Sentinels

by Bill Pronzini

  “But she’d want your blessing first.”

  “My blessing would be important to her. Whether she got it or not, she’d want me to know what she intended and to meet the young man before she did it.”

  “You’re sure of that.”

  “Absolutely. As I told you, Allison and I are very—”

  The telephone rang. The sudden eruption of sound made us both jump. Helen McDowell sucked in her breath, a rasping sound almost as loud as the phone bell, and went after the instrument the way a cat pounces on a piece of raw meat. Private line, I thought, not the one for store business.

  “Yes? Hello?” Her face, in those first couple of seconds, was a study in naked hope. But then, as she listened, the hope shriveled and her face sagged, as if drawn downward by invisible weights. Her voice was flat when she said, “No, Deirdre, not a word yet . . . It’s all right, dear. I know you’re worried too. . . . Yes, as soon as I know anything. Promise . . . I will. Yes. Bye for now.”

  She replaced the receiver slowly, almost carefully. “That was Deirdre Collins, Allison’s best friend. Her best friend all through high school, I should say. They’re not as close as they used to be, but then, distance does that to friendships.”

  “She knew your daughter was coming home?”

  “Allison called her before she left Eugene. But she didn’t say anything more to Deirdre about her young man than she did to me.”

  I’d been making notes on a pad I carry and I glanced over them before I spoke again. After Allison’s name I had written: Intelligent, dedicated, concerned, responsible, fun-loving, mischievous, secretive, impulsive, loves surprises, prone to making deep and intense commitments. Allison McDowell was an uncommon person, all right. Uncommonly complex. She and her mother were close, but how well can even a mother know her daughter? Particularly a daughter as complicated and evidently headstrong as Allison.

  I said, “So she and her friend left Eugene on the morning of Friday, the twelfth. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “In Allison’s car.”

  “An old MG, not very reliable—I’ve been after her to trade it in on a newer model. But she loves that old wreck. Even when it broke down on Saturday, she wouldn’t hear of getting rid of it.”

  “It broke down where?”

  “Outside a little town called Creekside. Off Highway 395, halfway between Susanville and Alturas.”

  That was in the northeastern corner of California, where it joins Oregon on the north and Nevada on the east—a fairly remote part of the state. “They went that way, to Three ninety-five, for what reason? The trip down from Eugene is a lot faster on Highway Five.”

  “I know,” Helen McDowell said. “But when Allison called that Saturday evening, she said they’d decided to take a more scenic route. Neither she nor her friend had ever been over that way and they wanted to see what the country was like. Impulsive, you see?”

  “What else did she say on the phone?”

  “That the MG had broken down on the highway and they’d had it towed to a garage in Creekside. The man at the garage thought he could have it fixed by ten Sunday morning. If the car didn’t break down again, she said, they’d be here—in Lafayette—by Monday evening at the latest.” Mrs. McDowell drew a heavy breath. “That was the last I heard from her.”

  “She was in Creekside when she called?”

  “At the only motel. The Northern Comfort Cabins.”

  “How did she sound?”

  “Happy. Very happy. She even . . . she made a little joke. ‘Having wonderful time, Mom, glad you’re not here.’ ”

  “As far as you know, she and the friend left Creekside as scheduled—around ten Sunday morning.”

  “Yes. That was the last anyone saw of them, when they drove away from the garage and out to the highway.”

  “Who saw them then? The garageman?”

  “The owner, yes. His name is Maxe, Art Maxe.”

  “You spoke to him personally?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Who else up there?”

  “A Mr. Bartholomew, the owner of the motel.”

  “Did you ask either man about Allison’s companion?”

  “Both. They weren’t very forthcoming. About all they’d say is that he was male. Bartholomew said he didn’t know the young man’s name because Allison had registered in her name only and paid with her credit card.”

  “Did you get an impression of why neither Maxe nor Bartholomew was forthcoming?”

