Fugitive Nights (21 page)

Sometimes he'd been lucky enough to spot some of the endangered bighorn sheep, most of them wearing transmitter collars attached by state conservationists who were trying to guarantee the sheep's comeback. They were majestic beasts, the rams in particular, with their curled, furrowed horns and snowy haunches.

The elusive cougar was probably gone forever except for an occasional cat who'd roamed hundreds of miles from home. Years ago he'd seen one, hiding under the branches of a smoke tree.

He knew there were more than three hundred species of birds in the desert that went unnoticed by the golfing and tennis hordes in the valley below. Jack Graves was glad that the Agua Caliente band of Cahuilla Indians were still the proprietors of these canyons as they'd been for centuries. There would be no resorts in this 32,000-acre reservation.

He looked through the binoculars again and was positive that man and dog were sound asleep now, alone out there by the canyon oasis, shielded from sun and wind by rock and palm, just as the Indians had been shielded since ancient times. He felt very sleepy too. Jack Graves put his floppy hat over his face and laid his head on his own day-pack.

He wasn't close enough to the stream to hear trickling water, but the birds were trilling, and the wind whistled softly. The whine of bees sounded like a plane in the distance. Beyond that was silence, desert silence.

Five minutes later, he was jerked upright by a dream. He was trembling, and droplets of sweat ran from under his hat. He knew that the recurring dream must've started, but it shouldn't come in the daytime! His mind had a new trick: Stop the dream before it gains momentum!

There he was in the darkness, outside the modest little house, the wrong house. He'd been detailed to watch the back door …

*   *   *

Nelson Hareem wasn't fooling around anymore. This was his last day with Lynn Cutter so he was going to go for it. He'd even dressed better. He wore a shirt with a collar and long sleeves. And he wore Levi Dockers instead of jeans. But he still wore his red snakeskin cowboy boots.

The sun was high and the desert was warming fast, but Lynn in a short-sleeved knit shirt was chilled from riding in the topless Jeep Wrangler. Hanging on to the roll bar didn't help his sick head. Nelson's jerky driving made him nauseous. Lynn rubbed his arms with both hands trying to help circulation.

Nelson noticed and said, “You still cold, Lynn?”

“Not at all,” Lynn said. “Of course I don't expect to find my shriveled balls till April or May, but what the hell, they're useless anyhow.”

“How many motels we got left?” Nelson wanted to know, punching his cassette until he got “Miles Across the Bedroom.”

Hearing those lyrics, Lynn said, “Please, Nelson, that's the story a my life. Haven't you got something old and appropriate? How about ‘The Wayward Wind' by Gogi Grant, since you insist on keeping your top down in hurricanes, with snakes and raccoons soaring across the desert like turkey buzzards.”

“How many motels, Lynn?”

“Four. We've visited every motel in Palm Springs and Desert Hot Springs that begins with A, B or C. Four more and that's it. I've earned my freedom. Lord a'mighty, free at last!”

“I'm coming back tomorrow alone,” Nelson said. “I'm personally gonna check every car rental in this part a the valley. I don't care how long it takes me.”

“I believe you,” Lynn said, as Nelson made a sharp turn, tossing Lynn against the door of the Wrangler. Without a seat belt he'd have been gone in the first quarter mile. “You march to a different drummer, and a restraining order couldn't stop the beat in your little head.”

“I can't help it,” Nelson said. “My sergeant says he thinks I'm full a naked aggression.”

“Can't we put clothes on your aggression and go home?”

“Only four more motels, Lynn,” Nelson reminded him. “There's the next one: The Cactus View.”

This one was on the mountain side of Highway 111, in the old residential section of Cathedral City, zoned for single-family residences, apartment buildings and motels. In past years it had been very cheap to live in this part of town, the high-density portion of the working-class community that was sandwiched between big-bucks resorts in Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage. Lately, with the population of the Coachella Valley booming, some very posh homes were sprouting up in Cat City, in the cove near the mountains.

