Man on a Leash

3

He checked the odometer as he made the turn into Third. After a few blocks of residential district and a close-in area of small farms and orchards, the two-lane blacktop ran unfenced through the sage with a low ridge to his right. There was very little traffic until a big Continental suddenly materialized in his rearview mirror as it overhauled him at high speed. It started to pass but braked and swung back, tailgating right under his bumper, as a pickup truck came toward them in the other lane.

The pickup went past; the Continental burst from behind him with a shriek of rubber and went on. He caught a brief glimpse of a blond woman behind the wheel as it flashed past. She was scarcely a hundred yards ahead of him when she abruptly hit the brakes again, forcing him to slow down to keep from running up on her as she swung off the road onto a driveway running up the hill between twin lines of white-painted fence. He muttered with annoyance. And they talked about California drivers killing themselves. There was a sprawling low-roofed ranch house at the top of the hill, and beside the road a white mailbox with the name Carmody. The mailbox was supported by a serpentine column of welded links of chain.

A few hundred yards ahead the road curved to the right around the end of the ridge, and he saw the place. There was a cattle guard through the fence and a red gravel drive leading back to the house, which was the only one in sight as the road swung left again and disappeared over a rise a quarter mile away. He turned in.

He stopped in front of the attached two-car garage at the right end of the house and got out. In the intense silence his shoes made a harsh grating sound on the gravel. There was a flagstone walk bordered by flower beds leading to the front door, and in front of that a considerable area of some kind of ground cover he thought was ivy. Beyond the far corner of the house was a large cottonwood. The big swing-up door of the garage was closed, and curtains were drawn over all the windows in front. The red gravel drive continued on past the side of the garage toward the rear. He walked back.

There was a wide expanse of flagstone terrace here, extending between the two wings of the house and outward toward the rear. Farther back were a redwood shed, which was probably the pump house for the well, and then a white-painted corral fence and a small barn. At the top of the sloping hillside to his right he could see some trees and part of a patio wall which must be the rear of the Carmody place.

He went back around in front and let himself in with the key Bolling had given him. There was a small vestibule just inside, floored with dark ceramic tile. The air was stale, as in a house closed and unoccupied for a long time, and underlaid with the ghosts of uncounted cigars. The back of the entry-way opened into one end of the living room, while a door on the right led to the kitchen, which was along the front of the house. Another door on the left connected with a hallway along the bedroom wing.

He crossed the kitchen and opened the door at the far end of it. The garage had no windows, and the light was poor. He flicked a switch, doubtful that anything would happen, but two overhead lights came on. The pump, he thought; they’d had to leave the power on because of the water system and the automatic sprinklers. The car was a blue Mercedes. It bore a heavy coating of powdery white dust, and the windshield was smeared with spattered insects. It had been on a long trip at high speed, all right, but he frowned, wondering how it had got that dusty driving to San Francisco. Well, maybe it had been that way before the trip.

There was no doubt Brubaker had already done it, but he opened the left front door and checked the lubrication record stuck to the frame. “Jerry’s Shell Service, Coleville, Nevada,” it said, and the date of the last service was July 4, 1972. Oil change and lubrication at 13,073. He leaned in and read the odometer. It stood at 13,937. That was more than 800 miles. San Francisco was—call it 270, round trip 540. So the old man had driven another 300 miles somewhere in that time between July 4 and 14. Well, that could be anything—or nothing.

He switched off the lights and went back into the kitchen, pushing the button in the doorknob to relock the door. There was another entrance to the combined living room and dining room from this end of the kitchen. It was a long room with a deep shag carpet, and most of the opposite wall was covered by drawn white drapes. At the right were a dining table and then a teak buffet and a long sofa sitting back to back to divide it from the living-room area. In the latter there were two large armchairs and a coffee table and a white brick fireplace, but the first and overall impression was of books, record albums, and hi-fi equipment.

He started toward that end of the room, but as he passed the end of the sofa, he saw a piece of luggage sitting on it. There was a faintly jarring incongruity about it in this otherwise neat and well-ordered room, and he stopped, for some reason remembering his question to Brubaker on whether there had been any sign of a fight. Why would somebody with a seaman’s passion for a-place-for-everything-and-everything-m-its-place leave his suitcase in the living room?

