I said, “Why do you suppose she left that way?”
Griscom shrugged. “Who’s to say? I asked young Hal about it, but he didn’t know. He’d been gone for three months before it happened-some job helping out a colleague with his practice, I think-and had only come back to the ranch a day or two before she took off. Was as surprised as the rest of us. I kind of thought the Johnstones had got things settled between them. Every marriage goes through a rocky period when the partners are trying to accommodate each other’s conception of how it should be. The good ones survive, the Johnstone marriage didn’t.”
It made me think of Hank and Anne-Marie. Would their marriage also be one of those that didn’t make it?
I said, “What about Frank Wilkonson?”
Walt’s mouth tightened slightly. “What about him?”
“I heard some talk at the bar. One man seemed to dislike Wilkonson pretty strongly. All he would say was that he doesn’t like what he’s doing at the Burning O. But you, on the other hand, seem to think he’s helping Hal Johnstone keep the ranch running.”
Walt hesitated, and finally said, “Oh hell. You’ve been straight with me; I might as well return the favor. There was talk about Irene Johnstone and Wilkonson, back about the time she did her turnaround and came alive again.”
“Ah.”
“Wilkonson had just come to work on the ranch. Irene helped out in the office. Jane Wilkonson was pregnant and having a rough time of it. The kids were running wild.”
“In short, the perfect set of circumstances to drive him into another woman’s arms.”
“Yes, but I for one don’t believe it. Irene was terrific to Jane. She did her shopping, drove her to the doctor, and took those kids-all five of the little hellions-for days at a time.” He grinned. “Must have driven Harlan crazy, having them in the house. Harlan loves his son, but the kid gave him a fair amount of trouble while he was growing up, and Harlan always used to say he was just as glad they couldn’t have more than the one.”
“His first wife couldn’t conceive again?”
“There was some medical problem. She was always a sickly woman, I’ve heard. But like I was saying, if Irene had been having an affair with Frank, I doubt she would have cozied up to Jane that way.”
For an ex-cop, Walt Griscom was remarkably innocent in certain respects, I thought. Irene’s actions were perfectly compatible with having an affair, to my cynical way of thinking. She might have realized that the best coverup for carrying on with the husband is a friendship with the wife. And she also loved kids and probably knew that the quickest way to a father’s heart is through his children. Or she might have genuinely cared for Jane and done the things she had out of guilt. The possibilities were numerous.
But that was beside the point. What mattered was that it all fit: the woman whose vocation was horticulture; her probable romance with Wilkonson; her disappearance; his reconnoitering places where a person in her profession might work, shop, or frequent.
I said, “What does Irene Johnstone look like?”
A former cop was a good person to ask. Without hesitation, Walt replied, “Tall, about five-nine or –ten. Brown hair-not drab, I’d call it chestnut. Used to wear it up a lot, in a fancy braid. Good facial bone structure, fine but strong. Wide mouth. Great big eyes, they’re her best feature-like blue lamps.”
It was the woman I’d encountered at Rudy Goldring’s.
“Did Irene ever mention Rudy Goldring-the man I told you about who was murdered?”
“Irene never mentioned anyone or anything about her life before she came here.”
“Why, do you think?”
“I’ve always assumed it was because she didn’t have much of a life up to that point.”
“And you never once had an urge to have a check run on her? Just to see what kind of woman Harlan had married?”
He smiled, in a way that said he’d thought of it often. “I stopped doing things like that when I quit the force and became a tavern operator.” Then he paused and added, “Now, in a way, I wish I had.”
Now, as I waited in the driver’s seat of the MG, watching the ranch’s west gate, I thought about Irene Lasser Johnstone-or Irene Lasser, as she’d been called by Rudy Goldring’s will, having apparently gone back to her birth name. She was a bit of a vague figure: no one down here seemed to know much about her, including the existence of her daughter, Susan. And my day’s researches had failed to provide more than the most basic details of her past before she’d come to the Burning Oak Ranch.
