The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “Suddenly I feel like a jerk.”

  She laughed. “I don’t want you to. I just want…” She cocked her head again. “I just want you to be able to look at me and say to yourself, ‘Hey, that’s Bobbie. She likes me. I can handle that.’ ”

  She kissed me briefly on the cheek and scooped up her bag. “Thanks for the drinks.”

  “Sure.” I went over to turn on the outside light and open the door. She went out without another glance, across the small patio to the stairs leading up to the street, but then she paused. She stared up at the sky a moment, then turned and came slowly back to where I was standing in the doorway. She stopped a couple of feet in front of me and stood there holding the bag by its strap in both hands in front of her, letting it just dangle and giving her shoulders a slightly rounded, dejected look. She stared at me without expression. I was good for about five seconds of that, then I thought about what she said Mrs. Parker had said about my social life, and I thought about what Bobbie herself had said and I thought even briefly about Connie Wells and nobility and finally I thought to hell with it. Maybe they were right and I was wrong.

  “You’re apt to catch a cold out there in that skimpy top,” I told her. “Maybe you’d better stay over.”

  She came in without a word. I closed the door quietly and turned off the outside light.

  SIX

  I had told Barker the San Francisco Chronicle liked 1947 crime stories. The next morning on page three there was a deep, three-column photo of the lofty Pimsler Hotel lobby. Their artist had painted in a broken line to show the approximate course that Moon’s body took on its big drop from the eleventh floor. They called it a gang-style slaying because of the ice pick somebody had planted into him. Maybe they were right. The story said Moon had checked into the hotel early that evening. Police had no clues. They were investigating.

  Bobbie had left my place sometime early in the morning. I dimly remembered hearing the shower going, and when I got up I saw that she had taken her life in her hands by stealing out to Mrs. Parker’s small bed of flowers on our side of the fence and snipping off a single forget-me-not. It was in a liqueur glass of water in the middle of the kitchen table along with a page from her memo pad. She’d drawn a number of little exes on it, the way kids used to denote kisses, and signed her name in a slanted scrawl.

  I drove over to Moon’s apartment building on Lombard. It wasn’t a place that had been built the week before last. The landlady had been around for several years herself. She was a frail, birdlike person with a perpetual cigarette in her mouth, curlers in her hair and breath that let the world know she didn’t wait until late afternoon to celebrate the cocktail hour. Her name was Mrs. Kerry and she’d already talked to the police the night before, and the pencil press and a TV news team that morning. She figured there would be more TV crews by, and that’s why she’d put her hair up in rollers. And what was it, she asked, that I wanted? I told her I worked for Moon’s employer and was making my own investigation of the murder.

  “Well, I’m glad he had the decency to die somewhere else,” she declared with whiskey good cheer. “This isn’t exactly the St. Francis Hotel I run here, but it’s no flophouse either, and my heart doesn’t need any murders happening on the premises.”

  “How was he as a tenant, Mrs. Kerry?”

  “Just grand. He was gone most of the time. Except during the football season, when he’d sit up there in his room drinking beer and watching the Monday night game on TV and laughing like the dickens whenever somebody got blindsided.”

  “How about visitors? Did he ever have any?”

  “Not that I know of. It even occurred to me that he might be some sort of traveling man. Like I said, except for during the football season on Monday nights, we never heard him. But I never asked him about it.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t like to pry. So long as the tenants lead a reasonable life, don’t get so drunk that they throw up in the halls on their way in or bring home girls who’ll moan loudly in the middle of the night waking everybody up, I figure they got a right to some privacy, same as me.”

  We carried on like that for a few more minutes. She even asked if I’d care for a mug of coffee with some whiskey in it. When I declined she looked at me as if there was something unwholesome about me.

