F is For Fugitive

10

It was 12:35 when I swung back around to the main street of Floral Beach and parked my car out in front of Pearl's Pool Hall. Weekday business hours were listed as 11:00 A.M. to 2:00 A.M. The door stood open. Last night's air tumbled out in a sluggish breeze that smelled of beer spills and cigarettes. The interior was stuffy, slightly warmer than the ocean-chilled temperature outside. I caught sight of Daisy at the back door, hauling out a massive plastic sack of trash. She gave me a noncommittal look, but I sensed that her mood was dark. I took a seat at the bar. I was the only customer at that hour. Empty, the place seemed even more drab than it had the night before. The floors had been swept and I could see peanut shells and cigarette butts in a heap near the broom, waiting to be nudged into the dustpan propped nearby. The back door banged shut and Daisy reappeared, wiping her hands on the toweling she'd tucked in her belt. She approached warily, her gaze not quite meeting mine. "How's the detective work?"

"I'm sorry I didn't identify myself last night." "What's it to me? I don't give a damn who you are."

"Maybe not, but I wasn't quite straight with Tap and I feel bad about that." "You look real tore up."

I shrugged. "I know it sounds lame, but it's the truth. You thought I was hustling him, and in a way, I was."

She said nothing. She stood and stared at me. After a while she said, "You want a Co'-Cola? I'm having one."

I nodded, watching as she picked up a couple of Mason jars and filled them from the hose dispenser under the bar. She set mine in front of me. "Thanks."

"I hear by the grapevine Royce hired you," she said. "What'd he do that for?"

"He's hoping to have Bailey cleared of the murder charge."

"He'll have a hell of a time after what happened this morning. If Bailey's innocent like he claims, why take off?"

"People get impulsive under pressure. When I talked to him at the jail, he seemed pretty desperate. Maybe when Tap showed up, he saw a way out."

Daisy's tone was contemptuous. "Kid never did have a lick of sense." "So it would seem."

"What about Royce? How's he doing?"

"Not that well. He went right to bed. A lot of people are over there with Ori."

"I don't have much use for her," Daisy said. "Anybody heard from Bailey?"

"Not as far as I know."

She busied herself behind the bar, running a sinkful of hot soapy water and a second sinkful of rinse water. She began to wash Mason jars left over from the night before, her motions automatic as she ran through the sequence, setting clean jars to drain on a towel to the right. "What'd you want with Tap?"

"I was curious what he had to say about Jean Timber lake."

"I heard you askin' him about the stickups them two pulled."

"I was interested in whether his version would match Bailey's."

"Did it?"

"More or less," I said. I studied her as she worked, wondering why she was suddenly so interested. I wasn't about to mention the $42,000 Tap claimed had disappeared. "Who called him here last night? Did you recognize the voice?"

"Some man. Not anyone I knew right off. Might have been someone I'd talked to before, but I couldn't say for sure. There was something queer about the whole conversation," she remarked. "You think it was related to the shooting?"

"It almost had to be."

"That's what I think, too, the way he tore out of here. I'd be willing to swear it wasn't Bailey, though."

"Probably not," I said. "He wouldn't have been permitted to use the jail phone at that hour and he couldn't have met with Tap in any event. What made the call seem so queer?"

"Odd voice. Deep. And the speech was kind of drug out, like someone who'd had a stroke."

"Like a speech impediment?"

"Maybe. I'd have to think about that some. I can't quite put my finger on it." She was silent for a moment and then shook her head, shifting the subject. "Tap's wife, Joleen, is who I feel sorry for. Have you talked to her?"

"Not yet. I guess I will at some point."

"Four little kids. Another due any day."

"Nasty business. I wish he'd used his head. There's no way he could have pulled it off. The deputies are always armed. He never had a chance," I said.

"Maybe that's the way they wanted it."

"Who?"

"Whoever put him up to it. I knew Tap since he was ten years old. Believe me, he wasn't smart enough to come up with a scheme like that on his own.

I looked at her with interest. "Good point," I said. Maybe Bailey was meant to get whacked at the same time, thus eliminating both of them. I reached into my jeans pocket and pulled out the list of Jean Timberlake's classmates. "Any of these guys still around?"

