CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

 

 

This time I did drive to Hollywood Security. Hodson McLean was out, which saved me a moral dilemma over the deposition. The faithful Vickie was still at her post, and she had a message for me. Captain Grove of the LAPD had called to give me a belated progress report. I was to call him back.

I had a hand on the phone when a better idea came to me. I told Vickie to call the captain and ask him to meet me at the Intersection Lounge. Then I wrote down Agnes Brown’s vital statistics and her old San Pedro address and asked Vickie to trace her, using all the operatives we had if she saw fit. All but one. I asked her to have that one collect newspaper articles on the Sugar Stapert murder. Gallimore had pronounced them worthless, but I wanted to judge for myself.

The Intersection Lounge was in Hollywood proper. At the epicenter of Hollywood, in fact, at the legendary crossroads of Hollywood and Vine. I’d broken a case there once, a very sad case, though I didn’t hold that against the Intersection. Not when the guy who worked behind its L-shaped bar mixed a Gibson that was second only to my own. Unfortunately, the lounge also had a pianist whose playing always reminded me of the old biblical injunction: “Never let your left hand know what your right hand is doing.” Luckily, the lady was off somewhere, maybe having her ear tuned, so I was able to sip my drink in peace.

At least, I could have if I’d never gone to see Helen Gallimore. Since then, I hadn’t had a peaceful moment. Rosa Wardell had convinced me that she had no prior knowledge of a bloody glove. But I was more certain than ever that Paddy had had such knowledge and that the whole con had been cooked up to separate Mariutto from that glove.

That left me with another question to answer. If Paddy really had drafted Rosa Mariutto, which appeared to be true after all, why had he done it? He could have worked the whole business without involving her and still recovered the glove. He might have known about Rosa’s situation and decided to kill two birds with one stone. But a more likely explanation was that he’d used Rosa to protect the identity of his real client, the lady of the gray glove. Protect it from everyone, me included. Maybe me especially.

I was seated at one corner the bar’s ninety degree angle, the corner that commanded a view of the front door. I saw Captain Grove enter, looking as rumpled and tired as I felt. He sat down on the other side of the angle, took off his hat, displaying his thinning but well oiled hair, and ordered a rye and water. Then he opened with a sneer, as he usually did.

“You’ll be the last guy in America drinking those damned Gibsons. You’ll have to carry around your own bottle of onions.”

“It’s close to that right now,” I said.

“What’s the idea of having your secretary call me back? When I call, I expect a call back from you, not from a flunky with a counteroffer.”

“I thought you probably could use a drink,” I said.

“Uh huh. Now let’s have your real reason. With Hollywood Security, I know the first answer is always a lie.”

Paddy had favored that approach. He’d also taught me to have the second lie ready to go.

“You said you were calling with a progress report on Paddy’s murder. I was afraid the report would be no progress and you’d tell me you were giving up. I didn’t think I could talk you out of it over the phone.”

“You couldn’t talk me out of it with a violin accompaniment. Look, Elliott, there just isn’t anything for us to go on. The old fixer covered his tracks too well. It hurts me to say it, but if you’ve come up with any leads, I’ll take them.”

“You told me not to look into Paddy’s murder.”

“And I told myself I was wasting my breath when I said it. What have you got?”

I had an old deposition that had reproduced like a young rabbit. I left it in my pocket. Before I’d driven to Thousand Oaks, my pride had kept me from turning it over to the police. Now I had a better reason.

“Nothing,” I said. “The agency’s loaned me out to a kid director.”

“Name of Amos Decker? Don’t look so surprised. Your name popped up in a police report on a fracas at Decker’s beach house. He catch you with your hand in the silver drawer?”

“Something like that,” I said, relieved to have the subject changed, even at the expense of my reputation. I could have changed it just by reaching for my glass, if I’d only known. I reached for it now, and my coat sleeve drew back, revealing Billy’s MIA bracelet.

“You’re wearing that now?” Grove asked.

“I’m wearing it now.”

“I’d never of guessed you’d fall for that mumbo jumbo.”

“What you mean, ‘mumbo jumbo’?”

