They introduced themselves. “We meet again,” Paul said. “How’s it going?”
“Hiya, Paul. I’ve just been here a few minutes but there are a couple of things. The woman, in her late forties, early fifties, died of severe head injuries sustained in a fall. Looks like she died instantly. One huge gash cracked open her skull on the right side. The trauma from that alone would have wiped her out.”
Paul and Armano crossed the small slice of sand and approached the body, which lay a few feet up from the beach among the rocks.
The woman’s eyes were open in a twisted face, a face already so removed from humanity Paul thought for a jolting moment he was looking at a theatrical mask. A mask of malice. A mask intended to frighten. The mouth gaped widely exposing teeth on the top and bottom, as if interrupted midhowl.
Susan took a deep breath. “Yes, the expression isn’t the usual. I’m thinking that this woman suffered from a medical condition which caused facial disfigurement. In death, the muscles normally relax. She looks older than she is. Was.”
“She moved,” Paul noted, responding to a small disturbance in the sandy patches around her that explained the body’s position.
Susan nodded. “Amazing what the human body will take. She couldn’t have lived more than a few moments after that fall. Shouldn’t have lived even that long.”
Quietly, they examined the sand and rocks.
“Have we got photos?” Paul asked. The tide or wind would make short work of this patch of beach soon.
The attending deputy nodded.
Paul rolled the body over with gloved hands to examine the skull wound, pulling the right arm out from underneath.
She was missing her left hand.
Warning bells rang in his head. It couldn’t be! Picking up the black leather purse he found still dangling from a strap attached to her right hand, he opened it and pulled out the wallet.
Virginia Reilly of Pacific Grove.
First Filsen, Nina’s ex-lover. Now Nina’s mother.
“Maybe she stopped to look at the view and jumped on impulse,” Armano said, sounding sad. He looked toward the ocean. “Looks like she had reasons to die.”
“Who called this in?” Paul asked Susan, who had straightened up. She had a round, intelligent face, not a whole lot of humor in it, not that he’d expect a comedian to go into her line of work.
“Exactly. There’s a witness. He says it wasn’t a suicide, Detective. A passing motorist, who did not leave a name, called it in. It was a male voice. He said he just saw somebody pushed off the cliff near Bixby Creek Bridge. The 911 dispatcher asked for a description, but he said the people were hidden when he approached the overlook, and he just glanced behind in his rearview mirror long enough to see her fall. He said, ‘I had the definite impression she was pushed. Somebody else was there with the old lady.’ He didn’t stop, just rushed to the nearest phone, which is a few miles further down the road.”
So much for suicide. The witness might not be able to describe the people standing at the cliff’s edge, but he should be able to describe their car. The witness had to be found. Paul looked up at the faces of onlookers leaning over the cliffs like small white moons against the darkening hills. The body would not be visible from a passing vehicle, so they were lucky someone had spotted her. The murderer probably waited for one of those unpredictable pauses in the afternoon traffic, pushed the woman, then hightailed it out of there.
“When did the call come in?”
“About four thirty in the afternoon. Jibes with my rough estimate of time of death.”
A team of paramedics came up to them, carrying the portable gurney, and Susan fell into conversation with them. Paul and Armano took another long look around.
They clambered back up the steep hillside by flashlight. A harsh evening wind had begun to blow. Dr. Misumi, finding handholds in the rocky mud, complained all the way up about the dirt on her good suit. “People die in the most inconvenient places at the worst times. I’m supposed to be at a wedding reception.”
Armano tumbled down a few feet and let loose a sharp Spanish profanity, which he translated with relish.
The ground at the crime-taped overlook was gravelly dirt, too hard to show signs of a scuffle, trampled besides by thousands of tourist feet. It was impossible to see if one or two people had stood at the cliffside, but from the position of the body, they could fix fairly closely where Virginia Reilly had been standing. Convenient for the killer that they had been hidden from view by the car. Or just plain resourceful.
