Find a Victim

Chapter 15

Lake Perdida was a narrow body of water held in place at six thousand feet by a concrete dam inserted in the slot between two timbered mountains. It was midmorning when I babied my hot engine over the top of the final grade and caught a glimpse of the lake between the trees. A cold wind from the Sierra peaks flawed its polished surface and soughed in the evergreens.

The blacktop followed the contours of the shore. I passed a tourist lodge, a roadside restaurant, a scattering of cottages. All of them were closed, and shuttered up for the winter. About midway in the lake’s five- or six-mile length I came to a filling station which looked as if it might be open. I stopped in front of the gas pumps, which were sheltered under a portico made of unpeeled logs, and leaned on my horn.

When nothing happened, I got out and walked around my car. There was a handwritten announcement pinned to one of the uprights of the portico: “Gone down the hill. Take water or air as needed, your welcome. For gas you’ll have to wait. Back by ten (a. m.)”

I filled my steaming radiator and pushed on. Half a mile beyond the gas station a weathered wooden sign was attached to a pine tree on the upper side of the road: Green Thought: Craig, Las Cruces. A smaller, newer metal sign: J. Donald Kerrigan, Esq., was nailed below it. I turned up the rocky lane.

The cabin stood on a slope, hidden from the road by the trees. It was a large one-story house with a deep veranda. Its squared redwood timbers were gray with age. The shadow of the ancient trees hung over it like a foretaste of winter.

My feet rattled the boards of the veranda. The heavy wooden shutters mat framed the windows were hanging open. I looked through the multipaned window beside the door into a dim deep room walled with oak paneling, roofed with slanting rafters. A Kodiak bearskin lay like something flattened by a steamroller in front of the stone fireplace at the far end.

I unlocked the door and went in. The air inside was chilly, and impregnated with the stale vestiges of a party. There were traces of a party in the main room. A brass ashtray on the redwood-bole coffee table was half full of cigarette ends, most of them smudged with lipstick. There were two dirty drinking glasses on the table, one marked with a telltale red crescent. Sniffing the glasses without touching them, I guessed that they had once contained good bourbon.

I went to the fireplace and felt the light wood ashes in the grate. The ashes were cold. As I stood up, I noticed something in the fur of the bearskin rug. It was a brown enameled woman’s bobby pin. I searched the rug with my fingers and found another bobby pin. The bear’s glass eyes were blase. His teeth leered in a fixed lascivious grin.

I went through the sleeping-rooms. There was a big bunkroom with half a dozen two-tiered berths built along its walls. The layer of dust on the floor hadn’t been disturbed for weeks or months. One of the two smaller bedrooms was equally disused. The other had been occupied more recently. The floor was swept. The maple bed had been slept in, and not made. I straightened out the tangled sheets. A limp rubber tube lay among them.

There were no clothes or luggage in the room, but there were several articles on top of the rustic bureau. A woman’s nail-file, a jar of face cream standing open and beginning to dry out, a pair of tortoise-shell sun glasses, a number of bobby pins like the ones I had discovered in the bearskin. In the adjoining bathroom I found a tube of toothpaste and a toothbrush, lipstick, a bottle of estrogen oil. They accounted for the things that were missing from Anne Meyer’s apartment in Las Cruces.

The kitchen was bright with chintz and knotty pine. A pot on the butane stove had remnants of spaghetti in the bottom, crawling with flies. The kitchen table had been set for two and not cleared, though the dishes were dirty. An empty wine bottle stood in the center of the table.

I left the kitchen to the languid autumn flies and let myself out the back door. Several cords of cut wood were piled under a tarpaulin against the rear wall. I looked under the tarpaulin and found black beetles. The outdoor brick oven in the yard was empty. A log outbuilding was cluttered with the remnants of past summers: canvas chairs, a small skiff, fishing tackle. I poked around in the outhouse and among the pine needles in the yard. Nothing.

I went back into the lodge through the kitchen door.

There seemed to be a thickening and darkening of the air in the deserted rooms. In the living-room I had a moment of panic. I thought that one of the giant trees was going to crash down on the house. The irrational fear passed over quickly, but it left a sense of disaster. The glass-eyed bear in front of the dead fire, the blood-red cigarette ends in the dully gleaming ashtray, were infinitely dreary. I got out.

I locked the door behind me, not so much to keep intruders out as to keep the disaster in. It slipped through the walls and followed me down the lane nagging at the nightmares in the back seat of my mind, where sex and death embraced.

The note had been removed from the front of the filling station. The door of the small stone building was standing open, and a gray-haired woman came out. She wore blue jeans and a battered man’s felt hat with a trout fly stuck in the ribbon like a cockade.

“Hello there. You want gas?”

“It’ll take about ten.”

I handed her the keys and stood beside her while she manipulated the hose. Her face was square and weathered, and her eyes looked out of it like someone peering through a wall.

