The Lonely Hunter (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries)

by Collin Wilcox

  Turning, I saw Vannuchi seated in a corner of the empty waiting room. I hardly recognised him. His grey-streaked beard was trimmed to a neat Vandyke. He wore a well-cut tweed suit and expensive cordovan shoes. Beside him lay a suede hat with a rakish green feather.

  “It’s a hell of a note,” he said. “The first time in over a year that I really have something that I’ve got to do outside the Haight, and I can’t wear my sweatshirt.”

  “Why can’t you wear your sweatshirt, Vannuchi?”

  He looked at me, then ruefully snorted. “Because, he said abruptly, “I’d feel silly coming to a place like this wearing a sweatshirt. If you really want to know.”

  “Well, that’s progress. I guess.”

  “Yeah? Well, everyone has his own idea of progress.” He paused, then asked in a different voice, “Did Harper confess?”

  “Not yet. But he will.” It was a stock answer.

  “But you’re satisfied that Harper murdered Karen Forest, Don Robertson and Maxine Summers?”

  “It looks like it, Vannuchi. But even if we can’t prove it, he’s still in plenty of trouble.”

  “I know. I heard you yesterday. You’re quite a celebrity, Sergeant. Last night on the radio, this morning in all the papers.” After a moment’s silence Vannuchi looked down at his large hands, clasped in his lap. “It’s incredible,” he said. “I never liked Harper. I understood him, I think. But I never liked him. Still, to do something like this—” He shook his head.

  “If you understood him well enough, though, it shouldn’t surprise you, what he did.”

  He raised his head, looking at me. “You sound like me, Sergeant. You throw out a little syllogism—a little epigram, for the audience to think about. Then you just sit back and watch them try to field it. A gadfly. If the audience is puzzled enough—if you’re obscure enough while you still manage to sound profound and provocative—then you’re a hit.” His voice was flat and dispirited; his eyes were dull and listless. He looked old and tired.

  “Do you want to see Harper, Vannuchi?”

  “No.”

  “Why’d you come, then?”

  “To help you, if I can.”

  “How?”

  “By telling you about my conversation with Angie Sawyer this morning.”

  I sat up straighter. “What’d you find out?”

  “She said that when she got home from the hospital, she found a letter, written by Don Robertson. It was a—a kind of confession, I guess. Apparently Donny concealed it in one of her dresser drawers, where she’d be sure to find it.”

  “All right; what’d it say?”

  “Well, chronologically, he started with the first time Harper proposed his stand-in scheme. I suppose you know about that.”

  I nodded. Matter-of-factly, I hoped.

  “Harper was apparently very clever about it,” Vannuchi continued, now speaking more rapidly. “He started it off by saying that he’d made a bet with someone. He offered Donny fifty dollars to make the switch. But it wasn’t until two days later that Harper came to him, and told him the whole story. Apparently Harper heard that you were questioning guys that answered his description, so he figured he’d better get Robertson out of town. He explained that Donny was an accessory—that he had to leave town. He gave him fifteen hundred dollars, and took him down to the plane, and made sure Donny got off.”

  “Why did Robertson come back?”

  “Conscience, I’d say. Old-fashioned, middle-class conscience. He brooded, all the while he was in New York. And, after three weeks, he just couldn’t stand it. Because, you see, Donny was basically one of the sweetest, gentlest, most passive people I’ve ever known. Without thinking about it, he already possessed the values that most of these hippies are trying so hard to achieve. But of course, he was weak. Terribly weak. Anyhow—” Vannuchi sighed. “Anyhow, finally, Donny decided that he had to come back to San Francisco and persuade Harper to give himself up. Or, at least, to tell Harper that he was going to give himself up. That’s how naïve Donny was. He didn’t recognise the danger.”

  “Naïveté is one thing,” I said. “Stupidity is something else.”

  “It’s all a question of semantics, Sergeant.” He picked up his hat. “In the long run, I guess, Donny had to come up a loser. But not dead. That didn’t have to happen. If only he—he’d just had enough sense to realise what Harper would do, once he’d discovered what Donny planned.” Slowly, heavily, Vannuchi rose to his feet.

