Labyrinth

THIRTEEN

Until the early sixties Bodega Bay had been a quiet and old-fashioned commercial fishermen’s province. People from the bigger Sonoma County towns like Santa Rosa and Petaluma went there to buy fresh crabs and other seafood, or to use one of the nearby beaches, and families came up from San Francisco once in a while to take in the scenic beauty of the Sonoma coastline; otherwise the natives had the place pretty much to themselves.

But then Hitchcock filmed his suspense movie, The Birds, on and around the bay, at the village of Bodega close by, and at the complex of bayfront buildings called The Tides and that resulted in a good deal of publicity and national prominence. Before long Bodega Bay became something of an “in” place to visit or even to live at, and it began to change accordingly. Along with streams of sightseers in the spring and summer months, artists of one type or another, enterprising merchants, retired couples, sport fishermen after salmon or sea bass all flocked there; land developers built a couple of fancy motels and at least one expensive community of homes, called Bodega Bay Harbor; antique and souvenir shops sprang up everywhere. Today, less than two decades later, it was a different place. The rugged coastline was still the same, and most of the old buildings and landmarks along Highway 1 were still there, but all the charm and attractiveness seemed to be gone. The impression you got was one of creeping suburbia: another twenty years and all the hills and cliffs and beaches would probably be covered with houses, fast-food franchises, shopping centers.

That was the feeling I had, anyway, when I got up there a few minutes past noon on Saturday-my first visit to Bodega Bay since a Sunday outing with Erika Coates eight years ago, in the good days before the breakup of our relationship. But then, maybe part of the feeling was my mood, and part of it, too, the heavy low-hanging fog that shrouded the coast and gave everything new and old a cheerless aspect. The mist was so thick it was almost like rain; I had to use my windshield wipers since passing through Valley Ford ten miles back.

I turned off the highway into the parking lot around which The Tides was built. There were only three other cars in the lot and nobody out and around that I could see; even the road was more or less deserted. I parked in front of the Wharf Bar and Restaurant and got out into the fog and an icy wind.

This place, at least, did not appear to have changed much. All the same buildings-The Tides Motel, the small ice house, the Union 76 dock, the barber shop and souvenir shop-and all of them still painted white with garish orange roofs and trim. Even the weathered signs on the front of The Tides Wharf, a long low structure that housed the restaurant and a fresh-fish market, looked to be the same.

I went over and onto the pier that led around and along the Wharf’s backside. The bay was an oily grayish-black color, windrumpled into whitecaps; the red-and-white buoys that marked the crossing channel and three high-masted fishing boats, anchored downwind, rocked in the swells. You could not see much of Bodega Head across the bay, and the narrows that led into the ocean at the southern end, bounded by a pair of rock jetties, were all but obliterated. The sea air smelled sharply of salt and dark rain: another storm building somewhere out on the Pacific.

An archway opened off the pier into the warehouse area where fish-market employees weighed, cleaned, and packaged catches brought in by the commercial boats. On my right as I walked through were round concrete tanks used to keep shellfish fresh; the long room to my left was lined with wooden benches and cluttered with large carts on oversized metal wheels, small dollies, stacks of wooden pallets, rows of storage lockers, a Toledo weighing scale, and two big refrigeration units.

At the far end a young guy dressed in a sweatshirt and Levi’s was hosing down the concrete floor. As I approached he turned and then released the hand shut-off on the hose. He had intense brown eyes, a square flattish face, and a mop of light-brown hair parted in the middle and swept back over his ears. Across the front of his sweatshirt, in maroon letters, were the words San Francisco State College.

“Steve Farmer?” I asked him.

He gave me a somewhat wary look. “That’s right.”

I told him my name. “I’d like to ask you a few questions about Jerry Carding, if you don’t mind.”

“You’re that private detective, aren’t you. The one in the papers.

“Yes.”

The wariness went away; his eyes took on a worried, unhappy look. He dropped the hose, ran a hand through his shaggy hair. “Well, I can’t help you much. I don’t know what happened to Jerry; I’ve already told the police that. But one thing’s sure: he didn’t disappear because Chris got pregnant or because he had anything to do with her murder. He loved her; they were planning to get married. And he’s a nonviolent person. He couldn’t harm another human being, not for any reason.”

I nodded. “Everyone I’ve talked to says essentially the same thing.”

“Don’t you believe it?”

“I’d like to. When did you last talk to Jerry?”

Farmer sighed. “The day before he disappeared. Last Saturday. We had a beer together after work.”

“What did you talk about?”

“Nothing much. He was in a hurry to get home.”

“Home?”

“I mean the Darden house over in Bodega. That was where he was living.”

“Did he say why?”

“No. Just that he had some work to do.”

“The article you told the police about?”

“I think so.”

“Did he ever hint as to what it might be about?”

“Never. But he seemed to think it was important.”

“How long had he been working on it?”

“I don’t know. He’d been kind of excited for three or four days, though.”

“Excited in what way? Nervous? Eager?”

“Eager,” Farmer said. “When I asked him about it he said it was a secret and I’d find out when everybody else did.”

