The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  Then there was the puzzling note up in the Buddy Bancetti file in lawyer Wilstock’s office that had come out of San Quentin. Another indication that Buddy was being put on ice just temporarily.

  Stall until the 20th. Stall why?

  A nurse started to raise the shirt-sleeve on the arm other than the one they’d given me some plasma through. I spotted a hypodermic needle on a tray beside her. “What’s that for?”

  “Just to calm you. Your blood pressure’s up.”

  “Fine, that’s right where I want it,” I told her, rolling the sleeve back down.

  “Hey, really, buddy,” said the young intern working on the leg. “You’ve got a messy thing going here. Time to get off it for a few hours. The world’s not going anywhere.”

  “I’m in a hurry, Doc. Just patch the leg, please.”

  “Look. You might have carried yourself in here, but you’re not just going to waltz on out again.”

  I lifted my leg out of his grasp and sat up on the side of the examining table. I rested one hand alongside his cheek. “Who’s going to stop me, Doc?”

  He flushed a little. “You’re going to regret this,” he told me. “I’ll want you to sign a form releasing us from responsibility if you keel over somewhere in an hour or so.”

  “Fine. Put away the needle and get the form. And some pain pills.”

  They went about their business grudgingly. I went back to trying to collect my thoughts, and a devious idea occurred to me. I wondered if the Cornell killing and frameup of Buddy Bancetti could have been engineered to accomplish exactly what it had, to prod the older Bancetti into trying to break out of San Quentin prison. I marveled at it. If somebody knew Beau Bancetti’s temperament and his deep concern for his young brother, who went around like a semiretarded individual, they just might think it would work. But why do that? What threat could Beau Bancetti be to anyone? He already was behind bars.

  It was a little crazy, but in its own way it seemed to work in with the other crazy aspects of this situation. I felt I was on the right track, even if I didn’t have all of it yet.

  The people finished their work and I sat up on the table, feeling a little spacey, like I had earlier in the day after the shooting. I signed the form and paid their bill by MasterCard. I did one other thing to mollify the young intern. I rented a pair of crutches from them. He said I could ship them back by Greyhound when I didn’t need them any longer. It was a good idea. I still put some weight on the injured leg, but the crutches took off a lot of the pressure and let me move around faster and more comfortably. I thanked them and went back out to the pay phone.

  There was one very important detail I’d forgotten in all this. I put a call through to the warden’s office to tell him Buddy Bancetti was being released and I was bringing him down from the mountains with me to show him to his brother, if that were needed. Warden Barry Thompson didn’t reply immediately when I got through to him.

  “That’s supposed to be good news, Warden. It’s what Bancetti wanted, right?”

  He sighed in a way that put me on guard.

  “That was yesterday, Bragg. Early yesterday.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We haven’t been in communication with Bancetti or the others for the past several hours.”

  “Why not? What happened?”

  He cleared his throat. “We decided not to wait any longer. We were afraid for the hostages. The pressure from Sacramento has been unrelenting.”

  “I haven’t been having a swell time myself. What happened?

  “We decided to have a squad of men move out from the hallway barricade early this morning, before dawn, in an attempt to catch them off guard. We didn’t think they’d still be that alert.”

  I started to say something, but bit my tongue.

  “We intended to disable them with tear gas. But the men were spotted before they could get a canister inside the door. Several shots were fired from inside where they’re holed up. They must have gotten additional ammunition along with the gun. One of our men was wounded. The inmates shut the door and they haven’t opened it since. They don’t respond to our efforts to communicate, either by telephone or verbally from the hallway.”

  “What about the two women and the guard?”

  “We don’t know. A while after the incident, men on duty in the hallway heard some sort of commotion in there. A woman screamed. We don’t know what happened. We are weighing the possibility of another assault on them. Tear gas through the windows outside—men in body armor to batter in the corridor door…”

  “Warden, please God, don’t try something like that again. You’ve got to understand. I did what I set out to do. What I didn’t think I had a prayer of doing when I first came up here. I got Bancetti’s brother out of jail. In the course of that, another person has been killed, a teenaged girl. I’ve been shot myself. You owe me a chance to get back there and show Bancetti I kept my part of the bargain.”

  He didn’t answer immediately. “Are you starting back now?”

  “Right away.”

  “I’ll try to hold off until you get here, Bragg, but I have a prison to run. If events dictate it, we’ll go in again. Sorry.”

  SEVENTEEN

  They were waiting for me in front of the Bancetti home, Buddy and Aggie and Harold and the dog, Mr. Wumps, having a fine reunion. Aggie was wearing a pair of Levi’s, and I had to send her back up to her place to change. They looked too much like prison denims. Wearing them, she’d never get through the outer gate at San Quentin. And I wanted her to accompany Buddy at least as far as the warden’s office. I had to get the boy at least to there in an attempt to prove to his brother that I’d kept my part of the agreement. If Beau and the others still weren’t taking phone calls by then I’d have to think of something else.

