Man on a leash

by Charles Williams

  He made no reply. He leaned his arms on top of the Porsche and stood, head lowered, staring at the ground. It wouldn’t do any good, Romstead thought, and he might be just asking for it, but he had to say something.

  “I’m sorry, Bonner,” he said. “I’m sorry as hell about it.”

  Bonner spoke without looking around, his voice little more than a ragged whisper. “Don’t bump me,” he said. “Don’t crowd me at all.”

  * * *

  It was hot in the room, and there was a strained, tense silence as they waited for Brubaker and the others to finish in the bedroom. Romstead had drawn the drapes and opened the sliding glass door to get a movement of air through it, but it didn’t help much. Bonner stood with his back to the others, looking out at the terrace. Paulette Carmody was smoking a third cigarette. Romstead stared at the rows of books without seeing them. The coroner had gone now, as well as a deputy with a camera, the picture taking completed. Two men came out through the vestibule carrying the sheeted figure on a stretcher. Brubaker was behind them. He watched the body go out to the waiting ambulance, his face bitter.

  “Junk,” he said. “Goddamned junk.”

  Bonner spoke without turning. “Nice she knew where to find it.”

  Romstead said nothing. What could he say? He asked himself. There was no use trying to kid himself or anybody else the girl had had the stuff with her. She hadn’t walked four miles in the dark and illegally broken into a house to take a bath. There was no use even conjecturing on how it had got here, but there it was. The girl was dead because of it, and Bonner was running very near the edge, so this might be one of the really great opportunities of a lifetime to keep his mouth shut.

  “It looks like just another overdose,” Brubaker said. “There are no marks on her of any kind, she didn’t fall and hit her head, and there’s no evidence anybody else was in the room. We’re checking for prints as a matter of routine, but we’re pretty sure what happened is that it was pure heroin instead of being cut four or five to one, and she took too much. The autopsy and lab tests should verify it.”

  “But,” Paulette interrupted, “why was she in the tub?”

  “Don’t forget she’d just walked four miles, probably running half the time, and she was suffering withdrawal symptoms—a couple of which are profuse sweating and screaming nerves. And she’d just walked into an addict’s paradise—at least a week’s supply of junk and a place nobody could find her and take it away from her. All she wanted was to get some of it into a vein, relax in a hot tub while her nerves uncoiled, and then float off for days. So just about the time she got the tub filled it hit her. She was probably sitting on the side of it testing the water, and she went over backward into it. She drowned, technically, but she’d have been dead anyway.”

  “If you want to ask me any questions,” Bonner said harshly, “ask ‘em. I’d like to get out of this place.”

  “You say she came back last week? How?”

  “On the bus. She said she’d quit her job and wanted to stay a few weeks while she made up her mind what to do. But she worried me, the way she acted.”

  “How?”

  “She couldn’t seem to decide on anything. One minute she was going to New York; then it was Los Angeles, and then Miami. She was going to try modeling; then she was going to study computer programming. I told her I’d lend her the money for any kind of trade school she wanted or even for college if she wanted to go back. She’d be all for it, and half an hour later it was out; she was going to get a job on a cruise ship or hook up with some couple sailing around the world. The only thing she never mentioned was going back to San Francisco, which was screwy, because she was always crazy about it.”

  Brubaker frowned. “Well, did she see any of her friends?”

  “No. She didn’t even want anybody to know she was here. She was nervous as a cat, pacing all the time, but she wouldn’t budge out of the house. I told her she could use the car any time she wanted it and asked her why she didn’t drive out to Paulette’s and visit and have a swim, but no, she didn’t want to see anybody. She’d jump six feet when the phone rang, or the doorbell—”

  “And you didn’t know she was on the stuff? There were needle tracks all over her arm.”

  “God damn it, maybe I didn’t want to know! Anyway, she always wore things with sleeves like so—” Bonner made a slashing gesture with one hand across the other forearm.

  “Three-quarters,” Paulette said.

  “When was the last time you saw her?” Brubaker asked.

  “About two o’clock this morning.”

  “When you got home from the store?”

