by Jack Lynch
I checked out my face in the bathroom mirror. I had some discoloration on the cheekbone, a cut on my jaw and a bit of dried blood on one ear. I’ve looked worse than that after shaving with a safety razor. I took the coffee back to bed, propped up the pillows and settled back to think about things. I supposed I could go marching around town looking for somebody who might have had a motorcycle chain bite into them the night before, but that sort of thing could take hours. Besides, maybe all of them had gone fishing for the day. I did some more thinking and tried to ask myself what people smarter than I am would do in my situation, but after a while I knew I was just playing games. I had done all the routine stuff. I really had only one solid place to start unraveling things, and that was the same place—or being—who’d been a key to it all along. I’d have to go back to the county jail and work away some more on Buddy Bancetti. Buddy baby, where were you on the day in question?
I know a lady who lives on the peninsula south of San Francisco who claims to be a psychic. I say claims because I put her into the same bin in which I tuck away stories of flying saucers and ghosts. I’ve never personally experienced those things, for sure, so I say Maggie Upton claims to be a psychic the same as I say an airline pilot friend of mine claims to have seen an honest-to-God unidentified flying object, and a crazy aunt I used to have claimed to have seen the ghost of her husband.
“Probably came back one last time to complain about the cooking,” she used to tell me with high good humor.
Of course, Maggie herself knows she’s a psychic. She doesn’t advertise in newspapers or babble away on TV shows. But for twenty years she has honed her skills, she says, and there are law enforcement officers who will swear they have found buried bodies and scenes of violent death through Maggie’s assistance. I just tell her she has a lucky streak. She sticks out her tongue at me and says if I wasn’t so thickheaded and unimaginative I could develop some ESP skills myself. What I never let on to her is that in my heart of hearts, I am very close to the wickedly thin line that exists between doubt and belief in all three cases—psychics, UFOs and ghosts.
I feel that way about extrasensory perception because there have been times when I’ve had hunches come out of the blue and make the body tingle and practically lift my feet right off the floor. When I think back on it, I soberly put it down to just a lucky set of synapses in my brain that at the right moment came up with a theory from a lot of fragmented information I had gathered, and an unconscious weighing of odds about what really might have been the answer to a puzzle.
But the process didn’t matter. I savored my coffee, as much as one can savor instant coffee in a motel room on a Sunday morning. I thought I was close to sensing what Buddy Bancetti was holding back from everybody. Almost. Maybe another chat would help.
The watch commander at county jail was the same officer who’d had the duty the day before. He remembered me and let me have another go at Buddy Bancetti.
I asked if there was somewhere a little more informal where I could talk to the boy, other than in the room where he seemed to spend most of his time. The officer arranged for us to go out into the exercise yard. There were some other men out there in red jumpsuits, but we were able to have a little walk to ourselves off to one side. And that’s about all we did, was have a little walk. I asked the boy if he’d thought at all about the seriousness of the situation down at San Quentin. He said he had and felt awful about it. He supposed it meant his brother would have to spend more time in prison. I told him it meant at least that.
We talked about Aggie some, and about the dog, Mr. Wumps. But any time I tried to draw him out about the day of J. D. Cornell’s murder he forgot how to speak English. I spent forty-five minutes with him. With each minute I became just a little more frustrated and angry. I must admit that before it was over, what I really wanted to do was to take the boy out behind a woodshed somewhere and find out how he reacted to pain.
But no, Bragg, I told myself. That’s the bully’s way, and you didn’t come up here to terrorize this tongue-tied, terrified dummy with the vicious brother holding two women and a guard hostage down at San Quentin prison. There had to be another way. Sodium pentothal, perhaps, but you might have a problem convincing the watch commander of that. As a parting shot I told him what somebody had said about him, without identifying Harold Leland. I told him somebody had suggested he was high theater. He just stared back at me with that hesitant, ready-to-run expression. I was beginning to suspect that the boy’s mind really was addled. Just before we went back inside the jail building I touched his elbow to stop him.
“You know, there really is a very good chance that your brother and those other men are going to be killed, along with those innocent people they’re holding, if I don’t come up with some answers very quickly. Your answers would help, Buddy.”
“I don’t know anything about Mr. Cornell’s death.”
“Then how did your wallet and undershorts come to be at the murder scene?”
His face started to turn crimson, but instead of replying he turned and went into the building. I suppressed the urge to kill.
I turned the boy back over to the khaki-clad crew inside and went out to the wide concrete parking lot alongside the jail building.
I had parked my car off by itself toward one end of the lot. Now there was another car parked alongside it, backed into the lined stall. It was a 1950s vintage Plymouth with grinning chrome grillwork and a well-maintained light blue finish polished to a high shine. Sitting on a beach towel atop the car’s hood, resting her back against the large windshield, was a girl in white shorts and a red-and-white bandanna fashioned into a halter. She wore a black-and-white sun visor on her head and had on a pair of sunglasses with dark reflective lenses strong enough to shoot your image out into space. She lifted off the glasses and held them away from her face.
