Labyrinth

TWENTY

The next few hours were a time I lived through with a kind of schizoid detachment: part of me seemed to retreat, to become a disinterested observer, while the other part continued to operate more or less normally. Temporary reactional dysfunction, the psychologists call it, induced by a period of intense physical and emotional stress. And the hell with them and their fancy labels.

The people who lived in the house were the Muhlheims, a couple of artists in their forties. They were helpful and solicitous types and the first thing they tried to do was to get me out of my wet clothes; but all I could think about was using the phone. Muhlheim wrapped a blanket around me while I called the county police in Santa Rosa. I used Eberhardt’s and Donleavy’s names to get through to a lieutenant named Fitzpatrick and laid out the story for him in clipped sentences, some of which I had to repeat because of the way my teeth kept clacking together; the only thing I omitted was mention of the private eye as a horse’s ass: my breaking into the Kellenbeck Fish Company. Fitzpatrick asked a couple of terse questions, and my answers and the urgency in my voice seemed to convince him I was telling a straight story. He instructed me to stay where I was, said he would take care of contacting other police agencies.

When I hung up I let Muhlheim show me to the bathroom. He and his wife had listened to my end of the conversation with plenty of interest, but to his credit he did not try to question me. He gave me some dry clothes-we were about the same size-and left me alone to strip and take a five-minute, steaming-hot shower. Which only just dulled the edge of my chill, but which at least stopped the shaking.

Mrs. Muhlheim had a pot of hot tea and another blanket waiting when I came out. Plus some salve for the barnacle cuts on my hands. Ten more minutes passed, most of it in silence; the tea warmed me a little more. Then there was a sharp rapping on the front door. And things began to happen.

Two highway patrolmen. Questions. A guy from the Coast Guard station at Doran Park. A pair of county Sheriffs deputies. More questions. Another highway patrolman. A telephone call to Santa Rosa made by one of the deputies. And after that they took me out of there, bundled in an old overcoat offered up by Muhlheim, and down to the Highway Patrol substation south of Bodega.

Fitzpatrick, a youngish guy with an authoritarian manner, arrived from Santa Rosa. More questions. Report from the Coast Guard: They had fished Kellenbeck’s body out of the bay near the marina, shot once through the heart. A doctor showed up, summoned by somebody along the line, and spent a little time examining me. No fever, he said, no other signs of incipient pneumonia. He gave me some pills to swallow, told me to see my physician if I developed any serious symptoms, and went away.

Eberhardt called from his home-Fitzpatrick had notified the Hall of Justice and they in turn had contacted Eb-and I was allowed to talk to him. In concerned tones he asked how I was. I said I was fine, wonderful, that son of a bitch Greene had come within minutes of killing me dead. Then I told the story all over again, for the fifth or sixth time. I’ll get back to you in the morning, he said. Yeah, I said.

Greene was still at large. But there was an All-Points Bulletin out on him, Fitzpatrick told me-it was only a matter of time. The head of the Alcohol and Firearms Unit office in San Francisco called. I got to talk to him, too, and answer some more questions, and listen to him tell me he would send agents up in the morning to interrogate me “when you’re feeling better.”

I was so tired by this time, from all the talk and the pills and the physical and mental strain, that I had trouble holding my head up. I asked Fitzpatrick if I could please, for Christ’s sake, be taken somewhere so I could get some sleep. Yes, he supposed I had been through enough for one night. Damned right, I thought. Put you up at The Tides Motel, somebody said, that okay? Just dandy.

Out of there finally and into a car, Fitzpatrick driving. Where was my car? he asked. Up by the Kellenbeck Fish Company. Keys? Lost in the bay, they were in my overcoat pocket, but there’s another set in a little magnetic box behind the rear bumper. He’d have somebody pick it up and bring it to the motel.

Motel. Check-in. Room. They went away, saying they would talk to me again in the morning. Bed. Sleep. Dreams of ice and water, guns and darkness, dead faces floating at the bottom of the sea.

Long, bad night…

A knocking on the door woke me. I sat up a little groggily and it took me a few seconds to orient myself, remember where I was. Gray light in the room, filtering in through half-closed drapes over the window. I squinted at my watch It was a good old waterproof Timex and still ticking away, undamaged by the salt water last night; the hands read eight-twenty-five.

