Schemers nd-34

by Bill Pronzini

  She went out to the car for the rest of the shelving. Another nice thing about this new place: plenty of close-by street parking. The car sat there at the curb like a fat scabby bug: Horace’s eleven-year-old Toyota. She hated that damn car-another of Horace’s hand-me-downs, like the apartment on 27th Avenue. Get herself a new ride, that was the next change she’d make. And do it soon. Wash the last of Horace Fields right out of her life.

  Back inside, she put the shelving and the other hardware items in the kitchen and then went around the flat straightening up. Lucas hadn’t said anything, but she had a feeling he liked things tidy. Mama’s influence, probably. She wondered again what Mama was like, how come a stud like Lucas lived with her and talked about her nonstop with that little glow in his eyes. Couldn’t be anything kinky going on there, could it? Oh, come on, Tamara. Don’t let the job make you suspicious of everybody. Man just loves his mother, that’s all.

  The flat was pretty clean, everything in the moving boxes put away the day after she took possession. Hadn’t been much-clothing, computer equipment, books, CDs, personal items. When she’d packed it up she’d been surprised at how little she owned. Not much to show for twenty-six years of living. Well, so what? She’d never been all that materialistic. Money was nice, possessions were cool, but living was what mattered.

  Making changes-that was important, too. Funny how one positive change could start a chain reaction. For her it’d been the decision to finally haul her booty out of that Horace-haunted apartment. Then she’d gone and gotten herself firearms qualified with Pop’s help, as a safety precaution and so she could start doing some fieldwork again. Then, after weeks of hunting all around the city, she’d found just the right new place. And one week after that, she’d met Lucas and put an end to the long, frustrating months of unsatisfying sessions with battery-operated Mr. V. Next positive change: dump the Toyota for a new set of wheels, one that suited her and not that celloplaying chump in Philadelphia.

  Happy again, life cool again? Yes! For the first time in over a year, maybe for the first time period, because now everything was in sync, coming together at last. The new Tamara. Tamara Corbin, reinvented.

  She put on a Dixie Chicks CD. “Not Ready to Make Nice”-God, she loved that song. Into the bedroom then, to put clean sheets on the bed. Nothing like clean sheets when you had somebody to snuggle down with. She dabbed some Chanel Allure under her ears and in the hollow of her throat. Not too much, just a sexy hint. Put on a nightie and a robe? Too obvious. Just let the evening play out like it had on Sunday.

  She was sipping a glass of wine, listening to the Chicks, when the bell rang. Lucas came in with two sacks of Chinese takeout and a big smile. Kissed her, but easy, not aggressive. He wasn’t in any hurry, either-something else she liked about him. Big and easy. Big all over, oh yeah! She always had been partial to big men. Ugly handsome. Blocky head, hook nose, hair starting to recede a little, but he had nice quiet eyes and a bushy mustache that felt like fur sliding over her skin. Thirty-four, he’d told her. Not too old. Mature. Exactly the kind of man she wanted and needed right now.

  They ate in the kitchen, making small talk. Easy there, too-none of that awkward second-date stuff. She was curious about his work, what kind of sales job he had, but he didn’t have much to say about it. Didn’t ask much about her profession, either. Okay with her. Bill had taught her it was best to keep casual talk about the detective business to a minimum, except when you were dealing with professionals. So what they talked about, mostly, was Lucas’s mama. Didn’t bother Tamara, though it probably would if they’d been moving toward a long-term relationship. So the man loved his mother, so what? Kind of refreshing. Not too many thirty-four-year-old studs with slow, slow hands had a sentimental side.

  “She’s out on a date tonight,” Lucas said, still going on about Mama. “I don’t like the guy, but that’s her business.”

  “How come you don’t like him?”

  “He’s not good enough for her. Dresses cheap, talks cheap.”

  “Serious between them?”

  “No, I don’t think so. Casual.”

  “Like you and me.”

  “God, I hope not. I mean, you know, sex. I don’t like thinking about her going to bed with that guy.”

  “Her business, like you said.”

  “Well, anyhow, it doesn’t matter. He’ll be gone before long and there’ll be somebody else.”

