by Jack Lynch
The approaching shoreline looked nearly as quiet as the other side of the lake. There was an elderly man up on a ladder doing something to the eaves of an A-frame building a couple of hundred yards from where we’d parked. He was the only person in sight. Angel was looking gloomy.
“Hey,” I told her. “I almost forgot. Thanks for the picnic. It was a good idea.”
“I hope.”
“No, seriously. Maybe we can do it again sometime, when you get down to San Francisco. I’ll take you to a favorite spot of mine, out along the Pacific. A place called Stinson Beach.”
At least it took her mind off her problems. “I’ve never been to the ocean. Can you swim there?”
“Sure. During the summer and fall anyway. Some people put on wetsuits and go in all year long. Surfers, mostly.”
She gave me a little smile. “I’d like that. If I ever get to San Francisco I’ll take you up on it.”
We were nearing the small, elevated dock at the water’s edge. They kept the boat tied beneath the dock. I planned to run it up on the shore, unload things, then use a rope tied to the bow to walk it back along the dock and shove it underneath. I twisted around to look at the shoreline just as Angel stood up.
“I’ll beach it,” she told me.
I didn’t really see what happened next. I was looking at the shore. But I heard two things, almost simultaneously. One was the report of a rifle from the hills above the lake, and the other was a splash in the water behind me. I turned around as the prow of the boat grounded on the shore. Angel wasn’t in the boat. Then I saw her, or what I took to be her, several yards out in the lake, floating in a growing patch of crimson.
The man fixing the A-frame roof said later I shouted something then. I don’t remember what. Probably a curse. I remember hearing another rifle shot as I dove off the boat and swam out to the girl. I had the gut-wrenching fear she already was dead when I wrapped one arm around her, raising her head out of the water and towing her back under the cover of the elevated dock. I didn’t realize it immediately, but one of the several bullets fired from the rifle on the hill went through my left thigh. I hugged Angel to me but I wasn’t God. It wasn’t enough to change anything. She had been shot cleanly through the chest right where her heart should have been. She probably had been dead by the time she’d hit the water. I didn’t think she was the one the gunman wanted to hit. If she hadn’t stood up suddenly when she did, the slug wouldn’t have hit her. Whoever it was wanted me. Or maybe both of us.
The sound of rifle fire echoed through nearby hills, then it was still again. Far off, somewhere up above, I heard the sound of a car or truck motor starting. The man on the ladder was shouting something at me.
“A girl’s been shot!” I yelled to him. “Call an ambulance!”
An ambulance probably wouldn’t do Angel any good. But maybe they knew a few tricks I didn’t. I think I was going into shock myself right then. My thoughts were jumbled. I wondered if the man had a telephone to call for help, or if he’d have to drive into town. I’d seen him scramble down the ladder after I’d called to him. If he didn’t have a phone, I reasoned, I probably could just drive Angel into the hospital myself. I wondered where the hospital was. Maybe if I drove back to that busy intersection somebody there could tell me where to take Angel. Maybe the hospital wasn’t the place for her. Maybe I should take her home and hand her over to her sister. Here, sis. Look what I brought you. It’s Angel.
I ripped up my shirt to make a pad over the hole in Angel’s chest. I’d dragged her up a few feet from the boat, and now I went down and got the towel to tie around the shirt dressing, only when I rolled her over to tie the towel and saw the exit wound, huge and gaping, I realized I didn’t have a bandage to cover anything that big. And I can’t remember for sure, but I don’t even think she was bleeding any longer.
By the time the first sheriff’s deputy arrived on the scene, I’d lost consciousness myself. I came to when he touched me. I started to move but he held me firmly by one shoulder.
“Just relax. You’ve lost blood.”
“What?”
Now he was cutting my pants leg away with a pocket knife. He used a portion of my tattered shirt to tie a tourniquet high on the leg.
“Angel…”
“Can’t help her. Not now,” the deputy told me.
I was aware of other things. The elderly man from the A-frame was standing a short distance off, staring at Angel’s body, his face contorted. Up by where I’d parked my car was the deputy’s wagon, its dome lights winking. The vehicle’s radio was turned up. A lot of chatter was coming over it. In the distance I heard a siren, and a moment later an ambulance arrived. The two attendants in it ran down to the girl’s body. They didn’t take anything for granted. One tried to find a heartbeat. The other ran back to get an oxygen unit, but by the time he returned with it the other attendant stood and shook his head.
More cars arrived. Sergeant Bart Findley was in one of them. He strode over and took in the scene quickly. The ambulance attendants had put something on my leg wound and were bandaging it. Findley knelt beside me.
“How are you?”
“How does it look?” I glanced over at Angel and shook my head. I still felt a little fuzzy around the edges, but my thinking processes had returned to normal. At least it seemed that way.
“What happened?”
“We were out on the island for a picnic,” I told him. His eyes did something I didn’t like right then. “God damn it, Findley, I was working. The girl had something she wanted to tell me, and that’s the only way she would do it.”
Findley grunted.
