Find a Victim

Chapter 16

The Inn was a rambling two-story building faced with weathered brown shingles. Its shuttered windows seemed to doze in the sun. The mountainside rose behind it, and farther back, in the eastern distance, the high Sierras thrust their bald white domes toward the stratosphere.

I parked in front of the rustic log veranda and walked up a gravel road that led around to the back. A gray squirrel scampered away from the crunch of my footsteps, looking back a couple of times to make sure he was being noticed. A bluejay jeered at me from the limb of a spruce. I told him to keep a civil tongue in his head.

A gray-bearded man in overalls appeared on the other side of the spruce. He walked with an awkward hitch and roll. Resting one hand against the trunk of the tree, he squinted up at the bird with a gap-toothed grin. “Don’t pay any attention to him. He thinks he owns the place.”

The jay jumped up and down in a small blue fury. He swooped at the man’s gray head, firing staccato bursts of sound. The old man waved him away, laughing in a voice almost as high and feckless as the bird’s. The bird flew up into the top of the tree and swung there like a bright blue Christmas-tree ornament.

“He’s the king of the castle,” the old man said, or chanted, “and we’re the dirty rascals.” His eyes were black and bright under unkempt gray eyebrows.

“Mr. MacGowan?”

He stroked his neck with the side of his hand. “That’s my name. You have the advantage of me.”

“Archer. Lew Archer. I’m a private detective working with the police on a disappearance.”

“Disappearance?” He pronounced the word with a faint Scots accent, imported long ago.

“A woman has turned up missing in Las Cruces.”

“What woman is it? Not Josephine?”

“Who’s she?”

A look of suspicion that went with his accent puckered the skin around his eyes. “I can’t say for certain that that’s any of your business, mister.”

“Forget it.”

“All right.”

I let the question of Josephine ride for the present. “The missing woman’s name is Anne Meyer. She was seen up here last weekend, by Mrs. Devore at the filling station. Mrs. Devore thought you might be able to help me.”

“Mrs. Devore thinks a lot of things. Not half as many things as she says, though. What’s it got to do with me?”

“She saw the woman driving with Kerrigan on Monday afternoon. They were headed in this direction. Do you know Donald Kerrigan?”

“I ought to,” he said darkly. “Yeah, I saw them Monday. They went past here up the road to the corrals.”

“Can you describe the woman?”

He wagged his white head. “I never did get close enough to make out her physog. I think she was a young woman. She had on a dark brown suit, and some kind of a funny hat on her head. I believe her hair was dark.”

“You saw all this as the car went by?”

“Nope. I didn’t say that. You’re putting words into my mouth.” He leaned his bowed shoulders against the tree-trunk and looked up into the branches. His scraggly beard pointed at me accusingly.

“Sorry. I misunderstood you.”

“All right, then. I saw this Kerrigan drive past, and I didn’t know but what the woman with him–” He broke off coughing behind his hand: “I mean to say, it so happens I’ve a bone to pick with Kerrigan. A private matter. I thought: here’s my chance to have a word with him. He couldn’t go far in that direction: the road ends up above the stables. So I followed along on foot. It took me quite a while to get up there. I don’t walk so good since I broke my hip. Time was when I could run up a little hill like that and not even change my breathing. I was a great rock-climber when I was a lad back across the water.”

There was continental distances in his eyes, and his old mind was spiraling off across them. I showed him Anne Meyer’s picture to bring him back to the point “Was this the woman with Kerrigan?”

“Maybe it was,” he answered slowly. “Then again maybe it wasn’t. I told you I never did get close up to her. When I reached the top of the hill behind the stables, I saw them through the trees. They were down in the hollow below the water tank, digging a hole.”

“Doing what?”

“There’s no call to shout, my hearing is perfectly good. They were digging a hole.”

“What kind of a hole?”

