Private eye four pack, p.24
Private Eye Four-Pack, page 24
Maybe I should, I thought. Maybe I should get out while I can. And then what?
I pictured the deadly routine of some nice, safe job and shook my head. Opening a desk drawer, I took out my purse and put away the money, firmly clasping the metal closure. Then, for a long unfocused moment, I sat, rubbing my fingers against the soft leather.
It’s not a pretty or a feminine bag. It’s huge and sturdy, handmade to order of beautifully embossed Mexican leather with the inside split into three sections. It’s big enough to function as a briefcase, handsome enough to go with me everywhere. Jack gave it to me when we opened the agency.
“Okay, darlin’, so I went overboard; so we can’t afford it. How many times do we open our own office? Come over here and kiss me and let’s get on with this celebration. Why, Delilah, what’s this? You’re crying…”
I blinked fiercely, dropped my purse back in the drawer, and slammed it shut. The glare from the window had mellowed to a glow as the sun crawled behind a neighboring building. A long, golden afternoon lay ahead. Golden for those who had things to look forward to. Homecomings. Laughter. All the comfortable, routine happenings people take for granted.
No, I wouldn’t think about that. Think about the job. I was being paid quite well to give it my exclusive attention.
God knows I’d get little except monetary satisfaction from finding Cathy Crowell. There would certainly be no joyful family reunion. No matter how much money her uncle was willing to shell out, I couldn’t believe he cared about the girl. At best, she was an unwanted responsibility, grudgingly acknowledged; at worst—well, I’d seen enough to think of some pretty sick possibilities. Whatever his motives, I’d get no thanks from Cathy for bringing her home. This was the second time she’d run away. Odds were she’d do it again.
Maybe I could talk to her. Nothing guaranteed that she would listen. I’d made other attempts to penetrate that prickly covering of hostility that kids her age wear like armor plate. All I could do was try.
“It happened again, didn’t it? A big kick in the teeth for your trouble.”
“I swear, Jack, it’s the last time, the very last time—”
“Darlin’, darlin’, you’ll never change. These runaway kids touch you too deeply. You’ll always keep trying to reach them.”
“And failing.”
“Maybe. Maybe so, but you cared enough to try.”
That was me all right. Never know when I’m licked. So I’d try to talk some sense into Cathy’s head, but first I had to find her.
I opened the drawer, took out my purse, and checked the contents. My gun was missing. It was back at the apartment. I thought about going to get it, but I just sat there, immobilized by indecision. The folder was still on my desk, the one that contained all the useless information on Jack’s death. I picked it up and put it away and twisted my hands together. It was only four-thirty. I knew the area where George Crowell thought his niece might have gone. It was too early to go up there; the locals don’t crawl out from under their rocks until long after the sun goes down. I didn’t really need a gun—instead I could use the time to make a detour.
I called my answering service.
“Rita, it’s Delilah.”
“Hey, kiddo. Checking out for today?”
“Yes. I have a job.”
“Great.” She paused expectantly. “Well, come on. Tell all.”
Until Jack died, Rita was little more than a friendly voice on the other end of a telephone wire. Then she made it her business to be there if I needed her, propping me up and holding my hand. I needed her a lot. I think of myself as an orphan, which is ironic considering the number of relatives on my mother’s side. Along with my biblical name, she left me hundreds of assorted aunts, uncles and cousins. None of them lived west of Tennessee, and all of them, after my one short visit, considered my speech and life-style both foreign and repulsive.
My dad was an only child of parents who had no brothers or sisters. I’m sure there must have been other women after mom died. He was a virile, attractive man. However, none of them took my mother’s place either in his heart or our lives, so there were just the two of us until my freshman year in college.
On one sunny Saturday afternoon while I studied for a history exam, Dad puttered in the yard, pruning and cutting the grass. As I sat at the kitchen table with my books and notes, I could see the mountains rising steeply, etched in startling clarity against a sky washed bright blue by winter rains. The lawn mower droned on and on. I wondered, irritably, if he would ever finish the damn grass so I could concentrate, and then, finally, the cold, still certainty grew that the mower had been running too long, much too long for our small yard. I ran, screaming, out the back door; but it was too late. My father had survived six years of service as an M.P. in the marines and twenty years of duty as a cop to die of a cerebral hemorrhage on the soft green grass.