They got back into the car as the ambulance drivers reached the top with their burden and began putting the body bag into the truck. Watching them, Paul was struck as he always was by their gentle handling of the body. Mrs. Reilly had been an important person, a living person, a mother. She deserved their respect, even at the end.
Filsen. Reilly.
Filsen had represented the acupuncturist Mrs. Reilly was going to sue—or had sued, Paul remained slightly murky on the details. The key to the murder had to lie in that situation. He couldn’t put it together in his mind, though he was looking forward to talking again with Dr. Wu.
Minutes later, heading south on Highway 1, they stopped at the first store they came to, a small redwood cabin that serviced campers. Two outdoor phones on the porch stood idle.
“Anyone use those phones lately?” Paul asked, showing the woman at the counter his identification.
The woman was more of a girl, with brown braids she had looped and pinned to her head. Her tone was not friendly. “You’re here about the woman who fell off the cliff at Bixby?”
“You can hear the phone from in here, can’t you?”
“Sometimes. It gets busy.” She sounded defensive in the empty store. Pulling out a stack of newspapers, she neatened them.
“We don’t have all night.”
“Okay, okay. A guy came in about a couple of hours ago, at about two thirty, three. Maybe close to four. It was getting on in the afternoon. He called the police. Saw something awful at the bridge. I heard that. That’s all I know.”
Paul luxuriated in a small itch of excitement. Maybe this cashier had seen the witness and his car. Maybe Paul had a real lead. “What did he look like?”
“Like half the people that come here: three-day growth of beard, short, stocky, wearing a plaid flannel shirt. All the city guys wear those when they come down here, it seems like. Let’s see. Levi’s. The shirt—black-and-white. A red watch, waterproof plastic. He looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t anyone I know from around here. You know the type, always on the make for girls about the age of his youngest daughter.”
“What did he do after he made the call?”
“Took off.” She brightened. “And what a car. Red Ferrari, an older one, vintage. That thing was smooth, and so quiet I never even heard him pull away. I heard cars like that were supposed to be mechanical disasters.”
That probably explained why the killer had moved when a witness was approaching. The road curved before and after the bridge, without a lot of visible roadway, but he or she should have been able to hear a standard car approaching from some distance on a quiet Monday afternoon.
“You won’t have much trouble finding that Ferrari, I bet,” the girl said.
“Did you notice which way it went?”
“Took a right. Went south. Probably on the way to the Ventana Inn for dinner or maybe on to Esalen for some soothing meditation? That guy had money falling out of his pockets.”
A family of campers in parkas and boots stomped in. Paul thanked the clerk and took down her contact information, then he and Armano left.
They took the winding road slowly in the dark. Several times they missed a driveway and had to reverse direction. Cabins and campgrounds lined the river that ran parallel to the highway. News of the killing had already spread, probably thanks to the girl at the store. Some families were packing up to leave. Nobody had seen the red sports car or its driver.
By se
ven o’clock their hunger had become insupportable. They pulled in to park at Nepenthe, a local landmark. The building, made of redwood shingles, loomed up from the lot in the moonlight, and the lines of windows surrounding the top-level restaurant glowed with tiny Christmas lights.
Armano took two steps at a time up from the parking lot, eager to procure a table at the restaurant or, failing that, perhaps a spot at the café below, while Paul toured quickly through the parking lot, which extended onto two levels.
Not too many cars were parked there now, although Paul imagined that earlier plenty of armchair adventurers had been leaping from their sheepskin seat covers toward the upstairs deck with its welcoming margaritas. The lower lot remained almost empty. He was ready to make the hike back up to the building when instinct suggested he go just a little farther up the road.
There, in an alcove of bushes just beyond the lot, a red Ferrari sat, empty.
He thumbed his nose, smiling. He approached and found it locked.
