The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  She looked at me sharply. “I didn’t,” she snapped, “but I didn’t want the son of a bitch to die on me, either.”

  FOUR

  I asked Jo if there was anything I could get her. She shook her head.

  “They don’t let us have anything from outside. You could be a dear and go by home and feed the cat. It’s a Siamese blue point. Her name is Sam.”

  She gave me the address and told me where she kept a spare key for when she or her late husband locked themselves out. She said it was on a nail driven into the inner side of a piece of timber supporting their hot tub in the back patio.

  Then her mind took an abrupt, kinky turn. She was fingering the material of the jail jumpsuit. “It’s too bad they won’t let a person wear their own clothes in here,” she said. “I’d love for you to be able to bring me back some underthings.”

  Then she set about describing the underthings she wished I could bring her. She said she bought them at a boutique in Carmel that called itself the Dream Shop. She said it carried specialty wear, which she described in some detail, about how slick it felt caressing her body—I think that was the term she used—and how it certainly beat the sort of thing a girl could pick up at J. C. Penney.

  Then she wanted to tell me about some of the erotic fantasies she would have from time to time wearing these particular garments, but that was when I told her it was high time for me to get back to the fairgrounds and collect Allison.

  But driving back to the fairgrounds, I decided to swing by the Sommers home first and feed the dumb cat. Besides, I wanted a look at the scene of the crime.

  What I found at the address Jo had given me was a rambling, single-story structure with brick exterior walls painted white and windows trimmed in gunmetal blue. Other people had gotten there ahead of me. It turned out I knew one of them. Two years earlier I’d been in the Monterey area working on a runaway case. A girl of about fourteen had become bored with life up in the Napa Valley and was last seen on the jumpseat of her seventeen-year-old boyfriend’s motorcycle headed south. Her family hired me to get her back. I started out by contributing to the delinquency of any number of Napa Valley minors by buying a lot of beer for a weekend party, and in that way got on speaking terms with young people who knew the fourteen-year-old girl and her boyfriend. And that in turn led me down first to Big Sur, then back up to the Carmel area. The case had a mixed ending. The boyfriend ended up being stabbed to death at a beach near the artichoke fields along the Carmel River, and the girl was kidnapped by the people who had done the knifing. She did a lot of growing up in the next two days, until a Monterey County homicide investigator named Wally Hamlin and I tracked them down, and I got the girl and Wally got the killer of her late boyfriend. By the time it was all sorted out, the Napa Valley looked a little better to the girl, and Wally Hamlin and I were pretty good friends. And since Monterey County doesn’t have all that many homicide investigators, it wasn’t too much of a coincidence that Wally was in the Sommers home when I showed up and explained my interest in the latest killing and asked if he’d seen the cat named Sam.

  He gave me a look and said no. “Whatever happened to that young girl you found down here last time?” he asked me.

  “She went home and behaved herself for a couple of years, then got all edgy again and ran off and married some sailor she met in Vallejo,” I told him.

  Wally made a face and opened the door wider so I could go inside. “Makes you wonder why you’re in the business sometimes, doesn’t it?”

  I agreed with him and stepped into a house that was occupied by people who obviously liked to live well. The interior gamely carried out the Carmel Spanish mission motif, although the Highlands were beyond the town limits of Carmel. The walls and ceilings were swirled in white plaster. The front room had large picture windows looking west, out over the shores of the Pacific, along with a couple of original Picassos that didn’t make any sense at all to me. The red tile floor was covered with a fancy Chinese rug that had a royal blue background and small inset renditions of streams and glades and hoop bridges and sampans. The fireplace was stoked with logs all ready to be touched off, but it was so clean in there it didn’t look as if anything had been fired up for about ten years. A couple of satsuma vases stood at attention at either end of the fireplace mantel, and a black leather sectional sofa and a couple of matching easy chairs were spotted about the room.

  “Cheery,” I remarked.

