Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 03 (2 page)

He considered bargaining. If Wendy wanted him to help Cynthia, he could propose that she go with him to San Diego and stay at the bayside cottage with his daughter, Elizabeth. Except that before they moved up this way and ever since, on their few trips off the mountain, anyplace but here she couldn’t lose the haunted expression, the flicking eyes, the tension that made her spook like a shell-shocked veteran. As though on the flatland demons surrounded her, but up here in the place she used to call heaven, angels gathered around.

He gave Wendy and Claire five San Diego phone numbers: the lawyer’s, Leo’s, Elizabeth’s, and home and work numbers for Rusty Thrapp, his old pal, a captain with the San Diego police. He promised to stop and phone every few hours on the drive. The second she wanted him, he’d turn the Chevy into a jet and flash back up the mountain. No matter what, he promised to drive home Monday night. He’d give Cynthia forty-eight hours, tops.

Chapter Two

It might’ve been the wind that startled Wendy awake, a racket like somebody standing in the meadow tossing up armfuls of birch leaves. She wrestled her legs out of the sheets, hoisted her body around, and stood up. Before tiptoeing to the window, she bent to tuck covers around Claire.

A pale light radiated from a place between two of the thickest junipers, beyond the woodshed at the edge of the property line. Harry’s guard dogs must’ve seen it, the way they snarled and the posts creaked as they tugged on their chains. The light was like mornings when the sun topped Mount Rose: beams refracting off the slopes, tinted pale green by the forest. Only it wasn’t morning, and the light only fell that one place, an oval shape about the size of a doorway. Maybe it was a flashlight beam from somebody walking along the road peering into the woods. Wendy gave up the breath she’d been holding and gulped a deeper one, waiting for the light to move on.

It stayed put. Didn’t even quiver. She folded her arms across her belly, rubbed them up and down.

Maybe it was a fallen star. A little piece of a star, egg-sized, could make that large a glow, she supposed. She wanted to ask Claire to tell her all about meteors, but Claire was sleeping so pretty with hair wrapped around her neck and her lips puckered like a whistler.

“Oh!” Wendy gasped and slapped a hand over her mouth to silence it.

She’d gasped from remembering the other time, a few years ago, when the same light appeared but she hadn’t paid it much attention because those days most everything spooked her. Wind. Loud voices. Songs with violins. Ladies in tight necklaces. Spicy food. Stillness. Every surprise seemed rigged by the devil. Back then she couldn’t sleep or take walks alone or sit on the beach without Tom. Every quiet time dared the pictures of Hell to return.

She remembered that the light appeared just after supper, on the night she ran away, just hours before she swiped the rowboat from Claire’s beach and paddled out, thinking she could get to the middle, tumble into the darkest water, and drown. But the wind current pushed toward Sand Harbor and heaved against her rowing until it got her into the traffic lane where the excursion boat whacked her and the big fellow splashed in beside her and the other men rowed her to shore in a dinghy and Claire took her into the big house, gave her a cashmere sweater and baggy trousers, and got her all warm by the fire.

It’s not a meteor, Wendy thought. Because the center of the light hovered about four feet off the ground. Meteors were rocks, they didn’t float in the air. She turned to the chair by her bed, picked up her robe, slipped it on, stepped back to the window, and stood wondering why the most terrible nights could be the grandest ones too. The same night Clifford went to heaven, Tom appeared and carried her out of Hell. The night she decided to swipe the boat and drown, Claire arrived, to become her dearest friend. Except Tom. God did very peculiar things, she thought.

Wendy turned to her nightstand and squinted at the clock. 2:20
a.m.
She reached for the California map she’d studied earlier. If the drive took about fourteen hours, Tom ought to be around Fresno by now.

***

The last time Tom Hickey had seen Cynthia—maiden name Tucker, alias Moon—over seven years ago, she’d been nearly as pregnant as Wendy now. Two months short of the big day and still confined to the mental ward where he and Leo had deposited her a few weeks after she’d gotten raped. They’d driven her to Riverview Sanitarium the night they snatched her away from Charlie Schwartz’s driver, after tailing her from San Diego to the Tijuana butcher shop where she planned to rid herself and the world of the seed planted by her mother’s boyfriend, an Indian yogi and charlatan who’d been cashing in on his classic profile and his stunt of slinging blue fire out of his fingertips, and charming or duping the pants off a legion of females.

The last time Hickey and Cynthia had met, she’d screamed that for every horror this beast inside her would ever loose upon the world, Tom was to blame. He was the guy who wouldn’t let her get scraped, she howled. The timbre of her voice had felt like icewater jetted into his ears.

