The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  He sat staring at me, weighing things. It took a while, but as he regained his composure and his face once more took on its perpetually enduring granite quality, I knew I’d lost.

  “I don’t know,” he told me. He got up and walked over to the door and held it open for me. I asked for my firearms back. He said he’d mail them to me.

  Walking back to the car I heard a new outburst of gunfire. It sounded as if it were coming from the direction of Doc Carrington’s newspaper office. I wondered what sort of job he would do in the next issue of the Sand Valley Piper, describing the events of the day. Maybe somebody in Washington would write an editorial deploring the mess in Sand Valley: “The Wild West Lives.”

  But brooding over reprehensible journalism wasn’t helping my own problems any. In fact the longer I spent in Sand Valley the more unreal it seemed, compared with its links to San Francisco. Armando was a ham hock, but he seemed sort of comic and real. A different sort from the evil realities of Sand Valley that day. And the little girl hardly seemed a product of the town or of Armando either. It was hard to bridge the psychic distance. Part of the problem of course was that it didn’t add up in orderly fashion. Not that I was apt to let that bother me. I’d had jobs in which I hadn’t understood what it’d been all about even after doing the work and getting my pay. But it wouldn’t work out that way this time. I’d have to figure out the link between the violence of Sand Valley and Armando and Beverly Jean and Moon’s death.

  I leaned against the side of my car, staring down deserted streets and listening to distant gun battles. I had forgotten to ask Slide if he intended still to leave in force the orders for my own scalp. Probably he did, I decided. He still wanted me out of town and he didn’t like me.

  I thought about Cathy Carson. Copper legs and a white beach with blue water. An expensive hotel room with air conditioning and tall rum drinks and piped in music. I thought about Beverly Jean and her grown-up ways and the wall and fence around the Mission Academy for Girls, and Lou and Soft Kenny. I’d been impressed when I’d seen the security arrangements at the Academy. But then I hadn’t been thinking about guys like Lou and Soft Kenny. I hoped Bobbie and the girl were well away from there.

  By now the phone booth in front of the drug store had been shot up some more, making it inoperable. I drove around looking for another. There was just one more ghost in this town I could think to go chasing after. When I finally found another phone I called the hospital and asked for Cathy. When she got on the line I asked her if the ex-cop, John Caine, had any relatives left in town. She said no. I asked where Caine used to live. She knew approximately, but didn’t know the house number. So next I called the police station again. Coffey was out of the building, but after I briefly explained my business, the desk officer looked up Caine’s old address for me. I thanked him and headed out that way. There’s an astonishing quality I’d learned about old houses. Sometimes they can tell you things. The sort of things that have gone on inside them. Things to make you smile, or things to make you shiver. I was hoping that John Caine’s old house would have a story for me.

  NINETEEN

  My ID got me through police roadblocks and into the town’s residential area. I found the address I’d been given was in an older part of town. The homes all looked as if they’d been built between the two World Wars. They were high-ceilinged and two-storied for the most part. Frame construction with overlapping board siding and some filigree around the edges as if someone from there had driven through the older sections of Alameda and San Francisco and Oakland and tried to put down some of it in this desert town. The old Caine home was a boxy place that needed a coat of paint and some yard work. I parked across the street and went over and up the front walk, stepping over a tricycle and toy dump truck. The door was open and inside a television set was competing with children’s voices. The doorbell didn’t work and it took a while rapping on the open door to get some attention. The smell of food steamed down the hallway and into the late afternoon air.

  A slight, dark-complexioned man with a thin black mustache and a napkin in his hand came to the door. I apologized for interrupting his dinner.

  “I’m looking for information about a man who used to live here. His name was John Caine. Did you know him?”

  “No, sir, I have never heard that name before,” he told me with a faintly Latin accent. “We bought this home through the real estate. We did not know the people who lived here before us.”

  A small head peered around the far end of the hallway, from where the man had come. It must have been the kitchen. Up front, off to one side, was a room with scuffed, overstuffed furniture. A picture of the Madonna hung on one wall and votive candles were on a mantle. I had thought it would help if I could prowl through the place, but there were new forces at work there now. Maybe the old house would have forgotten much of what I wanted to know. I thanked the man and went back down the walk.

  There was a vacant lot to one side of the house. A home, closed up and dark, was on the other. I crossed the street to my car, but didn’t climb in right away. I had parked in front of another big old house, but this one was well tended, and the lawn was green and trim. Of more interest was the old fellow standing just inside a little picket gate, drawing on a pipe and watching me. I crossed to him.

  “Excuse me, sir, I wonder if you could help me. Have you lived here long?”

  “Long enough. You selling aluminum siding?”

  I grinned. “No.”

  “Painted shutters? Air conditioners? Insurance or encyclopedias?”

  “I’m not selling anything. In fact, I’d be more likely to buy, if I could find what I was looking for.”

  He gave me a good once-over. He was a man past seventy, erect and alert, wearing a New York Mets baseball cap. The hand clasping the pipe was large and freckled.

  “I thought the police were keeping strangers out of here,” he said finally. “What is it you’d buy?”

