The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “No, he’s a vet. Has a place between here and town.”

  “A veterinarian. Good. On the road back to town.” I kept the pen poised over the pad. “Does he have a sign or something I could see from the road?”

  He was looking at me now. His hands were resting quietly beside him. “Yes. You can see it.”

  “I must have missed it on the way out here. When I’m driving back from here, will it be on my left or my right?”

  “On the left. There’s a big gray house, with a lot of fancy wood carving around the roof, set back in off the road. That’s where he lives. Then there’s a barn and some smaller buildings behind it, painted a kind of white color, a little ways from the house. And off to the right he’s got a horse ring.”

  I kept taking notes. The boy was practically babbling.

  “Fine. Dr. Schindler. I’ll stop there first. Who else?”

  Another hard-to-come-by smile flitted across his face and he lowered his eyes. “There aren’t really all that many,” he told himself as much as me. He looked up again. “My Aunt Jane used to be here. She lives down near Glendale now.”

  “Too far. I might try to get her on the phone later, but I need local people right now.”

  He looked at me a little doe-eyed, weighing something, then turned away with another shake of his head.

  “Ah, come on, Buddy, my boy. There have to be others. Neighbors. Kids you grew up with. Girlfriends?”

  He moved as if somebody had sent an electric current through the bedsprings. He wheeled around and put his legs over the other side of the bed and stared at the wall with his back to me. The back of his neck looked flushed. It was the closest thing to pay dirt I could imagine, but he wasn’t going to tell me about it.

  “Who do you talk to, Buddy, when you have to get something off your chest?”

  “Dr. Schindler.”

  “He’s the only one?”

  “Just about.”

  More time passed. He finally swung his stockinged feet back onto the bed and leaned against the headboard and stared at the ceiling.

  “Just about?”

  “He’s the only one I ever really talk to.”

  “Dr. Schindler.” I got to my feet, straightened the chair and strolled to the door, then turned back. “Your brother and three other men, one of them a sexual psychopath, are holding two women and a guard hostage in San Quentin prison because of you, and all you can give me is Dr. Schindler.”

  I didn’t ask him, I just stated it. He raised his head and looked at me vacantly.

  “Okay, Buddy, we’ll talk again.” I started to open the door, then turned back. “Wait a minute. Somebody said something about a dog. That you’d told them you were out walking, or giving a dog a ride. Whose dog? Yours?”

  “Mine and Beau’s.”

  “So who’s looking after it while you’re in here? Dr. Schindler?”

  “No.” He cleared his throat again. “I guess Aggie is. She told me she would.”

  “Aggie who?”

  “Aggie Leland.”

  “Who is she?”

  He shrugged. “She’s a friend.”

  “But not a girlfriend.”

  “She’s a girl, but…She’s just a pretty good friend.”

  “A pretty good friend. How come you didn’t think to tell me about her before?”

  “I don’t know. But she won’t be able to tell you anything.”

  He made a sigh that gulped in enough air to last him the rest of the day. I left.

  Dr. Matthew Schindler was a gnarled, stumpy man whose animal clinic was located in a broad, closed-in porch at the rear of the big gray house. Signs out front directed you around to the rear entrance, if you and an animal were seeking his professional services.

  “To keep people from tracking mud through the house,” explained his tidy little wife as she led me out back.

  Doc Schindler was wearing a white smock and low-cut rubber boots. His thick fingers probed some sort of wound on the haunch of a dark-haired, sad-faced setter stretched out on an examination table under bright overhead lights. The doc’s hair was combed in stately white waves, and he had an unlit cigar end gripped in his teeth as he used a pincer to deftly pluck out a lead pellet. He talked fairly steadily, this old vet, first with the anxious-looking teenage boy who’d accompanied the dog, then, after an introduction from his wife, with me. He never said anything to the dog that I noticed, but the animal remained calm under his probing and plucking. He seemed to know he was in good hands.

