by Jack Lynch
“And you?”
“I, Mr. Bragg, am clutching the walls about a foot from the ceiling. I feel like I could jump out the window. Where are you?”
“I’m at the office. I was just about to duck out for a bite to eat. You could join me, if you felt Maribeth was safely tucked in for the night.”
“I think she’s safely tucked in, and I’d love to join you. I’ve already eaten, but if you find a place that sells vodka, I’ll be able to amuse myself while you dine.”
“I’ll be there in about twenty-five minutes. Leave her a note telling her you’re with me and include the number of my answering service.”
I gave her the information then closed up the office and got my car. I hadn’t heard a weather forecast that day, but on my way to the parking garage I felt a little spritzing from out of the sky. It was a little late in the season to get rain in San Francisco, but it had been a funny weather year.
Bobbie was waiting for me in the lobby of the apartment building when I drove up. She came out and practically ran to the car. She was wearing a tan pair of Levis this time, but they fit her just as tightly as her dark blue ones. I leaned over and opened the door. She got in quickly, closed the door and put her head back on the seat.
“Get me away from here.”
I drove on up to the intersection and started down the hill toward Lombard. “Maybe your aunt had a good idea this afternoon. Maybe she should take a vacation. Down to Carmel with you, maybe.”
“I already suggested that. She said no, she’d thought better of it. It’s as if she’s committed to sitting in that apartment being morose.”
“She’s a complicated woman. If she were anybody else I think I could help her ride out all this. But I don’t know what it’s like inside her mind with all these impressions or whatever they are that she has. Did she talk any more about whatever it was she experienced up at the Wolf House today?”
“She just repeated what she said up there. That something is wrong. She’s confused by it.”
“I know the feeling.”
“You don’t show it. Where are we going?”
“I haven’t decided yet. Somewhere that has food and vodka, I suppose.”
It turned out she knew a little bit about my part of the world.
“Why don’t we drive over to the Jam Spot in Sausalito. You can eat a cheeseburger and I can let the music shake out my head.”
So that’s what we did. On the way over I told her about the interview Cliff Welch wanted, and it didn’t seem to bother her any. She said she would check with Maribeth in the morning.
The Jam Spot was a restaurant and dance joint looking out over the water just north of the business district. I used to patronize the place regularly in earlier days. As Bobbie had suggested they served a good cheeseburger, but with their new music policy these days I felt I risked loss of hearing every time I walked into the place. When I’d finished the meal I told Bobbie I’d had enough loud music for the night and we left to go back down Bridgeway to the No Name bar where I’d met Welch.
We sat inside at a table again toward the rear. I ordered a bourbon and water and Bobbie had another vodka martini. She’d had more than a couple since leaving Maribeth’s apartment. I myself hadn’t had much to drink that evening, but the glow and bubbly spirit that all that vodka sloshing around inside Bobbie brought out spread to me as well and the two of us had a pretty silly conversation, at least that was how I thought of it later. She prattled on about the bar and restaurant business down in quaint and rich Carmel, and she asked me in turn, as they always did, about my own work. And as I always did in turn I put some English on the conversation to get it onto a different part of the table.
My work, for the most part, was either too dull and routine or too gritty and bleak to be the stuff of social conversation. What I did was tell her about some of the screwball vacations I’d had. Not screwball by design, or at least not by my design. They did seem to have a sort of comic logic to them, though, so they turned out screwball and made acceptable social conversation.
Like the time the priest from Seattle apparently had listened to one confession too many and tried to hijack the airliner flying us from San Francisco to Albuquerque, New Mexico. He said he wanted to go directly to Mars. Or the time one of the little people—midgets, they used to call them—won the ballroom dancing contest two nights running on the cruise ship to Mazatlán before somebody broke into his stateroom and threw all his trousers overboard. That sort of thing.
At one point Bobbie asked the passing cocktail waitress for a piece of paper and the loan of a pen, and when she had these she wrote something briefly then folded up the paper and slipped it into a pocket of the thin cotton blouse she was wearing. We had another round of drinks and talked silly some more, and when she had finished her most recent vodka martini Bobbie put down her glass and took the note from her blouse and handed it across the table.
“For me?”
“For you.”
“If it was for me why didn’t you give it to me earlier?”
“I wasn’t sure earlier if I wanted to give it to you.”
“Is it a secret?”
“Not exactly. More like a decision.”
“A decision you had to have another martini over before you could make it.”
“Not really. I was more teasing myself than anything else. Pretending I hadn’t really made up my mind until now. Actually I had about made up my mind when I saw you drive up to the apartment building.”
I knew what it was all about, but I wasn’t quite prepared for my own inner reaction to it. My inner reaction was no reaction at all, which at first confused me some. But in about the time it would take a fat man to hit the ground from the roof of a one-story building I understood enough about the rich broth of Bobbie being the niece of Maribeth Robbins and the psychic’s fear of impending death and the bodies they were digging up in Jack London State Park (to say nothing of Allison France being not so much up in Barracks Cove as she was quietly, ever presently, just over my left shoulder) to accept my lack of reaction not with surprise or remorse but with inevitability. A lot of other men would feel differently I knew, staring across at the foxy young woman wearing the thin cotton blouse, but then I sat in a different pew from a lot of other men.
