Grave Error

by Stephen Greenleaf

  “But Mrs. Peel? Why would anyone kill her?”

  “I’m not sure. But I don’t think the killing is going to stop with Elena Peel.”

  It took awhile for it to sink in; murder always does. Sara’s breath whistled through the phone lines, and the whistles became more rapid as she realized what I was saying.

  “I’m frightened, Marsh,” she said at last. She sounded very alone and very far away.

  “You should be,” I said. “Claire Nelson should be frightened, too. Both of you should get out of town for a while. Disappear.”

  “Why? What do you think is going to happen?”

  “I’m not sure. It’s possible Claire may be the next target. Anyone connected with the Peel killing could be next. Even you.”

  Her gasp seeped out of the receiver and into my ear. I told her not to worry, that I was just being extra cautious, but she knew I was lying. “Who could be doing this, Marsh?” she whispered.

  “I can only guess at this point,” I said. “You want to hear it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Because I think your old friend Michael Whitson survived that wreck and established another identity, one he wants desperately to preserve, and that he’s eliminating anyone who might link him to the death of Jed Peel.”

  She didn’t say anything and I wished I were with her instead of in a parking lot two hundred miles away.

  “I suppose I should tell you I’m astonished to hear you suggest that,” she said at last. I could barely hear her. “But I’m not. I’ve thought of that possibility myself.” She laughed dryly. “I guess I want Michael so badly I’m willing to see him come back as a murderer. Obsessions aren’t terribly attractive, are they?”

  “You haven’t seen him, have you?” I broke in.

  “No. Of course not.”

  “If he contacts you, if he wants to meet you someplace or come over to your house, don’t let him. Or at least have someone with you when he gets there. Someone who can handle himself.”

  “Someone like you?”

  “Someone like me. I’ll be back in the city tomorrow night.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “Rutledge.”

  “What? Where’s that? I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Down by Riverside.”

  “Why on earth are you going there?”

  “To find Angelina Peel,” I said.

  “Angie. Is that where she lives?”

  “She did. I hope she still does. If not, I’ll try to trace her to wherever she is.”

  “Do you think she knows something about all of this?”

  “I don’t know. She may just be another potential victim.”

  “She’s already a victim, Marsh. We all are, all of us who grew up there and went through that experience. You should see Michael’s father. He’s the real victim.”

  “I have seen him.”

  “How is he?”

  “Not good. If his son is alive he may get better. Or worse.”

  “Strange things are going on in my head, Marsh. I feel like I’m a teen-ager again and this is all happening for the first time. The names, the faces. I can see them all, just as though it were nineteen fifty-eight. Our youth never really leaves us, does it? It just steps aside for a while, to let us get on with our lives, then comes roaring back when we least expect it. Like a yo-yo.”

  “Or a boomerang.”

  “Marsh, don’t take my talking about Michael all that seriously. He’s a part of me, a life companion, like Harvey the Rabbit or something. It’s just a shock to discover that my Harvey may be real after all.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “You’re nice.”

  I played with that one for a while, but not too long. “Can you take Claire away with you somewhere?” I asked. “Right away?”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere no one can find you.”

  “I guess so. We’ve spent weekends together before. She’s been down to my place in Carmel.”

  “Why don’t you go down there, then, but stay in a motel instead of your cabin.”

  “You really are worried, aren’t you?”

  She knew the answer to that, but I gave it anyway.

  “Should I tell Roland and Jackie about any of this?” Sara went on. “Claire’s their daughter, after all. Shouldn’t they know if she’s in danger?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Roland will go crazy if he thinks someone’s after Claire. He’ll have the Marines camped around his house by morning.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of. That would just make the killer certain that Claire knows something important enough to be a threat to him. Either that or it would scare him away so we’d never find him.”

  “You sound like you want to use Claire as bait.”

  “I may have to.”

  I could feel the chill before she said a word. “I don’t like that, Marsh,” she said. “Not at all.”

  I didn’t like it either. “Maybe Angie Peel will give me a lead and I can wrap it up right away,” I said without believing it.

  “I hope so. I’ll get Claire and drive to Carmel as soon as I can. We’ll stay at the Cypress Inn if we can get a room. If we can’t, I’ll leave a message with your service. Call me when you get back to the city. Please?”

  I told her I would. I also told her not to worry, that everything would be all right.

  TWENTY-TWO

  After a call to an airline I drove back to San Jose, worked at getting a few hours’ sleep at an airport motel, then caught the eight thirty flight to the Orange County Airport. Everything but the sleep went without a hitch. Whenever I closed my eyes I saw a caldron shaped like a human skull. Inside it were bits and pieces of Elena Peel. By the time we touched down in Santa Ana I was thankful to have something to do besides think.

  I called Sheriff Marks from the airport. In what I hoped was a disguised voice I said I didn’t want to make trouble but I thought the police should check out the house at 9251 Railroad Avenue. After he asked me why I told him I thought the old lady who lived there might be real sick—a heart attack or something. When he asked me my name I hung up.

