Slow Kill (7 page)

Kerney had been in-country as a lieutenant at about the same time as George Spalding, serving as a member of the last U.S. Army combat unit in Nam, the Second Battalion, Twenty-first Infantry.

“You’ve got DOD verification of George Spalding’s death?” he asked.

“Up the wazoo,” Chase replied.

“So why is Alice Spalding convinced her son is still alive?”

“Long before the Spaldings ever moved to Santa Barbara, she saw a wire service photograph in a newspaper of some people with injuries being treated at a traffic pile-up on the interstate. One of the victims in the photo looked like her son, and I grant you he did. But a check with the California Highway Patrol and the EMT who treated the man confirmed that it wasn’t George Spalding. As I understand it, that started the whole thing.”

“How did Clifford Spalding handle it?” Kerney asked.

“It was his cross to bear,” Chase said. “He asked me to contact him every time Alice called to report another sighting. She sees George everywhere, on television, in the newspapers, walking down the street, at shopping malls in Timbuktu. Most of the time the subject doesn’t even resemble George. I’ve been dealing with her obsession about her son for the past fifteen years.”

Kerney nodded sympathetically. “Why is she so obsessed?”

Chase shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“How do you handle her?” Kerney asked.

“In the past, she used to call me herself. But now it’s mostly her personal assistant who phones in to report a new sighting. I take down the information, tell her we’ll look into it, and then let Mr. Spalding know about it. He’d take it from there. He had a way of calming her down, at least for a while. Usually it would be a month, maybe two, before I heard from her or her assistant again.”

“Didn’t Spalding at one time hire a private investigator at Alice’s urging?” Kerney asked.

“Yeah, Lou Ferry,” Chase said. “He retired from the department about twenty years ago. I heard he got sick and had to shut down his business. Spalding used Ferry once or twice right after he moved here to placate Alice when she felt like we weren’t doing enough.”

“What about Debbie Calderwood?”

Chase held out his hands in a gesture of supplication. “Oh yeah, the girlfriend from Albuquerque. Wouldn’t it be great if she just dropped out of the sky into our laps? According to an Albuquerque PD report from back in the early seventies, she quit college and left town soon after George died. Nobody knows where she went or where she is. She’s just another person out there somewhere in the great unknown who doesn’t want to be found.”

“Not missing?”

“Who knows?” Chase replied. “She was never entered into the national missing persons data bank. For the life of me, I don’t see how any of this has any bearing on Spalding’s death or your situation.”

“When you don’t have a suspect, you focus on the victim,” Kerney said.

“That would be a smart thing to do,” Chase said, “especially if you did kill Spalding. It makes everybody think you’re just trying to clear yourself, protect your good name, and keep your job as Santa Fe police chief.”

“You have a cunning mind, Captain.”

Chase stretched, put his hands behind his head, and gave Kerney a friendly smile. “Tell me about this Dean guy you were talking about on the phone.”

“I already have,” Kerney said.

“Yeah, but it sounded like you got some fresh information.”

“It hasn’t been confirmed yet.”

“Is Dean someone you know?” Chase asked. “A friend perhaps?”

“I don’t know him at all,” Kerney said.

“Am I right to assume the phone call you got came from someone in your department who is keeping you advised?”

“My department is cooperating with Sergeant Lowrey’s investigation.”

“And keeping you advised,” Chase said.

Kerney decided it was time to end the game. “Of course. But I’m sure you know from your little talk with Sergeant Lowrey that she has asked the New Mexico State Police to verify any information my department passes on. It would seem she doesn’t trust my people.”

“Given the circumstances, wouldn’t you be cautious and skeptical?”

Kerney stayed silent.

“Tell me about this Santa Fe neighbor of Mrs. Spalding’s.”

“For now, there’s nothing to tell.”

“Holding out on Lowrey isn’t going to help your cause,” Chase said.

“I’m holding out on you, not Lowrey,” Kerney said, getting to his feet. “I see no reason to use you as an intermediary in this matter. It’s not your case or your jurisdiction. You know where I’m staying for the night. I’m sure Sergeant Lowrey will want to know how to contact me. Are we done here?”

