Cape Perdido

by Marcia Muller

  “Steph,” Joseph said, “will you contact Rhoda Swift? Please?”

  She hesitated, then nodded and motioned for the women to join them.

  As they got settled at the table, Joseph observed a restrained tension in Jessie’s movements. Bernina, clearly in a bad mood, plunked her big tapestry bag down and began rummaging in it, muttering.

  “Damn Kleenex, always goes missing at the bottom. God, why do we have to hold this meeting? Couldn’t you just handle the man yourself, Joseph? And then send him back where he came from?”

  “You have some objection to Mr. Whitesides being here?” Joseph asked.

  “Just one more outsider to confuse the issue.” Bernina glanced apologetically at Jessie. “You, I don’t mind. You seem to relate well to folks here. That lawyer I’m not so sure of, but he probably knows his stuff. But this director of yours—what does he know about a place like this, people like us? Why doesn’t he stay in New York, where he belongs?”

  Joseph wondered if she would have reacted the same way had Whitesides been a woman, but he knew better than to challenge her on the point. Instead he said mildly, “The meeting won’t be all that long, and if you want, you don’t have to join us for dinner—although it’s an early one, since Mr. Whitesides will want to get checked into his hotel at the Landing.”

  “That’s not the point—”

  The door opened, and the subject of the conversation stepped inside. Eldon Whitesides had always been on the heavy side, but prosperity had bulked him up even more. During the nine or ten years since Joseph had last seen him, his once-blond hair and beard had gone totally white, and the skin of his face had been stretched and rounded by his excess poundage. This afternoon his cheeks were ruddy from the cold wind, and he reminded Joseph of a defrocked Santa.

  As Joseph rose, Whitesides came toward him, with both hands extended to grasp his. His blue eyes radiated false pleasure as he said, “It’s been a long time. You’re looking fit, friend.”

  Perhaps Joseph was not as fit as he would have liked to be, but he hadn’t gained an ounce since their college days. He returned the compliment and quickly disengaged his hands.

  “Me? Fit?” Whitesides laughed, patting the stomach that bulged under his suede jacket. “Jessie can testify as to the calories I consume and the exercise I don’t get—and she only sees me at the office.”

  Jessie smiled and shrugged, and Joseph had a quick insight: she doesn’t like him.

  “Where’s Fitch?” he asked her.

  “He’ll be along.”

  She doesn’t like Fitch much, either, but I already knew that.

  Joseph introduced Bernina, who growled ungraciously, and Steph, who told them to help themselves to coffee and went back to the kitchen. He wished she would make the call to Rhoda Swift right away, but guessed that was too much to expect when all those vegetables were waiting.

  They all sat down again, Whitesides next to Jessie, and Bernina and Joseph opposite them. Seconds later, Fitch came through the door carrying a file. “Man, it’s getting cold!” he exclaimed, pulling up a chair. “Glad I stopped back at my room; there was a fax shoved under the door—the report from that private investigator you hired to check up on Timothy McNear.” He nodded at Whitesides.

  From the startled expression on Jessie’s face and the way she stiffened, Joseph assumed this was the first she’d heard about an investigator.

  Bernina frowned and leaned forward. “Why were you checking up on him?” she asked Whitesides.

  “We thought if he could be persuaded not to let Aqueduct trench and lay pipe across his property, our problem would go away.”

  “And for that you had to hire a private investigator?”

  Uh-oh, Joseph thought, never should’ve brought these two together.

  “Yes,” Whitesides said patiently. “In order to persuade someone, you need to know who you’re dealing with.”

  Bernina frowned more deeply.

  Before she could comment, Joseph said, “I could have given you background on McNear. I’ve known the man my whole life.”

  Whitesides made a motion of dismissal. “Not deep background, however.”

  “You mean the dirt.”

  “You always did tell it like it is, Joseph. Yes, the dirt. When it comes to the persuasion game, everyone has his weak point. Have we found McNear’s, Fitch?”

  “Unfortunately, no.”

  Joseph glanced at Bernina; now her lips were pursed, her eyes thoughtful.

