McHugh, page 10
“So the car was out of your control. Where was this place?”
“Laguna Beach.”
“It fits,” McHugh said. He remembered that the four men who had held up the armored car at La Habra had been killed at Laguna Beach. “Have you any idea how I’d find this chauffeur?”
“His name was Torres, and you won’t find him. He’s dead. He and three other men were killed after being involved in a big robbery,” she said flatly. “It was just a few days…”
“April twenty-sixth, nineteen thirty-six. Thank you, Mrs. Allaire.”
Chapter 9
The jet was leaving a silver contrail high above the Salinas Valley when McHugh asked the pilot, “Could you land us at Salinas?”
“Stand by. I’ll check the weather.” McHugh heard the radio crackle with flier’s code, and then the pilot was saying, “I probably could, but the wind is tricky. How about Monterey?”
“You’re flying it”
The plane made a wide swing high above the curve of Monterey Bay and seemed ready to wash its belly in the whitecaps as it made a straight-in approach over the water. A jeep met them on the apron of the field, which was used by Navy and civilian aircraft.
McHugh shed his pressure suit again and looked at his watch. He said, “It’s five now, which leaves us a couple hours more daylight. If I can make connections, we could be off by eight. Otherwise we can lay over, if you don’t have to be back in the city.”
“I’ve got nothing on.”
“Good. You’re on your own, then. Just let the operations shack here know where to reach you. And stay out of the rest rooms on the beach at Monterey. They’re infested with lavender kids who just drool over sailor boys.”
“One of the fringe benefits of being Navy.” The pilot winked. “See you around, sir.”
He took off in the jeep, and McHugh made a phone call from the administration building. An inspector from the sheriff’s office in Salinas, fifteen miles away, agreed to meet him.
The inspector’s name was Orville Dorney, and he did not look anything like a cop. He was tall and lanky and looked like he wasn’t old enough to do much more than play forward for the Santa Clara basketball squad, which it turned out he had at one time.
He patted a thick envelope on the seat of the unmarked police car and said, “Be real nice if you can help us close out this thing. Either this Stover is hot or that goddam car of his is. The FBI has had our boys checking every gas station and garage and motel in the damn county. What do we get? Nada.”
“This is a couple of weeks old, and I doubt it’s going to wrap up anything. But it’ll help,” McHugh said. He gave Dorney the name of the tire shop where Stover had used his credit card.
“I know the boys over there. Some punks lifted a lot of stuff from them a couple months back, and we cleaned it up fast. They’ll talk if they know anything,” Dorney said.
The manager looked at the picture Dorney showed him, stared at racks of tires for a minute and said, “Yeah, I remember the fellow. Big, nice-looking kid with blond hair. I asked him didn’t he need tubes and he said no, he had those. Tires were seven-fifty-seventeens and we mounted them.”
“On a car?” McHugh asked quickly.
“Uh-uh. Didn’t have a car. Came in a pickup with these two wheels. Heavy buggers. Whatever they were off had real iron in it.”
“Wire spoke wheels, chromed?” McHugh asked.
“Nope. Solid discs, and most of the paint was gone.”
Dorney was sucking on a pipe. He took it from his mouth and said, “Chip, you ever see the pickup before?”
“I don’t know it, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it around the county. About a ‘forty-nine or ‘fifty Ford, with stacks and a two-tone maroon paint job. Slick beast.”
“That’s all I need to know. Let’s move out, McHugh.” They got in the car, and Dorney headed back down the highway toward Monterey. “That pickup belongs to a punk we’ve had an eye on for a long time. Mel Sandoval. Runs what he calls a repair shop out in Seaside. We know damn well he and his buddies can boost a car and have it completely apart in an hour. We just haven’t been able to catch them at it.”
“Not yet,” McHugh replied. “There’s this Tony Tomasini that cashed a check of Stover’s. Know where we could find him first?”
“Sure. He grows chokes up by Castroville. We break up three or four cockfights on his place every year.” Dorney turned the car east on the road that cuts behind Fort Ord, reached Highway I and drove toward Castroville.
