by Jack Lynch
“Nope. Found a lot of places where he used to live. He seemed to be one of those fellows who moved around a lot.”
I took out my picture of Dempsey and handed it to Smythe. “Do you recognize this man?”
Smythe stared at it with a frown. “I ought to. It’s a hard face to forget. I can’t place it, but I’m sure I have seen him somewhere.”
“He was a police detective.”
“Oh sure, he came by here a couple years ago. He was interested in my collection of Pavel stuff too.”
“How so?”
“He was a little more blunt about it than you are, young man. He wanted to know why any man would want to collect this sort of stuff. I told him about the same thing I told you. Introduced him to Thelma and she charmed him some. Showed him my old medical degree, stuff like that. He finally accepted my story.”
“Did you ask why he was curious?”
“Sure, but he was here to ask questions, not to answer any. He just told me he’d heard I had a little collection of the stuff, and that he’d always had an abiding interest in the man’s work himself.”
I caught a flight to the small Rey Platte airport, and from there took a cab out to Coral Dempsey’s home and asked the driver to wait. I didn’t want to spend long with the widow. Just long enough to find out what she might know about her late husband’s interest in art.
It was the middle of the afternoon. Sounds of children came from behind a house across the street. At the Dempsey house the blinds were closed and there was no response to my ringing and knocking. I went around to the driveway beside the house. The carport was empty. I went back to the street in front. I was about to go across to the house where I heard the kids playing when the screen door on the house next door opened and an overweight woman of thirty or so in a white halter and pink shorts came out.
“Were you looking for somebody?”
“I wanted to see Mrs. Dempsey.”
The neighbor shook her head. “She left this morning. There was—a terrible accident in the family.”
“You mean Mr. Dempsey?”
“Yes.”
“I know about that. When will Mrs. Dempsey be back?”
“She didn’t say. She packed up the kids and left first thing this morning. Wasn’t it awful?”
“Yes it was. Did she say when she’d be back?”
“She didn’t know for sure. They went to Barstow. She has folks there. I’m sort of keeping an eye on the house for her. Would you like to come in?”
She was the concerned neighbor, with the morbid curiosity that concerned neighbors have. She figured she would find out more about what happened to Dempsey than Mrs. Dempsey would have told her. On that score she was right, but I didn’t want to ruin the rest of her day by telling her about it.
“No, that’s all right. Do you know the name of her folks in Barstow?”
She shook her head. “But she’ll phone later in the week.”
I nodded. “Thanks anyhow.”
I took the cab back downtown to the police station. Chief Porter was deep-bottomed into his chair as if he hadn’t moved since I was there Sunday night. But he showed some strain, as if he hadn’t been getting enough sleep, and he indicated what had been bothering him when he asked me to describe in detail the condition of Dempsey’s body when I’d found him. I did it as clinically as I could, but I’m not a coroner’s deputy, and the telling of it bothered us both.
“His revolver was still in his holster?” the chief asked.
“That’s right. He didn’t realize he’d found whoever, or whatever, he was looking for.”
“And what do you think that was?”
“Until last night, I figured the insurance man I’m looking for, and Dempsey, had both been looking for the source of the stolen money. But somewhere along the line Dempsey changed directions. I’ve learned he had great curiosity about a painting that was stolen last month from the Legion Palace Museum in San Francisco. Dempsey visited the museum and asked a lot of questions about it. Then he continued north and eventually ended up in Barracks Cove. My boy was a couple of steps behind him all the way. I think he disappeared while looking for Dempsey. I think he wanted to ask Dempsey why the painting was so important to him.”
“What kind of painting?” the chief asked.
“It was a wacky portrait. In fact, one of a whole series of weird figure studies I’ve learned Dempsey was interested in over the years. All of them done by somebody calling himself Pavel.”
Porter just stared at me a minute, then scraped back his chair and went over to a file cabinet.
