by Jack Lynch
He wasn’t interested. “Get down off those stairs, or you’ll die there.”
It was his house, so I went down the stairs. He looked like a man who might have killed other men in his time. He was about the right age for it. At the bottom of the stairs I tried talking to him again.
“It’s important that I talk to Duffy Anderson, Elaine’s ex.”
“Turn, and get over to your car.”
I started in that direction, but I didn’t make a foot race out of it.
“That’s Duffy’s car over there, the Porsche. Is he…”
He wanted me to make a foot race out of it. He hit me a sharp crack in the middle of the spine with the butt of the shotgun. He didn’t hold back a lot and could have chipped some bone. I lost my footing and went down on my face. He didn’t give me a chance to lift my mouth out of the dirt before he had the gun barrel pressing hard on the back of my neck.
“One more word out of you, cousin, and I blow away your neck. You are on private property. You are unwelcome here. Nobody here wants to talk to you. Nobody here has to talk to you. Now when I lift the barrel of this gun, I want you to climb into your car and leave here. Right now. And don’t say another word.”
He hadn’t been that garrulous the last time I was there. When I felt the pressure off my neck I got to my feet, cautiously but rapidly. On the way to my car door I spat out a little dirt. I climbed in, started the engine and backed around. I started out the same dirt road I’d come in by. That’s when he fired one blast from the shotgun at my retreating car. I wasn’t close enough for it to cause real damage. It probably just nicked the paint and metal some and chipped the back window in a few places, the minor sort of stuff that would cost about eight hundred dollars to have repaired at a body and fender shop. The balding man had just been putting a small exclamation mark on his statement.
Back out by the county road, I stopped and got out and went around to look at the back of the car. It was about what I expected. Maybe nine hundred dollars at the body and fender shop. Or a thousand dollars. The dents were deep. In many spots, the shot had penetrated the metal. If I didn’t go to the body and fender shop and have it taken care of, the dimples would start to oxidize, even before the next rainy season. The back of my car would look like a pepperoni pizza.
I brushed off my slacks and the sleeves of the sweater I was wearing. I swabbed my face with my handkerchief and looked closely at myself in the rear view mirror. I had a new cut on one lip.
On my way into Cloverdale I tried to stay calm. It’s the closest thing to meditation I’ve ever practiced. Keeping my mind on other things until the urge to kill subsides into a willingness only to tear somebody’s arm out of its socket. The man had no right to do that to me. I hadn’t been a threat to anybody. Not that time.
I found a big hardware store at the other end of town. I went in and used a plastic charge card to buy a Marlin 12-gauge pump shotgun they had on sale for $159.66, along with a box of shells. I took the shotgun and shells and drove around until I found a little machine shop that repaired farm equipment and did other odd jobs. I told the thick-chested black man inside about the odd job I wanted done. He said something about hearing somewhere that doing what I asked would transform the shotgun into an illegal weapon. I told him it was a joke I was pulling on somebody. I also told him I would pay cash and wouldn’t require a receipt.
I left the machine shop ten minutes later, and also left a few inches of the shotgun barrel inside the shop. The funny thing was that the balding man with the beard would have greater range with his own weapon than I had with mine. But the point of it all was that I didn’t intend for the man to see mine until I was up close. And it was the way mine looked up close that I wanted him to see.
I found a very rural road that meandered in toward the back end of the Wagon Weed property. I parked my car off to the side of the road and started through orchards and fields of this and that. A lot of it was new in the ground, and I probably couldn’t have told what they expected to harvest later even if I’d been a country boy.
About twenty minutes later I was crouched beside the shed that Duffy Anderson’s Porsche was parked next to. A woman I hadn’t seen before was swinging slowly on the front porch glider with an infant in her arms. Maybe it was my imagination, but she seemed to be keeping a watchful eye on the dirt road I’d driven in on earlier.
The sound of somebody sawing wood came from around the back of the big house. The front door was open this time, and somebody from inside called to the girl in the glider. She got up and went in.
I ran across the space between the shed and house and made my way quickly around to the sound of sawing. I peeked around a rear corner. It was the balding, bearded fellow. He had his shirt off and was sweating over a large section of log he was buck-sawing in a sturdy cradle device. His shotgun was leaning over against the back porch stairs. I was closer to it than he was. I moved up behind him.
“You work too hard,” I told him. “Why don’t you take a break?”
His head snapped up, and he sucked in his breath. I aimed the sawed-off shotgun in the general direction of his heart. “Which lung you want me to collapse first?”
His face was draining of blood. He made a helpless gesture with one hand and tried to smile. It was difficult.
“Hey, look man, I was just doing a guy a favor. Duffy said people are after him. He’s scared shitless. And right now, I am too. Hey, don’t point that thing at me that way. That thing is wicked.”
“Get over alongside the house,” I told him. “Under the windows.”
He did as I said. I fetched his own shotgun, broke it open, and took out the shells, then tossed the weapon onto the ground.
