I put the bills she had given me into my pants pocket without looking at them.
“It’s very simple,” she said, removing the cellophane from the pack in her hand. “It was near the tennis courts.”
“Was there anyone playing?”
“No. I came down the path behind a patch of trees.”
“And you saw no one?”
“On the path? No.”
“Don’t people recognize you?” I asked.
“I was wearing dark glasses and a wide-brimmed hat and a plain dress with very little makeup. Most people seem to think I’m just a housewife who bears a slight resemblance to Joan Crawford.”
I thought, but didn’t say, that in Los Angeles nothing calls more attention to someone than dark glasses and a wide-brimmed hat.
“He was standing there,” she said. “With that thing out of an old costume drama.”
“The crossbow,” I supplied.
“I saw the woman start to take her hand out of her purse and go to her knees and fall backward,” Crawford went on, looking at the backs of her hands.
“How close was she to the target?”
She shrugged. “About fifteen feet or so to the right of it.”
“You saw him fire the crossbow?”
“Yes.”
“And then she went down?”
“Yes.”
“He was aiming it at her?”
“I don’t know. He was waving it around before he pulled the trigger or did whatever one does to fire. I was looking only because it seemed so odd to see someone in the middle of the lawn with such a weapon.”
“How did he react when he saw her go down?”
Crawford looked up, a slightly puzzled expression on her face.
“Peculiarly,” she said. “For an instant, he didn’t react at all, just looked in the general direction of the target and then it was evident that he saw the woman falling. He looked …”
“Surprised?” I supplied.
“Surprised, stunned, horrified by what he had done. Certainly not calm and composed. He went over to her and knelt. I hurried back down the path. I found a policeman about five minutes away and told him what had happened.”
“You didn’t see anyone on the path? A skinny redheaded kid?”
“Oh, yes. On a bicycle. He drove past me just before I saw the policeman. I don’t think I told the police about the boy. Is it important?”
“The boy stopped to help Shelly. Shelly says he told the kid he thought his wife had a heart attack,” I said.
“I’m not sure that proves—” she began.
“—that Shelly didn’t know his wife had been shot,” I finished.
“If he was telling the boy the truth, and he didn’t kill his wife .…” She smiled.
“Then you didn’t see him kill her and you’re out of it,” I said.
Her smile disappeared.
“But I did see him shoot her.”
“We’ll get back to that. What happened after you got the policeman?”
“I waited for the officer on a bench near where I had found him. He ran down the path toward the lawn where I had pointed. And that’s all.”
“Would you mind showing me in the park where all this took place?”
“Can it wait till tomorrow morning? I have to pick up the children, and Phillip is coming home early.”
She looked at me earnestly. If she had been convinced my hands were clean, I think she would have touched me.
“What time did you see Mildred Minck get killed? I mean, was it right at eleven?”
“A few minutes past,” she said.
There wasn’t anything more to ask. We decided that I would pick her up at nine the next morning after the children were in school and her husband was at work. I wanted to look at the scene at the same time and, if possible, in the same light as when Mildred had died.
We walked back to the front door, passing a large living room with thin metallic lamps and sofas that looked never sat upon.
She stood in the doorway while I walked toward my car. I turned to watch her. She was wearing a sad, put-upon smile.
London could take it. The smile said Joan Crawford could, too.
It was late in the afternoon. I decided to find Lawrence Timerjack, founder of Shelly’s Survivors for the Future.
CHAPTER 3
I DROVE UP Cahuenga Boulevard toward the Hollywood Hills and turned right onto Holly Drive. From there it was a series of about twelve turns onto small, winding streets. I got lost, had to turn around and asked a pair of ten-year-olds how to get to Hollywood Lake.
It took me five more minutes to hit Hollywood Lake and another ten to find a low fence that surrounded three log cabins about fifty yards away from the lake shore.
The gate in the fence was simply a thin log with a wooden sign next to it with the words “Survivors for the Future: Just wait. We’ll see you.”
I parked and stood in front of the gate, pretending to admire the woods on either side of the fenced property that seemed to be about the size of a small city block.
I could have simply lifted the log and walked in or climbed over the fence. The place was not really built for survival in case of enemy attack.
After about three minutes, the door to the middle cabin opened and four people came out. The one in the lead was small and wiry. He had short-cropped blond hair and was wearing a black short-sleeved pullover T-shirt and denim slacks tucked into army boots. He held a bow in his right hand and a quiver of arrows bounced on his back.
Following him were a man, a boy, and a woman.
The boy was about seventeen, the woman in her forties. The fellow with them was steel-gray-haired, bronzed, with a craggy face, and around fifty. He had a holster and gun strapped under his left arm. They were all dressed like the man they were following. As they came closer, I could see that the boy had pink-fuzz cheeks that told me he had never shaved. The woman was heavy, her dark hair tied back with a tight band. The boy’s hands were empty. So were the woman’s, but she had a leather sheath on her hip that contained a knife just short of being called a sword.
When they arrived at the gate to face me, I could see that the blond man’s face had a leathery outdoor look and that his eyes were unsure about what they were looking at. One eye—his left—looked directly at me. The other eye looked off to the right. He reminded me of a lizard I’d seen in the Griffith Park Zoo.
