The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  I unlocked the door, took one step in and almost dropped to the floor. Only then I saw there was no need to. It was just Bobbie, curled up and dozing on the sofa bed under the window overlooking the carport. But it was unusual to find anybody there who hadn’t been there when I left. Either Pinky Shade or Mrs. Parker would need some talking to. Across from Bobbie there was a picture on the small color television set, but the sound was turned down. I closed the door and flicked the switch that turned on the floor lamp at one end of the sofa. Bobbie made a grunt, then rose slowly with a sleepy smile and a big stretch. She wore blue jeans with flower patches at naughty places and an abbreviated yellow blouse that left her pale tummy bare again.

  “Hi, sleuth.”

  “Hello, pest. Who let you in?”

  “The nice landlady. I said we were supposed to meet here but that you must have gotten held up and I didn’t want to wait out on the street in the dark by myself and everything. She seemed quite happy about it. Said she didn’t think you had enough women friends.”

  “She wouldn’t know. She can’t see me when I come in, I keep my drapes pulled and you could fire off a cannon down here and she’d never hear it. The next question is, why? And don’t tell me it’s because I’m compulsively attractive or that you’re drawn to father figures or anything like that because I’ll know it’s a crock. You can think up your answer while I go to the can.”

  To the left of the door as you enter is a kitchen, roomy enough for a fellow living by himself. It’s separated from the living room, where Bobbie was, by a stomach-high counter that can serve as a breakfast bar, if you don’t require too much room. The bedroom is off one side of the kitchen; the bath is off the other. I went into the bedroom and hung up my jacket and tie, looked around to see if she’d been going through things, and decided she hadn’t. I crossed the kitchen and went into the bathroom, remembering just in time to pull shut the door behind me. I was getting careless in my solitude. When I came back out Bobbie was sitting at the small kitchen table drinking a bottle of Dos Equis. I noticed she’d found the chilled mug in the freezer as well.

  “Got a good one ready?” I asked her, getting ice from the refrigerator and a bottle of bourbon from a cabinet beside the sink.

  “I hope so. It’s the truth.”

  “Let’s hear it.” I poured a drink and splashed some water over it and carried it into the next room and settled at one end of the sofa. She stayed at the kitchen table, but turned and gave me a funny stare.

  “Actually I do think you’re kind of cute. The way you’re acting makes me think you might be a little chicken around girls. You must have been hurt pretty badly once.”

  I felt like a startled butterfly. And her so young. I flapped and fluttered to get away. “Quit stalling.”

  “I would have come to see you even if you were some woman Armando had hired. If we’d done the same things and had the same conversation we did yesterday.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re somebody to talk to.” She stood up on her long, slim legs and walked past me into the adjoining room where I have a bookcase and desk in one corner, and a table where I could do more extensive dining if the occasion arose. She looked around for the overhead light switch, found it and turned it on, then went to my bookcase to see what was there.

  “What’s wrong with talking to Armando?”

  “He’s somebody to talk with, or listen to, not to talk to. He has me categorized. Dumb-little-topless-go-go-dancer thing.”

  “Why don’t you try to show him some of your good stuff?”

  “I did once, and he got mad. I was a threat to him that way.” She turned off the light and came back in to sit on the other end of the sofa.

  “I got the job dancing at the Palm Leaf Club right after I got to town. I wasn’t there a week before Armando took a liking to me. So I haven’t really had much of a chance to get to know anybody. And yesterday was just right. I mean, we didn’t talk much, but you asked me a couple of things and I had the impression you were listening to me when I answered. I thought we could do some more of that.”

  I got up and went out to fix another drink. “When did you decide you wanted to talk some more?”

  “Before I dropped you off at your office yesterday. What did you think I was doing, talking about having Mondays off and giving you my address and phone number and all? I thought the hint was broad enough to make an ape roar.”

  “It was,” I said, rejoining her on the sofa. “I just couldn’t accept it at face value. And I still can’t. How did you find out where I live?”

  “I’d spent most of the day hanging around the old farm, cleaning it and me and waiting to see if the phone would ring. You know, just like a dumb little teenager with a crush. ‘Maybe he’ll ask me to lunch somewhere.’ Then after one o’clock had come and gone I let myself think, ‘Maybe he’ll ask me out for cocktails this afternoon, later, or even better…’ ”

  She fluttered her eyelashes. “Dinner, maybe! It would of course be at some quiet little Italian place you knew about not in North Beach, with checkered tablecloths and candelight and red wine, run by somebody you called Mama Somebody, et cetera.” She cocked her head. “What have you been doing all day?”

  “Working.”

  “Until almost midnight?”

  “Yes. But back to how you found out where I live.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the romantic fantasy I lived. By seven-thirty this evening I was really irritated with you. Felt as if I’d been jilted. Yesterday, when I got back to Armando’s place, I tried to gently pump him about you. I didn’t get much, but he did mention that you used to be a bartender here in Sausalito. And although I am awfully dumb in some areas, I have been around the world a time or two and I know that in towns like this, bartenders in one place are apt to know bartenders in other places around town, and boy, they sure do here. I came over and the second place I stopped at, the fellow told me you used to work at the No Name, and at the No Name, everybody knew you. You must have been one helluva bartender.”