  “Makes me feel like I should take off my shoes,” said Wally. “The murder room’s this way.”

  I followed him down a long hallway, our shoes whispering across more thick carpeting, this a rich burgundy color. Some more original paintings, not Picassos, but just as nutty, looked down on our journey.

  The doctor’s study had a lot of bookcases; an old, oak rolltop desk; a sofa and chair, TV set and stereo system. On the walls were the sort of valiant battle-action paintings depicting land, sea and sky you’d expect to find gracing the walls of the Pentagon. This room too, had a small fireplace, and it looked well used. Overall, I estimated the size of the room to be about the same as the entire ground floor of the house I’d grown up in. We stood just inside the doorway. Wally watched me looking around.

  “All this for one man to relax in?” I asked.

  “Looks a little like the Fort Ord Officer’s Club, doesn’t it?”

  I wandered over to the smaller fireplace mantel. No satsuma vases here, but there were several small plastic models, mostly military. There was a Boeing jet cargo plane, an intricate rendition of a water-cooled .50-caliber machine gun with its barrel pointed groundward, a model of a fighting ship with the numeral 35 on its prow, an army ambulance with Red Cross symbols on its sides and top, some sort of jet attack plane looking scorched and damaged and a miniature stockade that had human figures with hollow-eyed faces looking out through a mesh wire fence.

  “What’s this all about?” I asked.

  Wally shrugged. “I didn’t know the man, myself.”

  I crossed to the easy chair in front of the TV set. “This is where the body was.”

  “When we got here, the body was on the floor,” Wally said.

  “His wife told me he was in the chair when she found him. I have to take her version of things, or there’s no reason for me to be here. Somebody held a pillow over his face?”

  “Right.”

  “Probably from behind,” I said, “if I go with her version. It would take somebody with muscle to do it without leaving signs of a struggle.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Wally. “We won’t have all the lab work done until sometime next week, but there were indications he’d been drinking like he knew it was his last night. And he’d taken a tranquilizer of some sort as well. If she’d just left him alone a while longer, he’d probably have snuffed himself.”

  “You think she did it, Wally?”

  I turned to look at him. He was a short, beefy man with a red-veined nose and a scar on his jaw where a bullet had gone through it during the nation’s Vietnamese pacification efforts.

  “I don’t know, Pete. The D.A. likes her for it.”

  “What sort of man is the D.A.?”

  “Thackery? He’s a hotdog. Ambitious. Wants to be governor someday. Maybe president. He’s into building a solid conviction rate. Prosecutes some cases himself, which can be dicey for a politically ambitious man, but he has a staff that does good prep work.”

  “Why does he want Mrs. Sommers for this?”

  “Two things, mainly. Our people got here literally minutes after the man died. If she didn’t do it, she’d almost have to have been standing here watching while somebody else did it.”

  “She told me she found him that way, head lolling on his chest, when she got home from the jazz festival. I saw her there myself. We had a drink in the Hunt Club.”

  “Did she tell you about the fight?”

  “What fight?”

  “The one she had with her husband. It was all down on a little tape reco
rder sitting on his desk there.”

  “No, she didn’t tell me about that. You figure the fight was last night?”

  “She talks about going to the jazz festival on it. Yeah, we figure it was last night.”

  “What did they fight about?”

  “Money. Her being tired of his crabbiness. His suspicions of her screwing around with other men. Usual stuff. Toward the end she talks about leaving him. For good. He tells her in turn to help herself: Says—if I remember it right—he’s been thinking about throwing her trashy ass out onto the street for a long time anyhow.”

  “Why do people who feel that way about each other stay together, do you suppose?”

  “Beats hell out of me.”

  “Could I listen to the tape?”

  “I doubt it. The D.A.’s got it. He’ll say no. Her lawyer will be able to, if they go to trial.”

  “She going to be charged?”

  “Don’t know. That’s for Thackery to say. He’d like to. That’s why I’m here again today, supposedly finding something more to nail her with.”

  “Have you?”