  “Dumbest thing I ever heard of in my life, arresting Buddy Bancetti for a thing like that,” Schindler told me. “The coroner showed me some of the autopsy photos. The Bancetti boy couldn’t have hit somebody that hard any more than he could hop to the moon on one leg. His brother, yes, but not Buddy. The boy has the hands of a healer, the hands of a healer, I tell you.”

  He eased out another pellet and dropped it with a small clank into a metal tray, glancing up at the boy. “You been letting this animal run out on rangeland, Bobby? Maybe in packs with other dogs?”

  “N-no sir. I told you. I keep him corralled most times, sir.”

  “You wouldn’t try to get one past me there, would you, Bobby?” asked the doc, crouching down for a closer look at the dog’s hide. “Wouldn’t be trying to get the old sinker past me while I was looking for your fastball? Huh?”

  He glanced up at the boy, who gave him a brief smile. “He got out for a while this morning. Guess it could have happened then.”

  The doc grunted and seemed satisfied he’d gotten the last bit of birdshot. “Well, he was lucky whoever did this used a scattergun,” he told the boy. “Most of these old boys running ranches around here would be more apt to put a heavy-duty slug through him. Then even the great Doc Schindler couldn’t save him.”

  “That happened not too long ago down near where I live,” I put in. “Up in Sonoma County. One guy whose sheep were being terrorized drilled a dog clean through and hung its carcass up on a fence post next to the road in front. Created a little stir in the local press, but he didn’t have trouble with loose dogs after that.”

  The boy was looking at me with a sickly expression.

  “Believe I even read about that up here,” said Doc Schindler, sprinkling powder over the dog’s wound. “It’s a serious matter, if you’ve invested several thousand dollars in a herd of sheep, and a bunch of dogs running loose get together and decide to have a little blood sport. You don’t know dogs the way I do, Bobby. They can be big, lovable pets around the house, but out there on the land, in a pack, they revert to something far different. They’re a bit like humans, that way. Anyways, you’d better keep this dog under a tighter rein.”

  The doc wrapped a bandage over the dog’s wound, gave the boy some pills and instructed him on how to tend to the animal. The dog was still a little shaky on its feet, but it managed to convey its own thanks to the doc by nuzzling his leg and wagging its tail. Doc ushered them out the back door, then straightened out his examining tray and put a couple of probes and the pincers into a sterilizing pot.

  I had only told him I was there to try helping Buddy Bancetti, while the boy and his dog had been there. Now I told him about San Quentin.

  “Bad business,” he said, shaking his head. “Beau’s a wild man. Always has been. He and Mitchell Tuck were getting into trouble together from the time they were able to climb out of their cribs, it seems. But not Buddy. Different bolt of cloth, that one. God, but it’s crazy the different directions one family’s genes can travel. Care for some coffee?”

  “No thanks. I just had breakfast not long ago.”

  “Then come along out back. Have a couple of critters I have to look in on. We can talk in the meantime.”

  It was Doc who did most of the talking, but even that wasn’t as much help as I had hoped for. It was one long character reference for Buddy, but dealt mostly with the boy’s ways with animals. Doc had noticed it years before, and once Buddy was old enough, he’d hired him to w
ork part-time as his assistant. He was bright and learned fast, but whenever Doc Schindler suggested Buddy should try getting into the University of California at Davis, with an eye to getting his own doctorate in veterinary medicine, the boy balked.

  “He’s deathly nervous around strangers. If you’ve talked to him you might have noticed.”

  “I noticed. Can you think of any reason for that?”

  “Not really. Both parents died of separate ailments when the boys were still little, so naturally there’d be a certain amount of reassurance and love missing when they were growing up, but the mother’s sister moved in and did as fine a job as she could trying to raise them. It didn’t work out for either one of them, as things turned out, but I don’t blame the woman who raised them for that. No, I just think it’s the gene thing. Buddy was an average student in school, but he always did have a devil of a time trying to make friends. Or rather, he didn’t try to make friends. There were just a few rare souls who took a sort of pity on the boy and tried to make up to him. Not too many of them were successful.”

