by Sue Grafton
He walked out the front door and slammed it behind him, so choked with fury he couldn’t utter a word.
19
I went back to the motel office and borrowed Mrs. Bonnet’s phone. I contacted the sheriff ’s office to report the incident and was told they’d send someone out. I then called Southern California Automobile Club and requested assistance. While I waited, I called Daisy’s house and Tannie answered the phone. She said Daisy had already left for work. When I told her about my tires being slashed, she was properly outraged. “You poor thing! I can’t believe someone would do that to you.”
“Personally, I’m thrilled. I mean, on one hand, I’m peeved. I hate to be without transportation and buying four new tires is the last thing I need. On the other hand, it’s like hitting all three cherries on a slot machine. Three days into the job and someone’s already nervous as a cat.”
“You don’t think it was vandalism?”
“Absolutely not. Are you kidding? I grant you my car’s conspicuous in a parking lot full of trucks, but the choice wasn’t random. This was supposed to be a warning, or possibly punishment, but I take it as a good sign.”
“Well, your attitude beats mine. I’d be raising six kinds of hell if somebody slashed my tires.”
“Shows I’m on the right track.”
“Which is what?”
“I have no idea, but my nemesis must think I’m close to figuring it out.”
“Whatever ‘it’ is.”
“Right. Meantime, I need the name of a garage, if you know someone good.”
“You forget my brother’s in the business. Ottweiler Auto Repair in Santa Maria. At least he won’t gouge you on the price.”
“Great. I’ll call him. What about you? What’s your day looking like?”
“I’ll be out on the property with a couple of guys. If I were so minded, I could be clearing brush for the rest of my life. I’m meeting with a contractor at eleven thirty, but you’re welcome to come by.”
“Let’s see how long it takes me to get my tires swapped out. If everything goes smoothly, I’ll stop and pick up some sandwiches and we can have lunch.”
“Tell Steve I sent you. That’ll surprise him for sure. Better yet, I’ll call him myself and tell him you’ll be in.”
“Thanks.”
A sheriff ’s deputy arrived at the Sun Bonnet within thirty minutes, and he spent an additional fifteen minutes, taking photographs and filling out information for his report. He said I could pick up a copy to forward to my insurance company. I couldn’t remember the amount of my deductible, but I’d doubtless end up paying for them myself. Shortly after he left, the tow truck arrived, and the driver loaded my car onto a flatbed truck. I hopped in the cab with him and we covered the fifteen miles to Santa Maria without saying much.
While the car was being unloaded, Steve Ottweiler appeared and introduced himself. He was seven years Tannie’s senior, an age spread that seemed to favor him. According to social standards other than my own, a man, at fifty, is just starting to look good, while a fifty-year-old woman is someone the eye tends to slide right past. In California cosmetic surgery is the means by which women stop the clock before the sliding begins. Lately the push is to get the work done earlier and earlier—age thirty if you’re an actress—before the slippage sets in. I could see the strong family resemblance between Tannie’s brother and their father, Jake, whom I’d met the night before. Steve had the same height and body type, lean and muscular. His face was broader than his dad’s, but his complexion was the same sun-stained brown.
I purchased four new tires, taking his advice about which brand I should buy, that being the one he had in stock. We sat in his office while the mechanic put my car up on a rack and started loosening lug nuts. Currently Steve Ottweiler was the only person in the area I didn’t suspect of slashing my tires, primarily because this was the first opportunity I’d had to piss him off. Somewhere in the last two days, I’d stepped on some toes, but I hadn’t stepped on his—as far as I knew.
I said, “You were, what, sixteen in Violet Sullivan’s day?”
“I was a junior in high school.”
“Did you know Liza Mellincamp’s boyfriend?”
“Ty Eddings? Sure, though more by reputation than anything else. I knew his cousin, Kyle. They were both a year ahead of me so we didn’t have much occasion to interact. Actually, I’m not sure anyone knew Ty that well. He transferred in from East Bakersfield High School in March of that year. By the time July rolled around, he was gone again.”
