ordinary civility.
I asked the guy at the desk when he thought they’d be ready for me. He laughed.
“They’ll let me know and I’ll let you know, okay?” He had thinning black hair and bleary, humorless eyes. A crossword puzzle was spread out before him.
I passed most of the hour reading the paper. A frontpage headline announced the grisly curtain-ringer to Dale Carpenter’s life and career, complete with two pictures of the star: a head shot and a publicity still of Carpenter feeding a palomino. “His well-muscled body, clothed in a yellow lounging robe and plaid swim trunks, was found next to the swimming pool of his luxurious ranch-style home in the Hollywood Hills.” Reporter Pat Marks went on to describe the “shambles” inside the home and to spill the official police verdict: Carpenter had been killed by burglars. The place had been gone through with such violent abandon that robbery was a credible motive. I happened not to believe it and wondered if the police did.
By 11:30 I was reduced to reading the horoscopes. Mine recommended “decisive action.” So I got up and headed for the door. “Tell Wynn he knows where to reach me,” I told the desk man. “I’ve got things to do.”
He looked up from his puzzle. “Hold it. You can’t just come in and out. They want to see you.”
“Then you call Wynn right now and tell him I either go up now or go home now.”
He scratched his head. “I’ll do you a favor and call,” he said unhappily, “but they don’t like me to do it.”
The desk man picked up the phone just as a pair of swinging double doors at the end of the room opened up. Wynn entered, followed by his faithful Lemon and Caputo. The three of them were wearing brown suits. Wynn clapped me on the back, friendly-like.
“Sorry, LeVine, but it’s been a madhouse this morning. We couldn’t bring you up any sooner.”
“Of course not. That’s why I had to be here at a quarter past ten. Must be hell, though, with this Carpenter robbery breaking. You find out what was stolen?”
Wynn’s eyes narrowed. He removed a pipe from his breast pocket and banged it out on his heel.
“You have some ideas about this, LeVine?” he asked.
“I have ideas about everything, but I don’t talk about them in waiting rooms.”
The lieutenant turned and shouted “Let’s go” to Lemon and Caputo, who were having a big laugh with the desk man. Something about why a fireman wears red suspenders. They came trotting over to Wynn’s side, inevitably flanking him. They were like a dog act, those boys.
“We’re going somewhere,” Wynn told me.
“I already had breakfast.”
He begrudged himself a small smile.
“Some people would like to talk with you. C’mon.”
The lieutenant turned on his heel and started for a rear exit. Lemon and Caputo held back, so I fell into step, a prisoner’s cadence, and the four of us went through a back door and out into the headquarters’ large parking lot. The lot was completely enclosed but for a manned gate, bordered on four sides by a rust-orange concrete wall. It looked like the exercise yard of the Big House.
We got into an unmarked black sedan, a Ford. Wynn and I climbed into the back, while the meatheads argued over whose turn it was to drive.
“C’mon, you dumb bastards, let’s get going,” barked Wynn.
Lemon finally slid in on the driver’s side. Caputo sulked.
“I drive the next time,” he insisted.
The ride proceeded in relative quiet. I attempted to make conversation, but Wynn only grunted and sucked on his pipe. He clearly did not want to talk about the Carpenter murder.
“If you’re so sure it was robbery,” I droned on, delighted to make a pest of myself, “why call me in? You think I’m a fence or something? I don’t even live in this miserable city.”
Wynn blew pipe smoke in my face, on purpose.
“And another thing,” I brayed on, “why can’t you tell me who I’m meeting with. I’m about to see them anyway. What’s all the hush-hush?”
“LeVine, I wish you’d shut up. I’m trying to think,” the lieutenant said softly.
“What’s to think about? You got one suicide and one robbery, right? That’s the whole ball game.”
Wynn was being unusually restrained. He looked sour and pensive, like the manager of a sixth-place club in the late innings of the season’s last game. A sense of resignation tightened the corners of his mouth into small curt creases.
“They’re really screwing it up for you, aren’t they, Wynn?”
He stared out the window. “In spades,” he said.
I was not taken by surprise when the police car pulled up in front of the Pill Building on Omar Avenue.
“This is it, Chief,” said Lemon.
Wynn leaned forward and peered out the windshield. “You sure?”
“Pill Building. Number 11 Omar.”
“Jesus Christ,” the lieutenant muttered. “Okay, LeVine. Out.”
“Some nice place,” I said. “What have they got, Hitler locked up in the basement?”
“Don’t give me a hard time, peeper, please. I’m plenty ticked off as it is.”
I did Wynn the favor of getting off his back. The four of us stepped from the unmarked sedan, Wynn blinking in the bright sunlight and buttoning his suit jacket. I followed him into the filthy lobby of the Pill Building, Lemon and Caputo covering our rear flank.
“
Holy Christmas,” said Wynn disgustedly. “What a fucking dump.”
“We don’t do things like this in New York,” I said cheerfully. “Skulk around in unmarked cars, meet secretly in dustbins.”
Wynn didn’t answer me, but stood staring down at the floor. A large waterbug cakewalked around his shoe, but the cop didn’t notice. He just waited, with increased agitation, for the elevator to arrive. The needle, as if magnetized, was stuck on three. Wynn leaned on the bell; it rang like a fire alarm in the empty shaft.
“Goddamn it!” Wynn screamed.
I turned to Lemon.
“Why don’t you suggest that we utilize the stairway?”
Wynn glared at me and started up the stairs. He was terribly angry. For all my obnoxious chatter, I felt a little sorry for the guy. Just a little.
It was the same office: Haller’s antique and jewelry appraisal service. Wynn knocked once, waited, then knocked twice.
“We auditioning for a spy movie?” I asked.
The door opened and the man I had observed yesterday, the one with the sunglasses and buttonhole mouth, stood to one side, hand on the knob.
“Lieutenant,” he said pleasantly. “Gentlemen.”
“Davis,” said Wynn, shaking his hand and entering the room. The rest of us followed. Seated in a corner of the office, in an ancient, cracked leather chair, was the younger man, he of the baby-fat jowls and ill-fitting suits. He arose and was introduced as U.S. Congressman Richard M. Nixon. Nixon shook hands all around, starting with Wynn and ending with me. I kept my mouth shut.
“And I’m P. J. Davis,” the other man announced. “I’m an investigator employed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Why don’t we all make ourselves comfortable.”
The six of us sat down, pulling up various “easy” chairs and folding ass-breakers. I couldn’t have gotten comfortable if I had planted myself atop a stack of satin pillows. The atmosphere was distinctly unpleasant. Not hostile, or even slightly angry; there was just that unmistakable air of crossed purposes. Everyone was on edge and expecting to be lied to, everyone was unsure as to what the other knew. It was like sitting down to play poker and discovering that the deck contained sixty cards.
Hollywood and Levine Page 13
