The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  I took a look around me, but still didn’t see any neighbors watching. I went around to the rear of the house and tried the back door. It was locked, but nothing covered the window in it, and I could see into the kitchen. By bachelor standards, the place was tidy enough. No dirty dishes on the counter. No garbage piling up. I rapped on the door some, but I didn’t expect a reply. There were bedrooms at the rear of the house. On the driveway side, windows in sliding aluminum sash were closed, locked and curtained. But on the other side of the house one of the windows was open a crack. I slid it open some more. There was a rumpled bed nearby, and a man’s clothing scattered here and there. I climbed into the room and paused to listen, but the house was dead silent.

  I crossed the room. Scruffy, wall-to-wall carpeting that needed replacing covered the floor and ran down the hallway outside. I went quietly toward the front of the house, past a bathroom on the driveway side, through a small dining room and into the front room itself.

  My eyes hadn’t been fooling me. There was a man’s body sprawled face down on the front room carpet. He’d been shot once in the back of the head by a small-caliber weapon. The man was a white male in his twenties. He was wearing jeans and a dark polo shirt. His light-brown hair was woven into a four-inch braid down his neck. Blood stained the tan carpet beneath his face. The body was cold, and the limbs moved freely. He’d been dead for a while—maybe a couple of days.

  A car backfired down the hill, and my heart climbed up into my throat. I got up and peeked out the open draw-drape, but still couldn’t see anybody. I went back to the body and fished a wallet out of the dead man’s hip pocket. There was money in it, more than a hundred dollars, and a driver’s license that identified him as a Benjamin Kempe. It gave an address in Stockton, over in the San Joaquin Valley.

  I stuffed the wallet back into his pocket and made a quick tour of the house. I didn’t learn much. The other bedroom was used as a utility-storage room. The bathroom medicine cabinet kept the sort of stuff a man living by himself keeps. The refrigerator in the kitchen was nearly empty. There was an empty beer bottle in the sink. I used a kitchen wall phone to call the sheriff’s office. I didn’t identify myself, but just told them there was a man who’d been shot to death sprawled on the front room floor at that address. I didn’t really know anything more to tell them.

  When I hung up and turned away from the phone, there was a gun pointed at my stomach. In the gloom it looked like a 9-millimeter pistol. It was held in the unwavering hand of a sturdy, young black man wearing a bush hat. The expression on his face showed both fear and hate.

  “Turn around and lean in against the wall,” he ordered.

  “Cookie?”

  He jabbed me in the gut with his pistol. I turned around, and he ran his hands down my body. I wasn’t armed. When I’d left home that morning, I hadn’t expected to run into anything like this.

  “You the heat?” he demanded.

  “No. I just phoned them.”

  That’s all he wanted to hear. He cracked the butt of his pistol alongside my ear. I saw a flash, felt a stab of pain and sagged first to my knees, then lost all balance and crumpled to the floor.

  I might have been unconscious for a couple of minutes, but I seemed to feel the pain through it all. I was struggling back into a sitting position when I heard the front door close. It was an effort getting on my feet. I briefly wondered if I’d had a handkerchief in my hand when holding the phone receiver to call the sheriff. I couldn’t remember, but there wasn’t time to clean up after myself now.

  I went out the back door. A car out in the driveway started. I went around to the opposite side of the house and started to climb the empty, sloping lot above. I did pretty well, considering the circumstances. My legs and feet moved all right, but my head wanted to go over in a corner somewhere and lie down. When I was even with my car, I cut over to the street and got in. Taillights were going around the corner at the bottom of the hill. I went after them.

  The car ahead of me had to slow at the stop sign on Shoreline for the traffic coming down the hill. It was a big, flashy car, American made and a recent model. It looked red, under the overhead street light. The car drove onto Shoreline during a break in the traffic and headed out toward the highway. I joined the flow about six cars behind.

