Sentinels

by Bill Pronzini

  Gary Oster wasn’t in attendance, not yet. One of the half-dozen young people manning the pizza ovens and beer spigots knew Oster and said he came in most nights by eight. I considered having my dinner there while I waited and rejected the idea immediately. Tuesday night’s chicken-fried disaster was enough high-cholesterol food to last me a month.

  I drove along Pearl until I found a quiet-looking restaurant with only a few cars in its lot. Roast chicken and a dinner salad gave the digestive juices something to work on, and allowed me to use up an hour in relative peace. It was a few minutes past eight when I reentered Porky’s.

  The joint was even noisier and more crowded now, though most of the excess tallow had been replaced by college kids who were slimmer and more energetic, if no less hungry and thirsty. Gary Oster was one of them; the employee who knew him pointed him out, sitting alone at a two-person table in the rear, a half-full pitcher of dark beer at one elbow, brooding into a mug that he had clenched between both hands. He was broad-shouldered, heavyset without being fat, and the owner of a mop of curly black hair. He didn’t know I was there until I slid into the chair across from him; then his head came up, spasmodically. His eyes were dark, too, under rat’s-nest brows, and bright with what I took to be a combination of hurt and smoldering anger.

  “Gary Oster?”

  “Who the hell’re you?”

  “I’d like to talk to you about—”

  “Go away. I don’t want to talk.”

  “Not even about Allison McDowell?”

  He made another jerky movement, this one bowing his body forward so that his chin was almost resting on the pitcher of beer. He narrowed his eyes at me. “What do you know about Al?”

  “I know she’s missing.”

  “That’s not news anymore. So?”

  “So I’m trying to find her.”

  “What are you, a cop?”

  “Private investigator.” I told him my name. I tried to show him my license photostat at the same time, but he didn’t have any interest in it.

  “What happened to her?” he asked grimly.

  “No idea yet. You wouldn’t have one, would you?”

  “I wish to Christ I did.” He took a long swallow from his mug, refilled it from the pitcher with hands that were not quite steady. He wasn’t drunk; the shaking was a product of the emotions simmering inside him. “Missing ten days and I just heard about it yesterday.”

  “Who told you?”

  “Jan. Jan Walters, one of her roommates.”

  “Did you know she’d left Eugene during Easter break?”

  “How would I know? Haven’t talked to her in weeks, not since she—” He broke off.

  “Not since she what?”

  He shook his head, then banged the flat of one hand on the table hard enough to swivel heads in our direction. “Shit,” he said. “Why’d she have to take up with him? Why him, of all goddamn guys.”

  “Who? Rob?”

  “If he’s responsible,” Oster said, “if he did anything to hurt her, I’ll kill the motherfucker. I swear to God I’ll kill him.”

  “Rob?” I repeated.

  “Who the hell else?”

  “What’s his last name?”

  “Brompton. Rob fucking Brompton.”

  “You know him pretty well, do you?”

  “Well as I ever want to know him.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Where he lives, for starters.”

  “Over on Eighteenth. Married students’ housing.”

  “Brompton’s married?”

  “No. Singles live there too.” Oster made a derisive nasal sound, like a flatulence in his sinuses. “Special privileges. Oh, yeah, right.”

  “He live alone or with roommates?”

  “One guy. Cottages aren’t big enough for more than two people. Perkins, Ken Perkins. I went over there this morning to talk to him. Waste of time.”

  “Perkins doesn’t know anything about the disappearance?”

  “Said he didn’t. No reason for him to lie. Two of them gone, just like that—Al and Brompton. If he did anything to her . . .”

  “What’s Rob Brompton like?”

  “What?”

  “Brompton. What’s he like?”

  “Smart. Four-plus GPA, dean’s list . . . that’s the reason Al turned on to him. Full of big-crank ideas.”

  “Such as?”

  “Change the world. All that liberal bullshit.”

  “I take it you like things the way they are.”

  “Who says so? It’s a lousy world, but committees and newsletters and protest marches aren’t gonna change it. Bullshit, that’s all.” He sucked down more beer. “I tried to tell her. But she wouldn’t listen. Just wouldn’t listen.”

  “What did you try to tell her?”

  “What she was getting into. She said I was prejudiced. I’m not prejudiced, for Chrissake. I love her, I want to marry her, I don’t want to see her hurt—”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Why would Allison accuse you of prejudice?”

  “Why do you think?”

  “I’m asking you. I don’t know anything about Rob Brompton or how Allison got involved with him. I’m blundering around in the dark here.”

  “Dark,” Oster said bitterly. “Yeah, right.”

  I waited.

  “Rob Brompton’s black,” he said.

  Chapter Nine

  The married students housing facilities on Eighteenth off Patterson had a military look, like army dormitories—probably because they had been built during World War II. Impermanent housing that became permanent as the university’s enrollment grew steadily larger. Little cottages sewn together in long rows separated by blacktop lanes with narrow berms and speed bumps every few yards. Each had a peaked roof, tiny yard, tiny stoop; some sported picket fences; most seemed to have an outside array of bicycles, tricycles, strollers, kids’ toys, and/or yapping dogs.

