State’s Evidence Read online

  “You sound like you’re calling from Siberia, Marsh,” Les said after I told him who I was.

  “Only El Gordo.”

  “Same difference as I remember. Hey. Did you know the first time I ever got laid was in a whorehouse in El Gordo?”

  “You don’t say.”

  “My brother took me. Cost him five bucks. Cost me ten times that for penicillin.”

  “How is your brother?”

  “Dead. Heart attack. Forty-one.”

  “Tough.”

  “Makes you think.”

  “Still smoking?”

  “Yep. You?”

  “Yep.”

  “I run, though. Three miles a day. You?”

  “Not unless the building’s on fire. Which last night it was, come to think of it.”

  “What was that?”

  “Never mind, Les. Listen. I need some information. Should be a piece of cake.”

  “That’s what you always say, Marsh. Last time it ate up five grand in expenses, and the local chief of detectives took the time to familiarize me with the law on misprision of a felony.”

  “You were reimbursed, Les.”

  “For the expenses, yes; for the humiliation, no.”

  Les laughed and I laughed too because we both knew the times we needed help from each other were among the best times we had, and that we would do the favors for free if we had to or were asked.

  “What’s up?” Les asked after we’d quieted down.

  “Very simple. Back in the early sixties a girl got married in Vegas to a guy named Zelko. Frank Zelko. I want Zelko’s current whereabouts and anything more you can get on him. Also anything you can come up with on the girl.”

  “What’s the girl’s name?”

  “Teresa Goodrum was her maiden name. She’s Teresa Blair now.”

  “How old?”

  “Forty, give or take.”

  “You figure she’s still in Vegas?”

  “No, not unless she went back there last week.”

  “What’s the case?”

  “Missing person.”

  “You sure that’s it?”

  “Sure I’m sure.”

  “I think I know the story on Zelko,” Les said, “but let me check some details. I should be back to you in an hour.”

  “Good.” I gave him the number at the motel.

  “You coming to Vegas any time soon, Marsh?”

  “Not if my luck holds. When are you and Marie going to wise up and move out of there?”

  “Hell, Marsh, we love it here. Why, Marie and Wayne Newton are on a first name basis.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  Les’s laugh was hollow. “Marie never did like you, did you know that, Marsh? Not even back at school. She said you always made her feel like she’d just cheated on an exam.”

  “Is that right? How does Wayne Newton make her feel?”

  We talked for a while longer, and after Les hung up I dialed again. Tancy Verritt answered on the second ring. The purr fell out of her voice the minute I identified myself. I asked if I could talk with her some time that evening.

  “What about?”

  “About Teresa Blair.”

  “I already told you everything. At the club.”

  “It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  She paused. “Be here at seven. I have a dinner date at eight. You can zip me up.” She laughed in my ear, then told me how to get to her apartment.

  I called my answering service next. The only message was from a Mr. Brutus Therm. A communication from a psychic. I took a deep breath and called the number Brutus had left, already skeptical because he’d had to use a telephone to reach me. Brutus answered the phone himself, uttering his name with the stentorian tones of melodrama.

  “What can I do for you, Mr. Therm?” I asked. “I got your message to call.”

  “Au contraire, Mr. Tanner. I can, and shall, do something for you. Your client, Mr. Blair, has engaged my services. He has given me a photo of his wife, as well as one of her blouses. I have been sensitizing myself to them all day. Unfortunately, the ether is turbulent today, aswirl with cirrocumulus disturbances. I have nevertheless received certain pulsars.”

  “Pulsars?”

  “Vibrations that meld with the beta waves in my brain to produce discernible psychic patterns,” Brutus explained tolerantly, as though you should learn about pulsars the day after you learn about Bambi. I asked Brutus what patterns he had discerned.

  “I sense skepticism on your part,” he countered.

  “You’re uncanny, Mr. Therm.”

  “I take it you have never employed a sensitive, Mr. Tanner.”

  “Right again.”

  “I am not a charlatan, whatever you might think. I have been of assistance in many cases such as yours.”

  Charm oozed from his voice like jelly from a doughnut. “How much are you charging James Blair to rent your sensitivity, Therm?” I asked.

  “I can’t see what business that is of yours,” Therm said.

  “Maybe it’s not my business at all. But I’ve got some psychic predictions of my own. I predict you’re charging him five grand or more. I predict the money’s not refundable, and is not contingent upon results. And I predict that nothing you tell me is going to be worth a chewed Chiclet.”

  Brutus was silent for a moment, breathing heavily and no doubt angrily. I felt bad about picking on him, but not bad enough to retract my slur. Failure frustrates me, and because I still didn’t have the slightest idea where Teresa Blair was, I took it out on Mr. Therm.

  When Therm spoke again, it was in the measured cadence of anchormen and kindergarten teachers. “I should terminate this conversation, Mr. Tanner. I’ve encountered your type of individual many times. Insecure. Only marginally self-sufficient in an economic sense and a psychological sense as well. Jealous of the accomplishments of others. A typical pattern. However, I shall persevere, but only because Mr. Blair wishes it. He is a man I am drawn to. He very likely possesses extrasensory abilities himself. Our conversations have been fascinating. The vibrations electric.”

