Illusions

16

Geyserville. Village a dozen miles or so north of Healdsburg, at the upper end of the Alexander Valley. Surrounded by wineries, vineyards, long stretches of flatland and low rounded hills. Tucked away in the hills were numerous mineral hot springs that gave the hamlet its name. Friend, fellow investigator, and licensed pilot Sharon McCone, who has flown over the area on her way to a Mendocino County retreat she shares with her significant other, once told me that from the air you can not only see and even smell steam rising from the underground springs, but also see a huge network of PG&E pipelines and energy-harnessing pumping stations. From ground level around Geyserville, though, your only view is of mostly pastoral countryside split by the concrete corridors of Highway 101.

The village is laid out along the east side of the freeway — a few dozen buildings, most flanking Geyserville Avenue and old enough to give the place a 1940s aspect that I found appealing. There were a couple of service stations, the one affiliated with the American Automobile Association, Kane’s Towing and Service, on the south end. I’d found that out by calling Triple A from the car phone on my way up. The service truck and driver were out on a call when I rolled in at one-thirty; wouldn’t be back until after two, the manager informed me. So I left the car there and walked back to the only restaurant, a well-regarded Italian place I’d eaten in a time or two, and killed forty minutes over a bowl of minestrone and some sourdough French bread. When I got back to the station, the tow truck was just pulling in.

The driver’s name was Pete Flynn. Three or four years younger than me, with a substantial pot belly that made him seem bigger than he was and hair, eyebrows, and mustache all growing in wild tangles, like brush on a boulder. He was the garrulous type, always a fortunate draw when you’re hunting information.

“Sure,” he said, “I’m the guy took that call last week. Mule Deer Road, right?”

“Gail Kendall, two-fifteen Mule Deer Road.” Tamara had gotten the address for me.

“Some name. The road, I mean. Ain’t been a mule deer out that way in forty years. You another cop?” He grinned. “ ’Scuse me, officer of the law.”

“No. Private investigator.”

“Yeah, huh? How come you’re askin’ same as the cops?”

“Insurance matter,” I lied.

“Insurance,” he said, as if it were a synonym for the next word out of his mouth. “Shit. One of ’em screwed my brother-in-law big time three years back. Fell off the roof of his house, up there puttin’ new shingles on, busted both his legs and couldn’t do nothing but sit around in a body cast for six months. Bastards wouldn’t pay off. Said he was drunk. Hot day, man works through a six-pack or two, that ain’t drunk. I ast you — you think that’s drunk?”

“Depends on your brother-in-law’s capacity for beer.”

“Capacity? Put my money on Hank against all comers in a chuggin’ contest. Buncha freakin’ crooks, you ask me. Insurance companies.”

“Some are worse than others,” I said agreeably.

“But not yours, huh?”

“Mine, too. I work for more than one. Freelance.”

“Then you ain’t exactly one of ’em. Man’s got to work, I don’t hold that against nobody. What was it you wanted to ast me?”

“About the Kendall service call.”

“What about it?”

“What time did she call in? Can you look up the exact time for me?”

“Don’t have to look it up,” Flynn said. “I remember on account of the sheriff’s boys ast me when they come around. Eight-fifteen, ayem. On the nose.”

Eight-fifteen. And Erskine had been shot at seven-forty. The timing, at least, didn’t rule out Kendall as a suspect. I asked, “What time’d you get out to her house?”

“Musta been about eight-thirty. Left right away, takes maybe fifteen minutes to get to Mule Deer Road from here.”

“And Gail Kendall was there waiting for you?”

“Sure. Out in the driveway, standin’ next to her car. Ford Taurus. Piece of crap, the Ford Taurus. Buy American, I believe in that, I own a Chewy myself, but a piece of crap is a piece of crap, no matter who makes it.”

“The car had a dead battery, is that right?”

“Dead as hell. Couldn’t raise a spark with the single cables. I hadda put the double jumpers on to get any juice.” Ridges appeared in the leathery skin of his forehead; he scratched his tangle of reddish hair with a dirty fingernail. “Funny thing, though.”

“What is?”

“Bugger was old and corroded, older than the damn car, looked like. But she musta got a spark out of it in the garage before she called us.”

“Why? Because the car was in the driveway?”

“Nah,” Flynn said. “Engine and block was warm.”

“As if the car’d been driven, you mean?”

“Yeah. Or set there idling for a while before the engine quit.”

“And you say it was an old battery? Older than the car?”

“Looked that way to me. Could be the original conked out on her, too, and she had that one layin’ around and stuffed it in there instead of buyin’ a new one. Women and their cars. Jeez, you can’t never tell what one of ’em will do to a set of wheels, even a piece of crap like the Ford Taurus. I remember one time—”

“Did you say anything to her about the battery? Mention the warm engine?”

