Boobytrap

by Bill Pronzini

  I shook myself, shook away the bitter thoughts. Now where had all that come from? All she’d asked me to do was talk to her son. No, it was more than that—it was a gesture of faith and trust in me, a man she hardly knew, offered as so many others had offered before her. Faith and trust were two names for it; another was shifted responsibility, the kind that I didn’t always want and too often didn’t deserve because I couldn’t live up to it, couldn’t be or do any of the things that were expected of me.

  Just say no. That was a nice little slogan, the perfect panacea. Too bad I was one of those who had never learned how, even to save my wise old charismatic psyche another bruise or two. The word simply wasn’t in my lexicon. Hell, I could not even say no to myself.

  Rita Judson was manning—womanning?—the grocery counter when I walked in. Through the archway I could see Mack and a few other men clustered near the bar; I detoured over that way for a better view. They were holding a private wake for Nils, the way it looked, their faces solemn and what conversation there was uttered in low voices. Fred Dyce wasn’t among them. Neither were Strayhorn or Cantrell.

  I went on to the counter and commiserated with Rita for a minute or so before I asked my questions. Drawing her out about the three other newcomers wasn’t difficult; she didn’t mind sharing what she knew, though it was not much about any of them. When I left her, this was what I had:

  Fred Dyce. He lived in the San Fernando Valley, not L.A. proper—Van Nuys. Sold used cars and drove one himself, a Jeep Cherokee with vanity plates: LKYDYCE. Marital and family status unknown; he wouldn’t talk about his personal life. Or explain what had brought him all the way up to Deep Mountain Lake from Southern California. He drank a lot, mostly sour-mash bourbon with beer chasers, but so far he’d kept it and his hostility under control. His cabin was number eight, on the north side lakefront.

  Jacob Strayhorn. Born and still lived in Stockton. What he did for a living was uncertain; he’d told Mack that he was in the manufacturing business, but he’d been reticent about what it was he manufactured. Kept to himself and volunteered almost nothing of a personal nature, beyond the fact that he was divorced. Drove the beat-up Chrysler I’d seen on my way to Two Bar Creek yesterday morning. He wasn’t staying at the resort; he’d rented one of the smaller private cottages downshore—not far from the Stapleton property.

  Hal Cantrell. Real-estate broker in and resident of Pacifica. Married a dozen years to his second wife; two grown children from his first marriage, none from number two. Rita’s take on him was the same as mine: shrewd and sly. “I wouldn’t want to buy a house from him,” she said, and even though she’d laughed, I had the feeling she meant it. He took annual one-week fishing vacations by himself, each year to a different location. But he didn’t do much fishing, mostly just sat around and drank beer and schmoozed with whoever happened to be handy. He occupied cabin one, on the south side lakefront. Which meant that his transportation was a four-by-four Chevy Tracker; I could see it parked in front of number one when I came outside.

  I went that way long enough to make a mental note of the license plate number, then walked back and across to cabin eight. No sign of the Jeep Cherokee. And no answer to my knock. Each cabin had a tiny porch tacked onto its lake side; I moved around to this one’s, climbed three steps onto its weathered boards. A plastic picnic cooler sat in the shade against the wall, but there wasn’t anything inside except an inch of melted icewater. The curtains were partially drawn across the window, so I put my nose up to the glass and peered inside. That didn’t buy me anything, either. The interior was messy, the bed unmade and clothes and fishing equipment strewn around. Dyce was a slob; so what? There was nothing out of the ordinary that I could see.

  I kept my hand off the handle on the porch door. Too early in the game for illegal trespass without provocation, even if the door happened to be unlocked. Instead, I went down and wandered along the narrow strip of beach that ran behind the cabins.

  Hal Cantrell was sitting on the porch of cabin one, feet propped on the railing, a bottle of Beck’s sweating in one hand. He waved the bottle as I approached and called out, “Hey there. Come on up and join me.”

  I did that. Next to his chair was a table that held a bucket of ice and more beer, and a pair of six- or seven-power binoculars with a worn leather strap.

  “How about a cold one?” he asked.

  “Little early for me.”

  “Me, too, if I weren’t on vacation. Might as well live it up. You never know, right?”

  “About what?”

  “How long you’re going to be around. One day you’re above ground, the next you could be under it.”

  “Like Nils Ostergaard.”

  “Like him. Hell of a thing, wasn’t it.”

  “Hell of a thing,” I agreed.

  “Nosy old bird, but I liked him.”

  “So did I.”

  Cantrell tilted his head back to get a better look at me from under the brim of his canvas fisherman’s hat. “You really think it was an accident?”

  “Why? Don’t you?”

  “Everybody seems to read it that way. But you were asking a mess of questions before the deputies showed up.”

  “Just my nature. I’m a professional skeptic.”

  “So am I, when it comes to John Q. Public. Can’t survive in my business if you’re not.”

  “Mine, either.”

  “That fellow Strayhorn,” he said. “What’s his problem?”

  “Problem?”

  “The way he kept needling you. Plain he’s a got a bone on where you’re concerned. How come?”

  “He doesn’t approve of my fishing methods.”

