Goodey's Last Stand: A Hard Boiled Mystery (Joe Goodey) (11 page)

The woman wheeled on them like a battered old lioness, worn out but still dangerous.

“Piss off the both of you,” she snarled. “I’ve got nothing to say to the press. All you did when my poor girl was alive was hound her and write lies about her. Leave me alone.”

This set the kid from the
Examiner
back on his heels, but Royster had badgered too many bereaved survivors in his day to let her off that easily. “Hell, Maggie,” he insisted, “all I want—”

My eye was caught by something big and white going away. It was Fat Phil in his rented Rolls. I looked to see if he had taken back his blanket of gardenias, but it was still at graveside. I suppose there’s not much of a market for used gardenia blankets.

The drivers were putting away their equipment while the two undertakers were standing discreetly at a distance, waiting to get a word in with Mrs. Barton. Maybe they wanted to hand her the bill. I couldn’t wait to witness that encounter.

But then I saw something else more interesting. Far across the cemetery, trying to look invisible in the shelter of one of the few large monuments, was yet another funeral guest. But one too shy to mix it up at graveside. It occurred to me that it might be worthwhile to interview this retiring mourner. But at that moment he spotted me spotting him and started making toward a late-model sedan parked near the cemetery gate.

I’m no speed merchant, but he must have been way out of training. I beat him by several dozen noses and was leaning against the car door when he came puffing up. He was a little guy in a dapper tan summer suit and dusty perforated brown shoes. He couldn’t have been much over thirty, but his indeterminate brown hair was withering on top like last summer’s rutabaga patch, and he’d soon be bald. His pale, shoe-shaped face was pleasant, but just then it wasn’t helped much by the streams of tears running from his red-rimmed eyes. He was obviously suffering, and I felt like a heel bothering him. But I did anyway.

“Excuse me,” I said, flashing my private buzzer quickly. “I’m a detective. Did you know Tina
D’Oro?”

That must have been exactly the wrong question. It doubled him over with sobbing and had him clawing for a big, white handkerchief from an inside pocket. The monogram was “F.I.” That rang a bell from Tina’s diary.

“I can’t talk to you now,” he gasped through the hanky. His free hand dipped into a coat pocket and shoved a small, white card at me. “Please, please,” he said, “come see me this evening. The address…the address…

He broke down again, and I got out of his way fast. I can’t take too much crying. If he was faking it, he deserved an Oscar, and would be too clever for me to handle anyway. He grabbed blindly for the car-door handle, stumbled behind the wheel, and the car lurched through the gates and disappeared.

Now that the danger of being run down by suicidal mourners had lessened considerably, I took a look at the card he’d given me. “Fletcher Irving, M.D.,” it said in fine capitals. The address was out on Ocean Avenue near City College. Dr. Irving wouldn’t be hard to find if the card was legitimate. If it wasn’t, I was a prize-winning sucker.

Such morbid thoughts were disturbed by an enfilade of gravel against my pants leg from the hearse as it passed at a fair clip through the big gates. Following it was the limousine with old
McDavitt sitting erect and composed in the back seat. He didn’t even give me a nod, but I didn’t have much time to nurse my wounded pride. The taxi from San Francisco was hot on the Caddy’s tail, and Royster was hanging out of one back window, shaking his fist and shouting: “Get laid, you old bag! They ought to bury you, too!”

Which I thought was pretty rude, since he was addressing the mother of the deceased.

13

That same old person was coming toward me right then at a pace only slightly slower than a good half-miler on a straight stretch. She had her long, black dress held up around her knees, and she was eat
ing up ground at about two yards a stride. I was between her and the gate. My two choices were either to get out of her way or get run down.

I took the coward’s way out and cut slightly to the left, at the same time saying, “Mrs. Barton?”

She wheeled around at me, causing a small dust storm with her upraised skirts. “You a reporter too?” she demanded.

If I had been, I wouldn’t have admitted it. But I could tell the truth. “No,” I said, bringing out the buzzer again. “I’m a detective.” That didn’t seem to impress her either.

“You sure?” she said. “You don’t look like any cop to me. Those reporters,” she added, “I wouldn’t piss on the best part of them. They ask you a whole lot of stupid questions, and then they go off and leave you at the end of creation. Bastards, they are. Real bastards. And McDavitt’s no better. He demands payment in advance and then claims to have an urgent call to make in Hillsborough. Hillsborough!” she repeated, spitting on the toe of my shoe.

“So you’re stuck,” I said, cutting to the heart of the matter.

“Son,” she countered, “I’m never stuck as long as I’ve got these.” She held up a fair-sized foot in what looked like a badly dyed bowling shoe. The sole was already beginning to curl back at the toe. She’d be barefoot before she got a mile. “And this.” She stuck a thumb like a small baked potato in front of my face. “I’ll be back in West Pittsburg before you could finish eating a banana split.”

“West Pittsburg?” West Pittsburg was a godforsaken little town at least fifty miles away over on the other side of the bay at the mouth of the Sacramento River. Somehow I could imagine her in dusty mourning weeds hitching all that way.

