Sonoma County, the Russian River resort area. MR. Mary something? Or the name of a town—Monte Rio?
“Are you sure that’s a W and not an H?” I asked her.
“I think so. Ray always wrote such a poor hand.”
“What about the numbers? Three-five-seven or five-five-seven?”
“The first one looks like a five. Five-five-seven.”
“I’ll keep this if it’s all right with you.”
“Yes, of course.”
With my pen I wrote “557” and “Wood” below the smudged address, then folded the paper and slipped it inside my notebook.
There was nothing else for me to look at, and no more questions to ask Mrs. Fentress. The atmosphere in the small house, with its odors of lemon and dog, its almost palpable aura of grief and loneliness and shattered lives, had grown oppressive. It made me eager to get out of there, which I did as quickly as I could manage it.
It also made me even more determined to stay with this investigation as long as I possibly could. I seemed to be the only one besides Tina capable of giving Doreen Fentress something to make her empty life just a little more tolerable.
13
I gave Tamara the paper from Ray Fentress’ jacket as soon as I came into the agency the next morning. While she was running a trace on the address, I put in a call to Lieutenant Heidegger at the Sonoma County sheriff’s department. He wasn’t in, and the officer I spoke to didn’t know when Heidegger would return. Just as well. I really had nothing definite to report that he needed to know. Courtesy call, more than anything else at this point, to maintain the cordial relationship.
It was another fifteen minutes before Tamara came into my office, a little longer than it usually takes her to track down a location. “It’s Monte Rio, all right,” she said. “Five-five-seven Old Wood Road. Single occupant, a woman named Marie Seldon.”
“Marie, not Mary?”
“Definitely Marie.”
So either Joe Buckner had misheard the blonde’s name or Fentress had deliberately mispronounced it.
“Ties to Floyd Mears as well as to Fentress,” Tamara said. “She’s the girlfriend Mears beat up five months ago. One of her neighbors heard them fighting and called the law when she started screaming. She had to have medical attention but still refused to file a complaint.”
“She stay with him after that?”
“If she did, she’s crazy. Any man smacked me around, I’d dump him faster than a sack of garbage.”
“How long were she and Mears hooked up?”
“Three years, according to the sheriff’s report.”
“So they were together when Fentress got himself in trouble with the law,” I said. “It’s probable he met her through Mears.”
“Right.”
“And if she broke up with Mears after the beating, it seems unlikely she was acting as an intermediary for him when she and Fentress got together last week.”
“Unless they got back together again. No record of it, if so.”
“In any event, who arranged the meeting, her or Fentress? And why? Another thing: Monday was the day of the shootings and seven p.m. could’ve been the time of the meeting at Mears’ cabin. But then why did he have her home address written down?”
“You could ask her, see what she has to say. Or notify Lieutenant Heidegger and let him talk to her.”
I thought it over. “Better me at this point,” I decided. “The connections are still too tenuous to have any direct bearing on the official version of what happened at the cabin. If I can’t get anything out of Seldon, then I’ll go to Heidegger.”
“Long drive up to Monte Rio.”
“I don’t have anything better to do today. There anything else I should know about Seldon before I leave?”
The answer to that was nothing much. Born in Cloverdale; married a Guerneville resident at eighteen and moved there with him; stayed in the Russian River area after they were divorced five years later. No children. Clean slate as far as any other encounters with the law went. Employed for the past three years at a place called Millie’s Gifts and Sportswear in Guerneville. Maintained a low profile for personal or financial reasons: no social media or e-mail accounts. No phone company account, either; if she used a cell phone, it was one of those prepaid jobs.
Tamara said, “There is one other thing I found out—not about Seldon, about Vernon Holloway. Might mean something, might not. Right around the time Melanie Joy disappeared, he sold off a chunk of his stock holdings—fast, over a couple of days. Strapped for ready cash, evidently, and in need of a large wad.”
“How large?”
“Six figures.”
“Why did he need so much cash in a hurry?”
“That I couldn’t find out. Might’ve been an under-the-table business deal, the kind that doesn’t leave a paper trail. Some of these rich dudes operate that way when they figure they can get away with it.”
“Does Holloway have a history of that kind of dealing?”
“Hard to tell for sure without some major hacking, the quasi-legal kind. If he played that game before, it was spread out over a longer period of time. Easier for his accountants to cover it up that way.”
“So his need for cash could’ve had something to do with his daughter,” I said. “But not to pay off gambling debts. No casino in the world would allow a twenty-two-year-old to run up six figures’ worth of losses, no matter what her pedigree.”
“How else could it tie in?”
“To her? To Fentress and Mears?” I shook my head. “Maybe I can get a clue from Marie Seldon.”
* * *
On the drive north across the Golden Gate Bridge, I tried again to make some cohesive sense of what I’d learned so far. I went over all the pieces, one by one. At first I couldn’t put them together to form a pattern, but the more I shuffled them around, the more they began to interlock. Not all, but enough to shape an outline.
