The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  I went back and sat on the edge of a chair. “That’s right, you don’t.”

  “Well, this is unofficial, and all I can tell you is what Bob Dempsey told me after being over to Santa Barbara to question Wesley Chase, the younger brother who was convicted as an accessory. Apparently this Stoval is the man who found the money in Chase’s apartment. There was some other evidence, but the money is the thing that convicted him. And the rumors around the Santa Barbara police department at the time were that the insurance fellow might not have found that evidence in a strictly legal manner, under the rules of search and seizure and all. A lot of people, Bob Dempsey being one of them, had the impression that a good lawyer might have developed that end of things and gotten the boy off. But he couldn’t afford a good—I mean a high-priced lawyer. He had a public defender who wanted to plea bargain with the prosecutor’s office down the hall. That’s what the insurance fellow wanted too, for Wesley to cooperate and tell them where his brother and the rest of the money was. But the Chase boy refused. He denied all knowledge of the crime or his brother’s whereabouts.”

  I took a cab to the Dempsey home. It was a tidy, stucco house in a neighborhood of neatly trimmed lawns. The front porch light was on and Coral Dempsey opened the door soon after I pushed the buzzer. Dempsey was married to a woman several years younger than himself. She was attractive in a dusky way with long, dark hair. She wore black slacks and a white blouse, and after letting me in, crossed the room to turn off a small color television set in the corner. The room lights were dim, but from what I’d seen beneath the front porch light, she hadn’t been sleeping well.

  “I’m glad you found Tuffy and Steve,” she told me.

  “I only found the boy. He was able to tell us how to find his dad.”

  Mrs. Dempsey sat at one end of a sofa. I settled in a chair across from her. There was a box of tissues by her side and a wastebasket on the floor. She’d been using both.

  “What is it you want, Mr. Bragg?”

  I told her about Jerry Lind and his search for her husband. “The main thing I’m trying to find out now is what your husband was doing in Barracks Cove.”

  “And that’s the problem, of course. He never talked about his work to me or the children.”

  “Did he drive up?”

  “No, he flew to San Francisco and rented a car.”

  “I understand that during a call you had from him, he said something about becoming sheriff.”

  “Yes. His last phone call.” She reached for a tissue. “We did use to talk about his dreams—our dreams.”

  Her face started to fall apart. She got up and excused herself before going down the hallway and closing a door behind her. I could hear water running. She returned looking about the way she had when she opened the front door.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Bragg, but the evening is when I can let it all out. After the boys are in bed. They’re four and six. I don’t want them to see. I haven’t figured out how I’m going to tell them yet.”

  “But tell them what, Mrs. Dempsey? Chief Porter says…”

  She sat erect and spoke firmly. “I don’t care what Chief Porter or anybody else says. I don’t need to. I know that Bob is dead. I know that he has been for days. I could almost tell you the hour.” She rose and crossed to a floor lamp to turn up the light. “Mr. Bragg, I don’t mean to be rude, and I don’t like people to see me when I’m looking so rotten, but there is something that I want you, or Chief Porter, or somebody to understand. The love that my husband and I had for each other was something quite extraordinary. Something quite different from what you find between a husband and a wife who have been married almost ten years. Perhaps it would be easier if you knew the terrible loneliness of a police officer’s work. Do you?”

  “I know something of their miseries.”

  “Miseries. Yes, that’s what it was. And for my part, Mr. Bragg, I used to be a singer in a little club on the strip in L.A. More than a singer, I was supposed to be an entertainer, I found out. When I landed the job I told myself, God, how wonderful. My first step to fame and fortune.”

  She crossed to a small stand, took out a cigarette and lit it. “I soon found out it was more like the first step to being a hooker. Nothing official, you understand, but we were encouraged to mingle with certain special customers. And if one of them asked to take out any of the girls working there, when we were through for the night, we were strongly encouraged to go along. It always meant a nice little bonus in the next paycheck. But I didn’t like that. I tried to get work at other clubs. Finally a fellow I met arranged for me to get an interview with an assistant producer of a TV show. Over in Burbank. The assistant producer turned out to be a very nice guy. He had me audition for him. He listened to me sing a couple of numbers, then in a very gentle manner told me that I didn’t really have much of a voice. Then he asked if I could dance. He said I had nice looking legs. I had to tell him I’d never danced, so that was the end of the audition.

  “But at least it made things finally fall into place in my head about how it was at the club where I worked. The attraction was my body, not my voice. So I stayed on at the club feeling miserable and sordid, but making a lot more money than I could have doing much else. Until the night I met Bob. There was a shooting at the club. A man was killed. It was some sort of minor gang feud. Bob was the detective in charge of the investigation. The shooting had happened during one of my sets. I’d seen the whole thing. Bob interviewed me two, maybe three times. After that he’d stop by the club from time to time. I assumed it was to talk to other people about the shooting, but it turned out he just wanted to watch me. I figured that out after the trial, when there wasn’t any official reason for him to be there. So I went over to the bar one night when he was there, after my numbers, and said hello.”

