Smoked Out (Digger)

by Warren Murphy

  "Good. Can I go back to bed?"

  "Not yet. I think we’re off the hook because Mrs. Welles’s application was fraudulent. But I’ve got a hunch."

  "Oh, God. It’s not another burglary, is it?"

  "No. It’s all on the up."

  "If it were that simple, Digger, you wouldn’t have called."

  "What I’d like, Frank, is…who’s handling that meeting today with Welles’s attorney?"

  "Langfill," Stevens said.

  "Okay. What I need is a little time. I’d like Landfill to just go through the motions. Listen politely and don’t volunteer anything and let everything stay inconclusive and, for Christ’s sakes, don’t commit us to paying anything."

  "It shouldn’t be hard for Langfill to just go through the motions," Stevens said.

  "It’ll be easier if you call him and tell him what you want him to do."

  "All right. Just what is it you’re pursuing?"

  "I don’t know yet."

  "I’d settle for a fraudulent application," Stevens said.

  "I know. But it’s the nature of man to follow truth wherever it leads him."

  "That’s two clichés in one telephone call. One more and I’ll have a contract put out on your life."

  "Call Landfill now, Frank. Before you go back to sleep. But don’t tell him anything. That man is an imbecile, and anything you tell him will wind up right in Welles’s lawyer’s ear."

  "All right, Digger. I’ll call him now. Then can I go back to sleep?"

  "Yes."

  "Thank you."

  "Sleep tight. Dream pleasant dreams."

  "That’s three. Goodbye."

  Digger depressed the receiver button and dialed another number.

  Lorelei Church answered her telephone on the first ring.

  "Hello."

  "Tim Kelp."

  "Hello, Tim. I was wondering how you were. And your liver. Are you okay?"

  "Yes. Still out of work?"

  "Yes."

  "Want to make a day’s pay?"

  "Is it legal?"

  "Moderately," Digger said.

  "Okay. I always wanted to be in public relations. What do I have to do? I won’t wear a bathing suit or like that."

  "No. I want you to go to San Francisco with me."

  "Why?"

  "I have to do an assignment on something. It helps if there’s a woman with me."

  "All right. Sure. When are we going?"

  "Today."

  "Okay. I don’t have anything to do today. When are we coming back?"

  "Tonight if we’re lucky. Maybe tomorrow if I get lucky."

  "Huh?"

  "Never mind. You had to be there."

  "I’ll pack."

  "Not more than a pocketbook’s worth. If we stay over, I’ll buy you a toothbrush."

  "All right."

  Digger telephoned Koko in Las Vegas.

  "I’m glad I caught you."

  "I was on my way out."

  "Take down this telephone number," Digger said. He read her Rochelle Lindsley’s phone number in Westport, Connecticut. "This is what I want you to do."

  He explained it carefully to the impatient woman.

  "All right. When do you want me to do this?"

  "Today sometime."

  "Okay. Are you all right?"

  "Sure. I’ve been beaten up, threatened with arrest, threatened with firing, threatened with jail. But I’m bearing up."

  "I’ll do this today. You be careful."

  "I have to go to San Francisco. I’ll call."

  "Okay," Koko said. "Digger."

  "Yes."

  "I miss you."

  "Ahh, you Oriental drunks are all alike. Hung over and feeling maudlin sorry for yourself."

  "Go to hell," she said, but she was laughing.

  Digger was happy. Things looked like they might be starting to come together. But there was another piece of the puzzle still to fit into the frame.

  The maid was frosty.

  "Mrs. Walker does not wish to see you."

  "Before you slam the door in my face, give her this," Digger said. He handed her an envelope.

  The maid took it and looked at it on both sides as if challenging it to say something, anything. She again closed the door on Digger.

  He waited a few minutes and the maid reopened the door. She smiled and acted as if she had never seen him before.

  "You can come this way, sir," she said.

  She led Digger to the same parlor room. It was again dark. Mrs. Walker sat in the shadows in a far corner of the room.

