Grave Expectations on Dickens' Dune

by Anna Celeste Burke

  “I’m sorry he couldn’t have been more forthcoming with you,” Midge responded almost in a whisper. “Some vets find relief in sharing their ordeal, but not everyone does.”

  “I believe Allen found that hard to do because he had secrets he couldn’t share. I don’t know if those were secrets tied to a Special Duty Assignment that he had in Vietnam or something more personal that happened while he was there. A couple of times, he let things slip about the price you pay for trusting the wrong people. Once, he told me that not all the bad guys were on the other side.” I glanced at Charly as she commented on what Judith had just said.

  “I told them about the Special Duty Assignment Pay Allen received. I’m doing what I can to find out what he did to earn it, and if that’s how he was wounded. I hope I can share what I learn with you now that it’s been more than forty years since he was injured.”

  “I’d appreciate it. Thank you.” Judith said, sighing. She lapsed into a somber silence.

  “I know this has to be difficult for you. We’ll do our best to fill in the gaps. Do you know what Allen was doing in this area when he vanished?” I asked, hoping to restart our conversation.

  “I can’t be sure. He and his family used to vacation here when he was a child. They rented one of the summer cottages. More than once, Allen said that he felt so free and happy here that it was as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Before he began to withdraw and got arrested, we came here as a family once or twice. It seemed to boost his spirits, so maybe that’s why he was here.”

  “From what you’re saying, it makes perfect sense that he came here to sort things out,” Charly suggested.

  “It does, although he didn’t have much money. I don’t know how he got here or where he stayed. When the police found his dog tags and a few belongings on Dickens’ Dune, they suggested he might have been camping on the beach.”

  “If he was here on a camping trip, what made them suspect foul play?” Marty asked.

  “I’d filed a missing persons report when I tried to contact Allen about a family matter. Nick, a roommate who answered the phone, claimed he was no longer living there. Wendy was angry and evasive when I drove over to the apartment worried that Allen was still there but too sick or too drugged up to face me. She told me to get lost—that he’d gone home to live with his parents. I knew that wasn’t true because the reason I called him in the first place was that he’d missed his Mom’s birthday a few days earlier. When Wendy claimed he’d been gone for a week, I contacted the police. It was a couple of weeks later that hikers spotted those personal items, and called the police because there was blood on them.”

  “Was the blood a match to Allen’s?”

  “They didn’t do DNA testing then, but the blood type was a match. They also found Allen’s dog tags, and when they ran a check on them, they discovered the report I’d filed about his disappearance.” She paused and gazed at us, making eye contact with Charly. “He wouldn’t have given up those dog tags willingly, by the way. If he’d killed himself, he would have been wearing them.” I wasn’t as convinced as Judith was about that issue now that I knew how easily it was to be fooled by a man you believed you knew well. Then Joe made a very good point.

  “He didn’t bury himself,” Joe said almost as if he was thinking aloud. Then he continued in a more empathetic tone. “Leonard had no reason to lie. I’m sure he was telling the truth when he said someone killed Allen. I just wish he’d told us who did it.”

  “I can make a guess,” Marty added. “If Allen had come here to sort things out, it wouldn’t surprise me if he was having second thoughts about his life. If that included his divorce, no matter what she said, Wendy Ballard may have thought he was going back to you. She wouldn’t be the first scorned woman to seek revenge for being jilted.”

  “That would explain her evasiveness, and the fact that she was so angry with you, Judith,” Midge added.

  “If she was out of her mind on drugs at the time, it would explain why she didn’t take the dog tags with her or bury them with him. That would have made it harder to figure out Allen Rogow had ever been there,” Carl suggested.

  “Judith, could Allen have gotten involved with drugs again?” I asked.

  “The police investigator asked me that once he’d looked into Allen’s background. I told him I didn’t know. Given my suspicions about Wendy Ballard’s condition when I first met her, it wouldn’t have surprised me. I suggested the police officer ask her that question. I must have sounded like a jealous ex-wife when I mentioned her because they took a closer look at me after that. They let go of the idea that I killed Allen once they found out the kids and I were in LA when Allen was on Dickens’ Dune.” Judith teared up at that point. Midge grabbed a tissue for her from a box sitting on a shelf.

