She squeezed my arm. In the outside lights, her dark eyes were shiny. “Soft as butter,” she said.
“The arm?”
“Idiot, your darn arm is like a slab of red wood. I just meant I’m glad you left her that much.”
“I wonder how long she’ll keep it.”
“What do you mean?”
“Somebody killed him. If they find him, he might have all the right reasons. I think I might talk to a cop.”
“Why, dear?” she asked earnestly.
“Dear?”
“Oh, shut up! It was just a… reflex.”
“You’ve done it twice today.”
“Why will you talk to a cop?”
“Because they very probably know a little more than Miss Ives thinks they know. And we’re close to the heart of it now, Dana. Where did D. C. Ives’ file copies go?”
My man was Sergeant Starr. Bill Starr. He was a little fellow about forty, very jaunty and bouncy. He was twenty percent nose, and it looked as if that nose had been hit at least once from every possible direction. Under the nose was the abrupt curve of an amiable little smile. He was a clowner, a most happy fellow. He seemed to want you to like him. There was so much nose, there was a danger of misreading the eyes. They were small, cat yellow, and about as soft and mild as cross sections of brass rod.
His tidy little gray office had a rack for cups won in various skills. Several of them were for pistol. He bounced up and perched on the corner of his desk and beamed at me and said, “Why should I play games with anybody, pal? Am I in a buyer’s market? Maybe, for residents. If I want to keep a source going. Sure. But I can park your gray tired ass in the tank and keep you there until you get eager to please.”
I chuckled as merrily as he and said, “This friend I’m doing the favor for would be terribly upset. No influence here at all, of course. Except the kind of lawyers money will buy. Platoons of them, if need be. I have no record, Sergeant. But careless people have put me in from time to time, here and there. And I have been hit on the head by old-fashioned ones. So it would be an inconvenience for both of us. I’m eager to please right now. And eager to have you please me.”
He picked the assorted cards and licenses off his desk and handed them to me. “McGee, there is every identification here except the right one.”
“Cards are needed to do a favor for a friend?”
“I’ll tell you again. If you have official status then maybe you can protect your client. But you have nothing. You have to tell me who hired you!”
“But I told you, Sergeant, that we might get around to that, if things go well. Besides, I’m not hired. It’s just… ”
“Oh God, yes. A favor for a friend.” He reached for his hat. “Let’s try some coffee.” He drew a car from, the pool and we went ten blocks to a drive-in. The pretty waitress knew him by name, and brought us coffee and raised doughnuts.
“I’ll start,” I said. “D. C. Ives. Sometimes a man has to be killed before people get the idea of some kind of hanky-panky.”
“Hanky-panky. Now isn’t that sweet! Put it this way. It isn’t a legal requirement a man should have a checking account, but nearly everybody with forty-thousand-dollar homes does. An estimate of his take on a legit basis would be fifty or sixty a week. Living expenses better than a thousand a month. So he could be living off a big score from way back, or making little scores as he goes along.”
“He was making it as he went along.”
“Thanks a lot. I already figured that.”
“Did you figure how?”
“It’s your turn again, McGee.”
“He had a studio and darkroom in his house, and he also had another setup. I’d guess somewhere near Verano Street. A limited setup. A quality enlarger for 35mm, a setup for making and drying eight by ten prints, no automation for quantity production-almost what you’d expect of an advanced amateur, a one-man operation.”
“To do what?”
“Isn’t it your turn, Sergeant?”
“Okay. He would do there something he wouldn’t want to do home on account of his daughter. When she wasn’t in school, she helped him with the home setup. He did a lot of traveling. Short trips. Assignments, he called them. I say it wasn’t just a standard smut shop. The requirements in that field are too low. And the pay is low. What do you say it was, McGee?”
“Discreet, careful, expert blackmail. Plus maybe some industrial espionage. And maybe just the long shots of people with the wrong people-the executive talking to the competition, the banker with the tout. Long lens stuff, up and down this coast. How would he get the work? Some from legitimate agencies, maybe. Some from the great unwashed. With really juicy negatives, he could wring a lot of money out, if the people were important.”
“And eventually make a slip and get his head smashed in.”
“Probably.”
“McGee, if you are trying to do a favor for a friend by getting hold of prints or negatives, forget it.”
“They’re gone?”
“If he’d been killed immediately, maybe we’d have moved a little faster. We found his hideyhole. A warehouse corner with its own entrance. It was an area check that turned it up. His prints were on everything. Not much file space for prints, but it was stone empty. No negatives. The file had been locked, and it was pried open. The door had been unlocked and relocked with a key. A good lock. There was a tin money box in the back of the file. It was busted open too.”
“What are you holding back, Starr?”
“Me? Me!”
“So all right. My friend is a sick sad girl. She’s at Hope Island on Bastion Key in Florida. Her name is Nancy Abbott. She’s a drunk. She’s been at that retreat for months. Her rich architect daddy is dying, or dead by now, in San Francisco. Ives sneaked some nasty pictures of her a year and a half ago. Now give me the rest.”
“I can check that out. The rest? Okay, I found out beyond any doubt that the break-in wasn’t accomplished until the day after Ives was clobbered. And in Ives’ pocket was a key to his little lab. Ives had an employee. Semi-retarded. Samuel Bogen, age 46. On and off welfare for years. Trouble twenty years ago. Peeping Tom and indecent exposure, and about four ninety-day falls for that. From what I can find out, Ives used him for scut work, paying him a dollar an hour for washing trays, drying prints, that sort of thing. By the time we got a line on him, Bogen had dropped off the face of the earth. He could be just a harmless spook. Or he could have flipped and bashed his boss. We think we traced him onto a Los Angeles bus. We’ve had an alert out on him ever since. Medium height, medium weight, glasses, bad teeth, hair brown turning gray, no special identifying marks or characteristics. No family. Left no lead behind in his furnished room three blocks off Verano Street. There is another thing too that makes me less interested in him. At about the right time, a car left the area at high speed. Bogen apparently never owned a car and doesn’t drive.”
I couldn’t risk pursuing the Bogen matter further. I was afraid the little tiger would check it back and come up with Lysa Dean’s name.
“So who was involved in the Abbott girl’s pictures?” he demanded.
I was ready for that one. “A stock car driver named Sonny Catton. He was killed last year when he hit a wall.”
“Where were the pictures taken?”
“Up around Point Sur someplace, at a private home I think.”
“A year and a half ago, you said? So why the heat to get them back now?”
“She was worried about whether he was using them to blackmail her dying father.”
“How did you track it back to this Ives?”
“Sergeant, that’s a long long story. Let me ask you one. Suppose somebody had some work for Ives. They couldn’t get him. So they called Mendez, of Gallagher, Rosen and Mendez, and found out from Mendez he was dead. Does that mean anything?”
“I wondered about that too. Charlie Mendez is clean. Small services for small fees. Like having mail come there.”