“If you find them,” she said, “you bring them back to me. Don’t take them to Daddy. They’re mine.”
“Don’t worry. I’m not supposed to go within a mile of him. I’ll bring them to you — if I find them.”
She opened the door and slid around it again in that oddly interesting fashion. “All right,” she said smiling, “just you don’t sneak in at night like they did, and leave them on the dresser.”
I grinned. “If I do, Miss, I’ll look the other way.”
“Sure,” she said. “Away from the dresser.” She giggled. “I bet you make lots of money.”
“Not that much. And it all goes in taxes. Well, goodbye, Miss.”
“ ’Bye, Mr. Scotty.”
I went out onto the porch and just before she shut the door she said, “Don’t call me Miss.” I looked over my shoulder at her and she said, “Call me Diane.” She took one arm off the door and kind of waved it at me, letting her hand fall limp from her wrist, then winked at me and said, “And listen, you. I’m older than I look.”
Then she shut the door and I thought about sitting down on the grass and rolling around howling, and I thought about jumping up and running back and crashing through the door, but what I did was go out to the Cad and lean my head against the cool steering wheel for a couple seconds, then shiver spasmodically and put the buggy in gear thinking that Jules Osborne should have told me more about Diane, and offered me at least twenty thousand dollars.
At the office J reviewed what little I knew and phoned Burglary Division in City Hall to refresh my memory. Then I propped my Cordovans on the desk and thought for a couple minutes. Starting about three months back there had been a number of night burglaries in and near Los Angeles, ranging from Beverly Hills to Boyle Heights. This particular rash of burglaries totaled nine reported so far; the m.o. was the same in all of them and unlike any known gang which Burglary had any record of. The capers always came off between ten at night and two in the morning, there was never any sign that doors or windows had been forced. Nobody had ever reported any lights in the burgled houses though some of the jobs had been pulled off next door to houses in which parties were going on or in which the occupants were chatting or watching television. The doors were always still locked when the people got home to find their jewels, money, furs, silver gone. The jobs had been well cased and the hauls were always good ones, the loot taken from wealthy people. The burglars had never been seen or heard, and Burglary didn’t have a solitary lead.
Homicide was interested too, because on one job, which both Burglary and Homicide agreed was obviously the work of the same ten-to-two gang, a wealthy attorney named William Drake had been murdered. And in messy fashion. It was assumed that he’d left his wife at a party and come home alone while the gang was in his big house on San Vicente Boulevard — the coroner set the time of death at around midnight — and the attorney had been brutally beaten by what must have been an exceedingly powerful man. The attorney’s face was a pulp, and one blow had broken his neck. He’d also been shot, a bullet from a .45 caliber automatic blowing away much of his brain.
Three of the jobs had been in the section between Wilshire Boulevard and Pico, the area in which Diane Borden lived, and there was a fair chance that Diane’s pretties had been number five. The m.o. seemed the same in every particular.
I took my feet off the desk and made half a dozen more phone calls, then left the office and talked to a shoe-shine boy, two cab drivers, a bookie’s runner, a bartender, and a barber. With several lines out I went back to the office and waited for a bite.
A lot of any private detective’s time is spent in waiting, and more cases are broken with phones than with guns. At the core of any investigator’s success, whether he’s police or private, are his “sources of information,” the informants, informers, stoolies, canaries. That’s the unofficial staff. Over the years in Los Angeles I’d built up a long list of them and many of them were now, I hoped, out working for me — or night, already, know something that would help. I’d dropped several words in several places, and sent out a thumbnail description of some of the most distinctive items I was interested in.
At three o’clock I got a nibble and, though I didn’t know it then I landed a whale. The call was from an alcoholic hoodlum with the unlikely name of Joseph Raspberry, and he wanted me to meet him in the back booth of Manny’s bar on Sixth. He also wanted me to bring him a sawbuck. I told him to order a shot on me, that I’d be there in ten minutes. On my way over I wondered if he had anything. Joseph Raspberry was a two-time loser who, when sober, was a good thief. I’d picked him up a year ago and found him carrying a gun, which isn’t encouraged by parole boards — and he was on parole at the time. I gave him a break, which was illegal from the strictest point of view, but which if enforced strictly would put all the cops and private detectives in the clink. Since then Joe had stayed out of stir and passed along a dozen tips to me, about half of which paid off, and one of which helped me break a murder case. The other half-dozen tips were fakes, pure and simple, and he dreamed them up because he wanted money for his sweetheart, Old Crow and Coca Cola. I always gave him a ten or so, because there was always another time, another tip. Then, too, when he wasn’t hitting the pot he was a likable character. I didn’t know much about him, and even the odd name might have been a fake or a monicker. Anyway, I usually got a charge out of him, kind of liked the guy for no good reason.
But this looked like one of the days when Joe needed money for his sweetheart. He was huddled in the gloom of a booth at the rear of Manny’s, his thin face pinched, hands shaking, lips twitching once in a while. I sat down opposite him and he said, “Scott, Manny wouldn’t gimme a drink. An’ I ain’t got a bean.”
“You had any breakfast, Joe?”
“Sure. Alka Seltzer and alcohol. Tell him it's O.K., huh?”
I waved at Manny and he waddled over, wiping his hands on a reasonably white apron. “A beer for me, Manny,” I said. “And a couple shots for Joe.”
I always felt funny about buying a drink for Joe — or any of the others like him. But if he didn’t get it from me he’d get it from somebody else, somehow. He was sick, but it wasn’t my job to try healing all the sick people. When the shots arrived Joe started to lift one of them but his hand was shaking so much he knew he’d spill it. He put his fingers around the jigger, pressing his hand against the table, then bent forward and got his lips on the rim of the glass and sucked. He lifted the jigger then and tossed the whiskey down. He didn’t spill a drop.
I sipped my beer and waited. Finally he shuddered, pulled the other shot over in front of him and, looking at it, said, “I got something for you.”
I put a ten-dollar bill in front of him. He licked his lips and said, “Gimme a pencil.” I found a pencil stub in my pocket and gave it to him. He started drawing on a napkin. It took him three minutes, but he didn’t touch the other shot till he’d finished. Then he lifted the glass, his hand not shaking so much this time, and tossed the drink off.
He pointed at the napkin. “Lupo seen me and says you been askin’ for somethin’ like that. If it’s right, it’s worth more’n a saw, ain’t it?”
The drawing was crude: a bracelet with a lot of diamonds, and curving off from it a snake’s head with the tongue licking out and two oversized eyes in its head. It could have been something to get excited about, because crude as it was it looked like the bracelet Diane had been wearing in the nightclub photo. I had the picture in my pocket, but I didn’t take it out yet. Joe just might have made his drawing from the description I’d sent around.
I said, “Could be,” took a twenty-dollar bill from my wallet and wrapped it around my finger. He reached for it, but I said, “The story first, Joe. The ice looks right, maybe, but give me what you’ve got. And don’t make any of it up, even if you haven’t got much.”