by Jack Lynch
“Yes, that’s closed. So there’s really only the two.” He looked at his watch again. “Afraid now I must leave, Bragg. Nice to have met you.”
We touched palms and I left the glass box. I looked around for Miss Benson, but the floor was deserted except for a different receptionist up front. It was two minutes past noon. I took an elevator back to the street floor. The sidewalks were crowded with furloughed office workers. I trotted across California Street in front of a dinging cable car and was about to go into the parking garage where I’d left my car when I saw the older gentleman from Coast West with the gray-streaked hair and paunch. He was standing between Banyon’s Cafe and a bar called the Silver Lode. He made a couple of false starts toward each, looked up the street with a frown and finally went into the bar. I followed. The bartender was just putting a drink down in front of him when I squeezed in beside him.
“Can I pay for that?” I put some money on the bar.
“Why should you?”
“I can use some help. You just saw me up talking to Stoval. The name’s Bragg.”
The man introduced himself as Wallace and lifted his glass with a shrug. I ordered a beer.
“I’m trying to get a lead on what might have happened to Jerry Lind. Stoval wasn’t much help.”
“What’s supposed to have happened to Jerry Lind?” He spoke with an accent that sounded lonely for New York.
“Nobody seems to know, but he hasn’t been seen or heard from for a couple of weeks. Didn’t you notice?”
“Not especially. He spends a lot of time out of the office.”
“Don’t all of you?”
“Not as much as him.”
“You an investigator too?”
“That’s right.”
“How long have you been with the firm?”
“Fifteen hilarious years.”
“That’s a long time. Still like the job?”
“Not all that much. But fifteen years is quite an investment. They have a nice retirement plan.”
“Is it a good outfit to work for?”
“So-so.”
“Do you have a family?”
“I thought you wanted to ask about Jerry Lind.”
“I do. But I don’t know anything about him. I figured if I could find out a little bit about his job—same as yours—I could learn something about him.”
“It wouldn’t help that much,” Wallace said. “We’re a varied bunch.”
“So, okay, what can you tell me about Jerry?”
“Not a whole lot. I feel he’s sort of a lightweight, myself. Personable, but not too bright. But the company doesn’t seem to care. Rather, Stoval doesn’t.”
“About the jobs you do?”
“It’s not the same with all of us.”
“You mean there was something special about the relationship between Lind and Stoval?”
“That’s not exactly what I said. But I don’t think I want to pursue that.”
“Have a heart, Wallace. If you didn’t have anything personal against Lind yourself, why not help out? I think the kid’s in trouble.”
Wallace turned to study me. “What makes you say that?”
“Things I turned up so far indicate he had good reason not to drop out of sight. I don’t think he would have done so voluntarily. I haven’t the vaguest idea what might have happened to him, but I think he needs help. I’d like to give it to him.”
“You a friend of the family, or what?”
“Sorry. Private cop. Should have told you before.”
I opened my wallet and he studied the photostat. “Peter Bragg, huh? I have a friend in robbery over at the hall. Name’s Mueller. Know him?”
“Not personally. Might have met him some time or other. Why?”
“We got into a discussion about private cops one time. Your name came up.”
He turned back to the bar. There wasn’t much left in his glass to swirl around the ice. I signaled for the bartender to bring him another.
“I can’t help you much, except for one thing,” Wallace said. “And that’s just speculation. I wouldn’t want anyone else to know I even had such a rotten thought.”
“Done.”
“The job used to be a little better than it is now. One of the reasons was the outside work was spread a little more evenly among the staff. It’s a pleasant break, you know, leaving the filing cabinets and telephones for a while.”
“Sure.”
“Then about eighteen months ago the department head retired and they brought up this guy Stoval, from L.A. One of the first things he did was throw a little party for the staff and our spouses, to blow off about what a swell working family we all were going to be.
“Not long after that a funny thing started happening. There seemed to be a trend of giving most of the outside work—things that would take you out of town for a few days—to a small group of the younger guys. Somebody mentioned it in a kidding way one time when Stoval could overhear it. He said something about us senior guys being more valuable for our brains than our feet. Curiously, a couple of us older hands noted one day over a drink after work that the guys who got most of the out-of-town assignments had the best-looking wives sitting at home, pining away the lonely hours. Or whatever.”
“Did you ever notice anything concrete in that way? Whatever it was you old hands might have suspected?”
“Just once. There was one young fellow, a go-getter named Harry Sund. His was a nice looking woman. Real nice. After one of Sund’s out-of-town jobs he came steaming into the office and flat out quit. None too gently. He marched into Stoval’s office and hung over the boss’s desk. There were rumors from the people nearest the office at the time that Sund threatened to stuff the out-of-town folders up Mr. Stoval’s ass. Then Sund turned and marched out of the office, never to be seen again, with Mr. Stoval sitting there with his face about the shade of a fresh Bloody Mary.”
“Tell me something about Mrs. Lind. Is she an attractive woman?”
Wallace looked up at me with heavy brows over the rim of his drink. “Let me put it this way, Bragg. I had occasion to dance a slow number with her at the company party I mentioned. It gave me the first erection I’d had in a month.” He stood a little straighter, thinking about it.
