by Bob Bickford
“Do you smell it?” she asked. “I hate fire. I'm afraid of it. You saw the burned house out at the ranch?”
I nodded. “I saw it.”
“That was my home,” she said, “When I was a girl. I still own the property. It belonged to my father and I was his only heir, if you can call it that. He didn't have a penny to leave me… just the land with avocado trees. The county got ready to take it for taxes years ago, but I paid them.”
“What have you been doing there? It looks abandoned.”
“It isn't abandoned,” she said. “June is still there.”
“What do you mean? June is still there? I thought you wanted me to find her.”
There was a long silence. Finally she answered, her voice so soft I almost couldn't hear her. “You don't understand. I want you to find out what happened to her, Mister Crowe. I know where she is. I don't need you to find her.”
“There's a lot more you aren't telling me,” I said. “That's why I don't understand.”
“My family was murdered,” she said. “It wasn't an accident.”
“I need more than that.”
She shook her head and clasped her arms in front of her. “I can't tell you more than I already have,” she said. “Not yet.”
“You offer me a piece of birthday cake, show me an old manuscript, and ask me to find an imaginary girl named June…”
She looked away from the street and over her shoulder at me. “She isn't imaginary,” she said. “I can show her to you.”
“She's been dead for twenty-five years and you'll show her to me?”
“I'll show her to you . . . any time you say.”
I had heard enough.
“I don’t know how to beg,” she said. “I’ve tried to never ask anyone for anything, ever.”
My hands were spread. “I wouldn’t even know how to start,” I said. “Everyone seems to know something about everything except me.”
“What would you charge just for trying?”
“Oh, hell, I don’t know. You still owe me a piece of birthday cake, I guess.”
Her face started out expressionless and then her smile flickered and flared into beautiful.
“You'll work for me for a piece of cake?”
“Why not?” I asked. “I don't know how much to charge for an imaginary job. Birthday cake is no crazier than the rest of it.”
“It's a deal,” she said.
She reached across the desk to shake my hand. Her fingers were warm, and felt strong. She and stood up.
“You didn't ask me what the second thing is,” she said. “The other thing I want you to do.”
I raised my eyebrows and waited.
“I want you to kill a man named Sal Cleveland.”
“Sal Cleveland?” I was stunned. “That’s the husband of the woman killed on your ranch. You want me to kill Sal Cleveland?”
“Yes, I know all about it.” She shook her head once, impatient. “He hurt June. I want you to find out what he did to June and then I want you to kill him.”
The crazy was getting dark, and I couldn’t keep up with it.
“Back in 1922?” I asked. “I don't kill people, Miss Kahlo. I'm a licensed private investigator. That isn't what we do.”
“I'll tell you a secret, Mister Crowe.”
Her face stayed absolutely still. She slipped on her dark glasses, like a curtain coming down. “I see things,” she said. “You're going to want to kill him. When you know everything, you’re going to want to kill him more than anything in the world.”
“You're seeing things that aren't there,” I said. “I’ve never wanted to kill anyone. I want to see him arrested, if I can prove he was involved with his wife’s death.”
“Arresting him isn’t good enough,” she said and stood up. “You’ll see.”
She didn’t seem like a woman who would notice if I stood up to show her out, so I stayed in my seat as she left. I gave her a half-salute and watched her pull the door closed behind her. She looked good, doing it. Her perfume lingered, faint as imagination, and I was surprised by the little pang of regret I felt at her leaving.
I sat for a while afterward and thought about things. It was still too early for a drink. I looked at the glass that Charlene Cleveland hadn’t drunk from, sitting on the little shelf in the corner. I wasn’t sure I’d ever use it again.
I had never been superstitious, but Charlene hung around, sort of like Annie’s perfume. No one knew what happened to people when they died, or if anything at all happened, but I thought sometimes dead people hung around after they were gone. I planned to leave Charlene’s glass where it was.
I needed to get busy with a manila file on my desk. A man had hired me to look into his business because he thought his manager was stealing him blind. It had been easy to prove him right. The crooked manager happened to be his brother-in-law, though, so he probably wasn’t going to do much with the proof I had collected. I’d get paid, whatever he decided.
Annie Kahlo had put a damper on any urgency I felt about the day’s work, and I looked out the open window at State Street and thought about things. After a while, I sat up and scribbled the man out a bill, sealed up the folder and got my hat. If I planned to chase butterflies, I’d better make a living while I could.
-Six-
“I'm not an accountant,” I said, “But you really don't have to be a genius to figure this out.”
I sat with a man named Roger Cameron in the office of a used car lot on Chapala Street. The place flogged cars that were high-end, or once had been. The lot was filled with shiny wire-wheeled Hispano-Suizas and Stutzes. There were a couple of concrete repair bays right outside the office door, but being Saturday morning, there were no workers around.
“How much is he stealing?”
“That’s where you’ll need an accountant,” I said. “I just find out what and how.”
He lit a pipe. After he shook out the match, he looked around on the desk for an ashtray. There wasn't one. Cameron owned the place, but he didn't come here much. He had let us in to the after-hours business with his own set of keys.