“Just a common ordinary hole in the ground. It went through my mind that maybe they shot a deer illegally and they were burying it. I yelled at them to stop, that it was private property they were on. I guess I ought to’ve waited and crept up on them. But these last few years by myself, I get mad awful easy.”

“Especially at Kerrigan?”

“You know him, eh? You should have seen him jump when I let out that yell. He ran for the car, with the woman at his heels. It was parked on the other side of the water tank where the road loops round, so I had no chance to catch them. I got a good shovel out of it, though.” A mischievous smile creased his face, and he looked like a withered boy in a false beard. “You want to see it?”

“I’d rather see the hole. Can we drive up there?”

“I guess so. Only, I warn you it isn’t much to look at. It’s just a hole. Course if you’ve never seen a hole–” He emitted a high jaybird chuckle.

“Hell,” I said, “I’m in one.”

A few hundred yards past the Inn, the road meandered op the hillside, dwindling to a rutted dirt track. We passed a sunlit clearing occupied by stables and corrals. Behind them the hill rose steeply, its rise accentuated by tall trees that grew up along it in desultory ranks. I caught sight of a wooden water tank standing high on scaffolding at the top. We crawled up the hairpinning lane toward it in low gear.

I stopped the car in a green tunnel made by overarching trees.

“Down there,” MacGowan said.

He led me across a granite ridge projecting like a broken rib from the earth, and down into the hollow. The hole was about six feet long by two feet wide. It was roughly the shape of a grave, but shallower, no more than a foot deep. A pile of sandy earth mixed with pine needles stood beside it. I got down on my knees and tested the bottom of the hole with my fingers. The earth at the bottom was still impacted. It hadn’t been dug deeper and filled in.

“I gave you fair warning it wasn’t much to look at,” the old man said behind me. “Wonder what those darn fools thought they were doing. Digging for buried treasure?”

I stood up and turned to MacGowan. “Who was doing the digging?”

“She was.”

“Was he holding a gun on her, anything like that?”

“Not that I saw. Maybe he had one in his pocket. He was standing right here where I am, with his hands in his pockets. It’s just the sort of thing he would do, letting a woman do his dirty work.”

“When they ran away, did you say he went first?”

“That’s correct. I bet he hasn’t run that fast in years. She had a hard time keeping up. Matter of fact, she took a tumble before she got up to the road.”

“Where did she fall?”

“I’ll show you.”

We climbed the far side of the hollow, where the lane looped around and swung back downhill. He pointed into the shallow ditch beside it. It was overgrown with manzanita bushes whose branches were red and shiny as if they had been freshly dipped in blood.

“Right about here,” he said. “He was in the car already when she fell. He didn’t get out and help her, either, fat slob that he is.”

“You’re not very fond of Kerrigan, are you?”

“No sir, I’m not. I’ve no cause to be.”

“What was the bone you had to pick with him?”

“I don’t much like to talk about it. It’s a family affair, having to do with my granddaughter. She’s only a young girl–”

He saw that I wasn’t listening, and broke off. My eye had caught a glint of something among the manzanitas. It was the heel of a woman’s shoe, wedged in the crack between two granite boulders. Several bright bent nails protruded from the top. I pried it loose with my fingers: a heel of medium height, tipped with rubber and covered with scuffed brown leather.

“Looks as if she lost a heel,” he said. “I noticed she walked peculiar when she got up. Thought maybe she hurt her leg.”

“Where did they go from here?”

“There’s only the one way to go.” He pointed downhill.

From where we stood, I could see the mercury trickle of the lake between the trees. The sun hung over it like a great silent blowtorch. Below the white lip of the dam, the powerhouse and its company town were hidden. The purple walls of the canyon beyond sloped down and away, dissolving in hot white distance. Under the white valley haze Las Cruces lay out of sight. It was hard to imagine from the cool forest height, but I knew that it was there, with fifty thousand people sweltering in its streets. I looked down at the leather object in my hand, and wondered which of the fifty thousand was Cinderella.