The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “Gus was kind enough to draw me a little map,” she said, batting her eyes at me.

  A little more room had opened up behind me along the bar. I moved back and tugged Allison with me, then lowered my mouth to just alongside her ear.

  “What say we get out of here. Go off together, somewhere. Just the two of us.”

  “What did you have in mind?” she asked in a guarded tone.

  “There’s a kind of nice motel I know about, over in Carmel, near the water. Has a great, whopping big bed and a bottle of gin inside a small refrigerator built into the cabinet beneath the color TV set.”

  She stood up, drained her glass and slapped one hand on the bartop. “Let’s go, pardner.”

  FIVE

  The motel I’d booked us into was a collection of white-painted wooden cottages, some of them two-story, double units, scattered down a grassy slope a dozen blocks south of Carmel’s main business district and a block up from the water. It was quiet and within easy walking distance of the squeaky white sand of Carmel Beach. South of the beach, a road ran past fine homes of individual character built just above the ocean. The seaward side of one structure resembled a ship’s prow pointed toward the oncoming waves. Another had copper trimming along the eaves that had turned green in the sea air, just like the Statue of Liberty. These were showplace homes, with huge, airy rooms and lots of glass looking out over the aqua-green water and jagged rocks rising from the seabed and clumpy kelp beds where otters basked and played. I’d been told that one-time movie actress Jean Arthur lived in one of those homes, or at least used to. She’d been a favorite of mine when I was growing up in Seattle. Since coming to California, it had been an ongoing fantasy of mine that someday I would be walking down that oceanfront road in Carmel and Jean Arthur would be out pruning her Pride of Madeira hedge and I would pause and we would have a moment’s chat, just so I could once again hear that fine, throaty voice that used to lift the hair on the back of my neck years ago in a darkened theater atop Phinney Ridge.

  There were other places within easy walking distance of the motel that I wanted to show Allison, but I didn’t know if I’d have the time, the way things were going. After we’d had some of the gin and tonic water we kept in the refrigerator under the television set, and done some of the romping around that seems like a lot more fun in a motel room than at home, it almost was time to grab a bite to eat and head for the fairgrounds again.

  When I came out of the bathroom toweling off after a shower, I found Allison sitting in a trance at a window that looked out over the water and line of cypress trees across the street. We had the upper floor in one of the double-decker units. It had a grand view, and Allison was looking at it, sitting in something resembling a lotus position, wearing only a frayed gray sweatshirt with its sleeves cut off that she’d bought in her favorite thrift shop. Her elbows were propped on naked legs and her chin was cupped in her hands. She was squinting out to where the late-afternoon sun was glaring off the Pacific. She had showered ahead of me, and I’d seen her sit down in that same chair before I went into the bathroom.

  I put on a pair of gray flannel slacks and a white polo shirt, and brushed off the dark blue blazer I’d brought along from home. Allison still hadn’t budged. I walked over and began to knead her neck and shoulders. She purred.

  “Why don’t you just take a picture,” I suggested. “You can get a blowup and hang it on your bedroom wall. Look at it from time to time and remind yourself of these days of spirit and dazzle.”

  She finally sat up a little straighter and stretched her long arms. “You don’t get it, Bragg. I want to draw what I see out this window, sometime.”

  “So draw it.”

  “The light’s not right. And I don’t have the right balance in mind yet.”

  “Balance?”

  “What I have to get in. What has to be left out. There’s just too much treasure for the eye out there. The trees and sea and sky. Angles and shadows. Glitzes of this and that I’ve never seen all put together like this even up in Barracks Cove.”

  “What’s a glitz?”

  “I don’t know, just a word I use. But you know what I mean.”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “So, since it isn’t the roof of the Sistine Chapel I have to work with, I have to figure out what to put in and what’s got to stay out. That’s always the challenge, but here more than most places.”

  I made another gin and tonic. She was still sitting at the window, her bare feet on the floor now, one hand on the windowsill and her shoulders partly turned, as if she were about to get up, but her mouth was puckered, and she continued to stare out at the scene in front of her. The sun was streaming through the window and seemed to heighten the shine to her honey-blonde hair until it almost hurt the eye to look at her.

  “Would you marry me, if I asked you seriously sometime?” I asked.

  “Probably not,” she said, her eyes not wavering.

  “Why not? Some girls would consider me a fair catch.”

  “Some would. Some girls would consider most anything a fair catch.”

  “Hey, not fair.”

  She turned then and came out of the chair. With a grin, she looped her hands around my neck, and stretched her neck and darted her tongue into one of my ears. I put down the gin and tonic and reached my hands beneath the sweatshirt to gently cup the pair of breasts from Barracks Cove which turned men’s heads and made other women suck their lips in envy.

  “Come off it, Bragg. You know it wouldn’t work. We’re a couple of independent roustabouts always insisting on having things go our own way.”

  “Not always.”

  “Most times,” she said. “We live alone by choice. We set up our lives to avoid the knocks. We get selfish. People like you and me don’t belong married to anybody.”

  “That’s pretty harsh.”

  “I know, but it’s true.”

