Los Angeles Noir 2

by Denise Hamilton

  “Easy to know.”

  “A bartender,” she said. “Had been since he was a kid, except for that period with Shevel. Easy friendliness is part of a bartender’s stock in trade—right? Only he didn’t fake it. He honestly liked people. Those old aunties Lauder and White fell all over themselves to get him back. Business has doubled since he took over. If he owned his own place he’d make a bundle.” She remembered he was dead and sadness happened in her face. “Except for one thing.”

  Dave worked on his coffee. “Which was?”

  “He also trusted people. And that’s for losers.”

  “About the rifle?” he prompted her.

  “He didn’t own one,” she said flatly. “I’d have seen it while we were putting away his stuff. No rifle. But I can tell you one thing. If there’d been one, Eddie could have used it. He used to talk about hunting rabbits when he was a kid back in Oklahoma.”

  “Thanks.” Dave tilted up the mug, drained it, set it on the counter, got off the stool. “And for the coffee.” He checked his watch. “But now it’s out into the cold rain and the mean streets again.”

  “Aw,” she said.

  Climbing the gritty stairs up the cliff face, he still heard the surf. But as he neared the top there was the wet tire sibilance of traffic on the the coast road and the whine of a car engine that didn’t want to start. At the railing, the little landlord, Dieterle, sat in a faded old Triumph, swearing. Dave walked over and wondered in a shout if he could help. Dieterle, with a sour twist of his mouth, gave up.

  “Ah, it’ll catch, it’ll catch. Son of a bitch knows I’m in a hurry. Always acts like this.” Rain had misted the big round lenses of his glasses. He peered up at Dave through them. “You’re some kind of cop, no? I saw you with them on the beach. I heard you tell Bambi O’Mara you didn’t think Lily killed Robinson.” Dieterle cocked his head. “You think Bambi did it?”

  “Why would I think that?”

  “Hell, she was in love with Robinson. And I mean, off the deep end. Weird, a smart chick like that. Not to mention her looks. You know she was a Playboy centerfold?”

  “It’s raining and I’m getting wet,” Dave said. “Tell me why she’d kill Robinson so I can go get Slocum to put cuffs on her.”

  Dieterle’s mouth fell open. “Ah, now, wait. I didn’t mean to get her in trouble. I figured you knew.” He blinked anxious through the glasses. “Anybody around here could have told you. She made a spectacle of herself.” Maybe the word reminded him. He took off the hornrims, poked in the dash for a Kleenex, wiped the rain off the lenses. “I mean, what chance did she have?” He dropped the tissues on the floor and put the glasses back on. “Robinson was a fag, worked in a fag bar. It didn’t faze her. So many chicks like that—figure one good lay with them and a flit will forget all about boys. Except Bambi never got the lay. And Robinson got Ed Lily. And did she hate Lily! Hoo!”

  “And so she shot Robinson dead.” Dave straightened, looked away to where rain-glazed cars hissed past against the rain-curtained background of another cliff. “Hell hath no fury, etcetera?”

  “And framed Lily for it. You follow?”

  “Thanks,” Dave said. “I’ll check her out.”

  “Any time.” Dieterle reached and turned the key and the engine started with a snarl. “What’d I tell you?” he yelled. The car backed, scattering wet gravel, swung in a bucking U, and headed down the highway toward Surf. Fast. Dave watched. Being in a chronic hurry must be rough on a man who couldn’t stop talking.

  Nobody ate at The Big Cup because it was an openfront place and rain was lashing its white Formica. It faced a broad belt of cement that marked off the seedy shops and scabby apartment buildings of Venice from the beach where red dune fences leaned. Dave got coffee in an outsize cup and took it into a phone booth. After his first swallow, he lit a cigarette and dialled people he knew in the television business. He didn’t learn anything but they’d be able to tell him later.

  He returned the empty mug to the empty counter and hiked a block among puddles to the Billy Budd, whose neon sign buzzed and sputtered as if rain had leaked into it. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes ago it had been noon. A yellowed card tacked to the black door said in faded felt pen that the hours were 12 noon to 2 a.m. But the door was padlocked.

  He put on reading glasses and bent to look for an emergency number on the card and a voice back of him said: “Excuse me.”

