by Rex Burns
Jenny asked, “If it’s a pattern, what’s she running from now?”
“I haven’t discovered any recent deaths among her friends,” I hedged. “And the idea of a pattern is only one more guess among many.”
Megan asked, “Was she dating Jerry Hawley? In love with him?”
“They were friends. I don’t know how close.”
“She seems to have had more than her share of tragedy,” she said quietly.
Jenny nodded. “I’ve sometimes wondered if some people don’t draw bad luck.”
“Nonsense.” The admiral finally lit his cigar, waving out the long wooden match through a cloud of smoke. “We all get our share, maybe some more than others. But no one’s handing it out to us and keeping a tally.” He snapped the match stick and set it in the ashtray. “Luck is what you do with what happens to you. And I’m not all that sure Henry doesn’t do the worst. If there’s bad luck in that family, that’s where it comes from.”
“Oh, don’t listen to him, Megan.”
She sipped at her drink. “Henry seems to do quite well for himself, admiral.”
“You know him?” I asked.
“He’s my cousin. It’s how I met Margaret’s parents.”
Which explained the openness with which the admiral and Jenny had talked about Dorcas. “Small world.”
She smiled. “Not that small, thank God. Henry goes his way, and I have gone mine.”
Which was as fine an exit line is I could ask for. “And I’d better be going mine—I still have a couple of phone calls to make.”
Both Jenny and the admiral wanted me to stay longer, but I wasn’t lying about the telephone work. Megan offered a polite good-bye, and I went down the front steps, my sense of relief tinged with the melancholy of a mild and insincere regret. She was an intelligent woman, attractive as well as pleasant. But I wasn’t in the market. And neither was she.
The distant telephone bell rattled half a dozen times before a man’s voice said, “Hello?”
I said who I was and what I wanted. “I realize this is a painful subject, Mr. Hawley, but it might help me locate Dorcas. Her family is very worried.”
“I don’t see how it can help. My son died almost two years ago, Mr. Steele.”
“I grant the chances are pretty poor, but the only two leads I have are slim and none. How well did your son know Dwayne Vengley?”
A long pause. “Is he involved in this?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been able to locate him yet. But his name keeps coming up.” Which, in another setting for work like this, had been prima facie cause for suspicion.
“I never did like that kid. I never could see why Jerry wanted to hang around with him.”
“Care to amplify a little? Anything you tell me will be confidential, of course.”
“I don’t give a damn if it’s confidential or not. I said at the time Jerry died, and I’ll say it again: I think Vengley knew more about it than he told the police.”
“Are you suggesting your son’s death wasn’t a suicide, Mr. Hawley?”
A deep sigh. “No, no. The police were convinced it was a suicide. Jerry’s hands weren’t tied and there was no sign of a struggle of any kind. It’s just that Jerry had no reason to do what he did. There was no reason for it at all!”
I pushed the issue. “I still don’t see what that has to do with Vengley.”
“I’m not sure myself. It’s just that Jerry … changed. After he met that Vengley kid.” The line was silent and I waited. “He got moody, and for no reason. He was on the soccer team and quit. I mean, Jerry loved playing soccer. But when I asked him once how his team was doing, he said he didn’t have time for it anymore—he’d quit.”
“Mr. Hawley, might that have been a prelude—a warning—that your son was contemplating suicide?”
“Looking back, I suppose we should have paid more attention. But it wasn’t that intense. Or persistent. It came and went. Sometimes—most of the time—he was his old self: outgoing, happy, full of life. But the more he saw of Vengley. …” Another sigh. “It’s just something I felt, Mr. Steele. I don’t have any evidence of anything at all. But when you mentioned Vengley’s name, it brought back all those feelings. And now you tell me he’s mixed up with a missing girl.”
“‘Mixed up’ might be a bit presumptive. I think he knew her. That’s all.”
“He knew Jerry, too.”
That was true. “Did your son ever mention Dorcas Wilcox?”
