“It’s hard to say. The Summer girl was at the scene—”
“That dirty-eyed little brunette of his?”
I nodded. “She got away in a stolen car. It doesn’t prove that she shot him, though.”
“That would be an irony now, if she did. The whole situation is ironic. Don was going away to start a new life, as he called it. Vita nuova.” Her mouth curled over the words.
“It isn’t as ironic as it looks. Your husband was neck-deep in crime. It put him in line for a violent death.”
It shocked her out of her mood, as I hoped it would. She rose abruptly. “Don was involved in crime? You must be mistaken.”
“There’s no mistake. The Summer girl was in it too, if that’s any satisfaction to you. You know about the highjacking?”
“Yes. The sheriff was here tonight.”
“What did the sheriff want?”
“I couldn’t say. I wasn’t in the room when they were talking. I could tell by the sound of the voices, though, that they were arguing. Apparently Don won.”
“You didn’t hear what they were arguing about?”
“No. When Brandon—when Sheriff Church was leaving, I asked him what the trouble was. He told me about the stolen truck.”
“Did he seem suspicious of your husband?”
“No. He was very angry, but he didn’t say a word about Don, one way or the other.”
“When was he here?”
“About ten o’clock.”
“Are you and the sheriff on a first-name basis?”
“Yes, I suppose we are, if it matters. Brandon’s been close to my family for years. My father and his father were close friends.”
“I understood Church worked his way up from the bottom.”
“His father was a barber, if that’s what you mean. It didn’t prevent my father from being his friend.” When she spoke of her father, there was a change in her face, both hardening and refining. “Father was a democratic man, and a generous one. He helped to put Brandon through college.”
“Could that have helped your husband to win his argument with Church?”
It took her a moment to catch my meaning. “Of course not. Brandon wouldn’t be influenced by personal considerations.”
“You’re sure?”
“Perfectly sure. I know Brandon.”
“And you’re fond of him?”
“I wouldn’t say I’m fond of him. I wonder if anyone is. I do admire him for what he’s done. I respect his integrity.”
“What has he done?”
“He came up from near the bottom, as you said. He’s made himself the best sheriff we’ve ever had in this county. And I’ve known the others,” she added. “Father was a Superior Court judge.”
“Did your husband have anything to say about his brawl with Church?”
“It wasn’t a brawl. They simply argued. No, Don wouldn’t tell me anything. It’s understandable, if he was involved in the crime as you say he was.”
“He was.”
“I don’t understand how you can be so certain.”
“I talked to the Summer girl tonight. She didn’t know who I was, for a while anyway, and she said more than she intended to. She and your husband and a man named Bozey were all involved in the highjacking. You may have seen this Bozey with your husband—a young hood with red hair, eyes like a rabid dog. He wears a leather jacket like a pilot’s jacket.”
“No, I never saw him.” But the description seemed to make the situation actual to her, perhaps for the first time. “It can’t be true! Don was at the court with me yesterday.”
“All day?”
“Most of the afternoon. He came out after lunch to work on the books. Then he started drinking in the office. He’s been drinking a great deal lately.”
“Are you sure he didn’t leave the office?”
“As sure as I can be. I didn’t sit and watch him, naturally. But I’m absolutely certain he had nothing to do with that shooting.”
“He had plenty to do with it, Mrs. Kerrigan. Whether or not he was there in person, he was one of those responsible.”
“You mean that Don planned a cold-blooded murder, for gain?”
“I’m pretty sure he planned the highjacking. The murder was part of it. The two crimes can’t be separated, so far as I can see.”
She said with a kind of awe: “I had no idea. I knew that he was in trouble, I didn’t realize how serious it was. He should have told me,” she whispered to herself. “He could have had the house. Or anything.”
I broke in on her self-recriminations: “There seems to be more to this case than murder for gain. Your husband’s death throws the whole thing wide open.”
“I thought you said that the girl—Jo Summer—”
“She’s the logical suspect, of course. But I don’t know. They were set to go away together. She was in love with him.”
“In love with him?”
“In her way. In love with him and the easy life he promised her. They were going to Guatemala and live happily ever after.”
“How can you know that?” Her face was a mask of pain.
“She told me herself. She wasn’t lying. She may have been dreaming, but she wasn’t lying. That wasn’t the only interesting thing she said. It got a little involved, but the idea was that Anne Meyer had something to do with the highjacking. Tony Aquista told her a story about Anne Meyer which changed the original plan.”
“What kind of a story?”
“I was hoping that you could tell me, Mrs. Kerrigan. I never got the story. The girl got suspicious and ran out on me.”
Her eyes widened. Their dark blue depths were bottomless. She said slowly and carefully: “Why should you suppose that I would know anything about Anne Meyer?”
“You said quite a lot about her at the motor court, before we were interrupted. You wanted her found and shadowed, remember?”
“I’d prefer to forget it. I was almost crazy with jealousy. It’s over now. Everything’s over now. There’s nothing left to be jealous of.”
“Do you mean that something has happened to her?”
“I mean that my husband is dead. You can’t be jealous of a dead man, can you? I was on the wrong track, anyway. She wasn’t the one after all.”
