The Case of the One-Penny Orange: A Masao Masuto Mystery (Book Two) (13 page)

“That's right.”

“We got the girl. She's back in the black-and-white.”

“That Haber thing was on Lapeer Street, wasn't it?” the other L.A.P.D. cop said. “Suppose we take them both over to San Vicente for starters.”

“I'd like to ride with you,” Masuto said. He nodded at his car. “It was a nice car, a really nice car.”

10

CLEO CONTINUED

It was half-past seven when Masuto arrived at the sheriff's station on San Vicente Boulevard in West Hollywood, and Wainwright was waiting for him there.

“You look like hell,” Wainwright said to him. “Why aren't you in the hospital or something?”

“I'm always amazed at the politeness of Caucasians.”

“Screw politeness.”

“I'm not in the hospital,” Masuto said, “because I am all right. When we get back to the station I'll wash up and change my shirt.”

“What about those cuts?”

“They stopped bleeding.”

“Why don't you go home and rest?”

“I can accept anything from you but solicitude,” Masuto said, smiling slightly. “I told you that I intend to put the pieces together tonight.”

“Sure, you told me.”

At that point Deputy Williams joined them. “The other two are dead,” he told them, and said to Masuto, “I know you made the collar and read Cleerey his rights, but wasn't that a hell of a way to go about it? You could have brought him back here.”

“We don't want the credit,” Wainwright said. “Goddamn it, what did you expect of Masao, with three demented thugs trying to kill him!” He turned on Masuto and said, “As for you, you give me one royal pain in the ass. Why in hell don't you carry a gun? If you had a gun …”

“I might be dead now,” Masuto said amiably. “Look, Williams, drop the charge of attempted murder on me. You can make the charge for Haber's murder stick.”

“How? Just tell me how. This Cleerey is screaming his head off, and we don't have one goddamn thing on him except that he resisted arrest and tried to kill you, which is something, but it don't clean the murder pad.”

“Why don't we talk to Cleo,” Masuto suggested.

“On her we got nothing, but nothing.”

“We'll talk.”

“She's not even a user.”

“Cocaine.”

“There's none on her and no tracks. So she sniffs. Go prove it. She's already called some shyster, and he'll have her out of here in ten minutes.”

“Let's talk to her.”

“You talk to her. We'll listen.”

The three of them, Masuto, Williams, and Wainwright, went into the interrogation room, and then a matron brought Cleo there. It was the first time Masuto saw her. She was smaller and more slender than he had imagined, with a face of such wide-set blue-eyed innocence that she might well have played Saint Joan. The voice was something else, hoarse and low and cold.

“I got nothing to say,” she told them. “You got nothing on me, and this ain't the end. Wait till my lawyer comes. We got a false arrest that will make me a bundle. That's it. I got nothing else to say.”

“That's fair enough,” said Masuto. “You don't have to say anything. Just listen, and I'll tell you a story.”

“Bullshit.”

“You met a man at a party,” Masuto said. “His name was Ivan Gaycheck. He gave you cocaine. He wasn't a dealer, but he used it.…”

“I don't know any Ivan Gaycheck.”

“You promised not to talk. Ivan Gaycheck was murdered.…”

“If you think you're going to hang Gaycheck's murder on me, you're crazy!”

“And after he was murdered, I went through his wallet, and found” — he took the photo out of his pocket — “this picture, which you gave him when you became his mistress.”

Her lips tightened.

“Then, one night, he boasted. He boasted that he was going to get his hands on a stamp that was worth a fortune, and that he would sell it for an enormous profit. He even told you where the stamp was. He told you that it belonged to an old woman who did not even know that she possessed it. He probably promised you a share of his profits, but you were greedy, and you told Cleerey and his two associates about the stamp. Then you read an announcement in the Los Angeles
Times
that this woman, whose name was Hilda Kramer, had died and would be buried at such and such a time. You knew the house would be empty during the funeral, so you went there with your associates, broke in, and ransacked the place. But you did not find the stamp because the stamp was not there. And then Gaycheck was murdered.”