“Gone,” he said finally, banging shut the drawer. “Guess Bob took it with him.”
“A file?”
“Yes, but hell, it was more his than the department’s, with all his own time he put in on it.”
“Tell me about it.”
“It started with a terrible story we heard from a local woman, Mary Madigan. It was about a painting that turned up at the art festival we have here in the fall. We got a lot of rich old boys living hereabouts, retired, you know, so this art fair attracts a lot of people from all over the state, both artists and dealers. Anyhow, one of the displays put up by a gallery from Los Angeles included one of those Pavel things. Mary Madigan saw it and nearly fainted. She said it was a painting of her brother, even down to the tip of his left middle finger that she said was lopped off in an accident when he was a youngster, and the necktie she said he wore the day he was murdered. Decapitated, to be exact. His body had been found a couple years earlier in a vacant lot back east, in Pittsburgh. The brother had been running a food specialty business that was a growing concern, supposedly making inroads on a competitor that had racket money in the operation. The Pittsburgh police told us later they believed it was a hired kill.
“Well, sir, Bob and I both went over and looked at the painting. It was a grisly thing, right enough, but a lot of what Mary thought she saw in it wasn’t all that apparent to me. It wasn’t as sharp as any photograph, after all. What she saw as a lopped-off finger could have been a smudge of something else. And the tie—hell, I could have found a couple resembling it in any men’s store. I figured it to be more a piece of Mary’s imagination, still upset over her brother’s death and all.”
“And Dempsey?”
“Well, Bob was fascinated at what it could mean if she did turn out to be right, so like I said, he started putting a lot of his own time in on it trying to find out who this Pavel was. He even learned the man’s true name, or at least the name he was using then, but it was a whisker too late.”
“What was the name?”
“John Roper.”
“That’s the same information I have.”
The creases deepened on the chief’s forehead. “Anyway, Bob had some extensive phone conversations with the Pittsburgh police. They never caught the person who murdered Mary’s brother, but they told Bob they thought it was a fellow with a terrible background who called himself Hobo. I’d heard stories about that name myself.”
My mouth went dry on me. “So have I.”
“Anyway, Bob nosed around a lot of art galleries along the coast, found and took photos of a number of those Pavel works. Sent copies around to a lot of major police departments, asking if they resembled victims who might have been killed in their area. He did get back a few tentative IDs, but it was all pretty iffy stuff.
“But there was one strange thing Bob found. This Pavel fellow wasn’t looking for any publicity. He always worked through intermediaries to get his work displayed. Then like I said, Bob got lucky. I think it was through some dealer in L.A. he knew. Found out the fellow who painted under the name Pavel was the Roper fellow. And we were practically neighbors. He lived just southeast of here, but it took another week for Bob Dempsey to learn that, and by the time he went there this Roper had moved, just days before. Didn’t leave a trace, either. Was like the earth had swallowed him. That’s the last I knew of Bob doing anything about it. I didn’t know he was st
ill pursuing that theory.”
“Theory?”
“Yes, that Roper and Pavel and the Hobo were all the same fellow. That he was some sort of madman who painted from memory what his victims had looked like just before he killed them.”
“You personally didn’t buy it?”
“No, Bragg, I didn’t. Like I said, it was all so iffy. Of course now, after what’s happened, I’d hate like hell to think Bob was right and I was wrong all this time.”
NINETEEN
I couldn’t blame Chief Porter for his doubts, but the aggravating thing was it did make sense in light of everything that had happened in the Jerry Lind case. I had heard enough, from enough sober cops, about this individual who called himself Hobo to know he existed, that he was ruthless and that he was responsible for a lot of carnage. That he could be a painter as well was not outside the realm of possibility. And if he were a painter, that he might be driven to portray his victims made a lot of sense. Dempsey, who seemed to have been nobody’s fool, had pursued that theory with vigor to the moment of his own death.
