“You rang, sir?” Oliver, the valet, stood in the doorway.
Byron jumped out of the chair. “Yes, I did! These gentlemen are leaving. Show them out, now!”
Sol and I brushed Oliver aside and started to leave. We got what we came for. There was no doubt that Byron had lied to us. Nowhere on the last page of the report did it say anything about the woman being murdered in a sleazy motel room. All of the information detailing Vera’s death was in the first few pages of the report. Yes, Byron had put Roberts behind bars by concealing the truth from him back in 1945, and he was still attempting to cover it up after all these years. The sixty-four thousand dollar question was why?
CHAPTER 9
The next morning I drove to my office, skipping breakfast. After giving a cheery greeting to Mabel and receiving a grunt in return, I grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down at my desk. I dialed Sol’s private number. Joyce, Sol’s secretary, answered and after a few pleasantries she asked, “How can I help you, Jimmy?”
“I know Sol isn’t in this early, but could you have him give me a call when he arrives? I have an idea about Byron and Raymond Haskell and wanted to bounce it off of him.” I wanted to know if Raymond Haskell’s family had any dealings with the District Attorney’s Office prior to his brother’s death in 1945. Just a hunch. I don’t know how, but Sol had ways of digging out information like that.
I hung up just as Rita walked in and placed a pink paper bag on my desk. A hint of her flowery perfume along with the pleasant aroma of donuts hung in the air. “Good morning, boss. Brought the donuts. They have a new kind. Made with soybeans, supposed to be healthy. Less fat, too. A diet donut.”
I let out my first groan of the day.
She winked. “Just kidding.” She reached in the bag and pulled out a jelly donut about the size of a basketball.
“Ah, breakfast. The most important meal of the day.”
I took a huge bite and washed it down with coffee. Rita nibbled on a French cruller, set it down and wiped her hands with a napkin.
“Boss, the word’s going around: you stepped out on a limb with the Roberts case. First the thing with Judge Balford, now this.”
“What do you mean?”
“I met Pamela Young, from the DA’s office, last night at the Regency for a couple of drinks.”
“Isn’t she prosecuting Geoff, your DUI client?”
“I was hoping to cut a deal, reduce it to reckless and plead it out. Didn’t fly, too many priors. But anyway, she heard through the grapevine that you and Sol took a little trip north to Rancho del Honcho.”
“Yeah, so?”
“Byron’s big time, a legend in the District Attorney’s Office, Jimmy. Not only that, he’s a huge contributor to Rinehart’s campaign.”
Joe Rinehart, the current DA, was looking at a bitter re-election fight coming up in two years. One of his deputies had made a name prosecuting a big time Mafia boss and was planning to make a run for the office.
“Yeah, so?”
“Pamela said you pissed him off. The minute you guys left his ranch, Byron called Rinehart personally. Wanted to press charges-impersonating a journalist.”
“What?” I laughed. “That’s not a crime.”
“He said you acted in a threatening manner. Shoved a paper in his face and demanded that he read it.”
“OK, maybe Sol got a little aggressive. You know how he is. But we just confronted him with a few facts. That’s all.”
“Rinehart, according to Pamela, told Byron that the DA’s office would keep an eye on you. I think Pamela enjoyed watching me squirm.”
“Keep an eye on me? What the hell is that supposed to mean? For Christ’s sake, I’m just defending my client. I don’t need this crap.”
“Hey, I’m on your side.” A gleam flashed in Rita’s eyes. “Jimmy, I think you might have stumbled onto something and I want to be in on this one.”
“Aren’t you too busy?”
“No.”
“What about Geoff? You said you were working on his case full time.”
“Done deal, four weekends in the slammer. And he has to take Antabuse during that time. So, it will be at least a month before he’s caught drinking and driving again.”
“But haven’t you got anything else cooking?”
“Nope.”
“Well, maybe you can help out a little, but just until we get a paying client. The Roberts case is pro bono-in other words, he’s broke. But we need to get some cash flowing in; the rent, utilities, phone-”
“Spare me the details, Jimmy. Mabel harps about that every morning when I walk in the door. But hey, we’ve been in tight spots before and we’ve always made it. Now, what can I do to help?”
“How about a little investigative work? I hate to keep leaning on Sol for stuff we can do ourselves.”
“Just call me the Girl from U.N.C.L.E.”
“Now that you mention it, you do look a little like Stefanie Powers.”
A pout appeared. “She’s a lot older than me.”
“Couple of years, maybe. But she’s a knockout.”
The billion-watt smile returned. “Why thank you, boss.”
“I mean, both of you have nice, ah… features.”
She gave me a demure look. “Features?”
“Rita, cut it out. You know what I mean.”
“OK. What do you want me to do? About the Roberts case, I mean?”
I smiled inside and said, “I’ve been thinking. When it all started for Roberts, he was coming to L.A. to find some girl by the name of Sue Harvey, a singer in the New York nightclub where he played the piano. She came west to break into the movies. But get this: he said that when he finally got to town, he never spoke to her. That doesn’t sound right. Traveling all that way, then not even calling her.”
“Maybe he wanted to keep her out of it,” Rita said.
“Yeah, that’s what I think. But it’s possible she might know something that would help.”
“You want me to track her down? My God, Jimmy, that was thirty years ago.”
“Stefanie Powers could’ve found her.”
“She had better writers than I do.”
CHAPTER 10
That afternoon I drove to the Los Feliz District, near Griffith Park area. I looked in the phone book and found the name of the motor court where Vera had been murdered. To my amazement it hadn’t been torn down and replaced by one of the ubiquitous strip malls that were popping up and spreading like fungus all over the Southland. When I called the place, an elderly woman named Mrs. Hathaway answered. After introducing myself-sticking with my story about being a journalist doing a history of Los Angeles in the forties-she told me that she had owned the motor court since before World War II and had been managing it alone ever since her husband, Dink, had died in the late fifties.
“Of course I remember the murder,” she said after I asked her about that day in 1945. “How could I forget? People don’t get knocked off in one of my bungalows every day, you know. I don’t run that kind of place.”
I knew I had to take a look at the murder scene, if nothing else, to verify the facts stated in the police report. But I also knew it could turn out to be a few hours wasted. After almost thirty years there couldn’t be much about the motor court that was the same.
Dink’s Hollywood Oasis, “Comfy beds, Cool rooms,” consisted of ten separate clapboard cabins rimming a pea gravel parking lot located on Los Feliz Blvd, close to Vermont Ave. The office occupied the first cabin to the left as I turned off the boulevard into the lot.
Mrs. Hathaway stood behind a wooden counter when I entered the office. A door behind her led to her private quarters, I assumed. She had to be in her seventies and wore a high-neck dress with black and white polka dots. The shoulders were padded, giving her a broad and square posture.
I introduced myself and she started in, telling me about the beef she had with the District Attorney’s Office and cops who investigated the murder back then. “Goddamn fingerprint powder all over the place. Took hours to clean it up. Not only that, we couldn’t rent the bungalow for several days after the murder. The bastards had it all tied up. Who’s going to pay for that, I asked Dink.”