The Conan Flagg Mysteries: Bundle #3

by M. K. Wren

  “Gabe didn’t shaft Corey, Lyn. He shafted ECon.”

  But the cold, berserker’s fire was in Lyn’s eyes. “Somebody should kill him. Put the world out of at least some of its misery.”

  Conan rose and crossed to the dressing room. “Lyn, I’m going after Di. If you want to ride with us, I’ll take the van.”

  Lyn visibly shook himself out of his preoccupation. “No, I’ll take my cycle. You better take the XK-E. It’s faster.”

  Conan was busy pulling on clothes. He didn’t point out that speed was undoubtedly immaterial now.

  Chapter 2

  The Dunlin Beach Road left Highway 101 four miles south of Holliday Beach and struck westward, skirting the south shore of Sitka Bay. Then it divided, the left-hand branch running south another mile down the beach to provide access for a handful of houses, while the right-hand branch continued around the bay for half a mile and dead-ended at Gabe Benbow’s house at the heel of Shearwater Spit. The latter section of the road and the span connecting it to the highway were paved, although it was only a narrow, county road. The beach road was not paved, and some citizens of Taft County were cynical enough to think that uneven treatment was related to the fact that Gabriel Benbow had for twenty-six years been a county commissioner, and the paving was done the year he left public office and a few months before he began construction on his “retirement home” on Shearwater Spit.

  Conan was among those cynical citizens, but the paving of Dunlin Beach Road was far from the forefront of his thoughts now. Jack pines and rhododendron bushes flashed in and out of the headlights on his left; Sitka Bay was invisible in the darkness on his right. Diane Monteil occupied the passenger seat, outwardly calm, but she’d spoken few words on this drive, only staring ahead blindly. Her aristocratic profile seemed carved in alabaster, even the sweep of golden hair, ashen in the reflected glow of headlights.

  Ahead, where the road curved north toward the spit, an island of light, as unreal as a stage set in a darkened theater. A line of red warning flares led inexorably to the cluster of vehicles blocking the right lane: two State Patrol cars; a winch truck backed to the edge of the road, where a flimsy wooden guardrail was broken. And there was the ambulance, that sterile harbinger of disaster. The white glare of headlights and spotlights, the spinning red and blue emergency lights, fragmented the stark scene. The rain had stopped, but the wet pavement mirrored the lights in long, wavering streaks.

  In response to a patrolman’s waving, red-sheathed flashlight, Conan pulled over onto the shoulder. A glance in the rearview mirror showed the Cyclops eye of Lyn Hatch’s motorcycle swooping to a stop almost on his bumper. The patrolman leaned down as Conan lowered the window.

  “If you’ve got business up the road, go on around. Otherwise, I’ll have to ask you to leave the way you came.”

  “Officer, this is Diane Monteil. She’s Corey Benbow’s business partner.”

  “Oh. You must be Conan Flagg. Chief Kleber said you’d—Wait a minute, mister!”

  That was for Lyn, who left his cycle and strode toward the winch truck at the center of this glaring tableau. Conan got out of the car. “Lyn! Officer, it’s all right. He’s a friend of Corey’s. Lyn, you’d better stay with Di.”

  Lyn’s head came around slowly, windblown hair and beard haloed with light. Conan wasn’t sure Lyn had heard him, but after a moment, he went to the car and opened the door for Diane, then took her arm as they moved into the hectic lights.

  Conan asked the patrolman, “Where’s Earl—Chief Kleber?”

  “Sergeant Roddy sent him up the road to get Gabe Benbow. He’s the woman’s grand—”

  “Yes, I know.” And he knew Roddy’s timing was, to say the least, unfortunate, bringing Lyn Hatch and Gabe Benbow in proximity now.

  The winch cables creaked and whined, the truck’s motor grinding stolidly. Shouts from the officers at the black edge of the scene indicated that the car was nearly up. Conan joined Diane and Lyn to wait. The wind blew cold from the south, laden with fine mist, scented with pine and salt. The grinding of the motor was too loud for the sound of lapping waves to penetrate; the only hint of the existence of the bay was the lights tracing the northern shore a mile and a half away.

  It came up streaming water, gouging ruts at the graveled edge of the road: a sky-blue Volkswagen Beetle with a rainbow stripe a foot wide running from the middle of the front bumper to the middle of the back bumper.

