“Nossir,” he said to a point three feet on my left. “You don’t have to worry, I won’t want no trouble. I’m just a guy tryin to get along, that’s all.”
“Sure you are. Don’t be long, Mr. Barnwell.”
He went back past the ladder, moving sideways as if he were afraid to put his back to me, and disappeared inside the ground-floor apartment. A little time passed. I leaned against the wall next to the front door and smelled the building’s secretions and thought about Lawrence Jacobs and Frank Tucker. Names, just names. And meaningless descriptions that fit dozens of people whose paths had crossed mine at one time or another. Where did Jacobs fit into the short, unpleasant life of Jackie Timmons? And did Tucker fit into it at all?
Voices began to filter out through the wall from Apartment 1—loud voices that kept getting louder. Barnwell shouting, Maggie shouting back. Then there were other voices, something falling over, a yell of pain, a screech that evolved into the words “You stinking animal!” and finally, when the door down there opened and Barnwell reappeared, the steady sound of sobbing.
Barnwell looked pleased with himself as he approached me: The fat worm had turned, and in the process had discovered he still had some sting in his tail. He was a sweetheart, he was. People like him … what made them that way? But I knew the answer; the answer was simple. Life made them that way. The hard, bad, sad, grinding task of living the lives they had constructed for themselves.
When he got to where I was he looked me straight in the eye. He had beat up on his wife and that had dissolved most of his fear, made him a man again for a little while. He said, “She had Tucker’s address, all right I knocked it right out of her, the two-timing bitch.”
“Well?”
“Two-ten Poplar Street.”
“In Vacaville?”
“Yeah. He called her with it after he moved. She said it was innocent, he just wanted us to know in case any of his friends come around or mail showed up for him. But that’s bullshit. He never had no friends except Jacobs and he never got no mail.”
“When did she last hear from Tucker?”
“Right after he moved, she said. Maybe that’s bullshit too. She might of seen him yesterday, for all I know.”
“One more thing. What kind of car does Tucker drive?”
“Chrysler. New one. I dunno the model.”
“What color?”
“Brown.”
“I don’t suppose you noticed the license number?”
“Nab. Who notices license numbers?”
“All right, Mr. Barnwell. Just remember what I told you about making phone calls.”
“I’ll remember. Like I said before, I got nobody to call. And I’ll see to it she don’t call nobody neither, least of all Tucker. Make sure she don’t if I have to bust her fuggin arm for her.”
O. Barnwell, humanitarian. O. Barnwell, the Christian ideal.
AFTERNOON
Vacaville is a farming and ranching community off Highway 80, some thirty-five miles west of Sacramento. The literal translation of the name is cowtown, which is appropriate enough, but in fact the town was named after the Vacas, a family of Hispanic settlers in the area. A quiet place, Vacaville, plain and old-fashioned in looks and outlook, hot and dusty in the summer—one of those towns with plenty of history and yet no particular historical attraction for the modern tourist. The only reasons you’d go there were to visit friends or relatives, or business, or to see one of the inmates at the California Medical Correctional Facility nearby. On first reflection, you wouldn’t think somebody like Frank Tucker would want to live there. But if he was the kind of man Barnwell had painted him—hired muscle, more brawn than brain—it was exactly the type of town he might pick. For one thing, a few ranchers and farm owners still believed in taking a hard line with recalcitrant laborers, the ones who had the gall to fight for better than starvation wages; such bosses weren’t above hiring somebody to knock heads when the “wetbacks” and the “greasers” and the “chihuahuas” got out of hand. Another reason for Tucker to pick Vacaville was that the cost of living was relatively low, by California standards these days; and a third was that as long as you didn’t mug old ladies on the street or break up bars on Saturday nights, the local law probably wouldn’t pay any attention to you. It was also possible that Tucker had some reason—contacts, a close friend—for wanting to be close to the prison facility.
It was just one o’clock when I drove into the smallish downtown area. I stopped at a convenience store to ask directions to Poplar Street. It was a few blocks off the main drag—an older residential neighborhood, the sidewalks shaded by big leafy oaks and elms. The private houses were mostly of pre-World War II vintage, but a few newer homes and small apartment complexes had sprung up here and there, none of them particularly aesthetic: weeds in a mossy old garden. The apartment building at number 210 was a two-story, brown stucco affair that looked more like a cut-rate motel. Eight units, four up and four down, all the doors facing the street, the ones on the second level reachable by outside staircases and a long low-railed balcony along the front.
There was an asphalt parking area, just as you’d find at a motel; no trees, no shrubs, no flowers except for some potted plants next to one of the street-level apartments. I put the Toyota into a painted parking slot and went looking for mailboxes. No mailboxes. Each apartment bore a number and each one had a private mail slot. Number 2 downstairs, the one with the potted plants next to it, also bore a neatly hand-printed card in a brass holder: Manager. There was no doorbell, so I banged on the panel a couple of times. Nobody came to see what I wanted.
I turned away with the intention of talking to one of the other residents; there were three cars in the lot besides my rental. No, make that four: a green, low-slung Firebird with a woman at the wheel was just turning in off the street. It skidded into a space next to the Toyota and a round brown Spanish face topped by piles of shiny black hair poked out of the window and said in a gravelly voice with not much accent, “You looking for me?”