Chase’s lips got tight and thin again. “Yeah, we’re done.”

“Good night, Captain.”

“See you around, Chief,” Chase replied.

In the rental car, Kerney drove in the opposite direction from the motel until he found a gas station, where he looked up Louis Ferry in a phone book and got an address.

He figured that Lowrey, by now fully briefed by Captain Chase, was on the road to Santa Barbara, prepared to ream him out once she arrived for meddling in her case. He decided it would be best not to meet with her until Ramona Pino and Russell Thorpe finished up with Nina Deacon and hopefully had enough information to put the spotlight on Kim Dean as a possible murder suspect or accomplice-if indeed a homicide had been committed.

He’d never completely discounted the possibility of murder, or disagreed when Lowrey took the investigation to the next level to see if it proved out. That wasn’t the issue. Kerney simply didn’t like the idea of Lowrey polishing her shield by tarnishing his reputation.

With the station attendant’s directions to Ferry’s address in mind, Kerney started off, aware that he might be on a wild-goose chase. Still, the story of Alice Spalding’s search for a son who’d been dead for thirty years continued to intrigue him. He wanted to learn more about it.

Lou Ferry lived in a trailer park on Punta Gorda Street, a dead-end lane cut off by the freeway. The rumble of traffic rose and fell as the cars and trucks rolled by.

Ferry’s residence was the first space in two long rows of small and medium-size camper-trailers that stretched down a paved drive filled with parked jalopies and older-model cars. The only modular home along the lane, it was enclosed by a five-foot-high wooden fence and gate.

Kerney knocked at the front door and a sour-looking, middle-aged Mexican woman greeted him.

“I’m looking for Lou Ferry,” he said.

“He don’t know you,” the woman replied.

“I’m a police officer,” Kerney said, displaying his shield.

“Just a minute,” the woman replied, closing the door.

Soon she was back, gesturing for Kerney to enter. “He’s in the bedroom,” she said, pointing to a passageway before walking away.

The sound of clattering dishes from the kitchen followed Kerney down the short hallway. In the back room, he found Ferry sitting up in bed watching television.

“Mr. Ferry?”

“Yeah,” Ferry said in a wheezy voice as he turned off the TV, “and don’t make any wisecracks about my name. I’ve heard them all.”

The nightstand held an array of prescription bottles and an empty drinking glass.

“My wife, who wants me to hurry up and die so she can sell the trailer park and move back to Mexico, says you’re a cop.”

“That’s right.”

Ferry made a gimme motion with his hand. “Let’s see your shield.”

Kerney handed him the badge case and watched Ferry reach for his reading glasses. He was a short man who’d lost weight and had the frail look that comes with an end-stage illness.

“Santa Fe Police Chief,” Ferry said, handing back the badge case with a slight smirk. “Impressive. What you want from me?”

“I hear you retired from the job,” Kerney said.

“After thirty-six years. I started when I was twenty-one. I’ve been on a pension for over twenty. You do the math.”

“You were a PI for a time.”

“Eighteen years, until I got sick.” Ferry dropped his reading glasses on his lap and coughed into his fist. “Get on with what you came here for. I could die before you finish asking your questions.”

“You did some private work for Clifford Spalding. I’d like to know about it.”

Ferry shook his head to ward off the inquiry. “That’s it. End of questions. Get out.”

“He’s dead,” Kerney said.

Ferry absorbed the information and relaxed slightly. “How did it happen?”

“We’re still looking into it.”

Ferry smiled sardonically. “Crazy Alice Spalding didn’t kill him, did she?”

“Why do you say that?” Kerney asked.

“For giving her the runaround all these years,” Ferry said as he adjusted the pillow behind his head.

“Explain that to me.”

Ferry propped himself up against the headboard. “Since he’s dead, I guess I finally can tell somebody. Spalding came to see me soon after he moved to Santa Barbara. Walked in the door of my office one day with a legal document he’d had drawn up. Said he would hire me to do some work for him if I agreed to do exactly what he wanted and sign a binding nondisclosure agreement. I looked it over. It basically said I couldn’t reveal any information I gathered about George Spalding or Debbie Calderwood to anyone but him, and that I’d forfeit any sums paid to me if I did.”

