The Complete Bragg Thriller Box Set

by Jack Lynch

  “Those were a couple of pretty kind things you said about me back there,” I told her. “About the newspapering and all.”

  She took a deep breath and let it out again, not replying right away, then she turned sideways in the seat toward me. “I could have said a whole lot more. I’ve been married to two other men since you, Peter. I see things—you—in a far different light these days than I did in San Francisco.”

  “Don’t make too much of that,” I told her. “I’m different from the man you knew in San Francisco. There are parts to me now that you probably would dislike even more than whatever you disliked back then.”

  Her hand touched my arm. “I never disliked you. I just grew bored with my life. I’ve always been like that. I’m bored with my life right now. I’m making quite a lot of money and I tell myself, Well, there is that, at least. But there’s no spark to my life these days. No fire.”

  She gave my arm a little squeeze before taking her hand away. “Would you give me a call sometime tomorrow? Whenever you’re not hard at work trying to save Benny’s skinny bottom?”

  “Sure. Give me something with your number on it. Maybe we could even have dinner together or something.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” she told me, groping in her handbag.

  I reached back and turned on the dome light so she could see better. She took out a notepad, wrote on it, tore out a page and reached across to tuck it into my shirt pocket. Then she squirmed back around to turn off the dome light. She always had done her share of the dozens of little daily chores that needed doing.

  She gave me directions to a recently built, two-story condominium complex a couple of blocks down from Phinney Avenue. I parked in front of the building and left the engine running. I put my hand on the door catch, planning to see her to the building entrance, but she opened the door on her own side.

  “Don’t get out, Peter, I can manage.” But she hesitated still. Neither one of us wanted to end it just then.

  “You’re funny some ways,” I told her.

  “Like how?”

  “You’re the only woman I know these days who would refer to my trying to save Benny’s skinny bottom. Anybody else would call it his ass. You still don’t ever speak in vulgarities.”

  “That’s not quite true, Peter,” she told me, dropping her eyes.

  “Oh? You let slip a cuss word now and then, do you?”

  “Not that, exactly. But I do, as you put it, speak in vulgarities on occasion. When I’m in bed. With a friend.”

  She looked back up at me then, without a trace of excuse or embarrassment. I whistled lightly.

  “Well, that’s something,” I told her. “You never used to.”

  “I know.” She reached out, repeating the gesture she’d made when we first met back in Benny’s dining room. She touched me along one cheekbone and let her fingers tail down to alongside my jaw. “You’re not the only one who’s changed some.”

  And then she was out of the car and tripping quickly up the front walk. She let herself in with a key and disappeared from view without a backward glance. I reached into my pocket and brought out the slip of paper she’d put there. Lorna had written down both her work and home telephone numbers, along with something else. I took a breath and wondered if I really knew what I was letting myself in for. Below the numbers, she’d drawn a single X and signed her initial, L. The X was a throwback to our earlier life. It signatured a kiss. She used a rising scale of them, to show her degree of fondness and passion. A single X didn’t promise a guy the whole world, but it did suggest things between us this time around had gotten off to a rousing start.

  FOUR

  It wasn’t raining the next morning, just threatening to. The west gate parking lot at Woodland Park was a long paved area between Phinney Avenue and the perimeter fence of the park and zoo itself. It hadn’t been a parking lot when I lived around there. But then the park hadn’t had a fence or charged an admission fee back then, either. What now was the parking lot had been just a tree-lined field of grass where neighborhood kids would gather to play touch football, keeping one eye out for the park cop, who would come by from time to time to chase us off and urge us to use the playing fields up at the north end of the park. But I guess we were too lazy a gang of kids to go all that way to play touch football. We were all from the southern end of the park, near Phinney and North 50th Street. We didn’t want to make the walk up to the other end. Besides that, the grass was a classier playing surface than the dirt and hammered-down turf of the fields up north. None of that mattered now. Now it was just a parking lot. I met Benny there at a little after ten o’clock.

  “As near as I can remember, I was parked where that green VW is,” Benny told me. His shoulders were hunched, and he glanced regularly behind him toward the buildings across the street. “It was either there or in the slot next to it. I remember that bent area in the fence.”

  “How about moving your car up to the empty space where it might have been that day?” I asked him.

  He looked at me with a little frown, but then went down to where he’d parked the loaner car and drove it up next to the VW. I asked him to position it as near as he could remember to the way it had been on the day of the shooting. He got back out of the car while I studied the sharp crease near the front of the car roof. It was about midway between the middle of the roof and the driver’s side. I walked around to in front of the hood and studied the angle of the crease. I could see how the cops figured the trajectory was from the roof of a building across the street that Benny had said was some sort of retirement home.

  “Show me where you were when the shots were fired,” I told him.

  Benny opened the driver’s-side door and started to get into the car. He made a false start or two, then slid in behind the wheel. “No, damn it,” he said, getting back out again. “I can’t do it. I was just in the act of getting behind the wheel. I can’t stop-action like that. I was a moving target. It’s probably what saved my ass.”