  I rented a Vega and followed the directions of the Avis girl to Highway 55 out of Santa Ana. Forty minutes later I was at the Rutledge city limits. A young Chicano on his way to town to find some Saturday morning action gave me directions.

  It took me ten minutes to find Shannon Drive and after I found it I wished I could have given it back. It was Southern California in microcosm. The sun was filtered through a brownish haze. Whatever flora had grown in the area originally had been scraped aside to make room for housing that had been built and sold within three months. Each home was surrounded by vehicles—cars and boats and jeeps and trucks and vans and cycles and golf carts and lawn mowers—stretching into the brown infinity, a collage of chrome and steel and internal combustion engines pasted to a burlap background. Signs on the bumpers advised me to be against gun control, for loving America, against abortion, and for Jesus, the local police, and Proposition 13. A politician once said he had joined the John Birch Society to get the middle-of-the-road vote in Orange County. These were his constituents.

  It didn’t take long to figure out that the address Angie Peel had written on the card to her mother was a vacant lot. It was badly overgrown, and the only things I could see were some McDonald’s wrappers, a pile of beer cans, and a Safeway cart minus the wheels. The faint paths through the weeds indicated someone had tried to play baseball there, but the last out had been made several seasons past.

  I pulled to the side of the road and gazed absently at the empty lot. Angie could have deliberately misled her mother about her address, but I didn’t think so. Why send an address at all if she didn’t want her mother to know where she was? But if Angie had ever lived here she was as gone as her house an
d the odds of running her down weren’t good. The case was stale again, unless there was a clue at Elena Peel’s house I had missed. Or unless there was another murder.

  I lit a cigarette and added a degree to the temperature inside the car. The air conditioner couldn’t keep up with it, so I shut off the engine before it boiled over. Three houses down a boy cranked a motorcycle. When it fired up he sat there and revved it for ten minutes. The pulsating roar reminded me of waves breaking on the shore, which reminded me of home, which made me wish I was in another line of work.

  The side door of the house just to the west of the vacant lot opened and a woman walked out. She was wearing white shorts and a halter made out of a red bandana. She stood for a moment with her hands on her hips and looked right at me. I looked right back. Before I could do anything she disappeared behind the blue Ford pickup parked in the driveway. I got out of the car and followed her.

  When I turned the rear corner of the house she was just settling down on a plastic lounge chair while glancing up at the sun to make certain she was properly positioned. Large blue discs hid her eyes and above them her hair was short and blonde and shaggy. There was a lot of skin exposed, and it was all brown and oiled like fine furniture. The bandana was there to keep the neighbors from calling the cops, and that was about all it did. She was attractive, but she was past her prime. In the desert a woman’s prime comes and goes like lightning.

  I coughed and excused myself. The woman rolled slowly onto her side. The bandana almost lost its booty. I sensed she was expecting me.

  “You make a habit of wandering around people’s backyards, mister?” she asked. She wasn’t as angry as she pretended to be.

  “No,” I said. “But that’s only because where I’m from there aren’t any backyards with women like you in them.”

  That brought a little squirm and a slight change of position. She had full breasts, with large brown nipples. They sagged like bags of fine, wet sand.

  “Where you from?” she asked.

  “San Francisco.”

  “I’ve been to Frisco a few times. People say it’s a swinging place but as far as I could tell there’s more action in the Cozy L Bar in Riverside than there is in that whole city.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. She probably was.

  “So what brings you down this way?” she went on. “Never seen a woman working on a tan before?”

  “Once or twice,” I admitted, “but never one that looks as good in her working clothes as you do.”

  “They also told me the men up in Frisco hand out a line of bullshit a mile wide,” she said. “Now I see why.”

  “Just telling it like it is,” I replied with a leer.

  “Crap. I saw you looking at the lot next door. You going to build there, or what?”

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  “I figured you were a real estate hustler. Don’t look like one, though. Must have forgotten your white shoes today.”

  “I’m not a hustler. Just thinking about buying for myself. Do you like it here?”

  “What’s to like? There’s only two good things about Rutledge. One, it’s cheap, and two, it’s easy to find your way out of town.”

  “You don’t exactly sound like a member of the welcome wagon.”

  “Welcome wagon, hah. I’ll tell you how we were welcomed to Rutledge. About six weeks after we moved in the broad next door tried to move in on my husband. He was welcome to anything she had and she let him know it right off.”

  “You mean the woman who lives there?” I pointed to the house behind her.

  “No, I mean the bitch who lived on that lot you claim to be interested in.”

  “There used to be a house there?”

  “Sure. You don’t think the creep that developed this area would leave any space for a park or a tree or anything, do you? Parks are against the law in this burg.”

  “What happened to the house?”

  “Burned down. Went up like a pile of pine needles. Almost took our place along with it.”

  “What happened to the woman?”

  “Angie?”

  “I guess, if that was her name.”

  “That was it. Angie Parsons. A real prick teaser, if you know what I mean.”

  I knew. I was looking at one. “Guess it’s a good thing she’s not around anymore,” I said. “Sounds like you and she were headed for trouble. She wasn’t killed in the fire, was she?”