“And?”

Ferry took a deep breath that rattled in his chest. “I told him I needed a hell of a lot more information before I’d even consider taking on the case like that. That’s when he showed me the official Army documents of his son’s death in Vietnam and explained the situation with his wife. He said he’d tried everything to help her accept the fact that George was gone, and since that hadn’t worked he’d been forced to live with an obsessive wife who was driving him crazy and hounding cops all over the West to find her lost son. He gave me copies of missing person reports Alice had submitted to a half dozen police departments in three or four different states.”

Kerney scooted a straight-back chair to the foot of the bed and sat. “So you took the case.”

“After he put ten one-hundred-dollar bills in my hand as an advance and told me what he wanted me to do.”

“Which was?”

Ferry chuckled. “Nothing. Make stuff up. The deal was that he’d call and ask me to follow up on one of Alice’s crazy leads. Then I’d write up a report about my phony investigation into it, wait a week or two, and mail it to him. He paid me five hundred dollars a pop.”

“Easy money,” Kerney said. “How many reports did you concoct for him?”

“About twenty, twenty-five, over the next couple of years.”

“What made the cash cow dry up?”

Ferry laughed. “I blew it. When I started running out of creative ways to lie, I decided to do some actual investigating to freshen up my reports.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Alice had tracked down an old college friend of Debbie Calderwood living in Portland, who said she’d gotten a card from her about a year after Calderwood disappeared. So, I called the friend, who told me Calderwood had written to her from Taos, New Mexico, where she was living on a commune at the time. Remember, that was back in the early seventies when all that flower power and antiwar stuff hadn’t completely faded away yet.”

“What else did the note say?” Kerney asked.

“That she was moving with an unnamed boyfriend to a small town in southern Colorado. But she’d didn’t say exactly where. So, I got out the atlas and phone book and called a bunch of places trying to locate her. When that didn’t work, I phoned some town marshals, sheriffs, and police departments, and still came up empty.”

“Did you tell Spalding that you’d actually done some real work on the case?” Kerney asked.

“Nope. But I put everything I’d learned in my report. That’s when he fired me. End of story.” Ferry coughed hard into his hand again. “It got me to thinking that maybe Spalding was up to maybe something more than trying to appease his unbalanced wife.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t know,” Ferry said breathlessly, waving the question away as if it was an angry hornet buzzing around his head.

“Did you check out Spalding before you spent the retainer he gave you?” Kerney asked, switching gears.

“Smart question.” Ferry smiled slyly and held up a trembling index finger. “Rule number one for a PI, always know who you’re working for. I made some calls, but I can’t remember most of what I learned.”

“What stands out?”

“He’d made a lot of money in the hotel business in a relatively short period of time. He went from owning a mom-and-pop motel in Albuquerque to building a resort hotel outside of Tucson in something under five years. That’s what got him started playing with the big money boys.”

Ferry’s head sank against the pillow and his eyes closed. The fatigue in his face ran deep into the wrinkles of his cheeks and cut into the furrows of his forehead. A vein throbbed in his skinny neck.

“Did you keep copies of your reports?” Kerney asked.

“No copies,” Ferry said in a weak voice. “That was part of the deal.”

“You need to sleep,” Kerney said as he stood.

Ferry’s eyes fluttered open and he winced in pain. “Yeah, maybe I’ll get lucky this time and won’t wake up.”

Kerney left the bedroom quietly. In a dining area off the front room, Ferry’s wife sat at the table talking softly in Spanish on the telephone. She looked at him with cool disinterest when he waved good-bye and left.

Outside under the street lights, some kids were kicking a soccer ball around, and two teenagers sat in an old primer-gray Chevy smoking cigarettes and playing loud rap music on the car stereo.

It wasn’t the Santa Barbara in the travel posters or real estate ads. Not that there was anything mean or menacing about the area. It was just another one of those tucked-away places you could find in any city that the underclass lived in and everyone else avoided.