He went still, knowing that even the slightest movement would make her squeeze the trigger. The click he’d just heard had been her thumb-cocking the weapon, which was probably single-action—the hammer had to be pulled back before it could be fired.
He whispered, as if rousing a sleep-walker, “Dulcie...do you hear me? It’s Michael. Dulcie...?”
She blinked for the first time but continued to train the revolver on him. He was beginning to believe that she knew very well who he was. Jimmy had warned him to trust nobody, man or woman.
He tried again: “Dulcie...it’s Michael Long Shore from Inyo County Sheriff’s Department. Lower the gun.”
He was thinking of reaching out with his right hand and jamming the webbing between this thumb and forefinger into the gap between the firing pin and the cartridge—when she gasped as if awakening from a nightmare. She tossed the weapon out into the grassless yard as if it had grown too hot to hold.
“Good,” he said, “very good.”
She ran her fingers over his shirtfront as if feeling for bullet holes. “Michael?”
“Yes.”
“Are you okay?”
He stepped past her to retrieve the gun and crack open the cylinder. A perfect ending to the confused face-off would have been finding that it was empty. But the revolver was loaded with hollow-point ammunition, the kind that left massive trauma.
“Michael, I’m so sorry!” She was back beside him, widening her search for gunshot wounds to his arms and shoulders.
He smiled under her frantic touch.
“What’s so funny?” She took a Kleenex from her housecoat pocket and dabbed her nose, which had been chafed red.
“Dulcie, don’t you think we would’ve heard something if you’d shot me?”
“I can’t hear anything—my ears are even more stuffed up than my sinuses.”
“Cold or flu?”
“I don’t know. Isn’t a summer cold supposed to be as bad as the flu...?”
“Blow.”
“Sorry?”
“Pinch your nose shut and blow.”
She did so, then grinned. “Oh, better.” She was even prettier when she grinned. “Come on inside. I got home early from work an hour or so ago. All I was doing was sneezing and hacking over the clients, so Janine told me to leave before I infected the whole county.” He followed her inside, closing the front door behind them. He saw Clark Gable with Marilyn Monroe on the television. A scene from the sixties film, The Misfits, the unlikely love story of a washed-up cowboy and a much younger divorcee. He made up his mind now not to tell her that it was one of his favorite pictures.
Leading him into the kitchen, Dulcie flicked on the light over the range. “I took some codeine I had left over from the last time I was sick, and then I zonked out on the couch—” Suddenly, she froze while taking the glass pot from the coffee-maker.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, wondering if she’d heard something he hadn’t.
“Is that legal?”
“Is what legal?”
“Using a prescription for two different times you’re sick?”
Michael dumped the cartridges out of the cylinder into his shirt pocket. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”
“Can you use some coffee? I can. Like you couldn’t tell.”
“Sounds good. Where do you want your revolver?”
“Not mine,” she said, filling the pot from the tap. “Janine loaned it to me. I keep it handy on the cocktail table, but you can put in the pantry behind you, top shelf. What about the bullets?”
“You get them back when I leave. Just in case you try to shoot me in a codeine haze.”
“I’m so embarrassed,” she said.
“No harm, no foul.” Hollow-points—trust a madam to know the round guaranteed to stop an unruly drunk. He scanned the countertops for any paperwork, hoping for something like the Carrara note, but her kitchen didn’t double as an office. “Why’d Janine feel the need to give you a gun?”
“My situation, I guess. It’s different from the other girls.”
“In what way?”
Dulcie kept her eyes busy with the coffee preparations. “All the others go home after their two-week stint here. You know, to places like Vegas or Pahrump. To boyfriends. Kids. Everything.”
“And you?” he asked.
“I live here, and there’s been problems in the past, you know, like guys following me home from work.”
“Is that why you put the cans with the rocks in them around the trailer?”
She nodded.
“Where’d you get that idea?”
“On the TV,” she said, “this show about the first war.” She wiped her hands down the front of her housecoat. “We can relax in the living room while the coffee brews. Are you too warm?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“I’ve been freezing all evening. I must have a fever.” She hit a switch on their way out of the kitchen, and the cooler on the roof hummed into action. She gestured for him to take the easy chair, while she turned on a table lamp and popped the CD of The Misfits out of the player in the TV. Then she sat on the couch, curling her legs beneath her.
“Dulcie, I left a message on your machine earlier today.”
“I know,” she said apologetically. “I got home from work round ten, Michael, and truth was I didn’t feel much like seeing anybody.”
“Then I’ll be brief. I’ve had a long day too.”
“No, no,” she added hurriedly, “that was how I felt then. I’d appreciate the company now, especially after the noise.”
“What noise?”
“The one that made me go outside with the gun.”
“Are you talking about me driving up?”
“I think it was before. Did you make the tin cans shake?”
“No,” Michael replied.
“Then it must’ve been something else.”
Several seconds passed in which nothing was said, then Michael shifted forward in the chair. “Dulcie, I’ve had the feeling all along there are some things you’re not sharing with me, things I need to know so I can make sure your husband is okay...” She stared down into her lap. “I’m asking you to be completely honest with me—did Carl show up here around July first? There’s no way you could have forgotten his coming here then or confuse it with another time. He would’ve been shaken up, frightened even. Please, Dulcie, tell me.”