CHAPTER 31
ARMANO PUSHED A MAN OUT THE DOORS OF THE RESTAURANT onto the deck with its fire pit. “Here’s our proud Ferrari owner. The bartender knew him. Talks about his hot-shit car. We’re going down to find a sandwich.” The man shook him off and walked on ahead, pulling a leather jacket over his flannel shirt. He was middle-aged and pissed off. “We have to get some food,” Armano whispered urgently to Paul as he approached. “Or else I’ll have to eat him.”
The middle-level café was on an outdoor patio that sat high above the ocean and in the daytime offered spectacular vistas. A young guy with his hair in a topknot and a right arm covered with black-ink tattoos wiggled a dishcloth at them. “Who left the gate open?” he called. “We’re closed.”
“No, you’re not,” Armano said firmly.
“Just a quick order,” Paul said, flashing his ID.
“A Reuben,” Armano specified as the cowed waiter began to scurry. “Extra cheese. Extra sauerkraut. Extra hot.”
They sat down on chairs across from a wooden plank. On the bench, they placed their witness. The sandwiches came quickly, huge and steaming. Armano bit and chewed. “That’s one fine vehicle you got,” he said with a full mouth.
“Correct.” The witness lifted one nicely pressed jeans-clad leg over the other. He was about fifty, mostly bald, and would rather have been anywhere else. He grimaced, exhibiting the whitest teeth Paul had ever seen on a human. Another problem with Californian smiles, this uniform white they all worked so hard to maintain.
“Guy in the restaurant says you come in often, always with a different woman. Braggin’ on your car,” Armano said.
Paul took over, introducing himself and Armano, apologizing for Armano’s rough handling. “We have reason to believe you were a witness—”
Recognition flitted across Armano’s face. “Hey, you were the guy in that old movie—ah, what was it called? The one about—at the Dream? Last week? A retrospective.”
“I’m Dan Fordham.”
“That woman you were with upstairs?”
“On her way back to L.A. by now. She’ll find a ride.” Fordham turned his attention to Paul. “You’re here about that 911 call. I guess this means you found something. Bad luck for me.”
“Much worse luck for the dead lady.”
Fordham acted as if he hadn’t heard. “I can’t add to what I said on the phone. We’re all better off leaving me out of the picture.”
“You’re an eyewitness to a possible homicide,” said Paul. “We want the whole thing, with details, please.”
“On the cliffs?”
“Yeah.”
“The lady’s dead?”
“Yep.”
“Whew.” Fordham worked his jaw. “I was late for my date, speeding some. What a stunning drive.”
“How fast?”
“Fifty-five. Okay, eighty. Slower on the curves. But there was hardly any traffic. I was heading south on Highway One, coming down from Carmel. Left there about three thirty.”
“It’s a dangerous road for speeding.”
“This car’s built to demolish that road. So I rolled around this tight curve. There at one of those scenic pullouts before Bixby Creek Bridge sat one of those blah American cars. White, maybe. A Monte Carlo, maybe. Not a classic car, you understand. Just far enough past banal to rate ugly. I spotted two heads above the car, then whizzed by.” Fordham shook his head. “The wind was blowing. I guess they didn’t hear me coming. Anyway, I saw an old woman standing there, I thought with another person, for just a second, then she went flying.” He sat back.
The waiter hovered. “You done? I’m due home an hour ago.”
“Soon, hermano,” Armano promised.
The waiter scowled and cleared a couple of plates.
“At first it just didn’t register,” Fordham continued. “I guess I assumed car trouble or people stopping to look at the view there, which is pretty stupendous. I had my stereo on right in the middle of a song we—I really like. Maybe it’s being in the movies—I didn’t believe what I saw. Then I thought, ‘Oh hell, that woman just got—unbelievable,’ I thought, ‘I have just witnessed a murder!’ I looked back in the rearview mirror, as I said before. I couldn’t see anyone else anymore.”
“You passed very close by when you drove by. I can’t believe that someone would push another person off a cliff right in front of you. It’s stupid.”
“It happened, though. Must’ve started pushing her before I rounded the bend is all I can figure out. And like I said, when I looked back, there was no one at all by the car. They ducked down.”
