Dead Seed

by William Campbell Gault

  At breakfast, I asked Jerry if Morgenstern had been a close friend of the Lacrosse family.

  “Not Carl or his wife. It was Carl’s parents he came to visit. I didn’t know either one of them, but Wendell told me that Carl’s mother had been a script girl and his father a still cameraman. They came here because Carl’s mother had emphysema.”

  “And Wendell Welch met Morgenstern through them?”

  Jerry nodded. “After Carl left and Mrs. Lacrosse was alone with Joel, Morgenstern started staying with Wendell. He’d go to Phoenix first and spend several days with Carl’s father and then come up here to visit the kids. I understand he never had any children of his own.”

  Lydia said, “I thought you had retired, Brock.”

  “For a while. I got restless.”

  She smiled. “You always were. A nice peaceful place like this would drive you insane, wouldn’t it?”

  “That’s no drive, it’s a putt,” Jerry said. “He was always half kooky.”

  She smiled. “That’s why I loved him.” She stuck her tongue out at Jerry. “And still do.”

  “I guess I do, too,” Jerry said. “Another waffle, fatso?”

  “No, thanks. I’ll want to rent a car tomorrow. Will it be possible to rent one in Prescott?”

  He shook his head. “Not the kind you’ll need if you intend to prowl through that Skeleton Gulch area. We’ll use one of mine when we go to visit Wendell today. You can use it as long as you need it.”

  It was Sunday and the rurals were driving into Prescott to church. I soon understood why we needed Jerry’s four-wheel-drive Scout. Time and again, we were forced to move over onto the soft shoulder of the narrow road to allow oncoming cars to pass. Several times, only two of the wheels would find traction there.

  The flora that bordered this torture trail was not impressive to my Southern California eyes; alligator-bark juniper, salt cedar, grama grass, manzanita.

  But the Bradshaw Mountains loomed over us and the tall ponderosa pines. To the son of a still photographer who hoped to follow his father’s trade, those mountains probably had been the challenge and the dream. What vistas, he must have wondered, would open on the far side of them?

  “What are you thinking?” Lydia asked me.

  “I can see now why Carl Lacrosse turned into a wanderer. He must have run out of pictures here.”

  “We didn’t come here for the scenery,” she said. “We came here for the air.”

  “Some of his best work was shot in Arizona,” Jerry said stiffly. “Look who is suddenly an art critic!”

  Lydia nudged me. “I’m looking, dear, but there is none in sight.”

  “You two,” he said. “You two and your nasty tongues.”

  Silence, as we twisted and turned up the narrow road. Then Jerry laughed. “My God, I’m still jealous!”

  “So am I,” I admitted. “‘This too shall pass away.’”

  “Who said that?” Lydia asked.

  “Abraham Lincoln,” I informed her, “in a speech in Wisconsin in 1859.”

  “Bartlett again?” she asked suspiciously.

  “You and your nasty tongue,” I said. “But I cannot lie to you. Jan told me.”

  “You got the right woman and I got the right man,” she decided. “After Jerry showed up, you were never in the competition, Brock. I owe you a finder’s fee for him.”

  Wendell Welch’s ranch was on a gentle slope below a high and threatening cliff. The white frame house was about a fourth as large as the stables behind it. There were half a dozen sleek horses grazing in his immense corral, and one lonely looking cow.

  He was a thin man of medium height with a face weathered as brown as saddle leather. His grip was strong as he shook my hand. Jerry had said he was around seventy; he had probably looked like this for the last thirty years. His dark hair had very little gray in it, his eyes were an unclouded dark blue.

  “Too early for a drink?” he asked.

  “Not for a beer,” I said.

  Jerry and Lydia agreed. The sun was hot; we drank our beer on a shaded patio behind the house. Welch pointed at a small adobe-brick building on the flat land south of his place.

  “That’s the Lacrosse house,” he told me. “Nobody is there now. Are they still in San Valdesto?”

  I nodded, “Joel left her. He joined a cult up there. I don’t think he went to get converted. I have this feeling he was only trying to get away from his mother.”

