The Murder Artist

CHAPTER 45

By the time I cross the Golden Gate Bridge, after a slow crawl from the airport, it’s almost five. The address I found online, with its suite number, is certainly an office and not where Mertz lives. I might have to make a trip to the Mendocino County courthouse in Ukiah, to look for properties belonging to Luc Mertz or Sequoia Solutions, but for now I head straight for Anchor Bay. It’s not a metropolis. If Mertz lives nearby, maybe somebody will know it.

I’m getting close to Cloverdale when I put in a call to Shoffler. I’m thinking maybe he knows someone in the local constabulary, someone who can help me.

“So how was France?” I say when he answers.

“Great food. Unbelievable.” A pause. “Who is this? Is that you, Alex? Where the hell are you? You sound like you’re on the moon.”

“I’m in California. I thought maybe you could help me with something.”

“You know I will if I can.”

“Know anybody in northern California? The coast above San Francisco?”

“Why? What you got?”

“I think my boys are here.”

“Where?”

“Near Anchor Bay.”

“Where’s that?”

“About forty miles south of Mendocino.”

“Hunh.” He heaves a long sigh. “You better tell me about it. What makes you think your boys are there?”

I hesitate. “It’s a long story, and there’s no way I can get through it on this cell phone. Bottom line, I know who grabbed them.”

“You do?!”

“His name is Byron Boudreaux, and if something happens to me, Ray, you’ve got to promise me you’ll go after him. He’s got a rich patron named Mertz. Luc Mertz.” I spell it. “Mertz is a Belgian.”

“Hunh.” He heaves a sigh. “You know, for me to play backup, I really need to know the story, Alex.”

“Look, do you know anybody out here or not?”

A sigh. “Not really. Used to know a guy in Healdsburg, but he got killed busting a ring of abalone poachers.”

The telephone crackles and hums. “If something happens to me,” I tell him, “get in touch with a P.I. named Pinky Streiber in New Orleans. He can tell you all about it.”

“I don’t like the sound of this, Alex. You’re not gonna help your boys if you get whacked. Hold off a day or two. I know a couple of guys in San Francisco. Let me network a little.”

As I make the turn to head for the coast, I realize I’m wasting my time. Law enforcement isn’t going to help me. Everything is circumstantial. Paper rabbits and voodoo burials, postmarks and the rope trick. And the connection to Mertz is even dicier.

No judge is going to authorize a search warrant based on what I’ve got, certainly not for premises belonging to a litigious multimillionaire like Luc Mertz.

“Pinky Streiber,” I tell Shoffler. “Decatur Street, New Orleans. You writing this down?”

“I’m telling you, Alex, hold off on this. I can-”

I press the button to cut him off, and drive on toward the coast.

I find the Sequoia Solutions address with no problem. It’s in a faux-Western wooden structure with dozens of small offices. It’s almost ten, and everyone’s long gone with the exception of the tired-looking man in Coastal Chiropractics.

He opens the door cautiously, lowers his reading glasses, and peers at me.

“Help you?”

“You know the guy in number two-ten, down the hall? Sequoia Solutions.”

He wags his head. “No. I don’t even think I’ve ever seen anybody in that office,” he tells me.

“Guy named Mertz?”

He shakes his head again. “Lot of these offices, people aren’t here on a daily basis, you know? I’m the exception. Sorry.”

I ask him for the number of the rental agency, which he gives me. They’ll have a lease, more information about Mertz. I’ll get in touch with them tomorrow.

In the meantime, I need a room.

This turns out to be a problem. It’s August, there are not that many places to stay, and they’re all booked solid. I strike out in Anchor Bay. I head north toward Point Arena, and I strike out there, too. Everywhere I go, I ask about Mertz, and Sequoia Solutions. I strike out there, too. No one’s heard of him.

The clerk at the Buena Vista Cottages in Point Arena takes pity on me and makes a few phone calls.

“Bingo,” he says. “The Breakers Inn, in Gualala. They had a cancellation.”

“Where’s that?”

“Just go south on 101. It’s the next town down from Anchor Bay.”

“Thanks a lot. I appreciate it.”

“Hey, my turn will come.”

It’s almost eleven by the time I pull into the Breakers Inn parking lot. Mine is a big room, with a balcony facing the sea, the kid at the desk tells me.

The motel’s landscaping is heavy with flowers and rose-covered arches. Beyond a placid estuary, the surf crashes and ebbs. Everything about the place, including the happy couple behind me in line, suggests that it’s popular for romantic getaways. Not exactly the way I’d describe my visit.

The clerk takes my card and runs it through his machine. I decide to get right to it. “You know a local guy named Mertz?” I ask him. “Short guy, bald, lots of money. But he’s not really local. Has a place around here, but he’s actually from Belgium.”

“Sorry, man. I’m just here for the surf.”

“You know anyone who might know?” I ask, taking the key from him.

He thinks about it. “The little grocery store – right next door. That’s open till midnight. Local people work there. You might try real estate agents – there’s a flock of them. They stay pretty up on things. And there’s a couple of restaurants in town that don’t just cater to tourists. Try the Cliff House.”

