Deadfall nd-15

by Bill Pronzini

  I introduced myself, letting him have one of my cards at the same time, and said I wanted to talk to Danny as part of a confidential investigation I was conducting. To forestall questions I didn’t tell him the investigation had to do with the Purcell family. But he wasn’t the nosy type, as it turned out.

  When he was done looking at my card I asked him, “Would you mind telling me why you let Danny go?”

  “Well… he’s had it rough the past month and I can sympathize with that. But I got a business to run here, I got my customers to think about. Not to mention insurance on the truck-last thing I need is to get sued. People can do that, I guess maybe you know — sue an employer for negligence if one of his employees has a drunk-driving accident.”

  “Danny was drinking on the job?”

  “Yeah. Damn shame, all the way around.”

  “Had he done that kind of thing before?”

  “No, no. Up until last month he was always sober, a good worker.”

  “What happened to change that?”

  “His wife left him,” Fuller said. “Well, his common-law wife, I guess you’d call her. Took their kid, five-year-old boy, cute little guy-took him and all their savings and went back to Mexico.”

  “What was her reason?”

  He shrugged. “They didn’t get along too well, always fighting. Just one of those things, I guess. But Danny’s crazy about the kid. That’s what tore him up, her taking the kid.”

  “Couldn’t he do anything about getting the boy back?”

  “He didn’t have any money for a lawyer. Besides, Eva was… well…”

  “An illegal alien?”

  “I don’t want to say.”

  “My investigation has nothing to do with immigration matters, Mr. Fuller. I’m not interested in the resident status of Danny or his woman. And I have no intention of repeating anything you tell me.”

  He nodded slowly, but he said, “I still don’t want to say. I’ll tell you this, though: Danny was born in the Salinas Valley. I know that for a fact.”

  “How long did he work for you?”

  “Three years, about.”

  “You said he was a good worker. Honest, too?”

  “Oh, yeah. Never any problem with that.”

  “I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me where he lives,” I said. “It would save me some time.”

  “I’ll tell you,” Fuller said, “but you won’t find him there.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s gone. Lit out somewhere-Mexico, I figure.”

  Damn! I said, “When?”

  “I dunno. Sometime after I fired him. I got to worrying about him, the way he’d been drinking, I wanted to see how he was, if he had another job or maybe he needed a few bucks…” Fuller let his gaze slide away from mine; like a lot of compassionate men in the macho eighties, he was embarrassed to let his compassion show because he was afraid it would be mistaken for weakness. “Anyhow, I drove out to his place last Sunday. Most of his stuff is gone. Packed everything into his beat-up old Chevy truck and took it with him. Nothing much left but the furniture, cheap stuff from the Salvation Army.”

  “And you think he went to Mexico?”

  “To look for his son,” Fuller said, nodding. “Better that than moping around here, getting drunk and feeling sorry for himself.”

  “Whereabouts in Mexico?”

  “Search me. He never said where Eva was from.”

  “Did he live here in Moss Beach?”

  “Yep. Back in the hills a couple of miles.”

  “Private house?”

  “An old farm. Lived there ever since he came here.”

  “Rented?”

  Fuller nodded again. “Danny had a lease. Some fellow down in L.A. owns the property.”

  “How do I get there?”

  He gave me directions. Then he said, “This investigation of yours

  … Danny’s not in any trouble, is he?”

  “I hope not, Mr. Fuller.”

  “Me too. He’s a good man, believe me. It’s just he’s had a run of lousy luck, you know?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I know.”

  I thanked him for talking to me-and then, because there didn’t seem to be any hurry now, and because disappointment and frustration sometimes make me hungry, I gave him an order for a poor-boy sandwich to go. I was eating too many sandwiches these days, which was one of the reasons my weight had crept up another few pounds. But how were you supposed to eat balanced, non-fattening meals when you were out on a job like this? And I was damned if I was going to eat any more yogurt and cottage cheese and carrot sticks; Kerry had had me on that kind of starvation diet once and it had been pure torture. Russian peasants and Basque sheepherders, she’d said, lived to be a hundred eating yogurt and soft cheese and vegetables. Well, so what? What was the use of living to the century mark if you weren’t enjoying life? I was willing to bet that when those ancient Russian peasants and Basque sheepherders finally did croak, not one of them had a smile on his face.