  "Please sit there. On the piano bench," she said. Digger sat on the bench, the farthest point in the room from Mrs. Walker, who hung back in the deep shadows.

  "Where did you get this?" she said. She was holding his envelope and the note it contained in her hands.

  "From Dr. Welles. I have the original on your own pink stationery. That’s a copy."

  "I told you the last time, Mr. Burroughs, that I didn’t think you were a nice person. I don’t have any reason to change that viewpoint."

  "I’m not a suspect in a murder."

  "Murder? Whose murder?"

  "I thought maybe you could tell me," Digger said. "Or isn’t that note a murder threat?" Digger noticed the room smelled of flowers. Had it smelled like that the last time? No. This was a perfume smell. Mrs. Walker’s. The last time she had been working in her garden and hadn’t been wearing perfume.

  "Oh, God, no," Mrs. Walker said. "You don’t really believe that, do you?"

  "I’ll tell you what I believe," Digger said. "I believe there was something stinko about Mrs. Welles’s death. I believe that you think she helped clip you and your husband out of your money. I believe that you are a bitter woman, sitting in the dark, and there isn’t a better place in the world to plot revenge. I believe it’s my responsibility to report this to the police and let them come and take you to the cop house for questioning and get to the bottom of this. That’s what I believe, unless I’m given something else to believe."

  It was a bluff, but it worked. Digger could sense Mrs. Walker perceptibly softening in the dark room. Going out in public, even to police headquarters, terrified her.

  "What do you want from me?" she said finally, after a long pause.

  "Why did you think your husband was cheated?"

  "Because Gideon tried so hard to get Harry to invest in that housing development. He was at Harry for months. And he had Jess working on me. It got so every time we were together, she was talking about that housing development. Then when Harry…died, I found out that we were broke. And Gideon told me, ‘Those are the breaks.’ Those were his exact words, Mr. Burroughs. ‘Those are the breaks.’ I just thought that they had made a killing off Harry’s money."

  "Did they?"

  "No. But I didn’t know that until my lawyers really checked into things. They had lost everything, too. I didn’t know that. In the meantime, I was writing Gideon letters. This one, Mr. Burroughs, is rather mild. Some of them were really violent and threatening. I’m surprised Gideon didn’t give you some of those."

  "He didn’t give me this one, either. I stole it from his desk."

  "Oh."

  "It sounds like a murder threat," Digger said.

  "Some of the others were worse. They really were murder threats. I was crazy, Mr. Burroughs. You may not know it, but I was rather seriously injured in the accident that killed my husband…"

  "I know it," Digger said.

  "Yes. And I was crazy. I wrote anything I could think of."

  "But what about Mrs. Welles? She was your friend. Couldn’t you talk to her?"

  "We didn’t talk. She wouldn’t answer my telephone calls. Obviously, Gideon had told her about my letters, but I didn’t know that. It just fueled my suspicion that this was a swindle and she was part of it."

  "Why did you go to her funeral?"

  "She called me the day before she died. She wanted to talk to me. I wouldn’t come to the teleph
one. Then she died. I felt guilty in some way."

  "You didn’t kill her."

  "No."

  "You don’t have any reason to believe her death was any more than an accident?"

  "No."

  "Suppose I told you she was recently insured for a great deal of money and her husband was the beneficiary? Would that change your opinion?"

  "You don’t really know Gideon Welles, do you, Mr. Burroughs?"

  "No."

  "Gideon Welles is a pilot fish. He attaches himself to people with power and talent and money. He lived for years off Harry’s medical talent. Oh, yes, he was a good salesman for the medical practice, but it was Harry’s talent that kept people coming back. Gideon attached himself to Jess because her family was rich. He would use anybody and do anything."

  "He’s a gambler," Digger said. "A big loser."

  "I know."

  "Why didn’t you sue him about the housing project if you thought he cheated you?" Digger asked.

  "Those letters I wrote. My lawyer told me that I’d probably wind up pictured in court as some kind of hysterical woman and—"

  "And you’d have to appear in court yourself? In public?"

