Grave Error

by Stephen Greenleaf

  Sara’s directions led me to a long single-story building built entirely from concrete blocks and layered with flaking whitewash. The words Law Enforcement Center were painted on the door. I found a place to park in back of the building and helped Ruthie out of the car. By the time we reached the front door I was as sticky as a strip of flypaper. I flipped out my cigarette and took Ruthie’s arm and led her inside.

  We entered a small, square area separated from the rest of the room by a waist-high railing. On our side of the rail were two vinyl chairs and a round metal ashtray. The chairs had been tortured with cigarettes and knives and the ashtray was a miniature garbage dump.

  Across the rail several gray metal desks were arranged haphazardly. None of them were occupied. A phone was ringing but no one seemed to be answering it. The place had a deserted feel, like a scene from a bad horror film. The air conditioner in the far window started to moan. It seemed hotter inside than out.

  I told Ruthie to sit down and started to go find someone. Just then a big man wearing dark blue pants and a white shirt wandered in and sat down at the nearest desk. The shirt was open at the neck and the button just above his belt was missing, exposing an underdone dumpling of flesh. He stubbed a cigar out in an ashtray shaped like a tire and leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. The dark stains under his arms aimed at us like twin cannons. The gold badge lay on his chest like a coin on a collection plate.

  “Can I help you folks?” he asked. “I’m Sergeant Cates.”

  “We’re looking for the officer in charge of the Spring investigation,” I said.

  “And just why would you want to see him?”

  “This is Mr. Spring’s wife. His widow.” I motioned toward Ruthie and she smiled faintly.

  “Ma’am,” Cates responded. “Guess you’re here to see the body.”

  “I was asked to come and make an identification,” Ruthie replied. “I’d like to take care of it as soon as possible. I understand there’s no real doubt that it’s my husband.”

  “It’s Spring all right,” said the cop, licking his puffy lips. “Prints matched some in the FBI files. Guess your husband was in the service or something. Or had a record,” he added with a leer.

  “Harry was a former deputy sheriff. He was also a major in the MPs during World War Two. He doesn’t have a record, except for service to his country.” Ruthie’s face was getting red, and it wasn’t from the heat.

  “Oh, that’s right,” Cates went on. “He was a peeper, wasn’t he? Found his ticket in his wallet. Guess he bugged one too many motel rooms, huh?”

  “Can we please get on with the identification?” Ruthie said fiercely.

  “Take it easy, lady,” Cates said. “I didn’t shoot the poor bastard.”

  “Just tell the man in charge we’re here,” I said.

  “Keep your shirt on. Guess you’ll be wanting to talk to Sheriff Marks.”

  “If he’s in charge of the Spring case.”

  “Sheriff’s in charge of the Spring case and every other case in the county. This ain’t the big city, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

  “I noticed. Where can we find the sheriff?”

  “Go through that door,” Cates said and pointed to his left. “This part’s the city police. Sheriff and his deputy are in there. Have to share this dump till the voters pass a bond issue for a new building. Bastards voted it down four times already.”

  “I can’t imagine why,” I said, “with fine officers like you on the force.”

  “You getting smart, Jack?”

  “Not from talking to you.”

  “If it wasn’t so frigging hot I’d come around there and wipe that smile off your face, pal.”

  “I’ll start to worry when someone comes along to help you get that belly out of the chair.”

  “You cocksucker,” Cates said and struggled to get up. The chair squealed like a castrated hog. Ruthie tugged me toward the door but I shook her hand off my arm. I thought I might need it.

  Cates was coming through a swinging gate in the rail when a voice behind me said, “Hold it, Harley.”

  I looked around. A small man wearing a seersucker suit and a straw cowboy hat leaned in the doorway. The toes of his black boots gleamed like obsidian arrows. I looked back at Harley Cates. He had stopped in his tracks.

  “This bird was cracking wise, Sheriff,” Harley said with a pout.