It was a small streamlined case of black fiber glass with no identification on it of any kind. He flipped the latches. It was unlocked. On top was a folded brown silk dressing gown. He lifted it out of the way and poked through the contents beneath it: pajamas, a rolled pair of socks, a laundered shirt in plastic, a couple of ties, a pair of shorts, and a plastic bag containing a soiled shirt and some more underwear. At the bottom were a zippered leather toilet kit, a half-empty box of Upmann cigars, and some books of paper matches variously advertising a San Francisco restaurant, a Las Vegas hotel, and a savings and loan association. He shrugged. There was nothing of interest here, and Brubaker had no doubt already searched it anyway.

But why was it here? He idly lifted one of the aluminum tubes from the cigar box, twisted off the cap, and slid the cigar out. It was encased in a thin curl of wood veneer and then a tightly rolled paper wrapper. He removed these and sniffed it. He’d smoked cigars for a brief period in his early twenties before he’d given up smoking altogether, but even after all these years he could still appreciate the aroma. He went out into the kitchen, found a knife in one of the drawers, cut the tip off it, and lighted it with one of the paper matches.

He took a deep, appraising puff, removed it from his mouth, let the smoke out slowly, and gestured with judicial approval. If you had to kill yourself, do it in the imperial manner; arrive at the operating room for the thoracotomy on a stretcher of royal purple borne by Nubian slaves. He picked up the silk robe to put it back in the bag; something slithered out of its folds, something golden and soft that might have been the pelt of some unfortunate honey-colored animal or the scalp of a Scandinavian settler. It was a hairpiece; a fall, he thought, was the correct terminology.

He looked at it helplessly for a moment and then sighed. That certainly didn’t raise any doubts it was the old man’s case; if you looked at it in the light of history, it merely confirmed it. No doubt his mother, unless she’d forsworn the practice early in the game, could have suited up an average sorority by filtering the old rooster’s bags for lipsticks, mascara pencils, pants, bras, and earrings. While it sure as hell could help answer a great many questions if you knew the identity of this molting San Francisco roommate and where she was now, at the moment it was of no help at all. He dropped the fall back in, folded the robe over it, and closed the bag. He wondered if Brubaker had spotted it and then decided he wouldn’t be much of a cop if he hadn’t.

Big hi-fi speakers were mounted in the corners of the living room opposite the sofa. They’d been housed in some dark wood he thought was ebony. The components—turntable, FM tuner, and amplifier—were mounted on teak shelves in the center of the same wall, themselves encased in the same wood as the speakers. Above and on both sides were shelves of operatic and symphonic albums, several hundred of them at a conservative guess. Most of the balance of the wall space was taken up with books. Romstead walked over and ran his eye along the rows, lost in admiration for the far-ranging and cultivated mind of a man whose formal education had ended at the age of fourteen. Though mostly in English, there were some in German and French and his native Norwegian, and they ranged from novels and biography to poetry and mathematics.

His thoughts broke off suddenly at the sound of a car coming up the drive, scattering gravel. He stepped out into the kitchen and parted the curtains above the sink just as it slid to a stop behind his and the driver got out and slammed the door. It was the hell-for-leather Valkyrie in the Continental.

She was five eight, at least, a statuesque figure of a woman clad in a peasant blouse and skirt in a flamboyant combination of colors and snugged in at their juncture around a surprisingly slender waist considering the amplitude of the bust above and rounded hips below. The tanned legs were bare, and her shoes appeared to consist principally of cork platforms an inch and a half thick. She carried an oversized straw handbag in the crook of her left arm and moved with a self-assured sexy swing as she came toward the flagstone walk. Romstead noted the shade of the rather carelessly swirled blond hair, and his eyes were coldly speculative as he let the curtain fall back in place. In a moment the doorbell chimed. He went out into the vestibule and opened the door. She looked up at him; the blue eyes went wide, and she gasped.

“Oh, no! Even the cigar!”

He removed it from his mouth. “I stole it,” he said. “It belongs to the United States Customs.”

