* * *
I woke up to see that fat Okie standing over me in a clean white shirt and sedate print necktie. My first thought was that we had to be dead–Davis Evans would never dress that square unless God himself forced him to.
“Wake up, boy. I been doin’ police work while you been beauty sleepin’.”
In a split second it all came back. I groaned, felt the cot beneath me and looked around at the cramped interior of the guard hut. “Oh shit.”
Davis handed me a wet towel. “On a stick. I made me some phone calls. Pal of mine at the Ventura courthouse said he logged twenty-one hundred sixty-six beans of the ransom money into the evidence locker. What you think of that?”
I stood up and tried my legs. They wobbled, but held. “Miller and Leroy spread eight or nine grand around the town,” I said. “Leaving close to ninety out there. It’s got to be the Ventura cops.”
Davis shook his head. “Uh-uh. That was a legit dispatch that came into town and shot down Harwell. They saw that wreck of ours on the detour road and came lookin’ for survivors. See, I called R & I and Robbery for a list of Miller’s known associates from his old rousts. Got six names from his jacket, and the records clerk told me a Ventura fed called in a few hours before, got the same information. You think that ain’t sweet?”
I thought of Stensland, the all-gray federal man with the big tax-free pension–if he could kibosh the fact that the snatchers glommed only chump change. “Let’s go get him.”
“That mother dog gonna pay for hurtin’ my Buick.”
“Get a car from the duty officer. And this time I’ll drive.”
* * *
Back in familiar, if not safe-and-sane L.A., we formed an itinerary out of the six names and last-known addresses from Miller Treadwell’s K.A. file. Davis took the wheel again, and I picked and poked at my various cuts, lacerations, and bruises as we prowled the south-central part of the city–home to our first three possibles.
Number one’s wife told us her husband was back in Quentin; the apartment house of the number two man had been torn down and was now an amusement arcade frequented by Mexican youths wearing zoot suits; number three had gotten religion and praised Jesus as we searched his pad. He told us he hadn’t seen Miller Treadwell since their last job together in ’41, damned him as a fornicating whoremonger, and handed us leaflets that cogently explained that Jesus Christ was an Aryan, not a Jew, and that _Mein Kampf_ was the lost book of the Bible. Davis’s response to the man was the longest “Wooooooo” I’d ever heard him emit, and we drove across town to Hollywood and K.A. number four, debating the pros and cons of parole violation on grounds of mental bankruptcy.
Number four–“Jungle” John Lembeck, white male, age thirty-four, two-time convicted strong-arm heister, lived in a bungalow court on Serrano just off the Boulevard. Giving the address a rolling once-over, Davis and I said “Bingo” simultaneously, and I added, “The Auburn with a bad black paint-job. Right by that streetlight.”
Davis blurted, “What?” slowed the car, and squinted out at the dark street. Noticing the dream-mobile, he said, “Double bingo. There’s a fed sled three cars down. If it’s got Ventura tags, this is grief.”
I got out and walked back to check; Davis continued on to the corner and parked. Squatting down, I squinted at the steel gray Plymouth’s rear license plate. Triple bingo: five-digit federal vehicle designation, 1945 Ventura County tags. Grief on a popsicle stick.
Davis trotted over, and we circled the bungalows in a flanking movement. They were individual stucco huts arranged around a cement courtyard, and John Lembeck’s file placed him in unit three. Alleys separated the court from the adjoining apartment buildings, and I took the one on the left.
The night was deep blue and cloudless, and I crept through the alleyway helped by light from apartment windows. The first two huts had drawn curtains, but the third one back was cracked for air, the venetian blinds down to just above the narrow open space. I drew my gun, put my eyes to the slice of light, and looked in.