“Don’t worry about it,” she interrupted coolly. “I’m perfectly able to get around by myself.”
Recognizing the no-nonsense tone—a Women’s Libber perhaps?—Casey dropped the subject. Where the hell was Krug, he kept wondering while he took down particulars. How the hell long did it take to make a pickup anyway?
“No, that’s double e,” she corrected him. “Shirlee. My mother’s name is Shirley, and my father’s was Lee. Don’t suppose they could resist it.” She smiled faintly. “Should be grateful, I guess, they didn’t think up something like Petunia.”
Erasing Shirley with a y, Casey took his time printing Reilly, Shirlee Barrett again, and her Nebraska address. Damn Al, he was probably feeding his face somewhere. Couldn’t stall much more than half an hour, Casey decided. They’d have to view the body, and he lacked whatever ingredient Krug lent to such occasions which kept most viewers of remains from collapsing into hysteria. Two in one day was too many.
“—Rotten reason to make a trip you’ve dreamed of for years, isn’t it,” she was saying. “I’d hate to tell you how long I’ve wanted to come to California. But with six kids and a stick-in-the-mud husband. Well, at least I’m getting a look. Guess it’ll have to last me till my kids’re grown.”
She kept talking, concealing an apprehension Casey could only guess at. A plain woman, years older than her brother, probably one of those thankless mainstays of her family. He told her that the inquest was scheduled for tomorrow at ten o’clock, and inquired gently if she had discussed arrangements with the family.
“Didn’t have a chance,” she answered bitterly. “Isn’t bad enough I spend all this money coming here, she’s got to scream the walls down, wanting to bring him home, too. The return of the prodigal to his loving mother.” Her eyes filled suddenly. “Oh God,” she whispered, “if he had to die, why couldn’t he do it decently!” Then she collapsed, sobbing.
Casey rooted for Kleenex in Haynes’s desk—a nasal sufferer, Haynes was always good for Kleenex. Then he went after a paper cup of water. But by the time he got back with it, she was composed again.
“Let’s get it over with.” Sniffing, she stood up, visibly bracing herself. “Nothing’s going to make it any easier, is it?”
“I’m afraid not, Mrs. Reilly.” Casey took her arm. “This way. It’s—he’s downstairs.”
Krug met them in the corridor—alone, Casey noted, he must have missed out on Rees—and took over from there. But Mrs. Reilly didn’t break down after all when she looked at the body in the morgue. Yes, that was her brother, she told them stonily, and looked away. Still frozen, tearless, she signed the formal identification statement upstairs at Krug’s desk, and received the itemized list of Barrett’s effects, including a notation about the counterfeit bills, which, of course, were not returnable.
The amount struck her first. “All that money…” her voice trailed off as she read on. “You mean it was fake?”
“That’s right, Mrs. Reilly.”
She sagged in the chair. “That’s what the rest of it was too, I suppose.” Bleakly, she looked from one to the other. “He’s been sending money home all these months. Since last December. Never said how he got it, just he was doing great and something big was—Oh, my God, she’ll have to pay it all back!”
“If the money was spent,” Casey reassured her, “chances are it wasn’t counterfeit, or you’d know by now.”
“Oh.” She blinked at him. “Well, that’s something, anyway.” And she leaned back, sighing. “But how am I going to tell her? Poor Mama, she was so proud of him. Thought he was all set. Doing well, making money, maybe ready to settle—I should’ve known,” she added bitterly, “when I saw that snapshot. He sent it in his card. Merry Christmas from your hippie son.” She smiled humorlessly. “Long hair, beard, the whole silly get-up. Sitting on this motorcycle with some girl up behind him like he thought he owned the world. I brought it with me in case—”
Digging in her cheap plastic handbag, she produced the snapshot, which she handed to Krug. He looked at it silently, then passed it over to Casey. A candid color shot, obviously taken with a good camera, for it was clear enough that both subjects were easily identifiable. The man was Gerald Barrett. The girl was unmistakably Susannah Roche.