  The voice belonged to a bony man, a boy of fifty, in an expensive raincoat and expensive cologne. He was out of breath, pale, and when he used a key on the padlock, his hands shook. He pushed open the door and bad air came out—stale cigarette smoke, last night’s spilled whiskey. He kicked a rubber wedge under the door to hold it open and went inside.

  Dave followed. The place was dark but he found the bar that had a padded leather bevel for the elbows and padded leather stools that sighed. Somewhere at the back, a door opened and fell shut. Fluorescent tubing winked on behind the bar, slicking mirrors, glinting on rows of bottles, stacks of glasses. A motor whined, fan blades clattered, air began to blow along the room. The man came out without his raincoat, without his suit coat. The shirt was expensive too. But he’d sweated it.

  “Weather, right? What can I get you?”

  “Just the answer to a question,” Dave said. “What did you want at Arthur Thomas Robinson’s apartment in Surf this morning?”

  The man narrowed his lovely eyes. “Who are you?”

  Dave told him. “There are details the police haven’t time for. I’ve got time. Can I have your answer?”

  “Will you leave without it? No—I didn’t think so.” The man turned away to drop ice into glasses. He tilted in whiskey, edged in water. He set a glass in front of Dave, held one himself. The shaking of his hand made the ice tinkle. The sound wasn’t Christmasy. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see if I can shock you. Ten years ago, Arthur Thomas Robinson and I were lovers.”

  “You don’t shock me,” Dave said. “But it’s not responsive to my question.”

  “I wrote him letters. I wanted those letters back before his ohso-righteous brother got his hands on them. I didn’t know how to go about it. I simply drove over to Robbie’s. I mean—I never see television. What do I know about police procedure?”

  “Ten years ago,” Dave said. “Does that mean Robinson left you for Bruce K. Shevel?”

  “That evil mummy,” the man said.

  “Clear up something for me.” Dave tried the whiskey. Rich and smooth. They didn’t serve this out of the well. “Shevel said he’d met Robinson in the hospital. Robinson was an orderly. A neighbor named Bambi O’Mara says Robinson was a barkeep all his life.”

  The man nodded. “I taught him all he knew. He was eighteen when he drifted in here.” The man’s eyes grew wet. He turned away and lit a cigarette. “He’d never had another job in his life. Orderly? Be serious! He fainted at the sight of blood. No, one sinister night Bruce Shevel walked in here, slumming. And that was the beginning of the end. An old man. He was, even then. He must be all glamour by now.”

  “You know that Robinson kept your letters?”

  “Yes. He was always promising to return them but he didn’t get around to it. Now he never will.” The man’s voice broke and he took a long swallow from his drink. “That damn brother will probably have apoplexy when he reads them. And of course he’ll read them. His type are always snooping after sin. Claim it revolts them but they can’t get enough. And of course he hated me. Always claimed I’d perverted his baby brother. We had some pretty ugly dialogues when he found out Robbie and I were sleeping together. I wouldn’t put it past him to go to the liquor board with those letters. You’ve got to have unimpeachable morals to run a bar, you know. It could be the end of me.”

  “I don’t think he’s that kind of hater,” Dave said. “Are you Lauder?”

  “I’m White, Wilbur White. Bob Lauder and I have been partners since we got out of the Army—World War II. We’ve had bars all over L.A. C
ounty. Fifteen years here in Venice.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Bob? He’ll be in at six. Today’s my long day. His was yesterday. It’s getting exhausting. We haven’t replaced Robbie yet.” He tried for a wan smile. “Of course we never will. But we’ll hire somebody.”

  “You live in Venice?” Dave asked.

  “Oh, heavens, no. Malibu.”

  It was a handsome new place on the beach. Raw cedar planking. An Alfa Romeo stood in the carport. Dave pulled the company car into the empty space beside it. The house door was a slab at the far end of a walk under a flat roof overhang. He worked a bell push. Bob Lauder was a time getting to the door. When he opened it he was in a bathrobe and a bad mood. He was as squat and pudgy as his partner was the opposite. His scant hair was tousled, his eyes were pouchy. He winced at the daylight, what there was of it.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Dave said, “but I’m death claims investigator for Medallion Life. Arthur Robinson was insured with us. He worked for you. Can I ask you a few questions?”

