by Jack Lynch
“Who do you know at Barracks Cove?” Rachel asked.
“I’m acquainted with several people. The person I know best is what I guess could be called a girlfriend. At least she used to be.”
Rachel glanced at me then turned her eyes back to the road without saying anything.
“We’ve been pretty close in the past,” I continued. “I mean, very close. But the last few times I’ve talked to her on the phone, well, I don’t know. There seems to be a chill there. I’m not sure what it’s all about.”
“Haven’t you asked her?”
“No. I’m a little reluctant to do that.”
“Does that mean she has cause to be chilly?”
“Not really, but from her take on things I just don’t know.”
Rachel gave me a look. We drove on in silence.
It was late afternoon by the time we reached Barracks Cove. We had agreed Allison would be a logical person to speak with first, but I had felt a growing trepidation as we neared the town. These weren’t the circumstances under which I had next wanted to speak with Allison. I asked Rachel to pull over to an outdoor pay phone in a shopping square off the town’s main thoroughfare. I dialed Allison’s number. There wasn’t any answer. Rachel and I walked around the area, prowling shops.
“Can’t we just drive on over to her place and wait there?” she asked finally.
“I have a feeling it would be better to phone first,” I told her.
I tried again twenty minutes later. This time Allison answered.
“Hi, I’m in town on business. Wonder if I could stop by?”
She thought about it.
“You might be able to help us,” I told her. “I have a woman sheriff’s detective with me. We’re working together.”
“Working on what together?”
I hesitated. “If you don’t know, maybe it would be better if I explained in person.”
“Why should I know?”
“My name’s been in the newspapers some, and on TV.”
“That must be nice for business.”
“Not necessarily.”
“I haven’t been watching the news all that much. Sure, you can come out I guess. But Bragg?”
“Yes?”
“This isn’t something I’m going to let you turn into a social call. Okay?”
“Allison, I have a woman detective with me. She even carries a great big revolver in her shoulder bag.”
“Oh, swell.”
I went back to the car. Rachel was waiting for me but I didn’t say anything right away. I sat there brooding.
“Well?” Rachel asked finally.
“I think I know now what’s making it such a chilly springtime in Barracks Cove.”
“What’s that?”
“It would make more sense to you if Allison explained it. It goes way back to the beginning between Allison and me. It’s also something I thought had been put to rest. But if it hasn’t, it’s going to make our visit far more difficult.”
“Bragg, I’m going to have to pry a little bit now. When it comes to men and women there is such a thing as being hung up, hung up high, or absolutely hanging upside down. Now which is it with you?”
I waved a hand. “No contest. Upside down.”
I gave Rachel directions to the quiet side of town where Allison lived in a funky old frame house with a big art studio out back. When Allison let us in and I made the introductions, Rachel routinely dug out her sheriff’s badge.
“How nice,” Allison told her. “I thought for a moment you were going to show me your gun.”
“What?” asked Rachel with a puzzled smile.
And I knew for sure then it was the same old thing that had dogged our relationship since the beginning. The two women seemed to be measuring each other. They were of about the same height. Except for the color of their hair they might have been sisters.
“What do you do for the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office?” Allison asked.
“I’m with the Violent Crimes Unit,” Rachel told her before I could interrupt.
“Jesus,” murmured Allison, sinking into an old overstuffed chair and turning half away. “How could it be anything else?”
“Is that it, Allison?” I asked quietly, settling into a chair across the small room from her. “The violence thing again?”
“That’s right, Pete. That’s exactly right.” She turned back in her chair. Rachel still stood just inside the front door, her puzzlement growing.
“Sit down, please,” Allison told her.
“I thought we had worked this out, down around Monterey and Big Sur,” I told Allison.
“I thought so too.”
“What happened around Monterey and Big Sur?” Rachel asked, settling on the edge of a small sofa.
“I shot and killed a man who was holding Allison captive,” I told her. “It was a long and pretty terrifying experience for her. She had always complained in the past how our relationship disturbed her because of some of the people I encountered in my work and the things I had to do. As if she were dating some animal just out of the dark part of the forest.”
“Peter, please,” said Allison. “Sarcasm doesn’t help. This is a very real and disturbing thing to me. I’ve tried to explain it to you before.”
She turned toward Rachel, having difficulty keeping her composure. “You’re a woman. I don’t understand. What ever would lead you into police work? What ever could make you want to be with a unit called Violent Crimes?”
Rachel pursed her lips. “To answer your first question, why police work, I figure it’s good work. It’s important work. I seem to have a knack for some phases of it. As for Violent Crimes, I guess the easy answer would be to say that sure, we handle homicides and assaults and any number of awful things people do to one another. Those things also include child molestation and rape. That sort of thing. Sometimes a woman cop is valuable in cases like that. But like I said, that’s the easy answer. The real answer is I figure it’s the elite squad in the department. If my boss figures I’m good enough to be there, that’s where I want to be. Bragg just said you seem to act like he’s some kind of animal. Well, I don’t think he is, but I can tell you, Allison, there are animals out there. I should think you’d take a little pride in having a boyfriend who tries to help keep them away from ordinary people.”