“Well, that figures, too.” She gave a flustered smile then that didn’t quite match the eyes. “Excuse me, I don’t know what I’m saying, you startled me so, the very image of him—I mean younger, naturally—but when you just loomed up there at me puffing on the same cigar—oh, heavens, I’m Paulette Carmody, your next-door neighbor.”

“How do you do,” he said. “Won’t you come in?”

She preceded him into the living room and sat down on the sofa right beside the suitcase with no apparent notice of it while girlish chatter continued to pour forth like whipped cream from a ruptured aerosol can.

“—just now heard you were in town, and then it struck me, I mean, that car I’d passed on the road, it did have California tags, and I was just positive I’d seen San Francisco on the dealer’s license plate holder, and I said I’ll bet anything that was Eric—”

She had crossed her legs,, revealing an interesting expanse of golden thigh, and Romstead reflected that if the front of that peasant blouse were cut any lower, she’d better never lean down or frothy conversation wouldn’t be the only thing to well forth. He wondered about it. Maybe she was a harmless fluff-brain, but he didn’t think so. She was forty to forty-five, and she’d been around. There were intelligence and tough-mindedness in there somewhere. He listened with grave courtesy while she said what an awful thing it had been and she wanted him to know how sorry she was.

“Are you moving in?” she asked then.

“Oh, no,” he replied. “I just borrowed a key to have a look.”

“Oh, I see.” She gestured. “I thought perhaps the suitcase was yours.”

“No.” He shrugged. “I just assumed it was his. It was sitting there when I came in.” Ma’am, there’s nobody here but us chickens, and you know we wouldn’t have searched it. “I wish I could offer you a drink or something.”

“You know, I could use a beer. He always kept some Tuborg in the refrigerator.”

“I’ll see.” He went out into the kitchen. There were several bottles of beer. He listened intently for the sound of the latches, but her continued chatter would have covered it if there were any. Somehow he’d have to get a peek into that straw handbag. He found some glasses and a bottle opener and poured the beer. He went back, and on the opposite side of the case from her there was just a fraction of an inch of brown silk showing where she hadn’t got all the robe back in. He handed her the glass and sat down.

“Thank you, Eric.” She smiled. “As I was saying, he was the most fascinating man I ever met—”

“You’d better run it through a laundromat before you wear it again,” he said.

“What?” Just for a second the confusion showed. “I don’t understand— Wear what?”

“The doily. It’s been shut up in a suitcase for two weeks with a box of cigars. It’ll smell like the end of a four-day poker game.”

“Well!” The outrage was just about to become airborne when it collapsed in a gurgle of amusement that gave way to laughter. “Oh, crap! So you had found it.” She lifted the hairpiece from her handbag, sniffed it, made a face, and dropped it back.

“It was a stupid thing to try, anyway,” he said. “Brubaker’s bound to have seen it when he searched the house, and he’ll know you were the only one who had a chance to get it back.”

She shrugged, took a pack of filter cigarettes from the handbag, and lighted one. “Brubaker could already make a damned good guess whose it is, but he’s not about to.”

“Why not?”

“He’d have to be ready to prove it, for one thing, unless he likes the odor of singed tail feathers. Also, he’d have to be damned sure it had anything to do with what happened to your father. Which it didn’t.”

“That remains to be seen. But he could sure as hell sweat some answers out of you about what the old man was doing in San Francisco and why he needed that money.”

She shook her head. “I wasn’t in San Francisco with him.”

“Sure. You just loaned him the rug. He was going to audition for a job at Finocchio’s—”

“Oh, I was with him, all right, but it was in Las Vegas.”

“What? I mean—when?”

“Before he went to San Francisco. We drove down on the Fourth—”

“Hold it. You say you drove? Which car?”

“His.”

“How far is it?”

“Four hundred and five miles. We checked it.”

“Excuse me a minute.” He strode out to the garage and opened the door of the Mercedes to check the figures again: 13,937 less 13,073 was—864. Twice 405 was 810. That left only 54 miles unaccounted for.

“What is it?” She had come out and was standing in the kitchen doorway.

He indicated the service sticker. “He couldn’t have driven the car to San Francisco. Or even to Reno to take a plane.” He repeated the figures. “So how did he get there?”

