Cyanide Wells (17 page)

“No, you’re not.”

“Dammit, Lindstrom, I hate being told how I am, how I feel!”

“Hey, I’m not the enemy.”

“Why did you have to turn up when the shit’s about to rain down all over me?”

“What kind of shit?”

“None of your business.”

“I’m making it my business.”

“Jesus, I hate you!”

“You don’t know me well enough to hate me.”

“Stop being reasonable!”

“One of us has to be.”

“Fuck you!”

“Carly, where’s all this anger coming from?”

From years back. From the day before yesterday. From five minutes ago.

Time’s up. Got to face it.

Got to tackle…

Matthew Lindstrom

Sunday, May 12, 2002

M
att followed Carly inside her house. In the days since he’d entered her office and found her sitting on her desk, she’d changed perceptibly: Her tan had faded to sallowness, and her facial skin pulled tight against the bone; her eyes were sunk in shadow.

A skull, he thought, topped by brittle, dead hair. He shook his head, pushed the image away, but he couldn’t rid himself of the notion that some essential part of her was dying.

Without a word she went to the living room window. Matt followed and looked over her shoulder. Gar Payne sat behind the wheel of a green Jaguar that blocked Carly’s truck, a cell phone to his ear.

“Get off my property, Payne!” she exclaimed.

As if he’d heard her, the mayor set down the phone, started the car, and drove off.

Carly expelled a long sigh. “Let’s go outside, huh? It’s stuffy in here. I need some air.”

She led him to the patio in front of the house. It was in full sun, so she raised the umbrella between two chaise longues and they sat side by side. Matt waited for her to speak and, when she didn’t, asked, “Are you ready to tell me about it?”

“I don’t think you want to know. It’s about Ard, and it’s bad.”

He didn’t think he wanted to know, either. Every revelation had been bad, only to be topped by something worse. But he sensed in Carly’s tone a need to tell it, as if she’d already made the decision to place it in his hands.

He said, “You may as well get on with it.”

She sighed again and rested her head against the chaise’s high cushion. “Payne is pushing hard now to get his hands on the Talbot property. This morning he wanted to sit down and talk about an offer with Ard and me. When I wouldn’t let him in the house, he made reference to some damaging information he and Rawson have about her.”

“He say what it was?”

“Didn’t have to. I know.”

He waited, letting her tell it in her own way.

“I told you that Ard took off for fifteen months and came back with Natalie.”

“Right. She went to San Francisco.”

“Well, I didn’t tell you why she left. I came home one night and found her in bed—our bed—with a man. Gar Payne. He’s one of those macho homophobes who can’t believe a woman can resist him. So he set out to prove it with Ard and then rub my nose in it. Apparently he hasn’t grasped the concept of bi-sexuality.”

Somehow it didn’t surprise him. Maybe nothing would have the capacity to surprise him again.

Carly went on: “After I chased Gar out of here, Ard and I fought. She said she felt smothered by a monogamous relationship. She said she needed to be with both men and women. She said I was the flip side of the coin from you, but that in essence we were both the same.”

“Meaning?”

“We were trying to control her, confine her to one way of life.”

“She never accused me of that.”

“No. Because she loved you and didn’t want to hurt you. With me she always seemed to want a confrontation.”

And because she’d avoided a confrontation, he’d never suspected…

Or had he, on some level?

There was the night, a month or so before Gwen began talking about divorce, when he’d come home early from a wedding shoot and called out to her from the front hall. She’d come running down the stairs in her bathrobe, expressing surprise at his return. She and her friend Bonnie Vaughan had been about to color her hair.

Except Gwen never colored her hair, and Bonnie came downstairs a few minutes later, clearly uncomfortable. The dyeing project was abandoned, and after a glass of wine, Bonnie went home.

Bonnie Vaughan, Gwen’s best friend. The woman who had ended his first life with her harsh words: “You better get out of Saugatuck before somebody murders
you!
”

In light of what he’d recently learned about Gwen, it all made sense: She and Bonnie had been lovers. Whether there had been other women before Bonnie didn’t matter. Gwen had loved her; Gwen had loved him. To a woman of the conservative upbringing she’d described to him, that was an untenable situation, even in the freewheeling eighties, so she’d run from both of them. And though Bonnie had initially supported Matt, eventually she’d turned her grief over losing Gwen to hatred for him—everybody’s favorite scapegoat.

