The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “How about the post office there? Didn’t they get a little pissed off at all the direct mail traffic?”

  “Heck no. The volume upgraded it to a second-class post office. The postmaster got a pretty good raise out of it.”

  He nodded and took another sip of beer. I did the same.

  “Who shot you?”

  “I don’t know. Some sniper up in the hills around Lake Appleton. I think he was the same man who killed J. D. Cornell.”

  “You a cop?”

  “Free-lance sort of one.”

  He nodded. “I got a buddy who’s a deputy sheriff. You’d be the fellow from San Francisco.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Trying to spring Buddy Bancetti and cool down things at San Quentin.”

  “Right again. News gets around Claireborn well enough.”

  “Sure. Biggest item we’ve had in days.”

  “I’ve got a bigger one.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Same fellow who shot me shot and killed Angel Reynolds.”

  He just stared at me a minute. “No shit?” he asked quietly.

  “It’s true. One of the things I’m doing is looking for her sister, to let her know about it. Know her?”

  “Sure. You mean Liz. Don’t know where she’d be now, though. Did you expect to find her up here?”

  “Nope.”

  We drank beer for a minute.

  “How bad’s the leg?”

  “Could be worse. Didn’t hit anything important. Lost a little blood is all.”

  He nodded. “You ever spend any time in ’Nam?”

  I shook my head. “I was a war earlier.”

  “Korea.”

  “Yup.”

  “They used bullets in that one too, I believe.”

  “That’s how I knew what it was when this one went through me.”

  He lifted a corner of his undershirt to show me scars along one side of his lean, tan middle. “Quang Dien,” he told me. “That’s along the Street Without Joy, brother.”

  I nodded. He took another sip of beer.

  “I can’t believe you showed up here on the off chance you might get a free can of Old English Malt Liquor.”

  “Nope. Gotta figure out a way of getting into the law office upstairs.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Wilstock is supposed to be representing the Bancetti boy, only from the conversation I had with him yesterday, I don’t think he’s trying as hard as he might.”

  “What do you want to rifle his office for?”

  “Don’t want to rifle it, exactly. Just want to see the folder he’s got on Buddy Bancetti. I’m curious about something inside it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “He had something there inside an envelope. The envelope had a postmark on it that said Tamalpa.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That’s the postmark they use on mail coming out of San Quentin prison.”

  “Why didn’t you ask him yesterday what it was?”

  “As soon as I showed a little interest and tried to move closer to his desk, he slapped shut the folder like it had state secrets in it. Sometimes it’s smarter to back off a thing like that.”

  “How’d you figure to get in there today?”

  “Not sure. I’ve been up there. Door’s locked, as it should be. There’s a fire escape outside the window at the end of the corridor and a narrow ledge that goes around the corner of the building, probably to outside the windows in the law office. Somebody foolhardy enough and not bothered by heights and with two good legs probably could edge around that corner and try the windows. They might not be locked.”

  “I can’t think of anyone in town with two good legs, not bothered by heights and foolhardy enough to try a stunt like that.”

  “Didn’t figure you would, really. I’m still turning the problem over in my mind.” We drank in silence for a couple of minutes.

  “Just the Tamalpa envelope, huh?” he asked.

  “That’s it. I’ve got a funny hunch about it.”

  “Is there enough truth in all this so you wouldn’t mind some other fellow peering over your shoulder while you looked at it?”

  “It’s all truth, and I wouldn’t mind.”

  He nodded. “You’ll notice I’m an industrious sort myself,” he said, looking around him. “Work sometimes on Sundays and all, just like your friend up near Seattle.”

  “I noticed.”

  “I’m also the super for the building here. It’s a dollar here, a dollar there. Something an ambitious fellow who’d like to retire inside another ten or fifteen years would do. Funny. You got me to thinking about those return-address labels. You figure they have some of those address directories for sale somewhere down in Sacramento?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of phone calls should find out. If not there they might have them in San Francisco, or somewhere else around the Bay Area. And along with those I’d pick up a book on direct mail techniques too, like my friend did. It might mention a couple of things I don’t remember. And keep you from becoming too discouraged at the number of postcards that didn’t come back. I recall there’s a pretty small return percentage that you should be satisfied with. Under ten percent, I’m almost positive. Maybe under five, or four, even.”

  He nodded and finished off his can of beer. I did the same.

  “Anything else about that return-address-label scam you remember?”

  “A couple of things. Only it’s hard to recall with that Tamalpa postmark weighing on my mind the way it does.”

  “I figured. Come on.”

  He led me back out front and groped in a desk in a corner of the small front office until he came out with a ring of keys. We went out to the elevator and spent a portion of the rest of the day going back up to the third floor. Then he let me into lawyer Wilstock’s office and I rummaged through some file cabinets until I found the folder with Buddy Bancetti’s name on it. Inside that I found the envelope with the Tamalpa postmark, and showed it to the building superintendent with the Fu Manchu mustache. He nodded and watched as I took out the single sheet of paper inside. It wasn’t signed. It was a very simple, typewritten message:

  “Stall until the 20th.”

