by Bob Bickford
She set her drink down and put her hands together.
“I think it's wonderful,” she said. “She's very beautiful, you know, and she doesn't socialize much. She wouldn't be right for most people. I don’t think many men would understand her.”
I didn't understand her either, but I didn't think I should bring it up.
“You might like to go to a movie together,” she said. “Especially since you're both shy. There's a new Dick Powell film playing that's very popular now. Johnny O'Clock it's called. Evelyn Keyes is in it. Gangsters and so on.”
I considered it.
“Movies are very impersonal,” she said. “Suited for people who don't really know each other. It can be easier later, if one or both of you wants to brush the evening off as not being a real date, or if you never want to see each other again.”
“I think I'll have to see her again, regardless. Since I'm working for her.”
“Well, a movie isn't a good way to get to know a person, especially if you do think you want to see that person again. A dinner is better, in a quiet place.”
She was struck by an idea. “Have you tried Chinese food? It's becoming quite popular. They always had it in San Francisco, of course, but now you're finding it in other places. I like it. There's a new restaurant on Garden Street, on the corner of Garden and Cota. It looks authentic, paper lanterns and so on. The owners are real Chinese.”
Dr, Gardiner spoke up. “Ortega,” he said, and I looked at him, surprised. I hadn't known he could talk.
“Garden and Ortega Streets,” he said. “That's where it is.”
“Of course, my darling,” she said. “You do the driving, so you should know.”
I drained my third drink. I needed to go, while I could still walk in a straight line.
“That might be just the thing,” I said. “I'll think about it.”
“After dinner, you could talk or go dancing,” she said. “There are all sorts of possibilities. I insist that you come and tell me about it afterward. It was my idea, after all.”
I promised her I would, and left them there.
-Seven-
I took a nap to let the martinis fade. When I woke up, the afternoon had mostly gone, and the telephone shrilled in the kitchen. I found my feet and went to answer it.
“Coroner's officially pronounced,” Rex Raines said. “Charlene Cleveland's death is a homicide.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“She's still on the table. They just finished with her. She had two broken legs, both compound fractures. Her insides were all busted up from the steering wheel. Runtz said she would have died anyway, even without the bullet.”
“Still murder,” I said. “The bastard.”
“It gets worse. Her shoes were full of blood. Doc says the bullet killed her more or less instantly, so she couldn't have been shot up on the road. She was alive and bleeding in the wreck for a while before she got it. Makes a second car more likely. Someone walked down the drive and finished her where she sat.”
“No fight, no struggle,” I said. I could feel the heat in my face. “She was shot in cold blood while she sat there dying. You know what that means?”
“Means I'm going to need a statement from you,” he said. “That's what it means. You know why. On account of her . . . relationship to you, and the check in her purse.”
He sounded wary. Since the station was just up the street from my house, I told him I'd be there the next day. We agreed on a time, and he got ready to hang up.
“I planned to call you anyway,” I said. “Want to ask you something.”
“Fire away.”
“I need to know how to get in touch with Sal Cleveland. I want to have a talk with him, someplace other than at the Star-lite Lounge. They'll be watching for me there. He knows I can’t just let this go.”
“Stay away from it.” His voice went flat.
“Charlene Cleveland was my client,” I said. “We both know she got killed because she had the nerve to get a divorce. He killed her.”
“That's my job to find out if he did,” he said. “You stay away from him.”
“I can go where you can't. Anything I find out, I'll gift wrap it and bring it straight to you.”
He got quiet. I could hear the ghosts of other voices in the buzz on the line.
“What the hell,” he sighed. “Who am I kidding? I don't care if you twist him up. Just take care he doesn't twist you first. He's been doing this for a long time. He has a lot of muscle, and he knows a lot of people. You'll be getting in deep.”
He told me that Cleveland spent time in another bar he owned, a place on Olive Street called the Hi-Lo Club.
“I know the place,” I said, surprised. “It’s a dump. Not what I would expect for a guy owns the Star-lite.
“Maybe he’s more at home in places like the Hi-Lo. Does his real business there, out of sight.”
I started to thank him, but he had already hung up. I washed my face and went outside. The sky was a peculiar dark orange, a false sunset stretched from one horizon to the other over the rooftops across the street. The smoke from the wildfire caused it, but that didn't make it feel any less alien.
The fire burned just to the east of the city, somewhere in the Padre Leone hills. The radio said the highway south to Los Angeles might be closed soon. The canyon roads were all blocked, and they were evacuating some of the homes and ranches in the hills. We were in for a long summer. The sage and chaparral were already as dry as tinder. Brush fires would be a regular thing this year, until the December rains came and turned the low mountains green.
As near as I could tell from the news reports, the fire burned somewhere in the neighborhood of the remains of the Kahlo ranch. It made me wonder how the old barn and groves had managed to survive all these years undisturbed. When the fires came and swept through the arroyos, fueled by the hot winds, there was nothing much anyone could do but leave the area. The Kahlo ranch should have been gone by now, wiped out by fire and then overgrown by new brush. It was still there, though.
