Dead Seed

by William Campbell Gault

  He glared at me. “Who told you that?”

  “Bernie,” I said soothingly, “this is old Brock, your stout friend and loyal confidant. Let’s start over.”

  He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. You called it right. I got the shaft again.”

  I said, “You are not exactly the Chief’s ideal Dale Carnegie cop, Bernie. But he can’t live forever.”

  “I know, I know! Those two in the van—locals?”

  “I doubt it. It had Arizona plates.”

  “Why didn’t you call the Sheriff? The citizens in your area get the kid-glove treatment from the Sheriff’s Department.”

  I shrugged.

  He smiled. “Come on! You were thinking blackmail, right? Maybe you were afraid your wealthy neighbor might get burned.”

  “Don’t be absurd. I happen to like Carol Medford and I think those people might be harassing her. And I have always admired her new boyfriend.”

  “She’s had enough of ’em. Who’s her latest?”

  “Fortney Grange,” I said, and waited for his reaction.

  “What’s he—another young one?” he asked.

  Were Mrs. Casey and I the only living members of the Fortney Grange fan club? I said, “Not too young. Let’s eat.”

  He had herring in sour cream. I had a corned-beef sandwich and another stein of Einlicher. Over our coffee, he said, “If you could get the license number of that van, I could help you there.”

  I handed him a slip of paper and said, “I thought you’d never ask.”

  “You bastard,” he said. “You devious bastard!”

  The gang I usually played with at Sandpiper on Wednesday was not playing today. I went to my own club and hit a bucket of balls and then went home.

  The van was not in sight. But there was a Sheriff’s Department car parked in the Medford driveway. Ten minutes later, Mrs. Casey came out to the pool to tell me there was a policeman at the door who wanted to talk with me.

  “Send him out here,” I said.

  The officer looked too young to remember me. But he smiled and said, “I had no idea the Rams paid this kind of money when you were with them.”

  “They didn’t. I had a rich uncle who met an untimely death. Untimely for him, I mean. I suppose you want to ask about those two who were parked out in front this morning?”

  He nodded. “Your housekeeper told me she tried to get the license number on the vehicle, but couldn’t. You didn’t get it by chance, did you?”

  I shook my head, which was not a lie. I had got it by design, not by chance. The front plate had been clean enough to read.

  “Did Miss Medford ever live in Arizona?” he asked me.

  “I don’t know. Did you ask the butler next door?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “I forgot to. I’m kind of new at this. He told me the woman was there yesterday morning, but Miss Medford wasn’t home. A very heavy woman, he told me.”

  “Very,” I agreed. “The kid was skinnier. Nicer, too, is my hunch. His mother didn’t seem worried when I threatened to phone you boys. By the way, who did phone you?”

  “The butler. But they were gone when we got here. Weren’t you with the police department in Los Angeles after you quit football?”

  I shook my head. “I was a private investigator.”

  “Oh,” he said in a tone just faintly tinged with contempt.

  “A man has to eat,” I explained.

  “I suppose,” he said doubtfully. “Hey—wait-how did you know the woman was his mother?”

  “Because he called her ‘ma’. After you’ve been with the department for a while you’ll pick up these sophisticated detection techniques.”

  He flushed. “You don’t have to get snotty.”

  “It’s a hangover,” I explained, “from my cheap-peeper days. Sorry. My father was a cop. He was killed in the line of duty.”

  His flush deepened. “Okay, I had a shot coming. You’re right; a man has to eat.” He took a breath. “If you get anything that might help, you’ll phone us, won’t you?”

  “Of course,” I lied.

  Bernie phoned around three o’clock. “Get a pencil and a piece of paper,” he said.

  There was a pad and pencil next to the phone. I said, “Shoot, Loot.”

  “That van,” he told me, “is registered to a Carl Tryden Lacrosse, aged forty-six, of Skeleton Gulch, Arizona.” He spelled out the Tryden and the Lacrosse: “Mean anything to you?”

  “I know a La Crosse in Wisconsin,” I said, “but that’s a town.”

