Hear the Wind Blow, Dear... (Vic Daniel Series)

by David Pierce

  'Done,' Olivia said, laughing. 'Settled out of court. Would that family be your family?'

  'No,' I said, 'a friend's.'

  'Why don't you come too?' she said. 'Then you can tell me all the bits of the story you left out hoping I wouldn't notice.'

  'Done,' I said. 'To make it easier, tell Emile I'll pay him directly for the sheep, then you won't have to lay out anything.'

  'You got it,' she said.

  I asked her then about dope smoking among the staff at the park. When she hedged a trifle, I told her it could be important so she allowed that from time to time of an evening she and the dolphin gal shared a peaceful pipe of hash, but as far as she knew that was it as far as drugs went. I thanked her and hung up.

  Ricky and I went by Tommy's office on our way out; he was sitting with his feet up on the desk looking through a gun catalogue. Ricky let out a derisive whistle of admiration when he saw Tommy's fancy new snakeskin boots.

  'Ay yi yi,' he said. 'What did you do, roll a pimp?'

  Tommy grinned all over his freckled face. Then he wagged a finger at his buddy. 'You be careful with that re-al-tor,' he said. 'Behind that mean exterior there could lurk a mean interior.'

  As soon as I realized the realtor he was talking about was me, as that's what Ricky had told him I was on our last trip, I gave him a grin right back, my boyish one. It didn't seem to impress him much.

  There were three cars parked outside along with the two Wagoneers. One of them was a low-slung Nipponese hatchback with wire radials.

  'Nice wheels,' I said as we passed it.

  'Tommy's,' Ricky said. 'Lucky bastard.'

  'Why lucky?'

  'His brother got it for him. He's in some part of the business, buying or selling, I dunno, he's always away. It was one of those repos sent up for auction. What they do is strip it, give it a terrible paint job, pour some guck over the engine because people who don't know anything about cars always think that if the engine's clean it means the owner has really looked after it. Then you buy it cheap, shove all the extras back in it, strip the lousy paintwork off, clean up the interior and you've got yourself fancy wheels for nada, man.'

  'Ain't some people dishonest,' I said, shaking my head. 'Where does your pal live, near you?' We got into Ricky's Jeep and took off.

  'At his brother's, in Sherman Oaks. We've been there a couple of times for barbecues. Nice place.'

  We continued with the small talk more or less deliberately to stop ourselves thinking about more serious things until we turned off on to another one of those logging roads that was so bumpy all a guy could do was hang on and swear, him in Spanish, me in American.

  It was just on five thirty when the road got so bad we had to park. We spent the next twenty minutes walking straight up the side of a cliff. Luckily I was in pretty good shape that year, I was bowling a few frames with John D. at the Valley Bowl once a month or so and there was all that walking from the Corner Bar to the Two-Two-Two, which were a good hundred yards apart. But my back was still tender and my legs sore from having been used for driving practice, so I wasn't sorry when we arrived at the foot of the fire tower.

  It was built the way you would build a three-sided tower out of matchsticks, triangles of logs laid on top of each other with ladders made of wood sort of zig-zagging up the middle. On the top was a square wooden watchtower resting on a platform. Ricky kindly let me get my breath back while he exchanged shouted insults with the inhabitant, who had seen us coming and was leaning out of one of the windows.

  Then, up we went. It wasn't too bad for the first few rungs, then I had to close my eyes, opening them only when we had to shift to the next ladder and then being careful to stay focused on something very close to me, like my hands or the peeled wood of the ladder. On the third ladder I was sick. On the fifth ladder I almost lost it completely and had to hang on until the whirling and falling sensations stopped. It all sounds a bit old-maidish, I know, a man my size coming down with the vapors, but I was a good fifty feet up by then. On the sixth ladder I was sick. When I managed the seventh and final ladder, the hatch above it was open and a smiling, bearded flower-child helped me through it. The first thing I saw was a large sign that said 'Welcome To Heaven. Glad You Made It'. The next thing I saw was a can of Coors which the beard was holding out to me. It was ice cold and as good as a Coors can ever be, which is fair. Ricky, who was bringing up the rear, joined us soon thereafter and made the introductions.

