The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “For what it’s worth, the friendship is yours for the taking. I think you’re a very special person, Terri, and the money down the road doesn’t have anything to do with it. We should plan to have more talks. But not the other. Not just yet.”

  She didn’t say anything, and I couldn’t tell much from her expression. She just got up and started over toward the elevators. I followed. She didn’t say anything while going down to the lobby or walking back to the car. And she kept mum all the way back across the Golden Gate Bridge. I was beginning to suspect steam would begin coming out of her ears soon. If she couldn’t understand that not everybody is ready to jump into bed at the drop of a hanky, then she’d just have to learn. Maybe that was to be my role with her. Part of a learning experience. I didn’t like it any better than she did, but doing anything differently had the distinct possibility of messing up my own life in the near future, or for as long as I had to deal with these people. That’s something else she wouldn’t understand just yet. I wasn’t being all that noble. I was just looking out for myself.

  But the girl seemed to have decided something while crossing the Bridge. She let out a sigh and moved around some in the seat next to me. And without any preamble she started telling me things.

  “Grandfather Burkette’s restrictions weren’t the same for Duffy as they are with me. Being a boy, he only had to stay at home and out of mischief until he was nineteen. That was five years ago. He moved out of the family scatter, and within six months he married Andy Dustin’s daughter, Elaine. She’s a tall girl, taller than I am. Quiet and stark. It lasted for about eight months. Needless to say, my brother was not prepared to cope with the married state. I doubt if he is this time, even. And he’ll learn. It’ll be worse this time. Elaine herself wasn’t worldly enough to make it work for both of them until Duffy finished growing up, which as I see it should occur just after the turn of the century. She’s younger than Duffy. But none of that prevented them from conceiving a child.”

  I looked across at her.

  “That’s right; they had a little girl. Elaine got the daughter when they split up, which was fine with Duffy since he wasn’t really into diapers and the squally, middle-of-the-night feedings that come out the other end of a romp in the sack and the mystery of life. She’s living on a communal ranch up in Mendocino County called Wagon Weed. She gets enough child support to make it work. She wasn’t really after Duffy’s big bucks. I kind of like her, actually. She was immature, but a pretty nice girl.”

  “Do you think she knows about Duffy’s engagement to Melody?”

  “I don’t know. There’s no special reason why she would.”

  “Could she know Melody?”

  “I doubt it. She never went to UC. She met Duffy through her father.”

  Terri lapsed back into silence and looked out the side window. I’d come down off the hill and had just passed the northern entrance into Sausalito. She kept quiet nearly all the way to San Rafael. It occurred to me I’d mentioned living in Sausalito when I was speaking to her family earlier.

  “You’re really going to do it, aren’t you?” she said finally.

  “Do what?”

  “Take me home. Not to your place.”

  “Sorry, Terri. For now that’s the way it has to be.”

  She kept quiet until I pulled up to her place and put on the handbrake. Then she turned.

  “Can’t you treat me like I count too? Like I’m somebody?”

  She said it quietly, as if she’d been saying it to herself for the last five miles. Then she was out of the car and I got out to walk her to the door, the way I’d been taught when I was younger, but she was having none of it. She walked ahead of me with a determined step, unlocked the front door and went inside without a backward glance. I got there just as she closed the door in my face. Firmly.

  SIX

  The next morning I phoned a friend and asked a favor. His name is Cal Gentle, a fallen-away Black Panther from Oakland. Some years before, he’d gotten into a pretty serious scrape with the Oakland police. If it hadn’t been for some information I had, along with something I’d witnessed in connection with another matter, Cal probably would have been unjustly sent to San Quentin or down to Soledad and still be looking forward to his first hearing before the parole board. Instead, I testified for the defense, Cal was acquitted, and during the next eighteen months we’d become pretty good friends. Today he was a ranking executive with a private security firm in the East Bay. I asked if he had any connections in Marin City that could get him a line on Cookie Poole.

