Deadfall nd-15

by Bill Pronzini

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “If I told her once after the divorce I told her a hundred times — good riddance. I warned her. Once bitten, twice shy, but she never listens to me.”

  I could understand why. But I said, “When do you expect her back?”

  “Not until tonight sometime. She had to go to Sacramento. They’re having a seminar today. A motivational seminar, whatever that is.”

  “They?”

  “Her company. She works for Avon Cosmetics, didn’t you know that?”

  “No, ma’am, I didn’t. Will you please tell her I returned her call?”

  “Yes, I’ll tell her. What else should I tell her?”

  “Ma’am?”

  “About your investigation. Are you making progress?”

  “I’m doing my best.”

  “That doesn’t tell me anything.”

  “I’m afraid it’s all I can tell you, Mrs. Mitchell.”

  “Miss Mitchell. I’m not married.”

  I could understand that, too. I said, “Goodbye, Miss Mitchell,” and put the receiver down before she could say anything else.

  The coffee water was boiling. I made a cup of instant and sat down again. The building was quiet-the real estate office and the Slim-Taper Shirt Company were both closed today-and that made this a good place to do some more thinking.

  But it was another exercise in futility. Assume Kenneth Purcell was murdered; assume Danny Martinez had seen or heard enough to identify the person responsible; assume Martinez had sold that person’s name to Leonard and that Leonard had been murdered by that person. All right. But where did Richie Dessault fit in? It was possible, even though he hadn’t been at the party the night of Kenneth’s death, that he had snuck onto the grounds some time after it got under way. But why? Not with the intention of murdering Kenneth; he couldn’t have known Purcell would decide to go outside alone at any time during the evening. I couldn’t think of another reason he might have gone there on the sly that night, long after Melanie had left. And yet if he hadn’t had a hand in either Kenneth’s or Leonard’s demise, what was his connection with Danny Martinez? And if I had read Melanie right this morning, where had Dessault been since yesterday afternoon? Why hadn’t he come back to the houseboat?

  More questions: What had upset Kenneth just before he stalked out of the house? Did it have a bearing on his death? Did the missing Hainelin snuff box fit in anywhere? Did Alex Ozimas and his carnal appetites? Alicia Purcell and her carnal appetites? Her evident affair with Eldon Summerhayes? Summerhayes’s secret purchase of Kenneth’s antique collection? Elisabeth Summerhayes? Margaret Prine?

  All the questions, all the names, seemed to run around bumping into each other inside my skull; they were giving me a headache. I remembered the photograph of Danny Martinez and his family that I’d confiscated, and took it out and looked at it-I wasn’t quite sure why. It made me feel a little sad again, the way it had in the farmhouse. But that wasn’t all. Something about it bothered me vaguely, something that seemed lodged in my memory-

  The telephone bell went off. It made me jump and I came close to upsetting my cup of coffee; I wasn’t expecting it to ring on a Saturday morning. I picked up and said, “Detective agency,” and Eberhardt’s voice said, “I figured I’d find you there. Don’t you know it’s Saturday?”

  “Too damn well. What’s up, Eb?”

  “Nothing much. Ben Klein tried calling you at home; when he didn’t get an answer he called me. He’s another one working on his day off.”

  “What did he have to say?”

  “He ran the check on Danny Martinez. Nada-not even a traffic violation. He’s got somebody looking into Martinez’s background, to get a line on where in Mexico the common-law wife came from. But it’ll probably take some time.”

  “Most things do nowadays. Did he say anything about Richie Dessault?”

  “No connection with Martinez that he could find,” Eberhardt said. “Dessault has a record of two arrests, both in San Mateo County. One six years ago, when he was eighteen-suspicion of grand theft, auto. The second last year-possession and attempted sale of cocaine. Both charges eventually dropped for insufficient evidence. Translation: the D.A.’s office doesn’t bother going to trial on small-potatoes cases unless they’ve got a lock on a conviction.”

  “Don’t be so hard on them. All D.A. s have a tough row to hoe these days.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Thanks to the shysters.”

