by Jack Lynch
“That’s fine.”
“Doubles,” she told the girl, but Bobbie stood her ground. The younger woman nodded, to let Maribeth know she’d fix the drinks, but she still stood her ground, and Maribeth looked up at her. “I guess you want to be in on it.”
“I guess I do,” Bobbie told her.
“All right,” said Maribeth, turning back to me. “I think I can help you some. I can tell you a couple of things about the surrounding territory. There’s a vinyard there, rows of stakes driven into a slope rising toward a wooded ridge in the direction of the afternoon sun. There’s a dirt road very near where the bodies are buried. Not far off there’s an old cottage and barns, but they seem deserted. And there are some old stone ruins not too far away.”
She sat very still for several moments, then looked up again. “What made me cry out…it’s different from the last time I was there. More people are buried there now. One of them is little more than a child.”
FOUR
When I first met Max Bolero I thought Commando Seaplanes was some sort of authentic airplane business, where they gave flying lessons and conducted flyover tours of downtown San Francisco and the bay and, who knows, maybe on occasion indulged in slightly mysterious and adventurous flight missions. Over the years I had come to know better.
Max and his partner ran a small terminal building with various offices that had old FAA maps on the walls and rest rooms for the customers. And they had a couple of float planes and some other aircraft available, and they did give flying lessons and tours over the city and bay, and there even was a helicopter pad next to the terminal building from where a chopper operated daily to check out the Bay Area traffic picture for one of the local radio stations, and Max from time to time would talk vaguely of getting his hands on some bigger sort of plane he could use to set up a freight charter business between the Bay Area and Portland and Seattle, maybe, or even up to the Northwest Territories in Canada and Alaska beyond.
But I had learned in time that the real heart of the Commando Seaplanes operation was a second building out behind the terminal. It was a small hanger building with a concrete floor and with overhead loft storage space crammed with all sorts of tools and equipment and paint and old duffel bags filled with who knows what. At the rear of the main floor there was a counter with a refrigerator and stove behind that, although there wasn’t much food preparation done there. Mostly they ate takeout.
And scattered throughout the hanger could be any number of various projects in progress. There might be one of the float planes being checked out or worked over, the engine being given its 1,000-hour check, or something being resealed or the paint being touched up. Or you might find a two-seat helicopter in there with somebody going over it, daubing various fittings with Par-Al-Ketone to ward off oxidation caused by the salty bay air. And in another part of the hanger there might be an elderly automobile undergoing an exacting customization, and lately, whenever I stopped by, a fellow of about 60 years had been on the upper landing that ran along one side of the hanger building, bent over a long, wide, flat table where he was drawing up a set of plans to build himself a three-quarter size replica of a World War II P-51 Mustang fighter.
Max or his partner usually was there along with two or three or more other guys, all of them working at this or dabbling at that, the air filled with aromas of epoxy and paint and a solvent they called MEK, and from back in the kitchen area a radio would be providing jazzy background music, and every once in a while somebody else might stop in to get a couple of tools to change a cracked wheel casing on one of the amphibian planes stashed in the parking lot out back, and it finally dawned on me. Max wasn’t running just a seaplane business down there on that south shore of Richardson Bay in Sausalito; on the side he was running a playground for grownups.
The people who drifted in and out and took part in these various projects, or just hung out swapping tales, were an egalitarian bunch. I had met an eye surgeon from the Davis Medical Center in San Francisco there one time, an insurance broker who also was on the Marin County Board of Supervisors, a San Francisco cop, an Alameda County assistant prosecuting attorney, a former beer truck driver who now tended bar at a rowdy place just down the road, a fellow in the import-export business who seemed all the time to be flying off to places like Hong Kong and Beijing, an ambulance driver and another fellow who taught mentally handicapped kids at a special school up in San Rafael.
And if all that wasn’t enough sham, Bolero wasn’t even Max’s real name. He’d never told me the name he’d been born with. He just said he’d never liked whatever name it was, so when he’d grown up he’d had it changed. He said a recording of Ravel’s Boléro had been playing the first time he got laid and he had liked both that particular melody and that name ever since, so when he made the official name change that was the moniker he chose.
Max stood six feet tall and never would see forty again, nor maybe even fifty. I never asked. He wore a pair of rimless eyeglasses, was losing his hair and had a stomach that might have been an advertisement for the beer company the bartender down the way used to drive for. He was partial to smoking cigars and wearing an old scabby-looking leather flight jacket.
I had phoned Max the afternoon before telling him I wanted to hire him and one of his planes for the better part of Sunday. By the time I got down there at a little after ten o’clock, Max had put the craft in the water and given it the morning run-up. Now he was in the hanger loft consulting with the older gent who wanted to build his own plexiglass version of a P-51. A couple of other fellows were tinkering at this and that around the hanger building.
Max saw me and waved. He continued chatting for another few moments then came down the wooden stairs and said something to another fellow who was sorting through a pile of nuts and bolts on a side counter. The man looked across the hanger at me. He was a mild, owly looking chap of about forty. He wore glasses, his frame was slender and his hair was thinning.