  “Oh, no…” The words a whisper on Diane’s lips.

  Conan realized that there had been hope until now: hope that someone had made an error about the license plate, that it wasn’t Corey’s car. Even now there was hope. Perhaps the car was empty; Corey had somehow gotten out before it plunged over the cliff.

  Conan watched two paramedics in dark blue flight jackets leave the ambulance and move toward the car. He said, “Di, stay here,” and followed them, drawing the attention of the State Patrol sergeant who seemed to be in charge, a rangy man on the far side of thirty with mouth set in a tense, horizontal line.

  “Sergeant Roddy?” At the man’s nod, Conan introduced himself and pointed out Diane, adding, “The man with her is Lyn Hatch. He’s Corey’s fiancé.” That wasn’t quite true, but it provided an acceptable rationale for Lyn’s presence.

  Roddy glanced over at Diane and Lyn, nodded wearily, then turned back to the car. The rear end was still off the ground, the winch easing it down. “We’ve got a mutual friend,” Roddy observed absently to Conan. “Chief Travers over at the Salem Division. Damn, I hate these things, especially with…” His distracted gaze flickered toward Diane and Lyn. “Another DUI, I suppose.”

  Conan frowned. “Drunk driving? What makes you think that?”

  “No skid marks. I know the pavement’s wet, but we checked it with spotlights. Not a damn mark. How else do you explain somebody running off the road like that without hitting the brakes? We figure she must’ve been coming down that grade from the west, judging by the angle of the tracks in the shoulder where she went through the guardrail. It’s a tight curve, and I guess she just didn’t—”

  “Sergeant, we got a body in here!” That from one of the officers by the car, which was firmly on the ground now. The winch truck’s motor stopped to make that announcement all the more audible.

  Roddy snapped, “Damn it, Jenkins!” He glanced again at Diane and Lyn as he strode toward the VW.

  The words galvanized Lyn, and he, too, started for the car with a hoarse cry. “Corey!”

  Conan intercepted him and almost had a fight on his hands. But after a moment, the tension went out of Lyn’s body with a sigh that was nearly a moan. Conan said firmly, “Lyn, Di’s going to need you. I’m trying to get some answers here. You’ll have to stay with her.”

  Lyn only nodded and went back to Diane, who hadn’t moved and seemed oddly detached, as if she were simply a curious spectator. Conan knew better. She was at this moment incapable of moving.

  Conan thrust his hands in his pockets and approached the car. Only the window on the passenger side was open, and that a scant three inches; the interior was filled with murky water to the tops of the seats. The bonnet and front fenders were crushed inward, the windshield marked with a spiderweb of fractured glass, its focus just above the steering wheel, but the damage was slight in view of the fifty-foot drop from the bluff. Conan went to the edge of the road. The spotlights were off now, and he could see nothing in the blackness; he had to imagine the water waiting below and the obdurate basalt that had left this bluff and the three remnant pylons of Reem’s Rocks intact, in spite of millennia of erosion. At high tide, or within an hour before or after, there would be enough water below to cushion the impact of the VW’s plunge. The last high tide had been about ten o’clock tonight.

  “Damn doors are jammed.”

  Conan turned. Sergeant Roddy was standing beside him, frowning as two officers pried at the door on the driver’s side with crowbars. Conan asked, “When did you get the accident report?”

>   “About one-fifteen. Man named Harrington called it in. Said he lives down on Dunlin Beach.”

  “That road turns off this one about a tenth of a mile back. The only house up this road is Gabe Benbow’s.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess Mr. Harrington missed the turn. Maybe he’d lifted a few too many, too.”

  “Too? Like Corey? Sergeant, it’s so unlikely that Corey Benbow was drunk, it isn’t even a possibility. She seldom drank at all. But you’re probably right about Harry Harrington.”

  Roddy eyed Conan with a sidelong smile. “You know him?”

  “Yes. He’s one of the local…characters, to be charitable.”

  “I know what you mean. You got it, Jenkins?”

  One of the officers manning the crowbars at the door nodded. “It’s coming, Sergeant.”

  “Well, let the water out slow if you can.”

  With a screech and a thud, the door gave way, and Jenkins and the other man had to throw their weight into the door to restrain the sudden flood of water. Conan stared at the spiderwebbed windshield, relieved that from this angle he couldn’t see into the car seats; he would have to face what the ebbing waters revealed soon enough.

