by Susan Dunlap
I looked out through the rain-splattered windows at the puddles that covered nearly half of the side parking lot, and beyond to the eucalyptus.
“Miss Haskell?”
Sheriff Wescott stood behind the counter. Somehow, he seemed out of place here, away from the darkened atmosphere of the bar at Frank’s. Under the fluorescent lights, it was apparent that his hair was not as light as I had thought, but a medium brown. His face still looked unfinished, though. And from his mustache a few extra-curly hairs poked out in odd directions.
“Right this way, into the inner recesses,” he said, smiling a surprisingly easy smile as he pulled open the half-door in the counter. I followed him down a plexiglass corridor to an eight-by-ten office on the side of the aisle away from the windows. Back here the light blue plexiglass walls didn’t reach the ceiling and the buzzing of typewriters, ringing of phones, and medley of conversations beyond gave me the feeling of entering a crowded maze rather than a private office.
Wescott plucked a newspaper from the light blue visitor’s chair, pulled the chair an inch closer to his desk, and motioned me to it. “Coffee?”
“No thanks,” I said, sitting. The office seemed even smaller than eight-by-ten now. A blue file cabinet stuck out from one wall behind Wescott. A blue bookcase filled with official-looking volumes and stacks of papers stood alongside the desk, and several cardboard boxes were piled at the other side. He had to step over one of them to get to his chair.
He settled back. “You made the right decision about the coffee. It’s from a machine and by the end of the day it tastes like the grease from the cogs.” He smiled again and shifted a pile of papers to the side of his desk.
“This isn’t a social call,” I said.
“Oh?”
“I’ve been suspended from my job.”
“You have?” He sounded truly surprised and concerned.
“My boss has suspended me for two days, for abusing sick leave.”
He waited, his expression unchanged.
“He said you told him I was at Frank’s Place on my sick day, drinking. Specifically, having two drinks.”
Wescott leaned forward. “Oh, I’m sorry.” He sounded sorry and surprised.
I didn’t expect that.
“I did tell him you were there, Miss Haskell,” he said. “You see, in a murder investigation we have to follow every lead even if it causes witnesses some difficulty. We don’t deliberately, um, inconvenience people, but we do have to do everything we can to find the murderer. It’s not always a fair process. Innocent people get their toes stepped on. We work on the theory of the greater good. You can see that, can’t you?”
“In part, but I can’t see why you had to be so specific with Mr. Bobbs.”
“How do you mean?”
“Was it necessary to your investigation to tell him I’d had not one but two drinks at noon? He already felt I was holding the utility company up to public ridicule by being out of bed on my sick day. But by having two drinks at an hour when decent people are only consuming tea, I moved into the category of a wicked woman, a wicked woman he employed.”
Wescott laughed. “I am sorry. But let me assure you that that is solely your Mr. Bobbs’s designation. The sheriff’s department of Sonoma County does not list you among the ladies of questionable reputation.” He leaned back in his chair. “I guess there’s nothing I can say now except tell you I’m sorry for the problems this has caused you.”
I hesitated. The apology came too suddenly, too easily. I needed more of a battle to sate my anger. But, logically, I got what I asked for, and probably any apology from a sheriff was a victory. “Okay,” I said.
“Good.” He smiled. “As long as you’re here, there is some background information I’d like to get from you. Do you have a few minutes?”
“I have two days.”
He hesitated, looking just a bit taken aback. “I can still offer you some of that coffee. Of course, it’ll taste even worse by now.”
“I’ll pass.”
“Wise.” He leaned against the back of the chair so that it looked as if it were on the verge of tipping. In the bright fluorescent light, I noticed his eyes—blue, but clearer, sharper, and a bit lighter than the furniture around him. They gave the observer the illusion of looking deep into the depths of his soul.
“So,” he said, “tell me about yourself.”
His smile, I realized, was like Frank’s, an open yet very personal expression. It had done wonders for Frank.
“Where would you like me to start?”
“You came from San Francisco, right? How long ago was that?”
“A little over a year. I got here just before the flooding last year. It wasn’t a bad flood then, not like this year’s should be, but it was enough to encourage me to buy a house on high ground.”
“Why did you move here?” He had a pad propped between his desk and lap and, almost unobtrusively, he took notes.
“I liked the area.”
“And?”
“I wanted to move out of the city.”
“Why was that?”
“I felt I needed a change.”
He put the pad on the desk. “Is this making you nervous?”
“Well, it’s not putting me at ease.”
“I can set it aside. This isn’t an interrogation. I just find it convenient to jot down something I want to come back to; then I can concentrate on what you’re saying now. You see?”
I nodded.
“I lived in L.A. before coming here, so I do understand the lure of the area.” He leaned back in the chair again, picked up the pen, and glanced at me for compliance.
Regardless of the reasons for the notes being taken, the process did make me edgy, but I felt foolish objecting. After all, I had nothing to conceal. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll give you a synopsis. I’m thirty-two years old. Originally I’m from the East. I lived in San Francisco for six years and worked in public relations. I married an account executive at the company. We had a superb apartment and made a fair amount of money. We were on the way up.”