Max brought him over and introduced him as Harvey Draper. “I got to thinking last night after we talked,” Max said.
I had told Max about the flight I wanted to take. I’d told him about Maribeth and the bodies she saw and the trip I had made to Santa Rosa. Max had taken it all in his stride, as I knew he would. You could have told him you wanted to go up and chase flying saucers, and it would have been okay with Max.
“It sounded,” Max told me now, “like the sort of thing Harvey here might be interested in, so I called and asked if he’d like to come along for the ride. He said he would. That makes it more of a joyride than anything else, and I don’t have to charge you the hourly rate. Just for the fuel we burn.”
“Sounds good to me,” I told him. “An extra pair of eyes is welcome. Did you tell Harvey here what we’d be looking for?”
“I sort of sketched it out for him,” Max said, tearing the cellophane wrapper off a cigar.
I turned to the smaller man. “If I might ask, Harvey, just what do you do when you’re not goofing off with everyone else down here at Max’s hanger?”
“I’m an anthropologist,” he said in an apologetic tone of voice.
“I’m impressed,” I told him, and the three of us trooped on outside and over to the wooden ramp that led down to the floating walkways where they tied up the seaplanes. We clambered into an old Republic Seabee amphibian with a huge Franklin pusher engine behind the five-person cabin.
Max had once told me the story behind the sturdy little plane. Republic was the same aircraft company that had built the P-47 Thunderbolt in World War II. Somebody at the company figured that after the war all those returning airmen who had piloted the Thunderbolts and P-51s and Corsairs and Helldivers and Flying Forts and Liberators and all those other aircraft that had invaded and finally conquered the skies over Europe and the Middle East and the South Pacific, would be just aching to get their hands around the yoke of their own reliable, versatile and inexpensive airplane. The Seabee was going to become the Volkswagen of the airways.
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“Unfortunately,” Max had told me, “about ninety-eight percent of all those pilots who won the war came home so scared of flying they never wanted to see another plane so long as they lived.”
Now, taxiing out into the bay, Max had a small grin working around the edges of his cigar. It surprised me a little, considering the business we were on, but then Max always had been a little strange. He was an ace mechanic, and chances were he could have built the P-51 replica the older fellow wanted all by himself using just a wrench and his Swiss Army knife. I suspected Max loved rubbing shoulders with the fellows with the advance educations and the degrees and high-powered positions because he knew he could work rings around them when it came to a piece of mechanical equipment.
We lifted up off the morning’s placid bay waters and circled for altitude then turned north before Max throttled back on the engine, making conversation possible again. I sat up front beside Max while Harvey was scrunched down on the bench seat behind us. It was then that Max took the cigar out of his mouth with a little chuckle.
“Ah, go ahead, Harvey, tell Bragg.”
“Tell him what?”
“What you really are.”
I looked over my shoulder. Harvey leaned back, his round eyes suggesting that Max Bolero had just insulted him.
“Why, I’ve already told Mr. Bragg what I am. I’m an anthropologist.”
“What kind of anthropologist?” Max demanded.
“I’m a professor of biological anthropology at San Francisco State University. You know that, Max.”
“Yeah, yeah. What else do you do?”
“I do consultation work.”
“Who for?”
“Various jurisdictions. Counties, for the most part.”
“And you have a San Francisco Police badge, right?”
“I have a shield, yes, but I’m not a police officer.”
Max did some fiddling with the trim tabs then turned to me with another big grin and jerked one thumb back over his shoulder. “Harvey’s a bone detective.”
I turned in my seat again. Harvey shrugged, with that apologetic little smile on his face.
“Does all that mean you examine stiffs?” I asked.
“Some of the time. I also am a member of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences.”
“He’s also an assistant medical examiner for the San Francisco cops,” said Max.
“That’s what the shield is from,” Harvey explained. “And I work some of the time as a deputy coroner for various Bay Area counties. When Max called me last night and told me what you’d be looking for today, I was naturally curious, and told him I’d love to come along. I hope you don’t mind.”
He said all that in an apologetic, low-key manner.
“No, I don’t mind at all,” I told him. “I just hope now it doesn’t turn out to be a wild goose chase of some sort.”
“It’s worth the gamble,” Harvey told me, leaning forward to scan the ground below. “I might even get some work out of it.”
Max had unfolded a big FAA chart for a part of Sonoma County, 20 or more miles to the north of us. “Tell me again what sort of terrain we’re looking for.”
And so I repeated everything I’d been able to dredge out of Maribeth following her painful session of seeing things most normal people couldn’t. I told how she had described the immediate area as a broad, open expanse amidst wooded forest land that rose toward the west. There was an old home nearby, painted white, she thought, and other structures in the area. Some sort of ruins, as well, she thought, not too far away. A nearby vineyard. Picnicking in the area and something else she had sensed. Something like “a pile of old, cold stones, some ways off. A pile with form to it.”
Max put aside the chart after a moment and hunched forward, staring straight ahead, his cigar jutting out like a bird dog at point. “Damn it,” he said.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know. Something at the edge of my memory.”
“You think you recognize what she’s talking about?”
“Maybe. What about you, Harvey?”
