“So?” Nina asked.
“That’s what I wanted to tell you. Before all this stuff, I saw him with somebody, sitting at one of the little tables. This other guy was yelling when I came in and Sykes was trying to shush him. This hairy guy was really mad.”
“Why?” Nina said.
“They both stood up and they didn’t even see me, and the hairy guy says something. And his fists came up and I thought, he’s gonna kill him before I get to kill him.” She closed her eyes and shifted from one foot to another, rocking like a boat on a wave. “What I wouldn’t do for a little wine. You sure you don’t have anything? Even a beer?”
“No. What did this other man look like?”
“Big and burly like a logger. Filthy dirty, matted hair. Rough. Bearded. A knitted cap on his head. Had some kind of accent.”
“Did you catch anything that was said?”
“No words. They had this bag on the table in front of them. They were arguing about it.” Nina had a prickling sensation. Was this what Nikki had taken?
“And Sykes died a week later,” Linda said. “One week. You’re a smart lady. You figure it out. What were they arguing about?”
“Linda, did you ever go to Sykes’s house?” Nina asked.
“Just the one time.”
“When, Linda? What happened when you went to his house?”
Although Nina persisted with her, Linda had nothing more to say. Her attention had wandered away to the thing she really cared about at the moment, and would not be shaken back. “I don’t feel good. You must have something. A few beers. A bottle of wine in the groceries. Maybe out in the car?”
“I didn’t bring anything.”
“Your mistake,” Linda said. She got up and crossed the floor. She sat on the bed. “I need a rest. Then I got to hitch to town. So you better go.” Her head hit the pillow and her eyes closed.
“Linda?” Nina said, coming over to the bed and looking down. “Let us help you.”
Linda just lay there, arms at her sides, eyes closed.
“Listen . . .”
“Go ’way,” Linda said. She wasn’t asleep. She opened her eyes, and what Nina saw there frightened her.
Two hundred miles away on the coast, the view from Paul’s living-room window that day embodied the best of California, all floating blue sky, water, and pirouetting eucalyptus leaves. At the bottom of the landscape, like the arms of a hula dancer, the Pacific swayed to its own rhythm. Here, the sea determined the moods of the day. Not so different from Tahoe, he thought, except there, the lake ruled.
Gathering the contents of his pockets, he got himself out the door. At the rental agency, he cajoled a pretty girl into driving him back to his condo and his own car.
“That yours?” she said admiringly as he got out.
He looked. A yellow Lamborghini preened at the curb. “You like it?” he said.
She kissed her hand and blew on it toward the car. Then she looked pityingly at Paul. “But I can see why you needed a rental.” She roared off.
He hoped, he really hoped, she meant because of the cast.
Parking, never easy in downtown Carmel, stunk on sunny days. Circling until he could get a place close to his office, he confronted his first major flight of stairs.
Five minutes later, huffing only a little, he landed at the door to his office, where a new sign announced “Dean Trumbo,” on a tastelessly large brass plate.
Below it hung his original sign which said in the more subdued, antiqued brass which Paul thought both dignified and imposing, “Van Wagoner Investigations.”
He touched the handle, which was unlocked, and turned it, ever so slowly. The door pushed open, and he peeked inside.
Dean held Paul’s telephone intimately close to his mouth, his loafered feet rested on Paul’s desk, and he was puffing, if Paul was not mistaken, on one of Paul’s prime Cuban cigars, the gift of a grateful client. Paul’s coffee cup, dirtied by Dean’s lips, rested lightly on the papers in front of him.
“Hello, Deano,” said Paul, watching with satisfaction as the cigar fell out of Dean’s mouth. The feet went down and the telephone crashed into silence.
“My man! Come on in!” said Dean, dusting ash off his shirt and crushing the cigar out in an ashtray.
