Blowback

Five

We beached the skiff at the foot of the slope and climbed up and went over onto the bluff. It was graveyard-still up there; nothing stirred anywhere in the hot, windless dusk. You could see the tracks made by the van's tires in the grassy earth, and they started back where a rutted trail hooked away through night-shadowed pine forest. There were no other tracks of any kind.

I said, “Where does that trail lead?”

“Connects with a fire road about a hundred yards back,” Harry said. “That one loops around the lake and picks up the county road into The Pines.”

“Used much?”

“Some. Tourists and local kids, mostly.”

“But not around this time of day.”

“Not usually, no.”

“So whoever did it probably got away without being seen.”

“If he isn't still around here somewhere.”

“Not much chance of that, as much noise as we've made.”

“What the hell could it be about?”

I shook my head.

We walked to the trail and followed it a short way into the woods. The ground there was hard-packed, covered with pine needles, and you could not tell if another vehicle had come along it or parked on it recently. The only indications of human presence-and human folly-seemed to be a scatter of rusting beer cans and the paper wrappings from fast-food chicken and hamburgers and at least two used condoms tied off like deflated carnival balloons. Lots of things lost here, I thought grimly. Virginity, hours and nights, laughter, another unspoiled piece of nature. And now you could add a man's life to the list.

I stopped to listen, but there was still nothing to hear; the area was deserted now, all right. Then my eye caught and held on something multicolored lying on the grassy hump between the ruts a few yards ahead. I went up there and sat on my haunches and looked at the thing without touching it. It was a couple of feet long, iridescent green and gold ornamented with eyelike markings in rich dark blue-and it had no more business being there at Eden Lake than a murdered dealer in Oriental rugs and carpets.

“Peacock feather,” Harry said beside me.

“Yeah.”

“Funny thing to find in a place like this.”

“I was thinking the same.”

“Could it've belonged to whoever did for the guy in the van?”

“Maybe,” I said. I leaned down close to the feather, still not touching it. Free of dust or pine needles or water stains; colors sharp, vane smooth and new-looking. “One thing's sure-it hasn't been here very long.”

Harry frowned as I stood up, “Doesn't make much sense,” he said. “Why would anybody carry around a peacock feather?”

“Yeah,” I said, “why?”

When we came out onto the bluff again, the last reflections of sunset were gone from the lake and the water had turned a dusty gray color. The sky was a velvety purple, studded with hard un-winking stars and the fingernail slice of a gibbous moon. You could tell that it was not going to get any cooler than it was now until the hours just before dawn.

I said, “You'd better take the skiff back and report this to the county sheriff.”

“What about you?”

“I'll stay here and keep watch.”

“You sure? It'll take a couple of hours.”

“I don't mind if you don't.”

“Whatever you say, buddy.”

I went downslope with him and held the skiff while he got in, and then shoved it off. When he jerked the outboard to life, mosquitoes and gnats gliding through the heavy stillness seemed to dart away in all directions, like shards of the suddenly broken quiet. I stood at the water's edge and watched until he had the skiff turned and the throttle opened up; then I sat down in the grass to wait and think a little.

The dead man in the van, and the Oriental rug angle, and the peacock feather, made the whole thing a can of worms-the county sheriff's, not mine or Harry's. Guesswork wouldn't buy me anything, then, and I had enough on my mind as it was: the results of the sputum test, and Harry's troubles at the camp. The thing to do was to stay aloof from what had happened here.

Sure.

At the base of the bluff, fifty yards away, the van sat motionless among the rule reeds, canted forward slightly onto its passenger side; all four wheels were submerged. The white body gleamed cold and pale in the gathering darkness.

Like marble, I thought. Marble slab, marble crypt.

A feeling of uneasiness began to creep over me, and it had nothing much to do with sitting alone in the dark. I could not stop thinking about the small nut-brown man lying over there with the top of his head shattered; in my mind I could still see his face, the staring eyes and the waxy features void of life force.

I had seen death before, too much of it-kids with their bodies torn open and limbs blown off by grenades and mortar shells, a woman with forty-two stab wounds in her face and torso, the living room of a house in San Francisco's Sunset District in which a man had gone berserk and taken an axe to his wife and family. I had never become immune to the sight of it, as some cops did-that was one of the reasons why I had finally resigned from the force-but I had learned how to block it out of my mind after a while, how to keep my attitude totally objective. Death was an abstract, death was a natural phenomenon, death was inevitable; accept it, and don't think about it because it might just interfere with the living of your life. Sound psychology, the only kind that made any sense for a man in my profession.

