“There’s a guardrail now, but not in 1971. It was pretty much a straight drop down to the water if the reservoir was full or to a rocky shore if it was down a bit. There hadn’t been much rain or snow that fall and winter, so the lake was down. Anyway, I decided I’d go a hundred yards in each direction from where I’d parked, then go back into town and radio in that I’d checked and found nothing.
“Except that’s not what happened. There’d been a snowstorm at the end of December, and most of it had melted off, but there were still a few small patches of snow along the edge of the road. I was running my flashlight along the edge of the dropoff, when I came to a patch of snow, about three feet by two feet. There was a fresh tire track cutting diagonally across it in a way that whatever made the track would have kept going over the edge. I looked over and saw the lights of a car that was on its side. I called out a couple of times, heard nothing, then hotfooted it back to the patrol car and the radio and called for help.
“It was a hell of an operation. Fire trucks, tow truck, ambulance, sheriff’s patrol. Everybody was out there. Two firefighters went down on ropes and said there was a body inside, beyond help. Took an hour and a half to get it back to the ambulance. It was dawn before they got the car back up. One of the deputies knew the family and went to tell them. I went back to the office because the commander had told me to write it up right away. I wasn’t sure how to do that, because I had the distinct feeling something wasn’t right.”
“That can happen to people who know their business,” Peter said. “Happens with doctors a lot. Why were you dissatisfied?”
Davies spoke slowly and carefully. “I’d been on the job two years at that point. I had a good feel for every stretch of road in the county. And one of the things I’d come to believe is that it isn’t the tight, dangerous stretches of road that kill people. That’s where drivers get cautious and slow down. It’s the flat, open roads that are dangerous, because that’s where they get careless and take chances. So I really don’t know why I thought of an accident at that spot that night. I’d never seen anyone go off the road there. Not a tourist in the dead of summer; not a teenager going too fast; not a drunk coming home in a snowstorm. Just didn’t happen. Then you get someone like Ned London, who’s lived here all his life, doing it. It didn’t feel right.”
“Had he been drinking?” Gordon said.
“When they did the autopsy, his blood-alcohol level was .08.”
“So he was legally drunk.”
“Not then, he wasn’t. You’re probably too young to remember, but in those days the presumptive limit for intoxication was .15.” Gordon whistled. “I know. It was lowered to .10 not long afterward, and then to .08 when Mothers Against Drunk Driving came along. But Ned London was careful and knew the road. He shouldn’t have run off it with that amount of alcohol in him. And there was something else.”
He looked at Gordon and Peter.
“When they finally got that car back to the road, it was pretty beat up, as you’d expect if it had rolled over a couple of times going down that cliff. But on the driver’s side there was a different colored patch of paint, not more than six inches long and a couple of inches high. That car had collided with something else beside the side of the cliff.”
“But could you say when?” Peter asked.
“That’s just it. You couldn’t. I noted the paint mark in the original report and went out for breakfast. When I came back, the captain wanted to see me. He pointed out what you just did — that it could have happened earlier and might have had nothing to do with the accident. And he pressed me on whether there was anything else at the scene that would indicate that Ned London’s car had collided with something else before going over the edge. I had to admit there wasn’t. The captain told me to take out the part about the paint. Said it could cause an uproar for no good reason, and that we were unlikely to ever find out where it had come from. I didn’t like it, but I followed the order.”
“That wasn’t by the book, was it?” Gordon said.
“No, but back then a lot of stuff wasn’t by the book. If you pulled over someone from a good family late at night and they were drunk, you’d tell them to take it slow getting home. That sort of thing. Leaving a detail out of an accident report to avoid a fuss fit right in.”
“What do you think really happened?”
“What I think is that Ned London’s car was sideswiped by another vehicle, and that’s what sent him over the edge. I couldn’t tell you if it was accidental or deliberate, and I can’t prove a thing. But that’s what I think.”
Davies rose, stepped to a filing cabinet on the right side of his desk, removed a sheet of paper from a manila folder, and set it on the desk in front of Gordon.
“I saved the original page 3 of the report. The page where I mentioned the paint streak. You can have a copy if you’d like, but I’d appreciate if you didn’t tell anybody where it came from.”
Gordon thanked him and put the paper in his messenger bag. There seemed to be no more to say, and after a pause, they rose to leave. As they reached the door, Peter stopped and turned back to Davies.
“Could I ask one more thing? The guardrail that’s on that stretch of road now. When did it get put in?”
“Fall of 1975. I can tell you without a doubt. It was in the budget approved that summer.” He paused. “Bart Sturges was elected to the Assembly in 1974, and the appropriation for that guardrail was the first bill he introduced when he took office.”
THEY ROLLED INTO ADAMS just before one o’clock and stopped for lunch. The town, tucked into a small valley, with houses hugging the surrounding hillsides, was originally built as a stop on the Hawk River Railroad and had the look of a village in the mountains of New England, especially in the fall when the trees changed color. The railroad hadn’t carried passengers or mail for years, and the abandoned station had been converted into the Old Station Café and Deli.
After ordering soup and sandwiches, they sat at a table on the outdoor deck. The lunch crowd was beginning to thin out, and they felt comfortable talking.