  “The police asked questions yesterday,” Lauder said.

  “The police don’t care about my company’s ten thousand dollars,” Dave said. “I do.”

  “Come in, stay out, I don’t give a damn.” Lauder flopped a hand and turned away. “All I want is sleep.”

  It was Dave’s day for living rooms facing the Pacific. Lauder dropped onto a couch and leaned forward, head in hands, moaning quietly to himself.

  “I’ve heard,” Dave said, “that Robinson was good for business, that you were happy to get him back.”

  “He was good for business,” Lauder droned.

  “But you weren’t happy to get him back?”

  “Wilbur was happy.” Lauder looked up, red-eyed. “Wilbur was overjoyed. Wilbur came un-goddam-glued.”

  “To the extent of letting Robinson take what he wanted from the till?”

  “How did you know? We didn’t tell the police.”

  Dave shrugged. “He was hurting for money.”

  “Yeah. Wilbur tried to cover for him. I let him think it worked. But I knew.” He rose and tottered off. “I need some coffee.”

  Dave went after him, leaned in a kitchen doorway and watched him heat a pottery urn of leftover coffee on a bricked-in burner deck. “How long have you and Wilbur been together?”

  “Thirty years”—Lauder reached down a mug from a hook—“since you ask.”

  “Because you didn’t let the Arthur Thomas Robinsons of this world break it up, right? There were others, weren’t there?”

  “You don’t look it, you don’t sound it, but you have got to be gay. Nobody straight could guess that.” Lauder peered into the mouth of the pot, hoping for steam. “Yes. It wasn’t easy but it was worth it. To me. If you met Wilbur, you’d see why.”

  Dave didn’t. “Do you own a hunting rifle? Say a thirty-thirty?”

  Lauder turned and squinted. “What does that mean? Look, I was working in the bar when Robbie got it. I did not get jealous and kill him, if that’s what you’re thinking. Or did I do it to stop him skimming fifty bucks an evening off the take?”

  “I’m trying to find out what to think,” Dave said.

  “Try someplace else.” Lauder forgot to wait for the steam. He set the mug down hard and sloshed coffee into it. “Try now. Get out of here.”

  “If you bought a rifle in the past five-six years,” Dave said, “there’ll be a federal registration record.”

  “We own a little pistol,” Lauder said. “We keep it at the bar. Unloaded. To scare unruly trade.”

  Where Los Santos Canyon did a crooked fall out of tree-green hills at the coast road, there was a cluster of Tudor-style buildings whose 1930 stucco fronts looked mushy in the rain. Between a shop that sold snorkles and swim-fins and a hamburger place Dave remembered from his childhood, lurked three telephone booths. Two were occupied by women in flowered plastic raincoats and hair curlers, trying to let somebody useful know their cars had stalled. He took the third booth and dialled the television people again.

  While he learned that Bambi O’Mara had definitely been in Bear Paw, Montana at the time a bullet made a clean hole through the skull of the man she loved, Dave noticed a scabby sign across the street above a door with long black iron hinges. L. DIETERLE REAL ESTATE. He glanced along the street for the battered Triumph. It wasn’t in sight but it could be back of the building. He’d see later. Now he phoned Lieutenant Ken Barker.

  He was at his desk. Still. Or again. “Dave?”

  “Shevel is lying. He wouldn’t lie for no reason.”

  “Your grammar shocks me,” Barker said.

  “He claims he met Robinson when he was in the hospital. After his so-called accident. Says Robinson was an orderly. But at the Sea Shanty they say Shevel walked in one night and met Robinson. According to a girlfriend, Robinson was never anything but a bartender. You want to check Junipero Hospital’s employment records?”

  “For two reasons,” Barker said. “First, that rifle didn’t have any prints on it and it was bought long before Congress ordered hunting guns registered. Second, an hour ago the Coast Guard rescued a kid in a power boat getting battered on the rocks off Point Placentia. It wasn’t his power boat. It’s registered to one Bruce K. Shevel. The kid works at the Marina. My bet is he was heading for Mexico.”

  “Even money,” Dave said. “His name is Manuel—right? Five foot six, a hundred twenty pounds, long hair? Somewhere around twenty?”

