“I am for now. We’ve all had a long day. Why don’t you lay over for the night?”
“I can’t. I have an important probate coming up at ten tomorrow morning. Before that, I have to talk to the Judge in his chambers.” He turned suddenly to the boy: “Do you drive a car?”
“I don’t have one of my own, but I can drive.”
“How would you like to drive me to Santa Teresa? Now.”
“To stay?”
“If it works out. I think it will. Your grandmother will be eager to see you.”
“But Mr. Turnell’s counting on me at the station.”
“He can get himself another boy,” I said. “You better go, John. You’re due for a big change, and this is the beginning of it.”
“I’ll give you ten minutes to pack,” Sable said.
The boy seemed dazed for a minute. He looked around the walls of the mean little room as if he hated to leave it. Perhaps he was afraid to make the big leap.
“Come on,” Sable said. “Snap into it.”
John shook himself out of his apathy, and dragged an old leather suitcase from the wardrobe. We stood and watched him pack his meager belongings: a suit, a few shirts and socks, shaving gear, a dozen books, his precious birth certificate.
I wondered if we were doing him a favor. The Galton household had hot and cold running money piped in from an inexhaustible reservoir. But money was never free. Like any other commodity, it had to be paid for.
Chapter 16
I SAT up late in my motel room, making notes on John Brown’s story. It wasn’t a likely story, on the face of it. His apparent sincerity made it plausible; that, and the fact that it could easily be checked. Some time in the course of the interview I’d made a moral bet with myself that John Brown was telling the truth. John Galton, that is.
In the morning I mailed my notes to my office in Hollywood. Then I paid a visit to the sheriffs substation. A young deputy with a crewcut was sitting at Mungan’s desk.
“Yessir?”
“Is Deputy Mungan anywhere around?”
“Sorry, he’s off duty. If you’re Mr. Archer, he left a message for you.”
He took a long envelope out of a drawer and handed it across the counter. It contained a hurried note written on yellow scratch-pad paper:
R.C. phoned me some dope on Fred Nelson. Record goes back to S.F. docks in twenties. Assault with intent, nolle-prossed. Lempi gang enforcer 1928 on. Arrested suspicion murder 1930, habeas-corpused. Convicted grand theft 1932, sentenced “Q.” Attempted escape 1933, extended sentence. Escaped December 1936, never apprehended.
Mungan.
I walked across the street to the hotel and phoned Roy Lemberg’s hotel, the Sussex Arms. The desk clerk answered: “Sussex Arms. Mr. Farnsworth speaking.”
“This is Archer. Is Lemberg there?”
“Who did you say it was?”
“Archer. I gave you ten dollars yesterday. Is Lemberg there?”
“Mr. and Mrs. Lemberg both checked out.”
“When?”
“Yesterday aft, right after you left.”
“Why didn’t I see them go?”
“Maybe because they went out the back way. They didn’t even leave a forwarding address. But Lemberg made a long-distance call before they took off. A call to Reno.”
“Who did he call in Reno?”
“Car-dealer name of Generous Joe. Lemberg used to work for him, I think.”
“And that’s all there is?”
“That’s all,” Farnsworth said. “I hope it’s what you want.”
I drove across country to International Airport, turned in my rented car, and caught a plane to Reno. By noon I was parking another rented car in front of Generous Joe’s lot.
A huge billboard depicted a smiling Santa Claus type scattering silver dollars. The lot had a kiosk on one corner, and a row of late-model cars fronting for half an acre of slunks. A big corrugated metal shed with a Cars Painted sign on the wall stood at the rear of the lot.
An eager young man with a rawhide tie cantered out of the kiosk almost before I’d brought my car to a halt. He patted and stroked the fender:
“Nice. Very nice. Beautiful condition, clean inside and out. Depending on your equity, you can trade up and still carry cash away.”
“They’d put me in jail. I just rented this crate.”
He gulped, performed a mental back somersault, and landed on his feet: “So why pay rent? On our terms, you can own a car for less money.”
“You wouldn’t be Generous Joe?”
“Mr. Culotti’s in the back. You want to talk to him?”
I said I did. He waved me toward the shed, and yelled: “Hey, Mr. Culotti, customer!”
A gray-haired man came out, looking cheaply gala in an ice-cream suit. His face was swarthy and pitted like an Epstein bronze, and its two halves didn’t quite match. When I got closer to him, I saw that one of his brown eyes was made of glass. He looked permanently startled.
“Mr. Culotti?”
“That’s me.” He smiled a money smile. “What can I do for you?” A trace of Mediterranean accent added feminine endings to some of his words.
“A man named Lemberg called you yesterday.”
“That’s right, he used to work for me, wanted his old job back. Nix.” A gesture of his spread hand swept Lemberg into the dust-bin.
“Is he back in Reno? I’m trying to locate him.”
Culotti picked at his nose and looked wise, in a startled way. He smiled expansively, and put a fatherly arm around my back. “Come in, we’ll talk.”
He propelled me toward the door. Hissing sounds came from the shed, and the sweet anesthetic odor of sprayed paint. Culotti opened the door and stepped back. A goggled man with a paint-gun turned from his work on a blue car.
I was trying to recognize him, when Culotti’s shoulder caught me like a trunk-bumper in the small of the back. I staggered toward the goggled man. The paint-gun hissed in his hands.
A blue cloud stung my eyes. In the burning blue darkness, I recalled that the room clerk Farnsworth hadn’t asked me for more money. Then I felt the sap’s soft explosion against the back of my head. I glissaded down blue slopes of pain to a hole which opened for me.
Later there was talking.
“Better wash out his eyes,” the first gravedigger said. “We don’t want to blind him.”
“Let him go blind,” the second gravedigger said. “Teach him a lesson. I got a hook in the eye.”
“Did it teach you a lesson, Blind-eye? Do what I tell you.”
I heard Culotti breathe like a bull. He spat, but made no answer. My hands were tied behind me. My face was on cement. I tried to blink. My eyelids were stuck tight.
The fear of blindness is the worst fear there is. It crawled on my face and entered my mouth. I wanted to beg them to save my eyes. A persistent bright speck behind my eyes stared me down and shamed me into continued silence.
Liquid gurgled in a can.
“Not with gasoline, greaseball.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“Why not? You’re a blind-eye greaseball, hamburger that used to be a muscle.” This voice was light and featureless, without feeling, almost without meaning. “You got any olive oil?”
“At home, plenty.”
“Go and get it. I’ll keep store.”
My consciousness must have lapsed. Oil ran on my face like tears. I thought of a friend named Angelo who made his own oil from the olives he grew on his hillside in the Valley. The Maffia had killed his father.
A face came into blurred focus, Culotti’s face, hanging slack-mouthed over me. I twisted from my side onto my back, and lashed at him with both feet. One heel caught him under the chin, and he went down. Something bounced and rolled on the floor. Then he stood one-eyed over me, bleeding at the mouth. He stamped my head back down into earthy darkness.