  “They say it takes a crook to catch a crook,” I said, also rising. “If you don’t have a little of the devil in you, it’s pretty hard to figure which way the devil’s going to jump. That’s the problem with living somewhere like Haight Ashbury, Vannuchi. You lose touch with the devil. And sometimes it can cost you.”

  He shrugged, sighed, and offered his hand, sadly.

  “Are you going back to the Haight?” I asked. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “No. Not today, anyhow. I—I haven’t seen my kids for months. And I have a friend—she’s a T.V. pitch woman, actually—who’d probably invite me to dinner, if I’d give her a call.” He smiled, for the first time as if he meant it. “Who knows, she might invite me for the weekend. Or longer.”

  “If she does,” I said, walking along with him, “let me know about it. I’ll want to keep in touch.”

  “Don’t worry, Sergeant.” Again he smiled. “We are bound together, I feel, for a short distance along the way. Like a couple of characters in Aeschylus. By the way, Cecile Franks says she’s found something of yours. She’s waiting for you at the Crushed Chrysanthemum.”

  I’d forgotten Claudia. With everything that had happened, I’d actually forgotten.

  Cecile, too. I’d forgotten her.

  The day was sunny; it was about two P.M., and the fog hadn’t come in yet.

  I watched Vannuchi walking toward the street and a bus stop. Just short of the bus stop was a phonebooth. He eyed the booth for a moment, hesitated, and then went inside.

  I walked to my cruiser, and climbed behind the wheel. Then, slowly, I drove away.

  SIXTEEN

  SHE WORE A LIGHT summer dress and a white sweater thrown over her shoulders. Her hair was brown, like mine. Her eyes were a clear blue. Like mine. Her mouth was wide and firmly set; her arms were smooth, tanned to a tawny brown. Beneath the sweater her full young breasts swelled with an exciting, mature promise.

  Had she lived with the two of them—Tomilson, and the poet? In barely two weeks’ time?

  Had she made love with them?

  I would probably never know.

  Barely three hours ago, I’d watched her pack the new bright-coloured hippie costumes she must have just bought. I’d seen many girls like her—young, beautiful girls dressed in bizarre, loose-fitting toga-like costumes, sometimes in skin-tight jeans. Something in their free, unconcerned stride made them seem anybody’s girl—for a day or a night, a week, or a warm summer in the sun.

  What had she done? What was she feeling?

  I couldn’t ask. I could only sit staring out at the airport, watching the lights of the planes. In less than an hour, her plane would be called. We’d walk down the ramp, and I’d kiss her, and she’d be in Detroit a few hours later.

  In the Grand Canyon, the last day, we’d—

  “—Wanted to call you, Daddy,” she was saying.

  “Wh—what?”

  She was staring down at the table.

  “I wanted to call you. And I—I wanted you to know. Before—”

  I swallowed, then said, “Is there any way that I—I can help you, Claudia? Anything I can do?”

  She tried to smile. “Not unless you want to take me in as a permanent boarder.”

  “I could do that, too. For a while, at least.”

  “No,” she answered, very softly. “I want to get out of San Francisco. Right now. Just like this. I—I want to get away, and think about myself. I—I’ve frightened myself, the past two weeks. That’s the only way I can express
it. And I—I want to think about it. I want to lock myself in my room, and look around at all my things, and just—just think about it.”

  I looked at her for a moment. Then, involuntarily, my gaze turned aside, to rest on the huge silver shape of a jetliner approaching the terminal. I’d spent the past six years professionally assessing human misery—objectively picking the precise moment when one more question, one more insult, or one more threat would bring a confession. I’d been successful; in another year—two years, at the most—I’d make lieutenant. I’d been successful because I’d been smart enough and tough enough to do the job. And because, most of all, I’d been detached—utterly, coldly, completely detached. When a fighter gets angry, he’s finished. When a cop feels pity, he can’t get the job done.

  Now, sitting in an airport restaurant, I was looking across the table at my own daughter. In her face I saw the same kind of misery that was my stock in trade—my profession.

