The Bohemian Connection

by Susan Dunlap

  Where there had been screams of protest minutes ago, now there were wary nods of agreement. I could see where Tisson got his reputation for thinking on his feet.

  “Like poor Michelle Davidson, you’ve followed the rules and the bureaucrats have ignored you. Am I right?”

  “Right!” someone yelled.

  “Michelle Davidson made a complaint to the Environmental Health Department once a month, every month since last Christmas, and still, in July, nothing has been done. Nothing. I say that is too long!”

  “Right!” The response came from voices on both sides of the crowd.

  “It’s six months too long!”

  “Right!”

  “I say, the time to have action is now! Right now!”

  The crowd broke into applause. The cameras were all on Tisson now. He turned to me at the back of the stand. “Who owns the cesspool?”

  “Ward McElvey.”

  “Is he here?”

  I hesitated, not wanting to be so visible on the stand. The congressman pulled me forward. “Look for him,” he demanded.

  It didn’t take long. “He’s over there, in the blue shirt and slacks.”

  “Ward McElvey, come on up here. We can handle this right away. Come right on up.”

  Ward looked around furtively, as if considering the possibility of escape, then shrugged and stepped forward and up onto the stand. As he moved to the microphone, Ward glared at me, then shook his head to flick his hair in place, and smiled tentatively at Tisson.

  “I’m sure, Mr. McElvey, that you are as saddened as everyone in town is at Michelle Davidson’s death.”

  Ward nodded.

  No wonder Vida hadn’t wanted to mention Michelle’s death to the congressman. Even I hadn’t expected him to play it for this maudlin a show.

  The crowd was silent. Tisson asked Ward about the mosquito larvae, then poked the microphone toward him. “Why haven’t you cleared up your cesspool problems, Mr. McElvey?” he demanded.

  Ward took hold of the microphone gingerly, then moved it close to his mouth. “I’ve been waiting to see if I’ll hook onto the sewer or have to get a new cesspool.” He spoke fast, nervously, into the too-close mike, so that his words melted into the electronic rumble. I doubted anyone ten feet away could understand him. “Everyone in town has debated whether or not to hook on. It’s not cheap, you know.” Sweat covered Ward’s forehead. His skin was as red as Alison’s bikini.

  “Another bureaucracy, the sewer bureaucracy, folks, that’s what we have here. One bureaucracy failed to act, and another kept neighbors from working out their problems together.”

  The crowd murmured approval.

  “But now, Mr. McElvey, as one of the leading citizens of Henderson, as a neighbor and friend, I’m sure you want to grant Michelle Davidson’s last request and dig up that cesspool. I’m sure you want to leave her family in peace.”

  There was no sound. Tisson looked at Ward. Ward looked at the crowd. Tisson reached for the microphone he’d given Ward, but Ward kept hold.

  “No,” he said.

  “What?”

  “No, I’m not going to dig up my cesspool. I told Michelle—”

  The crowd shouted him down.

  “Mr. McElvey, surely you can put aside personal concerns when your neighbor, your next-door neighbor, has been killed.” Tisson had taken the microphone. Now he held it out to Ward, but Ward didn’t take it.

  “No!” He turned and jumped down from the stand.

  Tisson stared after him a moment, then said into the microphone, “Is there a judge here?” He turned to the mayor. “Didn’t you tell me Judge Watson would be here?”

  “He was supposed to be. Probably caught in traffic.”

  “Judge Watson?” Congressman Tisson called.

  People in the crowd looked around, but no judge appeared.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I am not going to be stopped. Michelle Davidson’s last request will not be ignored. Sheriff! Let me see the sheriff.”

  From the edge of the crowd, Wescott made his way toward the stand. I sat down on one of the chairs.

  “Sheriff,” Tisson said into the microphone, “I need your help in finding Judge Watson. He’s on his way here. He should be here any moment. He’s just caught in that traffic jam.”

  “Then he won’t get here till tomorrow!” someone yelled.

  I looked at the crowd to see their reaction, but there was none. They had forgotten that Tisson was the cause of the traffic. They were with him in his quest.

