An Equal Opportunity Death

by Susan Dunlap

  “Like something you’d find in Oakland or San Francisco,” Paul said.

  “Frank came from San Francisco,” I said.

  “Yes,” Paul agreed, “but that was two years ago.” Involuntarily we both glanced toward Patsy. Normally pale, tonight her skin was almost as gray as Frank’s. She clutched a glass of red wine. Patsy had liked Frank. In fact, when she and Paul had taken over the canoe rental here last year, there had been speculation about her and Frank. It had died quickly when Frank was seen with several attractive summer people.

  Patsy looked like she would have been better off with a quiet drink at home this evening, but I suspected neither Paul nor Patsy had seriously considered declining a free meal. They could be generous and they could spend money (those cowboy boots weren’t cheap) but there was something about them—a stain of the sixties—that would always make a free meal irresistible.

  “Frank had left the city behind,” Paul said. “This was his place now.”

  “If you think that,” I said, “then it would follow that someone here shot him.”

  “No, I don’t …”

  “Of course not,” I said quickly. “Did the sheriff question you?”

  “He tried,” Paul said defiantly. Another vestige of the sixties. Beside him, Patsy shrank back and stiffened.

  “We couldn’t tell them much,” Paul continued. “We were in Santa Rosa all day getting supplies. As soon as the river floods, the county will commandeer our canoes. And they’ll bring them back banged up. They’re always pleased to have them for their rescues, but no one’s ever around when they need to be repaired.”

  Patsy nodded absently.

  “And our county government doesn’t feel any responsibility to pay. They shifted us from one department to another last year when we asked,” Paul said.

  “How well did you know Frank?”

  He stopped, startled. I had heard the monologue of complaint before and knew it was nowhere near half done. Still, it amazed me how quickly he had forgotten Frank.

  Regrouping, he said, “Frank was always friendly; he was helpful, if it didn’t put him out. You know what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “We saw him at the bar mostly.”

  “Did you know him in San Francisco?” I asked.

  “No. No way. Frank wouldn’t have been living like we were, not in the Haight, not eating off food stamps, not going door to door collecting for whatever cause was paying solicitors. Frank must have lived pretty high there. After all, he could afford to buy a restaurant here.”

  I almost commented that they had afforded the lease on the boat rental concession, but that would have directed Paul back to his finances, and I didn’t have the patience to listen to that, much less sympathize with it.

  Fortunately, the fettucini was on the card table and people were lining up. Rosa Fortimiglio ladled the noodles and Carlo, her husband, the clam sauce.

  “Poor Frank,” Rosa said, as she piled more noodles on my plate than I had any hope of consuming. “This was one of his favorites. He was always pleased on the days I brought him fettucini. But the calamari, that was the only thing he ever asked for.”

  I nodded. Rosa’s delivery service had been a good arrangement for both Frank and Rosa. For Frank, it kept customers from leaving to find dinner, and then perhaps not returning. With Rosa’s dinners, many of us spent all evening at Frank’s. And for the Fortimiglios, it provided some steady income to offset the capriciousness of fishing.

  I sat down next to Madge Oombs and Ned Jacobs, the ranger at the state park near town. Ned was dark, wiry, and reminded me of one of the chipmunks it was his job to protect. He was about my age, a bit over thirty. His family had had a summer place here when he was a child, and though his winters had been spent in Oakland, it was the Russian River that had stamped him. He had studied not law, as his family had intended, but forestry, then taken the necessary jobs in less desirable areas until he had the seniority to get back here. Now he was home.

  “How could something like this happen?” he was saying. “Here. To Frank. It must be some connection from when he lived in San Francisco. Or maybe one of the new people.” Ned always referred to the homosexuals and other emigrants from San Francisco, who had “discovered” the Russian River a year or two ago and were on the way to making it their own, as the “new people.” He wanted to make it clear that he didn’t care about their habits, he cared that they were disrupting his town. “Maybe they tried to get Frank to be a middleman in a drug deal, and Frank refused, and then they killed him. That would make sense, wouldn’t it?”