  Aggie returned wearing another pair of jeans in an off-white color. I told her and Buddy to tail me and said good-bye to Harold and the dog and started back for the Bay Area, my leg causing just enough discomfort to keep me alert on the highway. I drove a steady 60 miles an hour. The highway patrol wasn’t apt to bother us if we kept that close to the 55 mph limit imposed a few years earlier nationwide. I had a feeling young Bancetti couldn’t have gone much faster anyway. His car came off the assembly line a good many years ago and it threw a little smoke into the air from its exhaust pipe.

  My mind went back to wondering if somebody had deliberately created a set of circumstances to bring Beau Bancetti to the point where he would try to break out of San Quentin. In an effort to figure out who the somebody might be, I speculated on what the reason behind it could have been. And after a while I felt I had a possible answer. It wasn’t pleasant. If the behind-the-scenes puller of strings knew Bancetti well enough, he also would know Beau wouldn’t be the sort to try some ruse like getting through the gates hiding in a garbage truck or something of that sort. If he were caught doing that, he’d just get a few more years in prison added onto his sentence. Beau had an impatient temperament and the resources to get a handgun inside the walls, as difficult as that was these days. Somebody might know Beau would try to break out just as he had. And they would know he had a very large chance of being shot dead in the attempt. I came to the conclusion that somebody wanted Bancetti dead. It certainly fit in with all the other violence involved. The frameup of Buddy could have been a sophisticated plan to have his older brother executed. But again, why? How could Beau Bancetti, behind bars at San Quentin, pose such a threat to somebody? Or maybe he wasn’t a threat. Maybe he just had something that somebody else wanted. Maybe he had something they couldn’t take away from him even though he was in state prison. That line of thought led to an astonishing number of possibilities.

  I took out my notepad and turned to where I’d put down the address of Beau Bancetti’s wife. It wasn’t far off the route back to San Quentin, a little town north of Oakland and east of Richmond called San Pablo. We had to drive through Richmond to get to the bridge over to Marin County and San Quentin
. I figured it was close enough to take the additional time.

  I pulled into a parking lot beside a liquor store in Richmond at a little past five o’ clock. Aggie and young Bancetti pulled in alongside and I got out and went around to let them know about the change in plans. Aggie was the one doing the driving. I guess Buddy still was too edgy from the days at county jail to take the wheel. I leaned down to the open window and was greeted by a puff of fetid breath. The dog was in the backseat trying to poke his head out past Aggie to lick my face. I backed off.

  “I have to make a phone call, then I might have to go see somebody before we drive on over to the prison,” I told them. “What’s with the dog in back?”

  “He knew we were going somewhere. He just jumped in the car and wouldn’t get out,” Aggie told me.

  “We tried to make him stay, Mr. Bragg,” the boy added.

  “I think he was afraid Buddy was going to go off and abandon him again,” the girl said. “Who do you have to call?”

  “Beau’s wife. If she’s home, I want to ask her some questions.”

  I went to the phone booth and made the call. Mrs. Bancetti answered She was a little puzzled by my wanting to visit her, but she agreed to talk to me. She said she’d been out to the prison earlier in the day, but after unsuccessful attempts from the warden’s office to reach Beau by telephone, they’d sent her back home.

  “They thought maybe I could talk Beau into behaving more like a gentleman or something,” she told me with a dry, throaty chuckle. “They just don’t know that man when he’s doin’ his thing.”

  She gave me directions to where she lived. It was just a half-dozen blocks from where I was phoning, just across the Richmond-San Pablo line. I got back in the car and the youngsters followed behind me once again.

  It would be charitable to refer to where she lived as a lower-middle-class neighborhood. She lived in a faded, yellow stucco home on a flat lot with a small front yard of clumpy grass and dust. Except for its color, the place looked exactly like the houses on either side of it and those stretching on down the street for a couple of blocks or more. Aggie parked behind me and I told her and Buddy to wait for me. I left my crutches in the car, figuring after the drive the leg needed some exercise. There was a large, glistening Harley-Davidson motorcycle propped up by a kickstand in the carport driveway. I wondered if Mrs. Bancetti was using Beau’s machine while he was doing time. But it turned out the cycle was owned by another member of the Cherubs. He was sitting on a metal, tubular lounge chair in the shade of a small apple tree in the backyard somebody had bricked in to make a patio.

  “This is Luther,” Mrs. Bancetti told me after leading me through a house kept in so-so condition.

  Luther had long, dirty brown hair, a stringy beard, cold eyes and wore a leather jacket and boots. We barely nodded to each other across the patio.

  “I’d like to talk to Mrs. Bancetti for a moment,” I told him.

  “Be my guest.”

  “I mean privately.”

  “Why privately? We don’t know anything about you.”

  “I’m trying to help her husband, Beau.”

  “That’s what she said you told her on the phone.”

  I limped over to a nearby vacant chair and sat down. “Look, do you know Beau’s brother, Buddy?”

  He nodded. “The kid who’s in trouble.”

  “Not any longer. I got him out of it. That’s what Beau wanted me to do. Buddy’s sitting in a car out front right now. Why don’t you go say hello.”

  He sat up at that. “I figure you’re not making that up, because if he isn’t out there, you know I’ll be right back.”

  “I know.”

