The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller

by Jack Lynch

  Then I phoned Carol Jean Mackey, the receptionist-secretary I share with a couple of attorneys named Sloe and Morrisey in offices on Market Street. I asked Ceejay to make some calls to postpone some things, then I looked up the number of Coast West Insurance. The main office was over on California Street, just above the financial district. I dialed the number and asked if there were a Mr. Stoval working there. I was put through to a secretary.

  "Mr. Stoval's office..."

  "Hi, my name's Peter Bragg. I'm a private investigator working on something I think your Mr. Stoval might be able to help me with. It's pretty important, Miss..."

  "Benson."

  "Miss Benson. I'd like to see him for a few minutes, before he goes to lunch, if possible. I could be over there in about ten minutes."

  "Ummmm. He is one busy man today, Mr. Bragg. Maybe if you could give me some hint as to what it's about..."

  "The missing Jerry Lind."

  "I see. Please hold the line."

  It took a couple of minutes.

  "Mr. Bragg? It's all set. He can see you at twenty to twelve."

  "Thank you very much. Was he on another phone or did you have to talk him into it?"

  "I had to do some talking. We're on the fourth floor."

  "I'm in your debt, Miss Benson. By the way, what end of the operation is Mr. Stoval concerned with?"

  "The same as you, Mr. Bragg. Investigations."

  TWO

  Jerry Lind worked out of a wide, carpeted office with desks on the left for girls and desks on the right for the fellows. At the deep end of the room, denoting where the power was on the fourth floor, were glass-enclosed individual offices overlooking California Street. The receptionist summoned Stoval's secretary. Miss Benson turned out to be a woman about Janet Lind's age. She had longish legs and a pleasant face, but her hair was done up in a severe bun and she wore eyeglasses with sensible frames.

  "I'm Miss Benson. Will you follow me, please?"

  "Sure. And thanks again for the help earlier."

  She gave me a little smile over her shoulder. Miss Benson was dressed conservatively, in a dark blue skirt and a loose-fitting, high-necked blouse. But she had a pretty smile and a lilting swing to her walk.

  About a third of the men's desks and all of the women's were occupied. Some of the fellows were on the phone, others riffling through folders. An older guy with gray-streaked hair and a tube of stomach hanging over his belt stood to stretch. He sat back down and stared at his desk top with faint distaste.

  "Here we are, Mr. Bragg." She ushered me into one of the glass cubicles and quietly closed the door behind me. The man behind the desk half rose and extended his hand.

  "Bragg? I'm Stoval." The sign on his desk said his first name was Emil. He didn't look like an Emil. He looked younger than Miss Benson. He had a strong grip and a round face with an alert expression. Some of his hair was missing.

  "Nice of you to see me, Mr. Stoval. I've been hired by Jerry Lind's sister to find him. She said he's missing."

  "Either that or he's being damn secretive about his work. I haven't heard from him in nearly two weeks."

  "Has he ever done anything like this before?"

  "Certainly not."

  "What's his job?"

  "Standard insurance investigation. We review death policies, run checks on bonding applicants, look into theft, fire and auto accident claims."

  "Did Lind have a background for it?"

  "Not really. He spent some time with Army intelligence, but that was mostly code work. This isn't a top-dollar job. We can take any reasonably bright young man and train him ourselves. People with too much experience, ex-cops say, don't always project the image the company tries to maintain."

  "Do you think he could have been on company business when he disappeared?"

  "Why should I think that?"

  "I understand he said something to his wife about leaving town on business."

  "A man tells his wife many things, Bragg."

  "When you smile like that, Mr. Stoval, are you implying there's a reason to believe Jerry wasn't telling the truth?"

  The smile went away and Stoval leaned forward. "I'm not implying anything. All I know is that the man's AWOL. He has been for two weeks. When he shows up he might have a perfectly good explanation for staying out of the office. Until I hear from him I'm not judging one way or the other."

