Dangerous Thing

by Josh Lanyon

  “Which tribe?”

  “Miwok. Penutian Family. You really don’t remember me, do you?”

  “Should I?”

  Her eyebrows rose. “I thought you were Anna English’s grandson?”

  “I am.” When she didn’t offer her hand I offered mine. “Adrien English.”

  We shook hands. “Melissa Smith. My father used to work for your grandmother. You locked me in the fruit cellar once.”

  “I did?”

  I did sort of remember her now. She had been small, skinny and irritating as a foxtail in your sock. “Not for long, I hope.”

  “I guess it was only a few minutes. It felt like hours.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I swore to get even but you never came back.”

  “I scare easily.”

  “Don’t worry, you’re pretty low on my hit list these days.”

  If she was as tough at thirty-two as she had been at eight I hoped she didn’t hold a grudge.

  “I’m not up on local history.”

  Her dark eyes met mine. She smirked. “No, but you’re making it.”

  * * * * *

  I had a brief wait for Jake at the Bronco. I washed down a couple of headache tablets with diet soda from a nearby vending machine. At last I spotted him striding up the tree-lined street, in and out of shadow, big and purposeful. Even in jeans and a flannel shirt he looked like a cop. Maybe it was the way he held himself. That mix of confidence and alertness.

  He glanced up and saw me, and just for a moment something like a smile flickered across his impassive face.

  I started the engine as Jake climbed in beside me.

  “How did it go?” I questioned. “Were your fellow fuzz in a cooperative mood?”

  He hmmphfed. Drummed his fingers on the door armrest as I pulled out into the light traffic of Tuesday afternoon Main Street.

  “Are we playing twenty questions or are you going to tell me what you found out?”

  “The last time anyone saw Harvey was Thursday morning when he picked up groceries at the general store. He promised he’d be back the next day to pay his bill.”

  “But he was killed Thursday night.”

  “Maybe.” He glanced at me. “Harvey has a girlfriend. He might be hiding out there.”

  “A girlfriend?”

  I’m not sure why I sounded so amazed; probably because Harvey had been presented as such a loser by everyone I’d talked to. Jake said, “Most unmarried adult males do have girlfriends, Adrien.”

  I asked innocently, “Including you?”

  Jake’s eyes slid away from mine. He said, “The girlfriend might have a photo of Harvey or another lead.”

  “Doesn’t Harvey have a police record? Are there mug shots I could look at?”

  “Harvey has a couple of drug-related busts from the ’70s. In those days he wore long hair and a beard. I don’t think a thirty second glimpse of a dead man in your headlights will make for an accurate ID.”

  He had that right. Already my memory of the man in the road was fading — imagination adding details, time erasing others.

  I pulled up at Basking’s one and only signal light, and said, “So where does Harvey’s girlfriend live?”

  * * * * *

  Marnie Starr lived at #109 Oakridge Drive in a green tarpapered house, at the top of a long flight of rickety stairs.

  Marnie came to the door in a striped bathrobe though it was past noon. A tall woman, and built for comfort, she sized up Jake through the screen door mesh.

  “Yes?”

  “Marnie Starr?” Jake’s stance, that official tone of voice, all spelled cop. I wondered if it was deliberate or something he couldn’t help.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m Detective Riordan.” He nodded my way. “English.”

  “Detectives?” She stared at us through the cigarette smoke. She was about fifty, long salt and pepper hair, freckled skin that had seen too much sun.

  “May we come in?” Jake asked.

  Automatically she unlatched the screen and let us in.

  The front room was small and cluttered with battered furniture. Copies of The National Enquirer littered the coffee table, headlines screaming alien abductions and movie star infidelities. The room smelled heavily of cigarettes and orchid air freshener.

  “Sit down,” Marnie said, gesturing uncertainly. “Cops, huh? If it’s about the dog, I’m bringing him in at night now.”

  Jake sat down in a wooden rocker that creaked anxiously. I walked over to study a collection of framed photos on the TV.

  “It’s not about the dog,” Jake said. “We’re looking for Ted.”

  “Ted? Ted Harvey?”