Paul moved in and looked the old place over. He almost didn’t recognize his own office. The color photos of Namche Bazar, Tengboche, Machupuchare, Everest—gone. In their places were posters in silver frames featuring mega-magnifications of chrome in glossy black and white. His Tibetan rugs casually strewn about—missing in action, replaced by gray industrial carpet. Where once his bendable metal lamp had sat bolted to the desk edge, a black geometrical sculpture with light coming out of its head radiated illumination. Worst of all, his treasured battered venetian blinds had been usurped by mini-blinds.
The place looked like the “artistic” loft of some pretentious rich boy. Paul felt a snarl forming.
Dean stood up, reaching out to grab Paul’s hand from across the desk. Paul let the hand shake air for a few moments.
Dean took his hand casually back. “Good to see you,” he said. “What happened to your leg?”
“Work-related injury,” said Paul.
“Someone come after you?”
“Sort of.”
“Helluva big cast,” Deano said.
“Yeah.” Paul’s voice had dropped almost to a whisper. “Yeah, Deano. My good friend Deano.”
“Why don’t you take a load off?” Dean said. “That bum leg can’t feel too good.”
Pushing past him, Paul sank into the ergonomic chair behind the desk, the one thing in the office which remained undeniably his. “Have a seat,” he said.
Dean sat in the client chair across from the desk, while Paul pushed the papers onto the floor. “Paul, listen . . .”
“I don’t want to listen, Dean.”
“No, but . . .” Droplets of nervous sweat were springing up on Dean’s forehead. “Those are the accounts. I was organizing them to show you.” He got up again and picked up a stack. “See?” he said, putting some back onto the desk. “And see this?”
Paul knocked them off the desk, never taking his eyes off Dean. “I don’t want to look at papers, Deano. I want to look at you.”
“Don’t you like it?” Dean said.
“You mean the office?”
“Things were slow. I was looking for some ways to get the business jump-started. I really fixed it up, didn’t I?”
“You fixed it all right.”
“Your rugs are safe. I put them in the storeroom. I called a rug store to make sure I stowed them right.”
“And the posters?”
“They were so old,” Dean said. “Yellow on the backs. Torn.”
“They weren’t torn when I left.”
“I ran into a little trouble peeling them out of the frames.”
“Ah. Peeling them.”
“Thought I could save us some money there by recycling.”
“Even the one signed by Edmund Hillary?”
“Who?”
Paul said nothing for a moment, then, “I guess business must be booming, judging by all this redecorating.”
“Well, no,” said Dean. “That’s what I wanted to show you.”
The phone rang. Dean jerked. Paul picked it up. “Van Wagoner Investigations.”
“Hey, Dean,” said a voice Paul recognized. Ez, his oldest client. “About that job . . .”
“Hey, Ez. It’s Paul.”
Ez hung up.
“Why’d Ez hang up on me, Deano?” Paul said.
“Why, I haven’t got the slightest idea. I suppose Ez and I have worked together for six months now and he prefers that.”
“But he hung up on me.”
“Must be a bad day.”
“Did you tell him something about me that upset him?”
“Me? Oh, no. No, my man. I would never—you shouldn’t have left for so long. Things dried up without you, Paul. The client
s left. It’s just too bad.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that the business is going under. You have debts . . .”
“I have debts?”
“People that need paying,” he said hurriedly. “Suppliers knocking on the door. The income just isn’t there anymore, Paul. I’m really sorry I let you down like this.” Once again, he picked up the folder from the floor. “Just take a look. You’ll see what I mean.”
Paul poked a button on the machine. After preparing a less grating message, one that mentioned his name several times and Dean’s not at all, he let the machine take calls. For the next half hour, he studied the papers, while Dean sat opposite him, not daring to move.
“I see,” he said at last. “Van Wagoner Investigations does appear to be going under.”
Dean nodded vigorously. “Like I said. I know it’s tough. You’ve been here for a long time, my man . . . but maybe it’s time to start new, somewhere fresh. The old stomping grounds aren’t so fertile anymore.”
“Get out, huh?” Paul said, nodding, steepling his fingers. “You think I should?”
