Point Deception

by Marcia Muller

  There was evidence that the town had once seen, or been poised on the brink of, better days: A pier extended into the sea across from the hotel, its charter-fishing business boarded up; a weathered sign pointed the way to a yacht harbor. When he’d driven in the previous afternoon, Guy had noted a subdivision on the ocean side of the highway, streets with names such as Cormorant Way and Osprey Lane neatly laid out. Only three houses had been built there, and weeds grew through cracks in the pavement. Across from the subdivision the Pelican Cove Bed & Breakfast, a gabled, gingerbread-laden structure, looked to be in poor repair, and only two cars sat in its lot.

  Town in trouble, and Guy was going to lay bare the reasons.

  Two months ago, had anyone told him he’d now be standing on a hotel porch in a small coastal California town, shivering in the strong early October wind, he’d have thought them insane. His life was settled, and if he wasn’t happy with it, he wasn’t unhappy either. But then, at a dinner party at his literary agent’s home in SoHo, he’d been seated next to a man named Dunbar Harrison, and the whole thing was set in motion. Orchestrated, he thought, by his agent, Marta Backus, who was sick and tired of waiting for Guy to write another book.

  It was ten years since his first portrait of a troubled town, set in an Alabama hamlet torn apart by a series of racially motivated killings, had made the best-seller lists. Six years since his much-praised study of a small mid-western town rocked by scandal and corruption capitalized on that first success. Four years since he stopped contributing articles to newspapers and magazines. Three years since he shelved his major work on an entire country in trouble. Three years since Diana died and everything solid and good went out of his life.

  Three years, and Marta Backus apparently had decided it was time for him to get back to work.

  Dunbar Harrison was a man Guy knew casually. His family had made their money generations ago in New England manufacturing, and Dun had attended all the right schools, excelling at nothing. For years he’d drifted on the fringes of New York’s theatrical world, contributing the occasional review to unimportant publications and backing off-Broadway plays that invariably did poorly. A pleasant enough man in his late forties, but he didn’t relate well to others, and his demeanor was curiously dispassionate. At least that was how most people saw him. To Guy, he seemed haunted.

  Given his take on Harrison, he’d been surprised at Marta’s dinner party to hear Dun energetically lobby him to make Signal Port, California, the subject of his next book. It was his kind of material, he insisted. In what way? Guy asked. A mass murder had occurred there thirteen years ago, and had virtually destroyed the town. Hadn’t Guy heard about it?

  He thought back to where he’d been then. In Asia, working on a major series of articles on the emerging Pacific Rim economy for the Times. As was typical, he’d buried himself in his project and paid little attention to what went on at home, certainly none to a crime in a California town he’d never heard of.

  “No,” he said to Dun, “I haven’t. But don’t tell me any more. I’m not planning to write another book.”

  “Once you know the story, I’m sure you’ll want to pursue it.”

  “Sorry, Dun, I’m retired.”

  “Please hear me out.”

  Dun’s intensity intrigued him. A slight prickle traveled up his spine, the beginning of the old excitement when an idea was presented to him. He tried to suppress it. “Did Marta put you up to this?”

  “Actually, I came to her with the concept. But she thinks it’s a surefire winner. Just listen—”

  “No.” This time his refusal was less a rejection of the idea itself than an instinctive safeguard against it becoming contaminated. When he began entertaining the possibility of a story, he didn’t want to hear too much detail, particularly if it was biased, inaccurate, or incomplete. And given Dun’s excitement, his account was likely to be all three. Instead, Guy preferred to learn only the bare bones—who, what, when, where—then assign his research assistant to gather complete information. But before he tackled the volumes of material, he’d travel to the place armed with only a brief summary, and immerse himself in its culture. What he uncovered by spending time in the community and getting to know its people breathed life into his story and revealed facets of it that no amount of professional research could unearth.

  Dun had no way of knowing that, however, and he flinched at Guy’s abruptness, looking away. When he turned back, Guy was shocked by the expression on his face. The intensity was gone, but instead of disappointment, it had been replaced by anguish.

