The Bookwoman's Last Fling (15 page)

In a while Cameron went outside and crossed the road to the parking lot. When he came back he had a small bag, which he passed through the window to his pal. The night man asked to look at it and seemed to be satisfied. I guessed it was the other guy's clothes, meaning what?…that Cameron was going away for at least a day? Cameron had a few more words to say and they all laughed; then he went across to the lot again, got in his car, and drove away. The muscle man stayed another fifteen minutes, talking to the guard. When he did come out he hurried back through the stable area in the rain. I followed him at a distance and lost him briefly, but when I came into my shedrow I saw him about twenty yards away, in his own barn across the tow ring. The night was almost completely black and I saw him only because he was standing directly across the way, having himself a smoke. I waited in the dark until he apparently called it a night. The light went on briefly in Cameron's tack room and went off almost in the same breath.

Inside my own room, I stripped off my wet clothes in the dark, hung them across my chair, and lay down shivering under my blankets. I was asleep almost at once.

I dreamed of wicked things.

Monsters who looked like men.

Killers I couldn't catch, couldn't see, who wore masks of smiling friendship.

I opened my eyes and saw light trickling in from somewhere. I got up, pulled on my pants, and looked over at the clock radio.
Four forty-two.

I cracked the door, just enough to see Cameron's pal across the way. He was mucking a stall about thirty yards straight across the tow ring…the same stall Cameron had done last night. In our shedrow I saw Bob and Obie already hard at work.

I opened the door wide and walked down the row. “Anybody got horses to walk?”

They all did. Obie looked at the chart Sandy had made and said I could start with Pompeii Ruler. I hitched a shank to his halter and away we went. As I came around the first time I heard an angry voice across in the next barn.

“Whaddaya mean he had to go somewhere? What the hell's that supposed to mean?”

“I told you, an emergency came up.”

“Emergency, my ass. Goddammit, does he want this job or not?”

“Sure he does. Didn't he leave me to cover for him?”

“If I wanted you to rub eight, I'da hired you for eight. One man can't do a decent job with five head, let alone eight.”

I made another trip around the barn and the guy across the way was still steamed. His voice carried clearly over the tow ring “He's got a problem?
He's
got a problem? Don't tell me about Cameron and his problem, Rudy, I don't wanna hear it. This is what I get for hiring that guy, I shoulda known better, everybody said I'd live to regret it. Who the hell just disappears his first day on a job? I could hire a skid row bum and get more out of him than this.”

By then Sandy had arrived. He paid no attention to the ruckus in the next shedrow: he went about his own business and pushed on into the morning. “Let's walk 'em today,” he was saying. “All but Erica's Eyes. She needs the work even if it is miserable out there. I'll start 'em, see if we can get this done at a decent time.”

I moved on down the row. On my next trip around, Sandy fell in behind me. He had been standing with his horse in an empty stall, waiting for me to pass. He still didn't say anything and neither did I: we just did our half-hour walk and started two more horses, but I was aware of his presence the whole time. Now the shedrow across the way was quiet. Once I saw Cameron's pal Rudy drag out a muck sack and dump it into the bin between the barns, but he didn't look up and we never made eye contact. At some point I was aware that Sandy had dropped off. I went around one more time and he was standing in the shedrow, waiting. He didn't say anything: just cut his eyes back toward my tack room. I nodded and turned the horse into his stall. Obie took him and ran a rag over his gleaming coat.

“Where you goin', Cliff? I got a whole bunch of work for you.”

“Sandy wants me. I'll be back.”

I found him inside the tack room, sitting on the same saddle trunk, looking over his training log. “So what's been happening on your side of things?”

“Nothing much yet,” I said. “I'm still getting my feet wet.”

He tried to smile at the unintentional pun. “Sorry if I got my tit in a wringer yesterday.”

“Hey, you're entitled. What's your thinking about Sharon this morning?”

“I think I've got to talk to her myself.”

“For what it's worth, I think that's a good decision. Just don't drag your feet.”

