Free Top of the Heap by Erle Stanley Gardner Page A

Harvey B. Ludlow and he lived in an apartment way out on the beach. The car was a Cadillac sedan.

Chapter Nine
    I slept until noon Sunday, in my south-of-Market dump. Breakfast at a nearby restaurant consisted of stale eggs fried in near-rancid grease, muddy coffee, and cold, soggy toast.
    I got the Sunday papers, and went back to my stuffy room with its threadbare carpet, hard chair, and stale stench.
    Gabby Garvanza had made news of a sort.
    He’d discharged himself from the hospital, and his departure had given every indication that he was a worried, apprehensive man.
    He had, in fact, simply vanished into thin air.
    His nurses and physician insisted they knew nothing about it.
    Garvanza was recuperating nicely and had been able to travel under his own power. Attired in pajamas, slippers, and bathrobe, he had announced his intention of walking down the hall to the solarium.
    When his special nurse went to the solarium a few minutes later she drew a blank. A frantic search of the hospital yielded no clues and no Gabby Garvanza.
    Theories ranged from the fact that the gambler had taken a run-out powder to abduction by the enemies who had tried to rub him out.
    The mobster had left behind clothes which had been taken to him by Maurine Auburn on the day following the shooting.
    The three-hundred-and-fifty-dollar suit of clothes, the silk shirt, and the twenty-five-dollar hand-painted tie which he had been wearing on the night he was shot, had been impounded as evidence. The bullet holes in the bloodstained garments were expected to yield perhapssome clue on spectrographic analysis as to the composition of the slugs which had penetrated Garvanza’s body.
    The day after the shooting Maurine Auburn had brought a suitcase containing another three-hundred-andfifty- dollar tailor-made suit, a pair of seventy-five-dollar made-to-order shoes, another twenty-five-dollar handpainted necktie, and an assortment of silk shirts, socks, and handkerchiefs.
    All of these had been left behind. When he vanished the gambler had been wearing only bathrobe, pajamas, and slippers.
    The hospital staff insisted that a man so clothed could not possibly leave the hospital by any of the exits, and pointed out that it would be virtually impossible for him to get a cab while clad in that attire.
    Police retorted that whether or not it had been possible, Gabby had disappeared, and that he hadn’t needed a cab.
    There was some criticism of the police for not posting a guard, but the police countered that criticism with the fact that Gabby Garvanza had been the target. He had not done any shooting and had, in fact, been unarmed at the time he was shot. Police had other and more important duties than to assign a bodyguard for a notorious gambler who seemed to be having troubles with competition that wished to muscle in on what the press referred to as “a lucrative racket” — despite the fact that the police insisted the town was closed up tight and there was no gambling worthy of the name.
    I took my knife, cut the clipping out of the newspaper, and folded it in my wallet.
    Since I was, for the moment, at a standstill, and since I dared not circulate around too freely, I spent a long, tiresome day reading, thinking, and keeping under cover.
    Monday I went out to get a morning paper.
    The story was on the front page.
    The body of Maurine Auburn had been found buried in a shallow grave near Laguna Beach, the famous ocean and resort city south of Los Angeles.
    A shallow grave had been dug in the sand above hightide line, but air had seeped through the loose sand, the odor of decomposition had become noticeable, and the body had been uncovered.
    From its location authorities felt the grave had been hastily dug at night, and that the young woman was already dead when a car drove down a side street, stopped near a cliff, and the body was dumped over the cliff to the sand below. The murderer then had hastily scooped out a grave in the soft sand and made his