  I drew a slow, deep sigh.

  “Right now,” I said, “I imagine you’re thinking that you’ve made a mess of things. And in a way, I guess you have. I—I don’t know much about you, Claudia. I guess it’s pretty obvious. But I know a little about people making a mess of things. I see it every day—eight hours a day, sometimes more. And I know a little about making a mess of things from my own experience, too. I can look back and see that I believed too many locker room compliments, and too many clippings from the sports pages—and I believed too many girls, and too many well-dressed men with drinks in their hands. It was simpler, you see, to believe them. Easier. Just like it’s easier, for you, to think there’s nothing more important—more real—than how you look, and how you feel. You’re young, and beautiful. And that’s a kind of reality, I guess. But—” I paused, aware that I was shaking my head. I couldn’t think what I wanted to say—really wanted to say. But she was looking at me now. She was listening—biting her lip, blinking.

  “But you can’t just go by what makes you feel good, Claudia. That—that’s too easy. You’ve got to be tougher than that. Stronger. I don’t know whether you’re happy at home. You probably aren’t, if you ran away. And if—if things aren’t happier for you at home, that’s partly my fault—your mother’s and mine. Because your mother and I made mistakes, you’re unhappy right now. It’s unfair. It’s tough. Every day, I see what happens to people in a box like that. There’s no place for them to go, except to break out. And that’s where I come in—to see that they don’t hurt someone else, when they break out.”

  “You know, Daddy,” she said slowly, “I can never think of you as a policeman. Somehow I just never can.”

  “That’s what I’m telling you: I can’t either. I think of myself as—as someone who’s going to bring them to their feet on the next play. I—I’m a failure, Claudia. I feel like a failure. Just like, right now, maybe you feel like a failure, too. So I know how it feels.”

  “Mother said, one time, that you couldn’t make it out in the world.”

  “She was right,” I answered. “Not in her world, any how. Not in society. Not as a public relations man in her father’s business.”

  “Are you happy, Daddy? Now?”

  “No. I spent too long thinking about my clippings. Then I spent too long with a highball glass in my hand. Now—the past six years—I’ve carried a gun. And that’s a kind of failure, too. Because you’re on one side, and everyone else is on the other. I don’t know any really happy men who carry guns.” I glanced at the big wall clock. It was time to go. And I still hadn’t said it. I’d been giving this girl—my daughter—a pointless, rambling lecture that sounded, remembering it, like a locker room pep talk—or a squad room briefing.

  She was looking at the clock. Now she was gathering up her purse and gloves—her very proper, very white gloves. Carolyn would feel encouraged, seeing those gloves.

  She rose. As I gathered myself to rise, she stepped towards me, resting her hand on my arm, to keep me in my seat.

  “Let me go by myself, Daddy. That’s the way I came.” She leaned forward, brushing her lips to my cheek. “Thank you,” she whispered, and then turned away.

  I watched her walk through the doorway, without looking back.

  SEVENTEEN

  I WAITED UNTIL SHE slipped into the old checked hunting shirt she often wore for a robe, then I switched on the bedside light.

  “Would you like me to fix you some eggs?” she asked, looking into the dresser mirror as she ran careless fingers through her long, thick hair.

  “All right. Will you cook them with sherry, like you did Friday?”

  “If I do, will you marry me?”

  “No.” I lit a cigarette.

  “If I give up the Crushed Chrysanthemum and agree to go to the Policeman’s Ball, will you marry me?”

  “Afraid not. Sorry.”

  “How about if I ask Daddy to move to Chicago for the next twenty years?”

  I sighed. “I’ve told you many times, that I don’t dislike your father. It’s him. He’s a cop hater.”

  “Daddy is suffering from a crisis of identity. His perpetual crisis of identity.”

  “What your father is suffering from is the inability to realise that he isn’t a big shot. Do you realise how much money you’d have now, if you hadn’t been subsidising ‘Daddy’ for the past year or two?”

  She shrugged. “He was entitled. That was the deal. He did put up the money. He borrowed it, true. But he still put it up. That’s finance, sweetie. He backed a winner.”

