by Jack Lynch
“Yeah, there’s another photo missing, but I figure that was taken inadvertantly, or by somebody who thought it was a part of the Beyerly story. I don’t have these things in any particular order.”
“What was it a photo of?”
“Just a mug shot of the guy I was talking to about ferroconcrete houseboats—before the project went bankrupt and the story went down the tubes.”
“Do you still have your notes on that?”
“Yeah, they’re all here,” he said, holding up one of the folders. “That’s why I figure the photo was lifted by mistake.”
“Give me the name of the guy who was in the photo anyhow, will you?”
He checked through the folder. “Waldo Derington. He was the guy I was writing about.”
“When was that?”
“Oh hell, three, maybe four years ago.”
“Benny, you did good. It’s the first thing that shows any real promise since I hit town.”
Benny beamed. “Hey, great. The boys’ll love it when I tell them you said that. Timmy especially. God, that kid’s bright.”
We were interrupted by a loud commotion out in the hall. Workmen had been by earlier to rehang Benny’s office door and to replace the glass in the door and over his desk and to generally clean up the place. It sounded now as if somebody was trying to knock the door off its hinges again. Men’s voices were shouting. Benny started for the door.
“Stay here,” I told him. “You’re out of town, remember?”
Mary Ellen joined me as I stepped out into the hall. The door to Benny’s office must have been unlocked. It was wide open now, and the yelling men were standing just inside.
“Where is the little pimp?” one of them shouted.
“Come on, shithead, show your face,” cried the other.
Building tenants were coming down the hall to see who was making all the noise. The men in Benny’s office were big and beefy. Their faces were put together tough—wide-spaced eyes, heavy jaws, thick lips. One of them was as tall as I am, the other a couple of inches shorter. They wore dark topcoats and felt snap-brim hats. It was the way men in Seattle dressed when I was a boy.
“What’s the problem?” I asked.
“You the manager?” demanded the taller of the two.
“Where’s the little creep who wrote this garbage?” barked the other, holding what looked like a rolled up magazine in his fist.
“This office is leased by a chap named Benny Bartlett,” I told them. “Is that who you mean?”
“That’s him, that’s the one. Little four-eyed shithead,” said the shorter and more bellicose of the two.
“I hear he’s gone out of town,” I said. “The whole family has, I understand. Why? What’s wrong?”
“We wanna smack him around some,” said the shorter man. “Maybe break his typing fingers so he can’t write filth like this anymore.”
“Just who are you people?” Mary Ellen demanded. “What are you doing in here? Nobody invited you here.”
“Nobody needed to, lady,” said the taller man. “We pretty much go where we want to. Like right over the top of you if you don’t dummy up.”
“Okay, hold it, hold it,” I told them, crossing my arms and leaning back against the doorjamb with a smile. “You are two big, tough hombres and you’re irritated about something. Nobody’s going to be able to help you unless you calm down and tell us what it’s all about. If you have a beef with Benny, we’ll spread the word around the building here. If he gets in touch with anybody here, we can tell him about it and ask him to give you a call. So what’s the problem?”
“This is the problem,” said the shorter man, shaking the rolled up publication. He didn’t have a very tight grip on it and the magazine squirted out of his hand.
“Shit!” he cried, giving it a kick that sent it skidding across the floor. He crossed to it and picked it up, flattened it and held it out to us. It was the publication Benny had told me about, Sound Sounds.
“He libeled us here,” he told us. “We’re from the Jackson Detective Agency. I’m Wally Jackson. He’s my brother, Tom.”
“Then you’re Grady’s boys. I was up to see him yesterday.”
“You were up to see who?” demanded the shorter of the two, who’d said he was Wally.
“Your father. We probably were talking about whatever it is that has you two so upset. A story about Pacific Northwest investigators?”
“That’s it,” said Wally. “A piece of scum.”
“Filth,” said his brother. “A pack of lies.”
