“Okay.”
I sat back. “Your aunt didn’t happen to give you anything else, did she? Maybe a safe-deposit box key, something like that?”
“No, I’m afraid not. Sorry I couldn’t have been more helpful.”
“Gayle, you’ve been a great help.”
I laid a buck on the table for the coffee and started to get up.
Then it hit me.
“Goddamn!” I exclaimed.
“Jimmy!”
“I’m sorry, Gayle, gotta go.” I grabbed the shoebox and ran to the pay phone.
“Sol!” I said when he came on the line. “I know who hired Danny and Rollo.”
CHAPTER 42
I remembered that Raymond Haskell owned the Los Angeles Bank and Trust. But that alone didn’t prove he was responsible for the murders, or was involved in my kidnapping and torture. The fact that he owned the bank didn’t in itself tie him in with Danny and Rollo. Only one thing did…
I drove as fast as I could heading back to Downey, hitting eighty in stretches where the traffic was light, sixty where it was heavy. I leaned on the horn, passed cars on both the left and right, and prayed that I wouldn’t be stopped. The shoebox rested on the seat next to me. I’d take one more look at the stuff inside when I was alone in a quiet place-a place where I could think.
By the time I arrived at the Silverman Building and took the elevator to Sol’s office on the top floor, Rita was already there. “Sol told me you’d called. He said to be here where you arrived. Said it might be important. Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sure. I’m great. I figured it all out.”
Sol sat behind his desk, looking a little skeptical. With the glowing tip of his cigar, he pointed to a burgundy leather armchair. “Sit. Tell us what you figured out.”
I sat in the leather chair and Rita sat in the other chair facing the desk. A glass coffee table bigger than Delaware separated us. I set Mrs. Hathaway’s shoebox on the table, and Rita picked it up. “What’s this?” she asked, removing the lid.
“A shoebox, but that’s not the important thing. Now, get this-”
“Get what?” Sol asked.
“The Tower,” I said.
“What Tower?”
“Remember when I had my car repo’ed?”
“Yeah, sure. The day you ate all my crumpets. But what’s that got to do with the murders?”
“When I called the bank to work out a plan to get my car back-the bank owned by Haskell, Los Angeles Bank and Trust-they said no.”
“Yeah, so? You didn’t make your pay-”
“The guy said the repossession order came directly from the Tower. That’s where the executive offices must be located. Where Haskell has his office suite.”
“Yeah, we know Haskell was on your ass. The way you spoke to him at the dinner-”
“Sol, listen,” I interrupted. “It finally came to me. I overheard Danny at the warehouse tell the driver to call the big boss. Tell him they’ve grabbed me. He told Morelli to call the boss at the Tower! That means the goons worked for Haskell!”
“Hmm…” Sol said.
“If the goons murdered Mrs. Hathaway, then they did it on his orders,” I added.
Sol stubbed out his cigar and stood. “Are you sure? Are you absolutely certain that Danny said to call the Tower?”
“Yes, I am. He said ‘the boss at the Tower.’ Not only that, Los Angeles Bank and Trust is the bank that handled old Mrs. Hathaway’s trust account. We know that Haskell and Byron are as thick as thieves.”
“As thick as murderers,” Rita said. “But what about Vera? Did Haskell kill her too?”
“Of course. Vera had something, some kind of paper that she tried to blackmail him with. He killed her in ’45. Mrs. Hathaway just recently discovered whatever it was that she had. She probably found it while she was rooting around looking for the phone numbers she gave me. So naturally, she tried to blackmail him as well, and she met the same fate. She had been successfully blackmailing Byron, so why not tap Haskell, too?”
Sol listened intently, paused for a moment then grabbed the phone. “Get the Los Angeles Bank and Trust headquarters on the line.” He put his hand over the receiver. “Got an idea,” he told Rita and me. Then back to the phone: “Connect me with the Executive Tower, please, Raymond Haskell.”
“You’re calling Haskell?” I asked.
Sol held up his hand. “Yeah, I want to see if he even has an office there.” He tapped a button on a small black box sitting next to the phone. “Here, I’ll put the call on the speaker.”
“Hey, that’s pretty nifty,” Rita said. “We ought to get one of those things.”
“I’d like to speak with Raymond Haskell,” he said, after a succession of operators finally connected him to one of Haskell’s secretaries.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Haskell is not in his office today. Can I tell him what this is regarding?”
“No, I’ll call him back. But he does have an office there, in the Tower, correct?”
“Yes, but as I said, he’s not in today.”
Sol disconnected the speaker. “Yeah, he has an office there, all right. But what does that prove?”
“What do you mean?” I said. “It all fits. He has an office at the-”
“Doesn’t prove a thing. He’d deny everything you said. The only witnesses are Danny and Rollo and they’re dead. You killed them.”
“What about Morelli? I didn’t kill him.”
“Do you know where he is? Plus, does he know anything? You said he only drove Danny around for a couple of days. And even if he does know something, would he talk? No, Jimmy, we need more.”
“What about Hathaway’s blackmail payments? They stopped when she died.”
“Byron could’ve told him. Byron could have heard about the murder from Rinehart. The DA would automatically get the police report. Now that I think about it, it’d be a waste of time to even question the bank’s employees.”
“What about the warehouse in the middle of an oil field? Haskell’s in the oil business, too. Maybe-”
“I checked, ran a title search. Gannett Air Research, successor to Signal Oil, owns the property. What do you think-those engineers went to the motel and beat her up with slide rules? Bored her to death waxing poetically about the quadratic equation?”
I sat back in the chair and exhaled. Sol was right. We had nothing to prove that Haskell had murdered anybody.
“Look, Jimmy, he’s a putz, but he’s not a foolish putz. He’d have his tracks covered every which way. And you just can’t run around and accuse a big macher like Haskell of murder without dead-on proof. For chrissakes, he’s giving a speech tomorrow evening at the Coolidge League banquet. They’re honoring him for his service to our country. Gonna present him with a Calvin.”
“What the hell is that?”
“Kind of like the Academy Awards ceremony, but for businessmen. A bunch of billionaires giving each other attaboys.”
“I don’t give a damn how big he is. He’s the reason Al Roberts rotted in his cell for twenty-nine years. He killed those two women. I just know he did.”
“What about his motive? Blackmail? We have no evidence, just speculation that Vera and Mrs. Hathaway had anything on him. Without that, there’s no motive.”
Rita set the shoebox back on the coffee table. “I guess we really are back where we started from. No motive, no case.”
We sat back in silence, thinking. What would we do now? We were so close. But close could be a million miles from the facts, and without facts and a motive we’d never get there.
“Sorry, Jimmy,” Sol said. “But we’ll keep looking.”
Just then my eye caught the corner of the yellowing newspaper sticking out of Mrs. Hathaway’s shoebox. I fished it out and looked it over for a moment. Then I frantically dug through the box.
“What are you doing?” Rita asked.
I pulled out a torn sheet from the motel’s guest register and glanced at it. Then I took out some old newspaper clippings, including obituaries, buried under Vera’s make-up jars and creams and studied them. A minute later, the light bulb went off.