Traces of the Past

by Steve Laracy

  TRACES OF THE PAST

  A Milo Forbes Mystery

  Steve Laracy

  Milford House Press

  MECHANICSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

  To Peter, Tom, and Don -

  for helping me survive the California Years

  > CHAPTER 1

  OUT OF SAN DIEGO

  If you drive west out of San Diego on Route 8, long after the breeze off the ocean dies and the salty smell of the water is replaced—or smothered—by the dust you inhale, you will come upon a one-lane road on the left about halfway between El Centro and Yuma. There is no sign indicating the road’s name; however, there is a weathered marker on a rusty metal pole which reads Bell City—50 Miles. Turn left and follow the arrow on the sign, and you will travel through open range interrupted by a few, dusty towns until, after about thirty miles, you reach a smaller, dustier town named Cordoba.

  They say a dry climate is beneficial to your health. If that is true, judging by the lack of vegetation and the abundance of dirt and dust blowing around and covering everything that wasn’t moving (and a few things that were moving, like me), then Cordoba must be one of the healthiest places on earth. But I did not go to Cordoba for the climate. Rather, I had an urge to leave San Diego behind for a day and visit an old friend.

  I became a resident of San Diego courtesy of a formal invitation from the U.S. Navy. This invitation, called a draft notice, informed me that my freedom was in peril if I declined to accept the generous offer extended by the government of the United States. I accepted, and four years later, looking for employment after my discharge, I discovered with disbelief that my qualifications as a boatswain’s mate did not translate well in the civilian marketplace. The duties of a boatswain’s mate, as every sailor knows, consist of three primary functions: If it moves, salute it; if it doesn’t move, move it; if you can’t move it, paint it.

  Having decided my qualifications were limited for any line of work, I opened a practice as a private investigator in a nondescript office in an undesirable neighborhood.

  When I say I am a private investigator, my personality and experiences are not to be confused with private investigators you may be familiar with from books or movies. I will never be mistaken for Lew Archer or even Miles Archer. I am not much of a fighter and even less of a lover. Unlike Lew, I have never been punched in the face, and unlike Sam Spade’s partner, I have never ended up dead in a San Francisco alley. I cannot even favorably compare myself to the actress Anne Archer, who, in the movies, sometimes got her man.

  My practice has been limited to responding to wrong numbers, playing solitaire, and occasionally following a husband or wife suspected of infidelity. Most of my time is spent slouched down in my car with a cup of coffee, a Kodak, and a Snickers bar.

  Deciding to get away for a day, I went to Cordoba to connect with an old friend from my Navy days, Ben Nye. Ben was now the mayor of Cordoba, and he had invited me for a visit to catch up on old times. Having somehow lost the six of hearts from my solitaire deck, I thought the timing was right to accept the invitation.

  Beside the main road that enters Cordoba from the south—the road previously described—you’d notice a small, wooden sign which at one time read Cordoba—Pop. 73. The “73” had been crossed out by a knife and replaced with the words goes the weasel. A street sign notified visitors they were now traveling on Main Street.

  The commercial district of Cordoba consists of several small businesses, three of which surround the main intersection of Main and Third. The general store sat on the southwest corner. Across Third Street from the general store, there is a tiny gas station. On the opposite side of Main Street and a few doors down from the general store, there’s one of those old-fashioned metal diners shaped like a railroad car.

  I made my first stop in Cordoba at the gas station. My visit was necessitated by a small boulder disguised as a big rock that attacked the undercarriage of my car as I approached the town. The damage required me to wobble my way into the gas station with minimal haste.

  No one was in sight when I pulled in. In case someone was watching from inside the station, I got out and stooped and looked at the underside of the car on the driver’s side, trying to look like I knew what I was looking at, which I didn’t. No one appeared, so I looked the place over. The store was a rundown wooden shack with a sign above the door that read Hector’s Gas Station and Bait Shop. Out front was one old gas pump. When I say old, I determined this not just by its ancient appearance but because, rather than listing several octane grades, it offered only two choices—leaded or unleaded.