  Mrs. Bancetti, who told me her name was Dallas, seemed about a foot taller than her husband, with straw-colored hair dark at the roots, a skinny frame and hollows under her eyes. She could have been an attractive woman if she’d had enough money to have some work done on her teeth, put herself on a proper diet and got more sleep at night, but you could say that about a lot of women whose men were in prison. She was wearing white shorts and a thin cotton blouse. It was a warm evening in the East Bay.

  Dallas Bancetti sat across from me in the chair Luther had vacated. I told her briefly how my time in Claireborn had gone, leaving out the part about Angel Reynolds’s being blown away. That sort of information wouldn’t brighten anybody’s day. The important thing was I’d gotten Buddy out of jail and was on my way with him over to San Quentin.

  “But from the things I learned in Claireborn,” I told her, “I’ve grown a little curious about why Buddy was framed the way he was, and I think somehow it was done in an attempt to manipulate your husband.”

  Her face had the expression of a sidewalk. “Manipulate him how?”

  “I think they might have wanted him to do just what he did—make an escape attempt.”

  “That’s crazy,” she said in that throaty voice that was an octave lower than what seemed right for her.

  “I agree, but I still think that’s what happened. And maybe I’m even taking a chance telling you about it, because that means I have to trust you to level with me about relations between you and your husband and between you and any other man who might drop by.”

  “I could take offense at that.”

  “I suppose you could, but in the interest of time I’m trying to get everything out in the open.”

  “I don’t think I want to tell you anything about my personal life. Like Luther said, we don’t know you. Don’t know anything about you.”

  “Look, you can trust me. Your husband did, and I got his kid brother out of a terrible jam because of it.”

  “My husband trusted the prison officials too, that they’d leave him and the others alone until you got back.”

  “I know, and what they did this morning was very dumb. But I’m not a prison official.” I got to my feet with a little grimace. “I don’t want you or Luther, either one, to get the wrong idea, but I want to show you something.”

  I unbuckled my trousers and dropped them far enough for her to see the bandage. “I was shot this morning. That was in the course of getting the information that helped get Buddy out of the bucket.” I pulled up the trousers and rezipped and buckled them. “And this rusty-looking stuff on my pants is blood. My blood. The wound opened up again when I was running down the man who did the killing that Buddy was accused of doing. Now you’ve got to trust me, Dallas. If what I think is right, Beau could still be in danger, even after he releases the hostages and gives himself up. That’s in the event he does all those things. So if you and Beau still have a relationship and want to pick up your lives together someday, you both need to trust me.”

  She stared at me for several moments, her face still a blank. “I love Beau very much, Mr. Bragg,” she said finally. “We still have a relationship, as you call it. He’s my man; I’m his girl. Is that what you want to know?”

  “It’s a start. Is there any other man who’s been pestering you since Beau’s been in prison? Who would maybe like to have you himself, if Beau were out of the picture?”

  She lifted one shoulder and let it fall. “Who knows what other men think?”

  “That’s not good enough, Dallas.”

  She leaned forward in her chair in an almost male gesture, with her elbows on her knees and her hands clasped in front of her.

  “Mr. Bragg, since Beau has been in jail, and that’s a little over three years now, I’ve been…” She leaned back, staring past me and concentrating. “There’s a word I heard used once for this. It’s the sort of word I feel like I should use with you. Constant. That’s it. Since Beau’s been in jail, I’ve been a constant woman. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

  “Never mind what I want to hear, just tell me the truth.”

  “Okay, I haven’t been fucking my brains out with other fellows or anything like that.”

  My face must have reddened some. She gave me a prim little smile.

  “Just so maybe you’ll und
erstand how seriously I’m taking all this,” I told her, “what I’m trying to figure out is who might have a reason to want Beau dead.”

  It straightened her up some. “Are you nuts?”

  “Nope. That’s what I think this is all about. I think somebody wanted the state to do them a favor and kill your husband while he was trying to break out of prison in order to go help his younger brother. Now that’s why I’m asking these questions that you seem to be taking pretty lightly.”

  “I’m not taking them lightly now. Who would want old Beau dead? He’s a little wild at times, but…”

  She sat back and thought some, then shook her head. “I have no idea.”

  “Okay, Dallas. And you think I can pretty well forget about it being somebody so crazy in love with you they’d want Beau dead and buried.”

  “I do. Oh, I mean there’s a lot of talk that goes on. What the hell, I’m a woman. The Cherubs are men, all of them. But it’s just, you know, jiving around, most of it.”

  “Most of it?”

  She made a little sigh and glanced at me impatiently, wanting to get along to other topics. “I’m going to give you a ‘let’s pretend’ story. I’m going to describe something that could have taken place, but I’m not going to say it did, because you can talk to me about trusting you until dawn comes up at ten at night, but I wouldn’t breathe a word of something like this to anybody who just might pass it along to Beau. But in any event, if at some time a man I liked a lot as a friend began hinting around the way you suggested, telling me he thought I was the greatest thing since they discovered cocaine, and wondering if there’d ever be a chance of getting anywhere if he chased after me like somebody crazed—are you following me?”