Stalking Horse (The Lt. Hastings Mysteries)

by Collin Wilcox

  “Do you really think that’s what happened, Mr. Tharp?”

  “Sure I do,” he answered. “Don’t you?”

  “I’m not sure, not yet. I’m still trying to put the pieces together. That’s the reason I’m here, to get information. By the way, when was the last time you saw your sister?”

  “Oh—” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Three, four weeks ago. I’m not really sure. I looked in on her every few weeks. Not that it did much good. She was never in touch, you know. Never.”

  “How often did Fred see her at Brentwood, do you know?”

  He snorted. “Him. I think he went to see her once, after he got out of prison. And that was it.”

  “Did your sister leave a will?”

  “Yes, she did.” Defying me with his small, knowing eyes, he said, “She left everything to me. Which wasn’t much, believe me. A few clothes, and that was it. That, plus burial expenses.” Once more he snorted. “She was a lifelong problem. And if you’re expecting me to say I’m sorry she’s dead, forget it. I’m not. All she ever did was give me problems, her and Fred.”

  “Which Fred is that, Mr. Tharp? The first Fred, or the second Fred?”

  He’d been looking down at his desk as I said it, absently fingering an ornamental letter-opener that lay on the polished wood. I saw his mouth tighten and his eyes harden. For a moment he didn’t respond but sat motionless, still toying with the letter-opener. Then: “You know about that, then.”

  “That’s right. We know about that.”

  He nodded slowly. “It was bound to come out,” he said finally. “With all this happening, I knew it would come out.”

  “What happened twenty-six years ago in Santa Barbara? Who’s Frederick Tharp? What’s his real name?”

  He raised his thick shoulders, shrugging. “It’s Frederick Tharp. When she got him, she just gave him Frederick’s name—her baby’s name. She had the birth certificate. It wasn’t legal, but it worked. It just showed him being a year older than he was, is all.”

  “And, all the time, Donald Ryan was paying you for the child’s keep. Right?”

  He shrugged again, for the first time raising his eyes to meet mine. “That’s right. He paid. Of course he paid.” Now he frowned, acting puzzled. “Why wouldn’t he pay?”

  “Because it’s fraud,” I answered. “Because you found another baby and substituted it for Ryan’s child when that child died. All these years you’ve been collecting money from Ryan under false pretenses. He thought you were keeping his bastard son. But his son died. So you brought in a ringer. Didn’t you?”

  “What the hell’re you—”

  “It’s a little ghoulish, Tharp. It’s one thing to go to Ryan and demand that he do the right thing for your sister and their child. It’s also understandable that you’d put a little in your pocket. Or maybe a lot in your pocket.” I looked meaningfully around the office. “But then the baby died. You didn’t tell Ryan. Maybe your sister was already pregnant again, so you didn’t have to bother finding another baby. Was that it?”

  “But—Christ—that’s not what happened,” he interrupted hotly. “You’ve—Christ—you’ve got it all wrong.”

  “Have I? Then you tell me how it was, Tharp. Tell me what really happened.” I sank back in my chair, faking relaxation as I listened.

  “Well—” He gestured sharply, pugnaciously defensive. “I’ll admit that when Juanita told me that she was pregnant and who the father was, I saw dollar signs. Who wouldn’t, for God’s sake? But, Christ, somebody had to ask for money. Sure as hell, she never would’ve done it. Even then she couldn’t take care of herself. She was beautiful. God knows, she was beautiful. But all it ever got her was trouble. Even when she was little, she—” Momentarily, his eyes lost focus. Then, speaking more softly, more reflectively, he said, “When the baby died, it tipped Juanita over the edge. Being pregnant and having Ryan turn his back on her, that was bad enough, not to mention postpartum psychosis, or whatever they call it. But at least she had her baby. She hated being pregnant. She hated what it did to her looks. Because all she had, you see, was her looks. But right after he was born, at least she had the baby. She used to play with it, I remember, like it was a doll or something. And it seemed to help her for a while. But then, the baby died. It was crib death, they said.”

  As he spoke, I stared at him hard, trying to decide how much of it was the truth and how much lies. Meeting mine, his eyes were still hard and defiant. Skillfully, stubbornly, he was bluffing it out. Finally I said, “Did Ryan know the baby died?”

