The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “Maybe so. But my attorney told me the police have different priorities than does somebody who’s suspected of murdering her husband. I want somebody I know is on my side and working full time at it.”

  “What I mean, though, is that you shouldn’t hold back anything from the police just because you hire me.”

  “I’ve already told the police everything I’ve told you, and that’s all there is to tell.”

  She’d only had a couple of drags off the cigarette, but now she put it out in the ashtray, as if making a little period to her statement. She swirled the Scotch, made a little toss of her head to flounce back her hair, and raised the glass to her lips.

  I glanced at Allison. The heels of her sandals were making a silent little drumbeat on the Chinese rug, and she gave me a hopeful look. She was ready to get out of there.

  “Jo, just two questions, then we have to get moving along.”

  “All right.”

  “Had you noticed anything at all different in your husband’s activities lately? Unusual phone calls, things in the mail, the hours he came and went…”

  Jo made a little wave of her hand. “No. My husband’s life was bone-achingly predictable. He spent most of his time right here, when he wasn’t playing golf or attending some social function. That county detective, Wally somebody, asked me the same thing.”

  “Okay, then my last question. What was the temper of things between your husband and yourself?”

  That brought her up short. “Hey, wait a minute. If I’m the one paying you, you’re on my side, right?”

  “Of course. But a change in one portion of a person’s life can sometimes mask a change in another part. All I’m doing is asking my first question from a different direction.”

  “Oh. Well, no. Things between us were about the same as they’ve been for a good long while.”

  I let it sit there a moment to see if she’d take it any further. She didn’t. Allison was beginning to twitch.

  “Okay,” I said, getting to my feet. I had a head start, but Allison was on her feet with a contented smile before I was standing straight.

  “As long as you’re out of the bucket,” I told Jo, “there isn’t the same minute-to-minute urgency to all this that there was before, so tomorrow I’d like to combine a little pleasure with business. I won’t charge you for the day, but I’ll be thinking about things, and maybe do some initial poking around. But I’d also like to do a little sightseeing with Allison before having to put her on a bus or plane and send her home alone. We’ve already lost some time together because of your husband’s death.”

  “Kindly put,” said Jo. She rose and walked us to the front door. “Sure, have some fun tomorrow. I’m sorry I’ve taken away from your weekend.”

  “Hey, no problem,” said Allison. “I hope things work out for you. I’m sure Petey will give it the old college try.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Jo told her, opening the door and extending a hand toward Allison. “It was nice meeting you. Maybe we can get together sometime and do girl things together when this is all over with.”

  “Sure, I’d like that,” said Allison, taking Jo’s hand in both of her own. “Good luck.”

  She scampered down the stairs and crossed to my car.

  “And you,” Jo said. “I suppose I’ll be seeing you around the old farm, sometime.”

  “Of course. Look, it might be a good idea for you to lie low for a day or so, until I can get some kind of direction on this thing.”

  “Lie low?”

  “Stay around home here as much as you can, more as a watchdog than anything else. Make a note of any strangers you might see, anything else of a suspicious nature.”

  “You think I might be in some sort of danger?”

  “Not likely. But if anything does happen to frighten or disturb you, call Wally Hamlin and tell him about it. If anything special comes up you think I should know about, leave word at my motel.” I took out a card I’d picked up in the motel office and wrote my room number on the back.

  “Can I have friends in, if I start getting cabin fever?”

  “Women friends, sure. The other sort might be a little indiscreet.”

  She took the card and just stood there staring at me for a moment. “All right, I’ll do what you say, Daddy.” And with that she gave me a wink and a little kiss through the air, then closed the door.

  Down in the car, Allison was sitting in the passenger seat with her eyes closed. She had the radio on, playing some sort of twangy country song at high volume. I turned it down and started the engine.

  “Petey?” I growled, pulling away from the curb. “You’ve never called me Petey before in your life.”

  Allison gave me the little ladylike snort she resorts to from time to time. “Women sometimes behave in front of other women,” she told me, “in a fashion in which they would not behave if not in front of other women. Hey, listen, Bragg, I was in enemy territory in there. I could feel it in my bones.”

  “Jealousy stuff?”

  “Oh, sure, a little of that. You have to expect it among two reasonably attractive women and a reasonably attractive male. But this isn’t all me-and-you, and her-and-you, and her-and-me stuff. There’s something apart from all that. Something that just doesn’t ring true.”

  “I’d be a pretty bum detective if I hadn’t noticed it myself.”

  SEVEN

  The bit of sightseeing Allison and I had planned to do that afternoon was out of the question by now. We went back to the motel to clean up and have some of the gin in the refrigerator and pretend we were just a carefree couple down for a fun weekend, but memories of Jo Sommers and her dead husband kept intruding. We would be carrying on a reasonably normal conversation, then one of us would trail off and stare into the distance.