“We were coming back here and were just about beached when she stood up in the back of the boat. I was looking toward shore. I heard a shot—powerful rifle from the sound of it, from up in the hills somewhere. I didn’t see the girl get hit. I heard the splash she made when the shot punched her out of the boat. There was blood in the water. I went out to her and dragged her in under the end of the dock. The gunman kept firing. Six, maybe eight rounds. The man over there might remember.” I gestured toward the neighbor who was being interrogated by other officers.
“When the firing stopped, I thought I heard a car or truck motor start. I carried Angel up out of the water and tried to put a bandage on her. I didn’t realize I’d been hit myself and was losing blood. My mind started getting a little goofy. Then I passed out until the first officer arrived.”
“Who knew where the two of you were?”
“Anybody. Everybody. Before we drove out here Angel left her car with some friends in town, at a busy little intersection. Probably twenty or thirty people saw us. Angel made a point of it.”
“What did the girl want to tell you?”
There were a number of people standing around. The first officer on the scene stood just behind Findley, making notes as I told the story. The two ambulance drivers listened from a few feet away. People had arrived from the coroner’s office and were doing an initial investigation of Angel’s body. They were just doing their jobs, efficiently and professionally, but they rolled over her body in a brusque manner to study the exit wound. I honestly wanted to cry. I looked away, until the lump in my throat subsided. I cleared it a time or two.
“Let’s go somewhere else for that,” I told him. “Just us.”
“What’s wrong?” he asked sharply.
“I’ll tell you what’s wrong. For starters, mind telling me where you were about twenty, twenty-five minutes ago?”
He stood back up, his face hardening. “I was home trying to enjoy my day off with my wife and two youngsters. You’re a little paranoid, aren’t you?”
“You bet I am. About everybody except the man I saw working on his roof when the shooting started. Help me up.”
Findley and the two ambulance attendants got me to my feet and helped me hobble up toward the parking area. I made my way to the front fender of my own car.
“When you’re finished, we’ll run you into the c
linic for a better checkup,” one of the attendants told me.
“Thanks, but you can skip it,” I told them.
They looked a little uncomfortable. I took out one of my business cards from my soggy wallet. “You can send a bill to this address.”
Maybe I was a little abrupt with them. They looked as if they’d had their feelings hurt, but they took the card and went over and got into the ambulance and drove off.
I decided not to be wasting my time while I told Findley what Angel had to say out on the island. I hobbled around to the trunk of the car and opened my suitcase. It was awkward, but I was able to change into fresh shorts, shirt and slacks. I even had a lightweight seersucker sports coat I carried for this sort of emergency. Not that I felt I had to be all that dressy for the rest of my stay in Claireborn. I just wanted to be wearing something that would cover the revolver in the holster I was clipping onto the back of my belt.
“I’ve got a ticket that says I can carry this,” I told Findley, putting some extra rounds into a jacket pocket. “It won’t do much good if I run into that same man at rifle distance again, but it’ll make me feel better all the same.”
“You figure it was a man?”
“A normal assumption,” I told him. “Could have been a woman, I suppose. But I’m assuming it was the same person who bludgeoned Cornell to death, and that doesn’t seem like woman’s work, somehow.”
I told him Angel’s story. I didn’t go into the trying life the girl was living or how she felt quite a bit different about herself than most of the rest of the town seemed to. Findley was a cop, not a sociologist, and it was all over and done with now anyhow, but I experienced another little catch in my throat when I thought about it. The girl never had much of a chance, in life or death either one.
“That’s pretty secondhand information,” said the deputy.
“It’s secondhand, but it’s information neither one of us had when we rolled out of bed this morning. And I’m convinced she was sincere.”
“She seemed certain it was her sister, Elizabeth, with young Bancetti?”
“She was sure.”
Findley still seemed doubtful.
“Sergeant, the girl was scared. If you’d been there you’d believe it too.”
“Maybe so, but it’s still not enough to pop Buddy Bancetti out of jail, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“I didn’t figure it would be yet. But what if I get the boy to tell us, and Angel’s sister to corroborate it? Couldn’t you then at least put him into my custody long enough for me to drive him down to San Quentin and try to convince his brother he’s a free man? You can sort out the rest of it when I bring him back.”
“I don’t know. I’d have to get hold of the assistant prosecutor handling the case.”
“Why don’t you try to reach him now, so he’ll be available?”
He at least agreed to that. I hobbled back down to the lake. Thankfully they had removed the girl’s body to the coroner’s wagon. I turned and looked back into the hills. Findley consulted with the deputy who’d interviewed the neighbor from the A-frame, then rejoined me.
“The witness told the same story you did. He said you moved pretty fast after the girl was hit, going into the water after her.”
I just grunted. “I’m assuming the sniper was the one I heard drive off in a vehicle after the shooting. Are there a lot of roads up there?”
“No. One primary dirt-and-gravel track. Some others branch off that at various places.”
I asked the coroner’s investigators if they had any indication from entry and exit wounds of how the bullet had hit Angel’s chest—left-to-right, right-to-left or mostly straight on. They told me mostly straight on. I threw the stiff leg over the side of the boat and rolled into it, then made it on hands and knees to the back of the little craft.
