An Equal Opportunity Death

by Susan Dunlap

  Carlo was holding on to the front doorknob, blocking the way to the street. Even if I could get across the room, he could easily push me down into the water. I didn’t know whether he had hurled the box at me, or if it had been thrown from his grasp by the movement of the building.

  “Carlo, help me.”

  My hands were slipping. The water covered my thighs, smashing debris against me.

  “Carlo!”

  He looked at me. I couldn’t read his expression.

  He stretched away from the door and extended his arm. His hand was only a foot away. If I let go I could reach it. If he let go, he could send me into the river. I looked at his face again.

  A branch hit my legs. My knees buckled. I grabbed for Carlo’s hand.

  Time seemed to stop the moment I touched Carlo’s fingers. Nothing moved; neither he, nor I, nor the water. And then it started again. Carlo pulled me in. I caught the doorknob and clung, scrambling my feet under me.

  The building was hit again. It didn’t seem as strong a shake as before. Maybe it was enough to knock Carlo’s hands loose. Maybe the effort of pulling me in weakened him. Maybe.

  His body swept across the room like a pillow in the water. For an instant it caught at the doorjamb, where I had held on, then passed right by me, into the river.

  CHAPTER 22

  I STAGGERED OUT OF the old sandwich shop to my truck. The small Chinese plate was still under the seat. Not pausing to see how badly oxidized its finish had gotten, I stuck it in the back of Carlo’s truck, among the others. One plate was at the bottom of the river, the other nine were in bad shape. Even dead, Frank Goulet had gotten his revenge.

  The water had already seeped into the cab of my truck. I was lucky to get the engine started, luckier yet to get through on North Bank Road. From there, I headed over to the sheriff’s department.

  The session with Sheriff Wescott took hours. He sent one deputy out to get me cocoa and offered to have another fetch me dry clothes. The closest he came to admitting he had erred in suspecting me of murdering Frank Goulet was to smile and say, “So you two were really just friends, huh?” Then he reminded me that each time he talked to me he’d been sure I was withholding something. And since there were things I still couldn’t tell him about (like breaking into Frank’s Place, stealing the PG&E truck to get there, or keeping the Chinese plate on my mantel overnight) there was nothing more to say.

  It had been raining all night, and then, as if the rain had been part of a movie and we were walking out of the theater, it stopped. By morning the sun was out, bright. The river, of course, continued to flood, but somehow, in the sun, it seemed more entertaining than ominous.

  I was told that when it floods, all the townspeople wade down to the donut shop, buy crullers and coffee, and walk out to the main bridge—forty some feet above the riverbed—to watch the flood waters rush under them. They look at the markers, watch debris float by, and reminisce about the flood of ’64 or ’47. It’s a party, a celebration of surviving another bout with nature. By noon, someone always just happens to have found a bottle of champagne. A grocery owner, whose stock is going to be flooded anyway, provides a few more.

  I went down to the bridge. But there was no party. People were there, crowding both sides, but no one was laughing. Few even seemed to be talking. When I arrived, the people nearest me—the Greshams, who owned the hardware store—either didn’t recognize me or turned away. I moved on, nearer the center. No one said anything. They would know by now that Carlo was dead, that Carlo had killed Frank, and that I had been the one to expose Carlo.

  At the far end of the bridge I spotted Paul and Patsy Fernandez, listening to a man who had his back to me. They looked at each other, then turned and hurried off the bridge in the direction of their boat rental. They would disappear; I knew that. They would take advantage of the commotion as Carlo might have. They would turn up somewhere else, with different names, waiting on tables or renting canoes.

  Skip Bollo was on the other side of the roadway, staring down at the brown water, watching the town—as it had been—flow under the bridge.

  I stopped beside Ned Jacobs, wondering if he, too, would unconsciously blame me for Carlo, for the town.

  But he didn’t. He didn’t speak. He just rested a hand on my shoulder.

  I leaned against him, surprised by my need for support from a friend, after the long night hours with the sheriff.

  “There was no way I couldn’t tell the sheriff,” I said. “I didn’t want to. Carlo saved me. He pulled me back.”

  Ned firmed the arm around my shoulder. “You wouldn’t have been there but for him, Vejay.”

  “Maybe they won’t connect all the burglaries to him. I mean, who knows? Maybe the insurance companies won’t bother. Martin Walucyk will have nine of his ten plates. It’s his own fault for bringing them up here. He …” I realized I was crying.

  I remembered the last time I had cried, sitting at the table in Frank’s Place after talking to Sheriff Wescott. Rosa had come over, touched my arm, taken me home to dinner. Halfway across the bridge I saw her and Chris. Our eyes met. She turned away.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Vejay Haskell Mysteries

  CHAPTER 1

  “THE REASON I AM raising my voice,” I said, vainly trying to control it, “is that it’s after noon; I’ve got sweat running down my arms, my back, my chest, and all over my face. I’ve spent the last two hours trying to get my truck off the edge of the hillside ten miles out of town so it, and I, wouldn’t go careening down into a creek. There was no house for miles in either direction. If some guy with a pickup hadn’t come along I’d still be there.” I glared at my boss, Mr. Bobbs, the manager of the Henderson Pacific Gas and Electric office.

