by Peter Corris
We went over some hills and I got glimpses of the water before the next dip snatched it away. The street was a mixture of residential—apartments dating I guessed from the 1920's, when they re-built after the earthquake—and shops and blank, anonymous buildings whose functions I couldn't guess at. The number I had was one of the apartment blocks; stucco with grey peeping through the white paint and water-stained from the rusted guttering. I told the cabbie to go on a little.
‘Undercover huh?’ he said as he made change.
‘Mafia.’
He struck his forehead lightly. ‘I shoulda known. Spread to South Africa, eh?’
I didn't tip him.
Brave men march up to the front door; men in their forties who think it might be interesting to live into their fifties go around the back first. Along the street and down the lane, and we weren't bo-ho anymore. The back part of the apartment building had been scarred and broken by a fire. Windows were boarded up, woodwork was scorched and charred; and the wooden handrail that had run beside the metal fire escape was gone, leaving the steps naked and dangerous.
I stood behind a car in the lane and looked at the ruin and let the bad feeling creep over me.There was no VW van, but sticking out of an open window on the top floor was a hand. The hand wasn't stuck out to feel for rain, it wasn't doing anything.
I went up the fire escape feeling like a tight rope walker without his pole. I had the gun but you use a gun for ballast rather than balance. The back door to the top apartment was half-open and I listened at it for what seemed like an hour. There was nothing to listen to there and nothing down below where the building had been gutted. Up here there were signs of life of a sort, if you count an ashtray brim full of butts on a window ledge inside.
I pushed open the door and walked down the short passageway on broken boards laid like a walkway on top of charred bearers and between water-streaked walls. In the kitchen the water came in through a hose and went out through a hole. The floor was a sea of wine jugs, newspapers and take-away food containers.
In the room at the back I got my first sight of American flies in any number. They had four bodies to swarm over. Two men lay on their faces along one wall. Big pieces of their backs were missing and their T-shirts were gory ruins. The hand sticking out the window belonged to the Dark Stranger; his dark clothes were darker and glistened where the blood had soaked in. He'd taken two in the body but had still made it to the window. He and the other pair were neat compared with Vin Harvey: he was lying naked on his back in the middle of the room. He'd been worked on with cigarettes and razor blades. One eye was a black ruin. Thin and bearded he looked like something El Greco might have dreamed up on a bad afternoon. All the fingernails were missing on one hand, and I recognised the object nestling in the congealed blood of his left nostril as a front tooth.
I went over to the window for some air; and after I'd got some and was trying for some more, I heard the dark man speak.
‘Muerto’, he whispered, or something like that.
I bent down, it seemed impossible that he could still be alive.
‘English’, I said, ‘no Spanish’.
‘Ozzie’, he said, like in the Nelsons.
‘That's right, where's the girl?’
‘Away. Afortunado.’
‘Harvey told them?’
The movement he made was slight but it looked like a nod. Some blood seeped out of his mouth to join all the blood from everywhere else. The flies buzzed so loudly I had to put my ear down near his mouth.
‘Agua’, he whispered. I knew that much and went out to the kitchen to the hose. I brought it in a throwaway cup that should have been thrown away. His lips were nearly black and the glint in his slitted eyes was from pain. I wet the lips but he couldn't swallow.
‘Priest?’ I said.
‘Shoot me. I beg you.’
I realised I still had the .38 in my hand, although I could have been holding it by the barrel for all I knew.
‘Where's the girl, where did she go?’
‘Shoot’
‘I can't.’
‘Shoot’, he breathed.
‘The girl?’ I didn't mean to make it sound like a condition but maybe it did.
‘Dreamland.’ He'd echoed Percy Holmes. His voice was just a touch stronger, as if it had synched with the last beat of his pulse. There was no need to shoot him.
The smell of the guns was still faintly in the air, the dead were still warm and the vomit around Vin Harvey's body was fresh. The killing and torturing had happened a few hours ago at most. There was a light dusting of something on the floor near the wall where the two dead men lay. I didn't touch it and haven't seen enough of it to be sure, but it looked like heroin. Insurance. The thing could look like a drug dispute, a little extreme maybe.