“Come on, Sergeant, take up the oars for a minute.”
He climbed in, frowning with the full majesty of the sheriff’s department. I directed him to shove off and paddle out a little ways from shore, then set him up as nearly as I could in the same line I’d approached the shore along. I had him paddle in slowly, correcting as necessary. When we floated into the spot where I figured Angel had been hit I studied the hills directly ahead of me.
“Okay,” I told them after we beached and Findley and another deputy helped me back out onto the shore. “Do you see that big granite outcropping slightly left of the slash area?”
They nodded.
“Well, I figure the man must have fired from a point about two hundred yards to the right of that, very near to wherever a road might be in that vicinity. As near as I recall, the motor started just seconds after the shooting stopped.”
Findley stared at me a moment. “You figure you’ve been around enough shooting—man-shooting—to depend on your estimate of time between the shooting and the vehicle starting?”
“Lordy, Sergeant, yes, I figure I have.”
“Well that makes it easier,” Findley told me, staring back up at the hills. “There’s only the main track in that area.” He called over another team of deputies, pointed out the area and told them to go see what they could find.
“They’re good men,” he assured me. “They’ll know how to go about it. What to look for.”
“I’m sure,” I told him.
He turned back to me. “Who do you think the gunman wanted to hit? You or the girl?”
“I honestly don’t know. Maybe both of us. Angel had information that could be a threat to Cornell’s killer. I have that same information and the killer could assume Angel had given it to me. Even before then, there was a clumsy attempt to discourage me, last night out at Kelsey’s.” I told him briefly of the encounter I’d had with the men in ski masks.
“You should have reported that last night.”
“Come on, Findley. A fight in a parking lot out behind a dance-and-drink joint on a Saturday night? Are you kidding?”
“But you think you drew blood?”
“I’m positive of it. It’s the only reason they broke off and left me alone.”
Findley took a last look around. “Maybe you’d better go find some place to rest up.”
“Don’t be silly. What are you going to do next?”
“Go by the Reynolds house and see if Liz is home.”
“I’ll meet you there.”
THIRTEEN
The house was the crackerbox sort of place they had put up in tracts throughout the West just after World War II. It looked curiously out of place, sitting by itself in a cleared lot back forty yards from the road. The carport on one side was empty. We went to the front door and the sergeant rang the bell and I rapped on the door. We waited a couple of minutes but nobody answered.
I started limping around to the side and Findley started to follow. “Wait here,” I told him.
“What are you going to do?”
“What you as a sworn officer of the law can’t.” I continued on around to the back of the place. The back door was unlocked. I went in and hobbled through the place quickly, to make sure nobody was home. One of the two bedrooms had been Angel’s, with the posters and pennants and photos that teenagers still hang on their walls. It was painful to see.
Back in the kitchen I found a note on the counter from Liz addressed to Angel. It was pretty cold and impersonal. It just said she would be back in time to fix the evening meal. I went out the back door and around front, telling Findley what I’d found.
“I’ll get on the radio and ask patrol units to keep a watch out for her. I can’t think of much else to do right now.”
“I can. The other side of the relationship the afternoon Cornell was killed. Buddy Bancetti.”
Findley took a breath and let it out slowly. “Bragg, I’ve tried talking to that boy till I’ve nearly come down with lockjaw. I feel like a fool when I finish one of those sessions.”
“I know. Me too. But maybe I have an idea.”
“Such as?”
“I’
m groping a little, but I just thought of something Angel told me. I think she was a bright kid. She said everybody’s been too gentle with Buddy. So I’m going to try playing dirty with the youngster for a change.”
Findley shrugged. “He isn’t that much of a youngster any longer, just a little goofy. But it sounds all right with me. What did you have in mind?”
“I’m going to tell Aggie Leland, his girlfriend, everything Angel told me about Buddy and Liz. Then I think we should send Aggie in to speak to him. See if she can’t open him up.”
The sergeant stared at me a moment, then cleared his throat. “You have a finely twisted mind. It’s worth a try.”
I told him I’d meet him over at the county jail. When he’d driven off, I walked back around the house and went inside again to use the phone. I found a listing for the Lelands. When I dialed, Harold answered. I asked for his sister, and he gave me the number of a girlfriend she was visiting. I phoned there and reached Aggie and told her something important had come up to do with Buddy, and that I needed her help. She agreed readily and told me where to pick her up. We arrived out at the jail about twenty minutes later. She remarked about my leg when I walked funny across to the building entrance.
“I’ll tell you about it when you’re sitting down inside.”
“What?”
“Things have taken a rough turn. It’s the only reason I’m asking you to do this. And it won’t be easy.”
I figured she was too adult to flim-flam. Better to give her a hint of how serious things were, and hope for the best when I got around to asking her to go in and try to untie the knotted tongue of Buddy Bancetti. She hesitated at the entranceway. I shooed her on in and followed. She wasn’t wearing her hair in a ponytail today, but had fluffed it out so that it flounced off her shoulders as she walked across the entryway. She looked more grown-up and less tomboy today, and was wearing a dress to boot. Maybe because it was Sunday and this was Claireborn.
