by Bill Crider
I was giving Dino the benefit of the doubt by going over all this with him. I'd decided that there were already enough suspects without having to distrust my oldest friend. I hoped I wasn't wrong.
"If we take Becker and Zintner off our list of suspects, who does that leave?" I asked.
"The Hammer," Dino said. "He's old, but he's probably still man enough to take out Ro-Jo."
"And why would Hobart kill Macklin?"
"Because they hated each other for over thirty years. Because they were on opposite sides when it came to bringing gambling back to the Island. With two guys like that, you don't need anything else."
I wondered why they were on opposite sides. I wasn't satisfied that Hobart was opposed to gambling simply on moral grounds. He didn't seem to me to be the kind of man who spent a lot of time worrying about the moral consequences of anything, much less gambling. His own addiction didn't seem to be the real reason, no matter what he said.
"Hobart was at home last night, taking it easy," I said. "Could he have killed Ro-Jo?"
"How long had Ro-Jo been dead before you got to Hobart's house?"
I couldn't answer that with any certainty. Ro-Jo could have been dead for an hour or two by the time I found him, and after finding him I'd been out of things for a while, lying on the floor of the warehouse.
"I get the point," I said. "Hobart could have done it. He had plenty of time to kill Ro-Jo and then go home and make himself comfortable before I was able to get to him. Who else do we have?"
"Alex Minor," Dino said. "I wasn't paying much attention when you told me about him the other day. I guess I should have been."
"I've been worrying about Minor," I said, wondering why he hadn't turned up. "I thought he'd be following me around, but I haven't seen any sign of him."
"Then don't worry about him until he shows up. Who does that leave?"
I mentioned Laurel Lytle.
"You think she's back in town? Nobody's heard from her in years."
"I don't know where she is. I can't find any trace of her, but I've got a few other places to look."
"Why would she kill Macklin?"
"I don't know. It's just that she seems like the loose end in all of this. Maybe there's something we don't know about their relationship. Do you remember her daughter, Mary Beth?"
"She was a little older than us," Dino said. "The guy with old man Lytle at the cemetery today, what's his name?"
"Paul," I said.
"Yeah. He's Mary Beth's kid. She left here right after high school and got married, but she's dead now. That's all I know."
That wasn't much help, and it certainly didn't tell me any more about Laurel. I'd have to do some more checking. And there was something else I didn't know. I was still unsure about who'd told Paul Lytle that I was looking for Harry. I mentioned that fact to Dino.
"I thought you said it was Zintner."
"Not exactly. I said that's what Lytle told me. The more I think about it, the less likely it seems. Zintner wouldn't tell anybody anything unless he thought there was something in it for him. If Lytle had called him, he would have tried to persuade him to use Becker. That way Zintner would get paid for a job he was already doing."
"But not you," Dino said.
"I told Lytle that I already had a client."
"Yeah. Well, if Zintner didn't tell him, we know who did."
Maybe Dino did, but I didn't. It wouldn't have been Barnes; Lytle wouldn't have called him.
"Who?" I asked.
"You're not thinking," Dino said. "Who else knew?"
Almost before he'd asked the question, I knew the answer, just as I should have known it all along. There was only one person it could have been.
Cathy Macklin.
"You were blocking it," Dino told me when he saw that I'd tumbled. "I could tell you liked her."
"Why would she tell Lytle that I was looking for Harry?" I said. "What's the connection?"
"You're asking me? How would I know? You're the detective. You figure it out."
I didn't want to figure it out. Besides the fact that I felt as if I'd failed too often, there was another reason I'd stopped looking for people. Too many times things didn't work out the way they should have. Even when you made the right connections, even when you located the person you were looking for, you lost something along the way. I'd found Dino's daughter, all right, but Dino and I had lost a friend. Now it seemed that I might lose Cathy before I even got to know her. And she was the one I'd decided to trust.
"I'll have to ask her," I said.
There were a couple of other things I could ask as well. Like, how had Lytle known about the service at the cemetery that morning? It hadn't been in the papers. Even Cathy hadn't known until last night. She must have told him, which meant that they'd had more than one conversation. I didn't like the implications of that.
"Why don't you go talk to her?" Dino said. "I think I'll stay here and watch TV. I think Oprah's gonna have a pretty good show today. You can let me know what you find out."
I told him that I would.
Twenty-Seven
The sun was still shining when I drove to the Seawall Courts, but somehow the day didn't seem quite so bright as it had earlier. I really didn't want Cathy to be mixed up in the murders of her father and Ro-Jo, but it was beginning to appear that she might be.
As I climbed the stairs to her apartment, I thought about her behavior at the cemetery. It was almost as if she had been avoiding me. Could the presence of Lytle have had something to do with that?
She answered my knock, and I was glad to see that she didn't look unhappy to see me. I asked if I could come in.
"Sure." She stepped back from the door.
She had been wearing a black dress at the funeral, but she'd changed to jeans and a flannel shirt. She still looked good.
"I talked to Patrick Lytle at the cemetery this morning," I said. "I'd like to ask you about him.
She brushed her hair back with her right hand. "I thought that might be why you were here. I wish he hadn't shown up this morning."
