The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “When you talked to the victim on the phone this morning, you say you asked her if whatever sort of trouble she was in could have been connected with the death of Mrs. Sommers’s husband. And she told you, It might be?”

  “She said either, ‘It might be,’ or ‘It might.’ ”

  “Why the hell couldn’t she be more definite about a thing like that?”

  “She didn’t sound all that sure about it. She sounded upset. She’d already been shaken by the Sommers killing. If she thought her own life was threatened, maybe it was just natural for her to link the two. I don’t know. It’s lame, I admit.”

  Betta snorted. He put a lot more into it than Allison does. He looked across to where men from the coroner’s office were putting Nikki Scarborough’s sacked-up body into their van.

  “That ‘radioman,’ ” Betta said. “That mean anything to you?”

  “No. Maybe it means somebody with a local radio station. A disc jockey or engineer or time salesman or somebody.”

  Betta shook his head and put a stick of gum into his mouth. Chewing it gave him a chance to show off his outthrust chin.

  Allison had wandered off into a field across the road. She’d told the deputies, and then Betta, what she’d seen, then gone off by herself to try to calm down.

  “Lieutenant?”

  We turned. One of the deputies had found a key to the shed padlock in Nikki’s purse. He’d spent the past few minutes searching it.

  “We got money back here,” he called.

  I followed Betta over to the shed. “She had a stall at the jazz festival,” I told him. “Probably picked up a few bucks there. I even bought a coffee mug from her myself.”

  The deputy had found a stack of money with a rubber band around it. “I riffled the edges,” he told Betta. “Twenties and fifties, mostly. I’d guess there’s between two and three thousand dollars here all told.”

  Betta turned back to me, his jaw working on the gum. “How much business was she doing at the jazz festival?”

  “Not that much.”

  The deputy slipped the money into a plastic bag. I followed Betta back around to the front of the cabin.

  “Okay, Bragg,” he said. “Where do you see yourself fitting into all this?”

  “Not much of anywhere. She certainly wasn’t a client. I returned a phone call from her, then when she wasn’t at the Fernwood cafe, I drove on out with the lady across the way to see if I could suggest a way out of whatever was troubling her. I didn’t get here soon enough, and I don’t know what her problem was.”

  “What about Mrs. Sommers?”

  “She’s a client. She wants me to assist you people in any way I can to find whoever killed her husband. It’s a pragmatic bit of work. She’s afraid she might not get the proceeds of an insurance policy if we can’t show somebody else killed him.”

  “Assist us people? How?”

  “Oh, come on, Betta. I’ve been in the business for a lot of years. I’ll be working at it full time. Some people would talk to me who wouldn’t talk to you people. I’ll share what I get with you. This morning, I suggested to Nikki Scarborough that she go to the police if she felt she was in danger.”

  “You didn’t tell me that. What did she answer?”

  “She said no, she couldn’t do that. She didn’t say why.”

  “Which probably means she was involved in something she shouldn’t have been,” he speculated.

  “Like what?”

  “Like dealing in cocaine. Putting little bags of it in some of that pottery she was selling to musicians and high rollers at the festival.”

  “That’s not bad,” I admitted.

  “Yeah. Maybe we’ll turn up something more around here. Okay, get your lady and take off. But keep in touch.”

  “Sure.”

  The ride back up the coast was a quiet one. Allison was in a down mood, and just looked out at the passing scenery. I had too many things to think about right then to try cheering her up. And it wasn’t just the killings of Dr. Haywood Sommers and Nikki Scarborough occupying my mind. I was thinking about Allison as well. I let her know what I was thinking as we approached the busy intersection of Highway 1 and Rio Road, at the south entrance to Carmel.

  “I think things are going to start getting a little sticky,” I told her.

  She shot me a look. “I thought they began doing that Friday night.”

  “I mean, I’m going to be more involved. No more time for sightseeing. I’d like to put you on a plane to San Francisco. From there you can get a flight to Arcata. Our office has an account with Butler Aviation. I’ll call there and fix it for you.”