  He said that last like it bothered him. Well, maybe it did, if Mama had herself a string of boyfriends. But she was entitled, wasn’t she? Woman had been a widow a long time. A heart attack had snuffed Lucas’s father twelve years ago, he’d said.

  “I’d like to meet her sometime,” she said.

  “My mother? Why?”

  “You talk about her a lot. She must be pretty special.”

  “Special. Yes, she’s that.”

  Something in his voice again, but Tamara couldn’t quite get a handle on what it was. Jealousy? Disapproval?

  “Be all right with you?” she asked.

  “What? Meeting Alisha? I don’t know, I suppose so. We’ll see.”

  Reluctant. She had the feeling he wouldn’t allow it to happen.

  A thought popped into her head. What if Alisha wasn’t his mother, what if she was his wife? He’d told her he was single, never been married, and she’d accepted that without thinking too much about it. If Alisha was his wife, the reason he talked so much about her might be guilt working on him. Well? Come right out and ask him, he’d just deny it and spoil the mood. Did it really matter? On a casual hookup like theirs… no, it didn’t.

  Yeah, right. But good detectives were always looking for answers, something else Bill had taught her, and it was the detective in her that made her push it a little in spite of herself. “Okay if I ask you a personal question, Lucas?”

  “If it’s not too personal.”

  “Can’t help wondering how come you still live at home. I mean, your mama doesn’t sound like she needs somebody to look after her…”

  Whoops. Pissed him off. His face clouded up and he said, “Why I live where I live is nobody’s business but mine and my mother’s.”

  “Hey, I was just curious-”

  “Well, don’t be. We have a good little thing going here, Tamara. Don’t screw it up by being nosy.”

  “Okay, sure. Sorry.”

  Took a few seconds for the anger to fade out of his eyes. Then he shrugged and the smile came back. “I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to growl at you.”

  “No problem.”

  “Why don’t we take another glass of wine into the living room?”

  “Bedroom’s closer,” she said.

  “On a full stomach? How about we just sit for a while, let the digestive juices do their thing.” Slow wink. “Then we’ll let the other juices do theirs.”

  “Cool.”

  The word reflected how she felt right now. Not as eager for those clean sheets as before. Another glass of wine, and if he didn’t conjure up Mama again, she’d be ready-sure, she would. But there wouldn’t be too many more nights like this one. She didn’t care for that angry, private side of his. And Alisha kept cropping up and getting in the way.

  Alisha.

  Mother? Wife? Who was she and just what kind of relationship did Lucas have with her? Now she couldn’t get the questions out of her head.

  Well, there was an easy way to answer a couple of them, at least. Tomorrow at the agency.

  Bad, girl, wanting to check up on a casual lover. Better not do it. Be smart. It’s not important, it might put an even quicker end to the hookup. Don’t ask, don’t tell, don’t really want to know.

  Good arguments. She listened to them as Lucas poured wine, and nodded to herself, and made a promise to herself that she wouldn’t do it-and knew she’d break the promise two minutes after she walked into the agency tomorrow morning.

  14

  JAKE RUNYON

  Harmony was nothing more than a break in the two-lane cou
nty road. He came out of dense timber and there it was, like the appearance of a mirage-a scatter of buildings and a few hundred yards of surrounding meadowland. More thick forest walled it in on the east. Four miles in that direction, according to the directions Tamara had sent, an old logging road branched off and wound up to where the Hendersons’ hunting camp was located.

  You couldn’t call Harmony a village or even a hamlet. The only public buildings were a tavern and a general store made of redwood siding and fronted by a couple of gas pumps. There was a house across the road, set far back at the edge of the meadow where cows and a sorrel horse grazed. Parts of a couple of other houses or cabins were visible at higher elevations among the timber.

  The store and tavern were both closed. He should’ve figured nothing would be open this early, a little past nine by his watch. But he’d been too restless to hang around the motel in Fort Bragg, the nearest large town, where he’d spent the night. It’d been after dark when he pulled in there, too late to go out looking for Harmony and the hunting camp, and the downtime had weighed heavily on him. He’d left the motel at 7:00 a.m., wasted most of an hour on breakfast and a few more minutes driving around the area before finally heading out here.