  “That’s right. When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Has something happened to Ted?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, if you are detectives ....” she sketched the air with the cigarette. Jittery. Very jittery.

  “We’re looking for him, that’s all, Ma’am. When was the last time you saw Harvey?”

  “Monday night.”

  “Last Monday night? You haven’t seen him since?”

  Her eyes fell. “Er — no.”

  “Did something happen Monday night?”

  “No. No, of course not.”

  I picked up a photo of Marnie in fatigues and a duck-billed hunting cap. She was holding a rifle. Behind this was another photo of Marnie and a slight, gray-haired man in a sailboat. I studied the man.

  “Is this Ted?” I asked Marnie.

  She jerked her head around. “Yeah, that’s Ted.”

  Jake’s eyes met mine. I nodded.

  “What is this?” Marnie demanded suddenly. “You’re not from the Sheriff’s Department.” She indicated me.

  “I’m with LAPD,” Jake answered briefly.

  “LA ...” Her voice gave out.

  “What happened Sunday, Ms. Starr? Did you and Ted fight?”

  “It wasn’t a fight. Not really.”

  “But you argued?”

  Marnie seemed divided. At last she mumbled, “People say things when they’re mad.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “I was just angry. I was sick of the promises and the excuses and the big talk. I’m fifty-eight. No spring chicken. Is it so wrong to want a little security?”

  I said, “You asked for a commitment?”

  Jake gave me an odd look, but Marnie turned toward me eagerly, as though at last someone spoke her language. “Yes.”

  “Did you threaten Ted?” Jake probed.

  “Th-threaten? Not seriously. I mean, I love him.”

  “Uh huh. And how did Ted take this ultimatum?”

  “He said he’d show me. That he was going to score big this time.”

  “What did he mean by that?” I asked.

  She shrugged, stubbing out the cigarette. Then she dug in her bathrobe pocket for the pack. Her hands were shaking as she pulled another one out.

  Jake said coolly, “Did Ted ever cheat on you, Ms. Starr?”

  She flushed so that her entire face was the color of her freckles.

  “No!”

  “Did you threaten to kill him?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Did you?”

  “People say things when they’re angry. It don’t mean anything. Ted knew. Ted used to talk himself.”

  “Did he talk about his big score?” As I asked this question Jake shot me a warning look.

  “No.” She gestured vaguely. “What’s to tell? He was just blowing smoke.”

  “Speaking of which, who’s Harvey’s buyer?” Jake took charge again.

  “B-buyer?”

  “You heard.”

  “I don’t know what —”

  “Skip it,” said Jake. “We’re just looking for Harvey. I don’t care if he’s wholesaling weed out of the back of his pickup.”

  “Why do you want him then?”

  “Let’s just say it’s a matter of lif
e and death.”

  She looked doubtful and I didn’t blame her. I thought Jake should have come up with a better story than the truth.

  We didn’t get much further with Ms. Starr. She took the card Jake handed her and said she would call if Ted showed. I had no doubt it sailed into the trash before we were down the ramshackle steps.

  * * * * *

  While Jake vacuumed up a late lunch I moseyed on down to the corrals and, on impulse, went into the barn. Not that I expected to find marijuana drying from the rafters, but you never know.

  I entered through the tack room which, even after all these years, smelled hazily of leather and liniment and sawdust. Bridles hung from the walls. A saddle still waited for repair. I walked down the row of empty stalls. In my grandmother’s day the stable had been full of Arabian horses. Small-boned, fiery beauties with large liquidy eyes and graceful arched necks.

  I’d had my own horse, a chestnut gelding I had named Flame (inappropriately, given his mild disposition). Following Granna’s death, Flame had been sold with all the others, my mother no doubt fearing that I would break my scrawny neck.

  I always assumed it was my father’s early death that left Lisa so fearful about my own prospects. I was, as Lisa frequently pointed out, all she had. This was her own choice; my mother made a lovely, rich young widow. Maybe, as she always said, my father was the great love of her life. Or maybe she had been afraid to trust her luck a second time around. In any case Lisa had seen peril in everything from dogs to bicycles, and her worst fears seemed to have been confirmed when I contracted rheumatic fever at sixteen.