  “It wasn’t that they were unfriendly, just reticent. The way people in small towns are when they deal with strangers, especially over the phone.”

  “They must’ve given Captain Fassbinder a description of the man, even if they couldn’t supply his name. He’ll be identified eventually.”

  “Yes, but when? It’s been four days since Allison was officially listed as missing, and Fassbinder hasn’t bothered to call and give me any sort of update. Before I phoned you this morning, I called him and he still wouldn’t tell me anything. All he’d say is that he’s investigating.”

  “That’s standard procedure, Mrs. McDowell. Police agencies don’t like to pass along inconclusive or uncorroborated information.”

  “But, my God, four days! How competent is the Lassen Sheriffs Department, really? How hard are they trying? Allison and her young man didn’t just drop off the face of the earth—they weren’t abducted by aliens, for heaven’s sake. It’s maddening. . . .”

  I let all of that pass. Four days sounded like a long time, but it wasn’t; missing persons investigations are methodical time-users. And the fact is, though I wasn’t about to tell it to Helen McDowell, it’s a relatively low-priority police matter. Lassen County, where Allison was last seen and therefore the police agency with jurisdiction, would have refused to list her as officially missing until the Thursday after she was last seen—the mandatory seventy-two hours in cases where there is no evidence of foul play. Prior to that, all they’d have done was to take Allison’s name and the license number of her MG and put out a statewide stop-and-check order. Even now, with Allison on the books as a missing person, Mrs. McDowell was right—Captain Fassbinder probably wasn’t expending a lot of effort on the case. You could understand it from the authorities’ point of view: Kids were liable to do all sorts of crazy things on a whim, with little or no consideration for their parents, and every police agency has been burned too many times by false alarms. Give them something definite to go on, such as a hint of a felony crime, and they’d bust their humps. Until, if, and when that happened, Fassbinder would continue to spend most of his time frying bigger fish.

  One of the things Helen McDowell wanted from me was reassurance. But I was not going to lie to her; the truth, or at least a softened version of the truth, was less unkind. I said, “Mrs. McDowell, I have to be honest with you. I don’t know that I can do much the authorities aren’t already doing. I’m only one man. And California is a big state. Allison and her friend could’ve vanished anywhere within a radius of several hundred miles, could be anywhere at all right now—”

  “I know that. I know all that. But you could go to Creekside, try to trace them from there. Couldn’t you? I thought of doing it myself, but I’m not a detective, I wouldn’t know where to start or what questions to ask. That’s what I’d like to hire you to do, go to Creekside and try, just . . . try. Will you do that for me, for my daughter? Please?”

  I said yes, all right, I would try.

  What else could I say? Circumstances had already committed me.

  Chapter Two

  It was nearly five when I got back to the office. Tamara was still there, tapping away industriously on her Apple PowerBook, a frown of concentration wrinkling her round face. She’d taken to wearing what for her was conservative clothing to the office—blouses and slacks, even a skirt now and then. The green blouse and beige slacks she had on today were a far cry from her outfit the first time I’d set eyes on her last fall: purple and yellow tie-dy
ed scarf over her close-cropped hair, too-large man’s plaid shirt, rumpled and ripped orchid-colored pants, green strap sandals revealing a gaggle of silver and gold toe rings. What she’d called “the grunge look.” And she’d had, back then, a pretty grungy attitude to go with it.

  The attitude had been racially defensive, snotty, and loaded with misconceptions about both private investigative work and the motivations of an upper-middle-aged Italian man in wanting to hire a twenty-year-old African American woman. We’d clashed hard enough to throw sparks at that first meeting. I not only hadn’t hired her, I’d given her a dose of her own nastiness and sent her packing.