  It took me a while to find the cottage shared by Rob Brompton and Ken Perkins; I had to stop and ask directions. Its uncurtained front window was lighted, the outspill showing a relatively well-tended yard. The car parked in front was a ten-year-old Datsun.

  Ken Perkins turned out to be lean, studious-looking, with one of those short flattops surrounded by shaven scalp that many young African American men favor nowadays. When I identified and explained myself, he seemed eager to cooperate. Inside were two rooms and a kitchenette, all of them college-student untidy: books and papers strewn over every available surface. Perkins cleared a raggedy Goodwill chair of a sociology text and a library copy of a novel by Chester Himes and invited me to sit down.

  “I don’t understand how a thing like this could’ve happened,” he said. “It was just a trip down to the Bay Area to see their people. A big deal to them but no big deal. You know?”

  I nodded. “Rob’s from the Bay Area too?”

  “We both are. El Cerrito.”

  “Did he know Allison down there?”

  “No. They met on campus.”

  “Just recently?”

  “Couple of semesters ago. They had the same psych class.”

  “But it was recently that they became involved.”

  “About six weeks. They were both on the student council and they got to be friends, took to seeing each other in the evenings, and boom, they both fell hard.”

  “How hard?”

  “The hardest,” Perkins said. “That’s why they decided to go home over the break, see their people—get them over the shock in person.”

  “Then what? Marriage?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “Soon?”

  “Not until they both graduate. But they were set to move in together this summer.”

  “With or without the approval of their families?”

  “Right. Al thought her mother would understand, be supportive. Rob . . . well, he wasn’t so sure about his people. His dad’s old-fashioned.” Perkins grinned
wryly. “Make that bigoted. Races shouldn’t mix, separate but equal, all that.”

  “The Louis Farrakhan philosophy.”

  “You got it.”

  “Have you talked to him about the disappearance?”

  “Well, I called him the first time on Sunday. Rob and Al were supposed to be back before the end of last week, and when I didn’t see or hear from them by Sunday afternoon I got worried enough to call Rob’s dad.”

  “How come he didn’t call you? He must’ve suspected something was wrong when Rob didn’t show in El Cerrito as planned.”

  “He didn’t know they were coming. Rob figured it’d be best if he and Al just walked in cold. He was pretty concerned then, but when I called him again yesterday, after that asshole Oster stopped by, then he was really shook up.”

  “Was that the first you’d heard the details, from Oster?”

  “What few there are, yeah.”

  “Did you tell Rob’s father about Allison?”

  “Her being white? No. Just her name and that they were driving down together as a surprise. I didn’t want to make things any harder for him. He’ll find out soon enough.”

  “He hasn’t contacted Allison’s mother,” I said. “Did he ask for her name and phone number?”

  “Yesterday. But I couldn’t remember her first name and I don’t have her number. And I didn’t tell him Al was from Lafayette. Dead tip she’s white if I had.”

  “Would you mind letting me have the Bromptons’ address and number? It probably won’t be necessary for me to contact him, but the Lassen County authorities will want to.”

  “Sure, if it’ll help.”

  “I could use a photo of Rob too.”

  “Ought to be one around here somewhere.”

  He went into the bedroom and stayed in there for three or four minutes. In one of the adjacent cottages a baby was squalling, loud enough so that the kid might have been in the room with me. Must be fun trying to study in quarters like these, I thought. Oster had said Rob Brompton was “privileged” to have gotten this housing as a minority single student. Some privilege.

  Perkins came back with a three-by-five snapshot and a piece of notepaper containing the address and telephone number of Rob’s parents. “Photo’s of the two of us,” he said. “Only one I could find.”

  It was a color snap, probably taken on the university campus, Perkins and Brompton with their arms across each other’s shoulders, mugging a little for the camera. Rob Brompton was a nice-looking young man, large-boned and large-framed, all of his meat evenly distributed and without any trimming of fat. Medium dark-skinned, hair cropped close but without skull-shaving around the ears and above the neck. His smile was the kind once described as winning.

  “This’ll do fine,” I said. I put the photo into my pocket with the one of Allison. “I take it you don’t like Gary Oster much.”

  “Not much. How’d you know?”

  “Well, you called him an asshole.”

  The wry grin again. “So I did. Exactly what he is too. What Al ever saw in him is beyond me. She’s a good lady, smart, perceptive. I guess maybe he was her blind spot.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Rob’s the one who opened her eyes,” Perkins said. “Made her see that Oster’s a closet racist, among other things. She wouldn’t have anything more to do with him after the hassle.”

  “What hassle is that?”

  “When she told him she was quitting him for Rob. He threw a fit. Called Rob names, called her names—ugly scene.”

  “Were you there?”

  “No. Rob told me about it.”

  “Did Oster threaten either of them?”

  “Not in so many words. You think maybe he had something to do with it? The disappearance?”

  “Anything’s possible at this stage. What’s your take on the idea?”

  He thought about it. “Hard to say. Maybe, if he worked himself up enough. Damn, though . . . all the way down in California . . . it doesn’t seem possible he could follow them all that way, even if he found out they were going and when.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “But if a guy goes crazy,” Perkins said, “he’s capable of just about anything. All the stuff you read in the papers, all the sick shit that happens every day . . . It doesn’t have to be Oster. It could be anybody, right? Somebody they didn’t even know. If Rob and Al—”

  He didn’t finish it.