I swung my feet out, sat on the edge of the bed. The knocking came again. I called, “Just a minute,” and then stood up in a tentative way, testing my legs. Stiff, with a faint weakness in the joints. Same feeling in my arms. My head was stuffy and there was congestion in my lungs, the kind I used to have before I gave up cigarettes. Otherwise I seemed to be in reasonably good shape for what I had been through.

I put on Muhlheim’s clothes and went over and opened the door. Fitzpatrick. He asked me how I was, but not as if it mattered a great deal to him, and handed me my car keys.

“Greene?” I said.

He shook his head. “Not yet. But we’ll get him, don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried. Just eager.”

“Sure. Federal agents are here; they said they’d be over to see you later this morning. So don’t go anywhere for awhile.”

“How about after I see them? Can I leave for home then?”

“You can as far as I’m concerned,” Fitzpatrick said. “But stop by the substation before you go; there’s a statement waiting for you to sign.”

After he left I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. Beard stubble, puffy eyes, mottled skin, hair sticking up every which way like a fright wig: face to scare little children with. I turned out of there, put on Muhlheim’s overcoat, left the room, and hunted up my car. Reversed the procedure, carrying my overnight case, and then went to work on the beard stubble with a razor.

While I shaved I did some heavy thinking for the first time since early last night. Not about Greene and what had happened in the bay; that brush with death, and my own foolishness that had led to it, was something I did not want to relive. What I did think about was the bootlegging and the murders of Jerry Carding and his father. And about all the questions that were still unanswered, the one major question that was still unanswered.

Who had murdered Christine Webster?

The mental work got me nowhere. And yet, if I kept going over things enough times, maybe there was something I knew and could remember-like the little things I had known and remembered about Kellenbeck and the Cardings. Maybe…

The telephone rang just as I finished toweling off. I went into the other room, picked up the receiver. And listened to Eberhardt’s voice say, “It’s me. How you feeling this morning?”

“Fair. Better than I ought to.”

“No after effects?”

“None I want to talk about.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Guy in the Highway Patrol office up there told me where you were. According to him, no word on Greene yet.”

“I know. Fitzpatrick came by a few minutes ago.”

“You wouldn’t be planning to stick around up there until he’s caught?”

“Hell no. I’ll be home as soon as they’re done with me.”

“When’ll that be?”

“Sometime this afternoon, I guess. I’ve got to go sign a statement. And see a couple of Federal agents before that.”

“Me too,” he said. “I just got off the phone with one of the Alcohol and Firearms boys.”

“Have you talked to Donleavy?”

“Little while ago.”

“Is he dropping the charges against Martin Talbot?”

“That’s what he says. But the Carding murder is still officially open until Greene turns up. Or some kind of incriminating evidence does.” He paused. “The Christine Webster case is still open too, damn it.”

“Greene didn’t kill her, Eb,” I said.

“So you managed to tell me last night. You’re probably right-but I’d like it better if you weren’t.”

“I would too. But there’s just no motive for him to’ve shot the girl. Jerry Carding only had two copies of his article the night he was killed; there wasn’t a third he could have mailed to Christine.”

“Greene might have been afraid he’d told her something,” Eberhardt said, “and went after her for that reason.”

“It doesn’t add up. Why would Greene be more worried about Christine than, say, Steve Farmer or Sharon Darden-people right here at Bodega Bay? And if he had wanted to kill her, why wait until Tuesday night to do it? And why shoot her with a. 32 instead of the. 38 he used on Carding or the Browning automatic he tried to use on me?”

Eberhardt sighed. “I can’t argue with any of that,” he said. “All right, Greene didn’t kill Christine. But then who did? And why? Where’s the connection?”

“Maybe there isn’t one. Not a direct one, anyway.”

“Coincidence?”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“I don’t like coincidences worth a damn.”

“Neither do I, usually. But they do happen, Eb. They even happen in bunches sometimes.”

“Bunches?”

“I’m starting to wonder,” I said, “if maybe there aren’t a lot of coincidences in these two cases.”

“Meaning what? You got another theory?”

“No. Just a feeling so far. Did you dig up anything on Bobbie Reid, by the way?”