  “Sure he did. Or at least the Bayliss woman knew. See, I always dealt with her after the baby was born. She handled the money. And I figured, what the hell, if the baby died, all the more reason to get something for Juanita. You know—like a death benefit, something for pain and suffering.”

  “And for yourself. You wanted something for yourself, too. Didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Why not something for myself? Christ, it’s not like there wasn’t enough to go around.”

  “You realize, of course, that I can check all this with Mrs. Bayliss.”

  Truculently, he waved a thick, brawler’s hand. “Go ahead. Check. She’ll tell you. She’ll tell you everything just like I told it to you.”

  “Who was the father of the second child? Do you know?”

  He shrugged. “Ryan, I guess.”

  “Ryan,” I repeated furiously. “You expect me to believe that? You’re trying to say that he went back for seconds, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Seconds? What d’you mean, seconds?”

  “Listen, Tharp,” I grated, “I don’t know how far you intend to push this, but I—”

  “The baby was Ryan’s,” he interrupted hotly. “I’ll bet on it. I’d give odds. About a year later, see, after Juanita’s baby died, I got a call from the Bayliss woman. She said she had a job for Juanita—a lifetime job, she said.” He looked at me closely, then shook his head, wonderingly. “I thought you knew. Christ, I thought you knew. That baby—that second one—it was never Juanita’s. It was someone else’s.”

  Twenty-seven

  “THIS IS RIDICULOUS,” FRIEDMAN fumed, staring balefully across the Fairmont’s lobby toward a bank of four elevators that served the hotel’s first twelve floors. “This is the goddamndest, most bizarre, most illogical, most outrageous case I’ve ever worked. Right now—right this goddamn minute—we should be getting some answers, for God’s sake. So here we sit, cooling our heels because of orders. It’s like the goddamn war in Europe when we could’ve gone all the way to the Rhine but the politicians pulled the string. It’s just the same. There’s no difference. None at all.”

  “You’re quite a historian.”

  “I’m no historian. But I was there. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “I thought you were a flyer.”

  “I was a flyer. But I could still—” One of the elevator doors slid open. Half a dozen tourists left the elevator, followed by Richter and Clarence Blake, the Secret Service man.

  “Who’s that with Richter?” Friedman snapped.

  “His name is Blake. He’s a Secret Service bigshot from Washington.”

  “Yeah?” Friedman’s voice was sarcastic as he suddenly heaved himself to his feet. “Well, I think I’ll introduce myself.”

  “Pete—Christ.” Also on my feet, I put my hand on his arm. “All Chief Dwyer told us to do is wait for orders. How long has it been? A half hour? For all you know, he’s getting warrants.”

  “He’s getting crap,” Friedman snarled. “He’s sitting by the phone, waiting for his orders.” But he wasn’t resisting the pressure of my hand on his arm. Suddenly he turned disgustedly away, striding off in the opposite direction from Richter and Blake, who were walking purposefully across the crowded lobby toward the outside doors.

  “Come on,” Friedman barked.

  “Where’re we going?”

  “To the bar, naturally. Where else?”

  Even after two do
uble bourbons, Friedman was still fuming. “We don’t even know whether they’re up there,” he said. He glanced at his watch. “It’s precisely eight-twenty P.M. Which is to say that we’ve been here for exactly forty-five minutes. We’ve got at least one possible suspect upstairs. And here we sit.”

  “Which suspect is that?”

  “Eason,” he answered. “I think it’s very possible that Eason killed Juanita Tharp to prevent her from talking. He’s got the motive, which is to protect the great god Ryan’s reputation with blind, doglike devotion. He had the opportunity, probably. And he had the means. Which is to say that he’s a proven killer. It’s obvious. That’s what a lot of people in this business overlook, you know. There’re very damn few people who are capable of premeditated murder. Very damn few.” He nodded over his empty glass, then signaled the bartender for another drink. Irritably, I sipped at my tonic water. I didn’t like to sit in bars, and Friedman knew it.

  “You haven’t even talked to Eason,” I said sourly. “How do you know he’s the murderer?”

