Cana Diversion

by William Campbell Gault

  Vogel nodded. “Thank you for seeing us, Professor.” Outside the sun was shining. Some students were hurrying, some were strolling between the buildings. There was a smell of the ocean in the light breeze.

  “Knox Hamilton next?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so. He has a law degree but most of his work is investment advice. He’s managed to put a couple of Montevista widows on welfare with his advice. If his old man hadn’t been rich Knox would have wound up drinking muscatel in a doorway on lower Main Street.

  “You sound bitter, Bernie.”

  “I keep running into millionaire nitwits and wonder why I’m so poor.”

  “Elly told me you could have retired comfortably two years ago. She said you’ll never retire.”

  “What does she know?”

  “One thing she knows for sure is poor mouth Bernard Vogel. If not Hamilton, where?”

  “Nowhere,” he said. “Let the damned Feds handle it. Let them earn their ridiculous salaries. I’ve got a desk piled high with overdue reports right now. Maybe tomorrow. I’ll call you.”

  “Where is Hamilton’s office?”

  “In the Barlow Building. Where else?”

  Bernie knew how to milk a four-card flush but the stock market had burned him. We rode down to the station without further dialogue.

  In the parking lot, I said, “If Hamilton knows anything that might be useful, I’ll bring it to you. Otherwise—tomorrow?”

  “If we have some place to go. Don’t slug any more G-men. They might be our last best hope.”

  “I won’t. Cheer up, Bernie!”

  “I’ll whistle while I type,” he said.

  Driving around, asking questions, what a tiring and frustrating way to spend a day or earn a living. Census takers know that. That’s why they work only one year out of ten.

  The slim, tall secretary in Hamilton’s office asked me the question they are all taught the first day in secretarial school. “Do you have an appointment?”

  No was the proper answer. This time I said, “Do I need one?”

  Her smile was charming. “Not with me you don’t. But Mr. Hamilton is more formal. Why don’t you tell me who you are and why you’re here?”

  “My name is Brock Callahan. I’m here because Judson Barlow suggested I see your boss. How’s that?”

  “That gets you in there,” she said. She pressed a button and announced me on her intercom.

  I should have stayed in the outer office. The scenery had been better. Hamilton obviously knew nothing about the Mead Land Company and so he tried to avoid revealing his ignorance by double-talking in legalese. He was familiar with the name of Tony Romolo; he thought Tony was an operatic tenor. It couldn’t have been easy, but the bull had found a man in town who knew less than he did.

  I thanked him in the middle of one of his longer sentences and left.

  I had a new motive for the murder of Joe Puma. Barlow had hired him to smoke out Romolo and Tony had learned about it.

  But why then were there no investigative reports in Joe’s private file? If they had been in his office file, both the police and the government men would have interviewed Barlow by now. Had the bull lied?

  Joe wouldn’t have been likely to try to blackmail Romolo for thirty thousand dollars or even thirty cents. Hoodlums spend their money on politicians and expensive attorneys. A lousy private eye who threatened them would wind up crippled or dead, and Joe knew it.

  Somewhere in this muddled case there was an angle that I was overlooking.

  Vogel was depending on the Feds. In the last two days he had spent only the mornings on the murder of a San Valdesto citizen. Even a liquor-store holdup got more police time than that.

  I went home. Jan wasn’t there. I worked with the weights for about fifteen minutes and then swam twenty leisurely lengths of the pool. After my shower I went back to Joe’s notes.

  There was one number left of the four identified by initials. I dialed it. The mechanical voice of a recorder suggested I consult my phone book. I had dialed a number that didn’t exist.

  I was recradling the phone when the doorbell rang.

  It was Calvin. “I’m scared,” he said.

  13

  “COME IN,” I SAID. “WHAT happened?”

  He came in and I closed the door.

  “A couple guys were in Barney’s, asking about me. Thank God Barney doesn’t know where I live. There was a friend of mine in there. He came out to the house to tell me.”