“What do you make of it?” Gordon said.
“He seemed pretty certain,” said Peter. “He could be wrong, of course, but as a general rule, I’d tend to go with the hunch of a veteran cop. The good ones have a sixth sense about that sort of thing.”
Gordon nodded. “And he seemed like a good one. I wonder what Charlotte would have thought if she’d talked to him.”
“She was already suspicious. He’d have just confirmed the suspicion.”
“Still, it doesn’t move us forward very far. It’s just a hunch. Even if he’s right about Ned London being run off the road, there’s nothing to say who did it. Any ideas?”
“From the opportunity standpoint, you have to like the Paris family. He was leaving their house. They knew he was going to be on that stretch of road.”
“All right, but we’ve also seen from our friend who smashed my car window how easy it is to follow someone without being noticed. And what would their motive be? They were partners; they all had the same stake in the project.”
“Be that as it may, he was going to their house to express his disagreement with something involving Crocker Bank. What if the disagreement was so serious that Ned London had to go?”
“Over a question of financing? Hardly seems like a reason to kill someone, even in the heat of the moment.”
“Let’s put it to the group,” Peter said. “Maybe someone will think of something.”
The food arrived, and after a couple of bites, Peter turned the conversation in another direction.
“At the meeting last night,” he said, “did you pick up on what I did? When you were talking about Charlotte’s journal, every woman in the room, without being prompted, volunteered an abortion story from her own experience. It obviously struck a chord and shows how common it is.”
“And how seldom we hear about it.” Gordon shook his head. “A horrible situation Charlotte was in. I’m glad
I didn’t have to make the decision she did.”
“She chose not to be a character in one of the books she taught.” Gordon raised his eyebrows, and Peter continued. “The Scarlet Letter. Pretty obvious, really. Now all we have to do is figure out who was playing the part of Dimmesdale.”
“Easier said than done. About all we know is that there was an age discrepancy.” He took a bite of his sandwich and chewed it carefully. “I’ve been thinking about that whole age issue a lot the past few days.”
“I wonder why.”
“It’s another reason I’m glad I’m not a woman. I mean, I hate to say it, but most of the time they’re smarter and tougher than we are, and all it gets them is a disproportionate amount of grief. And some of it begins with assumptions. El is 12 years older than I am, and if we got into a serious relationship, nearly everyone would think it was ‘off’ somehow. Not right. But if I started going out with her daughter … ”
“Not that you would.”
“Not my type. Anyway, if I started going out with Anna, who’s 13 years younger than me, no one would bat an eye. Where’s the fairness in that?”
“There isn’t any. Next question.”
“It’s funny. You and I come up here and find ourselves charmed by El and Gina —women older than we are. The journal is ambiguous on the point, but Charlotte may have been older than her lover. And in the family history, her great-grandmother was older than her husband by a few years. This place is like the forest in Midsummer Night’s Dream, where enchantment’s in the air.”
“As a man of science, I’d be more inclined to ascribe it to coincidence than enchantment. And in the case of Charlotte’s great-grandmother, I doubt it caused much comment,” Peter said. “There weren’t a lot of single women in those frontier towns. The few who chanced it held the whip hand when it came to choosing a mate.”
They ate in silence for a few minutes.
“So,” said Gordon, “speaking of women, just how bad off are you after Saturday night?”
“Pretty bad, I’m afraid. I called Stella this morning and left a message offering to try to patch things up. It’s a long shot, I know, but I have to at least try. We’ll see.”
“You said you had alcohol on your breath. She might be taking that worse than she took Gina.”
“Could be. A big part of the reason I didn’t drink for three months was her influence. She’s been good for me, and I hope she can forgive. I don’t expect it, and she’d be justified if she didn’t. But I can still hope.”
BACK IN ARTHUR, Gordon parked at Stanhope House. Peter went in to rest, and Gordon walked to the newspaper office. El was on the phone, but waved him into her work area. He took a seat at a chair next to her desk.
“You’re absolutely right, Mrs. Mooney,” she was saying. “We’ll do everything we can to get to the bottom of this. You can rest assured of that.”
She rolled her eyes as the person on the other end replied.
“No, we won’t involve the sheriff. If you’re right, he’s part of the conspiracy.”
The reply to this went on for three minutes. El was taking no notes and made typing motions on the desk with her free hand.
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” she finally said. “Do you have any other information we can follow up on?”
Judging from the time that elapsed before El spoke again, the answer to the question was neither a simple yes or no.
“All right, then. Well, I have to be going if I’m going to look into this. You take care, Mrs. Mooney, and be careful.
Another long pause.
“Right. You, too. Bye now.”
She hung up and shook her head. “Thelma Mooney,” she said. “She calls around this time every Monday.”
“So what, exactly, are you going to look into for her?”
“Nothing, actually. It was a community service call. You see, she’s convinced Bart Sturges and Sheriff Ballou kidnapped and murdered her son and buried him in the lawn behind the courthouse.”
Gordon blinked. “How do you know they didn’t?” he finally said.
