Miss Pink Investigates 3

by Gwen Moffat

  ‘Yes, for the time being. Padilla will give you a receipt.’

  ‘Then you do think there’s a connection with Argent?’

  ‘So far as it’s stolen property and it’s in the dead guy’s cabin, that’s all. The connection was probably the girl.’

  ‘Are you going to try to locate her?’

  ‘No, ma’am. She’s not my concern and nor is your author. Like I said, we got nothing to show he’s not alive and well, just missing his wallet, is all.’

  ‘So what do you do about Vogel?’ Green asked.

  Raistrick nodded as if the victim’s former employer had a point there, which was more than Miss Pink had with her insistence on a significant connection with Timothy Argent. ‘I think we got a drugs runner here,’ he said. ‘And there’s not going to be no nationwide alert for his killers. It’s a case of dog eat dog and we got enough to do trying to keep up with the muggers and rapists and weirdos setting the forest afire, decimating millions of acres, without wasting manpower looking for a gang killed one of themselves.’

  ‘Why did they shoot him before they hanged him?’ Miss Pink asked.

  ‘Ah, you saw the hole in the screen.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘I guess they missed.’ He avoided her eye. ‘We’ll know more after the autopsy.’

  As the police climbed into their vehicles she turned to Green. ‘You can ask for the results of the autopsy,’ she told him. ‘You were his employer.’

  ‘You mean you want to know. You’re sure there’s a connection, aren’t you? I have to say, I’m intrigued about this guy, Timothy. And finding that wallet in the stove, that’s weird.’

  Beck said, scrubbing his beard: ‘What puzzled you about the fingerprints?’

  She blinked at him. ‘What’s the sense in lifting prints from the cabin without getting ours for elimination? He’s just going through the motions.’

  ‘Ask me,’ Green said, ‘he hasn’t got the manpower to search the forest, or do much else for that matter. And why should he, with nothing to indicate Argent’s up there?’

  ‘Except his continued silence,’ she said.

  To explore the trails after the discovery of Vogel’s body would have been an anticlimax; moreover the men wanted to get back to their wives, to close ranks. They were so eager that they would have left the ranch house and the cabin unsecured had not Miss Pink pointed out that the press would surely come to view the scene of the crime. Grumbling about ghouls, Green closed all the windows and locked the doors, and they left as they had come, the Toyota going first.

  At Dogtown they parked in front of the Queen where the wives could be seen inside, drinking coffee. Miss Pink glanced down the street and saw Charlotte Semple emerge from the museum to shake a mat. They waved to each other. She murmured an excuse and turned back from the restaurant.

  ‘I thought you were going into the canyons,’ Charlotte said as she approached.

  ‘Didn’t you see the police cars?’

  ‘Police? Where? What happened?’

  ‘I forgot; you can’t see cars on the canyon road from here, except at night. We found Brett Vogel.’

  Charlotte gaped. ‘So?’

  ‘He was dead, hanged.’

  ‘He killed himself?’

  ‘He’d been hanged with barbed wire.’

  ‘Oh, my God! Who’d do that?’ After a pause she added bitterly: ‘As if I didn’t know.’

  ‘I hadn’t come across this method before.’

  ‘How could you? It’s not something gets in the papers, even on the other side of the border. Frighten the tourists, bad for the image of the country; even the Mexicans keep it quiet – more or less. But you live along the border, even here, a hundred miles away, you know about it. We don’t talk neither.’ Charlotte’s mouth stretched in a travesty of a smile. ‘We depend on the tourists for our living. Why can’t they keep their quarrels on the other side of the border?’

  ‘Did you suspect Vogel was a criminal?’

  ‘Me? No. Not a criminal – not serious crime. Hiding out possibly, probably, but not mixed up in anything nasty. I suppose it was smuggling: illegals or drugs.’

  ‘They’ll find out. He used to go away for days at a time.’

  ‘Joanne was in it too?’

  ‘I understand she stayed behind to mind the store.’

  ‘So that’s why she ran. Timothy offered her an easy way out – security as well –’

  ‘The timing’s wrong. Joanne went two months ago but Vogel was killed in the last two days.’

  ‘Why are we talking in the street? Come inside, have a coffee.’