  “Thank you, Midge. I’m sorry. It was so frustrating to be treated as an overwrought ex-wife one minute, and as a murder suspect in the next.”

  “I get it, Judith. The police aren’t always the most sensitive people, nor is their process always a logical one. I’ve asked for everything I can get from their archives about the investigation. Let us take it from there.” She nodded as another question popped into my head.

  “Who called out Wendy’s name the first time you visited her?” I asked. “It wasn’t Allen’s voice, or you would have mentioned it. Could you tell if it was the same man you spoke to later—the roommate you called Nick?”

  “I’m certain it was a different man. On my first visit, the man who spoke to Wendy sounded like one of Allen’s Army friends who hung out with him almost every week before Allen went to prison. He didn’t bother coming to the door when she told him it was me, which didn’t surprise me. Mark Viceroy wasn’t a good influence on Allen. It wasn’t just that he encouraged Allen to drink too much and do who knows what else, but Allen was always angry and more withdrawn after he’d visited. I heard them arguing more than once. Allen refused to tell me what the arguments were about or to cut off his buddies.”

  “Guys who served together forge strong bonds—like brothers,” Midge offered.

  “Yes. Allen’s explanation was something like that. He wasn’t going to cut off any of them because ‘they’ve been through it all, too.’ When I got the message from Leonard, one of the first things I did was try to track them down. I found obituaries for several of the men, but none for Mark Viceroy. The last I heard he was in prison.”

  “Maybe there’s more information in the police record about Allen’s friends and associates from interviews with his housemates. That was Allen’s last known address; they should have spoken to everyone who lived there.”

  “There ought to be something in the case file about who they interviewed,” Charly said.

  “If they did interview them, it must have been a dead end since they never arrested Wendy or anyone else. In fact, the police told me that without a body, they couldn’t even be certain that Allen was dead. One officer even suggested his disappearance was a message that he wanted to leave his past behind and that I should take the hint. I told them in no uncertain terms that if Allen was leaving the area, he would have said goodbye to his children, if not to me.”

  “Leonard Cohen has set that idea to rest,” Charly assured her. Judith nodded and spoke to me.

  “I did see Wendy Ballard again, believe it or not. She came to a Remembrance Service that Allen’s parents and I held a couple of years after he vanished. Even though we had no way of knowing if he was dead or alive, we wanted to honor his memory. I hoped it would bring us some closure.”

  “That took some chutzpah, didn’t it?” Neely asked.

  “You can say that again. I was shocked, but not just because she had the gall to show up. Your question, Miriam, asking if she was still alive, triggered my memory of her appearance at the event. She and the guy she’d called Nick both turned up looking as if they were on their last legs. If I had any doubt about her drug use, it ended right then and there. From the volunteer work I’ve done with drug p
rograms since then, I’d say they were the spitting image of meth addicts.”

  “Did she speak to you?”

  “Oh, yes. She appeared to be genuinely sorry that Allen hadn’t returned. Then, she made a pitch to me about how tough it had been to make ends meet since he took off.”

  “No way!” Joe exclaimed. “Did she ask you for money?”

  “Not explicitly. If she had, I wouldn’t have given it to her. I did express my concern that she didn’t appear to be well, and then offered to drive her anywhere she was willing to go for help. She left soon after that.”

  “How about Allen’s Army buddies? Did they show up for the Remembrance Service?”

  “No, not one of them. You know what, though? Now that we’ve been talking about all of this, Allen did go camping with them on occasion. Maybe they came here to the dunes area and the weekend he disappeared wasn’t the first time. I’m sure I told the detective about Allen’s friends from his service in Vietnam, but I don’t believe I mentioned they could have been with him at the dunes. I never threw away my old address book. When I get home, I’ll call and give you the contact information for the halfway house, the apartment complex where Allen was living, and the old information I had about Mark Viceroy and Allen’s other Army buddies.”

