Die For Me

by Jack Lynch

  I drove on downtown, parked and walked up to the office. It was after seven o’clock and getting dark out. I let myself into the main reception area and relocked the door behind me.

  I didn’t bother turning on lights. I’d been coming into that office enough years now so the street light through the windows behind Sharon Rapler’s desk was more than enough to let me find my way. Sloe and Morrisey’s suite was to the right of the reception area. Their door opened into a comfortable conference room, all padded leather and law books and humidors. They each had a private office beyond, and past them was a doorway leading to adjoining offices which now housed the associate attorneys allied with the firm and other secretaries and clerks I’d never even met. My office was to the left of the reception area. I flipped on a desk lamp, hung my jacket, stared out the window for a minute at lights across the way then dropped into the chair behind the desk and tried to take stock of things. It was no easy task.

  I think of myself as having an adequate sort of brain. If I had a little edge I put it down to the way I had learned through trying times to view the people and things around me. And I had, over the years, developed a practice of taking problems and situations apart in my mind and putting them down on paper and working them around until something began to make sense in all of it.

  If after all that I still couldn’t make sense of it, I would fall back on the last line of a poem written by a fellow I knew named Bob Peterson, who used to hang out around Sausalito. The poem was a birthday tribute to a woman Peterson admired. In it he describes her nature as being similar to that of some rather famous persons who were of the same sign of the Zodiac. Then he compares those natures to Peterson’s own and some noted people of that sign. The piece ends on a promise of more, when Peterson declares in his last line that he was “going downtown for more information.”

  And that generally is what in the end I would do if things in my world didn’t fit together. I would get on the phone or go out on the street and dig up things that I could add to what I already knew until it began to take a recognizable shape. All pretty basic, really.

  But this thing with Maribeth and the bodies was turned upside down. It was the way Sergeant Barry Smith had described the problem with serial murders. You’re overwhelmed with information and there’s no way to shut it off to give yourself a chance to pick through it for the important stuff.

  I had a client who was a psychic. That in itself could throw you off your stride some. I had met her by helping to keep her from taking her own life a dozen years earlier. Now she was responsible for the unearthing of the victims of a multiple slayer.

  I knew a lawyer’s mind would tell me that my job didn’t have anything to do with those deaths. My job was to protect my client from some unknown threat. But the act of unearthing victims of the killer now had led to the suicide of another innocent party, and that, combined with the insensitivity of a man from the governor’s office, was putting my client into a state where I had to be wary that the unknown threat might be my own client’s suicide.

  I could imagine Maribeth experiencing guilt for the suicide of the slain Donald McGuire’s mother. Maribeth might feel it would have been better for the boy’s mother to think only that her child was missing. Better not to have had his body found and learn he had been slain. But because of Maribeth, they had found the boy’s body, and many others.

  But then I couldn’t be sure of that dark area my mind was leading me into. I doubted that even a psychiatrist could follow such a track through somebody else’s mind, let alone somebody who seemed to have the unusual mental process that Maribeth did. What I wanted was some meat and potatoes detective work: documents to find; clues to discover. Something other than trying to follow the shadows that hovered in another person’s mind.

  I leaned back and made a face at myself. I had come full circle. I had put myself back into the pickle Sergeant Smith faced. Where do you start? Where do you turn? What do you look for?

  I wondered what Allison France was doing up in Barracks Cove.

  I was up and putting on my jacket when the phone rang. I snatched up the receiver. “Bragg.”

  “Mr. Bragg, you don’t know me,” a man’s voice said, “but I think I might have some information you’ll find interesting. In fact, if you have a tape recorder by the phone you might like to plug it in.”

  “No, I don’t have a recorder,” I told him, sitting back down. “There’s probably one over in one of the other offices, but I have a poor track record with them. I’m apt to connect them wrong or hit the wrong button and erase everything.”

  The caller chuckled. “And you a detective? Well, probably it doesn’t matter that much. I heard your name mentioned by a guy on the Six O’Clock News.”

  “How was that?”

  “They showed some sort of press conference a guy gave up in Santa Rosa, to do with those bodies they’re finding.”

  “Was it a man named Pershing?”

  “I don’t remember, don’t know if I heard his name even. He was somebody out of Sacramento.”

  “And what did he have to say?”

  “He had quite a lot to say. In fact I was a little surprised the cops would release some of the stuff they did.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like that the mother of the young boy they dug up committed suicide last night. Talk about tacky. I could have gone the rest of the week without learning that, thanks.”

  “The man actually said that?”

  “Yeah, it was a part of some big speech he was making about how gung ho the governor was to catch the fiend behind all this killing, et cetera, et cetera. I should have thought he would have found it all pretty embarrassing, to tell you the truth. But about you, he said you were a private detective from San Francisco and that you’d first approached the Sonoma sheriff with information you’d gotten from some woman psychic.”

  “Wonderful. Did he mention the psychic’s name?”