Santa Teresa huddled against the ocean, mostly safe from whatever happened in the hills. It was a Spanish mission town, made of egg-crème stucco topped with red tile. A long time ago, the old priests had set up the missions to be a day’s horseback ride apart, all the way up the coast from San Diego to San Francisco. I was never clear on why they did that in the first place, but a lot of the towns on the coastline had started out as missions.
I had been here a little over two years. When the war ended for me, I got discharged in Los Angeles. I had been stationed in Hawaii, and I liked it there. Sometimes I had thought that after the war, I might stay in Honolulu. I imagined myself marrying one of the native girls and having a normal, simple life a long way away from what I'd become. As it turned out, I came back stateside on a hospital ship, so staying in Hawaii wasn't one of my options. When I left the hospital, I didn't have much desire and even less reason to go back east. Southern California wasn't Hawaii, but it was a hell of a lot closer to it than Missouri.
I took my resume to the L.A. County sheriffs, and got taken on, but I changed my mind before my first day.
I had been a cop in St. Louis, and then a military cop, and I was sick of being a cop. It made me tired, wondering why I had spent so many years doing something so pointless. The people I arrested went out and did the same things again, like they had no choice. The people that I protected were worse characters than the ones I protected them from, at least half the time.
I answered an ad, got the necessary permits and permissions, and went to work for a private agency. After a few months working for them, a case took me up the coast to Santa Teresa. I stood in a telephone booth, looking for someone in the book. It's surprising how much detective work gets done in telephone directories. On impulse, I looked at the listings for private detectives in the city, and found there weren't any. A month later, I had a dusty office on State Street, and a dark house on Figueroa.
It was hard
going for the first year, but I still had a little money coming in from the army, so I made do until business started to trickle in, and here I was, not doing too badly, either.
An unwritten rule of detective work: You don't get too involved with clients. You don't make judgments, and you don't take the things you saw personally. Between Annie Kahlo and Charlene Cleveland, I was breaking that rule. If I planned to break it, everything pointed at Sal Cleveland, so I knew I might as well start with him.
A guy sat on the running board of a new '47 Chevrolet coupe at the curb in front of my house. He wore a sleeveless white undershirt and a porkpie hat with a bright band. The car had a radio. The door was open and he had it running off the battery. I could hear the news, and I went down to the sidewalk to talk to him.
“What's new?” I asked him.
He peered up at me, and then took the cigarette out of his mouth. I thought I recognized him. He lived in the building across the street. I wondered if he was the one who lived in back and sold Mexican marihuana out of his kitchen. Judging by the new car with its fancy radio, the reefer business wasn't half bad.
“They say it might rain,” he said. “Brother, I hope so.”
I looked up. The strange orange sky had darkened around the edges. Flakes of ash from the fire drifted down and swirled in eddies of air. It didn't look like rain to me, and I said so.
“You never know,” he said. “This time of year, it comes in off the ocean in a hurry. Hard rain is what we need. This fire's already gotten close to Montelindo. Radio says they're getting people out of there.”
I was surprised. Montelindo was a wealthy community five or six miles south of the city. I didn't think about the filthy rich being troubled by things like fire. I pictured a black, smoking landscape dotted with swimming pools.
“That close?” I said. “Last I heard, it still burned up in the canyons.”
“Winds take it places fast,” he shrugged. “It could go anywhere. Why we need rain, and a lot of it.”
“Let's hope so, then,” I said. “Out of control fire is a bad thing.”
“That's the thing about these fires. They aren't out of control. Once they get going, they go where they want and do what they want. There isn't any way to stop them. They're the ones in control and they burn until they don't feel like it anymore.”
A few blocks away, a siren started up, rising from a growl to a wail. It seemed to be headed in our general direction, and we both looked across the street at the darkening rooftops.
“Most trouble is like that,” he said. “It stops when it wants to, and not before.”
“Or when it rains,” I said. “You can always hope for rain.”
We nodded at each other like we each had any idea what the other was talking about, and I turned to go.
“Wait a second,” he said. “I want to ask you something.”
I stopped and waited.
“They say you're a private detective,” he said. “That means you work with the cops?”
“No,” I said. “Sometimes we're on the same side, and sometimes we're not. I don't work for them though.”
“You got a card?”
I fished out my wallet and gave him one.
“I might need you sometime,” he called after me.
I waved at him without turning around. I didn't think he had a clue what I did, but who knew. There weren't enough new clients out there to be stingy with my cards. I went up the steps onto Annie's veranda. She answered the door before I touched the bell.
“I had a feeling you were coming,” she said.
Her braided hair hung over her shoulder. She wore something loose and cotton that looked hand-painted. I caught her fragrance, something that went well with the smell of the flowers wafting from the hallway behind her. Her face was composed, and her dark eyes stayed on mine. My breath felt a little short.
“Do you want to come in?”
“I'm just here for a minute,” I said. “I wanted to ask you something.”
Her expression lightened. “You've found out something about June?”
“Not exactly. Not yet. I wanted to ask if you'd like to have dinner with me.”