“Hey man, have a heart…”
“No, you just dummy up and listen for a minute, cousin. I am not at all happy about what you did to me or my car a little while ago. I came here in peace at the request of Duffy’s sister. I’m trying to keep him out of trouble. The routine you put me through didn’t help matters.”
I held up my left hand, with about an inch of space between thumb and middle finger. “I am about this close to beating you bloody enough so that people won’t recognize you for three months. You caused extensive damage to my car and you’ve cost me valuable time. Is Duffy inside here?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How about Elaine?”
He shook his head. “She took her kid to the doctor, in town.”
“Fine. Now the only other thing I want to hear out of you for the rest of the day is your getting Duffy out here. Right now.”
“What should I say?”
“Wing it. It’s your sweet body hanging in the balance. Go over to where he can see you from the porch.”
He did what I told him. I stepped around the corner of the house. The man called for somebody named Leslie. He must have known she was in the rear of the place, probably the kitchen. A moment later the back door opened and the bald man asked her to get Duffy. We waited. A minute later I heard Duffy come out onto the porch.
“What is it, Robert?”
“C’mon down. Want you to help me with something.”
“What? I don’t know anything about work around here.”
Robert gave an encouraging wave of his hand and turned back toward the cradle and saw. “C’mon, you might learn something.”
Duffy grumbled about it, but started down the stairs. He was wearing blue jeans and a white polo shirt. He didn’t seem to be carrying his weapons. When he hit the ground, I stepped up behind him.
“Now just take it easy, Duffy,” I told him. “It’s Peter Bragg. Your sister hired me to find you and to have a talk with you, nothing more. But we can’t do it here.”
He’d frozen in his tracks when I started talking. He looked across to where Robert was standing with a hound-dog expression. Duffy glanced down at the shotgun in the dirt nearby. Then he looked over his shoulder at me. He didn’t like what he saw.
“I’m armed because your friend t
here made me do it this way. It wasn’t my idea to get tough. But I’ve got to talk to you, and this time I’m not leaving before I do that.”
I let my voice trail off, and he got the drift of things.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Pick up the shotgun there and bring it along. It isn’t loaded.”
He picked up the gun. “Now what?”
“We’re going off a little ways. Start around front.” I turned toward Robert and held the stumpy shotgun up until it was pointed at his face. “And you, cousin, stay right here.”
I followed Duffy around and gestured him over to his car. I went around to the passenger side. “Get in,” I told him.
He fumbled in his pocket and brought out a set of keys, then tossed the shotgun behind the seats and climbed in. I got in next to him. “Out to the highway.”
He was more nervous than ever. His face looked haggard. I directed him back toward Cloverdale until we could turn off onto the dirt road where I’d left my own car. On the way into it, he complained about all the wear on his springs and shocks. I bit my tongue and looked out the window. When we got to my car, I had him pull in behind it. We got out and leaned against the cars so I could keep an eye on the country around us while we talked.
The boy was nervous. He didn’t know what to do with his hands, and one eyebrow was hopping around on his forehead.
“Try to calm down, son. I’m here to help, if I can. That’s what your sister wanted.”
“Then why not just leave me alone?”
“Because you’re going about things wrong. Nothing’s going to get cleared up while you’re hunched down out here in the boonies.”
“I didn’t shoot Red Dustin,” he blurted.
“Nobody I’ve talked to thinks you did. Were you on his boat the night before last?”
He hesitated. “I didn’t shoot him. I didn’t even have a gun with me. He was like that…” He lowered his voice and looked away. “He was like that when I got there.”
“I suspected something like that. Did you go there to tell him where his father was?”
Duffy looked up and nodded. He looked as if he was going to be sick about things. “It was awful. The back of his head…”
“Did you touch the body?”
A look of loathing crossed his face. “God no.” He shook his head.
“What did you do?”
“As soon as I saw he was dead, I left.”
“How did you get in and out of the cabin?”
“Through the door.”
“The one up on the wheel house?”
“No, the one on the main deck.”
“It was unlocked?”
“Yes.”
“What did you do next?”
“I drove around for a while. I got some money out of one of those automatic tellers. I didn’t know what to do. I’d—Red and I had a run-in earlier, in Sausalito. People saw us. I was afraid somebody would think I was the one who did it. I went by home and got some things. I knew things would look worse when people found out I used to be married to Red’s sister. That’s when I thought of coming up here. I figured it would be the last place anybody would think to look for me.”
“Have you told Elaine about Red?”
“No,” he said quietly.
I raised an eyebrow. “You haven’t?”
“The time hasn’t been right.”
“Okay, Duffy. After you found the body, when you were leaving the docks, did you see anybody? Or hear anything unusual?”
He looked up and stared at me a moment. “Yes. I saw a man going out one of the other piers. I think he’s a caretaker around there. I’ve seen him before when I’ve gone with my father to see Mr. Beamer, to talk business. I mean, I never talked business, of course. I usually waited in the car. But once I went to Mr. Beamer’s. This man was there working on a loose plank on the dock. He had a funny name, I remember.”
“Soldier Smith.”
“That’s right.”
