Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, Vol. 86, No. 6. Whole No. 511, December 1985

TV dope show by Robert Twohy[3]

At 5:00 P.M. Weare filtered out the door, never looked back — clean getaway.

Two great old films were showing at the great old Fox Theater on Main Street four blocks from the Courthouse: Suspicion and Dial M for Murder. As a Hitchcock buff, he was looking forward.

First show was at 7:00 — he’d have dinner.

An April wind muscled him as he hurried through the big parking lot behind the Courthouse to his ’77 red Pinto and a few minutes later he was westbound toward El Camino, and Heine’s Hofbrau.

At the Greyhound on Brewster he swung in — when in the neighborhood he usually browsed it. A few times he had spotted someone he was looking for, about to ramble to far places.

Four or five citizens were waiting in the wide area behind the depot. No one he knew. But a scrawny kid with a backpack raised a tentative hand. Weare pulled off to the side, out of the way if a bus came charging through, and watched the kid meander toward him. The face was mainly nose, two small wary eyes at the top. “You’re Sergeant Weare.” Weare nodded. “I saw you in jail. A guy in my tank said who you were. I thought he was kidding. You look more like a minister.”

Weare, small and grey, had started professional life as a minister in Ohio. Seven years later he was in California, a juvenile probation officer. Seven years later, working good connections, he became San Mateo County’s oldest living sheriffs rookie. Now seventeen years later, he was a detective-sergeant, more or less in charge of homicide though Captain Losey had the title. But Losey’s job was mostly to talk at civic luncheons and impress people involved in county funding, leaving not much time to run investigations. So Weare had gradually taken over that function — fine by Losey.

“Do you know a dude named Frank Reese?”

Weare did.

“He has a sawed-off shotgun.”

Weare asked, “Want to get in out of the wind?”

“My bus is about due. I just thought that maybe you ought to know. I mean that Reese has a shotgun.”

“Have you seen it?” If the kid had, he’d be the first direct witness to it. Other dopers who had mentioned it seemed to have never actually seen it, just heard about it.

The kid said that he’d never actually seen it.

“Do you know anything else about him I should know?”

“Sometimes you read in the paper that a body’s been found — then if you see Reese that night he’s grinning and spending money and passing out good dope.”

The kid wasn’t telling him anything he hadn’t heard from other dopers, adding up to nothing. “What were you in jail for?”

“Why?”

Weare shrugged.

“Dope. They dropped the charges.”

“So you’re clear.”

“Uh huh.” A San Francisco bus came pounding around the depot. Weare called, “Thanks.” The kid waved, loped away, and jumped aboard.

Weare drove a mile south on El Camino to Heine’s.

Savoring prime roast beef, he let his idling brain turn to his last talk with Reese.

Two months ago, about 10:00 P.M., he had spotted a battered, rump-sprung LTD painted dead-black in the parking lot near the S.P. station in Lindenvale. Reese was in the donut shop on the corner, at a table alone.

Weare had showed him a drawing that was a reconstruction from a photo of the remains of the face of a dead young man found buried on a little-used beach south of Half Moon Bay a few days before, where the M. E. guessed he had been disintegrating probably since last fall. Two .22 shotgun shells were in the back of the skull.

Reese, black-bearded and burly, thirty years old, in his standard uniform of black denim jacket, black jeans, and black stomper boots, studied the drawing and said he didn’t know the guy. Weare said that some people he had talked to had thought the drawing resembled someone they had seen last October or so in Reese’s car.

Reese nodded. “Figures. Every time a body’s found, my name comes up.” His brown eyes could look flat and dull or somewhat amused, like now. “Know who started all those rumors about me?” Weare said he hadn’t thought about it. “Me, couple of years ago. I began dropping hints that I had a shotgun, that a dope mafia operated on the Peninsula, and the less known what I did for a living the better.”

What Reese did for a living Weare hadn’t nailed down. Reese had told him that he had inherited money, which he’d invested. His smirk said that if Weare didn’t believe that, okay by him. Weare hadn’t pushed the matter — no point at the time or since.

“The kids picked up on the rumors. Why? Because they’d left their straight homes, most of them, looking for excitement, a heavy scene. That’s what I give them, what they relate to — a TV show.”

“You’re the star.”

“You got it, Mr. Weare.” He turned to look out the big window by the table, grinned fiercely and waved to someone out there, murmured, “That chick’ll spread around you’re grilling me about this latest murder. So the show goes on. I began it and the kids keep it running.”

Weare sipped coffee. “Why did you tell me this?”

