The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “If your husband isn’t around, we could go up to the Hunt Club and I could buy you a drink and we could stand around the bar and let everybody see how swell-looking we are together.”

  “I would like that,” Jo told me, giving me a stare that went through my eyes and out the back of my head and part way across the Pacific Ocean.

  “Hey, this isn’t a dating service I run here,” said Nikki. “Buy something.”

  I turned and looked at the display of glazed crockery and knickknacks. I picked out a maroon coffee mug that said “Monterey Jazz” on the side, along with the last two digits of the year. “I’d buy this, but I don’t want to haul it around for the rest of the evening.”

  “Pay now and pick it up when you’re ready to leave,” said Nikki, taking the mug and wrapping it in newspaper.

  I paid. Jo Sommers took my arm and we walked up the grassy fairway, past other stalls selling posters and T-shirts, straw hats and dreams.

  “Did you marry well?” I asked her.

  “I married comfortably. And you?”

  “I never married again, if that’s what you mean.”

  “That’s what I mean. I recall now that Jimmy John said you’d recently split up with your old lady back then, in Sausalito. You were quite miserable.”

  “Jimmy John said I was miserable?”

  “No, I could tell that for myself, although you put on a very good front.”

  “Well, that was a long time ago,” I reminded her. “At least I’ve got a girl now, a good one. A lady who paints things, and is starting to make a name for herself among the art crowd, on the West Coast, at least. She’s inside listening to the music.”

  “Why is she inside listening to the music while you’re out roaming around buying drinks for other women?”

  “She’s a fan of the Latin singer coming on next. I’m not.”

  “Is she pretty? The girlfriend, not the singer.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  Jo drew back her head and gave me a saucy look. “As pretty as I am?”

  “Different. I wouldn’t know how to compare the two of you. You’re both startling and powerfully attractive, but in different ways. For instance, Allison is also deeply into carpentry. Built herself a studio out behind where she lives. Likes to hammer and saw and things like that. Know many other dames like that?”

  “Goodness, no. That all takes so much muscle. I’d best watch my step around Lady Allison.”

  She said that last with the evil grin I used to think about during those lonely nights in my Sausalito apartment. And she also put the sort of move on me that would arouse the pagan in any man. As she said, “Lady Allison,” she shifted the arm looped through my own and grasped my hand to press the back of it against one of her small, neat breasts, only for the time it takes to blink an eye, but unmistakable, provocative.

  The Hunt Club was one of those semi-exclusive institutions that all communities seem to set up and treasure. For 362 days of the year it is just a middling bar set up in the front of the building that houses the fairgrounds stage. For the three-day weekend of the Monterey Jazz Festival in September, though, it is exclusive turf, with admission by pass only. It was meant to be a restricted enclave where performers could relax before or after their performing, and media people could have access to them for interviews and such. If you had a pass to the Hunt Club, you were sort of a hotshot for the weekend. The scrambling to get one of those could get close to nasty. I happened to have one because I had a friend on the Monterey Herald, Billy Carpenter, who also was one of the founding organizers of the festival and a member of the board of directors. Billy was quietly proud of his role in making the festival a reality.

  “It integrated Monterey,” he told me one time, meaning not only the city of Monterey, but the next-door communities of Carmel and Pacific Grove as well. In 1958, the first year the festival was staged, in an attempt to prolong tourist traffic at the start of the off-season, it was said that many of the hotels and motels in the area wouldn’t take reservations over the phone from anybody with a Southern accent. That has changed.

  The private security guard at the door to the Hunt Club barely glanced at my pass. I think he remembered me from the year before. There was a lively crowd inside. There always is. Laughter and chatter echoed off bare walls. There’s not much pretension about the Hunt Club. It’s a plain sort of place where a fellow can pop in and get a quick drink during the horse shows and other exhibitions they hold during the year at the fairgrounds. An open lounge area just inside the door was outfitted with very utilitarian tables and chairs. In one corner was a large television projector suspended from the ceiling. During the jazz festival, a closed circuit TV system showed the performance on stage. The backstage area itself was just beyond the back of the lounge area. Photographers wander through from time to time to take advantage of small, round viewing ports cut through the stage backdrop.