“Surprised?” she asked.
It was Angel, the youngster who’d had all the bold suggestions for me out at the playing field the day before when I’d been looking for Aggie.
“Not especially,” I told her. “You, know somebody working inside? Or being caged up in there?”
“Both,” she told me.
She moved her hands leisurely behind her head and arched her back for a mighty stretch. It brought to my attention how fully developed her breasts were. It struck me as reasonably possible she was on intimate terms with every last man inside the jail building, on both sides of the bars.
“Actually,” she said, replacing the sunglasses, “I’m practicing to be a detective.” She swung her long legs over to the side of the hood and pushed off lightly to the pavement. Whatever problems or shortcomings the girl might have, she had fluid body movements. They were unhurried, unstudied-looking—almost a lesson in choreography. She either had very natural physical ability or had spent a lot of time practicing to make it seem as if she had an innate sense of grace. She folded up the beach towel, then stepped just in front of me, holding the towel behind her and poking her bare belly out at me. “What I’ve been doing is searching for you. I found your car,” she told me, tilting her head toward it, “and now I’ve found you.”
“And what are you going to do now that you’ve found me, dazzle me into the pavement with your sunglasses?”
She laughed, and turned back to throw the towel inside the Plymouth. She took off the glasses and sun visor and put them in on the towel, then turned back and came up to loop her arms around my neck.
“You’ve been in town for nearly twenty-four hours now, so you’ve probably heard some things about me. Mostly bad, maybe, because that’s the way a lot of people’s heads work here in Claireborn. Well, I’m not all bad, Mr. Bragg. But I sure am all-girl, and that does cause a little problem here and there. From time to time.”
I glanced from side to side at the arms resting on my shoulders. “You look as if you’re trying to cause a small problem here and now.”
“Huh-uh. Wrong there. I want us to be friends.”
“Why do you want that?”
“Why not? I like to have friends. Around here, they’re a little hard to come by and keep. For me, anyhow.” She stretched up on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek, then lowered her arms and leaned back against one fender of the Plymouth. “I thought with you, I’d try to make a fresh start.”
“Why do you feel that?”
“In the nearly twenty-four hours you’ve been in town, I’ve heard a few things about you too. I think I could use a friend like you, maybe sometime when I get down to San Francisco for a visit.”
“Ever been there?”
“Just when I was a kid. Before it would count.” She ran one hand through her dark hair. Again, it was an attractive move. Studied or natural, I couldn’t tell.
“The only thing is,” she continued, “I’m not sure what sort of a friend I’d like you to be.”
“I didn’t know there were more than one kind.”
“Oh, sure there are. For a girl, at least. I mean—well, I would guess you are old enough to be my father, maybe.”
“I think most people who saw us together wouldn’t have any trouble arriving at that conclusion. In fact, it’s probably one of the first things that would cross their minds.”
“So there’s that. A father figure for me?” She tilted her head and rested the tip of one finger alongside her chin. “I think not. You’re too sexy-looking a devil for that. So I think I should leave my options open there.”
“And I think you’re too young-looking a devil for that, Angel. There are laws about such things, you know.”
She giggled in an unabashed way that was bothersome. This girl could be a trial.
“I’m not that young,” she told me. “Maybe when I came to San Francisco you could be my—what did they used to call them, the old fellows with the big bellies and a case of gout and a leer—sugar daddies?”
“My God, where did you ever hear a term like that?”
“Old movies on television. That’s where I learn a lot of things. But not everything.” She pushed off from the car and took a step nearer, jutting out her tum-tum again until it brushed the front of my jacket. “Actually, you should have taken me up on the suggestion I made yesterday, out at the ball park.”
“You mean run you up to Reno or Tahoe?”
“Yes.”
“Did you really want that?”
“Yes. No…I don’t know. I was just angry at something else that had happened earlier. Sometimes I do some wild things when that happens. Sort of in retaliation.”
“Sounds as if its the sort of thing that could be self-destructive.”
“You’re right. It has been, in the past. Still, it might have been to our mutual benefit if you’d done it.”
“Why’s that?”
“It would have gotten me away from the state I was in. And as for you—well, you might have learned a thing or two.”
I stood very quietly, waiting for her to continue, but she didn’t go on immediately. A little smile was playing at the corners of her mouth again, and she had a tease in her eyes that let me know that despite her young age, she knew exactly what she was doing. She had me by what the sugar daddies used to call the short hairs.
“I’ve learned some about why you’re in Claireborn, about the Cornell killing and Buddy Bancetti and the thing at San Quentin.”
“I suppose your sister told you. I met her last night at the roadhouse at the edge of town.”
She laughed. “Roadhouse. I love it. Wait till I tell Sandra Kelsey that. But no, my sister didn’t tell me all of it. But she did tell me she’d invited you over for brunch this morning. It’s one of the reasons—one of the reasons I wanted to find you. Before you went there. I wanted to spend some time alone with you first.”
“To try to win yourself a new friend?”