I made my way back north, by scheduled and charter flights. We were able to get back into Mendocino airport by late afternoon, just ahead of a thick, wet fog booming in from the sea.
The first thing I did was put in another call to the San Francisco homicide detail to ask John Foley the staus of the guy who called himself Hobo.
“Our best information,” said Foley with an edge to his voice, “is that he went into retirement a few years back. That is the word that came down in various state prisons and other places. Why do you ask?”
“There is a possibility that to avoid exposure, he has come back out of retirement.”
“Jesus, pal, I hope you’re wrong about that one.”
I made a note of the date and time in a pocket pad I carried. By now I was pretty grimly sure that Jerry Lind was dead. If that were true, I wouldn’t charge his sister for any more time I might spend poking around in Barracks Cove. And I fully intended to spend some more time poking around in Barracks Cove.
The one person locally who’d given me the biggest break was the man calling himself Joe Dodge. Maybe he could tell me more, now that he’d had a day to think about it. I looked up his phone number and dialed it. The line was busy, which told me he was home, so I got my car out of the airport parking area and drove up to Barracks Cove and out Cupper’s Road. What I found at its end displeased me. Joe Dodge’s old car was gone, but parked just up the road from the house was a tan late model Cadillac with the license number I’d jotted down the day before during my encounter with Emil Stoval.
It was a further complication I could have done without. I went up to the front door of the Dodge home and rapped on it loudly enough to stir apples in the orchard down the road. Nobody answered. I couldn’t hear anybody moving around inside. I went around and tried the back door. It was unlocked. It opened into a kitchen with dirty dishes in the sink and the musty, old, kick-around aroma of bachelor quarters.
I shouted Dodge’s name a couple of times, getting no response. Then I noticed a small, reddish stain on the kitchen linoleum near the doorway leading into the rest of the house. It could have been painter’s oil, burgundy wine or a dab of catsup. Or it could have been blood. I bent down for a closer inspection. It was still tacky and it wasn’t one of the innocent substances.
I went on through the doorway and stepped into a room that looked as if a couple of bears had done battle there. Shattered glass covered the floor, chairs were overturned and a wooden table with a couple of busted legs knelt to the floor with lost dignity. Something or somebody had gone through a side window that had a torn roller curtain ripped half off of its wooden staff. The room breathed violence. I went on through to the studio where Dodge worked. Things seemed innocent enough there. I went back to the living room and searched for more of the telltale reddish stains, but couldn’t find any. In one corner was a telephone with its cracked plastic receiver off the hook. So much for the busy signal I’d heard. I went on back through the kitchen and outside. I found another splotch of blood on a lower step of the back porch. The land behind the house sloped up toward a grove of trees. There appeared to be a recently made track through the wild grass, where something might have been dragged.
I went back around to the front of the house and over to my car. I opened the trunk and got out the shoulder holster and the .45-caliber automatic it held. I don’t like having to wear it, but it wasn’t just a missing person case any longer. It hadn’t been since I found Dempsey’s body. I took off my jacket and wrapped and tied myself in the leather gear. I vividly remembered the way Dempsey had looked, up by the Stannis River, with his gun snug in its holster. I thought about that for a moment then got out my revolver also and clipped its holster to my belt before putting my coat back on. If I’d had an old cavalry saber I would have hung that on me as well.
I closed up the car and went over to Stoval’s Cadillac. It was unlocked and the window on the driver’s side was rolled down. Inside, the car was clean and empty. I went around to the side of the house with the broken window. In the weeds nearby was a smashed table lamp that had been pitched through the glass. I continued on around to the back and started up the slope with .45 in hand. At the tree line the grass gave way to a ground cover of pine needles and earth. I took a good look and listen around the area, assuring myself nobody was lurking nearby, then continued on into the grove of trees where the drag marks led me. I knew how it had to turn out, as if I were taking part in an old familiar play. I rounded a tree and stopped. Emil Stoval wouldn’t be bothering anybody’s wife again, not even his own.
