Jonathan Kellerman - [Alex Delaware 01]

by When the Bough Breaks (Shrunken Heads) (v5. 0) (epub)

“Here.” She handed me the photocopy. The death of Lilah Towle and “Little Willie” had made the front page, sharing space with a report on fraternity hijinks and a reprint of an Associated Press report on the dangers of “mariwuana reefers.” I started to read but the copy was blurred and barely legible. Margaret saw me straining.

  “The original was rubbed out.”

  “It’s okay.” I skimmed the article long enough to see that it was consistent with Van der Graaf’s recollection.

  “Here’s another story, several days later—about the funeral. This one’s better.”

  I took it from her and examined it. By now the Towle affair was on page six, a social register item. The account of the ceremony was maudlin and full of dropped names. A photograph at the bottom caught my eye.

  Towle led the mourners procession, haggard and grim, hands folded in front of him. To one side was a younger, still toadlike Edwin Hayden. To the other, slightly to the rear, was a towering figure. There was no mistaking the identity of the mourner.

  The kinky hair was black, the face bloated and shiny. The heavy framed eyeglasses I’d seen a few days before were replaced by gold-rimmed, round spectacles resting low on the meaty nose.

  It was the Reverend Augustus McCaffrey in younger days.

  I folded both papers and slipped them in my jacket pocket.

  “Call Van der Graaf,” I said.

  “He’s an old man. Don’t you think you’ve questioned him enou—”

  “Just call him,” I cut her off. “If you don’t I’ll run back there myself.”

  She winced at my abruptness, but dialed the phone.

  When the connection was made she said, “Sorry to bother you, Professor. It’s him again.” She listened, shot me an unhappy look and handed me the receiver, holding it at arm’s length.

  “Thank you,” I said sweetly. Into the phone: “Professor, I need to ask you about another student. It’s important.”

  “Go on. I’ve only Miss November of 1973 occupying my attention. Who is it?”

  “Augustus McCaffrey—was he a friend of Towle, too?”

  There was silence on the other end of the line and then the sound of laughter.

  “Oh, dear me! That’s a laugh! Gus McCaffrey, a Jedson student! And him touched by the tar brush!” He laughed some more and it was a while before he caught his breath. “Mary Mother of God, no, man. He was no student here!”

  “I’ve got a photograph in front of me showing him at the Towle funeral—”

  “Be that as it may, he was no student. Gus McCaffrey was—I believe they call themselves maintenance engineers today—Gus was a janitor. He swept the dormitories, took out the trash, that kind of thing.”

  “What was he doing at the funeral? It looks like he’s right behind Towle, ready to catch him if he falls.”

  “No surprise. He was originally an employee of the Hickle family—they had one of the largest homes on Brindamoor. Family retainers can grow quite close to their masters—I believe Stuart brought him over to Jedson when he began college here. He did eventually attain some kind of rank within the custodial staff—supervising janitor or something similar. Leaving Brindamoor may very well have been an excellent opportunity for him. What’s big Gus doing today?”

  “He’s a minister—the head of that children’s home I told you about.”

  “I see. Taking out the Lord’s trash, so to speak.”

  “So to speak. Can you tell me anything about him.”

  “I honestly can’t, I’m afraid. I had no contact with the nonacademic employees—there’s a tendency to pretend they’re invisible that’s acquired over time. He was a big brute of a fellow, that I do recall. Slovenly, seemed quite strong, may very well have been bright—your information certainly points in that direction, and I’m no social Darwinist with a need to dispute it. But that is really all I can tell you. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. One last thing—where can I get a map of Brindamoor Island?”

  “There’s none that I know of outside the County Hall of Records—wait, a student of mine did an undergraduate thesis on the history of the place, complete with residential map. I don’t have a copy but I believe it would be stored in the library, in the thesis section. The students’ name was—let me think—Church? No, it was something else of a clerical nature—Chaplain. Gretchen Chaplain. Look under C, you should find it.”

  “Thanks again, Professor. Good-bye.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Margaret Dopplemeier sat at her desk, glaring at me.