  “Let’s not get started on the shysters,” I said, even though I agreed with him. “Anything else I should know?”

  “Ben says no.”

  “Okay, thanks. So what are you up to today?”

  “I dunno yet. Maybe I’ll drive over to Berkeley, take in the Cal game. You want to come along?”

  “I don’t think so.” But then I thought about it, and I said, “Hell, maybe I will. What time’ll you leave?”

  “Before noon. One-thirty kickoff.”

  “Let me make a few calls, see how the day shapes up.”

  “You’re a workaholic, you know that? Drop dead of a heart attack one of these days, you don’t start taking it easy. All right. Give me a buzz by eleven-thirty if you want to go.”

  I said I would and rang off. He was probably right about my needing to take it easy; Kerry kept telling me the same thing. It was a nice day, perfect football weather; why not take the afternoon off, go to the Cal game, soak up some sun and a few beers? I had no leads that needed immediate attention. Except for Richie Dessault-but I didn’t have any idea where he was and I was not about to hang around Mission Creek all day, waiting for him to show up. I thought about calling Tom Washburn, but he hadn’t got in touch with me and that meant he either hadn’t gone back to Leonard’s house yet, or if he had, hadn’t found anything among Leonard’s papers worth telling me about. I could drive down to Moss Beach again, try to find somebody who knew Danny Martinez, maybe knew where Eva’s family lived in Mexico; but Klein already had somebody working on that. No point in duplication of effort. I still wanted a talk with Margaret Prine, and one with Eldon Summerhayes, but they could both wait until Monday. Besides, to get either of them to see me on their home turf today, I would need ammunition-and I wasn’t exactly loaded at the moment.

  I fidgeted around for a time, while I drank the rest of my coffee. I wanted to go to the game with Eberhardt and yet I kept having mind’s-eye flashbacks to that bloody night in Leonard’s house-little messages of guilt. I told myself I was being obsessive. I reminded myself that I had been working plenty hard on this case, that I had already made some headway by ferreting out Danny Martinez’s name. And I just about had myself convinced to go ahead and call Eberhardt, take the rest of the day off, when the telephone rang again.

  “This is Elisabeth Summerhayes,” the voice on the other end of the line said, surprising me. “I am glad I reached you. I didn’t know if you would be available today and I want to do this before I change my mind.”

  “Do what, Mrs. Summerhayes?”

  “Talk to you about what you told me yesterday,” she said. Her voice was flat but I thought I detected an undercurrent of anger. “About Kenneth Purcell’s collection.”

  “I see.”

  “But not on the telephone. Can we meet?”

  “Of course. Would you like to come here?”

  “No, I can’t. My husband is out and my car is being repaired.”

  “I could come to your home…”

  “No. He might return.” She paused and then said, “Do you know Sutro Heights Park?”

  “Yes.”

  “The parapet above the Great Highway?”

  “Yes.”

  “I can be there in one hour.”

  “So can I. No problem.”

  “In one hour, then.”

  She hung up and I did the same, feeling relieved in spite of myself. Partly because the stirring up I had done yesterday seemed to have produced results, and partly because now I could spend the afternoon working ins
tead of loafing at the Cal game, even though the Cal game was where I really wanted to be.

  A bundle of ambivalences and inconsistencies, that was me. A living, breathing paradox, groping through a Saturday that might not turn out to be so blue after all.

  Chapter Seventeen

  There is an old superstition among San Franciscans that Sutro Heights is either haunted or cursed (nobody seems able to decide which). Not the park itself, which stretches for a couple of blocks south and west from Point Lobos Avenue, above Cliff House. Just the part along the rim of the promontory that contains the ruins of Adolph Sutro’s once-palatial estate.