  I bought a Bud Light to go with my sandwich and had my lunch sitting in the car. I did some ruminating while I ate. Despite what Fuller had told me about Danny Martinez’s honesty, it seemed pretty clear-at least to me-that Martinez was the man Tom Washburn had talked to on the phone. He was of Mexican descent and he spoke with a slight accent. He had been at the Purcell house the night of the party, at the approximate time of Kenneth’s death; he could easily enough have seen or heard something incriminating. And he had had a run of bad luck that might have made him bitter enough to throw up a life of honesty in favor of one big grab at a tarnished brass ring. The run of bad luck also explained the six-month hiatus between Kenneth’s death and the phone call to Leonard’s home: Martinez hadn’t needed money back then, had had a job and a family. As for why he hadn’t gone to the police with what he’d seen or heard-maybe it wasn’t all that incriminating or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to get involved.

  And now he was gone, probably somewhere in Mexico by this time. If Leonard had paid him the missing two thousand dollars, as it seemed likely he had, that would explain the sudden departure.

  But there were still questions. Had he actually seen or heard anything that night? It was conceivable he had pulled the whole thing out of his imagination, although that struck me as improbable for a simple-living deliveryman whose life was crumbling around him. If Kenneth had been murdered, and if Martinez did know who was responsible, had he given the name to Leonard? Had he confided it to anyone else-his wife, maybe, or a close friend? And exactly where was he now?

  Well, maybe there was something at his farm, something he’d left behind, that would give me a clue. I finished the last of my sandwich and the last of the Bud Light, got the car started, drove back into the village proper, and hunted up Sunshine Valley Road.

  It was a winding, two-lane country road that led back into the foothills to the east, past scattered homes-some new and well-maintained, some not so new and not so well maintained; past a couple of sprawling ranches that specialized in the breeding of quarter horses. After a couple of miles, the road made a sharp loop to the north and took me across a bridge that spanned a vegetation-choked creek. Just beyond the bridge a dirt road cut back to the east, up into another series of low hills thickly wooded with eucalyptus, madrone, and fir trees. Fuller had told me this would be Elm Street and a sign at the intersection confirmed it.

  I turned up the dirt road, past the only visible house around and through more trees, none of which was an elm. Another of those irritating little mysteries: Why Elm Street if there weren’t any elms on it? Moss Beach seemed to be full of enigmas, large and small. Beyond the trees to the south, where the land fell away into a tiny valley, I could see different kinds of flowers blooming in cultivated fields. They would belong to one of several ranches down there that specialized in growing flowers for sale to various nursery suppliers in the area.

  When I had gone a fifth of a mile, a green wooden mailbox appeared on the south
side of the road. Directly opposite on the north side, a pair of ruts that passed for a lane angled up through the trees. Those ruts, Fuller had said, would take me to Danny Martinez’s farm. But I didn’t make the turn right away. Instead I stopped alongside the mailbox-Martinez’s, presumably, since it was the only one in the vicinity-and got out and poked inside. There were two pieces of mail, both addressed to Daniel Martinez, but neither was worth tampering with: a PG amp;E bill and a mail-order catalogue. I put them back into the box and got into the car again.

  The ruts took me along the shoulder of a hill and then around and down into a good-sized clearing flanked on three sides by woods. The fourth side was a field that had been planted with vegetables and melons and that contained a couple of fruit trees. There were two buildings in the clearing-a sagging barn and an old farmhouse set back against the wooded slope to the east. A chicken coop stood adjacent to the barn but there weren’t any chickens in it.

