The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  When I was through talking, I turned to Jo Sommers, and right on cue, she apologized for her part of it.

  “I never, ever, could imagine that it would come to this,” she said quietly, staring at her feet. “And I hope, Gus, you’ll tell anybody who was touched by all this how ashamed I am. I understand from what Peter has told me that the tapes have all been destroyed. I hope they are. If I ever find any more of them, I’ll destroy them myself. I mean that.”

  “I’m sure you do,” said Wakefield, getting to his feet and pacing for a moment. “I just can’t figure out what would possess Whitey…”

  He sat back down and clasped his hands between his knees. “He should have gone to Woody Sommers and had it out with him. Not the way you said he did, of course. This whole thing might have been prevented. That’s the great flaw you know, in many of us who’ve spent our lives in the service of our country. Some of us have never learned to come to grips with the passions and drives of other human beings, off the battlefield. West Point? The Naval Academy? They’re engineering schools. We’re pump fixers and mechanics and mathematicians. We’re not social scientists. Sometimes we’re just out of our element.”

  “Sometimes we all are,” I suggested.

  “Amen,” said Allison, getting to her feet. “You know, Bragg, you’ve just hit it on the head. I’ve never felt so far out of my element in my life. Not that it hasn’t been a thrill a minute, but would you mind taking me home, please?”

  So I did that, in stages. First to the motel in Monterey, then the next day to my apartment in Sausalito, and the day after that, up the coast to her own home in Barracks Cove.

  I kept in touch with the Monterey authorities. Dancer, it turned out, didn’t make it. He was conscious at some point and made a statement to investigators, admitting the killing of Nikki Scarborough and Alex Kilduff, at Whiteman’s order. He died the following day. His buddy, whose name I never did learn, spent some time in the hospital, then a few days in Monterey County jail, but he was eventually released. Allison and I didn’t feel it was worth our while to try tagging him with kidnapping charges.

  The crime lab had been able to find some hairs they identified as coming from Woody Sommers on a jacket Whiteman wore the night Sommers was killed. The former destroyer skipper and his attorney were trying to plea-bargain their way through the legal thicket, but chances were he’d spend some time in prison.

  And I spent the whole next week with Allison, reading while she was working in her studio, taking walks on the beach with her, eating at restaurants or barbecuing things in her backyard. It was a way of getting our blood pressure back to normal.

  Then one day when I phoned the office, they told me I’d had a call from a Captain McDonnough with the San Francisco Police Department. My shoulders tensed when I heard that. McDonnough was the original hardcase, the only man I knew who had the capacity to make me quake in my boots. He was head of the police intelligence unit. And if he wanted to see me, I’d have to drive down and go on up to his office, right next door to that of the chief of police himself, and see what the captain wanted of me.

  I told Allison all this later that evening, sitting on the floor in front of a fire in her small fireplace, sipping brandy. She accepted it with a nod of her head, then turned to me with a little frown.

  “Gee, I almost forgot,” she told me, making a fist and giving me a little punch on the shoulder.

  “What’s that?”

  “Thanks for a helluva jazz festival.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  JACK LYNCH modeled many aspects of Peter Bragg after himself. He graduated with a BA in journalism from the University of Washington and reported for several Seattle-area newspapers, and later for others in Iowa and Kansas. He ended up in San Francisco, where he briefly worked for a brokerage house and as a bartender in Sausalito, before joining the reporting staff of the San Francisco Chronicle. He left the newspaper after many years to write the eight Bragg novels, earning one Edgar and two Shamus nominations and a loyal following of future crime writers. He died in 2008 at age seventy-eight.

  YESTERDAY IS DEAD

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1985, 2014 Jack Lynch

  All rights reserved.

  Previously published as Seattle

  ISBN: 1941298370

  ISBN-13: 9781941298374

  Published by Brash Books, LLC

  12120 State Line, #253

  Leawood, Kansas 66209

  www.brash-books.com

  BOOKS BY JACK LYNCH

  The Dead Never Forget

  Pieces of Death

  The Missing and the Dead

  Wake Up and Die

  Speak for the Dead

  Truth or Die

  Die for Me

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ONE

  Benny Bartlett called me long distance that Saturday and said he needed help. He said he was in all kinds of trouble, but he didn’t want to tell me about it over the phone. The tone of his voice said all that I needed to know. He was scared. I asked him for the number he was calling from and told him I’d get back to him.

  Benny was special. He was the funny little sort of man who could restore my faith in people whenever I got fed up with the tribe of whackos, con men and bad guys I’d met over the years, first as a newspaper reporter and now as a private investigator. Benny had been my pal since those awful adolescent years, when life at times could make a guy want to scream in the night. About his only shortcoming, so far as I could figure, was that he loved Seattle and wouldn’t think of living anywhere else.

  We’d both been born and raised, gone to school, and gotten married in that town. But I hadn’t really grown up, I realized years later, until I’d moved away from there. I decided I hadn’t really known what sort of town it was until I’d been to a few other places and had something to compare it with. Much the same might be said of my ex-wife.

