But there was no police business card in the door.
"What did the man look like?" Mario Villalobos asked.
"This is a detective," Dagmar Duffy explained. "Someone broke in my place last night."
"Really?" the girl said. "Well this man didn't look like a burglar. He wore a business suit like you," she said to the detective. "With pinstripes."
"Did you see his face?" Mario Villalobos asked.
"No," she said. "Just the back of him. He was sorta big and had black hair."
"Dagmar," Mario Villalobos said, "after we dust this apartment for prints, maybe you oughtta stay with Howard until I tell you to go home."
There were no readable prints that were not Dagmar Duffy's, but one hour later The Bad Czech, Hans and Ludwig were sitting in the Rampart coffee room, bitching loud enough to blister paint.
The detective lieutenant had made calls to Hans' commanding officer and talked personally with The Bad Czech's watch commander.
"Look, there's nothing to get excited about," Mario Villalobos assured them. "I only want you both available if I need you. Is that so tough to do?"
"But, Mario, available to a homicide dick means twenty-four hours a day," Hans griped. "I got a date tonight in Chinatown. I can't be on call!"
"Yeah, I got somethin to do tonight too," The Bad Czech griped. "What if I have to stop what I'm doin and come runnin to be your witness?"
"You, I know where to find every night," Mario Villalobos said to The Bad Czech. "Look, you two saw what the guy looked like. The only others that've seen him are a hotel clerk and a hooker. They're not nearly as reliable as two policemen. In fact, being as they're shorties, they say he's a tall guy. You two say he's not particularly tall."
"I also said I might recognize him," The Bad Czech said.
"Me too," Hans said. "He's maybe fifty or fifty-five. And now you say the black hair and moustache might be phony. I don't know if I'd recognize him or not."
"Look," Mario Villalobos said. "First I have to find somebody for you to recognize. I might not be able to do it, so you got nothing to worry about right now."
"I just hope my big night in Chinatown don't get interrupted," Hans whined. "I gotta find a new girl friend."
Mario Villalobos drove straight to the motel where Lester Beemer died. It was a no-tell motel all right. It offered closed-circuit television with X-rated shows. It promised a water bed in each room, but didn't deliver. The promises were on a marquee over the motel roof, which looked like it would leak buckets in a rain. The manager was no more happy than could be expected.
"I can't remember every guy that comes in," he said to Mario Villalobos. "Especially a month ago."
"It was a bit unusual to have one of your tenants die, wasn't it?"
He was a transient type who didn't own the place and stole only a modest amount from the cash he took in, thus was slightly more honest than the last five managers the owner had employed.
'The cop that came by when I found the body already asked me everything."
"And you gave him the same answers?"
"Yeah. I only remember an old guy renting the room in the afternoon. I was busy and he filled out the card. Gave the name a Lester Beemer and wanted the room for one night and that was it."
"You didn't see another person with him? Not a man nor a woman?"
"I didn't notice. I called the cops soon as I found the guy dead in the morning. I thought he checked out without turning in the key. He checked out all right."
"Lemme see the other register cards for that day," the detective said.
"Gimme a break. I'm busy."
Mario Villalobos glared at the manager who always kept his head down and crawled through life. Finally the manager said, "Aw right. Here, you go through them. I gotta clean up two rooms before three o'clock."
He left Mario Villalobos in the motel office and the detective sat and smoked and went through the stack of register cards. He supposed that one room could be rented four times on a good day with three of those day-rates going into the manager's pocket. Most of the customers gave obviously phony names and addresses and wrote fictitious license numbers.
There were eleven rooms rented on the day that Lester Beemer checked in using his true name, address and car license number. There no doubt were more than that, but he didn't expect the manager to tell him about the cards that got thrown away when he was stealing from the boss.
Three looked fairly legitimate. Two were out-of-state guests and the area codes on the phone numbers at least checked with the state given on the license. One was local and he decided to use the pay phone outside the motel and give it a try.