  “All right,” Guy said, “we’ll talk about this in the morning.”

  Dun’s twisted face sagged with relief. “You’re going to do it.”

  “I’m going to think about doing it.” But the prickle was back, stronger than before, and this time he did nothing to suppress it. How could he resist a story that had such power over a man like Dunbar Harrison?

  He spoke with Marta before he left her party. Eight weeks later, more intrigued than ever, a contract signed with his publisher, he was on his way to Soledad County.

  Rho propped her hip on the corner of Valerie’s desk and picked up the clipboard that held this morning’s faxes from Santa Carla—notices and memos that rolled off the machine in a steady stream from the Soledad County seat. As she paged through them she asked the clerk, “You know where Wayne went?” He’d left the substation after the last of the poachers were loaded onto the second van.

  “On a four-five-nine up at Deer Harbor. Second home. Valuable jewelry and antiques taken.” Valerie smirked and picked up her knitting. “Now, I ask you, what kind of people leave valuables in a vacation home where they don’t even have an alarm system or a private patrol?”

  “People who hope to defraud their insurance companies.”

  “I tell you, you work in a place long enough, you see it all.”

  “Yeah, you do.” Rho sighed, skimming a memo that said the department’s request for funds to hire two more patrol officers and a detective for the coastal substation had been turned down by the county board of supervisors.

  The trouble with policing Soledad County, she thought, was that it was too damn big and diverse. You had national forest to the east; Santa Carla, Talbot’s Mills, and Cedar along the Highway 101 corridor; the coastal ridge; and the coast itself. The coastal area extended from Westhaven at the south to Oilville—whose now dry wells were among the first to be drilled in California—at the north. In between lay small towns, state reserves, large ranches, and wilderness.

  This single substation served the nearly one-hundred-mile coastal stretch. Rho, nine other deputies, and Station Commander Iverson worked the facility, their territories overlapping with those of the inland cities. None of the coastal towns had its own police department, and even with the cooperation of the California Highway Patrol, the job was overwhelming.

  It didn’t help that the department’s Investigations Bureau was located at the county seat. Should a serious crime occur on the coast, detectives were dispatched from Santa Carla, but more often than not they relied on patrol officers such as herself to do the real legwork. As a result, she and her fellow deputies were more skilled at investigation than their colleagues inland and their work was more interesting, but they performed detectives’ duties for patrol officers’ pay. Many of the deputies complained about that, but Rho didn’t care. Often, like today, she worked during her time off.

  She set the clipboard on the desk and stood. “If you talk to Wayne,” she said to Valerie, “tell him I’m heading down to Point Deception to check on an abandoned vehicle.”

  Valerie took her eyes off her knitting and regarded Rho with a keen, birdy gaze. It said that she pitied her for many reasons: for having no husband, no children, no life outside her job; for throwing herself into her work in an attempt to atone for mistakes that under normal circumstances rookies were expected to make; for having thirteen years ago stumbled into abnormal circumstances that continued to
haunt her.

  Or maybe Valerie didn’t feel that way at all. Maybe Rho simply pitied herself.

  When Guy returned to his motel room at a few minutes after three, the door stood open. Late for the maid to be making it up, especially when it appeared that only two other units were occupied. He approached warily, ready for unpleasantness at the end of a frustrating and unpleasant day.

  A woman with enormous buttocks—what one of his British friends called “posterial exuberance”—was bending over to put the final touches to making his bed. As he stepped through the door she straightened and whirled, one hand going to her throat as her face went pale. Then she flushed, muttered something about having to take her son to the dentist—presumably the reason she’d been late to work—and fled, leaving a caddy of cleaning supplies on the small table next to his laptop and file boxes.