“I guess I was in the mood.”

“What if I spread it around?”

“Wouldn’t matter. The kids would say I was running a con on you. They want TV, not reality.” He flipped a finger at Weare. “So do you — cops, I mean.”

“We’re in the show, too?”

“Aren’t you?”

Weare gave his slight smile. He touched the pocket where he had slid the drawing of the dead boy. “Him, too?”

“Don’t lay him on me. He’s your contribution, not mine.”

Weare had left on that note and hadn’t seen Reese since.

The body had never been identified. The boy might have been brought a long way from home, wherever home was. Vague word that he might have been with Reese in October was nothing Weare could build on.

Leaving Heine’s, he mulled on what Reese had said — that everyone on and around the scene, dopers and cops and deputies, were mixed up in a show starring Reese, which the dead boy and other corpses had been no part of until dragged in by Weare or other lawmen, providing new thrills for the star’s young doper fans.

He got his mind on the two classic movies he was heading for, much pleasanter to think about than that he might be a supporting stooge in The Frank Reese Show.

The next three hours were a trip in Hitchcock’s world of elegant wickedry, not crime as is or ever was but as should be. Just once Weare would like to be involved in a case like Dial M, clean and crisp and winding up in a neat package, all questions answered, no slop left over. In seventeen years that hadn’t happened, but after a Hitchcock evening he could indulge in a dream or two.

At the left-turn lane on Howard in San Carlos, waiting behind a car for the green arrow, something caught the comer of his right eye — an LTD, dead-black and lopsided, looming in the curb lane, sliding beyond him to the red light. If the lane immediately right hadn’t been vacant, he might have missed it, made his left, and proceeded on home with no further thoughts of Frank Reese.

The scrap of profile he could glimpse between beard and shaggy black hair was turned left and slightly down — Reese seemed to be scowling fixedly at the side mirror, unaware of Weare.

Weare made his left, turned right the first block, scurried down Laurel to San Carlos Avenue, right-turned again, and hung in the left-tum lane, as northbound cars piled by on El Camino, the LTD not among them.

Half a minute later, he was cruising north, playing a hunch based on no more than the way Reese had been fixed on the side mirror, like super-watchful if anyone was coming up behind him.

Starting down the slope into Belmont, he got on the brake as ahead to the right, in the wide parking area at CooCoo’s Nut Haven, he saw a cop cruiser’s amber light. Pulled up just beyond it was the LTD.

He slid the Pinto fifty feet beyond, got out, and sauntered over. Leaning against the rear door of his car with his arms folded was Reese, a San Carlos cop fronting him. The wind had stopped gusting but the air was cold.

Reese flashed his teeth at Weare, got back a slight smile. Weare showed the thin young cop his badge, asked what was up, and learned that Reese had made an illegal lane change, cutting in front of the cruiser.

Reese made a face. “First ticket in five years. Really stupid.” The brown eyes were murky.

The cop got his signature, gifted him with the ticket, looked a question at Weare, who asked Reese if he’d wait a minute and walked to the cruiser, nodded to the cop’s even younger partner at the wheel, waited until the cop had slid in, then leaned in and murmured, “Did you ask him to get out?”

“No, he got out on his own — why?”

Reese was leaning on the LTD, looking their way. He could have waited in the car but seemed to prefer outside in the cold.

Weare asked if they would hang around a few minutes, walked to Reese, and asked if they could talk in the car. Reese shrugged and moved to the door. Weare walked around and got in beside him, sat looking at him.

Reese asked after a while, “What’s up, Mr. Weare?”

Weare kept up his steady grey gaze. Reese tripped his tongue around his lips and the murky eyes flickered to the back of the car.

— A mess as always. On the floor some empty oil cans, tools, frayed skin mags, cans of food, wads of dirty clothes, empty wine bottles, general junk. A brown army blanket was heaped along the seat.

Weare studied it, reached over, fiddled with a chunk of it. Reese said, “It just happens to be lying like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like it is.”

“Like covering something?”

Reese got up a smile. “You thinking of a sawed-off shotgun?”

Weare got a grip on the chunk. Reese asked, “Don’t you have to have reasonable cause?”

“You mentioned a shotgun.” He supposed that as reasonable cause that was questionable, like just.about everything a cop does. He wanted a look under the blanket.

He pulled, but it was hooked on something. Twisting himself around, he got a knee on the seat, made a two-handed grab, and jerked hard.