  She kissed the tip of my nose and turned to go into the bathroom again and start doing things to her face. But at the doorway she turned back. “And then, there’s always one other thing, Pete.”

  “What’s that?”

  “If we ever got married, or even lived together in sin, I just know there’d come a time when you’d do something that’d hurt me in a really bad way. You wouldn’t do it intentionally, but it would happen, because of the nature of the beast that’s you. You know what I mean. You did it once up in Barracks Cove, that first time we met. I don’t think I could go through that again, emotionally. I think I’d take my own life first.”

  Her face was dead earnest. She went in and closed the bathroom door, and I sat down across from the blank television screen to think somber thoughts.

  It was late by the time we got to Gus Wakefield’s party. We’d been running late all night. We had dinner at a restaurant out on a long wooden pier at Fisherman’s Wharf in Monterey. It was a seafood house and we went there because Allison likes seafood. I don’t, particularly. I would have had a steak, if there had been one on the menu, but there wasn’t, so I settled for a seafood salad that had a lot of suspicious-looking blobs in it.

  The evening concert at the fairgrounds started at a little after eight. We didn’t get there until a bunch of guitar players were finishing the first set. Instead of going right in to the arena floor and the hard folding chairs awaiting us, we went into the Hunt Club and worked at getting a little buzz on. At least one thing Allison and I had in common—we work hard and we play hard.

  A quintet came on next, which we listened to for a while over the closed circuit TV system, before deciding we should knock off the drinking or we wouldn’t be able to find the car to get to Gus Wakefield’s party.

  “Maybe we should take a cab anyhow,” said Allison, her arm around my own as we made our way past the stalls.

  Because of the party we were going to later, Allison was wearing a dress, a white linen number that showed off her bare, tanned legs to good advantage. Over the dress she wore a tan, quilted car coat. It ge
ts cold in that arena at night.

  “The trouble with taking a cab somewhere is that then you have to take another cab back. And by the time you’re ready to do that, they’re a little hard to come by.”

  “You really think ahead a lot, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Sure do. That’s part of setting up my life to avoid the knocks.”

  She swung her free hand around to give me a punch to the stomach. From most girls, a punch to the stomach is nothing to worry about. From Allison—look out. I realized what she was doing just in time—thank God—to stiffen my midsection or she might have dropped me to the grass. When she hit me, we were just in front of the pottery stall where I’d met Jo Sommers the night before. A couple had just moved away from there, and Jo’s friend, Nikki, witnessed the blow to my gut with a little look of apprehension. I led Allison over to the stall.

  “That’s nothing,” I told Nikki. “You should see what she can do when she really means it. Allison, this is Nikki. She’s a friend of Jo Sommers. This is where I ran into her last night. And Nikki’s the one who sold me the coffee mug.”

  They said hello, and Allison looked at the merchandise while Nikki and I chatted for a moment about Jo Sommers. I told her I’d been to see her and what the status of things seemed to be. Nikki said how awful the murder was, but she didn’t sound as if she thought it was really that awful.

  I guess I’d been so gaga running into Jo the night before that I hadn’t realized what a stark face Nikki had. It wasn’t unattractive, exactly. It was long and narrow, but she had a wide-open look about her eyes that made her seem to hover between astonishment and fright. Despite the way Jo had grabbed my attention, I was a little surprised at myself that I hadn’t noticed that quality about Nikki the night before.

  “What will happen to her?” Nikki asked.

  “If she didn’t do it, like she says, then hopefully nothing will happen to her, beyond having to spend a couple of nights in jail. She said something about getting an attorney, and I plan to do a little poking around into things myself, after the weekend.”

  “Who could have killed him?”

  She asked this with a little more intensity than I felt it merited, coming from somebody who was supposed to be mostly worried about the jam a woman friend was in.

  “I wouldn’t know. But I’m acquainted with the homicide investigator on the case. He’s a good man. I expect he’ll find out sooner or later. Nice talking to you again.”

  Allison had been waiting patiently. I took her arm and we started on toward the arena gates.

  “Mr. Bragg?”

  It was Nikki again. I stopped and turned. She was standing at her stall with one hand raised to her mouth, as if she’d called my name louder than she’d meant to. Her face was screwed up even more than it had been, but then she just shook her head.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s nothing.”

  Allison had disengaged her arm and continued on toward the entrance. I hesitated a minute, but then nodded and trailed after Allison. I had a feeling that when I began to look seriously into the murder of Dr. Haywood Sommers, Nikki would be one of the persons it would be worth my while to talk to.

  With one thing and another, it was almost midnight when we arrived at Gus Wakefield’s anniversary party. They lived back in the valley drained by the Carmel River. It’s a rural area that provides a way of life for the horsey set. Along with the small clothing store where I buy an occasional pair of jeans, it has a modest shopping center, a golf and country club that looks a little haughty from the road and a tennis ranch that’s very popular in that part of the world.

  Wakefield lived in a home of stone slab, redwood and glass piled on three levels along the side of a hill overlooking what I guessed would be a view of a fair amount of the Valley during daylight hours. We could hear music from the house when we still were a hundred yards down the hill. Cars were parked on both sides of the road. I found an empty space up near the house. It was late enough so that some of the earlier guests had already come and gone.