  'Lucky, Vic. Vic, Lucky.' Lucky gave me two high fives, then two low fives. He was a short, skinny, hairy lad in his twenties attired in light-blue jeans which some loving hand had flared at the bottoms and then decorated with embroidered flowers. I found out later the loving hand was his; when he had nothing to do, which was most of the time, he said, he had himself a toot and got out the sewing basket.

  Lucky had made himself comfortable in his home away from home. His cabin reminded me of Chico's, being roughly the same size and also made of wood, but Lucky had a bottled-gas fridge and bottled-gas camper's stove instead of a fireplace. On the ceiling was a beautifully stitched patchwork quilt, also Lucky's work, he told me diffidently. When I took a closer look I saw he'd hidden among the patchwork the outlines of various animals.

  There were large windows in each of the four walls, with wooden shutters that closed from the inside. The rest of the wall space was covered with maps and charts of the local flora and fauna, also mushrooms, trees, birds and fishes. Prominent also, needless to say, were the tools of his trade – a huge pair of binoculars on a swivel mount that was calibrated in degrees, also a telescope on its tripod and a large radio telephone. When I asked him how they got all the equipment and supplies up to Heaven he smiled and pointed out one of the windows where a couple of ropes were neatly tied off.

  'Windlass,' he said. He consulted a mammoth chronometer he wore on one wrist, said, 'Hang on', then sat on a stool, took a reading through the binoculars, made a note in a ledger, shifted the alignment a trifle, took another reading, then made a second note. He also took a careful look out of every window in turn without the binoculars.

  'All quiet on the Western Front,' he said. He stooped down suddenly and picked up a loose bit of thread which he rolled up in his fingers and tucked away in a pocket.

  After a while I found I could look out the windows if I didn't get too close to them so I took a turn at the binoculars, being careful not to disturb their setting although Lucky told me it didn't matter, with a flick o' the wrist he could easily re-set them. And the view was amazing, if slightly monotonous, mile after mile of woodland, forest and hills, all in shades of green and brown, highlighted here and there by the last of the late afternoon sun. I don't know what power those binoculars were but they were about a foot long and the detail they picked up was surprising to a landlubber like me.

  I asked Lucky if he remembered Chico's visit.

  'Surely,' he said, sprinkling just a soupçon of chocolate into the coffee he was making for us. 'A sweet man in a broken body. Ricky said the fuzz back where they came from poured enough juice through him to light up a small town. All in all, I think I'll stay up here in Heaven, thanks. In a storm it's insanely beautiful.'

  'Did Chico ever come back?'

  'Nope, not when I was here, anyway. And Freddy would have mentioned it, I mean, how many visitors do we get?'

  'Who's Freddy?'

  'I do six weeks up, then one down,' Lucky said, stirring his concoction cautiously. 'Then comes the Fred.'

  'Ever give Chico any dope, Lucky?' Ricky asked him. 'Good home-grown, not cleaned yet?'

  'Never had any good home-grown up here that wasn't clean,' he said. 'Why bother? And the Fred never touches the stuff. He gets off on pink gin, gin and angostura bitters.' He shuddered at the very thought.

  'What did Chico do the time he was here?' I asked them both.

  'Looked out the windows through the glasses,' said Lucky, swooping on another bit of thread. 'Couldn't drag him away, right, Ricardo?'