  “No.”

  She was looking away from me, out the window, staring across at the expanding shopping center east of the highway. When the light changed, I turned left and drove up past Carmel Mission and headed west toward the motel.

  “All right, then. You can take the car, if you want. I’ll rent another. You can go home at your own pace. Stop here and there along the coast and sketch things.”

  She was staring straight ahead out the windshield now. She turned her head for a quick glance, then faced forward again. The movement left her long, blonde hair shimmering along the side of her face.

  “No, Pete. Not this time.”

  “What do you mean, not this time?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it off and on ever since you saw that newspaper Saturday, the one that told you your old girlfriend was in trouble.”

  “She was never a girlfriend.”

  “Whatever. You’ve been thinking about her and her troubles ever since. Not every moment, but enough. So I’ve been thinking about us.”

  My stomach muscles tightened. I was afraid of what she might be trying to tell me. We had reached the small parking area on the street up behind the motel. I pulled in and turned off the motor but didn’t make a move to get out.

  Allison scrunched back into the corner of the seat and stared at me. “I’ve got to find out one way or another if I can really be this close to a man who’s involved in the things that you seem to be.”

  “Most of my work is pretty routine.”

  “Two killings in four days?”

  “Granted, that’s not very routine.”

  “But it happens with you. And what I have to decide once and for all is whether I can take the fallout.”

  “I don’t quite get that.”

  She stared at her hands a moment, then looked up at me. “Most of the time, at home, out in my studio, I have to think about you in kind of an abstract way. You’re that fellow down in San Francisco I get together with once in a while for some of the finest moments of my life.”

  That touched me more than I liked. Her eyes were beginning to glisten. I reached out without thinking and grasped one of her hands. She put her other hand down on top of my own.

  “Up there in Barracks Cove, it has to be abstract for two reasons,” she told me. “One, if I think of you—us—the times we spend together, I become rather too horny to be able to concentrate on my work. And two, if I let my imagination ride along with the sort of people and things you might be encountering in the way you make your living, I’m apt to just go all to pieces inside of myself, like I was watching a slow crawl of every nightmare I’ve ever had since I was a little kid.”

  She closed her eyes a minute. When she opened them again she blinked rapidly. “Well, mister, there’s not much I can do about the first, but there damn sure is one thing I’m going to try to do about the second. I’m going to stick it out with you one time—this time—while you’re doing your thing. If I can live with it in person, maybe it’ll help me live with it when we’re a couple of hundred miles apart.”

  I took a deep breath. “I can’t do my job and be worrying about what might happen to you, Allison. I can’t have you with me every minute of the time.”

  “Oh goddamn it, Pete. I don’t care about that. I don’t even care if you take that woman to bed. But I want to be here, not up i
n Barracks Cove. In a vicarious sort of way I want to go through it with you every step of the way. I want to feel your vibrations, hear your thoughts, get your viewpoint on things when you come in at night, or at dawn, or whenever you plop down to recharge yourself. I won’t be a nuisance. It’s just something I have to do for once, instead of running back to Barracks Cove like a little girl to sit and fret and wait for Daddy to come home from the war.”

  I broke up the hand-holding and scratched my head. “I don’t know if that is such a good idea.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know, otherwise I’d tell you. I don’t know that it’s a bad idea, but I don’t know that it’s a good idea, either.”

  “I won’t be any trouble.”

  “I’m sure you won’t. In fact, it’d be kind of nice to have somebody to bounce ideas off once in a while. And, lord knows, I do like the idea of having a pretty woman waiting around the motel for when I show up.”

  Allison snorted. “I’m not going to be waiting around the motel all the time, and besides, I’m not the only pretty woman waiting around to see you.”

  “If you mean Jo Sommers, you can forget about her. She’s just another client.”

