‘I remember it,’ said Pitman. He was speaking as if the effort of conversation was almost too much for him. ‘Führerkopie was rubber-stamped on each sheet. You said it was the minutes of some top-secret meeting.’
‘That’s right,’ said Stein softly. Outside in the hall the old long-case clock struck midnight; the chimes went on interminably and sounded much louder than they did in the daytime. ‘What did you do with those documents?’ said Colonel Pitman.
‘It’s better you don’t know,’ said Stein in the edgy voice of Corporal Stein, the orderly room clerk who never got anything wrong.
‘Perhaps it is,’ agreed Pitman. He went across to switch on extra lights, as if hoping that they would illuminate the conversation too. He looked at the Persian carpet that was hanging on the wall. It was a Shiraz – all that now remained of the treasures from the Kaiseroda mine. The carpet had been thrown from the truck when they first began to unload, a dirty stain on the canvas wrapping into which it had been sewn. The colonel still recalled the markings: Islamisches Abteilung, part of the Prussian state museum’s treasures, put into the salt mine to keep them safe from Allied bombs and Red Army artillery. In the hysterical atmosphere of that night, Jerry Delaney, who had driven the first truck right behind the colonel’s jeep, had shouted, ‘A present for the colonel,’ and the soldiers had cheered. They were good boys. Colonel Pitman felt a tear welling in his eye as he remembered them. Now he touched the surface of the carpet to feel the tiny knotted pile and the tassels. They were fine men; he had been proud to lead them.
‘What must we do?’ said Colonel Pitman.
‘We’ll have to know more about these film people, Colonel. They could be very dangerous, but …,’ he fluttered his hand, ‘but maybe they can be handled. Let’s see what they’re after.’
Pitman turned to look at him and nodded.
‘I’m going to take a few other documents back to California with me,’ said Stein. ‘I’ll feed them some odds and ends to see how they react. Meanwhile you follow up this trouble we’ve got with the bank. Talk to the other banks, see if they’ll support us. Maybe it’s somehow connected to this Breslow guy.’
‘You know best, Corporal, you always have done,’ said Pitman.
All cops who regularly ride the cars have an ‘eating spot’. Doughnut shops are a favoured choice. Such places always have good coffee ready to drink and, if a radio call comes in during the break, a doughnut can be snatched up and taken along. Also, doughnut shops are usually situated near busy intersections and have conveniently large parking places for their customers. All in all, a doughnut shop is a good place to start looking for a cop.
The cars outside the Big O Do-nut Shop, where the Santa Monica Freeway passes over La Brea, were parked nose to the wall, except for the ‘black and white’. That was parked nose out, the way all police drivers leave their vehicles while taking a refreshment break. The two uniformed police officers could be seen inside the brightly lit windows. It was 11.34 P.M. on Saturday, 2 June, when a local resident, an eighteen-year-old auto mechanic named William Dawson, went up to the table occupied by the police officers and said he wanted to report a crime. This public-spirited action was prompted by some difficulties Dawson was having at the time with the county Probation Department.
Dawson, whose interest in motor cars extended all the way from repairing them to stealing them and driving them while under the influence of drugs, had become curious about the presence on La Brea of a dented green Cadillac. It was a 1970 Fleetwood Eldorado, featuring the 8.2 litre engine – the biggest production car engine in the world. In his written statement, Dawson said that he was looking closely at the car with a view to finding its owner and purchasing it. He said he wanted to fit the engine into a hot rod he was building, although more than one officer in the detectives’ room expressed the opinion that Dawson was about to steal the car.
Accompanying Dawson to the parked Cadillac, the two officers were shown blood marks on the road surface under the car. Forcing open the capacious luggage space, they discovered the bound body of a man. His age was difficult to determine, for his head had been removed from his torso and was not anywhere in the vicinity. The smell – which had first prompted Dawson to go to the police – was enough to indicate that the victim had been dead for a week or so. One of the police officers vomited. For his assistance to the police, Dawson was given a letter stating the facts for the Los Angeles county superior court, to which he was responsible for the probation order.
That the murderer, or murderers, had been interrupted or disturbed during the commission of the crime became apparent to the investigating officer within a few hours. It seemed likely that the criminal, or criminals, had intended to eliminate both the Cadillac and the corpse by running the car into the Pacific Ocean. The police computer revealed that the car was registered in the name of Bernard Lustig who lived in a large house in Portuguese Bend in the Palos Verdes peninsula, a plush suburb known locally as ‘The Hill’.
The door of the Lustig ranch-style home was opened by a Spanish-speaking maid when the detectives called the following morning, Sunday, 3 June. Mr Bernard Lustig was not at home. He had left the house at about nine o’clock in the evening, on Wednesday, 23 May, together with two guests with whom he had sat drinking for about an hour. The maid, whose comprehension of the English language was limited, thought that the three men had been talking about movies. That was, she explained, her employer’s principal interest. In fact, she added, since his separation from his wife fourteen months earlier, movie making had been Mr Lustig’s only interest.
Detective Lieutenant Harry Ramirez looked the girl up and down. She was young and attractive.
‘Could I see your papers?’ said Ramirez. ‘Do you have a resident alien’s card?’
‘Everything is with my aunt at her house in San Diego,’ said the girl.
‘California driving licence?’ The girl shook her head. Ramirez changed to Spanish. ‘Half the inhabitants of Los Angeles county have left their papers with that aunt of yours in San Diego,’ he told her bitterly.
‘I can get them,’ said the girl impassively. They both knew it was a game. The girl had come across the border without permission to work. But Ramirez knew that, even in the old days, illegal immigrants he had deported were back at work within seven days. Now, since Mexico had discovered oil, the US immigration officials could seldom be persuaded even to start the paperwork. Ramirez snorted and called the girl a bad name. When he remembered the way in which his father had conscientiously gone through the process of getting his papers, so that Harry and his brothers and sisters could grow up as citizens, it made him angry that the authorities turned a blind eye to this generation of wetbacks.
‘You share his bed,’ said Ramirez. ‘Don’t tell me no, I say you share his bed – puta!’
The girl began to cry. Whether that was at the shame of being called a whore, or at the prospect of being deported, no one could be sure, not even the girl.
‘He’s dead,’ shouted Ramirez. ‘They cut off his head and we still haven’t found it. Maybe it’s here.’
The girl’s eyes opened wide in terror.
‘Now, tell me about the men,’ said Ramirez.
The girl nodded and sat down wearily. ‘It is true,’ she said sadly. ‘Once I go to bed with him. Just once. It was after his father died. He was crying. He was so sad …’ Even with the girl’s full co-operation the description of the two men was sketchy.
The first lucky break the homicide officers got on the Lustig killing