  Fitch opened his file. “Our investigator went all the way back to the beginning, per my request. Timothy was born in nineteen-thirty to Warner and Louisa McNear, an only child. Father was the second owner of the mill, bought it from the Breyer brothers in nineteen-seventeen, and turned control over to Timothy five years after he graduated from Stanford. While at Stanford, his academic record was excellent, and his student deferment—plus his father’s influence with a highly placed politico—kept him out of Korea. Married Caroline Corelli, of the Corelli ranching family, eight months after he graduated. By all accounts it was not a particularly good marriage, and McNear was rumored to have had two long-running affairs, but both women and the wife are dead now, so there’s no leverage there. The couple had one son, Robert, and a daughter, Angela, who died in her teens. McNear is said to have been a good employer and run the mill well; he tried to find a buyer before he closed it down, but with no success. By then he’d been widowed sixteen years. The son was also widowed, had two boys, Maxwell and Shelby, and lived with McNear for a year after his wife died. Was a graphic artist and had no interest in taking over at the mill, moved to Australia in nineteen-eighty-four. Some estrangement there, according to the housekeeper, who’s been with McNear for over twenty years. She’s not sure—”

  Joseph interrupted the recitation. “Your investigator was snooping around here, talking with people who know McNear?”

  Fitch looked irritated at the interruption. “That’s what investigators do, Joseph. Anyway, the housekeeper doesn’t know the details of the estrangement, but she says McNear has lived a fairly reclusive life since his son left. He’s a drinker, but regulates it. No other known vices at present. I’m afraid there’s nothing we can use.”

  Beside Joseph, Bernina cleared her throat. “Do you often use methods like this, Mr. Whitesides?” Her tone was more interested than critical.

  “When the situation is serious enough to warrant it.”

  Jessie said, “Excuse me, Eldon, but it was my understanding that you were planning to approach this situation on the legal issues. Set a precedent so what’s happening here couldn’t happen elsewhere. That being the case, why are you trying to cut short the process by getting leverage on McNear?”

  “Because, my dear, we need a fallback position in case the state board rules against us.”

  “He’s right, Jessie,” Bernina said. “Points of law don’t always impress these bureaucrats.”

  “I can’t believe you approve of these methods!”

  “Sometimes you have to get down and dirty.” Bernina actually smiled at Whitesides.

  Joseph had been afraid the two would lock horns, but he wasn’t sure he liked this sudden rapprochement, either.

  Jessie ignored Bernina, said to Eldon, “All right, if there had been any dirt in that file, would you use it? Right away? Before the board meets?”

  “Yes, Jessie, we would use it, because there isn’t time to handle the situation as we’d planned. Violence has been committed here, and no matter how the Friends decry it, if it escalates, the press and public are bound to blame them. Our job now is to forestall further violence that will make all environmental organizations look bad.”

  Typical Eldon Whitesides bullshit, Joseph thought. I’d like to know what he’s really up to.

  “Well,” Jessie said, “since there’s no dirt, what do you propose we do?”

  Whitesides grinned, a malevolent Santa now. “Perhaps,” he said, “we’ll have to manufacture some.”

  I
n the shocked silence that followed, he winked and said, “Just joking.”

  Sure you are, Eldon. Sure.

  STEPH PACE

  Steph seldom left the Blue Moon during the three daily meal services, so missing two today would be something of a record. But at this time of year, Sundays were slow, and she was sure her employees could handle dinner as well as they’d handled lunch and the tail end of breakfast. As she set out for the meeting she’d arranged with Rhoda Swift, she felt a sense of freedom and again wondered if she ought to move away from Cape Perdido and get into a new line of work.

  She’d fallen into the restaurant business more or less by accident. When she moved to Oregon after high school, she’d quickly realized how ill prepared she was for any kind of job other than the waitressing she’d done during the summers. Five years of working in the food service industry in the Portland area had taught her a great deal, and when she returned to Cape Perdido, the then owner of the Blue Moon—a good cook but a poor businessman—hired her as his manager. When he decided to retire, Steph’s mother offered to loan her the money to buy him out. And eleven years later, here she was, as sick of the daily grind as her former employer had been.