“I only opened this place on account of my wife,” he said, and shook his head. “Give her no-good brother something to do. Look what I get for it.”
I didn't like him much, but that didn't matter. I didn't like a lot of the people who hired me. He was outraged that his wife's family stole from him, but I knew the woman waiting in his car was his mistress. I figured he had gotten what he deserved, but no one was paying me to decide fair or foul.
“So how's he doing it?” he asked.
I laid it out for him. It wasn't very smart or very complicated.
Santa Teresa hosted a large community rich from oil, the movies, or crime. They flocked up from Hollywood and Bel Air and parked their bright, expensive automobiles in front of the Montelindo Hotel and went inside to drink and carry on and be seen with each other.
They attracted stragglers, the star-struck and leeches and con men, those who had lost a fortune and those who had never had one. They wanted flashy cars valeted from the front of the hotel, too, and settled for the cast-offs from the first group.
The business catered to both groups. If you were rich and you needed room in your garage for a strange little English or Italian sports car, he would sell your pre-war Cord or Auburn for too much money to some grateful moron who wanted to be just like you. He took ten percent off the top, and everyone walked away happy.
“I don't own a single one of these cars,” Cameron said. “No inventory costs…repair and reconditioning on the side. This place should be pure profit, and it's not. It's bleeding money.”
“It's a nice racket,” I agreed.
“So where's all the money going?”
“It's simple. He's not reporting all of his sales,” I said. “Since you don't own any of these cars, there’s no inventory. If he sells a car and doesn’t put the sale on the books, there's nothing missing as far as you're concerned. A lot of the p
eople who consign cars with you don't need the money. They're just making space for new toys. Some of the actual owners might not check on their property for months, if they ever remember to check at all.”
I gestured at the filing cabinet in the corner.
“If you check the consignment agreements in there, you'll find that a whole lot of cars supposed to be here on the lot are gone, sold a long time ago. You owe a lot of people a hell of a lot of money.”
Light dawned in his eyes, and a red flush came into his face. He set his pipe on the corner of the desk. “He's selling cars and pocketing the money?”
“Sure he is,” I said. “If an owner gets persistent, he admits the sale and dates the papers for a recent transaction and pays them off. Then he reports the sale to you, too. He's playing a shell game, and until now, staying a step ahead.”
He stood up and walked to the window.
“It doesn't happen with all of them,” I said. “He's probably got a good sense of when a jalopy can go missing for a while and not be missed. It adds up, though.”
“I can't have him arrested,” he said. “Robert is family.”
“It would ruin your business if this got out,” I said. “These cars are unusual. Sooner or later one of the consignors is going to recognize his old car running around with a new owner, and the balloon's going to go up. If rumors start that this place is shady, you’ll be finished.”
I looked out at the row of gleaming sedans and convertibles. A Packard cabriolet with ivory paint and red wheels sat nearby. I was tempted to ask the price, but I didn't. My Ford suited me better.
“What should I do?” he asked.
“Whatever he siphoned off is gone. People don't steal money so they can put it away for a rainy day. I'd get him out of here and get a bookkeeper to audit things, see what it will cost to clean up the mess.”
I knew he wouldn’t do it. He'd get rid of the brother-in-law and carry on with the crooked game. He'd tell himself he didn't have any choice. Maybe he didn't.
“How do you know what's in the filing cabinet?” he asked. “I assume Robert didn't just show you because you asked.”
I looked at him steadily, and didn't answer. He seemed startled, opened his mouth and then closed it again.
“I'll stop by your office later in the week,” he said. “Settle your bill.”
I pulled a folded piece of paper from my breast pocket.
“Brought it with me,” I said. “Save you the trip.”
“Why don't you join us?” Mrs. Gardiner asked. “We haven't seen you in a long time.”
I leaned over the back fence and looked into my neighbor's yard. After a minute, I nodded and went through the gate. They were sitting at a glass-topped table under an awning. I pulled out a wicker chair, and nodded at Dr. Gardiner. He wore a white shirt and tightly-knotted tie, even to sit in the yard. He nodded back and didn't say anything.
“There's a fire in the hills, you know,” Mrs. Gardiner said. “You can smell the smoke.”
I nodded. She poured a drink for me from an iced pitcher. I sipped it. The gin had been over-sweetened with vermouth, but I drank some anyway. Be a shame to waste it. “They aren't evacuating anyone yet,” I said. “It isn't close enough. Montelindo had a scare last night, but the wind shifted the right way.”
“I imagine we'll stay put,” she said. “We don't scare very easily.”
“I don't scare easily, either, but if they tell you to go, you should go.”
“What exciting things have you been doing lately?” she asked. “Don't leave anything out.”
Whenever I visited, she talked as though her husband wasn't there. She thought my life was exciting, and I told her a little about my cases sometimes, when it didn't compromise a client. In this instance, I didn't really have a client. The last one was dead and the current one was apparently going to pay me in birthday cake.
I told them that a car had been found in an arroyo in front of a burned-out ranch house. A dead woman slumped behind the wheel, a woman who had been my employer until the day before she died. The police found the car because they were directed to the property by our neighbor, Annie Kahlo, who owned the land.