“Not that I recall. His first year, he had a number of friends and brought several of them home on weekends or saw them over vacations. By his last year, he didn’t bring anyone home. The only one I knew about was the Vengley kid, and that’s because he stayed here a couple weekends with Jerry.”
“Did you see the police report on your son’s death?”
“Yeah. I insisted on seeing everything. I wanted to know why. But I still don’t.”
“The autopsy report mentioned a trace of drugs. Did Jerry have a history of drug use?”
“No. He was clean.” The man amended. “He was clean as far as I knew, anyway. But who knows what kids do when they’re away from home? They can be led, Mr. Steele. And I wouldn’t be surprised if it was by Vengley.”
I thanked Mr. Hawley for the information and sat staring at the evening sky over San Diego. The lights reflected in the calm waters of the bay as shimmering dots of white and green and red. Among other thoughts, I remembered the view from this same spot a few decades past, before the houses had been built and the boat slips dredged. The low spit of sand and grass had been known as the Hog Ranch. Under the nearly dark moon its gently shelving beach had been one of the favorite spawning sites for grunion. I could still recall the flash of silver catching the starlight as the sardine-sized fish came in with the tide to burrow into the wet sand. Then they skittered frantically back into the next small wave, their mating over until the next full moon. Perhaps up the Strand on the undisturbed sands of the Amphibious Base, the grunion still ran. I hoped so. It was good to think that, beneath the growth and building and change, the rhythms of an ancient life still went on.
The Hog Ranch. The grunion weren’t the only creatures to practice springtime mating rituals on these sands. Some evenings, the domes of car roofs scattered under the moonlight had rivaled the swell of dunes. And I could still remember one of the “luaus” we’d organized on a summer night—driftwood blazing to take the chill off the ocean wind, langousta pulled from the sea just below the Mexican line, fruit juice fortified by a bottle of rum traded in Tijuana for a few lobsters, and the whole feast smuggled across the border in sweaty guilt. Which made it taste all the better. And more people invited than there was food to serve. So we came down early to fish some sand sharks from the bay and, wrapping them in wet newspaper and seaweed, baked them under the fire’s hot coals. To be served proudly as ocean flank fish. I’d have to ask Tom what name the restaurants called it now. Mako-mako, perhaps, or Pacific whitefish.
God only knew what the sharks had fed on in San Diego Bay. Half the Pacific Fleet dumped its sewage into the waters and the ecology movement was somewhere in the future. Still, we had been lucky; no one caught cholera, no one died, no one got hung up on the drugs that, even then, were surfacing in the high schools. Luck. Perhaps some common sense, though I doubted that. There was too much evidence of its lack in a lot of things we did. We just happened to get away with them. What happened to those who didn’t get away with it? They were among the damaged, the crippled, the dead. Time thrust us all forward inexorably to survive or to fall aside, and, despite the admiral’s dictum, a lot of the outcome depended on luck alone, good or bad.
I poured the rest of my beer into the glass and imagined Megan Wells’s wry reaction to my talking like the closing paragraphs of The Great Gatsby. Every soul born walks this earth under a death sentence, and there’s no profit in lamenting what can’t be helped. What I had to do—and here I stirred my legs to fetch the telephone directory and
begin scanning names—was apply myself to those things that could be helped.
CHAPTER 10
SMILING POLITELY, I stood in the porch light and introduced myself to the large-boned girl whose dark hair was pulled back in a curly ponytail. But Stacey Briggs wasn’t overjoyed to make my acquaintance.
“I told you on the phone I don’t know anything about Dori or where she is.”
“This is about Dwayne Vengley—the Dwayne I mentioned earlier.”
Her eyes widened slightly. “Who?”
“A high school friend that you and Dorcas and the rest of the Four Femmes ran around with your senior year. Margot Hoyer remembers him; I’m sure you do, too.”