  “Maybe it’s just bad wiring.”

  “I hope you’re a better investigator than you are a wit, Mr. Tanner.”

  I did, too. “Why don’t we get back to those psychic patterns you mentioned. Where’s Mrs. Blair?”

  “I can’t tell you precisely,” Therm intoned. “Not yet. At this point I have only general images. I see rocks. Boulders. I see white. A broad expanse. Snow, perhaps. Or sand. I see water. Blue. Perhaps sky, but more likely water. I see an enclosure that is somehow in the air. I see globes of light. I see a word. Dodge, perhaps. Is it of any help?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps when your investigation is more fully fleshed out.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “When my images become more precise I’ll give you a call.”

  “I’ll be breathless until then, Mr. Therm.”

  “Don’t flaunt your ignorance, Mr. Tanner. You may live to regret it.”

  I hung up, but not without the realization that there was something in what Brutus Therm had said. I didn’t want extrasensory abilities to exist. I didn’t want to think that by taking shortcuts others could do what I did. I’m not good at shortcuts. I stay on the road, trudging step by step until they become mile by mile, plodding and slow, but proceeding with some intelligence and perhaps even some sensitivity of my own. If you could get there with beta waves and pulsars, I was going to be out of business.

  I dispatched Brutus Therm to the back of my mind and pulled the El Gordo telephone directory out from the drawer beside the bed and looked up James Blair’s number. It was the same as one of the numbers I had seen written on the cover of Mary Quilk’s phone book, the number that had been crossed out. The other number wasn’t an El Gordo exchange.

  Luckily, my source at the telephone company in San Francisco was on duty. We had once thought we loved each other and we’d been wrong. Later on we decided we li
ked each other and we’d been right. We chatted for a minute, promised to have lunch in a week or so, and I gave her the second number and she left to check it out. During her absence the telephone threw Muzak at me.

  “It’s a Tahoe number, Marsh. South Shore. It’ll take more time to find out exactly where it is.”

  I thanked her and gave her the number of my motel and asked her to check out the location and call me back. She said she would. I said I’d be eternally grateful. She said she doubted it, but she’d give me the chance.

  I tossed the receiver back on the hook and lay back on the bed, closed my eyes, and listened to the orgasmic groan of the air conditioner. Gradually I became less conscious of noise and more conscious of images, people, and places that came and went like flash cards in strobe lights. Some time later the groan became a scream and the scream became a bell and the bell became a telephone that I groped for through the thick smog of sleep.

  “Marsh? Les. I got something for you on Zelko.”

  “Good. Where is he?”

  “You want it metaphorically or you want it straight?”

  “I just woke up, Les. I’m not ready for poetry, especially yours.”

  “I was thinking more of Dante, but here goes. Zelko’s dead, Marsh.”

  “Since when?”

  “’Sixty-six. And that’s not all. It was almost certainly a contract job. A hit. Zelko was in jail at the time on a tax beef. The word is Zelko was working his way up through the syndicate hierarchy a little too fast for some people’s comfort, so they set him up for the tax fall and then decided to make sure he’d never get back in circulation. Zelko made someone nervous, someone made him dead.”

  “What about his wife?”

  “Nothing much on her. A show girl, great legs, Zelko fell for her in a big way. Only married a couple of years when he got sent up. She visited him every Sunday for a year. Zelko got it while she was in the visitors room, waiting to see him.”

  “Anything else?”

  “She hung around with another show girl named Trudy. Both left town a few weeks after Zelko bought the farm. That’s about it, though. You want me to dig some more?”

  “I guess not. What’s the best guess on who had Zelko taken out?”

  “Could have been any of about ten guys, is the way I hear it. Zelko was a real dandy, played around with other men’s women a lot, before and after he got married. Plus, he shot off his mouth. The cops didn’t break any legs looking for the killer. One sleaze offs another sleaze, is the way they look at it.”

  “Thanks, Les.”

  “No problem. Let’s get together, Marsh.”

  “Soon.”

  The phone rang again three minutes later. “The unit you asked about is in a law office, Marsh. Right on the Nevada border, the California side of Stateline. It’s billed to the firm of Flowers and Lane, on Spruce Street. That’s all I can give you.”

  I told her that was enough and thanked her. I was close, but not close enough. The lawyer was only a middleman, a delay to be avoided if possible.

  There was still some time to kill before I was due at Tancy Verritt’s and I didn’t have anyone handy to kill it with so I went to a movie. A run-down house not far from my motel featured old films, three of them, run back-to-back, twenty-four hours a day. Admission two bucks. When I walked in, the next feature was just beginning. Sheepman. Glenn Ford. Great. By the time I rang Tancy Verritt’s bell, there was a smile on my face and a quip on my lips.

  Neither my smile nor my quip found mates on the woman who answered the door. Tancy Verritt wasn’t eager to see me and she curled a lip to let me know it even before I crossed the threshold. When I made no move to enter, she waved me inside with urgent and enameled fingers.