  The mustache studied it over my shoulder. “You said he wasn’t trying as hard as he might,” he said. “Suppose that’s why?”

  “Looks like it.”

  I put the note back into the envelope and studied the postmark again. It was dated the previous Wednesday. I put the envelope inside the folder and put the folder back in the cabinet and we left. The printer rode with me down to the ground floor.

  “You recall now what those other things about the return-address-label business might have been?”

  “Oh, sure. When he was making the original pitch by postcard, he’d set the names and addresses of the potential customers on the same sort of gummed stock he’d print up the orders on. Again, he used the linotype for that. Each sheet would hold, I don’t know, maybe thirty or forty names. Then he’d cut up the sheet and use those names to address the postcards with the pitch on them, so the potential customer could see just exactly what a handsome little label it was, what with a couple of thin bars bordering the sides of it to make it a little more distinctive.”

  “Good idea,” he agreed. “Let them sample the goods. What else?”

  “Then he’d also run off a set of postcards for the customers who didn’t send in the money they owed after a reasonable amount of time. He’d make them kind of humorous, to appeal to their sense of decency and all. I mean, you can’t very well threaten to take away their car or break their legs or something for a bad debt maybe amounting to three or four bucks.”

  He grunted. “Did your friend have to send out many of these cards? To people who didn’t want to pay?”

  “Not a lot. But enough to justify having a supply of reminder cards on hand.”

  From the lobby he strolled with me out to the sid
ewalk. “Mind telling me something else?”

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m just a dumb country printer who got shot up some in ’Nam. You figure that note you saw upstairs is something important?”

  “Yup.”

  “Why? What’s it mean?”

  “Can you keep it quiet for a couple of days, if need be? Even from your friend in the sheriff’s department?”

  “Sure.”

  “It means that maybe this whole symphony is being orchestrated by somebody inside San Quentin prison.”

  FIFTEEN

  I drove out to the bar I’d visited the night before. This time I parked in front. I was even lucky enough to catch Sandra Kelsey there. She was in an office off the back end of the empty dance floor.

  “It’s my day to do books,” she told me, giving me the once-over. “What happened to you?”

  “Had an accident.”

  “Looks like you had a couple of them.”

  “Did, as a matter of fact.”

  “What can I do for you?” She leaned back from the desk and shoved a pair of dark-rimmed eyeglasses up atop her forehead.

  “I’m looking for Liz Reynolds. She’s not at home. You two seemed to be friends, so I thought you might know where she’d be on a Sunday afternoon.”

  “Hmmmm. She’s not around on Sunday a whole lot. Busy girl, that one.”

  “Her little sister told me she had a boyfriend.”

  “What?”

  “She told me that not two hours ago.”

  “A steady boyfriend?”

  “That’s right.”

  Sandra stared thoughtfully. “Must have just happened. I mean, she comes out here Saturday nights sometimes and dances with different fellows, but she never comes in with anyone.”

  “Her sister said she was seeing a married man sort of on the quiet.”

  She gave me a skeptical stare. “I think maybe her little sister is pulling the stranger’s leg.”

  “I don’t think so. But anyhow, I guess you don’t know anything about that.”

  “No, I sure don’t, mister. Why should you be interested in her social life, anyway? You smitten or something?”

  “More something, than the other. It’s just one of a lot of loose ends I’m trying to tie up. Know anywhere else I might look for her?”

  She had a doubtful expression on her face. I hadn’t handled her all that well. She was guarded now, and wasn’t sure whether she liked me or not. But my leg was starting to hurt again. Can’t have a smile for everyone when your leg hurts.

  Sandra took a county phone book out of a desk drawer and paged through it. “After you left last night, she spent some time over at a table with Jessica and her husband. That’s the pregnant woman who came in while you were still there. Maybe she said something to them about what her plans were for today.”

  She found the listing she wanted in the book and dialed. The office door was slightly ajar. A fly and its wingman came in and circled around and went out again.

  “Jessica? Sandy Kelsey. Hi, how are you today?”

  She listened a moment then laughed. “I know, honey. It was the same when I had Belinda. Say, honey, there’s a fellow here looking for Liz Reynolds. Any idea where she is today? Oh, really? Hold on.” Sandra held the mouthpiece away from her face. “Liz is out there right now. Want to talk to her?”

  I got to my feet. The wounded leg made me grimace. “No. Just ask that she stay put a little while. I’m on my way out, if you’ll give me directions.”

  Sandra passed along the message, then told me how to find the place. It was farther on out the road to the highway, but when I went back out to my car I first drove around until I found a phone booth. I called Findley and told him where Liz was. He said he’d meet me out there. Then I drove out to where the girl named Jessica lived. It was a big old clapboard, two-story home painted a dull slate color, trimmed in blue. It looked as if it might have been an old farmhouse. There were cleared fields stretching off in the distance out back, but a fence separated them from the house, as if they were somebody else’s property. A child’s old red-and-white wagon with a wheel missing was turned over in a corner of the scruffy front yard, and various other toys were scattered here and there. It looked well used, this place.