  It made me think of Lorna and her telling me of the vulgarities she sometimes mouthed these days when she was in bed with a friend. It was a little erotic, thinking of those sweet lips talking dirty.

  “Hey, you doping off again?” Benny asked.

  “No, just thinking about things.” I went over to stare at the fence, then went across to the VW and estimated where the slugs might have hit if Benny’s car had been in that slot. “Did the cops do any poking around inside the park?”

  “No. The shooting was out here, not in there.”

  “I don’t mean that far in. I mean just beyond the fence here. Did they go through the gate and search the area just beyond the fence?”

  “I don’t think so. They kept talking about ricochet tracks.”

  I tore a couple of sheets out of my notepad, tore the pages into strips, studied the crease in the car roof again, then went to the fence and folded the strips of paper near the outer limits of where I figured the slugs might have gone through. I did the same to the section of fence in front of the VW.

  “Okay, Benny, thanks for the help. You can go on into town now. I’ll finish up here by myself. I don’t know how much work you’ve got piled up, but it would be a help if you could take some time and go through your files and look for anything out of the ordinary. Like we were talking about last night.”

  Benny sighed. “Okay, but I keep telling you, I don’t do that sort of stuff. How far back do I go?”

  “When did you do the Walla Walla story?”

  “Couple of years ago.”

  “Okay, go back that far, at least, for a start. And keep in mind, what we’re looking for isn’t necessarily what you’re going to see on the written page in front of you. It’s the potential of a thing we’re after, in a subject, an idea, or an individual. Use your brains and intuition. I’ll be along later.”

  “What’re you going to do?”

  “I’m going to search inside the fence.” Benny grunted and climbed into the car.
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  He drove off and I stared after him. I paid my admission and walked back along the inside of the fence along the parking area and searched the earth and scruffy grass for about forty-five minutes. At the end of that time, I had two chunks of lead in my pocket that looked as if they could have been from the bullets that were fired that day at my friend Benny. One of them was skinned along one side. It could have been the one that nicked the car top. The other was in nearly perfect shape, which meant it had all the funny little individualistic marks and scratches that would be made on a slug traveling down just one gun barrel in this wide, wide land of ours. It was the sort of hard evidence I figured a police lab would like to get its hands on.

  I considered taking a stroll through the rest of the park to see what it looked like these days, but the skies looked as if they were going to open up again at any minute, so I went back out to the car and drove downtown. There, at the Public Safety Building on Fourth Avenue, I raised about the same interest and enthusiasm with the cops that Benny had.

  Hamilton was a cadaverous-looking detective lieutenant with a prominent Adam’s apple who told me Benny’s complaints weren’t receiving a very high priority because there just wasn’t enough to go on. “We don’t even have any real evidence that a crime has been committed yet,” he told me.

  I took out the two slugs I’d found at the zoo and put them on the desk in front of him and told him how and where I’d found them. He turned them over with his fingers, then gave me a so-what expression.

  “What the hell do these prove?” he asked. “Maybe they’re what you think they are, maybe they’re not.”

  We chatted for another ten minutes or so, his Adam’s apple bobbing and weaving. But his position to do with Benny remained basically the same. If you work as a private investigator in one town long enough, usually you develop some contacts with the police and can have a decent working relationship with them. But in a strange town, forget it. You couldn’t blame them, really. Just because you carried the license, it didn’t mean you weren’t a jerk. I finally put the slugs back into my pocket and left.

  At a stationery store I bought a small box and some wrapping material. I packed the slugs into the box and addressed it to a private criminalistics lab down in Berkeley. I mailed it at a postal substation in one of the department stores, then phoned down to the lab and told a man I knew there what I’d put into the mail. Then I drove on down to Benny’s building by the Burlington Northern railroad tracks.

  Benny had copies of four published articles to show me what he felt might have fallen into the category of things I’d told him to look for.

  “Except I really don’t put Bomber Hogan in that category,” he told me, pointing out the story he’d done about the mobster who had served time at Walla Walla. “He’s really a sweet old guy. Lives in a posh sort of place over on Mercer Island, right on the lake. I think he’s retired. Grows roses or something.”

  “They call him Bomber?”

  “Yeah, everybody does. Even the warden referred to him that way. His real name’s Julius.”

  “Why does everybody call him Bomber?”

  “I don’t know. When I asked him, he just chuckled and shook his head. Said it was something that happened a long time ago back in New Jersey.”

  I skimmed through the article and had to agree with Benny. It seemed unlikely the piece would raise anybody’s wrath. The tone of it was one of respect and good humor for one of the community’s elder statesmen. Every profession has to have elder statesmen, Benny’s article implied, even racketeering, which happened to have been Bomber Hogan’s vineyard. Still, I set it aside. If a man has received death threats, you can’t just ignore somebody he’s met who spent more than four decades in the crime business.