  “I’m sorry for being rude,” I said. “It was important.”

  “All right,” she said. “I just thought you could have been a little more polite in view of what I’ve done for you.” The possessive look slithered into her eyes like a python into a lagoon.

  “You’re right. I should have. I won’t trouble you further.” I stood up. “Thanks so much for everything.” I held out my hand, and when she reluctantly extended hers, I took it. “You’ve really made a big difference.”

  “That’s good to know. How long will you be staying?”

  Gently I broke the handclasp.

  “Not long.” I backed away, smiled at her, finally got my hand on the knob and pushed. “All the best, Margaret. Enjoy your blackberries.”

  She started to say something, then thought better of it. I left her standing behind her desk, a circle of pink tongue-tip visible in the corner of her unattractive mouth, searching for a taste of something.

  The library was properly austere and very respectably stocked with books and journals for a college the size of Jedson. The main room was a marble cathedral draped in heavy red velvet and lit by oversized windows placed ten feet apart. It was filled with oak reading tables, green-shaded lamps, leather chairs. All that was missing were people to read the august volumes that papered the walls.

  The librarian was an effete young man with close-cropped hair and a pencil mustache. His shirt was red plaid, his tie a yellow knit. He sat behind his reference table reading a recent copy of Artforum. When I asked him where the thesis section was, he looked up with the astonished expression of a hermit observing the penetration of his lair.

  “There,” he said, languidly, and pointed to a spot at the south end of the room.

  There was an oak card catalog and I found Gretchen Chaplain’s thesis listed in it. The title of her magnum opus had been Brindamoor Island: Its History and Geography.

  Theses by Frederick Chalmers and O. Winston Chastain were present, but Gretchen’s rightful place between them was unfilled. I checked and doublechecked the Library of Congress number but that was a fruitless ritual: The Brindamoor study was gone.

  I went back to Plaid Shirt and had to clear my throat twice before he tore himself away from a piece on Billy Al Bengston.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m looking for a specific thesis and can’t seem to find it.”

  “Have you checked the card file to make sure it’s listed?”

  “The card’s there but the thesis isn’t.”

  “How unfortunate. I would guess it’s been checked out.”

  “Could you check for me, please?”

  He sighed and took too long to raise himself out of his chair. “What’s the author’s name?”

  I gave him all the necessary information and he went behind the checkout counter with an injured look. I followed him.

  “Brindamoor Island—dreary place. Why would you want to know about that?”

  “I’m a visiting professor form UCLA and it’s part of my research. I didn’t know an explanation was necessary.”

  “Oh, it’s not,” he said, quickly, and buried his nose in a stack of cards. He lifted out a portion of the cards and shuffled them like a Vegas pro. “Here,” he said, “that thesis was checked out six months ago—my, it’s overdue, isn’t it?”

  I took the card. Scant attention had been paid to Gretchen’s masterpiece. Prior to its last withdrawal a half year ago, the last time it had been che
cked out was in 1954, by Gretchen herself. Probably wanted to show it to her kids—Mummy was once quite a scholar, little ones …

  “Sometimes we get behind on checking on overdue notices. I’ll get right on this, Professor. Who checked it out last?”

  I looked at the signature and told him. As the name left my mouth my brain processed the information. By the time the two words had dissolved I knew my mission wouldn’t be complete without a trip to the island.

  24

  THE FERRY to Brindamoor Island made its morning trip at seven-thirty.

  When the wake-up call from the desk came in at six it found me showered, shaved and tensely bright-eyed. The rain had started again shortly after midnight, pounding the glass walls of the suite. It had roused me for a dreamlike instant during which I was certain I’d heard the sound of cavalry hooves stampeding down the corridor, and had gone back to sleep anyway. Now it continued to come down, the city below awash and out of focus, as if viewed from inside a dirty aquarium.

  I dressed in heavy slacks, leather jacket, wool turtleneck, and took along the only raincoat I had: an unlined poplin doublebreasted affair that was fine for Southern California but of uncertain utility in the present surroundings. I caught a quick breakfast of smoked salmon, bagels, juice and coffee and made it to the docks at ten after seven.