She stared at me. Her expression changed to something very close to fear. She had one hand on the door, and looked ready to swing it closed in my face.
“Dinner?” she said. “I wouldn't . . . I wouldn't know what to do.”
“You wouldn't have to do anything,” I said. “It would just be having dinner with me.”
We stood there looking at each other. Her fingers tightened on the doorframe.
“Now?” she asked. Her voice was barely a whisper.
“No,” I said. “Not now. Tomorrow night. I'll come at eight o'clock.”
She nodded. Then I stood back and let her close the door.
-Eight-
I sat in Rex Raine's office in the back of the Santa Teresa station. The police stenographer sat off to one side. She was a young woman with brown hair and a dark green dress that looked too hot to wear on a day like today. She looked at me through the lenses of her glasses like I was some kind of rare bug. Raines stared up at the ceiling while I gave my statement. Since she seemed more interested in what I said than he did, I talked to her.
I said that Charlene Cleveland had come into my office on May 28, a Wednesday. I knew that because I had looked it up on my desk calendar. She was married to Sal Cleveland, a man who owned a place called the Star-lite Lounge in Montelindo, and probably a lot of other things. Mrs. Cleveland told me her husband had been physically abusive throughout their year-long marriage, and that his occasional slaps had progressed into beatings and humiliations in the bedroom.
She hadn’t been a babe in the woods, but she got tired of being a punch. She had talked about leaving him and he had threatened her. She wanted incontestable grounds for divorce. There was rarely such a thing, especially if you had connections. I had done some rooting around, and I got lucky.
I stopped talking for a moment, and the stenographer looked up. I wasn't ready to tell the cops about the photograph of the Mexican prostitutes in the truck. I didn't have any reservations about selling him out. He had canceled our deal when he killed his wife. I didn't know how to explain the photo without involving Danny Lopez. I had a hunch I should hold the information in reserve anyway, so I lied a little.
I told them Sal spent a lot of his time in the company of prostitutes and dancers, and I had taken pictures of him straying. A packet of glossy photographs would give a judge enough reason to grant Charlene a divorce with minimal fuss. It made it cheaper for Sal to cave in. It made for a common enough scenario. He was willing to trade my photos of adultery for his wife's freedom.
There wasn't much else to tell. I would have told them that I liked Charlene Cleveland a little bit, even if I had turned her down. I would have told them she had a little bit of a spark, and that she ran around with a sleazy crowd but hung onto some dignity. I would have told them that no one should have shot her in the face for it, but it wasn't what we were here for, so I kept it to myself.
When I finished talking, Raines nodded and the steno girl shut down her machine and stood up. She smoothed her dress over her hips and turned her back to me while she packed it away. Her glasses hid an awfully good figure.
When she was gone, Raines stood up and raised the venetian blinds on the office window. He slid the glass up to let in some air. I could hear the cops beneath the window, getting into and out of their prowl cars, coming and going. He stood and looked out, and then turned away and came back to the desk.
“You're not thinking of doing something stupid, are you?” he asked.
“Stupid like what?”
He flicked my question away, irritated. “You're not going to let this pass, Crowe, and we both know it. Problem is, you don't know what you're getting yourself into here.”
“Cleveland slapped her around,” I said. “And worse. She had a lot more sand than he gave her credit for, and she got free of him
.”
“You don't know what she got into after she got her divorce papers, or who she mixed up with,” he said. “It could have been a new boyfriend that killed her.”
“Cleveland killed her. We both know it.”
“Right now, I have as much evidence against you as I do him.”
I thought about things for a minute. When a minute wasn't enough, I lit a cigarette to buy another.
“What's the deal with Cleveland, as far as you know?” I asked. “What's his racket?”
“You must know about him,” he said, eyebrows raised. “Your line of work, you have to have crossed his path.”
I knew plenty about him. “A little bit,” I lied. “Like everyone. I've heard his name mentioned a lot of times. He's connected. East Coast?”
Raines crossed to his desk and picked up a half-cup of cold coffee. He inspected the surface of it for a moment and then poured it into a metal trash can. He pulled a bottle of scotch from a drawer and another cup. When he had poured a pair of short drinks, he pushed mine over and tasted his.
“He isn't really connected,” he said. “Not like you think. He has his thing here, a couple of clubs, a string of hookers, some dope. He has an off-track operation going over a dentist's office on upper State. He doesn't aim for anything too big, doesn't try to expand, and the LA boys leave him alone.”
I tasted my drink. I wasn't sure how clean the cup was, but the scotch was swell stuff for a cop's budget. Raines sat on the corner of the desk, deep in thought, looking out the window again. “I don't think he does the whole gangster thing for the money, exactly,” he said. “He does it for kicks. I think it's a cover for what he really likes to do.”
“You don't say.” My ears pricked up. “What does he really like?”
“Hurting people, I think,” Raines mused. “He likes to hurt people. Beat them up, scare them once in a while, kill them.”
“What I’ve heard, too,” I nodded.
“He lives the life, but it's like all the criminal stuff just gives him a good reason to be a psychopath.”