NINETEEN
“Didn’t I tell you, Al?” Harry Berger kept crowing abrasively—a Moshe Dayan-style diplomat, Casey thought, lumps first, soft talk later. “Didn’t I? Okay, you got her wired to Barrett now. And she was Johnny-on-the-spot when they took him out. No way to figure it but she was going with him, right?”
“Some cool pussycat if she was,” Krug came back at him. “She’s half a block away. Couple minutes closer and they’d of had her, too. But she shows up as a witness calm as can be? Even you and your Treasury buddies ought to be able to figure that one out.”
“Bait makes better sense, Harry,” Casey said reasonably. “If she was planning to run with Barrett, the last thing she’d do is expose herself—”
But Berger wasn’t listening; he had news too, it seemed. “Turns out Barrett bought the Mercedes last December. Had no credit rating, the dealer told me. But his down payment was big enough they let him have it on a contract with a balloon payment in six months.” He scowled at Krug. “That’s now, bubi. Score time for everybody. What it looks like is that Barrett held out on his partners and boosted the purchase price of the counterfeiting equipment so he could buy himself a flashy car. That’s why he kept it stashed, see? A little advance bonus he gave himself, the dumb schmuck.”
The feds had been busy too, he went on. Taking Barrett’s pad as their center, an army of agents had been out beating the bushes, checking every printing shop listed in both telephone and business directories in areas of five, then ten, then twenty miles from Barrett’s apartment. “Idea is, even a dude like him probably wouldn’t want to hit the freeway everyday,” he said, shrugging. “Good enough guess, I just hope they’re right.”
Anything unlikely or suspicious was being checked, he told them. Closures of print shops due to sickness or vacation—which, in this season, made the job that much harder. Any unusual activity noticed by neighbors. Anything out of the usual run of business.
“Got enough already to keep ’em busy for two months,” he sighed. “Not only firm names, proprietor names, too. And you figure the time we’ve got”—Berger made a throwaway gesture—“like none left! They’ll have the goods moved and peddled to some mob before anybody’s ass is even near the sling.”
The squad’s preliminary investigation had already been assembled, Casey discovered when Berger finally left —the sort of shoe-leather report which is standard in all cases of violent death. Subject’s physician, lawyer, landlord had been covered; names listed in a personal telephone directory were checked out; Teletype queries were already following up on the few letters which had been discovered on the premises of the deceased. Susannah Roche apparently had no family, at least none detectives had been able to locate so far. She owned a red Porsche, which was parked in the subterranean garage of the apartment building. Like Barrett, she appeared to have plenty of money, but no bank accounts. Rent had been paid in cash each month, and there was no evidence of any charge accounts. As references on her rental agreement, she had listed an actors’ agent and a professional photographer.
“Both dead ends,” Lieutenant Timms said disgustedly. “The agent claims she hasn’t worked for over a year, and since December he hasn’t even heard from her. Photographer’s even dimmer. Claims she’s no friend at all, he only knows her from one session of shooting publicity stills a couple years ago.”
“Looks like December was connection time for everybody. Maybe Rees, too?” Krug rubbed his hands. “Better shoot word off to Frisco—get a line on who he buddied with in the slammer.”
“That’s reaching for it, Al,” Timms objected. “We’ve got an eyewitness now says she went home alone.” It was the deliveryman for the Los Angeles Times, he said. There were twenty subscriber
s to the morning metropolitan newspaper in Susannah Roche’s building—which put the deliveryman inside about ten or fifteen minutes. “Claims he got there before five o’clock, and he was just pulling away when he spotted a woman wearing a big hat going in. The description sounds right, and he’s positive she was alone—so that probably lets Rees out.”
“The hell it does,” Krug muttered.
But Timms ignored him. “What we can assume from what we’ve got here…” He was shuffling through the reports on his desk. “Time, the way she was dressed, et cetera, she walked in and it happened immediately—whatever it was. The woman in 1006 heard somebody enter the Roche apartment around three. Two hours later, after the screaming, the neighbor in 1004—that’s the stockbroker—thinks he might’ve heard somebody running down the hall. The stairway’s at the opposite end from the elevator, which’d take anybody using it by 1004, so it could be kosher.”