  “I am submitting a request for repair of the truck, Miss Haskell. That is procedure.” In contrast to my sweat-stained meter-reader uniform, Mr. Bobbs’s tan summer suit was dry and crisp. And here in his windowless cubicle, the manager’s office, it was almost cool, unlike the ninety-seven degrees outside.

  I swallowed, using the time to control my anger. Slowly, I said, “This is hardly the first time a meter reader has been stuck on a back road. Suppose one of us were in an accident. He could be injured. It could be days before anyone discovered him.”

  Mr. Bobbs shifted his gaze to the clock behind me, silently stating that it was his lunch hour, too.

  “There are a lot of dangerous people in those hills. They have guns. There are marijuana growers; the last thing they want is someone in a uniform coming onto their land. They’ve been known to shoot first and check out which department you work for after.”

  “Are you telling me you want to work only town routes?”

  It was tempting after the morning’s frustration. But I said, “No, I’m not asking to shift the danger to someone else. I’m saying I gave you a very reasonable suggestion for how to deal with this problem.”

  He nodded, a motion that did not mean he agreed with my suggestion, or even that he recalled what it was, but merely that he acknowledged that I said I had made one.

  “I gave it to you a month ago.”

  He nodded again. The muscles around his mouth and neck tightened, leaving folds of skin hanging like a worn white scarf. “I put it in Follow-up,” he said.

  “Follow-up! You stuck my suggestion in a folder that won’t come back to you till next week, or next month, or whatever date you put on it! By that time one of us could be lying dead on some back road.”

  “I’ve scheduled your request to return to my desk on a date when I have the proper amount of time to deal with it. Now,” he said, taking an anxious breath, “it is well after twelve, and I have other responsibilities. I will call you in when the Follow-up folder with your suggestion comes back.”

  If you don’t just plunk it in another Follow-up folder for an even later date, I wanted to add. But I didn’t. Instead, I walked out of the cubicle and back to the storeroom in the rear of the office. My route book
was still in the middle of the old wooden table, where I had dropped it before stalking into Mr. Bobbs’s office. The tan duffle-like San Francisco bag that carried the completed route books to the computer in the city was waiting in the corner. And by the board where we hung the truck keys stood my fellow meter reader, Vida Riccolo.

  “Are you okay, Vejay?” she asked.

  “After a fashion. I told Mr. Bobbs—”

  “I know what you told him. All of the Russian River Resort Area knows, or they would if his office had a window. Come on, what you need is a beer. I could use one myself.” She looked like she needed a drink.

  “Right.” I stuck the route book in the San Francisco bag, relieved that there had been no “changes” (too great an electricity usage or suspiciously little) in any of the customers’ reads that needed to be mentioned to Mr. Bobbs. I put the truck keys on the board and signed out.

  Vida was parked outside the gate of the truck yard. With her short, thick curly hair and her deeply tanned skin she looked more like a little boy than a forty-five-year-old woman.

  “So?” she prompted as I climbed into her pickup.

  I shrugged. “My truck is a hazard. This time the reverse gear wouldn’t work. You heard what I told Mr. Bobbs; you know how I spent the morning. But that’s not really the issue. The thing is, anyone can get stuck back in the hills, and it’s dangerous out there. There are Vietnam vets who’ve lived off the land since they got back who still can’t deal with people. And there are our own homegrown drunks and crazies. It’s wild country. And we need two-way radios in the trucks. I told Mr. Bobbs that a month ago.

  “What did he say?”

  “He put my suggestion in Follow-up.”

  “Never do today what you can put off till tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow.” Her normally animated voice sounded flat. “Follow-up is the answer to a bureaucrat’s prayers.”

  “In the meantime,” I went on, “Mr. Bobbs said he had other responsibilities, by which I assume he meant lunch.”

  While I had been talking—complaining—we’d driven the commercial block of North Bank Road, inching through town in low gear. In summer, Henderson and the whole Russian River Resort Area was jammed with tourists. And now, the first weekend of Bohemian Week, traffic barely moved. The same people who in March sat in their San Francisco or Oakland living rooms watching television coverage of the Russian River flooding and asked each other how anyone could be crazy enough to live where the streets washed out and their homes filled with mud and debris every few years, now jammed the roads. They crowded onto the main beach in Guerneville and filled the little town beach here in Henderson. They stayed two, three, four to a room in ramshackle motels by the river, the same motels that had been three feet deep in water in March. Those old motels and “vacation cabins” were never quite clean and preserved the odor of mildew from year to year. But the families that came for a week of canoeing and swimming in the deep waters behind the summer dams didn’t care. For them the river provided a cheap traditional family vacation. Most of the summer the Russian River area was peopled with a combination of tourist families and the newly insurgent gay population, who viewed the area as a haven of their own. Then there were the winter people like me, who, grumbling at the inconvenience, opened canoe rentals and summer shops, who double-stocked their shelves and made more money in those three months than in the rest of the year.

  And in the ten days of July known as Bohemian Week, the Bohemian Grove hosted the business and political leaders of the nation. The area filled with their assistants and servants, with reporters and photographers, and, as with any convention, with pimps and prostitutes—another boon to motel owners and shopkeepers.

