by Susan Dunlap
“One-eleven.” He surveyed me top to bottom, sweater to jeans. His expression, as he pointed to the corridor behind him, said that tastes vary.
I could have had the desk clerk call Sugarbaker and ask him to meet me at the restaurant instead of charging along to his room. But I only needed to know what Alison had been doing at the bar and how long she was doing it. That would take two minutes. If I waited for him to get himself in shape to face breakfast, I might have to wait until noon.
I knocked on the door of room 111. There was no answer. Surely he hadn’t gone out. He should have been in no shape to go anywhere this morning. I knocked again.
It was on the fifth knock (loud enough that the man across the hall looked out) that Sugarbaker pulled the door open. I had expected him to be hung over, but he was beyond that. He looked barely human. His sandy hair hung down over his forehead in oily clumps. His eyelids were puffy and his eyes barely visible. His color was appropriate for one who deals with cesspools.
“Did I get you up?” I asked.
“I should be so lucky.” He made his way back to the bed, pulling his maroon cotton bathrobe tighter around him and trying to re-tie the belt. “Alcohol keeps me awake. I manage to forget that while I’m drinking. I don’t remember till I climb into bed. Then I collapse and in half an hour I wake up sweating and spend the rest of the night thinking how lousy I feel, and how lousy I’m going to feel.”
I stood for a moment, again amazed at how he could look so wasted and sound so lucid. Then I propped all four pillows behind him. “Lie back against these.” Picking up the phone, I asked for room service and ordered a large tomato juice with lots of Worcestershire sauce, a piece of dry grain bread, and a mix of egg yolk, salmon, and spinach, steamed.
“Yuck,” Sugarbaker managed to get out.
“Trust me. I used to be an account executive. Dealing with hangovers is ground-floor knowledge. I could explain what each ingredient is for—”
“Spare me that at least.” He sprawled back against the pillows. A moan flowed from his mouth as a consequence of the movement.
I pulled the one padded chair over and sat. “Last night you were telling me about Michelle Davidson…”
His eyes opened slightly. He stared at me. “Oh, you’re the one in the bar.”
I was tempted to ask who he thought I was, but most likely he hadn’t thought at all.
“Right. Did Michelle seem nervous, or frightened, or worried?”
His eyes returned to their nearly closed position. I couldn’t tell whether he was considering his answer or going to sleep. Finally, he said, “No.”
“Not worried, or nervous, or frightened?”
“Just teed off. She just wanted to know about her larvae.” He pushed himself up, propped himself on his elbow, and focused his barely opened eyes on me. “I told her how things work. See there was no perk test done of that property and that—”
“What’s a perk test?”
“Perk tests test the soil, its ability to handle water coming into it—how the water percolates into it.”
“Oh, and then how much it would absorb the water from the cesspool?”
“Right. But they’ve only been required for the last few years. Before that you could put a cesspool on cement and no one would care.”
I didn’t see that the absorption of the soil was likely to affect Michelle’s death. “What else did you talk about?”
“I told her what a cesspool is. It’s just a redwood box. A lot of people, even people who grew up with them, don’t know that. It’s usually about four-by-six. The outlet pipe that leads to the leach lines is high enough so that only the water and the bacteria flow out.”
“The bacteria goes into the soil?” I asked, appalled.
His cheeks moved with the hint of a smile. “A lot of people are shocked. We’ve even had people go out and dig up their vegetable gardens and throw everything out.”
I could understand that.
“The bacteria in the soil eats the bacteria in the effluent. By the time the water penetrates the soil it’s sterile.”
“I’ll take your word for that.”
“A lot of people are skeptical. They don’t know the first thing about containers. Some people think that they have to change their cesspools every year, and other people expect one redwood box to last a lifetime.”
“How long should one last?”
“Thirty years, given normal use. Of course, you move in eight or ten people and you’re going to fill up sooner.”
I thought of Ward McElvey’s cesspool. His father-in-law had been digging the hole for it when he died. That was eight years ago. I asked, “Did Michelle mention that her neighbor’s cesspool was only eight years old?”
“Oh, yeah. I told her that was real odd. Those people must either have had lots of guests or terrible bowels.” Again there was the hint of a smile. I assumed intestinal humor came with the job at Environmental Health. “They should have had a perk test done before they put it in. Some soil just won’t percolate enough.”
“But everyone else on that block has cesspools or septic tanks and they’re not overrunning their leach lines.”
“A lot of people think that way.” He nodded didactically. “But soil isn’t the same from one yard to the next. One place you’ve got a spring, another place a hidden rock formation. It’s nothing for an amateur to deal with.”
It was already more than I wanted to know.
“Michelle was real interested. She understood.”
There was a knock on the door. I opened it and told the boy to put the tray on the bed.
No longer supported by the stimulation of sewage, Sugarbaker slumped back against the pillows.
I tipped the boy.
“Sit up,” I said to Sugarbaker. “How’s your head?”
“Three sizes too small for my brain.”
I took a bottle of Tylenol from my purse. “Take two with your juice.” I put the glass in one of his hands and the pills in the other. “Take a drink first.”
