Landers flashed the badge. "Is a Mr. Buford one of your regular customers here? Dick Buford?" He added a description. "Maybe he didn’t come in often, just sometimes?"
The bartender’s geniality vanished. "Oh," he said in a subdued tone, "yeah, that’s so. Yeah, I knew that guy. I heard something happened to him-some guy down the street said he got killed. That’s a shame, seemed like a nice guy. No, I didn’t know him good, just a customer, not very often like you said.”
"Was he here on Tuesday night?" asked Grace in his soft voice.
The bartender passed a fat hand across his mouth and said unwillingly, "I guess maybe he was. I guess it was Tuesday. He never stayed long-two, three beers, and he’d go out."
"Did he get talking to anybody else here that night'?"
"I don’t remember. We were kind of busy, I didn’t take any notice. He never stayed long, like I said, in and out. I don’t remember what time it was."
"Remember any other regular customers here at the same time?" asked Landers.
"No. I couldn’t tell you a thing. I’m not even sure now it was Tuesday," said the bartender. A couple of men came in and he turned his back on police.
"Well, do tell," said Grace outside. "That’s a little funny, Tom. What’s he feeling nervous about?"
"Just doesn’t want to be mixed in-you know the citizens, Jase. This is a waste of time. The only way we’ll find out what happened to Buford is if the lab picked up some good evidence at the scene."
Higgins had had some paperwork to clean up on a suicide from last week, and was the only one in when a call came from Traffic about a new body. It was a rooming house over on Beaudry, and the landlady had walked in to confiscate anything there until the rent was paid up, and found the tenant dead in bed. Higgins went to look at it.
Anywhere there was always the narco bit, the addicts and the pushers; these days something new had been added. Time was the heaviest traffic in the hard stuff was in heroin; a while back the H had started to be old hat, and the thing now was cocaine. It was just as lethal but it took a little longer to kill its victims. But the younger generation had added a refinement, and increasingly now they were picking up the kids half high on dope of one sort or another and half high on gin or vodka.
Higgins couldn’t say exactly what might have taken off the fellow in the little bare rented room; the autopsy would tell them. But he didn’t look over twenty-five, and there were needle-marks on both arms, not a dime in the place, a few old clothes, an empty vodka bottle beside the bed. No I.D. in the clothes, but the corpse was wearing a tattoo on one upper arm that said Jacob Altmeyer in a wreath of flowers. Higgins called up the morgue wagon and went back to Parker Center, down to Records.
"And how’s Tom treating you these days?" he asked a cute flaxen-haired Phil Landers as she came up. Phil smiled at him.
"So-so. I think his Italian blood’s showing, he’s getting stingy with a buck."
"God knows aren’t we all these days."
"I understand," said Phil gravely, "that the baby’s walking at last."
Higgins grinned unwillingly; he’d taken some kidding about that. Well, since he’d belatedly acquired a family, his lovely Mary and Bert Dwyer’s kids Steve and Laura, and then their own Margaret Emily, he found he worried about them. And he’d never known any babies before, but by what everybody said they ought to start walking at about a year, and she hadn’t, and he had worried. She’d been a year old in September. Mary said don’t be silly, George, she’s a big baby, she’ll walk in her own good time. But he’d fussed about it, in case anything was wrong. And then suddenly, a couple of weeks ago, she’d got up and started walking just fine, and he’d been damned relieved. Probably bored everybody in the office about it.
"That’s so," he said. "She’s just fine. Have we got a Jacob Altmeyer on file anywhere?"
Phil said she’d look, and while she was gone Higgins thought about what Luis had said about the pretty boys.
When that had begun to show a pattern, not just the one-time thing, they had asked the computer about known threesomes at muggings, but that had come to nothing. Anyway, nothing said these three had been together very long. And even if Luis was right, and they didn’t belong to this beat, there was no way to go looking for them. Phil came back with a small package on Altmeyer. He had a rap-sheet of B. and E., possession, assault. Just another dopie, whatever he was on, supporting a habit which had finally removed him from his misery. There was an address for his mother in Glendale. Higgins went back to the office and got her on the phone to break the news. After two days of threat, it had finally begun to rain again.
"Well, I don’t know what to say," said the manager of the Globe Grill. "I suppose-my office isn’t very big-you could use the dining room, we don’t open that until four." He was a rather handsome sharp-faced man with friendly eyes and a quiet voice; his name was Rappaport, He eyed Mendoza, Conway and Galeano worriedly. "Police coming-you’re a new bunch-but Marta’s a good girl, and of course I’ve heard something about it. The damnedest thing-I don’t understand it. We’ve got to cooperate with you, and I don’t like to ask you, don’t keep her-but it’s working hours and we get kept busy here. If you want to go in the dining room, I’ll get her."
Rappaport, and this whole place, was a little surprise. Galeano had taken it for granted, from Carey’s report, that the blonde worked in a greasy spoon somewhere for peanuts. The Globe Grill, while down this side of Wilshire and not in the gourmet class of the better-known places out on La Cienega, was a quietly good restaurant. It was divided into a coffee shop on one side and a large dining room on the other, it was shining bright with cleanliness and polished chrome and sleek modern lighting, and was larger and busier than they had expected.
"Very nice," said Mendoza as they went past a red velvet curtain into a large dining hall with crystal chandeliers, red vinyl upholstery, a vaguely Mediterranean decor. The tables were octagonal, with low heavy chairs; he pulled out a chair, sat down and lit a cigarette.
"Maybe a little classier than we thought," agreed Conway. Galeano sat down too, and accepted a light from Conway.
The curtains parted. "Again, you want to ask questions? Oh, you are different police."
Carey’s blonde was blonde only in the sense that she wasn’t dark. Her thick hair was tawny russet to dark gold, obviously as nature made it, and she wasn’t conventionally pretty; she had high wide cheekbones, a face slanted to a slender chin, a wide mouth, uptilted brows and grave dark eyes. She was only about five-three, and had a neatly rounded figure in her yellow and white uniform. She came farther into the room and all the men stood up formally.
"Mrs. Fleming? Lieutenant Mendoza-Detective Conway, Detective Galeano. Sit down, won’t you?" Mendoza offered her a cigarette.
"Thank you, I do not smoke. You want to ask all the questions again?"
"Well, you see, Lieutenant Carey has passed the case on to my department." Mendoza was watching her. "Robbery-Homicide."
Her eyes didn’t change expression; she looked down at her folded hands and said, "You think Edwin is dead. So do I." She had the faintest of accents; her speech betrayed her more by its formal grammar. "I thought that from the first."
"We’ve heard all the-mmh-circumstances from Carey," said Mendoza, emitting a long stream of smoke, "and you must admit it all looks very odd, doesn’t it?"
"It is a mystery, yes," she said. "I have thought and thought, and I cannot decide what has happened." She was watching them too, looking from one to the other. "I am sure he has killed himself, but I do not understand how."