“Because I talk to her son at least once a month. Twenty-five years ago, he married a girl she didn’t approve of and moved to Sacramento. Over the years, Mrs. Mooney has gradually drifted deeper and deeper into senility and woven an increasingly elaborate story about what happened to her son. Thing is, he calls her every Sunday night and a couple of times during the week. But by Monday afternoon she’s forgotten and calls to ask me to do a story.”
“I suppose there’s no avoiding it?”
“I’m sure I could. But as I say, it’s community service. A small-town newspaper is a place people can call to let off steam. It probably makes her feel better for a while to think something’s being done about it.” She sighed. “She hardly gets out any more, and her husband isn’t doing too well. I don’t know what’s going to happen to her when he goes.”
There was a half-cup of coffee on her desk, and she stuck a finger into it.
“Piping hot when she called and stone cold now. Did you find out anything in Cabrillo?”
“Nothing concrete, but an affirmation.” He paused. “Davies thinks someone may have run Ned London off the road the night he died.”
She whistled. “So Charlotte may have been onto something?”
“Possibly. The main thing is that there was a trace of paint on the driver’s side of Ned’s car. Davies put it in the original report, but the captain made him take it out. He said there’s no evidence the paint transfer happened in connection with this accident and mentioning it could cause a fuss over nothing. Thing is, the captain was right. Not about taking the paint mark out of the report, I mean, but about there being no evidence it was connected with the crash that killed Ned. But Davies’ gut tells him there was a connection. He gave me a copy of the original page of that report, as he wrote it.”
“Can I see?”
As Gordon opened his messenger bag, the phone rang again. El slammed her desk in exasperation.
“Honest to God,” she said. “Some days I want to take a gun and shoot this thing.” She lifted the receiver, forced a smile onto her face and said, in a voice that would melt butter, “Elke Sundstrom. How can I help you? Adam! (to Gordon) It’s Adam Beckstein. Thank you so much for calling. No, no. This is a really good time. Listen, I have a gentleman named Quill Gordon here who’s helping me on this story … Yeah, just like the trout fly. Can I put you on speaker?”
She punched a button. A male voice with a pleasing baritone came over.
“So you want to know about The Peninsulas, eh?”
“That’s the long and short of it,” she said.
“Lucky for you I remember it like it was yesterday. My first really big story, and for a reporter that’s like your first lover. You don’t forget. But there was a lot to it. Did you have a specific question?”
El looked at Gordon and nodded.
“Gordon speaking, Adam. I guess to get right to the point, I’ve been wondering, after looking through the records, about Bart Sturges’ voting to approve it. It seemed to take a lot of people by surprise. Do you remember how it struck you at the time?”
After a brief pause, Beckstein said, “Before I answer that, let’s be clear on something. I’m talking to you on background, and you’re not going to quote me or use my name in connection with any story, right?”
“No problem,” said El.
“In that case, I have to tell you I thought it was pretty fishy, but I couldn’t prove a thing. And six months later, I moved on to a bigger paper and left that story behind. But I still remember the look of total shock on Celia Strickland’s face when Sturges started reading the speech — and he was reading from a script, no doubt about it — saying he was going to vote yes.”
“Did you grill him about it?” said El.
“Oh, I tried to pin him down, all right, but he was slipperier than a wet trout. He stuck to the technicality that he’d never actually said he opposed the project,
which was strictly true. But I can tell you that sure wasn’t the impression the community had.”
“Was there anything else that made it look fishy?” Gordon asked.
Beckstein thought about it for a minute. “It doesn’t prove anything, and it’s only my impression, but it seemed to me that during that public hearing, Sturges and the Paris family were exchanging glances and maybe a hand signal or two. It wasn’t something you could put in an objective news story, but I don’t think it was just my imagination.”
Gordon and El looked at each other.
“But if you think this was suspicious,” Beckstein continued, “there’s one other question you should be asking.”
“Shoot,” said Gordon.
“In 1974, Bart Sturges came out of nowhere to win an election for State Assembly. When he announced his candidacy, he already had the best Sacramento political consultant working for him. That didn’t come cheap. If it were me, I’d be asking how a cow county lawyer, whose only political experience was being on said cow county’s board of supervisors, came up with that sort of money.”
“Wouldn’t it have been on the campaign financial statements?” said El.
“The reforms triggered by Watergate hadn’t come in yet,” Beckstein said. “The campaign statements back then were pretty vague. You probably wouldn’t get much from them. But to start a campaign with the kind of professional help Sturges did, he’d have needed at least a hundred grand in today’s money. Probably 25 to 30 thousand back then. I don’t think his three-man law firm was doing enough business to rack up that kind of surplus.”
“But to someone who just got a million-dollar development approved … ” said Gordon.
“At least a million,” Beckstein said.
“Twenty five thousand would have been petty cash,” El said.
Beckstein was silent for a moment, before replying.
“You said that. Not me.”
WHEN GORDON CALLED THE MEETING to order, he wanted to begin with his report of the meeting with Davies. But Alice was crawling out of her skin with something she wanted to share, and in the interest of involving the entire group, Gordon let her go first.
Not Death, But Love (Quill Gordon Mystery Book 3) Page 24