So there was no family to turn to when Jack died. My friends from school were scattered. What few remained, plus the ones from my years in the L.A.P.D., rallied around, but it was awkward and strained, and they had to get on with their lives.
Jack really was an orphan. Dozens of his friends came by or called, but only one, Ted Lacey, lived in Orange County. He made a point of trying to help, but he was practically a stranger, at least in the beginning. So was Rita. Maybe, because she was a woman, it was easier to lean on her. I still can’t decide if I really like her. She’s pushy as hell. She has a way of getting you to blurt out things you don’t want to tell and giving you advice you don’t want to hear. Good advice, but blunt and painful.
I didn’t want to be told that I was becoming paranoid on the subject of Jack’s murder. So I didn’t tell her anything about the job, just, “Can’t talk now, Rita. Later, okay?”
“Sure, kiddo,” she said, and sighed.
She knew as well as I did that I was going to Laguna Beach for one more talk with Amy Terrell.
THREE
It took an hour to drive from my office in Santa Ana to Laguna Beach. Early rush hour traffic reduced the freeway to a sluggish morass of cars. I beat my fist on the steering wheel and read billboards that promised upward mobility, clean breath and farm-fresh corn. You could definitely believe the last one. Gold-tasseled stalks marked one of the few remaining fields of the once enormous Irvine Ranch. Near the exit to the Laguna Freeway, a sign promised that The Largest Shopping Mall in Orange County would soon cover up the tomatoes and lima beans.
The freeway ended in a couple of miles, dumping traffic back on Laguna Canyon Road. Caltrans planned that it would go all the way to the ocean, but the locals put a stop to that, so the drive was long and winding with plenty of slow-moving traffic.
It hadn’t rained since March. Wild grasses had dried up, making a gold brown background for huge gray-mottled boulders and the dusty green of live oak. So far, Laguna residents had fought off the builders, but the tide of tract homes was creeping slowly down El Toro Road from burgeoning Mission Viejo and Laguna Hills. Now there was talk of the federal government making a national park out of the greenbelt area. After a summer visit to Yosemite, I had to wonder if the proposed park would be much of an improvement.
As the traffic funneled into downtown Laguna Beach, I slowed to a crawl and turned left on Coast Highway. The sun was sliding toward the horizon, angling harsh light off the water. Offshore, the fog waited, obscuring Catalina. As usual, parking was impossible. I went around the block, weasled into a lot clearly marked Restaurant Parking Only—Violators Towed Away. The sign was strictly for show. Jack and I had often joined Ted Lacey here for a drink. Never dinner. The food was terrible. The owner was too cheap to hire a decent chef or to enforce the parking decree.
I walked back to Amy Terrell’s shop. The Earthmother, she called it. It was tucked away in a miniature plaza between an art gallery and a shop specializing in Navajo jewelry. The stock was craft articles made from natural materials and ranged from intricate creations of dried weeds to hand-painted rocks. Through a window display of gourd planters, I could see the counter that ran across the back of the store, where Amy stood wrapping things in tissue and packing them into cardboard boxes.
As I opened the door, a bell jangled. Amy looked up, hope faded to resignation, and she ignored me. The file folder in my office contained a rundown on everybody connected with the case Jack had worked on before he was killed. I had it memorized. Amy Terrell: 27, 5’1”, 120 lbs., blond hair, green eyes.
Usually the limp hair needed a touch-up and frown lines traced across a splotchy forehead. Now her hair looked freshly colored and permed, and there were no lines visible in the smoothly made-up face. Instead of jeans and flip-flops, she wore a sundress, and I decided I’d have to revise my statistics on her weight downward to a hundred and five pounds. I felt a vague stab of resentment at how good she looked.
