by Jack Lynch
“If you felt that way about Cookie, were you really planning to marry Duffy Anderson?”
The girl shrugged. “It all depended. The marriage thing was still a few months down the road. I’m the one who made it be that way. I told Duffy we needed time to see if we could really pull it off—the old black and white thing, you know? But what I really wanted was some moving-around room, to see how I could best situate myself for the years ahead when I’m not so yummy-looking. Cookie had prospects. With the Shores project, I had prospects. At least I thought I did, until people began dying. Remember, Mr. Bragg, I come from a disadvantaged culture. I might be a standout in that culture in some ways, but it’s still disadvantaged. I’ve just been using what I have to position myself the best I can during the good years.”
“That has a familiar ring to it. But what do you do next? After tonight? With no more Shores project?”
“Duffy, of course. He’s my fall-back position.”
“You figure a savvy girl like you can really be happy with that boy?”
“I think I can be happy with that boy’s money. And I’m not too worried about the rest. He’s just very slow, really. He hasn’t finished growing up yet. But I might change the program some, now with what’s happened.”
“How’s that?”
She looked at me carefully. “Can I trust you not to pass this along?”
“You can.”
“I guess I’ll have to accept that from a man who came back to get me out of the Fitzmorris house.” She made a little fist and hit me lightly on the arm. “I meant to thank you for that, by the way. I think I could have made my way out of there, but if old Fitz had caught me…I was just glad to see you waiting at the bottom of the stairs.”
“Forget it. From the looks of Jackie, you shouldn’t have had any problem with Fitzmorris.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But the thing about Duffy, the only really bad thing, is the family. I mean, the girl is okay, but Mommy and Daddy are walking cancer. I intend to move up the wedding date with a rush, then get him over the hill and far away. He’ll never be his own man until that happens.”
“I agree. And I wish you luck. What about Samuel P.?”
“Papa? What about him?”
“He hurts all inside over you. He loves you. He thinks somehow he’s let your mother down because of you.”
She just stared at me. “Well, what can I tell him?” she asked finally. “Just what am I supposed to go over and talk to Papa about? What am I supposed to tell him about my life? You’ve learned plenty about my life. How much of that am I supposed to lay on him? An old man like that?”
“You don’t tell him anything about that. You just tell him something that’ll make him feel good. You go over and hug him and kiss him on the cheek and tell him you think about him and pray for him every day, even if you don’t have the time to spend with him that you’d like. And it doesn’t matter whether any of that’s true or not. You just make him feel like maybe he didn’t do such a bum job raising you after all, so when he lies down in that lonely bed of his at night and stares into the dark, he can feel just a touch of pride, instead of having to lie there in fear of the monsters that are apt to come out of the ceiling. Children with half a heart have been doing that for their parents since the first ones left the cave. It doesn’t matter that he’s old-fashioned and hopelessly out of things. You’ve done that sort of thing for Duffy; you sure as hell can do it for your own father.”
“What do I tell him about the photos?”
“Laugh it off. Tell him it was for a big, lavish book project planned in the interest of interracial harmony that went bankrupt, then change the subject. Christ, Melody, I don’t know what to tell him, you’re better at that sort of thing than I am. Make up your own pipe dream. The thing is, he wants to believe you. He wants you to be a success, and he wants you to be happy. I don’t think he’ll do any handsprings when you marry Duffy, but if you tell him it means your future is financially secure, it’ll take a lot of the sting out of it. Just go visit and be a daughter to him before you carry off Duffy from this part of the country. Leave him with a smiling face instead of a sour stomach.”
She got into the car, but didn’t start the engine right away. She stared out the window, then looked back at me. “I’ll see what I can do about that. But for now, I think I’ll go find Duffy.”
“I thought you were going to go mourn Cookie.”
“I changed my mind. I don’t have time for that. I’m a day older every morning of the world. Gotta hustle.” She gave me a wink and closed the door. I stood back while she turned the car around and spat up a little gravel on her way out of the lot.
I got into my own car feeling a little disoriented—a little, maybe, like a lot of people returning from Vietnam must have felt after spending a year in the lethal jungle cooker, then being put on a jet plane and flown home to be turned out on the streets a day or two later. I was physically tired and emotionally drained. A lot of bits and pieces from the past couple of days kept flitting around in my head. I wished I had Melody’s resilience. Maybe I did when I was her age.
I started the car and headed up Bridgeway toward home. At the apartment I locked up the pistol and other junk weighing me down, then went in to take a shower. After that, I fixed a drink and went in to sit on the sofa. I turned on the television set. Ten minutes later the drink was gone, but I couldn’t remember anything I’d seen on the tube. Home wasn’t where the heart was that evening. I didn’t know if it was memories of Shirley or what, but it didn’t seem as if sleep would come easily that night in the little apartment.
