“His wife and bodyguard said he never packed heat,” Ski said.
“C’mon, boys,” Merrill said, slowly shaking his head. “Would you go before a grand jury with a wife and a hoodlum as your only witnesses? The attorney general sent a man down from Sacramento to look into it. He looked over the evidence, said, ‘Thanks a lot for nothing,’ and went back to Sacramento. Then Eddie resigned.”
He finished his coffee and dabbed his lips with a napkin.
Ski asked, “You came here from someplace else, didn’t you? Just curious. Accents interest me.”
“Everybody in California came from someplace else,” Merrill answered. “I came from southern Georgia.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I had a little law firm and a partner named David Vigil, who had kept business alive while I was off fighting the war. There really wasn’t enough business for the two of us, and my brother and sister-in-law were barely scratching out a living on the family farm. One day I got a call from California, probably the longest long-distance call in the town’s history. It was Brodie. He said, ‘How’d you like to be D.A. of Eureka, California? I need some help out here.’ So I packed my valise, took the bus to Atlanta, and hopped the train west. We kept busy. A shooting every week or ten days. Once in a while somebody stupid would rob the bank. If Buck Tallman didn’t drop them in their tracks coming out the door, Brodie would ride them down. There was a lot of law but not much order.” He stopped and chuckled. “Probably a lot more than you wanted to know. Southerners tend to go on.”
“We’re still trying to get a handle on the five hundred a month Verna was getting,” I said, cutting off his monologue. “Somebody was paying her off for some thing.”
“I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Does Culhane know?”
“You’ll have to ask him,” he said, grabbing his hat.
He laid a quarter on the table.
“Pleasure meeting you, Ski,” he said, and strolled out, leaving us staring at the door.
After a minute or so I said, “Know what I think? I think we’ve run out of gas here. Nobody’s going to tell us a damn thing.”
“I’ll tell you what I think,” Ski answered. “I think Lila Parrish lied at Riker’s trial. Merrill didn’t have Thompson’s body because Riker fed her to the sharks. So somebody arranged for Parrish to testify she had witnessed the murder, then paid her to vanish.”
“Interesting theory, Ski. But why, after nearly twenty years, does she turn up dead in her bathtub?”
“If we knew that, we’d know who killed her.”
“Maybe Merrill was giving us the shoo-fly about Ione Fisher. Maybe she knows where her daughter went.”
“Maybe.”
“There’s only one person who might give us a straight answer,” I said.
“The mother.” Ski nodded. “And she’s right down the road.”
“Worth a shot,” I agreed, and we headed south.
CHAPTER 27
The neon sign spelled albacore point in startling red letters that burned the name into the fog. Under it: vacancies. At this time of year it should have said Full. Charlie Lefton apparently was too far off the beaten track to attract much trade. Or maybe he didn’t care. Maybe Charlie was happy to have his little place by the ocean. Maybe he was independently wealthy and reclusive and used the place as a tax dodge. All Moriarity had said was that Charlie would give us a good price if we wanted to stay the night. Lefton’s was perfect since it was on the way south to Mendosa.
We got to Lefton’s by driving down a hard dirt road that led from Route 7 west toward the ocean and then curved around at a two-story hospital and followed the shoreline south. About five miles past the hospital, a sign had pointed off to the east to Milltown and a half mile beyond that was the paper mill, a black silhouette against the darkening blue sky. It was an eerie, ugly giant, a noisy complex with stacks that spewed reeking smoke and ash into the air. Man-made clouds obliterated a fiery sun sinking toward the horizon.
As we passed the plant, an early fog had suddenly surged out of the gathering dusk, not on little cat feet as Sandburg would have it but like a broiling storm cloud that had been grounded. Driving into it was like driving into a swirling, gray tunnel. The headlights reflected off it and were swallowed up. I switched to low beam and it gave us maybe ten feet of grace on the road. I was driving fifteen miles an hour when I spotted the red sign and slowed down, looking for the driveway into Lefton’s place. I found it under the neon sign and turned onto a shell drive, the tires crunching beneath us as I eased down it.
“I hope the ocean isn’t anywhere near here,” I said. “If we roam off the road, we could end up in the drink.”
After a moment, Ski said, “I can’t swim.”
I laughed at him. “Hell, you couldn’t sink if you tried.”
A sign jumped out of the fog at us, an arrow cut from a two-by-four, painted white with black letters: office. I felt disoriented, isolated in the middle of nowhere, with visibility of about five feet. I stepped out of the car and yelled, “Anybody around?”
My words sounded lifeless, without resonance, as the mist swallowed them up. Then a voice came back just as flat, “Who wants to know?”
“Customers,” I yelled back.
A spotlight blinked on, a blurred orb somewhere off to our left. A shimmering image came toward us, a rail-thin six-footer, his face leathered and tanned by sun and wind, his windblown black hair in need of a trim, and his face covered with four or five days’ growth of graying beard. He was wearing denim work pants, a clean white sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and what was left rolled up over his shoulders, and light blue canvas deck shoes. There was a tattoo on his left biceps, a knife piercing a waving banner on which were the words death before dishonor.
“Charlie Lefton?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m Lefton,” he said in a voice so quiet it was almost a whisper.
“I’m Zeke Bannon, this is my partner Ski Agassi. We work for Dan Moriarity. He said you might have room for us.”
“Homicide cops, huh?”
I nodded.
“Follow me up to the lodge. Can’t see shit in this soup.”
We followed him down a slight embankment and into the arena of light formed by the searchlight. I could hear water beating against something.
“We close to the ocean?” I asked.
“About a hundred yards to your right,” he answered. A moment later a small wooden bridge appeared through the fog. It led to the lodge, as Lefton called it, a strip of eleven rooms. The office was in the middle, five rooms on each side. A narrow walk surrounded the primitive billet and below it, a grid of four-by-fours supported it about five feet off the ground. Nearby, just out of the light’s perimeter, I could hear a boat groaning against its tie lines, and much farther away, almost out of earshot, the ocean smacking against rocks.
“Where the hell are we?” I asked as we walked down to the office.
He pulled open a squeaky screen door and flicked on the office light and pointed to a map on the wall. It was a sectional of the coastline. We were on the back side of a narrow cove, like a finger pointing inward from the Pacific. Lefton’s lodge was built on stilts in the event of an extremely high tide.
“Been here since ‘32 and never got a drop of water under the place,” Lefton said. “Always have been a little too cautious for my own good.”
The office barely earned the name. There was a scarred-up old desk against one wall, three straight-back wooden chairs, and a gray metal three-drawer file cabinet facing the desk on the opposite wall. An upright telephone, a small desk lamp, and a hot plate with a percolator held down the desk, and a 1939 calendar from a tackle shop adorned the wall.
“You guys just spending the night?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’ll by pulling out about seven.”
“Well, I brew up coffee at 6:30 if you need a jump start to get moving. Got some sugar and cream in my room, which is next door.”