  “I was. But I’m going to have to go down there one of these days and have a chat with my former colleagues. Security is breaking down all along the line.”

  “What’s the big deal? I noticed you don’t have a number in the phone book, either. Which reminds me.” She took pad and pencil from her purse and crossed to the phone on the breakfast bar. When she leaned over to copy the number, displaying the patches on the seat of her jeans, you could tell she wasn’t as bony there as you might have expected.

  “I should think you would have written down the number and prowled the bookcase and all that before I got home.”

  “Don’t be silly. I was raised better than that.”

  “Well, don’t hand out that number like chewing gum. I’ve had dealings with people who have later gone to prison or state mental hospitals, and sometimes they come back with a grudge. I don’t mind encountering it at the office, but once I get home here I like to feel I can take off my shoes and relax.”

  “That makes sense,” she agreed. “Can I have another beer?”

  “I guess.”

  “I don’t know why you have to be so stingy about it,” she said, opening the refrigerator door. “It’s about all you have in here besides the half gallon of gin. Don’t you ever fix yourself a decent meal?”

  “There’s stuff for breakfast and to make sandwiches with. It’s about all I mess around with here.”

  She took out another Dos Equis, uncapped it at the sink and came back to sit across from me on the sofa. We stared at each other a couple of minutes.

  “What did you want to talk about?” I asked finally.

  “Oh, Goddamn it, Pete, stop.” She wasn’t smiling this time. “Can’t you just pretend I’m a girl you met and liked and asked back for a nightcap and a little conversation? You don’t have to ask me to stay the night. I don’t even know that I would if you asked. Can’t we just talk, like yesterday?”

  “Yesterday I was talkin
g business. I don’t know that we’d have all that much else to discuss, frankly. There’s a lot of years between us.”

  “Not that many. Can’t you tell me about your work?”

  “There isn’t that much to tell. Most of it is the same dreary legwork any cop does. You spend a lot of time on the phone and a lot of time walking around asking people questions. That’s about all there is to it.” And sometimes you forced yourself to take a close-up look at a body that had fallen eleven stories into the Pimsler Hotel lobby, but I wouldn’t tell her about that part of it.

  “Do you meet a lot of women who want to get laid?”

  “Not as many as I did when I was a bartender. If you’re in a line of work where you deal with the public, you’re going to meet all sorts of people. Women and men both. Right now I’m beginning to wonder what sort of woman you are.”

  “A couple of minutes ago you gave the impression you thought I was still almost a kid.”

  “You are, almost. Were you just exaggerating when you told me you’d been around the world a couple of times?”

  “Yes. I’ve only been to England and the Continent. Spain, France, Amsterdam and down to India once.”

  “How did you like it there?”

  “Too many people.”

  “Still, you’ve been around. To more places than I have.”

  “Where have you been?”

  “Korea.”

  “Oh. Not nice, huh?”

  “Pretty bleak. Are your parents living?”

  “No. Did you grow up around here?”

  “I grew up in Seattle.”

  She brightened. “I was there last year. It’s pretty. Mountains and water everywhere you look. And that funky downtown area they fixed up.”

  “Yesler Square, the original Skid Road. Yeah, it’s okay when the sun is shining. But it’s not England or Spain or Amsterdam. Neither was Korea. I always wanted to see London.” I got up to pour another drink, feeling old.

  “What’s stopping you?” She crossed to lean on the breakfast bar, watching me. “You must make enough so you could get it all together, if you really wanted to do it.”

  “I really want to do it. But something always seems to come up.”

  “You could even take me along as your travel guide. I’m a happy companion. Would you think me awful if I turned in the rest of this beer for one of those things you’re fixing?”

  “No problem. There’s also some Scotch, and the gin you saw.”

  “What you have is fine.”

  I fixed the drinks and we went in and sat again. She lifted her glass.

  “To finding someone to talk to.”

  I lifted my own. “To pretty girls who come by in the night.”

  “Do you really think that I’m pretty?”

  “Prettier than most. You have a very innocent, fresh quality about you, yet at the same time there’s a cast to your eyes that suggests—I don’t know, something beyond your obvious years. And you also have a nice, round bottom for such a trim figure.”

  “You think so?” She grinned. “Far out. I never thought about it, even.”

  “I know. You can tell that from the way you walk. You could do something with that. You could make heads turn when you walked down the street if you wanted.”

  “I don’t, particularly. For a few good friends, maybe, if they wanted that sort of thing. But not everybody.”

  “You’re a strange kid. How long were you married to the soldier?”

  “Huh?” she asked, lifting her head. “Oh, that. That was a short, very dumb episode in my life. I was seventeen. Things were going badly around home. Billy was his name. He was in town on leave and sort of swept me off my feet. Asked me to go off with him. I did. He was on his way back out to Fort Ord. We stopped off in some little town in Nevada and got married. I spent the next three months waiting tables in Monterey and fighting with my husband. I finally packed up and went back home. End of the marriage bit.