  “Thanks,” Charly said.

  “It was such a long time ago, that I doubt the old information I have will be of much use to you. I drove by a couple of times long after Allen had disappeared, and the apartment complex had become more rundown, but it was still standing. Maybe there’s some long-term tenant who remembers him, and might have something to contribute to your investigation. Please find out what happened to him and if his body really is buried somewhere on Dickens’ Dune. He deserves better.” She didn’t say much more after that. I didn’t know about her, but I was emotionally spent. Midge summarized the experience perfectly a few minutes later after we’d said goodbye to her.

  “She certainly has taken Dickens’ words seriously to ‘have a heart that never hardens and a temper that never tires.’ Her commitment to finding out what happened to her ex-husband, even after all she went through with him, is remarkable,” Midge observed.

  “I agree,” Marty said. “I would have given up on him long ago. Then, I never knew the man.”

  “Okay, folks, we’ve got our work cut out for us,” Charly said when she returned. “Who’s going to do what?”

  In a few minutes, we’d decided that Midge and Marty were going to Santa Barbara to speak to the nurse who’d heard Leonard Cohen’s confession and relayed it to Judith. We hoped she might tell us if anyone visited Leonard Cohen while he was in the hospital—a spouse or child or some other family member. Even a friend who cared enough to visit him at the hospital.

  Charly had a lot of background checks to run to get more information about Leonard Cohen and the other people Judith had mentioned who were close to Allen at the time he disappeared. In addition, she was going to get case files for Leonard Cohen and see if anyone else in Allen’s circle of friends had a police record. Charly was working contacts in law enforcement in two County Sheriff Departments since Allen had lived in San Luis Obispo County, but disappeared here in the northernmost part of Santa Barbara County. That was in addition to other ties in the criminal justice system and the federal government she was using.

  Carl and Joe were going to try to track down Mark Viceroy and speak to him if he was living in San Luis Obispo. They figured he might be more inclined to speak to a couple of “old guys” rather than “the ladies.” While they were in the area, they also planned to make the rounds of veterans groups to see if anyone else remembered Allen Rogow, or better yet, had befriended him.

  Neely and I were also going to San Luis Obispo after a quick stop at the public library in Duneville Down. We were going to make the rounds, visiting the halfway house—or rather, the version of it that was there now—decades later. We’d check out the apartment complex, and we’d try to speak to Wendy Ballard if she was still alive somewhere in the area. Rather than wait for Charly to get back to us with background information from her contacts, Neely and I both planned to troll the Internet for anything we could find about the key players identified so far in this mystery—Allen Rogow, Leonard Cohen, Wendy Ballard, and Mark Viceroy. I felt a little overwhelmed by all we had to do as we walked home with Emily and Domino in tow.

  “Judith is the epitome of someone bent and broken into a better shape, isn’t she? I suppose her strong faith has done that for her,” I offered.

  “Or the power of a first love,” Charly suggested. I pondered how quickly that possibility had sprung to mind for her. Was it her devotion to the Brontë sisters and their gothic romances or was there an old love story in Charly’s life that I hadn’t heard about?

  I was still pondering that question as Domino and I walked the block or so to the Hemingway Cottage. I was so engrossed in my own thoughts, that I never noticed a man anywhere nearby. Not until he spoke to me by name.

  6 Self-swindlers

  “All other swindlers on Earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretenses did I cheat myself.” ~ Great Expectations

  ∞

  “Well, well, well, Miriam Webster, we meet at last!” As I turned, I searched the street for a car, wondering if we’d walked right past him. There wasn’t a vehicle of any kind parked on the street. As I faced him, he closed the distance between us quickly.