Grove tasted his neglected drink. “I mean, you can’t really believe a copper band can keep somebody alive. Isn’t that how those bracelets work? As long as somebody with a heartbeat is wearing that thing, your son isn’t really dead?”

“No,” I said. “As long as somebody’s wearing this thing, my son isn’t forgotten.”

“Don’t kid yourself. Every guy we sent to that side of the world was forgotten the minute the anchor on his transport was raised. That was true in our war, and it was true in your kid’s.”

“His name was Billy,” I said.

“Was is right,” Grove said, but he raised his glass to him. I did, too.

“You met him once,” I said. “When you came to our house to compare notes on another murder.”

I’d been playing with Billy on the living room floor and Ella had been fixing dinner. That little taste of domesticity had frightened Grove like no gun could. He hadn’t been able to get away fast enough.

“Nothing wrong with my memory,” he said.

“Good. I want to ask you about something. Something that may have to do with Billy, in a way.”

I hadn’t thought to use that gambit until Grove spotted Billy’s bracelet. I was a little ashamed to use it, though I knew Billy wouldn’t have minded. Not in the service of this particular cause.

“I knew we’d get around to the real business of the meeting sooner or later,” Grove said.

“I want to know how you got off Paddy’s payroll, way back when.”

“You asking for trouble, Elliott?”

“No, just an answer. When I joined Hollywood Security, Paddy had a paid source on the LAPD. Turned out to be you. Paddy had a saying about paid informants. ‘Pay once, own forever.’ He meant that once an informant had taken a bribe, the threat of exposing him would keep him in line.

“But it didn’t work with you. Only a year or so after I met you, you were off the payroll for good and no harm done to your career. I’ve always wondered about that. Now I’m asking how you did it.”

“What’s that got to do with your kid?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute.”

Grove drained his glass. “Forget it. I don’t owe you any favors.”

“Then I’ll owe you one.”

“You owe me one for every day you’ve stayed out of jail. But you wouldn’t thank me for this one.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That you don’t want to know the answer.”

“So you’re doing me a favor by not telling me? I thought you didn’t owe me any.”

Grove gave me the BB eyes for as long as it took him to check my math. Then he addressed the man behind the bar, who’d been doing his best to blend into the wallpaper. “Another round on his tab and then get lost.”

When the bartender had fired and fallen back, Grove said, “It was you, Elliott. You got me off the old mick’s hook.”

“How?”

“By getting engaged to a Warners publicist named Pidgen Englehart,” he said, using two of Ella’s old names, her studio nickname and her maiden name. “You two got married in ’48, right? That was when I was finally able to kiss Maguire good-bye, so to speak. I’d heard something about your fiancée that Maguire didn’t want you to hear. I used it to buy my way out. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.”

“What did you hear?”

“I say again, you don’t want to know.”

“If it was how wild Ella was during the war, she told me that herself. It was over her brother getting killed in action. It didn’t mean anything.”

“Maguire paid up for nothing, then.”

Grove suddenly wasn’t making eye contact.

“It was more than that,” I said. “What was it?”

The policeman shrugged. “I happened to hear that she’d had a little fling with a junior member of the local mob, a man I’ve always believed to be an unpunished murderer. He ended up driving himself drunk into a canyon, so I guess he got punished in the end. It was Moose Mariutto.”

I reached for my glass but found I couldn’t lift it, even though Grove had given me the answer I’d been expecting, the answer that made everything else add up.

Grove was having no trouble with his own glass. “Now tell me why you wanted to know that so badly.” He nodded toward the MIA bracelet. “And what it has to do with him.”

Paddy’s training saved me then. I’d worked out my last ditch answer in advance, as he’d taught me to.

“Ella and I have been separated for over a year. I’ve been trying to make up my mind one way or the other, to stay in limbo or file for a divorce. I’ve always suspected that you used Ella to break free. I wanted to know for sure. And I wanted to know what it was all about. I thought it might tip the scales for me.”

“What does that have to do with your boy?”

I hadn’t worked that part out in advance, but I didn’t miss a beat. “That’s what broke us up to begin with, Billy going missing and Ella not being able to let it go.”

Grove got philosophical then for only the second time in our long acquaintance. “Some things you can’t let go of. Not without selling out your whole life.”