“The big guy in seersucker talking to the older fellow is the D.A., Brett Merrill,” I told Ski.
“Ex-D.A.,” Ski corrected. “He retired. He’s Culhane’s campaign manager now.”
“So, how’d you do?” I asked.
“Not bad.”
That was encouraging. Ski, who had been in the bureaucracy six years longer than I had, was a master of the noncommittal, having learned the trick from Moriarity. His responses ranged from “not much” to “not bad.” Nothing less, nothing more. “Not bad” held promise.
“How’d you do?” he asked.
“Well, I had a steak sandwich and traded pedigrees with Culhane, met the Gormans, scored some points at a couple of banks, and then went to a whorehouse.”
He shook his head. “I got six years’ seniority on you and I get to spend the last three hours in the records room with a sweet little old lady named Glenda, listening to gossip, and blowing dust off old files. You eat steak, meet the snotty set, and get a matinee.”
“Privileges of rank.”
“Find out anything while you were eating and slumming with the rich?”
We started a familiar routine. Exchanging ideas and building on the evidence in some kind of logical order, trying to make sense of all the information we were gathering.
“I think I know who brokered the checks,” I said.
“I’ll take a wild guess,” he answered, flipping through his notebook. No one, not even a cryptologist, could decipher Ski’s scrawl. He looked over at me. “Delilah O’Dell,” he said.
“You been snooping around the banks, too.”
He nodded. “At least one check was bought by a working stiff I assume could have been her Japanese gardener. The rest of them were bought by sexy young ladies nobody knew. I get the feeling nobody wants to admit that the local madam has a chauffeur of color driving her and her employees around in a Rolls-Royce.”
The man Merrill was talking to got up. They shook hands and the man left without so much as a glance at us.
“You think O’Dell was banking Lila Parrish?” Ski asked.
“No. I think she’s the front. Her girls go into L.A. on occasion as well as San Luis Obispo and other towns along the route. Easy for them to make a five-minute trip to a bank. What did the records department give up?”
“A few interesting items. Some may fit in, some are just local history. For instance, there’s a death certificate on an Eli Gorman Junior. He was born in Massachusetts in 1900, died September 1920. That’s from the record. Isabel Hoffman and Ben Gorman were his parents. They were married in Massachusetts. Gorman was going to Harvard and she went with him. She was seventeen at the time. That’s from Glenda.”
“The kid was killed the night of the Grand View massacre,” I told him. “He drove his car off the overlook. That was his mother we saw with the flowers up on the cliff.”
“Eli Gorman, Ben’s father, owned this whole valley at one time. The deeds are all on file.”
“He won it in a poker game with O’Dell.”
“Not all of it. O’Dell snookered him. He sold the deeds to the property that was then the town of Eureka to Riker the day of the game.”
“And started a war,” I said.
Ski thought about that for a moment or two.
“It probably started long before that,” he said. “The old-timer, Tallman? He put up with the town’s sins. After the shoot-out in Delilah’s place, Culhane turned up the heat on Riker.”
I finished the analysis. “And when Riker went up the river, and Fontonio was shot, Culhane ran Guilfoyle and the rest of the bunch out of town.”
“I think I got a surprise for you. I took a stroll through the cemetery and came across a tombstone that’s interesting.” He looked at his notes. “Jerome Parrish. Born 1869, died 1908. Loving husband and father.”
“The daughter was Lila Parrish,” I guessed.
He nodded. “She was born in the clinic here, in 1900. Which would make her forty-one, close enough to fit Verna. Her mother was divorced when the kid was four. She remarried and divorced again. Her name now is Ione Fisher. Here’s the kicker. Ione Fisher was, and still is, a nurse at the Shuler Institute, the sanitarium down in Mendosa. Very private. I understand Mrs. Fisher is head nurse now. She’s sixty-two.”
“That’s a lot of stuff to get out of old records.”
“Mostly Glenda. She’s fifty-six, has a big nose, and loves to talk.”
I said, “So Lila blows town, heads down to Mendosa, hides out with her old lady in a private sanitarium for a while, and when Guilfoyle moves on Mendosa, Lila slips down to L.A., gets a new ID, hikes her age up a bit, and becomes Verna Hicks.”
“I have to wonder two things,” Ski said. “If she was being paid off, why would she hide out twenty-five miles from here in a town run by Riker’s boy? Seems a little risky, wouldn’t you say?”
“You’re forgetting the time element,” I said. “Guilfoyle didn’t move into Mendosa until after Riker’s appeal, which was almost a year after the trial.”
“You’d think if she was a key witness against Arnie Riker, Culhane would have found her when Riker appealed the case,” Ski said. “Hell, if big-nosed Glenda knew who her mother was, Culhane certainly did.”
“Sometimes what seems obvious isn’t necessarily fact,” a voice drawled, and we turned to face Brett Merrill. “Mind if I join you?”
He looked larger when confined in a small place. He was probably six-two and a hundred ninety or two hundred pounds. He sat down before we had a chance to answer him.
“Some things are bothering us,” I said to Merrill. “Maybe you can help us out.”
“I can try,” he drawled pleasantly.
“Lila Parrish was your key witness in the Thompson case. It seems to us that you would have kept a leash on her-knowing Riker was sure to appeal his conviction.”
“Yeah,” Ski said. “And since her mother lives in Mendosa, you’d think Culhane would look for her there.”
“Lila Parrish didn’t live with her mother at the time of the murder,” Merrill said. “She lived with another girl in a shanty in Milltown. She left her mother when Ione married Fisher. They were on the outs. Our people interviewed Ione Fisher. I’m convinced she wasn’t hiding Lila down there.”
“She was your only eyeball witness. How hard did you really try to find her?” I said.
Merrill shrugged and said in his easy drawl, “Lila Parrish vanished the day after she testified. Her roommate worked at the mill. When she came home from work, Lila’s things were gone. Nobody’s seen her since.”
“And you couldn’t find her?”
“Look, boys, sometimes you have to play the hand you’re dealt. We had Riker dead-to-rights. He and his boat were covered with her blood. The Parrish girl had testified she saw Riker shoot Wilma Thompson and throw her in his car. Thompson’s blood was all over the car. Riker had spent ten days in jail for beating her up once and she ditched him. Plenty of motive for a guy with Riker’s reputation. And he had no alibi. He said he went to his boat that night, got drunk, and passed out. When he was arrested on the boat he was still wearing bloody clothes and there wasn’t a scratch on him. He was lucky they reduced the sentence to life without parole.”
I smiled. “Said like a true prosecutor.”
“It was a solid case. The legwork was first rate. Woods and Carney gave me a preponderance of evidence.”
“Where’s Carney?”
“Died of a heart attack five years ago.”
“When Woods shot Fontonio, why did you dead-docket the case against him?” Ski asked, suddenly changing the subject.
“I thought you were investigating an L.A. homicide,” Merrill said softly. The smile got a little cooler.
“Just curious,” Ski said.
“Making a case against Eddie Woods would have been a waste of time. There were no eyewitnesses. We had started a grand jury investigation against what was left of the Riker outfit and Eddie Woods went to Fontonio’s place to deliver a subpoena. He says Fontonio went for a gun and he shot him. There was a gun in Fontonio’s hand we couldn’t trace.”