  “Man, that is not my beat.”

  “I know, but I also know how clannish you people are. Now come on, Cal, this is important.”

  “What do you want him for?”

  “I just want to ask him some questions. But a dead man was found in Poole’s home yesterday, and Poole sort of thinks he’s on the run. He’ll probably settle down in time, but I still need an introduction.”

  “You’re messin’ up my day, daddy. But call me tonight.”

  Next I went for a drive in the country. It was a pretty, Northern California morning. The sun was high and bright, the hills were still fresh and green from the early spring rains, and a pair of navy jets from Alameda slashed across the sky toward the Pacific. I drove up 101 through the Petaluma Valley to Santa Rosa, and then on to Healdsburg and Geyserville. It was vineyard and wine country, past Asti and on to Cloverdale. Just beyond Cloverdale, State Highway 128 branched off to the northwest, to Booneville. I got some directions at a service station, then drove down 128 for about two miles and found the secondary road that led into the Wagon Weed Ranch.

  There had been several of these communes in Northern California back in the 1960s and early ’70s. They were meant to be escapes from the real world of Vietnam, Big Brother and chemically treated foods. They were pockets of Zen and yoga and organic farming, hallucinatory drugs and marijuana. They also were targets of occasional two-bit raids by rural deputies who felt they had to respond to the rest of the citizens who were more often than not plain terrified by these long-haired people with their funny ways. But after a while the commune dwellers learned just how difficult it was to live off the land, or to survive on a macrobiotic diet and love, so by ones and twos they had packed up their busted hopes and gone on the road again, looking some other place for It.

  Wagon Weed had seemed to survive because it wasn’t as drifty as some of the others. The people there ran a fairly successful experimental school for troubled teenagers. Some of the members had jobs in the nearby community, became acquainted with their neighbors and allayed fears that they might all be crazed drug fiends. Also, Wagon Weed was close enough to civilization so that what they couldn’t scratch out of the ground, they could supplement from the Safeway store in Cloverdale.

  The road into the ranch went past a small pasture occupied by a couple of hippie cows. One wore a straw hat; the other had a string of love beads looped over its neck. The decorations didn’t seem to bother them any. They munched at the ground and raised their heads to stare off vacantly, the same as straight cows.

  The road ended at a rambling, three-story house with nearby outbuildings. Beyond the outbuildings were a couple of fields that didn’t seem to be under very intensive cultivation. I parked and went up the stairs and across a wide porch. I knocked on the screen door and waited, staring at the flaking white paint on the front of the structure.

  A young man with a balding head and thin, blond beard came to the door finally, and I asked to speak with Elaine Anderson. He looked at me the way people who are suspicious of law look at you, and asked if he could tell her who was calling.

  “She doesn’t know me. The name is Peter Bragg. Tell her Terri Anderson told me where to find her.”

  He nodded and went away. A moment later, a tall, bony girl with a very serious face came out onto the porch and introduced herself as Elaine Anderson.

  “We can sit over here,” she told me, indicating a nearby glider. It sui
ted me fine. I’d been inside this sort of let-it-all-hang-out dwelling before. It invariably depressed me. Elaine settled herself tidily, tucking a long, purple gown about her. She wore her dark hair in a severe bun at the back of her head. Despite her rangy size, she looked like a little girl trying hard to act grown up. She didn’t look completely well.

  I gave her the Father Conners story about the missing Cookie Poole, and told her how Cookie had worked after a fashion for Paul Anderson. I asked her if she knew Cookie, and a lot of other nonsense questions I knew she couldn’t answer, but gave me a chance to see what sort of person she might be. The impression only reaffirmed my first one: a little girl trying awfully hard to act grown up. She seemed placid, and not suffering from any sort of drug use.