“You from L. A.?”

“I am.”

“You’re the first customer I’ve had today.”

“It’s getting pretty late in the season, isn’t it?”

“Season’s over, far as I’m concerned. I’m closing up this week and moving down the mountain before it snows. Old Mac at the Inn is the only human being that stays up here all winter. He can have it.” Hanging up the dripping nozzle, she read the meter: “That will be three and a quarter.”

I gave her a ten-dollar bill – I’d cashed a traveler’s check at the place where I spent the night – and she made change from the pocket of her jeans.

“We get a lot of tourists from L. A. in the summer. What brings you up here so late?”

“Just looking around. I suppose you get plenty of people here from the valley towns?”

“Sure, they come up to get away from the heat. There’s cottagers from all over – Fresno, Bakersfield, Las Cruces. I live in Fresno myself in the wintertime. My son’s a junior at the college.”

“Good for him.”

“Ralph’s a fine boy,” she said, as if to rebut an argument to the contrary. “He appreciates me, even if some people don’t. Ralph knows a good mother when he sees one. And he’s not afraid of work, either. He helped me all summer with the station, and all fall he’s been coming up weekends. Ralph’s a real manly boy, not like some I could name.”

“I like to hear of a boy like that.” I was establishing myself with her, but I also happened to mean it. “I come across a lot of the other kind in my work.”

“What sort of work is that?”

“I’m a detective.”

“Oh. That must be interesting work. Ralph’s father – Mr. Devore was a constable, before he took to – other things.” She gave me a hard bright look over the pump. “Looking for somebody, mister?”

“You guessed it.”

“There’s nobody left up here, excepting me and old Mac and the foresters. The Inn is closed down for the winter.” I followed her gaze through the trees and saw the brown peaked roofs of the Inn at the upper end of the lake. She turned back to me with something girlishly fearful in her eyes. “It isn’t Ralph? He hasn’t done anything wrong?”

“It’s a young woman named Anne Meyer. I have a picture of her here.”

She squinted at the snapshot of the laughing girl on the beach. “Yep,” she said. “I thought so. I knew she wasn’t up to any good.”

“You’ve seen her?”

“Plenty of times. She used to come up here with that fourflusher that married Katie Craig.”

“Kerrigan.”

“That’s the one. A fourflusher and a womanizer if I ever saw one.” Her mouth was tight and grim. “Did Katie finally decide to divorce him?”

“You’re a good guesser.” Not good enough, but good.

“I’d say it’s about time. I’ve known Katie Craig since she was knee-high. She was as bright and sweet a kid as you could ask for, only somehow she never learned to look out for herself. I don’t mean to criticize the old Judge. He was a wonderful man, and it wasn’t his fault. I guess it wasn’t anybody’s fault. She was engaged to marry Talley Raymond from San Francisco, then he got killed in the war and it knocked Katie for a loop, you might say. She married the wrong man, you can take my word for it. I know what it is to marry a wrong ’un myself.” Her heavy neck flushed streakily. “When I think of the waste of a girl like that marrying a man like Kerrigan, it makes me heartsick. And then he had to come up here and turn the Judge’s summer residence into a – a nest of concubines, that’s what it is.” The slow flush mounted her face under the tan. “I’m talking too much.” She stared down intently at the snapshot in her hand, as if to focus her emotions on it.

“When did you see this woman last?”

“Monday, I guess it was. She spent the weekend up here, her first for a long time. I think it was the only time this summer. I was surprised to see her.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Kerrigan had a new girl, that’s why.” She threw an intolerant glance in the general direction of the Inn. “Last summer it was different. This biddy used to drive up with him practically every weekend, bold as brass. I often used to wonder if Katie knew about it. I was tempted to write her a anonymous letter, but I never did.”

“I’m interested in this last weekend,” I said.

“Well, she came in here on Saturday afternoon, asked me for water. Her radiator was boiling. Mine boiled, too, when I saw her. I had half a mind to tell her that there was plenty of water in the lake and she could take a running jump in it. But Ralph wouldn’t have liked that. He was here, and he tells me I got to maintain good public relations. That’s the way Ralph talks.”

“What kind of a car was she driving?”

“Black Chrysler convertible. Lord knows where she got the money to pay for it. The Devil knows, anyways.”

“Was she alone?”

“For a change she was. But she was all prissied up and dressed to kill, and I said to myself at the time: ‘You’re meeting a man and you don’t have to try the innocent act on me.’ She was, too.”

“Did Kerrigan show up later?”

“She didn’t come up to spend the weekend knitting. I saw them together Monday. For all I know he was in the cabin with her the whole weekend. I had better things to do over the weekend than spy on him and his hussy. But Monday afternoon I was coming back from fishing and I passed them on the road. They were headed toward the Inn.”

“Both of them? Kerrigan and Anne Meyer?”

