by Jack Lynch
“I don’t want to sound like such a ninny, but I’m really frightened. If I’m not there, at the restaurant, by a few minutes after three, maybe you could come check up on things here where I live…My last name is Scarborough. The people at the restaurant know me and can give you directions. ’Bye.”
She didn’t even wait for me to reply before hanging up.
Allison had been back in the restroom. She caught the last of the conversation on her way out.
“You reached her?”
“Yes. She’s a very frightened girl. Said somebody might want to kill her. I told her we’d meet her at a place back up the road, later this afternoon.”
“Don’t you think you should go now?”
“No, she should be safe enough where she is. She lives up a canyon somewhere down here. It’s pretty hard to root out places like that if you’re not familiar with the area. And there’s another place I want to show you while we’re down here.”
The other place was back up Highway 1 a ways. It was a scattering of lodges up in a fold of the high coastal hills. It was said to be a favorite getaway spot for a lot of the Hollywood theatrical crowd and various other eccentrics out of Southern California. I’d stopped in their restaurant one night around ten o’clock for an after-dinner drink and thought I’d stumbled onto a Halloween party. It turned out to be the fashionable hour for the lodge guests to eat. They were in their twenties and thirties, for the most part, all platform shoes, bright, flaring clothes, heavy cosmetics and exaggerated hair styles.
The place is more sedate during the day. Their restaurant also has an outside patio where you can stare at the hills and sky. Allison wasn’t all that impressed. You can only absorb so much of that kind of scenery without becoming jaded or feeling like you want to hurl yourself off the nearest cliff. So as it turned out, Allison had been right, back at Nepenthe. We should have gone looking for Nikki Scarborough sooner.
EIGHT
Fernwood was one of those wide places in the road with a gas station and small grocery store, a couple of motels, a nearby campground and the restaurant where I told Nikki I’d meet her. We got there about five minutes after three. There were a dozen customers in the dining room and an open area out back, and a couple of more people in the bar. Nikki wasn’t one of them. A tall woman in her early thirties with a long face and wide mouth that smiled easily was at the cash register giving change to an elderly couple. When the couple left, I asked the woman if she’d seen Nikki Scarborough that afternoon.
“She was just here, but left kind of suddenly,” she told me.
“How do you mean?”
“She was sitting at the counter drinking a cup of coffee. I was waiting tables outside. When I came back in she’d left. There was a quarter on the counter next to her half-finished coffee. I looked outside and saw her little red VW leaving like she was late for something. Of course, she always drove like that.”
“How long had she been here?”
“About ten minutes.”
“And how long ago would you guess that she left?”
“Couldn’t have been more than five minutes ago.”
“Do you know if she said anything to anybody before she left?”
“I don’t know. I’ll ask. Hey, is your name Bragg, by the way?”
“Yes, it is.”
“Do you have something that proves it?”
I took out my wallet and handed her my driver’s license.
“Peter Bragg. You’re the one, I guess.” She turned to take a manila envelope off the back counter. “She asked me to give this to you if she missed you.”
“When she was here just now?”
“That’s right.”
“We were supposed to meet here. I wonder why she didn’t wait to give it to me herself.”
“I don’t know. She seemed jumpy. But then, Nikki’s always been on the nervous side. She’s the only person I know who still chews her fingernails. Wait here. I’ll see if she said anything to anybody before she left.”
Allison looked at me and then at the envelope. “Going to wait until Christmas?”
The flap was sealed. I tore it open and took out a couple of audio tape cassettes. They were marked with a series of letters and numerals that didn’t mean anything to me.
“I don’t suppose you brought down a tape recorder with you?” I asked Allison.
“I don’t even own one. What do you think it’s all about?”
“I don’t know. But I don’t like Nikki leaving here the way she did.”
The waitress came back with a shake of her head. “She didn’t say boo to anybody. Nobody even noticed when she got up and left. That’s not like her. She’s a friendly girl. Always says hello and good-bye to us.”
I went over to a pay phone and tried dialing Nikki’s number. I let it ring for a long time, but nobody answered. I waited until the waitress was free again and told her what Nikki had said about somebody being able to give me directions to where she lived.
“I could, but I don’t know if I should. I’m beginning to think something funny’s going on.”
I took out my wallet and this time showed her the photostat of my investigator’s license. “I think you’re right,” I told her. “Nikki and I met at the jazz festival through a mutual friend. This morning she phoned my office in San Francisco to leave a message for me. I talked to her later by phone and she indicated she had a problem I might be able to help her with. We were supposed to meet here. But she said if she didn’t show up, I should get directions to her place and drive on out there.”
The girl was nodding her acceptance before I’d finished talking. “Gotcha,” she told me. She took a paper napkin out of a dispenser and drew me a crude but adequate map showing how to find the cabin Nikki rented.
While Allison was getting into the car, I unlocked the trunk and took out a small case that carried a .38-caliber revolver inside a clip-on belt holster. There was another case in there with my .45 automatic, but I left that in the trunk. I climbed into the car, took the gun and holster out of the case and transferred it to the glove compartment.
