Where Echoes Live

by Marcia Muller

  “Okay by me. I hope you’re not planning to follow up on this yourself.”

  “Only as far as it affects my case—and then only with your permission.”

  She shrugged. “You got it, as long as you keep us posted.”

  Gifford came up behind her, stroking his bristly mustache. “Either of you a friend of Ms. Nickles?”

  Hy and I exchanged glances.

  “The reason I ask, the boyfriend—if that’s what he is—took off, and she’s in bad shape. Not drunk so much as upset, but I still wouldn’t want her driving.”

  I said, “We’ll take care of her.”

  As the two of them left the room, Hy grabbed my arm. “We’ll take care of her?”

  “It’ll probably require both of us.”

  “Probably.” He sighed. “What are we going to do with her? We can’t just dump her off at her place in Stone Valley.”

  I thought of the awful loneliness of the valley night. “God, no. Tell you what—Rose Wittington seems like a motherly soul. Let’s take Lily to the lodge.”

  Ripinsky grinned. “Rose’ll probably mother her to death. Gives me a kind of perverse pleasure. We ought to go over there anyway, brief Anne-Marie and Ned on what’s happened.” He started for the door, then paused. “One thing, though: you take Lily in your car. Half the time she hates my guts; no telling what she’d do to me if I drove her.”

  I agreed, and we went to Bob Zelda’s office. The Tiger Lily’s petals were badly wilted. She sat on a broken-down couch with the restaurant owner, clutching his plump hand. When she saw me, she drew back and tried to grin in her usual sardonic manner, but she merely looked pathetic. I thought of what Hy had said about Lily’s toughness being mainly facade, and of how it had cracked earlier in the day when she spoke of the man who died and the children who were taken from her by county welfare. Since the tough appearance was clearly important to her, I greeted her without fussing and told her our plan.

  “No way!” She shook her head vehemently. “I’m going home—on my own.”

  “You can’t, Lily. Detective Gifford said he doesn’t want you driving.”

  “Why the fuck not? I’ve driven in worse shape, and I’m not bad off anymore, anyway. Look—steady as a rock.” She held out her right hand; it shook badly. “Well, almost,” she added.

  “It’ll only be for the one night,” I said.

  “Might be a good idea, Lily,” Bob Zelda told her.

  She looked as if she would weaken, but then she glanced at the door and saw Ripinsky, who had been hanging back, trying to be inconspicuous. “What’s that asshole doing here?”

  Ripinsky said, “Now, Lily, don’t start.”

  “Start? Shit, I finished with you years ago.” She turned to me. “He’s not coming with us, is he?”

  “No. You can ride with me.”

  “And you’ll bring me back for my Jeep first thing in the morning?”

  “Yes.”

  She yawned elaborately. “Well, I could use some shut-eye.”

  Nickles collected her jacket from where she’d left it near the dance floor, and she and I went outside to my car. Ripinsky remained in the restaurant, signaling that he’d see me later. It was close to midnight now; the parking lot was deserted, and the sign on the roof had been turned off.

  “Nothing like a good murder to clear a place out,” Nickles said, sounding more cheerful now.

  I chose not to respond, merely unlocked the passenger door of the MG for her. Apparently she sensed I’d found the remark in bad taste, because she didn’t speak again until we pulled up at the lodge. Then she said, “Rose is gonna have a shit fit when she sees me.”

  “Why?”

  “She caught her husband fooling around with me a couple of years ago, right before he died. Probably blames his stroke on the excitement.”

  I wasn’t terribly worried about how Rose Wittington would receive her; Nickles’s sexual escapades had begun to sound like just so many locker-room tales to me.

  We went into the public room of the lodge. Anne-Marie and Rose were watching Peter Lorre look nervous on the big screen. They seemed surprised to see Nickles with me, but when I explained the situation Rose got up, clucking and fussing, and gathered Lily to her comfortable bosom. She led her away, chattering about how the Willow Room was all made up, and wouldn’t Lily like a hot bath or maybe a nice glass of warm milk before she turned in? Nickles looked over her shoulder at me, eyes alarmed and pleading, but I merely smiled a cheerful good night. If she had indeed fooled around with Rose’s late husband, she was about to swallow a hearty dose of revenge-by-mothering.