“You lousy fuzz bastard! You think you're going to pin Gaycheck's murder on me. You're going to frame me, you bastard! You lousy Chink bastard!”

“Oh, no — no. You didn't murder Gaycheck. Neither did your associates murder him. I'm sure you thought about it, but you were too late. He was murdered while you were ransacking the Briggses' house on Camden Drive, so, you see, you have a perfect alibi.”

Her face fell, as the anger washed out. She stared at him, confused now.

“But you did decide that Ronald Haber murdered Gaycheck,” Masuto went on, “and that night, you and your three associates drove to Haber's apartment on Lapeer Street, and beat him and tortured him, and finally killed him.”

“You're crazy!” she yelled.

“But you didn't find the stamp. Yet you were persevering. You then went to Gaycheck's shop and opened his safe. And still you didn't find the stamp. So it was all for nothing, and stupid and senseless — as senseless as the scheme to kidnap the Briggs child.”

“Go to hell!”

Masuto rose, started to say something, then swallowed his words and began to pace back and forth across the interrogation room. Wainwright and Williams watched him keenly, but they said nothing.

“I don't judge you,” Masuto said finally. “Who am I to judge anyone? It's true that you stood by and watched your friends beat Haber to death, but don't we all stand by and watch people suffer and die and never lift a finger? However, the law regards it differently. The law says that you are an accessory to a murder, and you will go to prison for the rest of your life. There's no way out of that. You can hire every lawyer in California — and there's still no way out for you.”

The wide blue eyes were full of terror now. “You're lying. You haven't any proof. You're lying. You said Gaycheck gave me cocaine. He never gave me cocaine.”

Masuto sat down, leaned across the table, and said gently, “I'm not lying, Cleo. I have proof. There's a girl who lives on the same floor as Haber lived on. When you left the place, she opened the door and she saw you. Do you understand? She saw you.”

Recognition, memory. It mixed with the terror, and Masuto found his heart going out to her. She was defenseless now. The terror drove away her veneer of toughness. The blue eyes filled with moisture. “You bastard,” she whispered. “Why don't you try to make it in this lousy place — as a dame! Try! Get yourself worked over until you're no better than a lousy lamb chop. I never killed nobody. It was Cleerey and Buck who wasted him. I begged them to stop. I pleaded with them to stop. Look at me! I weigh ninety-two pounds and you tell me I beat someone to death.”

She put her head down on the table and began to sob. Masuto looked at Williams, who said, “Okay, I'll do what I can. I'll talk to the D.A. Are you sure this Cindy Lang over on Lapeer will testify? Are you sure she saw them?”

“Give her a break and she'll testify,” Wainwright said. “Come on, Masao. We'll get you cleaned up.”

Driving back to Beverly Hills, Wainwright asked Masuto how he felt.

“Good and decent. There's nothing I like better than to torture kids who have had the life beaten out of them.”

“She's no kid. Don't let those blue eyes fool you.”

“Then what is she, Captain? A monster of some sort? She never asked to be born into this hellhole that we call civilization. Where's her family? I don't see any hands stretched out to her.”

“That's sentimental crap, Masao. She stood by and watched a man beaten to death.”

“We all do, Captain. We all do.”

“Look, I can live without your goddamn philosophy. We know who killed Haber. What about Gaycheck?”

“It's still a half hour before nine o'clock.”

“And you're going to turn him up before nine?”

“I don't know,” Masuto said tiredly. “We may never know who killed Gaycheck. It won't be the first unsolved murder, and it won't be the last.”

“That's beautiful,” Wainwright said.

At the station, Beckman was waiting, sitting on the edge of Masuto's desk, grinning.

“What the hell are you grinning about?” Wainwright asked sourly. “I ought to dock that four hundred dollars of telephoning from your salary, and then you two clowns would stop playing Scotland Yard.”

“What's eating him, Masao?” Beckman asked as Wainwright marched into his office and slammed the door behind him. “And what did you run into? You look like you put your face into an electric fan.”

“Small cuts and a lot of blood.”

“I hear you cleared up the Haber thing. It sounds wild. What happened?”

“Got a clean shirt here, Sy?”