  “Where was home?”

  “A town you’ve never heard of back in the Midwest.”

  “Try me.”

  “No. I consider it bad luck to even mention it.”

  “How were things when you went back home?”

  “Better. My grades improved and finally I went away to college, in another, bigger town. I was there during some of that last big surge of antiwar demonstrations. We had National Guard on our campus too. Nobody got snuffed, but a lot of kids I knew were hurt and tossed in jail. That’s when I dropped out for good. It was too heavy for me.”

  She drank quickly, the same as Connie Wells had. Maybe it was something about working for Armando Barker. She held out her glass. “Could I have another?”

  “I guess so. Then I’ll have to toss you out. It’s nearly one o’clock and I have another busy day ahead of me.” I went back to the kitchen, built her a fresh drink and topped off my own. While I was doing this she had followed me out and come up behind me to gently run one finger down the middle of my back.

  “Was I really awful, coming here like this?”

  “I guess not. From my standpoint you could have picked a better time, maybe. From your standpoint…”

  She took her hand away and when I handed her the drink she rested one hip against the counter. “From my standpoint what?”

  “It still doesn’t make sense. Four months in San Francisco and even with your unusual job, to think you haven’t met a lot of people more your own age you could go talk to when you felt like it. Or whatever.”

  She stared at me without her usually good-natured smile.

  “I’m going to tell you just one more thing about my past,” she said quietly. “There are few people who know about this. I am going to tell you, Peter Bragg, because maybe it will help you understand some things and not be so goddamn guarded with me, and maybe you’ll treat me like you might any other girl.”

  “Is that so important to you?”

  She straightened. “Yes,” she said in a voice sharp enough to make Pinky Shade roll over in his bed upstairs. “I think it is.” She took her drink back to the sofa. I followed, feeling a little more uncomfortable than a man in his own home should.

  “You see,” she began, “I am the product of one of those situations you might read about sometimes in a confession magazine, God forbid that you should read confession magazines. At your age, at least.”

  “Broken home stuff?”

  “No, not broken home stuff. Gang rape stuff.”

  I took a careful breath.

  “I wasn’t a whole lot older than Beverly Jean is. Barely a teenager. But I looked older. And was dumb.” She rolled her eyes. “Jesus, was I dumb. There was this loose, neighborhood gang of boys. I was used to seeing them on my way home from school. They never were any problem. Then a couple of older boys, brothers, moved into the area. They were from some city back East. They sort of took over the gang. I didn’t know that. They had a couple of the younger kids, kids I was used to seeing, stop me one afternoon and ask if I’d like to see their clubhouse, in back of an old, vacated store. I told you. Dumb, right?”

  I walked slowly over to the breakfast bar and stood with my back to her. I’d worked on a particularly cruel case of the sort she was describing. I had spent hours trying to coax the young victim to accept me. To talk to me. To tell me about the boys who had done it.

  “Pete, look at me, please. I have to be sure you understand something.”

  I turned back. Her eyes were stinging her, but she kept her voice under control. “There were ten of them waiting for me. They put a gag over my mouth and the bigger boys held me down and tore off my clothes. It wasn’t so bad with the kids I was used to. Some of the younger ones just watched. Some of them didn’t even know what to do. The ones who did—it was over pretty quickly. But then, the two brothers sent all the rest of the boys outside. Those two knew what they were doing. The awful thing was I was afraid I wouldn’t get out alive. I was afraid to try fighting them off, for fear they’d do even worse things t
o me.”

  She paused to drink some of the bourbon. I went back to the sofa and held her hand.

  “It’s what happened after, that explains now,” she said quietly, a brief smile back on her face. “I’ve always felt lucky for the way they treated me at the hospital. But now I’m not so sure. One of their major concerns was that it not have the lasting effect of my wanting to avoid sex when I got older. There was a new, young psychiatrist there. They helped me through the initial trauma, and then they worked on this other thing. When I got older, it all seemed to have worked out fine. Except that something got lost in the translation. Can you get what I mean, Pete?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s not that I’m afraid to have sex with somebody. But all too often I’ve gotten into situations that are sort of iffy. Should I or shouldn’t I, you know? And because of the swell job they did rehabilitating me at the hospital, I’m apt to opt in favor of the guy, just to prove I don’t carry old scars around with me. And I keep getting a kick in the pants for my troubles. Not physically, but they’ll do bad things to me emotionally. See what I mean now? I shouldn’t have anything to do with some people, but that little mechanism that would warn most girls of that got unhooked way back there when I was thirteen.”

  We sat and stared at each other some more.

  “Maybe that attracts me to men who seem a little more mature than the ones my own age. Maybe it’s why I took the job with Armando. He might pinch my boob, but he doesn’t try to squash what is really me. He doesn’t even know it’s there.”

  I had run out of things to say. She drained her glass and got up. “I guess I’d better let you get your sleep.”