“I been trying to raise you,” he said. There was excitement in his voice.
“Eddie Woods and his wife are dead,” I said, and quickly gave him the necessary details.
“It fits,” he said excitedly.
“What do you mean?”
“You got me thinking,” he said. “All I got to do is lie up here, eat my pudding, and think.”
“And?”
“Something you said about Riker reading four newspapers a day and remembering every line.”
“Yeah?”
“So if he’s such a genius, how come he missed that picture of Verna the first time it ran-last April?”
It took only a few seconds for me to see where he was headed.
“Keep talking.”
“Well, if he read it in April, how come he didn’t get wacky about it until he saw it last Saturday?”
“Ski, you’re a genius.”
I thought back to what the captain of the guard, Craddock, had said about visitors.
“One of the last visitors Riker had was an ex-con he bunked with for six months,” I said.
“What’s his name?”
“Uh… Dahlmus. Henry Dahlmus. He did four years on a two-to-five for manslaughter.”
“ Is he on parole?’
“Yep. Six months ago.”
“Don’t forget, pard, we got a fingerprint. If this Dahlmus was tried in Los Angeles County, we might have his prints in our own files.”
“I’m heading back to the records department,” I said.
Pulling the card on Dahlmus took fifteen minutes. The picture showed a short, chunky man with thick lips and a brush cut. I was more interested in the prints. The technician in the print department slipped the print we lifted at Wilensky’s house on one side of the comparative microscope, and one by one fed Dahlmus’s prints in the other side. After six tries, the tech looked at me and smiled. “Want to see something pretty?”
I looked in the scope. He had a match. No doubt about it.
Dahlmus was our killer.
I called Ski and gave him the news, but told him to keep it quiet until it broke in the newspapers. I owed Jimmy Pen that much.
I had the photo department run off a dozen copies of Dahlmus’s mug shot and quickly typed out a physical description. Then I called Moriarity and ran the whole story by him. I had never heard Moriarity chortle before. It was nearly 4:00 p.m.
“We need Dahlmus alive,” I said. “He’s the only one can tie the can on Riker’s ass. Riker paid Dahlmus to kill Wilma and Eddie Woods. Revenge for framing him. And he raises a scandal Culhane can’t ditch and ruins his hopes for governor.”
“Let’s call the newsies and get this story in the late editions and on the radio,” he said. “Do you want to do the honors?”
“I’ve got an obligation to Jimmy the Pen,” I said. “I want to give it to him and sit on it until he has an exclusive. When he breaks it, everybody will run with it.”
“How much do we give them?”
“That there’s an APB out for Dahlmus. That we have a positive identification from a print found in Verna Wilensky’s house. That we’re also looking for Riker, who’s wanted for questioning. Let’s leave Mendosa out of it for the time being, although my guess is, Riker’s headed for Mendosa, if he isn’t there already.”
“Okay, give it to Pennington,” Moriarity said. “It’s a helluva story, Zee. Riker walks away a free man at noon, and by four he’s on the run for complicity in killing the same person he didn’t kill the first time, plus two others.”
We hung up and I called Pennington at the Times. I caught him as he was walking out the door.
“How’d you like an update on the Riker story?” I asked.
“Gonna to be hard to top the one I got already,” he said.
“Everybody’s got that story. This one’s a banner above the fold.”
“I’m all ears.”
“How about this for a headline: Henry Dahlmus, Former Riker Cellmate, Sought for Murder of Wilma Thompson. Riker to Be Questioned. And a side story: Dahlmus Also a Suspect in the Murder of Private Detective Eddie Woods and Wife.”
Pennington almost jumped through the phone.
“I’ll come over and give you the details along with his mug shot,” I said. “Can you make the final? I want to spread his picture all over town.”
“I’ll get the desk to hold the first pressrun. We can replate the front page with a banner head and run this story as a box.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
Before I left, I called Millicent and gave her a quick version of what was happening.
“It’s gonna be a busy night,” I said.
“I’ll wait up,” she answered.
CHAPTER 36
The Times hit the street fifteen minutes later than usual. Thirty minutes after that, the radio stations were on the air with it. By 7:00 p.m., Riker and Dahlmus were wanted men. Before the news broke, Moriarity had roadblocks everywhere and the airport covered.
I had my own agenda. I called Culhane before the paper hit the streets and gave him the news.
I could hear a combination of relief and excitement in his tone.
Then I told him about Eddie Woods and his wife.
There was a long pause.
“I told you… Eddie would never kill a woman,” he said with a catch in his voice. “Did you find them?”
“Yeah.” And then I said, “I’m sorry, Brodie.”
“You ever sleep, Cowboy?” he said.
“It was Ski who came up with the answer,” I said. “But I still got some questions that need answering.”
“Such as?”
“Who was paying Wilma Thompson for going into hiding all those years?”
“That’s out of your bailiwick, isn’t it? You put a cap on your homicide. I’m sure the A.G. is going to be all over me, now that Riker’s frame is public knowledge.”
“They all tie together.”
“First things first,” he said. “You’ve got to nail Dahlmus and Riker.”
“We have roadblocks all over the place. On the highways, at the airport. We got pictures of Dahlmus spreading all over town. But the minute this is news, Riker’s going to turn rabbit, if he hasn’t already.”
There was silence on the line for a moment.
“Go on,” Culhane said.
“I’m betting Dahlmus is at Shuler’s Sanitarium right now, and that’s where Riker will head.”
“And then have a seaplane drop down in the morning and he’ll be on his way to Mexico,” said Culhane.
“We alerted the Coast Guard before we went public with this,” I said. “I don’t think he can take a chance on getting out of L.A. except by boat and going north.”
“So you think he’s headed for Mendosa,” he said flatly.
“It’s his safest bet at this point. I can get a judge to issue me a search warrant for Shuler’s. Want to back me up?”
“You better hurry.”
“I’ll be on my way as soon as I can get the paperwork.”
“I’ll take care of that,” he said. “Just get your ass up here.”
“How long would it take Riker to get up there by boat?”
“Three, four hours. I have friends in the Coast Guard from the old days. I’ll see if I can get a cutter to bottle up Mendosa.”
“We need Dahlmus alive, Brodie, to testify it was Riker who ordered Verna Wilensky’s murder.”
“I know that.”
“I’m on my way,” I said.
William Diehl
Eureka
CHAPTER 37
T he Pretty Maid rocks gently at the Santa Monica pier. The captain, a trim, deeply tanned, hard-looking man with graying hair, in a blue blazer, a T-shirt, and white pants, is sitting at the controls listening to the radio.
There are three others on the boat. One, slender, dressed in a gray suit, with a fedora cocked over one eye, looks like a ferret: narrow eyes, a long nose, thin lips. His name is Earl and he is definitely not dressed for boating. He is sitting on a deck chair and is as calm as a cat taking a nap. The second is dressed like a tourist from Ohio. Red slacks, a loud Hawaiian sports shirt with bright green palm trees, its tail hanging loose. He has red hair and is wired, moving around the deck of the boat snapping his fingers, impatient, singing under his breath.