The baby arrived prematurely, got incubated. By court order, before Cynthia could snap its neck, the kid went to Laurel, Cynthia’s sister, whom she never called by name. Always “the Bitch.” The same sister who’d finally drugged the swami and tied off his nuts with rawhide.

Hickey would’ve fought against the adoption. The wisdom of handing over to Laurel a child produced by the man she’d castrated and the sister who considered her a fiend seemed equal to asking a cat to babysit your goldfish. But nobody summoned him to the hearing. Cynthia was in hysterics and Hickey’d lost touch. Other quandaries had arisen.

The kid was a boy, about four pounds at birth and sickly, with a misfiring heart. Leo had brought Hickey the news. September in the navy brig where Hickey lay recuperating from the wounds of the vile and precious year when he’d lost his wife to a Cuban gangster, gotten drafted, and been condemned to stand guard at the border. An MP. From there, Wendy’s brother Clifford lured him over the border and into the fray that won him the grand prize: Wendy.

A year later, Cynthia turned up again, singing for D. D. Drake’s orchestra at the Mission Beach Ballroom. Hickey would’ve gone to see her, stood in back where she couldn’t spot him. But she ran off to marry some flyboy. That was the last Hickey knew.

***

Through the San Joaquin Valley, he cussed the tankers and produce trucks that hogged the road. They stacked up like caravans, five or six deep. You needed a mile-long straightaway without a single northbound vehicle before you could pass. If not for the damned trucks, he would’ve gotten through LA before the traffic had jammed, stopped around Santa Ana and phoned Rusty Thrapp, caught him at home over breakfast, arranged for a meeting with Cynthia, and still made San Diego without losing much of the day.

Every time he passed a truck stop, he got an urge to phone Wendy but figured it’d be selfish, upsetting her sleep just to lighten his worries. Besides, waiting to call until he made San Diego would get him there faster. He eased his two-year-old navy blue Chevy coupe through the Bakersfield speed trap, then set the hand throttle at seventy-five, determined to climb the Grapevine before dawn when the truckers dozing along the highway would rouse and head out to jam the road. By first light he was halfway up the grade. He whizzed through the San Fernando Valley and Hollywood even before the churchgoers and folks on Sunday outings to the mountains or south coast beaches blocked his way. At half past eight he coasted around the bend in Laguna Beach where a strange old graybeard, long-haired and stooped as Father Time, stood waving joyously as though every motorist was the prodigal son he awaited to wrap in his arms.

Nearing San Diego, Hickey argued with himself about whether he’d visit Elizabeth. His only previous offspring, she was twenty-three years old, married to a drunken pretty-boy con named Stuart Crump, the black sheep of a bigshot New Jersey clan. The punk had started Elizabeth drinking, at first to keep him company, later on account of she was miserable living with the bum, who’d wheedled his folks into buying him a grocery in Ocean Beach. It was the last payoff before they disowned him. Now Elizabeth was stuck running the damned store. Stuart showed up once or twice a day to loot the cashbox, on his way to the track or a saloon.

If Hickey stopped to see her, no doubt Stuart would rile him. He might finally thrash the bum. Better to wait until Wendy and the baby got strong enough, then drive them down for a week on the bay. Maybe early July, after the foggy season and so they could be there for the fourth, when the bay dwellers filled the sky with Mexican pinwheels and rockets. On that trip, he’d ask Elizabeth if she wanted to scram, go live in Incline with her dad, her little brother, and Wendy, at least long enough to give Stuart a jolt, maybe hard enough so he’d ditch the booze and the ponies.

Approaching Garnet, the cross street into Pacific Beach where Elizabeth and the bum occupied Hickey’s cottage at the bayfront dead end of Fanuel Street, Hickey decided that for now he should leave his daughter be and attend to the most urgent business.

Sunday on the Coast Highway, the factories looked deserted. Only two Cessnas lifted off from Lindbergh Field while he passed. A single destroyer rested on the harbor, and a carrier loomed way down past the ferry crossing near the shipyards. Tuna clippers lined the docks where the warships used to load. From the looks of San Diego, you could’ve deluded yourself into thinking that people had melted their swords and cast them into plowshares.

The railroad-car front of the Pier Five Diner was tarnished, rusted along the floorline. The diner had a new cook, a Filipino. Bobo, the waitress said, had retired to a trailer in the Tehachapi mountains. The cabby at the counter next to Hickey remarked that this new guy slung elegant hash.

The hotcake batter, Hickey thought, could double as glue. The little he ate, he chewed and swallowed fast before it could cinch his teeth together. He washed it down with about two quarts of coffee, then hustled out to Market Street and up the block past a peep show arcade and a bar called the Blue Note where Negroes used to blow the town’s hottest jazz. The faded sign hung askew. A wino sat leaning against the wall in a sunny place, scratching.