  That would have been the end of it, except that underneath all the racial baggage she was lugging around, she was a good person. Intelligent, sensitive, owner of a caustic sense of humor, and quick to learn from her mistakes. She’d called a day later to apologize, which prompted me to give her a second-chance interview; and the Tamara Corbin who showed up for that one—better dressed, much less adversarial—had impressed me enough to hire her on a trial basis. I hadn’t regretted the decision; on the contrary, it was one of the best business decisions I’d made in years. She reorganized my bookkeeping and filing, established a simplified billing system, conducted computer information searches and made the skip-traces and insurance background checks that were my bread and butter much easier to complete, answered the phone and dealt with potential clients when I was away from the office. For her part, even though most of the work was routine and unexciting, she’d taken to it with considerably more enthusiasm than either of us anticipated—so much so that she’d surprised me a couple of weeks ago by saying that the detective business might be a career option for her.

  The blotter on my desk, I noticed, was empty except for its decorative polyglot of stains: ink, coffee, Liquid Paper, and others too obscure to identify. “No messages?” I said.

  “Well, there were a couple of calls.”

  “From?”

  “Bert Horowitz at Standard Armored Car. About that preemployment screening job we did for him last month.”

  “Some problem with it? The guy checked out . . .”

  “No problem. He said we underbilled them.”

  “Underbilled?”

  “By a hundred bucks,” Tamara said. “He’s putting through another check to cover. You believe it?”

  “The last honest man.”

  “Too bad all our clients aren’t like him. Abe Melikian, number one.”

  “Good old Abe.” Melikian was a bail bondsman who bitched about every expense account item and invariably took a full ninety days to pay up. “Tell me the other call was good news too.”

  “Wish I could.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “Could be, but not business. Barney Rivera.”

  Small surprise. “What’d he want?”

  “Personal, the man said. Nothing urgent. He’ll call again.”

  Terrific. Barney Rivera, chief claims adjuster for Great Western Insurance. Roly-poly, jellybean-popping womanizer. Smart guy with a smart mouth and a bent sense of humor tainted by a streak of cruelty. We’d been pretty good friends until about a year ago. Kerry and I had been having some personal problems and Barney had exacerbated them—intentionally and maliciously, in my opinion. Things had been cool between us since. For years he’d thrown eight or ten jobs per annum my way—Great Western farmed out its investigative work to independent contractors like me—but that number had dropped off to two in the past six months. I hadn’t heard from him at all in more than three months; and I’d picked up rumors that he was giving all of the company’s claims work to Eberhardt, my former partner and current competitor. I had just about written off Barney the Needle and Great Western, and now he’d surfaced again. Only not for a business reason. And sure as hell not to apologize: Barney never apologized to anybody. Most likely he wanted something from me—information, a favor. . .

  “. . . that woman’s case?”

  Tamara, I realized, had quit tapping and was fixing me with her brown stare. “Sorry, what’d you say?”

  “You take that woman’s case? Mrs. McDowell.”

  “I took it.”

  “Good. I knew you would.”

  “Good for us, maybe. Chances are, she’s throwing her money away. I doubt there’s much I can do.”

  “What happened to the daughter, you think?”

  “Hard to judge. Nothing good, or some trace of her would’ve turned up by now. I don’t suppose you’d care to hear the details of her disappearance?”

  She favored me with a half-smile. They used to have a sharp cynical edge, those half-smiles of hers; now the cynicism was tempered by more favorable emotions. “Mellowing,” she’d have called it. I called it “maturing.”

  She said, “Do bears do the nasty in the great outdoors?”

  “I hope I never get close enough to find out.”

  “Makes two of us. I’m listening.”

  I gave her a rundown of my interview with Helen McDowell. She didn’t interrupt; she was an attentive listener, one of the qualities a good detective needs to have. She had others too—an instinctive feel for which facts were important and which weren’t, advanced problem-solving abilities, and healthy doses of insight and imagination. I’d taken to confiding in her on cases where I felt a perspective different from mine would be beneficial.

  “Sure doesn’t sound good,” she said when I’d finished. “That girl’s the type got her head on straight, if what her mama told you is right. She wouldn’t’ve run off with the mystery man. Uh-uh, not Allison.”