  “I suppose it would, as well as anything else,” I said. “There are enough drugs in the area. And Frank was shot.”

  “But it was with his own gun.” Rosa Fortimiglio pulled up a wooden chair and sat across from Ned. I realized, as she spoke, that I had been too startled to ask Sheriff Wescott anything about Frank’s death, but Rosa wouldn’t have made that mistake. “It was with his own gun,” she continued, “the one he kept in the bar. You remember last summer, when he had to threaten two big drunks with it?”

  We all nodded.

  “Outsiders,” Ned added.

  “Shot him,” Rosa said. “Wiped the fingerprints off the gun and left it on the bar. Cool as can be.”

  “Outsiders,” Ned said.

  Madge Oombs, who had been sitting quietly, shook her head. “How would an outsider get there? Would they drive right up the street? The sheriff checked on that. They asked the old people who live on the hill across from Frank’s Place. There are three of them, you know. They don’t miss a thing. They sit by the window, watching the road, all day. They didn’t see any strangers drive up there. They didn’t notice anyone come after Chris. Isn’t that right, Rosa?”

  “Not a soul, so they said.” It was obvious that the two friends had carried on an in-depth discussion in the kitchen while Rosa heated the fettucini.

  “So how did they get there, Ned?” Madge demanded.

  “Parked and walked?” he suggested. But, even as he said it, we all knew it was wrong.

  “Ned,” Madge said, “there’d be no reason for an outsider to park half a mile away and trudge through the rain, on a road that has no sidewalk—only mud at either edge. They couldn’t know about the old folks staring out the window. And besides, the lawns are so flooded now that any pedestrian would have to walk in the middle of the street, and you don’t think those old folks would miss that, do you?”

  “Well, no.” Ned’s lips were pursed. He hated to have the outsiders cleared so quickly. “Then how did the murderer get there if he didn’t drive and he didn’t walk?”

  We all knew, but we waited for Madge to say it. “The river. Someone came down the river, past the empty houses that the summer people use. They came up to the hidden dock under the bar and up through the trap door.”

  We all knew what that meant, but again we waited for it to be put into words. Rosa said it. “It’s possible that a stranger might know the trap door existed, he might have heard about liquor being cooled in the water below during Prohibition. But no stranger would be able to find a small boat and get it downriver with the water like it is today, find the inlet into Frank’s, do his deed, and get the boat back. No outsider.”

  CHAPTER 4

  NOT SURPRISINGLY, I DIDN’T sleep well that night. Rain hit the windows in gusts; eucalyptus branches slapped against the house. I should have had the trees trimmed last fall, as the neighbors had suggested. Now the ground was soaked and wouldn’t support such tall trees. They would crash into the house. I wouldn’t have to worry about being implicated in Frank Goulet’s murder; I would be dead.

  When the sky finally lightened to the dim gray of dawn, I was relieved. Even the iciness of the house was preferable to staying in bed. By six-thirty I was up, dressed, and on my way to Thompson’s to get my paper.

  Since I was early, I went to the café for breakfast. It was nearly empty. On clear mornings it was filled with laborers from the sewe
r project. They had been working on that sewer so long that they were regulars there. They jammed into the booths, shouting, laughing, calling for more coffee, playing the juke box. Anyone else lucky enough to get a seat on one of those mornings found it impossible to talk or read. So most people avoided the café before eight. Now, in the rainy season, with the sewer work suspended, the café was empty and quiet. I was glad to be able to sit alone in a back booth and read the paper.

  The newspaper coverage of Frank’s murder filled two columns on the front page and several on page six, but it told me nothing new. And, thank God, it didn’t mention names. So, although everyone in town would know I was at Frank’s Place yesterday, it was still possible that my boss might not.

  Taking no chances on that, I got to the Henderson substation early and by ten after eight I had put in a sick card for the previous day, picked up the day’s route book, and signed out the most reliable truck in the yard. I was out of the office before most people had come in.