“Matt?” Carly said.

He didn’t respond.

“Earth to Lindstrom.”

“Sorry. Just remembering. So Ardis ran away, and…?”

“Came back with Natalie. Came back with all her usual excuses for returning. Her love for me, her love for our home, which would be the ideal place to raise our child. She actually said that: ‘our’ child, as if we’d created her. But then she came to the main one, and it was a biggie.”

Carly’s voice had gone hard and flat.

I don’t want to know. I don’t.

“The man Ard was involved with in San Francisco was an abusive alcoholic and a drug user who did not want a child. One night, when they were both high and he was trying to persuade her to get an abortion, they fought. Physically. Ard grabbed a kitchen knife and stabbed him. And then she ran. After she had the baby, she came home to me.

“So that’s what Gar Payne is holding over my head. Somehow he found out that Ard stabbed Natalie’s father, and that I helped cover it up.”

Impossible.

Or was it?

No. Nothing his former wife had done was impossible anymore.

“You say she stabbed him,” he said, his own voice sounding foreign to him. “Fatally?”

“No. If that had been the case, there would’ve been something in the San Francisco papers. She monitored them for weeks.”

“Why wouldn’t the boyfriend have gone to the police?”

“Probably because he had a long arrest record, didn’t want to have anything to do with the law.”

“Okay, Ardis stabbed him and ran. Where?”

“Los Angeles.”

“And Natalie was born there?”

“Yes.”

“And when they came here, Natalie was how old?”

“Four months.”

“And Ardis never heard from the boyfriend—what’s his name?”

“Chase Lewis. No, she never heard from him again.”

“I’m surprised he didn’t appear to claim his share of the glory when the paper won the Pulitzer.”

Her lips twisted in a wry smile. “I don’t think drugged-out trombonists follow the news all that closely.”

“Still, he must’ve made some effort to find her.”

“Ard’s theory is that it was too much trouble for him. Of course, she said the same of me because I didn’t hire a private detective every time she disappeared.” Carly closed her eyes, shook her head. “God, when I look back on the past fourteen years, I wonder how I got into such a messy relationship, much less remained in it. I never considered myself the kind of woman who lets herself be victimized, but that’s exactly what happened. And now I’m really in a mess.”

“Well, in order to extricate yourself from said mess, first you need to find out how serious it is. Find out how much damage Gar Payne and his partner can inflict on you. While you stay here and keep working on leads to Ardis and Natalie’s whereabouts, I’m going to find out what happened to Chase Lewis.”

Within two hours he left for San Francisco. Highway 101 narrowed some four miles south of Talbot’s Mills, widened to a freeway at Santa Carla, then narrowed again to a two-lane arterial that meandered along the bank of the Eel River. The expanse of water was swollen from the spring runoff; across it Matt glimpsed small cabins among the tall, newly leafed trees. They made him think of his own cabin overlooking Bear Rock, and he felt the strong pull of home. He was tempted to drive straight through San Francisco, turn in the Jeep at the rental car company, and use his open ticket to Vancouver. He had his camera on the seat beside him, its bag containing the films of Gwen; they would vindicate him. Let Carly McGuire solve her own problems.

But he didn’t go on to the airport. Instead he took the Lombard Street exit from Doyle Drive and checked into the first motel with a vacancy sign. In the lobby he bought a city map, then went up to his room to study it.

He’d visited San Francisco once during his wandering years, but found it too dreary and expensive. In the few days he’d spent there, he’d learned it was difficult to navigate—full of one-way streets and natural obstacles that made it impossible to travel in a straight line from one point to another. After he’d refamiliarized himself with the map, he pulled the phone book from the nightstand and looked up Wild Parrots, the jazz club where Carly said Ardis had waitressed. It was still in existence, on Grant Avenue in the bohemian North Beach district. It was not the starting point he would have chosen—that was the now-closed library, with its files of old newspapers—but he decided to drive over there anyway.