  "Yes."

  "Did Mrs. Welles have epilepsy?"

  "She told me once that she had had it when she was a child."

  "Was your husband her doctor?"

  "Well…sort of. Gideon was her doctor. Harry, too. But if she had a medical problem, Harry would not have told me about it. He was a very ethical and disciplined man. He lived by the rules. He wouldn’t talk about his patients, not even to his wife."

  "How long are you going to sit here in the dark, Mrs. Walker?"

  "As long as it takes to die."

  "I think you should see a good plastic surgeon," Digger said. There was no answer. He stood and walked to the windows and pulled open the heavy drapes. Sunlight flooded the room. When he turned to look toward Mrs. Walker, she had spun around in her chair to face the wall, her back toward Digger.

  "That’s cruel, Mr. Burroughs," she said.

  "You’ll think better of me one day," he said. He walked toward the door. His hand was on the doorknob when she called to him.

  "Mr. Burroughs?"

  "Yes."

  "Did Gideon kill Jess?"

  "I don’t know, Mrs. Walker. I honestly don’t know."

  As he walked through the door, her voice trailed after him until he shut the door and sealed her in the room. Her voice was saying, "Find out, Mr. Burroughs. Find out. Find out…"

  He called Lorelei Church from a roadside telephone. Three hours later, they were in San Francisco.

  Driving over the Golden Gate Bridge, Digger decided that the bridge would have to go if San Francisco were to be saved. It was more than just a physical link between the city and Marin County and the north country beyond. It was a pipeline through which the relative sanity of the city could be poisoned by the structured madness of Marin, birthplace of Hot Tubs and Encounters and Touchie-Feelie Therapy and hundreds of other proofs of the doctrine that no matter how ridiculous something was, if you spelled it with capital letters you could find people not only to buy it but to embrace it as Truth. Truth with a capital T. From which it was only a small step to Out-to-Lunch with a capital O.

  The central jewel in this sparkling diadem of dysfunction was Mill Valley. Digger had known it was up to no good when he had first seen it and realized that the people there had been given a beautiful flat valley and chose to live in homes that were hung from the surrounding hillsides like so many birdhouses. Its location did not bode well for the Center for Research into Involuntary Systems.

  "This town’s beautiful," Lorelei said. "I’ve never been here."

  "Yes," Digger said. "I just knew you’d like it. When we meet this Doctor Bogley, I’m going to use a fake name. You’ll be my research assistant. Take a lot of notes."

  "Why?"

  "Because it’ll make us look very professional."

  "No. Why are you using a fake name?"

  "Because I don’t want them to know my real one."

  "Okay." The girl belonged in the White House press corps, Digger thought. She had never asked a follow-up question in her life.

  The center was located in a big, rambling, redwood ranch house built onto a plateau up the side of the northern hill surrounding the valley. They parked in the drive and, before Digger could turn off the key of the rental car, they were met by Dr. Lemuel Bogley, the center’s director.

  He was a short, round man who looked as if his body structure had been designed in a beginner’s course in cartooning: one big circle for the head, a bigger circle for the body and four broad ellipses for the legs and arms. He wore a red and green plaid shirt, khaki trousers tucked into high leather shoes that Digger called shitkickers, a style much affected by a very recent President who, considering his family, had had frequent occasion to use them for their primary purpose. He was totally bald, but he had a full, rounded beard, totally gray, which gave the curious impression that his head was on upside down, an impression that was not dispelled when he spoke.

  He yanked open Digger’s door and said, "Shalom" touching his right fingertips to his belly, chin and forehead and bowing slightly at the same time.

  "Dr. Bogley?"

  "Yes."

  "I’m Burroughs. Here’s my card. It’s nice of you to see us on such short notice. This is Lorelei, my assistant."

  "Glad to help, Mr. Burroughs," Bogley said without looking at the card, one of a number Digger carried that gave his correct name but a string of different job titles. This one identified him as Medical News Coordinator for BSLI. Bogley looked instead at Lorelei, who had dressed for the occasion in a too-tight tee-shirt with a drawing of a caped cat flying through the night sky and the legend "Super Pussy."