  "Has he gone out of town on business in the past?"

  "Certainly."

  "When he did, would he phone in from time to time?"

  "Up until now he did."

  "Have you tried tracing his movements?"

  "I've phoned his wife a few times asking about him."

  "That's all?"

  "Listen, Bragg, you seem very determined to place the company and myself in some position of responsibility in this matter."

  "It might work out that way."

  "But Lind's job is a standard nine-to-five, five-day-a-week job. He dropped out of sight over the weekend. Until somebody proves differently, I have to assume it's a personal matter."

  "Does the company carry a policy on him?"

  "Yes. The same as it does for all the employees."

  "What sort of salary does he make?"

  "That we keep confidential."

  "What are you doing about his pay, since he's not here to pick up his check?"

  "We mail it to his wife."

  "How long will that go on, provided he stays missing?"

  "That's not for me to decide."

  I shook my head with a smile. "You're sure as hell casual about it."

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean one of your men is missing. A man in one of the occupations allied to cops and robbers. He's not a peddler or a tuba player, Mr. Stoval, but an investigator. Now if I were in your place and one of my men dropped out of sight for even two days, let alone two weeks, I'd be off and looking for him."

  "Very heroic, Bragg, but I think it's nonsense. As I said, there's nothing to link his disappearance to his job. Therefore, under company policy, my hands are tied."

  "Maybe so, during working hours."

  "That's not fair. Besides, Lind wouldn't get himself into anything of a dangerous nature. This is an old and conservative company. Our men have orders to avoid anything that even smells of danger. If they have any suspicion of illegal activity they report back here and we bring in the police. And believe me, we impress our people with the firmness of that policy. There's no reason to think young Lind would have ignored it."

  "What sort of man is he?"

  Stoval shrugged. "Pleasant enough. He dressed well, spoke well. Was a team player. That's another thing. Jerry wasn't too adventuresome. If anything, he was a bit more conservative than most men his age today. I don't think he'd take any gambles in his work."

  "I hope you're right. Can you tell me what he was working on two weeks ago?"

  Stoval looked at his watch. "I'll just have time to show you before my luncheon appointment."

  "It would be kind of you."

  The insurance man rummaged through a lower drawer of his desk and brought out a slender folder. He lifted out three forms. I thought I saw a fourth that he left in the folder.

  "It was a light caseload at the time," Stoval said. "These are all minor matters."

  "Mind telling me about them?"

  Stoval went through the three sheets. "One was an auto theft out in the Sunset. Victim's name is Jonathan Thorpe. Twenty-nine twenty Klondike. The car was a new Mercedes. It was reported missing three weeks ago."

  I made notes.

  "Then there was a small painting stolen from a traveling exhibit at the Legion Palace Museum. Owner of the painting is a man living in Santa Barbara, but the policy is carried by the museum people."

  "How much was it insured for?"

  Stoval tilted his head and pinched one lip. "We're out a thousand if it isn't recovered. The work itself isn't appraised that highly." He studied the third sheet with a frown. "This
is a home fire claim, but hell, I think I had one of the other men handle it." He went back into his file drawer and extracted another folder. He took a sheet from it and clipped it to the one from Lind's folder.

  "Yes, that's closed. So there's really only the two." He looked at his watch again. "Afraid now I must leave, Bragg. Nice to have met you."

  We touched palms and I left the glass box. I looked around for Miss Benson, but the floor was deserted except for a different receptionist up front. It was two minutes past noon. I took an elevator back to the street floor. The sidewalks were crowded with furloughed office workers. I trotted across California Street in front of a dinging cable car and was about to go into the parking garage where I'd left my car when I saw the older gentleman from Coast West with the gray-streaked hair and paunch. He was standing between Banyon's Cafe and a bar called the Silver Lode. He made a couple of false starts toward each, looked up the street with a frown and finally went into the bar. I followed. The bartender was just putting a drink down in front of him when I squeezed in beside him.