  “Maybe they were federal officers.”

  “I doubt it like hell. My friends said they were driving a black Chrysler Cordoba with Nevada plates. Man, that has to be the same car I saw that night!”

  “I think we’d better go downtown and tell the police about this.”

  “Like hell. I’m getting out of town. I thought, maybe, if you could lend me some money—I’ll pay it back.”

  “That would be a stupid move. The police might want to question you again, and the federal men might, too. And you can’t hide from the hoodlums, not on this planet.”

  “So what do I do—hang myself?”

  The image of the crippled eagle up there on his Ridge Road perch came to me. Crazy, maybe, but. …

  “Sit down, Calvin,” I told him. “I have to make a call.” I went into the den and phoned Sloan Hartford.

  I explained the situation to him, and asked, “Do you have a guest house or something up there? I didn’t notice any.”

  “No. But there’s plenty of room in the house. And I could use some company. Send him up.”

  “He’s not always, well, clean—and—”

  “Brock, I have shared quarters with cannibals, pygmies, and second lieutenants. I’m sure he will be better company than that. And Lydia will see that he stays reasonably clean.”

  “It could be dangerous.”

  “That’s the part that decided me,” he said. “Quit stalling!”

  I told Calvin where the house was and asked him, “Do you still have some of that money I gave you?”

  “I ran it up to two hundred,” he told me. “It ain’t likely I’ll need more than that if I stay in town and have free board.”

  “You gamble?”

  “I play a little cards now and then.”

  “Calvin, I think you’ll find a home up there on Ridge Road. I’ll stay in touch. Vogel and I will be looking for those men.”

  “Okay. But if I get cabin fever up there, I’m taking off.”

  “If you play cards with your host, you’ll be taking off broke. And soon dead. Those creeps have stoolies all over the country. Wise up!”

  “I’ll be careful,” he promised.

  Oh sure. Where had he ever learned to be careful? You don’t wind up in a shack on Arroyo Road by being careful. You wind up in Montevista, rich and dull.

  Jan came home about an hour after he left. “Lois,” she told me, “had Nadia as a fill-in again today. She is nice, isn’t she? Opinionated, though.”

  “I know.”

  “And a wild bidder,” my bride added. “She cost me a dollar and eighty-five cents when she was my partner.”

  “She goes for broke?”

  “Does she ever! And how was your day?”

  “Short and depressing. We had nowhere to go this afternoon.”

  “You’re depressed and I’m bored. How would you feel about it if I went back to work?”

  Jan had been an interior decorator before we were married. I said, “Anything that makes you happy. Do you mean running your own shop or working for somebody else?”

  “For Kay Decor. Audrey Kay suggested it the other day. And Lois has finally found me a good housekeeper.”

  “It should be more interesting than bridge and chitchat.”

  “God, yes! And booze. The way some of those women drink! I can understand now why you go plodding around with Bernie.”

  “I think Bernie’s stopped plodding on the Puma murder.”

  “But not you, I’ll bet. You’re no qu
itter.”

  “Not yet.”

  “My bulldog!” she said, “Give me a big kiss and a hug.”

  I was getting a little old for some homilies. It’s always darkest right before dawn was one of them. I had grown up on homilies in Long Beach, discarded some and stuck with others. There was no dawn in sight on this one and might never be.

  Joe was dead; nobody could bring him back. Because Joe was dead, Calvin had to hide. Who would be next? The mob could keep the dawn away forever.

  I called Bernie at dinnertime and told him about Calvin’s visit and the two men in the black Chrysler.

  “I’ll send out a call for them. We can bring them in for questioning, if nothing else. Did Calvin go back to his house?”

  “No. He wanted to leave town. I stashed him away up in Sloan Hartford’s mountain retreat. You don’t want to go with me and look up those two men?”

  “Why? The uniformed boys will be looking for them.”

  “I thought maybe you could show your badge to make it legal, and then I could muscle ’em.”