“And then, if that doesn’t sound too melodramatic?” He had put down the pen.
“And then,” I said, “then it seemed to collapse from the inside. I can’t tell you what happened first. John and I divorced, but that was the outcome, not the beginning. I think the beginning was that I could never leave the bed unmade or the coffee cups on the table. What I mean is that the apartment was never mine or even ours. Nothing was. Our lives were devoted to rising in the company. We spent our money entertaining, dressing appropriately, buying the right this or that. I never knew when it would be advantageous for me to bring a client home or for John to, so the apartment always had to be spotless. It wasn’t our home; it was just an adjunct to our jobs. As we were. I came to that conclusion; John didn’t.” I looked up at Wescott, feeling a bit embarrassed and rather amazed that I had told him so much about my divorce. It wasn’t something I discussed anymore. “It’s hardly an original story. And probably more than you wanted to know.”
“No. There’s never more than I want to know.”
Over the blue plexiglass partition, I could hear two women discussing Line Q errors on the computer printout.
“Anyway,” I said, “I stayed on at work in the city for a while after the divorce, and then I realized I needed to get away. I thought I would come here. I thought I would be moving to a simpler life, a life among wholesome country people. In honor of this metamorphosis, I changed my name from Veronica Joan to Vejay and bought a pickup. The pickup was sensible.”
“And not the name?”
I laughed. “Frank kept telling me changing my name was adolescent. Maybe it was. But by that time Vejay was what people called me.”
“And did you find peace in the country, Vejay?”
“That sounds like a sappy song title—‘Peace in the Country.’”
“Well?” He shrugged off a look of embarrassment.
“I found exactly wha
t you would expect. Instead of down-home folk sitting around the stove at the country store, there were other emigrants from the city searching for the country store. But life here is easier. People are nice. I like my job, and I like the fact that it ends at five.”
“Did you think this would be a good place to marry and raise a family?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“You dated Frank Goulet when you first came here?”
I drew in a breath slowly, seeing clearly where the line of questions was leading. “So this is an interrogation.”
“Hardly. Just questions, background.” But there was a steeliness to his voice that had been absent before. And when I said nothing, he added, “You were the last person to see Goulet alive.”
“The second to last,” I reminded him.
“Second,” he said. “About your relationship with Goulet …”
His expression remained unchanged, but instead of the spontaneous interest it appeared to hold a minute before, his face now looked like a mask held in place by nothing but discipline. It was the facade of interest John and I used to use with clients, listening for hours to the expansion plans of West Coast Metal Pipe or Alvin’s Fancy Pickles, trying to figure how much we could get out of them for a p.r. campaign. That was one of the things that had gnawed at me. I wondered how a client would feel if he found out. Now I knew—furious and humiliated.
“Look,” I said, “if you’re going to treat me like a suspect I’d rather you do it under a bare bulb. I don’t need this pseudo-friend routine.”
He drew back visibly. After a pause, he said, “Okay. Have it your way. You saw Goulet yesterday. You left mad. Now I want to know about your relationship with him. Clear enough?”
“I dated Frank when I first came to town. A year ago. Frank dated every new woman. You can check on that.”
“We will.”
“I went out with him two or three times. It was nothing serious, nothing to base the rest of my life on, to answer your question.”
“I didn’t ask that specifically. But you did go out a few times?”
“Probably three.”
“Probably?”
“Probably because a few times we ran into each other in town and had coffee. The point is there was never anything between us.”
He wrote something on his pad. I could see the small tight marks, but I couldn’t read it upside down. He held the pen poised against the pad when he looked up.
“Why did you stop dating?”
“We eased off and stopped, because, as I told you, it was never a big thing. So its ending wasn’t very important. I had to go back to the city for a couple of weekends straight to settle business. And then Frank was seeing someone else. And we were just friends. Which is all we ever were.”
“Perhaps you were jealous to come back and find Goulet dating another woman?”
I forced myself to take a breath before answering. All my fury that he had so skillfully dissipated by his facade of interest was back. It was an effort to keep from shouting. Yet as angry as I was, I was scared too. Scared for the first time. He was not ruling me out as a suspect. I could hardly believe it. Until this very moment I had always believed that the police, and the sheriff, were there to protect me. I was a white, middle-class, thirtyish woman: exactly the type of person the police look after. With the exception of speeding it had never occurred to me to break a law. But Wescott was not dismissing me. He had realized my vulnerability and made use of it, like he’d do with any murder suspect.
I said, “I was not jealous over Frank. I’m not seventeen. I’ve been married and divorced. I’ve been dating for nearly twenty years. I don’t view a couple of movies and a dinner as a pledge of lifetime devotion. And had it been, I don’t know that I would have wanted it.”
“What about the woman you assumed Goulet was talking to on the phone? You were mad enough about that to stalk out of the bar.”
“I was …” I took another breath and started again, calmer. It was one of those things they taught me in “executive school”: never let the client get you rattled, or at least never let him know he’s got you. “I think I explained that yesterday. Is there anything else you wanted to ask me?”
