“How’d he handle it?”
Vines shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “I heard it was a nitroglycerin explosion, some sort of charge they lower down into the shaft of oil wells to shake things up, but it went off too early. I guess you could set that stuff off by shooting into it with a rifle. It was all before my time.”
“How does the Sena-did-it theory explain Dillon Charley’s vision?”
“That’s easy,” Vines said. “Dillon finds out somehow that Sena was planning something funny. So he arranges to have his peyote vision at the church service, and he tells his crew to stay away from the well. Sena blows the place up, but he finds out that Dillon must have known something. So he tries to drive him away with the harassment.”
“Could be,” Chee said.
“I think Gordo would like to know if Dillon Charley told me anything,” Vines said. “Did his questions lead that way?”
“More or less,” Chee said. “Did Dillon Charley tell you anything?”
Vines smiled. “Did Gordo tell you to ask me that?”
“You brought it up,” Chee said. “I’ll change the question. What do you think happened out at that oil well?”
“I understand nitro is touchy stuff. In those days those accidents happened. I think they had another case like that in the state a few years earlier.”
“Do you think it was an accident? Do you think Dillon Charley was just nervous about having the nitro at the well?”
Vines swiveled his chair to give himself a view out the window. Chee could see only his profile.
“I think Gordo Sena murdered his brother,” Vines said.
8
Colton Wolf was running a little behind schedule. He had prepared oeufs en gelée for his breakfast. He meticulously followed the recipe in Gourmet and that took time. The aspic required twelve minutes at a rolling boil, and preparing the purée of peas for the garnish took longer still, and then another hour was required to allow the eggs to cool properly in their molds of aspic. It was midmorning when he folded away the breakfast linen and cleared the silver and china from the Formica top of his trailer’s eating surface. He had planned to work two hours on the model Baldwin steam engine he was building. Now he cut that to eighty minutes, working most of the time with his jeweler’s glass in his eye and getting much of the fitting done on the piston assembly. The alarm dinged at 11:35 A.M. Colton pulled the covers over his lathe and drill and put his metal working tools carefully back in their proper places in his toolbox and the toolbox back in his lock cabinet. The cabinet also held his collection of steam engines, all of which actually operated—blowing whistles, driving belts, and turning wheels—and all of which had been made by Colton himself. The engines sat among the tools of his trade—two rifles, the chambers and trigger assembly sections of three pistols, an assortment of barrels to be screwed into these assemblies, an array of silencers, three small boxes trailing insulated wires, which were bomb detonaters, a candy box which held plastic explosive (Colton kept eight sticks of dynamite and his dynamite caps safely cool in the refrigerator), and a row of cans of shaving cream and spray deodorant. Except for the rifles and their telescopic sights, he had manufactured much of this paraphernalia himself—partly because if it wasn’t purchased it couldn’t be traced and partly because some of it couldn’t be bought. The shaving cream and deodorant cans were Colton’s way of getting his tools through the x-ray stations at airport loading gates. One could fit the parts of one of Colton’s pistols plus its silencer into two cans, screw the tops back on, and show an airport inspection nothing more questionable than Burma Shave. The bomb detonators were also the products of Colton’s skill. He’d learned the principle from a former Special Services soldier he’d met in Idaho’s Point-of-the-Mountain prison. It involved two batteries and a little ball of mercury which closed the electrical connection when the box moved.
Colton locked it all away, and went to make his mail check.
It wasn’t that Colton Wolf expected any mail. It was part of the routine by which he lived. In whatever town he parked his trailer, Colton immediately rented a post office box. He rented it in the name of whatever commercial-sounding noun came to mind. Then he mailed a note to Boxholder at a post office box number in El Paso, Texas, in which he reported his new address. That was Colton’s link to the man who provided him with his assignments. It was his only link with the world. In Colton Wolf’s mind, and sometimes in his dreams, it was the flaw through which the world would someday catch him and kill him. Colton wished there were another way to do business. There wasn’t. So he minimized the risk as much as he could. Minimizing risks was very much a part of Colton Wolf’s life.