  “Sergeant, when you check the car and personal effects, keep an eye out for a leather-bound diary, about four by six inches, sort of reddish brown.”

  Roddy squinted curiously at Conan. “You sound like you’re working on a case. Yeah, I know about your sideline. Steve Travers says you’re a damned good PI.”

  “He’s never said that in my hearing. Just habit, Sergeant. I’m not on a case now.”

  “Well, doesn’t look like there’s much of a case here to work on. Hello, Chief.”

  Conan’s head came around abruptly. That greeting was for Holliday Beach Police Chief Earl Kleber, who approached the VW frowning, black hair rumpled like his hastily-donned civilian clothes, his square jaw even bluer than usual.

  It wasn’t Kleber who brought Conan up short—the chief even had a passably friendly nod for him—but Conan was looking beyond him at the man standing near the ambulance.

  Gabe Benbow. Tall and big-boned, he seemed to have gone to sinew with age, rather than to fat. Even in the old sou’wester, his wide shoulders made strict right angles with his arms; bony hands with spatulate fingers thrust out, making his sleeves seem too short. His face always reminded Conan of a Lincoln grown old, sans beard and sans most of his hair, the latter loss hidden now under a knit cap. All of Gabe’s eighty years were starkly evident in the furrows and pleats they had added to his face, but behind the thick bifocals, his cold blue eyes reflected a rapaciously alert mind.

  Conan walked over to Lyn, who stood with a protective arm around Diane’s shoulders, his baleful gaze fixed on Gabe.

  Conan asked, “Di, are you all right?”

  She was also staring at Gabe, but with none of Lyn’s smoldering anger. She nodded, pushing her windblown hair away from her face with both hands.

  “Yes, I’m all right. God, why does it take so long?”

  Conan didn’t try to answer that, instead turning to Lyn. “Whatever diabolical plans you have in mind for Gabe, Lyn, forget them. At least for now.”

  Lyn’s mouth only tightened, and Gabe chose that moment to demand loudly, “What’re they doing here?”

  The question was addressed to Sergeant Jim Roddy, who had joined Gabe by the ambulance, and “they” clearly referred to Lyn, Diane, and Conan. Roddy, looking embarrassed, apparently tried to explain their presence, but stopped abruptly.

  The paramedics were approaching, maneuvering a stretcher laden with a still form shrouded in a gray blanket. They stopped a few feet short of the ambulance.

  The sergeant said, “Okay, Mr. Benbow, you’d better have a look. I mean, if you’re—”

  “Get on with it!”

  Roddy leaned down to turn back the blanket, but hesitated, looking up at Diane as if she had spoken; she hadn’t.

  “Ms. Monteil?”

  Diane acknowledged the diffident invitation with a nod and moved slowly toward the stretcher, with Conan holding her arm, Lyn, hesitating, a pace behind.

  Conan thought absently, thank God she hadn’t been in the water longer. Corey seemed at first glance only asleep, wet, dark hair lying in tendrils across her forehead and one cheek like blown ink drops. Hers had never been a beautiful face, but it was well-proportioned, a pleasant and simple face. What had made her seem beautiful was gone now: the wholesome color in her cheeks, the warm perfection of her smile, the blue-green of her eyes that was so much the color of the sea on a sunny May day, as lucid and as changeable.

  Wake up, wake up, darlin’ Corey,

  What makes you sleep so sound?

  That song, Conan knew, would haunt him now. But he had no urge to try to waken her. There was no mistaking the quality of this sleep, even if the more fearful signs of death weren’t evident. The only hint of trauma was a lacerated area on the right temple.

  Perhaps Gabe made the identification. Conan didn’t hear it, but he heard Diane whisper, “Dear God, how will I tell Kit? How will I tell him he’s an orphan now?”

  What a cruel irony, Conan thought, that Mark Benbow had also died in a car accident. But Christopher had only been a year old then. He was six now and old enough for grief.

  Lyn Hatch had been staring numbly at Corey’s body, apparently unaware of anything or anyone around him, but at Diane’s words he roused himself and put his arm around her.

  “I’ll help if I can, Di. I mean, telling Kit. And Melissa. It won’t be any easier on her.”