“Who’re his other friends here? Anyone he might have talked to about what he was writing?”

“Just Sharon Darden, I guess. Her mother owns the house where Jerry lived; she rents out one of her rooms. But I talked to Sharon after Jerry vanished; she doesn’t know anything more than I do.”

“How close were she and Jerry?”

“If you mean were they making it together, the answer is no. I told you, Jerry was in love with Chris. He’s not the kind of guy who screws around on his lady.”

“I just wondered if they were good friends.”

“Pretty good. If Jerry’d told her anything, she’d have mentioned it to me or the police. She wouldn’t have any reason to keep it to herself.”

“When did you first find out Jerry was missing?”

“Monday morning. Gus Kellenbeck called me because Jerry hadn’t reported for work.”

“Kellenbeck?”

“He owns the Kellenbeck Fish Company,” Farmer said. “Jerry did odd jobs for him.”

“Oh? I thought he worked as a deckhand.”

“He did, off and on. But he couldn’t make enough money doing that, so he went to work for Kellenbeck.”

“This fish company is where?”

“A little ways north of here, on the highway.”

“Is it open on Saturdays?”

“Yeah. Every day but Sunday.”

“Which boat did Jerry work on?”

“The Kingfisher. Andy Greene’s troller.”

“And where would I find Greene?”

“Over at the marina, probably. On the other side of the bay. He lives on board the Kingfisher.”

I asked him about Victor Carding, and got a replay of the unenlightening answers Lainey Madden and Dave Brodnax had given me. Then Farmer paused, frowned, and asked: “Do the police think Jerry had something to do with what happened to his old man? Is that why you’re asking about him?”

“It’s a possibility.”

“Not to me, it isn’t. I thought they arrested the guy who shot Mr. Carding; that’s what the papers said.”

“Martin Talbot isn’t guilty,” I said.

“He confessed, didn’t he?”

“Yes. But he’s not guilty. There are psychological reasons why somebody would confess to a crime he didn’t commit.”

Farmer half-turned and stared over at one of the refrigerator units. After a time he said, “How can anything like this happen?” but he seemed to be talking more to himself than to me. “Jerry’s mother dead in an accident, his father murdered, Chris murdered-everybody he cared about just… wiped out. What if he’s dead too?”

Yeah, I thought. What if he’s dead too?

He faced me again. “Jerry’s not a killer, he’s a victim. You understand? He’s a victim whether he’s all right or not.”

“I understand, son.”

He seemed suddenly a little embarrassed, as if he felt he had displayed too much emotion in front of a stranger. “Look, I, uh, I’ve got work to do. Is there anything else?”

“Just a couple of things. Is Martin Talbot’s name familiar to you?”

“No. I never heard of him until yesterday.”

“How about Laura Nichols? Karen Nichols?”

“No.”

“About Christine-did she have any enemies you might know about?”

“You mean somebody who’d make those threats the paper said she’d been getting?” He shook his head. “No. Whoever that crazy bastard is, he must be the one who killed her.”

“So it would seem,” I said. And then asked him the question I had been saving for last: “What can you tell me about Bobbie Reid?”

His reaction was immediate: he jerked slightly, as if I had swatted him one, and his face closed up and something flickered in his eyes that might have been pain. “What does Bobbie have to do with any of this?”

“I don’t know that she has anything to do with it. But she and Chris were friends.”

“The hell they were.”

“You didn’t know that? It’s true, Steve.”

“Bobbie’s dead,” he said stiffly. “She killed herself more than a month ago.”

“So I’ve been told. Do you know why?”

“No.” But he said the word a little too fast, it seemed to me. “Listen, I don’t want to talk about Bobbie, okay?”

“You’ll have to talk to somebody about her sooner or later. If not me, then the police.”

“She couldn’t have anything to do with what happened to Chris. How could she? No-I’ve got enough dead people to think about as it is.”

I wanted to press him further, but it would not have done any good; his expression said that he was not going to do any more talking no matter what I said. “All right, Steve. Have it your own way. Thanks for your time.”

He was no longer looking at me. He said, “Yeah,” and bent to pick up the hose. I watched him walk away from me, open the nozzle, and begin to wash the floor again. But this time he did it in hard, jerky sweeps, with the stream of water thinned down to a jet.

I went out and down the corridor between the fish market and the restaurant. My hands and feet were cold; I decided on a cup of coffee before I made any more stops.

Inside the restaurant I sat near the windows overlooking the bay and did some brooding while I waited for one of the waitresses to serve me. Steve Farmer seemed like a decent enough kid, and his concern for Jerry Carding had struck me as genuine. But I was pretty sure he had lied about not knowing or at least suspecting the motive for Bobbie Reid’s suicide. Why? Deep personal feelings that had nothing to do with murder? Or for reasons that did have something to do with murder?

I wondered if Farmer had lied about anything else, or held back information of some kind. I wondered if the relationships between the young people in this business were what they seemed to be. Add all those questions to the dozen or so others that had accumulated, shuffle them together with the known facts, and what did you get?

Nothing.

So far, not a damned thing.