Allison made a desperate little “Oh!” sound. When she looked up she addressed Rachel again. “I appreciate all that. But that’s beside the point. The point is, and I admit it’s selfish, the effect all that has on me. And my work.”
She turned toward me now. “After we got back from Monterey and spent those few quiet days together, after that business was over, I thought I had finally come to terms with it. I thought I had gotten to the point where I could grasp and reconcile some of the things you had to do. I really thought so.”
She’s a big girl, Allison is. Large boned with long honey-blonde hair. It was a little room, that front sitting room she had. And when Allison became emotional, and she was being emotional now, turning in her chair, swinging her hair, trying to explain herself with desperate gestures and desperate words, she seemed to fill the whole space. Larger than life. Maybe harboring larger emotions than most of us have, and maybe that was what made her so good at what she did. Painting. She was a truly fine artist.
“It was not long after all that,” Allison continued in a quiet voice, “that my work began to turn to absolute shit. I mean, there was nothing about it going well.”
“You never told me that.”
“Do you tell me when your work stinks?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
Allison uttered a puff of despair. “And I was too dumb to see what the problem was, of course. Thank God for Gene Cooney.”
“Gene Cooney,” I repeated.
“Yes. I met him in the course I told you I was taking out at the college. He’s another painter. He has a studio in town. And you might as well know, Peter, I’ve been seeing him som
e outside of the classroom. He’s the one who answered the phone the other evening when you called. He’s helped me a lot.”
She took a deep breath and let it out again. “Outside the classroom I told him about the problems I’d been having, and he asked me some about my life, and I told him, and I told him about you and what you did and what we’d been through together down in Monterey, and he was able to show me how that might be behind the problems I was having. Not so much a delayed reaction to what happened to me personally down there, but this mental shifting of gears I’d tried to make for you. He suggested that by trying to come to terms with the violence, I could be raping my own mind, or at least that part of it that wants to explore some of the beauty of life, not that other side.
“I’m expecting Gene any minute, by the way. I phoned him after you called.”
I sat back in the chair. “Has it gone that far, Allison? You feel you have to have him with you before you can be in the same room with me?”
Allison shook her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s just that you said a woman detective would be with you. So I wanted somebody in my corner for a change, if push came to shove. Maybe he can explain all this to you better than I can.”
She turned once more to Rachel. “I’m sorry about this. Really. I must sound very dizzy to you.”
“No, ma’am, you sure don’t sound dizzy to me. In fact you’re making all kinds of sense, from your standpoint. I’m just sorry this thing has to come between you and Bragg. I know we’ve just met, but I think you’re both good people. I…Oh hell, Rachel, shut up.”
There was a light rap at the front door. Allison was out of her chair in an instant and crossed to open it. A smallish fellow in his mid-40s with balding hair, eyeglasses and the beginning of a little pouch at his middle came in and said hello to us all. He was mild mannered, mild spoken. I had an urge to pick him up and throw him through the front window.
“I’ve just been telling them about the problems I had with my work,” Allison told Cooney. “And how you’ve helped me overcome some of them.”
He hummed to himself.
I hate people who do that. As if they had all the world’s answers right there exclusively inside their own squirrelly heads. He gave me the once-over then took a pipe out of his jacket pocket. I was beginning to think that whatever gift Maribeth had was starting to rub off on me. I could have sworn that at some point Cooney would show us all that he was a pipe smoker. He didn’t light it. He just fondled it in his hand. I watched him and wondered what else he had fondled since he began seeing Allison outside of class.
“Rachel,” I said, “since you’re officially running this show, and since now you know the inherent difficulties attached to any conversation we’re going to have, maybe you’d better try explaining what this visit is all about.”
Rachel nodded. Cooney stepped across the room and sat on the bare wooden floor beside Allison’s chair. He squatted down Indian fashion right next to her, so that if she wanted she could reach out and pat the top of his head.
“I assume you’ve heard about what’s been going on over in Jack London State Park,” Rachel began.
Allison said that no, as a matter of fact she avoided the news whenever she was trying to get parts of her life back onto an even keel again.
Cooney hummed some more and told Rachel he’d been following the stories. “Under the circumstances, however, it wasn’t anything I’ve felt like discussing with Allison.”
I couldn’t let that one slide by. “Before you got here Allison said she had told you about me, and my work. Did she mention my name?”
“Yes.”
“And did you hear or read my name in connection with the London park story you said you were following?”
“Yes, I did.”
“But you didn’t mention that to her.”
“No, I didn’t,” he admitted softly. “I weighed it at one point, but then decided it might just unravel whatever progress she had been making. I felt that when she was up to facing that sort of thing she would begin watching the news again herself, and that would be soon enough for her to learn what you’ve been up to.”