He drove his GMC pickup slowly past the branch post office, inspecting parked cars. Nothing looked suspicious. He parked at the Safeway lot and strolled the block and a half to the post office, taking inventory of what he saw. Two women and a man were in the lobby. The clerks behind the counter were familiar faces. Colton walked to the wall of post office boxes. Through the glass of box 1191 he could see an envelope. He ignored it and inspected box 960. It was empty. Colton walked out through the lobby, memorizing the customers. He went back to the Safeway, bought a small filet, a half pound of mushrooms, a pound of white grapes, a half pint of cream, and an ounce of black pepper. He put the groceries in the truck, climbed in himself, and tuned in a country western music station on the radio. He let twenty minutes pass while he listened. Then he walked back to the post office. Five customers were in the lobby now and none matched the previous three. Colton walked directly to box 1191 and removed the envelope. A smaller envelope lay under it. He slipped both into his jacket pocket and returned to the truck. No one followed him, and no one followed him a few minutes later as he drove back up the freeway ramp. Colton Wolf had survived another contact with the world.
The smaller envelope was addressed simply to his box number. It contained a slip of paper on which a series of numerals was penciled. Properly sorted out, they gave Colton a telephone number to call and the time of 2:10 P.M. to call it. He had put the slip in his shirt pocket. The second envelope bore the return address of Webster Investigations and a Los Angeles street number. Colton had known that it would, since no one else knew his box number, but even so he had felt his stomach tighten as he put the envelope on the seat beside him. When he got home he would open it. Meanwhile he would try not to think about it.
In the trailer, he put away the groceries and plugged in the coffeepot. Then he sat in his recliner, dried his palms on his trouser legs, slit open the envelope, and removed the contents. Two typewritten pages were folded around an expense statement. Wolf put the statement aside.
Dear Mr. Wolf:
First the bad news, which is that the lead I had run across in Anaheim didn’t pay off. The woman was far too young to be your mother. I found her birth certificate in the county courthouse before I made arrangements with the detective in Anaheim, so I saved you that money.
The good news is that I located a truck-driver who worked at the Mayflower agency in Bakersfield in the early 1960s and he remembers working with Buddy Shaw. He found an address where Shaw lived in San Francisco. It’s old, but it will give us a place to start tracking him down….
Wolf finished the first page, laid it carefully on the arm of the recliner, and read through the second page. That done, he read both pages again, very slowly. Then he glanced at the itemized statement. It covered a month, charging Wolf for five days of time and an assortment of expenses which added up to a little more than eleven hundred dollars. He sat then with his slender, long-fingered hands resting in his lap, and thought.
His face, too, was slender, and his body and his bones, but a sinewy tension about him gave his thinness the look of a honed blade. His hair was thin, the shade of old straw, and his eyebrows and lashes were almost invisible against pale, freckled skin. His eyes were a faint blue-green—about the tint of old ice. Colton Wolf looked bleached, drained of pigment, antiseptic, neat, emotionless.
In fact, at the moment his emotions were mixed. At one level of his intelligence, Colton was encouraged. The detective would find Buddy Shaw. Shaw would still be living with Colton’s mother. Or Shaw would know where to find her. And then there would be the reunion. At another level, Colton believed none of that. Webster was screwing him. The private detective had been screwing him for four expensive years. There were no trips, no hotel bills, no long-distance calls, no trace of Buddy Shaw. Webster had had no more success than the first private detective Colton had hired. Webster simply sat in his office in Encino and once a month dreamed up a letter and fabricated an itemized bill. The first detective had gone to the house Colton and his mother and Buddy Shaw had occupied in Bakersfield. He had found it occupied by transients who knew absolutely nothing helpful. Absolutely nothing about a man and a woman and a child who had lived there nineteen years before. Colton had destroyed that report, tearing it savagely into shreds. But he still remembered what it said. It said the house was now occupied by a Mexican woman. The realtor who handled the place kept records back only five years. During that time there had been three other occupants. None had left forwarding addresses. There was no record in the county courthouse of a marriage between a man named Buddy Shaw, or any other Shaw, and a woman named Linda Betty Fry. Mayflower Van Lines records showed that a Buddy Shaw had been employed at their warehouse for eleven months nineteen years earlier. He had been fired for drunkenness. Police records showed an E. W. Shaw, a.k.a. Buddy Shaw, three times. He had been booked once for drunk and disorderly, had done thirty days for aggravated assault, and had been arrested for assault with a deadly weapon. No disposition of that was recorded. Relative to the woman herself there was hardly a trace. Just the booking sheet on Shaw, showing a woman identified as Linda Betty Maddox, brought in with him on the disorderly charge.