There wasn't much else in the place. Every possible hiding place had been ripped apart. Books, notes and manuscripts were torn and there were a couple of piles of ashes. There were student clothes, student food and a little grass. There was a .22 handgun in the kitchen in a drawer that stuck. Vin Harvey had seriously over-matched himself.
Two things worried me: the poster on the wall in the passageway was the same one I'd seen at Stanford, singing the praises of the Santa Cruz boardwalk. The hit men might make something of that. The second thing was the absence of the third muscle man I'd seen at the lecture. That could mean a lot.
I felt like Bony examining the road and car marks in the dimming light. It wasn't hard to read: a big oil stain showed where the van usually stood and fresh oil drops showed where it had stood briefly. These led away over the rubber laid down by a car leaving in a hurry.
No one saw me in the apartment or the lane; if they did they decided not to make it their business. I got a taxi back to my hotel, picked up some money and hired another Pinto. I bought a jug of wine with a narrow, drinkable-from neck and a box of oatmeal cookies and set them up carefully on the passenger seat. I studied the map carefully and set out for Dreamland.
After some false turns around Daly City I picked up the Cabrillo Highway which hugs the coast all the way south to Santa Cruz. Along the way Moss Beach and Half Moon Bay were nice names to roll off the tongue and the road had that hopeful, optimistic feel coast roads have. I drove just above the speed limit and drank wine from time to time. I felt more at home when I passed the greyhound track and had some wine and a cookie on the strength of that. A signpost to Bonny Doon amused me more than it should have, and I laid off the wine.
Santa Cruz was quiet; it was after eleven and everyone was inside watching the news about the poisonings and muggings and the fires in the trailer parks. I drove fast along Pacific Avenue down past the back of the Greyhound depot. The town shops were mostly new and or newly appointed and half of them seemed to sell things made of leather. Beach Street was at the end of Front, past the used car yards and the tyre repair place that had been in business since 1937.
It was a wide, palm tree lined boulevard swinging around in front of three quarters of a mile of beach. I drove slowly south past closed cafes, a big parking lot and several motels. The VW van was parked just short of where the road followed a narrow bridge across a creek. I stopped on the other side of the street a block away, and watched. There were a couple of other cars in the street under a high, half-moon and some desultory street lights; but nothing moved. I took the gun out of the glove box, put it in my jacket pocket and walked up to the van. It smelled of oil and food and age but there were no bodies in it.
At this end the boardwalk was given over to a roller coaster and other rides and it was locked up. I went down on to the sand and walked along parallel to the boardwalk wall, looking for a way up. Two men with torches and two dogs were running a metal detector over the sand. It beeped and hummed and they paid me no attention. A set of wooden steps took me up on to the boardwalk where there wasn't a board in sight; it was a concrete walkway about twenty-five yards wide with the sand on one side and a long row of amusement places on the other—shooting galleries
, ice cream parlours, a haunted castle. All closed, all deserted except for the castle which had a drunk sleeping with his back up against the portcullis and a wine bottle clutched to his chest.
I moved quickly, checking the dark recesses. The ferris wheel cast a giant shadow like a spiderweb across the cement and I could hear rats rustling in concealment. The boardwalk ended at a vast amusement parlour which was locked. I jumped down on to the sand and skirted the building which had a high Moorish dome topped by a Gothic turret with a flagpole on top of that. The stars and stripes hung limply in the still air.
Up ahead the pier was like a dark finger against the moonlit sea and sky. I squinted and saw movement on it. I sprinted across the sand dodging the volleyball posts and took the steps up to the wharf three at a time. It was about fifty yards wide with a solid white fence running along both sides. A crane loomed up about halfway out and I saw a public works sign. Then there was a flat, no-cover stretch with patches of light and shade formed by the wharf lights, of which about one in four was burning. I ran, crouched and ducking out of the light. Past a low line of fish cafes and anglers' needs shops the wharf narrowed to its last stretch which was about seventy-five yards long by twenty-five wide. The water slapped against the pylons and I could hear a strange barking sound further on.