  She paused, with a little smile. “We were married one month later. And for our married life, no two people ever loved each other more, or better. And we grew so close in some ways…There was this thing that bound us, even when he was away from home, working. Before he phoned home in the evenings, I would know if he was happy or sad.

  “The night he phoned from Barracks Cove, he was elated in a manner I’d never heard nor felt before.” She crumpled a tissue and stared at her fist. “Two days later I knew that he was dead. I think—I think I knew it later that same night, even, but didn’t fully realize it.”

  “Has he ever missed calling home in the past while he was away?”

  “Never. We spoke to each other at least once a day since that night back in the club when I walked over to say hello.”

  “That could explain the funny feeling you have. Maybe just because he hasn’t called…”

  “No, Mr. Bragg, that’s not it. My Bob is either dead, or something so horrible has happened to his head and his heart that I couldn’t bear to see him that way.” She lapsed into another silence, staring at the floor. She was beginning to make me edgy.

  “When he called from Barracks Cove, Mrs. Dempsey, did he say anything—anything at all about what he was doing, or what it was he had found?”

  She shook her head. “No. He just said he’d tumbled onto something that would make him sheriff. It was something he wanted. He was getting restless here in Rey Platte, but at the same time, he didn’t want to go back to the tensions of a large city.”

  “What did you talk about during that last call?”

  “The kids. Us. What I’d done that day. What we would do if he finished whatever he was working on in time for us to have a few days to ourselves before he would be going back to work here.”

  She was staring at me with a starkness bordering on the mad. “Oh, God, please leave. I can’t help you anymore. I just want to be left alone.”

  I thanked her and left quickly. I walked the half dozen blocks back into downtown Rey Platte before I found a taxi to take me back out to the airport. The night air was warm and gentle, but I felt a chill. Being overly tired could explain some of it, but the meeting with Mrs. Dem
psey had taken its own toll. It was like with Tuffy back in the meadow. The sort of conviction she professed in her husband’s fate wasn’t acknowledged in medical textbooks, but my own hunch was that she knew what she was talking about. I decided I wouldn’t call Jerry Lind’s sister or his wife that night to tell them of the day’s events. There wasn’t a chance I’d be able to keep the gloom out of my voice.

  FOURTEEN

  I slept all the way to San Francisco on the plane from Sky Charter with the smiling pilot. I didn’t have enough pizazz left to go the rest of the way home, and I wanted to get an early start the next morning. So I got a room in a hotel near the airport and slept seriously. When I rolled out of bed Monday morning my muscles had things to tell me. I wasn’t used to that much hiking, hauling and dunking. I sneezed a couple of times and got on the phone to call around until I found the rental car outfit Bob Dempsey had used. It was an economy firm that had leased him a VW bug. Dempsey had shown them his police identification and a credit card and told them he would need the car for an indefinite period. Subsequently, the firm had received a phone call from the police in Willits. The auto had been abandoned at the field there. The rental outfit asked the Willits police to impound the vehicle, but to hold it for another few days in case the client returned.

  Next I called the airline that bounced into small towns around the northern part of the state, one of them being Willits, where my own car was. Their rates were a lot more reasonable than Sky Charter’s and they had a flight that left in an hour, so I made a reservation and also asked if they had a record of a Robert Dempsey flying out of Willits in the past two weeks. They said they would check and call me back.

  Then I phoned Coast West Insurance and spoke with Laurel Benson. She confirmed what I suspected by then. The other case Jerry Lind had been working on, the one Stoval hadn’t told me about, concerned the hundred dollar bill that had been taken in the Rey Platte bank and armored car robbery. But she had some other news for me. Stoval had shown up in the office that morning with a suitcase. He’d gone through his mail and made some phone calls and then told Laurel that he would be gone for a couple of days. She said he’d never done that before.

  I went in to take a shower and was toweling off when the small airline phoned back. They had no record of Dempsey flying out of Willits. I phoned Ceejay Mackey at the office, introduced myself and tried to stifle a sneeze.

  “Are you phoning in sick?”

  “No, I’m at the airport. Has Janet Lind called this morning?”

  “No.”

  “If she does, tell her I’ll check in with her either tonight or tomorrow.”

  “A Marcie Lind called. Is that the missing man’s wife?”

  “Yes. What did she want?”

  “She just wanted to know how things were going.”

  “If she calls again tell her you don’t know.”

  “That’s what I told her before. How are things going?”

  “You wouldn’t want to hear.” I sneezed and hung up and went out to catch an airplane.

  The acting chief of police in Willits was a lanky young man of twenty-five or thereabouts with sandy hair and a long, droopy mustache. His name was Simms and he had a casual manner that bordered on malfeasance in office, but he knew what he was doing. He said they had checked out the VW license plates with Sacramento after the car had been at the airfield for about ten days. After then calling the rental outfit in San Francisco they’d towed it back into town.

  “Did they tell you the name of the man who rented it?”

  “They did indeed, and I have it right here on my desk somewhere,” he told me, picking through the papers on his desk.

  “It was Dempsey,” I told him. “He’s a detective from Rey Platte. He’s been missing for a couple of weeks. For strong reasons of her own, his wife is convinced he’s probably dead.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I’m afraid I have to agree with her.”

