Vertical Coffin

Chapter 41

I pulled into the parking lot of a one-story showroom office in Sunland a few minutes past five in the afternoon. The window art advertised Sprint contracts and the latest in digital communications. The company's name and slogan were in big white letters:

bell communications if it's a bell… ring it

I got out and walked inside. Most places that sell computer and phone equipment keep the air-conditioning on way too low. This was no exception. They hadn't wasted much thought on decor either. Like a lot of yuppie businesses these days, the trend was toward open space and hard surfaces. The color scheme was overpoweringly gray. The showroom had concrete floors and the ceilings were crisscrossed with exposed aluminum air ducts. Every kind of cell phone imaginable was displayed in glass cases.

I asked for Marion Bell and was told by a sneering pair of pleated pants that I couldn't see Mr. Bell without an appointment. I showed this arrogant dweeb my badge and cocked a suspicious eyebrow, which is the cop equivalent of "Wanta bet, asshole?"

He had an immediate change of attitude and led me into the back where the sales offices were. After a whispered conversation on the phone, I was shown into the boss's corner office. Decoratively, more of the same.

Marion Bell was one of those compact, thirtyish, yuppie packages whose stiff body language suggested a lack of grace, despite an athletic appearance. The best word to describe him was "severe." His physicality screamed no-nonsense, from the half-inch buzz cut to his ugly, Velcro-fastened shoes. His eyes were so blue, I suspected contacts.

"Police?" he asked as I entered. "I talked to Sergeant Brickhouse yesterday. She said she was going to set up a meeting, but she never called me back."

"She's my partner," I said. "This won't take long."

"About Vincent Smiley?" From his expression and tone, I could tell that Jo was right. Smiley was not a favorite.

"The cops are spending a lot of time on that guy, considering the fact that he's dead," he said.

"There are potential lawsuits surrounding that Hidden Ranch Road shoot-out," I said, electing not to tell him that Smiley was still alive. People are generally not all that anxious to rat out paramilitary psychopaths.

"Go ahead, ask away." Marion said, lowering himself behind his gray metal desk.

I took the uncomfortable gray chair across from him and opened my casebook. "Just tell me a little about Vincent. I understand he joined your mountain-climbing club, the Rock Stars, sometime last year. What month was that?"

"June," Marion said.

I wrote it down, thinking that was about the same time Smiley started digging the escape tunnel at his house in Hidden Ranch. Important? I wasn't sure.

Marion went on. "He wanted to do some organized mountain climbing. We're an outdoor club."

"As opposed to what?" I asked him.

"That means that our climbs are on real mountains. Some clubs are strictly gym climbing clubs. They scale indoor, artificial walls, that sort of thing."

"What was your take on him? What kind of guy was he?"

"Well, on a personal level he was a jerk. Frightening, if you want to put a better word on it."

"How so?"

"He was always right on the edge of going off on you. Even when he was laughing, it could turn ugly in a second. You said the wrong thing and you'd set him off. He had real anger-management problems. We took him in originally because he said he was YDS fifth-class qualified. YDS stands for Yosemite Decimal System. It rates climbing ability. To be fifth-class rated, you have to have expertise in all forms of technical free-climbing and be proficient with specialized techniques and equipment. Once he became a member of the Rock Stars, and we took him on his first climb, we realized it was all BS."

"So he lied."

"Big time. He was basically a Gumby. His equipment was a mess, mostly second-hand stuff. His haul bag was a disaster, full of the kinda stuff mountain shops sell to newbies, but nobody ever uses. Since we do outdoor climbs, not gym climbs, we have to travel to our sites. Sometimes it's a two-or three-hour drive, so I like to get an alpine start."

"A what?" I was writing all this down.

He smiled. "Alpine start-early, like three a. M. We'd meet in a market parking lot, or some agreed-upon place, and take off from there. You go early, especially if it's a snow climb, because the hard pack starts to melt after noon and you want to be off the mountain by then. Once the snow starts melting, all your protection starts pulling loose and it can get treacherous."