  Anne-Marie stood, about to speak, when Ripinsky put his head through the door. “All clear?”

  “Yes.” To Anne-Marie I added, “Let’s go down to our cabin and talk. And we’d better wake Ned—I assume he’s asleep.”

  “Oh, probably for hours now. Ned’s the early-to-bed type.”

  “In that case, he ought not to mind being early-to-rise.”

  She went to fetch Sanderman, and Ripinsky and I walked silently downhill to the cabin. It was very dark under the trees; at the lake’s edge I could see the outlines of the willows that trailed their long branches in the brackish water. Something rustled above us, and a bird gave a plaintive cry. I started and brushed against Ripinsky. He put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Nutcracker, from the sound of him,” he said.

  “He’s lonesome.”

  “Probably; nutcrackers like people.”

  We climbed onto the porch and stood for a moment, backs to the door, facing the dark lake. The moon was nearly down now; a red warning light at the end of the dock showed the water’s gentle rippling.

  “You love it here, don’t you?” I said.

  He shrugged. “It’s home.”

  “It’s more to you than that.”

  “What makes you an expert on me?” His voice held an edge of annoyance, but when I didn’t reply he relented. “Yeah, it’s a lot more than that, but it took me a long time to figure it out. When I was just a kid I read what Mark Twain wrote about Mono Lake and decided it went double for Tufa: ‘A lifeless, hideous, treeless desert … wild, gloomy, foreboding … suggestive of sterility and death.’ ”

  “Twain was wrong; he didn’t see its beauty. And given the way he felt about Mono Lake, I doubt he ever ventured up here.”

  “No, but I couldn’t get the words out of my head, and for years I dreamed of leaving Vernon. So I did.”

  “And?”

  “And now I’m back for good.” His tone was final; end of discussion.

  I unlocked the cabin and we went inside. By the time Anne-Marie arrived I had the fire started.

  “Ned took a bit of rousing,” she said, “but he’s on his way. Do either of you want coffee?”

  Ripinsky shook his head. “I’ll take a beer, if you’ve got one.”

  “Brandy for me,” I said.

  “And Ned wants seltzer, and I want herbal tea.” She went to the kitchen, grumbling loudly about people who complicated matters.

  Within five minutes Sanderman arrived, clad in freshly pressed cords and a pullover, his hair slicked back over his incipient bald spot. He’d taken time to shower—and probably time to shave—but his ablutions hadn’t done much for his mood. His face had the look of an infant who had been rudely awakened from his nap; judging from the way his lower lip protruded, I wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d started bawling. He sat stiffly on one of the chairs from the dinette set and accepted the glass of seltzer Anne-Marie offered, glancing disapprovingly when she handed Hy his beer and me my brandy.

  Ripinsky said we should start at the beginning and motioned to me. I told them about my day’s activities in Stone Valley, my visit to Hy, and our trip to Zelda’s. When I got to the part about seeing Nickles across the dance floor, Anne-Marie’s expression grew speculative; I knew I would have to field some questions about Hy after he and Ned left. Her face became grave when I told about the body in the lake, ho
wever. Sanderman’s gaze turned inward; he was probably trying to visualize the scene.

  After I finished, Ripinsky said, “You can see that it’s a damned strange set of circumstances. First no one’s ever heard of or seen this Franklin Tarbeaux. Then a man turns up in the lake, shot sometime today or tonight, and he’s got Tarbeaux’s I.D. in his wallet. And the I.D. looks fake. What I think we ought to—”

  Sanderman interrupted, his voice sharply edged. “What did you say his real name was?”

  “Erickson. Michael M. Address in Barbary Park in San Francisco. As I was saying—”

  “How can you be sure that Tarbeaux wasn’t actually his name? Maybe the Erickson I.D. is the false one.”

  Hy sighed. “I’ve seen enough fake I.D. to know the difference.”

  When he didn’t continue with whatever he’d been trying to say before Sanderman’s interruptions, Anne-Marie turned to me. “Do you think this Erickson was killed because of the land deal?”