  “No, huh?”

  I shrugged. “You know anything about him?”

  “Not much. Makes pipe down in the Central Valley.” Cantrell grinned, winked. “Me, now, I’d rather lay pipe on the coast.”

  “What kind does he make?”

  “Sewer pipe, I think he said.”

  “Have his own company?”

  “Could be. Didn’t tell me if he does.”

  “You spend much time with him?”

  “Nope. He’s not the social type.”

  “Neither is Fred Dyce.”

  “Hell, no. He’s got a bone on for everybody.”

  “Give you any trouble?”

  “Not me. I steer clear of guys like him when they’re boozing.”

  “Any idea what put that chip on his shoulder?”

  “Nope, and I could care less.”

  “Not much of a fisherman,” I said, “even though he pretends to be. Doesn’t seem to know a dry fly from a housefly.”

  “You can say that again.”

  “What do you suppose he’s doing here, then?”

  “Trying to learn how to be what he says he is.” Cantrell gave me another head-tilted look. “You seem pretty interested in Dyce.”

  “I’m interested in everybody. Another part of my nature.”

  “You go around looking in everybody’s windows, like you were doing over at Dyce’s cabin?”

  I didn’t answer the question, watching him. His expression didn’t change; his eyes remained friendly, guileless. Pretty soon I said, “Nice pair of binoculars you’ve got there.”

  “Had ’em twenty years. Can’t beat Zeiss.”

  “For what? Spying?”

  He grinned, put his hand over his heart the way he had at the gas pumps yesterday. “I am not a spy. Or a Peeping Tom. Just a guy with a nosy streak, like you and Ostergaard.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I happened to be scanning around, and I swung the glasses over that way and there you were, up on the porch. So I kept watching. What were you looking for in Dyce’s cabin?”

  “Nothing in particular. Just looking.”

  “Wouldn’t be because you think Dyce had something to do with the old man’s death?”

  “No. We all decided it was an accident, remember?”

  “Oh sure, I remember.”

/>   “I understand Ostergaard had a little run-in with Dyce just after he arrived.”

  “Is that right? About what?”

  “Him pretending to be an expert fisherman. Nils didn’t like people who weren’t what they claimed to be.”

  “Who does?”

  “You get to know him at all?”

  “Who? Ostergaard?”

  “Ostergaard.”

  Another grin. “Now we’re around to me. I’m on the list, too, huh?”

  “What list is that?”

  “The suspect list.”

  “There is no suspect list,” I said. “I wasn’t implying anything, Cantrell. About you or anybody else.”

  “Just asking questions to pass the time of day.”

  “More or less.”

  “Okay, here’s my answer. No, I didn’t know the old man except to say hello to. Didn’t exchange more than fifty words with him, most of those the day I got here. He was active and I’m lazy as hell—no common ground.” The grin had become a smirk by this time. “Sure you won’t have a beer?”

  “I’m sure.” I pushed away from the railing. “I’d better be moving along.”

  “Come back any time.”

  “Maybe I’ll do that.”

  “Meantime, good luck with your fishing,” he said as I stepped down off the porch, and when I glanced back at him, he winked again. Broadly. To let me know he hadn’t meant the sport.

  Nobody was home at the cottage Jacob Strayhorn had rented, a bungalow-style A-frame crowded by dogwood bushes on its west side and fronted by a stubby platform porch. Out in a boat somewhere, I thought. Nosed in between the bushes and the porch was his ten-year-old Chrysler, its low-slung tan body disfigured by dings, dents, and paint scrapes. I noted the license plate number before I drove on.

  At the Zaleski cabin I keyed open the door, took half a dozen steps along the hallway—and froze in place with the skin bunching and rippling along the saddle of my back. It was not anything I saw or heard, it was something in the air: emanations, vibes, whatever you want to call it. You get feelings like that when you’ve been a cop of one kind or another as long as I have and you learn to accept them without question.

  Somebody’d been in the cabin since Chuck and I had left this morning. Not the boy and not his mother—somebody who didn’t belong.

  Still here? It didn’t feel that way, but I went straight to the fireplace and caught up a chunk of firewood. The irony in that stayed with me, a bitter taste, as I made a quick search through the rooms.

  Long gone. And nothing disturbed or missing that I could spot on a second, more careful check. My fly case was where I’d left it, my underwear and socks and shirts were as I’d arranged them in the dresser. I’d neglected to lock the closet door, but when I looked inside I found that the gun cabinet was still secure, the rifle and shotgun untouched.

  Well? A daylight B & E just for a look around?

  Except that it hadn’t quite been a B & E. There were no signs of forcible entry on the front door lock, on any of the window latches or on the sliding-glass door to the deck. Had I forgotten to lock something besides the closet and he’d just walked in and then secured the place before leaving? Not much sense in that. Let himself in with a key? That was more likely; Nils Ostergaard may have had one and it could’ve been lifted off him sometime after he was dead. But that still didn’t explain the intruder’s motivation.

  I slid the deck door open all the way, opened a couple of the windows for cross-ventilation, and switched on the ceiling fan—mostly to get rid of trapped heat, partly to banish the bad air the intruder had left behind. Then I washed up, made a sandwich I didn’t much want, popped a beer I did want, and put in a collect call to Tamara at my office.