  The rain was heavier than it had been the day before. The river was higher and the water was thick with debris.

  It was good to have a truck that wouldn’t break down, one with new tires and an engine that could pull it out of the mud. I would be “dragging the truck” today—walking house to house for a couple hundred yards, then coming back to move the truck along so I would have it for parts of the route where there were long driveways and distances between houses.

  The route was assigned. The pages of the route book were in order, one page per customer, up one side of the street and down the other. But few readers followed that plan. There were always ways the route could be altered to suit one’s personal idiosyncracies. Some readers started at the west end of their routes and worked east each day, moving away from the ocean, as if every hundred yards would diminish the cold dampness of the Pacific. Some read commercial accounts first, residences last. Some did the flatlands in the morning in hopes that by afternoon, when they had to climb those endless wooden stairs, the rain would have stopped. I did the stairs first, before I was fully awake and aware of my aching thighs, and saved the flats till later, when just the thought of another step was debilitating.

  This route was divided into two sections. The first part, including South Bank Road and Frank’s Place, I had done Monday. The remainder of the route was set up to start with a group of cottages on the ocean side of town. The Fortimiglios’ was among them. If I did the hillside first, I could work down to their meter well before noon.

  I parked the truck halfway up the hill and checked through the route book. Each page had spaces to list the customer’s usage for twenty-four months, so I could see how much electricity they used this time last year. If their present usage was dramatically higher, like Frank’s, it raised questions. If it was considerably lower, the questions became suspicions. Before starting out, I glanced through the upcoming twenty or so pages for houses on this block, checking the comments section on each page. There were a number of places noted “dog OK,” a few merely “dog,” and only one “dog/w” (watch out). Although the location of the meter was mentioned on each page, I found it faster to follow the service drop from the main line to the weatherhead above the actual meter.

  I walked quickly on the streets and carefully down unpaved, muddy driveways to meters on the sides of houses. The houses were stuck like magnets on the hillside. “OK dogs” came out for a sniff of me, and just “dog” dogs looked warily before backing off. In the newer houses, the meters were around back, over ground that had been cleared out and not reseeded, and which was now a pool of mud. Older ramshackle places had their weatherheads above innocent-looking patches of weeds that too often turned out to be abandoned cesspools. The rotted wood of the cesspools was never equal to the weight of the unsuspecting reader. I was thankful when one had been abandoned long enough to be dry.

  A number of places—summerhouses—were empty, their service turned off. The route went fast. I was almost to the end of the hillside section when I came to the Kellys’ house. There was an “R” in the Changes column on their pages: last month the reader had found their meter tampered with. Most likely, the Kellys had broken the seal, pulled the meter out, and turned it over so it would run backwards. Every kilowatt hour they used would have saved them money. The reader had turned the meter right side up, resealed it, and stuck a warning sticker on it. Until recently, it had been rare for the warning to be followed by any real penalty, and the likelihood of a repeat was great. And indeed, the Kelly meter was upside down again.

  I laughed. The Kellys only needed to call the office to find what day I would be here. If they had controlled their greed and turned it back after a few days, even a week, I might not have noticed the difference in usage from last year. But greed is greed. Or sloth is sloth. Whichever, the Kellys had neglected to turn it back over. I marked the Changes column and left the meter. A fraud investigator would be out the next day.

  I dragged the truck up and did two accounts at the top of a long steep driveway, then I parked and walked for the next six houses. Beyond there, the street was washed out. The hillside beneath one of the new houses had given way. The house, a wooden chalet with the inevitable deck hanging off it, jutted out over the bare, concave hillside. The house would survive—it was on deep pillars, sunk into the rockiness of the hillside—but the street, completely covered in dirt, wouldn’t be shoveled out till summer.

  Irritated, I turned back. I would have to drive around, and that would use up all the time I had saved—time I had planned to spend at the Fortimiglios’.