  Still, no one appeared, so I headed for the shack. I thought of peering through the window to see if anyone was in, but alternate layers of dirt, grime, and dust eliminated that possibility. Instead, I went straight for the door. A bell attached to the inside top of the door announced my arrival and wakened a slight man who looked to be in his twenties. He had been sleeping in a plastic and aluminum lawn chair in a corner of the shop.

  After shaking the cobwebs away caused both by the sleep and the lack of sanitary maintenance applied to the room, the man said, “Hi, what can I do for you, gas or worms?”

  “Neither. I ran over a rock on the way into town and damaged my car. Are you Hector?”

  “Hector Suarez, that’s me,” he replied, followed by, “I better take a look at the car,

  Mr.—”

  “Forbes, Milo Forbes.”

  Hector Suarez was a man of medium height but exceedingly thin. His appearance and speech suggested he was a Mexican American. He had a friendly grin and manner and a handsome, if thin, face marred only by the condition of his teeth (or rather, lack of teeth) exposed by his smile. Whether he lost half his teeth to poor care, disease, or fisticuffs, I have no way of knowing.

  “I’ll look at your car and be back in a minute, Mr. Forbes.”

  He stretched slowly and, just as slowly, left the shop and sauntered outside. Having nothing better to do, I surveyed my surroundings.

  The shop was empty except for the lawn chair, a long, folding card table to the right which was used as a countertop, a battered cardboard box to the right of the counter, and an empty cigarette machine to the left, which, in older and better times, had vended Camels, Luckys, and Chesterfields for thirty-five cents. The floorboards were crude wooden slats spread across the ground with the dirt below showing between the boards.

  I walked over and looked inside the cardboard box. Inside was a layer of dirt which was almost completely covered with earthworms. Having no mind to explore this further, I returned outside to check on Hector’s progress. However, as I turned, the bell on the door announced his return.

  “Looks like you bent the front axle,” he offered.

  “Can you straighten it?”

  “Not me, Mr. Forbes. I’m not qualified to work on foreign cars.”

  “It’s a Buick!”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Hector replied. “I don’t know nothing about domestic cars either or any other kind.”

  “Where do I go from here?” I asked with a sinking feeling.

  “I can call over to Bell City and have the car towed. There’s a garage over there that can handle the repairs.”

  “Any idea how long that will take?”

  “I can get it towed this afternoon, but it will take a few days to fix it.”

  “I guess that will have to do. Is there any place I can get a room in town, and can you tell me where I can find Ben Nye?”

  “I saw Ben heading to the diner a little while ago,” Hector answered my last question first, “and there’s a boardinghouse on Fourth Street.”

  “Thanks. I see you sell worms. Is there any place to fish around here?”

  “There’s a reservoir northe
ast of here but it’s quite a drive.”

  “So, I guess you don’t sell many worms?” I reasoned.

  “Not many. The worms just crawl up through the spaces between the floorboards. I don’t like killing them, so I figured I would sell them instead. Mrs. C—that’s Mrs. Cavendish—over on Fifth Avenue has barn swallows living in the roof of her house and buys worms from time to time.”

  “Fifth Avenue?”

  “Yeah, there’s only five streets off Main Street. Used to be named First Street to Fifth Street, but when Mrs. C moved into a big house on Fifth Street, she made the Mayor change the name to Fifth Avenue. She’s a rich lady from San Francisco and sort of runs the town.”

  “The squeaky wheel gets the grease,” I replied.

  “Don’t worry,” Hector came back. “They’ll grease your wheels when they fix the axle.”

  Rather than try to explain, I moved on.

  “That explains the worms, but if you don’t mind my asking, how does someone who knows nothing about cars end up owning a service station and selling bait in the middle of the desert?”

