by Jack Lynch
“That’s right, Pete. That’s exactly right.” She turned back in her chair. Rachel still stood just inside the front door, her puzzlement growing.
“Sit down, please,” Allison told her.
“I thought we had worked this out, down around Monterey and Big Sur,” I told Allison.
“I thought so too.”
“What happened around Monterey and Big Sur?” Rachel asked, settling on the edge of a small sofa.
“I shot and killed a man who was holding Allison captive,” I told her. “It was a long and pretty terrifying experience for her. She had always complained in the past how our relationship disturbed her because of some of the people I encountered in my work and the things I had to do. As if she were dating some animal just out of the dark part of the forest.”
“Peter, please,” said Allison. “Sarcasm doesn’t help. This is a very real and disturbing thing to me. I’ve tried to explain it to you before.”
She turned toward Rachel, having difficulty keeping her composure. “You’re a woman. I don’t understand. What ever would lead you into police work? What ever could make you want to be with a unit called Violent Crimes?”
Rachel pursed her lips. “To answer your first question, why police work, I figure it’s good work. It’s important work. I seem to have a knack for some phases of it. As for Violent Crimes, I guess the easy answer would be to say that sure, we handle homicides and assaults and any number of awful things people do to one another. Those things also include child molestation and rape. That sort of thing. Sometimes a woman cop is valuable in cases like that. But like I said, that’s the easy answer. The real answer is I figure it’s the elite squad in the department. If my boss figures I’m good enough to be there, that’s where I want to be. Bragg just said you seem to act like he’s some kind of animal. Well, I don’t think he is, but I can tell you, Allison, there are animals out there. I should think you’d take a little pride in having a boyfriend who tries to help keep them away from ordinary people.”
Allison made a desperate little “Oh!” sound. When she looked up she addressed Rachel again. “I appreciate all that. But that’s beside the point. The point is, and I admit it’s selfish, the effect all that has on me. And my work.”
She turned toward me now. “After we got back from Monterey and spent those few quiet days together, after that business was over, I thought I had finally come to terms with it. I thought I had gotten to the point where I could grasp and reconcile some of the things you had to do. I really thought so.”
She’s a big girl, Allison is. Large boned with long honey-blonde hair. It was a little room, that front sitting room she had. And when Allison became emotional, and she was being emotional now, turning in her chair, swinging her hair, trying to explain herself with desperate gestures and desperate words, she seemed to fill the whole space. Larger than life. Maybe harboring larger emotions than most of us have, and maybe that was what made her so good at what she did. Painting. She was a truly fine artist.
“It was not long after all that,” Allison continued in a quiet voice, “that my work began to turn to absolute shit. I mean, there was nothing about it going well.”
“You never told me that.”
“Do you tell me when your work stinks?”
“It’s not the same thing.”
Allison uttered a puff of despair. “And I was too dumb to see what the problem was, of course. Thank God for Gene Cooney.”
“Gene Cooney,” I repeated.
“Yes. I met him in the course I told you I was taking out at the college. He’s another painter. He has a studio in town. And you might as well know, Peter, I’ve been seeing him some outside of the classroom. He’s the one who answered the phone the other evening when you called. He’s helped me a lot.”
She took a deep breath and let it out again. “Outside the classroom I told him about the problems I’d been having, and he asked me some about my life, and I told him, and I told him about you and what you did and what we’d been through together down in Monterey, and he was able to show me how that might be behind the problems I was having. Not so much a delayed reaction to what happened to me personally down there, but this mental shifting of gears I’d tried to make for you. He suggested that by trying to come to terms with the violence, I could be raping my own mind, or at least that part of it that wants to explore some of the beauty of life, not that other side.
“I’m expecting Gene any minute, by the way. I phoned him after you called.”
I sat back in the chair. “Has it gone that far, Allison? You feel you have to have him with you before you can be in the same room with me?”
Allison shook her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s just that you said a woman detective would be with you. So I wanted somebody in my corner for a change, if push came to shove. Maybe he can explain all this to you better than I can.”
She turned once more to Rachel. “I’m sorry about this. Really. I must sound very dizzy to you.”
“No, ma’am, you sure don’t sound dizzy to me. In fact you’re making all kinds of sense, from your standpoint. I’m just sorry this thing has to come between you and Bragg. I know we’ve just met, but I think you’re both good people. I…Oh hell, Rachel, shut up.”
There was a light rap at the front door. Allison was out of her chair in an instant and crossed to open it. A smallish fellow in his mid-40s with balding hair, eyeglasses and the beginning of a little pouch at his middle came in and said hello to us all. He was mild mannered, mild spoken. I had an urge to pick him up and throw him through the front window.
“I’ve just been telling them about the problems I had with my work,” Allison told Cooney. “And how you’ve helped me overcome some of them.”
He hummed to himself.
