by Jack Lynch
Barbara shrugged. “I just assumed he would have found out about it. And I’m sure Roger assumes the same thing.”
I left Barbara Beyerly soon after that, sitting up in the loft with the bottle of whiskey, or what was left of it, staring out over her ranch. I’d been planning to try to pump up her ego a little before I left, telling her I didn’t see all that much difference between her own appearance and that of her sister. But the day wasn’t right for that sort of thing. My heart wouldn’t have been in it. I was too tired and I’d had too much to drink and the story she’d told me was a little too depressing. I couldn’t have given it my best shot, and even my best shot wouldn’t have been a lasting impression. She needed a little professional therapy and I suspected she was bright enough to have figured that out.
On my way back into Bellingham, I decided I was ready for a little therapy myself. It was after five o’clock. I checked into a motel and caught up on my sleep.
SIXTEEN
It was raining the next morning. It rained continually during my drive back to Seattle and it didn’t stop when I reached there. But I told myself you couldn’t think about it like you were somebody from California, where it probably wasn’t raining. You had to think of it like somebody from eastern Colorado. Instead of thinking that it probably wasn’t raining in California, you had to think that it probably was snowing in eastern Colorado—or soon would be, as soon as this storm out of the Gulf of Alaska moved inland. If you didn’t want your mind to cramp up, you had to pretend you were from eastern Colorado. At least when you were trying to work in Seattle.
From the north end of town, I phoned Mary Ellen’s studio. Zither answered.
“Where have you been?” she asked once I’d introduced myself.
“Up north. Still trying to put together the pieces of Benny’s puzzle.”
“How is it going?”
“Slowly. Yesterday afternoon I had to cotton up to a woman who’s had a lot of misfortune befall her the past couple of years. The only way she’d talk was over a bottle. It was slow going, and I decided to check into a motel up there to sleep it off.”
“With the woman?”
“No. Just with myself and the sad story she had to tell me. It wasn’t very pleasant.”
“How was it with your ex the other evening? Was that pleasant?”
“I guess Mary Ellen told you about that.”
“Blabbed all about it. We sat around drinking white wine and speculating about it last evening. We wondered about how it might have gone between you and your ex-wife. Of course neither one of us has ever met your ex-wife. We don’t know whether she might be sweet or sour. But we decided, finally, that she couldn’t be too sour. Not in your eyes, at least, if you decided to spend the night with her.”
I sagged against the side of the telephone booth. I was beginning to feel worn down, and it wasn’t even noon yet.
“Something else we decided,” Zither continued. “We came to the conclusion that it was pretty unfair. Not necessarily on the part of you or your ex-wife. We were sure you had a lot of old memories to talk over. But just the circumstances, we decided, were unfair. That a gent should blow into town, single, nice-looking, pretty smart, and instead of picking up the hankie of a new feminine admirer, finds it necessary to cuddle up with his ex-goddamn-wife. That’s what we decided. Here’s Mary Ellen.”
“How are things going, Bragg?” asked Mary Ellen.
“Give me a minute to wipe off the blood, will you?”
“You don’t rate a minute to wipe off the blood. What is it you want?”
“A number where I can reach Benny.”
She gave it to me. “He’s registered under the name Bo Rinkle,” she told me, then changed the subject. “Zither isn’t standing here any longer. She went on back upstairs after she handed me the phone. I hope you don’t mind if I think of you in terms of an old Seattle expression from now on.”
“What expression?”
“Shitheel,” she said, and hung up.
I put more coins in the phone and dialed the number she’d given me and asked the switchboard operator to put me through to Bo Rinkle. Benny answered on the first ring.
“What did Dolly and the kids decide to do?”
“They decided to come join me at the new hideout.”
“What hideout?”
“It’s a motel called Easy Aces over in the Montlake district.”
“I don’t hear any chatter in the background. They shouldn’t be out walking the streets.”