  A tall black youth wearing a tuxedo was acting as doorman, whether to add a touch of class or to keep out the riffraff, I didn’t know. The entrance was at one end of the long house. We were directed down a short hallway that had an elevator along the way for easy transportation to the upper levels of the home. The hallway emptied into what might have been the world’s largest living room. The rugs were rolled up, a five-piece combo was playing at the far end of the room and a bar was set up along the wall opposite the windows. There was still a gang of people there, older folks, for the most part. The women wore formal gowns, and the men, most of them, were in military uniforms.

  “I’m speechless,” Allison murmured in my ear.

  “If I’d known it was going to be a theme event, I’d have worn my little sailor suit,” I told her.

  “You told me you were an enlisted man,” said Allison. “These gents are all officers. That’s probably the reason for the doorman. In your sailor suit, he wouldn’t have let you in.”

  Gus Wakefield had spotted us and was approaching with a sprightly-looking little woman with a grand smile who turned out to be his wife. There were introductions and small talk before another late-arriving couple came in behind us. The man was in an admiral’s dress white uniform and the woman was in gray bangs and black satin. Gus pointed us toward the bar and turned back to the newcomers. Gus himself was in an army uniform with two stars on the shoulders, which made him a major general, if memory served correctly.

  There was a lot of vigorous dancing going on out on the floor. Older couples they might be, but their movements were all vigor and youth. It occurred to me that Gus Wakefield might be a very wise man.

  The combo had been playing something familiar but vague, and now segued into “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” a World War II ditty. Fellows wearing a lot of stars and bars on their collars were doing a measured jitterbug to it. They and the gowned ladies going through the paces with them were grinning.

  “This is weird,” said Allison.

  “I think it’s a great idea,” I told her.

  She looked at me with that look of hers, and I ordered us a couple of drinks. The chap doing the pouring was a handsome youth in his late twenties wearing black trousers and a white steward’s jacket. He had curly black hair, a ready smile and an appreciative glance for Allison. He handed across the drinks with a little bow.

  “Don’t you have a tip glass?” I asked.

  “Nice of you to notice, sir. General Wakefield wouldn’t allow it. But he did say it would be all right for a bit of discreet palming on the guests’ departure.”

  “That means he really was a general? And these other gentlemen were the rank of the uniforms they’re wearing here tonight?”

  “Absolutely, sir. These might not be the authentic threads themselves, you understand. A fellow’s body does change over the years, I’ve been told.”

  Allison snickered.

  “But what they wear is what they were,” the bartender continued. “What were you? A spy?”

  “I wasn’t even in the war these people probably were in. I’m Pete, and this is Allison,” I told him, extending a hand.

  We shook, but his eyes and grin were for Allison. “I’m Alex. Pleased to meet you both. And Allison, if he ever mistreats you, I’d love to be your pal.”

  Allison smiled. Alex winked, but at me. He was a lad with a charming manner.

  “What do you do when you’re not hiring out for parties?” I asked. “Or are you family?”

  “Not family. And what I do is more of the same, for regular pay and hours in Carmel, at a little place just off Ocean Avenue. It’s called the Duck’s Quack.”

  “That’s an awful name,” I told him.

  “I agree,” he said, “but they let me keep a tip jar in view there.”

  We moved away. The combo was taking a break, and several of the guests had gathered around a piano in the corner. A man with a shiny pate and wearing a na
vy captain’s whites was banging out a rendition of another tune they used to play and sing in the 1940s that had a refrain advising young warriors to “Love them all, love them all…The long and the short and the tall…” only you could tell from the way the fellows singing around the piano looked at their women that love wasn’t the operative word they really used to sing when gathered around the pianos of their past.

  We drifted around some, having bits of conversation with various couples, most of whom I didn’t catch the names of. When we needed fresh drinks, I let Allison go fetch them so she could flirt with Alex and briefly escape the feeling she was at the retirement-home sock hop.

  During one of these forays, I noticed a man I’d been introduced to by Billy Carpenter at the Hunt Club the night before. He and another fellow were talking, and they both of them seemed to be staring in my direction. They turned away when I caught their eyes. The man I’d been introduced to was named Pitt. He was a stocky fellow with a crewcut and was wearing a navy officer’s uniform. The larger man he was talking to was in the dress blues of a marine officer. I was tempted to go over and join them to see if it ruffled them, but I was distracted right then by a portly man in the uniform of an army colonel who took a pratfall over in front of the bar. He’d tripped while carrying a tray of glasses filled with champagne, and the floor around him now was all sticky and fizzy and filled with pieces of glass.

  Alex was around the bar in a jiffy, helping the merrily chuckling colonel to his feet. Somebody else was mopping up the mess. Allison had been crossing the room toward me with fresh drinks when it happened. She had stopped and turned to stare, but now continued over to me.

  “Didn’t I see something like this years ago in La Dolce Vita?” she asked.

  I took the drink with a shrug. “You have to remember, there was a time when these aging gentlemen were the toast of the land. Trim, handsomely decked out, much sought after socially, when they were home. Those memories are hard to put down into the cold ground, until the body itself goes.”