CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

 

 

I didn’t say anything more to Agnes Brown beyond thanking her and urging her to be careful. When I was back in the Park Lane and headed north, sandwiched in the backseat as before, I gave her nephews a more detailed warning, instructions to be used in the event of my death.

The driver, who was again dividing his attention between the street ahead of us and the street behind us, said, “This guy we’re supposed to look out for, you know his name?”

I did, though I couldn’t quite make myself believe it. Not even when that name answered a last nagging question: If Ella wasn’t in danger, if the business wasn’t personal for Paddy, why had he run such a risk in that alley? The answer was that, for Paddy, the business had been personal, even without Ella as the damsel in distress. Maybe not at first, when he’d allowed himself to be “hired” by Helen Gallimore on a whim, but later, after he’d spoken to Agnes Brown.

A large elbow dug into my ribs. “So what is it?”

“Captain Walter Grove of the LAPD.”

Walter Grove, the man who’d been at the edge of the bright lights from the start, who’d first mentioned Sugar Stapert to me back in 1952, after he’d heard that Hollywood Security had designs on Ted Mariutto. Grove, the ex-soldier who fit the description Brown had given me of Stapert’s lovesick suitor. Grove, the man who’d tailed me to Helen Gallimore’s and killed her, not after following me around for weeks or days or even hours, but because I’d invited him to the last stop I’d made before going back to check on Gallimore: the Intersection Lounge.

The driver whistled.

“You know him?” I asked.

“Well enough to stay away from him without being told to by any honky.”

“Aunt Agnes never said anything about a cop,” the nephew on my right said.

“She never heard his last name,” I reminded him, “the one that made sense of his nickname.”

“Coconut Grove,” the nephew on my left said.

Stapert’s pun still worked thirty years on, at least for people who lived amongst the ruins of old Hollywood. The Ambassador Hotel’s Cocoanut Grove had been Hollywood’s first giant supper club and its greatest, a soundstage of a room with fake palm trees scattered around a fake Moorish town square, under phony stars in a navy blue ceiling. There’d been real stars at its tables every night in the old days and aspiring ones crowding the dance floor, hoping to be noticed, like Sugar Stapert and, once upon a time, me. Paddy had been a regular there during the war. The moment he’d heard Brown’s description of Stapert’s soldier beau and heard his nickname, Paddy would have known he had the killer. And not just any killer, either, but his own personal nemesis, the cop who’d quit his payroll and then haunted him down through the years.

When we pulled onto Central Avenue a few blocks from the hotel, our driver said, “Unmarked car watching Wheeler’s.”

“Watching a car parked in front,” I said. “Mine.”

It’d been careless of me to leave the Torino on the street. But I hadn’t expected the police to tie it to me so quickly.

I said, “Turn at the next block and drop me.”

The nephews did, without a parting “good luck” or “go to hell.” The block held an old Rexall drugstore and that held an old wooden phone booth, the kind that had once been my home away from home. I used it to call Ed Sharpe. I got another cop, who sounded like a newer member of the squad. He asked me for a name.

“Patrick J. Maguire,” I said, trying to sound big enough to fit it.

Sharpe came on a moment later, his voice conveying a breeziness that was every bit as convincing as the stuffed monkeys that had hung from the Cocoanut Grove’s palm trees. “Paddy. I hadn’t expected to hear from you again.”

“Or from me either,” I said.

“No,” Sharpe said. “Captain Grove’s arranged for my phone to be answered for me. Makes me feel like the president or like somebody nobody trusts anymore. Come to think of it, since Watergate, they’re pretty much the same thing. Where are you?”

“On my way back to the Wheeler House.”

“Bad idea. Grove has the place staked out.”

“Grove killed Paddy.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Maybe, but it’s still true. He also killed Helen Gallimore, after I led him to her.”

“Why?”

“Because in 1944 he killed Gallimore’s sister. That’s why he took her picture from Gallimore’s family shrine. Grove told me he was in the service in ’44.” Knee-deep in sons of Nippon. “Find out when he actually got home. His dates of service will be in his personnel file.”

“I don’t need to check any files. Grove and I both served under Stilwell in Burma. He went home on a stretcher early in ’44. Nearly dead of smallpox. That’s how his face got marked up.”

“You sure?”

“I should be. I served out my time in that hellhole. I’ve been junior to Grove on the force ever since.”

“Find someone senior to him. Tell him what I told you. Ella and I need to sit down with somebody Grove can’t order around.” Ella and I and every overpaid lawyer Hollywood Security could line up.

“Your wife’s involved in this? Did she call me by any chance? I was told I got a call half an hour ago from a woman, but there was no message on my desk.”

“Could Grove have gotten hold of it?”

“Bet your life. That’s why he’s having my phone answered.”

“Get over to Wheeler’s fast.”

“Scotty, Grove can’t do anything with two plainclothesmen out front. Let him bring you in. You’ll get your hearing.”

“We’d never make it.”

I hung up and headed for the Wheeler House at a run. Not to the staked-out front door, but to the back, which I prayed wasn’t watched. It was, but not by a cop. A dishwasher or someone disguised as one was holding up the building’s back wall, squeezing the last few drags out of a cigarette stub.

As I passed him, he said, “You Elliott? Casper told me to stop you if you came this way. There’s a cop inside. He’s got your wife.”