“And the so-called security guard was probably snoozing,” Krug said sourly. “So, for the second time in two days, our amateur hit man was home free.”
“If there was a hit man.”
“Took a souvenir with him, too, maybe.” Casey consciously misread his partner’s scowl. “If she was strong-armed, that hat she was wearing would’ve been knocked off. And if it didn’t go out the window, where is it?”
“Ah, for Chrissake,” Krug snarled, “quit playing Sherlock. There’s sixteen different hats in her closet!”
“But no black straw one trimmed with sequins, Al.”
“My partner, the fashion expert.”
“All right,” Timms said impatiently, “let’s not hassle the details. We’ve got enough to sweat about already. What’d you do with the sister?”
“Checked her into the Miramar,” Krug said. “I’ll pick her up at nine-thirty tomorrow for the inquest.”
Timms kept rubbing his forehead, staring at the snapshot which was lying on his desk. “You’re sure this couldn’t be a lookalike, Al.”
“No way.”
“Couldn’t miss that smile, sir,” Casey agreed.
Timms sighed gustily. “All right, get copies run off right away. I want her apartment house covered from top to bottom again.” Haynes and Zwingler drew a repeat of their previous assignment also—another shoe-leather canvass of every house backing onto the alley where Barrett had been killed, from Montana Avenue to Alta. When this was completed, they were to cover Alta again, all this in hopes of finding someone who might have spotted a red Porsche parked near the alley, or possibly a woman on foot—not a hopeful task considering that the time in question was four in the morning. “Al, you and Kellog hit that restaurant and those people who gave that party she took Rees to last night. Sit on that motel if you have to, and when he shows again, take him with you to locate the place. And when you do, pry a guest list out of them right away so we can get to work on it. What we’re looking for now is the next connection.”
After a twenty-minute scenic drive up the Coast Highway, they ran into a nasty traffic snarl. One northbound lane was closed off, and a pair of motorcycle officers stood by, directing the stream of backed-up traffic. Pulling up beside the nearest one, Casey flashed his badge. “What’s going on?”
“Slide up ahead. You fellas want an escort?”
“No thanks, we’ll manage on our own.”
“Whatever you say.” The young face under the black-and-white helmet beamed in through the window at them, glossy with happy self-importance. He tossed a breezy salute. “Good hunting!” Then he strutted off, his boots gleaming in the late sunlight.
“Look at that kook,” Krug grunted. “ ‘Good hunting,’ for Chrissake. Assholes all act like forties flyboys.”
Up ahead now, they could see road crews and heavy equipment scooping at the wide tail of decomposed granite which had slid down over the pavement—one of the natural hazards of the area. The towering palisades that walled the land side of this highway had been crumbling for as long as Casey could remember, but so far there had never been a fatality, only some near misses. Another everyday miracle which local residents took for granted.
Directly across the highway from the slide, he could see the restaurant sign—Ultimate Perception—and cutting between slow-moving southbound cars, Casey swung into the graveled parking lot. The place was closed, as they had expected, but it surprised them when there was no answer to their pounding on the door. A janitor might have left already, but kitchen staff for a dinnerhouse should be at work by this time.
Krug tried the long gates in a fence connected to the south side of the building, but they were closed tight. Over the tall, solid board fencing, Casey spied what looked like the top part of a tarpaulin-covered shed inside. Or maybe a load of building materials—
“Get the emergency number,” Krug was saying. “Got to be posted on the door somewhere.”
It was, and from a public phone in a gas station down the highway, Casey tried the number. But there was no answer.
“Try the Sheriff’s station,” Krug advised. “Could be the owner lives in town.” Meaning Los Angeles. “Somebody there’ll know.”
