Serpentine

Chapter 6

By eight thirty p.m., I’d finished two court reports and begun charts on the two kids I’d seen in the afternoon. Robin was back in the studio checking out the mandolin’s progress, Blanche was snoring in her open-door crate. I returned to my computer.

Neither Ellie Barker nor Milo had found a thing on Dorothy Swoboda but I looked anyway. Google pulled up one woman by that name, dead since 1895, gravestone in Missouri.

I switched to a broad-based Nexis periodicals search, found only the Times squib. Switched the subject to Stanley Richard Barker and got three hits.

Two were puff pieces from the East Bay Times. Forty-two years ago, “Dr. Stan” had been lauded for donating eye exams and glasses to underprivileged schoolkids. Not in Danville, the paper was quick to point out. In “less affluent neighboring communities.”

One year later, Barker had attracted similar praise for opening up a second branch of his SEE-RITE optometric shop in Oakland.

The third reference was a nineteen-year-old obituary in The San Francisco Examiner: The body of a Danville man had been discovered by hikers in a gully below a trail in the Las Trampas Regional Wilderness. Stanley R. Barker, sixty-four, a Danville ophthalmologist (sic) had been reported missing a week before by an unnamed receptionist.

I looked up the locale, found descriptions on several travel sites specializing in outdoor recreation: five-thousand-plus acres of regional park consisting of two ridges sprawling across Contra Costa and Alameda counties, the nearest city, Danville. Sections had been left wild, others featured marked trails.

Beautiful place according to every source but, with drops approaching a thousand feet, best suited for “highly athletic, experienced hikers under favorable meteorological conditions.”

I rechecked the Examiner piece. July 15, so probably mild weather, unless Barker had gotten lost and ended up stranded in the dark.

In the photo I’d just seen, Barker was soft-looking. Wearing a suit outdoors. I supposed he could’ve embraced fitness at an advanced age, but his death-site seemed curious.

What I also found curious was that Ellie Barker hadn’t mentioned his unnatural death.

Maybe when balanced against her mother’s murder, a fatal accident seemed benign. Or there was just so much bad karma she could tolerate at one time.

Mom in a car, shot and burned and rolled over into a ravine.

Dad found, decaying, in a gully.

There was a certain confluence.

I looked up Wikipedia’s description of the park, stopped short at the end of the first paragraph.

Trampas was Spanish for “traps.”

I called Milo.

He picked up sounding sleepy.

I said, “Another Martini?”

“Wine at dinner. Rick cooked and he picked a really nice Rioja, how could I say no? What’s up?”

I told him about Barker.

He said, “Nineteen years. Seventeen after Dottie, not exactly a pattern.”

“True.”

“But they did both go over cliffs.”

“And Ellie didn’t mention it.”

“Maybe she wanted to concentrate on Mommy. Speaking of Mommy, Petra called right after I dropped you off. She did come through with something, God bless her. Not the case file, but better than nothing — listing of three D’s who worked it.”

“Together or in sequence?”

“Passed from one to the other, there was never a task force. The first guy was before my time, D III named Elwin McClatchy. He was on it for six years, retired, died soon after. I know all this because googling him brings up a big departmental funeral, apparently he’d done some heroics as a patrolman. After McClatchy, the case sat there for three years before going to a guy I do know from when he worked at Pacific briefly before retiring. Drone named P. J. Seeger, we talked about a gang case that leaked over to West L.A. and then he was gone.”

“Any idea why the case got reactivated?”

“Not yet. This was before cold cases were a thing so it could’ve been routine housecleaning — new captain comes in, wants to clear the cobwebs. Or the department ran an audit and Hollywood wanted good stats.”

“Or Seeger got curious.”

“Maybe, but P.J. wasn’t an inquisitive guy and the fact that it was given to him tells me it wasn’t prioritized.”

“No Sherlock.”

“A dim bulb with low energy. Taaawked-liiike-thiiis, when I got off the phone with him I felt like shooting speed. He held on to Swoboda for five years before transferring so by the time he took his pension, the case was fourteen years old. I didn’t expect much from talking to him but no stone and all that, so I dug up the last home number in his file and talked to his widow. Chatty lady lives in the same house in Granada Hills. Turns out P.J. celebrated his newfound freedom by buying a Harley that he crashed fatally a month later.”

“She know anything about Swoboda?”

“Nope, Philly never brought his work home. Right after he transferred to Pacific, the case went to a name I don’t know, D I named Dudley Gallway.”

“Lower-grade detective,” I said. “That mean anything?”

“Probably. Haven’t found paper or internet info on Gallway yet but I don’t feel like attacking the issue under the influence of Spanish wine. Tomorrow I’ll ask Petra for some old-timer contacts, maybe take her to Musso as a gesture of gratitude. Speaking of which, lunch was pretty good, no?”

“Great,” I said.

“My imagination or did the portions get smaller?”