The male voice that answered the phone couldn't have surprised Mario Villalobos more if he had confessed to murder. What he did was to cooperate fully with a man who spent his life talking to people who lied when the truth would save them.
"Sure, I was at the motel that night," the man said. "Took my girl friend for a naughty birthday treat. Kind of a tacky motel, though. Wasn't what we expected."
"Tell me," Mario Villalobos said, "were you there when the police showed up the next morning?"
"No way," the man said. "A few hours in that tacky place was enough for us. We left about midnight, maybe earlier."
"Did you see an older man who rented the room next to you?"
"No, I saw the girl though."
"What girl?"
"When I went out to the car to get our second bottle of champagne, I saw a skinny blonde running out of the room."
"Running?"
"Almost," he said. "She was in a hurry. Rushed out onto Colorado Boulevard and disappeared."
"Would you recognize a picture? Did you see her face?"
"Not really. Just a skinny blonde with long straight hair. Tacky-looking girl."
"Tacky how?"
"Cheap-looking and flashy. Like a hooker. She wore yellow boots that went nearly up to her shorts. Don't see that around Pasadena too often."
Mario Villalobos was able to secure quite a bit of information at Caltech without having to reveal that he was a cop. The last thing he wanted at this stage of a fruitcake investigation, which was spreading like spilled mercury, was to tell anyone at the university that he was investigating a murder or two.
Caltech was not a large university, some eighty acres, including playing fields. There were about seventy buildings, mixed rather capriciously as to architectural style. Some were old Californian, with tile roofs and Moorish arches. Others were contemporary, of concrete and glass. The male students outnumbered the females eight to one. There were only 1,700 students in all. The impressive off-campus facilities included the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
He read the catalogue and learned that the professorial faculty numbered 266 with nearly an equal number of research faculty. There might be over a hundred visiting professors during any semester, he was told. And of course he knew that it was upon the faculty that he must concentrate his attention, particularly the chemists.
Mario Villalobos had known about as much as the average citizen knows about the handful of first-rate scientific institutes in America. That is, he had known next to nothing. He could see by the literature in the college office that virtually everyone had a Ph. D. after his name, which was to be expected. He learned that an extraordinary number of Nobel Prizes had been awarded to Caltech alumni and faculty, and that this small faculty had a higher percentage of members elected to the National Academy of Sciences and National Academy of Engineering than any educational institution in America. There were always Nobel laureates among the active faculty and in such a place it was to be expected that there were many more who had hopes and dreams of becoming one.
After reading the literature available to anyone who asked for it, Mario Villalobos walked outside and sat in the little amphitheater near a newly constructed chemistry laboratory. He watched the students come and go. He smoked, and enjoyed the little bit of sunshine the day offered. And he thought things over.
So far, he
had one murdered hooker. He had one second-rate private eye who died in a motel he had shared with the now-murdered hooker. Why a motel, he had no idea. Maybe they liked dirty movies.
He had one "foreigner" who tricked with his murdered hooker, and a crazy pansy who believed that the murdered hooker and her private eye may have set up the "foreigner" for blackmail.
He knew that his hooker had the telephone number of Caltech's division of chemistry and he knew that the private eye was a science groupie, and may simply have come to Caltech one day and asked Missy Moonbeam to call him there. Maybe Lester Beemer had only been attending a lecture in the auditorium. They were open to anyone.
But there was the cryptic promise from his murdered hooker to the crazy pansy that a Russian scientist was somehow going to enable her to get off the street. Hence, it did seem possible that the foreigner was a Russian being extorted.
Furthermore, his murdered hooker had done a little corpse-robbing and had stolen her former friend's credit card, which was understandable, given her tastes. But would she also steal his cheap wristwatch? That was not understandable, given her tastes. Or did someone else steal his wristwatch. And why? Did it reveal the time of death?
And finally, he had a tallish black-haired man in a pinstripe suit, who had been stalking one now-dead hooker and one live pansy, probably with a very bad idea in mind for the live pansy.