I changed clothes and drove downtown. I parked across the street from the No Name bar, but a look inside the big front window showed they were having a quiet evening. I didn’t need somber solitude right then. I needed music and noise, finger clicking and castanets. I walked on down along the water to the Sea Deck. I was looking for a place to wedge in at the bar when a handful of fingers rippled across one shoulder. I turned. It was Terri Anderson.
“Join me for a drink?”
I followed her back to her table, down on a middle level and over in one corner next to the windows looking out across the Bay to the sparkle of downtown San Francisco. Terri smiled briefly and sat down. I joined her. She was wearing a white jersey pullover and dark sateen slacks. A matching jacket was folded over a chair next to her.
“Melody said you had a busy evening.”
“She was here?”
“Yes. She came looking for Duffy and found him.”
“So Duffy came back today?”
“Yes. Went with a family attorney to see the sheriff. Returned a couple hours later, chastised but free. We were here celebrating. Also discussing the performance my father put on this evening. But when Melody came in, the two of them decided to drive up to Reno.”
“Like that?”
“Just like that—isn’t it marvelous? Not to get married, just for a holiday. It’ll be their first overnighter. Romantic, huh?”
“It makes the head swim.”
“Anyway, I’m glad you came in. I wanted somebody to talk to, and I didn’t want it to be one of the jerks who regularly come in here because I’d have to get shit-faced to bring myself to do that, and I don’t want to be that way.”
“How come?”
“It’s not all that much fun anymore, and Melody took me aside one day and told me if I kept it up I’d look like W.C. Fields by the time I’m thirty. I’m not dumb enough to want that just yet, but on the other hand, I don’t intend to go on the wagon altogether, either.” She finished her drink and signaled a waitress.
I ordered some bourbon, a double portion of it. Terri raised one eyebrow, then looked down at her hands with a little smile.
“What did your father do tonight?”
“Sure you want to hear? It’s a little sick.”
“You should have seen what I was up to a little earlier. Sure, tell me about it.”
“I won’t recount all the g
ory details, but he ended up sitting in a corner of the shower with the barrel of one of Duffy’s pistols inside his mouth. Never brought himself to go any further than that, of course, but it gave us all a good scare. Even Mother sobered up. We go through this sort of psychodrama at my place from time to time. It’s like paying the monthly electric bill. Been happening as long as I can remember.”
“No wonder your mother drinks. He’s attempted suicide before?”
“Not exactly, but then maybe I just don’t interpret everything in the right way. But he plays off that sort of morbid emotional extreme on the people around him. I was about to tell him after tonight’s show that he should check into Marin General for a good head examination, but I think my mother saw it coming and herded Duffy and me out of the house. She said she thought it was time she and Father spent an evening together talking over things. I told her it was fine with me, that if I had my way about it I wouldn’t be back for days. That’s when Duffy practically jerked me off my feet and got me out of there.”
“Did you bring your own car, or do you need a lift home?”
“Neither. I’m not going back there tonight. I told Mother. She understood. In fact, my mother, during moments of sobriety, has been showing some remarkably encouraging sense the past few days. Just blam out of the sky yesterday afternoon, while we were discussing where Duffy might have gone off to, she suggested I might like to get myself a little studio apartment somewhere, so when things get tense around the house I could have a place to go off by myself. She said I could still maintain legal residence at home, to satisfy the terms of Grandfather Burkette’s trust, but she didn’t see why I couldn’t sort of flit between the two abodes. I was so startled I couldn’t answer right away, but I knew she was serious. And Father’s performance in the shower might just speed things along. As for tonight, there are taxicabs and motels. And gentlemen friends’ apartments.”
“I thought you didn’t have many gentlemen friends.”
“There’s you, isn’t there?”
“Sure, Terri, there’s me. But I’m about where you are right now. I don’t know if I could get any sleep at home myself tonight. I certainly couldn’t bring myself to take a girl back there with me.”
“Why not?”
“Shirley. She spent the rest of the night there after the fire on the docks. She was afraid. She wanted to spend the next couple of days there. As it turned out, she could have without much inconvenience to me, since I was up in Oregon looking for Andy Dustin. But I didn’t let her. Told her the landlady wouldn’t like it. So she went home and got beat up instead.”
Terri brought her glass down onto the table with a bang. “Stop that.”
“What?”
She was sitting up straight, staring at me with anger. “You can’t put that on yourself. Not ever. She could have gone any number of other places. I know. She flirts with a lot of people, and I’ve seen her leave here with several of them. Believe me, Pete, yours wasn’t the last little refuge in town for her.” She shook her head with exasperation.
I had a brief sensation that our ages had been reversed. She made me feel like a little kid she was shaking to bring to its senses.
“That’s all well and good, Terri, but I’m the one she did ask. And I’m the one who found her, and saw what they’d done to her.”