  She asked about Terri, and I handled that as best I could. Then I asked about life on the ranch, and she said she liked it lots and that it was a good environment for raising her daughter. And then she asked me what I’d really come up there for. Her eyes were large and dark and indefinite. I had a feeling that in a different age, at a different place, she might have been accused of possessing dark forces.

  “What makes you ask that?”

  “We play transactional games,” she said quietly. “And hold encounter sessions where we endeavor to reveal everything about ourselves. I haven’t found them of much value, except I can generally tell now when somebody is lying to me.”

  “I’ll admit there’s another side to it, Mrs. Anderson, one I’m not at liberty to discuss right now. But so far as I know, it doesn’t pose any problem for you or your child. I’d just like to know a little more about your brief marriage to Duffy.”

  “Is Duffy in trouble?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  She thought for a moment, then told me about the same thing Terri had told me the night before. The marriage had been more a victim of their immaturity than anything else. Aside from the monthly child-support payment from Duffy, it was a closed and slightly sad chapter in her life. She was thankful she had the child from it, and she missed Terri.

  “Does Duffy visit you and the child?”

  “No.”

  “Never?”

  She shook her head.

  “When was the last time he saw the child?”

  “Her name is Heidi,” she told me. “Duffy last saw her when I left for up here. About four years ago. From time to time I send him photos of Heidi.”

  I sat back and blinked. “What do you think of him these days?”

  A soft crease formed between her eyes, and she stared absently at the sleeve of my jacket. “I can’t answer that,” she said finally. “He doesn’t come under the heading of like or dislike any longer. He’s neutral. Over somewhere else. I felt a little numb when we broke up, but Heidi occupies my thoughts now. I don’t wish Duffy any harm, certainly. If I had to think about it, I suppose I’d wish him happiness, the same as I’d wish happiness for everybody alive. But like or dislike—there’s just nothing there to like or dislike anymore.”

  “How did your father take it when you broke up?”

  “It surprised him. Disappointed him, I think. But I convinced him it was for the better. Besides, he always was so deeply involved in his own work.”

  “Where’s your father now?”

  “I don’t know. I received a card from him one day saying he was going on a long vacation. That was several weeks ago.”

  It sounded like a whacky father-and-daughter relationship. I got up shaking my head. She caught my mood and laughed easily.

  “You act just like Jimmy,” she told me.

  “It’s a normal way to act. Who’s Jimmy?”

  “My brother.”

  I sat back down. “I didn’t know you had a brother.”

  “I thought it was Duffy you were interested in.”

  “It is. But I’m curious about your brother too. Where does Jimmy live?”

  “I don’t know. He’s probably not even in the country now.”

  “You’re a family that really keeps track of one another.”

  “I know how it must seem. But Jimmy was away for so long. In Vietnam—first in the army, then working for some big construction outfit over there. After that he signed a contract and went to work for Bechtel, over in the Middle East.”

  “When did you see him last?”

  “About a month ago. He came to visit for a day. He wanted to know where father was too. I told him what I told you.”

  “Did he know about you and Duffy?”

  “Oh yes. I wrote him at the time. He was anxious to see Heidi when he came up.”

  “Do you have any other brothers or sisters?”

  “No. Jimmy said he’d be in touch sometime. That could mean a year and a half from now.”

  I stood up again. “Well, thanks for your time, Mrs. Anderson. It was nice of you to see me.”

  I drove back down to Santa Rosa and took the road over to the coast. Jenner is just north of Bodega Bay. It’s a small community sited where the Russian River empties into the Pacific Ocean. Samuel P. Moss had said his vacation cabin was just north of the town, was on the beach and had a sign out front calling it the Sand Castle. It was pretty easy to find, but I kept on driving past it because a bunch of people were at the cabin itself. I parked up the road a way, then walked back to where I could see the cabin itself while staying concealed behind a parked VW bus.