  “Let’s go to the bar,” I told Jo. “There’s an open stool there if you want to sit.”

  “Fine.”

  We made our way past people. Jo asked for a snifter of brandy. I had a bourbon and water. We touched glasses, and she gave me what I took to be a conspiratorial look.

  “Have any children?” I asked in straight-arrow fashion.

  She wrinkled her nose. “No. Do you? That you know of?”

  “No. Is back in the Valley where you live?”

  She shook her head. “But my husband and I attend quite a few social functions in there. And there’s the tennis ranch. We live on the hill just south of the artichoke fields along the Carmel River. Carmel Highlands, it’s called.”

  “I know. Expensive area. You married well.”

  “I married late.”

  “What does your husband do?”

  “He’s retired.”

  “Military man?”

  “He was, once. What do you do these days?”

  I gave her a business card and looked away. She let out a hoot. “Honest to God? A private eye?”

  “Something like that.”

  She was looking at me with, if anything, an even more mischievous look than before. “Is it perilous and exciting?”

  “Any job that has you dealing with people in California these days can be perilous and exciting.”

  “Do you carry a gun?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Show me.”

  “Now isn’t one of the times. I promised my girlfriend that this weekend would be just for the fun of it. No work.”

  She reached out and squeezed my thigh. “I envy your girlfriend.” The squeeze lingered.

  “You seem restless,” I told her.

  The smile went away, but her stare was very direct. “Yes, Peter. That’s exactly what I am. Restless.”

  There was laughter and men’s raucous voices behind me as a new group of people moved into the bar area. I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned. It was Billy Carpenter, my short, stocky friend from the Monterey Herald, wearing a red blazer the festival officials were sporting that year, along with the silver-gray golf caps they’d blossomed out in on the festival’s twenty-fifth anniversary. He was smoking a cigar and standing with a group of similarly attired men.

  “How’s it going, Pete? Hello, Mrs. Sommers.”

  He briefly doffed the cap. Jo returned the greeting. She also knew some of the other men in the party. In turn, Billy introduced me to them. A tall, spindly fellow named Gus Wakefield; a smaller man named Whitey something; a short, thickly built gent with a gray crewcut named Pitt; and another man whose name I didn’t catch. None of them would see the lower side of fifty again, and they all drank Scotch.

  “Doc around?” Billy asked.

  “No, he doesn’t like this sort of music,” Jo told him. “He’s home, probably listening to Brahms and reading Nietzsche.”

  Billy Carpenter assumed a shudder. “That’s pretty obscure stuff.”

  “That’s my husband,” said Jo.

  “I have to go to the h
ead,” said Whitey.

  “Doc?” I asked Jo. “Your husband’s a physician?”

  “A shrink,” she told me.

  “What’s your boyfriend do?” asked Wakefield, with a broad enough smile for me so I didn’t have to take offense.

  “Careful, Gus,” Jo told him. “He’s a private dick from San Francisco. I knew him when he was a bartender.”

  “Why would anybody quit a swell job like tending bar to become a private cop?” asked the fellow whose name I hadn’t caught. None of this bothered me. They were all a little drunk, obviously unwinding after getting another jazz festival under way.

  “Seriously,” the fellow continued. “Seems to me a bartender with your rugged appearance would have a social life to make the rest of us howl with envy.”

  “You do meet a lot of people,” I admitted, “but there comes a point where you feel it’s time to move along.”

  “I wouldn’t,” he assured me, turning to catch the eye of a bartender and making a circular motion over his head to buy a round of drinks for all of us.

  Things went along in this disjointed manner, pretty much ending the conversation I’d been having with Jo Sommers. Just as well, I felt. It had gone a bit further than it should have anyway, with Allison sitting out in the arena.