  Sutro was a German tobacco merchant and mining engineer who made his fortune in the Comstock Lode silver mines, and who became mayor of San Francisco in the 1890s. He bought the Heights ten years before that, after returning from Nevada; renovated and built additions on the cottage that already stood on the property, forested the land with cypress and pine and eucalyptus to act as windbreaks, and constructed elaborate gardens full of fountains, gazebos, and a hundred plaster statues of wood nymphs and Greek gods and goddesses cleverly painted to look like marble. But Sutro hadn’t much enjoyed his life on the Heights; things had begun to go wrong for him soon after he moved there-“as if something was exerting calamitous influences,” according to the legend. The cottage was badly damaged when a schooner carrying a cargo of gunpowder went aground on Seal Rocks and exploded. Sutro’s wife died unexpectedly. Cliff House, which he had bought for his own amusement, burned to the ground. His term as mayor was marred by infighting and corruption beyond his control. He contracted diabetes and his mind went on him. His daughter, the last member of the Sutro family to live on the Heights, also went insane before she died in the late thirties. And as if all that wasn’t enough to foment the superstition, a well-known local ballerina had plunged to her death off the crumbling parapet above the Great Highway in 1940, under circumstances that were still shrouded in mystery.

  I didn’t buy the “haunted or cursed” business myself; the only ghosts I believe in are those that haunt the human mind, and the only curses I give much credence to are the profane ones people hurl at me during the course of my work. Still, there is something vaguely eerie about the Sutro ruins-a sense of loneliness and despair that seems to pervade the place. Not too many people go out there on days when the fog comes roiling in off the Pacific, when the wind blows in gusts and moans among the trees and rocks. I had been out there once on a day like that. It hadn’t bothered me at the time, except to stir my imagination and my sense of history, as places like that always do; but then, I hadn’t been back since. Not until today-and I surprised myself by thinking, as I curbed the car on Forty-eighth Avenue, that I was glad it was a nice sunny day without too much wind.

  I walked into the park, thinking about the superstition and about the fact that there were not a lot of expensive homes in this neighborhood. Back a ways on Clement, across from the Lincoln Park Golf Course, there were some; maybe that was where the Summerhayeses lived. Either there, or all the way over on the other side of Lincoln Park, in Sea Cliff, and she’d taken a bus to get here. Not that it mattered. If I needed to know their address I could find it without too much trouble.

  The look of Sutro Heights did little to belie its legendary status. It was weedy and generally unkempt, with a lot of gopher holes and earth mounds pocking the grassy areas and a few pieces of disreputable statuary and urns here and there that may or may not have dated back to Adolph’s time. It was neither crowded nor deserted today: a few careless dog owners and their squatting, leg-lifting pets, some kids playing frisbee, a young couple sitting cross-legged on a blanket toasting each other with red wine in plastic glasses. I followed the old carriage road past the last remaining gazebo-it was decorated with graffiti, these being creative and enlightened times-and toward the high ground at the outer end.

  When I got there I turned onto a sandy path that took me up to a flight of crumbling stone stairs. At the top of the stairs was what had once been a grand terrace, roughly circular and enclosed by low stone walls; now it contained a few wind-sculpted cypress trees and a profusion of weeds, high grass, and litter. Near the westward parapet, where the ground was bare and gravelly, were some low backless benches. Elisabeth Summerhayes was sitting on the middle one, looking out to sea. There wasn’t anybody else around.

  She sensed my presence as I approached, glanced my way, and then looked back toward the ocean. She was wearing a knee-length leather coat with a fur collar and her blond hair was tied down with a scarf. She looked small and huddled at a distance, and oddly, considering her stature, the impression didn’t change much even when I reached her side.

  She still wouldn’t look at me, so I sat down on the other end of the bench and took in the view myself. From up here you could see a good portion of the south rim of the city, the full two-mile sweep of Ocean Beach in that direction. The other way and down below, the area in front of the new Cliff House was clogged with tour buses, sidewalk vendors, tourists. Seaward, lying just offshore beyond Cliff House, gulls and pelicans swarmed over Seal Rocks; and much farther out-thirty-two miles-the Farallone Islands were like an irregular blot of shadow on the horizon. Impressive, all in all, but I couldn’t enjoy it. Directly below the parapet, the cliff wall fell away to an extension of the carriage road and then, steeply, to the Great Highway; looking down there made me think of the promontory at Moss Beach-it made me think of death.