This part of town looked like a casualty of the war, as if it had gotten bombed or else contaminated by some dread chemical. The brick walls had darkened, the sidewalks and streetlamp poles turned a darker gray. The only hookers outside the Hollywood Burlesque were in glossy photos in the showcase. In wartime, any hour, this block would’ve accommodated a battalion of sailors, GIs, and jarheads and a company of females. Everybody on the make. You couldn’t have decided who was the hunter and who the prey.

Hickey turned up Fifth and strode north across Broadway. Even the center of town looked old and lonesome. In Marston’s windows, the mannequins stood naked. Only two buses sat idling in Horton Plaza, quivering as if half the spark plugs were fouled. A few people slept on the benches or inside the buses with their heads against the windows.

At the northwest corner of Fifth and Broadway, Hickey climbed the stairs to the second floor, above the Owl Drugstore, to the office he and Leo Weiss had shared from 1936 until Hickey got drafted in January of 1943. Across the hall, where the chiropractor used to moonlight providing abortions, Best Wholesale Eyeglass Frames had located. A redhead in spiked heels stepped out, wearing sequined, horn-rimmed specs. Nose aloft, she sashayed toward the stairs.

hickey and weiss, investigations
was still lettered on the door glass. The same old key fit the lock. Inside, the place looked as if somebody had scrubbed and dusted a couple of times since the war. Hickey walked to the Broadway window, threw it open, and stepped to the wall beside the desk where his and Leo’s family histories hung. Sketches and watercolors Elizabeth had drawn before Madeline had stolen her off to New Jersey: a sailboat, ballerinas, a snowy forest scene. Photos of himself standing tall, arms around Madeline and Elizabeth. A shot of himself as a bandleader, baton in hand, circa 1927. As an LA cop somberly receiving a citation for valor. Studio photographs of Leo, Violet, and their two girls, Una and Magda. From 1943 until peacetime Magda had served as Wendy’s sister. She and her folks had given Wendy a home. Beside the photos hung a poster copy of Magda’s latest diploma: Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from Stanford.

Hickey stared a minute, then wagged his head and turned to the desk. He flopped into the rolling chair and grabbed the phone.

After two rings, Wendy said, “Hi, Tom.”

“What if it wasn’t me?”

“My face would get red, but only Claire would see.”

“You okay?”

“Clifford’s a naughty one. He kicks harder every day. Sometimes I think his foot’s going to come out my belly.”

“Babe, if the kid’s a girl, are you still going to call her Clifford?”

“Funny man.”

“You feeling good?”

“Sure am.”

“Claire’s sticking with you, right?”

“You bet. We were getting dressed warm for a walk up to the village. I’m going to buy some peanut butter and a button for my blue flannel shirt, and peas and a ham bone for soup tonight. Did you talk to the poor lady yet?”

“Nope. I just got in. Wanted to hear your voice and make sure you remember how crazy I love you.”

“Same as I love you.”

“Maybe I’ll get home tonight, babe. I’m not wasting a second.”

“Well, if you drive back tonight, there’s a big storm coming. Be extra careful.”

“Storm, huh?”

“Yep. Already the water’s choppy and the clouds over Homewood look like dragons carved out of stone.”

After he told her to watch her step and reluctantly said goodbye, in the desk’s left top drawer he found Leo’s phone list. Stashed under the crossword puzzle, the same place as ever. He dialed San Diego PD, detective division, asked for Thrapp. Waiting to get switched through, he filled and lit his briar.

“Tom who?”

“Tom the guy you promised to come mooch off and go fishing with but never did.”

“I got five kids, old man. Want me to elaborate?”

“Naw. Tell me this summer when you visit. We’ll make the kids stay outside, build ’em a wigwam or something. They’ll think they’re in heaven.”

“You got a date. Last couple weeks in July okay?”

“That’ll do fine,” Hickey said.

“So, how’s tricks out in the wilderness?”

“Swell. It looks as if spring and our kid’ll arrive about the same time. Look, Rusty, I’m down here in a rush. Wendy’s due in no time. You got my note about the wedding, right?”

“Hell, yes. I even sent a gift, a fancy spoon or something.”

“Sure, that’s right. Wendy hung it on the wall.”

“On the wall? Good thing I didn’t send an oil painting. You’d be lapping up soup with it. Speaking of soup, you busy for lunch?”

“Yeah. I’m down here in a rush.”

“About an arson case, is my guess. Your client’s a certain ex-songbird.”