  “Well, Mr. Forbes, I don’t have much education, so there wasn’t much else I could do. Also, I had a little trouble with the immigration people, so I figured I would be better off at an out-of-the-way place like this.”

  “Immigration trouble?”

  “Yes, I got caught trying to sneak across the border at Mexicali and they sent me back.”

  “If they sent you back, how are you still here?”

  “I’m a United States citizen, born in Tucson. The Mexican police shipped me back.”

  Confused, I asked, “You mean you tried to sneak into Mexico from the United States?”

  “Sure. I wasn’t making out too well here, so I thought my luck might change down there. Besides, there’s a lot less traffic going that way, so I figured it would be easier.”

  “I hope you didn’t get into too much trouble.”

  “No, the police down there treated me good while I was there, though the local police captain spent most of the time complaining about the lack of border security and wondering why the President of Mexico doesn’t do more to stop the flow of illegal immigrants.”

  Deciding not to press my luck by asking another question, I said good-bye and, still reeling from my conversation with Hector, wandered out to clear my brain and find Ben Nye. I grabbed my suit jacket from the car, loosened my tie, and walked in the direction of the diner I had passed on the way in. I needed a cup of coffee by this time. I would then search out the boardinghouse and see about a room.

  As I approached the intersection, a dusty bus drove by, headed south toward Route 8. I’m not sure whether the bus came from Bell City or somewhere farther north, but I had half a notion to leave the car and hop on the next bus, hoping it was headed toward the coast. If I had known then what I know now about the events that would occur in Cordoba over the next few days, I might have left and never looked back.

  But then I would not have gotten to know the residents of Cordoba, most of whom I became fond of—and one in particular, I liked a lot. Some of the residents were strange and some had secrets, and each, like Hector, had a story to tell.

  And if I had caught the next Greyhound out of town, I wouldn’t have a story to tell.

  > CHAPTER 2

  THE CORDOBA DINER

  The diner was across Main Street and about half a block down in the direction from which I had entered town. The Cordoba Diner is the type you see back East, shaped like a silver railroad car. This one was sitting on wooden blocks positioned on both ends, and it had a large, rusty tank attached to the back to hold water or fuel of some sort.

  I had arrived in Cordoba around noon, and the heat and dust were affecting me by the time I made my way to the diner. The large yellow sun surrounded by the clear blue sky brought to mind a painting of sunflowers by van Gogh or some other painter I had seen in a museum in San Diego some time ago. I climbed the wooden steps and entered the Cordoba Diner, which welcomed customers with a handprinted sign attached to the front door by double-sided tape.

  After my eyesight adjusted from the bright afternoon light to the dim light inside, I looked around the diner. The interior would be familiar to anyone who has been in one of these boxcar-like diners. Straight ahead was a long, Formica-topped counter fronted by about ten or twelve swivel stools upholstered with bright-red plastic. The degree to which each stool had been occupied in the preceding years was determinable by the number of cracks in the plastic seat covers and the white stuffing peeking from between the cracks. I’m not sure what the inner material was made of, but it had the color and consistency of asbestos, which, for health reasons, I hoped it wasn’t.

  Behind the counter was an opening used to communicate with the kitchen to the rear and a door to the left to enter the kitchen. To the right was a little passageway that led to the restrooms. The rest of the back wall held shelves that contained the customary bowls of bananas, oranges, and grapefruit and tiny, individual boxes of cereal. The counter was populated with several sugar and salt-and-pepper shakers, napkin holders, and one glass-covered cake holder displaying what looked to be a carrot or spice cake. On closer inspection, I discovered this was a carrot cake, as evidenced by the little plastic carrots stuck on top of the white frosting. Also attached to the countertop were a few of those metal jukebox selectors with pages of selections that were flipped by a lever on the bottom.

