by Rex Burns
“Crystals?”
“Healing power and visions. She met somebody up in Julian who claimed crystals could cure cancer or something. She’s always been into that kind of stuff. Even in high school.”
“Despite a bachelor’s degree in philosophy?”
“Because of it, I’d say. She claims philosophy raises more questions than it answers. I mean she’s always reading. Weird stuff.” He added, “What’s she always saying … ? ‘There’s more to the mind than Reason or Freud.’ Whatever the hell that means.”
“What kind of weird stuff does she read?”
“Oh, Nietzsche, Bokanovski or whoever. I can’t remember all the names. If it isn’t business or economics, it just doesn’t stick with me, you know?”
“Did you go to Occidental, too?”
“No. USC. I’m applying to the business school now, my MBA. They like you to have some work experience after graduation before applying.”
“Did you see much of her after she went to Occidental?”
He shook his head. “Only on vacations now and then. Or when she’d drop by the house to see Margot.”
“Do you know if Dwayne Vengley went to Occidental?”
The thought was new to him. “No. I sure don’t.”
Tom Jenkins’s voice was the only message on my telephone answerer. “For a retired old fart, you sure don’t sit on the front porch much. Give me a call if you get in before midnight.” The number he cited was different from the one I had on my memo pad. Road-weary, I glanced at my watch—eleven forty-five—and opened a beer before punching the numbers into the telephone. The answer was a female voice whose briskness surprised me.
“The Lagoon.”
“I’m trying to reach Tom Jenkins, please.”
“Yessir. Who can I say is calling?”
I told her and a few seconds later Tom’s rusty voice greeted me with an invitation to lunch tomorrow.
“Make it around noon, okay?” Tommy coughed away from the mouthpiece and then his voice came back. “I don’t get out of bed until ten anymore.”
That was fine with me. The next day I slept until my own alarm went off late in the morning. Then I made a few telephone calls before running along the beach to let the sweat and salty mist clear away the loginess. By the time I returned, I had an answer to one of the calls and an afternoon appointment with Dwayne Vengley’s father. A quick shower and just time to meet Tom across from the Hotel del Coronado in a patio restaurant tucked behind a row of tourist shops.
Tom gripped my hand and looked me up and down. “By God, I’d hate to race against you now—a little gray hair, a few more lines and pounds, but by God—”
A waitress hovered beside me to take my drink order. Without asking, she brought Tom a bottle of mineral water. He, too, had put on weight. The runner’s frame had filled out and a fold of flesh under his chin showed where the man struggled against even more pounds. But he still moved with suppleness and he made a point to tell me that he played handball two or three times a week.
“Did you ever learn to pick them off the back wall? You always were a sucker for that shot.”
“Uh-oh.” Tommy leaned back. “Somebody’s looking for trouble. Dime a point?”
“I hate to take your money.”
“Plus two bits for every ace.”
I shook my head sadly. “But if you’re going to throw it away anyhow. …”
“Ha! Winner buys the drinks—just so you won’t feel bad.”
The ritual was more than twenty years old. It and the laughter that went with it carried us both back in time.
“By God, Jack, it doesn’t seem that long ago, does it?”
“It doesn’t. And it’s damn good to see you again. Here’s to.”
We tipped glasses and drank. Then he filled me in on his marriage—second one and childless—and kids from the first marriage, the son working in a San Francisco investment firm, the daughter teaching high school in Descanso. The waitress slid a plate onto the table, warning, “The plates are very hot, sir.”
“Good service.”
“Yeah, well, it helps if you own the place.”
I looked around at the airy patio shaded by a bamboo lattice overhead and given a cozy air from the uprights and the bougainvillea that climbed them. “Good business?”
“Christ, with any location at all, you can’t help but make money around here.” Tom laughed again, the grin making his face even more familiar. “And then lose it all.”
In high school, Tom had been one of the restless ones. He led weeklong trips into Mexico and talked about the chance to see Tahiti before it got too touristy. “But, hell, after twenty in the air force and flying all over the goddamned world, I couldn’t find any better place than right here.” He swished a bubbly mouthful of water. “I went up to LA a couple times. Thought I might start a restaurant up there. Hell, all I saw was cars on four sides and no place to park. They got more people, even, than we do. And every damned one of them lives on the freeway.” He took another long drink and nodded toward my beer. “Drink up. You look too damned healthy, and I’m envious. You’re still running, right?”
We talked about that and other things, calling up names I hadn’t heard in decades. Tommy was impressive in how much he knew about them; I was ashamed of my ignorance. My life had gone at a different angle from the rest of the class, and the few times I’d come through Coronado had been on business rather than pleasure. The thought crossed my mind that perhaps Dorcas, too, was moving away from the lives of her classmates. If so, it wouldn’t be too long before she was as distant from them as I was from mine, and I suspected she would feel the same surprise at how fast it happened.
“So you’ve retired from the marines.” Tom pushed a crust of bread across the remains of paella on his plate and glanced into the empty clay pot that sat between us. It was the house specialty, he’d said. I could understand why people were standing in line for a table even this long after the noon hour. “Remember Sonny McCrimmon? Went to the Academy? He sent me a news clipping with your name in it. About a year ago, maybe.”
