37

I LEFT THE BARBERSHOP AND DROVE BY THE ADDRESS I HAD FOR GRIFFIN Baer’s beach property. I couldn’t blame Baer for trading a farm in for a place in this neighborhood. Baer’s was one of the homes that formed a single row along the wide four-lane avenue-known in that stretch as Shoreline Avenue. On the other side of the avenue, a narrow, grassy park lay along the top of bluffs. At the foot of the bluffs was the sandy, south-facing shore, and beyond that, the Pacific Ocean.

Along that section of Shoreline the homes were huge, with mammoth picture windows, large balconies, and steeply sloping lawns. Many of the mansions were built in the 1920s and 1930s, although here and there one had been torn down and replaced with a contemporary structure. The newer homes seemed to be made of steel and tinted glass.

There was no parking available anywhere near the Baer place on this warm, sunny day, at least not on Shoreline, but I slowed as I neared it. A white Spanish-style home, with arched windows and a red-tiled roof, it didn’t look as if it had changed much from when it was first built. The paint looked fresh and the yard was well maintained. A low white stucco fence surrounded the front yard. There was a For Sale sign in the yard. I wrote down the real estate agent’s name and number. Someone honked behind me.

I drove to the end of the block and turned right, and right again at the alley behind the homes. I found the Baer house and parked blocking the door of the detached, flat-roofed garage in the back. I glanced at the latch on the garage door. It was padlocked shut, so I didn’t think there was a danger that anyone would throw it open and bash my car.

I got out of the car and tried the back gate. It proved to be padlocked as well. I peered over the fence, wondering how this place could have been used for smuggling. Maybe there weren’t as many houses along here then. Shoreline had been a much narrower road in the 1920s, and the park wasn’t in existence yet, but the bluffs had been there. A few miles from this point, they rose into steep, rocky cliffs, but here they were lower and made mostly of clay and sandstone, and in places were covered with ice plant. Although they weren’t as high as the two leg-shaped cliffs that gave Las Piernas its name, a fall from the bluffs would have caused serious if not fatal injuries. Would a bootlegger scale them?

Maybe there had been stairs along this spot in those days. Perhaps the goods were landed somewhere else along the beach and brought by car to this place. But that didn’t seem to make much sense. Why stop here? Why not just go on to the farm?

The house was quiet and from where I stood, it seemed to be empty. After a moment, I got back into the Karmann Ghia. The alley didn’t go through to the next street, but it was fairly wide, and I was able to maneuver the Karmann Ghia around rather than having to back up the whole way.

When I got back to the paper, the late-afternoon siege was on, the troops battering away at deadline. I looked over what I had written so far. I couldn’t add what I had heard about Griffin Baer; that was all unsubstantiated.

I called the real estate agent and told her I was with the Las Piernas News Express and asked for a tour of the house, but she apparently didn’t understand why I mentioned the paper, because she tried to “qualify” me. I bit back a laugh-mortgage interest rates were at a double-digit historic high; I had only held my current job a few months, and would have been a first-time buyer. Another big obstacle was the known fact that no lender wanted to make a home loan to a single woman. But the biggest one of all was that a reporter’s salary wouldn’t have allowed me to buy a single square foot of that neighborhood. So I told her I wasn’t a potential buyer, I was working on a story for the Express. She hung up on me.

I went to work on my story about Max.

I glanced up and saw O’Connor enter the newsroom. He saw me, checked for a moment, then came toward my desk with determined strides. He opened his mouth to say something to me, but I spoke first.

“I’m to tell you that Wildman was a perfect gentleman,” I said.

“Wildman? He’s drunk as a brewer’s fart. I just saw a couple of the boys loading him into a taxi outside the Press Club. He was passed out cold or they never could have managed it.”

“All right, so-a couple of hours before he passed out, Wildman was a perfect gentleman. I should explain that I asked for his help in finding you this afternoon.”

We went through what was now becoming a ritual exchange of apologies. I thanked him for visiting my dad and mowing the lawn.

“I told your aunt not to tell you about that,” he said testily.

“She’s my great-aunt, and she probably thought you were too young to give her orders. Did you tell her your name?”

“Of course I did!”

“She’s also a troublemaker,” I muttered.

“Kelly, no wonder you are as you are. All this uppity-woman stuff is inherited, I see. You haven’t a chance.” He shrugged. “Or perhaps it’s the rest of us who haven’t a chance.”

“True. Aunt Mary says you can tell a Kelly woman anything but where to sit and when to shut up.”

“What have you been up to this afternoon, my fine young renegade?”

“I went to the barbershop.” I told him what I had heard about Griffin Baer.

“Good work,” he said.

“Thanks, but I don’t know if what he told me is true.” I told him about the house. “It doesn’t seem well situated for bootlegging.”

“It’s not as unlikely as you may think. Those old houses have tunnels that lead from their basements to the bluffs. Most of them are sealed off now, but in the twenties they would have been functioning.”

“But wouldn’t just having one of those tunnels make the prohibition agents suspicious of you?”

He smiled and said, “I was only five when Prohibition was repealed, you know.”

“I know you didn’t fight in the Civil War, either. But did Jack or Helen or anyone else ever talk to you about it?”

“From what I’ve been told, almost all of the homes along the bluff had them, and the owners always claimed that they were just a convenient way to get to the beach or take small sailboats out on the water. The government never put enough money into hiring federal prohibition agents, and locally, there were certain cops and judges who were getting protection money to shield the bootleggers.”

“So the town had speakeasies and all of that?”

“Of course. And there was the gambling ship.”

“Gambling ship?”

“A big ship that was anchored offshore, with a sign on its side telling people where they could get speedboats to come out to her. There were a number of ships that were moored between the coast and Catalina in those years, run by gangsters. They sold booze out there, too. The one off Las Piernas caught fire and burned.”

“I didn’t realize Las Piernas had such a wild history.”

“No better or worse than most cities its size.”

“So I should walk along the beach and try to find a tunnel exit?”

“You could, I suppose.”

I told him about the meeting I had arranged with Max Ducane and Lefebvre. “Do you want to join us? I think it would be good to have you there, since you saw the house the night of the murders.”

He hesitated, then said, “Sure.”

We talked about what we’d do for the next set of stories. He showed me what he was working on-an interview he had done with Auburn Sheffield this afternoon about the trust and why he had taken on Warren’s unusual request. O’Connor had asked Auburn how he felt about it now that the coroner had identified the true Max Ducane’s remains.

“While I feel the deepest sympathy for Lillian Vanderveer,” Auburn had said, “and for Warren Ducane-assuming he may learn of these recent discoveries-I have absolutely no regrets regarding the trust. It is being given to a young man in whom Warren took a sincere interest, a young man who will, I am certain, bring honor to the memory of the Ducanes.”