  He pulled over in front of the store, got out to look at the posted hours. Open at eleven. Two more hours to kill, unless he wanted to start knocking on doors hunting for the owner of the Harmony General Store. Better to use the time checking the Hendersons’ property first thing instead of second.

  He drove on through the close-grown stands of pine and Douglas fir, climbing gradually. The logging road was right where Tamara had indicated, 8.6 miles from Harmony. Rutted, and muddy in patches of deep shade, but not too bad; there hadn’t been much rain or snow this winter. The Ford had all-wheel drive, so he had no trouble negotiating the rough spots.

  Half a mile of bouncing and rattling brought him to the private road that led uphill through more timber and finally emerged in what appeared to be a man-made clearing. Tree stumps, old and crumbling from the assaults of insects and woodpeckers, spotted it here and there. He threaded his way among them to within fifty feet of the main cabin, one of three buildings that made up the camp.

  He stepped out into biting cold and dead-calm stillness. Clouds and mist clung to the tops of the surrounding forest, as if somebody had draped them with puffs and streamers of gray bunting. Faintly, from behind the cabin, the sound of running water came to him-a trout stream that ran down to a small river whose name he’d already forgotten. He buttoned his coat against the chill as he moved toward the cabin.

  It was the standard peeled-log variety, simple but sturdylooking even though it and the two outbuildings hadn’t been maintained over the past several years. High grass grew up along its sides, the A-frame roof was missing a couple of shingles, and one of the porch stanchions showed cracks and splinters. But it wasn’t only simple neglect, he saw as he drew closer. The glass in the single facing window was broken, the front door stood a few inches ajar.

  He went up and looked at it. A hasp for an old Yale padlock had been pried loose from the jamb, hung bent to one side. He pushed the door open. Two steps inside was as far as he went, as far as he needed to go.

  The three-room interior had been torn apart. Furniture hacked to pieces by an ax or hatchet, the only escapees a flat-armed Adirondack chair and a small table. Canned goods split open and their contents splattered on walls and floor, glasses and bottles reduced to shards. But it wasn’t just wanton destruction, the kind that kids or homeless squatters perpetrated. It was cold, vicious, calculated-a systematic act of hate or vengeance or both.

  Burn holes and blackened streaks in the floorboards, wallboards. Pieces of glass and metal fused and bubbled. Acid. Flung helter-skelter after the first wave of damage was done.

  The Hendersons’ phantom stalker.

  Runyon backed out, toed the door shut, and went to look at the outbuildings. One was a woodshed, about a third full; the cordwood had been kicked around and doused with the corrosive, as had the walls. Same frenzy in the second building. Padlock pried off the door, a couple of old sleeping bags and some blankets and other goods torn apart and burned with acid. And in one corner, the scorched remains of something that might once have been a wood rat.

  The desecration of Lloyd Henderson’s gravesite and the attacks in Los Alegres were bad enough, but this showed even greater levels of rage and hate. Any man capable of this kind of carnage wasn’t going to be satisfied for long with venting on inanimate objects and rodents. Sooner or later, he’d start using his acid on human flesh.

  N ot quite eleven o’clock when Runyon rolled back into Harmony, but the general store was open early. Inside, he found the usual cramped hodgepodge of out-of-the-way mountain stores: hunting and fishing supplies and hardware items in one section, groceries in another. A burly, balding man was stocking shelves while a thin woman with hair dyed the color of French’s mustard swept the floor. Both were in their sixties and wore the same style of plaid lumberman’s shirt. The Fraziers, Ben and Georganne. Friendly and accommodating enough, but apologetic when Runyon asked them about a young woman named Jenny who’d worked there twenty years ago.

  “Afraid we can’t help you,” Frazier said. “We’ve only owned this place four years. Bought it right after I retired from PG and E.”

  “Who’d you buy it from?”

  “Man named Collins. But I don’t think he owned it twenty years ago.”