She started to laugh, but clipped it short, and leaned forward to rest one hand on my arm. “Oh Peter, you poor dear. Do you really think, if she were the least worried about her fragile bod, she wouldn’t have just trotted on down the dock and spent the night with one of her neighbors? She didn’t want the safety of your apartment; she wanted you.”
She was giving me a little smile that said she was sorry for me, being such a cement head and all. I looked away and studied the ice in my drink for a minute. “Maybe there’s something to that.”
Terri let out a deep breath and got up and slipped into her jacket. “Come on,” she said, grabbing her bag. “Drink up.”
I drank up. “Where to?”
“I’m not just sure, but don’t worry about it. There are plenty of swell motels and hotels and other slick places for the weary traveler out there, and for now that’s us, a couple of weary travelers. We’ll find something if we drive around for a while. Maybe we can even find one with dirty movies on closed-circuit TV.”
“Good God, I think you’re serious,” I said, peeling off a generous tip for the waitress.
“Of course I am,” she told me. “In for a penny, in for a pound, I say. I think we’ve earned us a nice time, because of this and that.”
When we started up the street outside, she put her arm through mine and looked up at me with a smile that seemed to say that for now she was my girl, and damn proud of it. I grinned down at her, feeling like a kid again myself, lucky I didn’t trip and fall over things because of not looking where I was going. But that was all right for a change, because all of a sudden somebody had lifted a couple of tons off my shoulder, and I had the feeling that things were going to start looking up again.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
JACK LYNCH modeled many aspects of Peter Bragg after himself. He graduated with a BA in journalism from the University of Washington and reported for several Seattle-area newspapers, and later for others in Iowa and Kansas. He ended up in San Francisco, where he briefly worked for a brokerage house and as a bartender in Sausalito, before joining the reporting staff of the San Francisco Chronicle. He left the newspaper after many years to write the eight Bragg novels, earning one Edgar and two Shamus nominations and a loyal following of future crime writers. He died in 2008 at age seventy-eight.
SPEAK FOR THE DEAD
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1984, 2014 Jack Lynch
Previously published as San Quentin
ISBN: 1941298354
ISBN-13: 9781941298350
Published by Brash Books, LLC
12120 State Line, #253
Leawood, Kansas 66209
www.brash-books.com
BOOKS BY JACK LYNCH
The Dead Never Forget
Pieces of Death
The Missing and the Dead
Wake Up and Die
Truth or Die
Yesterday is Dead
Die for Me
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ONE
It seemed like the middle of the night when the phone went off out in the kitchen. It wasn’t a friendly-sounding ring. At first I was afraid it was Allison, phoning down from Barracks Cove to call off the weekend. Between the two of us that sort of thing had happened far too often. But it didn’t sound like an Allison ring. The way the bell jangled off the walls, probably waking Pinky Shade in the apartment over mine, it sounded like something far different from Allison. I padded from the small bedroom onto the cold linoleum floor of the kitchen and crossed to the breakfast bar.
“Peter Bragg here.”
“Oh, thank God, Peter. I was afraid for a moment you were out of town.”
I squinted at the wall clock. In the moonlight coming through the casement windows over the si
nk the clock read a little after 4:00 A.M. “I was asleep, for Christ’s sake. Who’s this?”
“Casey Martin. And I have a tough favor to ask you, Peter.”
That could mean anything. Casey was a very veteran police reporter on The Chronicle. They finally had brought him back into the office so he could stick his feet up on a desk, smoke his pipe with his hands behind his head and think about the thirty or more years he’d spent covering cops and crooks, and every so often he would write a thoughtful piece in an attempt to tell the readers what some of it all meant. A view from the bottom of the deck, he liked to call it. But none of that was apt to prompt a phone call at four o’ clock on a Saturday morning.
“What’s up?”
“Have you been listening to the radio?”
“Not for several hours.”
“We have a hostage situation here. At San Quentin.”
“You’re calling from there?”
“Yes. Several cons are holding two guards and two women as hostages in the activities building. Somehow they seem to have gotten their hands on a pistol. It was an escape attempt that went sour. That was several hours ago. The ringleader told prison officials he wanted to speak to me. I got here a little after midnight. I had a long talk with him. What he wants done is something beyond me. I suggested some alternatives, one of them being you. Reluctantly, he said he would talk to you.”
“This is something along the lines of a conditional thing to releasing the hostages and surrendering the weapon?”
“That’s right, Peter. But it’s not the normal demands for better prison conditions. The man is too smart and sophisticated for anything like that. He has a family problem that needs looking into. I suspect it’s right down your alley, or I wouldn’t have suggested you.”
I rubbed the back of my neck and looked at the clock again and thought about Allison. I had a feeling that I’d be the one to cancel our weekend. I had been planning to drive up there and show off the snazzy old Cadillac sedan a friend had left in my care while he was on a month-long business trip to the Far East.