“Not much. She was the private type: no close friends, kept pretty much to herself. Her parents live in Red Bluff and they’re the ones who claimed the body; neither of them had much contact with Bobbie in the past year, said they didn’t know why she committed suicide. Didn’t seem too broken up about it, either. Nice folks.”

“What about the people where she worked?”

“Same thing. She was a legal secretary in a law office downtown; none of her coworkers knew her very well. Her boss, Arthur Brown, says he’d been thinking about firing her just before her death-late for work on a regular basis, withdrawn, moody, fouled up an important brief… Pause. “Hold on a second, will you?” He covered the mouthpiece but I could hear muffled voices in the background. A few seconds later he came back on. “I’ve got to go; the Alcohol and Firearms people are here. Call me when you get back to the city.”

“I may call you sooner than that,” I said.

“What?”

“Maybe inside an hour.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m not sure yet. I’ll get back to you when I am.”

I rang off and went over and stood looking out through the bayside window. More fog today, swirling heavily over the ruf fled surface of the bay. Like the thoughts swirling over the surface of my mind. Facts, memory scraps, additions and subtractions-all swirling and then beginning to coalesce into the missing part of the blueprint.

For the first time, then, I could see the complete design of the labyrinth. And it only had three connecting sides. The open end, the missing side, was nothing but coincidence-multiple coincidence.

Our stubborn refusal to accept that, particularly on this kind of Grand Guignol basis, was what had been hanging us up all along. Part of everything had begun with accidental occurrence and some of the complications had been built on it: a car driven by Martin Talbot crashing into one driven by Victor Carding; Christine Webster having my business card and Laura Nichols deciding she needed a private detective; Talbot and me arriving at the Carding house just after Carding’s murder; all the suicides real and attempted and bogus; interrelationships among the people involved; even things like Greene showing up at Kellenbeck’s house just in time to spot me last night. Three parts connective tissue to one part coincidence.

I thought I knew now who had killed Christine and I had a hunch as to why. But I needed the answer to one more question before I could be sure. Just one more question.

I put on Muhlheim’s coat again, went out and down across the parking lot. The cold wind made my eyes water and started my nose running; my chest still felt badly congested. If I was smart I would make an appointment tomorrow with Doctor White. The shape my lungs were in, pneumonia was a threat I could not afford to overlook.

Inside The Tides Wharf I walked around into the warehouse area behind the fish market. Deserted. I came back out to the counter where a balding guy in a white apron was fileting salmon and asked him if Steve Farmer had reported for work today. The guy said yes, he was in the restaurant on his break.

So I crossed over there and stepped inside. Farmer was sitting at one of the tables near the windows; he was alone and seemed to be brooding into a cup of coffee. When I went to him and said, “Hello, Steve,” he looked up at me with pained and listless eyes.

“Oh,” he said, “it’s you.”

I sat down. “I guess you know about Jerry.”

“I heard this morning. It’s all people are talking about.”

“I’m sorry it had to turn out this way.”

“Sure.” He stared into the cup. “Jerry too,” he said. “All of them-just like I was afraid it would be.”

Yeah, I thought, all of them. But I said, “I need the answer to a question, Steve. You’re the only person who can give it to me.”

“What question?”

“Why did Bobbie Reid commit suicide?”

His face started to close up again, the way it had before, but this time it did not quite make it-as if Jerry Carding’s death had taken the edge off his feelings about everything else. He rested an elbow on the table, cocked the hand against his forehead like a visor. “Why do you have to keep bugging me about Bobbie? It’s all finished now, for God’s sake. Her suicide doesn’t have anything to do with the murders.”

“Yes it does. It’s got everything to do with Christine Webster’s murder.”

He gave me an anguished look from under the visored hand. “But I thought Andy Greene and Gus Kellenbeck-?”

“No. They killed Jerry and his father, yes. But not Christine.” I paused and then asked him again, in a gentler tone: “Why did Bobbie commit suicide?”

“I don’t know, not for sure. She had hangups…”

“What hangups? Steve, why did you break up with her?”

“I didn’t. She broke up with me; she… found somebody else…”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. Somebody else, that’s all.”

“Another man?”

His shoulders sagged; he dropped both forearms to the table edge and slumped over them with his head bent. “No,” he said, “not another man. She was making it with a woman. I loved her and she turned gay on me, she turned into a lesbian… ”

Bingo.