  “That’s not the way I heard it,” the sheriff said mildly. “Anyway, this woman has lost her husband. She’s got better things to do than watch a couple of overweight thespians throw bad dialogue at each other.” He turned to Ruthie. “Won’t you come in, Mrs. Spring? Bring your friend before he and Harley start trying out for the main event at Kezar Pavillion.”

  The sheriff wanted me to feel foolish and I did. Harley was glowering but he was back in his chair. “I hope the next bond issue covers a new shirt, Harley,” I said. “It’s been nice.”

  “Up yours.”

  “That’s it, you two,” the sheriff said and turned and went through the door. Ruthie and I followed. It was cooler and darker in the sheriff’s office. We sat down and waited while he lit a meerschaum.

  “My name is Benson Marks,” he said. “Since I was nine, most people have called me Pencil. I’m the sheriff of this county. The body was found outside the city limits so I’ve got jurisdiction instead of our fine police department.” He puffed and smiled and went on. “You must excuse Harley. He gets irritable when it gets hot. All that fat is like an overcoat on him. Gets him overhet, as they say.”

  “Someone’s going to pound that fat off him one of these days,” I said. I was a little overhet myself.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. If he gives you any more trouble let me know. Harley generally does what I tell him to do.”

  “What kind of club do you use?”

  “Let’s just say Harley has a rather low threshold of pain and I caused him to cross over it one day. Happened right after I became sheriff. Harley got fooled by my size, I guess. Lots of people do.” The sheriff looked at me peacefully. He wasn’t trying to prove anything to me or to himself.

  “Mrs. Spring,” he said to Ruthie, “your errand here is an unfortunate one. You have my deepest sympathy.”

  “Thank you,” Ruthie said.

  “I have no desire to prolong your stay. It’s simply a formality, but an identification of the deceased is necessary. I suggest that after the identification has been accomplished you allow me to call one of our local funeral directors and arrange for him to transport the remains to San Francisco for burial. Or wherever you wish to have the services. In fact, I have already taken the liberty of alerting a man to have his hearse available this afternoon. Of course, it’s only a suggestion.”

  Ruthie said it sounded like a good idea.

  “I guess we should get on with it then,” Marks said. We all stood up. He led us out the back door, across the parking lot, down an alley, and into a large stone building where the air conditioning worked. I shivered as we walked down the marble hallway.

  “This building was originally designed to house the law enforcement agencies as well as other government offices,” Marks said as we walked along. “But the labor and welfare departments grew so fast we got shoved out the door after two years. I wouldn’t let them shove the morgue out, too. We left it behind as something to remember us by.”

  We passed a long line of people outside a door marked AFDC, and another outside a door marked Unemployment.

  “Lots of people think the folks around here would rather get welfare than work,” Marks went on. “Well, farm labor is about the hardest work there is, bending over all day in heat like this. It’ll make you wish you were dead if you’re not used to it, and if you are used to it you’re not the same man you once were. Takes some of the pride out of a man, to work like that. Anyway, farm work’s about the only work we’ve got around here, and I don’t know one family that doesn’t line up every day for piecework before coming to get their welfare
check. There’s just no room for them in the system. Of course there’s no room in the system for Lockheed airplanes or the Penn Central Railroad or all that Kansas wheat, either, but no one complains too hard about helping those folks out with loans and price supports and tax breaks. It’s a funny world.”

  Every time Pencil Marks opened his mouth I got a surprise. He was an unusual man, the last person I expected to find in Oxtail. I was eager to talk to him about Harry’s murder.

  At the end of the hallway we took the stairs to the basement and went through a slick yellow door. Inside a small anteroom sat a young Mexican wearing a short white jacket over his faded jeans. Apparently he didn’t need to be told why we were there. He led us into a larger room that was scrubbed spotless and lit by three overhead lamps. A stainless steel table stood in the exact center of the room, alone, displayed like a modern sculpture. It was an autopsy table. I’d watched how they use those tables a few times, and each time I hoped it was my last.