Now she did. “Oh, that Dwayne. I haven’t seen him in such a long time. …”
“I see. Did you go to Occidental with Dorcas?”
“No. Sweet Briar.”
“In Virginia?”
She nodded.
“That’s a very nice school—and a long way from home.”
“It’s what I wanted. I wanted to get away from home for a while. Is there something wrong with that?”
“Nothing at all. My own daughters had the same idea. May I come in?”
She finally turned from the door and led me into the cramped living room. A plaid couch almost filled one wall. A work table and electric typewriter turned another wall into a small office space. The breakfast shelf marked off the kitchen from the dining area, and drapes closed what must have been sliding glass doors leading to a balcony.
I glanced over the papers scattered on the desk. “What work do you do, Stacey?”
“Account executive.” She mentioned the television station. “Why?”
“Just trying to be friendly.”
“Well, don’t try! I’ve already answered your questions once, and I can’t understand why you keep bothering me.”
“Don’t you want your friend to be found?”
She didn’t answer at first. Her mouth clamped shut and she frowned at the coffee table in front of the sofa. “What makes you think she’s really lost? I mean, couldn’t she have just gone off somewhere for a while?”
“Sure. That’s one of the things I’m trying to find out. Is there someplace she might have gone? Some place her parents don’t know about?”
“Well, I certainly don’t know. I haven’t seen her in ages. I told you.”
“When did you last see Dwayne Vengley?”
“What does he have to do with it?”
“Maybe nothing. But Dorcas had a letter from a Dwayne, and now he seems to have disappeared, too.”
“Well I haven’t had anything to do with him in a long time. A real long time.”
“Did Dorcas ever mention Jerry Hawley?”
“Who?”
I repeated the name. “He committed suicide a few years ago. When Dorcas was at college.”
The young woman shook her head, face blank.
“Apparently he was a good friend of Dori and Dwayne and a few others up at Occidental.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
It was obvious she was hiding something, and equally obvious she didn’t want me to learn what it was. “Stacey, the only thing I’m trying to find out is whether or not Dorcas is safe. I’m not the police; I’m not going to haul her back to her parents if she doesn’t want to come. I won’t even tell her family where she is if she doesn’t want me to. But she does have the responsibility to let them know she’s unharmed—if that’s the case.”
“I don’t know where she is! Can’t you accept that? It’s God’s honest truth—I do not know where Dorcas Wilcox is!”
“But you do know something that might lead me to her.”
“No!” She stood with both arms tensely along her sides, hands curling into fists, and glared at me with a mixture of anger and fear. “I want you to leave—I don’t want to talk to you anymore!”
Mrs. Steele’s little boy knew a hint when he saw one, and even though I wanted to ask about the death of the Gates boy, Miss Briggs was finished answering any more questions. “All right, Stacey. Here’s my telephone number. If you do want to tell me something—if you change your mind—please give me a call.”
She didn’t say yes or no; but she didn’t throw away the slip of paper, either. At least not while I was there.
Henry’s voice waited for me on the answering machine, saying it was sorry to have misled me and asking me to call any time no matter how late.
I did, telling the man what I’d found out about Jerry Hawley and Dwayne.
Henry asked, “That letter you showed me—that was from the same Dwayne?”
“I’m not sure. It read like someone who knew her pretty well—someone she’d talked with over a period of time. And so far, Vengley is the only Dwayne that fits.”
“And he’s missing, too?”
“I can’t find anyone who knows where he is.”
“Do you make anything of that, Steele?”
“Just that it may or may not be coincidence.”
“So what the hell have you really found out?”
“About as much as I can without having police powers.”
“Police powers for what?”
“For the name and address of that Colorado telephone number. For a warrant to search Vengley’s last-known address. For access to the confidential files on the Hawley death. These things seem somehow all mixed together, but I’m just a civilian, Henry. I don’t have the authority to run a formal investigation.”
He got the point. “You’re saying I should go back to the police with what you’ve told me and see what they’ll do?”