To McHugh, it looked like all the artichokes in the world had sprouted in one place, and in the center of town there was a sign saying Castroville was the artichoke capital of the world. They turned off on a farm road and stopped at an old frame house, which had once been white but now was a weathered gray, streaked by the droppings from the big eucalyptus trees that formed a windbreak.
Dorney rapped hard on the front door. It was opened by a middle-aged Italian with a weathered face and hands that had spent their days working the earth. Dorney said, “Break out the grappa, Tony. Then we can have a little talk.”
“Si si. Come on in, Inspector.” He pulled the door open wide, grinning. “This time you come for nothing. Not one rooster on the place!”
There was a thin rag on the floor, and the house was cluttered, the way houses get when lived in only by men. Tomasini shoved a stack of papers off a sofa and brought a gallon jug of grappa and three glasses.
McHugh was introduced. Protocol required that no word of their business be uttered until the glasses had been filled and emptied and filled again.
They settled themselves wherever there was room, and Tomasini, smacking his Ups over the distilled wine, said, “Mr. McHugh, now tell me what it is you want”
McHugh took his notebook from his pocket and made a production of flipping through the pages. “A short time ago you cashed a check in a bar. Made out in the amount of one hundred dollars by a John Stover. Is that correct?”
Tomasini leaned forward in his chair, and his swarthy face became stern. “Sure. Whatsa matter? Damn thing bounce?”
“No, no,” McHugh assured him. “The check was good. We’re interested in how you came by it.”
“How I got it?” Tomasini said, his voice rising. “Hell, this Stover showed up here and he give it to me for the car. Damn fool!”
“Fool?” Dorney said.
“Sure. I been wishin’ for years somebody’d just come an’ haul the damn thing off. It wouldn’t hardly run at all, an’ the front tires were all shot. Why the hell would anybody want somethin’ like that?”
“What kind of a car was it, Mr. Tomasini?” McHugh asked.
Tomasini gulped the remainder of the grappa from his glass. “Jus’ an’ old coupe. Not even that. Hell, I cut the back end out an’ made a flatbed outta it years ago. Jus’ use it around the place.”
“No, I mean the kind, the make.”
“Oh, that. They don’ make them now. Not for twenty years, I guess. A Pierce-Arrow.”
McHugh held his breath and exhaled slowly. The pieces were beginning to fit. The only trouble was, the picture they might finally make could be a completely reasonable and innocent one. He knew Stover had picked up more than one old wreck simply to cannibalize it for parts to rebuild another. He thought anyone unfortunate enough to own a Pierce-Arrow would do well to have a few spare parts around.
“That’s fine,” he said. “One more question and we’ll leave you. Stover put new tires on the car before he hauled it off, didn’t he?”
“He didn’t haul it away,” Tomasini said earnestly. “So help me he drove the goddam thing off. I tol’ him it wouldn’t run, and he just grin an’ say, ‘It can be made to run,’ an’ he tore into it an’ goddam if it ‘didn’ rum!”
They left with Tomasini trying to press another drink on them. “No thanks. Be back for a chicken dinner, Tony,” Dorney told him.
The Italian laughed deep in his belly and called, “Inspector, you go to hell!”
The drive-in was in downtown Monterey. Carhops in brief jackets and tight slacks moved through the ranks of double-and triple-parked cars with their trays. Most of the cars were customized jobs with fancy paint and no chrome.
Dorney circled the place once, then pulled in beside a crimson Buick convertible. It was lowered and molded and looked like a going concern. The top was down, and McHugh saw two couples in it. The boys had leather jackets and duck-tail haircuts, and their girls wore sweaters that stuck out an improbable distance in front. Dorney whistled softly, caught the driver’s eye and beckoned with his finger.
The boy got out and slouched around the Buick, grinning and winking at his companions. He leaned against the police car, thumbs hooked in the top of his jeans. He was a big kid, and McHugh thought he would be improved if he had the hell pounded out of him.
“Get in the back end, Mel,” Dorney said quietly.
Mel Sandoval smirked. He wiggled his hips and patted the tight jeans where they stretched over his behind. “Inspector, I can get nicer propositions than that.”