  “What kind of car does the judge drive?” Tisson demanded of the crowd.

  “Buick,” a man yelled. “Maroon Buick. New.”

  “Thank you. And thank you, Sheriff.”

  Wescott hadn’t said a word.

  It took only a few minutes for Wescott to discover which way Judge Watson would be coming and to send the deputy I had talked to along North Bank Road toward Santa Rosa to bring him here.

  Ward McElvey was nowhere in sight now. Briefly I considered rushing to his house, but no matter what he did not want discovered, he couldn’t dig up a well-buried cesspool in an hour.

  The crowd had doubled now. The beach was jammed. Craig and Alison stood, not right together, but not far apart, near the south end of the beach. I spotted Jenny making her way down the slope. Someone must have told her something was going on; maybe they even knew her own husband was the villain of the drama. In the middle of the crowd, I noticed Father Calloway. And with a quick glance, I checked that Vida was still where I had left her.

  “Judge Watson, right up here,” Congressman Tisson called. “Make way, folks. Let the judge through.”

  When the judge, a tall, thin, bald man of about sixty, arrived at the stand, Congressman Tisson reviewed Michelle’s death and her complaint in loving detail. He had the crowd with him; they nodded in response to every phrase he uttered. They murmured approval as he asked the judge to issue an order on the spot to dig up that cesspool “and even in death give Michelle Davidson justice!”

  The judge assessed the political situation as quickly as had Tisson, and making a statement about the responsibility of the judiciary to the people, he ordered the cesspool opened.

  “And now, folks, who will volunteer to dig? Which of you strong men?”

  He didn’t need to ask twice. Enough men to excavate North Bank Road approached the stand. And then, with Tisson and the news crews in the lead, the entire crowd headed toward Ward McElvey’s cesspool.

  I found myself in the middle of the crowd. It was an odd mix of people. As the marchers hurried along, propelled by the anticipation of a show and the chance of being seen on the evening news, they fell into two groups: the locals who knew Michelle and were sad, angry, or still surprised by her death; and the tourists to whom Michelle was just another body waiting to be buried. To them, her death—in a sewer—was cause for bewilderment, or for laughter.

  We poured onto North Bank Road, blocking both lanes of traffic and filling sidewalks on both sides. There must have been three or four hundred people, and like any procession, we were picking up people as we went.

  As we passed Davidson’s Plants and started up Zeus Lane, a hand touched my shoulder. David Sugarbaker. “What is this?” he asked. He looked alert, his sandy curly hair shiny clean. Tan arms and legs extended from a T-shirt and shorts. “Someone said they’re going to dig up that cesspool I was checking.” He stared down at me in confusion and fear, as if the dig would be an indictment of his own work.

  “Didn’t you hear Congressman Tisson’s speech?”

  “No. I just came into town. I was going to get some breakfast. There’s this place that advertises a champagne brunch on Sundays.”

  “Well, what led to this dig is a long story.”

  “Tell me. We’ve got time. A cesspool isn’t six or eight inches under ground, you know. And that soil will be hard. It would never have passed the perk test. It’ll be murder to shovel up. You’ve got plenty of time to tell me the whole tale.”<
br />
  “Okay,” I said. The crowd was thinning a bit as we moved up the steep street. Those unused to climbing in the midday heat were falling back, the rest of us pushing ahead. Away from the river now, any suggestion of cool was gone; the sun glared down on the macadam; the heat seemed to foam up to surround us. Wiping the sweat off my forehead, I told Sugarbaker about Ross Remson having been the Bohemian Connection, about his flamboyant activities when he lived in Henderson, and then his move away. “He lived in San Francisco then, but he came back for Bohemian Week.”

  “When he made most of his money?”

  “Right. That’s how it was until eight years ago. By then he was gone for all but that week. Michelle had married her husband. Ross was living in San Francisco with Alison. But he had to get out of San Francisco, away from his dangerous associates there. So the first weekend of Bohemian Week Ross brought Alison here. He had all his records here. Michelle and Craig, his closest Henderson friends, were in town. His sister Jenny and her husband, the one who owns the cesspool, were here. Alison says Ross left her and went to his family’s house. When he got there his father was digging the hole for the cesspool.”

