The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  I drove several blocks away from there and found a pay phone. I called Jo Sommers to tell her to stay put at the motel. She didn’t like that idea, but I told her about what somebody had done to Alex Kilduff, and asked her if she really felt like going back home just then. She allowed as how she didn’t.

  “Did Alex ever tell you anything about his family?” I asked her.

  She thought a moment. “Not that I recall. Why?”

  “Did he ever talk about his father, or some other relative being in the navy?”

  “No.”

  “Did he ever say anything about a World War Two cruiser named the Indianapolis?”

  “No, but…Hmmmmm.”

  “What is it?”

  “I think there might be a little model of that ship in Woody’s den. I think he told me that was the name of it once, when I asked.”

  I remembered the ship model on the mantel. “You could be right. I’m still looking for the code list for the tapes. What sort of paper was it on?”

  She said the list was in a small, black spiral binder that looked like an address book. I told her it would have helped if she’d thought to tell me that earlier.

  I got back on the freeway, went over the hill and turned off to go into Carmel. I found a parking place a half block up from the Duck’s Quack, fed the parking meter and went down to where they were expecting Alex to show up and open the bar. When I squinted through a front window, I saw a woman carrying a clipboard inventorying the liquor in the bottles on the back bar. I rapped on the window and grinned and made funny faces until she knew I wasn’t going to go away until the place opened. She came to the front door and opened it with a little smile.

  “In case you couldn’t tell from the outward signs, we aren’t opened yet.”

  She was a woman with a small but trim build. She was about five feet tall, had a medium-sized chest and a meaty pair of hips she kept under tight control in denim. Black hair fell down her back. She was wearing a thin, filmy white blouse and had neglected to put on her bra that morning.

  “I got the outward signs,” I told her. “I also have some inside information you’ll want me to share. You the owner?”

  “No, but the boss tells me I’m one helluva manager. Is the information important to me and the job?”

  “Downright crucial, at this given moment.”

  “Well then. Maybe you’d best step inside.”

  She held open the door and I went in. The place had the sort of smells even the best-run bar has before they open the doors and give it a chance to air out.

  She closed the door again and went over behind the bar. “My name’s Dee,” she said. “Want a cup of coffee?”

  “My name’s Pete, and I’d love some coffee.”

  She poured out a couple of cups from a pot on a two-burner hot plate next to a blender. “Cream or sugar?”

  “Both.”

  She doctored it up with a professional flourish and slid the cup onto the bar in front of me. She drank her own coffee black. It matched the color of her eyes. She put her cup on the bar next to mine, then came around and climbed atop a stool beside me and tucked her feet beneath her, Indian fashion.

  “You’re a handsome dog,” she said with a little giggle, taking a sip of the coffee. “I saw you stick your head in here briefly the other night. You had a gorgeous blonde with you. That your wife?”

  “Nope. She’s my number one girlfriend, but we live a couple of hundred miles apart, so most of our conversation’s over the telephone. We came down for the jazz festival. And thanks for the compliment. You’re pretty cute yourself. If the gorgeous blonde wasn’t still down here with me, I’d probably try to see what sort of trouble I could get into with you. If any.”

  “That might be fun,” she told me. “I’ve been here five years now, and I don’t have any plans to leave. You might stop by sometime when you’re in town without the gorgeous blonde. Where are you from?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “That’s close enough so you could come down almost any weekend at all.”

  “That was going around the back of my own head.”

  She had a laugh in the high octaves and an inviting look on her small, angular face that made me wish I wasn’t working. Then she had another sip of her coffee and voiced my own feelings.

  “But then, we can’t just sit here and bullshit away the rest of the morning, can we? You were going to tell me something.”

  “Yes. I have good news and bad news.”

  “Doesn’t everybody. This day’s already off to a rocky start. Good news first, please.”

  “Your bar is going to get some sensational publicity in the Monterey Herald tomorrow morning.”

  “Oh, that’s nice. You sure?”

  “It’s guaranteed.”

  “What sort of sensational publicity?”

  “That’s the bad news.”

  “Which is?”

  “Alex isn’t going to make it in to work this morning.”

  “Damn it,” she said, with another sip of the coffee. “I might have known.”

  “How’s that?”

  “It’s the streak I’ve been on lately. It means I’ll have to work the day shift myself, and I had a luncheon date with a nice-looking boy who’s new to the area.”

  “Is that why you left your bra at home this morning?”

  It got another of the high-register laughs. “You’re observant.”

  “You bet.”

  “Why isn’t Alex going to make it to work this morning? You a friend of his?”

  “Nope. He wouldn’t let me get that close to him. And the reason he isn’t going to make it to work is the really bad part of the bad news.”

  The glitter went out of her face and she set the coffee aside. She was quick and bright. And ready.

  “Before I tell you,” I began, “I have to ask you a really important favor. Like forgetting we had this conversation when the cops come around.”