  The caller hesitated. “I don’t think so. He said he’d interviewed the two of you this afternoon, you and the woman psychic. He said the story you and she told was still under investigation. None of this really has anything to do with what I called about, Mr. Bragg, but I’d say he came within about a breath of giving you good cause to sue for libel. Or slander, whatever it is on TV. But I’m glad he did it because it gave me a name. Yours. Somebody I can talk to besides the cops.”

  “Why not talk to the cops?”

  “I just don’t like to talk to cops. Besides, this is all kind of thin. But I figured somebody like you, if you were any good at all, if you were willing to go to the cops with something a woman who claims to be a psychic tells you, then you might at least consider what I have to offer.”

  I sat back in the chair. “Look, if it’s important maybe it would be better if we could meet somewhere and talk it over. Pick a place.”

  “No, that would be a little too much like going to the cops. I’m not even going to give you my name. I just want to tell you about a conversation I had with a fellow, two, maybe three months back.”

  I waited, but the caller had fallen silent. “So what about it?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Hearing myself say it, it sounds so damned dumb.”

  “Don’t let it stop you. You’ve got my attention. I really want to hear about it.”

  “Well, this guy and me, we’d both been drinking, but thinking back on it as best I can, and in the light of what’s been happening, I think maybe he just might be responsible for all those bodies you’re finding up there in Sonoma.”

  I pulled over a lined yellow pad and ballpoint pen. “I’m beginning to wish I had a tape recorder. How about if I go looking for one?”

  “No, I’ve already spent longer on the phone than I told myself I was going to. Turns out you’re pretty easy to talk to. I really don’t want to be involved in this thing one little bit. But you know, I’ve read about those people they’re digging up, women, the youngster, most all of them just normal people, you k
now, and I said to myself, hey, that isn’t right. Somebody has to stop this. And so I figure the least I can do is tell you about the conversation I had.”

  “Okay, where did you run into him?”

  “In this bar I go into once in a while. I’m not going to tell you the name of that either, because I like it and want to continue going in there from time to time. But it’s in the Marina District. There’s enough bars around there so you could spend the rest of your life trying to find the right one. I was in there pretty late, well, late for me, around ten thirty one night, and I got into a conversation with this guy who’d been sitting there by himself sipping whiskey and staring into the backbar mirror.

  “I don’t remember what all we were talking about. The Giants some, I guess, but all of a sudden he turned to me and he said, ‘Well, time doesn’t heal all things, that’s all there is to it.’

  “I just sat there waiting for him to go on, wondering if maybe he was still talking about the Giants or maybe something else we might have been talking about. I knew I’d been drinking some. I didn’t know how much he might have poured down. But then he asked me if I knew what grief was. Right out of left field like that he asked it. And I made some crack like, sure I knew what grief was. Grief was having to get up the next morning with the hang-over I was going to have, or some such. But he was serious. And I sat there and listened to him ramble on about how time can eat away at a man when people die.”

  “Was he at all specific about any of this? Did he say who had died, or when, or what of? Where, maybe?”

  “No, he didn’t go into any of that. But while he was talking about it, well, the man was showing some pain on his face. I’m positive he was talking about some awful thing that had happened, and not so long ago. Either that, or the whiskey was eating holes in his brain.

  “I sat there trying to be sympathetic, but frankly I was getting a little depressed listening to him rattle on like that, and I was thinking maybe it was about time I lifted up and went home or found somewhere else to drink or something, but then he really got my attention when he turned to me like we’d just been sitting there carrying on a reasonable two-way conversation, and said, ‘I could kill them all, but where would that leave me?’ Then he sort of smiled to himself. ‘What?’ I asked him, wondering if I’d heard right, but he just said, ‘It’s been staring me in the mirror all along.’

  “End of quote, and end of phone conversation, Mr. Bragg.”

  “Wait! Give me that last quote again. I’m writing it down and I’m slow at it.” The man repeated it and I scribbled. “And don’t hang up on me. This could be very important. You might remember something more.”

  “No, I don’t think so. See, I thought about this quite a bit, after I began reading about the bodies they’re finding. I wrote down everything I could remember from the conversation I had with this guy. You’ve got it all.”

  “What did the man look like? How old was he?”

  “I’m lousy about things like that. I’d say he was probably approaching middle age, whatever the hell that means. Somewhere from his mid-twenties to mid-forties.”

  “That’s the best you can do?”

  “I’m afraid so. He had a couple days’ growth of beard, I seem to recall.”

  “How was he dressed?”

  “Don’t remember.”

  “What did his hair look like?”

  “He had on a hat of some kind.”

  “Did you see the color of his eyes?”

  “Are you kidding? Right then I couldn’t have seen the color of my own eyes if somebody had held up a mirror.”

  “What about his ears? Sometimes people remember ears, whether they flapped out, or were high on his head, or low?”

