by Kip Chase
‘Mind if I talk to him?’ Carmichael asked.
‘Hell, no. Be my guest.’
Horowitz led the way down the hall to a back room and opened the door. Seated at a table inside the room was the guard, Otis Phipps. His watery blue eyes were puffed and red-rimmed. His seamed face reflected an expression of fatigue and despair. Seated on the opposite side of the table was a burly plain-clothes sheriff’s man. Another man, standing beside Phipps with his hand on Phipp’s shoulder, was speaking. His voice was harsh.
‘Now, look,’ he was saying, ‘we’re tired. You’re tired. We all want to go home and get some rest. How long are you going to keep us here playing games? Huh?’
When the door opened the man speaking nodded briefly to Carmichael and Horowitz, then returned to Phipps.
In answer to the question the guard only nodded his head slightly. His eyes started to close.
The deputy shook Phipps roughly by the shoulder. His voice was sharp. ‘No sleeping, Phipps. Come on, make it easy on yourself. We don’t think you killed anybody or stole anything. We just know damn well you’re holding out on us. The sooner you give us the straight story the better off we’ll all be. Now how about it?’
With weary resignation the guard opened his eyes again. ‘Why don’t you believe me’, he almost whispered. ‘Why don’t you believe me?’
‘Because it’s a damn lie’, the deputy said. ‘That’s why we don’t believe you.’
While the questioning continued Carmichael turned to Horowitz and said softly, ‘Mind if I talk to him?’
Horowitz nodded.
Carmichael wheeled himself over next to the guard. The deputy who was standing moved out of the way, mopping his brow with an enormous white handkerchief.
‘Mr. Phipps’, Carmichael began quietly.
The guard looked at Carmichael, blinking stupidly.
‘My name is Carmichael. I am a retired policeman. I am helping out the sheriffs on this case.’
Phipps nodded weakly. ‘Yes, I know’, he said in a cracked voice. ‘I read about you in the papers.’
‘You are retired, too, aren’t you, sir?’ Carmichael asked.
The guard warmed to the friendly tone. ‘Yes. I finished off with the company back home a couple of years ago. The missus and I moved out to California. Always wanted to live in California, but I got restless. You know how it is.’ Phipps stopped talking briefly and sighed deeply. His gnarled hands toyed aimlessly with one of the buttons on his rumpled suit. The suit was grey, Carmichael noted, poorly fitting, and well worn. Phipps went on. ‘So I took this job with this here security company. It don’t pay much, but every little bit helps and it don’t make me feel quite so useless.’
Carmichael nodded sympathetically. I know how you feel, Mr. Phipps. Believe me, I do. Now, do you understand why you’re being kept here like this?’
For the first time the guard’s eyes showed a spark of life. ‘Sure I do. These here coyotes think I’m lying to ’em. They don’t believe me. They’ve been hammering away at me since evening last. Same questions. First one, then the other. Then two other guys come in. Then these two guys come back.’ He glared balefully at the two deputies. ‘And you know what they do, Mr. Carmichael? You wouldn’t believe it. I get thirsty and they drink water right in front of me and won’t give me no water. Can you imagine that? Well, they finally gave me a little. But it ain’t right. It ain’t constitutional.’
‘Do you know why they don’t believe you, Mr. Phipps?’
The mask of resignation dropped back over the guard’s face. ‘Yes. I know why. ‘It’s hard for me to believe myself, to tell you the truth. I just don’t understand it. Don’t understand it a-tall.’
‘Now, Mr. Phipps, I know you’ve probably gone through this a hundred times, but just as a favour to me would you mind telling me again just what happened that night? Don’t leave out anything.’
‘No. I don’t mind telling ya. There ain’t hardly anything to tell. I come on at five o’clock, same as usual. A company car brings me up there. I went in to check with this Goodall fella. Them’s our standing instructions. He was in that back room alone.’
‘You’re absolutely certain he was alone, Mr. Phipps? How about the bathroom, did you look in there?’ Carmichael interrupted.