  Simms stared at me a moment then got up and took a visored cap from the hatrack behind his desk. “You know, I don’t think any of my men ever checked out that car. Want to come along?”

  The corporation yard where they’d put the VW was only a couple of blocks away, so we walked. On the way over there I told Simms about Jerry Lind and the connection with Dempsey, the hundred dollar bill and even the father and son crash survivors in the Willits hospital. He’d heard about the last two. I did my explaining in fits and starts, working in a word here and there between all the greetings the chief exchanged with merchants in their doorways and people on the street. Even the young people with long, untamed hair had smiles for him.

  “You seem to be a popular man, Chief.”

  “I should hope so. We keep a good eye on things. The business community appreciates that. And the younger, tangled-looking citizens know I smoke a little dope from time to time. Makes them feel comfortable.”

  “I’ll bet it does.”

  “Of course the town fathers are a little nervous about me being so popular. They figure something must be wrong somewhere.”

  “They’ll get over that. How long have you been acting chief?”

  “Three years now.”

  We turned into the maintenance yard. There were a couple of trucks and a street cleaner parked to one side, some piles of sand and stacks of scrap lumber. The VW was parked over beside a low wooden building. Simms waved at somebody through the doorway of the building and we went around to the car. The door on the driver’s side was unlocked. Simms opened it and leaned his head in. I went around to the other side.

  We searched under the seats and in the back. The car was empty and clean. I took out a small pocket knife and popped out the nail file. I put the tip onto the release button of the glove compartment and opened it. Inside was an open map of California and a VW key. I lifted out the key by the loop of wire it was on and passed it over to Simms, who stared at it a moment then just took the key between his fingers.

  “There’s nobody around here I know about who has talent enough to bring out prints on this little thing.” Simms climbed into the car, put the key into the ignition and started the motor.

  “What’s the gas gauge say?”

  “Half full.”

  “Mileage?”

  Simms read off the numbers and I wrote them down. He turned it off and climbed back out, looking around him for something.

  “How about the trunk?” I suggested.

  “That’s what I was thinking. If I’d known we were going to be so damn professional I’d have brought along some tools.” He went around the corner and into the building. A moment later he returned with a length of wire that he twisted around the hood release and pulled. The front panel popped open and the chief went on around to lift it. There was a large suitcase inside. Simms hefted one corner. It was heavy.

  “Well now,” he said. “I suppose a fellow could fly off somewhere and forget his luggage…”

  “Seriously, Chief, do you have a man who can look for finger and palm prints?”

  “Oh sure, not to worry. We got a man named Corning. Even the sheriff uses him.” Simms straightened, staring at the car with his hands on his hips.

  “Do you have a photograph of the man who rented this?”

  I nodded, getting it out. “The Rey Platte police gave it to me.”

  Simms squinted at it. “He never stopped by to say hello. Can I have this long enough to get some copies made?”

  “I’d like to show it to Doctor Nelson first. I’ll bring it by your office after.”

  We walked back to the center of town and I got directions to the doctor’s office. It was in a building across from the hospital. I drove on over and showed a receptionist there my ID. I said I wanted to see Nelson. She said he was busy. I said it was important and involved a hundred dollar bill. She gave me a look, but asked me to be seated and went through a doorway and down a hall. In the waiting room with me was an elderly couple holding hands, a guy who looked as if he worked in the woo
ds, a young, good-looking girl with no bra beneath her T-shirt but a slow smile for everybody and a young mother with a boy of about five who eyed me as if I’d come to collect the rent. I’d just opened a last year’s copy of Newsweek when some sort of fuss erupted down the hall. Somebody dropped something and a guy with a loud, sharp voice was coming our way. He sounded a little hysterical, raving about people with acute emphysema, somebody crazy in the head who had hemorrhoids, a couple of people he didn’t know what was ailing them and other assorted complaints.

  The voice came from a fellow about my age or a bit younger wearing a white smock. He stomped into the room, looked around, then stared at me. “Are you the one asking about that hundred dollar bill?”

  “We all got problems, Doc,” I told him, getting to my feet. “Yours and mine aren’t all that different. We want to keep people from dying.”

  His voice lost some of its edge. “How do you mean?”

  “There are two men missing. They both were trying to find where the hundred dollar bill came from, and now they might not be alive. There are two more persons, a man and his son, in the hospital across the street who were in a plane crash a few days ago.”

  “I’m well aware of that.”

  “They were on their way down here to look for one of the missing men and nearly got killed themselves. So you see, there’s a lot of mischief tied up to that hundred dollar bill.”

  He gave a gusty sigh. His gaze shifted to the little five-year-old who by now was clinging to his mother.

  “Oh, hello, Billy,” said the doctor. “Did I scare you? I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.” He turned back to me. “All right, I’ll give you four minutes. Follow me.”

  We went down the hall to a small office with a desk in disarray and a diploma from a Midwest medical school on the wall. The doctor sat at his desk, brushed at a lock of hair on his forehead and gestured toward another chair.