“They’re not. Not down here, at least. One long afternoon and evening with the four of us in just one big room arguing over what we were going to watch on television was too much. They pulled out this morning for Sequim.”
“It’s better that way.”
“You bet it is. I can watch any damn thing I want now. I thought I’d give the soaps a peek this afternoon. Wanna come watch with me?”
“No. The soaps seem to be what I’ve been living the past couple of days.”
“How so?”
I told him about the visit with Barbara Beyerly. Then I told him about my conversation with Mary Ellen. “She of course told Zither I’d spent the night with Lorna. I’m sort of attracted to Zither, but I figure I can kiss all that good-bye.”
“Too many brands in the fire, pal.”
“It’s always been that way with me in Seattle. I don’t understand it. I never get into situations like this in San Francisco.”
“Maybe it’s the weather,” Benny told me. “You want to make sure you’ll have somebody to warm your toes against.”
We talked some more about Roger Hampton and what Benny’s impressions had been of the boy.
“If what the sister told you is true, the boy did a great job of faking it,” Benny said. “I thought those kids were really in love with each other.”
“What did he look like?”
“He was about six feet tall. Slender. Athletic looking. Had dark blond hair that he wore in sort of a modified boot camp cut. Don’t remember just how old he was, but at the time I knew, and I thought to myself he looked a lot younger than his real age. I think he was six or eight years older than the Beyerly girl. But you don’t think he’s really behind this, do you?”
“Why shouldn’t I think it?”
“The voice on the phone, for one. The kid didn’t have a voice anywheres near that deep. And you said there were a couple of bozos you chased after they tossed the bomb through my window. And the drawing Timmy and Al came up with. It didn’t look anything like Hampton.”
“He doesn’t have to be doing it all by himself, Benny. If he’s got a chance to get his hands on enough money, he can hire others. Just like any other business. When you’re not watching the soaps, take a look at the local newscasts. And get both daily papers. His face might show up in one or the other. Maybe that’s what’s behind it. Maybe Hampton is going to be in the spotlight and he doesn’t want you to see him and spoil whatever he’s up to. That was the Beyerly woman’s suggestion. He’ll be using a different name, though. Those missing photos seem to be a key here. Barbara Beyerly said Hampton was very upset when he learned the pictures you’d been taking might show up in People magazine.”
“Hmmmm. Would it do any good to give copies of them to the cops, you think?”
“Copies of what?”
“The photos. I keep negatives of a lot of the stuff I shoot. In this case, the People magazine folks paid me for expenses I’d racked up in the course of trying to do the story. I billed them for the photos, so I figure technically they belong to the magazine. If they should ever want them for some reason, I can send them a batch.”
“Benny, you’re a genius.”
“Why so?”
“Showing Hampton’s photos to the cops might not do much good, but showing them around town could.”
“Around where?”
“Wherever somebody planning to snooker a rich woman out of a bunch of money might put in an appearance. Did you save the n
egative of the other photo that was taken from your files? The ferroconcrete man?”
“Waldo Derington? I doubt it. I had to eat the expenses on that one. There’d be no reason.”
“Okay, where are the Beyerly negatives?”
He told me they were in a metal file cabinet out home in his garage. “Where will you be staying in case I see this Hampton kid’s puss somewhere?”
“I’m not sure. I spent last night in a motel up in Bellingham. During the day we can try to keep in touch through Mary Ellen. When I get a place for the night, I’ll phone you. And please ask Mary Ellen to be civil enough to pass our messages back and forth. Tell her it’s for your sake.”
“What do you mean, civil? She likes you, Pete.”
“That was before she learned I spent the night with Lorna. She just called me a shitheel a few minutes ago.”
“I’ll give her a call. What is it with you and Lorna, by the way?”
“If I knew that, I’d know what to tell Zither the next time I saw her.”
Benny laughed. “Keep your chin up, pal.”
“Yeah. Be talking to you, Bo.”