— Gazed at a small girl in blue jeans and a plaid shirt lying on her side, knees aimed at him, heels behind her, the small thin white face under a pile of light-brown hair at the far end of the seat. The arm on top went behind her hip. Strapping-tape was wrapped around the lower half of her face. Shiny blue eyes stared back at him.

Dropping the blanket on the junk on the floor, he got out, waving to the San Carlos cops as he walked to Reese’s side of the car. Reese spread his hands and said in a jagged voice, “Not what it seems.”

Weare opened the door and Reese came out. As Weare gestured, he turned to the car, took a step back, and laid himself forward, hands against the top.

Weare went over him and found under the denim jacket a sheath with a six-inch Buck knife, more or less legal. He unclipped it and slid it into his coat pocket.

The cop had come up, his partner drifting behind. Weare asked if he would cuff Reese, who turned obediently, hands behind his back. Weare asked, “Who is she?”

“Gale something — one of the kids on the scene. She’s not hurt.”

Three or four cars had slid into the wide area and a few drinkers stood at the door of the Nut Haven, checking the doings.

Weare murmured that maybe the cop could put Reese in his cruiser. The cop said he’d call in. Weare nodded, turned to the LTD, and got in back, shoving junk with his legs until he had space to crouch at the girl’s head.

He saw how the tape was wrapped six or seven times around, lapping over itself, found the end, and, picking up her head, ripped the tape, changing hands, giving the last lap a fast rip from her lips, balling the tape, and dropping it on the wadded brown blanket. “What’s your name?”

She worked her mouth, stretching her cheeks. He started to unwind tape from her wrists.

“Is your name Gale?”

“No. Petunia.” He glanced. Her eyes were the same, wide and shiny. “That was Mother’s name, too. Mother was a frog. I started as a tadpole but grew into a swan.”

He had unbound her wrists, was down at her ankles. “Are you hurt?”

“Endlessly. I float on a lake of tears — like Alice. My name is Alice. Do you remember Alice, Ben Bolt? Sweet Alice, whose hair was so brown? I have a beautiful long neck and bright swan eyes.” Bright doper eyes.

“Where was Reese taking you?”

“Father was a lizard, we lost him in a blizzard.” Ankles free, she swung her legs and sat up, rubbing her wrists, working her mouth.

He got out. Two San Carlos cruisers and one from Belmont had curved into the area, intimidating the gawker cars on their way. Drinkers clustered at the door of the Nut Haven and were ignored. One of the Belmont cops, wide and low with grey hair, said, “Hello, Weare.” He was Sergeant Dolan. “You got something on Reese?”

“He had that girl taped up and under a blanket. She’d doped but doesn’t seem hurt.” He walked with Dolan and a couple of cops to the cruiser, where Reese sat behind the screen, watching. Weare got in, Reese sliding centerward to give room. The two young cops in front watched and listened. “What’s her last name?”

“I never heard it.”

“Where does she live?”

“She has a van, an old green Dodge.”

“Where?”

“I dunno.”

“How about parents?”

“Somewhere, I guess.”

“Why did you have her taped up, under a blanket?”

“A game.” The eyes were less murky — not amused, but not particularly anxious either. “When she came to, I was going to tell her, ‘There’s a contract on you, you’re a ripoff artist, and you ripped off the wrong guy.’ That’s what I’d say. And I’d look real fierce, like this—” he made bulging eyes and a brutally twisted mouth “—and take out my knife, rub it on my thumb, and say, ‘Sorry, but this is it.’ She’d be scared, but excited, too, to be in the middle of a real heavy scene. Underneath, she’d know I’d never really hurt her.”

Weare looked at him in his steady way. Reese blew a sigh. “I guess it sounds crazy, but — well, that’s how it was.”

“Where did you get her?”

“At a dope party up near Skyline. She’d had a load and I thought I’d get her out before things got completely screwy. I got her in the car and asked where the van was. She said she didn’t know but if we drove around we’d find it. That’s what I was doing.”

“With her taped up under the blanket.”

“She’d passed out. I keep tape in the glovebox. I’ve played this game before three or four times — not on her but other girls. They’re scared at first but at the end we’re laughing at how shook up they were when it was just a game.”

Weare didn’t comment on Reese’s sense of humor. “Where was the party?”

Reese shook his head.

Weare asked for his car keys. Reese said they were in the switch of the LTD.

Weare asked the cop at the wheel to drive Reese to the Courthouse, and his partner to drive Reese’s car to the Courthouse garage for deputies there to go over it for anything useful. He asked Dolan if he and his partner would take the girl to Chope Hospital to be checked and held overnight.