  “Right. And two words. This is one. If you tell anybody I looked this up for you, I’ll deny it. When are we going to play poker again?”

  “As soon as I recover from the beating I took last time. Thanks a lot, old buddy.”

  The Tryden didn’t register with me, but Carl Lacrosse—that name had a familiar sound. I had seen it somewhere, and recently. It had stuck in my memory because my flanking tackle for four years with the Rams had been Moose Mulvaney from La Crosse, Wisconsin. To hear Moose tell it, La Crosse was the twentieth-century Eden.

  Jan came home around three-thirty. “Guess who is up in Solvang?” she asked me.

  “Ronnie? Paul Newman? Gore Vidal?”

  “Don’t be silly. Carol.”

  “Did you talk with her?”

  “I didn’t even see her. But my client has this house hidden in the hills near there, and I saw Carol’s Rolls in the driveway of a house on the road up.”

  “There must be more than one Rolls Royce in the Solvang area.”

  “Not with a license plate that reads CAROL MD. Now, what would she be doing there?”

  “The road through Solvang is a much quicker route to Carmel,” I explained, “than 101 is. They probably stopped to see friends on the way.”

  “Maybe—and maybe not. Mrs. Casey told me she was going over to talk with Charles today. I’m going out to the kitchen to find out if she’s learned anything.”

  When she came back, she looked disappointed. “Charles told Mrs. Casey that Carol told him that woman was a maid she fired years ago, even before Charles went to work for her. The woman has apparently been harassing her every time she comes to town.”

  I smiled. “And there goes your villainy theory.”

  “Try not to be smug,” she said. “What have you been doing while I’ve been out laboring?”

  “A little checking. That van that was parked in front is registered to a man named Carl Tryden Lacrosse. Why is that name familiar to me?”

  “I can’t believe it is,” she said. “Not for a man whose idea of a class camera is a Polaroid One-Shot. Carl Tryden Lacrosse is one of the finest photographers west of the Rockies. I am amazed that—”

  “You don’t have to get snotty,” I interrupted. “He had some pictures in Arizona Highways magazine, right?”

  She nodded. “Quite often. He lives in Arizona. Tell me what’s going on, Brock.”

  “You tell me. You’re the smart ass.”

  A miffed silence.

  “I owed you that,” I explained. “How did it go with the miserable woman in Solvang?”

  “I think I’ve got her nailed,” she said.

  “That’s better,” I told her. “Now you’re talking my language.”

  THREE

  SO, WHAT BUSINESS WAS it of mine? The woman in the van had called it right; I was being a nosy neighbor.

  “She always ran, didn’t she?” Jan asked at breakfast next morning.

  “Carol? How do you mean?”

  “She ran away from marriage often enough. And that’s the biggest commitment of all, isn’t it?”

  “And how!”

  “Please! Let us have a civilized conversation for a change. Carol is the same with her charities: no commitment, never physically active in them. She simply mails them a big check and gets her name on the honorary-sponsor letterhead.”

  “So okay, she’s a butterfly. I thought you liked her.”

  “I do. That doesn’t mean I app
rove of her. Do you?”

  I shrugged.

  “Be honest, Brock.”

  “All right. I grew up middle class. That is where my attitudes were born. If I had been born rich, I would probably be a butterfly, too.”

  She laughed.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked.

  “I had this sudden image of a two-hundred-and-forty-pound butterfly flitting from flower to flower.”

  “Two hundred and twenty-three pounds as of this morning, Ms. Acid Tongue. Are we going out for nine holes?”

  “I guess. I don’t have to be in Solvang until this afternoon.”

  It was ladies’ day at the club and Jan didn’t have a skirt that would fit me, so we played out at Sandpiper’s ocean course. The women’s tees there are at least fifty yards shorter than the men’s on almost every hole, but Jan refused to adjust her handicap. Underneath her refined and semisophisticated exterior, she has a tiger’s instinct for the kill.

