Murder Takes a Break (7 page)

"I know Barnes." I said.
 
"I might even have to get to know him a little better."

Sally didn't actually rub her hands together, but she gave the impression of doing so.

"I'm sure he'll enjoy that," she said.

"Has anyone told you lately that you're an evil old woman?"

Sally laughed her dry laugh again.
 
"How I wish that were true.
 
I haven't had the opportunity to be evil in decades."

"Sure you haven't.
 
Now what else do you know that you haven't told me?"

Sally thought for a second.
 
"Well, you haven't asked me what she was wearing."

"Right.
 
So tell me, what was she wearing?"

"Nothing unusual.
 
Just shorts and some kind of T-shirt with an advertisement on it."

"What kind of advertisement?"

"I don't know.
 
Could that mean anything?"

Probably not, I thought.
 
Everyone these days seemed perfectly willing to pay twelve bucks for a T-shirt that advertised some product or clothing line.
 
Not only were the products and clothing lines making money, they were getting all kinds of free advertising.
 
It seemed like a good racket to me.

"I don't know about the advertisement," I said.
 
"But she wasn't wearing a bathing suit.
 
That might mean something."

Sally agreed.
 
"That's another reason the police believe the girl was put in the water after her death.
 
She obviously wasn't out for a swim."

"How long had she been in the water?"

Sally hardly ever drank more than two glasses of wine during one of my visits, though I was certain that she had more after I left.
 
Now she looked at the wine bottle and then back at me.
 
I can take a hint, so I got up and filled her glass.
 
My own glass, still half full, sat on the floor by my chair.

"You've still hardly touched your wine," Sally said as I poured.

"I'm not very thirsty," I said.
 
I went back to my chair.
 
"Did the cops have any idea how long the body had been in the water?
 
Any estimate of the time of death?"

"I've never been sure just how such things are determined."
 
She took a dainty sip of Mogen David.
 
"At any rate, they believe that she'd been in the water only a few hours.
 
Most likely she was put in only a short time before she was found, probably not long before dawn.
 
She must have died a few hours earlier."

"What about her family and friends?
 
Did anyone find out where she'd been, what she'd been doing, and who she'd been doing it with?"

"You really must think I know a lot more than I do, Truman, if you think I know all of that.
 
Even my sources aren't
that
good.
 
In fact, I don't know any of it.
 
I suppose that you'll have to talk to your police friend, Mr. Barnes, about it."

I could think of several other things I'd rather do.
 
Some of them weren't even especially pleasant things.
 
But they were better than going to see Barnes.

"Why should I talk to him?" I asked.
 
"I'm not working on that case.
 
I'm looking for a kid named Randall Kirbo."

"You don't find it intriguing that he disappeared at about the same time a young woman's body was found?"

"We don't know exactly when he disappeared.
 
And we certainly don't know that he had any connection with Kelly Davis."

She looked disappointed in me.
 
"And we don't know that no one has talked to the police about her death, do we?
 
But it seems very likely that no one has.
 
Two strange events during the same week, and no one will talk about either one of them.
 
I find that peculiar."

So did I, but I was still hoping there was no connection.

"Don't you?" Sally asked.

I knew very well what she meant, but I said, "Don't I what?"

"Don't you find it peculiar?"

"Yes," I said.
 
I sighed.
 
"Yes, I guess I do."

Somewhere inside my head I heard Dino's voice:
"It'll be different this time."

Sure it would.
 
I'd hardly gotten started, and already it seemed pretty likely that there was a dead body involved.

Goddamn that Dino, anyway.

"T
here's absolutely no connection between the disappearance of Randall Kirbo and the death of Kelly Davis," Gerald Barnes told me, so unconvincingly that I was immediately certain he thought there was.

We were sitting at his desk in the police station.
 
I'd taken the same parking spot I'd used earlier, knowing that I was pressing my luck but hoping that everyone was too busy watching over the money changing hands at the turkey-leg booths down on The Strand to give me a ticket.
 
I was at least lucky enough to have caught Barnes in the building.
 
He had too much seniority to pull guard duty.

"How do you know there's no connection?" I asked.

Barnes had thinning brown hair and wore glasses with heavy plastic frames, the kind you don't see very often these days.
 
Buddy Holly would have been proud.
 
He pushed his glasses up on his nose and looked at me.
 
He didn't answer my question.
 

"Bob Lattner asked me about you earlier," he said.
 
"You know what I told him?"

"That I was a expert detective who'd solved a couple of really tough cases for you?"

"That's part of your trouble, Smith.
 
You think too much of yourself.
 
You didn't solve those case.
 
I solved them.
 
You just hung around and got in the way."

If that was the way he wanted to look at it, I wasn't going to argue with him.
 
It wouldn't do any good, and I think we both knew better, anyway.
  