“Somebody told me he left the same weekend Violet did.”
“No connection that I know of. They were both troublemakers, but that’s about it. He’d been kicked out of EBHS and sent to live with his aunt in hopes he’d mend his wicked ways. Guess that idea flopped.”
“Meaning what?”
“Word had it that he’d taken up with Liza Mellincamp, who was all of thirteen. The year before, he’d knocked up a fifteen-year-old girl and she ended up dead from a botched abortion. Ty was accorded outlaw status. Very cool in those days.”
“He wasn’t disliked or avoided?”
“Not a bit. We were all big on drama back then. Ty was regarded as a tragic hero because everyone thought he and the dead girl were deeply in love and her parents had forced them apart. He was Romeo to her Juliet, only he came out of the deal a lot better than she did.”
“But is it out of the question that he and Violet might have gotten together? Two black sheep?”
“Well, it’s always possible, though it doesn’t seem likely. Violet was in her twenties and married to boot, so she hardly registered with us. We lived in a world of our own. You know how it is; the big event for us was two classmates who got killed in a car accident. Violet was a grownup. Nobody cared about her. Liza was the one I felt sorry for.”
“I don’t wonder,” I said. “I talked to her yesterday and she said she was crushed when Ty left town. What was that about?”
“The story I heard was Ty’s aunt got a phone call from someone who told her he was fooling around with another underage girl, namely Liza. That was Friday night. The aunt turned around and called his mother, who’d flown to Chicago for a wedding. She got back to Bakersfield late Saturday night and picked him up first thing Sunday morning.”
“You’d think he could have gotten word to Liza. She was dumped without so much as a by-your-leave.”
“I guess good manners weren’t his thing.”
“What happened after that? I asked, but she wasn’t happy about the question so I left it alone.”
“Things went from bad to worse. Her parents had divorced when she was eight. She’d been living with her mom—essentially without supervision, since her mother drank. When her dad got wind of her relationship with Ty, he flew out from Colorado, packed her up, and took her back to live with him. Of course that went nowhere. The two didn’t get along; she hated his new family and she was back the next year. No big surprise. You take a kid like her, used to freedom, and she’s not going to react kindly to parental control.”
“How’d he hear about Ty if he was in Colorado?”
“He still had contacts in town.”
“So she ended up living with her mom again?”
“Not for long. Sally Mellincamp died in a house fire the next year and a local family took Liza in. Charlie Clements was a good guy and didn’t want to see her sucked into the foster care system. He owned the auto-repair shop in Serena Station that I bought when he retired in 1962. Liza married his son.”
“So everything connects.”
“One way or another; it sure looks that way.”
Steve was called out to the service bay, but he urged me to stay where I was until my car was ready. His office was small and utilitarian—metal desk, metal chair, metal files, and the smell of oil. Parts manuals and work orders were stacked up everywhere. I took advantage of the moment to review my index cards, playing with the information every way I could. A moment would
come when everything would lock into place (she said bravely to herself ). Right now, the bits and pieces were a jumble, and I couldn’t quite see where any of them fit.
It was Winston’s confession I kept coming back to. For years he’d kept quiet about seeing Violet’s car. Now I realized how lucky I was his wife was booting him out. Because he was pissed with her, all bets were off, and he felt no compunction about spilling the beans. If I’d talked to him a day earlier, he might not have said a word. It was a lesson I needed to keep in mind: People change, circumstances change, and what seems imperative one day becomes insignificant the next. The reverse is true as well.
My VW was returned within the hour, my tires looking as crisp and clean as brand-new shoes. In addition, I saw that someone had treated me to a complimentary car wash. The interior now smelled new, thanks to a deodorant tag hanging from the rearview mirror. I caught sight of Steve Ottweiler as I was pulling out and gave him a wave.