  I went on over to the office, exchanged pleasantries with the receptionist and went in and called Paul Kelly, the reporter who had gotten the byline on the Chronicle story. He’d been on the paper back when I was. We exchanged favors from time to time. I asked what he’d found out from the cops that hadn’t been in his story that morning. He didn’t have much to tell me. He said the closest thing to any eyewitness had been the little woman I’d pointed out to the patrolman. Nobody was around that part of the floor where Moon’s room was when it happened. In his room they’d found a canvas overnight bag with shaving gear and a huge pair of purple pajamas. No sign of another person. Moon had made a reservation by telephone that morning. The reservation had been for two. The elevator operators couldn’t remember anybody getting on or off that floor at the approximate time of his death. The police were trying to find out more about him. End of report.

  He was the same old lovable Paul Kelly that he’d been when I worked there, holding out even on his friends.

  “What about the printing on the handle of the ice pick?” I asked.

  “How did you know about that?” he asked, after the briefest pause.

  “A friend in the coroner’s office told me.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I forgot, I guess. From Sand Valley.”

  “Ever been through there?”

  “No, but I’ve got calls into some people who might be familiar with the place.”

  I thanked him and told him he was owed a couple of drinks the next time we bumped into each other. Then I called Barker to see how things had gone with the police. From his voice, more strangled than ever, it had not gone well. Either that or something else was wrong. He asked me to come by the house right away.

  It took me about fifteen minutes to get my car back out of the parking garage over on Mission and drive out to where Barker lived. Bobbie answered my ring. She wore a smart, light blue dress and looked as if she’d had a good night’s sleep. Her smile was brief and her voice low. It was part of the price you paid. You sleep together and from then on you’re conspirators in another man’s home.

  “Something’s really got him shook up. I’m glad you’re here.”

  Her voice had that same funny ring to it that had been there the morning we met. I didn’t like it as well as I had the night before. “Did he have a bad time with the cops?”

  “I don’t think so. Something else must have happened.”

  I started to go past her but she held my sleeve. “Pete?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you know about Moon last night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you say something?”

  “I didn’t figure that was what you’d come to talk about.”

  I went on down the hallway and into the game room. Bobbie followed. Barker was sitting glumly on a stool behind the bar clearing his throat. The telephone was near his elbow, as if he’d been making calls. He stood up when I entered and motioned Bobbie back out of the room.

  “How was it with the police?”

  “Okay for now. But that isn’t what I wanted to see you about. This came in the morning mail.”

  He laid another stiff white envelope into my hand. I opened it. Another sympathy card. On the back side somebody had pasted a couple of names snipped from a telephone directory. Beverly Jean.

  From the top of Lodi grade, the town of Sand Valley made the rough outline of an automatic pistol somebody had tossed onto the scrub desert floor. The barrel ran along the base of the Sanduski Mountains. That looked to be mostly residential, with grand old homes and lawns and a few swimming pools. The butt part was business. Several new buildings flanked a broad avenue. Off to the right the G
rey River splashed down out of the Sanduskis and wandered out onto the basin floor. Older sheds, homes and miscellaneous buildings followed it like a stream of ejected shell casings from the town itself.

  The new highway I was traveling bypassed the town by about a mile. Also out on the desert floor was what looked like a small airfield. That irritated me some. It wouldn’t be large enough to accomodate the big jets, but it looked large enough to handle feeder line planes. It didn’t, though. The closest field open to commercial craft was in the town of Spring Meadows, fifty miles back on the other side of Lodi grade. I’d gotten a charter flight to there from Phoenix, then had to make it the rest of the way by renting a car larger than I was used to driving.

  The town looked sort of attractive, but the desert land that spread out from it didn’t. Turkey vultures tilt-soared on the alert, scanning the sun-baked plain, their mean heads the color of blood. I continued down the grade at a conservative speed. Some of the big trucks I’d passed coming up the other side of the grade whined past like freed locomotives, their eighteen tires whistling. The new highway was a boon to cross-country truckers. It was an artery over the Continental Divide that allowed some of them to trim five to ten hours off a run between the coasts.