  “You’re mental,” he said. “You’ve been watching too much TV. You got a death wish or something?”

  “Nope. Only the normal quota of citizen indignation. Should I come in tomorrow, sir?”

  “Not in the morning. I’m about a third of the way through those reports that were due day before yesterday.”

  “Okay!” I hung up.

  I cooled off a little during the night and decided to go down in the morning. The private file had been deciphered to my present ability; maybe Bernie would let me examine what they had from Joe’s office file.

  Bernie’s office was blue with cigarette smoke. He looked up from behind his desk and grinned at me. “Still miffed?”

  “No. I wondered if I could look at Joe’s office files.”

  “If you want. There are forty-three cases in there and every one of the people involved has been interrogated. Maybe it would better if you just read those reports. Save you a lot of gasoline.”

  “When did all this happen?”

  “Every time an officer had a free hour or two. While you and I were riding around sniping at each other, they were working. You never thought of that, did you?”

  I felt about four feet tall. And dumber than the bull.

  “Well?” he said.

  “I apologize.”

  “Apology accepted. Anything else?”

  “I had this thought. If the men in the black car who were looking for Calvin are the same ones he saw in that parking lot, they couldn’t be working for Romolo.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you had alerted Romolo. He would have sent them home.”

  “Not if they had alibis. They were picked up last night. They have five people who will testify under oath that they were in El Cajon the night Puma was killed.”

  I nodded meekly. “I guess I’ll go out and play some golf. Sorry to have been such a bother.”

  “Oy!” he said. “Two hundred and eighteen pounds of petulance. You’ve been a big help, pal. If anything new develops, you’ll be the first I call.”

  “Thanks. See you tonight.”

  I didn’t feel that golf was my answer. I drove out to Arroyo Road. Maybe I could meet the gray cat again. Maybe he—or she—knew something.

  As I drove close to the lot I saw this black car parked in Calvin’s driveway. I drove on. I intended to drive past to check the plates, the sane thing to do. But my memory of Sloan Hartford was still strong. I pulled in behind the black Cordoba with the Nevada license.

  I was getting out of the car when two men came out of the house. They stopped on the porch to look down at me. They were not wide and swarthy and dressed in dark suits. They were average-size nondescript-type guys. They could have been insurance salesmen or stockbrokers. Both of them wore sports jackets and slacks and loafers.

  “Is Calvin home?” I asked them.

  “Calvin Ellers?” the one on the right asked. “Is he a friend of yours?”

  “Far from it,” I said. “Thirteen hundred dollars from it. Are you guys collectors, too?”

  The one on the left nodded.

  “He’s probably on his way to Miami by now,” I said. “Well, he paid us off last time he came back from there. He probably will this time.”

  They looked at each other and again at me. “Miami? What’s in Miami? Relatives?”

  “His sister lives down there, I guess she married some big shot. That’s what Calvin claims, anyway.”

  “Would you know the name of this big shot? Did Calvin name him?”

  “Calvin? You’re lucky to get the time of day out of him. He tried to scare me last time. He tried to sell me the story his brother-in-law was a big man in the syndicate.”

  They looked at each other again.

  The one on the right asked, “If it’s not too personal, would you mind telling me why any store in town would give Ellers thirteen hundred dollars’ worth of credit?”

  “It isn’t a store,” I said. “It’s a table. Calvin has this habit of drawing to inside straights. You guys from Vegas?”

  They shook their heads.

  “If you find him in town, would you give me a ring? The boss would appreciate it. It’s an unlisted number.”

  The one on the right took out a ball-point pen and a card. “Shoot,” he said.

  I gave him the phone number of the police department.

  “And if you get anything,” the one on the left said, “you could phone us. We’re at the Biltmore. Just ask for suite five-twenty-two.”

  “I’ll do that. Good hunting, boys.”

  It may not have been an Academy-Award performance, but I thought I had brought it off rather well. Even Burt Reynolds would have to admit I played the role with professional insouciance.