She shrugged. “I also know what went on in the parking lot out behind Kelsey’s when you left there last night. That made every girl in town interested in you. One-man chain gang. Whop! Thump! You’re danger! You’re excitement! And for a little while, I want you to myself.”
“I don’t have any more time for that sort of thing today than I did yesterday. If you know about the San Quentin thing you must realize that.”
“You don’t listen closely sometimes. That’s what I meant about yesterday. You would have been smart to take me up on my offer, whether I meant it or not.” She hesitated just long enough to set an edge on things. “Because I know some things you’d like to know.”
She stepped back from me. The smile was gone. This was sober-sided time, and I knew she meant it.
“Well,” I sighed, “I have been asking a lot of questions around town.”
“And I have a lot of answers.”
“There has to be a catch.”
“There is. But you won’t get the answers I have from anybody else in town. I can class-A guarantee that.”
“And the catch is?”
“Spend a little while with me. Get a little better acquainted. Take me on a picnic.”
“A picnic?”
“Yes. Out at the lake. After we go by the Safeway and pick up some goodies and beer.”
“And beer.”
“I’ve been drinking it for several years. Yes, definitely beer.”
“Goodies and beer. What else?”
“That’s all.”
“I think it would be smarter if we went back to your place and had brunch with your sister. She could listen in on whatever we had to discuss.”
She shook her head slowly, with her eyes closed and her lips pursed. “No. That is definitely out. It’s you and me, Peter Bragg, for a picnic at the lake with goodies and beer. Or no answers. Oh, there is one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“We’ll take your car. Only first, you’ll have to follow me back into town so I can drop off mine with a friend.”
“Why not just take it home?”
“No,” she said, crossing around to the driver’s-side door. “Town. Follow me.”
I followed her. At least she didn’t dawdle on her way back to town. And she drove to a busy little intersection with an open gas station on one corner and a little cafe on the other. When we drove up it looked as if half the town’s teenagers were lolling around one place or the other. All heads turned as Angel drove in and parked at the curb. Two girls hurried across the sidewalk when she stopped and spoke with her as she got out of the car. She was telling them the news, nodding in my direction as she spoke. Now there were a lot of people dividing their attention between the two of us. I’d pulled into a spot a couple of parking places behind her. She got the beach towel from the seat beside her and went around to open the car’s trunk and took out a blanket, then slammed the lid back shut and took a key off her key ring to hand to one of the girls. Then she walked in that measured, leisurely pace up the sidewalk to where I was parked. Everybody, with the sole exception of myself, was getting a great kick out of it.
It was getting warm. I’d taken off my jacket and tossed it into the backseat and opened the passenger-side window. When she got to the car, I reached across and unlocked the door, but she didn’t get in. She bent down to speak to me through the open window.
“Do you have manners?” she asked quietly.
“I think so. Why do you ask?”
“Then come around and open the door for me.”
My head sagged to my chest for a moment, but then I dutifully got out, walked around the car and opened the door for her. Around San Francisco, for the past ten or twenty years, if I’d gotten out to open the car door for a girl, I would have been laughed off the street. Most women I knew seemed to think that sort of thing was a great waste of time these days, but maybe they didn’t think that way in Claireborn. I had a feeling the onlooking teenagers were about to break out in applause. And Angel, she played it just fine. She might have been the queen of England, the gracious way she nodded her thanks to me before sliding into the front seat. Everybody was grinning and I felt like
a fool, only I hadn’t seen nothin’ yet. As I pulled away from the curb she looped her arms around me again and kissed the side of my neck to a chorus of whistles and hoots from the gang around the intersection.
“There, Mr. Detective from San Francisco,” Angel told me, settling back comfortably by the door. “That should just about take care of your reputation in this town.”
“I feel as if I’ve been branded.”
“Exactly. Know where the Safeway is?”
“I know.”
“Good. Don’t forget beer.”
ELEVEN
I insisted that Angel wait in the car when I went into the supermarket and got some cold meats and cheese, a loaf of sourdough bread that had been trucked up from San Francisco, macaroni salad in a plastic container and a jar of dill pickles and some cookies and any other junk I figured the long-legged kid in the Cadillac might enjoy. They were having a sale on generously large plastic ice chests and I decided if you’re going to have a picnic you might as well have a picnic, and picked up one of those along with a bag of ice cubes. And beer. A six-pack of Dos Equis and a six-pack of Heineken, figuring if the kid wanted to grow right out of her size 6 shorts that was her business, not mine.
I suppose that the twenty-one-year-old age requirement for drinking beer or any other alcoholic beverage in California was an out-of-date attempt at morality imposed by an adult population that didn’t quite know how to deal with the situation. But passing a law saying you had to be twenty-one to drink beer was about as effective as saying you had to be that age to have an idle thought. I didn’t have any smart alternatives, I just knew the reality of things.
Angel had some complimentary things to say about the stuff I’d bought in the store, and helped me transfer ice and cheese and salad and beer into the ice chest, then she sent me back inside for some fruit.