  Ricardo nodded. I said, 'Good coffee,' although I don't really like anything in my coffee but coffee and especially not chocolate or cinnamon. Lucky looked pleased. I was interested in his way of life. I too had my dreams of getting away from it all as I have perhaps already mentioned several dozen times, but here was someone who was not only getting away from it all, he was being paid for it. So I asked him what else he did besides sew and fire watch. It turned out his days were fuller than he'd first let on as he had a small sideline going with the Weather Bureau and every four hours took readings of the barometric pressure and the outside temperature, noted the type and amount of cloud cover, then hoisted himself up on the roof to measure the rainfall, if any, and also the prevailing wind speed and direction. Then he owned up he also belonged to the Audubon Society plus the Sierra Club and wrote the occasional piece for them on matters of general interest such as the feeding habits of the lesser spotted tit – his words, not mine.

  'It's a long way to go for a beer of an evening though,' I remarked at some stage.

  'You better believe it,' he said. 'You're looking at an alcoholic, so the farther the better.' Then he showed me a color photo of a desolate, treeless mountain top; some timber company had been through and cut everything with branches, it was a real-estate nightmare that looked like something left over after WW III.

  'Lucky Mountain,' he said with great pride. 'And one day it will be mine all mine. Have you any idea what it will be like in twenty years when the new growth hides all that shit?'

  I said I didn't.

  'Listen,' he said, striding around excitedly. He spotted yet another loose thread and bent to pick it up. 'I live free, or almost free, don't need many clothes and I make most of those, so almost all my not ungenerous salary is going into buying Lucky Mountain, now known only as MM-22-Six on a logging map, and, say, ten grand a year over fifteen years will buy you a lot of mountain, especially when it looks like this.' He put the photograph away carefully. 'You'll have to come up and visit me there sometime,' he said.

  'Love to,' I said. 'Where is it?'

  'Alberta, roughly,' he said with a grin.

  'That'll make it easy to find,' I said.

  I finished my coffee like a good boy, refused seconds, and said we had to be on our way, unfortunately.

  'So what's it all about?' Lucky asked us as he pulled up the hatch in the floor. 'Something happen to Chico?'

  'Roughly,' I said. He grinned again, or I thought he did. It was hard to tell through all that beard.

  Going down was easier than going up only because I knew in advance this time it was a one-way trip, but that did not make it fun. I asked my shrink pal Art once where fear of heights comes from but I don't remember what his answer was. Probably, call my secretary for an appointment. Lucky came down with us to see us off, hot-dogging it by sliding down the ladders using only his hands.

  After Ricky and I had bumped our way out to the main road, I asked him if he'd mind pulling over at some suitable spot for a minute. He looked at me inquiringly but did so. After he shut the motor off, he asked me,

  'Que pasa, amigo?'

  'I'll tell you what's passing, amigo,' I said, shaking my head sadly. 'Beware of likable, honest-looking, fresh-faced kids.'

  CHAPTER TEN

  There are no hours for someone in my line of work, or rather, no fixed hours, although I do try to be in the office when the sign on the door says I should be. But there's no sense at all in being your own boss if you can't show up late or go home early or take the day off and go fishing from time to time. To balance this apparent freedom are the times I have to work late or on weekends or throughout National Dog Week and other major holidays.

  So that night after parting with a worried Ricky and driving home, I decided that I would put in some late work. After smothered pork chops and crinkle-cut french fries with Mom, I donned my thinking clothes, took myself over to the Corner Bar, installed myself in the back booth, ordered up the usual, and thought. Well, thinking's work, isn't it? It is for me.

  After twenty minutes of heavy rumination, I got some change from the waitress Cherie and headed for the phone by the men's room. The out-of-town-information operator got me the number I wanted and after depositing most of the change I was connected to my party, ex-Sheriff Gutes, of Modesto, CA. I'd never met the man but I'd talked to him on the phone some months ago and he'd been helpful then. I wasn't sure he'd remember me but I needn't have worried.

  'Of course,' he said. 'Victor Daniel. You called me last May about Dev Devlin. Hang on til I turn that Goddamned TV down.' I hung on. 'What finally happened on that?' he asked when he came back.

  'Oh, it all worked out,' I told him. 'Nam screwed him up a bit, that was all.'

  'He's not the only one,' Sheriff Gutes said. 'So what can I do for you this time?'