  “Sure. I could forget about her the way I could forget about a missing hand. If it’s not her, what is it? Why don’t you want me around?”

  “I don’t know. A feeling I have.”

  She just looked at me a minute. “I’m my own person, Bragg,” she told me. “I’m staying. If you want me to move out so you can bring her back here with you, then I’ll find someplace else. But I’m hanging on the edge of this one. It’s not just Jo. It’s for all the times in the future there might be. When you’re working and I’m up in my studio trying to maintain my sanity. That’s what this is all about.”

  I’m usually fairly close-mouthed. I don’t ordinarily shoot off words without thinking. But this was one time when feelings skipped ahead of brain. I heard myself saying, in measured tones, “I love you.”

  We sat for a moment without speaking, then she pulled back one fist and gave me a stinging punch to the arm. “Then let’s go do something about the horny bit.”

  When I left the motel later, I suggested we go rent a car for Allison to use. She said she wouldn’t need one. She’d walk up to town for dinner, then come back and read a book she’d brought along. It was a paperback gothic romance, about four inches thick. She said it was enough to keep her mind off things for a couple of days while I was out in the world.

  I drove back down to the shopping center along Rio Road and telephoned Jo Sommers to tell her I was coming by to see her. I could have phoned her from the motel room, but I didn’t see any sense in having Allison’s imagination any more active than it already was.

  Jo answered the door wearing a pair of taut-fitting black satin slacks and a white blouse of very thin silk. She wasn’t wearing a bra beneath it, and I was reminded of some of the things that small-breasted women can get away with that larger-breasted women can’t.

  “You look like you’re going to a party,” I told her.

  “Woody liked me to wear hostess outfits for the cocktail hour,” she told me, closing the door and looping an arm around my own to lead me down the hallway. “It’s a habit I’ll probably keep up for a while. How was your day?”

  “A little bleak. I’m here to tell you about it.”

  “All right. Let’s go into Woody’s study. I suppose I should feel like sealing it off, after what happened there. But I’ve decided I have to learn to live with it.”

  “Sure.”

  She had rearranged the furniture some. The chair her husband had been sitting in when Jo found his body was shoved over into a corner. She’d brought in some white wicker furniture from another part of the house and hung some bright travel posters on the walls in place of the battle scenes. There was a fire going in the fireplace that looked like it had been touched off about the time I’d hung up the phone at the shopping center on Rio Road.

  “Would you like a drink?”

  “Sure. A gin and tonic, if you have it.”

  “I have it.” She went to another corner and slid back a door to reveal another wet bar similar to the one in the living room. Maybe they had one of those in every room of the house. She poured a couple of stiff drinks, brought mine to me and held up hers so we could clink glasses.

  “Cheers,” she said.

  “Yeah, the same,” I told her, my eyes drawn to the spot on the rug where Wally Hamlin told me her husband’s body had lain about seventy-two hours earlier. It’s a pleasure to witness the resiliency of the human spirit. The drink tasted mostly of gin. I put it aside to let some of the ice melt.

  “Notice anything around the neighborhood today?” I asked her.

  “No. It was quite typical. Like a wilderness area.”

  “Get any phone calls?”

  She tilted her head. “Is this a part of your investigation?”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She took a sip of her drink and crossed to sit in an easy chair she’d brought into the room from somewhere. “I had several telephone calls. From various friends and acquaintances expressing their condolences. Nothing out of the ordinary.”

  “Did you hear from Nikki Scarborough, by any chance?”

  “I don’t think so. No, I’m sure not. She’s probably back down the coast. She has a little place at Big Sur. Why?”

  “Some questions have come up about her background. Do you know if she uses drugs?”

  Jo’s shoulder moved slightly beneath the thin blouse. “She smokes a little grass from time to time. We all do.”

  “Anything heavier?”

  “Not that I know of. I doubt it.”

  “Is there a possibility she could have been involved in dealing drugs? Cocaine, maybe?”

