Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories Page 8

  It was some nice view, and some nice night. Peaceful, which was just what I needed, and plenty of it, after the past twenty-four hours or so. After I'd left the Pta. des Farayos I'd found a guy in Cala Ratjada who spoke English, and he'd gone with me to the local Guardia Civil station. Red tape and the language barrier hung me up there most of the night. But Dale had been treated immediately by a local doctor and then taken to a hospital in Palma. And York and Nina had been found and detained in custody, pending a full investigation.

  Today, there had been more questions, a visit with the American consul, papers to fill out, a trip to the hospital, accommodations to find, a call to Brita at the Little John Bar in Magalluf and an overseas call to Millard Frost in San Francisco. Dale was going to be fine; the doctors said he would suffer no permanent damage from the drugs he'd been given—amphetamines, mostly—and that he would be back on his feet again in a few days. I had told that to Brita, and I had told it to Millard Frost along with the rest of the story. Both of them were relieved and both of them were grateful—Frost to the sweet offer of a week's paid vacation for my trouble.

  So here I was. I'd had a nap and a late supper in the hotel's lavish dining room, and as I stood on the balcony I could hear the sultry beat of Spanish guitars drifting up from the patio garden below. It got into your blood, that music. I wondered if I ought to go down there and join the festivities. Well, why not? I could have a beer or two and watch the people dancing—and maybe, just maybe, I could find a lonely, English-speaking lady to keep me company.

  Even for an old fart like me, there might still be a little magic in a warm Mediterranean night.

  PRIVATE EYE BLUES

  Sunday Morning Coming Down . . .

  That's the title of a sad popular song by Kris Kristofferson, about a man with no wife and no children and nowhere to go and very little to look forward to on a quiet Sunday morning. On this quiet Sunday morning I was that man. Nowhere to go and very little to look forward to.

  I carried a cup of coffee into the living room of my flat in San Francisco's Pacific Heights. It was a pretty nice day out, cloudless, a little windy. The part of the Bay I could see from my front windows was a rippled green and dotted with sailboats, like a bas-relief map with a lot of small white flags pinned to it.

  I moved over to the tier of bookshelves that covered one wall, where most of my six-thousand-odd detective and mystery pulp magazines were arranged. I ran my fingers over some of the spines: Black Mask, Dime Detective, Clues, Detective Fiction Weekly, Detective Story. I had started collecting them in 1947, and that meant almost three decades of my life were on those shelves—nearly three-fifths of the time I had been on this earth—and next Friday, I would be fifty years old.

  I took one of the Black Masks down and looked at the cover: Chandler, Whitfield, Nebel, Babcock—old friends whom once I could have passed a quiet Sunday with, who would have lifted me out of most any depressed mood I might happen to be in. But not this Sunday.

  The telephone rang.

  I keep the thing in the bedroom, and I went in there and caught up the receiver. It was Eberhardt, a sober-sided lieutenant of detectives and probably my closest friend for about the same number of years as I had been collecting the pulps.

  "Hello, hot stuff," he said. "Get you out of bed?"

  "No. I've been up for hours."

  "You're getting to be an early bird in your old age."

  "Yeah."

  "Listen, how's for a little cribbage and a lot of beer this afternoon? Dana's off to Sausalito for the day."

  "I don't think so, Eb," I said. "I'm not in the beer-and-cribbage mood."

  "You sound like you're in a mood, period."

  "I guess I am, a little."

  "Private eye blues, huh?"

  "Yeah—private eye blues."

  He made chuckling sounds. "Wouldn't happen to have anything to do with your fiftieth coming up, would it? Hell, fifty's the prime of life. I ought to know, tiger, I been there almost a year now."

  "Sure."

  "Well, you change your mind about the beer, at least, come on over. I'll save you a can."

  We rang off, and I went back to the living room and finished my coffee and tried not to think about anything. I might as well have tried not to breathe. I got up and paced around for a while, aimlessly.