  There was just one lane of traffic in each direction, and traffic was heavy. It was the tail end of the homeward commute hours. The driver in the red car risked colliding with an oncoming truck at one point to pass the car in front of him. He didn’t have another chance to do that, and we held our relative positions.

  He took the northbound on-ramp of the freeway. I was a hundred yards behind. The highway was busy. The red car did a lot of weaving in and out among lanes. I kept up as best I could. He finally worked his way over to the innermost lane of traffic. At that time of day, it’s supposed to be reserved for buses and car pools. The highway patrol monitors it closely and tags the solitary drivers who try to use it.

  That was a risk the man in the red car was willing to take. I swung out onto it once myself in order to get around a gaggle of cars whose drivers all seemed to be meditating. On the flat stretch outside Corte Madera, the red car began working over to the right-hand lane, getting ready to exit. I had to do some fancy driving of my own to follow.

  The red car left 101 and took the underpass that put it onto Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, headed west. Now we had four lanes of traffic, controlled by signal lights at several intersections. I was farther behind than I liked, but couldn’t improve things. We went past the College of Marin in Kentfield and continued on toward San Anselmo. The road made a bend to the north, and narrowed to two-lane traffic. I had a bit of luck when a couple of cars ahead of me pulled onto side streets. It enabled me to pull up close enough so I saw the red car when it turned off into the town of Ross, a wooded community of stately homes and rambling estates. It was home to psychiatrists and captains of industry. I made the turn-off at high enough speed to make my tires squeal, and I saw the girl on the bicycle just in time.

  I hit the brakes and skidded to a stop with the rear end of the car drifting. In trying to make an evasive maneuver, the girl lost control of the bike and took a nasty spill on the asphalt. There was a tennis racket strapped to her back. She apparently had been coming from the courts at the nearby college.

  I scrambled out of the car and helped her to her feet and over to the side of the road. She had a long, blonde pigtail and a fresh, scrubbed look. She was rubbing one arm.

  “Sorry,” I told her. “I wasn’t looking for cross traffic right here.”

  “I’m glad it wasn’t any closer,” said the girl.

  I went back and picked up her bike and carried it over to her. Other cars were starting to back up behind me. I got into the car and pulled it over to the side of the road, then went back to the girl. She was the right age to be attending the college. I wondered why she wasn’t more familiar with the traffic on that particular road. She should have used more care picking a place to cross it.

  She assured me she was all right. I gave her a card and told her to call me if she found she was hurt more than she thought.

  “Before I came along, you didn’t see a big red car go past, did you?” I asked, watching her eyes.

  “No, I was replaying the last set I lost. Sorry.”

  She got back on the bike, and I watched her pedal away. I didn’t feel I had any chance of finding the red car again, but so long as I was there I decided to run up and down a few streets. I drove on west, looking into driveways as I passed. I doubled back and went down another road. Eventually I was traveling along the deep, western end of the community, at the base of the wooded slopes of the mountain and county watershed area. The largest estates were back here. Multimillion-dollar properties, some of them, where a lot of the old money in Marin County could be found.

  I drove past walled grounds and tall spiked fences. Several of them had the owner’s name on the gate in front. When I came across o
ne that read Fitzmorris, I stopped. Frankie Spain had said a man named Fitzmorris had financed Cookie Poole’s movies. I wondered if this could be the one, and if the red car might be behind the tall, wrought-iron gate guarding the driveway.

  I pulled off to the side of the road and got out to sniff the air. My head had settled down to a dull, throbbing annoyance. I still had a buzzing in the ears. The grounds were guarded by the same wrought-iron fencing as the driveway. Through the trees I could see lights in a large dwelling set back twenty yards from the road. I went over to the low pedestrian gate. It was closed and locked, and at first I couldn’t see how to get inside. Then I noticed an intercom box set in the fence to one side. I pushed the button next to the speaker. A moment later a man’s voice came from it.

  “Who is it?”

  “My name is Bragg. I’m looking for the Elliott Fitzmorris residence. Is this it?”