  I phoned a travel agent and was booked onto a flight out of San Francisco International the next afternoon. Then I phoned Benny back and told him when I’d be arriving. He asked if I wanted him to pick me up at the airport, but I told him I’d rather rent a car of my own. It turned out he was under some kind of deadline pressure so he’d be working that Sunday at his office in one of the old buildings down near the waterfront. He gave me the address. I told him to hang in there. He made a gusty sigh and said he’d been doing that for several days now.

  I left my Sausalito apartment and drove on over the Golden Gate Bridge and into San Francisco, to the offices on Market Street I share with a couple of attorneys. I didn’t know how long Benny’s problems might keep me out of town, and I had a little paperwork to clean up. It took me longer to do than it normally would because Benny’s call kept my mind drifting to thoughts of the old hometown.

  I felt really ambivalent about Seattle these days. It’s the home of the University of Washington, which has a top-flight medical school, a fine drama department, routinely awesome e
ight-oar rowing crews, and football teams erratic enough to make a bookie weep. It’s also home of the Boeing Airplane Company, which had given the world among other things the B-17 Flying Fortress and the 707 jetliner. And it’s a pretty city if you can ignore the months of drear and drizzle. It has an hourglass shape, a deep water port, and mile-high ranges of mountains to both east and west. Its citizens radiate an open, outdoorsy demeanor, and the place had gotten a lot of favorable national press in recent years. But I felt I knew a little different sort of a city underneath all that.

  Seattle had been a frontier town, make no mistake about it. Early settlers had killed off a number of the local Salish Indians and stolen their land. They’d sloughed off the hilltops to make them easier to build on and they’d run off the Chinese, who’d laid track over the mountains for their railroads. And the early locals had coined a term that’s identified today with flophouses and squalor—Skid Road. The original Skid Road had been a broad, muddy track used by ox teams to drag the great logs of Douglas fir and western cedar down from surrounding hills to the steam-operated sawmill that Henry Yesler had built where the Duwamish River empties into Elliott Bay. South of Skid Road, in the early days, was where you’d find the saloons and dance halls and theaters and whorehouses.

  And then, as the place grew and the railroad came and more women settled there and churches were built, the town from time to time would experience a cramp of high morality and shut down all those bawdy houses south of Skid Road. At least for a while. And Seattle today, it seemed to me, still had this awkward mix of puritanism, rawness, hooray outdoorness and small-town venality I’d also witnessed unthinkingly during my own formative years. The damn town just couldn’t make up its mind about things, was the way I saw it.

  I left a note for Ceejay, our secretary, receptionist and all-around troubleshooter, to let her know I’d be gone for a few days. Then I went home and packed a bag and thought about things, and what I finally decided was to include a couple of handguns along with the shirts and shorts.

  The plane touched down on the slick runway of Seattle-Tacoma International Airport the next day at a little after 4:00 p.m. About the time we’d flown into cloud cover over Eugene, Oregon, the captain had come on the speaker and told us it was fifty-eight degrees and drizzling in Seattle. The captain had been wrong. It wasn’t drizzling, it was out-and-out raining. I picked up a small rental car and drove north. Approaching downtown Seattle, I had another sharp sense of wrongness. I didn’t recognize the skyline any longer. They’d thrown up a bunch more high-rise buildings. The times I’d been to New York the tall buildings had seemed in natural place there, on that long, flat island of Manhattan. But Seattle was hilly and wasp-waisted, and those huge blocks of marble and stone and glass looked all out of whack. When I’d been growing up, the tallest building in town had been the forty-two-story Smith Tower, a venerable old thing of gray stone with a pointed crown. These days I couldn’t even find it amid the towers and spires. I passed a billboard that urged people to “Cast Your Bread on Potlatch Bay.” I didn’t know what that meant. What I felt like doing was casting a stick of dynamite or two at some of those high-rises.

  Benny’s office turned out to be in a great old warehouse of a building down below the Pike Place Market. It had been a veteran structure before Benny and I had been born, even, but it still stood solid and dependable right next to the Burlington Northern railroad tracks. The building was one of those red-brick treasures that today attracted artists and craftsmen and other odd sorts who needed a lot of space for modest rent. It was red brick because that’s what they used to rebuild the town after the terrible fire of 1889 started when a pot of glue boiled over on a gasoline stove in a basement paint store and cabinet shop on Front Street. Before the day was over, flames had devoured the heart of downtown Seattle—twenty-five city blocks of it. So they rebuilt with bricks. Bricks don’t burn. They do, however, crumble when a sharp earthquake rattles through town, and I’d been in more and stronger and scarier earthquakes while growing up in Seattle than I had in all the years I’d lived and worked in San Francisco.

  From the sound of things inside the building, Benny wasn’t the only one working that Sunday. There was laughter from the floor above and a couple of radios were playing. A lobby directory told me Benny’s office was up at the north end of the ground floor. The hallway was dim, and its wooden floor was worn and warped. Just outside the door to Benny’s office I heard the clickety-clack of a typewriter. Benny was a freelance writer, and he’d managed for the past twenty years to support himself and his wife and a couple of kids by clickety-clacking the hell out of that old manual typewriter. I rapped on the speckled glass pane in the door and went inside.