I played around with the idea all the way to the Russian River, shuffling and reshuffling, finding holes the way I had with the robbery theory and then either filling or discounting them. The upshot of all the mental gymnastics was a concept that was credible, if complicated and grim and not a little cold-blooded. I did not have enough information yet to be sure, but if the answers to a few more questions jigsawed into the pattern then I’d know.
I half-hoped I was wrong in my figuring. If I was on the right track, it would make Heidegger and some other people happy, but not me.
And not Doreen Fentress.
* * *
It was raining in Guerneville. The day had been overcast and dry in the city, but up here in redwood country there was more precipitation because most coastal storms, light and heavy both, came in off the Pacific or down from Canada and Alaska. Sixty-plus miles made a considerable difference in weather patterns, inclement and clement.
The cloud ceiling hung low, the downpour light but steady, so that the riverside community seemed to be huddled bleakly under a wet gray blanket. There wasn’t much traffic and I had no trouble finding Millie’s Gifts and Sportswear; the shop was on River Road, just beyond the turnoff that led to Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve, in an old building with a prominent sign above the entrance.
There was a parking place a couple of doors down, a good thing, because I hadn’t brought an umbrella. The shop was open, testimony to the owner’s optimistic nature; at this time of year and in weather like this there weren’t going to be many customers interested in local arts and crafts and an array of inexpensive sportswear, T-shirts and sweatshirts, and low-end gift items. The only person present when I walked in was a middle-aged woman with a hairdo so weird, at least in my experience, that I couldn’t help staring at it. Short, lemony-blond hair topped by a pelt of shoe-polish-black hair, so that it looked as though some sort of amoebalike creature was clinging to the crown of her head.
The woman was so pleased to see a potential customer that she either didn’t notice or ignored my impolite star
e. “Hello,” she said through a not very bright smile. “May I help you, sir?”
I dragged my gaze away from the creature and fixed it on a pair of squinty brown eyes. “I hope so,” I said. “I’m looking for Marie Seldon.”
The question turned her smile upside down, produced a half-resigned, half-annoyed sigh. “Oh. Well. You wouldn’t be a friend or relative of hers, would you?”
“No. It’s a business matter.”
“Uh-huh. Well, she doesn’t work here any longer. She quit. All of a sudden, not even a single day’s notice.”
“When was that?”
“Last night, when she closed up. On the phone, for lord’s sake, didn’t even have the decency to come and tell me to my face. I couldn’t find anybody to replace her on short notice. I shouldn’t have opened at all today, I suppose, this rain and all.” Then, not so irrelevantly, “I have varicose veins.”
“Did she say why she was quitting?”
“Moving away. She didn’t say where and I didn’t ask.”
One more piece to fill out the pattern. “Leaving right away?”
“I suppose so. She didn’t tell me that, either.” Another breathy sigh. “I’ll tell you this: I won’t miss her in the long run. She wasn’t the best employee I’ve ever had. Not dishonest, like some, but snotty and snappish to the customers sometimes. Late opening up, too, I had more than one complaint about that. But you take what help you can get these days. I suppose she owes somebody money?”
“… Money?”
“Why you want to see her. The business matter you spoke of.”
I said, “She owes somebody something, that’s for sure,” and left the woman frowning and running a hand through her hair as if she was petting the black-pelt thing.
14
The rain had slackened into a misty drizzle when I reached the bridge that spans the river near Monte Rio. The wide sandy beach below it on either side was a popular swimming and picnicking spot during the summer months; not much of it was visible now, with the water level up from the recent rains. Once you crossed the bridge, the main road looped to the right into and through the village center, but that was not the way I went. I’d programmed Marie Seldon’s address into the GPS, and the disembodied voice I still found vaguely annoying directed me past the turning and onto Old Wood Road, a narrow strip of pitted asphalt that stretched east along the river.
As soon as I made the turn I remembered that I’d been down this road once before, on an exploratory drive with Kerry and Emily one long-ago Sunday, and had forgotten its name. It ran for half a mile or so before dead-ending and was lined with a mixed bag of dwellings, most of them on high grassy banks crowded with pine and rock maple and wild grape that overlooked the river. Rustic cottages large and small, summer homes behind fences and screens of shrubbery, a small, closed resort that had once served food and hosted dances. The area’s old-time atmosphere had been palpable enough on a sunny summer day; winter desertion and the gloomy weather created the fanciful impression that I had passed through a time warp into the 1950s.
Marie Seldon’s residence was not on the riverfront, but one of a short, staggered row of small cottages at the edge of a pine forest on the inland side. They were all identical in old age, size, and design—resort cottages, probably, that had been turned into rental units. The one that bore her number was partially coated with thick twists of ivy along one side. And it looked as though I’d gotten lucky: a car, an elderly yellow four-door Ford Focus hatchback with the hatch raised, was backed up close in front on an unpaved driveway. If the vehicle was hers, then she was still here.
Right. I had confirmation five seconds after I pulled over onto the grassy verge. The front door opened and out she came, a somewhat chunky blonde in a black windbreaker, toting a large cardboard box.