  “Nope. But then, I’m a little more open-minded than Thackery. I’d like to find the killer, period. Mrs. Sommers, or the man next door or whoever. I’ve spent a couple of hours talking to neighbors. Nobody saw or heard anything unusual last night, before the ambulance arrived. Then I went around looking at windows and things for signs of a pry bar. Didn’t find any. When we got here last night the patio door was closed and locked. Which would seem to mean whoever killed the man had a key or was let into the house by the victim himself. Mrs. Sommers had a key, of course.”

  “And there’s a spare hanging on a nail on the hot tub platform out back in case they locked themselves out. That’s how I was going to get in, if the coroner didn’t have the place sealed.”

  Wally looked at me sharply. “Let’s go see about that key.”

  We went out to the patio. I went to the side of the platform where Jo said they kept it. I squatted and searched the inside of the beams. Wally handed me a penlight, and a moment later I saw it.

  “There.” I pointed.

  Wally got down beside me and nodded. He reached up and took hold of it by the notched shank and lifted it off the nail. He took it back inside, calling for the lab technician who’d accompanied him.

  I climbed the short stairway to the hot tub deck. The water looked as clean as one would expect it to look, being a part of this particular house. Some sort of aerator or filter made a track of small bubbles rising from the bottom of the tub. The hum of an electric motor came from a nearby shed.

  The patio was screened off from the rest of the backyard by latticework walls covered thickly with brilliant red bougainvillea blossoms. An arched gate in one corner opened into the fenced-in rear of the property. I went back down the stairs and through the gate to take a swing around the perimeter of the yard. One side of the house was bordered by a narrow strip of grass. Up toward the front was a warped wooden gate that squawked when I opened and closed it. The house was built up off the ground high enough so you wouldn’t be able to see into the windows without using a stepladder. I retraced my steps to the rear of the house and went around to the other side. The property sloped down a sharp little bank on that side, to the tall wooden fence separating the Sommers place from the home next door. Ice plant covered the slope, making your footing a little treacherous. I walked on up alongside the garage to the driveway in front. The property dropped in neat terraces to the street. There was more ice plant and miniature shrubs and moss among little beds of white stone chips. Black wrought-iron railings guarded the concrete stairway to the street below. Off in the distance, gentle white combers came home to the beach. I looked around at neighboring houses. It seemed to be the sort of place where everybody stayed inside minding their own business.

  Wally and the technician came out the front door.

  “Find anything?” I asked.

  “Good thumbprint,” Wally told me. “But it’s probably one of theirs. Whoever locked themselves out last. You staying?”

  “If it’s all right. I have to feed the cat.”

  Wally nodded. “We’re through, so far as I can see. Thackery isn’t going to be happy with what we have to tell him. I think the lady’s going to be coming home when her forty-eight hours is up.”

  We said good-bye, and they got into a car parked down on the street and drove off. Just before I turned and went back inside, I saw a small movement at the edge of a drape in a window across the street.

  Inside I called for the cat while taking a quick peek at the other rooms in the place. The temptation was great to take more than a peek, to try to get a feel for the people who lived there. But the clock was running, and Allison, by now, would be wondering about me. So I paused only briefly in what looked like a sewing room, but with no evidence of a sewing machine, a couple of bathrooms and the two bedrooms. They all were spacious, but had about the same warmth as the hallway. The only room in the place that reflected a human personality was the study where the doctor’s body had been found.

  Out in a corner of the kitchen was a newspaper on the floor with a red plastic water dish on it, nearly empty. I filled it with fresh water, called Sam’s name a few more times and poked around in cupboards until I found the stash of canned cat food. Another plastic dish was in a drain alongside the sink. I figured if anything would bring the cat it would be the sound of the electric can opener, and I was right. I had the lid off and was starting to dump the contents into the dish when a jungle yowl came from the doorway.