  “Information.” I took out one of my cards and gave it to him. He held it up in the fading daylight and studied it.

  “You have anything a little more official-looking than this?”

  I showed him the photostat of my license.

  “This for real?”

  “As real as they make them.”

  He handed it back. “You carry a gun?”

  “I was carrying two of them until a little bit ago.”

  “What happened a little bit ago?”

  “Somebody took them away from me.” I opened my jacket and showed him the empty holsters.

  That got to him. He had a good laugh over it, swung open the gate and invited me in. He led me over to a cluster of lawn furniture. He sat in a canvas chair and I settled on the edge of a bench he might have pinched from a park somewhere.

  “Bragg, huh? My name’s Nolan. Tom Nolan. What sort of information are you after?”

  “I’m looking for somebody who might have known John Caine. I was told he used to live across the street from you. Did you know him?”

  “Yes, I knew him.”

  “Good. I’m curious about him. What sort of man he was.”

  Tom Nolan studied me awhile, then knocked the cold ashes from his pipe. “Why don’t you first of all tell me about the job you’re on.”

  “That would take quite a bit of time.”

  “Splendid. I have plenty of that these days.”

  “You don’t look it.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I mean you look to be pretty active and alert for such an old fart. I figured you must keep busy doing things.”

  He liked that and blessed me with another grin. “Well, I don’t have my head as stimulated as much of the time as I’d like. And that’s what any information I might have is going to cost you. Don’t need your money, but I’d be interested in your story.”

  He meant it, so I told him as quickly as I could what my problems were, why I’d come to Sand Valley, about Beverly Jean and Moon and Armando. I didn’t go into a
ll the gang fighting downtown. I figured he probably knew as much about that as I did. Tom Nolan listened attentively. When I’d finished he remained still, as if marshaling a few thoughts of his own.

  “That’s some story,” he said finally. “But I’m afraid I don’t know anything much that could help you.”

  “What about Caine’s leaving the police force? The chief says he was on the take.”

  “The chief is a crook. I wouldn’t believe anything he says.”

  “But there was a bank account. And there were regular deposits made into it.”

  “I don’t know why that was. It was John’s bank account, but he told me he hadn’t used it for years. I believed him. He said somebody was trying to frame him, to keep him from doing his job. He was on to something big, and he was trying to find ways to prove it to the state attorney general’s office. He kept trying to do that even after they forced him out of his job.”

  “I’ve heard that. But what made him quit digging?”

  Nolan took a gusty sigh. “Maybe he just got tired of it all.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. A man lives in a place for as long as John Caine did doesn’t act that way. If he was a good cop, the way some people seem to think, he got wind of something he felt threatened his town. I mean, I know cops, Mr. Nolan.”

  “Well, he started drinking, John did.” The old man shook his head and patted around his pockets for a tobacco pouch. “A terrible waste.”

  He found the pouch and began stoking another pipe. “He’d be drunk by midday, and he’d just stay that way. After…” His voice broke, and he cleared it. “After he killed himself they found empty bottles under his bed. He either lay there and drank them during the day, or he woke up and drank from them at night. Have you ever seen a man destroy himself that way, Mr. Bragg?”

  “I’ve seen some after they’d gotten that way. I never spent any time around them while they were doing it.”

  “It is a tragic, tragic thing.”

  “How long was it before he died that he started drinking that way?”

  “It was several months, at least.”

  “Less than a year?”

  “I would say so. Not more than that.”

  “That’s surprising. Most of the heavy drinkers I’ve encountered have been that way for years. Something must have made him do it that suddenly. Something pretty big.”

  Nolan wasn’t ready to tell me what it might have been, if he even knew. He stalled around diddling with his pipe then struck a match getting it going just the way he wanted. It was just slightly maddening. I was running out of time. There was a generation between us, and I had to cross it in a hurry.

  “I guess you must be retired, Mr. Nolan.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What did you do before?”

  “Did a lot of things. Was a cowboy up in Montana when I was just a youngster. Drifted around a lot. Fought in a war. You don’t want to hear about all that.”

  “But it’s a part of my technique.”

  “What technique?”

  I pursed my lips a minute, then shrugged. “Okay, you’re an intelligent man. I’ll tell you about it. You see, Mr. Nolan, I don’t think you’re being as frank with me as I’d like. So I was going to work around to which job you’d liked the most of all the things you’d done. Then I was going to compare that to John Caine and his job, being a cop. He sounds as if he was a good one. He must have liked his work. Something turned him into a quitter. The people who run the town didn’t do that, because he kept on acting like a cop even after he was bumped off the force. It was something else. Something that made him drop his investigation of what was happening to his town, and hit him so hard that he had to turn to heavy drinking to keep his mind off it, or at least to dull it enough so it didn’t hurt so much. I’m trying to find out what that was, because it might be tied to whoever is now threatening my client and the little girl. I think you could tell me what it was, Mr. Nolan. If you just understood how important it might be.”

  I had gotten him thinking about it. He stared off across the street to where the television and kid’s voices and the smell of food came out an open door.