Tears welled in her eyes. “I’m really sorry what I said to you last week, Michael.”
“About what?”
“You know, not knowing what it’s like to have somebody close to you just disappear into thin air,” she said in a small voice. “I didn’t know about your mother, then.”
A stuffed animal toppled off the cocktail table and landed between his feet, but he didn’t pick it up. He was trying to figure out if he’d heard her right. “How do you know about my mother?”
“One of the new girls here used to work for an escort service in Vegas—”
“What’s her name?” Michael interrupted.
“Fanny. She knows your brother Jimmy pretty good. Years ago, he told her all about your mom walking out into the desert and never coming back.”
“But how’d Jimmy and I come up in the conversation?”
Dulcie took a tissue from the box and blew her nose. “When I got back from seeing you last Monday, I was real upset and needed to talk to somebody. Fanny, bless her heart, was listening to me blab on and on—when all of a sudden she told me she knew Jimmy Long Shore, and how he was always talking about his big brother, who was a cop in Death Valley.”
“What’s Fanny’s last name?”
“I don’t know.”
“You work with her, don’t you?”
“Fanny’s not her real name. None of us use our real names at work. It’s for our own safety, and I’m not close enough to Fanny yet to ask her something like that. Janine would have Fanny’s legal name for the health inspections and all that, but she’s real good about our pr
ivacy too.”
“Is Fanny at work tonight?”
“Please, Michael, don’t do this to me. I just mentioned it because I felt bad about getting sore at you when I had no right.”
He realized that he might have only one shot with Fanny. Confronting her directly might not work, and without her he might never find out who had put the contract out on him.
“But in answer to what you asked, Michael,” Dulcie went on, “Carl never showed up here. I wish to God he had. Know what I mean? Then I wouldn’t be on pins and needles like I’ve been all these weeks...” By now, she had begun to cry. “The worst part is never knowing. But still I’m afraid to ask too much. I’d bug you more about what’s going on, what you’re finding out, but I’m always scared you’ll have bad news, and I don’t know if I can take that.”
“Why does he mean so much to you, Dulcie?”
She smiled wistfully. “You’ve got these deep brown eyes that drink up everything I say, even when I’m being stupid. Carl’s are blue, but they do the same thing...” She took a longer moment to compose herself. “He believes in me, even when I don’t. He always tries to make me a better person, even when trying hurts him. He never gives up on me, and sooner or later everybody gives up on me. So I guess I’d do anything for him.”
“Would you help him vanish?”
She seemed genuinely dismayed. “Why would I ever do that?”
Her sincere-sounding answer left him feeling heavy-handed. “How’d you meet Carl?”
“Oh, you don’t want to hear all that.”
“I do, Dulcie.”
Her eyes went back in time. “Well, I was living in San Francisco. Things were getting pretty rough, and he saw that right off, so he talked me into coming over to Kern County. He set me up in an apartment in Ridgecrest and got me to enroll in Cerro Coso College and everything. I majored in business...” She made a face.
“You didn’t like business?”
“Not really. But Carl wanted to bring me into AEI. He said I’d add a human touch to top management.”
“So he had big plans for you.”
“Oh yes. He was going to change his will and trust so I’d have a place with the firm, no matter what.”
“Did he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you tell anybody at AEI about these changes?”
“Of course not.”
“What about Fanny?”
“No, I swear. But none of that matters, really...” There was a weight to her silence he didn’t care for. “I screwed it all up, Michael.”
The sound of dripping had stopped in the kitchen, but he no longer felt like coffee. “How, Dulcie?”
“I ran away from Carl to Vegas, where I got in an even worse situation than San Francisco. Then I wound up here in Beatty. Carl wanted me to quit so bad he married me, at least that’s what I think. It was a mistake. We both knew it. But he’s been under such terrible pressure, Michael...” She held a knuckle to her lower lip for a moment to keep it from trembling. “Carl asked me never to talk about his business. Never.”
“I think he’d understand now.”
“Things aren’t going good at AEI, at all.”
“In what way?”
“Oh Michael, I wouldn’t understand, even if I knew the details. All I know is that Carl’s not happy in his work, and he always was. He loses his temper, and he never did before either.”
“Has he been violent to you?”
“No, no. It’s just that he was always was so patient with me.”
“Then is it possible Carl wanted to disappear?”
“I hope not.”
The clouded look that came over her face told Michael that there was more to it. But he had to walk a fine line here. Something unpleasant was within the realm of possibility: She could have firsthand knowledge that Kincannon had transported Razin’s body from the quarry to its resting place in the mine. At some future date in court, if it ever got to that, a defense attorney could make it appear to the jury that Michael had taken advantage of Dulcie in these moments. She’d be very convincing on the stand. “Monday afternoon,” he said, slowly and deliberately, “you drove back here along the Chloride Cliff Road.”
“That’s right. Like I told you over the phone.”