  Melody had told Mrs. Anderson the night before that she was going to be showing the cabin to some prospective renters. I thought there might be something else going on there, and it turned out I was right. They were shooting another movie, and the overhead sky was ideal for it. They have different weather along the coast. The sky was still overcast and there was no need to rig up a bunch of lights or reflectors. But somebody was willing to spend a little money on whatever they were filming. There were two cameramen working with tripods to record the activity. At the moment, they were filming the arrival of two couples. A sports car and a station wagon were parked out in front of the cabin. The two couples got out of the vehicles and went into the cabin. They did it half a dozen times while I watched. Melody Moss wasn’t one of the women in the scene; she was directing it.

  I couldn’t tell what Melody was saying, but she clearly was in charge of the operation. She even walked through the part for one of the actresses, to show how the girl should look up at her partner’s face and briefly touch his back before entering the cabin. I didn’t know what she was trying to convey, but there was no mistaking that Melody herself knew exactly what she wanted and how she wanted the girl to go about it.

  When she was satisfied with that brief bit, the couples went inside the cabin while Melody, the two cameramen and some others in the crew went around to the beach and began to set up their equipment again. A few minutes later the actors and actresses reappeared, this time in swimsuits. This was going to be a cavorting-on-the-beach scene, and it was going to take a while to get it just right. The actors’ swimsuits looked as if they had cod pieces in them. The actresses’ suits were of the briefest sort, and one of the girls was practicing a stunt Frisbee toss that led to the popping open of the top of her swimsuit. They were doing a lot of fussing over the snap. There was no sign of the man I’d seen the day before in Tamalpais Valley, the one I figured was Cookie Poole.

  After they had filmed the popping-open-of-the-bra scene, they did a complicated bit of business in which first everybody expresses mirth over the frontal exposure of the girl, and then an I-dare-you sort of exchange takes place among them, and they all of them begin to peel off their suits. They only went as far as the starting to take things off. There were other people strolling down by the water in the distance. Once that particular scene was shot to Melody’s satisfaction, they all trooped back into the cabin itself. I figured I’d seen enough to tell me what I wanted to know, and I had a pretty good idea what was apt to be going on in the cabin.

  Thinking about things on the way back south, I was sorely tempted to resign the job. T
he man I eventually had to report to was going to be stricken over what I had to tell him. But the more I thought about it, I wondered if Samuel P. Moss hadn’t suspected something like this all along, and was willing to pay somebody like myself a fancy price just to have it all confirmed, as sort of a purge.

  Messed-up families weren’t really my cup of tea. I preferred my work to be a little more ennobling—helping people over the rough spots that come up which they aren’t emotionally or physically equipped to deal with themselves. But when I leveled with myself, that brought me full circle as to why I’d taken the job in the first place. I considered Moss to be a worthwhile individual. His chosen profession didn’t matter. To my mind, Samuel P. Moss, being black in this country, even in this continually more enlightened age, deserved better than the life he’d probably grown up with. In being a bookie, he’d found a little edge against life, and I said more power to him. And what, I had to ask myself, was a daughter like Melody to him if she wasn’t a rough spot he wasn’t emotionally equipped to deal with? There was very little that I could do to help him there, I knew. But at least I could hang in until I got answers to the specific questions he wanted answered. Who sent the photos to him? And why?

  SEVEN

  My best contact in the Marin County Sheriff’s Office is a lieutenant on the patrol force named Otto Damstadt. The reason I could go to him quietly for information stemmed from back in the days when I’d been a reporter with the Chronicle. I had developed some information on a murder suspect’s background before the sheriff’s investigators did. I passed the information along to Damstadt, who was a sergeant at the time. He spent some off-duty hours keeping an eye on the home of the suspect’s sister I’d uncovered in the northern part of the county. She was living there under her married name, and that’s why investigators hadn’t yet made the connection between the two. Otto got lucky and nabbed the suspect one night when the guy went to see his sister. Otto once told me that was the only reason he was a lieutenant today. I reminded him of that from time to time.