  I stopped the car in the middle of the dusty yard and hauled myself out of it again. It was quiet; the only sound was a jay scolding something in the fir trees behind the house. I walked over that way, up a slight incline to where a child’s battered wagon was lying upside down near the stairs. The stairs had a newish look and the white paint on them was fresher than on the rest of the house; some of the roofs shingles also looked new. Until the events of the past month, Martinez had evidently kept the place up pretty well.

  At the top of the stairs was a shallow porch with a geriatric swing and a rickety table on it. There was a screen door into the house, and a regular door behind it that stood ajar; the screen door wobbled open when I tugged on it. I called out, “Hello, inside,” and waited a while, just to be safe. Nobody answered me, so finally I went on in.

  Tiny front hall, with a kitchen opening on one side and a living room or parlor on the other. I turned into the parlor first. Salvation Army furniture, all right-sofa, two chairs, three tables, an old desk with papers strewn over its surface, some of which had fallen or been tossed on the worn carpet. One of the inner walls had been decorated with crayon marks, red and green, in a kid’s nonsense pattern that seemed more aesthetic to me than the Chagall painting in the Purcell house. A crucifix made out of dark wood and a painting of a Mexican village adorned the other inner wall. The two outer walls were mostly windows with cheap chintz curtains drawn back from the glass; the set to the north looked out on the open field and the set to the west gave you a view of the yard, of the barn-

  I was looking that way, toward the barn, when the man came out of it. His sudden appearance brought me up short; he was moving in a furtive way, his face and eyes turned toward the house. Bulky guy, sandy hair done up in a frizz-familiar even at this distance.

  Richie Dessault.

  What the hell? I thought. I ran back into the hall and out onto the porch. He was no longer by the barn and no longer moving furtively; he had started to run up into the woods on the far slope, being more or less quiet about it. I thought about yelling at him, but it wouldn’t have done any good: he was building a good head of steam, dodging this way and that through the trees, and he wasn’t looking back. I pounded down the stairs and across the yard in front of the barn. But by the time I got to the foot of the slope he had vanished near the crest.

  I didn’t see any point in chasing after him; he had thirty years on me and a lot more wind and stamina. And I couldn’t have caught him anyway because after a minute or so there was the distant sound of a car engine revving up, over on the other side of the hill. Another road, probably, invisible from here.

  What the hell? I thought again. What was Dessault doing here? What was his connection with Danny Martinez? And why hadn’t he driven his car into the yard, as I had, instead of leaving it out of sight and skulking over here through the woods?

  I swung around and went into the barn, to see if I could tell what he’d been doing in there. The interior was gloomy and nurtured a sour smell composed of dust, dry rot, manure, and other things I couldn’t define. On the packed-earth floor just inside the doors was a large stack of lumber, a couple of sawhorses, a scatter of carpentering tools; it looked as though Martinez had bought the lumber with the idea of making additional repairs on both the house and the barn. Along one wall was a workbench cluttered with all sorts of junk, from spools of wire to a radio in a cracked plastic case; propped against another wall were a hand plow and some gardening tools. At the rear were three horse stalls, two of them empty, the one in the far corner containing another, smaller stack of plywood sheets and two-by-fours. A ladder gave access to a hayloft; it looked sturdy, so I climbed it far enough for a look into the loft. The only things up there were a rusty pitchfork and some remnants of old hay.

  Dessault hadn’t been doing anything in here, the way it looked. Except hiding, maybe. Caught here, or out in the open nearby, when he heard my car; so he’d waited, watching, until I entered the house, and then made his escape through the trees.

  But I still couldn’t figure a reason for him being here. Did he know Martinez? The way he’d reacted yesterday morning, when I’d asked Melanie if she knew anyone who spoke with a Latin accent… now that I thought about it, his reaction had been a little too sharp and edged with surprise. Maybe he did know Martinez. But that still didn’t explain his presence here today, or his furtiveness.

  The barn was oppressive, somehow; I went back out into the sunshine and took a look at the chicken coop. Nothing there. I crossed to the house again. And prowled through its five rooms and bath, starting with the parlor.