  'You ever run across a husband and wife name of De-Marco, they have a farm of some kind outside your fine burg?'

  'Nope, but I could track 'em down with no problem.'

  'Good,' I said. 'Do you think you could use your wiles and find out where their sons are without them getting suspicious?'

  'I reckon I got enough wiles left for that, sure.'

  'One called Thomas, L.L., or Tommy, and a second one are supposed to be sharing a house down here in Sherman Oaks, if that helps,' I said.

  'Got a good reason why I should take my wiles out of mothballs?' the old gent asked.

  'Sure do,' I said.

  There was a pause, then a chuckle from Mr Gutes.

  'Give me a number and I'll get back to you,' he said. 'Shouldn't take long.'

  I read off the number from the dial, hung up, and watched two guys shoot bad eight-ball for a few minutes. Then Mr Gutes called back.

  'One son only, name of Thomas, L.L., like you said, also one daughter. You sure you got the right folks?'

  'Now I'm positive,' I said. 'If you don't mind me asking an old dog to reveal his trade secrets, how'd you do it?'

  He chuckled again. 'You probably don't know the local American Legion here is conducting a membership drive and therefore trying to contact all Vets in the area.'

  'No, I didn't know that, nor do I believe it,' I said. 'But what if Thomas isn't a Vet?'

  'He isn't,' said Mr Gutes. Then, in a falsetto lady's voice, he said. '"Oh, but we've only got Tommy and he's never been in the service. There's Cathy-Sue, but she's married and living in New York." If you call that living.'

  'You old smoothie,' I said. 'Many thanks.'

  'Glad I could help,' he said. 'Drop by, son, if you're ever by this way. I'm usually home, damn it.'

  I said I would, thanked him again, sat down and ordered another brandy and ginger. I was so pleased I tipped Cherie fifty cents instead of my usual quarter. She pretended to reel with the shock.

  There were several other ways I could have found out about Tommy's non-existent brother, of course. If you own property you're automatically down on more records than Bing Crosby and most of those are open to the public, but it is always gratifying to come up with needed information without having to leave the bar you're in. It might be considered the mark of the true professional.

  Logic. What can one say about logic? I do not care for it overmuch but it can be helpful:

  1. Chico was missing, presumed, by me at least, dead.

  2. There was in all probability a serious intention behind his death because . . .

  3. . . . it was unlikely there was a non-serious intention, such as a domestic flare-up, a car accident, a sudden bar quarrel or a mugging, given his isolated circumstances.

  4. It was likely that the reason had something to do with money, serious money, either in the making of it or the protecting of how it was made.

  5. There is serious money in growing dope. According to a recent article I'd read somewhere, not my dentist's waiting room, roughly one (1) million acres of the National Forest system were being used by marijuana growers. The largest single area was up north in Humboldt, Trinity and Mendocino countries
, insiders call it the Emerald Triangle. North Carolina, Arkansas, Florida and Missouri were the other main problem areas. The growers commonly protected their plantations with guns, boobytraps, dogs, even mines. The Forest Service workers were not as yet allowed to carry firearms so they had to depend on outside law-enforcement agencies to protect them, not a helpful state of affairs when you're being shot at, bombed and mined. Finally, it might be remembered that there are other forests in America aside from National Forests.

  6. Chico had some dope he didn't grow himself.

  7. Nor could we find anyone who gave it to him or sold it to him, if he even had money.

  8. I postulated therefore that he had stolen it from someone, and almost surely, someone who was growing it.

  9. I further postulated from the above that, as Chico had been down to his last sprig, which is a time of great fear and paranoia for the habitual user – for further research in this area witness my landlord's panic when his cookie jar runs low – he'd been off stealing some more, had been detected and killed, either accidentally or on purpose.

  10. Therefore Chico, in his wanderings, had either stumbled across – or, more likely, gone looking for – a pot plantation which he had seen through the binoculars up in the fire tower, a patch of green he recognized, a truck, some movement that made him curious.