The Wrong Girl

by Donis Casey

  When she felt she had put an adequate distance between herself and Schilling, she squatted down on the path, trying to catch her breath and calm down enough to take stock. The air was thin and cold. She had gained a lot of elevation. She looked at the sky to get her bearings. The sun was climbing toward its zenith. She could tell that she was facing north, but otherwise she had no idea where she was.

  If she had been in her native country she would have known where to go, and even if she had decided to hide for several days, she would have known how to survive. She had been to Arizona before, a few years earlier when she was ill with bronchitis and her mother had taken her to her aunt’s house in Tempe, south of Phoenix, to recover. But this was northern Arizona. Not the rolling, cactus-bestrewn desert of the south, but high forested mountains covered with trees and shrubbery she had never seen before.

  She found a likely tree to lean against and sat down to ponder her situation and formulate a plan. She took a deep breath and felt the tension in her body lessen. It was very quiet, this forest, and fragrant, like pine and vanilla.

  She knew enough about outdoor survival to know that birds would fly toward water come sundown, and that she could keep herself warm enough not to freeze to death tonight by making a leaf burrow. Surely by morning Schilling would be long gone and she could walk back out to the road and hitch a ride south to the nearest town. That is if anybody would stop for a dirty-faced girl with one shoe and pine needles in her rat’s nest of hair. Maybe she would look so pathetic that some kind passerby would take pity on her.

  1926, Santa Monica, California

  Fate has passed sentence, but which hand carried out the punishment?

  Ted Oliver wondered who the “friend with the police” was who had tipped off Ruhl about the body at the foot of the cliff. It didn’t matter. He had friends of his own. He only thought that if there was some overlap in their list of snitches, it would be more efficient for his investigation. Oliver parked his Ford at the side of the coastal highway and crossed the road and railroad tracks to where his friend Officer Hal Poole was standing guard over the remains of Graham Peyton.

  “How come you haven’t removed him yet?”

  “We’re waiting for the coroner to get down here and have a look. Once he says it’s okay, somebody will haul the drunk wagon out of the toolshed and bring it down here.”

  Oliver snorted. The Santa Monica Police Department’s “drunk wagon” was nothing more than a garden wheelbarrow. “Did the coroner say when he might drop by?”

  Poole shrugged. “Don’t know when he’ll make it over. Truth is this guy has been lying here for a long time, so I don’t guess there’s any big hurry.”

  “Any idea yet how he got here?”

  “There’s nothing left of him,” Officer Poole said. “No telling when he ended up here, or how.”

  Oliver lifted his gaze from the skeleton and looked out to sea. The sun was hovering over the horizon, a fuzzy disc of light behind the afternoon haze. He didn’t bother to speculate. You could come up with a hundred reasons a person might end up dead under a pile of rocks at the foot of a cliff, and in the end they would all turn out to be wrong.

  “My client tells me that you found the guy’s wallet on him and it still had his driving license in it.”

  “Who’s this client of yours who knows about a body on the beach practically before the police do?”

  Oliver briefly considered telling him. He expected that the name K.D. Dix might open a lot of doors in certain circles. But he liked the policeman, and there was no reason to drag him into something seedy. Poole was reasonably honest, and Oliver didn’t think that he was a member of said certain circles. “You don’t need to know,” he told Poole. “Just tell me about the wallet.”

  Poole didn’t argue. “Yeah, we found one. It’s still there, too. The chief said to leave everything as we found it until the coroner releases the body.”

  “Suppose I could have a closer look?”

  “I don’t know, Ted. If the chief finds out I let you dig around in there he’ll have my hide.”

  “Well, how about if you take a break and I’ll stand guard over the body for you?” Oliver dug a five-dollar bill out of his wallet. “Maybe take a walk on the beach for fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  Poole didn’t even make an attempt to demur. He pocketed the fiver and walked away. Oliver waited until the cop was across the highway and strolling across the sand before he scrambled up the rock pile and squatted down next to the partially exposed skeleton.