  "Can I pay for that?" I put some money on the bar.

  "Why should you?"

  "I can use some help. You just saw me up talking to Stoval. The name's Bragg."

  The man introduced himself as Wallace and lifted his glass with a shrug. I ordered a beer.

  "I'm trying to get a lead on what might have happened to Jerry Lind. Stoval wasn't much help."

  "What's supposed to have happened to Jerry Lind?" He spoke with an accent that sounded lonely for New York.

  "Nobody seems to know, but he hasn't been seen or heard from for a couple of weeks. Didn't you notice?"

  "Not especially. He spends a lot of time out of the office."

  "Don't all of you?"

  "Not as much as him."

  "You an investigator too?"

  "That's right."

  "How long have you been with the firm?"

  "Fifteen hilarious years."

  "That's a long time. Still like the job?"

  "Not all that much. But fifteen years is quite an investment. They have a nice retirement plan."

  "Is it a good outfit to work for?"

  So-so.

  "Do you have a family?"

  "I thought you wanted to ask about Jerry Lind."

  "I do. But I don't know anything about him. I figured if I could find out a little bit about his job—same as yours—I could learn something about him."

  "It wouldn't help that much," Wallace said. "We're a varied bunch."

  "So, okay, what can you tell me about Jerry?"

  "Not a whole lot. I feel he's sort of a lightweight, myself. Personable, but not too bright. But the company doesn't seem to care. Rather, Stoval doesn't."

  "About the jobs you do?"

  "It's not the same with all of us."

  "You mean there was something special about the relationship between Lind and Stoval?"

  "That's not exactly what I said. But I don't think I want to pursue that."

  "Have a heart, Wallace. If you didn't have anything personal against Lind yourself, why not help out? I think the kid's in trouble."

  Wallace turned to study me. "What makes you say that?"

  "Things I turned up so far indicate he had good reason not to drop out of sight. I don't think he would have done so voluntarily. I haven't the vaguest idea what might have happened to him, but I think he needs help. I'd like to give it to him."

  "You a friend of the family, or what?"

  "Sorry. Private cop. Should have told you before."

  I opened my wallet and he studied the photostat. "Peter Bragg, huh? I have a friend in robbery over at the hall. Name's Mueller. Know him?"

  "Not personally. Might have met him some time or other. Why?"

  "We got into a discussion about private cops one time. Your name came up."

  He turned back to the bar. There wasn't much left in his glass to swirl around the ice. I signaled for the bartender to bring him another.

  "I can't help you much, except for one thing," Wallace said. "And that's just speculation. I wouldn't want anyone else to know I even had such a rotten thought."

  "Done."

  "The job used to be a little better than it is now. One of the reasons was the outside work was spread a little more evenly among the staff. It's a pleasant break, you know, leaving the filing cabinets and telephones for a while."

  "Sure."

  "Then about eighteen months ago the department head retired and they brought up this guy Stoval, from L.A. One of the first things he did was throw a little party for the staff and our spouses, to blow off about what a swell working family we all were going to be.

  "Not long after that a funny thing started happening. There seemed to be a trend of giving most of the outside work—things that would take you out of town for a few days—to a small group of the younger guys. Somebody mentioned it in a kidding way one time when Stoval could overhear it. He said something about us senior guys being more valuable for our brains than our feet. Curiously, a couple of us older hands noted one day over a drink after work that the guys who got most of the out-of-town assignments had the best-looking wives sitting at home, pining away the lonely hours. Or whatever."

  "Did you ever notice anything concrete in that way? Whatever it was you old hands might have suspected?"

  "Just once. There was one young fellow, a go-getter named Harry Sund. His was a nice looking woman. Real nice. After one of Sund's out-of-town jobs he came steaming into the office and flat out quit. None too gently. He marched into Stoval's office and hung over the boss's desk. There were rumors from the people nearest the office at the time that Sund threatened to stuff the out-of-town folders up Mr. Stoval's ass. Then Sund turned and marched out of the office, never to be seen again, with Mr. Stoval sitting there with his face about the shade of a fresh Bloody Mary."