Heading west on Main, I realized I wasn’t that far from the neighborhood where Sergeant Schaefer lived. I took the next right-hand turn and circled back, parking out in front of his house as I had on my earlier visit. When he didn’t answer my knock, I followed the walkway around the side of the house to the rear, at the same time calling his name. He was in his workshop and when he heard my voice, he peered out the open doorway and motioned me in.
I found him perched on a stool with a miter box and clamps on his workbench. He’d cut lengths of framing and he was gluing them together. Today he wore denim overalls, and his white hair pushed out like foam from under a black baseball cap.
“I expected to find you working on a chair.”
“I finished that project and haven’t yet started on the next. These days, I’m so tied up with hobbies, it’s lucky I don’t work or I’d never fit it all in. What brings you this way?”
“I thought I’d give you an update.” I told him about my tires, my call to the sheriff ’s department, and my subsequent visit to Steve Ottweiler’s shop.
“Sounds like you’re making someone sweat.”
“That’s my take on it. The problem is, I have no idea who or how.”
“Tell me what you’ve done and maybe we can figure it out.”
I filled him in on my interviews, starting with Foley Sullivan, saying, “I hate to admit it, but I thought Foley made a pretty good case for himself.”
“Sounding sincere is a speciality of his. What about the others?”
“Well, the people I’ve talked to fall into two categories: those who think Violet’s dead—you, me, and her brother, Calvin—and those who think she’s alive, namely Foley, Liza, and possibly Daisy. I’m not sure where Chet Cramer stands on the question. I forgot to ask.”
“Too bad we can’t just put it to a vote,” he said. “I can see how Liza and Daisy ended up in the same boat. Neither wants to entertain the idea that Violet’s gone for good.”
“Maybe we’re the cynics, assuming she’s dead when she might be alive and well and living in New York.”
“Can’t rule that out.”
I went on down the list, telling him what Winston had confessed about seeing Violet’s car.
Schaefer said, “I’ve been thinking about that car. Couple of us old retirees get together for dinner once a month and talk about the old days. I was telling them about you and what you’re up to. The one fellow worked Auto Theft, and he said if the Bel Air landed in a junk yard, the VIN might have been stripped off and switched to another vehicle. You want to make a stolen car disappear, that’s how you go about it. The beauty of it is it then allows you to register a stolen car as salvage. You claim you bought some old clunker and fixed it up and who’s going to be the wiser? They call ’em ghost cars. Any rate, next day I phoned the SO and had one of the deputies read off the vehicle identification number from Violet’s Bel Air.”
“You had that?”
“Oh, sure. Chet Cramer gave it to us in one of the early interviews. I called up the Sacramento DMV and had them do a computer search. They show no record of the VIN. Dang. For a minute, I was hoping for a hit, but the car’s never surfaced, which sets me back to the notion it was shipped overseas.”
“You’re assuming the number Cramer gave you was correct,” I said. “All he had to do was alter one digit and the computer would spit it back as a no match.”
“That’s a troubling possibility. You’ll be careful?”
“I will.”
“And keep me in the loop.”
I assured him I’d be doing that as well.
I stopped at a delicatessen and picked up some sandwiches and Cokes, then took Highway 166 out of Santa Maria until it intersected New Cut Road. By now the route was familiar and I drove with only half my attention focused on the road. With the balance of my mental energy, I was sifting through the miscellany I’d collected over the past two days. I wasn’t much wiser but at least I was getting all the players sorted out.
I reached the Ottweiler property at 11:15. Tannie’s contractor had arrived early, and he pulled into the driveway the same time I did. She introduced him as Bill Boynton, one of the two Padgett had suggested the night before. I told her about the sandwiches I’d brought and then left her alone to chat with him while I took the opportunity to tour the interior of the house. From the porch, I could see two guys working at the edge of the property, cutting heavy brush as she had. A swath had now been cleared from the foundation to the depth of the yard. The ground looked naked and apologetic without all the high weeds, brambles, and old shrubs.