The Cactus View Motel was ripe for redevelopment. It was a one-story, room-and-a-bath accommodation, tucked behind the commercial buildings on the highway. Old bougainvillea had overgrown all of the walls on the sunny side, and was creeping across the cracked and shattered Spanish tile roof. The whitewashed walls on the shady side were blistered, and streaks of rust from the rain gutters stained the stucco.

“This looks like the kinda place a terrorist'd hide,” Nelson observed, as Lynn yawned and looked at his watch. It was 2:25
P.M.
Just a few more hours.

The manager's office was wide open. Like rattlesnakes, the desert flies laid low during the winter. A pale, watery-eyed guy, bonier than Jack Graves, sat behind a formica counter on a low stool doing a crossword from
The Desert Sun.
He had a sparse tattered fluff of hair like a windblown dandelion. His arms were utterly hairless, and Nelson was astonished to see that he had hardly any eyelashes and eyebrows on one side!

Lynn recognized the motel manager immediately.

“Carlton!” Lynn Cutter cried. “It's you!”

“It's me,” Carlton the Confessor agreed. “Yeah, it's me it's me.”

He dropped the crossword and slunk from behind the counter like a bag-of-bones coyote. If he'd had a tail it would've been tucked.

“It's me it's me,” he repeated. “Ya got me again.”

Lynn turned to Nelson and said, “This is Carlton. Everybody knows Carlton.”

“Yeah I done it,” Carlton the Confessor said. “I done it. I'm ready to go back. I'm ready to go. They never shoulda let me out. I warned em I warned em.”

Nelson Hareem stared slack-jawed as Carlton the Confessor began nervously and compulsively pulling at his right eyebrow and eyelashes, where there weren't any left!

“I was tryin to go straight, that's why I took this job, but it ain't no use, is it?”

“Wait a minute, Carlton,” Lynn Cutter said. “We just wanna ask a few questions.”

“You a captain, sergeant, lieutenant, what? I forget.”

“Detective,” Lynn said.

“Robbery, burglary, auto theft, what?”

“I used to work CAPS. Crimes against persons.”

“What department, I forget.”

“Palm Springs,” Lynn said.

“Oh yeah, I can clear a lotta old DR's for ya. Oh yeah, I can,” said Carlton the Confessor. “Strong-arms, I did lotsa strong-arms nobody knows about.”

Nelson Hareem could see that Carlton the Confessor couldn't strong-arm a sand flea, so he thought he better let Lynn handle this guy.

“We'll talk about clearing up our DR's later, Carlton,” Lynn said. “First I wanna know if you checked in a guy on Tuesday. A husky dark guy, maybe Mexican or maybe even an Arab. Bald, maybe wore a baseball cap. Coulda carried a red bag.”

“What'd he do, burglaries? I done burglaries too. I can tell ya about lotsa burglaries. You show me the reports, gimme the addresses, I'll tell ya if I done em. Prob'ly I done em.”

“Wait a minute, Carlton, you can confess later,” Lynn said. “First, the dark bald guy. Did you see him?”

“Ain't seen him,” Carlton the Confessor said. “Bald? Naw, I checked in six people during the last few days. Four women, two men. Everybody had hair and was very well groomed. No nubs under their arms. I think all a them was gay. I ain't gay. God created Adam 'n Eve, not Adam 'n Steve.”

“Scratch this one from your list,” Lynn said to Nelson, who sighed and took out page 572 of the motel listings from the pocket of his jeans. Nelson spread the page on the formica counter, but it was face down. He'd left his ballpoint pen in the Jeep so he couldn't draw a line through the listing.

“What else can I tell ya?” Carlton the Confessor wanted to know. “Auto thefts? I done em. Hundreds.”

“Yeah, well, I'll come back when I got a whole burglary series I'd like to clear up,” Lynn said. “You got a nice job here.”