“I am if you’re the manager.”
“Hold on a minute.”
She got out of the Firebird in wiggly, puffing movements—a big woman in an orange flowered dress that made her look even bigger. She leaned back in for a bag of groceries, then waddled over to where I waited.
“I’m Mrs. Ruiz,” she said good-naturedly. “If you’re selling something, I don’t want it.” She paused for a beat and then said, “Not that you look much like a salesman.”
“I’m not. I’m looking for one of your neighbors.”
“Which one?”
“Frank Tucker.”
Her mouth got puckery, as if I’d squirted lemon juice along with the name. “Him,” she said. “You a friend of that bum?”
“No. I just want to talk to him.”
“Some kind of cop, right?”
“How did you guess that?”
“Only two kinds want to talk to Frank Tucker—cops and other bums. But you’re too late.”
“Too late?”
“He’s gone. Moved out.”
“When?”
“Couple of weeks ago, like a thief in the night.”
“Do you know where he went?”
“Straight to hell, I hope.”
“No forwarding address?”
“Hah!” Mrs. Ruiz said. “He owed two weeks’ rent, the bum. So who do you think takes all the crap from the owner of this place? Me, that’s who. Like it’s my fault Frank Tucker is a bum. My ex-husband warned me, he said ‘Don’t volunteer to be manager, querida, it’s nothing but headaches.’ Well, he was right for once, the only time he was ever right about anything. And I didn’t listen.”
“Can you tell me—”
“The owner’s got some nerve,” she said, still indignant. “I told him in the beginning Frank Tucker was a bum and we shouldn’t rent to him. He said rent to him anyway. I told him Tucker was an ex-convict too, as soon as I found out, but he—”
“How did yo
u find out?”
“What, that he’s an ex-convict? I heard him talking to one of his friends. He was drunk or he wouldn’t have said it so loud.”
“Which prison was he in? The medical facility here?”
“No. Folsom.”
Folsom was a maximum security prison off Highway 50 east of Sacramento, not as well known outside the state as San Quentin but with the same kind of hard-core inmate population. I had helped send a few men to Folsom over the years …. Folsom, Folsom. And a slender man in his thirties, with straight brown hair …
I said, “Did he say how long he’d been in Folsom?”
“No.”
“Or when he got out?”
“No.”
“This friend he was talking to—what did he look like?”
“Like a bum,” Mrs. Ruiz said, “what else?”
“Could you describe him?”
“Big, no neck, black curly hair. Forty or so.”
“You happen to catch his name?”
“Dino. That’s an Italian name.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Well, he looked Italian, that bum.”
“Any idea where he lives?”
“No. I never saw him before or since.”
“Did you ever see Tucker with a man in his thirties, brown hair, average height, slim build?”
“No.”
“Did he ever mention the name Lawrence Jacobs?”
“Not to me. He didn’t talk to me and I didn’t talk to him.”
“Can you give me the names of any of Tucker’s other friends?”
“He kept to himself, mostly,” Mrs. Ruiz said. “I only saw him with one other bum, the day before he moved out.”
“What did that one look like?”
“Fat. Fatter than me and that’s fat.”
I wondered if the fat man had had anything to do with Tucker’s decision to pull up stakes. “Do you know what they talked about?”
“No. The fatty showed up in a big car and went up to Tucker’s apartment and Tucker let him in. I never heard him say a word.”
“So you don’t know his name.”
“No.”
“How long did he stay?”
“Search me. I went out shopping and when I came back, the fatty was gone.”
“The big car he drove—any idea what kind?”
“Cadillac. Cream-colored Seville. ’Eighty-five.” I must have looked a little surprised, because she grinned and said, “I know cars. My ex-husband is an auto mechanic.”
“You didn’t happen to get the license number?”
“No. Now I wish I’d looked.”
“You said Tucker kept mostly to himself—”
“That’s right, he did.”
“—but did he ever talk to any of the other neighbors? Somebody who might give me a line on where he is now?”
“No way,” she said positively. “I know everybody here, I get along with everybody, we’re always yakking with each other. That bum didn’t talk to anybody around here except the bums that came to visit him.”
“He drives a Chrysler, is that right?”
“Right. ’Eight-six LeBaron. Tobacco brown.”
“License number?”
“Personalized. MR F T. MR BUM would have been better.” She shifted the bag of groceries from one arm to the other. “Anything else you want to know? This bag is getting heavy.”
“Not unless you can think of something, some little detail, that might help me find him.”
She tried. I watched her round face screw up, the heavy flesh around her eyes draw tight and the eyes themselves disappear behind slits so narrow they might have been incisions. Then her whole face seemed to pop open again, like some kind of exotic flower, the eyes reappearing wide and black—an effect that was almost startling—and she said with genuine regret, “No, nothing. I wish I could, that bum ought to be back in jail, but I already told you everything I know.”
Dead end.
Now what was I going to do?