  “No. Unfortunately. She moved out right after.”

  “Where’d she go?”

  “What you want to know that for?” Suspicion pleated her brow.

  “I just thought if she were still around town I’d try to talk to her about the neighborhood. The lot and everything.”

  “The neighborhood’s a lot nicer since she left, I can tell you that. And she’s not here anyway. At least I haven’t seen her.”

  “How long ago was the fire?”

  “Let’s see. Nineteen sixty-seven. Year after Duane and I moved here from Topeka.”

  “Duane your husband?”

  “Yeah. A real bull, still built like a fullback, which he used to be at KU, but a sucker for the chicks. I guess if he wasn’t I never would have landed him. Old Angie over there twitched it and shook it and had Duane fumbling around like a spastic on an oil slick. Got to hand it to her. She’s the only one who’s ever been able to make Duane forget how good he’s got it at home.” She rubbed her hand up her flank, as if to make certain Duane’s home life was still intact. It was.

  “What finally happened between her and Duane?”

  “Duane got the shit scared out of him, is what.”

  “By a woman?” I said skeptically.

  “No, by some hood who came down to shack up with her. I think he was from Frisco, too. Duane claimed he was with the Mafia. The guy looked like a hood, anyhow. Drove a big black Chrysler, had a kind of flat face, like his old lady had been frightened by a frying pan when he was still in the womb.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Hell, I don’t know. He was just another tough guy to me. I’ve seen a million of them.”

  “Try to remember.”

  “I don’t know. Abe? Al? Something like that.”

  “Al Rodman?”

  “I think that’s it. You know him?”

  “Only by reputation.”

  “Well his reputation must be pretty bad. Duane was flirting around with Angie one afternoon, like he always did when she was out in the yard. Only this time this character Al was there and he didn’t like it much. Al said something to Duane that almost gave him a heart attack. I didn’t think anything could scare Duane like that. He sure left little Angie alone from then on, I can tell you. Like she had the syph or something.”

  “Did Angie go away with this Rodman?”

  “Yeah. Fire happened while he was down here and they took off. Wouldn’t surprise me if he set the thing himself, for the insurance money. Real estate wasn’t worth much here in those days. Isn’t worth much now, to be honest about it.”

  “You know where they went?”

  “I don’t know and I could care less.”

  “Say, you don’t happen to have any pictures of the house that burned, do you? Might give me an idea of what the lot looks like with a building on it. Makes a big difference sometimes.” If I was lucky I might get a glimpse of what Angie Peel looked like ten years ago.

  “Nah. No pictures of houses. The only thing Duane takes pictures of is me. Polaroid jobs, you know? They’re not the kind of pictures he likes me to show to strangers.” She could leer, too.

  “Anyone else on the block who was around in those days? Who might have some pictures?”

  “No way. People who pass through here are either on the way up or on the way down. Either way, they don’t stay around long. Except me and Duane. Guess that means we’re not on our way anyplace.”

  Her voice trailed off into the land of broken dreams. I asked her if Angie Parsons had any other frien
ds in town and she said she didn’t know of any. It was time to go. I thanked her for her time and said it had been nice talking to her. I didn’t even know her name.

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing you move in over there,” she said as I was backing away. “You look like you’d be a good neighbor.” Her head dropped forward and she peeked at me over the rims of her sunglasses. “You married?”

  “No.”

  “Didn’t think so. That’d make you an even better neighbor.”

  I backed into the drive.

  “Want to come in for a beer?” she asked eagerly. “Beer’s the only thing that cuts the thirst on a day like this if you ask me. Which you didn’t.”

  I told her I was running late.

  “Yeah,” she snarled. “The studs like you usually are these days. But not always, you weren’t. Ten years ago guys like you had plenty of time for little Candy, here. ‘I’d sure like a piece of Candy,’ that’s what they always said down at the Cozy L when I walked in. They meant it, too. Half the guys in the place would’ve kissed my ass if I’d asked them. Even that guy Rodman, he sniffed around over here when Angie wasn’t looking. Yeah, guys like you were all over me like a bad smell in those days.” Her fingers went to the valley between her breasts and flicked the sweat away. “I could be a good neighbor to you,” she went on dreamily. “A real good neighbor.”

  “I’m sure you could,” I said.

  “Just as good as you want.”

  “I believe it. Maybe it’ll work out that way. We’ll see.”

  “What did you say your name was?”

  “Frank.”

  “Okay, Frank. I can tell you’re itching to get out of here. Go on. Don’t let me keep you. I mean, just because you sneak back here and I let you get a look at me half naked don’t think you have to stay around or be polite or anything. Christ, I’ve a mind to tell Duane you tried to put the make on me. He’d tear your fucking arms off.”

  “I’m sorry you’re upset,” I said. “I’ll be on my way. Thanks for telling me about the neighborhood.”

  “Neighborhood my ass. Not one person on this whole block ever speaks to me or Duane. I don’t call that a neighborhood, I call it a fucking concentration camp.”

  “That’s too bad. Doesn’t sound like the kind of place I’m interested in.”