by Jack Lynch
“What?”
“Mr. Wumps. Buddy’s dog. The one Buddy either was or was not giving a ride to at the time somebody was dispatching Mr. Cornell with maximum prejudice. I didn’t get a chance to dish up any chow for him before the game. He’ll be getting sulky by about now and I wouldn’t want word getting back to ol’ Fireplug.”
“You mean Buddy’s brother, Beau?”
“Yup. Only two things left around here ol’ Beau cares about. One’s Buddy, the other’s Mr. Wumps.”
I drove her back across town to a quiet neighborhood of solid, old, two-story frame houses. She directed me to the Bancetti home, and pointed out her own, on up the street.
The Bancetti place, like the others, had been kept in good repair. The exterior, wooden shiplap, was painted a dull tan color and there was a front dormer poking up out of a roof of composition shingles. We went up a few stairs to a broad front porch. Aggie unlocked the door and led me through the place to the kitchen in the rear. The living and dining rooms we passed through were modest in size but tidy. There was a bathroom off the kitchen with shiny chrome fixtures and a glistening, waxed linoleum floor. Aggie opened a can of dog food and mixed it with some dry cereal from a big bag.
“Looks like Buddy does a pretty good job of picking up after himself,” I observed.
“You kidding? He’s a slob, same as every other man I’ve ever known. Me and Mom came over to air out the place and clean up the crud after they put Buddy in the bucket. This way.”
She led me out a rear door onto a back porch and down a short flight of stairs. The dog was snoozing alongside a big doghouse in a corner of a yard of scruffy grass. He was a big, shaggy English sheepdog of gray and white and black. He must have been able to see something behind the mop of hair on his face because he got up with a whiny yawn of welcome when he spotted Aggie with the food dish. He didn’t come to meet us, but just stood there thumping his tail in the air and opened his mouth to lick his tongue around his mouth a time or two. Aggie put down the food dish, and Mr. Wumps went to work on it. From a half-dozen paces away I could smell him. It was not the world’s most joyous aroma. Aggie scooped up his red plastic water bowl and went over to a tap alongside the back porch to freshen it.
“The dog smells,” I said.
“I know,” said Aggie. “He also has a touch of arthritis, doesn’t see too well and he’s a little hard of hearing. It’s called getting old.”
She brought the water bowl back and put it down next to the nearly empty food dish. The dog’s appetite was still okay. He belonged to the clean-plate club, and looked up at the girl expectantly with his tail wagging and with what I swear was a grin on his face. The girl squatted down beside him to ruffle his head. I joined her.
“This dog’s been a part of the neighborhood for as long as I can remember,” Aggie told me. “He’s taken us kids to school and back, sounded the alarm in the middle of the night once when a place down the street caught on fire, led us to a little kitten who’d wandered off and gotten lost one time. He’s just about as fine a citizen as a neighborhood could hope for. Smart, still has a keen sense of smell. That’s important to a dog, you know. So what does it matter if he’s getting on in years and moves a little slower and his body and breath get a little rank? Doesn’t cancel out all the good he’s done over the years, does it, Mr. Wumps?”
The dog sat down and shook his head. At least he seemed to. His head was turned in my direction now. I still couldn’t see his eyes.
“Meet Mr. Bragg, Mr. Wumps. His friends call him Pete.”
Mr. Wumps opened his mouth to pant some of his atrocious breath in my direction and raised a paw. I shook hands with him, not feeling nearly as foolish as a person might expect.
“You don’t have to fence him in or leave him tied?”
“Heck no. Folks would be more apt to do that to my brother than Mr. Wumps here. That’s him coming now. My brother, I mean.”
Then I noticed the noise coming down the street out front. Somebody was trying to imitate the computer sirens they install these days on emergency vehicles. It was a wavering “EEEEEYOUUUUU, EEEEEYOUUUUU,” up and down the scale.
“He saw your car and’s coming to investigate,” Aggie told me.
“You’re sure of that?”