  Trouble was, while marginally profitable, the Blue Moon’s remote location and highly seasonal trade would not make it an easy sell. And even if she were able to find a buyer, what would she do then? The restaurant business was all she knew. She supposed she could start over in whatever new location she chose, but that would defeat the purpose. No, she’d probably be at the Blue Moon, contending with the winter shortage of interesting vegetables, till the day she died.

  The lights of Calvert’s Landing appeared before her, strung out on a crescent along the shore. She’d decided the best way to approach Rhoda Swift was in person. When she called to ask for a meeting, the detective had sounded surprised, and then suggested dinner at a restaurant at the town pier. “You can check out the competition,” she told her.

  Steph didn’t take the comment seriously; there was no competition between her place and Tai Haruru. The seafood restaurant was tourist oriented, served food that greatly eclipsed Arletta’s plain cooking, and offered live entertainment on the weekends. Even on this quiet Sunday night, the parking lot was crowded. Steph left her car near the base of the pier and walked past the boarded-up processing shed that was the last remnant of the Landing’s once-robust days as a fishing port. Inside the restaurant, which occupied the entire top floor of the pier’s long wooden commercial building, people bellied up two deep to the ornate carved bar that in the thirties had been hauled north by wagon from a former San Francisco speakeasy. Steph went to the hostess station and was shown to Swift’s booth, in the rear section under a huge stuffed swordfish.

  Rhoda greeted her warmly, as if they were good friends rather than acquaintances. After they’d ordered wine and consulted the menus, Steph apologized for taking up her time on a Sunday.

  “Think nothing of it,” Rhoda said. “I’ve been at the substation all day, and you’ve given me a chance to relax and unwind before I go home. Besides, my man’s in New York till April, so I had nothing planned for tonight, other than tackling a sink-full of dirty dishes.”

  Steph had heard that Rhoda was involved with a prominent East Coast journalist, Guy Newberry, who owned a vacation home south of the Landing, near Deer Harbor. “He lives back there in the wintertime?” she asked.

  “Right. Says he can’t take the rain here. And when I visit him there, I can’t take the snow. But we’ve worked out a pretty good part-time arrangement.”

  The waitress came to take their orders—shrimp scampi, the best on the Soledad Coast—and after she departed, Rhoda said, “I assume you wanted this meeting because of the situation up your way. You have something to tell me?”

  “Actually, I’m after information. I understand you brought Curtis Hope in for questioning today. He’s a friend of mine, and I’m concerned.”

  Rhoda broke off a piece of sourdough from the loaf in the basket and buttered it, eyeing Steph thoughtfully. “Have you spoken with your friend?”

  “No. Apparently he’s holed up in a bar, and that bothers me, too.”

  “I see. Well, his drinking may be cause for concern, but our interest in him isn’t anything to worry about. It seems a rifle that he reported stolen last year was used to shoot that water bag.”

  So Curt wasn’t lying.

  “Are you sure it’s the right weapon?”

  “Yes. We were able to recover one of the spent bullets from the bag—which, by the way, is still wallowing off the pier at the mill—and it’s a match.”

  “And where did you find the rifle?”

  “In the admin building. There’s a row of lockers where the clerical workers hung their coats, and it was at the back of one of them, behind some old overalls.”

  “So the shooter climbed down from the roof, went inside, and hid the rifle before your deputies got there?”

  “That’s right. They didn’t search inside until later—we had only a few officers there, and given the panic, their first priority was crowd control. The shooter probably waited in the building, then took advantage of the confusion to slip away.”

  “Wouldn’t he have to know the building well, in order to find a hiding place and get away in time?”

  “We’re assuming he—or she—checked it out beforehand and made a plan. The mill site isn’t all that secure.”

  So it wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment shooting. How far ahead was it planned? As long as a year, when Curt reported the rifle missing?

  My God, what am I thinking? A year ago we didn’t know any of this was going to happen. Besides, Curt isn’t a violent man . . . is he?

  “Steph?” Rhoda said. “You okay?”