“Maybe somebody else drove him to the airport.”

“You’d think whoever it was would have said so by this time. Anyway, Brubaker checked the airlines; he had no reservation any time in that period.”

She frowned. “Well, we’d better tell him. I didn’t know about this mileage bit.”

“I’ll do it. Maybe he won’t lean on me for the name.”

“Oh, hell, that’s all right. I mean, if it’s important to the investigation. I’m not married, now. Or running for the school board.”

“Was the car this dusty when you got back?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It was dark. But I don’t see why it would have been; we certainly didn’t drive on any country roads, going or coming, and it wasn’t dusty like that when we got there.”

He nodded. Then a good part of that 54 miles had been on a dirt road. They went back to the living room, and he retrieved his beer. “How long did you stay in Las Vegas?” he asked.

“That night and the next day. I think we started back around eleven P.M. Anyway, he let me off at my place just a few minutes before five A.M.” She sighed. “Forty hours with about two hours’ sleep. God, I’m glad I didn’t have to try to keep up with him when he was twenty-eight—”

“Wait a minute,” Romstead interrupted. “That’d have to be five A.M., the sixth?”

“Hmmmm—yes, that’s right.”

Just two hours, he thought, before he’d called Winegaard with that sell order. “Well, look, did he go in the bucket in Las Vegas? I mean, on the cuff, for really big money?”

She smiled. “God, no. I doubt he lost twenty dollars. Gambling—or that kind of gambling—bored him to death. He said anybody with any respect for mathematics would have to be insane to think he could beat a house percentage and a limit. He just liked the shows, and the fact that nobody ever goes to bed—to sleep, anyway.”

“Well, did he tell you he was going to San Francisco?”

“No.”

“That’s funny. No mention of it at all?”

“Not a word. If it’d been anybody else, it would have puzzled hell out of me. I mean, if he was planning to take off again just as soon as we got home, you’d think he’d have said something about it, just to make conversation if nothing else, but that’s the way he operated.”

“But nobody knows for sure when he did leave.”

“Oh, it was within a few hours. Don’t ask me how in hell he could do it, but he was gone again before noon.”

“How do you know?”

“That’s when I woke up. When I started to unpack my bags, I noticed the fall was missing, so I called to see if I’d put it in his by mistake. No answer. I tried again several times in the afternoon and gave up.”

“Well, did he say anything about a business deal?”

“Absolutely nothing. But then he wouldn’t have; he never did.”

“You know Brubaker’s theory? That he was mixed up in the drug traffic.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m glad you don’t believe it. But I guess we’re in the minority.”

“Darling, I have no illusions at all about your old man; I’ve known him longer than you think I have. He was arrogant, pigheaded, and intolerant, he had the sex drive and the fidelity of a stallion, and any woman who could stay married to him for fifteen years the way your mother did could qualify for instant sainthood; but he wasn’t a criminal.”

“You knew him before he moved here?”

“Umh-umh. He saved my life, a few years back.”

“How’s that?”

“It sounds a little kooky, out here in the sagebrush, but would you believe a rescue at sea?” She glanced at her watch and stood up. “But I’ve got to run. If you’ll stop by when you get through here, I’ll hammer together a couple of bloody Marys and a bite of lunch and tell you about it.”

“I’d love to. Thank you.”

He went out with her and down the walk. As she started to get into the Continental, there was a sudden wild clatter of the pipes in the cattle guard beyond them, and a dusty green Porsche came snarling up the drive. It pulled off and stopped on the other side of her. When the driver emerged and slammed the door, there was more an impression he had simply removed the car like an article of clothing and tossed it aside rather than got out of it, and Romstead thought of the old joke about one of the Rams’ linemen: When he couldn’t find a place to park his VW, he just carried it around with him.

While he wasn’t quite that big, he would have made an ominous hunk of linebacker staring hungrily across the big butts at a quarterback. He was pushing forty now, Romstead thought, and a little gone to belly, but not too much, and the pale eyes were mean as he padded around the rear of the Continental. Something was riding him.

“I tried to call you,” he said to Paulette Carmody. “Carmelita said you were down here. Figures.”