  I heard the voices of children around back. Another youngster was yelling from somewhere inside the house. The front door was open, but a wooden framed screen door was in place to keep out winged vagrants. I tried the doorbell, but it didn’t seem to work. I leaned against the wall alongside the screen door to take the pressure off the hurt leg. After a couple of moments I rapped on the wooden frame. I was greeted a short time later by the big, red-haired pregnant woman I’d seen the night before. She was wearing a loose fitting house dress.

  “Hi, I’m Jessica Carson,” she told me, thrusting out her hand. “You must be that Bragg fellow.”

  “I’m him,” I told her. She had a solid grip.

  “Brush off your jacket and come on in,” she told me.

  She’d noticed where I’d been leaning against the outside wall. When I brushed off the seersucker jacket, it coughed out dirt and dust.

  “We were just having some iced tea,” the woman said. “Care for any?”

  “That would be fine.” I followed her through an old-fashioned front parlor and dining room, both of them looking nearly as well-used as the yard out front. A lad of about eight with a mop of his mother’s red hair careened around a corner and pulled up to stare at me before his mother told him to go outside with the rest of the kids. He ran off.

  Out in the kitchen Liz Reynolds was sitting at an angle to a round wooden table painted white that had a couple of glasses of tea on it. We exchanged hellos and Jessica pulled out another chair for me to sit on then went to the refrigerator to get ice and a pitcher of tea.

  “Are you limping?” Liz asked. She was wearing a pair of yellow shorts that showed off her long legs to good advantage. She moved them some to make room for me. For a top she wore what resembled a man’s sleeveless undershirt. She didn’t wear a bra under it and her nipples were prominent through the thin material. She looked like quite a different girl from the mousy creature I’d met and danced with in the bar the night before. Maybe she was on her way to or back from seeing her boyfriend.

  “Yeah, I’m limping,” I told her. “Had a little accident.”

  “Lord God,” said Jessica from the sink. “Been in town just one day and the man’s already catching it.”

  “Catching what?” I asked.

  “What I call the Rural Ouch syndrome,” the woman said, putting a glass of tea in front of me and settling heavily in a chair. “Always seemed to me people—men and boys mostly—out in the sticks seem to have more accidents than city folks. Boys fall out of trees or tumble into ponds. Men lose half a hand in a hay binder or rip themselves open on barbed wire fences. Even trip and fall flat on their face just walking down the street, like they weren’t paying attention or something.”

  “People in cities have accidents too,” I told her, sipping the tea. I nodded my appreciation. “Tastes good.”

  She nodded back and sipped at her own. “What sort of accidents do people have in the city?”

  I shrugged. “People trying to avoid dogs drive their bicycles into trees. Joggers get injuries from running on the pavement all the time. They bang their shins into coffee tables and fall down in the shower.”

  Jessica snorted. “Not much worry about falling down in the shower around here,” she told me. “Everyone’s always concentrating too hard to get to the supper table.”

  “Also,” I added, “people in the city aren’t as neighborly. They’re not as apt to know what’s going on down the block.” It wasn’t a profound observation, but I wanted to keep things in neutral until Findley showed up.

  “What sort of accident did you have?” Liz asked.

  “I hurt my leg.”

  “Well, I know that from the crablike way you walked in here,” she tol
d me. “What happened?”

  “It’s one of those things a man doesn’t like to talk about.”

  She made a little face that reminded me of one her sister used to make. I turned to the red-haired one.

  “Really fine tea,” I told her.

  “The house specialty. What happened to your chin?”

  “That came from skidding it some on the ground out behind Kelsey’s last night.”

  Jessica hesitated in the act of lifting her own glass of tea to her mouth and exchanged glances with Liz. “What?”

  “Yeah, there were some people waiting for me when I left there. We scuffled around some.”

  “How many of them?” Liz asked.

  “I counted five.”

  “What did they look like?” Jessica asked, shifting her weight in the chair. “Did you recognize them?”

  “No. This sounds silly in the telling of it, but they were wearing ski masks, like they were a gang in Chinatown on their way to a massacre.”

  “Well, what happened?” Liz asked, leaning forward in a way that fetchingly revealed a generous portion of what no bra supported.

  “I found an old motorcycle chain. It went a long way to creating a standoff.”

  The girls knew something about this; they were exchanging glances again. But then, maybe it was all innocent. Everybody inside Kelsey’s would have heard there’d been some sort of fight out in the parking lot.

  “Did you hurt any of them?” Jessica asked.

  “I hope so. They were the ones who started things.”

  The redhead had a look on her face that went a little beyond what you might expect from somebody who’d been in a bar when she heard vague rumors there’d been a fight outside. Or maybe I was just imagining things. My leg was hurting. I brought out the aspirin and asked if I could have a glass of water. Jessica got up from the table to fetch it.

  “I thought you might stop by for brunch earlier,” Liz told me.

  “If I’d known you were going to be dressed like that maybe I would have,” I told her.

  It cracked up the girls. They clapped hands and hooted, and I wished Findley would get there so one of us could tell Liz her little sister had been shot dead and maybe use the wild mood swing to get her to blurt out the identity of her boyfriend. It was going to be a sticky course.