I unfolded the slip of paper. Her note read, Let’s go up to your place.
When I looked up from the note without a smile on my face, chances were she had it figured out already. “I don’t quite know how to say this.”
She sighed and looked at me in a way that said no matter, it wasn’t going to be a mortal blow to her ego.
“You don’t even have to say the rejection bit,” she told me. “I am a little curious, though.”
I nodded. “Fair enough.” I looked down at the note again and smiled thinly. “There are times I would let out a whoop and go through plate glass at the prospect of something like this.”
“Times change.”
“Yes they do.”
“What’s the problem?”
“It’s nothing contagious, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
Bobbie shrugged. “A girl’s apt to think all kinds of things.”
“These days I’m sure she is. And it’s certainly nothing to do with the way I’ve thought about you from time to time.”
Bobbie stared at me with a little frown.
“It isn’t because I couldn’t, it’s because I can’t,” I told her. “Look, if you want some sort of endorsement, here it is. I think you’re a lot more than a saucy mouth and a perky body. I think you’re bright and irreverent and loyal and caring and feisty, and I happen to like all those things. I think if things were just a little different in my life right now I’d pick up and say to hell with everything and ask you to go off and spend a week or two with me somewhere, once Maribeth’s problem is taken care of.”
“A week or two?” she asked with a grin.
“Yes. This must sound a little strange under the circumstances,
but you didn’t just slip away out of my mind after we met down in Carmel. I’ve had some pretty lusty thoughts about you as a matter of fact.”
“You’re not just bullshitting me, are you?”
“No.”
“No. I don’t think you are, either. Then what do I have to do to make things a little different in your life right now? Who do I have to kill?”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Neither am I.”
“It is very, very complicated.”
“I can be very, very patient. Despite what I’ve shown you to date.”
I looked at her. “I’ll give you a short version.”
“Better than none.”
“I’m afraid for Maribeth. I don’t know if it’s because she might be driven to take her own life or something else. But I do think there is a life-threatening force around her. I’ve never come to grips with that until right now.” I hesitated. “I wonder why that is.”
“Things sometimes pop out under stress. You are under stress, I take it.”
“Yes, but it’s more than that. I’ve never known what to think of this psychic business, even after your aunt told us about the burial ground up north. Maybe it’s just now catching up with me. But more and more I can feel the danger she says she’s in. And here you are, the closest person in the world to her. Trouble rubs off.”
Bobbie stared at me a moment, then made a little shrug. “I hate to admit it, but that makes sense.”
“Another part of it is the enormity of the crime being unearthed up north. I’ve gotten to know myself better these past few years. I’m a little like a cocked gun when I find myself in a situation like this. Something takes over inside that dims the lights in my more civilized corners and shoves kissing and tenderness into a back seat. I’m particularly bothered by the youngsters they’re finding. A girl about sixteen, a boy twelve. Life isn’t all chuckles, but as a deputy coroner up there suggested, they should have had more of a chance, those two. Everybody deserves a chance.”
Bobbie made a cocked gun of her own with the finger and thumb of one hand and snapped it at my chest. “I like kissing and I like to be kissed, but it isn’t exactly a grand necessity when I’m naked in bed with a man. I can even get by without tenderness. For a while, anyway.”
“Make a note of this. Comes the day you’re ever naked in bed with this man, there’s going to be tenderness and kissing aplenty.”
“Just to keep my smart mouth closed, I take it.”
“I’ll be kissing more than your mouth.”
“Oh? Where then?”
“Here and there. Round and about.”
“Jesus, you really are a wretch, you know that? You can talk to me like that and expect me to act as if I’ve just entered a convent?”
“I was just telling you how it could be, someday when it can be.”
Bobbie leaned back and stared at me. “I’m beginning to smell something here, and it isn’t a rat.”
I just looked at her.
“Talk about me being a throwback,” Bobbie said. “It’s another woman, isn’t it?”
“That too is a part of it.”
“Are you married?”
“No. God, no.”
“Just massively hung up.”
“Something like that.”
Bobbie rolled her eyes and got up from the table. “Let’s take this act out of here before they begin throwing old fruit at us.”
I had parked in a public lot next to a dock with piers running out into the bay. A chill wind was blowing off the water, rattling the lines of sailing craft moored nearby and causing Bobbie to wrap her arms around herself and shiver as she waited for me to unlock the car door.
“Say listen,” she told me, “do you think we could put all the bullshit behind us and you could let me spend the night at your place? I really could do with a night away from that apartment. I’ll sleep on the floor if necessary.”
“I can put you up and you won’t have to sleep on the floor.”
We drove on up the hill and I led her down the side steps to my lower apartment. I opened the door and turned on a couple of lights.
“Be it ever so humble,” I told her.