“But as for anything more definite,” he continued, raising his fresh drink in toast, “like I said. It would be but the wildest speculation on my part.”
THREE
I went over to my own office to make more phone calls, ask more questions and wait for answers. Back when I worked for the San Francisco Chronicle, the paper kept a back file of several other newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. It turned out they still did, and a friend called back later to tell me he’d found Milton Lind’s obituary in the Times of June 10. He’d been a minor league land speculator. His only survivors were the niece and nephew in Northern California. Another call to a credit rating outfit I subscribe to brought the news that Jerry Lind had a normal load of debts which he handled with no difficulty.
I didn’t have much luck trying to reach the fellow who ran the Legion Palace Museum, a man named Bancroft. He either was on another phone or too busy to talk the several times I called. The last time, I was told he was gone for the day but that he’d be in for a half day on Saturday.
I also tried to reach a man in Southern California who was an executive officer with Coast West Insurance Co. I hadn’t seen the need to tell Emil Stoval about it, but I knew a little bit about the company’s operations myself. Stoval had been wrong when he said the company always went to the police when something tricky came up. Sometimes they went to private investigators to do jobs they didn’t want their own men to handle, or for matters involving internal operations. I had done such a job for them two years earlier. I’d gotten all the breaks and the company had liked the way I handled it. I hoped the executive I’d dealt with then would still be grateful and willing to give me a little information about Stoval. As it turned out, the man I wanted had already
left the office for the weekend. So much for trying to do a job on a Friday afternoon.
It was after three when I drove north to Marin County and the town of Larkspur. It was a warm day, steaming out things that had been drenched in a surprise rainstorm the night before. Lind’s address was on a street off Madrone. I knew the area. Madrone wound up a wooded canyon climbing toward Mt. Tamalpais. There were a lot of older homes in the area, some of them ramshackle enough to offer lower rents. They attracted kids with misplaced minds who strummed guitars and didn’t worry about tomorrow. It wasn’t really an area where you’d expect to find a man who worked for an old line, conservative insurance company. But then it wasn’t easy to find reasonable rents in Marin County any longer, either. Every time they put up another office building in downtown San Francisco, rents rose thirty miles away.
The Lind home was up at the end of an asphalt street with the closest neighbors fifty yards below. The house was a newer structure, a one-story frame building perched on stilts punched into the hillside. I parked out front behind a blue Karmann Ghia, climbed up a lot of stairs and rang the bell. I stood there a while waiting for somebody to answer, but it was worth the wait. The girl who opened the door was small, part Oriental and very cute. She wore her glistening black hair in a long ponytail. She had a saucy face with bright, alert eyes and a full mouth that looked ready to surprise you. I couldn’t tell about her body. She wore a loosely belted, white terrycloth robe.
“Mrs. Lind?”
“Yes?”
“My name’s Bragg. I’m a private investigator.” I held out the wallet. “I’ve been hired to look for Jerry.”
She stared at me for a moment. “All right,” she said at last. “Come along out back if you want.”
She unlocked the screen door and turned to lead me through the house. “Excuse the mess. I had a little birthday party for a girlfriend last night. Haven’t had a chance to clean up.”
The front room was a mess. There were overflowing ashtrays, glasses with liquid residue, chip dip gone bad and the aroma of stale good times. A couple of unmatching shoes were near the sofa and a pair of woman’s underpants in a chair nearby.
“Looks as if everyone had a pretty good time.” I followed her through a devastated kitchen and out onto a stone patio.
“Christ, they should have with all the booze I bought,” she replied. “I don’t know how it all ended. I passed out at two this morning.” She sat in a canvas recliner and lit a cigarette, motioning me to a nearby chair in the shade of a Japanese plum tree. Before sitting down I gave her one of my business cards.
“You’re not from the regular police, then?”
“No.”
“Those bastards. I never heard back from them.” She blew a sharp spike of smoke through her nostrils, made a face and glared at the tip of her cigarette. “Goddamnit, these things taste awful today.” She looked about her, then got up again. “I have to get something to drink.”
She was wearing high clogs and they were a little clumsy for her. She reminded me of a kid playing grownup as she stumped across to the kitchen doorway. I listened to her clinking ice and pouring things. She seemed to be bearing up well. She clumped back outside and sat down with a tall, clear drink.
“Why is it the regular police don’t help?”
“They have a fairly hard-nosed approach to cases involving a missing husband or wife, if there’s no history of mental illness involved. A lot of married people get fed up with their lives and decide to do something about it. They don’t always want to go through the hassle of divorce or the big scenes at home so they just up and take a hike. The cops know all this so after some routine steps don’t turn up anything, they’re not apt to spend much more time on it. They have a lot to do.”
“Do you think that’s how it is with Jerry?”
“I don’t know, I just started working. What do you think might have happened, Mrs. Lind?”
She gave her mane of hair a backward toss. “I don’t know. I’ve been through a lot of heavy trips thinking about it. Worrying. Imagining things. It didn’t really start to hit me for two or three days. I thought he’d left town on business. He does that sometimes on Sundays, to get a start on a case the first thing Monday.”