“The night you were leaving Red’s boat, was it Beamer’s pier that Soldier was going out?”
“No, one of the others. He was carrying what looked like a rifle, or a shotgun of some sort.”
“Soldier did?”
“Yes. At least that’s what it looked like. I didn’t wait around to find out. I was very frightened.”
“I guess you were. There’s still one thing I don’t like about your story. I was trying to find Red the same night he was killed. About the same time you were there. As near as I can figure it, I must have gone aboard his boat just a bit after you did. But the door on deck was locked when I tried it. You said it was open.”
“It was open when I went there. I locked it on my way out.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t want anybody to find the body right away. I needed time to get away. I used my handkerchief on the knob.”
I let my breath out slowly. “All right, son. As I see it, this is where you stand. Your story makes sense. It will make sense to the sheriff’s investigators too, I’m sure, once they can hear you tell it a few times and compare that with what other people who know you will be telling them. But you’ve still got to go back and talk to them.”
“Can’t you tell them for me?”
“No. They’ll still want to hear it from you. And the longer you stay away, the harder they’re going to be on you, just because you stayed away for so long. If you want, you can have a lawyer sitting in when they question you.”
He looked a little more hopeful.
“You’ve got a life of your own to be getting on with. A job. A fiancee. They both need you, and you need them.”
He looked up at me. “Melody said that?”
“Not to me, she didn’t. But your sister told me she’s pretty upset. Whether it’s over you or something else, you could probably help with your presence. You’ve got a lot of things going for you, things the rest of us scramble our whole lives trying to get. But that doesn’t cut the obligations you’ve still got to the people around you. You could start in with Elaine. She deserves to know about her brother, no matter how much pain it might cause her. And she’d be better off hearing it from you than she would from a stranger like me. Then maybe you could even offer her a ride back to the Bay Area. Her dad’s coming home. It would be a good time for the two of them to have each other. Then you can go in and get your business over with the sheriff.”
He looked glum.
“It has to be done, Duffy. Either today, or after a few more sleepless nights.”
He nodded limply. “I suppose.”
I unlocked the car trunk and tossed in my new shotgun. I went around and unlocked the door and climbed in, rolling down the window. I started the engine, and Duffy came over to me.
“Where are you going?”
“Back to Marin County.”
I put the car in gear and turned around, then started back out the road. In the rear view mirror I could see Duffy standing with slumped shoulders in the middle of the road, staring after me.
TWENTY
On the way back through Cloverdale I phoned into the office to let Ceejay know where I was and to ask if anything important had come up.
“What are you doing up in Cloverdale?” she asked.
“Doing a survey on aging hippies. Some of them have turned mean. Any phone calls?”
“Two or three routine things I was able to field for you. But yesterday afternoon, just before five or so, you had kind of a funny one from a woman named McAteer.”
“That doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Try Shirley.”
“Oh yeah. What did she want?”
“You, mostly, from the sound of her. She wanted you to call.”
Ceejay gave me the number she’d left.
“You say she sounded funny?”
“Well, I don’t know the woman, but she didn’t sound normal.”
“Had she been drinking?”
“No, it was more like she was frightened. Sh
e wouldn’t tell me anything, and I tried probing nicely. But I do believe there was a note of urgency in her voice.”
“Thanks, Ceejay. I’ll try the number.”
When I dialed the number I got a busy signal. I went back to the car and started driving. This latest business bothered me. I should have tried phoning Shirley the night before, to see how things on the docks were. A few miles down the road I tried her number again. I again got a busy signal. I thought about it a minute before I got back into the car. About ten miles on down the road I pulled into a gas station and tried the number again, and got the same busy signal. I stayed on the phone and dialed the operator. I asked her to check Shirley’s line for me to see if she indeed was talking to somebody. After a few moments, the operator told me the receiver apparently had been left off the cradle. I went back out to the car and drove.
My original plan had been to go by the Anderson home in Peacock Gap to tell Terri I’d found her brother, but now I drove directly to Sausalito and Marinship Basin. On my way into the parking area, my mouth went dry. At the foot of the fan of piers several Sheriff’s Department vehicles, three patrol cars and a van from the coroner’s office were parked. When I got out of the car I could see they weren’t out Six Pier, where Shirley lived. Instead, they were out near the end of the pier from where I’d heard the gunshots on the night of the fire. I glanced out Six Pier. Things seemed calm enough. I went out to where the sheriff’s men were.
They had fished a body up off the tide flats. It was wrapped in green plastic. They were still taking photos and doing some preliminary things before unwrapping it. Lieutenant Reitlin was in charge again. I went over to him.
“What happened?”
“A girl living on one of the houseboats saw this thing lying out in the mud at low tide this morning. A hand had worked loose through a torn spot in the plastic. A manila line was cinched around the body, and a chunk of concrete was tied to the end of it. People had seen the bundle out here for a couple of days, whenever the tide went out, but they didn’t think too much of it until the hand worked loose.”
We watched while the technicians knelt over the bundle.
“Anything doing on the Dustin boy killing?”