  “You’re another intelligent man, Mr. Bragg. Yes, I could tell you what it was that hit John Caine like a mule’s kick, but there isn’t any way it could be connected to your problems, I don’t think. It was just a tragic, personal thing. I think I’m the only living person John ever told about it. And I’ve never told another soul.”

  “I’m not here to get information I can spread around, Mr. Nolan. I never do that unless it’s mighty important that I do. About the worst thing you could tell me was that John Caine killed somebody in circumstances other than in the line of duty. But brutal as it is, murder is an understandable crime, in some instances.”

  “No,” he said so quietly I could hardly hear him. “It wasn’t a killing. Quite the opposite.” He took the pipe out of his mouth and wrapped both hands around it, staring at the glowing tobacco as if he might find something there that he’d lost. “You see, it’s something that had happened quite a few years earlier, only John didn’t know it then.

  “You say that you’ve heard rumors that the little girl, Theresa Moore’s daughter, was Burt Slide’s. And you say that Carl Slide told you it was Armando Barker’s. Well, that’s all baloney. John Caine fathered that child.”

  I leaned forward with a tingling at the base of my neck.

  “John had known Theresa Moore for many years. He and his wife took her in for a period. It wasn’t then, but later. Things happen to a man sometimes, you know. He’s afraid he’s on the verge of losing something, then somebody comes along who shows him it isn’t so, and he sort of loses control of his senses. John’s wife was a pretty sick woman the last years of her life. It wasn’t a happy time. And I guess Theresa just happened to lighten the misery for John. She never told him she was pregnant. She just went away and had the child and came back later with the story about the soldier husband. The little girl must have been six or seven then. Theresa still didn’t tell John it was his child for another year or so.

  “She told him after he’d been kicked off the police force. I don’t know if she really loved this Barker fellow, but she knew then she didn’t have much longer to live, and I guess this Barker promised to take good care of the child after she was gone. To bring her up proper and all. Well, here was John Caine snooping into all the dirty business starting to go on around here, downtown and out at the Truck Stop, and maybe some people might have gone to jail over all that. Barker was one of them. So Theresa told John the child was his. And she told him she was going to die. And she told him that Barker was going to look after the little girl. John wanted to take the child himself, but Theresa didn’t want that. She wanted the girl brought up somewhere else besides in Sand Valley. And of course, John Caine would never leave here.”

  He groped in his pocket for a stick match and relit his pipe. “And so John just sort of fell apart inside. He lost interest in everything and he began drinking. Within a year, both Theresa and John were dead.”

  Tom Nolan took out his pipe and just stared at me. The telling of it seemed to have angered him. “Well, now you know. Does it make you feel any better?”

  “I won’t feel any better until I know the threat to John Caine’s little girl is gone. Does Armando know it’s John Caine’s child?”

  “I’m sure he does not. They had all left town by the time John told me. And he said I was the only one he’d told.”

  “Why would Theresa tell Burt Slide the girl was Armando’s?”

  “Because she’d cast her lot with Barker and wanted Burt Slide out of her life. It was all of it for the little girl. Of course she had no idea Burt would go off half crazy like he did when she told him that. Burt swore to her he was going to kill Barker. So Theresa called John and told him what she’d done. John raced down to the church to try stopping the shooting, but it was too late.”

  “Why do you suppose he told you al
l this, Mr. Nolan?”

  “Because I guess we were about as good friends as men can be. I went through some terrible times with him after he began hitting the bottle. I sat up with him, more than once, trying to talk him out of what he was doing to himself. I guess my words caused him enough grief or shame or whatever, that one night he just broke down and told me why he was doing the things he was. I haven’t even told my wife about that night, Mr. Bragg. And Mary and I have been married for fifty-three years.”

  “I guess that does make you and John Caine some kind of friends.”

  “You bet it does. Good enough friends so I didn’t even show the police a note John left me when he killed himself.”

  “A suicide note?”

  “I guess you could call it that. But it was a personal message for me. Nothing more. It was his parting token of friendship.”

  “Do you still have it?”

  “I do not. I destroyed it the day that terrible thing happened.”

  “But you remember what it said.”

  “I do. And I’ll repeat myself. It was a personal message for me alone.”

  “What did it say, Mr. Nolan?”

  “Damn it all, Bragg. Nothing good can come of it. That’s why I never told anyone about it. It’s like picking at a grave, what you’re doing.”

  “Tom, I guess you thought John Caine was a pretty good cop.”

  “You’re darn right I did.”

  “I do too, Tom. From what I’ve heard, I think he was one damn fine cop. Smart at his work. And I’ll tell you something else. In my own way, I think I’m a pretty good cop myself. And if I were John Caine, and my little girl was in any sort of danger, I’d want a pretty good cop to know anything Tom Nolan could tell him.”

  We looked at each other steadily. Tom Nolan came from the old days, and he did things the old ways. He figured if he could look at a man hard enough, and the man looked back the right way, then it was somebody you could trust. It had never worked for me. People I would have trusted my mother’s left leg to had lied right to my face and sent me off to trouble. But then, maybe that was some flaw in me. Maybe if you had whatever Tom Nolan had inside of him, it would work for you.