by Jack Lynch
She turned and went back toward the bleachers. She had a graceful walk, without a bit of country in it. But then her mind seemed a little extraordinary as well.
At home plate, the tomboy with red hair smacked a line drive over the second baseman’s head and into center field. The girl I’d been told was Aggie Leland didn’t dawdle on her way around the bases. The centerfielder bobbled the ball and Aggie arrived at third base standing up. She was about Angel’s age, but beyond that a completely different-looking person. She was a tall, angular girl with a million freckles, and her dark red hair was tied in a ponytail down her back. She wore a pair of khaki shorts that had spent some time on the ground, low white socks and blue running shoes and a gray sweatshirt that looked like it belonged to an older brother. She wore a baseball cap at a rakish angle and was chewing gum as if her life depended on it.
“Bring me home, Harvey!” she yelled through cupped hands to a slender boy cocking his bat over the plate.
Harvey gave her a nervous glance and watched the pitched ball sizzle past him.
“Strike!” yelled the youngster umpiring from behind the pitcher.
“Don’t fail me, Harvey,” cried the girl on third base, “or I’ll slug you.”
She was grinning when she said it, but Harvey seemed to take it seriously. He swung at another strike and fouled it off to one side. The boy then took a couple of called balls, one high and the other wide, and finally looped a little pop fly into short right field that fell in for a base hit and allowed the girl on third to make it home with a whoop and a springing broad jump the last few feet to the plate.
She trotted on off to a bench on the first-base line. I walked around behind the stands to the bench. She was pouring herself a drink from a canvas waterbag when I caught up with her.
“Aggie Leland?”
She looked up with a grin, then realized she didn’t know me. The grin went to neutral and smart brown eyes looked me over quickly. “Yes?”
“My name is Peter Bragg. I’ve come up here to try to help out Buddy Bancetti.”
She wasn’t ready for that. “What?”
“When you have a minute, I can explain. Maybe a little bit apart from the crowd here.”
“Okay.” She finished drinking the water and walked over to a stocky man in his early thirties with a blond crew cut. He looked like the coach. He glanced across at me and said something reassuring to the girl, giving her a little pat on the shoulder.
“He’ll put in another pitcher for the last inning,” she told me. “What did you say your name was?”
“Peter Bragg.”
“Funny last name.”
“Has two gees.”
She grunted. “Better. We can talk back here.”
She led me around behind the stands to a grassy slope where we could stretch out in semiprivacy.
“What’s your connection with Buddy?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you in a minute. He says you’re a friend.”
“That’s right,” she said, plucking out a blade of grass and sticking it into her mouth. “Practically grew up together.”
“Do you think he had anything to do with Mr. Cornell’s death?”
“Nope.”
“Are you more than just friends?”
She gave me a look that, despite the difference in years, made me think of a tough old broad who’d been one of the first women reporters to work for the San Francisco Chronicle. She had been canny, insightful and tough. This girl Aggie might have been her granddaughter.
“Not yet,” she told me finally.
When I didn’t reply right away she looked at me again, for several seconds. “He’s not grown-up enough for that yet,” she said quietly. “Not emotionally. He will be someday. Takes some guys longer for things like that.”
“I’ve been to see him. It struck me he might never make it.”
The girl shrugged and dug a knuckle into the grass the way I’d seen Buddy worry the mattress in his cell. “Maybe,” she said. “But that’s okay. I’m not planning to go anywhere. Not for now, anyway.”
I liked this girl. If she were on Buddy’s side, he was in a little better shape than I’d first imagined.
“Now that we’ve covered my love life,” she said, looking at me with another glance that went clear through me, “mind telling me what this is about?”
I told her. I took a chance and told her all of it, from the phone call long before dawn right up to the visit with Doc Schindler and the very unsatisfactory talk with Buddy. The only thing I left out was the identity of the San Quentin hostages. I don’t ordinarily tell anybody that much about anything—a holdover from my days as a bartender. But this girl was one of the few hopes I had left to learn whatever I needed to know about Buddy. And I felt I could trust her. And Buddy needed help. And so did those people down in San Quentin.
By the time I’d finished she was staring at me steadily. She looked away with a shake of her head, then looked back. “Tell me the part about San Quentin again.”
So I did. And when I’d finished she pulled up another blade of grass. “You can’t have made that up,” she told me. “It’s too weird.”
Weird seemed to be the word of choice among the younger set in Claireborn this year.
“How can I help?” she asked.
“Tell me about Buddy, if you can. If you had to describe him in a word or two, what would they be?”
“Gross underachievement.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes. He’s smart. Did well in school if the subject interested him. He’s got it together physically. Never seemed to go through the clumsy stage of knocking over everything they touch that a lot of boys do when they start to shoot up. Even has a sense of humor, but you have to know him for about twelve years before he’ll share it with you.”
“The two of you are pretty close then.”
“Oh, sure. We talk and everything, just like real grown-ups. Yup.”
She gave me a glance and a fleeting smile.
“You sound pretty grown-up to me, if that’s what that look meant.”