Paul said, “So, tell us. Who was in the car with you? The woman who’s now on her way to L.A.? We need her name and number.”
Fordham reddened slightly. “I’ll be glad to provide whatever information you need. She wasn’t with me, though. It was a girl I picked up hitching. Nobody ever hitches anymore, do they? It’s rare. Dangerous. But I’m a sucker for a young, pretty girl. Her name’s Becky, but that’s all I can tell you about her, except that I picked her up a little south of Carmel, near the Highlands Inn, and dropped her at the store where I stopped to call. She’s a carrottop. Young. I think she was staying at one of those cabins down by the river.”
“You’ll have to go back up to Monterey to give a statement,” Paul said.
“God dammit,” said Fordham.
Five minutes later a deputy arrived to make sure he didn’t head back to Hollywood.
Armano, sliding into the driver’s seat beside Paul, said, “He was showing off for the hitchhiker. Speeding, showing he still had balls. His movie? Did you see it?”
Paul shook his head.
“Vampire movie. The guy’s a terrible actor. Still riding on history.” Armano pulled a hunk of chocolate out of the glove compartment and waved it at Paul, who shook his head.
“He looks just like Malcolm McDowell,” Paul said. “A little less hair. Can’t be all bad.”
“Should have asked him to autograph a napkin.”
By the time they got back to the River Inn cabins, hidden in the tall pines that sloped down to the Big Sur River, it was nearly ten o’clock. They parked near a trailer that said OFFICE but looked deserted and began knocking on doors.
At the third cabin, a yellow bulb lit a porch decorated with forlorn laundry, and a young girl in a tight tank top answered the door. She pulled a sweater off a peg, stepped outside, and pulled the door shut behind her, first looking anxiously back into the room.
“Who are you?”
They explained.
“Don’t mention the hitching, okay? My mother will kill me. She thinks I was with someone I knew. Well, I guess everybody knows Mr. Fordham, don’t they? Awesome, wasn’t it, that he stopped?”
Paul assured her that they would only tell if necessary, and that was all she needed before her story began pouring out.
Her name was Rebecca Barjaktarovich. Becky was sixteen. She and her mother were living temporarily in the cabin, while her mother applied
for jobs as an attendant for an elderly, handicapped person. They had lived in Castroville for several years with Becky’s father, but following a nasty breakup ended up broke and without a home. A long time ago Becky’s mom used to come down to Big Sur to hang around and still had some good friends here, one of whom was loaning them the cabin during the off-season, till they were able to get back on their feet again.
“See, I was applying for a waitress job in Carmel for after school, which I got by the way. All you have to do to get a job is to lie and say you’re eighteen. It’s something to do with insurance. They want you to lie; they beg you to lie. So I did. I start tomorrow.” Becky sat on a rusty, pink metal chair, twisting her red hair between her fingers. “I hope you’re not here to put me in jail for that, because then for sure the world’s totally pathetic.”
“There’s a bus you can take,” Paul said. “No more hitching. You’ll get hurt eventually.”
“How’m I supposed to pay for the bus?”
Paul opened his wallet and handed her a $10 bill. She gaped at it.
“Bus fare,” Paul said. “After that, use tip money. I don’t want to find your body by the side of the road one day. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“We need to know what you saw at Bixby Creek Bridge.”
“You mean the car? Hmm. White. One of the big, plush kinds old ladies love. And what I thought were just a couple of people admiring the view.”
“What did they look like?”
“Oh, jeez. It went by so fast.” She pursed her lips, looking down. “I wasn’t paying much attention. I was singing along with the radio, then Dan—Mr. Fordham—got all excited and told me to look back, which I did. I didn’t see anything, but he went on and on about how there were two of them and where’d everybody go. Stuff like that.”
That was all she had, and it wasn’t enough. They thanked Becky, got the inn’s telephone number and the name of her new employer, and headed back north toward Pacific Grove.
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