“I left a message for her last night. Jesus Christ, Janeway, Rome wasn't built in a day.”

“I'm just telling you, if she asks me I've got to tell her.”

“I
know
what you're telling me.”

I decided to leave him alone and let the story work itself out. “Look, I can't help being upset,” he said. “I don't want to lose her friendship over something that might not even be real.”

I wanted to tell him that wouldn't happen but what did I know? I had met Sharon only two weeks ago and he had known her all her life. “I can't imagine anything good coming out of this,” he said nervously. “But we're in it now, and I guess I'll hear back from her this morning.”

I said nothing for another moment. Sandy hadn't moved from his perch on the trunk and I watched him fidget with a piece of rope. “Everything comes home to roost, doesn't it?” he said.

“Sometimes that's good. It can be liberating. By the way, how long did you work for the Geigers?”

“I worked for the old man. I was with him about two years when I was just starting out. I was to him what Obie is to me. Rubbing horses for old Geiger was the best education a kid could get. Too bad the sons didn't learn what the old man knew.”

“That's usually the way, isn't it? Offsprings' got to find their own light.”

“Or spend their lives trading on the old man's name. Resenting his real accomplishments and wondering what it's all about.”

Abruptly I changed the subject. “Did you ever hear Candice mention a character called Tricky Dicky?”

He shook his head. “Sounds like something from her storybooks.”

“And she did a lot of that.”

“All the time. If your name or personality struck her a certain way, she'd call you that. She called me Pooh.”

“Wasn't Pooh a short, fat bear?”

“She thought I was a worrywart. Whenever I started naysaying, she'd say, ‘Oh, Pooh,' and give me a shove.”

“Any others you knew about?”

“She had a friend she called the Mad Hatter.”

“You ever know who that was?”

“No. I only heard her mention him once.”

“But you remember it all these years later.”

“She was special to me. That's not hard to understand, is it?”

He asked again if I had made any progress and I told him I might know more tonight. “I guess there's no use asking what's happening tonight,” he said.

“Sure, you can ask. Cameron's gone missing.” I watched his face, which now showed surprise. I looked at his eyes, which had opened wider.

“Gone missing how?” he said. “I didn't even know he was still here.”

“He took a job yesterday, rubbing horses for the stable across the way.”

“That doesn't sound like him. Wherever he is, Cameron likes to be boss.”

“You've got to have some gas in your tank to be boss, Sandy. Looked to me like he was running on empty. The man over there sounds pretty pissed this morning.”

“I don't blame him. If he came to work for me and did that, he could keep on walking.”

“Any idea where he might have gone?”

“How would I know that?”

“I heard Geiger had a farm not far from here. Would Cameron have gone there?”

“I can't imagine why.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“I worked there for a few weeks myself, but that was thirty years ago.”

“Can you make me a map?”

“I can try. I'll do the best I can.”

He pulled up a chair and began to draw a rough sketch. “It's just a little holding farm with a training track, a house, two or three barns, some pasture, and a storage shed. When you get off the highway at the gas station, it's about ten miles along this road. Then you'll see a dirt road leading off to the east. Once you're that far you can't miss it.”

But he gave up the map reluctantly, as if he might change his mind and snatch it back. I had to reach to take it from his fingers. “There's no telling what it's like down there now,” he said. “It might be a shopping center after all this time.”

“I don't think it's a shopping center, Sandy. Sharon says they still own it.”

Slowly he nodded his head. “No, they wouldn't sell it. I remember now, Candice bought it for Geiger's birthday. Did you know she died down there?”

I left three hours after daybreak and drove south in the rain. I knew that at some point I would want to check the records in the coroner's office on Candice's death, but now I wanted to see the farm where she had died. The storm had an eerie intensity, almost like one I remembered in Seattle, and I was glad I had brought one of the raincoats from the tack room. The sky to the south looked worse than the sky north but the black clouds retreated as I drove toward them. Then the rain eased up and by the time I made the loop around the bay it had almost stopped. I struck out to the east.

