Deadfall (Nameless Detective) (12 page)

The Cabrillo Market was a fifth of a mile south on Highway 1, or Cabrillo Highway as it was called through here. It was a cavernous place with an old-fashioned oiled, black-wood floor —a combination market, deli, butcher shop, and liquor store. The woman behind the grocery check-out counter was busy with a line of customers; I didn’t want to incur anybody’s anger by interrupting, so I wandered into the back to the customerless deli counter.

The guy behind the counter was about my age, lean and sinewy inside one of those white full-length aprons that look like bleached-out overalls. I asked him if Danny was working today and where I might find him.

“Danny Martinez, you mean?”

“If he’s the deliveryman here.”

“Well, he used to be. Not any more.”

“Oh? As of when?”

“Two weeks ago. I had to let him go.” There was a note of regret in his voice. “I’m Gene Fuller, I own this place.”

I introduced myself, letting him have one of my cards at the same time, and said I wanted to talk to Danny as part of a confidential investigation I was conducting. To forestall questions I didn’t tell him the investigation had to do with the Purcell family. But he wasn’t the nosy type, as it turned out.

When he was done looking at my card I asked him, “Would you mind telling me why you let Danny go?”

“Well … he’s had it rough the past month and I can sympathize with that. But I got a business to run here, I got my customers to think about. Not to mention insurance on the truck—last thing I need is to get sued. People can do that, I guess maybe you know —sue an employer for negligence if one of his employees has a drunk-driving accident.”

“Danny was drinking on the job?”

“Yeah. Damn shame, all the way around.”

“Had he done that kind of thing before?”

“No, no. Up until last month he was always sober, a good worker.”

“What happened to change that?”

“His wife left him,” Fuller said. “Well, his common-law wife, I guess you’d call her. Took their kid, five-year-old boy, cute little guy—took him and all their savings and went back to Mexico.”

“What was her reason?”

He shrugged. “They didn’t get along too well, always fighting. Just one of those things, I guess. But Danny’s crazy about the kid. That’s what tore him up, her taking the kid.”

“Couldn’t he do anything about getting the boy back?”

“He didn’t have any money for a lawyer. Besides, Eva was … well …”

“An illegal alien?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“My investigation has nothing to do with immigration matters, Mr. Fuller. I’m not interested in the resident status of Danny or his woman. And I have no intention of repeating anything you tell me.”

He nodded slowly, but he said, “I still don’t want to say. I’ll tell you this, though: Danny was born in the Salinas Valley. I know that for a fact.”

“How long did he work for you?”

“Three years, about.”

“You said he was a good worker. Honest, too?”

“Oh, yeah. Never any problem with that.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me where he lives,” I said. “It would save me some time.”

“I’ll tell you,” Fuller said, “but you won’t find him there.”

“Why not?”

“He’s gone. Lit out somewhere—Mexico, I figure.”

Damn! I said, “When?”

“I dunno. Sometime after I fired him. I got to worrying about him, the way he’d been drinking, I wanted to see how he was, if he had another job or maybe he needed a few bucks …” Fuller let his gaze slide away from mine; like a lot of compassionate men in the macho eighties, he was embarrassed to let his compassion show because he was afraid it would be mistaken for weakness. “Anyhow, I drove out to his place last Sunday. Most of his stuff is gone. Packed everything into his beat-up old Chevy truck and took it with him. Nothing much left but the furniture, cheap stuff from the Salvation Army.”

“And you think he went to Mexico?”

“To look for his son,” Fuller said, nodding. “Better that than moping around here, getting drunk and feeling sorry for himself.”

“Whereabouts in Mexico?”

“Search me. He never said where Eva was from.”

“Did he live here in Moss Beach?”

“Yep. Back in the hills a couple of miles.”

“Private house?”

“An old farm. Lived there ever since he came here.”

“Rented?”

Fuller nodded again. “Danny had a lease. Some fellow down in L.A. owns the property.”

“How do I get there?”