  “You left out something,” Barker said. “He’s scared to death. He won’t say why, but it’s not just about what happened to the boat. I’ll call Junipero.”

  “Thanks,” Dave said. “I’ll get back to you.”

  He left the booth and dodged rain-bright bumpers to the opposite curb. He took a worn step up and pushed the real estate office door. Glossy eight-by-tens of used Los Santos and Surf sidestreet bungalows curled on the walls. A scarred desk was piled with phone directories. They slumped against a finger-smeared telephone. A nameplate by the telephone said, L. Dieterle. But the little man wasn’t in the chair back of the desk.

  The room wasn’t big to start with but a Masonite partition halved it and behind this a typewriter rattled. A lumberyard bargain door was shut at the end of the partition. Tacked to the door was a pasteboard dimestore sign, NOTARY, and under it a business card. Verna Marie Casper, Public Stenographer. He rapped the door and a tin voice told him to come in.

  She’d used henna on her hair for a lot of years. Her makeup too was like Raggedy Ann’s. Including the yarn eyelashes. She was sixty but the dress was off the Young Misses rack at Grant’s. Glass diamonds sparked at her ears, her scrawny throat, her wrists, the bony hands that worked a Selectric with a finish like a Negev tank. She wasn’t going to, but he said anyway: “Don’t let me interrupt you. I just want to know when Mr. Dieterle will be back.”

  “Can’t say,” she said above the fast clatter of the type ball. “He’s in and out. A nervous man, very nervous. You didn’t miss him by long. He was shaking today. That’s a new one.”

  “He thinks the storm is going to knock down his apartments in Surf,” Dave said. “Will you take a message for him?”

  “What I write down I get paid for,” she said. “He was going through phone books. So frantic he tore pages. Really. Look”—suddenly she stopped typing and stared at Dave—“I just sublet this space. We’re not in business together. He looks after his business. I look after mine. I’m self-sufficient.”

  “Get a lot of work, do you?”

  “I’m part of this community,” she said and began typing again. “A valued part. They gave me a testimonial dinner at the Chamber of Commerce last fall. Forty years of loyal public service.”

  “I believe it,” Dave said. “Ever do anything for a man named Robinson? Recently, say—the last two weeks or so? Arthur Thomas Robinson?”

  She broke off typing again and eyed him fiercely. “Are you a police officer? Are you authorized to have such i
nformation?”

  “He wanted you to write out an affidavit for him, didn’t he? And to notarize it?”

  “Now, see here! You know I can’t—”

  “I’m not asking what was in it. I think I know. I also think it’s what got him killed.”

  “Killed!” She went white under the circles of rouge. “But he only did it to clear his conscience! He said—” She clapped a hand to her mouth and glared at Dave. “You! You’re trying to trick me. Well, it won’t work. What I’m told is strictly confidential.”

  Dave swung away. His knuckles rapped the Masonite as he went out of her cubbyhole. “Not with this partition,” he said. “With Dieterle on the other side.”

  Past batting windshield wipers, he saw the steeple down the block above the dark greenery of old acacia trees. Merwin Robinson had told the truth about the neighborhood. Old one-story frame houses with weedy front yards where broken-down autos turned to rust. Stray dogs ran cracked sidewalks in the rain. An old woman in man’s shoes and hat dragged a coaster wagon through puddles.

  CHURCH OF GOD’S ABUNDANCE was what the weathered signboard said. God’s neglect was what showed. Dave tried the front doors from which the yellow varnish was peeling. They were loose in their frame but locked. A hollow echo came back from the rattling he gave them. He followed a narrow strip of cement that led along the shingled side of the church to a shingle-sided bungalow at the rear. The paint flaking off it was the same as what flaked off the church, white turning yellow. There was even a cloverleaf of stained glass in the door. Rev. Merwin Robinson in time-dimmed ink was in a little brass frame above a bell push.

  But the buzz pushing it made at the back of the house brought nobody. A dented gray and blue sedan with fifties tail fins stood at the end of the porch. Its trunk was open. Some of Arthur Thomas Robinson’s clothes were getting rained on. Dave tried the tongue latch of the house door and it opened. He put his head inside, called for the preacher. It was dusky in the house. No lights anywhere. Dave stepped inside onto a threadbare carpet held down by overstuffed chairs covered in faded chintz.