She took the list, pausing while she removed a pair of bifocals from her shirt pocket. She hooked the stems across her ears. She held the paper at arm's length and peered at the names, tilting her head back. "This one's dead. Ran his car off the road about ten years back. This fella moved up to Santa Cruz, last I heard. The rest are either here in Floral Beach or San Luis. You going to talk to every one of 'em?"

"If I have to."

"David Poletti's a dentist with an office on Marsh. You might want to start with him. Nice man. I've known his mother for years."

"Was he a friend of Jean's?"

"I doubt it, but he'd probably know who was."

As it turned out, David Poletti was a children's dentist who spent Wednesday afternoons in the office, catching up on his paperwork. I waited briefly in a pastel-painted reception suite with scaled-down furniture and tattered issues of Highlights for Children stacked on low tables, along with Jack and Jill and Young Miss. Of special interest to me in the last was a column called "Was My Face Red!" in which young girls gushingly related embarrassing moments-most of which were things I'd done not that long ago. Knocking a full cup of Coke off a balcony railing was one. The people down below really yell, don't they?

Dr. Poletti's office staff was composed of three women in their twenties, Alice-in-Wonderland types with big eyes, sweet smiles, long straight hair, and nothing threatening about them. Soothing music oozed out of the walls like whiffs of nitrous oxide. By the time I was ushered into his inner office, I would almost have been willing to sit in a tot-sized dental chaise and have my gums probed with one of those tiny stainless-steel pruning hooks.

When I shook hands with Dr. Poletti, he was still wearing a white jacket with an alarming bloodstain on the front. He caught sight of it about the same time I did, and peeled his jacket off, tossing it across a chair with a soft, apologetic smile. Under the jacket he was wearing a dress shirt and a sweater vest. He indicated that I should take a seat while he shrugged into a brown tweed sport coat and adjusted his cuffs. He was maybe thirty-five, tall, with a narrow face. His hair frizzed in tight curls already turning gray along the sides. I knew, from his yearbook pictures, that he'd played high school basketball and I imagined sophomore girls gushing over him in the cafeteria. He wasn't technically handsome, but he had a certain appeal, a gentleness in his demeanor that must have been reassuring to women and little lads. His eyes were small and drooped slightly at the corners, the color a mild brown behind lightweight metallic frames.

He sat down at his desk. A color studio portrait of his wife and two young boys was prominently displayed, probably to dispel any fantasies his staff might entertain about his availability. "Tawna says you have some questions about an old high school classmate. Given recent events, I'm assuming it's Jean Timberlake."

"How well did you know her?"

"Not very well. I knew who she was, but I don't think I ever had a class with her." He reached for a set of plaster-of-Paris impressions that sat on his desk, upper plate positioned above the lower in a jutting overbite. He cleared his throat. "What sort of information are you looking for?"

"Whatever you can tell me. Bailey Fowler's father hired me to see if I could come up with some new evidence. I thought I'd start with Jean and work forward from there."

"Why come to me?"

I told him about my conversation with Daisy and her suggestion that he might be of help. His manner seemed to shift, becoming less suspicious, though a certain wariness remained. Idly he lifted the mold's upper plate and stuck his finger in, feeling the crowded lower incisors. If I had banged a fist down on the mold, I could have bitten his finger off. The thought made it hard to concentrate on what he was saying. "I've been thinking a lot about the murder since Bailey Fowler's arrest. Terrible thing. Just terrible."

"Were you in that group of kids who found her, by any chance?"

"No, no. I'm a Catholic. That was the youth group from the Baptist church."

"The one in Floral Beach?"

He nodded and I made a mental note, thinking of Reverend Haws. "I've heard she was a bit free with her favors," I said.

"That's the reputation she had. Some of my patients are young girls her age. Fourteen, fifteen.

They just seem so immature. I can't imagine them sexually active and yet I'm sure some of them are."

"I've seen pictures of Jean. She was a beautiful girl."

"Not in any way that served her. She wasn't like the rest of us. Too old in some ways, innocent in others. I guess she thought she'd be popular if she put out, so that's what she did. A lot of guys took advantage." He paused to clear his throat. "Excuse me," he said. He poured himself half a tumbler of water from the thermos sitting on his desk. "You want some water?"

I shook my head. "Anybody in particular?"

"What?"

"I'm wondering if she was involved with anyone you knew."

He gave me a bland look. "Not that I recall."