“What were you up seeing the old man about?” Wally demanded.
I told them briefly why I’d been up there and what we’d talked about. “I know Benny from years ago,” I told them. “Somebody’s been trying to kill him. I’m in the same line of work you two are, down in California.”
“Sure, that’s right,” said Wally. “Dad told us about you. You’re from down fag city way.”
I laughed.
“What’s funny?” Tom demanded.
“Your brother has a colorful way of phrasing things.”
“Well, if you’re a buddy of this Bartlett,” Wally broke in, “where is the lying little shithead?”
“I don’t know. The pressure got too great. He and his family packed up and left town. I don’t know where they’ve gone. He said something about putting his home on the market. I don’t expect him back, frankly. But I’m surprised he wrote something that would bother you guys. He mentioned the story to me and said he bent over backward so as not to write anything that would offend you. Said he just needed to mention you to explain what happens when somebody complains to the state about a PI agency, whether the complaint is justified or not.”
“Sure, that’s the line he fed us,” said Wally. “That’s what he told Dad he was doing. But listen to this.” He paged quickly through the publication until he found the part he wanted. “He says here about how the complainant didn’t show up for the hearing in Olympia, and the state dropped the investigation without prejudice.”
“Sounds innocent enough to me,” I told them.
“Yeah, but then the little rat went on to say, ‘But the Jackson agency still has a lingering, malodorous reputation among the Seattle investigatory community.’ That’s garbage!”
“Sheer libel,” said his brother.
I raised my hands. “What can I say? Sounds like a cheap shot to me, and I’ve never known Benny to do things that way. Like I said. We’ll spread the word around the building. If anyone hears from Benny, we’ll ask him to call you guys and try to explain himself.”
“Good,” said Wally. “And you tell him if I ever get my hands on him, by the time I’m through with him he’ll be doing any future explaining in a high, squeaky voice.”
They gave us their best tough-guy looks and strode out into the hallway. Wally spun back around toward me. “You sure you don’t know where the little creep is?”
“Honest. He’s running scared. I doubt if he’ll ever show up in these parts again. Somebody tossed a bomb into his office there last night. Wouldn’t that be enough to scare you off?”
Wally chewed the inside of his mouth some. His brother stood there like a big stooge with his arms folded. Then Wally grunted and turned around and the two of them marched back down the hall and around the corner. They were talking loudly to each other again. Talking about the brutal things they’d do to my pal Benny Bartlett if he ever showed his face around town again.
FOURTEEN
Bellingham is about eighty miles north of Seattle. You can stop for coffee along the way and still make it in two hours these days. Before the interstate highway system was built, you could spend what seemed like half a day making the same trip, lurching and crawling in traffic along two-lane roads that went through places like Everett and Marysville and Mount Vernon and half a dozen smaller burgs. Bellingham had been a small town when I was growing up, but it was a city today, with a big oil refinery and a population of around 50,000.
It’s on a bay that was discovered in 1792 by an English explorer, Captain George Vancouver, ultimately much to the dismay of the Indians who had discovered it long before then.
I had left Benny shaken and fuming back in Mary Ellen’s studio. He’d been standing behind her studio door and overheard the ranting and railing of the Jackson brothers.
“I never wrote that,” he complained. “ ‘…lingering, malodorous reputation…’ I’ve never used words like that in my life. It must have been that dizzy bitch Carlotta Pantree.”
“Who’s that?”
“Editor of Sound Sounds. When she first read the piece, she suggested I call around some of the other agencies and ask them what they thought of the Jacksons. Holy cow, I didn’t have to call around. The Jackson agency had come up plenty of times while I was researching the article. I told her to forget it—to just stick with the bare-bone facts of the hearing in Olympia that never got off the ground. For God’s sake, I knew what I was dealing with—sheer dynamite. So Pantree must have taken it upon herself to make a couple of calls and add that juicy bit. I’ll murder the bitch.”