Suddenly things were looking up. The sky was now white with only an occasional streak of gray. A fine mist coated my windshield as I pushed on, but the heavy rain had gone, at least for the moment. I looked again at Sandy's directions. I figured the dirt road leading back to Geiger's place should be about ten miles straight ahead. My spirits were lifted by the undeveloped landscape: I had seen few houses and one country store; the rest was sporadic woods and open fields. The road was still gravel mixed with dirt, just as Sandy had remembered it from long ago. I came to the road I sought; it was lined by trees and set off by a large mailbox. Nobody was around: no cars approached from either direction and I could already see that the mailbox had the name
GEIGER
painted clearly on the side of it. There was a spic-and-span neatness to most of it, but Geiger's mailbox had been here so long that it was almost red with rust. I stopped and looked both ways; opened the mailbox door and saw a small stack of recent mail. I leafed quickly through it: ten pieces, all addressed to Cameron Geiger, all dated within the last two weeks, most postmarked here in California or up in Washington state. Bills, bills, a collection agency, more bills. I put it all back the way it was and sat in my car at the side of the road.

This did not bode well. If Cameron had come this far he had gone on past without picking up his mail. Unlikely, I thought. But given the nature of the mail and the character of the man, it might mean nothing. I turned the car into Geiger's road and drove back through the trees. The road went about half a mile and dead-ended at a locked gate, where the initials HRG were cut ornamentally into the white-painted wood. I could see some shacks off to my right, outside Geiger's property along a single-lane rutted road that skirted the fence. The road had been wet but now it was pretty well drained; there was no standing water and no tire tracks in the mud. As I continued along outside the fence, I could see some of it now—a rolling field, a road separated in classic horse-country style with white wooden fencing, and the gable of a house maybe a quarter-mile away. This was more than Sandy had remembered: much more than just a holding farm. I could see no obvious end of it—no fence to the south or the east—and this suggested a sizable spread, maybe a hundred acres or more, a nice little present from a loving spouse. There was no telling from this limited vantage point whether anyone was now living here, but the grounds looked immaculate and well cared for. To a man with no end of money this would not be difficult: just hire it done, get a man, two men, or half a dozen to come in once a week or twice a month and see that it was kept shipshape. Why?
Because it's her house,
I thought. This was how he would see it:
her house, her gift,
and he would maintain it exactly as it was then. I was optimistic again, even though this was just a thought, even if there was little reason for any celebration. I had still discovered nothing.

The house was now almost in full view. It was plain but well-painted, standing up on brick supports about six feet off the ground. There was a generous front porch that looked out over the fenced pasture, and from where I was the pasture seemed to continue on over the next hill. The illusion was forever: a nice country estate, still no telling how far it went. My road got ugly, and now there were deep ruts. I felt the bottom scrape and I saw some serious-looking water-filled potholes ahead. At the next wide place, I pulled off and parked the car in the bushes under a tree. From there I could look down at the house, into the backyard, and partway around the side. I saw the back of a car parked on the far side of the house, just the blue fenders of an older GM model, and this was enough to make me sure it was Cameron's Buick.

I had a sudden dark thought, that this had all happened before in another time and place. I could look back over two decades and see half a dozen times when I'd had to go in alone after someone who might be armed and dangerous. I had no reason to think this now, but I always gave myself high marks for intuition.
Always call for backup
—that was the rule, but here I was and there was no backup. I got out in the woods and put on my raincoat. I zipped it up and tied my hood tight under my chin. Just for the hell of it, I got my smaller gun out of the trunk, then I started ahead, ducked between the slats of the fence, and ran in a half-crouch across the open space to the back of the house.

All the blinds had been drawn over the windows, I saw as I ducked under the house. Same old stuff. Just once it would be nice to go into one of these things and not be the only man visible. The place looked deserted; to a casual watcher it looked like a painting, perhaps of another time. The house, I guessed, might be any age from forty to eighty years.