“This is rural California, Mr. Bragg, as I tried to point out to you earlier. I could predict every move half the people in this town would make on a given day from the time they got out of bed at daybreak until they went to sleep drunk or sober at night.”
She stood and cupped her hands to shout toward the front of the house. “We’re back here, stupid!”
The noise stopped. A moment later, a voice approaching along one side of the house said, “Ho-ho-ho. Caught you this time, little Bobby.”
He was about fourteen or fifteen, wearing a shiny black derby with a pin on its side that read “I’m ET.” He came around the corner of the house with an exaggerated, slow-motion trot combined with jerky arm pumps. He had his sister’s dark red hair and freckles but his build was beefier.
“Gotcha!” he said, skidding to a stop on one knee and lifting the derby in greeting to his sister.
“Mr. Bragg, meet my brother, Stupid.”
The boy was a natural cutup. He rose to his feet and turned toward me gravely, holding the derby over his heart. “My name, sir, is Harold. My sister seems unable to retain that. She is such a bore.”
“What are you doing here, Harold?” Aggie asked.
“I saw the strange car in front and came down to investigate,” he said airily.
Aggie turned toward me with her hands extended and made a little curtsy.
“What’s this for?” Harold asked.
“Your sister predicted that’s what you’d be doing,” I told him.
He raised his eyebrows, clamped the derby back on and tilted his head. “She could have been wrong. She’s been known to have been wrong before, and she can be depended upon to be wrong in the future. It is women’s way.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Aggie told him.
“Ho-ho-ho,” Harold chuckled. “Do not wager thy fortune on that one, fair lady. Besides,” he added in a more normal voice. “Wumpy was having dreams again and putting the neighborhood on edge.”
“Don’t call him that,” Aggie said, dropping to her knees to ruffle the dog’s mane.
“Sorry, but it’s him,” said Harold. “It’s how he smells. Wumpy. It’s perfect for him. I should be congratulated and fawned over.”
“You should be locked up and gagged,” his sister told him.
“How do his dreams put the neighborhood on edge?” I asked.
“He moans,” Aggie told me. “Odd, it never happens at night. But during the day he snoozes in the sun and dreams and moans and yelps in his sleep.”
“Sometime it approaches a bloodcurdling wail,” said the boy. “I would love to get inside that animal’s head. Gad, such imaginings he must have. Zounds!”
“Don’t mind Stupid,” Aggie told me. “He starred in his class play two months ago and he’s been carrying on like this ever since.”
The boy struck another pose, his head lolling over one shoulder as if he found life dreary.
“Mr. Bragg is here to try springing Buddy Bancetti from the Bastille,” Aggie told Harold.
The boy’s eyes widened. “Oh, wow! Bang-bang-bang! Take that, you dirty rat! Spring like that? A bustout?”
“No, I have to do it the hard way. Legally. Do you know Buddy at all?”
“Nobody,” declared the boy, “knows Buddy Bancetti. Not even Buddy Bancetti knows Buddy Bancetti, which makes it exceedingly difficult for the rest of us.”
“I know him,” said Aggie, concentrating on the dog.
“But you live on another plane,” Harold said. “Nobody knows you, either.”
“Seriously,” I told the youngster. “Do you and the gang you hang out with ever talk about Buddy and the Cornell slaying?”
“It was the
only topic of conversation for approximately one and one-half weeks following the gruesome death,” Harold intoned. “I believe it was a Tuesday, at around three-fifteen in the afternoon, finally, when Willie Farrogaut said, ‘That’s enough of this shit, let’s go get a malt and talk about something else.’ ”
“Don’t use words like that,” Aggie told him.
“Willie Farrogaut’s word, not mine,” said Harold.
“What’s the general feeling among the guys?” I persisted. “Do they think Buddy killed him? They think somebody else did? Anybody grieving over Cornell?”
“Don’t grill me with your rapid-fire questions,” Harold said calmly. “In order, no. Nobody thinks Buddy could have done it, except under the most freaky circumstances, such as flying on angel dust or something. Ergo, somebody else must have. We have no leading suspects at this time, although the investigation continues. As for Mr. Cornell, there is no great loss expressed among my set. The Nazi freaks are pissed because now they can’t go out shooting in the woods and pretend they’re hunting down Jews and things.”