Mrs. Gardiner leaned forward and served me more martini. She was still a good-looking woman at her age, and I didn't mind talking to her.
“Annie is a lovely girl,” she said. “I'm glad you two have finally met.”
“Do you know her well? She's originally from Santa Teresa, isn't she?”
“I've known Annie for many years,” she said. “Yes, she started out here. It was a hard start. Her parents were too much like children themselves to be raising two girls.”
“You know she had a sister, then.”
It wasn't really a question, but I waited for an answer just the same. If Annie wanted me to find out what happened to June, then this might be a source of information. Mrs. Gardiner seemed to know all of Santa Teresa's secrets; the last fifty years' worth, anyway. I decided to be blunt. “Annie has asked me to look into her sister's death,” I said. “In that sense, she's a client. Anything you can tell me might help.”
She looked at me blankly.
“After all of this time has gone by?” she asked. “Whatever for? There never was any mystery about it. The girl and her father died in a house fire at the ranch you were at today. I don't know if the house is still there.”
“There are walls,” I said. “Not much else, but it's there.”
“They found the father's body, what was left of it. The little one had been completely incinerated. A terrible thing. Of course there were rumors.”
“What kind of rumors?” I felt my instincts kick in, even though I didn't think of this as a real case. Mrs. Gardiner took a long drink from her martini glass as though giving herself a reason to talk.
“They said that the father had fallen into debt to local criminals, trying to keep his little farm afloat. He owed money he had no hope of paying, and in the end they took his life as payment. There were whispers he got shot before the house burned down. I never heard if they proved that, or even tried to.”
“No sign of the girl's body?”
“No. So small.” She was lost in some thought. “Nothing left. At the time, I hoped she got shot to death, too, and didn't have to experience the fire. Isn't that an awful thing to think?”
The doctor half-stood and refilled my glass. I was surprised to see it empty.
“It's a kindness,” I said. “So the feeling was that they were murdered?”
“Oh, yes!” she said. “Absolutely murdered. The fire was intentionally set, and a lot of people felt it was a miracle it didn't start a major fire. It did spread a little way up the canyon, and it's hard to get any equipment up there. That probably got more attention than two dead people. It all happened a long time ago. I'm trying to remember what I can.”
“They never caught anyone?”
“They never arrested anyone, even though the whole city knew who had done it. We all knew who the money was owed to, a low man named Cleveland. I remember his name, because of the city. A well-connected man back then, and the last I heard he's fat and happy, still right here in Santa Teresa.”
I was shocked. “Sal Cleveland?” I asked. “Guy who owns the Star-lite Lounge out in Montelindo?”
She gave me an arch look. “I'm sure I wouldn't know about what he owns, or doesn't. His name was Cleveland, though, yes.”
I looked at the flowers and the green grass, lost in thought. Somewhere nearby I heard the sound of a water sprinkler ratcheting back and forth.
“The dead woman they found on Annie Kahlo's ranch this morning,” I finally said. “Her name was Charlene Cleveland. She was Sal Cleveland's wife, and I had just helped her get a divorce. I have a pretty good idea he killed her. Now we're talking about a twenty-five-year-old murder in the same spot, and his name turns up in that one, too. What are the odds?”
“You think he killed his wife? On Annie Kahlo's property?”
“Th
e car slid off the road and ended up in her dooryard,” I said. “I don't think it could be managed on purpose. More like Fate, maybe. I'm pretty sure he killed her though. Shot her in the face.”
“Then it's simple. You should arrest him at once.”
“I don't arrest people, Mrs. Gardiner.”
“Well, shoot him then. You carry a gun. The police won't do anything to him.”
I smiled. She was the second person who thought that my killing Cleveland would be a swell idea. We sat agreeably and drank our martinis. The glasses were crystal, the small yard was manicured, and it was all very nice. The third gin martini tasted a whole lot better than first one, and it was a big enough pitcher to last a while. The sun shone, and there were little bits of ash drifting down from the fire, like snowflakes. I felt glad of the awning over our heads.
“I do plan to talk to Mister Cleveland,” I said. “If he's involved, I'll do something about it.”
“I should hope you would.”
I had a sudden thought. “Can I ask you something? If I were going to ask a woman to step out . . . socially, what would you suggest to do? Around here?”
“Do you mean on a date?” She looked surprised. “You don't seem like a man who needs advice about that.”
“I don't socialize much since I've lived here,” I said. “It was different in the military, or on the cops. I sort of fell into what was expected.”
I hadn't known I would ask for her advice until I did it, and now I wasn't sure what I was asking for.
“This woman's different,” I said. “She doesn't seem much like the night club type, and I don't know much else. She's sort of serious, and artistic, I suppose. Should I take her to the museum, maybe?”
“No one wants to go to the museum. Certainly not on a date.”
She sipped her drink. A bowl of vanilla-colored orchids stood on the table, and she arranged them absently while she thought about it. Dr. Gardiner watched me steadily while she did it. He didn't bother me any. I was used to him.
“You're talking about Annie Kahlo, aren't you?” She eyed me steadily over the rim of her glass.
“Do you think that's a mistake?” I asked. “She might not welcome it.”
