Death in Donegal Bay

by William Campbell Gault

  Ahead, the gray Plymouth was taking the Lobero exit. I followed it, and the Volvo followed me. It was Corey’s car ahead; I could see the broken lens in the right taillight.

  No traffic had followed us onto the ramp. Halfway up it, I cut over to the middle, as Corey’s car turned north on Lobero and headed for the hills.

  I hit the brakes and heard the screech of the Volvo’s tires

  Tom behind. I waved for Max to pull over on the flat stretch of grass to the right of the ramp. When he did, I pulled over in front of him and got out of my car.

  His jowls were quivering, his small eyes blazing. “What in hell do you think you’re doing, Callahan?” he asked me.

  “I’m protecting my young friend,” I said. “You were following Corey Raleigh.”

  “So what? What makes it your business?”

  “Max,” I said, “this is kind of an insular little town that Corey and I live in, and the police don’t like private investigators from L.A. who come up and bring trouble with them. I wanted to warn you.”

  “No kidding? I imagine the police aren’t too crazy about you, either.”

  “You’re wrong on that. Both Corey and I have connections with the department. And his uncle, a veteran in the department, was very annoyed when he learned you had threatened Corey’s father.”

  “That’s a lot of crap. I talked with him. I never threatened him. If there were any threats, they were his. And I’ll ask you again, what makes it your business?”

  “Well, you see, Corey and I often work together. I trained the lad. But he doesn’t have the beef you and I have, so I’m kind of his muscle man. And I remembered how you beat up hat poor little stoolie three years ago.”

  “That stoolie,” he said, “pulled a knife on me.”

  He put his left arm outside his car window. He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt. He showed me the long, jagged, livid scar that ran from his inner wrist all the way up to his inner elbow. He said, “He tried to kill me. Does your young friend carry a knife?”

  “Not yet. Tell me, Max, are you working for Allingham or Joe Farini?”

  “That’s none of your damned business and you know it.”

  “I’m making it mine. The way I figure it, Norman Geller, Farini’s brother-in-law, probably recommended you.”

  “You figure it any God-damned way you want, Irish. But neither you nor your cop friends have a right to ask me in this town or any other. What the hell is it with you? What’s your beef with me? You weren’t exactly Mr. Clean when you worked down in L.A.”

  “My beef is Corey Raleigh, and I’ve warned you. Lay off the kid.”

  “Drop dead,” he said, and started his engine. He swung out to pull around my car, and turned north on Lobero, just as Corey had.

  I, too, took Lobero, the long route home. Max pulled into a filling station about a block from the ramp. I drove on.

  Corey’s car was parked in front of the house when I got there. He got out of it as I drove into the driveway and met me as I got out of my car.

  “Was that you,” he asked, “who stopped Kronen on the Lobero exit?”

  “It was. Did you know he was tailing you?”

  “Of course I knew it! I was going to lead him up into the hills and get him lost. He wouldn’t be able to find his way back for hours with all those crazy roads up there. God knows why he was tailing me. I’m not working today. The Bakers are in Los Angeles.”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Were you tailing him?” Corey asked.

  I shook my head. “I just happened to notice he was following you.”

  “And you thought I didn’t know it? I saw his car down in Donegal Bay. He came to my house and tried to question my father. Why does he drive that Volvo you can spot from a mile away? Brock, I said if I needed you, I would call on you!”

  I nodded humbly. “Come into the house. Well have lunch and a beer and a talk.”

  Chapter Ten

  THE LUNCH MRS. CASEY served us was a little fancier than she provided when I ate alone—beef stroganoff. Mrs. Casey thinks Corey is the cutest thing that’s come along since Peter Pan.

  I told him about the murder of Luther Barnum and added, “It could be involved with your case.” I went on to explain my counterblackmail theory and told him about meeting Kronen in front of the Allingham castle.

  “If it’s that clean-cut,” he said, “the Allinghams against the Bakers, why would Mr. Baker pay me to shadow his wife?”