I remembered both Sonny and the news item. The Washington Post and New York Times had run stories. Their reporters had managed to find out about the shadowy role I’d played in the downfall of a U.S. representative. Although I told them nothing that wasn’t already published or admitted publicly, both stories made me into something of a giant killer: lone officer courageously battles bureaucrats and self-interested politicians for the good of the nation. So much so, in fact, that I had received a telephone call from Admiral Burgnon himself. But it wasn’t congratulations. Instead, he made it quite clear that Oliver North be damned—the navy and marines did not tolerate grandstanding in their officer corps.
“What I guess, Jack, is maybe you didn’t volunteer to retire.” There was a shrewdness in Tom’s glance that said he, too, had learned a few things since high school.
“Let’s just say I was eligible to stand down. Highly eligible.”
“And there was no way you couldn’t step on toes, right?”
“You got it.” I tried to bury the sour taste in my mug of beer.
“Let me understand this, now: the bastard’s a traitor. You find him out. You end up getting canned. That right?”
I nodded. The congressman had squawked loudly about vindicating himself in court, but the trial was never called. Too many national secrets would have been aired by the defense. After a suitable time, the man had resigned from his office and taken his fat and tax-sheltered pension with him. And I was an expendable embarrassment. It took the Pentagon a while, but the commandant of the Marine Corps, who took his orders from Burgnon, finally offered me a retirement package I couldn’t refuse. My quiet but emphatic exit smoothed a lot of ruffled congressional feathers and reestablished a badly eroded power structure.
But Tom didn’t need to know all that. And, as I told the admiral, I wouldn’t have done a thing differently—I couldn’t have. People had come up to me in em
pty corners of the Pentagon and out-of-the-way spots around Washington to say how much they admired my sense of duty and what a lousy screwing I was getting. That was true, but as I had told Karen and Becky when they were children, the only reward to expect for doing right was the knowledge that you did the right thing. Now I spent a lot of time reminding myself of that. One of the damned problems of being free with advice is that sometimes you have to take it.
Jenkins read my silence as an unwillingness to open wounds, and he was right. “Okay—so we change the subject. So what you got in mind for rest and recreation? Fishing? Traveling around?”
“Well, I have been thinking of buying a sailboat—but God knows taking care of a boat’s a full-time job.”
“Yeah. Like being married. Except a wife, at least she scrubs her own bottom.” He leaned forward, habitually aware of listening ears at neighboring tables. “Listen, I know a couple guys in the boat business over at Shelter Island—there’s always boats for sale, and they can get you a good deal.”
I told him that sounded fine but I was still thinking it over. “I want to see how my daughters feel about the idea. Becky, especially. Hell, it’s their inheritance I’m spending.”
“Spend it on yourself! Leave them good memories and a lot of war stories to tell the grandkids—that’s what I’m doing. So how’s this detective business going?”
I told him what little more I’d found out about Dorcas Wilcox.
“Is she knocked up, Jack?”
“Why do you ask that?”
“Hey—it happens in the best of families.” He looked at me closely. “By God she is, isn’t she? She really is!”
Reluctantly, I nodded. “Her employer, Mrs. Gannet, says so, anyway.”
“Margaret and the admiral know?”
“I haven’t told them.”
Tom nodded. “Yeah. They’re worried enough.” He stared away across the heads of neighboring diners. “So why’d she run off? Why didn’t she get her parents to help out? She’s got to know she’s going to need a hell of a lot of help.”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“Jack, you think she’s been killed?”
“I don’t believe so. I think she’s run somewhere. At least I hope that’s it.”
“Yeah. Kids running off. Happens all the time, don’t it? I wish to hell mine would run off—they keep running back.” He waved away my attempt to pay the check and initialed the slip, leaving a large tip for the waitress— “I pay them minimum wage; nobody can live on that.” We stood a few minutes in the sunshine of Orange Avenue. I watched the traffic and the palms and the tourists crossing from the Hotel Del. The moment was a flashback to some similar moment before so much had happened to Tom and me and all the others. We had been standing on this same corner talking about something—running, college dreams, surfing—something. Now I was back. As Tom had said, sooner or later, everybody comes back to the island even if only to see it again. And Tom was right about something else: there weren’t many places better.
“Listen.” Tom leaned toward me and spoke under the chatter of the clutch of tourists nosing the shop windows. “In the restaurant business, I make a lot of contacts. I have to if I want to keep making money, you understand? So if you need help, Jack, just give a jingle. I’m really glad you’re back. I mean that.”
CHAPTER 7
I DIDN’T HAVE to settle in Coronado after retirement, and neither the admiral nor Tom had to take me in. But they had and the place was beginning to feel almost like home. Jenny and the admiral had asked me over for lunch, but it had conflicted with Tom’s invitation. So after I left him, I drove the few blocks to their house before heading downtown. Jenny met me at the door and offered coffee. The admiral came in from the backyard and peeled off a pair of cotton gloves stained with garden soil. We sat at the kitchen table and I told them what I’d found out last night.
“None of her old friends knew anything about her?” Jenny offered a slice of pastry that I declined.