I could feel the arrow on my bullshit meter swing up into the red. "What about you?"

A baffled laugh. "Me?"

"Yeah, I was wondering if you got involved with her." I could see the color come and go in his face, so I ad-libbed a line. "Actually, someone told me you dated her. I can't remember now who mentioned it, but someone who knew you both."

He shrugged. "I might have. Just briefly. I never dated her steadily or anything like that."

"But you were intimate."

"With Jean?"

"Dr. Poletti, spare me the wordplay and tell me about your relationship. We're talking about things that happened seventeen years ago."

He was silent for a moment, toying with the plaster jaw, which seemed to have something on it he had to pick off. "I wouldn't want this to go any further, whatever we discuss."

"Strictly confidential."

He shifted in his chair. "I guess I've always regretted my association with her. Such as it was. I'm ashamed of it now because I knew better. I'm not sure she did."

"We all do things we regret," I said. "It's part of growing up. What difference does it make after all this time?"

"I know. You're right. I don't know why it's so hard to talk about."

"Take your time."

"I did date her. For a month. Less than that. I can't say my intentions were honorable. I was seventeen. You know how guys are at that age. Once word got out that Jeannie was an easy lay, we became obsessed. She did things we'd never even heard about. We were lined up like a pack of dogs, trying to get at her. It was all anybody ever talked about, how to get in her pants, how to get her in ours. I guess I was no better than the other guys." He shot me an embarrassed smile.

"Go on."

"Some of 'em didn't even bother going through the motions. Just picked her up and took her out to the beach. They didn't even take her out on a date."

"But you did."

He lowered his gaze. "I took her out a few times. I felt guilty even doing that. She was kind of pathetic… and scary at the same time. She was bright enough, but she wanted desperately to believe someone cared. It made you feel sheepish, so you'd get together with the guys afterward and bad-mouth her."

"For what you'd done," I supplied.

"Right. I still can't think about her without feeling kind of sick. What's strange is I can still remember things she did." He paused for a moment, eyebrows going up. He shook his head once, blowing out a puff of air. "She was really outrageous… insatiable's the word… but what drove her wasn't sex. It was… I don't know, self-loathing or a need to dominate. We were at her mercy because we wanted her so much. I guess our revenge was never really giving her what she wanted, which was old-fashioned respect."

"And what was hers?"

"Revenge? I don't know. Creating that heat. Reminding us that she was the only source, that we could never have enough of her or anything even halfway like her for life. She needed approval, some guy to be nice. All we ever did was snicker about her behind her back, which she must have known."

"Did she get hung up on you?"

"I suppose. Not for long, I don't think."

"It would help if you could tell me who else might have been involved with her."

He shook his head. "I can't. You're not going to get me to blow the whistle on anybody else. I still hang out with some of those guys."

"How about if I read you some names off a list?"

"I can't do that. Honestly. I don't mind owning up to my own part in it, but I can't implicate anybody else. It's an odd bond and something we don't talk about, but I'll tell you this-her name gets mentioned, we don't say a word, but we're all thinking the same damn thing."

"What about guys who weren't friends of yours?"

"Meaning what?"

"At the time of the murder, she was apparently having an affair and got herself knocked up."

"Don't know." *

"Make a guess. There must have been rumors."

"Not that I heard."

"Can you ask around? Somebody must know."

"Hey, I'd like to help, but I've probably already said more than I should."

"What about some of the girls in your class? Someone must have been clued in back then."

He cleared his throat again. "Well. Barb might know. I could ask her, I guess."

"Barbara who?"

"My wife. We were in the same class."

I glanced at the photograph on his desk, recognizing her belatedly. "The prom queen?"

"How'd you know about that?"

"I saw some pictures of her in the yearbook. Would you ask her if she could help?"

"I doubt if she knows anything, but I could mention it."

"That'd be great. Have her give me a call. If she doesn't know anything about it, she might suggest someone who would."

"I wouldn't want anything said about…"

"I understand," I said.

I gave him my card with a little note on the back, with my telephone number at the Ocean Street. I left his office feeling faintly optimistic and more than a little disturbed. There was something about the idea of grown men haunted by the sexuality of a seventeen-year-old girl that seemed riveting-both pitiable and perverse. Somehow the glimpse he'd given me of the past made me feel like a voyeur.