  Miss Pink started to walk through the museum and paused, horrified. There was a body on a trestle-table and Semple was doing something to its feet with a knife. ‘Got this lot yesterday in Fresno,’ Charlotte was saying happily. ‘Beautiful condition, that dress is pure silk. There are two more in that chest, stinking of camphor –’

  Miss Pink swallowed and moved closer. Semple straightened and picked up a small white boot. ‘No way,’ he told his wife. ‘It’s tiny! I’m having to pare the feet down.’

  ‘You do that, hon; dummies are cheap but those boots are something else, and they gotta be displayed with that dress.’ She appealed to Miss Pink. ‘Aren’t they a perfect match? And we got an ivory fan to go in her hand, buy a blonde wig. Now we have to find hats. We plan to have a whole section of effigies: ladies like this, farm women, teamsters, even children, we can find kids’ clothes. It’s Julius’s idea, isn’t my old boy creative?’ She regarded him proudly and stroked his arm. ‘Hon,’ her voice dropped, ‘Miss Pink brought bad news about Brett Vogel. Seems he was into something illegal, like drugs? And he’s been murdered.’ Semple’s lips moved but he said nothing. ‘Strung up with wire,’ Charlotte said meaningly.

  ‘I don’t believe it! That’s – that’s –’

  Charlotte nodded. ‘An execution. The Westerners found him. Miss Pink was along. I don’t expect the police are much bothered,’ she said to Miss Pink.

  ‘The sheriff’s view is that dog eats dog. Meaning he’s not interested in a drugs runner being murdered by one of his own kind. One assumes that it would be extremely difficult to trace them anyway; they’re probably back across the border by now.’

  ‘He was definitely a trafficker?’ Semple asked.

  ‘The execution implies that, and that he was an informant. The wire was barbed.’

  He looked sick. ‘It’s obscene!’

  ‘Mexicans!’ Charlotte exclaimed. ‘They’re third world down there, you know? Extortion, torture, you name it. Things like this make you feel like pulling up stakes, moving to Montana, Minnesota, someplace you never see anyone except Anglos. Hell, let’s go find some coffee.’

  They left Semple staring at the little boot. ‘He’ll forget it soon enough,’ Charlotte said fondly. ‘The murder, I mean. Men are so squeamish, aren’t they?’ In the cabin’s kitchen she went on talking as she prepared a tray: ‘You think out here you’d be safe, not like in New York or LA, but it’s worse when it does happen. These border gangs are like animals; thank God Joanne wasn’t there. I can’t believe she could have been in it with him, and I don’t recall she ever acted as if she was on drugs herself.’

  ‘She was living with Vogel,’ Miss Pink pointed out. ‘She had to know – unless –’

  ‘Unless what?’

  ‘If his job was to distribute the stuff: pick it up after it was brought across the border, take it into LA or San Francisco and return home empty, she needn’t have known. He could have lied about the reason for his absence.’

  ‘She wasn’t stupid. More like she knew and turned a blind eye. Like I said, she wanted to run and Timothy came along, provided her with means and opportunity. She already had the motivation.’ The kettle boiled and she made the coffee.

  ‘That’s normally used of murder,’ Miss Pink said, accepting a mug: ‘means, motive, opportunity.’

  Charlotte sat down. ‘Help yourself to cookies. They’re homemade.’

>   ‘Timothy’s wallet was inside the stove in Vogel’s cabin.’

  Charlotte sipped her coffee, her face blank. ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘What would your reaction be if someone had been missing for two months, you’re looking for him, and you find his wallet – minus currency but with credit cards – in a stove?’

  ‘Someone needed to burn it? A cold stove? So he’d burn it next time he lit the fire – but he was murdered before he could do that. You’re telling me Vogel stole the wallet … No, you’re suggesting he was responsible for Timothy’s disappearance? You think he’s dead too – Timothy.’ It wasn’t a question.

  Miss Pink drove to the garage ostensibly for petrol but in reality looking for Hiram Wolf. Lorraine said he’d gone to Bakersfield for tyres and wouldn’t be back until evening. She asked for the lavatory then and was directed round the back of the garage. From there she could see the rear yard of the Wolf bungalow, and a slim German Shepherd watching her intently from the other side of a chain-link fence.