“It looks fine,” she said after a quick glance around. “Just one thing, mister.”
“What’s that?”
“Now that I know where you live, you’d sure better invite me back here some night when the pressure’s off and you’ve got your head on straight. Or else.”
“Or else what?”
“I’ll torch the place.”
FOURTEEN
“Diogenes Holmes, known to friends and foes as Dizzy, had a life that was roughly one-third legitimate business, one-third murky business and one-third chasing after women,” said Detective Sergeant Barry Smith. “Unfortunately, at the time of his death, as near as we can estimate, he was engaged in, or had just been engaged in, the third part of the equation, but so far no fun-loving woman has stepped forward to volunteer the information that she might have been the last person to see him alive, bar the killer.” Smith heaved himself out of the chair behind his desk and turned to stare out the window toward the jail building and parking lot.
“Was his wife much help?” I asked him.
Smith snorted, and turned back. “His wife has barely given us the time of day. She is in what you could call deep seclusion. I get the impression this has really shattered the woman, as is to be expected. But one doesn’t know if it’s from the loss of her husband or because he had most likely been out with one of his popsies that night.
“Lionel Mapes, the gay San Francisco waiter who was known to his friends and foes as ‘Lion,’ was last seen leaving work at the Melody Meals Restaurant on Grove Street at about ten o’clock after a slow Tuesday evening. He had first cruised the piano bar at Melody Meals but soon left. His roommate gave us a list of his hangouts but he wasn’t seen in any of them that night. Which could mean he might have been intercepted soon after leaving the restaurant, but nobody we’ve found so far saw any such encounter. His roommate is nearly as grief stricken as Mrs. Holmes.
“John Clarke, he of the accounting degree and roving eye, was last seen in attendance at one of his seminars on the Clarke CPA program for personal computers. It was held here in Santa Rosa, as it turns out, so it would have been a handy time to take out Mr. Clarke by whoever’s going around slaughtering people and has this compulsion to dump their bodies over at Jack London State Park.”
“That’s a point that’s bothered me some,” I told him. “What is there about the park that draws this person?”
“And that is a question I ask myself during my quiet moments, since all this started. That means about the last eleven seconds I’m in bed before falling asleep. Maybe it’s an attention-getting device. Maybe the killer didn’t like any of the stuff London wrote. Who the hell knows? Pershing feels we should check the backgrounds of Pat Davenport and the other park rangers.”
“What for?”
“They have access to keys to the padlocks they put on the gates. Our killer has to have a key to the padlocks so he or she can truck in all those bodies. Either that or there’s another road into the park that none of us around here, including Pat Davenport and the other rangers, know about. And what’s that funny look on your face?”
“You referred to the killer as he or she.”
“So?”
“You really think it might be a woman doing all of this?”
“Could be. After learning about some of the things women belonging to the Weatherman did back in the seventies, you have to consider it as a possibility. It’s a different world out there these days.”
“I know, but digging all those graves, even shallow graves, seems like a lot of physical work for a woman.”
“Maybe it’s more than one woman. Or more than one man. I don’t think we’re dealing with just one person here. That’s one of the things I wish your psychic could clarify for us. Oh, while I think about it…”
He peeled back some papers atop the desk until he found what he was looking for and handed it over. “That’s an updated list of the bodies we’ve so far recovered and identified.”
There were two columns of names. I recognized one of them as those of the victims. “Who are these other people?”
“Next of kin or other persons who were closest to the victims. Husband, wife, boyfriend. Father, mother.”
He knuckled some reports aside. “If your mystery caller should phone again, read that list of victims to him. He might, just might, have heard one of them mentioned by the man he said he met at the bar. If he did, then we somehow are going to have to entice your caller into talking to us. We can help him remember things he doesn’t even know he remembers.”
“I tried to tell him that.” I ran my eye down the list. “Hello.”
“What?”
“One of the persons close to a victim. Karen Ellis. I know her. Or rather I know of her. I had some dealings with the man she used to be married to. He was another private cop.”
“Which of the victims did she know?”
“Nancy Dobbs.”
Smith consulted his own list. “The one with the blood spatter on her chest. She and the Ellis woman were partners in a modeling agency in San Francisco. You say you never actually met her? Did you talk on the phone with her?”
“No, it was just her husband I encountered. He was pretty much a jerk, but he knew his business. Paid the price, though.”
“Meaning?”
“He was shot to death.”
Smith sat back in his chair. “Would there be any possible connection between that and what’s going on now?”
“No. The man who shot him was a psychopath who didn’t live much longer himself.”
“Did you ever want to meet the man’s widow? This Karen Ellis?”
“No, but I was a little curious about her at one time. Somebody told me she was quite a looker.” I glanced up from the list. Smith was smiling at me.
“Why? What did you have in mind?”
“You could save us a little time. One of our people talked on the phone with her, but the team going into the city hasn’t been able to interview her yet. How would you like to show her the list of names and photos of the victims? It’ll be another day or two before we give them out to the press. If she recognizes any of them we’ll get right back to her.”