I started past him, and he grabbed my arm. “Something’s not right about that cat. He’s drunk or sick or—”

The sound of a gunshot came to us from somewhere inside. I took off running again, first through a kitchen where the day shift stood frozen in place, then out into the lounge where we’d interviewed Wheeler. The jazz lover was there, on his back, open-eyed. Ella was in the booth where I’d left her, Grove seated beside her. The revolver in his hand was not quite pointed at Ella, not quite pointed at me.

“I had to do it,” Grove said. “He had a gun. You’d better pick it up.”

As Wheeler’s man in the alley had said, something wasn’t right with Grove. I could tell that even in the half-light of the lounge. He was sitting stock-still, but his black eyes were hitting every corner of the room. His face was gray and glistening with sweat, as though his Burma bugs were at him again.

Beside him, Ella was also very still. She was staring down at Wheeler, seeing yet another victim of her sins. For that reason alone, I almost bent down for the gun.

When I didn’t, Grove barked, “Did you hear me, Elliott? I said pick it up.”

I looked down with an effort. The gun, Paddy’s gun, lay at my feet. Why Wheeler had decided to face Grove with it, I didn’t know. I never would know. I was more concerned right then with the way the gun was lying. The butt was pointing the wrong way, toward Grove.

“Had it in this belt at the small of his back,” Grove said. “Damn movie trick. Pick it up. Secure the scene.”

“Let Ella go,” I said. “You don’t want her to hear what we’re going to say.”

“I say again, you don’t want to know,” Grove growled at me.

It took me a beat to realize that he was back at the Intersection Lounge. That we were back there, chatting over drinks. Grove gave me a clue by glancing down at the MIA bracelet that dangled on my wrist.

“I knew she’d had a fling with Moose Mariutto, an unpunished murderer. I told Maguire.”

“Moose wasn’t unpunished,” I said. “He died in a wrecked car at the bottom of a canyon. You pushed him over. When it was safe to, after Morrie Bender was gone. When you traced Al Alsip to Lake Arrowhead, you gave him the same push.”

It’d been a mistake to use the back door. I should have run in through the front, dragging the stakeout team in after me. Or sent Wheeler’s backdoor guard around to get them before I charged in.

“Alsip was a punk,” Grove said. “He thought he had a chance with her, believe it or not.” He looked at Ella then, confused, expecting to see someone else beside him.

“With Sugar Stapert?” I said to draw him back to me.

“Right. With Sugar.”

“Why wouldn’t Alsip have a chance with Stapert? Didn’t every man? Every man but you, that is. She laughed at you. When you’d had your fill of that, you killed her.”

That got his eyes off Ella. “Pick up that gun, Elliott.”

“How about Stapert’s sister?”

Grove nodded. “I never knew she was around but I always knew. I felt her eyes on me.”

“You didn’t know she’d been warned off by Captain Wallace?”

“That old crook? Morrie Bender owned him to the back teeth. No, I never heard he’d warned her off. I was on the outside looking in when Wallace was running things. But I felt somebody’s eyes just the same.

“I thought they might be yours,” Grove added, turning back to my wife.

Ella had always said that Grove was afraid of her and she’d been right. Not because she represented hearth and home, as I’d joked, but because she might have remembered him from the Sea Hawk days.

“Why did Gallimore have to die?”

“Because she wouldn’t quit. Because she sent the old mick after me. Because she sent you after me, though you didn’t know it was me you were after. I followed you from the Intersection. I knew you were lying about not having any leads on Maguire’s murder. I knew you’d take me to whoever’d set him on me. And you did.”

Mentioning the Intersection reminded Grove of the MIA bracelet that had so fascinated him at the bar. He glanced down at my wrist again for the merest second. In that second, I saw a last desperate play I could use if Sharpe didn’t arrive before I ran out of questions. A damn movie trick.

“How did you get Paddy into that alley?”

“He made a mistake. He tried to get the file on the Sea Hawk murder from some old chair warmer at headquarters. Maguire didn’t know I had a string tied to that file. No one could touch it without me finding out. I saw that he got the file, with a little extra included. Contact information for Little Al Alsip.”

“How do you contact the bottom of a lake?”

Grove grinned wildly. “It was just an LA phone number. Belonged to a stoolie I own. He set up an appointment as Alsip. I kept it.”

I finally heard sirens. Grove heard them, too.

“Time’s up, Elliott. I’ll get your fingerprints in a minute. You shot at me and hit your wife. Wheeler caught a stray round. That’s how it’ll read.”

There wasn’t a prayer of making the frame stick. I would have pointed that out if Grove had been present in the here and now.

“That’s how it’ll read,” he repeated. “That’s how it’ll read.”

“Wait,” I said. “Take this for me.”

I held out my left arm. When Grove’s eyes locked on the MIA bracelet, I reached out with my right hand and pulled the band free. At the same time, I located the thirty-eight with the toe of my shoe and spun it without looking down to see if I’d made things better or worse.

“Why?” Grove asked.

“Somebody’s got to wear it for Billy. You said so yourself.”

The play had an unexpected side effect. It woke Ella.

“Don’t, Scotty.”

Grove didn’t seem to hear her. “Why me?”

“You were a soldier. You know what it’s like to be forgotten halfway around the world. You wear it for Billy. Take it.”

I made my hand shake even more than it wanted to. So much, in fact, that I dropped the bracelet.

It did its part, landing on edge and rolling, Grove’s eyes following it. I stooped and grabbed the gun.

We fired at the same instant. It wasn’t an easy shot for either of us. Grove was being shoved sideways by Ella, and I was wing shooting on one knee. But we both hit our targets.