  For an expert in involuntary systems, Bogley seemed to be having a little difficulty with his voluntary systems, Digger noticed. The center director had managed to pat Lorelei’s jeans-clad butt before they reached the front door. Inside the corridors, he kept finding excuses for her to brush his upper arm against her bosom. She took to holding her note pad and pen close to her face, with her arms pressed tight against her sides for protection.

  Digger explained that as an information expert with the life-insurance industry, he had one of the greatest opportunities to deal with the nation’s medical establishment. He always looked for an opportunity to bring the new truths to the hidebound, narrow-thinking medical establishment. He said this after seeing the diploma on Bogley’s office wall that established his doctorate as one in philosophy from the Far West University of Life.

  A quack. The man was a quack.

  But he was a talkative quack.

  "What we’re trying to do, Mr. Burroughs, is to quantify what the Far Eastern religions have been doing for years."

  "Praying?"

  "No," Bogley said seriously. The man had no sense of humor, Digger decided. "We’re talking about the physical manifestations of their religious and cultural beliefs, most dramatically, perhaps, the abilities of the yogis. The proven abilities, I might add, to control body functions to a degree that to us in the West appears to be magical."

  "Did you get that?" Digger asked Lorelei. She looked at him in hopeless confusion. Digger winked and she nodded. Good girl, he thought.

  "Such as?" he asked Bogley.

  "There is the proven ability to slow down and sometimes even to stop one’s heartbeat." Digger thought that people had been doing that in the west for centuries simply by dying, but he let it slide. "And to slow one’s pulse. To change one’s skin resistance to electrical currents. To lower one’s blood pressure. Obviously, the potential medical benefits are enormous."

  "And you think people can learn to do these things?" Digger said.

  "It’s no longer a thought; it’s a fact. We have ways now of measuring people’s heartbeats and pulses and blood pressure and skin responses instantly and automatically, with devices that report these re
adings back to the subject instantaneously. Biofeed-back devices, they’re called. And a fact is that if we can monitor an internal activity, we can control it."

  "Fascinating," Digger said.

  "All we need is the right equipment."

  Bogley decided to show them some of the equipment.

  There was a large room in the rear of the building, broken up into small cubicle rooms. Each contained a desk, two chairs and a different piece of apparatus.

  There were blood pressure devices hooked up to computer display boards so subjects could see their blood pressure numbers continuously.

  Heartbeat monitors were rigged up to the same displays. "When a man sees his heart rate is eighty, for instance," Bogley said, "then he’s able to lower it. But don’t ask me why. We don’t know yet. We just know it works."

  In one of the rooms, on a desk, was a small black box with a red-lighted read-out panel. Coming from the box were two wires, which ended in two metal-meshed rings. It was the same machine Digger had seen in Dr. Welles’s desk. He had thought it was a battery charger.

  "And what is this?"

  "It measures galvanic skin response, the changes in resistance to the body’s own electricity as it passes through the skin."

  "In English?"

  "It can be used to measure tension," Bogley said.

  "Do you have some written material on your work?" Digger said. "It would really help me in my article."

  "Sure. Loads of it. A wonderful article in the Berkeley Barb, and the San Francisco Other did a fine piece. I’ve got reprints."

  The reprints, Digger noticed, were careful not to mention the names of the publications. Anyone who wanted to think that they were from the Journal of the American Medical Association was obviously free to do so.

  In the office, Bogley asked, "Who told you about me?"

  "Digger said, "A friend of mine in Los Angeles. Gideon Welles?"

  "Oh, sure. I know Gideon well. One of my star pupils."

  "Really? He didn’t tell me that," Digger said.

  "It’s not like him to be modest. But he was one of my students a year ago when I was running the Center for Creative, Rational Hypnotherapy. Became quite a good hypnotist."

  "And he’s been with you here?" Digger asked.