  Her living room was designed to exist without care—there were no surfaces that would absorb a stain, no plants that would thirst, no woods that would crack, no floors that would streak or cloud. Nothing visible had existed five years before. The only things on the walls besides simulated cedar paneling were an appointment calendar and a poster of Robert Redford in a cowboy hat. I thought briefly of Mary Quilk and Elvis. The only thing on Tancy Verritt besides impatience was a belted dressing gown, phosphorescent, red and long, just like her fingernails. I expected her to stop somewhere in the vicinity of the various heaps of Naugahyde in the living room, but she kept walking and I kept pace, through one door and then another.

  We ended up in the bedroom. The bed was large, with tubular brass grills at head and foot. The alternating bands of orange and white that covered it were stuffed with something puffy and inviting. The ceiling wasn’t exactly mirrored, but it was covered with shiny and crinkled foil that dissected my image weirdly.

  Tancy Verritt walked straight to a dressing table and sat on a padded stool, picked up a silver-backed brush, and started brushing her hair. Her reflection was the hub of a wheel of naked bulbs, and it didn’t seem pleased with itself. Still with her back to me, she gestured toward one of the club chairs near the foot of the bed. I had to lift some filmy fabrics off the chair before I could sit on it.

  I took my seat and watched the planes of Ms. Verritt’s back move beneath her gown as she stroked her hair. I watched them for quite a while, feeling absurdly domestic and content. The only sounds in the room were from quiet, silken things.

  “Well?”

  The crystal-thin mood shattered with a single syllable, nasal and insulting. I reluctantly adjusted to match it.

  “Your friend Teresa is in serious trouble, Ms. Verritt,” I began. “You’re not helping by keeping quiet about her past.”

  “I told you at the club I didn’t know anything about her past, love.”

  “You were lying.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m a lie detector. You grew up in El Gordo and you were Teresa Goodrum’s best friend, then and now.”

  The arm missed a brush stroke, then resumed at a faster pace. “What of it?”

  “Your name isn’t Tancy Verritt, is it?”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Pulsars.”

  “What?” She stopped the brush, then put it down.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Your given name was Trudy Valente. You and Teresa Goodrum ran off to Las Vegas, two pretty girls on the make for cheap thrills in the city that lives off them.”

  For the first time since we’d entered the room, Tancy Verritt looked at me without the aid of her mirror. “Who told you all this? Teresa?”

  “It’s not important, but it definitely wasn’t Teresa. What is important is that you tell me everything you can about the Las Vegas days. I think Teresa’s disappearance could be connected with that period of her life.”

  “I try not to remember anything about the Las Vegas days, Tanner. I try real hard. When trying’s not enough, I get help.”

  “What kind of help?”

  “You don’t want to know. Listen, love. I can’t talk about Vegas. I just can’t.”

  “Not even to help your friend?”

  “Not even then.”

  A line of gleaming sweat had formed at the base of Tancy Verritt’s neck, soaking her hair, causing strands of it to stick like lampreys to her flesh. “Tell me about Teresa’s husband,” I said. “Tell me about Frankie.”

  Her eyes rolled wider. “You know about Frankie, too?”

  I nodded.

  Her eyes drifted back to the mirror, but this time what she saw was not her face. “Frankie Zelko was the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen,” she breathed. “You could see it even in that little picture you had. He had everything. Frankie made a woman feel like she was the only woman in the world who could make him laugh or cry or come or anything in between.”

  “Frankie’s dead,” I said.

  “Frankie’s dead,” she repeated. “You don’t have to tell me that.”

  “Tell me how he died.”

  “Shot. He was shot. In jail.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. And
I very much don’t want to know.”

  “Why not?”

  “Do you know Vegas, love? Do you know the kind of people who run that town?”

  “Only what I saw in The Godfather.”

  “Well, it’s best to know of them and not about them, if you know what I mean. They don’t like people to know what they do or how they do it. When people know too much, they end up dead. Or worse. I had a girl friend …”

  She paused. A stricken look crossed her face like the shadow of a tomb. “What about your girl friend?” I prompted.

  The memory had dazed her, backed her into a trance. “I had this girl friend. She knew something she shouldn’t have known. Not a big thing, you know, just a thing. She saw two people together who didn’t want to be seen together, and she talked about it. Not to cops, just to someone. Anyone. Now she lives in a wheelchair. Her feet don’t work so good. She looks like she died and they forgot to bury her.”

  “Was Frankie in the mob?”

  “Everyone in Vegas is in the mob. Whether they know it or not. You go down there and play the tables, you’re in the mob, too.”

  “Was Frankie hit?”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “People. Casino creeps.”

  “What did Frankie know? Or do? Or say?”

  “Like I said, love. I don’t know and I don’t want to know.”

  “Did Teresa Blair know whatever it was that got Frankie in trouble?”

  She shrugged.

  “How did Frankie end up in jail?” I continued.

  “He … I don’t want to get into that, love. I’ve talked too much already. Why don’t you just split? Then me and my date can go drink a magnum of the bubbly and I can forget I ever saw you or Vegas either.”

  I stayed where I was, my mind abuzz with possibilities, all of them grotesque. “Did Teresa say anything recently about those days in Vegas?”