“You can get your ass in the car. Or you can get it kicked up around your shell-pink ears,” Dorney said without raising his voice. He reached for the door handle and added, “Again.”
The boy looked at him. He shrugged, winked at his pals and got in. “Okay, What’s the squeal this time?”
“Play along and there might not be a squeal,” Dorney said as he backed into the street. “Think it’s about time we dropped in on your shop and looked at some serial numbers.”
“I got papers on all my stuff,” Sandoval said sullenly. He stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and his hands trembled.
“So we take a look at the papers too, kid. You been moonlighting, and any time I want you I’ll make you for it,” Dorney said pleasantly.
“1 like to get along.”
The car was moving slowly out Del Monte to Seaside. “So tell us something. We know you did some work for a guy named Stover a couple of weeks back. On a Pierce-Arrow car. All we want to know is what you did, and what happened to the car.”
“That’s all, huh?”
“That’s all, Mel. Don’t sweat it, he owned the car, all right. Nothing illegal in sight yet, but we’re interested.”
The boy sucked on the cigarette and tossed it out the window. “Knowing nada, Inspector.”
“Surprising how many things a guy can remember if he’s doing a ninety-day bit in the road camp, Mel.”
“This I know, man, this I know,” the boy said quickly. “I tell you no lies. I don’t know the guy’s name. If you say it’s Stover, it’s Stover. All I know is he braces me, says he’s a friend of a friend. He offers me three bills to use the shop and tools overnight and borrow the pickup. His dough looked real, and long as he didn’t steal off me, I should care less.”
“That all, boy?” McHugh said sharply. “He just rented your place? You didn’t peek in a window to see what he might be up to?”
Mel Sandoval chuckled. “Man, my shop got no glass.”
“Let’s go look anyway,” McHugh said.
Dorney turned off Del Monte, cut into an alley and parked in front of a weathered building with stucco breaking off its front. There was a single big door and a smaller one beside it in the front.
“Open it up, Mel,” Dorney ordered.
There was a light switch inside the smaller door. Sandoval turned it on as they went in. The building was about fifty by fifty feet inside. There were benches, a lathe, a drill press and a motor-tuning machine. Assorted tools and equipment hung from the walls, and a motor swung from a chain falls. There were doors and fenders and hoods hanging from the ceiling.
“He came and did his business and went,” McHugh said. “And he had two cars. Two Pierces. Right?”
“Yeah. He had two, and the bastard left me one of them. Or it looks like enough parts to make one, anyhow. If there’s anybody nuts enough to want one.” Sandoval pointed to a tangle of iron in a far corner.
McHugh recognized the flaring, fender-mounted headlights that were a Pierce trademark. There was a rusted radiator shell, a hood, an entire body with truck bed still on the back, pieces of frame, wheels, axles.
“A do-it-yourself car,” McHugh said to himself. “Or should it be undo-it-yourself? He did all this in a night?”
“Yeah. I guess,” Sandoval said. “Might have been a little longer. It was a Saturday, and I didn’t come around the next day. It was just like this when I opened up the next Monday, except it was all scattered to hell over the floor.”
McHugh wandered around the garage. He looked at an oil company grease chart showing a stripped-down chassis, picked up a flashlight and went over the dismembered Pierce. Mentally he checked off the components. So far as he could tell, only two or three parts were missing. He tried to think what those parts should look like, and remembered the teevee movie of Stover fixing the phaeton.
“Dorney, run me back to the airport as fast as that buggy will move,” he said, starting for the door.
“Hey—what about me?” Sandoval yelled.
“Hoof it,” Dorney retorted. “Be glad you got the chance.”
He spun the car in a tight circle and used the siren. “I don’t know what you could have figured out from looking at that pile of junk, McHugh.”
“Maybe it’s a wild hare,” McHugh said, gripping the dashboard as the car slewed around a corner. “But I know one thing. We’ve got to find Stover now. I mean, find him before he’s dead.”
Chapter 10
“I come bearing gifts,” McHugh said. “Free, like for nothing.”