Her attention was on loading the carton into the back of the Ford; she didn’t notice me until I was a third of the way up along the edge of the muddy lane. When she did see me she froze, one hand up on the hatchback lid as if she’d been about to close it. The nearer I got to her, the surer she was that she’d never seen me before and the surer I was that she did not want anything to do with a stranger. Her stance was rigid, her broad mouth set tight, her stare both hostile and wary.
“Who’re you? What do you want?”
She flung the words at me when I reached the Ford’s nose, but I kept on going to where she stood before I answered. The car’s rear seats had been folded down, I saw, and the space behind the front seats was packed with suitcases, cartons, clothing on hangers.
“Marie Seldon?”
“So what if I am?” She had a hard, abrasive voice. Her face was hard, too, pinched, her eyes like flat brown stones—the face of a not very smart woman who had been kicked around and done her share of kicking back. Some men might have found her attractive, in large part because of oversized breasts that bulged the front of the sweater beneath her open windbreaker, but I was not one of them. There was no softness in her, no vulnerability, no indication that she was capable of either compassion or love.
I nodded toward the car. “Moving out?”
“None of your business. What do you want?”
“Some conversation.”
“Why? What about? Listen, mister—”
“Ray Fentress,” I said.
The name plainly jolted her. “I don’t know anybody named Fentress.”
“I think you do. I think you met with him in San Francisco last week to discuss something that happened in June of 2014.”
“Who the hell are you?” Snapping the words, almost snarling them. “If you’re a cop, let me see your ID.”
I gave her a close-up look at the photostat of my license. She sneered at it. “Private cop,” she said, as if mouthing an obscenity. “Go away; get out of here. I got nothing to say to you.”
“Floyd Mears,” I said. “Melanie Joy Holloway.”
What color there was in Marie’s pale face drained away; the rain-damp skin across her cheekbones tightened visibly. But she hung on to her cool; the fact that she was a cold number by nature helped her manage it. “You keep throwing out names of people I never heard of. You better get out of here before I call the real cops, tell ’em you’re hassling me with a lot of bullshit I don’t know anything about.”
“Go ahead, call them.”
“You think I won’t? Wait around and see.”
She slammed the hatchback shut, spun around, and stalked back to the cottage. I had two choices, follow her or leave. If I left, she’d be on the road five minutes after I was gone. I couldn’t hang around and then trail her for an extended length of time—only a quarter tank of gas left in my car after the long drive from the city, for one thing—and I did not have enough on her to convince the law to pick her up before she fled the state. I doubted she would carry out her threat to sic sheriff’s deputies on me, and I had the idea that if I prodded her a little more she might crack enough to let something incriminating leak through. So I followed her.
She stomped up onto the low porch, yanked the door open. Stopped and half-turned, saw me coming, said something that sounded like, “Bastard!” Then she went in, but she didn’t shut the door behind her.
I went up and stood in the open doorway. She was across a small musty living room by then, next to a table that held a brown suede purse. There was a cell phone in her left hand, but she wasn’t doing anything with it. The room was mostly empty except for a few sticks of mismatched furniture; she’d finished packing and loading the Ford, and if I had gotten here five minutes later she’d have been gone.
“Go ahead and make the call,” I said. “Ask for Lieutenant Heidegger. I’d like to have him in on this.”
She neither did nor said anything in response, just glared at me across a dozen feet of empty space.
“You know who Heidegger is, don’t you? The man in charge of investigating the double homicide in Floyd Mears’ cabin.”
“So what?”
“So you were Mears�
� girlfriend in June of 2014. And Mears and Fentress knew each other from the hunting camp in Lake County. The three of you cooked up and carried out the plan, right?”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” The denial came out sharp, but not as sharp as what she’d said previously. She didn’t seem quite so cool any longer.
“Or was it just you and Mears, with Fentress supplying the info on Melanie Holloway? Maybe he didn’t even know what the two of you had in mind until it was too late.”
Nothing from her.
“How much of the take was he getting? A third? Less than that?”
Still nothing.
“Lot of money in any case,” I said. “Six figures altogether.”
She put her back to me, lifting the cell phone to her ear. But I didn’t see her other hand dive into the purse, didn’t see the gun until she whirled around and pointed the damn thing at me.
“All right, you son of a bitch, get your ass in here and shut the door.”
I hesitated, tightening up inside, cursing myself for not figuring she might have a firearm close at hand. Age-slowed reflexes, mental as well as physical. The piece was a small automatic, probably a .32, not an optimum weapon for accurate shooting at a distance but deadly enough nonetheless. I could have ducked and run, but I’m not made that way. If I was going to get shot, it would be looking her straight in the eye.
“Do what I told you, goddamn it!”
I stepped inside, swung the door closed with a backhand thrust. Moved forward in short, slow steps—one, two, three before she told me to stop. Eight feet or so separated us then, too far for me to risk rushing her yet. But unless I could talk my way out of this, and there was little enough chance of that, or find a way to create some kind of distraction to give me an edge, I’d have to make the try sooner or later. I kept my eyes on the gun, on her finger curled around the trigger. If the finger tightened …
“This isn’t going to get you anywhere,” I said. “Lieutenant Heidegger knows everything I know.”
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