  Benny kept on typing for a moment, his thin shoulders hunched over the machine, a cigarette in his mouth, thick-lensed eyeglasses giving him his view of the world. I noticed the view through the window over his desk wasn’t of a particularly attractive part of the world. Crumbled foundations in the lot across the street indicated there had been a building standing there once. Now it was a weedy lot that was home to rusty tin cans, old wine bottles, and probably some other things I wouldn’t want to get close enough to identify.

  Benny slapped the carriage return bar and swiveled around in his chair.

  “Thank God, safe at last,” he cried, coming out of the chair to grab my hand. “Though, frankly, I don’t know if I’m a victim of my own imagination or a case of the crazies or what. I almost phoned you back this morning to tell you to forget it. I thought I’d try to adopt the old wait-and-see attitude. But then I thought, Well, if I waited and saw until I was dead and buried, then what would Dolly and Timothy and Al have to say about that, huh? ‘Boy, Pop, you really blew it this time,’ they’d say, standing over my lonely rain-soaked grave. ‘Why didn’t you let your old pal Peter Bragg in on things soon enough to save your ass, instead of us now having to go fatherless to the workhouse for the rest of our lives?’ ”

  “Al? What happened to Fred?”

  “His given name is Alfred. We called him Fred until he started speaking in complete sentences in much the way I just mimicked. He’s too much of a smartass for a Fred. Al it is.”

  “Maybe I’ve been away for too long.”

  “Five years, pal.”

  “Actually, I did pass through town a year or so ago, but I was working and didn’t have time to look up anybody.”

  “We’re not anybody, Pete, we’re family. You’re missing a sensational show not being around while the kids are growing up. Timmy’s thirteen, plays piano and drums, is noticing girls for the first time in his life and is beginning to get a squeak to his voice.”

  “That makes Fred, or Al rather, eleven?”

  “That’s right. He doesn’t do much yet, though, except lip-off.”

  “How’s Dolly?”

  “Just great. A little more fleshy than you’ll remember her. She’ll swoon when I bring you in and tell her to set another place for dinner.”

  “Hey, if she’s not expecting me, I’ll just…”

  “Don’t be silly. She shines in such moments of crisis. And I didn’t know until the last moment if I was really going to ask you to do this. I haven’t gotten around to telling her about it yet. Your being here, I mean.”

  “You were a little vague on the phone about what the problem is. What’s going on?”

  “Ah Christ,” he sighed, motioning me to a chair and sinking back behind the typewriter. “The thing is, there’s this ugly-sounding guy who phoned me and told me I’d better leave town or I was going to be killed.”

  He blinked rapidly a time or two and began to straighten things on his desk. I leaned back and waited for him to gather his thoughts. It wasn’t the sort of trouble a man like Benny was supposed to encounter. He wasn’t an investigative reporter, he was just an article writer who once in a while would score with a well-paying piece in Playboy or Esquire. What put the bread and butter on the dinner table year in and year out were the dozens of stori
es he wrote for various trade journals and specialty publications most of us have never heard of. He sometimes would mail me copies of articles he was especially proud of. The last one he’d sent was about how to rid your lawn of gophers. He wrote about Puget Sound fisheries and new timber products, office management techniques and disc sanders. He had written about a new steel bearing developed at the University of Washington school of mechanical engineering and about the effect of tidal flow on clam beds. He was not a man to write his way into trouble.

  “You’re sure it’s not somebody’s idea of a practical joke?” I asked him.

  “No way, Billie Mae. They’ve already tried it, I’m convinced. Tried it even before I got the phone call. Only the cops don’t see it that way. I don’t know how it is with you, but I don’t have much rapport with cops. Never. Other people can go to them with a problem and they’re courteous and attentive and capably efficient. With me it’s like they were watching seven years of bad luck coming through the door. They turn sullen and bitchy and rude. I complained to the uniformed officers so much they finally gave me the name of a detective I should go talk to. Hamilton, his name was. I said, ‘Detective Hamilton, somebody just tried to kill me.’ Hamilton yawned and told me I was imagining things. But finally he agreed to look at the car along with somebody from the police garage, but they said there was no way of telling.”

  “The car?”

  “Yeah, the car. Old Bronco Billy, my trusty Olds. I had some errands to run around town. I found a parking place uphill on Madison Street. You remember Madison Street, Pete? I mean I know you think you have hills in San Francisco, but have you ever tried climbing up Madison Street with a hangover? Anyway, once done with the errands, I’m planning to come back here. I climb into Bronco Billy, crank over the motor, release the handbrake and turn the wheels away from the curb, and wheeeeeeee, discover to my horror as I began to speed down Madison Street that the brakes have failed. I mean, talk about sweaty palms time. Kids were screaming and women were fainting along the sidewalks. I nearly dropped the gear box trying to shift down, and finally killed the motor altogether. By the time I tried to stop it with the hand brake, I was going too fast for that to work. Went two and a half blocks, swerving back and forth, scaring all the other traffic to a standstill.