I thank him and look at the key, which has no number. “So where’s my room?”

“You’re in Canada,” he tells me. “Down the walk, third on the left.”

“Canada?”

“They’re all named after places,” he says. “Decorated that way, too. Thinking out of the box, you know. Someone thought numbers were boring. Too hierarchical.”

“That is sooo California,” the woman behind me says. “Don’t you just love it?”

At the grocery store, I let an elderly lady in line behind me go ahead, and she does, with a little genuflection of thanks. She buys Salem Lights, a can of Pringles, and a half gallon of skim milk.

The woman working the register is young and huge, at least six-feet-two, two hundred fifty. With her round, cherubic face, she looks like a giant baby.

I put my bottle of Zephyrhills water on the conveyor belt. “I’m looking for somebody,” I tell her. “Maybe you know him?”

She flips her wrist with a practiced motion and scans the water. “Dollar twelve,” she says.

“Guy named Luc Mertz. He’s-”

“-a fucking frog is what he is,” the cashier snarls. “Tells me no, he ain’t a frog, he’s Belgian.” She shakes her head. “Same difference. They hate our guts, too. Some kind of allies, huh?”

“So you do know him,” I say.

Babyface doesn’t miss the stupidity of this remark. “Duh,” she says. “Yeah, I guess so.”

I’m stunned. For a moment I feel the surprising and unfamiliar radiance of luck. I was prepared to grind it out.

“He live around here?”

“Hell, yes. I worked a party down there one time, bartending. Big place, down by Sea Ranch. Got some frogoid name.” She concentrates like a toddler, her face contorted by concentration. “Mystère!” she says like a quiz-show contestant. “You know, it’s like frog for mystery.”

She puts my water in a plastic bag, places the receipt in it, hands it to me.

“Where’s Sea Ranch?” I ask her.

“You don’t know where Sea Ranch is?” Now I’m testing her patience. She rolls her eyes. “It’s probably the biggest development between here and… San Francisco is all. You go south on 101. You could be legally blind and you couldn’t miss the place. It’s a million acres or something. You’ll see these big old ram’s horns – that’s like the Sea Ranch” – she searches for the word on the ceiling – “logo. Got a rental office and all. Lodge, restaurant. Okay, maybe a few miles past the end of Sea Ranch, there’s a little road on the right called Estate Road. You go down that and at the very end, you get to Mystère. Iron gates with a big old M in the middle. Guardhouse and all.”

Before I head out, I throw my suitcase on the bed and dig the gun out of its foil cocoon. As long as I have the gun, I might as well take it along. I slide it under the passenger seat of the car.

I cross the county line, leaving Mendocino County and entering Sonoma County. So, a trip to the courthouse in Ukiah would have been useless.

Ten minutes later, I’m past the Sea Ranch, and I’m on Estate Road. It’s almost dark now, and as I drive past Mertz’s estate, all I can really see is the brightly lit cubicle of the guardhouse and the general lay of the land. A series of rolling hills fall away toward the sea, which is far enough away that I can’t really hear the surf. And then I do – a dull and distant thud, like a faint heartbeat. The moon slides out from underneath a cloud and illuminates, for a few moments, a boulder-strewn patch of ocean. In the moonlight, the knobby pinnacles of rock look like a crowd of alien giants striding toward shore. The waves fracture against them, sending up spumes of white. And then the moon slips under the cloud again, and I can’t see much but the rough contours of the land.

The estate – it’s down there somewhere – is huge, its borders protected by the sea and by a towering iron fence whose vertical pikes end in sharp points. Every twenty yards or so, red diodes mark the location of surveillance cameras.

Somewhere down there is a house.

And somewhere in that house are my boys.

My heart seems to be outside my body.

What are they doing – Sean and Kevin? Is one of them rehearsing his lines for the performance? Is the other practicing his emergence at the end of the trick, with a big smile for the audience?

I can picture them together, Sean making fun of Kevin as he bursts out of the basket, arms thrust up in victory like a gymnast at the end of a winning routine. I can see them giggling, delighted by their part in the deception, the twin trick. What would Boudreaux tell the boy who’d been chosen to rise in triumphant life? How would he explain the bloody limbs and body parts tossed into the basket atop the one crouched there, waiting for the signal to come forth. It occurs to me that certainly the basket is specially built – like the dovepan described by Karl Kavanaugh – so that the waiting boy is spared contact with the hacked limbs and severed head of his brother.

I roll along at a crawl beside the iron fence, tempted to climb it right now, but deterred by the cameras. Then the road comes to an end in a gravel cul-de-sac on the edge of a cliff. I can see the property line clearly. The metal fence turns the corner and extends a hundred feet or so along the flat area at the top of the cliff. Then, as the land abruptly falls away into a rocky crevasse, the border of Mystère is demarcated by a multiple-strand fence of barbed wire that stretches as far as I can see, down into the sea. Its topmost run, at about nine feet in height, glitters in the moonlight: it’s strung with razor wire. Even here, in terrain that would challenge a rock climber, surveillance cameras sit atop the metal stanchions supporting the barbed wire, every twenty yards or so as far as I can see down toward the ocean. It’s eerie to see them whir and turn, robotic eyes restlessly scanning the misty night. I hope I’ve managed to stay beyond their reach.