“If that’s her name. Leastwise, he had a woman with him. I didn’t see her face – she had a hat on – but it must of been her.”

“Would you swear to it?”

She looked a little flustered for a moment. “Sure I would, if Katie needs it for her divorce.”

“Are you sure it wasn’t Mrs. Kerrigan herself?”

“Naw. I’d know Katie if she had a potato sack over her head. It wasn’t her. It was this one.” She flourished the picture.

I took it out of her hand. “Was she driving?”

“No, he was. She was leaning back in the seat with her face sort of turned into the corner. Which is why I didn’t get a decent look at her. Not that I was missing much.”

I said: “Mrs. Devore – do I have your name right?”

“Yep.”

“This woman you saw in the car with Kerrigan. Are you sure she was alive?”

Her face went ugly with surprise. She looked like a bewildered bulldog. “That’s some question, mister.”

“Can you answer it?”

“Not for sure I can’t. I didn’t see her move or talk, but she certainly didn’t look dead. Is she supposed to be dead?”

“This is Friday. She was last seen Monday, unless you’ve seen her since.”

“Nope, I haven’t seen her. What goes on, anyway?”

“Murder. There’s quite an epidemic of it running in Las Cruces.”

“Holy cow.” Her jaw pushed forward and the lower teeth scraped at the few black hairs on her upper lip. “Maybe Ralph was right at that.”

“Right about what?”

“About this fellow that came here Saturday night. He knocked on the door about ten o’clock, wanted the use of a phone. I told him we didn’t have one – the only phone up here belongs to the forest service. The little whippersnapper didn’t believe me. He got mad and wanted to make a personal issue out of it: something about how he was a Mex and that was why I wouldn’t let him in. I told him, shucks, said I got no feeling against Mexicans. He didn’t believe that either.”

“What did he look like?”

“Well, he looked like a Mex to me, though he didn’t talk like one. He talked pretty good English, just as good as me. But he was dark-complected and he had that dead black hair, sort of curly. And those big black eyes they have. I never seen such eyes in a man’s head. They rolled around in their sockets like he was off his rocker. That’s what Ralph thought, too. Lucky Ralph was here. He practically had to throw him out on his ear.”

“Did you say he was a small man?”

“Compared to you or Ralph he was. Medium-sized. Pretty well built at that, but I almost had to laugh when he wanted to fight with Ralph.”

“What did he say?”

“Something about he had an important telephone call and could he use our phone. I said, sure, if we had one, only we don’t. Then he got sassy, started to call me names. That’s when Ralph stepped in. Ralph grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and marched him out to his car. He was screaming at Ralph in Spanish. Ralph said after, it was just as well I don’t know any Spanish.

“Ralph didn’t think it was very funny, though. He could handle the fellow all right, but he was worried about other people. He said in his opinion the fellow was dangerous. Borderline psychopath, I think he said, something like that. Ralph is a real deep student of psychology. He said you can often tell them by their eyes: they get that vacant look in their eyes like there was nobody home. This one certainly had it. So maybe he’s the one you’re looking for?” Her face was transfigured, bright with curiosity.

“I found him yesterday, if it was the man I think it was.”

“And he committed a murder?”

“He was involved in one.”

“Who is he?”

“His name is Tony Aquista,” I said. “Getting back to Monday afternoon, you said that Kerrigan was driving the woman’s car toward the Inn?”

“Yessir.”

“What about the old man at the Inn?”

“MacGowan, you mean? He’s the caretaker.”

“Did he see them after you did?”

“I wouldn’t know. I haven’t been talking to him this last month.” Her mouth clamped tight on itself again. “Not since the old rounder let his granddaughter take up with Kerrigan. He’s irresponsible, an old fool, that’s what he is.”

“Is she the new girl you mentioned? Kerrigan’s girl?”

“She went off to Las Graces with him last month and hasn’t been back. What do you think?”

“I think her name’s Jo Summer. Am I right?”

“Josephine. Josephine MacGowan. He calls her Jo all right, but you got your signals mixed on her last name.”

“Somebody has. Is MacGowan over there now?”

“Unless he changed his habits. He never goes anywhere. I don’t think he drives down the hill more than once a year.”

I thanked her for her information and started to climb into my car.

“Listen, mister, what’s been going on in Las Cruces? Is Katie Craig all right?”

“She was a few hours ago. But her husband isn’t. He’s dead.”

“Is he the one that got murdered?”

“One of them.”

“Katie didn’t have anything to do with it, did she?”

“No,” I said. “She didn’t.”

“Thank goodness for that. I’ve always had a soft spot in my heart for Katie, though I haven’t seen her now for a couple of years. Taught her to tie flies when she was just a little yellow-haired tomboy.” Her eyes were luminous with old memories. “It’s terrible to see the years pass, and the suffering they bring to people. I know how Katie has suffered.”

So did I.