Morris Cramm was night legman for a columnist and worked the graveyard shift. He knew everybody worth knowing in the metropolitan area, and enough about them to set up a blackmailing syndicate bigger than Sears Roebuck. To Morris, that idea would never have occurred.
“Look at it this way, Hilda. I am searching for the long-lost son of a wealthy English nobleman. The bereaved father is offering a fantastic reward for the prodigal’s Los Angeles address. With Morris, I go halves. If he can give me the address, it will entitle him to this valuable gift certificate, bearing an engraved portrait of Alexander Hamilton and personally autographed by the Secretary of the Treasury.” I took a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet.
“You sound like a radio program. A couple of radio programs, all mixed up.”
“For five minutes of his personal sleeping time, I offer ten dollars in cash. Two dollars a minute, a hundred and twenty dollars an hour. Show me the movie star that gets nine hundred and sixty dollars for eight-hour day.”
“Well,” she said dubiously, “if there’s money involved. They’re selling Beethoven quartets fifty per cent off down at the record shop— Only what if Morris doesn’t know the answer?”
“He knows all the answers, doesn’t he?”
She turned with her hand on the doorknob and said quite seriously: “Sometimes I think he does. He knows so much it saps the energy right out of him.”
Hilda adjusted the blind and let a little light into the bedroom-sittingroom. The floor was covered with newspapers, the walls with shelves of books and record albums. A large Capehart dominated the room and the lives of the two people who lived in it. Morris was sleeping on an uncovered studio bed opposite the window, a small dark man in candy-striped pyjamas. He rolled over and sat up blinking. His eyes looked huge and emotional without his glasses.
He stared at me blindly: “What time is it? Who is it?”
“Nearly nine o’clock, dear. Lew came to ask you a question.” She handed him his glasses from a shelf above the bed.
“My God, so early?” He refused to look at me. He put his hands on opposite shoulders and rocked himself and groaned.
“I’m sorry, Morris. It will only take a minute. Can you give me Walter Kilbourne’s address? He isn’t in the phone book. I have his car license, but this is a personal matter.”
“Never heard of him.”
“For ten dollars, darling,” Hilda said very gently.
“If you don’t know where Kilbourne lives, admit it. He looks like money to me, and he’s married to the most beautiful woman in town.”
“Ten million dollars, more or less,” he said resentfully. “As for Mrs. Kilbourne, I don’t go for ash blondes myself. My aesthetic taste demands a ruddier coloration.” He smiled with frank admiration at his wife.
“Fool.” She sat down beside him and ruffled his black wire hair.
“If Mavis Kilbourne was as beautiful as all that, she’d have got on in pictures, wouldn’t she? But no, she married Kilbourne.”
“Kilbourne or the ten million?”
“More than ten million, come to think of it. Fifty-one per cent of Pacific Refining Company, current quotation 26-7/8 figure it out for yourself.”
“Pacific Refining Company,” I said slowly and distinctly, thinking of the woman who was drowned. “I thought he was in the taxi business.”
“He has some over in Glendale. His finger’s in several pies, but Pareco’s his plum. They got in early on the Nopal Valley strike.” He yawned, and leaned his head against his wife’s plump shoulder. “This bores me, Lew.”
“Go on. You are cooking electronically. Where does he live?”
“In the Valley.” His eyes were closed, and Hilda stroked with maternal awe the forehead that enclosed the filing-cabinet brain. “Staffordshire Estate, one of those private communities you need a special visa to get in. I was out there for a Fourth of July party. They had a Senator for guest of honor.”
“U.S. or State?”
“U.S. Senator, what do you think? State Senators are a dime a dozen.”
“Democratic or Republican?”
“What’s the difference? Haven’t I earned my ten dollars, brain-picker? Sweat-shopper?”
“One more question, asphalt intellectual. Where did the money come from in the first place?”
“Am I the Bureau of Internal Revenue?” He started to shrug, but found it required too much effort. “I am not.”
“You know things they don’t know.”
“I know nothing. All I hear is rumors. You are inciting me to commit a libel.”
“Spill it,” I said.
“Storm-trooper.”
“Now that isn’t nice to call anybody,” Hilda said soothingly.
I reminded him of the question: “The money. Where did it come from?”
“It didn’t grow on trees,” he said, and smothered a yawn. “I heard that Kilbourne made a fine thing out of black-market cars in Detroit during the war. Then he rushed down here to invest his money legitimately before somebody took it away from him. Now he’s grand old California stock and politicians go to his parties. Don’t quote me, it’s only a rumor. He might have spread it himself to cover up something worse, now that I come to think of it.”
Morris looked around the room with a dreaming smile and went to sleep sitting up. Removing his glasses, Hilda laid the limp boyish body out on the bed. I handled her the ten and moved to the door.
She followed me. “Come round in the daytime, Lew, we got the new Strauss from Paris.”
“I will when I have some time. I’m on my way to Nevada at the moment.”
“Seriously?”
“It looks like it.”
“That’s where Sue’s living, isn’t she?” Her round fat face lit up. “You’re going to have a reconciliation!”
“Not a chance. This is business.”
“I know you’ll come back together. Wait and see.”
“The bottom dropped out. All the king’s horses couldn’t put it back in for us.”
“Oh, Lew.” She looked ready to cry. “You made such a nice couple together.”
I patted her arm. “You are lovely and good, Hilda.” Morris groaned in his sleep. I went.
Chapter 14
From the highway the Staffordshire Estates were a discreet brass marker bolted to a stone arch, through which a new blacktop turned off the public road. A metal sign on one side of the arch informed me further that they were PROTECTED BY PRIVATE PATROL. The rustic redwood gates stood open, and I drove through them. Morning haze was drifting slowly up the canyon ahead, a translucent curtain between the outside world and the privately patrolled world I was entering. There were trees along the road, tall cypresses and elms, and small birds singing in them. Behind adobe walls and thick square-cut hedges, sprinklers were whirling lariats of spray. The houses, massive and low and bright among banks of flowers set in billiard-table lawns, were spaced out of sight of each other, so that no one but the owners could enjoy them. In this corner of the San Fernando Valley, property had become a fine art that was an end in itself. There were no people in sight, and I had a queer feeling that the beautiful squatting houses had taken over the canyon for their own purposes.
Valmy, Arbuthnot, Romanovsky, the mailboxes announced as I drove by them: Lewisohn, Tappingham, Wood, Farrington, Von Esch. WALTER J. KILBOURNE was neatly stenciled on the ninth mailbox and I turned up the drive beside it. The house was built of pink brick and glass, with a flat jutting redwood roof. The drive was lined with twenty shades of begonia. I parked in the gravelled loop that went past the front door, and pressed the button beside it. Chimes echoed through the house. The place was as noisy as a funeral parlor at midnight, and I liked it almost as well.
The door was opened silently by a small Japanese whose footsteps made no sound. “You wish something, sir?” His lips were very careful with the sibilants. Over his white linen shoulder I could see an entrance loggia containing a white grand piano and a white-upholstered Hepplewhite sofa. A pool beyond the white-columned windows threw rippling sapphire shadows on the white walls.