  “Oh-oh. It really is bad news, then.”

  “Very bad.”

  She made a little face and nodded. “I can probably do you that favor without much trouble. It’d be even easier if I thought you’d really come back down here some weekend without another woman on your arm.”

  “It’s a promise.”

  “Before too many years go by.”

  “Before even the rest of this year goes by.”

  She put out a small hand with a good grip to it when we shook. “Call a couple of days ahead,” she told me, “so I can cancel all my other social engagements.”

  I smiled and took out a business card and handed it to her. “If you get to San Francisco before I get back down here, you can give me a call. You don’t even have to call a couple of days ahead of time.”

  “You don’t have any San Francisco girlfriends?”

  “Not really. I keep pretty busy most of the time.”

  She was reading the card and made a little humming noise. “I suppose this is why you don’t want me to tell the cops about the conversation we’re having.”

  “That’s right. I’m working, and while I’ve had some dealings with the local law, I’m not ready just yet to tell them everything I’ve got. I have a client who could be in very serious trouble if the cops knew the things about her and Alex that I know.”

  She looked at me sharply. “Who’s the client?”

  “Jo Sommers. Her husband, a retired psychiatrist, was murdered Friday night. Know her?”

  “No, but I read about him, of course. I mean the murder.”

  “There have been a couple of other killings since then, all a part of the same business.”

  “Alex?”

  “The most recent. And most spectacular. That’s why you’re going to get the sensational publicity.”

  She had another sip of coffee. “Tell me about it.”

  So I told her about the flagpole. Her eyes widened some, and when I’d finished telling her, she shook her head.

  “Dynamite way to go,
” she said.

  “I’ll bet he thought so.”

  She giggled again.

  “The two of you couldn’t have been too close,” I said.

  “We weren’t.”

  “Any special reason?”

  She held one hand out and wagged it from side to side. “He was just a little too precious. Too glib, too friendly. Too—too bubbly. Myself, I don’t particularly care for that in a man. I mean, I don’t think you have to be all strong and silent, bordering on glum or anything. But then, I don’t think you have to be out there dancing on tiptoes all the time, either.”

  It was my turn to chuckle. I had some of the coffee. I felt this was the sort of lady a guy like me could trust. Far more than I ever could trust a woman like Jo Sommers.

  “So now if I’ve got your promise you won’t tell the cops I’ve been here this morning…” I told her.

  “Cross my heart.” She clamped one hand across her right breast with a saucy grin.

  “Then I’ll tell you what I really came by to ask. I need to know anything you can tell me about Alex. Where he’s from. How I might be able to get in touch with his family. I’d like to be able to do that before the cops do.”

  Dee put down the coffee and slid off the stool. “I don’t know that,” she told me, “but I might have a way of finding out.”

  I got up and followed her. She led me down a hallway past the restrooms and unlocked the door to a little office. She rummaged around in a desk drawer and took out a small white card with some numbers on it. Then she led me back to a room where they stored soft drinks and had a big machine that made ice cubes. There also were several lockers in there with combination locks on them. She went over to one of them, consulted the card and spun the combination dial. A moment later she popped open the locker drawer.

  “Aren’t I wonderful,” she said, turning with a grin. Hanging inside the locker was a pair of dark trousers and a couple of shirts. Dee reached in and took a small carton down from an upper shelf. “Mail call,” she told me, handing it to me.

  “What’s this?”

  “Mail. He got all his mail here. Even local bills.”

  “He didn’t get home delivery?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe he could have, but that would have meant letting people know where he lived. He was a little funny that way. You can bring that back and use the desk in the office, if you’d like. I’ve got to get back to work, especially since I have to open the place.”

  In five minutes I had what I wanted. I found two letters from the same town back in Pennsylvania. One was from a girl, the other was filled with family gossip and signed, “Mom.” I copied the return address on the envelope from Mom then took the carton back and shut up the locker.

  When Dee unlocked the front door for me, I thanked her with a wink and said I’d see her later. She winked back and said she hoped so.

  I stopped at another pay phone on my way back to the car and called the motel Allison and I were staying at. I asked the man on the switchboard to try ringing our room. He did, but there was no answer.

  “But somebody’s been calling for you,” he told me. “Some fellow. A couple of times, now.”

  “Did he leave a message?”

  “He just said he had something important to tell you.”

  “Did he leave a number?”

  “No, he just said he’d call back.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I thanked him and hung up. On the way back to the car I thought about things. Despite his public life at the Duck’s Quack, Alex seemed to have lived cautiously. Probably because he’d been planning a major bit of blackmail to do with the sinking of the Indianapolis for a good long while, maybe even before he came to Carmel, from some of the things Jo Sommers had told me, and from what the book and photograph I’d lifted out of his bookcase would indicate.