“Well, I followed you out of Furnace Creek. Mostly because I was worried you’d walk out into the heat alone. I later found a body in a mine up on the cliff. Did you know that?”
“It was on the Beatty radio station,” she said, rather mechanically. “At first, I thought it might be Carl. But then they gave a description of the dead person. Isn’t it funny how many people say it wrong?”
“What?”
“Beatty. They say it like there’s a bee in it. Instead of how Warren Beatty says his name.” Then she continued with no change of inflection: “On that Tuesday Carl phoned, he said somebody was playing games with him. He wasn’t quite sure why.”
“Did he mention a name?”
“No, but I thought maybe it was somebody with Energy or the nuclear people. He was going to make one quick stop on his way over here.”
“A stop related to the person who was giving him trouble?”
“It sounded that way to me, Michael.”
Then, one of her tin-can alarms rattled. The sound was loud enough to be heard over the hum of the swamp cooler.
Dulcie looked to him, wide-eyed.
“Stay inside,” he said. “Lock your doors and don’t open them ‘til I come back.”
Michael didn’t draw his pistol until he was outside. He paused on the front steps to listen, believing the can had been one of those on the darkened side of the trailer. He couldn’t see anyone—where her porch light faded the stands of tamarisk took over, thickly. He rushed back to his cruiser and exchanged his penlite for his more serious flashlight. As he moved quietly around her trailer, he heard rocks being overturned out in the arroyo. The intruder was making his break. And it was no dog. A heavy-footed man was fleeing southeast.
Michael didn’t use his light until he was well out into the wash. Then he did so in quick pulses, long enough only to scan each stretch of ground for foot tracks. He found a line of them tending southeast, as expected. He had also expected to find size thirteens, but the impressions were approximate nines with a diamond-sole pattern.
Well, what do you know...
He knelt in the shadow of a tamarisk thrown by the star-light and mulled over his next move. Strange how a contract on your life changed everything. Ordinarily, he would pursue the intruder without a second thought. But that is precisely what someone hired to kill him would want him to do. It was also possible that Dulcie was playing a part in the set-up, though he hoped that wasn’t the case.
He decided to back off and fight another day.
But there was one more thing to do before he returned to the trailer: Michael took out Carson’s cell phone, shielded the lit screen with his hand, and pressed the first and only selection on the speed-dialer.
As it rang, he lowered the phone to his side.
At first, he heard nothing out in the arroyo. But then, ever so faintly, he caught a tinkling melody that was the ring tone to the number he’d dialed.
The tune was I Got You, Babe.
Nobody answered.
Chapter Fifteen
Michael had just dozed off when someone or something tapped his bare foot. Cracking an eyelid, he gazed up into the morning sun, which was working its way around a date palm. Shifting back and forth across this dazzle was a slim human figure. Maybe a kid. Splashing sounds reminded him where he was. Unable to sleep after returning to Furnace Creek from Beatty at five this morning, he’d come to the swimming pool, having decided that he was safer sleeping in a public place instead of his bungalow. If worse came to worst at poolside, at least there would be witnesses for the prosecution.
He knew none of this was logical, but he wasn’t feeling very logical on the day after coming to the conclusion that Carl Kincannon had
planted a rock pick in the base of Nastour Razin’s cranium.
He was now waiting for two shoes to drop. The first, of course, would be Gorman showing up any time to give him holy hell for his foray into Nevada yesterday. The second would be the FBI demanding to know what Michael had learned about Kincannon and when he’d learned it. If they were readable, the smudges of dried blood on the front of convertible most likely had been left there by the geophysicist.
Sighing, the figure eased down into the chaise lounge beside him. “Investigator Long Shore?”
“Ms. Wallace?”
At last, his blurred vision had managed to bring Joanna Wallace into focus. She wasn’t in her usual uniform of white AEI cap and khaki jumpsuit. She wore what was apparently her off-duty attire: an olive drab shirt and a pair of yellow shorts which showed off her very nice legs.
“How’d you find me?” he asked.
“There was a note on your door, saying you were at the pool.”
“Ah yes.”
“Who is R.J.?”
The FBI agent had left a message on his voicemail at four this morning, about the time Michael had been taking his leave of Dulcie. Higgins, sounding tired and cranky from probably what had been his own sleepless night, was accepting Michael’s invitation to swing by the resident post on his way back to Los Angeles. He mentioned that he wanted to discuss some significant developments. His arrival could be imminent, and Michael wasn’t sure if he wanted to introduce him to Joanna Wallace without knowing beforehand what those developments were. It was highly likely that somebody within the FBI, a former colleague, had the bad habit of keeping Carson apprised of Michael’s whereabouts, probably on his own prepaid cell phone. Until he learned why Carson had been lurking around Dulcie’s trailer on the evening of the same day Michael had rubbed elbows with the bureau in Carrara, he would remain wary of the FBI fraternity.
“Investigator—”
“I thought we’d gotten past that. It’s Michael, and you asked me to call you Joanna. Remember?”
“Are you awake enough to carry on a conversation, Michael?”
Under the Killer Sun: A Death Valley Mystery Page 12