  “Yo, chief,” she said. “Checking up on me, huh?”

  “No way.”

  “How’s Deep Mountain Lake?”

  “Peaceful,” I said, which was not quite a lie.

  “How many trout you murdered so far?”

  “Only one. The reason I called—”

  “Not much happening here,” she said. “I finished the Dalway skip-trace, no problem. Oh, yeah, Bill Gates called, wanted us to handle security for Microsoft at three mil per year. I told him we were too busy and besides, you think computers’re tools of the debbil.”

  “Soul-stealers, right, so you better watch out. Listen, I need you to do something for me.”

  “Sure, what?”

  “Background checks on three men. ASAP.”

  “Hey, what’s this? You working up there?”

  “No. Doing a favor for a friend.”

  “Uh-huh. Heard that one before.”

  “Tamara—”

  “How extensive? The checks, I mean.”

  “Depends. What I’m looking for is anything out of the ordinary, anything crooked or shady or even antisocial. Criminal records or ties. Mental problems. Like that.”

  “How come? Who are these three guys?”

  “Two of them are probably average citizens. The third one... well, he may be mixed up in a felony.”

  “And you don’t know which of ’em it is.”

  “That’s it.”

  “Why not let the local fuzz handle it?”

  “It’s not an official case. Not yet.”

  “Okay. Names, addresses?”

  “No street addresses; all I’ve got are cities.” I gave her the information I’d gathered on Dyce, Strayhorn, and Cantrell.

  “Not much to work with,” she said.

  “It ought to be enough. Anything you find out, call me right away,” and I added the phone number.

  “I’m on it right now. You want me to keep working after five? Double-time if I do, remember.”

  “You won’t let me forget. You mind?”

  “Money’s one thing I never mind.” She paused and then said, “Tell you something.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Man, you work too hard, you know what I’m saying? One of these days you really ought to take a vacation.”

  TEN

  DULL, STATIC AFTERNOON. I SWEATED MY way through a restless nap, debated going for a swim, decided the icy water would probably do more harm than good, and settled for a shower instead. Then I packed up my fishing gear, locked it away in the trunk of the car. Funny, but I had no second thoughts, no sense of nostalgia: I simply was not a fisherman any longer. It was as if the sport had given me up, rather than the other way around. I remembered a woman saying to me once that she hadn’t quit smoking, smoking had quit her; she’d awakened one morning and reached for her cigarettes, as was her habit, and suddenly the thought of lighting one made her physically ill. She’d never lit up again, she told me. I hadn’t quite believed her, but I believed her now, fifteen years later. It can happen that way, all right. Vices, hobbies, other pursuits. Relationships, too. One day there’s interest, desire, some degree of passionate involvement, the next it’s gone with no real sense of decline or transition, as if it had never existed in the first place.

  I wondered briefly if it could happen that way with Kerry and me, one or the other of us. But it was not anything that worried me, really. You don’t love the way she and I loved and have it end all of a sudden, overnight. There’s too much at stake on both sides. The ardor cools a little, the relationship changes and goes through its crises big and small, but there is no abrupt termination. If we ever split up—and I was as sure we wouldn’t as I could ever be of anything in this life—we would both see it coming long before it reached critical mass.

  Around five I went over to the Dixons’. No answer to my knock, so I took myself down to the dock. It and the deck above were deserted, but I heard sounds from the storeroom and saw that its door stood open. As I started up there, Chuck emerged carrying his father’s heavy tackle box and an armload of fishing poles and a wicker creel.

  “Oh, hi,” he said when he saw me. Not much enthusiasm; there was a listlessness in the way he looked and moved.

  “Hi. What’r
e you up to?”

  “Not much. Just moving Dad’s stuff inside, so it’ll be ready when he gets here.”

  “He call since your mom talked to him?”

  “No. Jeez, I hope he comes up tomorrow.”

  “He will if he can possibly get away.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “That tackle box looks pretty heavy. How about letting me lug it inside?”

  He hesitated, then let me take it. “Dad’s got a lot more junk in there than I remember.”

  “Lead sinkers, feels like.”

  “Some of those, yeah, no kidding. He’s had junk like that since he was my age and he won’t get rid of it.”

  “Sentimental, your old man.”

  “I guess.”

  We went up into the house and set Pat Dixon’s gear in a corner of the living room. “Where’s your mom?” I asked. “Still at the Ostergaards’?”

  “Yeah. She called a few minutes ago, she’ll be back pretty soon. She said you went over there to see Mrs. Ostergaard before she did.”

  “Just for a few minutes.”

  “How come? You hardly knew Mr. Ostergaard.”

  “I knew him well enough to like him and want to pay my respects to his widow.”

  “I oughta go see her, too,” Chuck said. “But I can’t make myself do it, not yet, anyway.” His mouth tightened; the moistness that came into his eyes made him turn away from me. “Shit. Why’d a thing like that have to happen? Mr. Ostergaard, he was... I dunno, he was like my grandfather or something.”