  Friedman tapped his temple and winked. “I’ve got the instinct, you know—the hunter’s instinct.”

  I snorted. “You’ve got a buzz on, is what you’ve got.”

  He turned his big body on the bar stool and leaned back to look me elaborately up and down. “Eason dunnit,” he pronounced, raising a thick forefinger. “You know he dunnit. And here we sit, like a couple of snot-nosed rookies, trying to decide what to do about it.”

  “That’s not really true. We’re waiting for warrants.”

  “Do you really think,” he said, “that Dwyer is going to approve warrants to search Lloyd Eason’s room and whichever one of those Cadillacs he might’ve been driving? Which is to say that we’ve got to search them all. Do you think for one moment that Dwyer will risk having Donald Ryan find out that we’re seriously investigating his faithful slave?”

  “No,” I answered, “I don’t. But that doesn’t prevent us from interrogating Eason. We don’t have to lean on him. All we have to do is—”

  “Interrogation, hell,” he interrupted acidly. “All we have to do is take his clothes downtown and see if we can find any horseshit. We vacuum his room, and we vacuum the cars. It’s—Christ—that goddamn horseshit is a once-in-a-lifetime piece of physical evidence. Usually the lab is trying to compare samples of different kinds of house-dust and getting all bogged down in how many particles of magnesium per million constitute proof. But here we’ve got horseshit, for Christ’s sake.” Despairingly, he shook his head over his drink, then smiled mischievously. “Can you imagine the defense attorney’s pain, trying to explain how his client just happened to have traces of manure on his clothing, hanging around the Fairmont?”

  I didn’t reply, and we sat silently for a moment staring morosely down at our drinks. Then Friedman said, “I also think we should lean a little on the beautiful, mysterious Katherine Bayliss. After all—” He gulped down half his third bourbon and water. “After all, she’s the one—maybe the only one, besides Ryan—who knows who Frederick Tharp really is. And, more and more, it looks like his true identity could be the key to this whole thing. Who is he, anyhow?”

  “Are you asking me?”

  “You know,” Friedman mused, “what we’re getting on this case is a behind-the-scenes, under-the-counter civics lesson. These people—they do it with mirrors, you know that? Nothing is what it seems. It’s all hype—all PR. None of these people are for real. They’re in the make-believe business, just like in the movies. What you vote for isn’t what you get, it’s what you thought you got. It’s nothing but—”

  At my belt, my pager sounded. As I reached reflexively for the small black box to shut it off, I saw Friedman making the same involuntary gesture. Simultaneously, we’d both been paged.

  “That’s a first,” Friedman observed.

  “Finish your drink. I’ll call in.” Glad to get out of the bar, I walked out into the lobby, got a dime at the newsstand and called Communications.

  “Just a second, Lieutenant. I’m going to patch you through to the field. Hold on.” Thirty static-filled seconds elapsed before I heard Canelli’s voice.

  “What’ve you got, Canelli?”

  “Well, Jesus, it looks like what we’ve got is Frederick Tharp.”

  “You’ve what?”

  “That’s right, Lieutenant. He’s out at Stow Lake, in Golden Gate Park. Not too far from the boathouse here.” But Canelli’s voice sounded apologetic, not excited or pleased.

  “The only problem,” he continued, “is that he’s dead. He’s been shot.”

  Twenty-eight

  “DO YOU KNOW THE way?” Friedman asked as I turned into the Seventh Avenue entrance to Golden Gate Park.

  “I think so.” I turned first to the left, then to the right, following a narrow, winding road through a night-time wilderness of pine and eucalyptus. Golden Gate Park was one of the largest urban parks in America: it had sixty acres of forest, a natural wonderland. During the daylight hours, the park’s hiking trails and grassy meadows were lively and carefree, a vast and varied playground. But after dark the predators took over, some of them animal, most of them human.

  Echoing my thoughts, Friedman said, “I have to admit, this place gives me the willies at night. You get off the main drive, and you feel like you’re cut off from civilization.”

  “You are cut off from civilization.”

  “How many homicides have you worked on out here?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. A dozen, maybe.” I turned into the main drive, relieved to be driving in the familiar, reassuring glare of sodium vapor streetlights.