I get back into the car, swing around, and head back toward the highway.

A half-dozen ideas on how I might get into the place flicker through my mind – disabling the guard, climbing the metal fence, renting a small boat and arriving by sea, cutting through the barbed wire, posing as a delivery person – but I reject each one after a few seconds of contemplation.

They share the same risk. What if I get caught? If the perimeter of Mystère is this well defended, I’m sure that there are interior defenses. And the house – with my kids isolated somewhere within it? The house will be a fortress.

If I go in now and I get caught, I don’t think Boudreaux would hesitate to kill me. He’d tuck me away somewhere until the performance was over, and then I’d be disposed of, along with the bodies of my sons. Somewhere far from here, would be my guess. Maybe just dumped at sea.

I’ve gone past the gates and guardhouse and I’m rounding a curve when a squad car comes into sight. I assume it’s simply on patrol until suddenly it lights up like a Christmas tree, then swerves to block my way.

I wait, in my seat, a good citizen. I remind myself to take a deep breath. I used to get mouthy with cops who stopped me for speeding. But after a decade or so of going in and out of combat zones, I’ve learned to curb my issues with authority. Sometimes the baby soldiers at checkpoints are so nervous, stoned, or indifferent to the lives of others that almost anything could provoke a hail of gunfire.

I reach into my back pocket, extract my license, open the glove compartment, and take out the rental papers. It seems to take a long time for the cop to get out of his car. Then he taps on my window. I roll it down. I see he’s young, early twenties. Bad skin and one of those trooper hats with the brim.

“What’s this about?”

“License and registration,” he says.

One of those. I sigh, hand them over. He scrutinizes the documents, then heads back to his patrol car. He’s in there for a long time, maybe ten minutes, before he saunters back. He returns my documents. “What’s your business here, sir?”

“I took a wrong turn.”

“You ‘took a wrong turn.’” He looks at me. “Hunh.”

I try to keep myself from jabbering. Less is definitely more in a conversation like this. The kid has the gift of patience though, and I can’t keep my mouth shut. “I was just trying to get a look at the ocean,” I say. “I guess it’s not the best time for sightseeing. Night. Where is the road to the public beach, anyway? Isn’t it around here somewhere?”

He cocks his head. “You staying around here?”

“Breakers Inn,” I tell him, happy to answer this question. It’s an upscale place, the kind of spot an upright citizen stays in.

He nods. “You know why I stopped you?”

I shake my head.

“Down to Mystère [he pronounces it Mister], they called in a complaint. Car cruising by real slow. I’m thinking a poacher or maybe some guy casing the place for a burglary.”

“No,” I say, with a smile. “Just a tourist.” I reach back for my seat belt, start to pull it across my chest.

“Step out of the car, sir,” he says.

“What?”

“You can see the ocean just fine from the Breakers Inn.”

“But you can’t walk on the beach,” I protest. “That’s all I wanted to do. Come on, I-”

“Something’s not right here,” he says in a staccato voice. “Step out of the car.”

I do. He tells me to put the palms of my hands on the hood. He frisks me. He tells me to maintain the position while he calls “backup.”

Twenty minutes later, a second squad car arrives, lights blazing. There’s a brief conversation – the upshot of which is that the two troopers concur they have probable cause to search my car. They snap plastic cuffs on me as “a precaution.”

In the forty seconds between when they begin to search the rental car and the moment they find the gun, I fight the temptation to jump out of the squad car and run. I force myself to think of the boys. I can’t help them if I get shot in the back, which is the likely outcome of jumping out of the squad car. How could I let this happen? I could shoot myself for driving around with the gun on me. What was I thinking? What do you get for illegal possession of a firearm? What are the gun laws like here in California?

Two and a half hours later, at 2:04 P.M., I’ve been processed. I’m in orange coveralls, in the temporary lockup in Santa Rosa, which is the county seat of Sonoma County. I’ve been read my rights. I will be charged with illegal possession of a firearm. The gun itself is the subject of a separate inquiry. I only hope it wasn’t used to murder anyone.

I agonized over who to call, but eventually decided on my father. Even though I woke him up and he sounded terrified, I knew he’d find me a good lawyer.

“Dad?”

“What, Alex?”

“I’m in a hurry. There’s not much time.”

“What do you mean?” my father asks, his voice full of fear. But then he withdraws the question. “Never mind. What do you need?”

The night goes on and on and on. At first, all I can think about is how many ways things can go wrong, how the remaining time can drain away. I believe, from what I read about the rope trick, that the performance will occur in the early morning of August 10, before the fog burns off. It’s August 9. When is court in session? Nine, I’d guess. When will my case be called? Who knows?

I pace. I can’t sit still. When the audience is seated and ready for the performance of the legendary rope trick, when one of my boys joins Byron Boudreaux on stage as his assistant (the other already hidden until the moment of his triumphal emergence), will I still be here, pinned down in the Sonoma County jail?

And even if the lawyer does show and succeeds in springing me, how will I get into Mystère?