Colton remembered the letter in detail. He especially remembered the final paragraph:
Unless you can provide more information relative to this woman, there’s no hope of finding her. Can you tell us her age, where she was born, something about her family, mother, father, brothers, sisters, where she was educated, where she was married, or any information about her past? Without such information to develop leads, there is simply no hope of finding her.
No hope of finding her. He had been living in Oklahoma City then, using the name Fry. He had driven to Bakersfield. Two hard days and nights on the highway. In Nevada, he’d decided his name probably wasn’t Fry. Maybe it was Maddox, but it wasn’t Fry. He remembered Fry faintly—a round, dark, pock-marked face, a round belly, a sullen, unhappy mouth. They had lived with him in San Jose and Colton had been Colton Fry in school there. He’d assumed Fry was his father. Perhaps it was someone named Maddox. Colton could remember no one by that name. Somewhere west of Las Vegas, he’d decided to choose a neutral name for himself. He’d use it only until he could find his mother. She’d tell him his real name. She’d tell him about his father, and his grandparents. And about the family home. It would be in a small town, Colton thought, and there’d be a graveyard with tombstones for the family. When he found her, she’d tell him who he was. Until then, he’d pick a last name. Something simple. He picked Wolf.
The coffee was perking now on the butane burner. Through the aluminum walls of the trailer came the sound of a truck’s air horn blaring on the freeway. Colton was not conscious of either sound. He was remembering arriving in Bakersfield, the drive to the old neighborhood. The Mexican woman who came to the door spoke no English, but her daughter had talked to him. She knew nothing of a thin, blue-eyed blond woman named Linda Betty, nor of a burly man named Buddy Shaw. He could see the girl now, nervous at his questioning. And he could see the cracked concrete steps as he left the porch—no more broken now than they had been when he was eleven and had sat on them those nights when Buddy Shaw and his mother were drunk, had sat waiting for Shaw to go to sleep so that he could slip in.
Colton had stood beside his pickup, looking back at the house. The sparse grass he remembered was no longer there, the glass in one window was replaced by plywood. But otherwise it looked much the same. The last time he had seen it was the day after his twelfth birthday—the last time he had come home. The boy he knew at school had said he couldn’t stay at his house any longer and he had walked home to see if Buddy Shaw had sobered up, and if Buddy Shaw would let him return. He had found the house empty. He had peered through the windows and seen the kitchen stripped of his mother’s pans, and the bathroom stripped of her toiletries. But in the room where he slept, his things were still scattered. The bedclothing was gone from the cot, but the blue jacket his mother had got for him somewhere was still hanging on its peg. And his books were there. And his cap. He had broken a window and gone inside, cutting his hand in his panic. There had been nothing except the old furniture that had been there when they moved in and his own spare clothing.
Colton Wolf stirred uneasily in the recliner. All the desolation of that discovery came back to him again—the sense of loss and confusion and rejection, and with it the bleak, hopeless loneliness. Where could she be? How could he find her? Why had she gone? On the burner, the percolator gave a final cough and fell silent, its duty done. Colton Wolf ignored the sound, if he heard it. He was considering the same questions he’d considered for nineteen years.
A few minutes after one-thirty, he pushed himself out of the recliner and poured a cup of coffee. He took it to the truck, to sip as he drove. At a pay booth beside Central Avenue he made the call. He dialed the El Paso, Texas, area code, and the prefix number, and then waited while the second hand of his watch swept toward 2:10. Then he completed the dialing. He dropped in the coins and heard the number ring just a moment before the second hand swept past his deadline.