  I was among the first to queue up at the entrance to the auto bay. The line moved and I drove down a ramp into the womb of the ferry behind a VW bus with Save the Whale stickers on the rear bumper. I obeyed the gesticulations of a crewman dressed in dayglo orange overalls and parked two inches from the slick, white wall of the bay. An ascent of two flights brought me on deck. I walked past a gift shop, tobacconist and snack bar, all closed, and a blackened room furnished wall to wall with video games. A waiter played Pac Man in solitude, devouring dots with brow-furrowing concentration.

  I found a seat with a view at the stern, folded my raincoat across my lap and settled back for the one-hour ride.

  The ship was virtually empty. My few fellow passengers were young and dressed for work: hired help from the mainland commuting to their assigned posts at the manors of Brindamoor. The return trip, no doubt, would be filled with commuters of another class: lawyers, bankers, other financial types, on their way to downtown offices and paneled boardrooms.

  The ocean pitched and rolled, frothing in response to the surface winds that drag-raced along its surface. There were smaller craft at sea, mostly fishing boats, tugs and scows, and they danced in command, curtsying and dipping. For all the ferry moved it might have been a toy model on a shelf.

  A group of six young men in their late teens came aboard and sat down ten feet away. Blond, bearded in varying degrees of shagginess, dressed in rumpled khakis and dirt-grayed jeans, they passed around a thermos full of something that wasn’t coffee, joked, smoked, put their feet up on chairs and emitted a collective guffaw that sounded like a beery laugh track. One of them noticed me and held up the thermos.

  “Swig, my man?” he offered.

  I smiled and shook my head.

  He shrugged, turned away and the party started up again.

  The ferry’s horn sounded, the rumble of its engines reverberating through the floorboards, and we started to move.

  Halfway through the trip I walked over to where the six young drinkers sat, now slumped. Three of them slept, snoring open-mouthed, one was reading an obscene comic book, and two, including the one who’d offered me the drink, sat smoking, hypnotized by the glowing ends of their cigarettes.

  “Excuse me.”

  The two smokers looked up. The reader paid no attention.

  “Yeah?” The generous one smiled. He was missing half of his front teeth: bad oral hygiene or a quick temper. “Sorry, man, we got no more Campbell’s soup.” He picked up the thermos and shook it. “Ain’t that right, Dougie?”

  His companion, a fat boy with drooping mustaches and muttonchop sideburns, laughed and nodded his head.

  “Yeah, no more soup. Chicken noodle. Ninety proof.”

  From where I was standing the whole bunch of them smelled like a distillery.

  “That’s all right. I appreciate the offer. I was just wondering if you could give me some information about Brindamoor.”

  Both boys looked puzzled, as if they’d never thought of themselves as having any information to give.

  “What do you want to know? Place is a drag,” said Generous.

  “Fuckin-A.” Fat Boy nodded assent.

  “I’m trying to find a certain house on the island, can’t seem to get hold of a map.”

  “That’s ‘cause there ain’t any. People there like to hide from the rest of the world. They got private cops ready to roust you for spittin’ the wrong way. Me ‘n’ Doug and the rest of these jokers go over to do groundswork on the golf course, pickin’ up crap and litter and stuff. Finish the day and head straight back for the boat, man. We want to keep our jobs, we stick to that—exactly.”

  “Yeah,” said the fat one. “No shootin’ for the local beaver, no partyin’. Workin’ people been doin’ it for years and years—my dad worked Brindamoor before he got in the union, and I’m just doin’ it until he gets me in. Then, fuck those hermits. He told me they had a song for it, back in those days: Heft and tote, then float on the boat.” He laughed and slapped his buddy on the back.

  “What you interested in findin’?” Generous lit another cigarette and placed it in the snaggled gap where his upper incisors should have been.

  “The Hickle house.”

  “You related to them?” Doug asked. His eyes were the color of the sea, bloodshot and suddenly dull with worry, wondering if I was someone who could turn his words against him.