  “Yeah. Her bedroom door was closed; but I looked in, and she was asleep.”

  Brubaker shook his head. “Probably faking it so you’d cork off and she could slip out. If she was desperate enough for a fix to walk four miles and burglarize a house, she wasn’t sleeping, believe me.”

  “Well, why did she wait till I got home? I was at the store from six P.M. on, and she could have taken off any time.”

  “Maybe it still wasn’t unbearable then, and she was trying to sweat it out. She probably had a little she’d brought from San Francisco. Also, after two A.M. there’d be no traffic on the road and she wouldn’t be seen. Did she ever mention Captain Romstead?”

  “No, not that I recall.”

  “But she did know he was dead?”

  “Yes. At least, I told her, but you could never be sure she was paying any attention to what you were saying. It didn’t seem to interest her.”

  “Do you know whether she’d ever been in the house here?”

  Bonner’s face was savage. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Well, obviously she knew the stuff was in here and right where to find it.”

  It was Paulette who answered. “No, I don’t think she was ever in here. As far as I can recall, a few days last Christmas was the only time she’s been home since Captain Romstead moved here, and he was in San Francisco then.”

  Brubaker nodded, his face thoughtful. “That still leaves the question, then, of how she was so sure she’d find it here ... But I guess that’s all, Lew, except I’m sorry as hell about it.”

  Bonner started out. He turned in the doorway and asked Paulette, “You want a lift home?”

  “No, thanks, Lew. There’s something else I want to see Mr. Brubaker about.” She got up, however, and went out with him.

  “How old was she?” Romstead asked.

  “Twenty-four or twenty-five. Jesus Christ, that’s what tears you up.” Brubaker took a cigar from his pocket and started removing cellophane. They heard the Porsche go down the drive, and Paulette came back in.

  “Good God, not that smudge pot,” she said to Brubaker, “unless you want us to yell police brutality. Here.” She flipped up the top of the black case, dug in it for the box of cigars, and held it out. He took it, completely deadpan, lifted out one of the tubes, and pulled the cap off, watching as she started to close the case again. Innocence itself, she flipped the robe out full length, folded it carefully, and replaced it so she could bring the lid down. He sighed.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”

  She told him about the trip to Las Vegas. He went out to the garage to verify the mileage on the Mercedes. When he came back, he looked thoughtful, but he shook his head.

  “So he just went to San Francisco with somebody else,” he said. “Probably one of the outfit he was dealing with.”

  “But where did he go on that dirt road?” Romstead asked. “And why? If we could find the place—”

  “You got any idea how many old ruts there are out there through the sagebrush and alkali flats in a radius of twenty-seven miles? To windmills and feeding stations and old mining claims? And if you did find it, I think what you’d see would be the wheel tracks and tail-skid marks of a lightplane.”

  “Why?”

  “A lot of junk comes in from Mexico that way. And it could be how your father got
to San Francisco.”

  Romstead tried once more, with the feeling he was only butting his head against a wall. “Look—he got back here at five A.M., and two hours later he was on the phone to his broker to raise two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. There hadn’t been a word about going to San Francisco or about a business deal. I think something happened in those two hours we don’t know about.”

  “Sure. Because he hadn’t said anything,” Brubaker said wearily. “You ever hear of anybody on his way to pick up a shipment of junk that bought time on TV or took out an ad in the paper? Anyway, what is there to argue about now? I’d say Jeri Bonner had settled it once and for all.”

  It would always come down to that, Romstead thought, and it was unanswerable. Brubaker went on, “I’ll admit I goofed to some extent; I searched the house, and I didn’t see it; but I was looking for something the size of that suitcase, not a teabag.”

  “Incidentally,” Romstead asked, “where was the suitcase? Did you find it right here?”

  “No. It was in the trunk of the car. We brought it inside. They must have been waiting for him when he drove in.”

  “Since you keep begging me for my opinion—” Paulette said.

  “All right. Go ahead.”

  “Your whole theory’s horseshit. I don’t have the faintest idea who killed Captain Romstead, or why, but he wasn’t a drug peddler. And if Jeri found that heroin in this house, I say he didn’t know it was here.”