  I had forgotten what a racket a Siamese can make, at mealtime, during mating season and whenever else it wanted to get your attention. In the confines of the kitchen it was deafening. The animal was rubbing its sleek, dark fur against one side of the doorway. As I finished emptying the can, she trotted across the floor and gave my ankle a massage. Those who bring food, even complete strangers, are welcome in the house of the cat. I put the dish down alongside the water bowl, and Sam ate. I didn’t know if the animal had an escape hatch to outdoors or if there was a box of kitty litter around, and I didn’t take the time to find out. I left the house and zipped back over the hill, then took the Aguajito Road exit that led to the county fairgrounds.

  By the time I found a parking place alongside the road at the south gates and got into the grounds themselves, people already were coming down the long grassy avenue from the arena. When I reached the community of food stalls and trailers near the Hunt Club, everybody else started spilling out, and I knew I’d missed the last of the afternoon concert. I didn’t even bother going into the arena itself but headed for the bar. The guard at the door recognized me, and I went on inside and found Allison standing at the bar like one of the boys, carrying on a laughing conversation with some of the older ducks I’d seen with Billy Carpenter the night before when I’d stopped in with Jo Sommers. I made my way over to her. As I wedged into the bar she gave me a playful poke to the shoulder without missing a beat in the story she was telling. I ordered a double gin and tonic, and a moment later, after getting a big laugh with the punchline of the story she’d been telling, she turned to me.

  “Double?”

  “I figured from the looks of things I had some catching up to do. How was the concert?”

  “Mr. Bo Diddley showed up, as advertised. What more needs saying?”

  “Who’s Bo Diddley?”

  Her eyes rose to the ceiling then came back to me. “Anyway, it was quite a performance. Hands clapping in the seats, hips shaking in the aisles. I loved it, and I’m glad you brought me down here. How did it go with you?”

  I started to tell her, but then noticed that while the tall gent she’d been talking to had turned slightly away, he wasn’t talking to anybody else just then, and I suspected he was listening to us.

  “I’ll tell you about it later. Sorry I’m so late.”

  “Didn’t matter. Mr. Wakefield here saw me sitting all alone and came down during one
of the intermissions to invite me up to his box. Have you met Gus?”

  With the mention of his name, the man she’d been talking to turned with a look of kindness. “I hope you don’t mind, Mr. Bragg. I saw the two of you in here together after last night’s concert, some time after Billy Carpenter first introduced us. I said to myself then, my lord, but what a circle of handsome women that man travels in. Then, when I saw Miss Allison alone down there in one of those hard folding chairs, I just had to invite her up to my seats in the stands for some Chardonnay and Brie.”

  The Miss Allison is what made something fall into place in my mind. The man had a whisper of the South in his speech.

  “I don’t mind,” I told him. “It was thoughtful of you to invite her. How long do you have to be a season ticket holder before you get seats in the grandstands?”

  “Oh, about twenty years, I imagine. Miss Allison told me you’ve been visiting with Mrs. Sommers, poor woman. How is she?”

  “Holding up about as well as you can expect of a person sitting inside a jail cell.”

  “It was a terrible shock to us all. Dr. Sommers was well known in the community. Did Mrs. Sommers tell you what happened?”

  “I didn’t go into it all that much with her.”

  “I see. Well, maybe we’ll have a chance to talk a little more about it tonight.”

  Allison had a small smile on her face. “Gus has invited us to a party he’s having at his place tonight. Anytime after the first set at tonight’s concert.”

  “Yes, it’s for my wife, really. We ordinarily wouldn’t do such a thing during the jazz festival, but it’s our fortieth wedding anniversary. Billy Carpenter and some of the other fellows you met last night will be there as well. And even if you want to sit through all of tonight’s concert, I suspect there’ll be some whiskey left at the Wakefield house. Personally, I feel these performances run overly long on Saturday nights.”

  “It’s kind of you to invite us,” I told him. “I’m sure we’ll be able to make it.” I shifted my gaze. “Does Miss Allison here know how to find your place?”