"You told him about the service?"
"Yes. He asked me to call, so I did. I should have known better."
"Why did he want you to call him? Did he say?"
"He hated my father. He wanted to see him put in the mausoleum. That's all. And that's why I shouldn't have called him. No one should gloat at a funeral."
"Did you hate your father as much as Lytle did?"
"I told you the first time I saw you that my father didn't really mean much to me. I hardly ever saw him at all. I used to be bitter about that, and I guess I haven't gotten over it. If I had, I wouldn't have called Lytle."
"Your father bought you this place," I said, referring to the motel. "He must have had some feeling for you."
"If he felt anything it was probably just guilt. He thought that by buying me something like this, he could make up for what he'd done to me and my mother, but he should have known he could never do that."
Maybe she was right about her father. I wasn't in a very good position to know Macklin's motives, but liked to think I could understand her feelings about him.
"Let's get back to Lytle's call," I said. "You told him that I was looking for Outside Harry, didn't you."
She looked at me steadily with those deeply blue eyes. I couldn't see any guile or evasiveness in them.
"That's right," she said. "I did. Was there any reason I shouldn't have?"
I couldn't think of one. I hadn't told her it was a secret.
"No," I said. "Why did he call?"
"He'd heard about my father. He wanted to tell me to be sure to let him know when the funeral would be held."
"How did Harry's name happen to come up in the conversation?" I asked.
"I can't really remember. I think Mr. Lytle was asking something about the investigation into my father's death. He wanted to know what the police were doing, and he asked if anyone else was looking into it."
"Didn'
t that strike you as curious?"
"Not really. And at the time I wasn't in much of a mood to wonder about it. I was wrapped up in my own problems. I was feeling a little guilty myself, if you must know. My father was dead, and I found I didn't really care very much."
I wasn't getting very far in my investigation, but that didn't matter to me at the moment. I was at least finding out that Cathy hadn't done anything wrong and that she didn't have any ulterior motive for having told Lytle that I was looking for Harry.
I felt an odd sense of relief. For a while there I had allowed myself to think that Cathy might even have had something to do with her father's murder. Looking at her now and hearing her straightforward answers to my questions, I was sure that she was completely innocent of any involvement.
"I'll tell you what," I said. "Why don't you let me take you to dinner tonight? You could use a break. Call your friend Barbara and tell her to look after the place."
Cathy smiled. "You seem pretty sure she'll be willing to do that."
"Hey, you said she liked me."
"All right. I'll see. Call me later."
"You can count on it," I said.
Wally Zintner wasn't glad to see me. Neither was Dale Becker. They were crowded into Zintner's little office, probably going over their strategy for finding Harry.
"You locate him yet?" Zintner asked.
"No. Have you ever talked to Patrick Lytle about Harry?"
"Lytle? Hell, no. Dale and I are thinking of getting out of this whole damn mess. We've wasted too much time on it already. Let the dead bury their dead, I always say."
I'd never heard him say that, but that didn't mean he hadn't always said it to a lot of other people. It wasn't like Zintner just to drop something, though. He was a real bulldog when he got his teeth into something.
"What about your deal for the Retreat?" I asked.
"Hell, Smith, I wasn't cut out to be a big-time casino owner. I'll leave that stuff to Donald Trump and stick to what I know. I've got a pretty good business here."
"What about you, Dale?" I asked.
He gave me his best scowl. "I got nothin' to say to you."
That was just fine with me. And I thought I knew what was going on now.
"Minor got to you, didn't he?" I said.
Zintner started to deny it, then changed his mind.
"Got to us," he said. "I wasn't the whole show in this thing. There were other investors."
I took it that the "other investors" didn't refer to Becker. Zintner would never have cut Dale in on something as big as the deal for the Retreat.
"How much did Minor pay you?" I asked.
"Enough," Zintner said.
If he wasn't going to talk about it, that was all right with me. I'd already found out more than I'd hoped to. I knew now why Minor hadn't been following me. He'd been too busy working out a deal between Zintner and his principals. That didn't mean that Minor couldn't have killed Ro-Jo. It might even mean that he'd already found Harry.
"What about Harry?" I asked.
"We can't find him," Zintner said, and Becker nodded.
"And you don't care?"
"That was part of the deal," Zintner said. "Besides, I don't give a damn about Macklin now. I don't have any point to make with Minor. He and I are pals. So if Harry's got a secret, let him keep it."
"Just tell me one thing. Did Minor get Harry?"
Zintner's voice was flat. "He didn't say. I didn't ask. None of my business."
Becker nodded vigorously in agreement. He obviously didn't like the idea of having to deal with Minor. I wondered why.
"What about Ro-Jo?" I asked.
Zintner lit a Camel. Becker wrinkled his nose. He wasn't a smoker; I'd forgotten that he had one good quality.
"I don't know anything about Ro-Jo," Zintner said, a thin cloud of smoke floating in front of his eyes.
For some reason I didn't believe him. Maybe it was because he wasn't a very good liar. Dale was looking at the floor and fiddling with his earring.
I thought it was time to change the subject. "I want to get into some bank records," I said.
"That's illegal," Zintner told me, as if that was news. "Unless you've got a court order."