  On the TV monitor I watched Jimmy Lyons, the main honcho of the Monterey Jazz Festival since its inception, come onto the stage applauding politely, trying to indicate to the female Latin vocalist it was time to move along to the next act. The female vocalist ignored him and swung into yet another dizzy tune. Lyons withdrew gracefully. Personally, I would have put a come-along hold on her and dragged her off into the wings.

  “I’m going to have to wander back into the arena or my lady will begin to wonder what became of me,” I told Jo. I was half turned away from the gentlemen again, facing Jo Sommers on her stool. She gave me a pouty expression.

  “Do you have to? It’s been so long.”

  When she said this she put her hand out to squeeze my leg again. Up high. She relaxed the hand but left it there and then let it drift some. Things were crowded and busy enough around us so that anybody not right there on his hands and knees wouldn’t have noticed, but this wasn’t the sort of trouble I needed right then. I shifted my position to disengage whatever she was up to.

  “I have to. Maybe another time,” I told her.

  “Maybe we’ll see each other again during the weekend,” she said.

  “Maybe,” I agreed. “But I’m apt to have Allison with me next time.”

  “Your idea, or hers?”

  “Probably mine. I’m the sort of guy who can only concentrate on one girl at a time. Can’t handle the complications that crop up, otherwise.”

  “I thrive on them,” she told me.

  But at least she let me get out of there without any more fondling. I decided the marriage with the doctor must be dull.

  TWO

  The town of Carmel is on the western slopes of a tall hill that plunges down to the edge of the Pacific Ocean. It has a population of five thousand and was said to have been named by Sebastián Vizcaíno in honor of some Carmelite monks traveling with him and his band of explorers who camped near the Carmel River in 1602. But the town didn’t really get on its feet until about 170 years later when Padre Junípero Serra relocated his mission near the same river. He’d moved it from what was described as the rowdy influences of the growing town of Monterey, up north. Probably the reason Monterey had been getting too rowdy for a proper Christian environment was that it has a fine harbor. If you’ve ever lived in a seaport town and seen the sailors and others that type of town draws, then you’ll appreciate why Padre Serra picked up his priestly skirts and moved south. Monterey went on to become a Spanish military post and after that a whaling port. The canneries and John Steinbeck came later.

  Due west of Monterey, at the northern tip of the Monterey Peninsula, is a town called Pacific Grove. Pacific Grove is noted for two things, the annual November fly-in of thousands of monarch butterflies from Alaska and other points north, and its historic reputation as California’s last dry city. They hadn’t allowed spirits proper into the town’s retail establishments until 1969. But then, it was only a short drive east to Monterey, or south to Carmel.

  Between Pacific Grove and Carmel is the Del Monte Forest, which is part forest but also an exclusive residential community with some of the most scenically breathtaking golf courses in the world. Pebble Beach, Cypress Point and Spyglass Hill are all there, laid out alongside the Pacific. The Bing Crosby Pro-Am Golf Tournament is held on those courses every year in late January or early February. Some of the nation’s finest professional golfers are paired up with members of the smart set from Hollywood, various athletes and assorted industrialists to drive off the tee into howling gale-force winds and putt across rain-soaked greens.

  Carmel used to be a hangout for writers and artists, but then it became a trendy place to visit, driving up real estate prices and for the most part forcing out the creative people. The Spanish mission at the south end of town set the tone for Carmel’s low, stucco, Spanish style of architecture in the business district, while its groves of cypress and pine trees seemed to set the residential pattern of tucked-away cottages. Hansel and Gretel and the witch would have felt right at home in Carmel.

  Among the shops catering to the tourist trade are several dozen art galleries. I was standing in one of them in a shopping square called Carmel Plaza, in the heart of town. Allison France was at the other end of the plaza casing the fine clothing in the I. Magnin store. Why, I couldn’t say. About the only thing I’d ever seen her wear, though she wore them well, were jeans and shirts designed for men.