  Another of the articles had appeared in an electrical journal and detailed the problems that had developed in a line of industrial motors manufactured locally. It turned out the trouble had been caused by faulty switches supplied by a subcontractor. There hadn’t been any serious fires or injuries caused by the bum equipment, but there had been costly, time-consuming problems in a lot of plants. The experts Benny interviewed indicated a combination of bad original design and a certain amount of cost cutting in the manufacturing process had been responsible.

  Another article, published a year earlier in the magazine section of the Sunday newspaper, had probed the causes of earth slippage on Queen Anne Hill. Some structures had been lost, and the story suggested they shouldn’t have been built there in the first place, but too many parties had been involved—city engineers, realtors, builders, and architects—to neatly put the blame at the doorstep of any one of them.

  The fourth article, for a local weekly newspaper, was a comprehensive look at Seattle’s busy drama scene. In it, Benny mentioned a theatrical agency whose operators had dropped out of sight owing a lot of people money.

  “Did these people ever turn up again?” I asked him.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Well, you’re right,” I told him, putting the stories aside. “I don’t see much in any of this to bring somebody out of the woodwork after you.”

  I sat back in a chair alongside his desk and stared at the dim ceiling. Benny rested his chin on his hands at his typewriter and stared out at the vacant lot across the street.

  “Benny, have you ever had anybody—I mean anybody—make any kind of a threat to you before? I mean, go back ten years or more. Anyone at all?”

  “As a matter of fact, there were a couple of chaps who told me to lay off certain of their affairs or they’d do something dreadful to me. A month or two ago, it was.”

  I sat up straight. “How come you didn’t tell me before now?”

  “Well, they were kidding, is how come. At least I think they were. They were smiling when they said it.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Strange coincidence, this, but it was a couple of guys from a local private detective agency, Tom and Wally Jackson. They’re sons of one of the founders, old Grady Jackson.”

  “Tell me the rest of it.”

  “Pete, it’s no big deal.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Well, I wrote this piece on private eye agencies in the Pacific Northwest. You ever hear of these guys, by the way? The Jackson Detective Agency?”

  “No.”

  “Well, I hadn’t before, either, but their name came up during interviews with people at some of the other agencies. They seem to have kind of a tough reputation. They’ve had their license temporarily suspended a couple of times over the years. And there was a hearing down in Olympia just last year over whether it should be suspended again. It wasn’t a big deal, just some accusations of padding the old expense account. One of their former clients squawked, but the former client never showed up for the hearing, so the thing was canceled. But I figured these guys might add a little color to the story. Most of you PIs are a pretty dull lot, I learned. So I phoned for an appointment with old Grady Jackson himself. He thought I was a potential client. When I went in to talk to him and told him what I was writing, you’d have thought he’d just been brushed by the man who turns faces to stone. A flintier pair of cold gray eyes I have never seen. All in all, the man isn’t too sinister looking himself. He’s maybe six feet tall, but he must be pushing seventy or thereabouts, so to make an impression on me he called in his boys, who were both in the office at the time, Tom and Wally. Now they look sinister, make no mistake about it. Both big, beefy guys full of hard looks and growls. Then, with Tom and Wally standing on either side of me with their arms folded, old Grady tells me he doesn’t want a word about them to appear in the story I’m doing. I argued myself blue in the face. I said theirs was the only agency that had been called before the state licensing body in the recent past, and I wanted to mention the occasion just to illustrate the appeals process when a beef is brought. I told him I’d emphasize that since the complainant didn’t show up, it was assumed in the eyes of the state they were as pure as the driven sn
ow.”

  “What was the threat?”

  “Well, near the end of our conversation, Wally Jackson cleared his throat, a noise that resembles the cannon they fire off at the conclusion of the 1812 Overture, and he told me if I wrote one word they didn’t like, they wouldn’t bother with any libel suits or anything, they’d just come after me with an axe and cut off my left leg.”

  I leaned back and thought about it.

  “Pete, he was kidding. I think.”

  “When did the article run?”

  “It hasn’t yet. It’s due out this week. Running in a new regional publication called Sound Sounds. That’s for Puget Sound, get it?”

  “I get it. I’m going to have to go see those guys, you know.”

  Benny fidgeted in his chair. “Boy, I wish you wouldn’t. It might just get them all pissed off at me again. I mean, these are pretty hard guys. If you do go see them, I sure as hell hope you carry your hat in your hand and call them sir.”

  “Leave it to me.”

  “Yeah, well I guess I have to do that, but, boy…” He shook his head and stared at the typewriter.

  I picked through the four articles again. “And I’ll try to go see this guy Bomber Hogan. Have you checked in with Dolly lately to see that everything’s all right around home?”

  “I spoke to her an hour or so ago. Things were fine.”

  “No more threatening phone calls?”

  “Naw.” He chuckled. “Timmy picked up an odd one, though.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. Just after you and Lorna left.”

  “Who was it?”

  “Didn’t say. Wrong number, probably. Tim was out in the kitchen getting a snack when the phone on the wall rang. He picked up the receiver and said hello. Then he heard this guy’s voice say, ‘It’s nine o’clock…’ Timmy said the guy hesitated a moment, then hung up.”