He gave me directions. Then he said, “This investigation of yours … Danny’s not in any trouble, is he?”

“I hope not, Mr. Fuller.”

“Me too. He’s a good man, believe me. It’s just he’s had a run of lousy luck, you know?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I know.”

I thanked him for talking to me—and then, because there didn’t seem to be any hurry now, and because disappointment and frustration sometimes make me hungry, I gave him an order for a poor-boy sandwich to go. I was eating too many sandwiches these days, which was one of the reasons my weight had crept up another few pounds. But how were you supposed to eat balanced, non-fattening meals when you were out on a job like this? And I was damned if I was going to eat any more yogurt and cottage cheese and carrot sticks; Kerry had had me on that kind of starvation diet once and it had been pure torture. Russian peasants and Basque sheepherders, she’d said, lived to be a hundred eating yogurt and soft cheese and vegetables. Well, so what? What was the use of living to the century mark if you weren’t enjoying life? I was willing to bet that when those ancient Russian peasants and Basque sheepherders finally did croak, not one of them had a smile on his face.

I bought a Bud Light to go with my sandwich and had my lunch sitting in the car. I did some ruminating while I ate. Despite what Fuller had told me about Danny Martinez’s honesty, it seemed pretty clear—at least to me—that Martinez was the man Tom Washburn had talked to on the phone. He was of Mexican descent and he spoke with a slight accent. He had been at the Purcell house the night of the party, at the approximate time of Kenneth’s death; he could easily enough have seen or heard something incriminating. And he had had a run of bad luck that might have made him bitter enough to throw up a life of honesty in favor of one big grab at a tarnished brass ring. The run of bad luck also explained the six-month hiatus between Kenneth’s death and the phone call to Leonard’s home: Martinez hadn’t needed money back then, had had a job and a family. As for why he hadn’t gone to the police with what he’d seen or heard—maybe it wasn’t all that incriminating or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to get involved.

And now he was gone, probably somewhere in Mexico by this time. If Leonard had paid him the missing two thousand dollars, as it seemed likely he had, that would explain the sudden departure.

But there were still questions. Had he actually seen or heard anything that night? It was conceivable he had pulled the whole thing out of his imagination, although that struck me as improbable for a simple-living deliveryman whose life was crumbling around him. If Kenneth
had
been murdered, and if Martinez
did
know who was responsible, had he given the name to Leonard? Had he confided it to anyone else—his wife, maybe, or a close friend? And exactly where was he now?

Well, maybe there was something at his farm, something he’d left behind, that would give me a clue. I finished the last of my sandwich and the last of the Bud Light, got the car started, drove back into the village proper, and hunted up Sunshine Valley Road.

It was a winding, two-lane country road that led back into the foothills to the east, past scattered homes—some new and well-maintained, some not so new and not so well maintained; past a couple of sprawling ranches that specialized in the breeding of quarter horses. After a couple of miles, the road made a sharp loop to the north and took me across a bridge that spanned a vegetation-choked creek. Just beyond the bridge a dirt road cut back to the east, up into another series of low hills thickly wooded with eucalyptus, madrone, and fir trees. Fuller had told me this would be Elm Street and a sign at the intersection confirmed it.

I turned up the dirt road, past the only visible house around and through more trees, none of which was an elm. Another of those irritating little mysteries: Why Elm Street if there weren’t any elms on it? Moss Beach seemed to be full of enigmas, large and small. Beyond the trees to the south, where the land fell away into a tiny valley, I could see different kinds of flowers blooming in cultivated fields. They would belong to one of several ranches down there that specialized in growing flowers for sale to various nursery suppliers in the area.

When I had gone a fifth of a mile, a green wooden mailbox appeared on the south side of the road. Directly opposite on the north side, a pair of ruts that passed for a lane angled up through the trees. Those ruts, Fuller had said, would take me to Danny Martinez’s farm. But I didn’t make the turn right away. Instead I stopped alongside the mailbox—Martinez’s, presumably, since it was the only one in the vicinity—and got out and poked inside. There were two pieces of mail, both addressed to Daniel Martinez, but neither was worth tampering with: a PG&E bill and a mail-order catalogue. I put them back into the box and got into the car again.