Benny kept copies of all his work, so I suggested that instead of murdering Pantree, he just mail the Jacksons a photocopy of what he’d originally written. The Jacksons might or might not believe him, but he could enclose a note suggesting they phone or visit Carlotta Pantree and ask her who had written the offending passage. He said he’d give it a try.
Before leaving, I also put in a phone call to Turk Connell, head of the World Investigations office in San Francisco. World is a far-flung outfit that maintains a small force of investigators they bolster from time to time with freelancers like myself. I asked Turk to call their office in Vancouver and see if they could provide any information on Waldo Derington, whose photo had been lifted from Benny’s file along with those of the Beyerly family. As Benny suggested, the picture probably was taken inadvertently, but it’s best to check on that sort of thing.
People at the Bellingham Herald told me I’d find the Beyerly place by driving out east of town on Whatcom County Route 542. They confirmed what Benny had remembered, that the family patriarch had died a couple of years earlier. They said his widow had moved up to British Columbia, where she had a sister. The Beyerly son, they said, taught at a small university somewhere in the Midwest, and the surviving daughter, Barbara, lived on the family ranch. But nobody would say much about the other daughter, whose death had prompted People magazine to scrub the story Benny had been working on about the rich and spoiled.
Skies were overcast and I drove through rain showers on my way to the ranch, which turned out to be about fifty acres nestled in a broad river valley. The ranch buildings were back a good mile from the county road. The ranch road leading back to them was straight as an arrow and out in the open, so that anybody at the ranch could have a good look at you coming.
The main house was a rambling sort of place made of Arizona sandstone and wood. It was two stories tall in the center, with a couple of single-story wings on either side of that. I suspected that if the remaining Beyerly daughter ever moved away, somebody would come by and transform the place into a ritzy bed-and-breakfast inn. The outbuildings were weathered, but both they and the horse pens and meandering rail fencing I could see were kept in good repair. You knew the person running things had enough money to provide good upkeep.
When I drove into the broad turnaround area in front of the house, an older fellow wearing Levi’s and a plaid lumberjack shirt was standing waiting for me with his arms folded. I got out of the car, gave him a little wave, and crossed over to him. He had a face as weathered looking as the outbuildings.
“My name is Bragg,” I told him. “I’m from San Francisco. I’d like to see Miss Beyerly if she’s home.”
“She’s home, but she doesn’t much like dealing with strangers. What did you want to see her about?”
“It’s a long enough story, so I’d rather not have to repeat it too many times. But you could tell her it involves a family down in Seattle. The father’s been threatened. Attempts have been made on his life. Three of them we know about. We think somebody tried to abduct his two sons. We don’t know why all this is happening. It’s possible Miss Beyerly might have some information that would help us put a stop to it.”
“You police?”
“No, but I’ve worked with them in the past. I’m a private investigator. But I’m not doing this as a job in the ordinary sense. I’ve known the man who’s been threatened since we were in high school together. He’s a good friend. He’s in trouble. So I thought I’d do what I could to help him. I’d guess the people around here probably do that sort of thing for friends too, same as they do in Seattle or San Francisco or Sydney, Australia.”
“Sure we do. But what sort of information you think Miss Beyerly, living the kind of reclusive life out here that she does, might have that could help your friend in Seattle?”
“Like I said, it’s a long story. I’d rather explain the rest of it to her.”
He cleared his throat and stared at his boots some. “I don’t want to appear to be asking questions about things that aren’t any of my business, Mr. Bragg. It’s just that Miss Beyerly isn’t all that outgoing. Before she agrees to talk to you—if she does agree to, and I frankly couldn’t tell you whether she might feel up to it or not—she would want to know more about what she’d be getting herself into. And if I can’t tell her these things I’m asking you when I go inside, she’ll just send me back out again to ask them then. I’m really trying to save us all a little time, is all.”