  The young man walked to the far wall and put his hand on a small square door. The sheriff nodded. The door opened and the man pulled out a long metal tray draped with a sheet. Between the sheet and the tray was something you didn’t have to guess at. A waft of cool air hit my face. The odor that came with it would never be sold in a bottle.

  The sheriff nodded again and the kid peeled back the sheet. I took Ruthie’s hand and we stepped closer. The puffy, gray face had once belonged to her husband and my friend. I didn’t know who it belonged to now.

  Ruthie turned away, her face as firm as a statue’s. “That’s Harry Spring,” she said firmly. “My husband.”

  The sheriff thanked her and we trooped out, leaving Harry and the young man behind. By the time we got back to the sheriff’s office Ruthie had decided to go to a local funeral home to make the arrangements. She made some calls and told me she would feel better if she rode in the hearse with Harry’s body. If I didn’t mind. I told her I didn’t and gave her a kiss. She set out for the Evergreen Funeral Parlor and I sat down to have a little chat with Pencil Marks.

  FOURTEEN

  “She handled that well,” the sheriff said as we sat down.

  “She handles everything well.”

  “Lots of women fall apart. Unless they aren’t all that upset about their husband’s demise.”

  The sheriff was asking me a question so I answered it. “Ruthie Spring was a nurse in Korea and a deputy at the San Francisco county jail. She’s seen more death in a year than you’ve seen in your whole life, including your nightmares. She loved Harry and he loved her. You’ll waste your time if you try to prove otherwise.”

  Marks shifted in his chair and shrugged. “I never know what to expect at one of those identifications,” he said. “I took a woman over there once to see her husband. He’d fallen off his tractor and gotten run over by a disc. Sliced him up like a hunk of bologna. I thought she’d go berserk, but she just looked at him for a minute, touched his face where the blade had pared his scalp away from the skull, said, ‘that’s Clyde,’ and shook my hand and walked away. Cool as a mint julep. Three days later she shot her three kids and herself with her husband’s forty-five.”

  “You get a nice variety of death out here.”

  “We do for sure. Found a guy last week drowned in an irrigation canal and one the week before dead from drinking a gallon of Prestone. There’s a lot of violence in this valley. Not too surprising, I guess. Kids grow up seeing cattle slaughtered and game shot and dogs kicked and one class of people treating another class of people with less consideration than they give the dirt in their fields. We had twenty-seven homicides last year.”

  “A lot.”

  “A lot. Most of them run to a pattern, of course. We’ve got a short supply of women and money and self-esteem. Men kill to get them and kill to keep them. Most of our crimes are pretty easy to figure out.”

  “But not Harry Spring.”

  “No. Not that one.”

  “I’d like to know everything you have on his death,” I said.

  Marks looked at me steadily. “I was about to ask you the same thing,” he said.

  “We can’t both go at once,” I said and smiled.

  “No,” Marks said firmly. “You’ll go first. What’s your interest in all this, anyway?”

  “Harry Spring was a friend.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. Isn’t that enough?”

  “It is if it’s the truth. I just thought you might have a more professional interest.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as finding Spring’s killer and making me look like a low-grade moron in the process and getting a nice hunk of publicity for yourself and your investigation business. Or such as following up on whatever brought Harry Spring to town. Or such as digging around just because guys like you always like to stir things up and then back off and watch what happens after all the fuses are lit.”

  “You’re wrong on all counts, Sheriff. I just want Harry Spring’s killer to get what’s due him, so I can go to a ballgame without wondering if the guy in the next seat might be the man that did it. Nothing more. So I’d like to know how you see this thing.”

  Marks got up and opened the office door and asked his secretary to bring us a couple of Cokes. He lit his pipe again and sat down. On the wall behind his head were three framed diplomas, but I was too far away to tell where they were from or what they were for.