The ruts took me along the shoulder of a hill and then around and down into a good-sized clearing flanked on three sides by woods. The fourth side was a field that had been planted with vegetables and melons and that contained a couple of fruit trees. There were two buildings in the clearing—a sagging barn and an old farmhouse set back against the wooded slope to the east. A chicken coop stood adjacent to the barn but there weren’t any chickens in it.

I stopped the car in the middle of the dusty yard and hauled myself out of it again. It was quiet; the only sound was a jay scolding something in the fir trees behind the house. I walked over that way, up a slight incline to where a child’s battered wagon was lying upside down near the stairs. The stairs had a newish look and the white paint on them was fresher than on the rest of the house; some of the roofs shingles also looked new. Until the events of the past month, Martinez had evidently kept the place up pretty well.

At the top of the stairs was a shallow porch with a geriatric swing and a rickety table on it. There was a screen door into the house, and a regular door behind it that stood ajar; the screen door wobbled open when I tugged on it. I called out, “Hello, inside,” and waited a while, just to be safe. Nobody answered me, so finally I went on in.

Tiny front hall, with a kitchen opening on one side and a living room or parlor on the other. I turned into the parlor first. Salvation Army furniture, all right—sofa, two chairs, three tables, an old desk with papers strewn over its surface, some of which had fallen or been tossed on the worn carpet. One of the inner walls had been decorated with crayon marks, red and green, in a kid’s nonsense pattern that seemed more aesthetic to me than the Chagall painting in the Purcell house. A crucifix made out of dark wood and a painting of a Mexican village adorned the other inner wall. The two outer walls were mostly windows with cheap chintz curtains drawn back from the glass; the set to the north looked out on the open field and the set to the west gave you a view of the yard, of the barn—

I was looking that way, toward the barn, when the man came out of it. His sudden appearance brought me up short; he was moving in a furtive way, his face and eyes turned toward the house. Bulky guy, sandy hair done up in a frizz—familiar even at this distance.

Richie Dessault.

What the hell? I thought. I ran back into the hall and out onto the porch. He was no longer by the barn and no longer moving furtively; he had started to run up into the woods on the far slope, being more or less quiet about it. I thought about yelling at him, but it wouldn’t have done any good: he was building a good head of steam, dodging this way and that through the trees, and he wasn’t looking back. I pounded down the stairs and across the yard in front of the barn. But by the time I got to the foot of the slope he had vanished near the crest.

I didn’t see any point in chasing after him; he had thirty years on me and a lot more wind and stamina. And I couldn’t have caught him anyway because after a minute or so there was the distant sound of a car engine revving up, over on the other side of the hill. Another road, probably, invisible from here.

What the
hell?
I thought again. What was Dessault doing here? What was his connection with Danny Martinez? And why hadn’t he driven his car into the yard, as I had, instead of leaving it out of sight and skulking over here through the woods?

I swung around and went into the barn, to see if I could tell what he’d been doing in there. The interior was gloomy and nurtured a sour smell composed of dust, dry rot, manure, and other things I couldn’t define. On the packed-earth floor just inside the doors was a large stack of lumber, a couple of sawhorses, a scatter of carpentering tools; it looked as though Martinez had bought the lumber with the idea of making additional repairs on both the house and the barn. Along one wall was a workbench cluttered with all sorts of junk, from spools of wire to a radio in a cracked plastic case; propped against another wall were a hand plow and some gardening tools. At the rear were three horse stalls, two of them empty, the one in the far corner containing another, smaller stack of plywood sheets and two-by-fours. A ladder gave access to a hayloft; it looked sturdy, so I climbed it far enough for a look into the loft. The only things up there were a rusty pitchfork and some remnants of old hay.