‘Bathroom door was open. Nobody in there. Nobody in that room but Mr. Goodall, I tell ya. Mr. Goodall, he told me the painting was locked up for the night and everything was okay. He asked me not to bother him. He was gonna be working for a while. Then I set down at the desk. When the other fella come on at one to relieve me we went back to check with Mr. Goodall and then’s when we found him. That’s all I know, Mr. Carmichael. I swear to God, that’s all I know.’
‘And you never left your desk that whole eight hours, Mr. Phipps?’ Carmichael asked.
‘No, that’s not right. Like I told these fellows, I left it once.’
Carmichael looked inquiringly at Horowitz.
‘That’s right’, Horowitz said. ‘Phipps told us he left once to look through the rooms. But you said you weren’t gone for more than a couple of minutes, isn’t that right, Phipps?’
The guard bobbed his head. ‘That’s right. Five minutes at the most. More likely three or four. Just long enough to walk through those couple of rooms.’
‘Then that’s the only time the murderer could have got in and out’, Carmichael said.
‘Mr. Carmichael, I know it sounds awful odd, but I swear no one come into that place. The way the hall is situated like there, he’d have to open that big door to get in and you can see that door from any one of them rooms. Course I might have had my back turned temporarily or something like that, but I sure would’a heard it. That’s a big door and I’m not deaf. I tell ya . . .’
The guard’s whining voice was interrupted by Horowitz.
‘You see, Carmichael, even if Mr. Phipps is mistaken and someone did get past him, they couldn’t have got in that room, killed Goodall, drilled open the safe, taken the painting out of the frame, and got out again in five minutes. Or even ten minutes. It’s a physical impossibility. And that’s why, Mr. Phipps, we just can’t believe you. Now then, you admit yourself you can use the little extra money you make as a guard. We think someone’s paying you off to keep quiet.’
‘No one’s paying me nothing’, the guard shrieked in a sudden fit of temper. ‘Not one god-blamed cent.’
‘All right,’ Horowitz cut in, ‘maybe no one’s paying you. Maybe somebody’s just scaring you. Maybe they threatened your wife. I don’t know. I just know that you’re not telling us the truth. You’re a reasonable man, Mr. Phipps. How can we believe that story of yours?’
‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. There’s a secret panel in that back room, or something. There’s gotta be something.’
Horowitz’s voice continued relentlessly. ‘There’s no secret panel, Mr. Phipps. There’s no window back there. You know that. We’ve been over that place a dozen times.’
‘Mr. Phipps,’ Carmichael interjected, ‘would you object to taking a polygraph test?’
Phipps looked blank. ‘Polygraph? What’s that?’
‘It’s a lie detector. You’ve heard of them, I know. We ask you questions, you answer them, and the machine tells us whether you’re telling the truth.’
Phipps snorted. ‘Lie detector! You’ll never make me believe some machine can tell whether a man’s telling the truth.’
‘But you don’t object to taking the test?’ Carmichael persisted gently.
No, no. I don’t object to nothin’. Anything that’ll get me out of this place.’
‘I don’t see the point, Carmichael’, Horowitz said. ‘Is there any doubt in your mind that Phipps is withholding something?’
‘I don’t know, Carl. But something’s out of kilter, that’s for sure. I can’t see that a polygraph would do any harm.’
The detective shrugged. ‘I suppose not. Okay, Mr. Phipps. You can go home now. But we’ll be keeping in touch with yo
u. Don’t leave town.’
‘No, I ain’t going nowhere. I sure wish you fellas would find out who done it. I’m gettin’ mighty tired of this. Probably gonna lose my job, too.’ Despondently Phipps shuffled out of the room.
There was a brief silence as the door closed behind him. Horowitz looked at his two deputies inquiringly.
‘Well?’
Both men glumly shook their heads.
‘Stubborn old cuss’, the heavier one said. ‘Okay if we go now?’
‘Yeah. It’s okay. Oh, before you go, Schultz, call up and see if you can get an appointment for the polygraph tomorrow. Let me know what time.’
‘Okay.’
Carmichael and Horowitz returned to the detective’s office. Horowitz threw himself into his swivel chair behind the desk. The chair creaked noisily under his weight. He leaned back, laced his fingers behind his head, and stared moodily at the ceiling.