  If a person is serious about taking in the jazz festival, there isn’t much time for elegant dining. We decided to have a couple of cheeseburgers at a snug and friendly little bar and restaurant in Carmel named after writer Jack London, but before eating, we searched out the Duck’s Quack, to see if Alex, the personable bartender from Gus Wakefield’s party, was on duty. He was on duty, but we didn’t stick around to have a drink. The place was crowded. The bar was packed, and out on the floor, we would have had to share a table with other people. Neither of us felt like doing that right then. One other thing we noted, which seemed a bit odd, was that when he wasn’t mixing drinks for the bar customers or a pair of cocktail waitresses, Alex was in what looked like a serious discussion with Nikki, Jo Sommers’s girlfriend who ran the pottery stall at the fairgrounds. The reason it seemed odd was that the shopkeepers outside the arena don’t shut down their stalls between concerts. There are two other areas on the grounds where small jazz groups provide free concerts throughout the day and into the evening, and there are always enough people around to provide a brisk business at the food stands and merchandise stalls.

  When we got back out to the fairgrounds, we saw that Nikki had already packed up her goods and abandoned the stall. She was the only shopkeeper there to have done so.

  Two hours later we were in our chairs on the arena floor, applauding the set just concluded by that year’s assembly of Monterey Jazz Festival All-Stars that included Shelly Manne on drums and Clark Terry on trumpet. My companion turned to me with a sober expression and said, “It just came to me. I think that woman Jo is in the business of stealing people’s souls.”

  It was about as whacky a comment I’d ever heard from Allison, but in a curious way I thought I knew what she meant. My thoughts about Jo Sommers had never been that far-ranging when she used to come into the No Name. They never got much beyond the stage of trying to imagine what joy it would be to get into bed with her. But it occurred to me now that there was a dark side to her nature which Allison had just commented on. It could be the dangerous side of a person’s character that would always attract some well-meaning dummy like myself, who thought he only lusted after her body. I was thinking all this whe
n I realized Allison and I had been staring at each other for some moments.

  “I think you might be right, and maybe I should kick the job,” I told her.

  “You can’t do that. You’d regret it for the rest of your life. But I don’t think I can listen to any more music tonight. Let’s go get pie-eyed somewhere.”

  And that’s how we managed to get our minds off of Jo Sommers for the rest of the evening.

  Monday morning, after staring out the motel window for another twenty minutes, Allison got her sketch. I had just finished shaving and had stepped out of the bathroom. She was poised with her pad on her knees; she cocked her head, and made about three dozen lines with some kind of pencil she uses. It took less than a minute, but she finally turned to me with a big grin.

  “Got it!”

  I looked over her shoulder, and she did indeed have it, though my eye isn’t good enough to tell what she’d put in and what she’d left out, but the drawing captured not only the appearance but the fresh air, sea tang and cypress-smell mood of the view from that upper-room window at the white inn with green shutters in Carmel.

  “Great hands,” I told her.

  “Huh? Oh, yeah. Thanks.”

  It put her in a fine mood for the rest of the day. We took a walk down along the beach road, then wended up through a pleasant residential area in the shallow hills above. I purposely led her around to a two-story, Spanish mission–style home with white stucco walls and red tile roof not far from the motel we were staying at. By Carmel standards there was nothing outstanding about the place except for a plaque set in a large block of white stone to one side of the narrow driveway. I pointed it out and Allison bent over to read the inscription:

  Stilwell House

  Home of Joseph Warren Stilwell

  “Vinegar Joe”

  General, U.S. Army 1883–1946

  A soldier without peer who never deviated in his absolute

  dedication to the United States of America

  She looked up at me.

  “Ever heard of him?” I asked.

  “Vaguely. Who was he?”

  “Pretty much what the plaque says. He was a very good soldier who was put into an impossible situation that called more for a politician. He was American adviser to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek in China during World War Two. Stilwell thought all the money and supplies this country pumped into China in those days should have been used to equip and train a first-rate army that then would go out and kill Japanese troops who were occupying a large portion of that country.”

  “Sounds logical.”

  “Unfortunately, the generalissimo had other ideas. It was a frustrating war for Stilwell. Barbara Tuchman wrote a book about him. I have it at home. There’s a photo of him right here in the side yard with a bunch of reporters. It was his swan song press conference. This is the home he retired to. Not much more than a year later he was dead.”

  Allison moved off a little ways, staring at the stucco walls. “You have a feeling for the place.”

  “I have great feeling for the memory of the general. Whenever I’m down in this area, I like to come by and look at the home that was his. It’s a little bit like going to church was when I was a kid.”

  “I’ll sketch it for you sometime, if you’d like.”

  “I’d like.”

  We had breakfast up in town and decided to drive down the coast to Big Sur country. We were on our way back to the car when I thought about the office. I hadn’t told anybody I wouldn’t be showing up that morning, so I ducked into a patio ringed with shops and used a pay phone there to call Ceejay, the office secretary and traffic director.

  “You must be having a nice time,” Ceejay said when I told her I wasn’t sure when I’d be back.

  “We’re having a grand time,” I told her. “We’re going to spend another day sightseeing. After that, I’ll be working. Somebody I know from the past is in some trouble. I told her I’d try to help her out.”

  “Her name isn’t Nikki, is it?”

  “Nikki? No. What made you think so?”