“Doesn’t he phone you when he’s out of town?”
“Not always. It’s how he does his job. He takes it very seriously. I guess he likes to drop out of sight when he’s working on something.” She shrugged and made a little face, then took another drag of her cigarette. “You know, I don’t like to mention all this, but if you’re trying to help—see, I don’t know what’s reality and what’s fantasy when Jerry’s on a case. He used to talk sometimes about trying to get into the CIA or something. I think lots of times he pretends things are more important, or at least something different, from whatever it really is he might be doing. Does that make any sense?”
“Sure it does. But it’s more the sort of assessment I’d expect from an older woman. Mind telling me how old you are?”
She gave a wave of her hand. “I’m twenty-three, but don’t give me any of that flattery bullshit. You can’t live with a guy without figuring out some things about him.”
“This fantasy element, does it extend to other parts of his life, or just to his job?”
“I don’t know. But then he’s really into his job. He spends a lot of time at it. I can’t figure it, to tell you the truth. He doesn’t get paid any overtime, just some travel expenses. But he’s always working. I mean, a lot more than other young people I know.”
“Could you tell me his salary?”
“Three hundred a week. That really isn’t very much money anymore. I used to ask him what the job was going to lead to. How much more he could expect to make if he stayed with the company. But he doesn’t like me nagging him like that. He says it’s a perfectly fine job. Not the CIA, but he’s satisfied.”
She flicked ash off the cigarette. “Big deal. I should let him do the grocery shopping some time.”
“Maybe he figures he’ll come into half a million bucks some day.”
The girl snorted. “He never told me about it if that’s what he thinks.”
“But all in all, Mrs. Lind, would you say that yours is a reasonably successful marriage?”
She waved her hand again. “Oh, you know…” She stopped speaking and stared at me as if I’d just thrown a handful of dice that rolled funny.
“You know, there’s something very important I forgot to find out. Who hired you?”
“Jerry’s sister.”
“Jesus,” she cried, getting out of the recliner. “I might have known. Well, you can just go and dig up your dirt somewhere else.”
“Hey, wait a minute, Mrs. Lind. Why can’t you be as shrewd about this as you are about the way your husband does his job?”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m not trying to dig up any dirt. Only to find Jerry. It would seem to me you’d want to do the same. My job will be easier if you can figure I’m doing it for you, only his sister is the one paying for it.”
“She’s paying you to snoop into our private lives.”
“She’s paying me to find Jerry, but to do that I need to know everything you can tell me about him. The bad along with the good. I don’t even have a jumping off place on this one yet.”
She took a little breath and ground out her cigarette. “All right. So Jerry and I don’t get along like love birds all the time. So what? A lot of young couples have trouble adjusting. You married?”
“Used to be. I know what you’re talking about.”
She liked that and gave me a small smile. We were friends, or at least fellow veterans of the same old campaigns.
“But we don’t fight all the time, either,” she continued. “His job is the biggest pain in the ass. For me, at least. I’m a little jealous of it. We don’t go out enough. I mean, I know who and what I am. Men have been watching me since I was twelve years old. I’ve been dating since I was fourteen. You�
��d think Jerry would want to show me off a little or something. I like to get out and have a little fun sometimes. But it gets so I might as well be living with a sailor who’s shipping out all the time. And for a lousy three hundred a week.”
“Could he be seeing other women?”
“Are you kidding?” She stood and opened the terry cloth robe. Beneath it she had on a string bikini. She tossed the robe aside and posed with her hands on her hips. I had to work some to keep from swallowing my tongue. She was, as they used to say in the movies, quite a dish.
“Tell me,” she said, “would you be out chasing other girls if you had this waiting at home for you?”
“No, Mrs. Lind, I don’t guess I would. But then a lot of guys are funny that way. They can’t seem to settle down in their heads with any one mate.”
“Hey, I like the way you put that. One mate.” She sat back on the recliner and ignored the robe. “Okay with you if I sit here like this?”
“Sure, just so long as you don’t expect me to be staring you straight in the eye all the time.”
She giggled. “No, that’s okay. I like to turn men on. What’s the sense of having a nice body if you can’t show it off a little?” She grinned at me. “I feel like a peacock.”
“Does it ever go beyond showing it off?”
She took away the grin. “If it did I wouldn’t tell you. Unless I decided I wanted you. Let’s change the subject.”
“Okay, Mrs. Lind.”
“Call me Marcie. All my friends do. What’s your name?” She looked at the card again. “I’ll call you Pete, okay?”
“Sure. How come you don’t like Jerry’s sister?”
“That snob bitch? She’s full of phony bullshit airs, that’s why. Like she was last season’s Miss Bryn Mawr. And she thinks I’m common. Not good enough for her fucking brother. Of course I don’t think of Jerry that way.”
“How do you think of him?”
“Lots of ways. As my husband, mostly.” She tucked her feet up on the recliner. “But that sister of his is too much. I never finished high school. I got into some trouble down in Santa Barbara. I was holding a guy’s stash when the cops stopped us one night. It was no big thing, but I had to drop out of school, and by the time I got that hassle straightened out I decided why bother?