“McHugh is a strange name for a Greek,” Inspector Kline said, gazing through the rain-streaked window of his office.
“My old man couldn’t stand the smell of cooking. You’re a Greek, you gotta run a restaurant.” McHugh stripped the wrapper from a thin cigar and fired it up. “I make you a gift of Wille Waddle.”
Kline’s shoes hit the floor and he half stood. “Gift-wrapped? I’d like to see him gift-wrapped. It would be a lot of work.”
“He blasted a guy the other day. Before the horrified gaze of an innocent citizen. Me.”
Inspector Kline made clucking sounds and burrowed through a stack of reports. He picked one out, scanned it and said, “Now here is something interesting. A couple of days ago you were in that same chair offering me things free, like for nothing. Willie Waddle was involved, and the names of a Jug Benich and Mickey Drinkwater came up. And the long arm of coincidence has Mickey turn up floating face-down in the bay less than twenty-four hours later. Someday I hope someone is found floating face up. It would be a refreshing change.”
“So?” McHugh said.
“So the police department is sitting on its collective ass doing nothing, of course. We got to keep a backlog of unsolved murders or the Homicide Division will get its manpower cut in the next budget, you boob.” Kline went to the water cooler and drank. He crumpled the paper cup and tossed it on the floor. “Aaah—we get the usual collection of tight lips. Willie claims Drinkwater went out to lunch and never came back. Benich and Howie Hale say the same thing.”
“Whereupon they were thanked for their co-operation with investigating authorities and told to go and sin no more,” McHugh said, chuckling.
Kline dropped into the swivel chair again. He studied McHugh’s face. “A strange thing. Mickey had assorted abrasions, contusions and fractures and a dislocated kneecap when they fished him out. His nose looked like it had been hit with a fungo bat.”
“Find a man with a fungo bat and you’ve got it made.”
“And when we picked Jug up, we thought he was wearing a mask. Close inspection disclosed, however, that he had been hit between the eyes.”
“Fungo bat again?”
Kline ignored him. “Now, looking at you, I see what a reasonable man might think were bruises a couple of days old and a fat lip.”
“I don’t even know what the hell a fungo bat is.”
“Bat, splat! For your information it is a tool used in the baseball business. Come on, McHugh. You come to me and say Willie blasted a guy. We find one of his bodyguards in such a condition. Mickey was beat up. Jug was beat up. You were beat up. What the hell happened? You go in to see Willie holding Mickey in front of you?” “What the hell would you do about it if you knew? You got a stiff. His chums dummy up and instead of tossing them in the sweatbox you turn them loose.”
Kline got up and prowled the floor. From time to time he shot dark glances at McHugh. McHugh looked smug.
“Maybe we think more than one move ahead at a time in Homicide,” Kline said curtly. “Maybe we think it’s better to let this crew run loose so we can clear up some big things instead of one two-bit gang kill. McHugh, Mickey Drinkwater isn’t about to revive. We can burn the boys who did it any time.”
“So be it,” McHugh said, sighing as he got up and started for the door.
“Sit the hell down again,” Kline shouted. “What the devil do you want, anyway?”
“Never mind. It’s something you don’t want to do, and I don’t blame you. I was just trying to save you the trouble of starting a file on a new cadaver.”
“Yeah?” Kline kicked the leg of his desk. “Who?”
“Johnny Stover, for one.” McHugh flipped the butt of his cigar at the wastebasket. “Maybe another.”
“Homicide doesn’t give a damn about Stover, unless he becomes a client. Go talk to Murrell and Foote.”
“Okay.” McHugh got up.
“Sit down!” Kline’s face was becoming flushed. “What’s this other prospect?”
“Willie Waddle.” McHugh watched with approval as a small fire started in the wastebasket from his smoldering cigar. “Willie is a marked man. The Black Hand is sticking pins into a little doll that looks like Willie.”
“What makes you think so?”
McHugh pointed. “Your wastebasket is on fire.”
“Godalmightygivemestrength!” Kline blurted. He glared at McHugh, at the wastebasket. He grabbed it and threw it out the window.