“Close enough to it,” she said. “I’ve got a little place on the Contra Costa Canal.” She fixed me with a narrow gaze. “You wouldn’t be going out in that direction, would you?”

“Not intentionally,” I said, “but I’ll make you a deal. I’ll give you a ride home if you’ll tell me a bit about your daughter.”

She gave me a bit more of the deadeye, thought it over, and then looked down at her feet. “You sure you’re a cop?”

“Ex,” I said, giving her a closer look at the buzzer. “And I don’t like reporters any better than you do.” That went down well with her, so she decided to take a chance.

“Where’s your car?”

I pointed to the Morris, and her face dropped a bit. Maybe she’d expected a Cadillac like the one she’d come in. Tough luck. Watching her face, I could see that she was weighing her chances of getting a better ride hitching. Then she shrugged.

“Okay, Goodey,” she said. “But could you put the top up? The sun gives my complexion fits.”

I doubted whether anything short of a flame thrower could do that, but I wrestled the fragile old top up and we set off for the
Bayshore Freeway and West Pittsburg via San Francisco. Behind us the caretaker was struggling to shut the gates.

Before I could start asking questions, she undid a couple of but
tons, loosened something around her middle, kicked off the bowling shoes, sighed contentedly, and asked me, “Why do you care who killed my daughter?”

She looked tough enough to stand a little truth, so I said: “I don’t really, but the person I’m working for would like to know. He has his reasons.”

“Who’d that be?”

“Nobody you would know,” I said. “I’m supposed to be asking the questions here. Are you sure you’re not a newspaper reporter?”

That tickled her, and after a crackly laugh she said: “I’ll tell you one thing for sure. Her name wasn’t really Tina D’Oro.”

“I figured as much,” I said. “What was it?”

“If you know so damned much,” she said acidly, “figure that out, too.” She didn’t like smart alecks.

“Sorry,” I said.

After a long pause to let me know I was on probation, she sniffed loudly and said: “Olga. Olga Dombrowitz. The Olga was after a dancer I once saw in a show over in Concord. Olga Samovar, it was. Did a little bit from Swan Lake.”

“Funny how your Olga turned out to be a dancer too.”

“You may call standing up on a bar jiggling your tits dancing,” she said sharply, “but I don’t. No, Olga could have been a dancer, but she was too lazy. Bone idle.”

“Where’d the
Dombrowitz come from?”

“Mr.
Dombrowitz,” she said, “was my first husband but one. He was the headwaiter on a boat that used to go up and down the river between Sacramento and San Francisco. He knew every member of the state legislature by his front name. We lived in Pittsburg then, and I used to take Olga down to the dock so that she could wave at her daddy. The captain would do the old ‘Shave and a haircut—two bits’ on the steam whistle for her.”

“What happened to Mr.
Dombrowitz?”

“World War II. He was too old for the army so the damned fool signed on with the merchant marine. Ran into a torpedo someplace out in the Atlantic, and there wasn’t enough left to send home. That was early in 1943.”

As sad as the demise of Mr. Dombrowitz was, I couldn’t help noticing something that didn’t seem to jibe. “Nineteen forty-three?” I said. “How—”

“You’re surprised, aren’t you? How old did you think Olga was?” “Twenty-five,” I said, “maybe twenty-six.”

“Wrong!” she said triumphantly. “Olga would have been thirty-five come this November. The seventeenth. She fooled everyone, she did. Did you see her laying in that fancy coffin at the church?” I said I’d missed that experience.

“Well, I’m telling you right now she could have passed for a girl of twenty and one. She never looked so good in her life. Whatever that
McDavitt did to her, he did the right thing. Downright beautiful. That’s what got me to howling there at the grave. I’m a pretty hard old devil…” She took a sideways look at me to see if I was going to contradict her, then she shrugged. “But when I saw her looking almost as young as she did when she graduated from John C. Fremont Junior High, I just went to pieces.”

She rummaged through a handbag that had cost the lives of at least two alligators and brought out a tattletale-gray man’s handkerchief just in case she had another attack. But it didn’t come.

“Mrs. Barton,” I suggested, “why don’t you just go back to the time Tina—somehow, I can’t get used to calling her Olga—graduated from junior high school and take it right up to the present. I’ll ask you a question or two if some occur to me.”

She wasn’t too happy about me calling the shots, but the old lady wriggled herself into a more comfortable position, took something fuzzy with lint from the bottom of her purse, stuck it in the side of her jaw, and started talking. At the Bay Bridge toll booth she opened the big purse again and dived in for a good rummage until I’d paid the toll, but mostly she just talked. She’d had some practice; I could tell.

Leaving out the more convoluted subplots and tortured rhetoric, the truth seemed to be that Tina was born on the outskirts of Pittsburg a couple of years before the war. After Mr. Dombrowitz was torpedoed, a series of “stepfathers” came and went. Mrs. Barton seemed to remember most of them and recited their names with some relish: Mr. Roper, Mr. Hawkins, Mr. Hufnagel, that son of a bitch Charlie Ramond, Mr. Gilliam. But Tina grew up just like other little girls in the East Bay until she graduated from junior high school.

