Bad Samaritan (9 page)

“A few. But I think that first we should talk to Mrs. Gonzales again.”

“Okay. That was some shake this morning, wasn’t it?”

“It was. The next one could be worse. Is there such a thing as earthquake insurance?”

“If you’re willing to accept a big deductible. I’ve got it. Let’s go.”

If we had been a few minutes later, we would have missed Mrs. Gonzales. There was an ancient stake truck parked in the alley in front of her second-floor apartment. Two wide-backed kinsmen were loading her furniture.

One of them grinned at Vogel. “Hi, Loot. I ain’t seen you in the poker game at Manny’s lately.”

“I like to play for cash,” Vogel said. “I can get paper at a stationery store. Is Mrs. Gonzales moving?”

“Home to mama,” the man said. “She’s upstairs. Still looking for Jesus, Loot?”

“My people,” Vogel said, “gave up on Him two thousand years ago.”

We climbed the outside steps to her apartment. The door was open. The children were not in sight; they probably had already been transported to grandma s place. I hoped it was bigger than this one.

Mrs. Gonzales was packing dishes. She looked up fearfully. “You have news about Jesus? Bad news?”

Vogel shook his head and glanced at me. I said, “We were wondering how you knew your husband had left town. The report at the station isn’t complete.

“Lenny Tishkin told me. He went with Jesus to the bus station.”

“Do you have Tishkin’s address?” Vogel asked.

She shook her head.

“I have it,” I said. “It’s one of the names on Si’s list.”

We went down the steps and out to the department car. “Tishkin,” Vogel said. “I should know that name. It rings a bell.”

“Villwock,” I said, “told me yesterday that Lenny Tishkin was the nastiest one of the kids on the list.”

“Villwock? How would he know? He wasn’t much more than a clerk, and not a very good one, at that.”

“I thought he was a parole and probation officer.”

“It’s the same thing. Well, we can check Tishkin’s record later. What’s that address again?”

I gave it to him. We rode in silence for a few blocks before I said, “You’re quite a shark at poker, I hear.”

“Not good enough to keep me from day labor, or let my wife stay home. She isn’t really crazy about that library work, how that kids no longer read.”

“The way I heard it, you and Marner and Pontius are about the best in town.”

“Huh! If they’d let me play with them more than once or twice a year, I could buy a house up in your neighborhood.”

He stopped for a light at Main Street. “Marner tell you about my poker?”

“Nope. Helms.”

He sat there, staring moodily ahead.

“The light has changed,” I informed him. “Bad day, Bernie?”

“They’re all bad,” he said. “When do cops have good days? And every year it gets worse.” He turned left on Main Street. “I remember that Tishkin now. Tough little bastard, a cinch for the gas chamber, eventually.” He snorted. “Unless Nowicki and his knee-jerk liberal friends keep it from becoming law again.”

If anybody, I thought, should be opposed to gas chambers, it should be you, Lieutenant Bernard Vogel. I said, “Nowicki and his friends will lose, Bernie. We live in a vindictive age.”

The address I had for Leonard Tishkin was a few steps up from the Gonzales neighborhood, a cluster of cheap, fairly new stucco apartments between the freeway and the sea.

The manager repeated the familiar story. Lenny Tishkin had moved on. There was a slight variance this time; his rent had been fully paid.

“Did he leave a forwarding address?” Vogel asked.

The man shook his head. “Not with me. Maybe with the post office. Though he never got any mail that wasn’t addressed to ‘occupant.’ ”

“Occupant,” Vogel muttered, as we walked back to the car. “That’s what we all are, occupants. Faceless, nameless occupants.”

I didn’t argue with him. I had been carrying the same thought around with me all morning, ever since the earthquake.

I
’VE FORGOTTEN THE NAME
of the last man we visited, but he checked out clean. He was working, his wife informed us. He would be home at four o’clock and would phone us then.

It was close to noon when we drove back to headquarters. Vogel went to another room to check the file, if any, on Tishkin; I sat in Helms’s empty office reflecting on the morning’s work. We knew little more now than we had when we started.

The file on Tishkin was slim: thirty days in a youth camp for marijuana possession, six months’ probation for disturbing the peace. He had been acquitted of the most serious charge, robbing a liquor store. His alleged partner in the indictment had been Jesus Gonzales.