  “By now I couldn’t even remember if he had ears. Really, Mr. Bragg, you’ll have to take my word for it. I just can’t remember anything much about him. Except for that weird conversation. And hell, I could even be all wrong about this, you know? I don’t personally think I was. There was something about the guy, and those things he said. If you’d been there you’d know what I’m talking about. The man was serious, whatever he was talking about. And he left, right after.

  “Now I couldn’t go to the cops with something like this, but like I said, after I heard your name mentioned on the news, I figured if you had the balls to go to the cops with something a psychic told you, and if you were any good…”

  I couldn’t hold him any longer. Maybe the caller was afraid somebody else in the office might be trying to get a trace on where he was calling from. Just before he hung up I asked him to phone back in a day or so, even giving the man my home tele-phone number. I told him that maybe by then we would learn something that would make it important to talk to him again, that maybe we’d learn something that would trigger another memory to do with the conversation he’d had in the bar that night, or to do with the person’s appearance.

  The man told me he’d think it over, but he didn’t think he’d call again, without something more to offer. He said he would be following the TV news and reading the papers and if he saw something that might seem important he would give me a call.

  I sat staring at the wall a good ten minutes before I put in a call to Sergeant Barry Smith at the Hall of Justice in Santa Rosa. I figured the chances were better than even that Smith would still be in the office, and I was right.

  THIRTEEN

  “Hello, Bragg. Sorry about what happened this afternoon. How’s the psychic friend?”

  “She was in pretty bad shape when I dropped her off. Pershing’s going to need an arrest warrant the next time he wants to talk to her. Or try to talk to her.”

  “I don’t blame you for feeling that way. He gave his little press conference, you know.”

  “I just heard about some of it. Sounds as if he’s really gumming up things.”

  “No, actually it might have been the best thing he could have done for us. I didn’t see it myself, but I heard the sheriff is extremely upset at some of the things Pershing let out. The sheriff’s been on the phone to the mayor and chairman of the county Board of Supervisors and the mayor and board chairman have been talking to our State Assembly people and the governor’s office. Since then the governor’s office put in a call to Pershing. It will be interesting to see what tomorrow brings. What’s happening with you?”

  “I had a phone call myself a few minutes ago. It so happens it also came about because of the press conference. The caller wouldn’t give me his name, but he did have an interesting story to tell.”

  I passed it on to Barry Smith as concisely as I could, and after I had finished the sergeant was quiet for a few moments then sighed deeply. “If only he could have told you something more.”

  “That’s how I felt.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “If you were standing in front of me I’d shrug my shoulders. I think the caller believes what he was telling me, the same as the Robbins woman believed what she was telling me. But then I know less about the caller than I did about Robbins. I’m sure the caller thought the man he talked to in the bar could be the one doing all this.”

  “Okay, listen. When we hang up I want you to recreate that conversation you had with the guy right away. Write down anything and everything you can remember about it. When that’s done I want you to phone back. There’ll be somebody here ready to record what you have. Fair enough?”

  “Fair enough.”

  I hung up and spent the next twenty minutes trying to recreate the phone conversation I’d had, then called Santa Rosa again and fed it all into a recorder. By the time I had finished it was after nine o’clock and my stomach was growling. I stretched and yawned and considered walking over to a nearby restaurant that served hearty pasta and honest red wine. The phone rang again.

  “It’s Cliff Welch, Mr. Bragg, wondering if you’ve had a chance to talk to the psychic lady about the taping session I’d like to set up.”

  “Hi, Welch. Yeah, I asked her about it and she
said no. She’s worried that the exposure could lose her some business. Some of her clients are skittish and she’s afraid the publicity might panic them. Tell me something, though, were you at that news conference up in Santa Rosa late this afternoon?”

  “I sure was.”

  “Given by a man named Pershing?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I understand he mentioned me and the psychic woman.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did he identify the woman?”

  “No. But I figure I know who she is.”

  “How do you figure that?”

  “I heard somewhere she’s from San Francisco. I went to the Yellow Pages and I think I found her. Not under psychics, it was something else. But if her name isn’t M. Robbins, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “I’m not going to tell you whether you’re right or not. I just wanted to know how much Pershing released.”

  “He blabbed quite a bit, but not about her beyond mentioning it was something she told you that got everybody started on all this.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. The woman’s having a rocky time these days.”

  “Oh? How so?”

  “She’s not at all happy about her role in it. She’s a woman of deep feeling. It’s very depressing for her to turn on the news and see what you people have been shooting up there in the park, or to hear about the suicide of that boy’s mother.”

  “That’s understandable, I guess. Still, news is news. How about that niece of hers you were talking about? Could I get a session with her do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I completely forgot about that as an alternative. I’ll try to talk to them tomorrow about it and leave a message on your machine.”

  “I’m much obliged.”

  I disconnected, then dialed Maribeth’s number. Bobbie answered. “How are things with you and your aunt?”

  “I think things are fine with Maribeth. She had some warm milk about an hour ago. I looked in on her a few minutes ago and she seemed to be really zonked. I think she’s down for the night.”