  She drove back through the Rattlesnake Hills and took the road to Malachite and then the fork for Crazy Mule. The road was – so far – empty.

  There were no animals outside Fortune’s cabin and the door was closed. ‘I can smell woodsmoke,’ she said pleasantly, raising her voice, ‘so I guess you’re around. I came to tell you what’s happening because I think you need to know.’

  He came pushing through the branches carrying a shovel and two dead ground squirrels. ‘You talking to yourself?’ he asked, pretending he hadn’t been hiding. She thought that was a good sign.

  ‘Who are the squirrels for?’

  ‘Snake.’

  ‘It has to be a diamondback to swallow something as big as that. I thought snakes were in hibernation.’

  ‘This one isn’t. And he’s not a diamondback.’

  He dropped the squirrels on the chopping block and went into the cabin, emerging with a large plywood box. He put it down, reached inside and straightened up holding a sleepy claret-coloured snake. Miss Pink stared. Fortune raised troubled eyes. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘I was about to ask you. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  It would have been a rather dull snake but for three broad and diffused stripes that gave it the claret tinge, and ran down a body that was surprisingly heavy for its length which was only three feet or so.

  ‘It should be hibernating,’ he said. ‘It won’t eat but it won’t sleep neither. I’m afraid it’s going to die. Here, you hold it while I cut up these squirrels. Maybe the smell of blood’ll make him hungry.’

  ‘These stripes are like a garter’s,’ she observed, taking the animal gently. It moved sluggishly until its head rested on her wrist. ‘But he’s far too thick for a garter.’

  ‘You like snakes,’ he observed, deftly skinning the first squirrel.

  ‘Most of them. Not the venomous ones. I don’t think I could form a relationship with a rattler. Where did you find this fellow?’

  He came and held a squirrel’s head in front of the snake which could have been dead, for all the response it made. ‘He’s not even tasting the air!’ Fortune’s tone was that of an anxious child. He touched the scaly snout with the bloody little head. The snake turned and tried to rearrange itself. Miss Pink sat on a log in order to provide a lap.

  ‘When did it eat last?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I’ve only had it a coupla days. It’s took nothing from me.’

  ‘You must have picked it up just as it was about to hibernate. If we took it back –’

  ‘Not that one, not where it was.’

  ‘A pity.’ She looked down at the broad dorsal stripe. ‘It’s quite plump; it might survive if we could discover its own territory.’

  ‘How you going to do that?’ He was suddenly, fiercely angry. ‘He were in Vogel’s barn! That shit!’

  After a pause she said: ‘So Vogel keeps pets,’ adding quickly: ‘You couldn’t say he has animals as friends.’

  ‘Pets!’ He spat. ‘Merchandise! Snakes is so many dollars a foot! Filth, shittin’ filth!’

  Suddenly she knew what this was about, but she had to be careful; he could lie like the devil.

  ‘We have to identify this snake,’ she said firmly, ‘and then we can find out what kind of country it belongs in and take it there. I think it’s a desert snake, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s not from around here. How you going to find out what it is? You going to take it away?’

  ‘That won’t be necessary. I can’t believe there’s anything else like this. I have a friend on the coast. I’ll go and call her. I’ll be right back.’

  ‘Melinda!’ crowed Grace Dodge, the naturalist. ‘How nice to hear your voice. We got your card. Did you find any trace of Timothy yet … Well, I’m sure you will; you’re tenacious enough … What? A snake? What kind of snake? … My dear, you’ve got a rosy boa, how exciting, how did you – But how did it come to be at that altitude in the first place? … Look, I suggest you get it back to the desert just as soon as you can. If necessary steal it from its so-called owner … Escaped? Great, so what are you waiting for? … I see. Let me think. There are rosy boas in Joshua but that’s a long way south. There are colonies in Death Valley. You’re looking for a rocky canyon with a spring in it. Why don’t you take this specimen into Butcher Knife Canyon; you can get a Jeep all the way to the spring. Release it there; it’s the best you can do. You go over Towne’s Pass … I forgot, you know Death Valley …’

  Asa Fortune didn’t speak until they were on the paved highway and then it was only to protest when she told him to fasten his seat belt.