  The loose papers on and around the desk weren’t particularly interesting. Old bills, some paid and some not; a couple of personal letters written in Spanish to “Eva cara mia” and signed “Mama,” but with no address or envelope to tell me where they’d come from; some crayon drawings similar to the one on the wall, the kind of stuff proud parents save. What was interesting was the way the papers were strewn around, as if they had been pawed through by somebody in a hurry. Martinez? Or Dessault? And if it had been Dessault, why? What was he looking for?

  The kitchen was next. Pots and pans, a few dishes, some packaged and canned foodstuffs in the cupboards-Martinez hadn’t bothered to take any of that. Or clean out the refrigerator, either: a couple of things in there wore greenish fur coats. But again, there was evidence here of haste either in packing for departure or in a rapid search. Cupboard doors stood open, drawers had been pulled out and left that way, the shards from a broken vodka bottle were scattered across the drainboard and among a tier of dirty crockery and utensils in the sink.

  A dining area opened off the kitchen, but there wasn’t anything in it except a table and some chairs and a sideboard. Nothing in the little boy’s bedroom, either, except a bunk-style bed; the closet was empty except for a couple of dropped coat hangers, a toy soldier with its head twisted off, and the remains of a balsa-wood model airplane. I moved into the bath that separated that bedroom from the one where Martinez and his common-law wife had slept. The medicine cabinet door was open, revealing two empty shelves and one containing some used razor blades. A vial of cheap men’s cologne had been dropped and broken in the sink; but there was not much odor from it, even when I poked my nose down there, which meant that the vial hadn’t been broken recently.

  The closet in the master bedroom was empty, too. So were the bureau and the two nightstands flanking the bed. The bed still had its sheets and pillows and blankets, all of them rumpled and not very clean. On the wall above it was another crucifix, this one made out of bronze with silver ornamentation. An oval mirror in a dark-wood frame hung on another wall, and what drew me to it were two color snapshots wedged between the glass and the frame on one side. One of the snaps was of a laughing little boy with huge brown eyes, like a child in a portrait by Keane. Danny Martinez’s son. I wondered, for no particular reason, what his name was. The other photo was of a man and a woman and the same little boy, the man holding the child in one arm, all three of them grinning. It had been taken at a
beach somewhere; the ocean, spattered with sunlight, was visible behind them.

  I took that one off the mirror and looked at it more closely. The woman was slim and attractive in a narrow-faced way, with shiny black hair that fell almost to her waist. The man-Danny Martinez, no doubt-was tall, heavy through the chest and shoulders, and sported a bandit’s mustache. They had made a nice-looking family, the three of them, back when this photo was taken. It gave me an odd, sad feeling, being here in the house they’d shared, a house emptied of all but the residue, the ghosts, of their years together. No more outings on the beach, no more closeness, no more laughter. Nothing left now but bitterness and pain and the wreckage of a man’s self-respect.

  I stood for a time holding the snapshot, staring at it. Then, on impulse, I slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket and turned and left the bedroom, left the house. Nothing more for me there either. Like the barn, it too had become oppressive.

  Chapter Fourteen

  I drove around the area for a while after I left the Martinez farm. It took me all of five minutes to find the road and the gravel turnaround where Richie Dessault had parked his car. So he wouldn’t have had to know the area any better than I did in order to find the road himself and figure out that it was a short trek through the woods and over the hill to the Martinez place. And he hadn’t had to worry about anybody noticing him or the car because there weren’t any other houses within sight.

  On the way back along Elm Street I stopped at the only neighboring house I’d seen in the immediate vicinity, the one I’d passed coming in. A middle-aged woman greeted me cordially and told me nothing useful. She knew Danny Martinez-“a nice young man,” she said-but she hadn’t seen him since his wife and son went away to Mexico, and expressed surprise to learn that he was gone too. She didn’t know any of his friends; and when I described Dessault she gave me a blank smile and shook her head. The only thing of any interest I got from her was the little boy’s name: Roberto.