“Lew,” she began the introduction, “this is Eric—”

He cut her off. “I know who he is.” The eyes flicked contemptuously across Romstead and dismissed him along with the rest of the scenery. “Have you seen Jeri?”

“Mr. Bonner.” The tone was sweetly dangerous. “May I present—” She broke off herself then. “Jeri? You mean she’s here in town?”

“She came in last Tuesday. But when I woke up awhile ago, she was gone. No note or anything.”

“I’ll see you up at the house,” Paulette said.

“Right.” Before he turned away, Bonner swept Romstead with that flat stare again. “Going to take over the family business?”

“Shut up, Lew!” Paulette snapped. Romstead stared thoughtfully after him but said nothing. The Porsche shot back down the drive.

“I’m sorry,” Paulette said. “Usually he has at least as much social grace as a goat, but he’s a little off his form today.”

Romstead shrugged. “Something’s chewing on him.”

“It’s his sister. I’m worried about her, too.”

“Who is he?”

“He used to work for my husband, and before that, he played pro football, one of the Canadian teams. Owns a liquor store now.” She got into the car. “See you in a little while.”

“Hadn’t I better skip it?” He nodded after the Porsche now disappearing around the bend in the highway. “I don’t think we’re going to grow on each other, and it’ll just be unpleasant for you.”

“Oh, he’ll be gone before then.”

She swung the big car and went back down the drive. Romstead returned to the house. He rinsed out the two glasses and dropped the beer bottles in the kitchen garbage can. There was another room in this wing of the house, directly back of the garage, its entrance through a doorway at the rear of the dining area. He went in.

It was a library or den. There was another fireplace, a big easy chair with a reading lamp, a desk, and a coffee table. On the walls were more books, an aneroid barometer, some carved African masks, a bolo, a pair of spears, and several abstract paintings. A magazine rack held copies of Fortune, Time, and Scientific American. The cigars were in a closet, each box individually wrapped and sealed in plastic.

In the other wing the small bedroom at the front of the house was apparently a guest room. The next door down the hall was a bathroom. He glanced in briefly and went on. The master bedroom was at the rear. He stepped in and stopped abruptly in surprise. After the neatness of the rest of the house it was a mess.

It was a big room containing a king-sized double bed with a black headboard and matching night tables with big lamps on each side. One of the lamps was lighted. The drapes, the same dark green as the bedspread, were all closed. Off to his left, the door to the bathroom was ajar, and he could see a light was on in there too. Beyond the bathroom door was a large dresser, all its drawers pulled open and their contents—shirts, socks, underwear, handkerchiefs, boxes of cuff links, pajamas—thrown out on the rug.

On top of it was a woman’s handbag, open and lying on its side, a kitchen knife, a spoon, a hypodermic syringe, and a small plastic bag containing some fraction of an ounce of a white powder. He strode on in to look at the floor on the other side of the bed. A yellow dress and a pair of scuffed and dusty pumps with grotesque square heels lay on the rug beside it. Next to them on a hassock were a slip, nylon pants, and a bra. There was no sound at all from the bathroom. He felt the hair prickle on the back of his neck as he went over and slowly pushed the door open.

To his left was a stall shower and at the other end the commode and washbasin. The oversized tub was directly opposite, a slender leg draped over the side of it with the doubled knee of the other leg visible just beyond. He stepped on in and looked down. She was lying on her back, her head under the spigot and turned slightly to one side with the long dark-red hair plastered across her face so that little of it was visible except the chin and part of the mouth. There was about an inch of water in the bottom of the tub, but no blood and no marks of violence on her body.

The tub had apparently been full when she fell in, but owing to an imperfectly fitting plug in the mechanical drain assembly, the water had slowly leaked out over the hours, leaving her hair to settle like seaweed across her face. There was no need to touch her to verify it; she’d been dead from the time she fell in. Had she struck her head on the spigot? There was no hair stuck to it, no blood. The heroin, he thought, or whatever that stuff was she’d shot herself with. But, hell, even somebody drugged should be able to climb out of a bathtub before he drowned. He was suddenly conscious of the passage of time and that he was wasting it in disjointed and futile speculation when he’d better be calling the police. He whirled and went out.