“Not that I spoke with. Do either of you know anything about David Gates?”
The admiral shook his head, frowning into memory. Jenny said, “That name … Oh!” Then, “You remember, Dalton. That poor child who died. You know—the picnic.”
A grunt of recognition. “I was TAD to Norfolk when that happened.”
“It was tragic, Jack. Dorcas felt so guilty. Margaret had to send her to a psychologist for a while after that.”
“Did it happen before or after she ran away from home?”
“I don’t know. … I didn’t know she’d run away until you told us the other day. But the accident happened in the springtime … early March, I think.”
The admiral sipped at his cup. “Do you think it has any bearing on this disappearance?”
“I don’t know, sir. Probably not. But there might be a pattern in her behavior.”
“You think she’s running from something now?”
“It’s a possibility we should consider. Is there any chance she’ll get in touch with you if she’s in trouble?”
“By God, I hope so.”
“Maybe, Jack.” Jenny lightly pushed her coffee cup handle with a forefinger. “I wish I could say yes. But Margaret and I—well, I don’t know what it is, but my daughter was always … independent of me. I think Margaret sensed that I really never did like children, Jack. Not even my own daughter. I tried. With Margaret, with little Dorcas. But some women … suffer children rather than welcome them. I’m one of those kind.” She looked up to catch my expression. “That’s a hard admission to make, but I’ve come to realize it now. And to accept my blame for the way Margaret is now.”
The admiral shook his head. “I think you had too much responsibility too early, Jenny.” He turned to me. “You know how hard the service is on wives, Jack.”
I knew Eleanor had never resented our daughters. But neither did I know all there was to know about Jenny’s life or her daughter’s.
“I tried very hard to make amends with Dorcas for my failure with Margaret. And for a while it was easier—I don’t know why the friction’s so much less with a grandchild. Maybe because we know we don’t have to be responsible for them all the time.” She sighed and touched the glass to her lips. “But in high school Dorcas began to grow distant—she developed her own circle of friends. She had to establish herself on her own, of course. It’s to be expected.”
“Is there anyone at all you can think of that she might go to if she needs help?”
Jenny slowly shook her head. “Besides us? No—not in the family. I don’t know her other friends, now.”
“You keep saying ‘if she needs help,’ Jack. Is she in any trouble? Have you found out something?”
I shook my head. “I don’t have any evidence, admiral.” And no information I was at liberty to tell them.
As I headed across the sweeping curve of the bay bridge into downtown San Diego, I studied the ripple of low headlands on the bay side of the Strand. I thought I could make out a distant gray dot that might have been my house. Even if it wasn’t, I was beginning to feel a sense of belonging with this landscape. The points of reference that had been based exclusively on memory were coming to be based on the present. And with that new basis, I felt the beginnings of order in a life whose old frames of reference, emotional and geographic, had been torn away before I was ready to let them go.
Face it, Steele, the real reason Fairfax had been “home” was not that soft and green Virginia landscape that felt so easy on eyes and spirit. It was because Eleanor had lived there. And was buried there. The nearness of her grave had brought some comfort. But now it was a continent away, along with the places we had last visited together. What I was gradually discovering, and what Jenny’s confession brought to light, was that my move to the West Coast had generated a sense of betrayal to Eleanor’s memory. What I had to realize was that she couldn’t get any farther away than dead.
The offices of Windsor, Blake, and Vengley filled a co
rner of the tenth floor in a high-rise back from First Avenue. The receptionist, efficient in a blue suit with a modest touch of color at the neck, nodded and pushed the intercom when I told her I had an appointment with Mr. Vengley. “He’ll be right out.”
He was, curiosity masked behind a polite smile and a dry, perfunctory handshake. He led me to a corner office whose windows looked one way toward the busy flicker of traffic on the San Diego Freeway, and another toward the Embarcadero and the black hull and bare spars of the Star of India maritime museum. A sprinkle of bright-shirted tourists moved here and there across the old ship’s decks.
“You mentioned something about my son, Mr. Steele?”
I explained about Dorcas Wilcox. “I understand she and your son were friends in high school.”
“High school was several years ago. I don’t remember the Wilcox girl. Certainly, Dwayne hasn’t mentioned anyone by that name recently.”
“Your son lives in the San Diego area?”
“As of the last I heard from him, Mr. Steele. Dwayne doesn’t make much effort to communicate with me.”
“So you don’t really know if he’s been in touch with Dorcas Wilcox?”
Vengley’s frown said he didn’t like to be caught in a contradiction. “That would seem to follow, wouldn’t it?”
“Might he have told your wife? Does he communicate better with his mother?”
“My ex-wife. And no, I doubt that he’s told her, either. Dwayne is emancipated, Mr. Steele. He has been for some time. I’d hoped that he would apply for law school after he graduated college, but he’s still in the process of—ah— ‘finding himself.’ ”
“That’s Occidental College in Los Angeles?”
“Yes. He graduated over a year ago. But since then he hasn’t discovered just what it is he’s looking for.” The man rocked forward in the blue chair. “I suppose that’s not abnormal. But sometimes I think Dwayne luxuriates in a lack of commitment to any responsible future.”