Aggie jumped up. “Harold, that is a ghastly thing to say.”
The boy held out his hands like he couldn’t help himself. “Sis, I mean it. There are kids who say and do things like that. They are jerks. They don’t know what that time was all about.”
“Do you?” I asked him.
“Not really, I suppose. I doubt if anybody does who wasn’t a part of it. But I have a deep interest in the theater and a wide streak of the hambone in me. I am interested in all manner of dramatic production. I saw a program, a movie on television, not long ago. The setting was Auschwitz, in Poland. I was appalled.”
He gave me a level gaze that attested to a maturity somewhat beyond the kidding around that seemed second-nature to him. For the moment he was sober and serious.
“The reason I’m here is important,” I told the boy. “Aggie can tell you about it later. But other lives might depend on it. Anything you could tell me about Buddy Bancetti, or Cornell and his death, could be important.”
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“San Francisco.”
He nodded. “Good town. Good theater. Do you like theater?”
I shrugged. “I go once in a while. Probably I don’t have the imagination to appreciate it the way you do.”
“What do you do? For a living?”
“I’m a private investigator. It’s why somebody wanted me to look into the Cornell killing.”
Harold nodded, as if he’d suspected some such. “Good theater could help you in your work, Mr. Bragg. It’s sleight of hand, but on an emotional level. I really don’t have anything to offer about Mr. Cornell’s death. It caught our attention. But nobody I know has any bright thoughts about it. Buddy Bancetti, though, is something else, I think, maybe. Sis here is probably as close to him as anybody around town. Only I don’t think she knows all there is to know either. I think Buddy Bancetti is, in part, high theater. Think about it. See you later, Sis.”
The boy turned and walked back around the side of the house with as much dignity as could anybody who was wearing a derby hat with a button stuck on it that read “I’m ET.”
NINE
I did some more poking around town. I talked to the local pharmacist who told me neither Buddy Bancetti nor the late John Donald Cornell were habitual users of any prescription medication. The harried manager of a local Safeway supermarket said Cornell had been the sort of customer who complained about prices and kept returning items for credit. The Bancetti boy wasn’t a regular customer of the Safeway, but he did patronize a local 7-11 store where he bought a lot of easy-to-fix junk food. A man named Halburton who ran the town hardware store told me Cornell regularly bought ammunition from him, for both a hunting rifle and a couple of handguns, and he was able to give me the name of a boy who sometimes accompanied Cornell when he came in shopping for bullets. The boy’s name was Randy Bosk and he wasn’t easy to track down, but by late afternoon I found him lounging around with a couple of other youths outside one of Claireborn’s two video game arcades. Bosk was a sullen youth who wouldn’t tell me anything until I agreed to treat him like an informer and give him five dollars. After I did, he wasn’t able to tell me anything more than I’d already learned from Sergeant Findley, except for the fact that Cornell had been rash enough to brag to this youth about the Mexican immigrants he’d shot crossing his land down in Texas years earlier.
“Did he tell that to all the boys who used to hang around out at his place?” I asked.
“Nope. Just a few of us who were special,” he told me.
By late afternoon the long day I’d put in, along with the lack of headway I’d made on the Bancetti-Cornell thing and a headache I’d picked up, sent me out to a motel just off the highway to Reno. I checked in for a night’s stay and phoned San Quentin. Warden Barry Thompson had gone home. Deputy Warden Shellbacher had slept during the day and now was back running things. He asked me what sort of progress I was making. I told him I had the feeling the Bancetti boy didn’t kill Cornell, but I was a long way from being able to prove it. I asked him how things were going with Beau and the hostages. He said box lunches had been sent in for all of them and things seemed quiet. He said he didn’t expect the warden back until morning.