“Yeah I know I know. Lucky to have it, recession and all,” Carlton the Confessor said. Then he looked down at page 571 of the Palm Springs yellow pages, and said, “What's this? Ya checking out modeling agencies or money order services or monuments and memorials? I done em all. Burglaries were they?”

“Sure,” Lynn said. “I hope the monuments and memorials weren't too heavy to carry.”

When they were leaving, Carlton the Confessor yelled, “Don't forget to come back when ya need me!” Then he found one eyelash left and plucked it out.

After they were back in the Wrangler heading for the last three motels, Lynn said, “In the old days of questionable statistics I've been told that detectives'd come from miles around to clear up their stats. Carlton'd confess to anything for a ride in a police car and some Famous Amos cookies. Mighta been all that sugar wrecked his brain, I dunno.”

T
he penultimate motel on their list was several cuts above The Cactus View Motel. It was just off Date Palm Drive, in a more recently developed part of Cathedral City. On the way there, Nelson Hareem finally found a country song with which Lynn Cutter could identify. It was Patty Loveless singing “The Night's Too Long.”

Nelson said to him, “This one's about a waitress in Beaumont, Lynn.”

“I used to date a waitress from Beaumont!” Lynn said. “I've dated a waitress from every town around here, come to think of it. That might be what killed my sex life, all that greasy food and caffeine.”

Nelson was disappointed when he saw the Blue Moon Motel. It had a sign done in pencil-thin pink neon, and the building was peach, pseudo Southwest, with faux-adobe walls, a flat roof, and even two imported saguaro cactus sentinels on each side of the driveway. It was too trendy for a terrorist, Nelson thought.

This time there was a pair of young men at reception. One of them, a big guy with a small head and a fifties flattop, looked at Lynn Cutter's I.D. and said, “How can I help?”

And before Lynn had completed two sentences, the young guy said, “I think that man
was
here. I remember the hat and mustache and the red flight bag. He was in room D, Tuesday night.

“What's his name?” Nelson blurted, and Lynn said, “Easy, Nelson.”

The clerk looked through his register. “Mister Ibañez, Francisco V. Residence address is … let's see … Las Palmas … de … Gran Canaria, wherever that is.”

“I know
exactly
where that is!” Nelson said to Lynn. “I been studying the atlas! The Canary Islands! A Spanish possession across from the Sahara!”

Nelson was so excited he barely listened when Lynn wrote down the scanty register information, complaining to the young man that the guest had failed to fill in the automobile data.

The young guy apologized saying, “The man was in a big hurry and said he'd fill it in later. We always try to get that information.”

“Yeah, yeah, okay,” Lynn said. “Why'd he only stay one night? Any problem?”

“
That
I can help you with. Said he was attending some kind of seminar or conference. Only staying one night with us because there was a problem with the hotel he'd booked. His room wasn't available till Wednesday.”

“Which hotel?”

“He didn't say.”

Lynn said, “There's dozens a seminars and conventions this time a year. Did he look like a businessman, a professional man? What?”

“Tell the truth, I didn't pay much attention. The phone was ringing like mad and I was trying to train my assistant. I just remember the mustache and the red bag. He blew his horn for service when he first drove up, like he thought we did curb service. Never took off his hat so I don't know if he was bald or not.”

“And it was a baseball cap, right?”

The young man paused, thought about it, and said, “I can't say for sure if it was a baseball cap.”

“Was he pretty scruffy?” Lynn asked. “Like he coulda slept in a car all night? Something like that?”

“Yeah, he was grungy all right. Said he'd been on an airplane eighteen hours.”

“Did he speak good English?”

“Real good.”

“Could his accent a been, like an Arab accent instead a Spanish?” Nelson asked.

“Gosh, I don't know,” the young man said. “He spoke real good though, with a slight accent.”

“Did he have any other bags, like maybe in the car?”

“I don't know. Becky took him a feather pillow later. She might know.”

“Where can I find Becky?”