  We played for fifty cents a hole. As we walked off the ninth green she graciously accepted the four and a half dollars I owed her. And she considers me the competitive partner!

  She left for Solvang right after lunch, and another afternoon yawned at me. Her belief that Carol Medford was running from trouble was not a belief I shared. A butterfly Carol might be, but the rich don’t have to run; they are insulated by their wealth and their powerful attorneys. And Fortney Grange running—? No way!

  But that woman in the caftan and that sullen kid driving a van that belonged to a famous photographer? That didn’t make sense to my rational (and investigative) mind.

  I put in a long-distance call to the editor of Arizona Highways.

  He was out to lunch, the secretary told me, but an assistant editor was available and would that do? I said it would.

  It was a woman. I explained to her that I was the president of a camera club San Valdesto, and we were trying to get in touch with Carl Lacrosse to address our group. But the letters I had sent to his Skeleton Gulch address had been neither answered nor returned by the post office as undeliverable.

  “I am sure,” she told me, “that he would have answered if he had received your letters. He has spoken to many photography clubs. But I doubt if he spends more than a week or two in Skeleton Gulch.”

  “Do you have a current address for him?”

  “We don’t. The last one we have is in London, and I know he is back from there. His most recent show was in the Smithsonian. You might try them.”

  “Doesn’t he have an agent I could call?”

  “Not him He is a real loner and almost pathologically noncommercial. Anyone who is not seriously interested in photography is of absolutely no interest to Carl.”

  I thanked her and considered phoning the Smithsonian. Then I realized it was almost six o’clock in Washington and the place would be closed.

  It was possible that the van was stolen. This picture formed in my mind of poor Carl being bludgeoned to death by the overweight woman and buried in a shallow desert grave, while her son looked on, horrified.

  It was also possible that the woman in the van could be his wife. That would be reason enough for him to spend only a week or two a year in Skeleton Gulch—to visit his son. It was an incongruous pairing, but not all marriages are made in heaven.

  I was putting together patterns without substance, building an incident into a drama. Carol could have been telling the truth; the woman might be a disgruntled former maid. But I doubted it.

  For the second day in a row Jan came home looking unhappy. “I have decided,” she told me, “to let Audrey handle that woman. She and I are never going to agree on anything!”

  Audrey Kay of Kay Décor was Jan’s boss. I said, “Take off your shoes and relax. I’ll bring you a drink.”

  When I brought our drinks back, I advised her, “Don’t quit. Stick with that woman.”

  She shook her head. “I know your philosophy—try, try, and try again.”

  “Right.”

  “My daddy added a line to that adage. ‘Try, try, and try again—and then stop making a damned fool out of yourself.’ I’ve given her three tries. She’s had it! Has anything new happened next door?”

  “Nothing.” I hesitated, and then told her about my call to Arizona, omitting the lie about my presidency of a camera club.

  “I thought you weren’t going to play nosy neighbor.”

  “I thought of my role as that of a concerned friend.”

  Mrs. Casey came out of the house then to tell us Lieutenant Vogel was at the front door. “Tell him to come out here,” I said.

  He wore the same weary expression Jan had worn when she came home. “I thought I’d drop in on the way home,” he explained.

  “You took a strange route.”

  “I know. But you’re the only friends I have who pour good Scotch. Do you want me to leave?”

  “You’re always welcome here,” Jan said. “Don’t mind Brock. Sit down.”

  He nodded and sat on the chaise next to Jan. I went to get him his drink. He had gone four miles out of his way for a drink? Baloney! He was a devious man, at times.

  “Bad day?” I asked him as I handed him his drink.

  “They’re all bad,” he said. “I’d retire if I could afford it.”

  Poor-mouth Bernie Vogel. His father had left him three small old buildings in the heart of the business district. They were now worth twenty times what his father had paid for them. His father had run the only kosher delicatessen in town right up to a month before his death. Plotkin was now renting two of the buildings from Bernie.

  He sat there silently, sipping his drink and staring out at the hills.

  “We sure need rain,” I said. “Those hills are dry as tinder.”

  He nodded.