  "Tell me something about Mrs. Lind. Is she an attractive woman?"

  Wallace looked up at me with heavy brows over the rim of his drink. "Let me put it this way, Bragg. I had occasion to dance a slow number with her at the company party I mentioned. It gave me the first erection I'd had in a month." He stood a little straighter, thinking about it.

  "But as for anything more definite," he continued, raising his fresh drink in toast, "like I said. It would be but the wildest speculation on my part."

  THREE

  I went over to my own office to make more phone calls, ask more questions and wait for answers. Back when I worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, the paper kept a back file of several other newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. It turned out they still did, and a friend called back later to tell me he'd found Milton Lind's obituary in the Times of June 10. He'd been a minor league land speculator. His only survivors were the niece and nephew in Northern California. Another call to a credit rating outfit I subscribe to brought the news that Jerry Lind had a normal load of debts which he handled with no difficulty.

  I didn't have much luck trying to reach the fellow who ran the Legion Palace Museum, a man named Bancroft. He either was on another phone or too busy to talk the several times I called. The last time, I was told he was gone for the day but that he'd be in for a half day on Saturday.

  I also tried to reach a man in Southern California who was an executive officer with Coast West Insurance Co. I hadn't seen the need to tell Emil Stoval about it, but I knew a little bit about the company's operations myself. Stoval had been wrong when he said the company always went to the police when something tricky came up. Sometimes they went to private investigators to do jobs they didn't want their own men to handle, or for matters involving internal operations. I had done such a job for them two years earlier. I'd gotten all the breaks and the company had liked the way I handled it. I hoped the executive I'd dealt with then would still be grateful and willing to give me a little information about Stoval. As it turned out, the man I wanted had already left the office for the weekend. So much for trying to do a job on a Friday afternoon.<
br />
  It was after three when I drove north to Marin County and the town of Larkspur. It was a warm day, steaming out things that had been drenched in a surprise rainstorm the night before. Lind's address was on a street off Madrone. I knew the area. Madrone wound up a wooded canyon climbing toward Mt. Tamalpais. There were a lot of older homes in the area, some of them ramshackle enough to offer lower rents. They attracted kids with misplaced minds who strummed guitars and didn't worry about tomorrow. It wasn't really an area where you'd expect to find a man who worked for an old line, conservative insurance company. But then it wasn't easy to find reasonable rents in Marin County any longer, either. Every time they put up another office building in downtown San Francisco, rents rose thirty miles away.

  The Lind home was up at the end of an asphalt street with the closest neighbors fifty yards below. The house was a newer structure, a one-story frame building perched on stilts punched into the hillside. I parked out front behind a blue Karmann Ghia, climbed up a lot of stairs and rang the bell. I stood there a while waiting for somebody to answer, but it was worth the wait. The girl who opened the door was small, part Oriental and very cute. She wore her glistening black hair in a long ponytail. She had a saucy face with bright, alert eyes and a full mouth that looked ready to surprise you. I couldn't tell about her body. She wore a loosely belted, white terrycloth robe.

  "Mrs. Lind?"

  "Yes?"

  "My name's Bragg. I'm a private investigator." I held out the wallet. "I've been hired to look for Jerry."

  She stared at me for a moment. "All right," she said at last. "Come along out back if you want."

  She unlocked the screen door and turned to lead me through the house. "Excuse the mess. I had a little birthday party for a girlfriend last night. Haven't had a chance to clean up."

  The front room was a mess. There were overflowing ashtrays, glasses with liquid residue, chip dip gone bad and the aroma of stale good times. A couple of unmatching shoes were near the sofa and a pair of woman's underpants in a chair nearby.

  "Looks as if everyone had a pretty good time." I followed her through a devastated kitchen and out onto a stone patio.