It was answered instantly. “This is Boxholder,” the voice said. That address had become something of a joke between them. A joke and a code.
“Okay,” Colton said. “Boxholder here, too.”
“We have another opportunity in New Mexico,” the voice said. “One thing led to another, I guess.”
“Same client?” Colton asked.
Silence. “We never talk about clients,” Boxholder said. “Remember?”
“Sorry,” Colton said.
“Conditions are a lot the same, though. The subject won’t be on guard. And there’s a hurry.”
“How much hurry?” Colton asked. Hurry bothered him. And his voice showed it.
“Nothing specific,” Boxholder said. “Just the quicker the better. Every day increases the risk. So forth.”
“I don’t like to rush things,” Colton said. “Things go wrong.”
“You don’t have to handle it,” Boxholder said. “Maybe you’d better not. But I know you wanted to clean up that original business, and that kept you in Albuquerque anyway, and…”
“I think I’ll have the other business finished in twenty-four hours or so,” Colton said. “Maybe tonight.”
“Well, that’s all we’re committed to. After that’s done we’ve kept the original contract.” Boxholder chuckled. “Took a little longer than anybody figured, but what the hell?” Silence. “I thought maybe you’d like to show these folks how good you usually are.”
Colton grimaced. Boxholder assumed the thought of a dissatisfied customer would bother him. That was correct. Boxholder assumed he took intense pride in his work. That was also correct. “Okay,” he said. “Tell me about it.”
Boxholder told him. Then, as they always did, they arranged the time and telephone number for Colton’s report.
Colton used up three hours. He walked. He dropped the letter he had written to Webster Investigations into a mailbox. It contained his check for $1,087.50 and a note suggesting that Webster run personal ads in West Coast newspapers asking Linda Betty Shaw/Fry/Maddox to contact him. He walked some more. He sat on the bench at a bus stop. The bus stop was near a school crossing and he studied the homeward-bound students. They seemed to be junior-high age and younger, and
most of them walked in little clusters and bunches, talking. Once a single kid came along, all by herself. Colton guessed the single was somebody who had just moved to the neighborhood. If you did that, you couldn’t make friends, because everybody already had them. When he was eight they had lived in San Diego in this one apartment almost a year and he had made a friend there. And then when he was fourteen and had been in Taylorville long enough, he had made a friend or two. But that was different. In reform school nobody knew anybody at first and everybody was looking for connections. Taylorville had been a pretty good place, all in all, and he’d been glad enough to go back for his second stretch. They kept the gays off of you in Taylorville. Not like in Folsom, where he’d done his armed robbery time.
Finally it was late enough. He called the University of New Mexico Hospital and asked for Mrs. Myers on the terminal ward. As always, her voice was placid. “I’m afraid it’s all over,” she said. “He’s been in a coma all day and his heart finally quit.”
“Well, you just have to be philosophical about it.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Myers said. “But it’s always a blow.”
“Well,” Colton said. He found himself searching for something else to say—a way to extend the conversation. But there was no reason for that. He was finished with Mrs. Myers. This would be the last of more than two months of intermittent conversations, all carefully planned, all carefully executed. First he had learned the name of the nurse who ran the middle shift on the cancer ward. He had got that from hospital information by pretending he wanted to send her a thank-you card. And then, on his first call to learn the patient’s condition, he had said, “By the way, are you Mrs. Myers? He’s told me how kind you’ve been to him. I want to thank you for that.” That had set the tone. Colton rarely talked to anyone, but he knew how to do it well. He watched television, and he listened carefully to conversations in airports and restaurants and the waiting lines for movies—the places where people talked to each other. Once in a while he practiced, with cabdrivers or the call girls he took to motels twice a month. But he rarely talked to the same person more than once or twice, except for Boxholder. After all this time, he found himself imagining how Mrs. Myers looked and what she was like—just as he wondered about Boxholder. He had been tempted to go to the ward some evening and take a look at her. But that involved a risk. Colton did not take risks. “Well,” he said again. “Thank you very much,” and he hung up.
People of Darkness Page 5