  Stretching across the front of the diner, facing Main Street and on either side of the entrance, were several booths. I will not describe the booths, other than to mention there was more Formica, red plastic, shakers, and napkins. To the far left was the vintage jukebox, filled with a collection of 45 records destined to be forever picked up, rotated, placed on a turntable, and played at the whim of the customers. Opposite the jukebox, at the right end of the diner, was a large oscillating fan on a stand. Conspicuously absent was an air conditioner, although, in my estimation, the furious spinning and turning of the fan was successful in keeping the temperature of the air inside the diner in the upper eighties.

  I then turned my attention to the people present, of whom there were three. Two middle-aged men were sitting at the counter to the left, the closest of whom I recognized as Ben Nye. Behind the counter was a tall, ample woman, maybe late sixties or early seventies, with blonde, curly hair, either dyed or a wig.

  Ben turned and studied me for a minute, recognized me, and jumped from the stool to come over and shake my hand.

  “Milo, old friend,” he exclaimed, “finally took up my invitation to visit!”

  “Hello, Ben. Good to see you again. I decided I had postponed my visit for too long.”

  Ben now gave me a hearty slap on the back. “Well, it’s about time!” he shouted. “I’d almost given up hope.”

  Ben had that familiar but strange look of a friend you haven’t seen in years. I could tell that the features I remembered were tucked away inside his face, but they were somewhat distorted by the film of age. He was still tall and thin but a little more stooped. His face had a healthy glow, and he still had a full head of black hair, although some white was working its way up his sideburns.

  “Come in and have a cool drink,” he continued. “You must be thirsty after your drive. Hilda, get my friend here a glass of iced tea.” The last remark was directed to the woman behind the counter, who seemed to take a moment to digest the command and then to reluctantly take steps to comply with it.

  “I think I’ll have a black coffee and a glass of water,” I said. I needed a quick jolt of java to keep me functional.

  Hilda processed this second request at about the same speed and then glared at both Ben and me in succession. The menacing gesture was quickly replaced by a huge smile. “Come on over and sit down,” she said, gesturing with her arm to a seat at the counter. “I’ll get your drinks.”

  “Yes, come sit,” Ben said, taking my elbow and leading me to the counter. He moved a half-eaten piece of cake and
glass of milk from his place at the counter one spot to the right and seated me in between himself and the gentleman on his left, who was about halfway through a grilled cheese sandwich.

  Ben introduced. “Milo, this is Phil Childers. He owns the general store across the street. Phil, this is my old Navy pal, Milo Forbes.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Milo,” Phil offered.

  “Hello, Phil,” I replied, and then, to lighten the mood, asked, “Who’s minding the store?”

  Not catching my tone, Phil responded, “A young girl down the street watches things while I spend my time relaxing over here, chewing the fat with Ben.”

  “Milo is a private detective in San Diego,” Ben informed Phil.

  “Is that so?” Phil responded. Phil was a short, round fellow who was wearing a short-sleeve white shirt under a checkered vest. His face was as round as his body, and he had large, round brown eyes. Overall, he resembled a child’s drawing of a human body made up entirely of circles. He had brown hair with a slight curl in the front, the hairline suffering from a reverse case of male pattern baldness: hair on the top of his head, bald on the sides. With his short stature, unusual hairstyle, and checkered vest, he would have fit right in as a resident of Munchkin Land.

  After I had updated Ben and Phil on my car problems, Ben and I spent time reminiscing and updating each other on our lives, he as mayor of a small town, me as a big-town private detective, while I drank my coffee. When we had caught up, Phil jumped into the conversation.

  “Say, maybe you can help with the little mystery we’ve been having. Couldn’t hurt to have a professional opinion.”

  “Milo’s just here for a short personal visit,” said Ben. “I doubt if he’s interested—”

  “I don’t mind if you’d like me to help,” I interrupted. I was somewhat flattered that anyone would want my “professional opinion”. Besides, I needed something to keep me busy for the next few days, and Cordoba didn’t seem to offer much in the way of entertainment.