  Sunday morning coming down . . .

  Abruptly, the old consumptive cough started up. So I sat down again, handkerchief to my mouth, and listened to the dry, brittle sounds echo through the empty flat. Cigarettes—damned cigarettes! An average of two packs a day for thirty-five years, thirty-five out of fifty. More than a half-million cigarettes. More than ten million lungfuls of tobacco smoke.

  Knock it off, I told myself. What's the use in that kind of thinking? Once more I got to my feet—all I seemed to be doing this morning was standing up and sitting down. Well, I had to get out of there, that was all, before I became claustrophobic. Go somewhere, do something. A long solitary drive, maybe; I just did not want to see Eberhardt or anybody else.

  I put on an old corduroy jacket, left the flat and picked up my car. The closest direction out of the city was north, and so I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge and straight up Highway 101. Some two hours later, in redwood country a few miles north of Cloverdale, I swung off toward the coast—and eventually, past two o'clock, I reached Highway One and turned south again.

  There, the sun was invisible above a high-riding bank of fog, and you could smell the sharp, clean odor of the sea; traffic was only sporadic. The breakers hammering endlessly against the shoreline began to have a magnetic attraction, and near Anchor Bay I pulled off onto a bluff. I left my car in the deserted parking area, found a path leading down to an equally deserted beach.

  I walked along the beach, watching the waves unfold, listening to their rhythmic roar and to the sound of gulls wheeling unseen somewhere in the mist. It was a lonely place, but the loneliness was part of its appeal. A good spot for me on this Sunday.

  The cold began to get to me after half an hour or so, and the cough started again. I came back up the path, and when I reached the bluff I saw that another vehicle had pulled into the parking area—a dusty, green pickup truck with a small, dusty camper attached to the bed. It listed a little to the left in back and the reason for that was evident enough: the tire there was flat. Nearby, motionless except for wind-tossed hair and clothing, two men and a girl stood looking at the tire, like figures in some sort of alfresco exhibit.

  I started in their direction, the direction of my car. The crunching sound of my steps carried above the whisper of the surf, and the three of them glanced up. They did some shifting of position that I didn't pay much attention to, exchanged a few words; then they stepped away from the pickup and approached me, walking in long, matching strides like marchers in a parade. We all stopped, a few feet apart, along the driver's side of my car.

  "Hi," one of the men said. He was in his early twenties, the same approximate age as the other two, and he had longish red hair and a droopy mustache; wore a poplin windbreaker, blue jeans and chukka boots. He looked nervous, his smile nothing more than a forced stretching of his lips.

  Both the other guy and the girl seemed to be just as nervous. His hair was dark, cut much shorter than the redhead's, and he had a dark, squarish face; his outfit consisted of slacks, a plaid lumberman's jacket and brown loafers. She was plain, thin-lipped, pale, wearing a long heavy car coat and a green bandanna tied forward around her head like a monk's cowl. Chestnut-colored hair fell across her shoulders. All three of them had their hands buried in their pockets.

  I nodded and said, "Hi."

  "We've had a flat," the redhead said.

  "So I see."

  "We haven't got a jack."

  "Oh. Well, I've got one. You're welcome to use it."

  "Thanks."

  I hesitated, frowning a little. You get feelings sometimes, when you've been a cop in one form or another most of your life, and you learn to trust th
em. I had one of those feelings now, and it said something was wrong here—very wrong. Their nervousness was part of it, but there was also a heavy, palpable tension among the three of them: people caught up in some sort of volatile and perhaps dangerous drama. Maybe it was none of my business, but the cop's instinct, the cop's innate curiosity, would not allow me to ignore the feeling of wrongness.

  I said, "It's a good thing I happened to be here. There doesn't seem to be much traffic in these parts today."

  The redhead took his left hand out of his pocket and pressed diffident fingers against his mustache. "Yeah," he said, "a good thing."

  The girl snuffled a little from the cold, produced a handkerchief, snapped it open and blew her nose. Her eyes were focused straight ahead.