That was the extent of her formal education, and it qualified Tina for a choice spot behind the candy counter at Kress’s in Antioch. P. D. Zimmerman, the manager, gave her in fairly rapid sequence a promotion to lipsticks, a ten-cents-an-hour raise, a baby, and enough money to go to San Francisco for an abortion.

Tina never came back, at least not for any amount of time. Oh, a couple of years later she did come home to stay long enough to have a baby. It seemed that her first experience with an abortionist had put her off that gentle art for life. But then as soon as the stitches were removed and the baby was hooked on the bottle, Tina—she was still calling herself Olga—had gone off again, leaving behind the baby, a hundred and ten dollars in cash, and an expensive pigskin suitcase.

“What happened to the baby?” I asked, as we drove through the tunnel heading for Orinda.

“It didn’t live,” she said, taking a good grip on the hanky again. “The poor little bugger. The winter after Olga went back to San Francisco it took down with gastro—gastro-something-or-other and just wasted away. We had the doctor out, but it just got thin like a little skeleton. One morning I found it dead.” She started snuffing in the big handkerchief. “I haven’t thought about that baby in years.”

“How did Tina take it?” I asked to get her off the morbid reminis
cences and back on the story.

Mrs. Barton threw back her head and sniffed deeply. “Just like she took everything else,” she said. “Dead easy. She sent me twenty-five bucks to buy a little gravestone with and didn’t bother to come home for six months.”

She looked at the handkerchief again as if wondering whether to have another go at it, but then stuffed it back into the dead alligator. “You’re certainly a nosy bastard,” she said.

“It’s my job. After that, did you see much of Tina?”

“Olga,” she corrected. “She didn’t take the name of Tina D’Oro until maybe five years ago. No, she didn’t come back much. But every so often there she’d be. She was onto something good in those days. She was always dressed smart and driving a new car.”

“Did she ever tell you his name?” I asked.

“Whose name?”

‘The man who was providing all those smart clothes and new cars. Did she happen to mention who he was?”

She looked across the front seat at me like a turkey hen that’d been run down in a dusty street by a bread van. “She didn’t tell me,” she said, “but I found out. He was crazy about her, he was, and he couldn’t let her be away for even a couple of days without writing to her.”

“And you snooped.”

“Yes, I snooped. Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

She had me there. “Are you going to tell me his name?”

“What are you going to do for me?”

“I might find out who stabbed your daughter to death, in case you’re interested. Might even get him punished.”

“How’s that gonna help me?” she demanded. Then she lapsed into a bout of subdued grumbling as we pulled into Walnut Creek.

The old woman hadn’t seen Tina in nearly a year, and it was pretty clear that she hadn’t any more idea who killed her than I did. Still, if she’d give me the name of old Sugar Daddy, it might lead somewhere. Or nowhere. We drove more or less silently through hilly East Bay country until I saw a sign that said Contra Costa Canal.

“You’ll have to direct me from here,” I told her. “I’m a stranger in these parts.”

“Sometimes I wish I was, too,” she said, but she directed me down a dirt and gravel road along the canal bank past a couple of tarpaper shacks. At the sound of my car, occupants of various sizes and sexes emerged into the glaring sunshine to wave Mrs. Barton home like a returning duchess. She acknowledged their greetings with sullen grace.

“Lot of no-account people live along the canal these days,” she muttered, hinting at genteel days long past.

We bumped across a railway line which crossed the road at a right angle, turned sharply to follow the canal perhaps fifty yards, and then came to a dead end at a half-submerged pier jutting out into the canal. There, sitting at the end of the line, was an old, red-brown Southern Pacific caboose which had been converted into a house. A line of limp laundry ran down to a pole from the high poop deck at one end. An old geezer dressed in a
railman’s striped overalls looked up at the car from his calabash pipe without hostility but with no great enthusiasm, either.

“You made good time,” he told Mrs. Barton, snapping up the lid on a turnip-sized watch hung on a finely wrought gold chain.

“This fella’s name is Goodey, Jim,” the old woman said in a completely different tone from the one she’d used with me. “He says he’s some kind of detective looking into Olga’s death.” Then she said to me, “This is Mr. Barton,” as if introducing me to the Duke of Earl.

Barton was a fine-faced old man not far off seventy, with a geo
metrically precise trainman’s mustache. He had a faint gray powder of beard on his weathered cheeks which left him just short of needing a shave. He’d probably figured out just how long a retired railroad man could go between shaves without looking like a bum. When he did shave it would be with a straight razor. Barton looked me over with fathomless gray eyes that gave away nothing.

“Have you got anything in the way of credentials, Mr.
Goodey?” he asked politely. I came up with the brand-new private operative’s license, and he looked it over with an eye that could spot a phony cargo manifest at fifty feet. He didn’t hurry, but read it all and then handed the card back to me. “You’re new to the game, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I was on the force in San Francisco for nearly fifteen years.” That didn’t make me a forty or forty-five-year man
as he’d obviously been with the railroad. But it gave me a bit more credibility in his eyes.