“She was at one time, you said.”
“Yes, but it was finished. I was misled by something that happened last Friday. Don offered her the use of our place in the mountains for the weekend. She came here to pick up the keys, and I overheard the—transaction.” Her voice took on a cutting edge: “He had no right to do it. The cabin belongs to me. I guess that’s what upset me.”
“Where is the cabin?”
“On Lake Perdida. Father built it over twenty years ago, when they first put in the dam.”
“Could the woman still be there?”
“I don’t believe so. Don said not. When she failed to come to work on Monday, he drove up to the lake to see what was keeping her. But she was gone when he got there. At least, so he said.”
“His story should be checked. Is there a telephone in the cabin?”
“No, there are no private telephones in the settlement. It’s rather isolated.”
“I’d like your permission to go up and make a search for her.”
“Of course. If you think it will do any good.”
“How do I get there?”
She gave me detailed instructions. The lake was on the western slope of the Sierra, about two hours of mountain driving from Las Cruces. “I’ll get you the keys.”
“Duplicates?”
“No, there’s only the one set.”
“Then she brought them back?”
“Don did, Monday night. Apparently she left them there.”
“Was he gone all day Monday?”
“Yes, he was. He didn’t come home until long past midnight.”
“But he hadn’t seen her?”
“He said he hadn’t.”
“Do you think he was telling the
truth?”
“I have no idea,” she said. “I lost track of Don years ago. No, I didn’t ask him what he’d been doing all day.”
“What do you think he was doing?”
“I have no idea.”
She left the room and came back a minute later, with two Yale keys and some smaller padlock keys clinking on a chrome ring. “There you are. Good luck.”
I said: “It might improve my luck if you don’t mention this to anyone. Especially anyone official.”
“Brandon Church, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Have you been having trouble with him, too?”
“That’s an understatement. Church hates my insides. He seemed like a reasonable sort when I first met him, and we were getting along. Then the whole thing went to pieces. He’s a friend of yours. What’s on his mind?”
“I don’t pretend to understand him. I know that he’s a good man. Father thought very highly of him.” She managed a wan smile. “Could you be partly to blame for the trouble between you?”
“I usually am, I guess.”
“Perhaps he resents an outsider horning in. Brandon takes his work very seriously. Don’t worry, I won’t say a word to him about you.” She offered me her hand. “I do trust you, you see. I don’t know exactly why I should—”
“Because you can. I wish you well. But I wouldn’t go around trusting people indiscriminately.”
“You mean Brandon again, don’t you?”
“I’m afraid so. A good man who goes sour—” I didn’t complete the sentence.
A high-powered engine was whining up the hill. It stopped in front of the house. Kate Kerrigan went to the window.
“Speak of the devil.”
I looked out over her shoulder. Church climbed out of his black Mercury and started up the concrete steps from the street. Braga toiled along behind him like a fat Indian wife. I went out the back door as they came in the front.
I drove east toward the phantom mountains. When I was a few miles outside the city limits, something broke like a capsule behind my eyes. It leaked darkness through my brain and numbness through my body. I stopped the car on the shoulder of the road. Somewhere in the hills to the southwest, the Cyclops eye of the air beacon still scanned the starless sky. I wished that I was made of steel and powered by electricity.
I drove on slowly through the night-filled hills until I came to a tourist camp. I rented a cottage from a bleary-eyed boy and had a bad night’s sleep, wrestling nightmare on a lumpy bed.
CHAPTER 15: Lake Perdida was a narrow body of water held in place at six thousand feet by a concrete dam inserted in the slot between two timbered mountains. It was midmorning when I babied my hot engine over the top of the final grade and caught a glimpse of the lake between the trees. A cold wind from the Sierra peaks flawed its polished surface and soughed in the evergreens.
The blacktop followed the contours of the shore. I passed a tourist lodge, a roadside restaurant, a scattering of cottages. All of them were closed, and shuttered up for the winter. About midway in the lake’s five- or six-mile length I came to a filling station which looked as if it might be open. I stopped in front of the gas pumps, which were sheltered under a portico made of unpeeled logs, and leaned on my horn.
When nothing happened, I got out and walked around my car. There was a handwritten announcement pinned to one of the uprights of the portico:
“Gone down the hill. Take water or air as needed, your welcome. For gas you’ll have to wait. Back by ten (a.m.)”
I filled my steaming radiator and pushed on. Half a mile beyond the gas station a weathered wooden sign was attached to a pine tree on the upper side of the road: GREEN THOUGHT: CRAIG, LAS CRUCES. A smaller, newer metal sign: J. DONALD KERRIGAN, ESQ., was nailed below it. I turned up the rocky lane.
The cabin stood on a slope, hidden from the road by the trees. It was a large one-story house with a deep veranda. Its squared redwood timbers were gray with age. The shadow of the ancient trees hung over it like a foretaste of winter.
My feet rattled the boards of the veranda. The heavy wooden shutters that framed the windows were hanging open. I looked through the multipaned window beside the door into a dim deep room walled with oak paneling, roofed with slanting rafters. A Kodiak bearskin lay like something flattened by a steamroller in front of the stone fireplace at the far end.
