by Jack Lynch
“He’d really like you to try, Maribeth.”
She raised one shoulder and let it sag. “I suppose then I’ll have to do it. But tell him not to expect any whiz-bang sidebars. And tell him they have to finish their digging first.”
I smiled. “That should satisfy him.” I started for the doorway, then turned back. “Sidebars?”
“Sure. You used to work for a newspaper. You know what a sidebar is, a piece related to a main story.”
“And when we were recalling that time you phoned the paper, to tell us you were going to take the big jump. You said you had a possible story, or maybe at least some caption matter.”
“What about it?”
“Like you said, I used to work for a newspaper. Did you used to work for a newspaper?”
“Why sure. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“No. About the only thing we’ve ever talked about is death. When did you work for a newspaper? Were you a reporter?”
“Yes, a reporter and a feature writer. Oh, not on anything like the Chronicle, but I worked on a couple of weeklies up in Oregon, soon after I got out of school. Then I worked for a small daily over in the Central Valley before I got married. I spent three, maybe four years in the business.”
“Did you save clips of the stuff you wrote?”
“Some of them. But why?”
“Maribeth, there are a lot of people out there who don’t like newspaper people. Maybe somebody who feels their privacy’s been invaded, or who resents something you might have written about them.”
“Oh, but Bragg, that was all so long ago. Twenty years, at least.”
“That’s not such a long time at our age. Go get your clips, Maribeth.”
SEVEN
It didn’t take long to get through the file of old newspaper clippings. Maribeth brought out a manila folder. I settled down and began to go through them, soon realizing she had been right. Her newspaper career had been a modest one. She had covered visiting speakers at club luncheons, ground breaking ceremonies and local cleanup campaigns. She had reviewed high school plays, written obituaries, did an occasional weather story and interviewed the wife of a then recently elected mayor of a small town over in the Central Valley east of San Francisco. In other words, she had done the pedestrian work that makes up the major portion of newspapering in small towns, where what she wrote would be of interest only to the surrounding community.
If our serial killer lurked somewhere in Maribeth’s news-papering past he was well concealed. I had in front of me between 30 and 40 stories she had clipped out and saved. Most of them took only a glance at the headline to be discarded.
Maribeth was sitting nearby on the sofa, watching with a small smile. When I’d been through the batch I looked up at her.
“This is the cream of the crop?”
She laughed. “I told you that you wouldn’t find anything. It’s just small-time stuff.”
“You never know.” I began going through the clips again, reading a few of them now. Small-town stuff had been known to cock a trigger or two.
One of the obituaries she had written puzzled me. It was about an attorney named Vanderhoff who seemed to have been a prominent figure in the little valley city where Maribeth had worked. It was a long story compared with her other pieces, and what she had written was as much a tribute to the man as it was an obit.
“What did this man die of?”
“Who?”
I held up the clip. “Attorney Vanderhoff. You go on and on about him. You say here he was only forty-seven. What did he die of?”
“He was shot outside his home one night.”
“Murdered?”
“Yes.”
“Did they catch the person who did it?”
“Not that I know of. Not while I was working around there.”
“Did they have any strong suspects?”
“I never heard, but I wasn’t a part of that. I just did the obituary. I got out the stories we had written about him in the past. I called around to friends and others who had known him. I never stepped foot out of the office working on that one. It was the male reporters, of course, who got to do all the juicy stuff.”
I read through the story again. She described Vanderhoff as a prominent criminal attorney, but her story didn’t mention any specific people he had represented, nor cite any of his cases. The story itself would seem a pretty thin motive for anybody wanting to harm Maribeth. Still, it was the only thing in the batch that had possibility.
“Would you remember the name of any detective who might have worked on the killing?”
“Lord, no. I probably read who it was in the stories we ran about it at the time, but there’s no way I could remember that now.”
I gathered up the clippings and put them back into the folder, all except for the paean to attorney Vanderhoff. “I’d like to take this one with me. I’ll make a copy and return it.”
Maribeth looked at me as if I had just spoken in some Mandarin dialect. “Whatever for?”
“It’s called a starting place, Maribeth. It gives me something to do. I’ll go waste a few hours on the phone until I’m sure there’s no connection with this man’s shooting and the troubles we’re having now. Then I’ll look for another starting place and waste whatever time it takes to satisfy myself it isn’t connected to your premonitions and danger. And I’ll keep doing that until I find something that does seem to tie into things, then I’ll go after that one like a bullet.”
I left her staring after me as if I were a little balmy. When I got off the elevator down in the lobby Maribeth’s niece Bobbie was just coming in, her arms filled with smartly designed carrying sacks from Union Street boutiques and chichi shops.
“Don’t you get enough of that sort of thing down in Carmel?” I asked her.
“Never,” she told me. “Why is it you always leave here without me on your arm?”
“Because I’m working.”
“Not because I’m too skinny or forthright or any of those things?”
“No. Just because I’m working. As a matter of fact, what are you doing for dinner this evening?”