  It was quiet here, almost too quiet; the noisy activity around Cliff House and the stream of Saturday afternoon afternoon traffic on the Great Highway seemed muted. I could feel the odd pervasiveness of the place, even on a day like this, and I would have broken the silence myself if Mrs. Summerhayes hadn’t done it first.

  She said without preamble, and still without looking at me, “My husband has been having an affair with Alicia Purcell. For at least a year now.”

  I couldn’t think of a response.

  “He came home one night with scratches on his neck, after he’d been to see her. He said he was seeing Kenneth but I knew Kenneth was away that night. He was very clever about not letting me see the scratches; I saw them anyway.” She paused to watch a gull that came winging up over the cypress beyond me. Then she said, with a kind of dull bitter loathing, “I hate women who mark men, the ones with claws like cats.”

  “Have you confronted her?”

  “I wanted to, several times. But I didn’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t know.”

  “You haven’t confronted your husband either?”

  “No. Eldon is not a man you can confront. He blusters, he denies, he lies, he makes you feel as if you are the one who has done wrong. He would never admit the truth.”

  “How serious is it between them?”

  “Not serious. Very, very casual. Lust is what binds them together, nothing more.”

  “Did Kenneth also know about the affair?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Possibly.”

  “Would it have bothered him if he had? Would he have had words with your husband about it?”

  She shook her head. “He knew the kind of woman Alicia is. He condoned her lust because he understood it. He was filled with lust himself.”

  “Forgive me for asking this, Mrs. Summerhayes, but did he ever make a pass at you?”

  “Yes. Once. I slapped his face.”

  “When was that?”

  “A long time ago. Three years.”

  “How did you get along with him after that?”

  “I had as little to do with him as possible. My husband handled all our business dealings.”

  “How did he and Kenneth get along?”

  “They had no trouble. They are two of a kind, after all.” Another pause. “If you’re thinking Eldon might have murdered Kenneth, you’re mistaken. He had no reason. He doesn’t want Alicia; he only wants her body.”

  “There’s Kenneth’s money,” I said m
ildly.

  “Yes. But I have more than Alicia inherited, you see-much more. My father was a very rich man in Oslo.”

  Again I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Eldon told you the truth that we were together when Kenneth died,” she said. “Not alone together; with some of the other guests. If someone pushed him, it wasn’t Eldon. Nor I. I had contempt for Kenneth but I didn’t hate him. I couldn’t have killed him if I had. I couldn’t kill anyone.” She seemed to think about something for a time. “Not even Alicia,” she said.

  I had nothing to say to that, either. Silence rebuilt between us; she still wasn’t looking at me-hadn’t looked at me the entire time we’d been talking. It was an eerie sort of conversation, as if there were a great distance between us and we were each talking to ourselves. It matched the surroundings, made me even more aware of them.

  She had more to say; I sensed it, and I sensed, too, that prodding was not the way to get it out of her. When she was ready to talk she would, not before.

  A good three minutes passed, with her looking out to sea and me looking here and there, everywhere but at her. Birds made a racket in the cypress nearby. A dog came bounding up onto the terrace, took a look at us, sniffed around, peed on one of the empty benches, and went away again.

  “I examined the gallery records last night, after you left,” she said. The words came so abruptly that her voice startled me a little, even though I had been waiting for her to speak. “My husband paid Alicia fifty thousand dollars four months ago, from his private checking account.”

  “A down payment on Kenneth’s collection?”

  “I don’t know. It was for an unspecified reason. But on the same day he also deposited seventy-five thousand dollars.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  “From one of our better customers.”

  “For something he’d sold, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who was the customer?”

  “Margaret Prine.”

  “Uh-huh, I see. Do you have any idea what it was he sold her?”

  “It was nothing from our inventory at the time,” she said. “I made a careful examination of those records, too.”