  “Oh.” She looked down distractedly at the glass of wine the waitress was setting in front of her. “Just worried about the situation.”

  Rhoda nodded. “Understandable, since you and Joseph and Curtis used to hang together in high school. Somebody else was part of your group, right? Mack Kudge?”

  Now, why does she have to remember that? Probably because younger kids always notice what the older kids are doing.

  “Right.”

  “We still have an open file on his murder, you know. Back-burnered, of course.”

  “I guess it’ll always be a mystery, what happened to him.”

  “You never know. Every so often something turns up unexpectedly and there’s a break in one of these old cases.”

  “Like that mass murder down at Point Deception a while back?”

  Rhoda nodded. “Thirteen years we waited for our break.”

  “But Mack—that was even longer ago, twenty years.”

  “Thirteen, twenty—not all that much difference, once the case is cold. It’s probably coincidental that Mack’s body was found on the pier at the mill, but it still makes you wonder.”

  “Well, he worked there.”

  “Wasn’t shot there, though. The body had been moved from someplace else.”

  “So what’re you saying? That there could be a connection to what’s going on now? That seems awfully far-fetched to me.”

  “I’m not saying anything except what I said before—you never know what might turn up.” Rhoda paused as the waitress set their plates in front of them.” Then she smiled at Steph and added, “Bon appetit.”

  TIMOTHY MCNEAR

  He’d thought on the problem all day, and his head throbbed from the effort. A throbbing that hadn’t been helped by too many generous helpings of Scotch. Now it was well on toward midnight, and if he didn’t take himself downstairs and eat some of the roast that was drying out in the oven, he’d have a monumental hangover in the morning.

  But he remained in his chair in the dark loft, still trying to solve the seemingly unsolvable.

  There has to be a way to turn this thing around without paying the ultimate price. Has to be a way to take the weapon that’s aimed at me and aim it back at them.

&nbs
p; The main difficulty, of course, was that he had allowed his fear and rage to get in the way of rational thinking. He’d replayed his initial meeting with the CEO of Aqueduct Systems again and again, relived his disbelief and shock and horror. It seemed now as if he’d capitulated much too easily. And last night, when Gregory Erickson had shown up unannounced but not unexpected, to warn him not to change his mind . . .

  What happened to the man who was once such a hard negotiator? When did I become this shrinking, cringing creature?

  Erickson had presented no proof at any time, but he didn’t need to show documents or name sources to convince Timothy. What the man knew could have come only from one of three people. Three people who, Timothy had thought, had good reason never to reveal their knowledge to anyone.

  He reached for the decanter with a shaking hand and poured more Scotch. So what if he had a hangover tomorrow? Or the day after, or the day after that? His mind, once keenly analytical, had failed him, allowed his emotions to rule it. He was no better than a child shivering in the dark. If this was what the rest of his life was to be, he couldn’t face it sober.

  Timothy drank and stared at the window. From the southwest came a reddish glow. At first he thought he was imagining it, but it grew brighter, more intense.

  Fire!

  He leaned forward, peering, then got up and went to stand by the glass. His heart beat erratically as the flames reached from behind and below the downslope and lit up the midnight sky.

  The mill—my God, it’s the mill!

  He dropped the glass he still held, gripped the window frame for support. Downstairs the phone was ringing, but he ignored it. The shriek of sirens rose from the highway—fire trucks heading south from the volunteer station. The phone stopped ringing, then immediately started again.

  Timothy remained by the window, watching his past go up in flames.

  Monday, February 23

  JESSIE DOMINGO

  Jessie was on the phone talking with her roommate, Erin Sullivan, when she heard the sirens. It was two minutes after three in New York, and Erin had called, half smashed, with a story about meeting Jessie’s ex-boyfriend, Matt Westley, in one of the clubs they frequented. The story involved Matt and his date getting into a fight and being forcibly ejected, and it depressed Jessie because it reminded her of her poor judgment when it came to men. She was, she’d come to realize, a practical, intelligent woman with an impractical, unintelligent attraction to bad boys, which no amount of self-awareness had so far been able to cure.