Photo credit: Los Gatos Weekly-Times file photograph
Place Funeral Home, at 115 N. Santa Cruz Ave., was one of a series of mansions that lined the west side of the street between Bean and Almendra avenues. Today The Chart House restaurant occupies the stately Victorian.
Detectives of fact and fiction capture the imagination of the public. Such a gumshoe came to Los Gatos when the Chart House was Place Funeral Home. This detective was searching for a photograph of an embalming-fluid salesman who was thought to have been riding in a local parade with Margaret Talle, a victim of her husband Tom's .45.
The Bay Area, home of Sam Spade of Maltese Falcon fame, was actually home to several intriguing "dicks," including "Eye Spy" Moultan of San Jose and William "Peek-a-Boo" Pennington. This pair operated when proof of infidelity was needed for divorce. Pennington dropped into the San Leandro Town Hall press room, where I was a greenhorn learning the ropes of reporting and probably taking money under false pretenses from Mr. Hearst and his Oakland Post-Enquirer.
Two girls driving to San Leandro High School had been killed by a train running off its usual schedule. We reporters were of no help to Pennington, who nonetheless sat down and regaled us with the romance of his profession. Was he afraid the surprised male lover would become hostile? No: The love pair usually vowed that this was not sordid but true love. If Peek-a-Boo knew that the man was a battler, he had his Stanford football-playing son stationed in the hall.
Pennington told of a well-to-do Oakland woman who wasn't sure of her (younger) intended husband. His first night of trailing the man led across the Bay Bridge south to San Mateo, where the "intended" picked up a young woman at her home and proceeded to a motel. No flash-camera work was necessary. Upon hearing these findings, the suspicious woman paid his fee and thanked him. "I could have milked that case for a month," Pennington said.
Unlike the talkative Pennington, the sleuth who dropped in on the Times-Observer revealed little, and staffers were disappointed that he would not sit down and talk about his profession.
We thought he may have been working for Los Gatan James Boccardo, who was defending Talle. The staff wondered if the detective might have thought that a photograph of Mrs. Talle and the embalming-fluid salesman riding together might establish that Mrs. Talle was intimate with the salesman and thereby be worth a fee from the Talle defense team. The Times-Observer files, however, contained no such photograph or negative.
In auto-accident stories involving lawsuits, the Boccardo office would call the Times-Observer news editor, request a photograph and instruct the editor to bill Boccardo's San Jose office. For that reason, it was assumed the detective was working on his own.
Place Funeral Home and Melvin's Mortuary at Main and Tait (last owned by Rex Brunner) are no longer in business Today, Darling-Fischer Chapel of the Hills on N. Santa Cruz Avenue is the lone local mortuary. Don Van Straten, director and manager of Chapel of the Hills, said embalming-fluid salesmen still come to town: "Four of them, in fact."
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times, June 26, 1996.
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