“I’ll try to help out. Here’s my offer. I sublet this office from you, and buy out your position with your few remaining clients here. There’s just enough to make a start, as long as only one of us is drawing on the pot. I could give you five thousand. That gives you a little financial pillow, too. Maybe you’re ready for a big change. I didn’t see you flying back from Washington any more often than you had to, except to see Susan a couple of times. And then you spent more time up in Tahoe than here when you did come around. This is a small pond for a big guy like you.”
Paul stood up. He pulled his crutches under his arms.
As if preparing to give Paul a hand, Dean rushed over. “So what do you think?” he said. He took one look at Paul’s face and backed off, but too late. Paul nudged him with his crutch. Deano fell on his ass.
In about a tenth of a second, Paul was on him, thumb pressed against Deano’s throat.
“Gawk. Gawk, gawk,” Dean sputtered.
“I think,” Paul said softly, “that you have been cheating me and slandering me and embezzling from me. But that’s not important, because you’ll pay back the money, every stinkin’ penny. What’s really important”—he pressed the thumb a little and saw Deano’s terror increasing as the breath began to be cut off— “what I can’t forgive”—Deano’s rasping breath and bulging eyes—“is your not knowing who Sir Edmund Hillary is. You’ve gone too far, my man.”
“Don’t kill me,” Dean rasped.
Paul pressed a little harder, until he judged Deano would be seeing red, then leaned close and whispered, “You’re the one who’s leaving town. Tonight.”
Dean nodded and gasped. Paul rolled off him, grabbed a crutch, and hauled himself up. Dean sat up on the floor, getting his breath back.
“Get out, Deano.”
Dean went without another word, sport coat flapping. Paul flopped down at his desk again and reached behind him in the credenza for his special bottle of Scotch. Gone.
He had thought, when he had Deano on the carpet, of inflicting a little damage, pressing the point as it were. But when Deano said, “Don’t kill me,” all the fun had gone out of it.
Back in the car, he left a message on Susan Misumi’s voice mail, making nice without a long-winded explanation of his absence. He specified a particular picnic table at Point Lobos, saying he would meet her, lunch in basket, in an hour. Stopping at a deli on the way out of town, he loaded up on his favorites, deviled eggs, barbecued chicken, sourdough bread, cold beer, a Beringer Merlot, pippin apples and Bartlett pears, tucking them into a basket with red and white napkins and crystal stemware he had remembered to stick in the trunk before he had left home. He made a second stop at a booth on the road to buy some fried artichoke hearts.
He looked forward to spending time with an uncomplicated woman and some good food.
She arrived not long after he had staked out a table with a spectacular ocean view. They talked and ate. He liked her a lot. He decided to go home with her, and she didn’t mind.
Which is why Nina found him at Susan’s place later that afternoon, crutches abandoned in the living room, Susan asleep beside him, her mouth open, snoring softly.
The phone rang, stirring him out of a serene trance of post-sex nothingness. When he saw that Susan was not going to answer, in fact could not, given her advanced state of unconsciousness, he picked it up.
“Paul?”
“Who else?” he said, because it was such an all-purpose retort, and the circumstances were still groggy in his mind.
“It’s me. Nina.”
“Hi, there,” he said. Susan moved. He held the phone and his breath absolutely still. Her head sank deeper into the pillow.
“You have a minute?”
“Sure.” He lifted his arm ever so gently out from under Susan’s right breast. “Maybe you could hold on for a minute while I, um . . . just hold on . . .” He meant to change phones but realized suddenly that his crutches were in the living room and he was in the bedroom and never the twain would meet, short of waking Susan and asking for help or going down on all fours. All three, anyway.
“No, wait. This will just take a second. You’re sure I’m not interrupting something?”
How irritating the woman could be. “Of course not.”
“Nobody was at the office, and I couldn’t raise you, so I called Dean on his cell phone. He was kind of short with me. Said I might find you here.”
Susan’s arm snaked its way over to his thigh. “Umm,” she moaned.
He edged away. He did not want her hand on his thigh. There was a time and a place for that sort of thing. “What’s up?” he asked.
“I need you to get back to Tahoe right away,” Nina said. “Can’t you come first thing in the morning?”