“I see. Well, thank you for that. You can tell Miss Beyerly I think she met my friend a few years ago. His name is Benny Bartlett. He’s a writer, and he told me he talked to several members of her family at one time. And something one of them told him just might be a clue as to whatever is happening to him these days. Miss Beyerly might be the one who has the information that could lead me to the people threatening to kill my friend. She might be able to help me solve a mystery.”
The older man was watching me closely. He was trying to decide whether or not I was shucking him. He’d be telling himself that just because he might be living in a rural area, it didn’t make him any sort of dummy. But even I knew that. And the creases in his face suggested he’d been to a place or two besides horse-ranch country.
“I’ll go tell her what you said,” he told me. “I’d ask you to come inside to wait, but Miss Beyerly doesn’t like strangers in the house unless she’s approved of them ahead of time.”
“That’s fine. I understand.”
I watched him go inside then, and turned around and went on back to lean against my car and tried to look as sincere and concerned as I knew how. Maybe I’d be under a little visual inspection from behind one of the upstairs curtains. I’d told the ranchhand just before he went into the house that I understood, but that wasn’t really true. I didn’t understand. I was beginning to think the rich and reclusive Miss Beyerly might be a little whacky.
I spent the next five minutes or so staring around at the surrounding countryside and the bleak skies overhead, watched a couple of chestnut horses romping around in a distant field and listened to somebody hammering a piece of metal out somewhere in back of the house. The man I’d spoken with finally opened the front door and waved me in.
“She’ll see you, but she’s in the middle of something right now,” he told me. “You can go wait in the living room there. She’ll be down as soon as she can.”
He showed me into a large room off the entranceway that had windows across the front and along a portion of one side and was filled with Danish modern furniture and paintings on the walls depicting the roping and riding of ranch life. I settled down on one end of a white leather sofa and the man with the seamed face went back outside. A couple of minutes later, a round-faced Indian woman of fifty or so, wearing Levi’s and a red-and-green-and-black-checked workshirt identical to the one worn by the man who’d ushered me in, came into the
room and asked if I’d care for any coffee or tea. I told her no. She nodded her head as if it were the answer she had expected and left the room.
Twenty minutes later I still was waiting for Miss Beyerly to put in an appearance. I was about ready to try hunting up the Indian maid or my pal from outside when I heard conversation from another part of the ground floor and a clatter of dishes. A minute later a very ordinary-looking woman in her early thirties came to the doorway and said, “Mr. Bragg? I’m Barbara Beyerly.”
I got to my feet and nodded. “Thank you for seeing me, Miss Beyerly. I’m sure your days are busy, running something as large as the ranch here.”
“My days aren’t all that busy,” she told me. She hadn’t made a move from the doorway. She stood leaning against one of the doorjambs in a semi-slouch with her arms folded. She was wearing a pair of Levi’s, like the people she had working around her, but instead of the lumberjack shirt, she wore a long-sleeved red knit sweater over a white silk blouse. She was a lean-figured woman whose shoulder-length dark brown hair was braided in two plaits. She had an unremarkable face, with dead-looking blue-gray eyes and a mouth that might have been handed down through the years like an old heirloom.
“ID,” she said.
“You want to see my ID?”
“Yes. Some identification, please. I don’t know you from Adam.”
“No, ma’am.” I took out my wallet and crossed to show her the photostat of my investigator’s license and my driver’s license.
“You told Dolph you were from San Francisco. This driver’s license says you live somewhere called Sausalito.”
“That’s just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco,” I told her. “My office is in downtown San Francisco.”
She made a humming sound and handed back the ID. “Whiskey,” she said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I asked if you wanted some whiskey. Rhoda said you didn’t want any coffee or tea. I read mystery stories, you know, not that that has all that much to do with it. It just does seem to me that a person in the line of work you are in, dealing with the sort of people you must deal with on a more or less regular basis, that chances are you’d prefer whiskey to coffee or tea. Or gin, perhaps.”