I’d driven up to San Jose shortly after breakfast, but had found most of the resources-the university personnel office, the newspaper morgue-closed because it was Saturday. Eventually I’d settled for the public library’s microfilm room and files of back telephone books and university course catalogues.
Irene Lasser had taught at the university for a period of five years before she’d married and left San Jose. Her course load had been primarily freshman and sophomore horticulture lectures and labs, although as her status had risen from assistant to associate professor, she’d been assigned more specialized courses for upperclassmen. In the faculty roster, she was listed as having gotten her Ph.D. in 1976 from UC Davis-the “good ag school” the men at Walt’s bar had mentioned.
Lasser had made the newspaper once, for a fellowship she’d been awarded the year before her marriage. From the phone book, I learned she had lived at the same address on Pine Drive for the entire time she’d been with the university. When I drove over there I found that Pine was a one-block street near the campus, in an area that was now predominantly Vietnamese; the address was a small white frame house, and its occupants spoke no English. Some of the neighbors-who were also Vietnamese-did, but none of them remembered the woman who had lived there over seven years before. Neither did the operator of a nearby corner grocery, which stocked rice and Oriental foodstuffs. As he told me, “Here everything is different and everyone is new. We are making another Saigon.”
The sum total of my information on Irene Lasser was frustratingly slight. And I’d have to wait until Jack Stuart got back from Yosemite-providing he hadn’t fallen off Half Dome and cracked his skull, Lord forbid-to ask him what he knew about her. I wouldn’t be able to talk with the personnel department at San Jose State or the registrar’s office at Davis until Monday, and by then-
Headlights appeared on the drive that ran from the Wilkonson house to the highway. I glanced at the luminous dial of my watch: ten forty-five. He had had time to finish up his work at the ranch office and have his weekly solitary dinner with his wife.
The headlights moved down the drive and then stopped. In their glare I saw the mechanically activated gate open; the vehicle drove through, and then the gate swung closed. The moon’s light was bright enough that I could pick out the distinctive shape of the Ranchero. It turned left and picked up speed, moving toward Hollister.
I waited until its taillights were out of sight, then started the MG and switched on its headlights. Although I was reasonably certain that Wilkonson would go straight to the Kingsway Motel on Lombard Street in San Francisco, I didn’t want to lag too far behind him.
THIRTEEN
Wilkonson drove through Hollister and maintained a steady pace north to San Jose. There he merged onto Freeway 280, which runs along the ridge of hills on the western side of the San Francisco Peninsula. South of the city he exited at Skyline Drive; that surprised me, because it was a pretty roundabout way to get to Lombard Street.
Skyline climbs even higher on the ridge, above miles and miles of lookalike tracts. The day had been blisteringly hot inland, and the high temperatures had brought the fog billowing in over the hills. It wafted in wet tendrils across the MG’s windshield and hazed the lights of the houses below. Then the road dipped down into a dark, sparsely populated area. Just beyond Fort Funston on the cliffs above the Pacific, it branched; the ranchero took the arm that became the Great Highway.
Now he had me thoroughly puzzled. This
was a very indirect route to his motel, and the weather was too inclement for a drive along the beach. The fog sheeted across the road, carrying with it gritty particles of sand. Visibility was nil, except for the reflected glare of headlights on the white concrete traffic barriers that had been erected to prevent encroachment from both the dunes and the loose dirt created by a seemingly endless waste-control project. Beyond the barriers hulked the primeval shapes of earth movers and scoop-loaders parked in the construction area, backlit by smears of light from the houses and apartment buildings on 48th Avenue.
Ahead of us a traffic light went from green to amber to red. It had cycled to green again by the time Wilkonson reached it. I slowed as he turned right onto Lincoln way, the long street that borders Golden Gate Park on its southern side. Immediately he pulled into the left lane and made the turn into the park. The signal changed and I stopped, watching his taillights. The Ranchero’s brake lights flared as it pulled to the curb.