  Down near the basin floor there were some billboards. One of them advertised the Sky Lodge in downtown Sand Valley. It promised “Sophisticated Action A-plenty!” A girl’s pretty face winked out at you. Another board advertised Rancho Sanchez: “The Recreated Old West—Just Three Miles Straight Ahead.” A third board seemed to beckon the fellows with rolled-up sleeves driving the big rigs. It showed a cute girl wearing next to nothing carrying a tray with a shot of whiskey and a mug of beer on it. The message read, “Ma Leary’s—The Damndest Truck Stop Ever.”

  The truck stop wasn’t far off the highway, and it was my destination, but I decided to take a look at the town first, before it got dark. There had been a lot of recent construction. Probably the result of the highway. There were several new buildings half a dozen stories high, built of light stone and dark glass.

  People were walking the evening streets, giving the little town a sense of quiet bustle. There were smart, ground-level shops punctuated by airy restaurants. The broad, main arterial was Nevada Street. It led straight to the Sky Lodge, a recent building that rose a dozen stories to dominate the skyline, as if keeping watch over the whole town. It looked like one of the casino hotels at Lake Tahoe, fronted with smoky glass that rose to mezzanine level. A theater marquee out front advertised the appearance of an up-and-coming singing group that called itself the Yankee Slippers, playing the hotel’s Monopoly Lounge. I felt drawn to the place, but circled around the block and headed back out of town toward Ma Leary’s place. Armando Barker had told me he used to own it. He didn’t tell me why it billed itself as the damndest truck stop ever.

  SEVEN

  The truck stop complex was off a secondary road that ran from town to out beyond the freeway. Beyond were Rancho Sanchez and the abandoned airfield. The Truck Stop sprawled over a plot of land near the river. There was a garage and other service facilities and what looked like a couple of warehouses of corrugated metal off to the left. I counted between thirty and forty big truck and trailer rigs parked in long rows fronting the service area. A hundred yards farther down river was a low, hacienda-style adobe building with a neon tube in the shape of a martini glass out front. Straw-colored lawn ringed the building, and in back of that, a long stand of big shade trees marched down to the water. It looked like a rambling picnic area, with a few cabins scattered through it. Near the entrance road was one other structure, a frame building resembling an army barracks.

  I parked just beyond the patch of lawn. As I was getting out of the car a couple of good old, raw-boned boys came banging through the front door and moved off toward the barracks building in the dusk. One of them had the hiccups.

  It turned out that about the most pretentious thing about the place was the straw lawn out front. You stepped into a long barroom with wooden floors, cuspidors and row upon row of slot machines, most of them chunking away under the steady arms and hopeful gazes of men in work clothes. The long bar across the room was claptrap old-fashioned, with all sorts of junk hanging from the ceiling and back wall—guns, elk heads, hats, helmets and old pictures, beer signs, a parrot in a cage and enough other stuff to keep a boy staring for hours. A wide archway led into a room filled with dice tables, roulette wheels and blackjack dealers. Most of the people working there were young women. Underwear and black hose seemed to be their uniform. I went over to sit at the bar. All four bartenders were women. To set them apart from the girls on the floor, they wore spangled shorts and halters. The girl working the section where I sat was wearing lavender. She was in her twenties, tall and a little bony, but cute, with blonde hair tied in a ponytail and her nose brushed with freckles.

  She approached with a puzzled smile, eyeing my tie and sports jacket. “Need directions, sir?”

  “Not at the moment. You do serve civilians, don’t you?”

  Her brow wrinkled even more. She didn’t have a mean bone in her body nor a complicated thought in her head. “Oh, go on, sir, we’re all civilians here.”

  “Sure. How about an Early Times in a tall glass with some water.”

  “Right you are.”

  She talked simple, but she had good moves behind the bar. She poured a good drink smoothly. She put it in front of me and took the dollar bill I’d put on the bar. When she returned from the cash register with a quarter in change, I put that coin and another like it in the bar gutter in front of her. It earned me a grin.

  “Thanks, Lucky.”