I unlocked the door and went in. The air inside was chilly, and impregnated with the stale vestiges of a party. There were traces of a party in the main room. A brass ashtray on the redwood-bole coffee table was half full of cigarette ends, most of them smudged with lipstick. There were two dirty drinking glasses on the table, one marked with a telltale red crescent. Sniffing the glasses without touching them, I guessed that they had once contained good bourbon.
I went to the fireplace and felt the light wood ashes in the grate. The ashes were cold. As I stood up, I noticed something in the fur of the bearskin rug. It was a brown enameled woman’s bobby pin. I searched the rug with my fingers and found another bobby pin. The bear’s glass eyes were blasé. His teeth leered in a fixed lascivious grin.
I went through the sleeping-rooms. There was a big bunk-room with half a dozen two-tiered berths built along its walls. The layer of dust on the floor hadn’t been disturbed for weeks or months. One of the two smaller bedrooms was equally disused. The other had been occupied more recently. The floor was swept. The maple bed had been slept in, and not made. I straightened out the tangled sheets. A limp rubber tube lay among them.
There were no clothes or luggage in the room, but there were several articles on top of the rustic bureau. A woman’s nailfile, a jar of face cream standing open and beginning to dry out, a pair of tortoise-shell sun glasses, a number of bobby pins like the ones I had discovered in the bearskin. In the adjoining bathroom I found a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush, lipstick, a bottle of estrogen oil. They accounted for the things that were missing from Anne Meyer’s apartment in Las Cruces.
The kitchen was bright with chintz and knotty pine. A pot on the butane stove had remnants of spaghetti in the bottom, crawling with flies. The kitchen table had been set for two and not cleared, though the dishes were dirty. An empty wine bottle stood in the center of the table.
I left the kitchen to the languid autumn flies and let myself out the back door. Several cords of cut wood were piled under a tarpaulin against the rear wall. I looked under the tarpaulin and found black beetles. The outdoor brick oven in the yard was empty. A log outbuilding was cluttered with the remnants of past summers: canvas chairs, a small skiff, fishing tackle. I poked around in the outhouse and among the pine needles in the yard. Nothing.
I went back into the lodge through the kitchen door. There seemed to be a thickening and darkening of the air in the deserted rooms. In the living-room I had a moment of panic. I thought that one of the giant trees was going to crash down on the house. The irrational fear passed over quickly, but it left a sense of disaster. The glass-eyed bear in front of the dead fire, the blood-red cigarette ends in the dully gleaming ashtray, were infinitely dreary. I got out.
I locked the door behind me, not so much to keep intruders out as to keep the disaster in. It slipped through the walls and followed me down the lane, nagging at the nightmares in the back seat of my mind, where sex and death embraced.
The note had been removed from the front of the filling station. The door of the small stone building was standing open, and a gray-haired woman came out. She wore blue jeans and a battered man’s felt hat with a trout fly stuck in the ribbon like a cockade.
“Hello there. You want gas?”
“It’ll take about ten.”
I handed her the keys and stood beside her while she manipulated the hose. Her face was square and weathered, and her eyes looked out of it like someone peering through a wall.
“You from L.A.?”
“I am.”
“You’re the first customer I’ve had today.”
“It’
s getting pretty late in the season, isn’t it?”
“Season’s over, far as I’m concerned. I’m closing up this week and moving down the mountain before it snows. Old Mac at the Inn is the only human being that stays up here all winter. He can have it.” Hanging up the dripping nozzle, she read the meter: “That will be three and a quarter.”
I gave her a ten-dollar bill: I’d cashed a traveler’s check at the place where I spent the night: and she made change from the pocket of her jeans.
“We get a lot of tourists from L.A. in the summer. What brings you up here so late?”
“Just looking around. I suppose you get plenty of people here from the valley towns?”
“Sure, they come up to get away from the heat. There’s cottagers from all over—Fresno, Bakersfield, Las Cruces. I live in Fresno myself in the wintertime. My son’s a junior at the college.”
“Good for him.”
“Ralph’s a fine boy,” she said, as if to rebut an argument to the contrary. “He appreciates me, even if some people don’t. Ralph knows a good mother when he sees one. And he’s not afraid of work, either. He helped me all summer with the station, and all fall he’s been coming up weekends. Ralph’s a real manly boy, not like some I could name.”
“I like to hear of a boy like that.” I was establishing myself with her, but I also happened to mean it. “I come across a lot of the other kind in my work.”
“What sort of work is that?”
“I’m a detective.”
“Oh. That must be interesting work. Ralph’s father—Mr. Devore was a constable, before he took to—other things.” She gave me a hard bright look over the pump. “Looking for somebody, mister?”
“You guessed it.”
“There’s nobody left up here, excepting me and old Mac and the foresters. The Inn is closed down for the winter.” I followed her gaze through the trees and saw the brown peaked roofs of the Inn at the upper end of the lake. She turned back to me with something girlishly fearful in her eyes. “It isn’t Ralph? He hasn’t done anything wrong?”
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