  The dark-haired guy shifted his feet, and his gaze was furtive. He drew the flaps of his jacket in across his stomach. "Pretty cold out here," he said pointedly.

  I glanced over at the pickup; it had Oregon license plates. "Going far?"

  "Uh . . . Bodega Bay."

  "You on vacation?"

  "More or less."

  "Must be a little cramped, the three of you in that camper."

  "We like it cramped," the redhead said. His voice had gone up an octave or two. "How about your jack, okay?"

  I got my keys out and stepped back around the car and opened the trunk. The three of them stayed where they were, watching me. They don't belong together, I thought, not those three—and that, too, was part of the feeling of wrongness. The redhead was the mod type, with his long hair and mustache, and the dark one had a more conservative look. Did that mean anything? One could be an interloper, the unwanted third wheel—though in a situation that may have had a lot more meaning than the average kind of two's-company-three's-a-crowd thing. If that was it, which one? The girl had not looked at one guy more than the other; her eyes, crinkled against the wind, were still focused straight ahead.

  I unhooked the jack and took it out and closed the trunk again. When I returned to them I said, "Maybe I'd better set this up for you. It's trickier to operate than most."

  "We can manage," the dark guy said.

  "Just the same . . ."

  I took the jack over to the rear of the pickup; the spare tire was propped against the bumper. There were little windows in each of the camper doors, one of them draped in rough cloth and the other one clear. I glanced inside through the clear window. There were storage cupboards, a small table with bunk-type benches on two sides, a ladder that led up to sleeping facilities above the cab; all of it neat and clean, with everything put away or tied down that might roll around when they were in motion.

  The three of them came over and formed another half-circle, the girl in the middle this time. I got down in a crouch and slid the jack under the axle and fiddled with it, getting it in place. As soon as I began to work the handle, both the redhead and the dark-haired one pitched in to help. Nothing passed between any of them that I could see.

  It took us fifteen minutes to change the tire. I tried several times to make conversation, small talk that might give me a clue as to what was going on among them, which of them didn't belong, but they weren't having any. The boys gave me occasional monosyllables, and the girl, snuffling, did not say anything at all.

  When I had worked the handle to lower the truck onto all four tires again and pulled the jack out from underneath, I said, "Well, there you go. You'd better get that flat repaired at the first station you come to. You don't want to be driving around without a spare."

  "We'll do that," the dark guy said.

  I gave them a let's-bridge-the-generation-gap smile. "You wouldn't happen to have a beer or a soft drink or something inside, would you? Manual labor always makes me thirsty."

  The redhead looked at the girl, then at the dark-haired one, and began to fidget "Sorry—nothing at all."

  "We'd better get moving," the dark guy said, and he picked up the flat and slid it into the metal holder attached to the undercarriage, locked it down. Then the three of them went immediately to the driver's door.

  I did not want to let them go, but there was no way I could think of to keep them there. Following, I watched the redhead open the door and climb in. That gave me a good look inside the cab, but there wasn't much to see; nothing there that shouldn't be there, nothing at all on the seat or on the little shelf behind the seat, or on the dashboard or on the passenger-side floorboards. The girl got in second, and that made the dark one the driver. He swung the door shut, started the engine.

  "Take it easy," I said, and lifted my hand. None of them looked at me. The pickup jerked forward, a little too fast, tires spraying gravel, and pulled out onto Highway One. It went away to the south, gathering speed.

  I stood watching until they were out of sight. Then I went back to my car and got inside and started her up and put the heater on high. So now what? Drive back to San Francisco, forget about this little incident? That was the simplest thing to do. But I could not get it out of my head. One of those kids, or maybe even more than one, did not belong. The more I thought about it, the more I felt I ought to know which of them it was. More importantly, there was that aura of tension and anxiety all three had projected.