Susan’s eyes drifted open, then closed again, but lightly. Her breathing deregulated.
“Why?”
“I’m beginning to feel you aren’t really committed to this case, Paul. I told you I need you. I’ve got a young girl’s life in my hands, and so far, nothing to stop the machine from putting her in jail for the rest of her life. How’s that for a reason? Now, are you with me on this, or not?”
“I am, Nina.” He felt a stab of guilt and looked at the cast.
“Beth Sykes offered to give you and Wish the run of her house tomorrow, and her neighbor Louise Garibaldi is willing to be interviewed, but she says it has to be tomorrow or we have to wait another week. I can’t really prepare for the prelim if my investigator hasn’t seen the main witness against Nikki and the place where the murder occurred. I spoke with the mother of a girl who died after a procedure Sykes did. Linda Littlebear. Remember her?”
He remembered Sandy’s wedding very well, remembered Nina focused entirely on another man, wanting to marry him. “Yes.”
“She blames him for her daughter’s death. She attacked him once at Prize’s. She also told me about a man who was arguing with Dr. Sykes at the casino that night. A man who might be a foreigner, who looked like a logger. And there was a bag on the table in front of them. Who was he? What was that all about? What was in the bag? Sykes was a doctor. Was he doing some illegal traffic in drugs? Could the man have been Dave LeBlanc? Is that the connection?
“And I had a conversation with Daria Zack last night. Turns out she recently sold the victim a piece of land she inherited from her grandfather some time back. Nikki was angry when she found out. She felt ripped off.”
“That’s interesting. She ever tell you what she took?”
“I tackled her about it again last night on the phone. I used her mother, used the threat of prison, used everything. She won’t talk.” Tension and anger flowed through her words.
“You’ll get what you want out of her eventually, Nina. Somehow, you always do. Now, where is this land? At Tahoe?”
“No. It’s in a place called Clay Hills, north of Winnemuc
ca. It’s an old silver claim. Totally mined out. That’s been checked from here to eternity, according to Daria. She said everybody knew it, even her Grandpa Logan, who was a real silver prospector and knew all about that kind of thing.”
“Sykes bought worthless land,” Paul said, drawn in in spite of the hazards of the moment. “Maybe he wasn’t as bad as we’re making out.”
“According to some, he could be a real stinker. Sandy set up some appointments for you over the next couple of days with other associates, too. I want you to meet his partner, Dylan Brett, get a read on the man. See what you can dig up. Can you come?”
“Sure. I’ll drive up first thing in the morning. Have Sandy tell Wish to pick me up at Caesars tomorrow about 11 A.M.” He felt her surprise at his easy agreement, but an instant later, she had recovered and was pressing him further.
“Maybe I can fly you up out of San Jose,” she suggested. “They’ve got direct flights running to Tahoe again.”
“I’ll drive,” he said firmly, putting the phone back in its cradle. Nina, Nina, everywhere, even here, in another woman’s bed.
“You’re leaving again?” asked Susan, stretching. “You just got here.”
“Be here now,” he said, putting his hand back where it belonged. “Remember that old saying? Remember Baba Ram Dass? Remember when bliss was attainable by chanting and shaking rattles at airports?”
“No,” she murmured. “But it doesn’t matter.” She started fooling around, too, and pretty soon they were traveling once more toward those distant realms.
CHAPTER 12
BETH SYKES, NOW the sole owner of the house on the private court off Bayview Way, had left a key for them under a slat by the front door. She had gone to Carson City for the day.
Parking to one side of the narrow lane, Paul and Wish got out and tried to get a feel for the property. A lodge-style home, it reminded Paul of Yosemite’s Ahwahnee, true to its rough mountain setting on the outside but luxurious on the inside. Running down a gently sloping hillside toward the lake, the two-story house appeared to be only a single story from the road. Afternoon sun poured down on them from between the branches of neat blue spruces. The birds had returned from their winter getaways and were taking full advantage of the beautiful day, staking out territories, making a mad racket in the surrounding pine trees.
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