“The battery — yeah. Told her she better get a new one or she’d be callin’ us again because that old bugger wouldn’t hold a charge. Only I didn’t say bugger, not to her. Uh-uh.”

“No?”

He winked. “Stone fox,” he said. “Not that I cuss around any woman much, except my old lady, me bein’ in the public service like I am, but around a stone fox I’m extra polite. That’s just the way I am. I don’t want the babes thinkin’ I’m one of these crude guys don’t give a Frenchman’s fuck who they use shitty language to.”

“You think Gail Kendall is a fox?”

“Sure. I got an eye for good-looking women. And them skinny types with the pouty lips put a charge in my battery, if you know what I mean.”

I said, “Skinny?”

“Yeah, sure. Small, skinny, cute as a bug’s ass.”

“Pete, Gail Kendall is heavy set and thin-lipped.”

“The hell she is. You musta never seen her, that’s what you think.”

“Or you saw somebody else,” I said.

“Huh?”

“What color was her hair? What style?”

He shrugged. “Hey, man, hair’s hair. I’m a leg and ass man myself. Hers looked pretty fine to me, what I could see under that heavy coat she was wearin’.”

“Her hair, Pete. What color?”

“Couldn’t tell you if I wanted to. She had this scarf tied around her head, covered up everything ’cept her face from the eyes down.”

“How old was she?”

“Who knows from age? Old enough, that’s for sure.”

“Around forty?”

“Nah, not that old. Thirty, maybe. Yeah, around thirty.”

“Wait here a second, okay? I’ll be right back.” I hustled over to my car. I’d put the photos of Janice Erskine in the glove compartment last week, after my first visit to Silver Creek Cellars, and they were still there. I brought the set back to Flynn. “Is this the woman you saw?”

He peered at one photo, then the other, turning each a little this way and that. Finally he said, “Could be.”

“But you’re not sure?”

“Could be. Got the same pouty lips. But this fox here, she’s younger.”

“Try to imagine her older by five years or so.”

“I ain’t got much imagination,” Flynn said, but he tried. “Could be,” he said.

“The woman on Mule Deer Road — how did she seem to you?”

“Huh?”

“Was she happy, nervous, upset — what?”

“I dunno, why?”

“It might be important, Pete. Think about it.”

Thinking was a chore for him and it took him a while to get his memory cells in firing order. Then: “Kind of upset, I guess. Yeah. Wired, you know? She wouldn’t hardly look at me, now I think about it.”

“Kept her face averted? Turned away from you?”

“Yeah. I figured it was on account of I’m no Paul Newman. My face, some women like it and some don’t, what the hell. Could be she was wired on account of the battery con-kin’ out and she’s late for work. She said something about that when I got there, her bein’ late for work.”

“Did you tell any of this to the county cop you talked to? What the woman looked like, how she acted?”

“Nah, I don’t think so.”

“How about the old battery and the fact that the Ford’s engine was warm when you got there?”

“Nah. They never ast me about none of that. You ast the right questions and they didn’t.”

That was it exactly. The key to finding out anything is whether or not you ask the right people the right questions.

I had no difficulty locating Mule Deer Road. It was off Lytton Springs Road southwest of Geyserville — a narrow country lane that wound back into the low hills and then began to climb. Near the top of a rise a driveway appeared, a narrow break in a stand of scrub oak; a mailbox on a post there bore the number 215 and the name “Kendall” in paste-on reflector orange.

The house and two outbuildings were partly visible as soon as you turned into the drive, spread along the flattened hilltop above. I drove up slowly, framing what I would say to Gail Kendall if I caught her home. It was probable that she’d be at the winery, but then, not everybody works a full eight hours on Friday. Safer for me if she was home, but I wouldn’t be disappointed if she wasn’t.

At the crest of the drive was a gravel parking area large enough to accommodate half a dozen vehicles. It was empty now and so was an extension of the drive that led to a detached garage separated from the house by a flower garden in full spring bloom. The house was smallish, of redwood and glass in no particular architectural style that I could identify. A raised redwood deck ran along the rear; from there you’d have an impressive view across the valley to the east, and of a miles-long stretch of the mountain range that extended north-south like the county’s bony spine.

Nobody came out of the house when I parked or when I walked up onto a narrow front porch. And nobody responded to three long pushes on the doorbell. The screen door was unlatched, but a sturdy inner door was secure — almost a relief because I’d have been hard-pressed to resist the temptation of an unlocked door.