There were no cars behind me, so I waited even after the signal had turned green. The Ranchero’s lights went out. Then I saw a glint of metal, as if its door had opened, and a faint series of motions as an indistinct figure crossed the road. When the signal went amber, I pulled through it, into the first available parking space on Lincoln.
I unlocked the MG’s glovebox, took out my .38 Special, and stuffed it in my shoulder bag. Then I grabbed my pea jacket from the backseat, put it on as I hurried across the street and into the park.
The darkness there was thick and enveloping. An icy wind rattled the dry vegetation and brought the damp taste of salt to my lips, the smell of the sea to my nostrils. The hollow bray of a foghorn came from the Golden Gate to the north; after it bled away into silence, all I heard was the soughing of the trees and the faint whine of a motorcycle on the highway. In spite of the proximity of buildings on the side streets, I felt miles removed-almost as if I’d stepped back into the time when this part of the city had been a remote outpost covered with sand and dune grass.
The foghorn sounded again as I spotted the Ranchero some fifty feet ahead, pulled onto the verge in the shelter of a wind-twisted cypress. I moved toward it and squatted by its rear bumper, peering into the blackness on the other side of the road, where the figure I’d seen had gone. The trees were thicker there; a massive conical shape rose from them, stark against the white mist.
One of the old windmills.
What on earth was Wilkonson doing there?
Quickly I calculated my bearings. This would be the Murphy Windmill, built around the turn of the century to pump water to the park’s Strawberry Hill Reservoir and now unused and sinking into decay. Its counterpart, the Dutch Windmill, had recently been restored and was fully operational, but funding had run out before work on this one could commence. It stood moldering away in an overgrown thicket next to a sewage plant.
It wasn’t too inviting a place during the day-much less so on a dank, foggy night.
I fumbled in my bag for my flashlight. When I stood and shone it through the Ranchero’s windows, I found, as I expected, that the vehicle was empty. Hastily I switched off the flash and once more studied the shadows surrounding the windmill. Nothing moved over there. The only sounds were the regular laments of the foghorn and a distant hum, which I now identified as coming from the adjacent sewage plant.
After a few minutes I came out of the shelter of the Ranchero and moved to the other side of the road. The soil was sandy there; my tennis shoes made little noise as I edged down a slight incline toward the windmill. I stopped next to the heavily overgrown thicket, listening.
Nothing moved here. No one breathed.
After a bit I took out my light and trained it on the windmill. It was octagonal; rough concrete for half its height, then shingled. Most of the shingles had peeled away, creating an irregular checkerboard pattern; the lower windows had been bricked up, but the upper ones gaped blackly. When I moved my flashlight beam over one with a precariously dangling frame, a bird flew out, wings flapping. I followed its flight path with the flash, highlighting the huge T-shaped nut that had once held the vanes and the jaggedly broken support beams that projected like mammoth splinters from the walls. Then I switched off the light, waited to see if anyone would come to investigate my presence.
No one appeared, but I stayed watchful for several minutes. Then I thought I heard a creaking and moaning, as if the vanes of the windmill were straining in the wind. Not actual vanes, of course, but the ghosts of those that had once laboriously turned….
No, just the cypress tree over there, bending in the wind.
After a couple more minutes I moved down into the declivity where the windmill stood. A sandy path led around the building, bordered on the up side by an extension of the thicket. The ground was littered with fast-food wrappers and beer cans and wine bottles; in one place there was a tailing of toilet paper extending from the windmill’s wall. I moved slowly around the structure, stumbling twice on some exposed piping, fretting because the ever-louder sounds from the sewage plant would obscure any others that might be made.
About three-quarters of the way around I came upon a double metal door set into the rise opposite the mill. More mechanical noises came from beyond it. I was so busy shining my flash on the padlock and chain that secured the doors that I didn’t notice the ground ahead of me had dropped off. My foot found only air-and I pitched forward, jerked back, and landed on my rear.