  The maid, Guy thought, was clearly as strange and unfriendly as all the other citizens of Signal Port whom he’d encountered that day. At the supermarket, the hardware store, the pharmacy, the small public library. Even the folks at the realty office, usually a place where newcomers were eagerly welcomed, had been distant and discouraging. In two bars where he’d stopped for a beer, he’d been on the receiving end of vaguely hostile glances. At the beach, the people he’d complimented on their dogs shied away from him.

  An unfriendly town, yes, but there was more. Guy caught the scent of xenophobia.

  He went to the table and picked up the caddy, intending to set it outside the door, and his gaze rested on the file boxes. The lid of one was askew. Setting the caddy down, he raised the lid. His files had been disturbed, no question about that.

  By whom? Given her reaction to his arrival, the maid was the likely culprit. But there was also the unfriendly motel proprietor and his sour-faced wife. Or some unknown other party. Were strangers’ possessions routinely intruded upon in this town?

  Or was the reason for the intrusion something unique to him? Unique because he intended to turn the spotlight on the thirteen-year-old unsolved murders in Cascada Canyon?

  The black Mercedes was still parked at the turnout, its sheen dulled by salt cake, its windows misted. Rho pulled her truck over by the fence; as she started to get out, Cody yelped. She fixed him with a stern look and said, “Later.” The dog was well trained, but people drove fast on this stretch, and she didn’t want to take any chances with him, particularly on a blind curve.

  Three other vehicles were parked in the turnout, two pickups and an old sedan. Fishermen, who went through the gap in the fence and across the grassy slope to clamber down the cliff to the cove. The land was owned by an old man who used to run sheep there—Gregory Cordova, the descendant of Basques who had migrated to the coastal region generations ago. He lived all alone in a ramshackle farmhouse at the south end of the property and didn’t care if people crossed for fishing access so long as they didn’t bother him or camp there. His hand-painted sign of a tent with a line through it was overgrown by gorse, but by and large his wishes were known and respected.

  Rho approached the Mercedes cautiously, conscious that she was off duty, without the uniform and badge that gave her authority. Last night she’d thought it odd that the woman had gone off without lowering the hood, and she’d shone her flashlight through the windows to make sure she wasn’t asleep inside. Now she looked into the engine compartment to see if she could pinpoint the source of the trouble, but apparently it was beyond her expertise. She circled the car once, then tried the driver’s side door. Unlocked, and a cursory search of the interior turned up nothing but a couple of marijuana roaches in the ashtray; the glovebox held no registration, insurance card, or other identifying papers.

  She backed out of the car and went to the trunk. Inside was a first-aid kit that looked to be standard equipment and a duffel bag whose contents had been dumped out and scattered across the compartment. Pair of jeans, a couple of T-shirts, blow dryer, a few changes of women’s underwear, toiletries kit. The kit contained the usual items, but no prescription medicines that would show its owner’s name.

  Ransacked, or had the woman been looking for something in a hurry? Either way, she’d packed for only a short trip.

  Rho shut the trunk and went back to the driver’s side door, where she located the metal plate showing the vehicle identification number. She’d run it and the license plate through the DMV’s central files, get a name and address. The car would be towed and impounded if it wasn’t removed within forty-eight hours.

  For a few minutes she stood beside the Mercedes, putting herself in the young woman’s place. Traffic whizzed by on the highway—heavy because it was Saturday—but no one stopped and what few people glanced her way averted their eyes quickly. No one cared about a woman who appeared to be stranded with a disabled vehicle in this isolated place. They were too caught up in their travel plans or their errands or their pursuit of a good time to give a damn.

  Too caught up to give a damn—as she herself had been yesterday afternoon. Except it was her job to give a damn, her responsibility to offer assistance and guarantee safety.

  Guy lowered himself onto a stool at the hotel bar and ordered a Beck’s. The bartender said, “So you’re back.”

  “Yeah, I am.” When the man returned with the beer, he added, “Not much here for a tourist to do, is there?”

  “Don’t get many tourists.” The bartender looked pointedly at Guy’s new L.L. Bean shirt that still showed creases from packing. “Not the kind that stay more than one night, anyway.”