  We’d walked inside the big, airy barn that had doors open at both ends. The doc went into a pen along one wall that had a black-faced sheep in it wearing some sort of metal splint. Doc squatted down to check the device’s fit beneath the animal’s shoulder.

  “What happened there?”

  “Oh, he broke a leg. Could even have been something that dog I was just treating inside was responsible for. Sheep are awful skittish. They panic. This one they found bleating alongside a fence he’d run into. Ordinarily you’d just shoot some poor critter who’d done that. But this ram’s a breeder. Suffolk. Fine mutton. But for now they’re more interested in this fellow’s offspring than they are his meat. So they brought him in to me and I rigged up this contraption to keep his leg straight and his weight off it till the bone mends.”

  The ram baaaahd and Doc got up and wiped his hands on his smock.

  “I hear Buddy spent some time out there with Cornell a while back.”

  “You heard that, did you? Well, that was just a stage boys are apt to go through, you know. All that Nazi junk, and the—oh, you know, maybe some sexual explorations of this sort and that. But I think the minute that started, Buddy took off like a shot. I think that’s why the man used to tease him some.”

  “Was the teasing ever bad enough so you think Buddy could harbor some bitterness? Could lead to a sudden violence?”

  “Not in a million years. Cornell was not an attractive man, Mr. Bragg. I think Buddy felt lucky just to have had the excuse to break off whatever acquaintanceship they might have had. I don’t think he really spent more than a couple of weeks hanging around out there with some other kids before he and Cornell got into whatever led to the flare-up.”

  We’d left the barn and were standing back out in the dazzling mountain air. A hen clucked somewhere and a horse whinnied in reply. The sun was warming to the bone. “Buddy told me he had a friend, a girl named Aggie Leland.”

  Doc’s face beamed. “Oh, yes, that Aggie. She’s a pip. Lives just a few doors away from the Bancetti place. She’s been a sort of guardian angel for young Buddy for as long as I can remember. Buddy’s at ease with her because she’s been around for nearly as long as he has. Almost family.”

  “Does he have any other friends you know of?”

  Doc Schindler shook his head. “No. Well, myself, I guess. He seems pretty comfortable out here with me and the animals.”

  “This is way off the subject,” I told him, “but what do you think the answer would be for somebody like Buddy? What could bring him out of his shell?”

  The doc threw out his hands. “The simple answer is the same for all of us, of course. The more time you spend around people, the more comfortable you are with them, in most instances. But it hasn’t worked for Buddy, and he wants to back away from even the limited contact he’s had up to now. I suppose the answer, if it ever presents itself, will be sheer luck. If he’s fortunate enough, he’s going to stumble into something that grabs his interest and attention enough to make this other phobia a secondary thing. But whether that might be, oh, maybe a passion to excel at some physical thing, or a drive to learn what makes computers work, a determination to be an astronaut or a butcher, I couldn’t say.”

  “Then tell me this. Who do you think could have murdered J. D. Cornell?”

  He stood staring at me with his hands on his hips. “Oh, God. From around here, you mean?” He looked off at the distant hills, then turned back. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

  SEVEN

  Doc told me that Aggie Leland played on a softball team for teenagers who either weren’t quite proficient enough or didn’t have the time to try out for the local high school teams. The team was holding a preseason practice at a municipal field near the downtown area that afternoon, and he said I might find her there.

  What Doc didn’t tell me about were the girls of Claireborn. Or at least some of them. A group of youngsters and a few older citizens were watching the workout from wooden bleachers along the first-and third-base lines. I stopped to watch the action on the field, off a little way from the third-base bleachers. After about ten seconds I realized there was a girl standing nearby, giving me the once over. She was a teenager with long dark hair, a turned-up nose and a questioning smile on her mouth.

  “You the Blackmore scout?” she asked.

  “What’s a Blackmore?”