  “That’s what’s puzzling Lieutenant Vogel and me. It could be that he’s using you more as a bodyguard than as a snoop. And we can’t figure out which side Kronen is on.”

  “I hope he’s on our side,” Corey said. “I don’t have the muscle to be a bodyguard.”

  He left right after lunch; he had to take his mother shopping. I phoned Bernie and told him about my encounter with Max Kronen. “Just so you’re prepared,” I said, “if he comes in and makes a complaint about me.”

  “I thought you were going to play golf.”

  “I am. In five minutes. I’m phoning from the pro shop.”

  He laughed. “I’ll bet you are! Kronen won’t have to come in of his own volition. We’ll bring him in. Stay with it, citizen.”

  He knows me too well, that man.

  Threats and counterthreats, skulduggery, chicanery, lies, and evasions…And now murder. Luther Barnum had said that what he had told me was all he knew. Somebody must have thought he knew more. Or, possibly, Luther had learned more since my visit. Maybe somebody had offered him more money than I had. The killer certainly had brought him fancier booze.

  I couldn’t believe he had been a principal in the cast, only a peripheral victim. If it hadn’t been for his relationship to Farini, his death would have occasioned minimal police interest. His only living relative had not traveled the forty miles from Veronica Village to arrange his funeral.

  It was still early afternoon. I phoned Bernie again to learn the cousin’s name, but he was not in the office. I didn’t want to ask anyone else; I was not that popular at the station.

  I climbed aboard my ancient steed and headed for Veronica Village. It was Friday and the weekend traffic was heavy: Los Angelenos heading for the clean air and open spaces. But we made it without strain in less than an hour.

  A feminine voice answered the phone. I identified myself and said, “I’d like to speak with Mr. Allingham again. He knows me.”

  “My father is out of town,” the voice said, “but I’ll see you, Mr. Callahan.”

  Down with the drawbridge, up with the portcullis, back to the Middle Ages.

  She met me at the door, a plain and full-bodied tall woman with eyes of dark blue. She was wearing a white linen skirt and tan blouse.

  “Mrs. Baker?” I asked.

  She smiled and shook her head. “Not anymore. I took back my maiden name after the divorce. My father told me of your previous visit. I’m sorry he isn’t here today. Come in.”

  We went into the same lofty living room; I sat in the same chair I had graced before. I said, “I came up to talk with your maid, Luther Barnum’s cousin.”

  “Why?”

  “Lieutenant Vogel, a friend of mine, feels that there might be something she would know about Luther’s background that could reveal a possible enemy. I’ve worked successfully with Lieutenant Vogel beforehand he knows that many of the officers in the San Valdesto Police Department are not overly concerned with what happened to Luther. He has … quite often embarrassed them in court by giving them evidence that turned out to be false.”

  She frowned. “You mean he was a—a—”

  “An informer,” I said.

  “I see. I hate to sound inhospitable after you have driven all the way up here, Mr. Callahan, but Lucy has been so distressed since her cousin’s death that the doctor gave her a sedative. She’s resting now. Is it possible I could be of help?”

  “Perhaps. First, for background, your former husband tried to cheat me when I was a
much younger and dumber man than I am now.”

  She nodded. “My father told me about that. Surely, though, neither you nor the police can suspect that Alan might have anything to do with—with what happened?”

  “Maybe not directly, though even that is possible. Through a friend who plays cards with him, I learned that Alan and a disreputable attorney in San Valdesto have become rather close. And when I was last up here, I met a private investigator named Max Kronen who had come to see your father. Did your father hire him?”

  “Definitely not! He is working for an attorney in your town, a man named Joseph Farini. Is that the disreputable attorney you mentioned?”

  “That’s the man. And three years ago Max Kronen almost lost his investigator’s license for severely battering an informer who worked for him, and apparently double-crossed him. That, with the information your father gave me when I talked to him, might indicate that your former husband might be more than indirectly involved in Luther Barnum’s murder.”