“You think you’re going to need that thing?” Allison asked.
“Probably not, but it’s like the Amex card commercials.”
“You never leave home without it.”
“You got it. Maybe just for the hell of it you should hang around here while I drive out to Nikki’s. You can flirt with the bartender, or something.”
“And become the second person that girl in there knows who still chews her fingernails? Drive, Bragg.”
I drove, back down out of the redwood groves and across the easy rolling pastureland to the north.
We came to a small state park and beach on the shoreward side of the highway. Opposite the park was a narrow secondary road that ran on back into the hills to the east. According to the map, we turned up the road and followed it back for about a mile. The waitress had said we’d see Nikki’s place off to the left, a weather-faded structure nestled at the base of a steep, low hill covered with brush and wild grass. There would be another nearby structure that Nikki used to manufacture her pottery.
The secondary road wasn’t kept in A-1 condition, and I traveled a little faster along it than its designers had anticipated. We did some jouncing around. Allison didn’t say anything more but just sat tight-lipped beside me. I hoped we wouldn’t find anything amiss at the cabin. Allison has some toughness to her, but not when it comes to violence, in any of its forms. It puts a hammerlock on her psyche and screws up her painting. She had told me that more than once. She said she really shouldn’t be going out with a hooligan who ran into the situations I sometimes did. It was one of those things we’d never found a satisfactory way to resolve.
We saw the cabin and outbuilding when we still were a quarter mile down the road. Twin tire tracks led from the road over to the cabin, and at the end of the tracks was a red VW with its driver’s side door standing open. I did not like the looks of that. As I braked and turned off the roa
d, I saw the door to the small cabin was standing wide open as well, but I didn’t see any sign of Nikki. Allison saw these things as well.
“Pete, I’m worried.”
“Me too.” I stopped a little ways off from the red VW, staring around at things, then I put the car back into gear and made a tight circle so my own auto was pointed back toward the road. I braked but left the key in the ignition and the motor running. I took the .38 out of the glove compartment and got out, scanning the area all around us.
“Come around and get in the driver’s seat,” I told Allison. “If you see anybody at all besides that girl, honk the horn twice and get the hell out of here.”
She got out of the car like a shot and came around to the driver’s side. She started to get in but then stood up. “I can’t do that, just sit there like that.”
“Then stand right here and leave the door open. Do not leave here.”
“Okay, boss. Call me if you find anything.”
I grunted and crossed quickly to the VW. I skirted it all the way around in a circle, my eyes alternating from the ground around the car to the cabin and outbuilding. There didn’t seem to be anything around the car I might disturb, so I went over to the open door and looked inside. The car was empty.
I approached the cabin in the same way, cautiously, revolver in hand, eyes trying to take in everything at once. I peered through the open front door. It was sparsely furnished. Nothing seemed in disarray. I called Nikki’s name. Nobody answered. I went on inside. The place was mostly one large room, with a bed along the wall to the left and a small kitchen area in back with a stove and refrigerator. Off that was a small bathroom. I went through the place quickly. There wasn’t anybody at home, but on the kitchen floor behind the small counter I found a telephone with the receiver off the cradle. The phone was attached to a wall connection, but it wasn’t making the whine phones make when you leave the receiver off the hook.
I went back outside and tried to follow the telephone line with my eyes, but it went through some trees out near the road and I couldn’t follow it all the way to the utility pole.
Allison stood in a little crouch, her hands on her knees, the way football and baseball coaches are apt to crouch during a tight game. I raised a cautionary hand to keep her back and started to circle the cabin. The door to the outbuilding was secured by a hasp with a padlock on it. I went around behind the cabin, scanning the surrounding hills.
That’s when I saw her. Or what I took to be Nikki Scarborough. She was lying facedown about twenty yards up the steep, grassy slope behind the cabin. I went up to her quickly, but I didn’t touch the body. There was no need to. She had what looked like a small-caliber entrance wound at the base of her skull. Blood still flowed feebly from the wound, and a small puddle was soaking into the ground next to her turned face. Her right leg was cocked up and her fingers were dug into the ground on either side of her, as if she were trying to claw herself out of harm’s way.
“Bragg!” Allison called.
I slid to the ground at a front corner of the cabin and brought up my .38 in a two-handed grip. But Allison was all right and alone. She was standing straight and staring intently up into the hills. I got up and trotted over to her.
“What is it?”
“I saw somebody. Just a glimpse, but it was somebody dressed funny, running over the top of that hill.”
“Dressed funny how?”
“Oh, in those dumb war clothes everybody wears. With the brown-and-green-and-black splotches.”
“Cammies.”
“What?”
“Camouflaged field uniform.”
“That’s it. Whoever it was must have been ducked down up there somewhere. I was trying to look all around, the way you’d been doing. All of a sudden, this apparition rose up like from out of the ground and trotted over the top of the hill.”
“Standing erect?”
“No, sort of crouched over. If I hadn’t been looking right at him at the time, I never would have seen him.”
“Show me where, exactly.”