  “I may tell you what we have and I may not,” Marks said. “It depends on what I get out of you in the next few minutes.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I let Mrs. Spring go over to the Evergreen without questioning her because identification of a deceased is an unsettling experience,” he went on. “But there are still some questions that need to be asked. I think you may already have asked them. If you’ll relay the answers to me I won’t have to tell Mr. Frost over at Evergreen to stop by here before taking Mrs. Spring back to San Francisco.” Marks looked me over like a trainer at a claiming race. “What was Harry Spring doing in Oxtail?” he asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  The sheriff laid his pipe down carefully and picked up a pencil and began to drum it on the desk. It sounded like the metronome my mother used to put on the piano when it was time for me to practice.

  “Come on, Tanner. Harry Spring was a private investigator. As are you. This is not exactly Vacationland, USA out here. He must have been here on business. What was it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Investigators like Spring keep files. I’d bet the ranch you’ve seen those files. So. I ask again. What was Harry Spring doing in Oxtail?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Now just a minute. You’ve looked at Spring’s files, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you’ve asked his wife the same questions I’m asking you, correct?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you want me to believe you don’t have any idea why Harry Spring came to this town? Bullshit.”

  “I can’t help what you believe or don’t believe. I’m just telling you that I know of no connection between any of Harry’s cases or clients and this town.”

  “You’ve got absolutely no idea what brought Spring out here?”

  “No. I thought I did but I don’t.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “I thought Harry was here to check up on a man named Al Rodman.”

  “Rodman. He was before my time, but I’ve heard of him. Did some time. Hooked up with some big-timer in San Francisco named Bollo.”

  “That’s the man.”

  “Why would Spring be checking him out?”

  “I thought it had to do with Rodman’s girlfriend. I thought she had hired Harry to find out more about Rodman before she married him. But I was wrong.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I found out why the girlfriend really did hire Harry.”

  “Who’s the girlfriend?”
<
br />   I just smiled.

  “Why did she hire Spring?”

  I got up and went over to look at the diplomas. A B.A. from San Jose State, a Masters and a Ph.D. from Berkeley. Conferred upon Mr. Benson Marks, beginning in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fifty-four. Marks was getting more unreal by the minute.

  I sat back down. The secretary came in with the Cokes. Marks got a brown bottle out of the desk and filled both Cokes the rest of the way with bourbon and handed one to me. We toasted each other silently.

  “I can’t tell you the name of the client or what she wanted Harry to do. As far as I know that case doesn’t have anything to do with Oxtail. If I find out later there’s some kind of connection, I’ll let you know. If I can.”

  “What do you mean, if you can? You have no right to withhold information from me, Tanner. No legal privilege attaches to communications between a private eye and his clients.”

  “I know that as well as you do.”

  “So what’s this game about what you’ll tell me and what you won’t?”

  “The game is this. You can arrest me for withholding information and trot me in front of a grand jury and cite me for contempt when I refuse to answer your questions and throw me in jail till the grand jury expires and maybe longer. But I still don’t have to tell you what you want to know. I can appeal and keep you trotting off to hearings and depositions instead of doing your work, and in the meantime the Harry Spring case will get as cold as the balls on a brass monkey. I don’t think you want that to happen.”

  “I might. Just to keep you out of my hair.”

  “Okay, let me add one more thing. I’m a lawyer, sheriff. A member in good standing of the bar of the state of California. There’s an attorney-client privilege, as I’m sure you know, and it will cost more than this county can afford for you to prove I don’t have the right to keep quiet when you ask me questions about this case.”

  I was on awfully thin ground. Jacqueline Nelson was my only client, not Claire, and neither one of them had consulted me as a lawyer. No privilege existed, but Marks didn’t know that. Not yet.

  “A lawyer,” Marks said with a dry chuckle. “Lord help us all. Well, you wouldn’t be the first one of those I’ve put in jail.”