He was wearing the same jacket and slacks he’d had on the day before. He was lying face up with his unbuttoned jacket scrunched up under his shoulders from being dragged feet first up the slope. His dead eyes were staring into the trees overhead. His mouth was slightly ajar and a big soggy patch of drying blood caked his shirt front. I put away my pistol and got down on my hands and knees to try seeing the shape of his back. The scrunched jacket propped him up from the ground so I could pretty well see he hadn’t sustained much damage there. I got back up and brushed off my clothes. There was a mark over his left eye that could have been made by a blow to the head, but it wasn’t anything sensational. I leaned over to study his hands. There was matter beneath several fingernails. One of the nails was even torn. It appeared he’d come to grips with his foe, and probably put up a fair scrap before somebody shot him in the back. At least that’s how it looked from the mess on his shirt front—shot with a heavy-caliber weapon that made a nasty exit wound, just as in Dempsey’s case.
I searched the ground surrounding the body without seeing anything important. I studied the body some more and wondered if a rough idea of the time of death would be important enough to me to justify fooling with it. Rigidity, or coagulation in the muscles, generally is first noticeable in the neck and jaw, but I didn’t feel like messing with his face or head. I bent over and touched one of his hands. It had cooled off some. I tried moving a couple of his limbs. There was some stiffness in his leg, but the arms still moved freely. Which meant it was early in the stiffening process. Emil probably had been killed five to six hours earlier, around noon.
I left the body and went back to the Joe Dodge house. It probably wouldn’t matter, but I used a handkerchief to hold the phone receiver and dialed Chief Morgan to tell him what I’d found. He wasn’t at all happy about it. I agreed to hang around until he and his men got there, then made a couple more phone calls. I dialed Allison’s number to ask her if she’d seen Joe Dodge that day. There was no answer. I made a collect call to check in with my answering service in San Francisco. They said Allison had called, trying to get a message to me, soon after I’d spoken to Ceejay that morning. Allison had wanted me to phone her at another Barracks Cove number. It was the number of the phone I was using right then, in Dodge’s smashed-up living room. My stomach felt as if it wanted to go to pieces on me again.
T
hey hadn’t had a case of known murder in Barracks Cove for several years. It brought out just about everybody in the department. They all were tramping up to the grove of trees behind the house to get a look at the body. They were giving fits to an area physician who served as county coroner. For that capacity he dealt mainly with the victims of auto collisions and hunting accidents. While it didn’t take a medical genius to determine Stoval’s primary cause of death, the doc wanted to employ correct preliminary investigative procedures he’d read about over the years, and he wasn’t being helped any by the gawking local cops.
Morgan listened in grim silence to what I had to tell him about the Hobo and the curious theories to do with him that the slain Dempsey had been following. Morgan had never heard of the Hobo, but that didn’t surprise me. He’d had no reason to in order to do a decent job of policing Barracks Cove. And while he found it hard to swallow the possibility that a man who had slain a vast number of people could be living in Barracks Cove without anyone becoming the wiser, he at least was professional enough to concede the possibility and not just laugh in my face over it.
“Of course,” said the chief, “the killer you’re talking about could be living here, right enough, but still not have had anything to do with this man Stoval’s death.”
“It’s possible, but I doubt it. I think it’s a simple case of a man killing to protect his real identity. I think the Hobo killed Dempsey. I think he probably killed the man I was hired to look for, Jerry Lind, and I think probably he killed Emil Stoval earlier today.”
“This Stoval was by my office yesterday. But he told me he was trying to trace some stolen money that turned up recently.”
“I know, but so was Dempsey, early on. Then he stumbled across something that put him on the Hobo’s trail. The same thing could have happened to Jerry Lind, and now to Stoval.”
The chief rubbed one ear, then fixed me with a gaze that told me he was about to say or ask something that he didn’t like to think about. “Could Joe Dodge be this Hobo fellow?”