She pointed along the car door to a slope beyond the one Nikki’s body was on. It was the way a man might travel to intersect with the front road again, further back in the hills.
“He must have gotten rattled when I…” I tried to bite it off, but Allison was too smart for that.
“You found her, didn’t you?”
“Yes. Just before you called. She’s on the little hill behind the cabin. Somebody shot her once in the head. At least she wouldn’t have suffered.”
Allison stepped back and stared at me. “How can you say that? She was terrified! She knew somebody was after her. She was trying to get away and probably knew she didn’t have a chance. What do you mean she wouldn’t have suffered. She must have died a dozen times over before she was shot!”
I grabbed one arm and shook her a little roughly. “Allison, it’s done with. We can’t do anything for her now but try to make it up to her.”
She jerked back her head. “You’re not going after him?”
“Not now. I’ll stay here. But I want you to drive back to Fernwood. Call the Monterey sheriff’s office and ask for Wally Hamlin. He’s a homicide detective I’ve worked with. Tell him about the girl and what you saw. It’ll probably be too late, but tell him he might want to bring down a dog team if he can raise one, to try tracking the man who went over the hill. Tell him you’ll stay at Fernwood until the first patrol unit gets there. You can lead them in.”
Allison closed her eyes, took a deep breath and repeated very nearly word for word the instructions I’d just given her. Then she opened her eyes, turned and got into the car. “What are you going to be doing?” she asked, putting the car into gear.
“Just keeping an eye on things. Oh, and Allison. Do not tell Wally about the audio tapes Nikki left for me.”
“I’d forgotten all about them. But why not tell him?”
“I want to listen to them first. They might involve a client of mine.”
She gave me a lingering look, then took off back out to the road with the tires spitting dirt behind her. I waited until she was down the road and out of sight, then turned and started running, back behind the cabin, up the slope Nikki’s body was on, over the top and across to the farther, higher hill the man in cammies had gone over. I stayed below the ridgeline and worked my way thirty or forty yards past the point Allison had seen the uniformed man top the rise. I moved on up to the top and stayed low to study the territory on the other side of the hill. Other hills like the one I was on rolled on in the distance. I didn’t see anybody. I stood up and walked a few paces further along the ridgeline.
I heard a little bang of some sort off in the distance, and then several hundred yards off to the right I had a glimpse of a large dark car roar across a short stretch of road just visible between two hills. It was moving fast and headed east. There must be another way to get out of there besides on the road that passed Nikki’s cabin. I holstered the revolver and trotted back down, past Nikki’s killing place, to pause outside the cabin and look at my watch and make a couple of notes about the estimated time of arrival, time of finding the body and Allison’s spotting the person going over the ridge top. Then I walked back out to the pocket of trees the phone lines went through. From there I could see where somebody had swung up into the trees and snipped the phone wire. The severed ends dangled down through the limbs. The line must have been cut just before Nikki was chased out of her home and shot to death.
The killer must have been pursuing Nikki when she pulled into her parking place and ran for the cabin. There had to be at least two men involved in all this. One of them could have climbed the trees and cut the phone line while the other ran after Nikki. The terrified girl must have seen him coming, dropped the phone and tried to run away up the hill out back. And by that time, the man who had cut the phone line could have heard my car coming. When Allison had left, I’d been able to hear the car until I got to the top of the low hill Nikki’s
body was on. So the man who’d cut the phone wire could have shouted a warning to the man who was about to shoot Nikki. They could have agreed to meet farther along the road. The man who cut the wire could have gotten in their car and driven off just before I arrived, while his partner killed Nikki and started over the hills.
It was the second murder in the area that had occurred just moments before somebody else came on the scene. Wally Hamlin had told me if Jo Sommers hadn’t killed her husband, she must have been there almost soon enough to have seen it done. But then, you never knew what might have happened if somebody had arrived sooner. The saving of a life, or the taking of more?
I went back to the red VW. The first time I’d looked inside the car it was to find people. This time it was to find anything else worth noting. And there was something worth noting, an envelope, jammed partly behind the front seat cushion on the passenger side. It looked as if it held the stub of a utility bill. I used my knife to bend the envelope so I could see the back of it. It had a word scrawled on it. The writing was jerky, the sort a person might make trying to drive a car over rough road and at the same time, write something. There was a small pencil she might have used on the floor in front of the seat. I studied the writing for several seconds before it made any sense. As best I could tell she’d written Radioman. It didn’t set off any bells in my head. I left the car and walked back around the cabin and up the slope, to settle down on the ground a little ways off from Nikki’s body, keeping her company, waiting for the law and feeling bad about things.
NINE
It turned out Wally Hamlin’s father had died that morning over in Fresno, and Wally was on emergency leave. The lead investigator taking his place, a spare, dark, scowling man named Betta, wasn’t nearly as pleasant to deal with. He had lines around his eyes as if he didn’t get enough sleep nights, and he walked around with his chin thrust out. He listened to my story a couple of times, making notes that he punctuated with irritable little grunts, toured the scene and came back to ask me more questions.