She batted her eyelashes at me. She really did, just like they used to do in old silent movies. She batted her eyelashes and I snorted.
“Why, I have no plans at the moment, sir. Why do you ask?”
“I thought maybe we could grab a bite somewhere.”
“Just somewhere? That means I don’t have to change out of my jeans?”
“Right. I think you look just fine in your jeans. Of course if you decided to put on a dress I could take you some place a little more elegant, with starchy waiters and soft music.”
“Forget that,” she told me, heading for the elevator. “I’ll be in jeans. Pick me up at seven-thirty.”
The small town in the valley was named Mesquite. Back in the office I put in a call to the Mesquite chief of police, explained what I was after to a couple of people before being put through to Chief William Terry. I introduced myself, told the chief what I did for a living and said he could check me out by phoning Sergeant Barry Smith in Santa Rosa. Chief Terry didn’t feel it was necessary to check. Instead he gave a low whistle.
“So you’re tied in with our latest graveyard. How many people have you dug up by now?”
“I myself haven’t had to dig up any of them, thank God. The last time I talked with the sergeant there were a total of five. But somebody told me they’d heard a sixth had been unearthed. The latest at least sounds promising. Maybe you’ve heard of him, an ex-con and mob-connected figure named Diogenes Holmes. I understand they call him Dizzy.”
“It rings a faint bell. Six of them, huh? And they figure there’s more?”
“That’s what the sergeant figures.”
“Huh! Well what is it you want from us?”
So I told him about the Vanderhoff killing in his town nearly twenty years earlier and said there was a remote chance it could be connected somehow with the bodies being unearthed.
I didn’t go into all of it. Doing that sort of work over the telephone involves a certain amount of trust on the part of both parties. It was tough enough trying to get information out of a cop who didn’t know you without telling him about Maribeth and the psychic business. I told the chief I wanted to find out if an arrest had ever been made in the Vanderhoff shooting. Or, if an arrest hadn’t been made, whether the people working the case felt they knew who had done it, even if they couldn’t get enough evidence to take it to court. That happens regularly.
“You’re talking before my time, friend,” Chief Terry told me. “This is going to take some research. I’ll put somebody on it. Give me your number.”
I gave it to him, then put in another call to Santa Rosa. This time the sergeant was in his office. He confirmed what Morrisey had told me about Dizzy Holmes. I asked him if finding the Holmes body made his life any easier.
“Just the opposite. Before we found the remains of Mr. Holmes, the one thing all other bodies had in common was that they seemed like ordinary, innocent citizens. I’ve kept hoping we would stumble onto a common link, like having them all in the same restaurant at the same time when something really unusual occurred. But now Mr. Holmes shows up with all the twisted background and evil corners the world’s tramps give you.”
“Maybe he was in the same restaurant along with the others,” I suggested.
“It couldn’t be that easy,” Smith said. “No, finding Dizzy up there just really screws up the works.”
Chief Terry called back at a little before three o’clock. He told me that an arrest had never been made in the Vanderhoff case, but that they did have a lead suspect. He gave me the name of the detective, now retired, who had worked the killing.
“Stuffy Braddock,” Terry told me. “He was a good cop. I was just talking to him. He’s expecting your call.”
Stuffy might have been a good cop, but he also was a grand tale spinner. Garrulous, you could call him. I learned that Vanderhoff had been gunned down at 10:17 p.m. on a Tuesday evening in the driveway at the rear of his rambling ranch-style home just outside of Mesquite. Vanderhoff had just returned from a dinner and subsequent “liaison,” as Braddock called it, with a woman friend other than his wife. The Mesquite police had quickly determined that Mrs. Vanderhoff had an ironclad alibi for the time of the shooting, and through discreet police work they had managed to keep the woman friend angle enough in the background so that the slain man’s wife never learned of her, avoiding another load of grief she would have had to deal with.
I was quoted enough from the Vanderhoff autopsy report to suspect Detective Braddock either had a photographic memory or a copy of the report in front of him. By the time Stuffy got around to the part I was interested in my ear was sore from holding the telephone receiver to it.
“The man who shot him was named Billy North,” Braddock told me. “Everybody called him Billy the Kid. He was a punk of only seventeen at the time. He and an older brother had been arrested a few months earlier for strong-arm robbery. Billy got a suspended sentence, partly because of his age, I guess, but his brother, three years older, was sentenced to state prison. The brother only did about a year, as I recall, but Billy was so hopping mad he decided to take out the attorney who tried unsuccessfully to defend him, and that would be attorney Vanderhoff, of course.
“A reliable informant told us about it,” Braddock said, “but we had no weapon, no witness, no signed confession and no case you could take to court. But we knew Billy did it.”
“What happened to Billy after that?”
“Oh, he kept on being his same rotten self. He was one of the violent ones, Bragg, and at that age they can be mean. He finally served some time, on more than one occasion. The last time was over in San Quentin. He got himself into a prison gang fight. Suffered brain damage. Lives now with his brother in San Francisco or Daly City or somewhere near there. Understand he can’t talk or walk or even think straight. Of course as a cop I figure that last was his problem all along.”