  Oliver simply looked for a while, trying to imagine the last moments of the man’s life. The little cove at the bottom of the steep sandstone bluffs on the northern end of Palisades Park, past Adelaide Drive, was isolated and hard to get to. There was a footpath winding below the clifftop, but it was dangerously narrow, covered with loose slag, easy to lose one’s footing. That’s probably what happened to the guy, Oliver thought. One slip high up and you could lie all broken up on the rocks for weeks before some unlucky passerby found what was left of you.

  Still, the secluded little beach was popular with lovers. Most couples walked in beside the Southern Pacific railroad tracks running along Beach Road, or came in by boat. They mostly stayed on the beach for their hanky-panky. There wasn’t anything romantic about the railroad tracks under the cliff. The poor bastard had probably loosed a minor avalanche when he fell and was immediately buried on the cliff side of the tracks. The unlucky dope had been lying there during countless illicit trysts. But just a week earlier, a violent storm had practically destroyed the Santa Monica Pier, and had driven the Pacific Ocean to erode the beach and beat on the rocks long enough to finally expose the bones. The two latest hormone-driven visitors to the cove may have been looking for privacy but had found more than they bargained for. Nothing will shrink your willie like a skeletal hand sticking up out of the rock pile in a gruesome gesture for help.

  The skeleton was wearing a suit. The material was much the worse for having lain under a rockfall for who knew how many years, but it was unmistakably a man’s suit. Oliver found the one intact jacket pocket with the top of a leather wallet sticking out of it. He knew that the responding cop had already rifled through it, but Oliver hoped that if he were very lucky indeed, the wallet would provide a clue about who might want to kill the wretch and dump his body over the cliff.

  He didn’t hold out much hope. Since the guy still had his wallet on him, this looked to Oliver more like an accident than a premeditated killing. Or maybe the death had been an act of passion. Spontaneous killers were usually so shocked at what they had done that all they could think was to get the hell out of there. The other kind of killer planned his task so that he had enough time to get rid of as much evidence as possible before dumping the body.

  Oliver slid the wallet out of the pocket and sat back on his heels to examine its contents. There was a lot of money, maybe a hundred dollars. The weather had had time to do its work on most of the paper, but the California driving license had been wedged between the bills and a couple of receipts. The typewriting was beginning to smear around the edges but otherwise was perfectly readable.

  “Graham Peyton,” Oliver said aloud. He looked back over his shoulder to see that Poole was still contemplating the ocean before he slipped the wallet back into the corpse’s pocket, careful not to rip what was left of the disintegrating material. He stood up and leaned close over the bones to see what else he could see.

  Oliver repositioned one good-sized rock, exposing more of an arm bone. The arm was lying at an unnatural angle, broken between the wrist and elbow. He took a deep breath and removed a few more rocks and detritus from the side to expose more of the skeleton. The entire body slowly came into view as he shifted the rocks, exposing feet still in shoes, legs, pelvis, arms, and finally all of the grinning skull with a few strings of light brown hair still attached to a bit of mummified scalp. A fall from the cl
iff could have easily caused the fist-sized hole in the top of the skull.

  From the area he had recently cleared, a glint of metal caught his eye. A skeletal finger on the left hand still sported a ring. Not a wedding ring, more like a signet. Black onyx with a gold insignia. No, not an insignia, not a lion or helmet or some other family crest. Initials, wound around one another in such a fancy script it was hard to tell what the letters were. One was a P, maybe, tangled up with a little G and a little E.

  A gold ring, a lot of money. Ruhl’s late business associate had not been poor. Graham Peyton had not been whacked on the head by a robber, not unless the thief had knocked him right off the cliff with a cosh and then was too lazy to climb down to retrieve his hard-won loot. No, this sucker took a wrong step and bashed his head on the rocks below. How he got covered with these big rocks was a question, but a Pacific storm as violent the one that had occurred the week before could have deposited a battleship on top of him without any trouble.