  “It would seem that way.” I considered for a moment. “The fact that Erickson may have used a false identity sheds a fairly bad light on that deal. Maybe someone connected with Transpacific silenced Erickson to ensure the fact that Tarbeaux didn’t exist would never come out.”

  “But he had the I.D.,” she reminded me.

  “In a hidden pocket in his wallet,” Ripinsky reminded her. “The killer wouldn’t necessarily have known that.”

  Sanderman stood up and began pacing around the room, hands clasped behind his back, head down. “If that’s the case,” he said, “the killer must have been one of those armed guards at the mine site.”

  “Maybe, maybe not. We can’t jump to that kind of conclusion at this point,” I said.

  “Well, what can we conclude?” he asked.

  “Nothing, yet,” I said.

  “Great, just great!”

  “Take it easy, Ned,” Anne-Marie cautioned.

  Sanderman stopped by the window and stood with his back to us, one fist rapping on its frame. Anne-Marie looked concerned; Ripinsky regarded him with hooded eyes.

  I said, “Let me propose a plan of action. I want to talk with the people I couldn’t locate today in Stone Valley, as well as the one who waved the shotgun at me. I’ll take Nickles along to ease matters. If any of them knew Erickson or even saw him in the valley, I’ll find out.”

  “What about here in town?” Anne-Marie asked. “He’s got to have stayed someplace, talked with someone. You could ask—”

  “The sheriff’s people will do that, and I don’t want to get in their way. Kristen Lark was relatively agreeable about allowing me to continue my investigation; I don’t want to do anything to antagonize her or anyone else in the department. You, on the other hand …” I looked at Ripinsky.

  He was still staring at Sanderman’s back. He moved his focus to me and said, “I, on the other hand, am a concerned local citizen who happened to be there when the body was discovered. It’s natural that I talk about it—and to anybody I damned well please.”

  “Right.”

  “And after that?” Anne-Marie asked me.

  “Transpacific seems to be a big unknown in all this. I need to get back to the city and look into them. I’ll leave Monday morning, stop by the sheriff’s department in Bridgeport and find out what they’ve got on the murder. Then I’ll drive home by way of Carson City and Reno, ask around the casinos for Earl Hopwood.” I turned to Ripinsky. “Is there anyplace I can get a picture of him?”

  “I can probably find one at home if I dig deep enough. Julie was fond of him, used to have him to our ‘strays’ dinners at the holidays.”

  “Good. If Hopwood’s in Nevada, he’s likely to frequent one of the seedier casinos. Their security people may recognize him from a photograph.”

  Sanderman turned from the window. “I don’t know why you’re so interested in Hopwood,” he said peevishly.

  “I’m interested in anyone who had anything to do with that land deal.”

  “Sounds like a waste of energy to me.”

  “Ninety percent of what an investigator does could be classified as a waste of energy.”

  His mouth pulled down. To a man whose computer went everywhere with him, my methods must have seemed quite inexplicable, to say nothing of irritating. After a few seconds he moved toward the door. “I trust no one minds if I try to get a few more hours’ sleep?”

  Ever the peacemaker, Anne-Marie said, “Of course not. Thanks for sitting in, Ned.”

  He nodded curtly and left the cabin. The three of us were silent until his footfalls died away in the grove. Then Anne-Marie said, “Behold the new breed of environmentalist.”

  Ripinsky didn’t speak. His eyes were on the door—cold, contemplative.

  After a moment I said, “Enough about him. What I want to know is this: is anyone else starving?”

  Anne-Marie’s eyes lit up. “Now that you mention it, I’m ravenous!”

  “I haven’t eaten since lunch, except for a few pretzels.”

  “Scrambled eggs? With toast? And I think there’s some sausage.”

  “Chop up some onion and green pepper and mix it with the eggs.”

  “What about mushrooms?”

  “And cheese—I saw some Parmesan in there this morning.”

  “Black olives. And strawberry preserves on the toast.” She got up and started for the kitchen. “Hy?” she called over her shoulder.