“Are you moving, Amy?”
She shook her head and said grudgingly, “The Sawdust Festival starts tomorrow.”
I must have driven past the festival grounds in Laguna Canyon, but I had been too preoccupied with traffic to notice the activity. The Sawdust Festival, a funky offshoot of Laguna’s traditional festival, full of crafts and flowers and strolling musicians, had been a favorite place for Jack and me to visit during July and August. My heart constricted as the fleeting thought, we’ll never go there together again, slipped through my mind. I crossed the room, leaned against the glass-topped counter, and watched her layer a box with newspaper from a stack on the counter.
“Can we talk?” I asked quietly.
“Talk! You don’t talk, you hassle.” A wisp of curl floated across her face. Impatiently she pushed it behind her ear. “Every time I turn around you’re giving me the third degree. I’ve told you over and over—what are you? Some kind of masochist? You enjoy reliving your husband’s last days?”
I flinched but stood my ground. “I don’t enjoy it. But if there’s some detail, anything—something you thought so unimportant you pushed it out of your mind…”
She finished a box, added extra newspapers on top, closed it. Picking up a roll of strapping tape, she snapped off two strips and sealed the box.
“There’s nothing. Nothing. Look, my old man took off. It happens all the time. You can look up the statistics yourself. It had no connection with Mr. West’s murder.”
Something had happened to alter more than Amy’s appearance. Why had she changed her mind about Frank? Was she finding a way to accept the inevitable?
“You weren’t so sure Frank had simply run away when you hired Jack to look for him,” I reminded her.
“It’s not something you like to admit to yourself. Okay? Now I can face it.”
“But you refused to accept it then,” I persisted. “When the police suggested the possibility, you didn’t believe it.”
“I know, but now—”
“Nothing’s changed, Amy.”
“You’re wrong. Time changes things, or at least it changes the way you look at them. I’ve had six lousy months of worry. Six months of crying at night and remembering. Frank had big ambitions. He was never satisfied to be a gardener. But you know what he used to say? ‘When I hit it big.’ Never we, never us. He didn’t care about anybody but himself.”
“That’s bitterness talking, Amy. At the time you instinctively felt something was wrong.”
She shrugged impatiently. “It seemed to me the police were dragging their feet. I kept picturing him hurt, maybe even dead. So I hired Mr. West.”
I shook my head. It was important to put things in their proper order. “You didn’t hire Jack right away. First you did some checking on your own.”
“All right. I went up to see some of Frank’s customers.”
Frank Terrell ran his own gardening service. All of his customers lived in North Bay Estates, a monied community north of town that protected its privacy with high walls, electric gates and guards.
“Most of them didn’t give a damn about Frank,” Amy said. “They were just mad because he wasn’t around to keep their ivy trimmed. Here I was worried to death and some old lady complained because he forgot and left her sprinklers running. Mr. Lacey was the only one who showed the slightest concern. He called me a couple of days later to see if I’d heard anything. I mentioned that I was planning to hire a private detective, and he suggested Mr. West.”
“Strictly routine,” Jack told me after Ted Lacey’s call. “Looks like this guy skipped out on his wife. Ted thinks Mrs. Terrell will feel better if I do some checking.”
“So I’m going to get stuck with running these personnel investigations while you go hold some grass widow’s hand.”
“That’s what comes of being the brains in this outfit.”
“…and Mr. West came up with a big fat zero.”
Something stirred on the edge of memory and then it was gone. I blinked a few times and swallowed. “Jack kept working on the case.”
“You say he did. All I know is what he told me. No leads. No unidentified bodies. No guys in the hospital with amnesia.”
“Also, no trace of Frank renting a car or buying an airplane ticket. How did he leave, Amy? He didn’t take the bus; his truck was on the street in front of your apartment when you got home. You had the car.”
“So what? She picked him up and they drove off into the sunset.”
“She? Another woman? As I remember, you insisted there was nobody else.”
“Haven’t you heard?” she asked bitterly. “The wife is always the last to know.”