“It doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
“I could swear I’ve seen it somewhere,” Max told us. “But not from up here.” He was scanning the sky around us for other traffic. “Well, what do you say, Bragg? Vineyards. Old pile of cold stones. That could be a warehouse where they store wine barrels. Sebastiani has a place like that just outside the town of Sonoma. And they have a picnic area where you can sample the products and eat lunch. Why don’t we fly over that and maybe some other wineries?”
“Okay by me.”
It was as good a hunch as any, I figured. Sonoma County covered a lot of territory. It was nearly 60 miles from its southern border with Marin County to the Mendocino County line up north, and at its widest it was nearly 40 miles across. Santa Rosa, the county seat, was growing like a boom town with smaller towns scattered its width and depth, but still the county was mostly agricultural ranch land and vineyards, tawny rolling hills and thick woodlands of oak and madrone and manzanita. Flying over it in a plane, looking for the burial ground that Maribeth had sensed, gave us an edge, but it still was a lot of territory to cover.
Max began flying a search grid from the southeastern corner of the county, off San Pablo Bay, traveling in a northerly direction until we were over the small town of Sonoma, where in June of 1846 a group of American roughnecks proclaimed California a republic and raised the Bear Flag in a plaza that used to be a drill field where Spanish soldiers marched.
Not far from there a Hungarian nobleman, Count Agoston Haraszthy, planted the experimental vineyards of the Buena Vista winery, and from that beginning was to grow the entire California wine industry.
Max banked east and we flew over the Sebastiani winery, but scanning the ground below we didn’t see the sort of things in combination that Maribeth had said would be there, so Max flew farther north, past Boyes Hot Springs and the Hanna Boys Center, to the vineyards of the Valley of the Moon winery, but most of these were on bare, baked flatland, with no nearby woodland, no sloping hills. We continued north, over the vineyards and fields near Kenwood then flew over Sugarloaf Ridge State Park and past Hood Mountain. Whenever we spotted old ranch buildings scattered in pockets here and there we would fly in low for a closer look, but nothing seemed promising.
We continued on to Mark West Springs, studying the carpet of land below, then Max flew the plane up Porter Creek in the direction of the town of Calistoga, known for its hot mud baths, and on over a ridge into Napa County.
And then Max sat straight up in his seat and said, “Son of a bitch.”
“What’s wrong?” I was afraid he might have heard a bad note in the engine.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Max said, putting the small plane into a tight bank-and-turn until we were headed back almost due south. “You want to find some open space with wooded hills rising to the west? You want old outbuildings? An old frame home with a nearby vineyard? I’m going to give them to you, pal. There’s nothing wrong at all. We’ll be there in a matter of minutes.”
“You’re pretty sure of this?”
“Dead certain, if you’ll excuse the pun. And about a quarter mile away from all that is another building. It’s a museum now, called the House of Happy Walls.”
“That rings a bell,” said Harvey. “But too faintly to tell me where we’re headed.”
Max had a tight smile on his face now. Not a smile of happiness, but one of grim satisfaction, of certainty, and true to his word a few minutes later we were circling a two-story stone building on a ridge of Sonoma Mountain overlooking the Valley of the Moon.
“That’s the House of Happy Walls,” Max told us. “This is Jack London State Park.”
A parking lot stretched west of the building, out to the blacktop road that snaked on down to the town of Glen Ellen.
“But it doesn’t look like what we’re supposed to be looking for,” Harvey complained.
“Come wit
h me,” said Max, climbing once more and buzzing west, over another parking lot and then a collection of old buildings. “There’s the farm London ran,” Max said. “That old white cottage is where he lived and wrote, waiting for them to finish building the Wolf House.”
Harvey put one hand on Max’s shoulder.
“Max, circle around. Over that field north of the cottage.”
Max put the plane into a shallow bank. An old dirt road meandered from the London home toward a couple of old silos in the distance, then curved around to a ridge off to the west. Harvey was interested in a patch of ground near the turn in the road, in a small hollow just below some other old farm ruins.
“There,” Harvey said. “That patch of vivid green.”
“What about it?” Max asked.
“It could well be,” Harvey said quietly. He cleared his throat. “If this is the place your lady psychic wanted us to find, Mr. Bragg, that patch could be showing what we in the trade call a green halo effect. It could be decomposition. Nutrients, various things seeping into the ground and fertilizing the immediate area.”
The little anthropologist leaned back in his seat, his eyes staring off into the empty sky ahead. “I think it’s time we call the sheriff,” he said. “Unless somebody has buried some dead cattle down there, I think we’ve found what the lady was afraid we’d find.”
FIVE
They unearthed the first body at a little after three o’clock that same afternoon. It was a woman in her late twenties whose handbag had been buried beside her under 18 inches of soil. Identification in the handbag indicated the victim was a twenty-eight-year-old nurse from San Francisco named Michelle Sykes. She had been employed at San Francisco General Hospital. A wallet inside the handbag held nearly $40 in currency. The woman had been shot once in the head at close range. The body was fully clothed in slacks, blouse and Nike running shoes. Harvey Draper estimated she had been in the ground between two and three weeks.