“We help you?” asked the lizard, his voice low.
“I’m interested in the Survivors for the Future,” I said. “I’m looking for Lawrence Timerjack.”
“You just found him,” he said. “You interested in joining us?”
“Might be.”
“Mind showing me your wallet?”
I took out my wallet and handed it to him.
He flipped it open, looked at it with one eye, then back at me. The woman and boy and the other man hadn’t stopped staring at me expressionlessly.
“Private investigator,” he said.
“We like to survive, too.”
“We’re not a joke, Mr. Peters,” said Timerjack.
“Okay,” I said. “One of your members was arrested yesterday for murdering his wife with a crossbow. He said he learned how to shoot it from you.”
“Pigeon Minck,” Timerjack said.
He pronounced it “Pidg-ion.”
“He called me a little while ago,” Timerjack went on. “From the jail. Said you might be coming to see me. You carrying a weapon?”
“No,” I said.
“You should. Come in.”
He nodded. The boy and the woman lifted the log and pulled it toward them so I could enter. Then they put it back.
“Come,” said Timerjack.
I followed him to the center cabin with the boy, the woman, and the other man behind me. With gravel crunching under our feet, we passed a green Ford sedan with dark windows. No one spoke till we got inside and the door was closed.
The room we were in was large.
A desk with a blackboard behind it stood facing us across the room. A dozen metal folding chairs in two rows added to the schoolroom look. Detracting from it, however, was the array of weapons hung on hooks around the walls. There was a painting of an archer in green with a little green pointed cap. He had his bow pulled back and he was aiming at a boy with an apple on his head.
“William Tell,” said Timerjack, moving to the desk and putting his bow and quiver on it. He had followed my gaze. “One of our patron saints.”
The painting looked as if it had been copied from a poorly drawn comic book.
“Legend has it that after Tell shot the apple from his son’s head, he went into the woods and defended himself from all attempts to capture him,” said Timerjack, moving behind the desk and sitting.
I sensed the boy and woman behind me.
“What about the painting next to it?”
That one was of a man in a tan leather jacket and pants. He had an old rifle on his shoulder aimed at war-painted Indians running toward him. Their tomahawks were raised.
“The Deerslayer,” Timerjack explained. “The ultimate Survivor.”
“Impressive,” I said.
“No, you are not impressed,” Timerjack said. “But I’m not trying to impress you. If you had been trying to assassinate me or attack our compound, you would have been dead before your gun came out.”
Timerjack nodded his head, and I heard a shuffling at my sides. As I turned, the boy whipped a thin bamboo tube from his pocket and the woman was pulling her knife from its sheath. The man with the shoulder holster and gun just stood there with his arms folded and smiled.
There was a whoosh of air as the knife shot past me and a thin shaft of wood or metal flew out of the tube the boy was holding up to his mouth.
The knife thudded into the William Tell painting, and so did the missile from the blowgun.
“Now are you impressed?” asked Timerjack, looking at me with one eye and at nothing with the other one.
“She killed William Tell’s kid,” I said. “So did he.”
Timerjack smiled. It was a loony smile.
“That’s what they were supposed to do, Mr. Peters.”
“Now you’ve got holes in your painting,” I said, as the woman went to retrieve her knife. The boy stayed behind me.
“We have others.” Timerjack sat back and fished in his desk drawer.
He came up with a pipe and motioned for me to sit in one of the folding chairs. I had the feeling I was going to get lesson number one. The woman had a little trouble digging the knife from the wall, but she managed and gave me a less-than-friendly look as she returned to her spot behind me. I moved to the front row and sat. Timerjack nodded his approval.
I raised my hand.
“Yes?” asked Timerjack.
“May I go to the washroom?”
“Right through that door.” He pointed toward a door to his right, but looked somewhere behind me. I didn’t move.
“Forget it,” I said. “It just seemed like the right thing to say to the teacher.”
“Are you like this all the time?” Timerjack asked.
“Only when someone feeds me a good setup for a punch line. I do have some questions, a few of them about Sheldon Minck.”
Timerjack puffed and nodded his head knowingly.
“Pigeon Minck has been with us five—”
“Six,” the woman behind me corrected.
“Yes,” Timerjack agreed with a smile. “Thank you, Martha. Six weeks. I’d say he’s making slow progress in his skills, but we have no intention of giving up on him. He is a difficult project. We like the challenge.”
“Progress in what?” I asked.
“Survival in the wild, in dark alleys, making and using weapons, blowguns, knives, clubs, spears, bows and arrows, crossbows and bolts, slings. We don’t believe in guns.”
“They exist,” I said, looking pointedly over my shoulder at the craggy-faced man with the gun and holster.
“If other people make them.” Timerjack ignored my look. “They need bullets made by other people, parts made by other people. When the time comes, we will be able to slip into the woods here or anywhere and survive. Of course, in these times, we make exceptions.”
Now it was his turn to look at the man with the gun. “You mean Pathfinder Anthony. Even Natty Bumppo was forced to use a gun,” he added.