I drove over to Benny’s place and let myself in the back door with the key he’d given me. I went to the file cabinet in the garage and found the envelope with the Beyerly name on it. There didn’t seem to be anything with Derington’s name on it. Before leaving there, I got out my AT&T card and punched a lot of numbers into the phone in the kitchen. When Ceejay answered, I told her it was me and asked if there’d been any messages of note.
“Several,” she told me. “Morrisey has a new client in a peck of trouble. The client’s wife was strangled in the bathtub and the cops think he did it. Client has an alibi, but it’s paper-thin. Morrisey wants you to find the man the client was with at the time the cops say the woman was murdered. He’s somebody named Bob who lives in the Gilroy area. Morrisey wants to know how soon you can get on it.”
“Tell him within a few days. I hope. What else?”
“You had a query from George Thompson. Wanted to know how you’re doing on some sort of background check you’re supposed to be running.”
“Call him back and tell him I’m waiting to get answers from sources back East. I should have them by the first of next week, or rather you should, Ceejay. You might keep an eye open for letters from the New York state police and a law firm called Smithers and Wevern. They should have the information Thompson needs.”
“Will do. And you had a couple of checks come in that I photocopied and banked.”
“Thank you.”
“And Allison called.”
“Oh? Is she in town?”
“No, she called down from Barracks Cove. Said she’d been thinking about you. She said she had the intuitive feeling your personal life was troubled. She tried phoning your apartment. I told her you were up in Seattle. She was a little surprised you hadn’t called to let her know you were going away.”
“I guess when Benny phoned me with his SOS I got a little distracted thinking about the old hometown.”
“Was she right?”
“What do you mean?”
“Allison’s intuition. Was it right? Is your personal life in turmoil?”
“Yes, but I don’t want to talk about it to anybody right now.”
“Are you messing up again, Peter?”
There were times, this being one of them, when Ceejay’s voice took on the tone not of an employee addressing one of her employers, but rather that of a hard-nosed schoolmarm who’d caught me smoking in the cloakroom.
“Frankly, Ceejay, I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s just something about Seattle. It keeps me off balance.”
“Is Lorna a part of it?”
I nearly dropped the receiver. “How do you know about her?”
“A woman who said her name was Lorna also phoned this morning. She said she was calling from Seattle and had been trying to get in touch with you. She wanted to know if I had a phone number for you. Who is she?”
I didn’t answer right away. Ceejay was more than a secretary and office manager. In some ways she was my conscience. And I didn’t know what to tell her. She knew I’d been married once, but I’d never gone into the gory details, as Barbara Beyerly would have put it.
“You are messing up, aren’t you, Bragg.”
Not a question, a statement.
“Someday we’ll talk about it, Ceejay, and you can tell me where I went wrong, every step of the way.”
“Maybe you’d better try doing whatever has to be done up there and get on back home.”
“I’m trying, Ceejay. I’m trying.” I gave her Mary Ellen’s number for daytime messages and told her I’d phone our answering service and leave them a nighttime number when I had one.
I also called the World Investigations office in San Francisco. Turk Connell had heard back from their office in Vancouver to do with Waldo Derington, the man who’d dreamed of building luxurious houseboats on ferroconcrete hulls. Turk pretty much confirmed Benny’s account. He said the firm had gone bankrupt despite some pretty hefty down payments that had been made by people who thought they were commissioning the construction of swank dwellings on the water. There was some grumbling at the time, Turk said, because Derington hadn’t left behind any extensive accounting of where the money had gone. The crestfallen builder had carried most of it around in his head, and he’d left town and hadn’t been seen since. It didn’t surprise me. Who ever heard of floating concrete?
I thanked Turk and hung up, but didn’t let go of the receiver. I went back and forth in my mind some about whether to make the next call, but I finally dialed Lorna’s number at work.
“I’m glad you phoned,” she told me. “I was just leaving for a luncheon appointment. I missed you last night.”