  “Just another beer. Well, maybe some toast. Oh, what the hell—everything.” He looked at me, and I knew we were both thinking that this was a pretty perverse but not uncommon reaction to finding a corpse. After a few seconds he asked, “You folks get the late-night munchies often?”

  “We used to.” I thought of the old days, before Anne-Marie had bought her building in the Noe Valley district and married Hank. Back then she’d lived in a tiny room on the second story of All Souls, and if I’d been working late, I could always count on her to join me in whipping up some peculiar, delicious concoction in the big kitchen at the rear of the Victorian.

  Anne-Marie called out for help. Hy and I crowded into the tiny kitchen and pitched in as best we could, an effort that produced much confusion, stepping on of feet, and laughter. Finally we heaped plates—hideous yellow crockery that clashed with the unfortunate orange tile countertops—and carried them to the dinette set. And ate like hungry wolves.

  At one point I looked up and found Ripinsky staring at me. “You always stuff yourself like this, woman?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “How do you stay so skinny?”

  “Good genes.”

  He nodded and went back to his eggs.

  When we’d finished we dumped the dishes into a sinkful of sudsy water. Ripinsky said, “I’d better get going before I get so sleepy I have to beg the use of your couch.” Then he looked at me. “Walk me up the hill?”

  “Sure.” I grabbed my jacket and left with him.

  It was well after two. The early-morning hours in the high desert were frigid; our breath billowed white as we walked to his car.

  “McCone,” Hy said, “are you firearms-qualified?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good shot?”

  “I’m good. A woman in my profession has to be.” Now I was holding back, as he had earlier when he’d refused to elaborate on the years he’d spent away from Tufa Lake. Holding back not so much facts as emotional shadings, about things I’d been forced to do and sometimes wished undone.

  He asked, “Got a piece with you?”

  “No, it’s at home. I used to keep one in the glovebox of my car, but when it was broken into and the gun stolen, I decided that was too risky.”

  We reached the Morgan. Hy leaned against it, arms folded, face concerned in the glow from the lodge’s security lights. “I’d loan you one of mine, but by the time I got it and brought it back—”

  “Don’t bother. I’m also a mean hand with a fireplace poker.”

  His lips twitched, but he sobered quickly. “
I don’t know, maybe I’m overreacting. But old habits die hard. You do me a favor—keep that poker next to your bed tonight.”

  “I will.”

  He made no move to get into the car. I shifted from foot to foot—not really cold or impatient, but suddenly ill at ease.

  Hy said, “Come here, McCone. Give me a hug.”

  Without hesitating, I went to him. He held me tightly, his breath warm against my forehead. The closeness seemed as natural as when we’d danced at Zelda’s. After a few seconds he released me, a melancholy smile on his lips.

  “See you later on today,” he said, and folded his long body into the Morgan.

  Seven

  I didn’t sleep restfully or long, and by seven I was up and dressed. A quick glance into Anne-Marie’s room showed that she’d burrowed deep and pulled the pillows over her head as defense against the sound of the shower. The fact that she’d already been in bed when I’d returned to the cabin after walking Hy up the hill told me how tired she must have been; I’d seldom known her to restrain her curiosity about anything so provocative as why I’d allowed Ripinsky to talk me into dancing at Zelda’s.

  I made myself a mug of instant coffee, pulled on my jacket, and stepped onto the porch. The gray outlines of the willows framed the pink-streaked lake. Waterfowl glided across its surface, pausing occasionally to turn tails-up to feed; gulls and plovers made touch-and-go landings on the gnarled tufa islands.

  My gaze rested on the nearby dock, where a figure sat facing lakeward, one knee drawn up. Apparently Ned Sanderman couldn’t sleep either. At first I almost went back inside, but finally I descended the steps and carried my coffee over there. He glanced back as my footsteps set the boards vibrating.

  “Good morning,” I said. “It looks as if it’ll be a pretty day.”

  He nodded curtly.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “If you like.”

  Good Lord, I thought, he can’t still be pouting! I asked, “Were you able to get more sleep?”

  “No. I kept thinking about … Actually, I’m glad you’re up early so we can talk privately. There’s something I have to tell you.”

  I sat next to him and offered him a sip of coffee.