"Protection?" I was still scribbling like mad trying to keep up.

"Anything you pound into a rock face, or screw into ice to tie you off, is called protection."

I nodded.

"He always escalated any disagreement past the place you were willing to go. It's how he won arguments. There was something about Vincent. You never knew what he was capable of, and you didn't want to find out."

I nodded. Pretty much exactly what Tad Palmer had said.

"On the first climb he went on, we saw how dangerous he was, so we made him a belay monkey. That's basically somebody who stays at the belay station and minds the anchors."

"I'm sorry, I'm afraid…"

"Somebody who stays below and holds the end of the climbing rope, keeps it from getting tangled. It's a job anybody can do. If a guy brings his nonclimbing girlfriend, we always give her the job. Make her our 'Belay Betty', so to speak, okay?"

"Right."

"But after the first time he didn't want to do that, so the next time we went, we had to take him up as a rope man. He was long on nerve and short on skill. Basically, a screamer in training."

I raised my eyebrow again.

"A screamer is somebody taking the big drop. A screamer is dangerous to everybody, because he can zipper out all the protection and kill everyone on the line with him."

"Got it."

"So we asked him, basically, to stop climbing with us and resign from the club. As president, that was my job. I actually considered putting a gun in my belt when I talked to him. He was that unstable."

"Sergeant Brickhouse told me you'd mentioned that he belonged to some kind of survivalist club."

"That's what he said. He was always talking like some ex-military, antigovernment fanatic. But if you want my take on it, he was just mouthing off. He didn't have any tats on him, no swastikas, or any of that other antigovernment nonsense those survivalist guys like. I think it was just talk."

"Anything else?"

He thought for a moment, then said: "Well, one thing. He was always wanting us to climb the Chocolate Mountains."

"Where's that?"

"Way the hell on the other side of the Salton Sea. It's a mountain range between California and Arizona, which is, to be honest, not all that challenging. But he wanted to go up there anyway. Said there was a high altitude SEAL training camp he wanted to see. Even had maps."

"When was this?"

"All the time. He never stopped talking about it, until we threw him out. Most of the club members like the big face at Pinnacle National Monument, or, if we're going to overnight, we like Yosemite National Park. There's hundreds of great V-five climbs up there, some as high as thirty pitches, that require two or three days to complete."

I didn't know exactly what pitches or V-5 climbs were, but I more or less had the idea, so I didn't ask. "If he was going to make a climb somewhere, you think it would be in these Chocolate Mountains?" I asked.

"If he was still alive, yeah, I'm sure that's where he woulda gone. To the SEAL camp up there. It's almost four thousand feet up."

"Do you have a map?" I asked.

"Yeah, I think I have the Chocolate Mountains in a book- right here."

He crossed to a bookshelf where he had a library of climbing books. He pulled down a volume labeled Bradshaw Trail Climbs.

"The Bradshaw Trail is out past Indio by the Salton Sea in Riverside County," he explained as he started flipping pages. "It runs between the Chukwalla Mountains and the Chocolate Mountains. There's some spectacular views from the Chukwalla Bench of the Palos Verdes Valley."

Then he found the page he wanted. "There's a Navy SEAL camp known as Camp Billy Machen down here at the base camp. They used to use it for desert training. It's closed now. The other SEAL camp, the one he wanted to visit, is at altitude." He pointed at a spot on the map. " 'Bout here, above Silver Pass."

"Could I make a copy of this?" I asked him.

"You can take it, if you bring it back."

He gave me the book and I pulled out the sheet of paper that I'd found by Smiley's trash. "You recognize anything here?" I asked him. He scanned it for a moment.

"YUMA TACTS," he read aloud. "Looks like some kind of military operation."

"Yeah, but for what?" I wondered out loud.

He shrugged and handed it back. "Beats me."

I thanked Marion and walked back out to the car, wondering how to go about this.

If Smiley wanted to go to the Chocolate Mountains, then that's where I wanted to go.

My problem was, I didn't know the first thing about mountain climbing.