  “No,” she said. “Not Alan. When we were divorced, my father paid him a very substantial sum of money to get him out of my life. I guess he now claims he had dug up some information about my father, some scandal my father refuses to discuss with me. From the crumbs of information I’ve managed to gather, it’s a business scandal. My father, as I am sure you are aware, Mr. Callahan, has been pictured in the press as a ruthless business man. But not even his most vicious critics have ever claimed he was dishonest.” She was shaking when she finished. She stared at the floor, breathing heavily.

  I said gently, “But you still don’t believe that Alan had anything to do with the murder?”

  “No.” Her voice was soft. “He doesn’t have the—the stomach for that. You know, he is actually a very gentle man—though not really a gentleman, is he?” Her smile was sad. “I sound as if I’m still in love with him, don’t I?”

  “Are you?”

  “No. But I can understand him, though our thinking is poles apart. I wish he could have tried harder to understand my father. With Alan’s considerable gift of persuasion, he could have helped my father’s cause so much!”

  I stood up. “You have been very cooperative. I am sure your father’s enemies will not prevail. Would it be possible for me to talk with Lucy at some later time?”

  She was smiling now, the gracious lady. “Of course. I am almost sure she will, once the shock wears off. I’ll find an opportune time to ask her and then phone you if she agrees.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “Give my best to your father.”

  “I shall. I am sure he will regret having missed you. He was always a devoted Rams fan.”

  Traffic was light on the way home; the heavy traffic was on the other side of the divider. We dawdled along at fifty-five miles an hour.

  If Max was working for Farini, why had he been checking on Corey? Corey was working for Baker, and so was Farini. Alan and Felicia had gone to Farini’s office together.

  The bodyguard theory I had suggested was doubtful. Corey was too fragile for that role. But Corey, I reminded myself, had not been Baker’s first choice for the job. I had.

  A con man, a crooked attorney, a greedy private eye; what rational mind could decipher the machinations of minds like those? All of their loyalties were temporary, except to their mutual god—money.

  About twelve miles short of San Valdesto, a jerk in a Porsche came alongside and looked over with the scornful smile those pukes reserve for drivers of shoddy Detroit vehicles.

  The road ahead was clear to the horizon. I bottomed my right foot and so did he. Four miles later, the Porsche was only a tiny red dot in my rearview mirror.

  Didn’t the nitwit know that even the original Henry’s Model T had a bigger engine than his puddle-jumper?

  Vogel usually went home early on Fridays. I phoned him there when I got home. I told him I had learned it was Farini that Max was working for.

  “Where did you learn that?”

  “Up at Veronica Village about an hour ago.”

  “I thought you were going to play golf.”

  “Get off that tired kick! What’s new at your end?”

  “We have a partial print off the cognac bottle that doesn’t match Luther’s. What were you doing in Veronica Village?”

  “I was having a conversation with Joan Allingham. Luther’s cousin was resting under sedation and incommunicado. Joan thinks Baker is threatening her father with revealing some old business scandal. She also told me that Max Kronen is working for Farini. If you get a make on that print, you’ll let me know, won’t you?”

  “Yes. Thanks for the info. Farini was in with the chief this afternoon, screaming harassment.”

  “Let’s hope the chief doesn’t buy it.”

  “Even if he does, we’ve always got you,” he told me.

  Another day of pretense, playing a role of somebody I wasn’t. Cyrus would probably send my name to his multifarious mailing lists. Our mailbox would be flooded with the super-WASP, superpatriot idiocies those organizations considered to be the only acceptable Americanism.

  I had nobody to blame but myself; I could have played golf.

  “Down?” Jan asked when she came home.

  “A little. You don’t look too up, yourself.”

  “Tedium,” she said. “Trivia. Chasing a dollar I don’t need.”

  “There is one thing we must not forget,” I pointed out. “We were even more bored before we went back to work.”

  I was adding today’s revelations to my journal when the phone rang.

  It was Duane Detterwald. He was phoning from the Biltmore Hotel in town. Would it be possible, he asked, for Jan and me to join him and his wife for dinner there tonight?