“Nowicki defended both of them,” Vogel said. “Maybe we ought to talk with him.”

“After the service,” I suggested. “Are you going to Maude’s memorial service?”

He nodded. “You going with your wife?”

“Nope. She’s going with the Marners. Come on, I’ll buy you your lunch.”

“Today,” he said, “I buy. I owe you.”

I had expected something in the hamburger line, but he took me to the University Club. The way he explained it, he made enough, playing gin rummy with the members, to more than meet his monthly dues. It would have cost him money
not
to belong.

Over the martinis I said, “I was thinking of something a while ago. I was thinking that none of the other occupants of Kelly’s Kourt would get this much attention if they had died under mysterious circumstances.”

“You sound like Nowicki.”

“Well, would they?”

“No unsolved murder case is ever considered closed.”

“I’m talking about
active
investigation, Bernie. So what does a smart murderer do?”

“I don’t know. I never met one.”

I plowed on. “He figures that if he can make it look like suicide, however crudely, you boys will have an out.”

“You boys? You mean the department?”

“I mean any understaffed and overworked police department headed by a politically minded chief.”

“That would be almost all of them.”

“Probably. Now, with the possibility of suicide still valid, the investigation comes to a dead end.” I paused. “Where we are right now? We’ve had three and a half days of full department investigation and come up with zilch. When do you figure the chief will give his official pronouncement of suicide to the press?”

“Certainly not until Nowicki’s friends get off his back.”

“And then it will be called suicide and forgotten.”

“It won’t be forgotten.”

“Come on!”

He said stiffly, “There have been murders apprehended long after they thought they were in the clear.”

“How many?”

“I don’t know and neither do you. What’s your point? Maude’s dead. If she was murdered, and the murderer punished, she would be just as dead. Are you joining the vindictive age you were running down this morning?”

“I guess. It looks that way. But it really burns me to think that the son of a bitch who murdered Maude Marner is still breathing free air. I suppose that’s adolescent emotionalism

He nodded. “You must be a lousy poker player.”

“The worst,” I admitted. “I’ll have another martini.”

We left the car on the University Club parking lot and walked to the memorial service at the Unitarian church three blocks away. There was not a single empty parking space in the three blocks. Maude’s friends had come early and come in force.

Si’s and Julie’s friends were there, about three dozen of them. Maude’s friends filled the rest of the church and the foyer and the walled courtyard in front. The sweet odor of burning grass was strong in the courtyard; the lost children had come down from their mountain retreats and brought their own suckling children them.

“The hope of tomorrow,” Vogel muttered. “God help us!”

Chief Harris had saved us some seats in the last row. Helms was with him and two officers I hadn’t met.

I told Helms, “That man who threatened Mary Serano was from out of town. I don’t know his name.”

“Where’d you learn that?”

“I can’t tell you. And what I did tell you is all I know about him.”

“Why muscle Mary? If the big boys are trying to move in, they wouldn’t start with her, would they? They’d start with the heavy money books.”

“Maybe they already have those.”

“No way. Remember, you’re working with the department, Callahan. Your sources are our sources.”

“Nope. The chief labeled me, Joe. I’m a citizen observer. My source told me the man had absolutely nothing to do with the death of Mrs. Marner.”

“Maybe, maybe not. We’ll talk about this later.”

The crowd was quieting. The room was full. There was no altar in this church, the first I had visited in twenty years. There was no display of the body. Maude was now ashes, drifting through the rolling waters of the Pacific.

In one of the rows near the front, Jan was sitting with the Marners, Glenys and the Lunds. A few rows in front of us, the retired parole officer, Danning Villwock, sat with Nowicki.

The eulogy was fairly brief and quoted mostly from Emerson. Ralph Waldo Emerson, son of a Unitarian minister, had been a preacher too, in his earlier years.

Reason and the rational inquiry, that is the Unitarian bag. But the minister delivering the eulogy was young and he obviously had been a friend of Maude. There was no way he could keep the emotion from his voice.

He finished with four lines from “Good-bye”:

I laugh at the lore and the pride of man,

At the sophist schools and the learned clan;

For what are they all in their high conceit,

When man in the bush with God may meet?