  * * *

  “Why?” Romstead asked. He had brought Paulette home, and they sat in the air-conditioned living room of her house with the bloody Marys she had promised. It was too hot now to sit out by the pool, and neither was interested in lunch with the death of Jeri Bonner weighing on their spirits. The Romstead house was locked up again, and Brubaker had said he would notify Sam Bolling so the broken window could be replaced. Romstead had given him the key to return. “I don’t think he knew the stuff was there either,” he went on, “but what makes you so sure of it?”

  “Because I knew him. Better than anybody here.” She set her drink on the coffee table between them and lit a cigarette. “I’ve heard his views on the subject, and like all the rest of his views, they were pretty strong. He had nothing but contempt for people who used drugs of any kind—except, of course, for his drugs: Havana cigars, brandy, and vintage champagne—and an even worse loathing for pushers and smugglers who dealt in any of it, even marijuana. On the Fairisle, his last command, he arrested one of his own crew for trying to smuggle some heroin in on it. I mean, right out of the eighteenth century, locked him up like Bligh throwing somebody in the brig, and turned him over to the federal agents when they docked. High-handed, oh, brother—he could have been fired for it or picketed by every maritime union in the country, except that the man was guilty, he had the heroin to prove it, and the guy was convicted and sent to prison. That’s no wild sea yarn, either; I knew the nut myself. He was out in orbit, a dingaling with a hundred and sixty IQ. But I was going to tell you how we met, almost five years ago.”

  She hesitated a moment, rattling the ice in her drink; then she looked up with bubbling amusement. “This is a kooky experience—I mean, telling a son about your affair with his father. I feel like a dirty old woman or as if I were contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”

  “It’s all right,” Romstead said. “I’m precocious for thirty-six.”

  “Good. I felt fairly certain you might be ... Anyway, this happened in 1967. Steve—my husband —was a businessman, mostly real estate and land development, here in Nevada and in Southern California; but his health was beginning to give him trouble, and he was semi-retired. We lived about half the time at our place in La Jolla and did quite a bit of sailing. Steve had been an ocean-racing nut since he was a young man, but he’d given that up when his health began to fail. He sold the Ericson thirty-nine and bought a thirty-six-foot cruising sloop a couple could handle, and we planned to sail it to Honolulu, just the two of us.

  “Then Lew Bonner asked us if we’d take Jeri, Lew was working for Steve then, running a lumberyard and building supply here in Coleville, and we both knew Jeri, of course, and liked her. She was a real sweet kid, but becoming something of a hippie, and it bothered Lew a little. Most jocks are as square as Smokey the Bear, anyway—oops. The good old Carmody tact, but then I don’t think of you as a jock, somehow.”

  Romstead shrugged. “Neither did the National League.”

  “Their parents were dead, and Lew had looked after her since she was sixteen. She’d been going to school at San Diego State but dropped out and was hanging out with a bunch of kids in Del Mar. She liked sailing and thought the trip would be groovy, or whatever the word was in 1967, so she came along.

  “Everything went along fine until about a thousand miles out of Honolulu when we ran into a real bitch of a dustup. I don’t think it ever reached gale force, actually, but it kept freshening while we were running before it, and before we knew it, we were carrying too much sail and had already carried it too damned long. We broached to, got knocked down, lost the mast and sails overboard, and shipped enough water to soak everything below. But the worst of it was Steve. He was badly hurt. He’d got thrown across the deck and landed on something that caught him just below the rib cage. He was in awful pain and could hardly move. The radio was drowned, so we couldn’t call for help, and Jeri and I alone couldn’t cope with that mess over the side. We made Steve as comfortable as we could with the pain-killers from the medicine chest, but we were absolutely helpless.

  “We were near the Los Angeles-Honolulu steamer lane, and late that afternoon we sighted a ship on the horizon and fired off some distress flares, but either it didn’t see us or didn’t give a damn, because it went on. And just about sunset, Steve died. I still wake up with a cold sweat, dreaming about that night. Jeri and I didn’t think we’d ever see dawn again, and before the night was over, we were so beaten we didn’t really care a great deal whether we did or not. But when daylight did come there was another ship in sight, way off on the horizon. All we could do was fire off the last of our flares and pray. Then we saw it had changed course and was coming. It was the Fairisle.