He sniffed the Worcestershire-heavy juice. “Yuck.”
“Don’t talk, drink.”
He sipped tentatively then downed the pills. His eyes opened.
It occurred to me that this was the first time I’d really seen his eyes. They were brown. I took the glass and handed him the plate.
He looked down. His mouth started to form a “Yuck” but he caught himself before he said it. With the same amount of belief that I had had in the soil bacteria eating the effluent bacteria, he looked at the salmon, spinach, and yolk mixture that sat atop the grain bread. He forked a tiny bite and chewed as if every move of his jaw hurt. Staring down at his plate, he said, “This looks like it’s been eaten before.”
“Beauty is only skin deep.”
He forked another bite.
“You remember the woman you saw at the bar—the woman with the overalls and the wild blond hair?”
He continued to chew. “Yeah, the one Michelle got so mad about.”
“What was she doing there, in the bar?”
He took another swallow of juice. His brow scrunched. He stared at me. “Hey, you were with that jerk of a sheriff, weren’t you? I remember now. They told me that after you left. Made me feel like a real fool. I thought you helped me, but you didn’t. You were with him.”
“It was a mistake. I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
“Big deal. Sorry! That didn’t stop that jerk from dragging me outside.”
“I’m sorry. If I’d known—”
“And then you walked out on me.”
“You were drunk. You do remember that.”
“And now you barge in here when I feel like hell.”
“And I give you medicine and get you breakfast.”
“Just get out.”
I hesitated. I’d already been thrown out once this morning. But I needed to know about Alison. “Tell me about the woman at the bar first.”
“I’m not telling you
another thing.”
But I had one more bit of leverage. “That county car in the lot, that’s yours, right? It’s easy to check. You brought it here Thursday, right? It’s going to be hard enough for you to explain why you’ve still got it Saturday morning. I’m sure Environmental Health doesn’t work on weekends, not checking mosquito larvae.”
“I have other inspections here.”
“Saturday inspections?”
“Listen—”
“I’m also sure you don’t want Environmental Health to know you were driving the county car after the sheriff told you you were too drunk to get behind the wheel.”
“Damn you!”
“The woman in the bar. How long was she there?”
He sat clutching his plate. Briefly I wondered if he might throw it like Craig had the vase. Finally he said, “Not long. She only came in to buy a bottle of wine. That doesn’t take more than five minutes.”
“You saw her come and go?”
“Come and go,” he repeated.
“One more thing,” I said.
“Why not?”
“I saw you in Michelle’s yard yesterday morning and in the afternoon about four. You were looking down toward the sewer hole where the sheriff and Michelle’s husband and I were standing. If you’d already checked the garage, what were you doing there?”
“Can’t you guess?”
“Tell me.”
“I thought she’d be home. I didn’t expect her husband—”
“After she walked out of the bar?”
“Well, things seem different in daylight. We’d gotten along pretty well. She’s a real looker. I thought I’d tell her I’d come to do a view test of the soil, nothing real scientific, just eyeballing it.”
“Why did you leave all of a sudden?”
“Like you said, I saw the sheriff and a man. The man looked like he lived there. I didn’t want to find out.”
“And you’d parked up the hill on the next street, right?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to leave my car parked in front.” He took another bite of the salmon mixture. He seemed to have forgotten he was mad at me. “We got along real well, Michelle and me. She dug me, I could tell.” His brow scrunched again. He stared at me. “Hey, you said you were there. You and your friend the sheriff. What were you doing there? Meeting a woman isn’t illegal.”
“Michelle’s dead. They’d just taken her body out of the sewer hole.”
In one movement he flung the plate aside, clutched his mouth, and ran for the bathroom.
CHAPTER 15
SO ALISON HAD NOT been with Craig, slaving over the books all Thursday evening. She had been at the bar, albeit briefly. She’d been buying a bottle of wine. Was it to take back to the plant shop? I doubted it. If she’d bought a couple of beers I could accept that. A beer is what you’d want after hauling plants around the shop floor or going over the books till ten. You’d be hot, tired, anxious for a long cold drink. You wouldn’t want a sip of Chablis.
No, a bottle of wine is what Alison would buy for a client’s rendezvous. Wine was certainly easy to come by here, in Sonoma County, the wine country. But you couldn’t go to an empty house for a rendezvous and call out for it as if you were ordering pizza. Getting it there was the Bohemian Connection’s job.
Everything pointed to Alison as the Connection. She was the person Ross had stayed with. She knew his failings and still allowed him to live with her. He had brought her to Henderson during Bohemian Week when she could meet whomever she would need to know. She was strong, competent, and able to look after herself.
I needed to talk to Alison. Normally she would be in the shop, but that was closed. I knew where she lived—a boardinghouse on the block behind the PG&E office here in town. It was an old three-story clapboard building that looked like a transplanted Boston rowhouse—an undecorated rectangle chopped off at the property lines, and stark in spite of the eucalyptus trees and wild blackberry vines that filled the lot on either side. I had read the meter there often enough to have a sense of how small the rooms were. It was definitely not a place Alison would choose to spend a free Saturday afternoon.