As we walked out, Vogel said in his cynical way, “I wouldn’t call Kelly’s Kourt the bush, would you? I’m not even sure that Maude believed in God.”

I had no learned answer, only a memorable line from Buddy Hackett I’d heard on TV. “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m sure God believed in her.”

The cars went away, carrying the mourners back to their labors or back to their hills, according to their life-styles. Chief Chandler Harris stood on the sidewalk, flanked by Nowicki and Helms, waiting for us.

“I think we should have a conference,” he said, “in my office. I think we should coordinate what we have and determine where we are.”

I nodded. Helms nodded. Nowicki said, “I’m free.”

“So is your guilty client,” Vogel said bitterly. “You are really a cute one, Stan.”

Nowicki smiled. “I know. My mother has been telling me that for years.”

Harris glared at both of them. “In my office. In twenty minutes.”

They drove away. Vogel and I walked back to the University Club lot. “A conference,” I said. “And then the official word—suicide.”

“Don’t bet on it.”

“That old fox was counting the house,” I said. “He saw how the unwashed outnumbered the washed.”

“I know him better than you do,” Vogel said, “and I’ll tell you something. He may cut a corner here and there and he has to be a politician, but he’s something better, too. He’s all cop!”

“Seven bucks to a fin it’s suicide.”

“You’ve got a bet,” he said.

Harris was in his chair behind his desk when we entered his office. Helms sat in a straight chair nearby. Nowicki was standing gazing out at the impressive view of bail bond offices across the street.

The chief held up a stack of papers about two inches thick. “Reports,” he said. “All we know about the death of Mrs. Marner. Do you know what they add up to?”

All of us except Nowicki nodded.

“Do you now?” Harris grated. “All three of you agree on what they add up to? Would one of you Hawkshaws inform me?”

“They add up to nothing in the middle of nowhere,” Vogel said.

Harris shook his head. “It’s more serious than that. They add up to bad police work. It includes the most superficial coroner’s report I have ever seen, and I’ve seen some beauts from that office. All he tells us is that the lady died from carbon monoxide poisoning. If one of our meter maids had found Mrs. Marner’s body, she could have guessed that.”

He stopped to get his breath, his face glowing.

“Was there any indication that the lady had been bound or gagged? Any rope marks on her body, any lint on her teeth or in her mouth, any evidence of a fight for life? No mention of it here.” He slapped the papers on his desk. “And no mention of the lack of it here!”

Vogel said, “He was questioned about it. He said he hadn’t noticed any.”

“After the body was gone, after it was cremated, he was questioned about it. He hadn’t noticed any? Had he
looked
for any? Was he asked that question?”

Vogel nodded. “I asked him. He only repeated that he hadn’t noticed any. He’s not a detective, Chief.”

“On this kind of case he is supposed to be. And now Gonzales. Mrs. Marner was asking around about him, the reports show. What did we originally have on him? An incomplete missing persons report. Here’s a kid who finally straightened out. Got himself a fair job, a better than fair future,
finally.
Is that the kind of man who suddenly takes a bus out of town? Was there any checking of the original report? Hell, no!”

He was breathing heavily now, and his red face was glowing like a neon sign. “Why not?”

Nobody answered.

“Maybe,” the chief went on in a softer but even meaner voice, “we
knew
Gonzales had left town because Lenny Tishkin told us so. Is that the place to get the official word, from a vicious punk who started to lie when he started to talk?”

“He was Gonzales’s best friend,” Helms said.

“Was he?” The chief looked at Nowicki.

“At one time,” Nowicki said. “Not in the last year. Tishkin went one way and Jesus another. And Lenny resented it. You can be sure of one thing—Lenny Tishkin didn’t go to the bus station with Gonzales unless he had a massive change of heart in the past month.”

“But if Lenny killed Jesus,” Harris said, “and Maude Marner suspected it—”

“That’s a real wild guess, Chief,” Vogel interrupted quietly. “That’s completely unsubstantiated speculation.”

“Hell, yes,” Harris admitted. “But it’s a line of inquiry, isn’t it? Do we have a bulletin out for Tishkin?”