  There was a jukebox near the front door with Kris Kristofferson singing one of his traveling dope songs. Among the junk on the back wall was a small sign listing room rates. An all-night single went for ten dollars. It said the rates for doubles were negotiable. An asterisk led you to a note on the bottom that suggested you inquire about Ma’s dating service.

  I called over the bartender and asked where the dining room was.

  “There’s a little eating area over the other side of the main casino, Lucky. Or I can call in your order and have it brought in here.”

  “That’ll be fine. How about a cheeseburger, hold the relish, with some fries.”

  “That’s simple enough, Lucky.”

  She ordered it on a house phone behind the bar. When she hung up I ordered another drink and told her my name was Pete.

  “Mine’s Harmony,” she told me, stacking more ice in the glass. “I’ll try to remember your name, but don’t take it badly if I can’t. We get so many fellas through here I just can’t remember half of them. So I call most everyone Lucky. Of course you don’t dress like most, so maybe I’ll be able to remember yours…” She frowned with the Early Times bottle poised over the glass.

  “Pete,” I told her.

  “Oh, yeah, Pete. Thanks.”

  She went about her work. My burger came and while I was eating it a curtain opened on to a stage in the next room. Guys on piano, drums and trumpet began playing “Blues in the Night,” and a big, overdressed brunette came dancing out and began taking off her clothes.

  I finished my food and swung around on my stool to watch the action. The machines were kept busy. There was a frequent clatter of coins into the payoff trays. A few of the players slowed enough to take quick glances at the stripper on stage in the next room. The others kept wrenching. A couple of fistsful of quarters cascaded into the tray of a nearby player. He was a short, wiry fellow in his thirties wearing blue work clothes and cowboy boots. He had a stubble of beard, a ragged grin and old fire in his eyes. He stuffed the coins into his pockets and lurched over a stool that had been vacated beside me.

  “Whooee! Goddamn, ain’t it swell, though. Get me a beer, Harmony!”

  “Coming up, Lucky.”

  The man gave me a gapped-tooth greeting. “Howdy!”

  “Hiya.”

  “Ain’t it an everlovin’
bitch, though?”

  “Appears that way.”

  “You know it is,” he said, giving me a friendly poke on the arm. “The greatest damn runnin’ town in the whole Western world. My name’s Andy.”

  He stuck out his hand and I shook it. “I’m Pete.”

  “You’re not a trucker, Pete.”

  “No, Andy, I’m just sort of passing through. You come here often?”

  “You better believe it, ever’ fuckin’ chance I get. Gimme a run within three hundred miles of here and I’ll manage to get by for a day or so.”

  “That long?”

  “Shore. That’s why I won’t haul perishables no more. None of these boys will,” he said, encompassing the room with a wave of his hand. “I got me a Peterbilt California hauler that I sometimes pretend’s a moon rocket when I’m on a good flat stretch, and there’s only two places I’m ever lookin’ for, one of them bein’ end of the line and the other right here. I just bust my ass gettin’ cross-country, keeping an eye out for the law of course, then fakin’ breakdowns or whatever, so’s I can lay over here. Hell, it’s better’n Elko, Nevada.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Cuz the dispatcher back in Chicago knows about the whorehouses in Elko, that’s why, and ever’ time we’d phone in and say we was broke down there in Elko, he’d tell us to go break down somewhere else.” His eyes turned crafty and he leaned toward me and lowered his voice. “But the dispatcher don’t know about Sand Valley.”

  His eyes hovered over the knot in my tie. “Say, you’re not a company spy, are you, Pete?”

  “Nope. If I were, I’d dress like you guys.”

  He grunted. “Good. More’n likely the boys would assassinate any company spies they found around here. Sand Valley’s the best-kept secret on the road.”

  I wondered how that could be, and called Harmony back and asked her about the dating service.

  “Well, there’s nothing too formal about it,” she told me, looking up at the wall clock. “But it’s getting kind of late.”