Even at first glance, I found myself agreeing with Padgett, who considered the place beyond redemption. No wonder her brother was urging her to sell. The first floor had all the charm of an inner-city tenement. I could see touches of former splendor—ten-inch crown molding, beautifully plastered ceilings with ornate medallions and cornices as delicate as cake icing—but in most rooms, decades of leakage and neglect had taken their tolls.
When I reached the stairs, I began to pick up the acrid scent of charred wood, and I knew that the floors above would be damaged not only by the fire, but by the water from the firemen’s hoses. I went up, following a once beautiful oak banister that was now dingy with soot and age. A fine layer of broken glass crunched underfoot, making my progress audible. Fixtures had been stripped. In the largest of the bedrooms at the front of the house, I was momentarily startled by what appeared to be a vagrant curled up in one corner. When I moved closer, I could see that the “body” was an old sleeping bag, probably left by a drifter taking shelter uninvited. In the large walk-in linen closet, I could still see labels written in pencil on the edges of the shelves—SINGLE SHEETS, DOUBLE SHEETS, PILLOW CASES—where the maids had been directed to place the freshly laundered linens.
The third floor was inaccessible. Yellow CAUTION tape had been stretched across what was left of the stairs. Gaping holes in the stairwell traced the course of the fire as it ate its way through the rooms above. There was something unbearably creepy about the ruin everywhere. I returned to the second floor and made a circuit, pausing at many of the windows to take in the view. Aside from the field across the road, there wasn’t much to see. One field over, a new crop of some kind was sprouting through layers of plastic sheeting that served to keep the weeds down. The illusion was of ice. Closer to the house, Tannie’s battle with the brush had uncovered meandering brick paths and a truck garden now choked with weeds. During the summer, a volunteer tomato plant had resurrected itself, and it sprawled over a wooden bench, cherry tomatoes in evidence like little red ornaments on a Christmas tree. I could see the outlines of former flower beds and trees stunted by lack of sun for all the overgrowth.
To the left, at an angle, I gazed down at an ill-defined depression that might have been a sunken pool, or the remnant of an old septic system. There wouldn’t have been sewer lines in place in the early 1900s when the house was built. A mound of newly cleared snowball bushes was visible along one edge. The uprooted plants boasted once bright
blue blossoms as big as heads of cabbage. I felt bad at the sacrifice of bushes that had grown so impossibly grand.
In the side yard of the lot where our trailer had sat, my aunt had planted hydrangeas much the same color, though not quite so lush as these had been. The neighbor’s hydrangeas were a washed-out pink, and Aunt Gin took delight in her superior blooms. The secret, said she, was burying nails in the soil, which somehow encouraged the shift from pink to the rich blue shade.
Afterward I felt I’d been incredibly dense, taking as long as I had to add that particular two plus two. I stared down at the cracked and slightly sunken oblong of soil and felt a flash, the sudden gelling of facts that hadn’t seemed connected before. This was where Winston had last seen the car. Amid dirt mounds, heavy equipment, and orange plastic cones, he’d said. A temporary road barrier had been erected, denying access to through traffic. No sign of Violet, no sound from the dog, but from that night forward, the Bel Air was never seen again.
Perhaps because it was buried here. Maybe all these years, the rich blue hydrangeas had been feeding on the rust.
20
I drove to the service station near Tullis and used the pay phone to call Schaefer. I told him what had occurred to me and asked how we might confirm or refute my hunch about the oblong depression in the earth. Schaefer was dubious but said he had a friend who owned a metal detector. He agreed to call the guy. If the guy could help, they’d meet us at the property as soon as possible. Failing that, he’d drive out on his own and assess the situation. I hadn’t told Tannie what I was up to, but now that I’d set the wheels in motion, I worried I was making a colossal ass of myself. On the other hand, oh well. There are worse things in life and I’ve been guilty of most.
By the time I pulled up at the house again, she’d finished her business with Bill Boynton and he was gone. “Where’d you disappear to? I thought we were having lunch.”