And all this added up to fruitcake and caviar, since it was absolutely wacky to suppose that there was a mad Russian prowling the streets of Los Angeles and Pasadena for a whore, a pansy and a sleazy old private eye who set him up in a badger game. In any case, it was hardly a motive for multiple murder: a threatened revelation to his wife or boss or commissar that he indulged in kinky sex while visiting Los Angeles, the home of kinky sex.
Some men might murder to hide such a secret. If it meant utter ruin. But homicide investigations usually entailed what was probable, and in this day and age, men might pay quite a bit and do quite a bit to keep an evening with Dagmar Duffy and Missy Moonbeam secret. Yet it was highly improbable that the exposure of bizarre sexual taste was worth throwing people off buildings.
And how in the hell was the private eye killed, if he was killed? Drugs maybe, which made it look like a coronary? He wished there hadn't been a family doctor so willing to sign the death certificate. He wished they hadn't cremated the body.
He had to find out if there were any Russian scientists presently at Caltech. He wanted The Bad Czech and Hans to see every face of every professor in the division of chemistry and chemical engineering, foreigner or not. He had no idea how to arrange it. There was one thing for sure if he was even going to hope to unscramble the mess of fruitcake and caviar before he died of exhaustion: he couldn't tell anyone how little he had. Because he had nothing, not a wisp of hard evidence. He didn't dare tell anyone at this institution what he was really doing here or they might call the L. A. chief of police, and he might get a stress pension sooner than he expected.
Therefore, there was only one thing for a sensible cop to do if he was going to pursue his nutty Russian clue at the California Institute of Technology: Mario Villalobos was going to lie like hell. But he needed a good one. A lie that would fly.
The detective offered a sample from his bag of lies to three people in the administration building. Each person referred him to another person, and finally the rather confusing police matter was referred from the office of the president to the office of the vice-president for institute relations, to the office of the vice-president and provost. He was getting sleepy and cranky. But then he suddenly perked up.
He wished he'd shaved a little closer when he suffered three gotcha cuts at the station after his early date with Dagmar Duffy. He also wished he'd combed his wind-blown hair to hide the bald spot. And while he was at it, he wished he'd worn his new suit and didn't have on a shirt with a frayed collar and that his necktie didn't have a coffee stain on it. And for a moment he didn't even care that her boss was at the Pasadena conference center for the day, because there was a secretary smiling at him with the largest eyes he'd seen lately, outside of Ludwig's. And her hair was even blacker than Ludwig's and much shinier. And then he was sure that his fruitcake investigation had made him bonkers because he realized he was comparing this Latino woman to a panting Rottweiler, and she was anything but a dog.
"My name's Lupe Luna," she said, smiling.
"Mario Villalobos," he said. "Los Angeles Police Department."
"Much o gusto" she said, still smiling.
"I don't speak Spanish," he said. "Well, a little street Spanish."
"With a name like Mario Villalobos?"
Then it slipped out, the thing he had said a thousand times in his life: "I'm not Mexican."
She laughed and said, "I didn't accuse you. But I am. East L. A. Mexican."
"I didn't mean ... What I meant was, my name's Spanish, but I'm not."
"Were you adopted?"
"No, but ... oh well, I'm a counterfeit Mexican. I'll explain it some time if you give me a chance."
"What can we do for you?"
"I'm investigating a very large jewel theft," he said.
She was one of those steady gazers, the kind of mature, good-looking woman who always rattled Mario Villalobos. He knew he wasn't terrific to look at and she was. And she appeared to be smart. And the more he thought of his bag of lies, the dumber they sounded.