EIGHT
There were no shooting stars nor passionate aftermath to the dinner date I had that evening with young Bobbie, she with the gamine face and trim bottom.
It was a funny evening. I wasn’t sure what might have been wrong. Maybe both of us had been expecting too much since that one flirty conversation we’d had down in Carmel months earlier. Maybe she spent too much time thinking about old boyfriends, and maybe I spent too much time worrying about Allison France up in Barracks Cove. Or maybe both of us were too worried about Maribeth sitting back in her apartment fearful for her life.
I had made another phone call to Santa Rosa. They had temporarily halted the unearthing operation at Jack London State Park. Another body had been uncovered, a woman, nude to the waist with blood spatter marks across her chest. They wanted a specialist from Sacramento to examine her at the grave site before removing the body. The specialist wouldn’t arrive until the next morning. They knew there was at least one more body in addition to the half nude woman. That made at least eight victims so far. Detective Sergeant Smith sounded over the phone ready to tear his hair out. My story about Billy “the Kid” North didn’t cheer him up.
“Where did the glitter go?” Bobbie asked now as I studied the bill the waiter had just dropped off at the table. We were in a comfortable old English-style restaurant on Lombard Street, down the hill from Maribeth’s apartment. Neither of us had wanted to get too far away from Maribeth, sitting alone up there.
“What glitter is that?”
“Whatever we had between us down in little old Carmel.”
“You noticed that, did you?”
“I don’t mean to say it’s your fault. I haven’t been my normally chatty self, either. I’m not sleeping that well up at Maribeth’s. But you also seem a little glum.”
“I’m beginning to feel a little worn out.”
She reached across the table and patted one of my hands. “Maybe we can try it again sometime.”
And that was about as intimate as our conversation got that evening. I drove Bobbie back to the apartment and went up with her and waited until I heard a deadbolt and chain being put on the door, then went down to the car and drove back over to Sausalito.
I lived in a smallish apartment on a steep hillside overlooking Bridgeway, the main thoroughfare that wound around the water’s edge from the southeast end, through the downtown area then north past a couple of parks and the houseboat community. I was between downtown and the houseboats, avoiding the rollicking noise you could hear from either.
Usually when I got home, no matter how rough the day had been, I could heave a sigh of relief and feel sane and settled in. It didn’t work this time. I had turned on the television set and played spin the dial, but there was nothing I felt like watching and I turned the set off again. I went into the kitchen and looked around at the refrigerator and stove, stared out the casement window at the stars in the sky overhead, wandered back into the living room and sank down on the sofa to stare into space.
I was feeling down, and the bodies they were finding up in Jack London State Park weren’t the only reason for it. I got up again and crossed to the remote phone sitting in its mother ship on the kitchen counter and carried it back to the sofa. I punched out Allison’s number in Barracks Cove.
A man’s voice answered. I looked at my watch; it was nearly ten o’clock.
“Is Allison there?” I asked.
“Who shall I say is calling?”
“Why, are you her new secretary or something?”
The man hesitated. “No, I am not her secretary. I’ll get her for you.”
I heard him call her name. He called her Allie. I had tried calling her that one time and she in turn had begun calling me Peetie. I went back to Allison. But now I could sense how it was going to go. I was all wrong thinking I could talk to her just then. I was a little upset and a little bit angry. What I should have done was to just hang up before she got to the phone.
“Hello?�
�
“Hi, Allison, Bragg here.”
“Oh. Hello, Peter. Just a moment, please.”
What was the tone of her voice? Noncommittal? Aloof? Warm? No, not warm. Noncommittal. She had partially covered the receiver and was saying something to somebody she called Gene. It was another moment before she spoke to me again.
“What have you been up to?” she asked.
“Same old stuff. How about yourself?”
“I’m keeping busy.”
It got a little awkward. She was waiting for me to continue, but for the first time in all the while I’d known Allison I couldn’t think of something easy and comfortable to say to her. I was thinking about the man who apparently had gone into another room.
“I don’t really have a lot to talk about,” I told her. “Just thought I’d check in and say hello.”
“I see.”
“How’s the work going?”
“Like I said, I’m keeping busy.”
She sounded evasive. There was another awkward pause, awkward for me, at least. “I was thinking that if I could break away I’d try to get up there someday soon.”
“Time might be a problem,” she told me. “I don’t know how much I’d have to give you. You’d better phone ahead first.”
“Sure, I can do that. Do you work evenings as well these days?”
“No, but I keep busy with other activities.”
“Oh? What sort?”
“I’m taking a night course at the local college.”
“What on?”
“Theory of Color. It’s a new study being offered up here. I’ve been having some problems. I thought the class might help solve them.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. Allison worked in many media, but was a premier watercolorist, a member of the American Watercolor Association and probably one of the top five people in her field on the West Coast. She should have been teaching the class, or even teaching the person teaching it, not taking it herself. “Problems with your painting?”