  “Did you hear about what happened here last month—about those Cambodian refugees?”

  “No. What happened?”

  “Well, you know there’re dogs running wild out here. Dogs that people abandon. Right?”

  I nodded. “Right.”

  “And you also know,” he continued, “that Asians eat dogs. Right?”

  I looked at him. “You’re kidding.”

  “You think so?”

  “No,” I answered, turning my gaze back to the road. “No, I guess I don’t think so.” I turned left onto the narrow road that led to Stow Lake. Ahead, through the trees, I saw flashing red lights and the glare of portable floodlights. I sighed. Had it only been twenty minutes since I’d been sitting in the bar at the Fairmont, listening to Friedman’s complaints about the bureaucracy? It seemed impossible.

  Frederick Tharp was still dressed as I’d last seen him, in jeans and a Levi’s jacket. Under a large flowering bush, I saw the leather hat. He lay face-down at the base of a huge pine tree. His right arm was doubled under him; his left hand was flung wide. His fingers were claw-crooked, dug desperately into the dirt as if he’d been trying to hold on to the world while it slipped away. His legs were widespread. A large bloodstain was centered on the Levi’s jacket in back.

  Working under the glare of floodlights, with the practiced flair of a movie director, Friedman was coordinating the efforts of our technicians, moving them in and out of the area surrounding the body, one group at a time: first the photographers, then the laboratory technicians, finally the coroner’s team. All of it had to be done in sequence, with each step in the process certified by the officer in charge to preserve the chain of evidence.

  I turned away from the body and moved to the drive that circled Stow Lake, gesturing for Canelli to follow me. It was a one-way drive, so narrow in places that branches touched both sides of the coroner’s van.

  “What’s it look like, Canelli?” As I spoke, I surveyed the scene. Moonlight danced on the surface of the man-made waterway. During the day, if the weather was good, dozens of rented boats could always be seen moving from the boathouse through artificial bayous and backwaters until they finally emerged again at the far end of the lake, making for the boathouse. At night, though, both the boathouse and the waterways were deserted. The only illumination was a pair of dim lights that shone
on the boathouse door and the front of the adjoining refreshment stand. A parking lot was located behind the boathouse. The narrow driveway beside which the body lay was a closed circle that began at the east end of the parking lot and ended at the west end.

  “Well, Lieutenant,” Canelli said, “we might have a break. Repeat, might.”

  Lately, I’d noticed, Canelli had been using the word “repeat” for emphasis whenever he was making a verbal report. The purpose, I imagined, was to give weight to his statements. But Canelli rambled when he talked, so the effect was often more puzzling than precise.

  “What d’you mean, Canelli?”

  “Well,” he said earnestly, pointing toward the parking lot, “I’ve got an old wino, I guess he is, in my car over there. I’ve got a couple of uniformed men keeping an eye on him. Not that he’s liable to go anywhere. I mean, he’s really zonked out. Repeat, zonked.”

  “What’d he see?”

  “Well, he heard shots, he said, which woke him up. He was sleeping on the ground, on the downhill side from the parking lot, there, in some bushes.” Dolefully, Canelli shook his head. “You know, Lieutenant, it’s sad to see, you know that? I mean, here’s this old guy, sixty years old or so, probably begging all day just to get enough money to buy some muscatel, or something. And then, at night, he’s got to sleep out under the—”

  “Canelli. Please. Get to the point, will you?”

  “Yeah. Sure. Sorry, Lieutenant. Well, anyhow—” He drew a deep breath. “He was sleeping down there, like I said, in this real ratty old sleeping bag, when all of a sudden he woke up, he says. Because, see, he heard shots. Several shots, he said.”

  “How many?”

  “Well, Lieutenant, he’s not sure how many. I mean, he thinks that at least one or two of them woke him up. Or maybe more, for all he knows. But, anyhow, he’s sure that after he woke up, he heard three or four shots coming from there—” He pointed toward the glare of floodlights shining through the trees. “He was just about to—you know—investigate, when suddenly he heard a car, and the next thing he knew, there was this big old Cadillac barreling into the parking lot from the driveway.”