“I think it’s worth a try.”
He didn’t say yes, no, or thank you. “What do I owe you?”
CHAPTER 11
I JOGGED ALONG the early-morning beach, telling myself I’d done the right thing in advising Henry to go back to the police. Ahead, down the gentle tilt of sand and foam, a cluster of seagulls lifted heavily into the wind as I neared. Through the pant of my breath and the thud of heels on the wet pack, the headset of the Walkman interrupted the morning news to tell me what the weather was going to be. “High today in the low seventies, low in the mid-fifties. Light and early fog along the coast.” A weather report that hadn’t changed since I was a kid waking to the same forecast on the clock-radio so many times that I could repeat it from memory.
Admiral Combs hadn’t been as phlegmatic as Henry about my stepping back from the case. When I told him about it, the telephone had been silent for a long count before he grunted and said he wished I hadn’t done that.
“Well, admiral, I’ve reached an impasse. The police can do a lot more than I can now—they have access to information that I don’t.”
“I realize that, Jack. And I understand your reluctance to waste any more time on this.” Still, the pause told me, he didn’t like it. “I’ve been tossing all night, wondering what might have happened to make her run again.”
“We don’t know for certain that there is a cause.”
“Yes, yes. Damn it, I understand that. But you did point to a pattern in her behavior starting with the David Gates thing, and that has me worried.”
David Gates.
That was the loose thread that all day yesterday had tugged at my attention. Now I regretted not asking Stacey about it.
“That happened in springtime,” the admiral went on. “Then that boy’s suicide and she ran again—another spring. Now it’s springtime again and she’s gone. Something must have sent her off, Jack. And I’m damned worried for her.”
Vengley dead? Suicide? Accident? And Dorcas running from that knowledge?
The chill and foggy haze down the shoreline matched the vague outlines of my thoughts. I replayed my short conversation with the admiral. The thump of my running feet, the one-two of my breathing in pace with my strides, seemed to echo the names, as well as the questions that came with them.
I hadn’t told the admiral I would do anything more. But as I stretched my l
egs in a closing sprint down the street and hung gasping at the front door to catch my breath before entering, I admitted to the irritable feeling of not having done enough. The Gates death was an avenue I hadn’t pursued as well as I should have. And shoddy work—especially mine—bothered me.
Nonetheless, I’d advised Henry to see what the police could do. That advice was sound. I told myself that as I rattled pots and pans in a kitchen designed, like so many new California homes, for couples who didn’t want or couldn’t afford children. And, I repeated as I pulled silverware from the dishwasher and stacked it away in the cupboards, Henry had not been upset to see me drop the case. But Henry, my self responded, had not been the one to ask for help in the first place. It had been Jenny and the admiral. And none of them knew Dorcas was quite probably pregnant.
What the hell, a few telephone calls and then I could go back with a good conscience and tell the admiral that I’d tracked down the loose ends.
Margaret answered, her voice creaky and dull as if talking or even thinking this early in the morning were an effort. “Henry told me what you told him, Jack. He made an appointment. Somebody in the sheriff’s office. Do you want him to call you afterwards?”
“I would like to know what he finds out.” And there was something I wanted to find out. “Margaret, what can you tell me about David Gates?”
The silence was long and when her voice came back it was tense. But she only asked, “Why, Jack? Why do you want to know?”
“The name came up when I talked to Margot Hoyer’s brother. He told me about the beach party and the accident.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing. What else is there to say, Margaret? Who was Gates?”
“A child—a young boy. … He went to high school with Dorcas.” With a clutch of breath, she added, “I don’t want to talk about him—I don’t want to hear any more about him!”
“Why, Margaret?”
“Because people are vicious—they lie and they’re vicious!”
“Margaret—”
“No! I don’t care what anyone says, it was an accident. The police investigated and it was just a terrible, terrible accident, and Dorcas had nothing to do with it!”