  “Even though she’s mischievous, loves surprises?”

  “No way. That type plays little controlled games, not ones that’re off the wall. Airheads run off with a guy, mainly so they can screw their selfish little brains out. Allison’s no airhead.”

  “So what’s your take on the situation?”

  “No sense speculating when you don’t have enough facts. Isn’t that what you always say?”

  “Go ahead and speculate anyway.”

  “Well, something must’ve happened to her,” Tamara said. “Could be any damn thing if it happened to Mr. Mystery too. Accident, they got lost somewhere, they picked up the wrong kind of hitchhiker.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But if it was to just her alone—could be she picked the wrong dude to fall in love with. Lot of crazies out there, pretending to be normal. Start something with a girl, get her away someplace, do their sick thing, and more times than not, nobody ever finds out what went down. Man, I hope that’s not it. But all the secrecy, Allison not even telling her mama his name . . .”

  “You mean it could’ve been his idea, not hers. The secrecy.”

  “Right. And she went along on account of her love for surprises.”

  “One fact argues against that scenario,” I said.

  “You mean the people in Creekside who saw him?”

  “That’s it. The authorities have his description by now.”

  “Wouldn’t matter if she’s never found. Or if he’s Mr. Average and a traveler and nobody can find him.”

  I nodded. She’d touched on most of the problems that had been bothering me. “So you see what I’m up against,” I said. “Plenty of possibilities, most of them bad, and not many definite facts. And only one starting point that’ll like as not turn out to be a dead end.”

  “Creekside.”

  “Creekside,” I agreed.

  “You gonna drive or fly up there?”

  “Drive. It’s not much more than a wide place in the road and out in the middle of nowhere. Nearest airport is Susanville, and it’s bound to be too small for any regularly scheduled commercial flight.”

  “Maybe you could get that detective friend of yours, Sharon McCone, to fly you up. She’s a pilot, right? Got her own plane, keeps it over in Oakland?”

  “Sure, she’s a pilot, but the plane belongs to her significant other and he uses it for his own business. And Sharon’s expanded
her operations—she’s away a lot of the time herself. And I wouldn’t bother her for a favor like that even if she weren’t a friend. I can get to Creekside almost as fast in my own car.”

  “Scared to fly in one of those little planes, huh?”

  “You know something, Ms. Corbin? Sometimes you’re too smart for your own good. All right, I admit it. The one time I went up in a plane as small as hers—a ‘matchbox with wings,’ she calls it—there was a lot of turbulence and I almost needed a diaper.”

  She laughed. “I hear you. Wouldn’t catch me flying in one either.”

  Helen McDowell had given me two color photos of her daughter, both head-and-shoulders portraits from the same batch as the framed one on her desk. I passed one to Tamara for inclusion in the McDowell case file.

  “So that’s Allison.”

  “That’s Allison. Taken about six months ago.”

  She studied the photo for several seconds. “Pretty,” she said, and then, “Funny. I knew a white girl once, looked a little like her. Down on the Peninsula.”

  “Did you?”

  “When I was in high school. She married a plumber.”

  “A plumber.”

  “Yeah. He came over to her house to fix her folks’ pipes. Ended up fixing hers instead. Laid some pipe on her and clogged her drain, you know what I’m saying?”

  I didn’t at first. Then I sorted it out. “Got her pregnant so they had to get married.”

  “Knocked up big as a boiler.”

  “So what’s your point?”

  “Point?”

  “About this girl you knew and Allison McDowell.”

  “Isn’t one. They looked a little alike, that’s all.”

  “I thought you were making a point.”

  “Well, I wasn’t.” She gave me one of those generation-gap looks. “You know,” she said, “you and my old man ought to get together. He thinks everything has to have a point too. Must be a cop thing.” Her father, Darryl Corbin, was a lieutenant of detectives with the Redwood City police.

  “A cop thing and a mature guy thing,” I said. “But we don’t think everything has to have a point, we wish everything had one.”