  In my rearview mirror I could see the Cordoba pull out of Calvin’s driveway and once again head toward the ocean. On the road in front of me, coming my way, was a yellow Pinto. Mr. X had scraped the Yosemite sticker off his windshield. In bureaucratic reasoning, that probably made his car inconspicuous. I tooted my horn at him as we passed.

  There was the unmistakable smell of Irish stew in the house when I opened the front door. A tall and buxom middle-aged woman in a light blue cotton housedress was in the dining room polishing the silverware.

  “Mr. Callahan?” she asked me.

  I nodded.

  “I’m your new housekeeper. My name is Mary Casey. Your wife is at the market buying some things for tonight. She told me you’d probably be home for lunch.”

  “And you made us an Irish stew,” I said.

  “It was your wife’s idea. She told me hers have never been exactly to your taste.”

  This one was. I was back in Long Beach at my mother’s table. Conning those hoodlums had diminished some of the humiliation I had suffered in Vogel s office. Mary Casey’s Irish stew restored the confidence of my youth. Nobody was going to hold back the dawn forever, not from me.

  “Pay her whatever she asks,” I told Jan. “Don’t let her go.”

  “Yes, master. But don’t expect stew three times a day.”

  Whole again, and fortified, I went to the den. I wrote down everything I had learned since Joe died and tried to find a pattern in it.

  It was still a maze, every passage coming to a dead end.

  I phoned Sloan Hartford and asked him, “How are things going?”

  “Very well. Lydia goes around sniffing and muttering, but I’m sure she’ll adjust to the situation.”

  “And Calvin?”

  “He’s interesting company—if a little stubborn. He’s into me for fourteen dollars already but he refuses to play for high stakes.”

  “He’s never had much experience at it. Once he builds up his bankroll he might change his attitude.”

  “Let’s hope so. In the meantime he’s a lot more fun than the boob tube.”

  “Let me know if he gets restless. I don’t want him out in the open where he’s an
easy target.”

  “Neither do I. I sold my Trinity stock. At a profit.” He chuckled. “I sold it to Knox Hamilton.”

  “That wasn’t very sporting—shooting fish in a barrel.”

  “He sold it to me originally. From Judson’s holdings. I figured I owed him one. I’ll keep in touch.”

  I went back to the den, back to the maze. I was still looking for a pattern when Jan came in to warn me our guests would soon be arriving.

  14

  MARY CASEY’S CULINARY MAGIC was not confined to Irish stew. Her hors d’oeuvres were worthy of a French chef. I gladly relinquished my barbecue specialty—burning steaks over charcoal—to her.

  After the obligatory opening chat, the company divided as it always does into special-interest groups. Jan, Bernie and Ellen talked about books, Nadia and Lois about the difficulty of finding good domestic help. Alan, Stu and I talked football, the great names, the great games. Nobody mentioned CANA.

  A few minutes before we ate I was sitting on the couch with Nadia when she asked quietly, “Did Mr. Puma continue to investigate my husband after I—well, you know—”

  “There’s no record of it in his files. Why?”

  “One of Stu’s attorney friends made a remark the other day that made me wonder.” She paused. “This is just between us, but Stu was very active in an antinuclear group when we lived in Los Angeles.”

  “He wasn’t working for the company then?”

  “No. That was several years ago. It wasn’t South Coast that lured us up here. It was this lovely town.”

  “And now I’ll share a secret with you,” I said. “Puma did some work for the Trinity Investment Company. He was probably working for them when he died.”

  “Working to discredit Stu?”

  I shrugged.

  She put her hand on mine. “This was your idea, wasn’t it, having us at your party?”

  “Not completely.”

  She patted my hand. “You are a good man, Callahan.”

  “Careful!” I said. “Stu is looking our way. You know how jealous he can be.”

  “You are a good man,” she repeated. “With a nasty tongue.”

  It was Judge Vaughan who suggested a little poker after we had eaten. I saw Bernie’s eyes light up.