  “Absolutely not.” She took another sip of her drink and then held the glass off to one side. “She had a brother down in Florida somewhere who was involved in all that. He was a user himself. And a pilot. He snorted his brains away. Thought the entire world was out to get him. Somebody was still foolish enough to ask him to fly in a load of the stuff. One night, hauling a million or so dollars’ worth of the white stuff, he flew into downtown Miami. Literally. In a long, shallow glide, smack into the seventh floor of a condominium.”

  She took another sip of the drink and settled herself more comfortably in the deep chair she was in. “Nikki is definitely anti-cocaine, Peter. She has even been so gross as to chide others who were using it at a party we both attended one time at Pebble Beach. It was during the Crosby golf thing.”

  “What about money matters? How well off is she?”

  Again, the shoulder movement. “She manages to scrape by, like the rest of us. What is all this to do with Nikki? You needn’t play detective with me, Peter. You’re working for me, remember?”

  “I remember. Some people from the county sheriff’s office found a couple of thousand dollars stashed in her little workshop this afternoon. They were going over the place after I sent Allison to call to tell them I’d found her body on the slope behind her cabin. She’d been shot through the head.”

  The glass of gin and tonic slipped out of her hand onto the carpet, but she paid it no mind at all. I got up and went over to the bar and wet a towel. Jo just gaped off across the room. I picked up the ice and put it back in the glass and was mopping the rug when she turned to look down at me.

  “Jesus Christ, you made that up.”

  “You wouldn’t say that if you’d found her the way I did.”

  She swung back into the chair and stared straight ahead, sucking the knuckle of one hand. Sam the cat came to the study doorway to see what all the fuss was about.

  “When was that?” Jo asked sharply enough to make the cat blink and back out of the room.

  “This afternoon. Sometime after three.”

  “Why had you gone there?”

  “She left a message with my answering service in San Francisco this morning.
Said she was in trouble and wanted to talk to me. I got in touch with her and agreed to meet her at a little restaurant down near where she lives. She was there waiting, but then got up and left suddenly, before I arrived. I got directions to her place and drove on out. From the looks of things, she’d been shot just before I got there. Allison saw the man who probably did it going over a nearby hill at about the same time I found the body. After I sent Allison off for help, I climbed the nearby hill. I think the man who killed her got into a car that was waiting for him up the road from Nikki’s place. That means at least two people were involved in the killing.”

  I finished doing the best I could with the rug, then went back to the bar, made her a fresh drink in a clean glass and carried it over to her. She took it without a word and drank about half of it. I sat down and took a sip of my own.

  “When I talked to Nikki on the phone I asked her if her problem had anything to do with your husband’s murder. She wasn’t sure but indicated there might have been a connection. After they found the money, the sheriff’s people thought she might have been dealing in drugs. So what do you think about all that?”

  Jo looked a little out of it. It was several moments before she came back from wherever she’d been and stared at me blankly. Then she had another drink of her drink, which pretty well finished it, and got up and went across to fix herself another. She came back and sat down, hunching forward and staring at me with all the sincerity she could muster. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “Jo, you’re not leveling with me. Her killing was a shock, but you know she was mixed up in something. What was it?”

  “Peter, I swear, I don’t know. But if she said it had something to do with my husband…Well, she knew Woody, of course. And they seemed affectionate toward one another, despite the difference in their ages.”

  I hoisted my eyebrows a ways.

  “Oh, I don’t mean they were lovers, though they could have been, so far as I know. They were fond of each other. Nikki did quite a handsome sculpture of Woody’s head one time. It’s over there, atop the bookcase.”

  I got up and strolled over to where she pointed. I’d seen a couple of framed photos of the late doctor when I’d gone through the house on Saturday, so I had something with which to compare the rendition of a man’s head in rust-colored modeling clay atop the bookcase. It could have been Sommers or somebody living up the street. But then, I don’t know how hard something like that might be. I went back to my chair and had another sip of the drink.