Damned frustrating feeling, he was thinking, every solid lead seems to drivel off into nothing and time is running out.
Carmichael, sensing his friend’s thoughts, remained silent. Finally he ventured a suggestion.
‘How would it be, Carl, if I arranged to have a little talk with that waitress, Jennie, or Jeanie, or whatever her name is. We might get a little better results if I tried the soft-sell approach before your goon squad clamped on to her. That type of girl is usually about as sympathetic to a cop as she would be to a tarantula.’
Horowitz pursed his lips reflectively. ‘That’s fine by me, but for Christ’s sake don’t run yourself into the ground on this thing. We can handle the leg work.’
‘I know you can, Carl. But I like to talk to people. Sometimes the damndest things turn up.’
‘Don’t I know it’, Horowitz grinned. ‘But don’t rush off. How about you and me having a little belt just to unwind us?’ Horowitz reached for his bottom desk drawer without waiting for an answer from Carmichael.
Twelve
ON THE perimeter of Palos Verdes Peninsula are several small bays. The adjacent beaches are rocky and the paths leading to these beaches from the cliffs above are steep. But each week-end finds a group of hardy picnickers, surfers, fishermen, and skin-divers, making use of the bays for their various activities. The good people of Palos Verdes Peninsula do not care for this invasion from the metropolis, but as the beaches are public land there is nothing to be done about it. The primary objection is not to the use of the beaches themselves, but to the unpleasant side effects. This includes the litter left by the invaders, the clogging of the Peninsula’s limited roadways, and, most particularly, the inevitable group of teenagers whose fast-wheeling hot-rods fill the week-end air with the screech of tyres, the roar of twin pipes, and the raucous laughter of youth.
One Sunday morning two men made their way down the path leading to Abalone Cove. On their backs they carried the metal tanks and associated gear of the Scuba diver. For George Craig and Tony Ortega, skin-diving was an almost weekly ritual. Once on the beach, each of their haversacks disgorged a wetsuit, a face mask, sweat socks, cotton gloves, the regulator for the air tank, a diver’s knife, and an abalone iron. Hanging from the exterior of the haversack were their fins. Around their waists they wore their weight belts.
It took about ten minutes to powder their suits and get all their equipment in place. Each carried an inner tube which they blew up. Attached to the tube was a gunnysack. Pushing the tubes ahead of them they made their way out through the surf, then paddled leisurely towards the kelp beds a quarter of a mile offshore. The water was calm, so that they were able to keep close together. With their masks pushed back on the tops of their heads it would have been easy to have an exchange of conversation, but there was none.
They reached the kelp and tied their tubes to a convenient swatch of kelp. Tony went down first, with a grin at his friend and a wave of his hand. He made a clean surface dive and with scarcely a ripple disappeared beneath the blue-green water.
George lifted his elbows on his inner-tube and stared at the rocky shoreline. Diving, for him, was a panacea. Whatever ailments he had, imaginary or real, physical or mental, became lost in the beauty and excitement of the underwater world. But this day he was gripped with a sense of foreboding he could not shake off. Patiently he waited for the sense of calmness he had grown to expect just before making a dive. It would not come. Finally, with a shrug of his shoulders he adjusted his mask over his nose and eyes and blew into the mouthpiece of his regulator to clear it of water. He then took a couple of deep breaths to assure himself the air was flowing freely. Bringing his knees up to his chest, he rolled over, head down, straightened out, and propelled himself downward first with his hands, then with his feet.
Forty feet down he moved slowly across the ocean floor with a slight kicking motion of his flippers. On his right loomed a ledge of stratified rock. It was here he sought the telltale feelers of a lobster backed into a crevice or the asymmetrical shell of an abalone clinging to the underside of an overhanging ledge. But even as he searched George could not disassociate himself from the world of air and sunlight and violence over his head.