She waved it away with her hand. “Oh, it’s just…This town is so small, and all. People from the outside always expect us to be a bunch of hicks. And who’s to blame them? Or you too, for that matter.” She gave me another look, a thoughtful one with her head cocked. “You know how this town got its name?”
“No, I never heard.”
“A bunch of farmers from back east, all of them a day late and a dollar short, were coming over the Sierras on the way to the California gold fields. This was in 1850. Two years after James Marshall found the first nuggets near John Sutter’s mill. More than a year after all the reasonably promising claims had been grabbed up. Not only were they late for the gold, they were late for the weather. It snowed early that year. They almost got trapped by a storm up in the mountains. Before that, on their way up the eastern slopes of the Sierras, they’d had to shed most of their belongings from home and the mining gear they’d bought back in St. Joseph, in Missouri. They didn’t know anything about mountains like we have around here. By the time they got down to here their last wagon broke an axle and the snow got them. They found water nearby and set up camp for the winter. By the time the weather broke in the spring and they got it all together again so they could have moved on, some of the single young bucks in the party who’d made their way on down to the gold fields had come back and told them the only gold left down there not being worked was in folks’ mouths. So people looked around, figured they maybe could get a couple crops in the ground hereabouts and decided to stay. That next fall, one of the women in the party had a baby girl. Named her Claire. She was the first baby born here of white folks. This is where Claire was born,” she said, nudging me with an elbow. “Got it yet?”
I nodded and the girl made a yucking sound. “Now I ask you, can you get any more country than that? Why shouldn’t folks think we’re a bunch of hicks?”
I let the silence build for a
minute, then cleared my throat. “I know we seemed to have covered this earlier, but—wasn’t there ever a time when you and Buddy might have been a little close physically? I mean, as I remember it, when you’re a teenager you get pretty charged up.”
“That’s a funny question,” she told me, knuckling the grass again.
“I guess it is. I wouldn’t be so inconsiderate as to ask if I didn’t think it might help me learn enough about the boy to help him out of the jam he’s in.”
She looked at me again. I was deadly serious, and I guess she saw that, by the little nod she gave me. “You seem okay,” she told me. “I guess you’re not even getting paid for what you’re doing.”
“Not for this one. Sometimes that isn’t all that important.”
“Well, to answer your question, no. You couldn’t say Buddy and I have ever been much of anything approaching physically close. There was a time or two when we were both—ahem—well, we tried a little smooching. I thought it was okay, but you’d think Buddy was trying to get something going with his own sister or something. He felt awkward and turned about fourteen shades of rose. Like we were too good a couple of friends to let something like sex get in the way of it all.”
She made another yucking sound. “What did I tell you? Gross underachievement.”
“Is he close to any other girls you know of?”
“Nope.”
“Could he be, without your knowing it?”
She gave me a glance suggesting I might be about the dumbest thing on the planet. “Are you kidding? If Buddy Bancetti so much as idly brushed a hand across a girl’s breast or patted her fanny, it would be such a revelation it would be all over this entire town in something under thirteen seconds. No girl could keep that a secret, no matter how vile the activity might have been.”
I had to grin. “So in summing up, Buddy Bancetti is sort of a loner whose going to take some goading to make something of himself.”
The girl frowned. “I’m not so sure the goading would do any good. Not now, anyhow.”
“And he’s not a very passionate boy,” I continued. “Isn’t ready for girls. Did he ever tell you what went on between him and Cornell earlier that caused some sort of trouble between them?”
“Nope. He just said the man was sort of eerie. That they did funny things out there. There’s an expression he used. Only time I ever heard him use it. He said very gravely, ‘It wasn’t my cup of tea.’ He must have read that somewhere.”
“And he seems pretty passive. Wouldn’t harm a fly, and such like that?”
“Oh, now, wait one minute,” she told me. “That isn’t quite what I meant to indicate.” She looked at me again. “Maybe I should have added, Buddy also is very stubborn. If the motivation was just right, be it for girls or anything else, I’d say he was capable of most anything. I told you there was nothing physically wrong about him.”
“Capable of most anything? Even killing somebody?”
“Sure. Even that. It would have to be a highly unlikely set of circumstances, is all.”
“You seem to be the only one around who thinks so.”
“Nothing monumental about that,” she told me. “I’m the only one around these days who really knows him.”
“But you told me earlier you didn’t think Buddy had anything to do with Mr. Cornell’s death.”
“That’s right. I went to see him as soon as they’d let me after they picked him up. I asked right out. He told me no. He wouldn’t lie to me. Not about that.”
“Did you ask him where he was that afternoon of the murder?”
She sighed and thought a moment before answering. “You really are here to help Buddy, that right?”
“That’s the truth, Aggie.”
“Okay. Then I guess I should say this. It is the one thing that has bothered me some. Buddy wouldn’t give me a direct answer. He didn’t try telling me what he told the sheriff, that he was out taking a walk or giving his dog a ride or any of that stuff. But he wouldn’t actually tell me what he was doing. He just shrugged his shoulders about a dozen times and said something like he was just, ‘Oh, hangin’ out, you know?’ ”
EIGHT
Her faith in the boy was admirable, and I was glad she was astute enough to realize that in extreme circumstances, most anybody can be brought to take the life of another human being. There are brooding forces and atavistic survival tracks in everybody’s data banks.
