The Murder Book

CHAPTER 36

She stood by the Seville, waiting for me to leave.

I turned the ignition key, and said, "Did Dr. Harrison mention taking a vacation?"

"Him, a vacation? He never leaves. Why?"

"He told me he might be doing some traveling."

"Well, he's certainly entitled to travel if he wants. Why don't you ask him? You're going there right now, aren't you? To check up on my story."

"I'm going to talk to him about the unsolved case."

"Whatever," she said. "Doesn't bother me being checked up on, because I'm not hiding anything. That's the thing about not letting yourself get involved in hopeless things. Less to worry about. The shame about my Pierce was he never really learned that."

The turnoff she'd described led to an oak-shielded path barely wide enough for a golf cart. Branches scraped the Seville 's flanks. I backed out, left the car on the side of the road, and hiked.

The spot where Pierce Schwinn had died was half a mile in, a dry gully scooped out of a granite ledge and backed by mountainside. A sere corridor that would fill during rainy seasons and transform to a green, rushing stream. Now, it was bleached the color of old bones and littered with silt, rocks and boulders, leathery leaves, snarls of wind-snapped branches. The largest rocks tended toward ragged and knife-edged and glinted in the sun. Up against them, a man's head wouldn't fare well.

I walked to the edge and stared down into the arroyo and listened to the silence, wondering what had caused a well-trained horse to lose its footing.

Contemplation and the warmth of the day lulled me into something just short of torpor. Then something behind me skittered and my heart jumped and the tip of my shoe curled over into open space and I had to jump back to avoid pitching over.

I regained my bearings in time to see a sand-colored lizard scurry into the brush. Stepping back from the ledge, I cleared my head before turning and walking away. By the time I reached the car, my breathing had nearly returned to normal.

I drove back to the center of Ojai, cruised to Signal Street, past the fieldstone-lined drainage ditch, and parked in the same eucalyptus grove, where I peered through blue shaggy leaves at Bert Harrison's house. Thinking about what I'd say to Bert if I found him. Thinking about Pierce Schwinn's nightmares, the demons that had come back to haunt him during the days before his death.

Bert knew why. Bert had known all along.

No movement from the old man's house. The station wagon was parked right where it had been. After a quarter hour I decided it was time to make my way to the front door and deal with whatever I found, or didn't.

Just as I got out of the Seville, the door squeaked open and Bert stepped out onto his front porch in full purple regalia, cradling a large, brown, paper shopping bag in one arm. I grabbed the Seville 's door before it clicked shut, hurried back behind the trees, and followed the old man's descent down the wooden staircase.

He loaded the bag on the station wagon's passenger seat, got behind the wheel, stalled a couple of times, finally fired the engine. Backing away from the house with excruciating slowness, he took a long time to complete a three-way turn. Battling with the wheel- manual steering. A small man, face intent, hands planted at 10 o'clock-2 o'clock, just the way they teach you in Driver's Ed. Sitting so low his head was barely visible above the door.

Crouching low, I waited until he drove past. The old Chevy's tired suspension wasn't up to the semipaved road, and it creaked and whined as it bounced by. Bert stared straight ahead, didn't notice me or the Seville. I waited till he'd passed from view, then jumped in my own chariot. Power steering gave me an edge, and I caught up in time to spot the wagon lurching east on 33.

I sat at the intersection as the Chevy diminished to a dust mote on the horizon. The empty road made following too risky. I was still wondering what to do when a pickup truck loaded with bags of fertilizer came to a rolling stop behind me. Two Hispanic men in cowboy hats- farmworkers. I motioned them around and they passed me and turned left. Interposing themselves between Bert and me.

I set out behind the truck, lagging a good ways behind.

A few miles later, at the 33-150 intersection, the truck kept going south and Bert managed a torturous, overcautious right onto 150. I stayed with him but increased my distance, barely able to keep the wagon in sight.

He drove another couple of miles, past private campgrounds and a trailer park and signs announced the impending arrival of Lake Casitas. The public reservoir doubled as a recreational facility. For all I knew the paper bag was filled with bread crumbs, and Bert was planning to feed the ducks.

But he veered off the road well before the lake, swinging north at a corner that housed a single-pump filling station and a one-room bait shop and grocery.

Another unmarked trail, this one dotted thinly with unpainted cabins, set well back from the road. A hand-painted sign at one of the first properties advertised homemade berry cobbler and firewood; after that, no messages. The underbrush grew thick here, nurtured by a shade-canopy of ancient oaks and pittosporum and sycamores so twisted they seemed to writhe. Bert bounced along for another two miles, oblivious to my presence, before slowing, and turning left.

Keeping my eye on the spot where he'd disappeared, I pulled over and waited for two minutes, then followed.

He'd gone up a gravel drive that continued for two hundred feet, then angled to the left and vanished behind an unruly hedge of agave- the same spiky plants that fronted his own house. No building in sight. Once again, I parked and continued on foot, hoping the wagon's destination was measured in yards, not miles. Staying off the gravel for quiet's sake, and walking on the bordering greenery.

I spotted the Chevy another hundred feet up, stationed haphazardly in the dirt lot of a tin-roofed, green-boarded house. Larger than a cabin, maybe three rooms, with a sagging front porch and a stovepipe chimney. I edged closer, found myself a vantage point behind the continuing agave wall. The house was nestled by forest but sat on a dry-dirt clearing, probably a firebreak. Diminishing sunlight spattered the metal roof. A poorly shaped apricot tree grew near the front door, ungainly and ragged, but its branches were gravid with fruit.

I stayed there for nearly half an hour before Bert reemerged.

Pushing a man in a wheelchair. I recalled the chair in his living room.

Keeping it for a friend, he'd said.

Dr. Harrison gives.

Despite the mildness of the afternoon, the man was wrapped in a blanket and wore a wide-brimmed straw hat. Bert pushed him slowly, and his head lolled. Bert stopped and said something to him. If the man heard, he gave no indication. Bert locked the chair, went over to the apricot tree, picked two apricots. He handed one to the man, who reached for it very slowly. Both of them ate. Bert held his hand to the man's mouth and the man spit the pit into his palm. Bert examined the seed, placed it in his pocket.

Bert finished his own apricot, pocketed that pit, too.

He stood there, looking up at the sky. The man in the wheelchair didn't budge.

Bert unlocked the chair, pushed it a few feet farther. Angled the chair and allowed me to catch a glimpse of the passenger's face.

Huge mirrored sunglasses below the straw hat dominated the upper half. The bottom was a cloud of gray beard. In between was skin the color of grilled eggplant.

I stepped out of the trees, made no attempt to muffle the crunch of my footsteps on gravel.

Bert turned abruptly. Locked eyes with me. Nodded.

Resigned.

I came closer.

The man in the wheelchair said, "Who's that?" in a low, raspy voice.

Bert said, "The fellow I told you about."