A woman with blonde hair was bending over the end rail looking out west over the dark Pacific. The barking was louder as I got nearer and there was splashing with it. There were some openings in the tarred surface of the pier about ten feet square with waist high post and rail fences around them. At the first opening I found out about the noise: seals were jumping on and off the pylons twenty feet below. At the second opening a man was crouched with a gun resting on the rail; he was sighting along it at the blonde woman's back.
I moved quickly up behind him and tried to slam the side of his head with my gun butt. He heard me, very late; he fired but the flash went high, he ducked a little and my blow hit him high and glancing. He went ‘oomph’, bent over and shot himself up through the chin. I already had another punch travelling; I pulled it and it turned into a push and he went over the rail. He bounced once on a cross beam and a seal barked and jumped into the water, and then he went in too.
She was standing with her back to the rail, facing America with Australia over her shoulder. I put my gun away and walked forward.
‘Diane Holt?’
She nodded. ‘Are you going to kill me?’
‘No’, I said. I pointed down to the water. ‘But he was.’
The seals which had gone quiet after the big splash, started barking again. Closer up I saw that she had a lot of blood on her face and that she was rigid with fright.
‘Your father sent me. It's all right.’
‘My father’, she said.
‘Are you hurt?’
She touched her face and looked at the blood. ‘No, I get blood noses when I'm upset.’
I took her arm and brought her away from the rail, we passed the opening and she pointed.
‘What's that?’
I looked down and saw his gun lying on the tar. I kicked it into the water and a seal barked.
We got back to the van and I told her to take off her blouse and a shoe. She did it like an automaton. I wiped blood from her face with the blouse and her nose started up again and the cotton got well soaked. I put the shoe and the blouse in the VW, muffled up my .38 and fired a shot into the passenger seat.
She came out of her trance at the sound of the shot. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘We need a mystery here’, I said. ‘We want some people to stop worrying about you. I hope it works.’
She grabbed a bag out of the van and we left Santa Cruz in a hurry.
She filled me in on the drive to San Francisco. Harvey was getting together a big show for his day in the park. He was going to put some of his films on a big screen and play some of his tapes. He was going to name names.
‘Some of the biggest people’, she said. ‘Top people.’
‘Don't tell me’, I said. ‘Forget them’,
‘I got scared, and I didn't trust Ramsay. He's the one … back there. Vin and me had a fight and I split’
When she came back to the apartment she saw what I'd seen.
‘Pedro was still alive’, I said.
‘I just ran.’
‘It was too late anyway, but he helped me to find you.’
She cried then, deep and long, most of the way to San Francisco airport. She stopped crying and wiped her face.
‘Why did you go to Santa Cruz? That boardwalk looked pretty tacky to me.’
‘It's innocent’, she said.
She had some clothes in the bag and she cleaned up while I bought her a ticket to Los Angeles where she had an aunt. She was in some kind of shock but there was a strength in her that kept her functioning. She phoned the aunt.
‘Go straight home’, I said. ‘Tomorrow, today, whatever. I'll cable your dad.’
She nodded, said Thanks', in broad Australian, and caught the flight.
I sent a wire to Wesley Holt from the hotel and worried about the untidy ends. I worried about things like the muscle man's car, the clean slug in the VW seat and the tides off the Santa Cruz beach. But there was nothing I could do about any of them.
‘The Luck of Clem Carter’, ‘Silverman’ and ‘Mother's Boy’ were first published in the National Times December 1980 to January 1981. Slightly different versions of ‘Blood is Thicker’ (as ‘The Fratricide Caper’) and ‘Heroin Annie’ were published in Playboy November 1980 and June 1981. ‘Marriages are made in Heaven’ (as ‘The Negative Caper’) and ‘Escort to an easy death’ were published in slightly different form in Penthouse January and June 1982; ‘California Dreamland’ was published in Playboy April 1983.