  “Speak up,” I said. “You’ve got better Scotch than that at home.”

  “Okay, okay. Mrs. Carl Lacrosse dropped in to see us this afternoon.”

  “Was she a heavy woman in a caftan?”

  “She was plenty heavy. But she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”

  “God, what a sight that must have been! What did she want?”

  “She wanted us to get her son back.”

  “Back? From where?”

  “Oh, that crazy cult up there off San Marcos Pass Road. I forget the name of it. I guess the kid has deserted her.”

  “So—?”

  “So what can we do? They call it a religion. We stick our noses into that and we’ll have the ACLU crawling all over us.”

  I laughed. “But you figured old Brock might go up there and check it out. That’s why you dropped in—on your way home.”

  “Not for one second! I simply wondered how much you knew about those two.”

  “I didn’t even know the woman was Mrs. Lacrosse. She never identified herself to me. Since I talked with you at lunch yesterday I’ve learned that her husband doesn’t spend more than a couple of weeks a year in Skeleton Gulch.”

  “Where did you learn that?”

  “From an assistant editor at Arizona Highways.”

  “You phoned them?”

  I nodded.

  “Why?”

  “Because the people next door are not only neighbors. They are friends. Another drink?”

  “Thank you. Make it weaker this time.”

  I took my glass along and added some vodka to my martini. When I came back and sat down again, he asked, “Isn’t this Carl Lacrosse an artist?”

  “In a way. He’s a photographer.”

  “Which is an artist,” Jan explained, “to anyone who spends more than nineteen dollars for a camera.”

  I smiled at her tolerantly and agreed with a nod and asked Bernie, “Who will Mrs. Lacrosse go to next, an attorney?”

  “A lawyer won’t touch it if he knows the law. She’ll probably go to Dwight Kelly and his hoodlum associates.”

  “Who is Dwight Kelly?”

  “An ex-cop. He was a crooked cop, which is why he is an ex-cop. He calls
himself a deprogrammer, but what he really is is a kidnapper.”

  “What’s a deprogrammer?”

  “A person,” Bernie said, “who is trained to straighten out the thinking of those troubled kids who are rescued from all the weird cults that infest Southern California. To my thinking, that would require an M.A. in psychology or an M.D. in psychiatry.”

  “Is Kelly qualified to do that—or any of his associates?”

  “I don’t know much about his associates, but Kelly is trained in only two disciplines, dishonest police work and larceny. We have been trying to nail him for two years.”

  “What stymied you?”

  “The rich people who hire him, mostly. He is not cheap, only crooked.”

  “You mean like a private eye?”

  “I’d say ‘yes’ to that if I wasn’t drinking your booze.” He finished his drink and stood up. “Are you sure you’ve told me all you know, Brock?”

  “All I know about Mrs. Lacrosse and her son. Cheer up, Bernie! It’s a crazy world, but we have to adjust to it.”

  He left. Jan said, “Poor Bernie.”

  “Poor, hell! He’s loaded. And he enjoys putting the bad guys into the clink. Even if he wasn’t paid, he’d want to do it. He is a moaner, a poor-mouth moaner.”

  “That’s no way to talk about a friend, Brock.”

  “I love the bum! Do I have to whitewash him? He is what he is.”

  We sat in silence for a while, and then Jan said, “Let’s eat out tonight.”

  “Isn’t it a little late to tell Mrs. Casey?”

  “I told her when I came home,” she informed me.

  While she was taking her shower, I looked up the address of Dwight Kelly. It was on Cathedral Oaks Road, a fairly logical route to Charley’s Chowder House, where I would suggest eating.

  When I turned off our street onto Cathedral Oaks Road, Jan asked, “Why this way?”

  “Less traffic,” I explained, “and it’s more scenic.”

  We were half a block from the Kelly address when she said, “Doesn’t that look like the same van on that driveway up there?”

  “Check the license plate as we go by,” I said.

  “Arizona,” she said as we went by. Then, “I hope you’re not going to tell me this was a coincidence.”