  He was breathing hard from the exertion, and I immediately recognized the hacking cough that overcame him for a moment. As he towered over me, I could smell his breath. It reeked of beer and cigarettes. When he moved his arm to adjust the sunglasses on his face, I could see that his fingertips were stained by nicotine—something I recognized from a short stint as a volunteer in a detox facility after the bakery shut down. There were lots of diehard smokers among clients at the drug facility. Unfortunately, I’d discovered I have a sensitivity to tobacco smoke—even second or third hand. I could feel my throat growing itchy.

  “Who are you?” I replied as I took a step back and reached behind me for the gate that leads into my front yard. Domino didn’t yield. In fact, she took a step toward the hulk of a man who was the same one I’d glimpsed at Dickens’ Dune. I tightened my grip on Domino’s leash as I heard a low growl come from her.

  “Call off the dog. I’m here on business.” When Domino growled again, he took a step back. After he’d spoken again, it was clear to me that his voice was the one I’d heard earlier on my phone.

  “What sort of business?” I asked. I let out a tiny bit more of Domino’s leash. She edged toward him, and he inched back. I slipped my other hand into a pocket and clutched the kubotan that Charly had given me soon after she’d used it so effectively at Shakespeare Cottage.

  “Now, that’s more like it—getting right to the point rather than dodging me and making me chase you down.” He chuckled, and that set off a bout of coughing that made his bloodshot eyes water. “That climb up the dune, or whatever the dickens it is, nearly did me in!” Laughing at his own joke, set off another round of coughing. While he was wiping his eyes, I slipped my hand out of my pocket with the kubotan concealed in it.

  “Do me a favor and get to the point, please.” That brought him up short, and he went from garrulous to grim.

  “Will do. Where’s my money?”

  “Money? What money?” I asked as my mind raced. He shook his head.

  “Aw, come on. You can do better than that.” My head spun, and I felt dizzy trying to fathom what he was talking about. “Pete said you were good for it or I never would have given him more money. Don’t play dumb. Your signature is as plain as the nose on my face.” He held out a sheet of paper in front of him. My mouth popped open when I saw a makeshift promissory note with my signature at the bottom of the page next to Pete’s. It was typewritten on what was supposed to be letterhead, but I quickly spotted a misspelling and a couple of typos. That didn’t stop me from feeling woozy again, this time as I
peered at the dollar figure.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” I gasped.

  “You do remember. Good! That’s ten grand, plus penalties and interest. I should tag on the time and money I’ve spent tracking you down, too. By the time the loan came due, and I found out Pete was six feet under, you were long gone. I figured out where you’d gone and tried to pay you a visit at your apartment, but by then you’d left again! You’re a sly one. Fast on your feet, too. I admire that in a woman, which is why I’m going to treat my expenses as part of the cost of doing business.”

  As he said that, he leered. Then he stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it. Something in the way he struck the match suddenly flipped a switch in my mind, and I remembered where I’d seen him before. He’d been standing in front of the building where Pete worked, chatting, and not in a casual way. When I’d pulled up to the curb to pick up Pete, I only caught a few words as they said goodbye. When Pete got into the car, I’d groused because he smelled like cigarette smoke.

  “I don’t get to tell my clients to quit smoking,” he’d said in a casually, irritated fashion. Pete’s tone and his reference to the man as a client had kept me from asking more questions. I hadn’t seen the man’s face, but his hulking form and mannerisms were enough to trigger the vague sense that I’d seen him somewhere before. The sick, uneasy feeling I get when I’m hit with some new revelation about Pete lying to me put me into a fog. The next words out of the man’s mouth cleared it away.

  “Let’s make it twenty thou, okay? I’ll tear up the promissory note, and we’ll call it even.” I wished that I’d snatched that paper away from him before he’d folded it and stuffed it into his shirt pocket behind his pack of cigarettes. I still held Domino’s leash in one hand and my kubotan in the other.

  “I can tell you right now that you’ve wasted your time. That’s not my signature. I’m afraid Peter Webster deceived us both. If you want to take me to court, go ahead, but I’m not giving you any money.” My heart was pounding in my throat, but I got the words out. He went from shocked to furious in seconds.