  “He didn’t,” Mrs. Frazier said. “I remember he told us he reopened it about fifteen years ago. Closed for a while before that. Not everybody likes living in wilderness country like this. We love it, though.”

  “Does Collins still live in the area?”

  “No. He was old, couldn’t get around very well anymore. Moved down to Sacramento to live with his daughter right after the sale to us went through.”

  “Would you know who owned the store before it closed?”

  “No. No idea.”

  “Any longtime residents in the area who would know?”

  “Well… Mrs. Genotti, Ben?”

  “She’d know,” Frazier agreed, “but her memory’s not too good. She’s in her eighties.”

  “Anyone else?”

  “Let me think. Twenty years ago, you said?”

  “About that.”

  Before Frazier could respond, his wife said, “Oh, wait, Ben. That old desk in the storeroom-it’s full of papers and receipts. There might be something in there.”

  “That’s right. Might be at that.”

  “Would you mind if I had a look?”

  “I guess it’d be all right,” Frazier said. “Why’d you say you were looking for this Jenny?”

  “Not her so much as a relative of hers.”

  “This relative do something wrong?”

  “He may have. So you don’t mind if I have a look through the desk?”

  Frazier shrugged and glanced at his wife. “Georganne?”

  “As long as you don’t take anything.”

  “I won’t,” Runyon said. “Names and addresses are all I’m looking for.”

  They led him into the rear storeroom, then into an alcove that at one time had been used as an office. The scarred old desk took up most of the space and was piled high with cardboard cartons. More cartons were stacked alongside it.

  “Have to move those boxes,” Frazier said. “Okay for you to do that, but I’ll ask you to put ’em back the way they were when you’re done.”

  Runyon promised he would and began shifting the cartons around so he had access to the desk drawers. The Fraziers stood watching him, not offering to help. None of the desk drawers was locked. The usual desk clutter, some string-tied accordion files full of receipts for delivered goods and paid bills dating back to the midseventies. The only name on these was Harmon Digges, evidently the store’s owner up until 1992. Runyon made a mental note of the name.

  In the last of the large bottom drawers he found a stack of dusty ledger book
s. One contained a meticulous record of charges and payments made by individuals who had been allowed to shop on credit. None of the first names was Jenny or Jennifer or anything similar. The second ledger listed payments made by Digges for various supplies, utilities, and services. In a separate section were pages headed Employees, Salary-and the name Runyon was looking for.

  Jenny Noakes.

  Employed from June 1984 to April 1988.

  The salary record gave no address. He rummaged through the rest of the papers in the desk, hunting for an address book, social security and tax records-anything that would tell him where Jenny Noakes had lived during that period, her age, something of her background. Nothing. Nor was there any document that gave a clue as to why her employment had been terminated.

  Frazier was still hanging around, watching him to make sure he kept his word about not taking anything and putting the alcove back in order. Runyon asked if the name Jenny Noakes was familiar to him. It wasn’t. He replaced the cartons, offered to pay for the rummaging privilege. Frazier shook his head. “Not necessary,” he said. “But if you’re hungry, my wife makes the best deli sandwiches you ever tasted.” Runyon wasn’t hungry, but he bought a deli sandwich anyway.

  Jenny Noakes. Up to Tamara now. All she needed to track anybody living or dead was a name.

  H is cell phone didn’t work in the mountains; it wasn’t until he was down near the coast that he was able to pick up the satellite signal so he could call Tamara. A few minutes later he was back in the old lumbering and fishing town of Fort Bragg. He hadn’t had much breakfast; he found his way to a seafood restaurant under the long, new bridge that spanned the harbor entrance. He was sipping hot tea, waiting for a bowl of clam chowder, when Tamara called. He went outside to talk to her.

  “Took a little longer than I thought,” she said. “You’ll see why.”

  “What’ve you got?”

  “Jenny Noakes. Born Jennifer Torrance 1962 in Ukiah, married to Anthony Noakes June 1981, son Tucker born early 1982. Father listed on the birth certificate as Anthony Noakes. Looks like you were wrong about the kid’s old man being Lloyd Henderson.”