A chill space opened beneath my breastbone. “You found out something.”
“It’s been a learning experience.”
“Don’t play word games, Amy. What did you find out?”
She yanked other cardboard box off the floor and began throwing things into it. If she’d discovered that Frank was having an affair, it would be the first piece of solid information after months of feeling as if I were fighting shadows. A possibility, a lead, and she just turned her back and sniffed. All the frustration came welling up.
I grabbed her arm and swung her around. “Damn you! Tell me the truth.”
“You’re hurting me—”
“Amy, what the hell’s going on out here?”
A man stood in the doorway leading to the rear office. A pair of faded Levi cutoffs hung low on his hips. Nobody had that particular shade of skin or that color of bleached hair unless he spent most of his waking hours exposed to the sun. My opinion of Amy fell to a new low. A beach bum, a surfer—that’s what she had picked to replace Frank, and not even a good representative of the species. This one was edging forty, definitely past his prime. Soon the sun would crack his skin like crazed veneer, if skin cancer didn’t ravage it first.
“Friend of yours?” I asked Amy.
She flushed, but she pulled away from me and went to him. The casual way he slipped a possessive arm around her shoulders answered my question. Despair squirmed in my chest.
“You haven’t found out a thing,” I said dully. “All that talk about Frank taking off with another woman—”
“It could be true. You don’t know for sure any more than I do.”
“I know you’re full of crap, lady.”
“And I know I’m sick of having you bug me about it. Tommy—”
She raised her eyes to Golden Boy and he responded with appropriate muscle flexing and a snarl, “You heard her. Out!”
I knew the type. His emotional involvement went no deeper than that golden surface. Scratch him and he’d bleed cold, salty water. I ignored him and kept my eyes on Amy’s face.
“So you’re writing Frank off, is that it?”
“What am I supposed to do?” she demanded. “Frank’s gone. I can’t wait forever. I deserve something, don’t I?”
“You got it, baby,” I said, and walked to the door.
“What about you, Mrs. West?” she called. “Jack’s dead; how long are you going to do the sackcloth and ashes routine?”
FOUR
I ran toward the parking lot with Amy’s words bouncing around my brain cavity. Dead, dead, dead…My feet slapped out the rhythm against the pavement, and the world shifted.
A howling wind whipped icy rain into stinging projectiles, scouring my face, blinding me to everything outside my small ring of light. I ran, knowing that out there in the darkness…
“Hey, watch it, lady.”
I stared uncomprehending into a stranger’s eyes, vaguely aware of the thump of my heedless body against his. More people, a whole cluster of them, swirled around me, all dressed the same in shorts and flowered shirts, their pale skins turning pink and mottled from a day in the sun.
“What’s the matter with this dame?”
“Who knows?”
“Doped to the gills, I bet.”
“What do you expect? We’re in California.”
I pushed away from their knowing eyes and beery breath and staggered the remaining block to the parking lot. I collapsed against the roof of my car and waited for the world to right itself.
My shoulders heaved and my breath came in burning, shuddering gasps, but a clean flash of anger brightened the darkness in my mind. I clutched the window moldings and wished it was Amy’s throat beneath my fingers. Goddamn bitch, crawling into bed with the first creep that came along and then trying to justify her actions by rearranging the details of Frank’s disappearance to ease her conscience.
From the beginning of my fumbling investigation, I had felt that a bond existed between us. We shared something, Amy and I—we’d each lost a husband. The difference was that she didn’t have that awful finality of death when she thought about Frank. If we could have exchanged places, if I was the one with a hope, any kind of hope, that Jack was alive…
Dully I noticed the fog closing in. It lay just offshore, endless, amorphous, waiting to swallow up the land. I unclenched my grip on the hard chrome window molding. My fingers throbbed, and noise began to filter back into my private circle of torment: traffic, people laughing—forced, hollow laughter—the thin, piercing howl of a flute. Several cars entered and exited the lot. I paid no attention to them until one stopped behind me and a familiar voice called, “Delilah?”