Twenty minutes later he was on the fourth floor of the Courthouse, checking Reese into jail on overnight hold. He turned in the Buck knife. Reese gave him a pleasant goodnight and was trotted away to be strip-searched, showered, given orange jail rompers, and tucked in.

Weare went down to the garage and was told that the search of the LTD had turned up nothing that looked useful. He looked over stuff from the trunk and under the seats and agreed that it might as well be chucked back in. He drove to San Carlos, made his turn on Howard, and half an hour later, a little past 1:00, he was asleep.

At 8:30 A. M. he was at Chope, on the third-floor jail ward. A nurse told him, “She’s okay. She didn’t take as much as they first thought.” She led him to a 6 x 10’ nothing-colored room with a screened window, a bed with a folded blanket and a pillow, a chair, and a toilet. Gale or whoever perched on the bed in jeans, plaid shirt, and worn sandals, her brown hair brushed, small face clean, looking at an old People. She put it down and blue eyes a lot less shiny than last night looked him over. He took the chair and said who he was, and who was she?

“Am I busted for something?”

“Do you remember last night?”

“Not particularly.”

He told her when and where he had discovered her last night, taped and blanketed. She was quiet a while, then shrugged. “It’s all a jumble.”

“Did Reese tape you up?”

“Is that what he says?”

“Where did you get the dope?”

“I dunno. Somebody gave to me, I guess.”

“Were you at a party?”

“Could be. There’s lots of parties.”

“What do you think of Reese taping you up, throwing a blanket on you?”

“Somebody told me he did that to her once for a joke. He does weird things.”

“What’s your name?”

“Gale Winfield.” Which could be true or a lie, as could further information he got — that she was seventeen, from Modesto, an orphan who had lived with an aunt named Ann Woods until two years ago when she had split to find out what life was like. She didn’t remember the Modesto address, Aunt Ann didn’t have a phone. Weare didn’t push — his interest was last night. “Are you a ripoff artist?”

“Is that what Frank said?”

“Are you?”

“Now and then.”

“What’s the most you’ve ripped off?”

“Once I got a guy for about a hundred dollars’ worth of crank.”

“Recently?”

“Kind of.”

“Who was he?”

“I dunno. Never saw him again.”

A young guy new on the scene might take it hard, being foxed by a small, slight girl — might consider it an insult he should do something about, else be put down as a nobody, a wimp. He might hear about a burly, bearded dude with a sawed-off shotgun rumored to take care of ripoff artists for a prices.

Weare rambled around with that notion for a few minutes. The girl fiddled with her lip, looking thoughtful “If someone hired Frank to off me, he’d have been driving toward the coast, or into the hills — not north on El Camino at Belmont, like you said.”

“Sometimes bodies are found in the Sierras. Nobody ever finds who they were, or where from.” Sometimes bodies were found on beaches on the San Mateo coastside.

The girl was quiet. He asked, “Did Reese give you the dope?”

“All I know about last night is what you tell me, that you found me taped up and I started babbling about frogs and swans.”

“I didn’t say anything about frogs or swans.”

She mumbled, “No? I thought you did. I guess it was a thought floating around in my head.”

Weare guessed that last night she had been stalling until she could work things out, decide the best line to take — which seemed to be that she remembered nothing. He asked again if Reese had been her dope source. She got a tight mouth. “What difference does it make what I say? He’ll walk anyway, you know that. You cops never get anything solid on him. Maybe you don’t try too hard. Why should I stick my neck out, get him down on me?”

“He is already.”

“You don’t know that.” She said sulkily, “Get him on your own if you want him. I doubt you do. If he went to prison, who would you have to play your cop games on?”

Weare said they might put an ad in the paper and left.

He told the nurse he’d like to have the girl held seventy-two hours. In that time he’d try to run down some info, find out if there was an Aunt Ann, and if she wanted her back and could handle her. If not, he’d turn her over to a juvenile officer, to get her into a halfway house or a treatment center or somewhere.

He liked her. He remembered the bright line of baloney she had handed him last night. Where had she picked up on an old poem like ‘Ben Bolt’? Probably a reader, high IQ, good marks in school before discovering the wonders of dope, heading out to find out about life. Or death. Or TV.

He went to the Sheriff’s Office, third floor Courthouse, and got word from a deputy to call Milt Josten at the D. A.’s office. He crossed the hall and Josten asked what he had on Frank Reese. He told him.

Josten sighed. “Not this time, then.”

Weare called the jail and said to cut Reese loose, adding, “Tell him I’ll be in the basement restaurant.”