  There was some hesitation. “Yes, this is the Fitzmorris residence. Did you have an appointment to see Mr. Fitzmorris?”

  “No, but if he could spare me just a moment it would be helpful. It’s a police matter.”

  There was more hesitation, as if the man on the other end of the speaker deliberated every movement. Then I heard the gate click in front of me, and the voice in the speaker asked me to close it behind me as I entered. I clanged the gate shut and made my way up the walk to the big house.

  It was a three-story structure of old stone and glass. Most of the lights came from the ground floor. There was more light at a couple of windows on the second floor, but the third story was in darkness. The driveway continued on in toward the rear of the grounds.

  The front door was paned with translucent glass. I rang the bell, and a moment later a shadow crossed the glass. I couldn’t tell if the gent who opened the door was supposed to be the butler, the owner or a passer-by like myself. He was tall and thin, with a gaunt face and dark, probing eyes, maybe forty years old, with a singe of gray at his temples. He was wearing a dark suit and black knit tie. The suit had a thin, soft stripe pattern to it. All in all, he didn’t look very California. Maybe he was the undertaker.

  “Mr. Bragg?”

  “That’s right.”

  He didn’t make any gesture for me to come in out of the dark.

  “My name is Anthony. I am Mr. Fitzmorris’s aide. Perhaps you can tell me your business.”

  “I think I’ll save it for Mr. Fitzmorris. I’d only have to repeat it for him anyhow. I can just settle down in a corner of the porch here until he’s free.”

  He was back in the deliberate state, staring at me without a flicker of expression. Then he finally swung open the door and made the barest gesture that I could enter. I went in.

  There was cigar smoke in the air. The entry hall had a bare, hardwood floor polished to a high luster. Nearby, carpeted stairs climbed to the upper floors. I thought I heard voices up there somewhere, one of them a little agitated.

  “This way.”

  Anthony led me through a large, carpeted room where some people were sitting. They were all men—three of them—dressed similar to the way Anthony was. Two were smoking cigars. They were husky fellows, in their thirties, occupying a sofa and chairs around a coffee table in front of a fireplace. They’d been talking when we entered, but now they fell silent. All three watched me trail across the carpet behind Anthony. No words were exchanged. I smiled and nodded in their direction. They didn’t seem to know what to do about that.

  Anthony kept glancing over his shoulder, as if he was afraid I’d get lost, or plunge a knife in his back. These were nervous people.

  I was ushered into a smaller room, a den or study, with a desk and book-lined walls.

  “I’ll ask Mr. Fitzmorris to come down.”

  “Thanks, Anthony, you’re a good egg.”

  I got the blank stare again before he closed the door with a slender, well-manicured hand. Voices resumed in the next room, too muffled for me to hear what was being said. Somebody laughed.

  I crossed to some french doors to see what I could see. Outside was a small balcony of metal scrollwork. I looked back once at the door Anthony had gone out, then opened the balcony doors and stepped outside. The driveway ran along that side of the house. It went back to what had at one time been a big, old carriage house. The front doors were open, and I could see the rear of a couple of cars. The red car wasn’t one of them. I studied the area beneath the balcony. Low shrubbery hugged the stone facing of the house. I was about ten feet above the ground. I went back inside and closed the doors.

  A couple of minutes later Elliott Fitzmorris came into the room, hesitated a moment as if he might recognize me, then closed the door and introduced himself. He was younger than I had expected, in his late twenties or early thirties, at most. Compact and of medium height, he had thinning, sandy hair, receding chin and lips that were just a little too full to look right on a man. But he crossed the room with the assurance that a lot of money gives some people. He was wearing gray slacks and a blue turtleneck sweater. We shook hands.

  “Now, what’s this all about?” he asked, swinging around to sit behind the desk. “Anthony said it was something to do with the police.”

  I took out the photostat of my license and showed it to him. “That’s right. In the course of an investigation I’m conducting, I came across the body of a slain man earlier this evening, in a house down in Tamalpais Valley. He was shot through the back of his head.”

