She shrugged. “It was probably in a closet.” She drank some coffee and frowned. “Wait a minute. I helped Robbie move in. No, I didn’t know him. I parked up at the cliff edge and there he was with all this stuff to carry. I just naturally offered to help. And I hung around helping him settle in and we had a drink.”
“Easy to know.”
“A bartender,” she said. “Had been since he was a kid, except for that period with Shevel. Easy friendliness is part of a bartender’s stock in trade—right? Only he didn’t fake it. He honestly liked people. Those old aunties Lauder and White fell all over themselves to get him back. Business has doubled since he took over. If he owned his own place he’d make a bundle.” She remembered he was dead and sadness happened in her face. “Except for one thing.”
Dave worked on his coffee. “Which was?”
“He also trusted people. And that’s for losers.”
“About the rifle?” he prompted her.
“He didn’t own one,” she said flatly. “I’d have seen it while we were putting away his stuff. No rifle. But I can tell you one thing. If there’d been one, Eddie could have used it. He used to talk about hunting rabbits when he was a kid back in Oklahoma.”
“Thanks.” Dave tilted up the mug, drained it, set it on the counter, got off the stool. “And for the coffee.” He checked his watch. “But now it’s out into the cold rain and the mean streets again.”
“Aw,” she said.
Climbing the gritty stairs up the cliff face, he still heard the surf. But as he neared the top there was the wet tire sibilance of traffic on the the coast road and the whine of a car engine that didn’t want to start. At the railing, the little landlord, Dieterle, sat in a faded old Triumph, swearing. Dave walked over and wondered in a shout if he could help. Dieterle, with a sour twist of his mouth, gave up.
“Ah, it’ll catch, it’ll catch. Son of a bitch knows I’m in a hurry. Always acts like this.” Rain had misted the big round lenses of his glasses. He peered up at Dave through them. “You’re some kind of cop, no? I saw you with them on the beach. I heard you tell Bambi O’Mara you didn’t think Lily killed Robinson.” Dieterle cocked his head. “You think Bambi did it?”
“Why would I think that?”
“Hell, she was in love with Robinson. And I mean, off the deep end. Weird, a smart chick like that. Not to mention her looks. You know she was a Playboy centerfold?”
“It’s raining and I’m getting wet,” Dave said. “Tell me why she’d kill Robinson so I can go get Slocum to put cuffs on her.”
Dieterle’s mouth fell open. “Ah, now, wait. I didn’t mean to get her in trouble. I figured you knew.” He blinked anxious through the glasses. “Anybody around here could have told you. She made a spectacle of herself.” Maybe the word reminded him. He took off the horn-rims, poked in the dash for a Kleenex, wiped the rain off the lenses. “I mean, what chance did she have?” He dropped the tissues on the floor and put the glasses back on. “Robinson was a fag, worked in a fag bar. It didn’t faze her. So many chicks like that—figure one good lay with them and a flit will forget all about boys. Except Bambi never got the lay. And Robinson got Ed Lily. And did she hate Lily! Hoo!”
“And so she shot Robinson dead.” Dave straightened, looked away to where rain-glazed cars hissed past against the rain-curtained background of another cliff. “Hell hath no fury, etcetera?”
“And framed Lily for it. You follow?”
“Thanks,” Dave said. “I’ll check her out.”
“Any time.” Dieterle reached and turned the key and the engine started with a snarl. “What’d I tell you?” he yelled. The car backed, scattering wet gravel, swung in a bucking U, and headed down the highway toward Surf. Fast. Dave watched. Being in a chronic hurry must be rough on a man who couldn’t stop talking.
Nobody ate at The Big Cup because it was an openfront place and rain was lashing its white Formica. It faced a broad belt of cement that marked off the seedy shops and scabby apartment buildings of Venice from the beach where red dune fences leaned. Dave got coffee in an outsize cup and took it into a phone booth. After his first swallow, he lit a cigarette and dialled people he knew in the television business. He didn’t learn anything but they’d be able to tell him later.
He returned the empty mug to the empty counter and hiked a block among puddles to the Billy Budd, whose neon sign buzzed and sputtered as if rain had leaked into it. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes ago it had been noon. A yellowed card tacked to the black door said in faded felt pen that the hours were 12 noon to 2 a.m. But the door was padlocked.
He put on reading glasses and bent to look for an emergency number on the card and a voice back of him said: “Excuse me.”
The voice belonged to a bony man, a boy of fifty, in an expensive raincoat and expensive cologne. He was out of breath, pale, and when he used a key on the padlock, his hands shook. He pushed open the door and bad air came out—stale cigarette smoke, last night’s spilled whiskey. He kicked a rubber wedge under the door to hold it open and went inside.
Dave followed. The place was dark but he found the bar that had a padded leather bevel for the elbows and padded leather stools that sighed. Somewhere at the back, a door opened and fell shut. Fluorescent tubing winked on behind the bar, slicking mirrors, glinting on rows of bottles, stacks of glasses. A motor whined, fan blades clattered, air began to blow along the room. The man came out without his raincoat, without his suit coat. The shirt was expensive too. But he’d sweated it.
“Weather, right? What can I get you?”
“Just the answer to a question,” Dave said. “What did you want at Arthur Thomas Robinson’s apartment in Surf this morning?”
The man narrowed his lovely eyes. “Who are you?”
Dave told him. “There are details the police haven’t time for. I’ve got time. Can I have your answer?”
“Will you leave without it? No—I didn’t think so.” The man turned away to drop ice into glasses. He tilted in whiskey, edged in water. He set a glass in front of Dave, held one himself. The shaking of his hand made the ice tinkle. The sound wasn’t Christmasy. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see if I can shock you. Ten years ago, Arthur Thomas Robinson and I were lovers.”
“You don’t shock me,” Dave said. “But it’s not responsive to my question.”
“I wrote him letters. I wanted those letters back before his ohso-righteous brother got his hands on them. I didn’t know how to go about it. I simply drove over to Robbie’s. I mean—I never see television. What do I know about police procedure?”
“Ten years ago,” Dave said. “Does that mean Robinson left you for Bruce K. Shevel?”
“That evil mummy,” the man said.
“Clear up something for me.” Dave tried the whiskey. Rich and smooth. They didn’t serve this out of the well. “Shevel said he’d met Robinson in the hospital. Robinson was an orderly. A neighbor named Bambi O’Mara says Robinson was a barkeep all his life.”
The man nodded. “I taught him all he knew. He was eighteen when he drifted in here.” The man’s eyes grew wet. He turned away and lit a cigarette. “He’d never had another job in his life. Orderly? Be serious! He fainted at the sight of blood. No, one sinister night Bruce Shevel walked in here, slumming. And that was the beginning of the end. An old man. He was, even then. He must be all glamour by now.”
“You know that Robinson kept your letters?”
“Yes. He was always promising to return them but he didn’t get around to it. Now he never will.” The man’s voice broke and he took a long swallow from his drink. “That damn brother will probably have apoplexy when he reads them. And of course he’ll read them. His type are always snooping after sin. Claim it revolts them but they can’t get enough. And of course he hated me. Always claimed I’d perverted his baby brother. We had some pretty ugly dialogues when he found out Robbie and I were sleeping together. I wouldn’t put it past him to go to the liquor board with those letters. You’ve got to have unimpeachable morals to run a bar, you know. It could be the end of me.”