I had a light meal next door to the motel in the snappy little sort of restaurant with bright lights and imitation leather booths that can be found just off the nation’s interstate highway system everywhere. I asked the waitress, a tall, blonde woman with a long jaw, where the people of Claireborn who went out on a Saturday night went out to. She said the most popular spot was a place back at the edge of town called Kelsey’s. It had a bar, booths and a dance floor, and on Saturday nights a small country-western band “did their stuff,” she told me. She said it also had a mechanical bull, but it kept breaking down and she didn’t know if it would be working or not that night. I told her it didn’t make any difference in my case, I wasn’t feeling much like a cowboy.
On my way out to the car it occurred to me that maybe if I had been a cowboy I’d make more headway finding out the truth of the J. D. Cornell murder. I wasn’t really country, the way the people around Claireborn were country (Aggie’s word). The problem was I wasn’t really that much city, either. I’d grown up in Seattle, and I guess by now the place feels like a city. Back in my days it hadn’t. I’d been around some since, and lived in enough real cities so country people probably would never trust me completely, despite my own unsophisticated background. But for the sake of Buddy Bancetti, Margot Smith, Louise Dancine and a guard named Jones, and all the other fellows up and down the hallway in the activities building at San Quentin penitentiary, I intended to visit Kelsey’s and give it my best try. I had been a bartender once. Sometimes that helped with other bartenders, because no matter where your bar is, city or country, a certain percentage of your drinking customers, after a couple of rounds, are going to be complete jerks. Only another bartender can really understand that, and it creates a little brotherhood all its own.
Kelsey’s was a low, squat building set back from the road far enough for a dozen cars to park in front. There was more room in the rear, a broad, hard-packed dirt area that stretched up to the edge of what looked like a garage and wrecking yard. A few cannibalized hulks of cars, pickup trucks and recreation vehicles were strewn about at random. They reminded me of some works of modern sculpture you could find these days around San Francisco and other places. I left my car over at the wrecking yard end of the lot, away from where the parking lot fights might start later in the evening. We were still on standard time and it was nearly dark when I went into Kelsey’s.
I had a feeling I’d been in the place a dozen times before. Or maybe it was just that the same fellow had toiled throughout the West building country bar and dance joints using the same blueprint. There was a long bar running down one side of the dance floor, a little bandstand at one end of the room, and booths and tables around the floor itself
. There was indirect light around the walls and a revolving glitter ball hanging from the ceiling. A backbar mirror and more indirect lighting allowed the bartenders to see what they were pouring. Half a dozen customers occupied revolving stools at the bar and another twenty or so customers occupied some of the booths and tables. The country-western band wasn’t on the stand yet, but three couples were dancing to a Willie Nelson number on the jukebox while a woman gowned in black satin spread glide powder on the floor.
An old fellow with trembling hands was pouring drinks for the waitresses working the floor. Bar customers were being waited on by a small wisp of a woman wearing jeans and a white silk cowboy shirt with purple stitching. She had an orange scarf around her neck, dark hair that she wore in a short, bobbed style, a tanned, knowing face and efficient-looking moves. I decided to forego any attempts to call on the old bartender brotherhood. She’d just take me for another jerk trying to flirt with her, but she did manage a little smile when she asked me what I wanted. I ordered a bourbon and water, put some money on the bar and turned around to look at the people. It seemed most of them in turn were looking at me. I turned back to the drink.
I was the only man in the place wearing a sports jacket and not wearing jeans. And the bartender lady, when she had nothing else to do, turned out to be as inquisitive as everybody else in the place. She came back to where I stood and gave me another little smile.
“Visiting folks or just passing through?” she asked me.
“I guess if I tell you, then you can tell the waitresses and they can spread it around the floor so everybody can just sit back and enjoy themselves again.”
Not bad. It brought a little laugh.
“People are naturally curious,” she told me. “You won’t be the only stranger in the place tonight, but it’s a little early still and people aren’t all wrapped up in their own things yet the way they will be later.”
I nodded, wondering if it would do some good to level with her. I decided chances were some of the other people in the room would already have heard about me and what I was doing, and most people I’d met in Claireborn seemed generally sympathetic to Buddy Bancetti and not too upset by what had happened to the late J. D. Cornell.