I stood listening to the wind mutter and bluster across the hilltop. It was strong up here, heavy with the scents of oak and sage, roses and climbing sweet pea and other blooms. Nice spot for a home, if you liked a certain isolation. I wondered if Gail Kendall had moved here from the Sonoma Valley to get away from people — a reaction to the hostage ordeal she’d gone through with her dead husband. Wondered, too, just how deeply the years and those final five hours with him had scarred her; if it had made her distrust men in general, and actively hate the abusers like Ira Erskine. If she was involved in Erskine’s death, as I now believed, then the answer was yes. No sane and functional member of society conspires with a friend to commit murder, however powerful the motive, without some sort of intense personal impetus.

I went crunching across the gravel to the driveway extension. The garage was a short redwood-walled box, large enough for two cars to be squeezed in side by side, with a peaked sheet-metal roof that might have been added on as a rainy-season afterthought; the second outbuilding stood at the edge of the garden, a privy-size shed that no doubt held hoes and rakes and the like. The main garage door was locked and appeared to be electronically operated. I walked around to the near side, where a single door flanked by big, wheeled garbage containers was cut into the wall. That one was locked, too, but it wasn’t much of a lock and the door was loose in the jamb. It wobbled and rattled when I tugged on the knob.

Here we go, I thought. And leaned my leg and hip tight against the lower half and did some strongarm lifting and yanking — what Kerry calls “animating around” — and in less than thirty seconds, without my having to exert myself enough to break a sweat, the lock tore free of its plate and the door jerked open. There wasn’t much damage: a little splintering of the wood around the plate, a bent edge, and some scrapes on the bolt. I ought to be able to relock it again when I was done inside. And the minor damage wouldn’t be noticeable without a close examination.

Small surprise when I stepped into the inner gloom: a car was parked there. I found a light switch, and a bare overhead bulb chased away two-thirds of the shadows. White Ford Taurus — Gail Kendall’s car. So where was she? Off with a friend, maybe. Or someone might have given her a ride to Silver Creek Cellars. In any event, for my purposes the presence of the car was an unexpected bonus.

I tried the driver’s side door; it wasn’t locked. I slid in and poked through the glove box without finding anything to hold my attention. A plastic trash bag hung from one of the radio knobs: used Kleenex, a candy wrapper, and a couple of styrofoam coffee containers. One of the tissues had a smear of bright-red lipstick — the shade Sondra Nelson had been wearing at Woolfox’s ranch. I swept the floor mats in front and back, reaching under the seat as far as I could. Nothing.

Hood release, trunk release, and around back to check the trunk first. Nothing. I lifted the hood to have a look at the battery. Newish but not brand-new, the terminals free of acid-leak corrosion. It would be heavy to lift, but it was positioned where you could get at it easily enough; exchanging one battery for another would take less than five minutes, as long as you had a wrench handy and the rudimentary knowledge of how to hook up the cables. A woman could do it without much strain, even a small, slender woman like Sondra Nelson.

The old corroded battery Pete Flynn had recharged was still there in the garage, under a bench along the rear wall. I took a quick look, left it where it sat.

Finished. I stepped outside and futzed with the door until I was able to force the bolt back into the locking plate.

The house now? I wouldn’t have minded a quick look around in there, but I was not going to break in to get it. Trespassing and animaling your way through a door into a garage were minor offenses; a house B&E was a major felony whether you took anything away with you or not. If Kendall happened to’ve left a window or the back door unlatched, maybe I’d chance it. Otherwise, no.

One other thing I could do here, even if it would make me feel like one of the government’s dirty tricks boys. I lifted the lid on the nearest of the garbage containers, peered inside. Half full. I couldn’t reach all the way down to the trash because the thing was a good five feet in height, so I tilted it carefully on its side and then got down on my knees and took off my jacket and rolled up my shirtsleeves and began sifting. Nasty job, and all it got me were stained fingers and an even lower opinion of myself. I almost didn’t bother with the second container. Then I thought, what the hell, I’d gone this far, and opened that one and laid it down and went garbage-diving again.

Pay dirt, partway through.

Perforated stub torn off a large postcard. I thought at first it was either part of a bill or some kind of computer-generated advertisement, but then I spotted the red lettering on the front: “Sonoma County, Office of the Jury Commissioner.” Sondra Nelson’s name was on it, too, along with a number — her assigned juror’s number.

The stub went into my jacket pocket. And in my mind now was a developing idea of how they’d worked it. I needed a little more information to be sure the basic premise was possible; if it was, then I could go to Sheriff’s Lieutenant Battle and lay it all out for him. He might not like the idea of my having conducted my own unsanctioned investigation, but he’d struck me as a dedicated cop without an ego problem, and that meant results were what counted with him.

Too late to get the information today? Probably, it being a Friday. If so, it could wait until Monday. Sondra Nelson and Gail Kendall weren’t going anywhere.

I shoved the pile of smelly trash back inside and closed the container. I was about to wheel it back into its original position against the garage wall when I heard the sound rising above the cry of the wind. It froze me as soon as I recognized it.

A car was coming up the drive, whining in low gear.