He sat at a far table with coffee. Reese strolled in, looked around, spotted him, got coffee, and ambled over. “Morning, Mr. Weare.” He patted his hip. “They gave me my knife back.” Weare hadn’t thought they wouldn’t — it was his, and more or less legal.

“What do you want to talk about?” He slouched at ease across the table.

“Your first ticket in five years, you said.” Reese nodded, gave him a slice of wry through the bear. “Poor time to get one.” Reese said anytime was a poor time. It would cost him forty dollars.

Weare said, “Five miles north of CooCoo’s is the bridge turn. Cross the bridge and 80 East goes toward the Sierras.”

Reese looked puzzled. “So?”

“The cop stopped you. I got involved, Gale went to Chope, you went to jail — nobody went to the Sierras.”

Reese scratched his beard. “What about the Sierras?”

“I’m just improvising. This is a scene in your TV show. You’re just out of jail, we’re having coffee, I’m asking some roundabout cop questions — okay?”

Reese shrugged a hand.

“What if last night you hadn’t been stopped, had kept driving, no plan, just a feeling that the game was expanding? You don’t know why, but you feel excitement, like maybe something big is going to happen. You’ve crossed the bridge and you’re on 80 East. A while later it’s the mountains, darkness, steep cliffs — nobody but you with your knife and little Gale taped up in back.”

Reese licked hi lips and watched Weare witheyes that had got somewhat cloudy.

“Suddenly you know why you’ve come. The three or four other times you played this game were rehearsals, dry-runs for tonight. This is the night you’re going to find out the hard and bloody way if you have inside you what it takes to be a real-life star.”

The clouds were darker. Weare said mildly, “I’m improvising is all.”

Reese’s voice was thick. “This is crazy.”

“What is?”

“What you’re hinting. It was a game. All right, a sick game — I won’t play it again. But that’s all. It wasn’t going to turn into anything vicious.”

Weare said, “A power game. Manson played power games. So did a guy named Leopold and his friend Loeb. Sometimes without realizing it, the guy loses control, the game takes charge. One move on the board — the game says make it. The guy makes it.”

He let that hang a half minute, sipping coffee and gazing at the cloudy eyes. Then, “Near CooCoo’s, did you feel you were starting to lose control? Did you say, I’ve got to stop this, now! — and cut in front of the cop?”

“You’re saying I did it on purpose?”

“Asking.”

Reese muttered, “I never say him. I don’t think I saw him.”

Weare got up. Reese held up a hand and Weare waited. Reese said, “If you hadn’t showed up he’d have ticketed me, let me go — what then? What about the game then?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you’d have been back in control. Or maybe the game would have gone on to wherever it was going — Sierras, maybe?”

Reese said slowly, “You’re a scary guy, Mr. Weare.”

“Am I? Or is that just a good line to finish this scene?”

He gave a farewell knock on the table, walked to the elevators, didn’t look back.

A couple of minutes later, he was at his desk, going over the scene. Maybe Reese had got a ticket on purpose. Or maybe he’d never seen the cruiser.

Maybe if the cop and then Weare hadn’t got involved, the game would have played itself out a few miles from the Nut Haven, Reese stripping the tape from Gale and the two having some laughs about hos shook-up she’d been.

Or maybe it would have carried on into the Sierras or some other remote place and ended with Gale’s remains left there, and Reese, blooded, on the threshold of the career he’d maybe always yearned for — a real-life bad dude, a killer for pay.

If that wasn’t already his career.

Maybe, maybe, maybe — Weare gave a low moan. He was sick of Reese, of himself — questions, more questions, footless speculations, no answers. He knew no more about Reese now than he had two months ago in the donut shop.

Instead of the unerring detective in Dial M, he was the inept detective in The Frank Reese Show, if that’s what it was.

He told his mind to drop Reese. His mind complied, chanting dopily, “Father was a lizard, we lost him in a blizzard.”

That gave him a little lift and a smile, both welcome. He’d stop stewing about Reese, pick up the problem of Gale.

He needed background facts, meaning another talk with her. She might balk, probably would — but at worst he’d pick up some hints he could work with.

Ten minutes later he was on the freeway northbound, feeling better, remembering how last night had started, with him keying on Reese’s fixed look in the side mirror, and following up. If he hadn’t, how would the night have ended?

He didn’t know. But one thing he knew — the small, brown-haired girl, Gale or whoever, was at Chope right now, not elsewhere.

Did that make him not completely inept?

Maybe.