Only now that I was in its presence again, touched by it, I could not seem to erect the old objective barrier. Death had become personal, an immediate threat, a specter with which I had to deal directly. In what was left of the small nut-brown man I saw myself in a few months, or at best a few years, lying dead somewhere, nothing but an empty shell that had once contained a man.

And what of the soul?

All of us are conditioned from childhood to believe that the souls of the righteous will live on in an afterlife and be given immortality in a corner of some inexplicable non-place called heaven. So you go along for fifty years, calling yourself a Christian even though you don't much hold with organized religion, and you hide behind your objectivity, and you tell yourself that when your time comes you'll be ready. But then the time sneaks up on you, looms suddenly and dismayingly imminent, and you realize you're not ready at all-nor maybe will you ever be ready-because when you come face to face with your own mortality your beliefs no longer seem so simple and strong and certain.

Without the unshakable faith of the True Believer, you begin to wonder. And the prospect of a disembodied, unaware drifting through eternity becomes somehow more haunting and even less appealing than the other alternative-that death is the end, and when you die your soul dies with you. Nothingness is comprehensible; every time you go to sleep you experience some of what nothingness is like. But how can you begin to comprehend the mystical concepts and rewards of the Judeo-Christian ethic?

The uneasiness grew stronger, and I stood up and put my back to the van and walked up onto the bluff again. The sky seemed immense, sentient, an oracle that knew but would never reveal the answers to life and death and infinity. I paced back and forth in the warm darkness, imagining the passage of seconds and minutes, feeling small and alone.

And afraid.

It was two hours and fifteen minutes before Harry returned with the county authorities. I heard them out on the fire road, and I went over onto the trail to meet them when they appeared through the trees, flashlights cutting away at the heavy shadows. The man in charge was the county sheriff, a thin gray man in a khaki uniform whose name was Cloudman. With him were a couple of deputies and the county coroner and a guy in plain clothes carrying a camera and a satchel of forensic equipment.

I gave Cloudman my name, and he asked me a couple of polite questions to corroborate what Harry had told him, and then they all went down to the base of the bluff to have a look at the van and the dead man inside. When they came back up, grim-faced, Cloudman asked Harry and me to wait on the fire road.

We did that, leaning against the side of a cruiser with official markings; a plain blue sedan sat there too, along with an ambulance and a tow truck outfitted with a good-sized winch and two small searchlights. The drivers of the ambulance and the tow truck stood talking in low voices nearby, not paying any attention to us. I wanted a cigarette pretty badly, and I noticed one of them lighting up every now and then; I had to force myself not to go over and ask to bum one.

After a while one of the deputies appeared and told the tow-truck guy that they were ready for him. He took the truck along the trail and out of sight, and pretty soon I could hear the sound of the winch. Bright whitish light from the searchlamps back-lit the screen of trees, silvered their upper boughs so that they looked frosted.

Harry said, “This on top of the mess at the camp-Christ.”

“Everything okay when you got back with the skiff?”

“Seemed to be. I didn't see anybody around.”

“The Jerrolds' Caddy there?”

“No. But I still don't like being away like this.”

“I guess I don't either.”

“How much longer, you think?”

“Depends. Not too long, probably.”

The winch shut down after ten minutes, and there was ten minutes of silence broken only by the low fiddling of crickets, and then it started up again. Shortly after that, Cloudman came out of the woods and signaled to the ambulance driver. When the ambulance had vanished along the trail, he walked over to where Harry and I were at the cruiser.

“Looks like murder, all right,” he said. Even though he was somewhere in his forties, he had a reedy voice with a catch in it now and then, like a kid whose voice is just starting to change at puberty; it made him seem deceptively less authoritative than he was. “Skull crushed with a tire iron, and no way it could have happened accidentally.”

Harry and I had nothing to say.

Cloudman took his hat off and dug at his own scalp with a fingernail, brought the finger down and squinted at it in the darkness, then wiped it on his trousers. “Victim's name is Vahram Terzian, resident of San Jose,” he said. “Armenian, I guess. Either of you know him or ever see him before?”

Harry said, “No.”

I said, “His van was parked in front of the General Store in The Pines this afternoon.”

“What time was that?”

“Around three.”

“You see any sign of Terzian?”

“I'm afraid not.”