  She gave me something between a giggle and a laugh, then dipped her knees and stepped closer to touch my arm as if she’d caught me trying to put one over on her. “Blackmore is a little hick town down in the valley. We play them next week. But I guess you’re not the Blackmore scout.”

  “No, I’m not. What are you, the Claireborn Welcome Wagon?”

  “Might just be at that.” She grinned. “My name’s Angel. What’s yours?” She had her hand on a hip that was tightly clad in blue jeans and jutting out toward left field.

  “Peter Bragg. Does your mother know you’re out flirting with strange men?”

  “Is that what I’m doing?” She reached out a hand to squeeze my biceps. “Hmmmm. Not bad. Well, actually, since I know your name, Peter Bragg, you can’t hardly be a stranger, can you? Where are you from?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “Oh, neat. Except…” She was frowning at me now.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re not weird, are you?”

  “Now come on, Angel, just because a fellow’s from San Francisco it doesn’t make him weird.”

  “I’m not so sure. They should have some sort of test that people living out here in the sticks can apply to people coming from San Francisco. To see if they’re weird.”

  “I’ve never been accused of that by anybody up to now. Headstrong, sometimes. I’ve been accused of that. But not weird. Not on my worst days have I been accused of weird.”

  “Maybe then you’re a carrier, if you’re from San Francisco.”

  “A newspaper carrier? Hell, I was that years ago when I was growing up in Seattle.”

  “No, no. Not that kind of carrier. I mean—you know, those hideous new social diseases people are coming down with.”

  “If you’re talking about what I think you’re talking about, that’s more apt to hit one part of the community than another. And I don’t happen to be a part of that part of the community. In fact I don’t even live in San Francisco, I just have an office there. And this is one of the dumbest conversations I recall having in recent memory.”

  “It’ll pick up.”

  “I have small hope for that,” I told her, looking out at the field again.

  “On your way to Reno?”

  “No, why should you think that?”

  “It’s logical, is all. If you’re from San Francisco, it’s logical you’d be a high roller on your way to Reno, or Lake Tahoe, and just cruise in here for a pit stop or something.”

  The girl made me chuckle in spite of myself. She might hav
e been first cousin to another girl I’d nearly gotten into a lot of trouble with up in my home state of Washington. It was after the newspaper-carrier stage. In fact, I was about seventeen physically, fourteen mentally. I had more brains now.

  “No, Angel. Actually I came up here to talk to some people.”

  “Great,” she said, stepping back to give me another perusal. “If you’re from San Francisco, and you’re not weird or a carrier, you can talk to me. I don’t have anything important to do for the rest of the day. Or tonight. Or for the next several days, as a matter of fact, not counting school. And I’m about ready to give school a rest. In fact, Mr. Bragg, if you asked me to go along with you up to Reno or the lake, I just might do it. You know, sort of as your companion or something. I’m no trouble, just a simple country girl, happy for a little food in my stomach, a place to rest my head…”

  “Yeah, I know. I even think you’re serious.”

  “I am.”

  “Good God, Angel, don’t you realize the sort of trouble you could get into hitting on strangers like this?”

  “Yes. But the thing is, with me, at least, I take chances sometimes. With people. About whether they’re okay or not. I figure you’re okay. And I have this…” She made a funny, eloquent gesture with one shoulder—light, deft, and with much more feeling than a shrug. “I have this very strong urge sometimes, around people…”

  “It sounds like the sort of thing you have to learn to rein in, honey. Seriously.”

  Then she gave me a look that was all innocence. “To want to talk to someone?”

  I shook my head. “I hope not everybody in town’s this tough.”

  “Why? Whatever do you mean, Mr. Bragg? What did you think I was talking about, when I was telling you about strong urges and things?”

  “Look, this has been a lot of fun, but I have to get to work.”

  “Work? On a Saturday?”

  “That’s right. Tell me, is one of those people out there on the field named Aggie Leland?”

  Angel took a disappointed breath and scanned the players. “She’s the tomboy with red hair just coming up to bat. I think maybe you are weird after all.”