  “Your father sent over a boat and took us off. An autopsy was performed on Steve when we reached Honolulu, and the doctors said he’d died of internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen. I’d had it with oceans for all time, or thought I had. After I got back home and began to recover a little, I wrote the usual letters thanking him and the boat crew and also to the line praising him for his seamanship and for the royal way we’d been treated after we were picked up.

  “That would have been the end of it, normally, except that about a year later I was in San Francisco on a shopping jag and walked out of the City of Paris one afternoon and bumped right into him. He invited me to have a drink. I don’t know what he did three days later, when the tugs pulled the Fairisle away from the pier and she started down the bay, but I went back to the Mark and collapsed; I think I slept the clock around twice. Your father was one hell of a charming and fascinating man, and he had a way with women, as perhaps you’ve heard.

  “When he came back from that trip, I was waiting for him in San Francisco, flew to Los Angeles to see him there, and then flew to Honolulu. The following trip I sailed with him, to Hong Kong, Kobe, and Manila—the Fairisle has accommodations for twelve passengers, you know. In the next three years I made three more trips to the Orient with him, and when he retired, I was partly responsible for his settling here. He wouldn’t even consider La Jolla.

  “There was never any question of marriage. I was in no hurry to be married again, and certainly not to him, and he said from the start he’d never try it again, that he wasn’t cut out for domesticity—which I could see even then was probably the understatement of the century.

  “I have no doubt he had another girl, or perhaps several of them at different times, in San Francisco, but whether she or one of them was Jeri Bonner, I don’t think so. She was o
nly twenty-four, for one thing, and surprisingly, he didn’t go for very young women. I know this is contrary to the classic pattern of the aging stud, needing younger and younger girls to get it off the runway, but maybe he was saving that phase for his eighties and nineties; his theory was that no woman under thirty even knew what it was all about. And there was the drugs; if she was using heroin, he wouldn’t have had anything to do with her at all.”

  And still the stuff had been in the house, and she’d known it was and just where to find it, Romstead thought. You never came up with any answers, only more questions. And though he liked her, the sexy Mrs. Carmody’s hymn to his father’s virtuosity as a lover was beginning to bug him; he’d been twenty days at sea. He thanked her for the drink, went back to the motel, and called Mayo.

  “What did you find out?” she asked.

  “Nothing you’d believe,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about it when I get there. Around eleven P.M.”

  “I’ll wait for you at your place.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Sure. I thought it would be convenient. So if you’re going to whizz through town in five minutes again, you can tell me about it while you’re taking a cold shower.”

  “Let’s make that ten instead of eleven.”

  He went out to the office, paid the toll charges, and left a call for five P.M. It was still a few minutes to ten that night when he emerged from the elevator in the high-rise complex overlooking the Embarcadero and the bay and padded quietly along the carpeted hallway to his apartment.

  The lights were dim in the living room. Mayo Foley, clad in a housecoat with apparently nothing under it, was listening to Ravel with her feet and long bare legs up on the coffee table beside a champagne bucket. She smiled, with that smoky look in the deep blue eyes he’d come to know so well, and said, “You’re just in time, Romstead; I was about to start without you.”

  5

  Mayo, whose real first name was Martha, was thirty-three, divorced, a creamy-skinned brunette with eyes that were very near to violet, and a registered nurse who’d always wanted to be a doctor but hadn’t quite been able to make it into medical school after four years of premed at Berkeley. In spite of the med-school turndowns, she was only mildly hung up on women’s lib, but she was a dedicated McGovernite and a passionate advocate of civil rights and environmental causes. She was also sexy as hell and possessed of a vocabulary that could raise welts on a Galapagos tortoise, as Romstead had learned early in their acquaintance when he’d jokingly called her a knee-jerk liberal. So far he had asked her at least three times to marry him, but she had refused, always gently, but decisively. Her first marriage had been a disaster, and she had reservations about him as a candidate for a second attempt.