*
I drove back to Long Beach wondering what role, if any, Cliff played in all this. Perhaps, the chauffeur’s connection to Eddie went beyond being the family driver. While I drove, I called Charles at the Whittaker home. He told me that back then Cliff had taught Eddie to ride a motorcycle and the two of them had hung around some. “Partying, they called it.” Charles further recalled that Eddie had trouble keeping his balance and eventually lost interest in his motorcycle.
“You have to understand, Mr. Kile, Eddie was very coordinated and most things physical came to him easily when he applied the effort. When something didn’t come easily he’d sour-grapes it and walk away.”
I asked Charles if the two men were still close.
“The only thing the two had in common was riding motorcycles, so once Eddie tired of that, as he eventually did nearly everything, he sold his motorcycle and they quit palling around.”
“How long ago did Eddie sell his motorcycle?”
“Right after Ileana died. Cliff found the buyer.”
Charles also said that Cliff still arrived each day on his motorcycle and while on duty kept it in the Whittaker garage. Charles explained that Cliff had an apartment in town, in addition to a small sleeping room upstairs over the garage.
I thanked Charles and hung up. So, Eddie and Cliff had been pals, but no longer. I needed someone to poke around and see what could be learned about Cliff’s dad and the other four old soldiers the general had taken care of in the assisted living facility. I called Axel. There would be lots of hits about the general on the Internet: his life and philanthropic activities, so maybe something would come up on his providing the care for those soldiers. I also needed someone with at least solid bookkeeping skills to go through the records to see how many years and how much the general had spent to care for the five men. I wasn’t certain if doing that would mean anything, but I wanted to have the information in the event I chose to follow it.
All this was likely a dead end, but so far the game only had the general, Eddie, Karen, Charles, and Cliff. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was playing poker with an empty chair at the table, a chair for a player who had yet to join the game.
Chapter 13
Axel wanted me to join him and a young lady friend for dinner tomorrow night. He said their relationship was not romantic. They had met outside Mackie’s and he had invited her to join him for lunch. “She’s young enough to be my daughter,” he said, “my granddaughter even. For Christ’s sake.”
He asked me to go along for two reasons: so she and I could meet, and because he hadn’t yet gotten a driver’s license. I had gone through this kind of thing with my daughters when they first started dating so I suppose I had a feel for it. But Axel was in his sixties and from what he told me the young lady was still looking up at twenty. It would be weird, but he said it was no date. “I’m no pervert,” is how Axel put it.
Axel also said she had some skills I might make use of. Although, when he told me how he met Hildegard it left me somewhat unsure to which skills he had referred. Then he told me her father had been an accountant, and that she had worked with him summers and weekends for several years. Before she left home she had planned to become a CPA like her father.
“She can handle going through the records about the five old soldiers the general helped,” Axel said. “She can use the money, boss.”
I understood, but promised nothing.
Cars had changed enormously since Axel went to prison over thirty-five years ago, not to mention changes in the roads and the traffic lights. Yesterday he had begun driver training. His teacher was Buddha, one of the ex-cons who hung out in Mackie’s. The cars Axel drove before going inside featured split front windshields, bench seats, bigger steering wheels, and stick shifts to mention just a few of the differences. The roads in those days had fewer lanes and not many designated for turns. In prison he had gotten more than comfortable with computers, but he found nearly everything else on the outside new and a bit strange. So far I had only identified a few changes he found agreeable: big-flat-screen color television, and women’s shorter skirts along with the improved engineering of brassieres.
*
At nine I stopped for a quick meal in Hof’s Hut on Long Beach Blvd in the Bixby Knolls area. I took in the department’s homicide file on Ileana Corrigan and went over it again while I ate. There was nothing in the file about Cliff and Eddie being pals around the time of the murder. I hadn’t expected there would be, but I recalled the report mentioning guns at the Whittaker residence. The general had approved Fidge taking and testing any guns he wished. Fidge had taken a few possibles to determine if they had recently been fired. Ileana Corrigan had been shot twice, first in her throat and then a make-sure bullet in her head. The department ran tests, but none of the weapons had been fired recently enough, and in the opinion of their experts the bullet wounds had not come from shots fired by those guns. The shots that killed Ileana had been through-and-throughs from a powerful handgun. The evidence team had found no casings or bullets at the scene. Whoever had murdered Eddie’s fiancee had been calm and knew not to leave behind anything that ballistics might use.
After getting in my car, I called Charles’s cell phone to see if Cliff was still around. The chauffeur had left. Charles reminded me Cliff had a small place he kept in town to use sometimes. That he had gone there for the night and gave me that address. I started to head for his apartment on the off chance I might catch him there.
*
“Cliffy? Cliffy?”
Cliff Branch heard his name being spoken softly. It was after ten and he had just turned off his television. He knew the voice, but had not heard it spoken just that way in nearly a year.
“Hello,” he said after opening his door. “What brings you here?”
“I need someone to talk to and you’re the only one who really understands me.”
Karen Whittaker walked in wearing a loose extra large man’s tee shirt and red high heels. He could tell she wore no underwear and the way she moved without it could have been a commercial for a pediatrician. He wore only the jockey shorts he always slept in.
“I just don’t know what to make of this Matt Kile nosing into our family’s business. I’m not sure it’s good for Eddie.”
“Why not? The general believes Eddie didn’t kill Ileana. He’s hired Kile to prove that.”
“But what if Eddie did do it?”
“Well, from what you said a while back you’d get a much bigger slice of your dad’s dough.”
“I guess that’s true. If so, I’d be set up, that’s for sure. Then you and I could pick back up where we were years ago. You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I mean, I still see you watching me. Can I sit down, Cliff?” He nodded and headed toward the couch to move some clutter off it. “Oh, don’t bother. I’ll just sit here on the bed.”
“Do you think Eddie did kill her?”