  “Seen enough?”

  Oliver started when Poole spoke to him. He had been so engrossed that he hadn’t been aware of the policeman’s return. He sat back on the rocks. “Did you see the driving license? You know what the guy’s name was?”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  Oliver was interested to see that Poole’s nostrils had narrowed, as though he smelled something bad. “You’ve heard of him?”

  “Oh, yeah. He was quite a presence around town. That was before you came to California,” Poole said. “He was the slipperiest snake who ever slithered. I don’t know that there was anything he wasn’t willing to do. He sold drugs, ran whores, smuggled booze, mostly for the motion picture studios. Murder, for all I know. He always liked young girls. He supplied fresh young things to the studio pimps and madams. He was good looking, a real sheik. He’d tempt the girls with tales of stardom and they’d end up working in a whorehouse. We were never able to pin anything on him. He liked to throw money around, so he was usually able to bribe his way out of trouble. He disappeared about five, six years ago. No one knew what had happened to him, not until now. He was such a son of a bitch that when he disappeared without a trace, not even his best clients shed a tear. There was some talk that he helped himself to a wad of his boss’s loot and legged it off to South America. I always figured he finally ran afoul of the scumbags he did business with. Looks like I was right.”

  1920, Outside Prescott, Arizona

  She thought he was her knight in shining armor, but he was just a snake in the grass.

  She pulled her knees up to her chest and settled in to wait for evening. Fatigue allowed her mind to wander and she found herself wondering what was happening at home. Were her parents hot on her trail? How long had it taken for Sophronia to rouse the household and for Ruth to call out the cavalry? Minutes, at most. What had Alice admitted to their mother? Had they traced out her meetings with Graham at the Owl Drug Store? The sour-faced woman behind the counter would be able to describe Graham, but she wouldn’t know his name. No one in Boynton knew his name. As they had flown through the night in his roadster, he had bragged that he had been staying at the American Hotel under a false name and had listed his hometown as Chicago, Illinois.

  At the time, she had thought him so clever. Too clever. He had devised a perfectly conceived misdirection. The kind of perfection only gained by long practice. Now, as she sat bedraggled under a pine tree in the Arizona wilderness, she wondered how many times he had used this very ruse to lure ambitious or lovestruck girls away from home. She tried not to think of her parents and sisters and brothers. If she were at home in her family’s warm kitchen, her mother would lave her wounded foot and wrap it in soft cotton bandages.

  No, she told herself sternly. No mother, no sisters, not anymore. She’d find that mountain creek again and wash her own wounds as best she could. She had burned her bridges forever. She was on her own.

  Graham didn’t love her. He had taken advantage of her naivete and used her not just for his own pleasure, but to sell her for profit. And she had believed every word he said to her.

  Or had she? If she told herself the truth, hadn’t she always had an inkling that the whole thing was a lie? Too good to be true? And, if she told herself the truth, hadn’t she been more enamored of the adventure than she ever had been with Graham Peyton? Because what she was feeling right this minute was not heartbreak over his betrayal but burning, all-consuming anger.

  Besides. Besides. Besides, if all she had wanted was to be Mrs. Somebody, there were plenty of Somebodies to choose from around Boynton, Oklahoma. No, she grew up among good, gentle, religious people whom she loved and who loved her, and in their way of thinking she had done the worst thing ever: thrown away her virtue, shamed her parents, and broken their hearts. But if she admitted to herself the raw, ugly truth, she didn’t care. She was free, and she knew that she would do whatever she had to in order to remain free.

  Jays began to chatter in the trees as the light turned golden. She watched as attentively as if her life were on the line, which it was. There was a sudden flurry in the treetops and a swirl of small birds of an unfamiliar species rose into the air and flew west.