  Now I stood in the empty stable breathing in the decaying memory of hay and horses and something bitter as wormwood. My childhood ambition had been to breed Arabians like my grandmother. What would my life have been like if I hadn’t gotten sick? Would I still have ended up running a bookstore? I probably wouldn’t have met Jake.

  I recalled another of Lisa’s strictures, the one about “rough boys,” and grinned to myself. If ever anyone qualified as a rough boy it would be Jake.

  There was a moth-eaten looking buggy at the far end of the stable. I wandered over to it, thinking what a shame it was to let all this go to the termites and wood rot. Maybe a donation or two to a local museum would earn me a much-needed tax deduction.

  I could hear the buzz of insects unnaturally loud in the echoing silence of the cavernous building. I followed the sound back down the center aisle, stopping finally to look over the gate of a stall. Something lay half-buried in the old straw and sawdust. Unlatching the gate, I stepped into the stall.

  I could make out the sprawled outline, the pattern of material — plaid flannel.

  My heart began to pound with revolted knowledge before my brain made the connection. How the hell had I missed the significance of that sweetish sick smell?

  I pulled out my hanky, pressing the cotton folds over my mouth and nose. Within a foot of the thing, I stared down and the buzzing of the flies matched the buzzing in my brain. I desperately wanted fresh air and light. I wanted to run from the barn and close the doors on what lay there in the moldering hay. Close the door and lock it and forget about it.

  The physical reality is so different from the academic puzzle.

  I squatted down and brushed off pieces of straw.

  The days had not been kind to him. But then again neither had been the person who shot to death Ted Harvey.

  Chapter Seven

  “It’s not the same man.”

  Jake tore his gaze away from the official activity before us. The yard seemed full of black- and-whites, like a used police car sale. Men in uniform smoked and chatted — obviously a slow day for crime-busting in the Sierra Nevadas. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s not the same man I found in the road that night. It’s not Ted Harvey.”

  “Maybe it’s not Ted Harvey but it has to be the same man.”

  “It’s not.” I broke off as we were joined by Sheriff Billingsly.

  “I guess I owe you an apology, English,” he said grudgingly.

  “Yes and no. That’s not the man I found in the road that night.”

  “Come again?”

  “It’s not the same —”

  Jake interrupted in a tone of voice I hadn’t heard since the first grim days of our acquaintanceship, “For Chrissake, Adrien, the guy is exactly how you described him, right down to the plaid shirt.”

  “Superficially, yes.”

  Billingsly looked from Jake to me and said, “You gotta admit, English, the chances of two different dead men turning up on your property are mighty suspicious.”

  Suspicious, not coincidental? Call me oversensitive but my internal smoke alarms were going off. And where’s there’s smoke…

  “Is it Ted Harvey?” Jake asked.

  “Well no, it ain’t,” Billingsly admitted.

  “Who the hell is it?”

  The sheriff lifted his shoulders. “Don’t know, but I’d sure like to have a word with old Ted.”

  We fell silent as the body was carried on a stretcher out of the barn and loaded into a station wagon marked Medical Examiner. One of the deputies slammed shut the stable doors. Another began unrolling yellow crime scene tape to seal off the building.

  Billingsly said, “Some place we can go and talk, English? I need to hear more about that night.”

  We trooped inside the house and Jake listened silently as I once again ran over my discovery of the body in the road. The sheriff took slow and copious notes but he stopped when I tried to explain why I thought the body in the barn and the body in the road was not the same man.

  “The guy I found that night was more grizzled looking. Weathered. He hadn’t shaved in a couple of days and his fingernails were dirty.”

  “You don’t think the deceased in the barn looks battered enough?” the sheriff asked dryly. “Given the decomposition of the body, how the hell could you tell whether his fingernails were dirty or not?”

  “I guess I’m not explaining this well.”

  Jake said forbearingly, “Adrien, you had a few seconds to run a make on a DB in the moonlight. It’s been nearly five days. I think you are doing the normal thing, which is confusing that memory with the photo you saw of Harvey.”

