The Bohemian Connection (6 page)

“Still, that would make one a bit wary.”

“It sounds like it when you’re not involved, but it took a while to see that pattern. The first couple of times it happened, particularly if the subject was not yourself, it didn’t register, or the change was so abrupt, so unusual in the normal day-to-day life, that you assumed you must have missed something. And while you were the subject of Ross’s attention the intensity was so great, so flattering, that’ it was worth any effort to get it back.”

“Then how come you just went back to the city when Ross didn’t come back?”

“Well, Vejay, I was never a consuming passion for Ross. I always knew he was living with me temporarily.”

“Really?” It was hard to imagine confident Alison on the short end of any relationship. Alison, who had come here knowing no one, who had talked her way into a job that seemed as unpromising as selling sand to a sheik and was making a go of it. I couldn’t picture her letting Ross move in when he found her second-class. But women do a lot of less-than-well-adjusted things for lovers. My friends had done them. I had. I hoped I had outgrown doing them. I waited to see where Alison placed herself on this continuum.

But she added nothing. Instead, she reached into the truck and handed me Craig’s house key.

“You never did tell me how Ross got you your job,” I said.

She took a step back toward her plants. “Partly it was that Ross told me about the area, so I had an idea what kind of gardening service would be needed; partly that I told Craig that Ross had left me stranded here, and that appealed to Craig—hearing about Ross doing something rotten. It probably made a nice change.” She gave me a quick dismissive nod of the head, a regal pronouncement that the audience was over, and returned to her plants.

I
DROVE BACK ACROSS
the Guerneville bridge and on toward Henderson. The windows of my pickup were all open, but that only served to channel the hot air. Outside I could hear the yelps and screams from the Guerneville beach. Had I looked down while crossing the bridge I could have seen the canoes passing under in either direction. Canoes were rented out at the beach. Upstream were islands, piles of sand raised a foot or two above the water line, where you could pull the canoe up and lie in the sun. Or you might eat salmon salad and watch the canoeists—parents paddling a child perched on the middle seat, divorced fathers with weekend children, couples, pairs of bare-bottomed guys who assumed their canoe seats were lower than they really were. At one spot above Guerneville the river was deep enough to allow a rope to fling any taker Tarzan-like into the water. But mostly the water was so shallow that the danger in canoeing was scraping the bottom of the boat.

Fifteen minutes later I drove through Henderson and up past the nursery to Half Hill Road. The area looked exactly as it had when I left about two hours ago. There were no vehicles parked either in front of the Davidsons’ or the McElveys’. Surely if he were home, Ward McElvey would have parked in front. He wouldn’t drag his city prospects up the hill and through the neighbor’s back yard.

I looked more closely at his house. The windows were shut. It was now four o’clock, traditionally the hottest hour of the day, and it had to be over one hundred degrees. The normal temperature was fifteen to twenty degrees cooler, with the Pacific breeze keeping things tolerable, and the redwoods and eucalyptus shading the roofs. But even they were no match for today’s heat. No one would be home with their windows shut.

I pulled the truck up next to the sewer hole and made my way around it. Even though there was no sewage in it, nothing to distinguish it from any other fifteen-foot hole, I, like everyone else in town, gave it a wide berth, not really believing there was no raw sewage in there waiting to foul the feet of the unwary.

Once on Michelle’s deck, I knocked before using the key. But no one was home here either. I went directly to the bedroom and found the picture in Michelle’s album. In it, she stood, eight years ago, looking up at a tall young man with sandy hair. He held the picket sign. The sign was at an angle to the camera and the words were unclear. But what needed no interpretation was the adoration in Michelle’s eyes.

I looked closely at Ross. His charm wasn’t immediately apparent. But I could see the intensity Alison had described. He was tall and very thin. There was a space between his front teeth that made him look a little younger and more vulnerable. His hair was a bit curly, a bit long, a bit uncared for, as if he had no time for such inessentials. But as he looked toward the sign, his eyes were piercing. He held it with both hands, his arms stretched away from his body like he was making a religious offering. And yet there was something in his relation to the sign that focused the viewer’s attention not on it but back to him. Michelle stared at him; the sign reflected him. He was the center of the snapshot.