  It was twelve-fifteen when I got to their house. Rosa was at the door before I reached the meter.

  “Come in, Vejay. Dry off. We’re just thinking of lunch. It’s lucky you got here now.”

  Sheepishly, I thanked her for the invitation. It was hardly luck.

  Carlo sat in the kitchen, while Rosa stirred something on the stove that smelled of spiced tomato. From the living room I could hear the television and the low rumble of voices.

  “Take your boots off and let them dry by the stove,” Rosa said.

  As I did that, Carlo poured three glasses of red wine. I sat and, disregarding the headache I still had from the rum and wine yesterday, I took a sip.

  “It’s terrible about poor Frank,” Rosa said, as if returning to an interrupted thought. “The person who killed him couldn’t have been anyone local, not from town. The way Frank was shot, in the forehead, someone had to be looking right at him. You wouldn’t do that to a person you know.”

  “You might,” I said, “if you were angry enough to kill him.”

  “Well, perhaps,” Rosa said without conviction. “But who would feel that way about Frank? He didn’t have any enemies here, not even any real business competition.”

  “Drugs,” Carlo said.

  Rosa was silent, and I turned to him in surprise—not so much at what he said, but at the fact that he had spoken at all. I doubted whether I had ever heard Carlo offer an unsolicited comment. Frank’s death must have affected him deeply.

  “You were close to Frank, weren’t you?” I said to him.

  He nodded.

  “Frank was always over here at first,” Rosa said. “You know he and Chris were friends. That’s how Frank came up here. Chris and Frank were in the Navy together. Chris can tell you about that. Chris!” she called without missing a beat. “Chris, Vejay’s here.”

  I heard the television go silent. Chris and a teenage boy I recognized as one of the Fortimiglio grandchildren walked into the kitchen. They both wore jeans and woollen shirts. It was the slack season for fishing, so Chris was home. It took only one look at the boy’s red, running nose to see why he wasn’t in school.

  “Chris, I was telling Vejay how you were in the Navy with Frank,” Rosa said.

  “That’s right.” Chris directed his reply to me. “I was going to make a career of it. I went in right after high school. It was okay, the Navy, for that time. But it wasn’t like here, where it’s
our boat, our fish, our family business.”

  Chris took a beer from the refrigerator. “But Frank, it was different for him. He wasn’t like anyone else on the ship.” He laughed. His parents looked at him, slightly shocked, as if it were too soon to laugh about Frank. “The thing was that Frank really hated being on ship. I guess he didn’t think of that part when he signed up.”

  “It would seem to be a major oversight,” I said.

  “‘Join the Navy and see the world!’ Frank loved the ports. He was always the first off and the last back on ship. And he bought more stuff than any five guys. Not the normal junk either. He knew what he was getting. He’d study up while we were at sea. He really hated being taken. That’s how he got into studying up, see?”

  I waited for Chris to continue.

  “One time,” Chris said, “I think it was in Taipei, Frank bought a jade figurine. He paid a lot for it, and when he got back on ship he was showing it around and one of the officers had a look. He knew right off that Frank had been had. It was no rare yellow jade, like Frank thought. It was yellow glass! We all had a big laugh over that. Everyone but Frank. He was furious. If the ship hadn’t been pulling out, he would have hunted down the guy who sold it to him.”

  “But instead he started reading up on jade?” I prompted.

  “Right. He bought a lot of jade. And later, netsukes, you know, those tiny Japanese carvings, the ones with lots of little animals all on top of each other? They’re only a couple inches tall.”

  I nodded. I’d seen netsukes at the Asian Art Museum.

  “Anyway,” Chris continued, “Frank hated every minute he was on ship. I think he was actually seasick a few times. Of course, he wouldn’t admit it—the guys would have ribbed him to death. He got enough flack as it was. He was really a step above most of us. He was older; he’d been to college. He wasn’t just interested in the body count in every port, if you know what I mean.” Chris looked sheepishly away from Rosa.

  “Your mother said Frank came up here because of you.”