I ignored the inconsistency and raised my hand again.
“You don’t have to keep raising your hand.” Timerjack was irritated.
“How many of you are there?” I asked.
“That is restricted information. We don’t want our enemies to know our numbers.”
From the size of the compound and the number of folding chairs, I guessed we were talking about twelve or fifteen.
“Your enemies?”
“And yours, too.” He pointed the stem of his pipe at me. “The government, foreign powers. Indians. We live on a ridge along the Slough of Despond in the Valley of Despair.”
“Indians?”
“They’ve been secretly conspiring for nearly a century to take back the land,” Timerjack said. “Like Magua and the Hurons, they’ll coordinate their move at night taking out the president, the cabinet, Congress, the governors, and generals. They’re already in place.”
“I didn’t know there were that many Indians left,” I said.
Timerjack smiled knowingly.
“We’ll thwart them,” he said. “When we have enough people, we’ll thwart them; but just in case, we must learn to survive.”
“The next Indian attack?”
“The next effort to destroy our resistance, to enslave us. It could come from almost anywhere.”
I could have said, “You’re nuts,” and added, “Good-bye and keep your arrows sharp,” but I had a mission.
“Maybe you’ve got a point,” I said.
“You don’t believe that,” he countered. “I’ve gotten where I am because I can read people.”
Where he was, as far as I could see, was three log cabins, some homemade weapons, a gun or two and about a dozen people wanting to buy into a religion of survival.
“What about Jews?” I asked. “Negroes?”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand. The Jews are too smart to want to take over. There aren’t enough of them, and they’re doing fine the way they are. Hitler’s an idiot, a con man. While he’s been busy killing harmless Jews, the British, Russians, and Americans have been killing Nazis. Negroes don’t have the capacity to constitute a threat. They don’t have the will, with a few exceptions. Negroes are nothing to be afraid of. Waste of effort. They just let out two more of those Scottsboro Boys after thirteen years. Two more of them are still in jail. They didn’t do it. Pigeon Minck is a Jew. Pathfinder Jackson is a Negro. We have no prejudices here. We are all human beings determined to survive.”
“Pathfinder?” I asked.
“Our levels,” said Timerjack. “Pathfinder Lewis will explain.”
This time the pipe stem pointed over my right shoulder and I turned as the baby-faced boy said, “Pigeon. Bumppo. Pathfinder. Deerslayer.”
Timerjack gave a smile of approval. It was pretty much what Shelly had told me. The boy smiled back and looked at me. It was the look and smile of someone Mrs. Plaut would call “simple of mind.”
“You beginning to understand?”
I was beginning to understand that he was a loony and belonged in a loony bin, but I had a dentist to try to save.
“How good is Shelly with a crossbow?” I asked.
“Pigeon Minck is improving by the week.” Timerjack examined the bowl of his pipe.
“Improving?”
“When he started, he couldn’t hit the broad side of a large barn. Now he can. I’m not talking figuratively here. I’m talking about an abandoned farm through the woods over there.”
He pointed to his right, looked that way with his right eye and at me with his left.
“So, what woul
d be his chances of hitting a person about twenty yards away from him?”
“Given amazing luck or lots of tries, it would be within the realm of possibility.”
“You willing to say that to the police?”
“I don’t talk to the police. They come for me, and I go to the woods. I’m ready.”
“But not to save Pigeon Minck?” I asked.
“I’ll take it up with … I’ll think about it. Pigeon Minck took the oath. He knows that the survival of the individuals in our group takes precedence over the survival of a prisoner of war.”
“Who taught him how to use the crossbow?” I asked.
“I did, and Deerslayer Helter,” he said, pointing this time at the woman.
I turned to her. She didn’t look at me.
“Deerslayer Helter used to be a Catholic nun,” Timerjack said.
“Mind if I ask Pathfinder Helter a few questions?”
“No,” said Timerjack, “but don’t expect any answers. She’s taken a vow of silence in penance for a violation.”
I was going to ask what the violation had been, but decided it might take me down a path with a pathfinder that I did not want to follow.
“Other people here have crossbows?” I asked.
“We all do,” Timerjack said. “We all learn to use whatever weapons we might be called upon to take up.”
He stood up suddenly, emptied the tobacco from his pipe into an ashtray, pocketed the pipe, and announced, “Four o’clock. Judo in Fortress One. Care to join us, Mr. Peters?”
“I’ll watch.”
“No,” he said. “Our lessons are open only to members. I want to know if you want to join us, become a Pigeon, and learn to be a survivor. Special rates this month. Three hundred dollars to register. Eighty-five a month after that.”
“I can’t afford to survive.” I stood up.
“We can work out a payment plan,” he said, coming around the desk and handing me a pamphlet with a rough green paper cover.
“No, thanks.” I pocketed the pamphlet.
“Didn’t think so,” he said with a sigh, picking up his bow and arrow. “But remember where we are and pray that you have enough warning to get to us when you realize that the enemy is in the streets. You forgot something.”
“What?”
Mildred Pierced: A Toby Peters Mystery Page 3