  “It’s about time,” Welch said. “What a monster. I see her cousin Alvin is home again. He must have done all right up there. He left here in a 1963 Dodge and came home in a 1983 Ford pickup.”

  Another revelation. “Is it yellow?” I asked.

  He nodded. “You know about it? Is it stolen?”

  I told him about the fire that had threatened the cult and the police search for the suspected arsonist.

  He said, “If there was a Chitty in town, they should have grabbed him. Maybe we ought to alert the sheriff here?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “There are an awful lot of yellow Ford pickups. What does he do for a living, if anything?”

  “Odd jobs. He’s handy around cars. He ran a one-man garage in Prescott for a couple of years.”

  But they had taken the van to a garage for new points and plugs. Even I could put in new points and plugs.

  “I don’t know Joel,” I said, “but a young friend of mine who does thinks well of him.”

  “He’s a good kid,” Wendell said. “He worked for me a couple of summers, and after school in the fall. I never found any trace of Chitty in him.”

  I told him about the money Mrs. Lacrosse had come into and her boast that now Joel could go to college.

  Wendell smiled. That would be a big thing to her. She was the only Chitty who ever finished high school. And Carl had four years down there at Tempe, at Arizona State, before he went off to photography school in New York. You see, after she hooked Carl, she wasn’t a Chitty anymore. She was a Lacrosse.”

  I said nothing, staring down at the Lacrosse house. That was the place the head of our photography school had called a shrine. So, Abe Lincoln’s log cabin wasn’t a mansion, either.

  “You’re here because of the Morgenstern murder?” Wendell asked.

  I nodded.

  “I’ll help you all I can,” he promised. “Sydney Morgenstern was as fine a man as I have ever known in my seventy-one years.”

  FOURTEEN

  HERE WAS WHERE IT had all started. Here is where I should have started. The seed was here. It had been dumb to suspect Kelly of starting that fire in order to get Joel out; he had an ally inside the fortress.

  There were other deprogrammers, possibly, who might have risked arson, but why hadn’t we thought of the obvious? Mrs. Lacrosse had her money. What she wanted now was her son. But probably not at the price Kelly would charge her.

  Another unsubstantiated pattern. As I had told Wendell, there was a host of yellow Ford pickup trucks roaming the golden West.

  I had learned more here in one day than we had learned in a week in San Valdesto. The Morgenstern involvement was a shocker to me. I reminded myself that he was an agent, a loyal agent. His job was to protect his client. I had to leave myself at least one hero.

  Wendell phoned in the morning to tell me that the yellow pickup was now parked in front of the Lacrosse house and Alvin was unloading his belongings. Apparently he was moving into the deserted house.

  “Does he know you?” Wendell asked.

  “I was with a police officer who questioned him. He might remember me.”

  “Was he sober at the time?”

  “So far as I could tell. We were only there for a couple of minutes.”

  “I think it would be safer,” he said, “if we saw him together tonight. There’s a wingding at the Ponderosa Rifle Club, and I’m a member. He won’t be sober there for long. Come here and we’ll go together. Make it around seven.”

  “Fine.”

  “In the meantime,�
�� he suggested, “you might talk with the man that Carl’s father sold his shop to. His name is Prentice Coldwell. He knew the family well. The new name of the shop is Coldwell Camera. Tell him I sent you.”

  I phoned the shop and told Coldwell that I was interested in the history of the Lacrosse family, and that Wendell Welch had given me his name. I asked if I could take him to lunch.

  He said I could. “The Rooster’s Roost Cafe,” he suggested, “at a quarter to twelve, before the tourists begin to crowd in. I’ll be standing near the front door and wearing a brown-and-white polka-dot bow tie.”

  In a cornball movie, Prentice Coldwell would have been typecast as a small-town editor who stands up for what he believes, supports unpopular causes, braves the scorn of his fellow citizens, and loses the advertising of the town’s merchants and the support of his closest friends; a Jimmy Stewart type.

  He was more than thin; he looked dried-out, not unusual among the citizens of Arizona. I expected him to order a bourbon and branch water before lunch. He ordered a daiquiri.