  I snorted.

  “Anyhow,” she continued, “you’re right. Daddy and I have slipped into an inversion of roles, and it’s destructive for him. So I’m going to sell out, give him half, and re-examine psychology. Unless, of course, I become pregnant.”

  “Cecile—”

  “Have you got some sherry? Eggs Benedictine aren’t good, you know, with anything else.”

  “I think so. Look.”

  She turned the silver-framed picture of Claudia to catch the dim light.

  “I remember,” she said softly, “the first time I saw that picture. I think I must’ve been interested in you even then, because I remember, very distinctly, that I was disappointed when I discovered the real reason you picked me up that night. Are you sure you won’t marry me?”

  “Cecile—”

  “Claudia is a nice girl, Frank,” she said, gazing at the picture. “She’s going to do all right. You wait.”

  “She’s back with Sandy Tomilson, apparently. Much to her mother’s disgust. It sounds to me like Claudia’s being condescending to both of them: Sandy and her mother.”

  “Good.” Decisively she nodded, turned the picture to its proper position and left the room.

  “Eggs Benedictine in twenty minutes,” she said. “Be there, Lieutenant.”

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Lt. Hastings Mysteries

  1

  AS I PULLED TO a stop and set the brake, the reporters came to cluster in a listless group around the cruiser. Dan Kanter, from the Bulletin, was yawning. Crime reporters weren’t accustomed to working in the morning, and as I glanced at my watch I saw that the time was only 9:15. It would be a long day.

  I got out of the cruiser, automatically taking the count: two squad cars, a motorcycle, two cruisers, the crime lab truck, an ambulance and the assistant coroner’s car. It was the standard assortment, indicating a standard departmental homicide—nothing very dramatic, or puzzling, or very important. Yet the neighborhood was Sea Cliff, one of San Francisco’s best. Thus the larger-than-usual gaggle of reporters, so early in the morning.

  “When’re we going to get a look, Lieutenant?” Kanter was asking.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t had a look yet myself.”

  “How’d the squeal read?”

  “I don’t know. I got the call on my way to work. Just the call, no squeal.” I began pushing my way along the sidewalk. “You probably know more than I know.”

  “They’re about ready to m
ove the body,” someone complained, “and we haven’t got any pictures yet.”

  “There might be a reason,” I answered shortly. “Anyhow, they won’t move it until I’ve had a look.”

  “We understand it’s the family maid,” Kanter said.

  Not replying, I nodded to the patrolman standing in the lushly planted entryway. As he opened the front door, I turned back to the reporters. “As soon as I find out anything, I’ll let you know. Before the body’s moved.” Then, ignoring the ritual rumblings of protest, I walked into the house.

  Dick Culligan got to his feet, nodding. He’d been sitting at one end of a long brocaded sofa, talking to a slim, pale woman, a brunette of medium height, probably in her middle forties.

  “This is Lieutenant Hastings,” Culligan said. “Mrs. Allingham, Lieutenant.”

  She looked at me with large dark eyes. She was wearing a tailored silk housecoat. Her lips were pressed into a tight, prim line. Her face, without make-up, was creased with a network of small, well-bred wrinkles. She looked intelligent, rigidly self-possessed—and worried.

  She nodded to me, then managed a low-voiced greeting. Her fingers, clasped in her lap, were fretfully twisting. As she swallowed, the cords of her neck tightened spasmodically. But she held my eyes steadily, determinedly.

  I stared at her a last long, deliberate moment before Culligan said, “The lieutenant and I will be a few minutes, Mrs. Allingham. If you’d—” He paused, then said, “If you’d like to get something on—” He let it go unfinished.

  Nodding, not replying, she got to her feet. Her walk was steady and self-possessed. She held her head straight and didn’t look back as she left the large living room.

  As I followed Culligan down the rear corridor, I looked in at each room as we passed. The furnishings were elaborate and expensive. The Allinghams, I was thinking, must have paid a hundred thousand for the house and another thirty or forty thousand for the furnishings.