Cloudman said to Harry, “You know anybody in the area has an interest in Oriental rugs, Mr. Burroughs?”

“No, nobody.”

“Same goes for the people staying at your fishing camp, I take it.”

Harry nodded.

“Uh-huh. Well, let's see now,” Cloudman said. “You didn't notice anyone on the bluff either before or after the van went off, that right?”

“That's right, yes.”

“Nor hear the sound of another car?”

“No.”

“You touch anything when you came up to have a look?”

I said, “Nothing. But we found a peacock feather on the trail over there; it seemed out of place in these surroundings.”

“I thought so myself. No wild peacocks around here that I ever heard of.”

“You find anything else that might help?” Harry asked.

“Too early to tell.” Which meant they hadn't.

I said, “Was there anything in the back of the van?”

“Nope. Empty.”

“Then it might be a hijacking.”

“Rugs and carpets?”

“Some Orientals can be pretty valuable.”

“I suppose so,” Cloudman said noncommittally. He studied me for a moment. “Hope you don't mind, but I'll have to see some identification. For my report, you know.”

“Sure.”

I got my wallet out and thought about letting him see just my driver's license; but he would probably still ask me what I did for a living, if Harry hadn't already told him. So I gave him the photostat of my investigator's license and watched while he clicked on his flashlight and read it in the beam. Behind the whitish glow, his thin face told me nothing at all of what he was thinking.

When he finished reading the license, he copied information from it into a notebook that he dug out of his jacket pocket. Then he put the notebook and his pen away and gave the photostat back to me. “So you're a private eye,” he said, and there was nothing in his tone, either, that gave me any idea of his reaction to the fact.

“Private detective, yes.”

“Like one of those TV boys, huh?”

“Not hardly. I've never been in a car chase in my life.”

He liked that: it got me a faint smile. “We don't get many private eyes up here. But then, we don't get many Armenian rug peddlers or many homicides either. Mr. Burroughs tells me you're a guest at his camp.”

“Right. I just got in today.”

“Business or pleasure bring you up from Frisco?”

“Pleasure. Harry and I are old friends.”

“We were in the South Pacific together during World War II,” Harry said.

“That so? I tried to enlist for Korea in '49, but they wouldn't take me. Asthma. Hell of a thing, asthma. Still bothers me when the weather turns cool.” He sighed. “Well, I guess that's about all for now. Getting pretty late. I'll have one of the deputies run you back to The Pines.”

“Thanks.”

“Couple of other things tomorrow, though,” Cloudman said. “One is that I'll have to send a deputy around early in the morning-talk to your guests, see if any of them might have seen something.”

Harry looked pained.

“Can't be helped,” Cloudman said. “You're the only people around here for five miles.”

“He understands,” I said. “No problem.”

“Good. Second thing, I'd appreciate it if you fellas would drop over to the courthouse in Sonora sometime after lunch. I'll have statements by then that'll need your signatures.”

“Well be there.”

He nodded and started to turn away; paused, looked at me again, and said as though in afterthought, “You don't happen to pack a gun, do you?”

“No. It's against the law in California for a private citizen to carry a concealed weapon.”

He nodded again, this time in a satisfied way, and let me see another faint smile. “Never been in a car chase, that's pretty good,” he said. “I got to remember that.” He lifted his hand and then went off toward the trail and disappeared into the woods.

Harry said, “You handled that like a politician, buddy.”

“I've had practice. Cloudman seems to be a decent sort, and plenty sharp; you don't buy anything but problems playing games with a man like that.”

“Well, thanks for not saying anything about the trouble at the camp. It would only have complicated things even more.”

“I'd have told him if it was a police matter,” I said. “Or if I thought it had any connection with what happened to Terzian.”

“My God, there's no chance of that.”

“No, I don't see how there could be.”

“Just no chance of it,” he said again, as if to reassure himself. Then, plaintively, “Haven't I got enough on my head without the police coming around?”

I knew that he was worrying about the deputy Cloudman would send out in the morning, having the people at the camp stirred up by questions about a murder, maybe losing a couple of them-and the rental revenue he needed-because they didn't like the idea of continuing their vacations in a place where a homicide had occurred and was being investigated. I said, “There's nothing to be done about it, Harry. It's police routine and out of our hands.”

“Yeah,” he said. He rubbed a hand across his face. “Christ, what next?”

“Nothing next,” I said. “Nothing else is going to happen.”

He looked at me as if he did not quite believe that.

And I wondered if I quite believed it myself…