  Carl’s father, he told me, had every bit as much talent as his son. But being a free-lance photographer in the depression of the thirties was the road to starvation. He had jumped at the chance to get a weekly paycheck at the studio. Morgenstern had wangled him the job.

  “And then,” I said, “his wife got emphysema and they came here?”

  He nodded.

  “How about Carl junior’s wife?” I asked.

  He gave me the Henny Youngman line. “Compared with what?”

  I had heard it a hundred times, but I forced a small laugh.

  “She was a ripe beauty when she was young,” he told me. “And probably the only Chitty who could read without moving her lips. As she got heavier, she got grosser, and she got meaner. I think she must have realized she had married too far above her. She turned into a vicious, bitter woman.”

  “And Joel?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “The jury is still out on him. Morgenstern was more his father than Carl was. Morgenstern had this dumb genetic theory that the seed had to be carried down from Carl and Carl junior. He spent a lot of time with Joel. He had no kids of his own, you know, and all his natural fatherly instincts were centered on Joel. He offered to send him to college, and his mother was willing to go along with it, but Joel wasn’t interested. I have a feeling there is more Chitty than Lacrosse in Joel. He was not at all interested in photography. He is one bitter kid.”

  “Wouldn’t you be bitter,” I asked him, “if your father had deserted you when you were young?”

  He shook his head and yawned. “He did and I’m not. I recommend the mountain-brook trout for lunch.”

  This was no Jimmy Stewart. An hour later, I thanked him and drove back to the home of my first true love in her husband’s four-wheel-drive Scout.

  Prentice had told me at lunch that he was the man who had sold Morgenstern the camera new. He was also the man who had bought it back from Joel for eight hundred dollars. He had then resold it, used, to a tourist for twenty-three hundred dollars.

  Would Jimmy Stewart do that? Not in a million years!

  “Learn anything?” Lydia asked.

  “A little. He confirmed some things I suspected.”

  She sighed and smiled sadly and asked, “Do you really enjoy this kind of work, Brock? I mean—the messy people you have to get involved with, and the dangerous people?”

  “I must enjoy it. Nobody is paying me. Do you think that’s crazy?”

  “A little. Do you still have dreams about your father?”

  “Occasionally.” I smiled at her. “That’s not why, Lydia. Does Jerry have dreams about horses?”

  “I fail to see the connection,” she said. “You know we came here for Jerry’s health.”

  Jerry’s physical health, at a rough estimate, should put him into the top ten percent of the country’s healthiest citizens. His health problem was purely mental. It is called hypochondria in the medical dodge. It has made a lot of doctors rich.

  A man must do what he has to do. If Lydia had been a decade younger she would have realized that a woman must do the same.

  Instead, we stood with Jerry that afternoon and watched a kid from town test out a few of his colt hopefuls on the short track Jerry had laid out in the valley below.

  It was almost as much fun as questioning Alvin Chitty.

  Jerry’s rare fall from grace had been expended Saturday night. He sipped a glass of grapefruit juice while Lydia and I enjoyed our martinis on the deck.

  “Who needs alcohol,” he asked, “when the very air is wine?”

  The air had a tinge of horse manure in it, but I smiled and nodded. A man must do what he has to do, and believe what he has to believe.

  When I climbed into the Scout to take off for Wendell’s place, Lydia said, “Be careful now, you damned fool!”

  “I’m a big boy now, Lydia.”

  She nodded. “Boy is the definitive word for you.”

  A wingding at the Ponderosa Rifle Club was not likely to be a black-tie affair. I was wearing my oldest corduroy pants, a turtleneck sweater, and a fleece-lined field jacket. The night was frosty. Crisp would have been what Jerry called it.

  Wendell’s attire was also informal; jeans, sweatshirt, and a well-worn mackinaw. “Alvin left the house half an hour ago,” he told me. “He should be pretty well oiled by the time we get there.”

  We took the Scout, but Wendell drove it. It was dark now and he knew the road. I was glad it was dark. We were climbing. If it had been light I would have been able to see how deep the abyss was only a few feet from our right-side wheels.