  Billingsly interjected, “What photo?”

  “I don’t think so,” I answered Jake. “When I saw this body, just for a minute I could see the first guy’s face, like it was superimposed. This corpse didn’t look at all how I remembered. I think the bullet hole in his back was higher.”

  “It’s been five days!”

  “What photo of Harvey?” persisted the sheriff.

  “Adrien saw a snapshot of Harvey somewhere,” Jake replied vaguely. “Keep in mind, Adrien, you are not a trained observer.” Then, like a born and bred asshole, he added to the sheriff, “He writes murder mysteries.”

  Billingsly took a moment, sliding the beads across his cerebral abacus one by one. “Oh, I gotcha. Like Murder She Wrote!” He guffawed, the sound ricocheting off the hardwood floor and my nerves.

  I tried to hide my irritation. “I admit my memory of the first body is fuzzy, but when I saw this man’s face it struck me as wrong. I know my first impression was correct.”

  Billingsly, at last containing his amusement, said, “English, you been through plenty, I give you that. Lots of material for stories, eh? You probably can’t wait to get home to LA.”

  I sent Jake one of those poison pen looks. He met my eyes and glanced away, addressee unknown.

  Billingsly made a few more notes, clearly humoring me. He thanked me for my time and trouble, and took himself off. His was the last of the fleet of cop cars to leave my property.

  When the sound of engines had died away the kitchen seemed mighty quiet. The heavy, cool scent of just-bloomed lilacs drifted in the open window easing the memory of that other smell.

  “That’s that,” Jake said, setting the coffee cups in the sink.

  “Is it?”


  “Yes.” He turned to study me. “Don’t start trying to make a mystery out of a molehill. Your missing body has been found. The vic was probably a confederate of Harvey’s. Harvey killed him and now he’s split.”

  “Harvey is dead.”

  After a pause Jake turned on the faucet. Over the rush of water I heard him say, “Maybe he is by now but that’s not our problem.”

  “If you say so.”

  He turned off the water. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that I may not be a trained observer but I’m not blind either. Two different men. Two different bodies.” I held my fingers in the peace sign though I was feeling anything by peaceable. “Why doesn’t anyone want to believe that?”

  He threw me a chiding glance. “Now it’s a conspiracy?”

  “Come on, Jake, you know what I mean. Everybody is too eager to accept the obvious solution. I know why you are, but why is the sheriff?

  Jake turned off the water. “Baby,” he said finally and almost kindly. “You have too much imagination. That’s good in a writer and bad in a — um — detective.”

  “I seem to remember you saying once that a good detective isn’t afraid to use his imagination.”

  “Do you take notes on everything I say?” he inquired exasperatedly.

  “There’s so many contradictions it helps to keep track.”

  “Yeah. Which reminds me. Aren’t you supposed to be writing or something? Isn’t that why you came up here? I haven’t seen you write a word since I arrived.”

  “And that’s another thing: that Murder She Wrote crack!”

  He avoided my eyes. “I didn’t make that crack.”

  “You set me up for it.”

  Jake folded his arms across his chest like the Rock of Ages refusing to cleave itself for me or anybody else.

  “Yeah, whatever.” I know when I’m wasting my breath. Off I went to the study to give myself time to cool down.

  I guess it was natural we were going to butt heads if we spent any amount of time together. Truthfully we butted heads when we didn’t spend any amount of time together.

  I recalled that impromptu backrub.

  After a few minutes of brooding I got bored and picked up the yellow pamphlet I’d purchased at the museum.

  According to Histories of Basking Township, Basking was first settled in 1848 by an ex-Cavalry scout named Archibald Basking. Basking was also an artist and his sketches of Indians and Indian life hung in local museums like Royale House. By 1860, Basking had moved on into the pages of history, but by then the gold rush was in full spate and Basking Township had a sizable population. After the gold rush ended in 1884, many citizens stayed on in other fields of enterprise. Basking survived and even flourished, unlike most of the 500 mining camps spawned during the gold rush which were now nothing more than crumbling foundations or faded names on signposts.