  ‘If I have to stop suddenly,’ she said, ‘the snake will fall off your lap and get hurt.’

  ‘You don’t have to stop sudden.’

  ‘What happens if a jackrabbit or a tarantula is on the road? Do I go over it? Have you never seen a squashed animal on the pavement?’

  He fastened his seatbelt. He was amenable enough when people took the trouble to explain. They were silent again until he asked: ‘What was it I needed to know? When you come to the cabin you said you come to tell me what was happening?’

  ‘The boa put it right out of my mind,’ she lied. ‘Live snakes are more important than dead criminals. Vogel was hanged.’

  ‘Hanged?’

  ‘Hung: strung up with barbed wire.’ He was quiet. She looked across the cab and met his intent gaze.

  ‘When did this happen?’

  She shrugged. ‘Recently. In the last few days.’

  ‘Where was he found?’

  ‘In the forest.’

  He turned back to the road. ‘Joanne said he could be into drugs. He were away about three days usually.’ She thought about the snake, coiled on a sack on his lap, but she didn’t look at it. As if he had divined the thought, he went on: ‘It weren’t drugs here. This is what he were smuggling.’ He glanced at the plump coils and smiled. ‘He got his deserts.’

  ‘How right you are. What’s that raptor? A falcon. Must be a prairie falcon. What do you think?’

  ‘If you say so.’ After a while he said, almost meekly: ‘I know the bird, I don’t know what folk calls it. I only know the names of animals if someone tells me. And I don’t meet many people.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that. You know everyone in Dogtown; Joanne was your friend, you knew Brett Vogel –’

  ‘He don’t count.’

  ‘Who killed him, d’you think?’

  ‘Drugs traffickers caught up with him. When Joanne met him in New Mexico he were on the run, back in the spring. He told her he’d been part of a scam stealing new pick-ups from this side of the border, drive ’em across, Mexicans pay a fortune for them. He kept the purchase money from some trucks, and then he run. Joanne reckoned it wasn’t cars but drugs; all the time she said it was drugs. I didn’t find out the truth till I come across this guy in the tack-room.’

  ‘If he kept smuggled animals at the ranch Joanne must have know
n –’

  ‘He didn’t, not before she left. She’d never have gone along with that kind of trade; more’n half dies on the road: no food, no water, terrible, drying heat. Joanne didn’t know. I knew soon’s I walked in that barn: the smell, sour-like, the smell of fear.’ He touched the boa’s back with a touch like a feather. ‘This one must have escaped. I found him in a corner, curled up to die.’

  ‘What would you have done if Vogel had come back? Were you armed?’

  ‘I would have looked for a way to kill him, not then, later. I wasn’t armed. I had warning; there are windows round that barn, in the tack-room too. I knew I’d see the headlights if he came back while I was there. That’s what happened. I saw the lights and I slipped out and away.’

  ‘That was the night before last?’ He didn’t reply. She went on smoothly: ‘Because if it was, you were lucky, lucky they didn’t have a dog either. If that pick-up came down the meadow from the Deadboy trail, it wasn’t Vogel driving but the people who murdered him.’

  ‘You could be right.’

  ‘Was there another vehicle at the ranch? There had to be. I mean, if it wasn’t Vogel in the pick-up.’

  ‘I didn’t see one. They could have left it somewheres. Wouldn’t want to drive up and warn him, would they?’

  ‘Did you go in the cabin?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A pity. It could have been useful to know if it was in the same condition then as when we saw it this morning.’

  ‘How was that?’

  ‘With a chair pushed back from the table, a gun magazine open to a picture of some kind of automatic rifle, a mug half-full of coffee, the bed made –’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about any of that.’

  ‘The police fingerprinted everything in the cabin.’

  Silence. ‘I opened the door,’ he said at length. ‘Looked in just. It was like you said. My prints will be on the door, but it don’t matter, I never been printed.’

  ‘You didn’t look in the stove?’

  ‘Why should I? I never went beyond the door.’

  ‘What made you go there in the first place? Did you know he’d be away?’

  ‘Granville Green likes me to keep an eye on the ranch.’