  The clubhouse was a long, low building of logs chinked with concrete. It had been built by the members, Wendell informed me. There were no power lines running up here; they had installed their own electrical system, a generator driven by a small gasoline engine.

  There were only three cars in the parking lot, one of them the yellow pickup. But there were about a dozen men in the building when we entered. The bar, too, was obviously handcrafted by rough carpenters. It was composed of two long four-inch-by-twelve-inch planks set edge to edge on four-by-four-inch standards.

  Some of the men were playing cards at the round, mission-oak tables. Alvin was standing by himself at one end of the bar.

  Wendell and I went over to him. He looked up as we came closer, and his eyes narrowed when he saw me. “Don’t I know you?” he asked.

  It was, I decided, the moment of half-truth. “You should,” I said. “I was with that cop who talked with you in San Valdesto.”

  His eyes narrowed more. “What are you doing here?”

  “Hoping to get the goods on Kelly,” I told him. “I used to work for the bastard. I don’t like the way he operates.”

  He looked less suspicious. “You got a point there. That crooked son of a bitch wanted five thousand smackers from us.”

  I nodded. “That’s when I quit him, when I learned he was gouging those poor parents. And I’ll tell you something else—he and that purple foot were splitting the take. Can I buy you a drink?”

  “Hell, yes. Sarkissian you mean? They work together?”

  “They do. You drinking bourbon?”

  He nodded.

  A skinny man with a narrow face had joined us as we talked, standing next to Alvin. “Who’s buying?” he asked. “I know it’s not Alvin.”

  “Aw, shut up,” Alvin said. “I buy more than you do.”

  “I’m buying,” I said. “How about you, Wendell?”

  “Bourbon,” he said.

  “Four double bourbons,” I told the bartender.

  “I’d introduce you to my leeching cousin,” Alvin said, “but he’d have you buying all night. Why don’t you take your drink somewhere else, Clyde?”

  Clyde smiled. “Not me. I’m waiting for your turn.”

  Alvin turned his back on him and said quietly to me, “That double-dealing Armenian bastard!”

  I said, just as quietly, �
�If you’ll give me a signed statement that Kelly wanted five thousand dollars to get Joel out, and his mother will confirm it, that will make it grand larceny. The other parents I talked with refused to tell me how much they paid. This way, we’ll have enough to nail both Sarkissian and Kelly. And Joel won’t be jailed up there any more.

  “Tomorrow,” he said. “Come over tomorrow. Wendell knows where I’m living now. Tonight, I drink and play cards.”

  “So long as somebody’s buying,” Clyde said.

  “Keep your goddamned mouth shut, Clyde,” Alvin growled, “until you have something sensible to say.”

  Clyde wasn’t intimidated. He smiled. “I have something sensible to say. My glass is empty.”

  “You miserable freeloader!” Alvin said, and reached into his back pocket for his wallet, a weather-beaten brown model with a steer head embossed in gilt on the flap. He called to the bartender, “Another whiskey for my idiot cousin.”

  Clyde continued to smile. “When did you get that Mickey Mouse job? What happened to that classy alligator wallet you bought in San Valdesto?”

  Alvin went suddenly rigid. There was a moment of ominous silence. The bartender set a glass of whiskey in front of Clyde. Wendell moved further down the bar, away from us.

  Alvin’s voice was hoarse. “There’s your whiskey, Clyde. You can take it over to a table and drink it, or you can stay where you are and wear it.”

  Clyde was no longer smiling. “Sorehead,” he muttered, and took his drink to a nearby table.

  Wendell moved back toward us. Alvin said, “Thanks for the drink. I’ll see you tomorrow.” He walked over toward a table some distance from the one where Clyde was now sitting.

  “Do you play poker?” Wendell asked.

  “Very badly,” I told him.

  He smiled, “I thought I did, too, until I started playing with this crowd. Let’s pick up a few dollars before we go home.”

  About a half-dozen tables were occupied by men playing some local game called kill-the-cat. Alvin sat at one of these. There were about as many tables devoted to poker. Wendell and I joined a group of four at one of the small-stakes tables.