And, after working all week with plants, I was willing to bet that the place that would appeal to Alison now would be bare of even grass—the beach.
An access road sloped down from North Bank Road to the beach. The pavement ended, and cars parked against the bank and in two rows between there and the concession stand. Beyond the stand the beach was filled with sunbathers. There were no parking spots left by this time, almost noon. I pulled up next to the concession stand and parked along the rear wall, hoping that I would be quick enough to avoid the sheriff’s patrol. That was one group I didn’t expect any special favors from.
I took off my shoes and rolled up the legs of my jeans. The beach was only about fifty yards wide. It was ample for a town the size of Henderson, and swamped by twice as many tourists. Making my way between blankets, chairs, and coolers required considerable concentration. Straight ahead were the beached canoes waiting to be rented. There were only five now, but by evening there would be ten times that number. Further out in the water a wooden raft rode low under the weight of children, swaying as they climbed on and tipping precariously close to the water line when they dove off.
I made my way to the west side of the beach near the summer dam. It was the dam that the town put in each summer to make the water deep enough to swim in. It was the same dam that had caught Ross’s mother’s body after her suicide. Alison lay on a blanket at the farthest point of the beach, almost in the parking area. She was wearing a shiny red bikini and lying on a yellow- and black-striped blanket. Her hair spread out from her head like ripples of corn-blond water.
The blanket was loud, the bathing suit skimpy for someone with a workman’s tan like hers, but on Alison it looked right, as if her pale shoulders and stomach only served to contrast with the bright red of the suit. Surveying the beach, I realized that Alison’s was the one blanket that stood out. Was that because of her natural stylishness or was it calculated to make it easier for those seeking the Bohemian Connection?
I made my way around two full-sized army blankets and waited while a family of grandparents, parents, aunts, and six children of various ages trooped in front of me to the river.
As I came to Alison’s blanket, she opened her eyes. She looked like a different person than the stylish woman who had been at Vida’s potluck dinner a few months ago, or even the woman who was working in the yard on Route 116 yesterday. She looked like a tired, older person. There were dark circles under her eyes and her hand shook as she reached for her sunglasses.
“You look exhausted,” I said.
“I didn’t get much sleep. It hasn’t been, well, it’s been pretty depressing at the shop.”
“I can imagine.”
“Craig’s not good at handling something like death,” she went on. “The Sheriff’s Department still has Michelle’s body. It’s in a funeral home. Did you know we don’t have a morgue in Sonoma County? Isn’t that amazing. I thought any place as large as Santa Rosa would have a morgue.”
“Is the coroner doing tests?”
“What?”
“On the body.” I couldn’t bring myself to refer to the body that was being cut up and analyzed as Michelle.
“Oh. I don’t know. Craig didn’t say. He just can’t plan for the funeral and he doesn’t know what to do.” Alison looked to be in the same shape. She stood up, reached down for a corner of the blanket and picked it up, holding it out as if she didn’t know how it had gotten in her hand. “I thought I’d sleep in the sun. But I wasn’t sleeping.”
Had she been up all night worrying about Craig? It wasn’t the response I would have expected from cool, controlled Alison. I could more easily believe she had been delivering marijuana or cocaine to errant chairmen of the board.
“Alison,” I said, “do you remember telling me that Ross brought you up here one weekend?”
She n
odded.
“When was that?”
If the abruptness of the question surprised her, she didn’t show it. She looked down at the blanket hanging from her hand. “It was just this time of year. I remember that because there was a party at Jim’s bar on a Saturday night. It was called the Bohemian Ball—the first and last, I understand. Jim thought it would be fun for the townspeople to have their own Bohemian festivities, so he arranged that. People were supposed to come dressed as bohemians, however they chose to define that. They may have come that way, but they left as drunks. By the time Ross and I cleared out the sheriff had been there four times and left with a carload three of those times.”
“What year was that?”
She shook the blanket and began folding it. “Not recent.”
“How not recent?”
“Not in the last couple of years.”
“Can you be more specific?”
She stood staring down at the blanket. “No. I can’t. I don’t have much of a sense of long-term time. I’m real reliable on what I have to do this week, maybe even this month. But I don’t think about the past much and it all runs together.”
“But surely—”
“No, believe me, Vejay. I’ve been through this type of thing before.”
“Okay then, on the more recent scene, you were in the bar Thursday night about ten, buying a bottle of wine. How come?”
For the first time she looked alert. She stopped with the blanket half-folded and stared at me. Then she continued to fold in silence.
“Craig told me you were never out of the shop that night. Why would he say that?”
“It was only ten minutes. He probably forgot.” She started toward the cars. “Did Michelle’s aunt put you up to asking that, Vejay? Because if she did—”
“Good weekend for some fun, eh girls?” Two men stood in our path. I had been so absorbed in my questions I hadn’t heard their footsteps. Alison almost walked into them. The speaker, a man of about fifty with styled hair and tan slacks, looked us over appraisingly and let his gaze come to rest on Alison. His companion, somewhat younger, but similarly dressed, watched nervously.
“How about a drink?” the spokesman asked.