I left Mrs. Ruiz to her groceries and her managerial woes and drove around for a while, aimlessly. Then, because I hadn’t eaten yet today, I stopped at a cafe on Merchant Street that accepted credit cards and brooded over coffee and a steak sandwich. Lawrence Jacobs, Frank Tucker, an Italian guy with no neck named Dino, a fat man who drives an ’85 cream-colored Cadillac Seville … but where were they now? A possible Folsom prison connection … but I didn’t have enough information yet to identify Jacobs or his motives. And no way to get it soon unless I picked up his or Frank Tucker’s trail again.
Three options, as far as I could see. There was a fourth—go back up to Deer Run and stake out the Indian Hill cabin—but I wasn’t ready to do that yet. Would do it only as a last resort. It might be another three to four weeks before Jacobs decided to return to the cabin; I couldn’t live up there anywhere near that long, alone, doing nothing except waiting. It would be almost as much of an ordeal as the one I had already been through. It would put me right over the edge.
Three options. One: Canvass the other residents at 210 Poplar Street, even though Mrs. Ruiz had seemed certain that none of them knew any more than she did about Frank Tucker and his activities. Two: Return to Sacramento, to 4719 K Street, and find out if Maggie Barnwell had held anything back from her husband. Three: Run a DMV check on Tucker’s Chrysler LeBaron with the MR F T license plate, see what address turned up. The first two choices struck me as a waste of time. And the only way I could accomplish the third was to contact Harry Fletcher at the DMV’s San Francisco office. I could swear Harry to secrecy—but he had a big mouth and he might let something slip, something that would get back to Eberhardt or Kerry or into the news media. Besides, Tucker had owned the car while he was living in Sacramento, might have put the K Street address or some other old address on the registration. And if he moved around as much as it seemed he did, he wouldn’t bother to notify the DMV each time he changed residences.
One person he probably would notify was his parole officer … if he was out on parole. In the old days I could have gone through channels, got hold of his prison record, and if he’d been paroled, the name of his parole officer. But these weren’t the old days. I had fewer resources available to me now, and therefore fewer options than I would have had on a normal investigation—
Susan Belford, I thought.
Something I should have asked Susan Belford and hadn’t.
Her name and the question popped into my head at the same time, an obvious question that had somehow failed to occur to me when I spoke to her on the phone. That wouldn’t have happened if I’d been myself—my old self, the one with the sharply honed professional instincts. Maybe the answer to the question was no, but if it was yes …
I pushed up from the table, paid my check, and followed the cashier’s directions to a public telephone back by the restrooms. I spent most of my change on a call to Richards and Kirk in Carmichael. Susan Belford wasn’t in, but the man I spoke to, a Mr. Unger, said she was due to “check back in around three.” It was two-thirty now. I gave him my name and asked him to tell Ms. Belford that I’d called, that I was on my way up to see her, and would she please wait until I got there. He said he would relay the message.
It was twenty minutes to four when I finally found my way to the shopping center where Richards and Kirk had their offices. Susan Belford wasn’t there. Yes, she’d checked in as expected. Yes, Mr. Unger had given her my message but she’d chosen not to wait. No, Mr. Unger would not give me her home address or telephone number … which meant that she’d told him not to. Usually real estate agents are more than willing to give out their home numbers, to the point of listing them on their business cards.
I drove to a service station and looked in the telephone directories for Carmichael and several other nearby communities, including Sacramento. If she lived in one of those places, she was either unlisted or listed under another name. The only Belford in any of the books was Leon Belford and Son, Manufacturers of Qual
ity Brass Fittings.
* * *
The Third Day
* * *
MORNING
Susan Belford showed up for work at five minutes to ten the next morning. I had been waiting since nine, when Richards and Kirk opened for business, and I was fidgety and trying hard to conceal my irritation when she walked in.
Today I wore a hound’s-tooth sports jacket, the loose-fitting kind with deep pockets so I could carry the .22 without any telltale bulges, and a white shirt and a pair of gray slacks—items I had bought the night before at a cut-rate clothing store in this same shopping center. One reason was that the too-tight clothing I’d taken from the Carder A-frame was beginning to both chafe and smell after three days of constant wear; the other reason was that if I was going to convince the uncooperative Ms. Belford to answer another question, I would need to look as well as act like a reputable private investigator. I had thought so last night, anyway. One look at her, and I knew that neither I nor anyone else would ever have to dress up on her account.
La Belford was a frumpy blond in her late forties, sloppily outfitted in a baggy gray skirt and a white sweater with little spots and streaks of cigarette ash on the front of it. She had mannerisms that were as twitchy as her voice, and such a preoccupied air that she almost ran into me before she realized I had moved into the path she was taking from the front entrance. And in almost running into me, she also came within an inch of setting fire to my new sports jacket with the lighted cigarette she was brandishing in one hand.
She was not glad to see me. She scowled when I identified myself, and made a violent waving gesture with the cigarette that sent particles of ash flying. “You again,” she said. “Why do you persist in … what is it you want now?”
“Five minutes of your time, that’s all.”
“I answered all your questions yesterday—”
“Not quite. There’s one other I should have asked.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’m a busy woman, I don’t have time for this sort of thing …”
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