he tried to burn somebody, only he did it to the wrong crowd.”
“What the hell kind of pipe dream is this? He never touched the stuff in his life. He was a shipmaster.”
“I know that. But how many retired ship captains you ever hear of—or any other working stiff on a salary—that managed to save a million dollars?”
2
Romstead stared in disbelief. “Million dollars? He didn’t have anything like that.”
“You don’t seem to know anything about your father at all.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt he was pretty well fixed for his retirement—but not these boxcar figures you’re talking about.”
“Listen!” Brubaker picked another sheet out of the file and scanned it for what he sought. “On July twelfth, just two days before he wound up on the city dump here, he went into his bank on Montgomery Street in San Francisco and drew out two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—”
“What?”
“In cash. Said he needed it for a business deal. Now you tell me what kind of business transaction you need currency for.”
Romstead sighed. “Okay, the whole thing’s crazier than hell, but go on.”
“Right. Early in the morning of July fourteenth two men on a garbage truck found his body there. Two of us went out first and then called the county coroner. Your father’s wallet was still in one of the inside pockets of his coat, with all his identification in it and about forty dollars in cash. His legs were hobbled together with that rope so he could walk but not run, and his hands were bound behind him with two-inch adhesive tape. He was still a powerful man for his age—sixty-six, wasn’t it?—but a gorilla couldn’t have broken that tape the way they had it wound on there.
“As soon as we started digging that lactose out of his mouth, we found that his lower lip was cut, one lower incisor was broken, and the one next to it was gone altogether. We’d already found the entrance wound in the back of the head, of course— You want all this medical who-struck-John about the trajectory?”
“No. Just a rough translation.”
“What it amounted to was that the bullet had entered fairly high up in the back of the head and exited through the rear part of the palate and on out the mouth. As tall as he was, it meant that unless the gunman was standing on a stepladder, your father was on his knees. It doesn’t show in the pictures, but there was some carbon on the knees of his pants from those charred magazines, and there was another, secondary wound on top of his head, the scalp split open as if he’d been hit with something.
“The ground was too hard and there’d already been too many people milling around to make out any tracks, but the logical supposition was that he’d been taken out of a car, duck-walked over to the edge of the dump, slugged and knocked to his knees, and then held while he was shot in the back of the head like a Chinese execution. A real homey crowd. Could have been two of ‘em, or three, or even more. We started sifting the place and found tooth fragments and finally the slug itself. It was too beat-up for any chance of ever matching it to any particular gun, but we could arrive at the caliber. It was a thirty-eight, which of course is no help at all; there are thousands of ‘em everywhere.
“We’re pretty sure he must have been blindfolded when they took him out there, and then they removed it because it was something that might possibly be traced. He was too big a bull to go quietly when he saw where they were taking him; there’d have been some bruises and torn clothing and plowed-up scenery before they ever got him there, even tied up the way he was.”
Brubaker paused to relight his cigar. He puffed and dropped the match in the ashtray. Romstead winced, trying to push the too-vivid scene out of his mind. “When did he leave here?” he asked.
“Nobody knows for sure. He lived out there alone and came and went as he pleased and seldom told anybody anything—though I