Allison looked at Cooney while he talked. “Maybe somebody had better just come right out and tell me what this big story is,” she said. “Don’t worry, Gene, I’m not going to come apart like some china doll that’s been dropped.”
Cooney shrugged, and Rachel launched into a condensed version of all the digging that had been going on and what the harvest had been. She made it as clinical and palatable as possible. Cooney sat nodding his head, as if approving Rachel’s report. Allison sat listening, a little numb looking, and when Rachel had finished Allison turned to me with a large sigh.
“Boy, you’re really into it this time, aren’t you?”
“Not all that much. The homicides are Rachel’s problem. I’m just trying to look out for Maribeth’s safety.”
“This Maribeth. Where did you ever meet such a woman?” Allison asked.
“She’s just somebody I had a phone conversation with back when I worked at the Chronicle.”
“She sounds bizarre.”
“It is sort of a weird story, isn’t it?” Rachel said with a grin. “But she’s a pretty good old gal, what I’ve seen of her.”
Allison shrugged. “Okay. So now I know all the juicy details of the latest insane killer striding across the California landscape. What does it have to do with me?”
“I don’t know that it has anything at all to do with you,” I told her.
Cooney hummed again. I turned and gauged the distance. If I kicked out with my heel I figured I could just clip Cooney’s dimpled chin. I forced my attention back to Allison.
“Rachel and I were over talking to Maribeth again this morning,” I continued. “Just before we left her, she asked me if I knew a place called Barracks Cove. I told her I did. The way she said it, I don’t think she had ever heard of it before.”
Allison snorted. “Absolutely bizarre.”
“She said she thought there was somebody in town here I should talk to. I wanted to talk to you not because I thought you were the person Maribeth meant, but because I felt I knew you better than anybody else in town, and you might have heard something or could point me in the right direction. I didn’t know you hadn’t been following the news. I don’t think I would have bothered you if I’d known that. And since you haven’t,” I said, glancing across at Rachel, “we might as well pack it up and get on our way.”
“Ellen Whitley,” said Cooney, more to himself than to the rest of us.
“Sir?” Rachel asked.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was just thinking of poor Ellen Whitley. She’s an English Lit teacher at school. She’s been touched by all this. Her brother was one of the victims they found up there. A friend out at the college phoned me earlier to tell me Ellen had just seen her brother’s name in the paper for the first time this morning. Absolutely devastated by it, according to my friend.”
“What was the victim’s name?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t remember. Marian’s married. She has a different name than her brother. But I heard he’d just moved out here from back in Missouri somewhere.”
“Carl William James,” said Rachel. “We know very little about him.” She turned to Allison. “Can I use your phone? I have a credit card.”
Allison led her out to the kitchen then returned to the front room while Rachel phoned. Probably calling her office, I guessed. I started to say something more to Allison, but found that I couldn’t. Not with her pal Gene there on the floor beside her, fondling his pipe and staring rheumy eyed into nowhere.
Rachel came back out of the kitchen and gave me a little nod. “I’ve got the address. Let’s go.”
I got up and followed her to the door. I still couldn’t bring myself to say anything more to Allison. Rachel had the right idea, I decided. Do it with nods. That’s how I made my good-bye. I nodded at Allison and the man she had wanted in her corner if push ca
me to shove, and closed the door behind me.
NINETEEN
Rachel said a little lamely that it was nice to know that the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office, with a little help from area newspapers, would have been capable of making the connection between Carl William James of Missouri and Ellen Whitley of Barracks Cove. It turned out that while Mrs. Whitley had missed seeing or hearing her brother’s name in earlier news accounts, the local paper that morning had printed his name in a story to do with the second group of victims that had been recovered. Mrs. Whitley had seen it and phoned the sheriff’s office, praying that there had been a mistake. There hadn’t been; it was her brother. All of that had occurred between the time Rachel and I had left Sausalito and arrived in Barracks Cove.
“We were a few gimpy steps behind Maribeth, of course,” Rachel said dryly, “but it’s nice to know we would eventually have managed on our own.”
“One thing I noticed back there.”
“What’s that?”
“Your hick country accent sort of comes and goes depending on the circumstances.”
“Sure, why shouldn’t it? A lot of people I deal with live out in rural areas. When I talk to them I try to talk in a way they’re comfortable with. I told you the way I spoke was mostly playacting.”
“Barracks Cove isn’t all that rural. Allison and her new boyfriend aren’t exactly hicks.”
“I know. I had a different reason for that.”
I looked across at her. “You thought Allison might have been jealous of you?”
“Why not think it? It’s always possible. I’m looking in the mirror these days, remember. I look okay. We’re working together. So I figured if I came on in a country way she might not think too seriously along those lines. God knows you looked as if you wanted to unload on her little friend.”
“Did I ever.”
“Ease off, babe. She didn’t come right out and call him her boyfriend. She’s got real problems there with her work. She thinks he’s helping her.”