  Blanche pulled herself up and limped deeper into the woods, in the direction of the flock.

  It took a while to find the creek. She could hear it before she could see it. It was beautiful and cold, and she nearly wept with relief as she sipped the pure clear water from her cupped hands. Her stockings were ruined anyway, so she took one off and wrapped it around her wounded foot to make a kind of moccasin. She stood and took a tentative step. Better. Better than nothing, at least. She had walked farther into the woods, in the direction the birds had flown, in order to find the creek.

  A storm came up suddenly, black and roiling, not there one minute and pounding rain the next. Damn. It’s not supposed to rain in the desert. Her misery was complete. The storm lasted long enough to dump its load on her, almost as though it had been saving it up until it was right over her head. Then, task completed, the clouds scudded out of sight over the hilltop. Blanche didn’t know if that was the natural way of the mountains. She came from flat country, where it was easy to see from horizon to horizon, where you had time to prepare for whatever was coming.

  She was chilled to the bone and couldn’t be any wetter than she was at that moment. The wind that had pushed the cloudburst over the hilltop was still gusting, a puff, a swirl, a gust, then dead quiet just long enough to draw a breath before blowing again. The clouds were lighter now, and only shedding a light drizzle. She heard a crack, and a slash of lightning cut across the sky over her head.

  Blanche pushed a wet hank of hair out of her eyes. She was going to have to find some shelter. Walking out among the forest of tall, straight trees—natural lightning rods—was not wise. She swallowed down a lump of panic. She was in a dangerous situation, and she knew it. She might have escaped her captor, but she was alone in the wilderness, in country that she did not know.

  She needed shelter—that was order number one. Food and assistance would have to wait.

  No matter which way she looked, she could only see trees. She was not totally disoriented. The road from Prescott was in that direction, but what lay in the other three was a mystery to her. She could either go back the way she had come and risk recapture, or take her chances. As much as she wanted to take her chances, she knew which was the wisest course to take.

  She expected that the storm had driven Schilling back to town, and it was unlikely that he was still searching for her. Still, better to wait as long as possible before returning to the road. If it hadn’t been for the rain, she would have tried camping out by the creek for a day or two. She didn’t know if there were dangerous animals, or dangerous people, in the woods, but she had water and she knew how to stay warm. But wet was dangerous.

  She was having trouble thinking, cold and unable to maintain her concentration. The woods were busy w
ith jays and ravens, all about their own business in the treetops and unconcerned with her plight. Blanche considered trying to knock a bird off a branch with a rock. She had seen her brother do it, though she had never tried it herself. It didn’t take her long to dismiss the notion. She had no way to light a fire, and hungry as she was, the idea of eating raw bird didn’t appeal to her. She squatted down under a young lodgepole pine and wrapped her arms around her knees. Quiet. Except for the wind in the pines, there was no sound—no skittering animals about. She closed her eyes and listened with all her might. It was not her ears that gave her a clue, but her nose.

  A faint smell of smoke on the wind. Smoke, a wood fire, and just a hint…maybe her desperation was misleading her, but she was sure she could catch a whiff of something cooking.

  She stood up and headed into the gusty, moisture-laden wind, toward the smell of hope.

  ~A witch or an angel? Is salvation at hand,

  or is Blanche in for more shades and terrors?~

  The wet leaves and pine needles muffled the sound of her steps, making a slurping noise around her feet as she slopped through the muck. She followed her nose while keeping an eye on her surroundings. She didn’t want to find herself face-to-face with a bear or lion or whatever other dangerous beast lurked in this unfamiliar country. She began to see signs of the humans who had been here before her. Another narrow footpath covered with piles of windblown pine needles from the squall. A tree that had had its bottom limbs trimmed. She came upon a section of wooden fence just before she topped a small rise and saw a house in a clearing. There was no movement or light in the windows, but a thin line of gray smoke rose from the chimney toward the treetops, dancing like a live thing in the gusty wind.