"This jewel theft makes my position delicate, as I'll explain." He drew thoughtfully on a cigarette, hoping he looked sincere and thought, Jesus, she has a slight overbite. He was a sucker for women with an overbite. No wedding ring and an overbite! "Uh, you see, this theft took place in a very chic Los Angeles restaurant. My victim is an elderly lady and she was dining there with a young man, a gigolo you might say. And a couple at the next table admired her necklace and they did some talking and became acquainted. The man at the next table was a Caltech professor and he was with a young lady. They didn't give their names."
The detective paused to smoke and he was almost starting to enjoy himself. First of all, because he had her attention, and secondly, he discovered that his story was turning into pretty good soap opera.
"Well, this is sad, all in all," he continued. "The young lounge lizard stole the old lady's necklace and disappeared from her life. We know who he is, but he denies ever knowing our victim and he has an alibi witness as to his whereabouts that night. Are you with me?"
"Yes," Lupe Luna said. "Where does our Caltech professor fit in?"
"Ah," Mario Villalobos said. "You see, your professor and his lady could corroborate my victim and destroy the suspect's alibi. But, and here's the delicate part: we suspect that your Caltech professor was not with his wife that night. The waiter and busboy who served his table said they were sure it was an illicit rendezvous. Thank God for busybody waiters and busboys." Mario Villalobos was starting to wonder if he wrote this as a script, could he sell it?
uNow we've got a problem, Miss Luna ... is it Mrs. Luna?"
"It's Ms. Luna," she said, dashing his hopes, "but you can call me Lupe."
That restored them a bit. "I can't expect your college president to make an announcement asking who was at the restaurant that night. A married man with a young woman? I have to locate him in a discreet manner and assure him that it'll remain confidential."
"But you don't even know the professor's name."
"No. My victim knows what he looks like, but that's another problem. She's a distraught old lady. What I'd like to do is bring the waiter and busboy here and have them look at pictures of your faculty. And if we can narrow it down to people who look like the witness, maybe the waiter and busboy could see the professors in the flesh. In their classroom or laboratories or something? Very discreetly. We can't embarrass your professor if we want to make our case. We need his full cooperation, and if he's a married man having a night out, well ..."
"I don't know how current all our pictures are. He may have been a visiting member o
f the research faculty. We have nearly two hundred research fellows."
"My victim thinks he was connected with the division of chemistry and chemical engineering."
"I can think of something that might help," she said. "Tomorrow night's one of our many open-house nights. Lots of chemists will be milling around along with outside people who donate money to Caltech."
"Do you have any visiting scientists from, say, the Iron Curtain countries?"
"What's that got to do with the professor you're looking for?"
"He, uh, he ... mentioned a visiting scientist from ... I think it was Russia."
"Might be biology." She held up slender fingers and ticked off the science divisions. uAnd we have chemistry and chemical engineering, engineering and applied science, geological and planetary science, physics, math and astronomy. Take your pick."
"How about chemistry?" Mario Villalobos asked. "Any Russians here now?"
"I haven't heard of any. When Russians come it's different than visitors from anywhere else, even Red China. Each Russian scientist travels with a party member and a security man. They stay, oh, six weeks to two months. And no women."
"They leave mama back home so they don't defect?"
"Exactly."
"Wonder if they ever feel like doing a little barhopping?" Mario Villalobos said it casually. "In some decadent capitalist place. Like Los Angeles, for instance?"
"I've heard they're pretty well under control," she said. "No barhopping without Comrade Vladimir tagging along."
"But they must get a little romance-starved, with Olga back on the Volga?"
"I'm sure it'll be okay if you want to come tomorrow night," she said. "I hear there's going to be wine and cheese set up in the Athenaeum patio for all the visitors. You like wine and cheese?"
"I like margaritas and came asada," Mario Villalobos said. "Being a counterfeit Mexican and all."
"What's that about?" she asked, smiling again. "Your Hispanic name?"
"I'd love to tell you about it," he said. "Tomorrow afternoon I'll bring my waiter and busboy to look at all available faculty photos. If that doesn't help, we'll come to the open house for wine and cheese. You gonna be there?"
the Delta Star (1983) Page 19