  “Geez. That’s a big job for one man, particularly an old man.”

  “It was. He had a heart attack. The ambulance came. And Jenny told me that when she looked for Ross to drive her to the hospital, he had gone. The flurry of the ambulance arriving would have covered his escape.”

  “What about his records? Did he take them with him?”

  “I doubt it.” I recounted my reasoning to him. “So I’ve been assuming that the records are in the cesspool—”

  “And they’re forcing the liquid into the leach lines!” Sugarbaker looked delighted, as if the whole Remson family crisis had been arranged to solve his leach line problem.

  We turned onto Half Hill Road. The pace slowed. I looked up at Sugarbaker. He kept nodding as he considered the cesspool blockage.

  I quickened my pace, moving to the front of the line. For once I was thankful for my winter of climbing steep wooden stairways and clambering up muddy driveways. Sugarbaker, with his long legs, had no trouble keeping up. The congressman was breathing heavily. The judge’s face was red. Sheriff Wescott strode beside them. And directly behind were four men with shovels they had managed to acquire one way or another as they walked. The reporters hovered, sweating, but never falling back. Most of them crowded around the congressman, but several talked to the men with shovels. Forming a wider circle around the group were the cameramen, walking crablike, looking up from their lenses only to wipe the sweat from their foreheads.

  There was a brief pause by the sewer construction hole. Cameras panned from it to Michelle’s house to Ward’s and back to Congressman Tisson. Then the group made their way around the hole and up Michelle’s stairs to the deck.

  The congressman looked around expectantly. “Okay, men, dig it up.”

  No one moved.

  Tisson stared at the shovelers.

  One said, “You got to tell us where it is first.”

  Tisson looked puzzled. As a former city-dweller, I knew what he was thinking—the cesspool should be under the toilet. He would have no idea that that needn’t be the case. Cesspools were where the hole could be dug and the line connected. Many people who hadn’t dug the holes themselves had no idea where their cesspools where. We meter readers, who faced the danger of falling into abandoned cesspools after the lids rotted away, knew the above-ground signs. I started to move forward, but Sugarbaker beat me to it.

  Before I had taken a step, he was next to the congressman, introducing himself, and explaining that he’d been here investigating the complaint. It was clear from Tisson’s expression that the last thing he wanted was evidence that the bureaucracy had moved on Michelle’s complaint without his prodding. Stepping between Sugarbaker and the cameras, he instructed him to lead the men to the hole.

  It was between the houses, partway up the incline, no more than ten feet from Michelle’s garage and the mosquito larvae.

  The crowd filled Ward and Jenny’s stairs, spilled over onto their yard, stamping for footholds on the steep ground. They covered Craig’s yard, using the seedlings for handholds. And they filled the street, pushing so close to the sewer construction hole that the sheriff’s deputies had to move them back. Men lined up by the diggers, ready to relieve them.

  But Sugarbaker had been wrong about the soil. It wasn’t hard. And he had been wrong about the box. It wasn’t yards deep. The crowd was still arriving when the diggers struck the top of the redwood cesspool box.

  The sheriff stepped forward. “Okay, hold it there.” He took a shovel and began to pry the top loose.

  I leaned over the railing and looked down. The box was less than four yards away.

  The sheriff lifted the lid.

  The smell was awful.

  It took only six shovels full of excrement to uncover what was inside. The sheriff ordered the diggers to step back and called for a garden hose. He aimed the water into the box. The diggers vacillated between moving forward for a glimpse inside the box and jumping back to avoid the ricocheting spray. I leaned over the railing.

  The sheriff turned off the hose nozzle. The water stopped.

  Inside the cesspool were the remains of a body—very decomposed.

  I swallowed hard.

  Grimacing, the sheriff leaned close to the skull. When he stood up he shook his head and said to one of the deputies, “There’s a gap between the front teeth.”