“I got more than that.”

“Can you hold it until I wash up? Where's the shirt?”

“In my locker. Be my guest.”

After he had washed up, rinsed his mouth, and gone over his face with a styptic pencil, Masuto felt better. He changed his shirt. His tie was patterned and the bloodstains hardly showed.

“That's better,” Beckman said when he returned to the squad room. “You look almost human. What happened over at Topanga?”

“I had some trouble but then it turned out all right.”

“I hear you totaled your Datsun.”

“Is there anything on the lot I can use?”

“There's a loose patrol car. The chief said you could have it for a couple of days. Here's the keys.” He tossed them over at Masuto.

“Thank you, Sy. What did you find at the library?”

“Just what the doctor ordered.” He grinned again and took a folded sheet of paper out of his pocket. “Page twenty-two of
Der Spiegel
, September seventy-two — although what you want it for I can't figure out. We know Gaycheck was Schwartzman, and whatever his name was, we know he's dead.” He spread out the sheet on the desk. “I tore it out — stealing public property. Who the hell's going to miss it anyway, five years old?” There, in the center of the page, was a five-by-seven portrait photo of a pudgy young man in the uniform of an SS officer.

“That's the name,” Beckman said, pointing to the caption under the picture. “That's all I can read, but there it is. Gaylord Schwartzman. Anyway, I'd recognize him.”

“Would you?”

“Masao, I spotted him before I read the name.”

“Maybe. Do you have the morgue pictures?”

“Right here.” Beckman took them out of his pocket and laid them next to the magazine photo. “Well, Masao — am I wrong?”

“No. He changed very little. Lost most of his hair, but otherwise …”

“No beard, no mustache, lives here in Beverly Hills, right here out in the open, and nobody recognizes him.”

“Somebody did.”

The telephone on Masuto's desk rang. It was Lieutenant Pete Bones from L.A.P.D. “Masao,” he said, “I hear you had us running errands for you.”

“I guess we did.”

“You sound down. Not the usual Oriental confidence.”

“I had a hard day.”

“I hear you totaled that crummy Datsun you drive. Real cowboys and Indians out there at Topanga. They tell me the good guys won.”

“You hear a lot down there.”

“We keep our ears open. That's why we're so good. You want to know about that twenty-two that killed Gaycheck?”

“No, I don't want to hear about it,” Masuto said sourly. “We just asked to keep you busy.”

“Sarcasm, sarcasm.”

“How do you know it's the gun that killed Gaycheck?”

“We don't know, because we haven't got the gun. You told us, and we consider you to be honorable.”

“All right. What have you got?”

“That's the thanks I get. We had two men on this all day and we covered twenty-two gun stores, but what's that to you? You don't pay us taxes. You live up there with the swells in something that calls itself a city and doesn't even have a legitimate flophouse.”

“Pete, I thank you. Now what have you got?”

“That's better. All right, over the past two weeks, only one store sold the kind of a purse gun you describe. Sam's Sporting Goods on San Pedro. Small automatic, five shots. A little British gun made by Webley-Fosbery. Most of their makes fire six cartridges. This one shoots five. It has a light trigger action and it only shoots the twenty-two short. They stopped making them before World War Two. This one had a mother-of-pearl handle. Funny thing, the dealer asked the customer whether she wanted extra cartridges. She said no, all she wanted was the full magazine. She didn't know how to operate it. He showed her.”

“She. A woman bought it?”

“That's right.”

“Did you get a description?”

“We did. Here goes. Straight blond hair, down to her waist, blue eyes, very blue — the dealer remembered them specifically. Bluest eyes he ever saw. Beautiful pair of knockers, he couldn't stop raving about them. I'd say size thirty-six. Sweater, long skirt, the kind they drag around Hollywood — and an English accent.”

“How old was she?”

“He says maybe twenty, twenty-five. Somewhere around there. Said she lived in the Hollywood Hills, with ripoffs all around her. She wanted the gun for protection.”

“What did she sign on the register?”

“Angela Cartwright, 2240 Langley Drive. No such street in the Hollywood Hills. We checked it.”