Traffic in North Beach was heavy and parking spaces at a premium. Wild Parrots, shabby-looking in the early-evening light, didn’t have valet service. Many blocks away he found a lot with hourly rates so high it would have been more economical merely to trade them the Jeep; then he joined the crowds on the sidewalks. The district seemed seedier than he remembered it: Barkers outside the topless clubs were more aggressive; trash littered the gutters; homeless people reclined in doorways. It was a relief to turn uphill, onto the lower slope of Telegraph Hill, where Italian bakeries and delis and esoteric shops replaced the rough-and-tumble commercialism.

The club was small, with a raised bandstand at one end and round tables scattered across the floor. A bar ran along the righthand wall, the smoky glass mirror behind it etched with a flock of colorful parrots. He recalled reading in a guidebook during his first visit to the city that such birds, once escapees from their cages but now generations in the wild, frequented Telegraph Hill.

It was early, only a little after six. A couple sat at the far end of the bar in earnest discussion, but otherwise the club was deserted. Matt took a stool at the other end and waited until a bald man in a vest whose colors matched the parrots’ plumage emerged from a curtained doorway, carrying a case of Scotch. After setting it down, he approached Matt, slapping a paper cocktail napkin in front of him.

“What’ll it be?”

“Sierra Nevada.”

When the bartender set the bottle and glass in front of him and started to turn away, Matt added, “And some information.”

“About?”

“Chase Lewis.”

“What about him?”

“He used to play here.”

“Yeah.”

“You know him?”

“Was before my time. I know of him. They say he could’ve been one of the greats, but he didn’t get the breaks.”

“You know what happened to him?”

He shrugged. “What happens to any of them that’ve got the talent but don’t make it? They booze, they do drugs. They’re in rehab, they’re outta rehab. Some of them do time. Chase Lewis, I don’t know. It’s been years since anybody here has seen him.” He gestured at the wall beside the mirror. “That’s him, the middle picture.”

Matt squinted through the gloom but could make out very few details. “Would you have an address on file for him?”

The bartender’s eyes narrowed. “You a cop?”

“No. I’m trying to locate a woman he was once involved with. A family member.”

The suspicion in the man’s eyes turned to greed. “I don’t know. I’d have to check a long ways back.”

“It’s worth twenty bucks to me.”

“I shouldn’t leave the bar. Business’ll be picking up pretty quick.”

To Matt, it didn’t look as if business would ever pick up. “Thirty bucks. Final offer.”

After the bartender disappeared through the curtain, Matt got up and went to examine the photograph of Chase Lewis. It showed a slender, light-skinned black man with a small mustache and conservative Afro, smiling and cradling his trom-bone. A standard publicity still, and it told him nothing about the man who had fathered Ardis’s child.

The man whom Ardis had stabbed and run from.

He returned to the bar, sipped his beer, waited. The couple at the far end left, and no other patrons materialized. It was nearly ten minutes before the bartender returned and slid a piece of scratch paper across to him.

“Had to get it from one of the file boxes in the storage room,” he said. “Why’s it that the box you want is always on the bottom of the stack?”

Matt placed thirty dollars on the bar as he read the address. “Hugo Street. Where’s that?”

“Inner Sunset, a block from Golden Gate Park. Nowhere place. You’d think a guy like Chase Lewis would’ve lived in a more lively neighborhood.”

Yeah, but I bet it was plenty lively the night Ardis stabbed him.

The apartment house was on a corner: three stories of beige stucco with bay windows, and fire escapes scaling its walls. In the arched entryway was a bank of mailboxes with buzzers beneath them, Number five was labeled with the name C. Lewis. His good luck that the man hadn’t moved.

He pressed the buzzer twice but got no response. Then he rang number six, which by his reckoning would be on the same floor. No response either, but seven gave an immediate answering buzz. Matt pushed through the door into a dimly lighted lobby that smelled faintly of cat urine.

There was no elevator, so he started up the narrow staircase. A woman’s voice called down, “Hey, how much do I owe you?” Her face appeared over the railing, round and eager, but it quickly turned wary. “You’re not the pizza guy,” she said.

“Sorry. I rang you at random. I’m looking for Chase Lewis. He doesn’t answer his bell.”