“Did Johnny have any friends?” I asked.
“Only one,” Lutz said. “A chemistry teacher at Marquette. Was. He’s a wino now. He and Johnny used to get drunk together on the row. The guy was nutso. Used to teach a semester, then take off a semester and go on a bender. The priests at Marquette finally got sick of it and gave him the heave-ho. He’s probably still on skid; the last time I saw him he was sniffing gasoline in front of the Jesus Saves Mission.” Lutz shook his head.
“What was the guy’s name?” I asked.
Lutz looked to Kraus and shrugged. Kraus screwed his face into a memory search. “Melveny? Yeah, that’s it–George ‘The Professor’ Melveny, George ‘The Gluebird’ Melveny. He’s got a dozen skid row monickers.”
“Last known address?” I queried.
Kraus and Lutz laughed in unison.
“Park bench,” Kraus said.
“Slit trench,” Lutz rhymed.
“No dough.”
“Skid row.” This sent the two detectives into gales of laughter.
“I get the picture,” I said. “Let me ask you something: where did a skid row bum like Johnny DeVries get morphine?”
“Well,” Floyd Lutz said, “he was a pharmacist by trade, before the dope got him. I always figured he was using George ‘The Gluebird’s’ lab to make the shit. We checked it out once; no go. Beats me where he got the stuff Johnny was kind of formidable in a lot of ways; you got the impression that maybe he was hot stuff once.” Lutz shook his head again, and looked at Kraus, who shook his, too.
I sighed. “I need a favor,” I said.
“Name it,” Kraus said. “Any pal of Will Berglund’s is a friend of mine.”
“Thanks, Walt. Look, Will told me that maybe Johnny DeVries and his sister were involved in a drug robbery at the naval hospital in Long Beach, California, during the war. They were both stationed there. Could you call the provost marshal’s office there at the hospital? A request from an official police agency might carry some weight. I’m just an insurance investigator–they won’t give me the time of day. I–”
Lutz interrupted me. “Are you fishing in the same stream as us, Underhill?”
“All the way. A big load of morph was stolen, I know that, and that would explain where Johnny got the stuff he was pushing.”
Kraus and Lutz looked at each other. “Use the phone in the skipper’s office,” Lutz said.
Kraus jumped up from his desk and walked to a cubicle partitioned off and festooned with Milwaukee Braves’ pennants.
“All the particulars, Walt,” Lutz called after him.
“Gotcha!” Kraus returned.
I looked at Lutz and popped my next request: “Could I see DeVries’s rap sheet?”
He nodded and went to a bank of filing cabinets at the far end of the squad room. He fumbled around in them for five minutes, finally extracting a file and returning to me.
I was getting nervous. Kraus had been on the telephone a long time, and it was only 6:00 AM. in L.A. His protracted conversation at that hour struck me as ominous.
The manila folder had “DeVries, John Piet; 6-11-14” typed on the front. I opened it. When I saw the series of mug shots clipped to the first page my hands started to shake and my mind recoiled and leaped forward at the same time. I was looking at the face of Michael Harris. Every curve, plane and angle was identical. It was more than a basic familial resemblance; it was purely parental. Johnny was Michael’s father, but who was his mother? It couldn’t have been Marcella. With shaking hands I turned the first page and went into double shock: John DeVries had listed Margaret Cadwallader of Waukesha, Wisconsin, as next of kin when he was arrested for assault and battery in 1946.
I put down the folder and suddenly realized I was gasping for air. Floyd Lutz had rushed to the water cooler and was now shoving a paper cup of water at me.
“Underhill,” he was saying. “Underhill? What the hell is the matter with you? Underhill?”
I came out of it. I felt like a madman restored to sanity by a divine visitation; someone viewing reality for the first time.