Why the murder of Hubert Goodall should affect him so deeply he could not say. He had seen his share of killings firsthand – bodies unprettified by the mortician’s cosmetics. He had seen close friends cut down in front of his eyes. Hubert Goodall had not been a close friend, an acquaintance only, and one whom he had not particularly liked, and he never saw Hubert’s body. It was a strange thing. Perhaps during the war one’s mind became numbed to the horrors it had to endure. Perhaps having lived a normal life for several years removed from violence, his reaction was now only what a normal person would experience under similar circumstances. But George believed he never really would be a normal person again. His reactions to circumstances, his relations with other people, would be for ever influenced by his wartime experiences. His relationship with Tony, for example, was evidence of this. Had they not gone through what they had together, in all likelihood he and Tony would have drifted apart after high school. Aside from their mutual addiction to skin-diving they had no really common interests. Tony’s association with the art gallery, George felt, was actually an artificial bond. He would not, in fact, be there at all had it not been for George’s intervention. He liked Tony, he would be forever indebted to him, but the bonds of true friendship were missing.
An hour and a half later both men were back on the beach. They had had a fair day. Each got his limit of abalone; George had two lobsters, Tony had three. They peeled off their suits, packed their gear, and started the long climb back to the top of the cliff.
When they got to the top they stuffed their gear into George’s Volkswagen, then George dug a package of cigarettes out of the glove compartment and the two men lit up. The routine seldom varied on these expeditions. After diving and having a cigarette the next step was to retire to the “Village Pub”, the nearest bar on the road back to the beach cities where attire of sweatshirts, wet bathing-suits, and sandals attracted no attention, as at least half of the other patrons in the place were as informally clad, some more so.
The bartender, without having to ask, served them each a draught of beer in a tall pilsener glass. Tony raised his glass in salute. ‘Here’s to it’, he said.
‘Right’, said George.
George stretched out his legs and cupped his hands fondly around his glass. With half-closed eyes he surveyed through the window the sun-splashed panorama of fields, tall trees, and sparkling ocean laid out before him.
Tony’s voice interrupted his reverie. ‘We’ve come a long way, Old Buddy.’
George nodded. ‘A damn long way. I sometimes think I don’t deserve all this luck.’
Tony smiled ruefully. ‘Well, I damn well deserve it. And so do you. And so does John.’
‘Say,’ George said suddenly, ‘it just occurred to me. What’s going to happen to you now?’
Tony shrugged. ‘I don’t know. The will’s going to be read tomorrow. Goodal
l Gallery is down the drain, I guess. Happen to know anyone that could use an experienced art gallery manager?’
‘Nope. Goodall loved that place, though. He might have made some arrangements to keep it open – a trust fund, or something.’
Tony shook his head. ‘I doubt it. I don’t think he had that much money. And the Association alone can’t cut it.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about it, Tony. Either the Gallery will stay open, or if it doesn’t, well, you’ve got your feet on the ground. That’s the important thing. It took you a little while to come around, but now that you’ve seen the light you shouldn’t have any more trouble.’
‘Don’t preach at me, George’, Tony said sharply.
‘Sorry. All I meant was, I think you’ll do okay.’
Tony emptied his glass. ‘I hope you’re right. Ready for another one?’
‘Yes.’
Three beers later the two men climbed back into the Volkswagen and headed for George’s house. There they hosed off their gear with fresh water, put a large black kettle of water on the barbecue pit in preparation for the lobsters, then set about cleaning the abalone.
They had the shells shucked and were just finishing up on the slicing when Pat arrived.
‘Looks like I’m just a little too early’, Pat remarked brightly as she opened the gate into the patio where the men were working.
‘Just in time, honey’, George said. ‘Grab a beer bottle.’
After slicing into quarter-inch-thick steaks, the abalone had to be pounded to break down the muscle fibre. This was done by using any smooth heavy object that could be gripped firmly. George and Tony had found a long-necked beer bottle worked admirably.
It was not until late in the evening, long after the catch had been cooked and consumed, that the murder entered the conversation. A lively discussion of the merits of boiling lobsters versus broiling them had been completed, when Pat turned suddenly to Tony.
‘Damn it, Tony’, she said. ‘I told myself I was going to forget about this silly business but I just can’t seem to get it out of my mind. It seems like I’ve heard everybody’s opinion but yours. Who did it, Tony?’