I hate people who do that. As if they had all the world’s answers right there exclusively inside their own squirrelly heads. He gave me the once-over then took a pipe out of his jacket pocket. I was beginning to think that whatever gift Maribeth had was starting to rub off on me. I could have sworn that at some point Cooney would show us all that he was a pipe smoker. He didn’t light it. He just fondled it in his hand. I watched him and wondered what else he had fondled since he began seeing Allison outside of class.
“Rachel,” I said, “since you’re officially running this show, and since now you know the inherent difficulties attached to any conversation we’re going to have, maybe you’d better try explaining what this visit is all about.”
Rachel nodded. Cooney stepped across the room and sat on the bare wooden floor beside Allison’s chair. He squatted down Indian fashion right next to her, so that if she wanted she could reach out and pat the top of his head.
“I assume you’ve heard about what’s been going on over in Jack London State Park,” Rachel began.
Allison said that no, as a matter of fact she avoided the news whenever she was trying to get parts of her life back onto an even keel again.
Cooney hummed some more and told Rachel he’d been following the stories. “Under the circumstances, however, it wasn’t anything I’ve felt like discussing with Allison.”
I couldn’t let that one slide by. “Before you got here Allison said she had told you about me, and my work. Did she mention my name?”
“Yes.”
“And did you hear or read my name in connection with the London park story you said you were following?”
“Yes, I did.”
“But you didn’t mention that to her.”
“No, I didn’t,” he admitted softly. “I weighed it at one point, but then decided it might just unravel whatever progress she had been making. I felt that when she was up to facing that sort of thing she would begin watching the news again herself, and that would be soon enough for her to learn what you’ve been up to.”
Allison looked at Cooney while he talked. “Maybe somebody had better just come right out and tell me what this big story is,” she said. “Don’t worry, Gene, I’m not going t
o come apart like some china doll that’s been dropped.”
Cooney shrugged, and Rachel launched into a condensed version of all the digging that had been going on and what the harvest had been. She made it as clinical and palatable as possible. Cooney sat nodding his head, as if approving Rachel’s report. Allison sat listening, a little numb looking, and when Rachel had finished Allison turned to me with a large sigh.
“Boy, you’re really into it this time, aren’t you?”
“Not all that much. The homicides are Rachel’s problem. I’m just trying to look out for Maribeth’s safety.”
“This Maribeth. Where did you ever meet such a woman?” Allison asked.
“She’s just somebody I had a phone conversation with back when I worked at the Chronicle.”
“She sounds bizarre.”
“It is sort of a weird story, isn’t it?” Rachel said with a grin. “But she’s a pretty good old gal, what I’ve seen of her.”
Allison shrugged. “Okay. So now I know all the juicy details of the latest insane killer striding across the California landscape. What does it have to do with me?”
“I don’t know that it has anything at all to do with you,” I told her.
Cooney hummed again. I turned and gauged the distance. If I kicked out with my heel I figured I could just clip Cooney’s dimpled chin. I forced my attention back to Allison.
“Rachel and I were over talking to Maribeth again this morning,” I continued. “Just before we left her, she asked me if I knew a place called Barracks Cove. I told her I did. The way she said it, I don’t think she had ever heard of it before.”
Allison snorted. “Absolutely bizarre.”
“She said she thought there was somebody in town here I should talk to. I wanted to talk to you not because I thought you were the person Maribeth meant, but because I felt I knew you better than anybody else in town, and you might have heard something or could point me in the right direction. I didn’t know you hadn’t been following the news. I don’t think I would have bothered you if I’d known that. And since you haven’t,” I said, glancing across at Rachel, “we might as well pack it up and get on our way.”
“Ellen Whitley,” said Cooney, more to himself than to the rest of us.
“Sir?” Rachel asked.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I was just thinking of poor Ellen Whitley. She’s an English Lit teacher at school. She’s been touched by all this. Her brother was one of the victims they found up there. A friend out at the college phoned me earlier to tell me Ellen had just seen her brother’s name in the paper for the first time this morning. Absolutely devastated by it, according to my friend.”
“What was the victim’s name?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t remember. Marian’s married. She has a different name than her brother. But I heard he’d just moved out here from back in Missouri somewhere.”
“Carl William James,” said Rachel. “We know very little about him.” She turned to Allison. “Can I use your phone? I have a credit card.”
Allison led her out to the kitchen then returned to the front room while Rachel phoned. Probably calling her office, I guessed. I started to say something more to Allison, but found that I couldn’t. Not with her pal Gene there on the floor beside her, fondling his pipe and staring rheumy eyed into nowhere.
Rachel came back out of the kitchen and gave me a little nod. “I’ve got the address. Let’s go.”
I got up and followed her to the door. I still couldn’t bring myself to say anything more to Allison. Rachel had the right idea, I decided. Do it with nods. That’s how I made my good-bye. I nodded at Allison and the man she had wanted in her corner if push came to shove, and closed the door behind me.