But with the picture in front of me, I couldn’t be sure this was the man I had seen next door earlier. It was, after all, eight years old. The man leaning on the railing next door might well have been Ross. Eight years was plenty of time for his unsavory San Francisco associates to forget about him. As Alison had said, he would have no fear of coming back here now.

I looked at the picture again, but by now my recollection of the man next door had become blurred. The more I tried to bring it into focus the faster it faded, until I couldn’t recall a single feature clearly.

Michelle and Craig’s closet was also as it had been two hours ago—jammed. Nothing had been removed. Did that mean Ross had not come for clothes but for something else? Household money perhaps? Or maybe he had had second thoughts and not come in at all. Or maybe he wasn’t Ross.

I sank down on the bed. In the heat of the afternoon it was very appealing. Was there anything to do but wait for Ward McElvey to come home? And when he did, would he remember having seen the man on his porch? Would he know if he was Ross? But even if he was Ross, that didn’t mean he was having an affair with Michelle.

The sensible thing to do would be to lock the house and drive home to salvage the rest of the day. I could call Vida when she got off work and tell her… No. As long as it wasn’t definite, I would hold off telling Vida my suspicions.

There was one more person to talk to—Father Calloway. He had dropped Michelle downtown last night. She told him she was getting out to catch up with a man she knew. Surely he had looked to see who it was. Father Calloway had been the priest at St. Agnes’ for years. If Ross were Catholic he would have known him; if not, he might still have some memory of him, particularly if I could jog that memory with Ross’s picture.

Holding the picture by the edges, I pulled the front door shut and hurriedly started down the stairs. What time did priests eat dinner? Five? Five-thirty? If I drove fast, I might be able to catch Father Calloway before—

I stepped on the ivy. My foot slipped. I grabbed for the railing. It was too late. Both feet were in the air. I landed hard on my bottom and bounced down to the step below.

“Damn!”

My shoulder ached; I wriggled my bottom to see if it was still in one piece. Then I felt my jeans for rips. They too were whole. But that ameliorated the situation only slightly. It wasn’t till I looked up that I realized I had let go of the photo. I eyed the stairs, the ivy, and the road; I spotted it just as a breeze carried it into the sewer hole.

“Damn! Damn!” Somehow, the picture falling into the sewer hole pretty well summed up my day.

I dusted off my jeans, rubbed my bruised bottom, and walked down the steps to the hole.

Through the cracks between the boards I could see only darkness. There was nothing to do but shift the boards. I grabbed the edge of one, pulled it up, and flipped it over onto the road.

I looked back into the hole and choked off a scream.

At the bottom of the hole, next to the end of the sewer pipe, was Michelle Davidson. She lay on her back, her arms at her sides. Her brown eyes were open wide, but weren’t looking. A spray of dirt had landed on her face and in her open eyes. There was no question that she was dead.

I called the Sheriff’s Department from Michelle’s house, then walked back outside and down the steps slowly, and sat, still shaking, as two deputies pulled up and walked to the hole. I answered the questions one of them asked.

Sheriff Wescott arrived, and then the department photographer, the ambulance, and the doctor. Neighbors began to emerge from their houses and formed a group at the far side of the street. The McElveys were not among them. I recognized only faces; I couldn’t have put names to any of them.

The sheriff’s contingent seemed to talk among themselves for a long time. I could hear words but I made no attempt to put them into sentences. One of the neighbors walked away and returned with a ladder, and first one of the ambulance men, and then the sheriff, climbed down into the sewer hole. The others stared over the edge.

I pushed myself up and walked toward the sewer hole. The neighbors had stayed back. None of the deputies seemed to notice me. They were all looking down.

A light covering of dirt overlaid Michelle’s body, as if a mourner had thrown in a traditional handful after the graveside service. But Michelle looked like a parody of the traditional corpse. Her arms lay near her sides and her legs were straight but flung apart, as if her torso and arms had hit the damp earth in the hole and stuck but her legs had been jerked up by the force of her fall and came down apart. Her long brown hair was wet and hung limply. Her face was a sallow gray-green; it looked more like a mask than something that had recently been alive.