  “No. I’m an architect. Just doing a little sightseeing. I was told the Hickle house would be of interest. Supposed to be the biggest one on the island.”

  “Man,” he said, “they’re all big. You could fit my whole fuckin’ neighborhood in one of them.”

  “Architect, huh?” Generous’s face brightened with interest. “How much school it take to do that?”

  “Five years of college.”

  “Forget it,” the fat one kidded him. “You’re an airhead, Harm. You got to learn how to read and write first.”

  “Fuck you!” said his friend, good-naturedly. To me: “I worked construction last summer. Architecture’s probly pretty interestin’.”

  “It is. I do mostly private houses. Always looking for new ideas.”

  “Yeah, hey, right. Gotta keep it interestin’.”

  “Aw, man,” chided Dougie. “We don’t do nothing interestin’. Clean up goddam garbage—hell, man, there’s fun going on there at that club, ‘cause last week Matt ‘n’ me found a couple of used rubbers out by hole number eleven—and we’re missin’ it, Harm.”

  “I don’t need those people for my fun,” said the generous one. “You want to know about houses, mister, let’s ask Ray.” He turned and leaned across one sleeping boy to elbow the one with the comic book, who’d kept his nose buried in his reading and hadn’t looked up once. When he did, his face had the glazed look of someone very stupid or very stoned.

  “Huh?”

  “Ray, you dumbshit, man wants to know about the Hickle house.”

  The boy blinked, uncomprehending.

  “Ray’s been droppin’ too much acid out in the woods. Just can’t seem to shake himself out of it.” Harm grinned, his tonsils visible. “C’mon, man, where’s the Hickle place?”

  “Hickle,” Ray said. “My old man used to work there—spooky place he said. Weird. I think it’s on Charlemagne. The old man used to—”

  “All right, man.” Harm shoved Ray’s head down and he returned to his comic book. “They got strange names for streets on the island, Mister. Charlemagne, Alexander, Suleiman.”

  Conquerors. The little joke of the very rich was evidently lost on those who were its intended butt.

  “Charlemagne is an inland road. You go just past the main drag
, past the market, a quarter mile—look hard because the street signs are usually covered by trees—and turn, lemme see, turn right, that’s Charlemagne. After that you’d best ask around.”

  “Much obliged.” I reached in and pulled out my wallet. “Here’s for your trouble,” I said, taking out a five.

  Harm held out his hand—in protest, not collection. “Forget it, mister. We didn’t do nothin’.”

  Doug, the fat boy, gave him an angry look and grunted.

  “Up yours, Dougie,” said the boy with the missing teeth. “We didn’t do nothin’ for the man’s money.” Despite his unkempt hair and the war zone of a mouth, he had intelligence and a certain dignity. He was the kind of kid I wouldn’t mind having at my side when the going got rough.

  “Let me buy you a round, then.”

  “Nah,” said Harm. “We can’t drink no more, Mister. Got to hit the course in half an hour. Be slick as snot on a day like this. Bubble Butt here, drink any more, he could fall and bounce down and crush the rest of us.”

  “Fuck you, Harm,” said Doug, without heart.

  I put the money back. “Thanks much.”

  “Think nothin’ of it. You build some houses that don’t need union help, you want reliable construction muscle, remember Harmon Lundquist. I’m in the book.”

  “I will.”

  Ten minutes before the boat reached shore the island emerged from behind a dressing screen of rain and fog, an oblong, squat, gray chunk of rock. Except for the coiffure of trees that covered most of its outer edges, it could have been Alcatraz.

  I went down to the auto bay, got behind the wheel of the Nova and was ready when the man in orange waved us down the ramp. The scene outside might have been lifted off the streets of London. There were enough black topcoats, black umbrellas, and black hats to fill Piccadilly. Pink hands held briefcases and the morning’s Wall Street Journal. Eyes stared straight ahead. Lips set grimly. When the gate at the foot of the gangway opened they moved in procession, each man in his place, every shiny black shoe rising and falling in response to an unseen drummer. A squadron of perfect gentlemen. A gentleman’s brigade …