NINETEEN
Rachel said a little lamely that it was nice to know that the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office, with a little help from area newspapers, would have been capable of making the connection between Carl William James of Missouri and Ellen Whitley of Barracks Cove. It turned out that while Mrs. Whitley had missed seeing or hearing her brother’s name in earlier news accounts, the local paper that morning had printed his name in a story to do with the second group of victims that had been recovered. Mrs. Whitley had seen it and phoned the sheriff’s office, praying that there had been a mistake. There hadn’t been; it was her brother. All of that had occurred between the time Rachel and I had left Sausalito and arrived in Barracks Cove.
“We were a few gimpy steps behind Maribeth, of course,” Rachel said dryly, “but it’s nice to know we would eventually have managed on our own.”
“One thing I noticed back there.”
“What’s that?”
“Your hick country accent sort of comes and goes depending on the circumstances.”
“Sure, why shouldn’t it? A lot of people I deal with live out in rural areas. When I talk to them I try to talk in a way they’re comfortable with. I told you the way I spoke was mostly playacting.”
“Barracks Cove isn’t all that rural. Allison and her new boyfriend aren’t exactly hicks.”
“I know. I had a different reason for that.”
I looked across at her. “You thought Allison might have been jealous of you?”
“Why not think it? It’s always possible. I’m looking in the mirror these days, remember. I look okay. We’re working together. So I figured if I came on in a country way she might not think too seriously along those lines. God knows you looked as if you wanted to unload on her little friend.”
“Did I ever.”
“Ease off, babe. She didn’t come right out and call him her boyfriend. She’s got real problems there with her work. She thinks he’s helping her.”
“Do you think he’s helping her?”
“I don’t know. But I think he’s being pretty pompous about it all. I mean, what is he, an artist or a psychiatrist? That’s a very complicated little problem your lady friend has. A lot of cop families go through that sort of thing. I think it would take somebody very highly trained to try getting inside of her head and find the nooks and crannies that create the problem. I don’t think Little Bob back there has that kind of background or knowledge.”
I had to laugh. “Little Bob. I love it.”
But that was the last laugh either of us had for some while. The mood at the Whitley house was deadly somber. The Whitleys lived off a road that ran back into the coastal hills behind Barracks Cove. George Whitley was a tall, quiet-spoken man nearing his fifties. He looked like he was carrying a lot of old scars around inside, as if it had been his own brother who had been killed and buried up in Jack London State Park. He didn’t want to let us in at first. He said his wife wasn’t in any shape to speak with anybody.
Rachel was patient and understanding with him. She also made it very plain that we wouldn’t be leaving until we had a chance to talk to her.
“I’m going to leave most of this to you,” I told Rachel, while Whitley went in to warn his wife she had company.
“That’s all right with me, but Maribeth said she saw you talking with somebody up here.”
“I’ve already talked to somebody up here. Allison and Little Bob. That’s enough talking on my part.”
Ellen Whitley was a much younger woman than her husband. She was a small figure wearing a bathrobe, sitting up in her bed with pillows propped up behind her. There was a lot of torment on her face and she had a wad of paper tissues in her hand she used to dab at her eyes.
Rachel introduced us and promised we wouldn’t stay long. Then she brought over a chair from a nearby dressing table and settled down in it alongside the bed. The room was small. I hung back in the doorway and looked around at prints of huge red chrysanthemums on the wallpaper. It made me think of funerals. George Whitley had wandered back to the front of the house and I heard the screen door slap shut.
Rachel asked the Whitley woman about her brother, and she told us that Carl William James had been an electronics distributor back in a suburb of St. Louis. She said he traveled
fairly regularly, and sometimes when he came to the West Coast he would manage a side trip to Barracks Cove. She said he had grown fond of the area and sold out his business in the Midwest and was planning to open a new operation in this area. There were other, family reasons for his move as well, she told us. She said her brother had had some business to conduct in San Francisco. That had been ten days back, she said. That had been the last she had seen of him.
Ellen Whitley told us that her brother had been the only remaining, really close person in her life. The telling of the last time she had seen him seemed to punch a leak in whatever reservoir she had where she carried around old grief. She told us her parents had both died of cancer, three years apart. Lingering deaths, they had been. She talked about childhood friends who had died, and other relatives. She said she and her husband George had tried to have a child, but the infant had been stillborn, and their physician had recommended against her trying to bear another. She said the marriage with George was hanging by a thread, and he was looking around to see if he could get work down in Santa Rosa. They decided the time had come for them to separate.
“We tried a second honeymoon, even,” she told Rachel. “At a guest ranch down south. The Horse Around Ranch they call it. That turned out to be a disaster. Things have gone downhill between us in the months since. That’s what got my brother to thinking about moving out here. We were close and he knew the problems I was having. He knew I could use some support.” She sobbed once. “Instead, it got him killed, coming out here.”
Rachel got to her feet. “Just one other thing, Mrs. Whitley, then we’ll be going.” She reached into her handbag for a sheet of paper, unfolded it and handed it to Ellen Whitley.
“I’d like to know if you recognize any of the names on this list. Besides your brother, I mean.”
“Who are these people?”
“They’re the other victims.”
She glanced down it. “I think I recognize two of them, from the newspaper stories. That young boy, Donald McGuire, I’m sure I saw his name.”