The sheriff climbed back up. Another ambulance crew member lowered the stretcher down and then climbed in after it.

I didn’t need to see Michelle’s body belted onto it and lifted out. I didn’t want to see the dirt that had been sprinkled over her face and stuck to her eyes. I wanted to sit on the steps with a very strong drink. Instead, I took a breath and walked up to Sheriff Wescott. Michelle’s murder was his business now. I said, “I spent some time checking into where Michelle was last night.”

As he turned to me his tanned brown face wrinkled; the corners of his mouth moved but I couldn’t tell whether he had instinctively started to smile as he recognized me, or grimace in recollection of the murder investigation I had been involved with in March. There were things I hadn’t told him then, things I could never admit. He suspected that then and it had added an edge to our encounters. He ran a hand through his curly brown hair. “Does no one die in this town without your attention?”

Ignoring that, I said, “Michelle had a boyfriend in high school, a guy who was older than she was. People speculate that she was still fascinated by him even though he hasn’t lived here in years. His name was Ross Remson.”

Out of the side of my eye I could see the ambulance crew lifting Michelle’s body out of the sewer hole. I swallowed.

Wescott had turned to watch them. To me he said, “So?”

“I’m just trying to pass on what I know to make your murder investigation a little easier.”

“Murder?” he said, drawing his attention back to me. “What makes you think this is murder? A woman comes home from a bar, falls into a fifteen-foot hole and hits her head on the end of a sewer pipe, and you instantly suspect murder.”

I stood staring at the hole a moment. It hadn’t occurred to me that he could assume otherwise. I started to protest, then caught myself. Why was it I suspected Michelle had been murdered? Was it just because I had been checking on her disappearance? Was it because I assumed she had been with Ross (Ross who lots of people viewed with suspicion)? So now I assumed Ross had killed Michelle? Was that all? Was Sheriff Wescott correct in saying that I instantly suspected murder?

But no. There was more. There was something about Michelle’s body.

“You don’t fall down a hole like this backwards,” I said. “We’re all familiar with the sewer hole. We give it a wide berth automatically, as if it were already filled with sewage. I’ve caught myself doing that. I’ve seen other people. No one strolls right next to it as if it were a pothole.”

“So?” He glared down at the hole. Beyond it one of the deputies was driving off.

“So Michelle wouldn’t be casually standing at the edge and step back by mistake.”

“Look, you told the deputy that she came home from a bar. You don’t know what time she got here. She was probably drunk. Half the Russian River area is drunk. If we didn’t have drunks driving into trees, getting into fights, falling down flights of stairs, or wading out into the river until they forget where they are and drown, we wouldn’t need two-thirds of the sheriffs here.”

“You don’t know she was drunk.”

“We’ll find out. The lab will tell us.” He took a step toward his car.

“When?” I demanded.

“As soon as they can,” he snapped. “It’s a busy time for them. It’s not just the merchants who do a big business when the Bohemians are here. The lab’s got plenty of samples to analyze and they’ll have lots more as soon as the festivities get going proper.”

“So the question of whether Michelle Davidson was murdered is going to sit on the back burner?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t say anything definite.”

He took another step and then swiveled back to face me. “Is there something conclusive, some piece of evidence that you want to tell me about? You’re good at concealing evidence, I know that. Now if there’s something that’s made you decide this is murder, tell me.”

I had seen his face harden like this before. It had the leathery look of suntan and of disgust. His blue eyes looked icy. There might be more behind that expression, but it was impossible for me to say what it was.

“Michelle was a gymnast. She had good balance. She knew how to move. Even if she had been drinking she’d still have better reactions than you or I. She wouldn’t fall flat on her back like that. She would roll instinctively.”

“Everyone has off days.”

“Then what about the boards. The boards that covered the sewer hole were too close together for her to have fallen between them—particularly backwards.”