  CHAPTER 20

  THE ONLOOKERS SEEMED TO gasp as one. The sheriff stood motionless, looking down at the decomposed body of Ross Remson.

  Thirty seconds passed, then it was as if the still picture came to life. The cameramen pressed in. Congressman Tisson began speaking. Reporters crowded around. And the news of what was in the cesspool passed in a visible wave through the crowd.

  I moved back to the far side of Michelle’s deck, staring blankly at the crowd. David Sugarbaker came up beside me.

  “I can’t get anything from those guys,” he moaned, pointing to Tisson and his entourage. “What does all this mean?”

  “It means that Michelle Davidson was murdered to stop her from complaining about her mosquito larvae—to keep the cesspool from being dug up.”

  “Then her death had nothing to do with this Bohemian Connection you were telling me about? That Bohemian Connection job wasn’t passed on that weekend?”

  “No. The Bohemian Connection job did pass on, but not as Ross intended. But that’s not why he was killed.”

  “Well, why was he killed? And who is the Bohemian Connection now?”

  I thought a moment, letting my eyes survey the crowd. I couldn’t find the familiar faces now, not Jenny, or Ward, or Craig or Alison, or even Vida. The crowd had pressed forward, leaving Mr. Bobbs standing a few feet off from its outer edge.

  Turning back to Sugarbaker, I said, “The question that has bothered me all along is why was Michelle’s body put in a place where it was bound to be found no later than Monday morning. All along I’ve looked at it as if the killer had to put it down there Thursday night to get rid of it then. Like the Follow-up I told you about. But I’d forgotten that there’s another end to Follow-up—that’s when the folder comes back. And that was the reason Michelle’s body was dropped into the sewer hole. It wasn’t only because the killer couldn’t dispose of it Thursday night. It was so the killer could deal with it at a convenient time before Monday morning. Like Mr. Bobbs said about Follow-up—the idea is to deal with it at a time when you can give it your best attention. That’s what the killer planned. The killer didn’t expect me to find it Friday. It was reasonable to assume that it would still be there Sunday night.”

  “But who?”

  “There was one person who needed to put off disposing of the body till then. And there was only one person who could have taken over the job without Ross’s approval.”

  “Listen, could you—”

  I looked ov
er the crowd again. The killer was gone. But I knew where the killer would go.

  Suddenly the crowd was quiet. A reporter’s voice rang out. “Congressman Tisson, how does this connect with this woman’s complaint?”

  “Well, that’s hardly an issue now,” the congressman said.

  “Hardly an issue!” Sugarbaker fumed. He looked toward me and back to Tisson.

  “Go on,” I said, giving him a push.

  He leapt forward.

  Momentarily I was tempted to follow, to tell the sheriff what I had figured out. But he was right in the middle of the crowd. It would take a good ten minutes just to elbow my way to him and then who knew how long to get his attention and to convince him who the killer was. Suppose he wouldn’t believe me—again. I wasn’t about to give him that opportunity.

  I started up the hillside, making my way across the path behind Ward’s house, through the crowd and up the incline from there, the way Sugarbaker had gotten back to his car Friday afternoon. My boots slipped. I grabbed at branches, pulling myself up, scraping for handholds in the earth until I could reach another branch and clamber on up. When I got to Cemetery Road, I turned left, hurrying on, thinking of the killer and of Michelle Davidson’s incredible bad luck.

  I hadn’t had to guess how the killer knew I would be at Maria Keneally’s house last night—following me from my own driveway was easy. But I had wondered why, why then? Now I realized that it was to keep me from seeing Congressman Tisson. I had stood in front of Michelle’s house yesterday afternoon telling Vida that I intended to pass on Michelle’s complaint to Tisson. I had argued with her that it was vital. Michelle had been killed to prevent her from asking him to push her complaint about the cesspool, and thus, to keep Ross’s body from being discovered. Poor Michelle had stumbled innocently upon the one cause that would prove fatal to her.

  Cemetery Road was empty now. Everyone was either downtown or in Ward’s yard. I hurried on past the dead-end roads, along the turn to the cemetery, then through the old cement pillars.