Even if he didn't, I certainly did.

"What's the other part of my trouble?" I asked.

"You're a smart-ass."

I was beginning to think that was a unanimous opinion among all my acquaintances.
 
That didn't mean they were right, of course.

"Thanks for sharing that with me," I said.
 
"Now, let's get back to what we were talking about, the non-existent connection between the disappearance of Randall Kirbo and the death of Kelly Davis."

"Someone might have hired you to look into the disappearance, Smith," Barnes told me, "but that doesn't give you the right to poke around in any other on-going investigations."

His glasses had slipped again.
 
I started to suggest that he go in and have them adjusted, but I decided he wouldn't appreciate the advice.
 
So I kept it to myself.

Instead, I said, "Let's just pretend for a second that while I'm trying to find out what happened to Kirbo, I happen to discover that he knew Kelly Davis.
 
What then?"

"Then you inform me.
 
I'll take it from there."

"You haven't taken it any great distance so far."

Barnes took off his glasses and set them on the desk.
 
His eyes suddenly looked smaller.
 
He pinched the bridge of his nose and leaned back in his chair.

"You're right about that," he said.

I knew then that he was weakening.
 
Or maybe he'd just been setting me up.
 
Maybe he'd been planning to tell me all along.

 
"Just tell me what you do know." I said.
 
"We can help each other on this.
 
We've done it before."

He picked up the glasses and slid them back on.
 
He looked around to see if anyone was listening to us, but no one was.
 
There was hardly anyone else there.

"What I'm about to tell you?" he said.

"What about it?"

"I didn't say it."

"Of course you didn't."

"All right.
 
We think there's a connection between Kirbo and Davis, all right.
 
Hell, we
know
there is.
 
We just can't get anywhere with it.
 
We're getting stonewalled all around."

"But you're going to tell me what the connection is."

"Yes.
 
Not that I think it'll do you any good."

"You never can tell," I said.

"That's right.
 
You might accidentally stumble onto something.
 
Otherwise I'd be keeping my mouth shut."

"You're not, though.
 
So what's the connection?"

"We think that Randall Kirbo did know Kelly Davis, but we can't prove it.
 
We think they met at a party at a beach house, but we're not sure who else was there.
 
We've put a little pressure on a few of the ones we think might know something, but we can't get a thing out of them."

"Why not?"

"The beach house is owned by Big Al Pugh," he said as if that explained it all.

Maybe it did.
 
Big Al was into a little of everything — restaurants, beach property, illegal gambling, prostitution, and drugs — or so it was said.
 
No one had ever proved anything about the illegal stuff, mainly because people who seemed likely to reveal any of Big Al's secrets had a way of turning up missing.
 
No one wanted to mess with Big Al.
 
Not even the police.
 
Certainly not me.

Goddamn that Dino.

"I'm surprised you found anyone who even
might
know something," I said.

"So am I," Barnes admitted.
 
"But we don't have much.
 
We found a couple of kids who didn't know any better, and they said they thought that maybe they'd seen Kirbo and Davis at the party, but they couldn't say whether they were together or not.
 
And the next time we talked to them, they didn't even remember that much."

"Big Al had a little talk with them," I suggested.

"I doubt it.
 
Big Al doesn't talk to anybody, not that way, not these days.
 
I figure it was Henry J."

I wasn't sure what the exact relationship between Henry J. and Big Al was.
 
They might have been partners, or Henry J. might have been just an employee.
 
If anything, Henry J. was bigger and meaner than Al.
 
If that was possible.

"None of that was in the police report Randall Kirbo's father had."

Barnes didn't say anything.
 
He tilted his head back and looked at the ceiling.
 
Well, the report had been only a copy, not anything official.

"What can you give me?" I asked.

He thought about that for a while, then opened a desk drawer and pulled out a folder a lot like the one Tack Kirbo had given me.

"I'm going to take a walk outside," he said.
 
"Get a little fresh air.
 
If you copy anything out of that report, I won't know about it."

That was fine with me.
 
He had a pencil and paper lying on his otherwise clean desk, and I started writing almost before he had taken ten steps.
 
I got the names of the two people who'd said they might have seen Kirbo and Davis at the party and the phone number and address of Davis' parents, who lived in San Antonio.

It wasn't much, and Barnes was back as soon as I finished.
 
He took the folder and slid it back into the desk drawer.

"You knew I was coming," I said, folding the paper I'd written on and slipping it in the back pocket of my jeans.
 
"You had the folder ready."

"I thought you might drop by."

"I wasn't invited."

"I told Lattner not to give anything away.
 
I wanted to see if you'd put it together.
 
You did it a lot faster than I thought you would.
 
I wasn't expecting you for a couple of days."

"People like you and Lattner always tend to underrate us expert detectives."

"Maybe.
 
I don't think so."