  The art gallery I was in specialized in Western art. Cowboys and Indians and frontier soldiers and grizzly bears. It’s my kind of stuff. I had family who’d taken part in all that. On a lower level and at the other end of the plaza was a crackerjack bookstore that had the largest collection of war literature, fact and fiction, I’d ever come across. It took me a couple of visits to figure out that probably the reason for that was the large retired military community in the area. I’d never found out why so many former generals and admirals and officers of lesser rank chose to retire in the area. Fort Ord, home of the 7th Infantry Division, was a few miles up the road north; and not far from the fairgrounds in Monterey was the Navy Postgraduate School. Maybe people passing through those posts liked what they saw and decided to come back. Or maybe it was all those golf courses.

  The painting I’d been staring at for a few minutes wasn’t about frontier soldiers. It showed two men on horses, one of them leading a laden jackass. They were in a wooded thicket, racing hell-bent through the field of vision alongside a stream. The men were in buckskins. They had intense, driven expressions on their faces. One of them was looking over his shoulder.

  I was strongly drawn to those two men, their three animals and whatever it was they were hoping to escape from. I felt as if a part of me might have been included in that particular scenario. Either running from, pursuing or lying in wait down the trail. Whatever.

  “Who do you suppose is after them?”

  I turned. Allison France stood at my shoulder. Five feet eight inches of firm, trim, well-conditioned sinew and flesh; intelligent blue eyes; honey-blonde hair down past her shoulder blades. Heart’s-desire kind of stuff. She was wearing jeans and a jazz festival T-shirt.

  “I don’t know. Indians, probably. A bear, maybe.”

  “Maybe the sheriff’s after them. Can’t tell what they might have in those saddlebags.”

  “That’s true. Or maybe there is a Bigfoot and he’s loping along after them.”

  “I doubt that. I’ll stick with the sheriff.”

  “I’ll put my money on the Indians.”

  “Why?”

  “They killed a relative of mine.”

  “Oh? Who dat?”

  “George Armstrong Custer.”

  She drew back with a small but ge
nuine look of astonishment. “You serious?”

  “Yup. Custer was my grandmother’s maiden name.”

  “Do you always do Gary Cooper when you talk about General Custer?”

  “Most of the time.” I turned back to the painting. “I am really drawn to this thing.”

  Allison tilted her head and looked at a small blue price sticker on an edge of the frame. She gave me a look. “Twelve hundred dollars worth?”

  “No. I’m not hardly attracted to anything that much. Did you find any rags you liked up at I. Magnin?”

  “Lots, but none I can’t get along without just now.”

  “Back to the thrift shop, hey?”

  “What’s wrong with that?”

  “With your figure, nothing. You’d look good in swaddling clothes.”

  “Perhaps. Show me where you buy your clothes.”

  “What?”

  “You told me one time you buy your clothes in Carmel. I’d like to have a look at the shop. Show me.”

  “I told you I bought some of my clothes in the area. It’s not in town here, but back in the Valley six or eight miles. It’s a small place that sells Western jeans and belt buckles and cowboy hats.”

  “What do you buy there?”

  “Pants, mostly. That’s where people from the ranches back in there buy their riding gear.”

  “Ever buy anything besides pants there?”

  “Once.”

  “What?”

  “A hat.”

  Her eyes grew a little wide. “A cowboy hat?”

  “Yup. Has a dark blue denim sort of nap to it.”

  “I’ve never seen you wear a cowboy hat.”

  “Nobody’s ever seen me wear a cowboy hat. Only time I wear it’s when I’m home alone in my apartment.”

  “That’s not fair. Why don’t you ever wear it out where we can all see it? There are any number of us who’d just love to see you in your cowboy hat, Bragg.”

  “I suppose there are. But I have my clients to think about. Past and potential. I have a feeling it might cut into my business to the point where I’d have to go back to tending bar.”

  “I’d almost prefer that you did, if it weren’t for the girls you’d meet, like the one you described to me last night.”