"Yeah," Becker said. "That's illegal."
I liked him better when he wasn't talking to me, but I didn't tell him that.
"Now that we all know it's illegal for me to get into the bank records, who do I talk to?" I said. "And forget the court order. I don't want to bring the police in on it. I need a name."
"Johnny Bates," Zintner said.
Another sign that I was slowing down. I should have thought of Johnny myself.
Twenty-Eight
King Vidor, so I've been told, was a famous director in the early days of Hollywood, and for all I know it's true. You couldn't prove it by me, though. The only movie of his that I've ever seen was something called Solomon and Sheba, way back when I was a kid. It was made long after Vidor's glory days, and what I mainly remember is Gina Lollobrigida. She made quite an impression on me, but it wasn't a result of the way she took direction.
Anyway, Hollywood nostalgia aside, Vidor was born in Galveston, and his house is still here on the corner of 17th and Winnie. Johnny Bates lives less than a block away.
Bates is a strange guy, even for a city like Galveston, which has its share of strange guys. He's about my age, but he looks as if he went to sleep in 1968 and just woke up -- shaggy black hair and beard, going gray now, with a hat to cover his bald spot, bell bottom jeans, and usually a paisley shirt.
He was wearing one of the shirts when he came to the door. I don't know where he gets them. Maybe at the Goodwill outlet.
His latest toy was a flotation tank, which he showed me after inviting me in. The tank took up most of his living room.
"You really should try it out, Tru," he said. He grew up in Galveston, but he's lost most of his Texas accent. He spent a lot time somewhere in the Northeast. "You just get in it and float."
Though Johnny said that the tank was made of fiberglass and lined with Styrofoam, the thing looked a lot like a coffin to me, and I didn't like it, especially not just after having seen Braddy Macklin laid to rest.
"I can float in the Gulf," I said.
"Not like this. No light, no sound, water exactly ninety-three point five degrees. There's nothing like it."
I couldn't disagree with that. "What about sanitation?"
"The water's salt water," he said, slapping the side of the tank with his hand. "There's nearly a thousand pounds of Epsom salts dissolved in there. Look at this." He pulled me around to the side. "Here's the filter and pump, and the water's purified by an ultra-violet process. No sanitation problems at all; I guarantee it. You could float a dead dog in there and then get in yourself without any risk."
A dead dog? "Sounds great," I said.
"It is. It really is. And you look like you could use it, if you don't mind my saying so. You look like you did after the game with Dickinson where you gained nearly two hundred yards before they decided to have the whole team maul you. Why don't you give the tank a try? You'll be so relaxed, you won't believe it."
He was absolutely right. There was no way I could believe lying in hot water in absolute darkness would relax me. I'd probably come screaming out in ten minutes. Or less.
"No thanks," I said. "I need your help with something else, though."
He looked disappointed that I wouldn't try his tank, but he was glad to help out. He told me that we should sit down and talk things over.
I didn't really want to sit down. Johnny was the only person I'd ever known who actually had beanbag chairs. But he flopped in one, so I fell into the other.
"So what's up?" he asked when he got comfortable.
"I need to look at some bank records," I said.
He didn't even blink. "Current?" he asked. "Or something older?"
"Both, I think."
"What's the bank?"
I told him that I didn't kn
ow. "But it's in Galveston. I'm pretty sure of that."
He shifted in the chair. I wondered if he was as uncomfortable as I was, but he probably wasn't.
"Not knowing the bank makes it a little trickier," he said, "but I can probably manage it. Whose records did you want to see?"
That was what I liked about Johnny. He got right to the point. No complaints about the difficulty of the job, no whining about legality or the impossibility of doing what I asked. And the main thing was that he would produce results. All he asked in return was that you didn't ask how he did it.
He'd been the same way for as long as I'd known him. In high school, if you wanted a copy of Friday's chemistry test, Johnny could get you one. If you needed tickets to see the Rolling Stones, Johnny could get them. If you parked in the wrong place in Houston and your car was impounded, Johnny could get it out. And it wouldn't cost you a cent. If you were his buddy, nothing ever cost you, not even the tickets to see the Stones.
He always insisted that you not inquire into his methods. As far as I know, no one ever did. Everyone was too happy with the results to care how they were obtained.
Later in life, when Johnny went North, or so the stories went, he'd put his skills to work for various organizations on the shady side of the street and made a lot of money doing it. Or possibly he worked for some super-secret government agency. It depended on who you talked to. All of that may have been legend, but no one ever asked Johnny about it. That was always part of the deal.
When he returned to Galveston, he had no visible means of support, but he lived very well indeed. I'd heard all sorts of rumors: that he was living off his ill-gotten gains; that he was running several 900 number hot-lines that specialized in sex talk; that he was still working for the super-secret agency. I don't know that any of those things was true. Maybe they were all true. I didn't really care. All I wanted was information, and Johnny was the one who could get it if anyone could.
Among his many skills was his computer expertise. He was a hacker from way back, and I was pretty sure that with his equipment he could tap into the records of most any bank he wanted to. He got a new computer about every six months, never having been one to let technology get even a half step ahead of him.