  “A tragic business,” Fitzmorris said. “But Tamalpais Valley—haven’t I read about drug arrests in that part of the county? Could it have been something of that nature?”

  “I don’t know. Could be, I suppose.”

  “And why have you come to see me about it?”

  “I had just phoned the sheriff’s office when another man came into the house. A black man wearing a bush hat. I think it was his house the body was in. He held a gun on me, searched me, then walloped me alongside the head. While I was on the floor in a dazed condition, he fled. I tried to follow him, but lost him just as we turned into Ross. I thought it possible he might have been on his way here.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “I have an acquaintance in the city who said you two knew each other, if the man I was tailing is who I think he is. A young fellow out of Marin City named Jerome Poole. I understand he goes by the name Cookie.”

  Fitzmorris hesitated the barest moment. “Who is your acquaintance in the city?”

  “I don’t think you’d know him. He just knew that the two of you—you and Cookie—had business dealings.”

  Fitzmorris scrunched up his face. “Well, I don’t know…” He sat there as if he was trying to remember something. “Poole…Jerome Poole. Cookie. Yes, now I believe I remember. I think he’s doing some work for us in connection with a project on the Bay I’ve arranged financing for. Marinship Shores. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”

  I swallowed, and tried to keep the surprise out of my voice. “Sure. I live near there.”

  “We’ve been looking into the possibility of hiring some of the economically depressed blacks living in Marin City, once the project is completed. I believe Jerome, or Cookie, has a role in that somehow. But that’s really all I could tell you. I’m not involved much with the day-to-day planning.”

  “Who would be?”

  “Paul Anderson, I suppose. He’s the man putting together the package. He lives over in Peacock Gap.”

  “I’ll go talk to him. Would you recognize this Cookie Poole if you saw him?”

  “I suppose so. We’ve met.”

  “But he didn’t come here just a few minutes ago.”

  “Of course not. I barely know the man. And our interests are hardly mutual.”

  I grunted and got to my feet. His information had hit me with almost the same surprise the black man’s pistol had. I was having trouble keeping track of things. “Well, I won’t take any more of your time. Good of you to see me.”

  He followed me to the doorway. Ant
hony was just outside, prepared to take up escort duties again, while the three men over by the coffee table, now with drinks in their hands, watched me silently. At the front door I turned. “Good night.”

  Anthony didn’t reply. He just stared at me as I went down the stairs and out to the gate. It clicked open as I approached. I closed it behind me and crossed to the car. I got in and drove slowly past the entrance to the driveway, and on up to the next road intersection. I turned left and picked up speed, making a big loop on the roads in back of the Fitzmorris place until I was back on the road that fronted it. I parked well off to the side, maybe two hundred feet up from the house. I sat there ten minutes, hoping the big red car would drive back out, but it didn’t happen. I was going to have to go back in. At least the fence hadn’t looked like it was electrified, and there didn’t seem to be any dogs around.

  I changed into a pair of sneakers and put on a dark pullover sweater I keep in the trunk. I closed up the car quietly and trotted back down toward the Fitzmorris place. He had a neighbor on the other side, but there was a vacant plot of land next to him on the side I approached from. There were trees and overgrown shrubbery that made good cover for this sort of nonsense. There wasn’t any trick to shimmying over the fence, so long as you didn’t lose your grip and impale yourself on the spear-tipped top.

  I dropped down on the other side and made my way quickly toward the back end of the house. When I took a peek around the corner, I saw movement over by the carriage house. I waited a moment, then dashed across the rear lawn.

  There were voices coming from just inside the front entrance. I edged back alongside a window, but the view inside was blocked by some boards leaning against the inside wall. There was another window on the opposite wall, one that would give me a better angle to see whoever was doing the talking.

  I never leap at the chance to do that sort of scout work. Some guys thrive on it, I suppose, but I always worry about the unnoticed hole in the ground or something else that can trip you up and bring trouble when you’re in territory where you don’t belong. But sometimes it is the only way.