  The Grove was reputed to be a glorified boys’ camp where for ten days the rich and powerful could cavort with impunity, secure from the eyes of the uninvited. Bohemian Club members included the President of the United States, presidents of multinational corporations, and even the chairman of the board of PG&E, though not all members attended each encampment. They were reported to put on skits in drag, get drunk, and pee in the bushes. Like Boy Scouts, they lived in tents, albeit luxurious ones, and competed to see whose chef was best. During Bohemian Week, helicopters flying in caviar and Dom Perignon were not uncommon sights. And although there was supposed to be a ban on discussion of business, major speeches at encampments in the past had been given by men like Henry Kissinger and Caspar Weinberger. The Bohemian Club publication even stated that the idea for the Manhattan Project, which led to the atom bomb, came out of one Bohemian Week. While all that went on, the public was barred from the grounds, as was the press, and women in any capacity. The anti-woman rule was so strongly enforced that we women weren’t even allowed to read their meters during those ten days.

  When the limousines of the powerful arrived outside the Grove they would be greeted by lines of protesters—anti-nuclear, anti-poverty, anti-military. But the people of Henderson viewed the encampment with amusement. Whatever the big shots did in private, they brought publicity to the area and plenty of money to the town.

  And a lot of cars and people. The limos would start coming this evening. Our congressman would be in town Sunday. But already the advance people, the newspeople, and the hangers-on were here.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as Vida started up the hill away from the main street. “I thought we were headed for a beer.”

  “We are—at my niece’s house.”

  Her normally energetic voice was almost still. I realized that we had sat in silence since the end of my jeremiad. There were fatigue lines around her mouth, dark circles under her eyes.

  “You look worn out, Vida. That’s not like you. You can usually go twice as long as anyone else.”

  She turned left onto a narrow hillside street. “Michelle,” she said in a barely audible voice. “My niece Michelle, she didn’t come home last night. I don’t know what happened to her.”

  I waited for Vida to go on.

  “Craig, her husband, didn’t call me till this morning. I guess he didn’t want to worry me. He should have called last night. This morning I couldn’t take time off from work. You know Michelle, don’t you?”

  It was like Vida to assume that I would. Vida had grown up in Henderson, raised three sons here, then finally, years after she should have, divorced their father and left him to the bottle. Anybody in town was either a relative, one of her husband’s relations, a son’s friend, someone from St. Agnes’ Church, or at least someone she had met doing one of the town routes.

  “I might know her by sight,” I said. Having lived here only a year and a half, with no husband now, and no children, my acquaintances were more limited. From reading the town routes I knew most people in a general way. I knew about their electricity usage, I knew if they weeded their yards or fixed their porches, I knew about their dogs and cats, and I knew the odd tidbits people chose to tell me. But I didn’t know the most basic things about many people—where, or if, they worked, how many children they had, how they voted, or what they liked to read. In spite of that, as Vida pulled up in front of a new chalet-type house, I realized that I did know her niece.

  “I’ve read Michelle’s meter here. She’s very pretty, isn’t she? She looks something like you, Vida, but her hair is long, darker, and curled back. And she has,” I paused, hunting for the right words, “a lot of curiosity and drive.”

  “You don’t need to be polite, Vejay. What you mean is that Michelle can be a pain in the behind.”

  “No, I don’t. Well, not after you know her. At first, when she stopped me to complain about her bill, I would have agreed with you. According to her then, not only was I incompetent, but PG and E was corrupt and focused entirely on cheating her and those like her.”

  Vida nodded knowingly.

  “But Vida, once I showed her how to read her meter, and gave her the tips on saving electricity, then she was really enthusiastic. The next month she was waiting for me by the meter with her figures ready, anx
ious to see if she had read it right.” I smiled. “She was pretty proud of how much energy she saved. She had reason to be.”

  Vida pulled the truck up next to the spot where the sewer construction had ended for the week. The hole blocked the road. “Enthusiasm or nuisance, take your pick,” she said. “It depends on which side of the issue you’re on.”

  “Don’t you like her?” I asked, climbing out. For someone who was so obviously upset by her niece’s disappearance, Vida seemed to have a very negative view of her.

  “It’s not a question of like. She has her good points and her bad points. Like you say, she’s got a lot of drive. But she’s not mature enough to focus all that energy. She goes from one cause to the next. It can be a nuisance. But that doesn’t mean I don’t love her. She is my only sister’s—God rest her soul—daughter.” Vida’s voice trembled. “Vejay, I dropped her off at this anti-hookers’ group meeting at St. Agnes’ last night and she hasn’t been home since. I don’t know what to do.”

  I put my arm around Vida’s shoulders and waited till her shaking stopped. Then we started up the stairs of Michelle’s house.

  “Have you called the hospitals, the highway patrol, the sheriff?” I asked.

  “Craig called the hospitals three times, the last time right before he left for work this morning. He called the highway patrol and left a number. They said they’d let him know if they found Michelle. But they won’t find her; she wasn’t driving.”

  “She could have been riding with someone else,” I said.