  Diane turned away, letting Lyn lead her toward Conan’s car. Lyn said over his shoulder, “Conan, I better stay what’s left of the night at Di’s. I’ll head back to your house and get my stuff together.”

  Lyn didn’t pause when Gabe muttered testily, “Get me out of here. Earl! Take me back home.”

  But Lyn sent a backward glance at Gabe that should have struck terror in the old man.

  Chapter 3

  Conan Flagg had chosen the solitary life because inherent in solitude is freedom. Since he could afford it, he shaped his solitude to his preferences. His house was a case in point. It occupied a wooded lot sloping down to the seawall that was occasionally all that stood between him and the full force of storm-driven waves. Conan had made only one non-negotiable demand of the architect: that the west wall of every room must consist of a floor-to-ceiling span of glass facing the Pacific.

  The architect had met the challenge and more, especially here in the living room. The west wall was an expanse of glass forty feet long and thirty high, with a beamed ceiling sloping back over the balcony on which the two bedrooms opened. The interior decoration was entirely Conan’s own and grew in an eclectic fashion out of the things he loved and collected: Lilihan rugs; Haida masks; cases of netsuke, jade prayer wheels, and agatized Cenozoic fossils; a Ben Shahn tempera, Cassatt pastel, Baskin woodcut, two Klimt drawings, a Grover encaustic; and the Bösendorfer grand piano that was the centerpiece, literally, of the room.

  But now he stood at the windows looking into the darkness beyond the rain-shattered reflections. He couldn’t remember when the rain had begun again, but when he had left Diane at her house with Lyn and Mrs. Miller, her neighbor and baby-sitter—and the two children still asleep in their blissful ignorance—a fine rain had been falling.

  It was four-thirty now, but at this latitude and so near the winter solstice, it would be two and a half hours before dawn finally ended this night. He knew he should get some sleep. He also knew that it would be futile to try.

  The first time I saw darlin’ Corey

  She was standin’ in the door.

  Her shoes and stockin’s in her hand

  And her feet all over the floor.

  Damn that song. He couldn’t get rid of it. Corey had loved it, willingly identifying with the plucky moonshiner who met such an enigmatic end.

  So many things that had once been amusing had turned poignant now.

  The f
irst time he had seen Corella Benbow, she had in fact been standing in a door: the door of the Holliday Beach Book Shop, whose continuance, despite the slings and arrows of outrageous dry rot and irrational tax forms, he considered his primary raison d’être. He’d been at the front counter while Miss Dobie took her lunch break, when Corey and Diane came into the shop on a rainy October day five years ago. Kit had been asleep in a sling on Corey’s back; Diane’s daughter, Melissa, at two, had discovered the delights of bipedalism and needed constant supervision. Corey introduced herself and company and breathlessly announced that she and Diane had just bought the Camber building.

  She said it as if she’d just been handed the deed to the Taj Mahal, but she was talking about a two-story, frame building across Highway 101 and south of the bookshop; a building that had been shabby when it was built fifty years ago and hadn’t acquired any charm with age. Then, with even greater enthusiasm, Corey explained that she and Diane planned to open a kite shop. Diane had training in design; she’d worked as display designer and coordinator at the Marine Science Center museum in Westport until her recent divorce. As for Corey, well, she’d worked in a kite shop near Coos Bay, among other things—which Conan later learned included a stint at the Bumble Bee Tuna cannery in Astoria, a summer on a Forest Service fire tower, and a year in Bandon as a PUD meter reader. The kite shop would be called “Rainbow Wings,” and she described it so eloquently, Conan began to see the Taj Mahal latent in the Camber building.

  And it had come to pass. With the arrival of spring, Rainbow Wings opened for business, and the Camber building was transformed, painted a warm, cerulean blue studded with stylized clouds, and, arcing across the broad, board canvas of the facade, a huge rainbow. On sunny days, the shop was festooned with bright windsocks and air-gulping, gold-spangled carp; a joy forever, or so it seemed.

  Conan turned away from the window and went to the stereo console by the fireplace on the north wall to put on a record; the graceful passages of the Chopin “Ballade in G Minor” spun out into the shadowed recesses of the room, finding a union of cadence with the quiet surf. He paused to light a cigarette, then crossed to one of the Barcelona chairs facing the windows.