“Sure, we got a number here,” the desk man at the Malibu station of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department told Casey. He sounded young and bored and inclined to gossip if given half a chance—a country policeman. “Licensee of record is Victor Russo, but his son really owns the joint. Rodman. Had a couple vice busts years ago up north someplace, so he couldn’t make it with the Board of Equalization. Had to get his old man to front for him on the liquor license.” He reeled off the telephone number Casey already had. “Anything going on there we ought to know about?”
“No, just a routine inquiry. You happen to know any names of anybody who works there—like a waiter, maybe?”
“You got to be—Hey, wait a minute. Come to think of it, one of the girls here…” His voice faded away and distantly Casey heard him calling to someone named Hetty or Letty. Then there was a long wait while they gabbled, their voices incomprehensible, mixed with the clack of typewriters, phones ringing, office racket. Startlingly loud, someone breathed in his ear, saying, softly, “Yeah. Okay, love-face, I’ll get back to you later. You still there, Santa Monica?”
“Still here, love-face.”
The deputy laughed. “You weren’t supposed to hear that. Okay, a clerk here in the office has this brother works there part time. You want to talk to him, I got the address and phone number…”
Since they would be passing the waiter’s home on their way back to Santa Monica—the address was approximately two miles south of there—Casey didn’t bother calling first. Krug whistled appreciatively as they pulled up before what looked to be a modern and expensive condominium on the beach side of the highway ten minutes later. “Pretty fancy for a waiter. Hustling tables must be good these days.”
A gray-haired, rather pretty woman wearing a wildly patterned muumuu answered the door. That they were policemen did not seem to bother her at all. “Charley’s having a swim,” she told them cheerfully. “But he won’t be long. Says the water freezes his you-know-whats. Just have a seat, and I’ll pour you—”
“No, thanks, ma’am,” Krug refused hastily. “We’ll just leave a card. Your son can call us when he—”
“Oh no you don’t,” she cried gaily. “You’re not getting away from here without telling me what this’s about. He won’t, that’s for sure!” The idea seemed to amuse her. “Now you just sit down over there and tell Mama everything.”
“Ma’am, we’re short of time—”
“Now, you stop that!” She waggled an admonishing finger under Krug’s nose. “You be nice or I’ll write one of my nasty letters, and then you’ll be sorry!”
Greek meets Greek, Casey kept thinking as they chose chairs and she served them coffee after they refused beer. Krug’s wife was perhaps one of these steam-roller ladies? Part-extortionist, part-flirt; Circes, Cassandras, and sometimes, sadly, Medeas—
“Well, no wonder you didn’t fi
nd anybody there,” she was saying in answer to Krug’s inquiry about the restaurant. “They’re probably running all over town trying to find a range.”
“A range, ma’am?”
“Stove. You know. Can’t cook on just anything at a restaurant. You’ve got to have professional equipment…”
Someone she called Freddy had phoned early this afternoon, she told them, informing Charley, her son, that the stove had blown up; they’d be forced to close down the dining part of the restaurant this evening. Charley had been terribly disappointed, of course. He simply loved his work there. So many interesting people. And all so witty. Charley said it was Freddy who drew the crowd. A lot of show-business people—
“That’s very interesting,” Casey interrupted—acting as safety valve, since Krug looked ready to explode. “But what we’re really inquiring about is a couple that had dinner there last night. A routine matter.” He stood up. “So if you’ll have your son call—”
“Isn’t he nervous,” she said to Krug. “Something about your work, I suppose? Anyway,” she went on cozily, “about Freddy. He’s just been wonderful to my boy. So kind. You wouldn’t think it to look at him, either. Such a—well, you know how they can be. Snippy sometimes. Nasty. But not Freddy. I’ve got some pictures here—they’re in Charley’s room. He gave them to Charley a while ago. Simply gorgeous things! You wouldn’t guess in a million years it was a man. He used to perform in San Francisco. As a—what d’you call it when they dress up like women? Anyway, his wardrobe alone cost him thousands, he told Charley.”
“Women,” Krug groaned when they had finally escaped. “A fag son with pinups of some drag queen in his room—and what’s her reaction? She drools over ’em, too!”
The Complete Krug & Kellog Page 29