  I had no real cause to play detective, but I did have a duty to my conscience and to the vested interests of others, and I did have a strong disinclination to return to my empty, quiet flat. So all right. So I would do some of what I had been doing in one form or another, for bread and butter, the past thirty-one years.

  I put the car in gear and drove out and south on the highway. It took me four miles to catch sight of them. They were moving along at a good clip, maybe ten over the speed limit but within the boundaries of safety. I adjusted my speed to match theirs, with several hundred yards between us. It was not the best time of day for a shagging operation—coming on toward dusk —and the thick, drifting fog cut visibility to a minimum; but the pickup's lights were on and I could track it well enough by the diffused red flickers of the tail lamps.

  We went straight down the coast, through Stewart's Point and past Fort Ross. There was still not much traffic, but enough so that we weren't the only two vehicles on the road. The fog got progressively heavier, took on the consistency of a misty drizzle and forced me to switch on the windshields wipers. Daylight faded into the long, cold shadows of night. When we reached Jenner, at the mouth of the Russian River, it was full dark.

  A few miles farther on, the pickup came into Bodega Bay and went right on through without slowing. So that made the dark-haired one a liar about their destination. I wondered just where it was they were really headed, and asked myself how far I was prepared to follow them. I decided all the way, until they stopped somewhere, until I satisfied myself one way or another about the nature of their relationship with each other. If that meant following them into tomorrow, even into another state—okay. I had no cases pending, nothing on my hands and too much on my mind; and work, purposeful or purposeless, was the only real antidote I knew for self-pity and depression.

  Valley Ford, Tomales, Point Reyes . . . the pickup did not alter its speed. We were maybe thirty miles from the Golden Gate Bridge then, and I was running low on gas. I had enough to get me into San Francisco, but not much farther than that.

  The problem of stopping to refuel turned out to be academic. Just south of Olema Village the pickup slowed and I saw its brake lights flash. Then it swung off onto a secondary road to the west, toward the Point Reyes National Seashore.

  When I got to the intersection a couple of minutes later, my headlamps picked up a sign with a black-painted arrow and the words Public Campground, 3 Miles. So maybe they were going to stop here for the night, or for supper anyway. I debated the wisdom of running dark. The fog was thinner along here, curling tendrils moving rapidly in a sharp, gusty wind, and you could see jagged patches of sky, like pieces in an astronomical jigsaw puzzle. Visibility was fairly good, and there did not figure to be much traffic on the secondary road, and I did not wa
nt to alert them. I switched off the lights, turned onto the road drove along at less than twenty.

  The terrain had a rumpled look because this area was a major San Andreas Fault zone. I passed a little "sag pond" where runoff water had collected in depressions created by past earthquakes. Exactly three miles in, close to the ocean—I could hear again the whisper of combers—the campground appeared on the left. Backed in against high sand dunes westward, and ringed by pine and fir to the east and south, it was a small, state-maintained facility with wooden outhouses and stone barbecues and trash receptacles placed in reminder every few yards.

  The pickup was there, lights still on, pulled back near the trees on the far edge of the grounds.

  I saw it on a long diagonal, partially screened by the evergreens. Instead of driving abreast of the entrance and beyond, where they might see or hear me, I took my car onto the berm and cut off the engine. Ten seconds later, the pickup's lights went out.

  I sat motionless behind the wheel, trying to decide what to do next, but the mind is a funny thing: all the way here I had been unable to clarify the reasons why I felt one or more of those three didn't belong, and now that I was thinking about something else, memory cells went click, click, click, and all at once I knew just what had been bothering me—three little things that, put together, told me which of them was the interloper. I felt myself frowning. I still had no idea what the situation itself was, but what I had just figured out made the whole thing all the more strange and compelling.

  I reached up, took the plastic dome off the interior light and unscrewed the bulb; then I got out of the car, went across the road. The wind, blowing hard and cold, had sharp little teeth in it that bit at the exposed skin on my face and hands. Overhead, wisps of fog fled through the darkness like chilled fingers seeking warmth.