  I found a motel off Highway 99, not far from the campus. In my room, first thing, I phoned Helen McDowell at home. Even though it was almost ten o’clock, she answered immediately.

  “My God,” she said, “I’ve been waiting and waiting to hear from you.” The strained quality of her voice told me that she had news too. Bigger news than mine. “Allison’s car. It’s been found.”

  “Where?”

  “In Eureka.”

  “. . . Eureka?”

  “Of all places. In a public parking lot downtown. It—the police said it had been there at least a week, accumulating parking tickets.”

  “What did they find inside?”

  “Nothing to suggest . . . well, at least I still have that much to hold on to.”

  Nothing to suggest foul play was what she’d been about to say. “Any leads to where Allison and Rob might have gone?”

  “Evidently not.”

  “Her luggage? His?”

  “Both suitcases were locked inside. There wasn’t anything in his to identify him.”

  “I found out who he is,” I said. “That’s why I called this late.”

  I told her about Rob Brompton—everything I’d learned except for the fact that he was black. The discovery of the abandoned MG had given her enough to deal with for the present.

  She said, “Do you think . . .” and then seemed to choke on the rest of the sentence. She cleared her throat and started over, haltingly. “Do you think he . . . Rob Brompton . . . I mean, that he . . .”

  “I know what you mean,” I said gently. “No. My impression is that he’s a good kid.”

  It didn’t reassure her much. “Why would they go to Eureka?” she said. “I don’t understand that, when they were all the way over in Lassen County.”

  Only one way it made sense to me, with the superficial knowledge I had, and I was not about to hurt her with it. I said, “Was it Captain Fassbinder who notified you?”

  “Yes. He called at five, just as I was about to close up the shop.”

  Contact Fassbinder in the morning, I was thinking, tell him about Rob Brompton and see if there’s anything he held back about the MG to spare Mrs. McDowell’s feelings.

  She said, “Will you drive to Eureka tomorrow?”

  No, I thought. But I said, “I’m not sure yet.”

  “But if that was the last place Allison . . .”

  “Whatever I do, I’ll be in touch.”

  “All right.” She made a shuddery sound. “I don’t know how much more of this I can stand. I want a drink desperately, but if I have one I’m afraid I won’t stop until I pass out.”

  What can you say? Platitudes, more empty reassurances? I muttered a lame suggestion that she try to get some rest, and broke the connection.

  All the driving the past three days had fatigued me, but it was a physical tiredness only. My mind was in one of those hyperactive states where you know damned well you’re going to have trouble shutting it down. No sense in going to bed yet. Instead, I went into the bathroom and ran a tubful of hot water and got in to soak and think.

  Eureka. I didn’t like that, not a bit; it put a new and disturbing slant on things. Eureka was on the coast, the largest town in the northern part of the state, some 250 miles west of Susanville. It didn’t add up that after the MG had already broken down once, and a mechanic had warned Allison of other potential problems, she and Brompton would opt for a reverse course from Lassen County all the way over to the coast, much of the distance over rough wilderness roads. Sure, they’d made a spur-of-the-moment change in pla
ns to take 395 downstate rather than the much faster Highway 5 route, and it was possible they’d made another impulsive decision to swing over to Eureka and follow scenic Highway 1 to the Bay Area. But given the MG’s problems, and what I’d learned of Allison and Rob and their intentions, it wasn’t likely.

  The only other explanation, the logical one, was that they hadn’t gone to Eureka; that a third party had driven the MG there. Red herring: abandon the car a long way from the real vanishing point to throw the authorities off the track.

  Foul play, in that event. No question.

  I ran more hot water into the tub. Gary Oster? Followed them down from Eugene, committed an act of violent revenge at some point after they’d left Creekside? Ken Perkins had pointed out a couple of obvious flaws in that reasoning, and there were others too; even without them it would be stretching credibility pretty thin. Same was true for any other person they’d known in Oregon. There was no good sense in anyone trailing them several hundred miles and then waiting around until their car broke down and was repaired before assaulting them.

  Stranger or strangers, then. Allison and Rob in the wrong place at the wrong time in conflict with the wrong people.

  In Lassen County, assuming they’d continued south on 395? As Fassbinder and I had discussed, it didn’t have to be; they could have run into trouble anywhere in a several-hundred-mile radius stretching all the way to the Bay Area. On the other hand, there was the Eureka factor. If the MG had been abandoned as a red herring, it was probable Eureka had been picked because it was far away, and because it was the nearest good-sized town in which an abandoned vehicle wouldn’t escape police attention for very long. The idea being that the sooner it was discovered, the sooner the focus of the investigation would shift. Not a very smart scheme: Eureka was too far away and in the wrong direction. The fact that it had taken a week for the MG to be found had also worked contrary to the plan.

  So Lassen County was still the best bet. And to narrow the focus even more, there was Creekside, the last place Allison and Rob had been seen. The unfriendly little pimple on the backside of nowhere.