We walked back over to the bench on the sidelines. The game was over and Aggie introduced me to the young coach, an affable chap named Hack Carson. She said he taught at the local high school and also coached the school’s varsity baseball team.
“I sort of do this on the side to quiet the resentment of the kids who can’t make the school team,” he told me. “Like an equal opportunity employer, so to speak.”
“Besides,” put in Aggie, “he knows if he didn’t, a bunch of us would waylay him some night.”
“Hey, that’s not fair, Aggie,” the young coach told her, rubbing a hand across his crewcut head. “I told you, if you’d started coming out for the team when you first got into high school you could have ended up on the varsity squad no matter what the league rules say. They would have had to let you play once they saw what you could do.”
“I saw her out there earlier,” I told him. “Is she that tough in a hardball game too?”
“Is she ever,” said the coach, making a face. “Even I’d be leery to pitch when Aggie came up to bat. In a softball game she’s very tricky. Usually spots the ball through the infield on this side, that side, just little grounders, you know, but she sure brings in the runs. But in a hardball game she only has one place she seems to favor. Sends the ball screaming back over the pitcher’s mound at about a hundred miles an hour. She took part in batting practice one day last year. Put one of my relief hurlers out for the season. Two cracked ribs.”
“He was supposed to get out of the way,” Aggie told him.
“He had his glove over his testicles,” said the coach. “If he’d gotten out of the way you probably would have brained the shortstop.”
Aggie stuck out her tongue. Coach Carson grinned, then glanced over toward the third-base line grandstand, where there was a sharp scream and a lot of giggling. The dark-haired girl named Angel who approached me as if I were the last man on earth a bit earlier was over there cutting it up with a group of girls and a trio of boys more her own age.
“That’s some youngster over there,” I observed. “The dark-haired one who calls herself Angel.”
Aggie made a face. “She’s a mess.”
“How do you mean?” the coach asked me.
“I’ve never been around here before,” I told him. “Never saw her before. But when I first got out here she came up to me and inside of a couple of minutes was trying to talk me into taking her up to Reno for an overnighter. I still might be a little naive in some areas, but I do believe she meant it.”
“Oh, she meant it, all right,” said the coach, staring across the field.
Angel had just stolen the baseball cap off one of the boys and ran around behind the bleachers with it, the boy galumphing after her.
“She’s one of those, oh, girls who come along from time to time,” said Carson. “If you know what I mean. Only she’s worse than most, if that’s how you think of it.”
“Yuck,” Aggie murmured.
“I mean, I am a happily married man, Mr. Bragg. Most happily married, with kids and all, but I’ll tell you, when Angel’s around—well, whew, you know what I mean?”
“She’s just a big tease,” Aggie said quietly.
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Aggie, I swear,” said the coach, turning to me. “Visiting somebody hereabouts?”
“Working,” I told him. “Looking into the Buddy Bancetti thing.”
“Looking how?”
“Trying to find out what went on out at the Cornell place. Whether Buddy really had a hand in it.”
“Well, I wish you
luck,” said the coach. “Buddy’s too nice a boy to be sitting down in county jail.”
“Do you know him well?”
“No, not well, really. Taught him health ed in school a year or so back. Tried to talk him into coming out for a couple of teams. He’s a well-coordinated boy. Could have played most anything, but didn’t have the ambition, I guess. How do you go about looking into something like the Cornell matter?”
“Talk to people. Look at things. Trail along wherever my nose leads me. Were you around the Sunday afternoon Cornell was killed?”
“Me?”
“Yes. I was wondering if you might have seen Buddy that day.”
“Yeah, I was around, but I didn’t remember seeing Buddy. I thought about it at the time it happened, or after they picked up Buddy. Just to try and remember if I’d seen him. If I could give him an alibi of sorts.”
There was another rhubarb going on across the way now. The girl Angel was yelling again, and not all the words were ladylike. She came back around from behind the stands to join her girlfriends, her face angry. The boy came after her, his cap back on his head and a sullen look on his face. The girl lashed out at him again.
“Just keep your dirty hands to yourself, Charley Wilson,” she shouted at him. “If I ever want them all over me I’ll let you know.”
She spun around and led the troupe of girls off the field. One of them looked back over her shoulder with an accusing stare at Charley Wilson. Charley, looking properly hound-dog, mumbled something to his buddies and shook his head. They drifted off in another direction.
“What did I tell you,” said Aggie. “Tease city.”
“Maybe so,” said Coach Carson with a hearty sigh. “Well, I gotta run. Good luck, Mr. Bragg.”
We shook hands and he returned to the nearby bench to gather up bats and mitts.
“Seems like a nice fellow,” I told Aggie.
“He’s okay,” the girl told me, “only a little unpredictable about whether he’ll show up for practice or not. Wanna go meet the famous dog in the case?”