  But he hadn’t been careful enough to prevent somebody from putting a bullet through his head and hanging him out to dry atop the flagpole. And I hadn’t been making any secret of what I’d been doing since the weekend, and if anybody was interested in what I was doing, they’d also be interested in the fact that I had my girlfriend with me. I decided it was time to put Allison on a plane and get her out of there. She’d have to learn if she could live with the rigors of my job another time.

  I drove down past the motel and turned onto Scenic Road, where we’d taken our morning walks. I stopped and got out a couple of times to scan the beach below me, but I didn’t see a woman in blue jeans and red turtleneck top. Then I thought of something. She’d told me that morning she was going to go paint a picture. And the day before, when I’d shown her the Stilwell house, she’d told me she’d sketch it for me someday. Maybe she was up there now, doing one or the other.

  I drove over to Inspiration Road. At the Stilwell home, Inspiration forms the top part of a T with San Antonio Road, and I figured that down San Antonio a ways is where somebody would set up things to best sketch the house. I didn’t see Allison. I drove slowly along the road, looking at things. I was thirty yards back from Inspiration Road when I saw something that made me hit the brakes and jump out of the car. Allison’s sketchpad was lying facedown on the tree-shaded, dirt and grass parking strip alongside the road. I picked up the pad and looked at it. I’d been right. She’d made some tentative outlines of the house down the way. A few feet away I found a couple of the sketching pencils she used. I put these things in my car and studied the ground around me some more. Some trampling had gone on there. In the dry dirt I could make out a grid mark that looked like the waffle pattern left by a hiking boot. There also was a single strand of blonde hair, that could have been from the head of my lady. I looked for tire treads at the edge of the roadway but didn’t see any. Then I began to knock on doors.

  An elderly man with a slight stoop and a pipe in his hand answered the door behind the hedge where I’d found the sketchpad. He’d seen Allison there earlier. He’d been outside watering his lawn and had seen her settling down with her sketchpad. She had a grand smile, he told me. He said they’d chatted pleasantly for a minute, then he’d gone on about his chores and finally went back inside the house. No, he wasn’t able to see her from inside the house. And no, he didn’t hear any commotion outside afterward. No raised voices or squeal of tires.

  Across the street a stout woman wearing a yellow housecoat with curlers in her hair and holding a calico cat to her chest answered my knock. She hadn’t seen nor heard anything unusual. At three other homes in the area, two of the residents weren’t any help. But the third, a retired gentlemen in his early sixties, had noticed Allison sketching when he drove into his driveway after a trip to the market.

  It was a gray-haired woman, thin as a stick, pruning her hedge two homes farther up the block, who was able to give me the story of what had happened about forty minutes earlier. She’d been inside her yard working when a noise that seemed unusual prompted her to go to the front gate and look down the street. A woman wearing a red top was either being helped or shoved into the back of an automobile by a man wearing some sort of uniform.

  “You know, like they wear in the army these days.” She had a slow, deliberate manner of speaking.

  “Camouflage material, you mean.”

  “Yes, I guess that’s what it was.”

  “Did the woman seem to be struggling?”

  “I couldn’t tell that. She was partway into the back of the car when I saw them. I had the impression somebody else was already in the back of the car. Then the man with the uniform shut the door, got into the front and drove off.”

  “Did they drive past here?”

  “No, they went on up the street in the other direction and turned the corner left.”

  “Do you remember what the car looked like?”

  “Oh, I’m afraid not. So many of them look so much alike these days, don’t you think? It was a dark color. Dark blue, or black, maybe.”

  “What sort of sound was it that made you come to the gate?”

&n
bsp; “I don’t really know. Either—well, I couldn’t tell if it was human or animal, to tell you the truth. Kind of a whoop. Or a cry, maybe.”

  We talked for a moment more and I went back to the car, then just sat there, staring through the windshield without seeing anything. I’d wised up too late, that was the dominating thought. The rest was a jumble. My mind was going on in a dozen different directions, and it took a major effort to calm down. The man at the motel said somebody had called me. Maybe it was somebody who knew about Allison. I drove back there.

  Up in the room I sat and thought about how easy it would have been for somebody to get a line on me and have the motel under observation. I hadn’t been secretive about what I’d been doing, and when they saw me go off by myself that morning, they could have waited until Allison came out, followed her and set up the snatch.

  The phone rang twenty minutes later. It was a flat, male voice that I didn’t recognize.

  “We have your woman,” he said dryly. “We want you out. Out of town, out of this part of the state. We don’t want you back. Just drop what you’re doing. You’ll be under surveillance. We’ll know whether or not you leave. After you’ve been gone for two days, we’ll release the woman. She was blindfolded, so she can’t identify us. We have no cause to fear or harm her. So in two days we’ll release her. Pack up and leave.”

  “After I talk to the woman you took.”

  “What?”

  “Bring her to the phone and let me speak with her. If you have harmed her, or cause her any harm at any time, I might as well let you know this. I’ll kill you. I’ll find and kill you and anybody else who’s a part of this. You had better believe I can do that. I could give you references.”