  “I thought this part of the coast was a vacationer’s dream.” It had been described as such in a giveaway paper he’d earlier picked up at the supermarket. The paper made scant mention of Signal Port, however.

  The barkeep shrugged. “Parts of it, yes. Parts of it, no. A town like this, it’s ordinary. Just a place where people live out their lives, working and raising families.”

  “Former doghole port, isn’t it? Logging town?”

  “Right.”

  “Rum-running port during Prohibition?”

  “That too.”

  “Colorful history. Seems your chamber of commerce could exploit it.”

  “If we wanted them to. Which we don’t.” The bartender moved along to another customer.

  Five o’clock now, and the bar was filling up. Maybe Saturday nights at the hotel were more lively. Guy studied the other patrons in the mirror of the backbar: men and women who looked as if they spent most of their time outdoors. He tuned out extraneous noise, listened to their conversations. Identified several distinct groups: commercial fishermen discussing the week’s catch, which had been disappointing; loggers complaining of the new forestry rules that had been adopted at the first of the year; ranchers and hands talking about their stock and the possibility of a wet winter. An extended family, all dressed up for a special occasion, occupied a round table toward the rear. From the wrapping on the presents piled there, Guy assumed they were celebrating the older couple’s wedding anniversary. A much younger pair at a small table leaned toward each other over their drinks, heads close. At the start of a similar life’s journey, and Guy envied them.

  After a while he began to recognize some of the people who came in. The racially mixed couple who had been quarreling in here last night took a table near the windows and drank, not speaking. Will, the man who had gone over the blueprints with the urbanite, was at the bar with a redheaded woman who would have been stunning were it not for fifty extra pounds and tense lines around her mouth and eyes. Guy’s gaze lingered on her as he tried to identify what her problem might be. It wasn’t Will; he touched her hand often, called her “Virge-honey,” and occasionally brought a faint smile to her lips.

  In one corner a couple was half hidden by the jukebox. The man was youngish, in his twenties, with spiky hair and cheap but trendy clothing. The woman was blonde, and when she turned to look for the waitress, Guy realized she was the urbanite’s wife. The two were holding hands, but the man kept looking at his watch.
Whenever he did, she pouted and shook her head. Once she said loudly, “Please don’t go, darling!”

  Interesting.

  The crowd ebbed and flowed. The extended family were called to the dining room and a rowdy group of drinkers claimed their table. The straying wife and her friend finally left, and another pair who had just entered took their place. The man was big and graying, with a gut that hung over his belt buckle. The woman was the black-haired motorist who had almost run Guy over. Unaccountably he felt a stir of disappointment. Such a pretty woman, and seemingly the most pleasant person in town. Was that her husband?

  He continued to watch them as they ordered drinks, and finally he saw that while the man wore a wedding ring, the woman did not. They were discussing something seriously, she ticking off items on her fingers, but their body language was wrong for intimacy. Perhaps they were just friends or business associates.

  Whatever, she was certainly one pretty woman.

  “So what’re you saying, kiddo?” Deputy Wayne Gilardi asked Rho. “That the woman with the Mercedes was the victim of the kidnapping that poacher claimed he witnessed?”

  “It’s possible. The situation’s irregular, anyway. The Mercedes’ VIN doesn’t match with the license plate. Plates were reported stolen six months ago in Ventura County. My check on the VIN shows the car’s registered to a Richard Bartlow, address is in Corona del Mar, Orange County. But there’s no phone number for him, listed or unlisted.”

  “So he moved, forgot to send the DMV a change of address.”

  “And the stolen plates?”

  “Maybe he can afford a Mercedes because he knocks over liquor stores for a living.”

  She tapped her fingers on the table, irritated. “It’s irregular, I tell you.”

  “No, what’s irregular is you going to the trouble to check out ownership of an abandoned vehicle on your day off. I say the girl knew the plates were hot and walked away from a potentially bad situation. Or she’ll be back tomorrow with her boyfriend, who thinks he’s a great auto mechanic.”