“Not now.” He stood up.
But I remained seated. I didn’t want to leave him with nothing but my life to ponder. “You said I was the last person at Frank’s. The Chinese Laundry truck was there when I left. Have you checked with them?”
He sat back down. “We have only your word for that.”
“Ask the old people across the street. They’re famous for spotting any unusual activity on South Bank Road.”
“We did. They didn’t see a laundry truck.”
“What?”
He waited.
“Did you check with the laundry? The laundry must have records.” Panic was beginning to be evident in my voice.
“We’re checking.”
“What about drugs?”
He picked up the pen and leaned toward me. “How do you mean?”
“Suppose Frank was a middleman or someone wanted him to be.”
“Do you have information you want to give me on that?”
I wished I did. “Well, no. I just wanted to raise the speculation. There are plenty of drugs around here. It’s not unreasonable to think Frank might have been involved in trafficking drugs. I mean, even the authorities admit they can’t keep up with the marijuana growers to the north, that they just burn their fields for show.”
“Your point, Miss Haskell.”
“There are a lot of drugs going through Henderson, and as a bartender and owner, Frank was in a good position to distribute them.”
“Do you have anything to indicate that he was?”
“No.”
“Any reason for suspicion?”
“Only that he was killed.”
He sighed. “You can rest assured that we at the sheriff’s department are aware of the drug traffic, perhaps even more aware than you. You may assume that we give it serious consideration in any crime of this nature.”
I stood up.
“For the record, Miss Haskell, is there anything more you can tell me?”
“No.”
“I assume you will keep yourself available,” he said.
“I’ll have a lot of free time, at least for the next three days.”
I walked out quickly, looking at neither the man at the desk nor the wanted posters. Once outside I felt relieved, as if I’d escaped. But my stomach still churned with the midnight terrors. Less than twenty-four hours ago I was a normal, middle-class woman. Since then I had been suspended from my job—a matter that now seemed almost trivial—and the sheriff suspected me of murdering a man.
As I walked to the pickup I shifted back to thinking that surely he couldn’t envision me as a murderer, surely this questioning was just for show, surely … but it wasn’t. He manipulated me as he would any suspect.
And from what I knew of this type of investigation (learned mainly from prime-time police shows), I suspected that the sheriff would focus on his best lead until something better was presented to him. In other words, he was going to concentrate on me.
CHAPTER 7
BY THE TIME I left the sheriff’s department, the air was thick with the threat of rain and the sky was dark, though it was just a bit after four.
I considered driving into Santa Rosa. Probably the Chinese Laundry was there, but I wasn’t sure. I also wasn’t sure the hand launderers would speak English. Probably not. And I had purposely avoided the laundry truck at Frank’s Place. So even if the driver had noticed Frank, he wouldn’t know whether that was before or after I was there.
I shifted the pickup into reverse and backed out. The Chinese Laundry could wait till tomorrow. Better I should concentrate on what and who might have caused Frank’s death.
I turned onto North Bank Road toward Henderson. Live oaks hung over the road from both sides. Even at midday the pavement was shaded by a wonde
rfully verdant canopy. I loved this section of road.
Frank, I thought. He wanted to get out of San Francisco, and he’d heard about Henderson from Chris Fortimiglio, so he came here and bought the bar and ran it for two years, until he was shot. That left a lot of questions. Why did Frank want to leave the city? Had I asked him? I couldn’t remember doing so. No. When he mentioned wanting to leave, it seemed natural to me, since I had left. But Frank could have had more pressing reasons than a change of scenery. Still, he had enough money to buy, or at least put a down payment on, the Place. So he wasn’t leaving the city because of bad debts or anything like that. And Henderson was too close to the city, with too many city people coming back and forth, for Frank to consider hiding out here—particularly in a job as visible as tending bar.
Whatever his reasons for leaving San Francisco, they couldn’t have been too pressing. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to know more about them.
But if the motivation behind Frank’s murder wasn’t something in San Francisco, then it must be here. I recalled the conversation at the Fortimiglios’ the night before—was it that recent? Madge Oombs said if the killer couldn’t have been a stranger trotting down South Bank Road for all the world to see, then it must have been someone local, slipping in along the river.
Then, too, the cause must have been something local. What? What had Frank done in his two years here? He ran the bar. And? Well, he dated a lot of women, but most of them were tourists, who would see him as a summer fling. Even if they hoped for more, it was unlikely that they would arrive one afternoon in flood season and shoot Frank in the forehead.
Of course, he dated local women, but not many. The only one I could think of who had even been speculatively linked with him was Patsy Fernandez, and I felt sure there was no truth to that rumor. She and Paul were too close. Surely. Well, pretty surely. Of course, Paul and Patsy were from San Francisco. Could they have known Frank there? I should find out about that.
If the cause was not women, what about men?
A truck passed me and cut in front of me, missing my bumper by inches. I hit the horn, but by that time the truck was yards ahead of me. Glancing at the speedometer, I saw that I was driving twenty-five miles an hour. The speed limit here was fifty-five, and few drivers observed that. I stepped on the gas.