  When I asked Jan, she said, “Tell them to come here. We have a leg of lamb and there’ll be plenty for all. Duane will pep us up. He was always a positive thinker.”

  They came early enough for a drink. Duane had done well by himself; his wife, Daphne, was a pert and sassy imitation blonde only a few inches taller that he was.

  She made points with Jan the moment she entered the living room. She looked around and sighed. “This is what I have always wanted, a house decorated by Jan Bonnet! But I suppose you’re retired now?”

  “Not yet,” Jan said. “Let me show you the other rooms.”

  They left, and it was Duane’s turn to sigh.

  “Don’t fret,” I said soothingly. “For an old friend like you, Jan will probably cut her markup to a hundred percent. And you can always sell another ranch. Drink?”

  “Scotch on the rocks,” he said.

  He was sitting on the couch when I brought his drink. I asked, “Why the Biltmore? I should think you would stay with the Bakers when you came to town.”

  “Daphne can’t stand Alan,” he explained, “and neither can I. What’s going on, Brock?”

  I sat down next to him. “I wish I knew. My first thought was that Baker was having Felicia followed because he was jealous of Mike. But then Cyrus Allingham got mixed up in it, and Luther Barnum was murdered here in town, and—”

  “That man who was murdered? How does he tie in?”

  “His cousin is a maid at the Allinghams’. And I guess you know that Baker was married to Joan Allingham.”

  He nodded. “And now Felicia’s worried about Mike but won’t confide in me. She might be seeing Mike on the sly. I’m going to check that out!”

  “Let me know what you learn.”

  “I sure as hell will. You’re one man I can trust.” He laughed. “Greg Hudson! You’re like me, Brock. You’re too dumb to be crooked.”

  Chapter Eleven

  IT WAS A SOUL-RESTORING evening, trivia without tedium. Duane related the complicated handicapping system that he and a friend with access to a computer had worked out during his gambling days. It was too sophisticated for me to understand all of it. Apparently, it had also been too sophisticated for the computer. They ran their original kitty of eighteen thousand dollars down to nothing
in sixteen days of racing.

  Daphne related the comic joys and transient sorrows of her brief career as an exotic dancer at a less-than-exclusive nightclub called Beauty In The Buff, in Hollywood’s shadowland.

  When they left, Jan said, “Duane and Daphne Detterwald—do you think it was alliteration that brought them together?”

  “Maybe. Whatever it was, it was certainly lucky for both of them. They belong together.”

  “They do. They are both darlings. We belong together, too, don’t we, Brock?”

  “There’s a way to find out,” I suggested.

  “I know. Grappling. Let’s go!”

  A happy finish to a disspiriting day. No dreams that night, no tossing, no turning. Jan worked on Saturdays; she was gone when I woke up.

  The previous evening’s edition of the local paper had carried three paragraphs on the death of Luther Barnum. The morning’s Times held no mention of it. Unmourned and little noticed—thus ended the undistinguished life of Luther Barnum.

  At ten o’clock I went to the club to play with the foursome I had been neglecting. They made me pay for my unauthorized absence and lack of practice. Camaraderie but not compassion, that is the creed of the devout golfer.

  In a mixed foursome on Sunday, I fared better. Jan helped me to get some of my money back, suggesting a press to our opponents on the short holes she knew she could handle, not suggesting it on the long holes she knew I would blow.

  We topped the day with an Alan Aida movie and awakened on Monday morning ready for the real world again.

  On the phone, after breakfast, Bernie told me the approximate time of death had been between eleven o’clock and midnight. The night clerk had seen no stranger go up the stairs at that time. “But,” he added, “there is also a back stairway that goes to the second floor. Those are the stairs that the resident hookers use.”

  “How about the fingerprint?”

  “Nothing yet. We sent copies to Washington and Sacramento. We should hear soon. The chief put a stop to our surveillance on Farini. Are you busy?”

  “Too busy for that kind of peon labor. Duane was at our house last night. He thinks that Felicia Baker might be messing around with a former boyfriend in Donegal Bay. He’s going to check it out.”