Now I regretted making the call. “I spent the night in Bellingham.”
“Oh? With whom?”
“A few dozen other people. At a motel.”
“Nobody in particular, then.”
She was trying to make it sound teasing, but she wasn’t too successful at it. “Nobody at all.”
“Such a waste. What are your plans for this evening?”
“I don’t have any. I’m working on the Benny thing. It might carry on into the night.”
“Oh. I was hoping we could meet for a drink after work.”
“Any special reason?”
“No, no special reason. But I thought maybe you could give me a lift home. I cabbed in this morning. It was pouring out.”
I hesitated.
“Well, I don’t want to be a burden, Peter…”
“No, that’s okay. What the hell, I ought to be able to take a break. I’ll try to pick you up sometime between five and six.”
She made a kissing sound before she hung up. Ceejay was right, or almost so. If I wasn’t messing up, I was on the very edge of it. But I tried to put Lorna and Zither and all the gang out of my mind. I went through the Yellow Pages until I found the address of a professional photography outfit over in the Wallingford district. That wasn’t far from where I’d gone to high school.
I drove over there and waited around while they processed the negatives and showed me a contact sheet. I pointed out the photos I wanted copies made up of and a half hour later I had them in hand. Then I began going around to the places rich women and their handsome young squires might go.
SEVENTEEN
I didn’t have any luck with the people I talked with at the University Yacht Club, the Seattle Town Club in West Seattle, or the Chinook Tennis Club in the Magnolia district. None of them recognized the blond young man in the photos I showed them, even when I asked that they try to imagine him with a moustache or a different hair style.
But a bartender named George in a well-appointed saloon at the East End Golf and Country Club, just outside the city of Bellevue on the east shore of Lake Washington, spotted him in a minute. He said the man’s name was Kirby and that he was the swain of one Marietta Narcoff, who came
from a very well off family and shot an eighteen-hole round of golf in the mid-eighties. George said Marietta and Kirby had been an item for about the past two months. They were nearly always together, which annoyed George a bit because George used to enjoy flirting with Marietta Narcoff himself, whenever she came into the bar, before she took up with the man he knew as Kirby.
These days, George’s free drinks and winks and flirty conversation with Marietta had to be limited to those times when Kirby excused himself and went to the men’s room. He said Marietta Narcoff, though well moneyed, was a democratic sort of woman. She wasn’t the least bit above flirting with the help at the club. In the way that bartenders have after you’ve shot the breeze with them for a while, he managed to convey the impression that Marietta Narcoff was a woman who was not above flirting with any man who might appeal to her.
George said Marietta Narcoff’s family had made its money in the Pacific Northwest timber industry and owned half the port of Coos Bay, Oregon. The main family residence was a big old stone-faced place up on Capitol Hill. But they had getaway retreats as well, over in the Palouse country of Eastern Washington, up in the Snoqualmie ski country, and one over on Hood Canal somewhere. Marietta herself, George told me, had investments in this and that and lived by herself in an apartment in a downtown building called Luckner Plaza. George knew this, he told me, because she’d let him take her home one night after she’d had a few drinks too many and couldn’t remember how to turn on the headlights of her Mercedes. She’d invited him in for a drink at her apartment, and he had held high hopes she might invite him to spend the night, but she’d passed out on the sofa while he’d been telling her some of the gossip going around the bar at the East End Golf and Country Club, and he had decided prudently to just lift her feet onto the sofa, throw a spread over her, turn out the lights and let himself out.
I asked George if Marietta Narcoff and the man he knew as Kirby might be thinking of getting married sometime down the road and he said he couldn’t say, but then who the hell could figure out what the really wealthy thought about anyway. I knew what a few of the really wealthy who lived in California thought about because I’d worked for some of them, but up in Seattle I had to agree with George. I had no idea what they thought. I found it hard to accept that anybody who chose to live in Seattle through all that rain would have that much money to begin with. So that put me at a disadvantage.