An arrow of pain shot upward through my tailbone. I said, “Uff,” brought my hands down, and felt rough cement. I’d dropped the flash when I’d lost my balance; I groped around and finally located it under the bend of my right knee. In its beam I saw I was roughly a foot below the surrounding terrain, in a concrete area that led to the door of the windmill. The door was of wood, with a massive iron bolt.
I sat still for a minute, waiting for the waves of pain to recede from my spine. McCone, I thought, you’re not the agile cheerleader you once were.
In the years since I’d entered my profession-which at the moment seemed a dubious one, even to me-I’d inflicted countless bumps and bruises upon myself. In addition, I’d been stabbed, chloroformed, and kidnapped, almost fallen to my death, almost drowned, and once-humiliatingly-shot in the ass.
Now I asked myself, How much more of this can you take?
It was a good question, but right now my attention was focused on the big iron bolt on the windmill’s door. The bolt should have been in a horizontal locked position. Instead, it was slightly canted, and the door stood open a crack.
I took the .38 from my bag and stood. Then I moved to the door, placed my other hand on the bolt. As I pulled the door toward me, its rusted hinges squealed. I flicked the gun’s safety off and crouched down, waiting.
There was no sound of movement within.
A nervous prickling merged with the pain waves that still lapped at my spine. He was waiting for me to make the first move.
With my free hand I felt around behind me, came up with a chunk of loose concrete. I tossed it around the door. It fell with a clatter.
No response.
No one there-or someone more clever than I?
I waited. Minutes passed. Dead silence.
I stood, straightening slowly against the persistent pain. Took the flash in my left hand and moved around the edge of the door. Blackness inside, cold and musty.
I raised both my gun hand and the flash-steady, very steady.
And saw no one.
The space inside the door was concrete walled and floored. It was full of junk of various sorts, too numerous for me to take in. There was a smell of onions and grease, old and cloying.
The room was empty.
FOURTEEN
When I was certain no one was hiding in the shadows, I stepped inside the windmill. A brief scan with the flashlight told me someone had been camping out there. A pile of tattered blankets next to the far wall formed a makeshift bed; a candle in a red glass globe-the kind they put on your table in cheap Ital
ian restaurants-stood on the ground next to it. There were paper bags and cardboard boxes arranged along the walls on either side of the bed, and scattered refuse bore the names of fast-food outlets and cheap vintners. When I examined the far corners, I found two more nests of rags and blankets-making it a dormitory of sorts.
What I’d stumbled onto was one of the hideaways that homeless people crept into within the confines of the park. This one must have been quite a find for the people who lived here: enclosed, dry, and-so long as none of the mounted police or park personnel noticed their comings and goings-relatively undetectable. The patrols would routinely check the door to make sure it was secure, of course, but the residents would know their schedule and wedge it shut to give the appearance that all was as it should be. If they were careful, they could go on living here indefinitely.
I had appropriated several books of matches from my motel room that morning. I located them in the pocket of my jeans, pulled one out, and lit the candle. The flaring reddish light showed the room in greater-and more wretched-detail.
There were plywood-covered areas on the cement floor where pumping equipment had obviously been removed; the stone walls were cracked and covered with mold; a stairway had once ascended to the upper stories, but that too had been ripped out, its splintered handrails still reaching down, like arms whose hands had been cruelly severed. The room seemed several degrees colder than outside. And beneath the greasy food smell was the stench of rotting garbage.
I turned my attention to the refuse on the floor: discarded wrappings, bottles, Styrofoam cups, used hypodermic syringes, cans, chicken bones, food that was decayed beyond recognition. Much of it had probably been spoiled before it was brought here: the park administrator I’d met at the All Souls party had told me the homeless scavenged the trash cans for remains of picnic lunches; they also visited the dumpsters at McDonald’s and other neighborhood restaurants. Apparently some of their gleanings had been so unpalatable as not to tempt even their ravenous appetites. When I found an empty cat-food can I shuddered, thinking, Even Watney won’t eat this brand.
There's Something in a Sunday Page 12