  “Somebody by that name phoned the office before anybody was in this morning. The answering service took the call. She left a number. It’s in the four-oh-eight area. That’s where you’re at, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, and maybe I know the girl. I met one named Nikki who’s a friend of the girl who’s in trouble. Did she leave a message?”

  “She wants you to call her. Said it was urgent. The girl at the answering service said she sounded distraught. Nikki told her that she didn’t want to sound corny, but that you should be told it really could be a matter of life or death. End of message.”

  “Better give me the number. I’ll see if I can reach her.”

  When I tried dialing the number that had been left with the answering service, nobody picked up the phone. I called the Sommers residence. Jo answered on the second ring. I asked if she’d spoken to Nikki that morning.

  “No, I haven’t spoken to anybody. Why?”

  “She might have been trying to reach me. It doesn’t matter. How have things been around there?”

  “Not nice. I had a heavy case of insomnia, followed by some of the worst nightmares I’ve ever had. I think I’ll spend most of the day in the hot tub. You could come by and join me.”

  She was doing it again, but it was harmless enough over the telephone. At least I thought it was.

  “With Allison, of course,” I told her.

  “Of course. Provided she’s willing to take off her clothes and soak naked with the rest of us.”

  “You don’t wear a swimsuit?”

  “Of course not, Peter. That’s not the California way.”

  I finally got off the phone. Allison, slightly nettled, was looking into nearby shop windows.

  “What took so long?” she asked.

  “I checked in with the office. They’d had a call from somebody down here named Nikki. It might be the girl from the pottery stall. She sounded as if she might be in a jam of some kind. I tried calling her but didn’t get an answer, so I checked with Jo Sommers, but she hadn’t talked with Nikki today.”

  Allison gave sort of a grunt, and after that she didn’t have much to say as we made our way down south to Big Sur. It might or might not have been a moody reaction to my call to Jo Sommers.

  The drive south of Carmel is pretty breathtaking, one of the most spectacular stretches along the entire California coastline. The shoulder rubbing between a couple of tectonic plates along the San Andreas Fault that made most of the state a potential earthquake disaster area also created the upwelling of earth that formed the coastal range of hills. The highway that traversed them along this part of the coast ran from several hundred feet above the Pacific to nearly sea level, rising and plunging down long canyons inland, soaring across gorges on deeply vaulted bridges, crossing great slabs of grassland that sheer off to the sea.

  It is almost too spectacular. The first time I drove down that road I nearly plunged off it in a couple of places. I pay more attention to my driving now, but if you’re in the passenger seat, it’s some treat. Cattle ranches are scattered here and there along the way, but once you get to the Big Sur country, about twenty-five miles south of Carmel, most of the countryside is state or federal wilderness protection areas.

  After a couple of side excursions, I drove to Nepenthe, a restaurant and bar in a building that used to be the private residence of Orsen Welles and Rita Hayworth. At least that’s what they tell you. It’s built into the side of a gorge about a quarter of a mile back from the shoreline and several hundred feet above sea level. But that’s still not very high compared with the surroundings. Inland, across coast Highway 1, brown, hummocky hills, scarred with trenches formed by heavy winter rains and speckled with grass and scrub brush, climb several hundred feet higher. Nepenthe has a couple of patios on different levels, both of them looking out over the sea and hills and sky, with the watchful turkey buzzards circling overhead.

  And like most fa
cilities open to the public in remote stretches of California, Nepenthe has a gift shop, in a separate building down on the parking lot level. It sells everything from jewelry and brass to sheepskin clothing and books. Allison, like most women I’ve known, felt compelled to devote a half hour or more going through the shop. I stuck it out for about ten minutes then climbed the stairs and took a steep upward path to the main building that houses the restaurant and bar. I was sipping a Bloody Mary on the main patio when Allison showed up, and we went inside for lunch. And after we ate, I finally reached Nikki on the telephone.

  “Thank God, Mr. Bragg. Thank you for calling.”

  The girl at the answering service had been right. Nikki was upset.

  “I’ve got to see you,” she told me. “There’s something terribly wrong. I think somebody wants to kill me.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “I—it would sound silly if I tried to tell you over the phone. Jo told me you’re a private detective. I don’t have a whole lot of money, but I thought…Well, maybe you could just advise me. I’ve never been in anything like this in my life.”

  “It sounds like something you maybe should go to the police about.”

  “No, I can’t do that.”

  “Does this have anything to do with Jo? Or her husband’s murder, do you think?”

  “It might. I can drive up to Carmel or Monterey or wherever you are. Right now, if it would be convenient.”

  “I’m not at Carmel. I’m at Nepenthe.”

  “Even better. I live down here. Do you know where Fernwood is?”

  “You mean that cluster of buildings just before you get to Pfeiffer State Park?”

  “That’s it. I live back in a canyon near there. Could we meet at the restaurant there?”

  “Sure, but I’m with a friend, and I wanted to show her another place or two before we headed back north. How about three o’clock?”

  “That’ll be fine.”

  “Okay, see you then.”

  “Mr. Bragg?”

  “Yes?”