“Sometimes he drove to San Francisco, and sometimes he just went over to Reno and took the plane. We checked the airlines, and they have no record of a reservation for him any time in July at all, so he must have driven all the way. As far as we can pin it down, the last time he was seen here was on the Fourth, when he had his car serviced at his usual place, the Shell station on Aspen Street.
“When he planned to be gone more than a few days, he usually made arrangements with a kid named Wally Pruitt to go out to the place and check on it now and then, make sure the automatic sprinklers were working, and so on, but this time Wally says he didn’t call him, so apparently he wasn’t intending to stay long when he left or else he just forgot—”
The phone rang. “Excuse me,” Brubaker said, and picked it up. “Brubaker ... Oh, good morning ... Yeah, he did. As a matter of fact, he’s here in my office right now ... Okay, I’ll tell him. You’re welcome.”
He hung up. “That was your father’s lawyer, Sam Bolling. He’s been trying to get hold of you, too, and he’d like to see you as soon as we’re through here.”
“Right,” Romstead said. “Thanks.”
“His office is in the Whittaker Building at Third and Aspen. It was through Sam, as a matter of fact, that we first learned about the money and also that your father had an apartment in San Francisco. He’s the executor of the estate, and as soon as he learned Captain Romstead was dead, he notified the tax people, the banks, any possible creditors, all that legal bit. The bank in San Francisco told him about that whopping withdrawal, and he immediately notified us. He was worried about the money, of course, but we already had a pretty good idea nobody was ever going to find it.
“We asked the San Francisco police to check out his apartment while we searched the house here to see if we could turn up any trace of it just on the off chance he still hadn’t consummated the so-called deal. There was no money in either place, but we did find evidence of just about what we expected—or that is, San Francisco did. All we found in the house was a thousand Havana cigars stashed in a closet. But the apartment was the payoff.
“It had just been thoroughly cleaned, with the exception of one item he overlooked. In a closet there was an empty suitcase that had some white powder spilled in the lining. The police vacuumed it and had the stuff analyzed. It was heroin, all right, and it had been cut with milk sugar.
“So there you are. All the evidence says he must have been mixed up in smuggling junk when he was going to sea and still had connections. Somebody brought in a consignment for him, he drew out that money to pay for it, but before he sold it as pure heroin to the next bunch of bastards along the pipeline, he cut it, or cut part of it, to increase the take. Sound business procedure, I suppose, as long as you don’t do it to the wrong people. He apparently did, and they caught up with him after he got back here.”
“No,” Romstead said. “I don’t buy it. Maybe in a lot of ways he wouldn’t qualify as Husband of the Year or the thoroughly domesticated house pet, but junk—no.”
“I wouldn’t call you an expert witness,” Brubaker pointed out. “You’ve practically admitted you didn’t know a damn thing about where he was or what he was doing.”
“No, but I don’t see that you’ve got any evidence, anyway. Who says that suitcase was his? You know as well as I do he wasn’t using that apartment alone. Christ, with his track record there could have been a half dozen girls in and out of it at one time or another, any one of ‘em a possible junkie or with a junkie boyfriend on the side.”
“And I suppose he was just keeping those forty boxes of Upmann cigars for some girl? Maybe she didn’t want her mother to know she smoked.”
Romstead gestured impatiently. “Cigars are not heroin.”
“No, but they’re contraband.”
“Only in the United States. He smoked ‘em all the time. Said tobacco had no politics.”
Brubaker removed his own cigar and looked at it. “And I have to smoke these goddamned ropes.” He shrugged. “Oh, well, if Castro was chairman of the Republican National Committee, I still couldn’t afford his cigars.”
“Well, look,” Romstead said. “It seems to me there’s a big hole in your reasoning somewhere. If he bought this crap for a quarter million dollars, as you say, and then sold it to somebody else at a profit, he must have got more than forty dollars for it. It wasn’t at the house, and it wasn’t in the apartment, so what happened to it?”
“Those hoods got it, obviously. The same time they got him.”
“It must have been at the house, then, if they came up here looking for him. Was there any sign of a fight?”
“None at all. But don’t forget, he was playing with professionals. They don’t come on like Laurel and Hardy.”
“You’re convinced of that? Then there’s not much chance of catching them?”
There was a sudden darkening of anger in the chief deputy’s face, gone just as quickly as he got it under control. “Jesus Christ, Romstead, I know how you feel, but look at the hole we’re in. It wasn’t anybody here that killed your father. We’re just a geographical accident; all we’ve got is a dead body and jurisdiction. Everything leading up to the crime and everybody connected with it came from a metropolitan area in another state.
“The police down there are cooperating with us all they can, but they’re shorthanded and overworked the same as everybody else, and every detective on the force has got his own backlog of unsolved cases as long as a whore’s dream. Our only chance is to keep questioning people, the same as we have been ever since it happened, till we locate somebody who saw that car that night, to get some kind of description of it, a place to start. Your father had an unlisted telephone number and a post office box address, so they had to ask somebody to find out where he lived.”
Brubaker began to put the file back into the folder. There were several questions Romstead wanted to ask, but they could be answered by Bolling just as well or maybe better. “We’ll let you know when we come up with anything,” Brubaker concluded.
Romstead stood up, and they shook hands. “Thanks for your time.”
“Not at all. Incidentally, who’s the owner of that boat you were on?”
“A man named Carroll Brooks. You can reach him at the Southland Trust Bank in San Diego.”
Brubaker shrugged. “Just standard routine.”
“No sweat.” Romstead went out and walked over to Aspen Street, trying to collect his thoughts. What in God’s name had the old man intended to do with a quarter million dollars in cash, even assuming he had that much in the first place? Why’d he bought a farm here, or ranch, or whatever it was, and then rented an apartment in San Francisco? The whole thing seemed to get murkier by the minute.
* * *
Bolling’s office was on the third floor of the Whittaker Building, a large corner room with windows on two sides. The desk was a massive one of some dark wood, the carpet was gray, and there were two leather armchairs. The walls were lined with identically bound volumes of an extensive law library. Bolling himself appeared to be well into his sixties, but erect, with a homely, angular face and sparse white hair. The eyes were a sharp and piercing blue. He smiled as he got up from behind the desk. “By God, you’re almost as big as he was.”
“Not quite,” Romstead said.
“Somehow I expected you to be darker, since your mother was Cuban, but you look exactly like him.”
“She was blond, too.”