I stood quietly in the deep shadow under the house, the silence deafening. I heard nothing from above: no telltale walking, no noise whatever. I went deeper under the house and came to a large brick column, a strange fireplace, which I guessed opened into the real fireplace in the upper room. I certainly had no reason to think Cameron was
not
upstairs: he might be asleep, but again I had a hunch that he wasn't here at all. This wasn't the way to bet, it was just my hunch.

A moment later, pushed on by my craziness, I decided to walk up and knock on his door.

But I didn't do that, at least not yet. That hunch kept battering my insides and I stood my ground until I became almost a basket case from the quiet. I eased around to the side and there was a walkout opening. I could now see Cameron's car from the trunk to the crushed fender. I looked across the field and I could see what seemed to be the end of it, five hundred yards down the slope. To my right was a set of wooden stairs that led to a small porch and the side door. Slowly I started up.

Nothing.

I was at the top, staring into a kitchen that opened on one side into an airy room and straight ahead into a dark hallway. Slowly, carefully, I backed down the stairs and went around to the front porch. I knew enough law to figure I was in a mildly compromised position. Even if I walked up to the door and rang the bell, I might have some explaining to do, how I had gone through a locked gate and showed up suddenly on his porch. The hell with it; it wasn't a capital offense, so I went up and knocked on the damn door.

Again, nothing. I waited and knocked a bit harder.

I peered in through a set of flimsy curtains. I could see the fireplace in the center of a large living room; I saw a TV set across the room, one of those consoles, I thought about twenty-five years old. What I could see of the furniture looked old as well, the kind of new-old that says,
I may be old but I've been used kindly.
Not many people had flopped on that sofa in the years since it had been put here. I had Cameron pegged for a slob, so he had either slipped out of character to keep this place looking good or had not used it much at all. I walked to the end of the porch and looked down at his car. Then I went down the stairs and stood beside the car, looking in the windows. I could see the keys dangling in the ignition. This was too much temptation: I pulled on a pair of gloves and opened the door, took the keys, and opened the trunk.

I don't know what I expected to find there. There was nothing; just a jack and a flat tire, but in that half-moment I almost expected to see a dead body and I thought,
Janeway, you've been to too many homicide scenes.

But I couldn't shake the doomsday feeling that had come with the turf. I got back in the car and looked in the glove compartment. Nothing there but motor vehicle papers, and oh, a wicked-looking gun, loaded and ready for something.

Wrong tense: the gun had already been used; I could smell it the instant I opened the little compartment door. Gloves or not, I didn't want to put any prints at risk, so I picked up the gun carefully, held it with a pen stuck down the barrel, and sniffed it at closer range. The smell of gunpowder filled the car, and now I looked closer and saw that one shell was gone: the one under the firing pin. I smelled the barrel again. Strong gunshot stink: fired as recently as today. Not here though. No blood in the car: no spatter anywhere, inside or out on the grass.

I looked at the papers, moving them as little as possible. In addition to the registration and a few other things there was a traffic ticket for speeding, written yesterday, somewhere between the racetrack and here. Mr. Cameron Geiger had been the lucky recipient. Out of long habit I copied all the information, including the officer's name. I put everything back just as it was and figured it was time I got the hell out of there.

I never made it past the hedge. I had just turned the corner when some dark shadow rose up behind me, came from under the stairs and whacked me behind my right ear with something hard, a poker it turned out.

 

I opened my eyes and knew I was in trouble.

I knew some time had passed and I was somewhere in the house. The room was dark; the door was closed and only a little light got in around the curtains. In fact I had no idea where I was or what curtains I was thinking about or how long I had been there. For at least a full terrifying minute I couldn't remember my name.

I had never been kayoed like that in my whole rough-and-tumble career. I had been in more fights than I could remember; I had been whacked by brutes when I was ready for them and sucker-punched when I wasn't. This was different. I didn't know how different it was or why it was different, I just knew I had to get out of there or die trying.

I rolled over on my side and two things happened: I knew why and I began to remember my name.

I was a cop; at least I knew that. My partner Hennessey and I had been ambushed and I had been shot. These things will sometimes happen to a cop, but I had never been hit with such obvious intent to kill. Whoever had done this had meant to do serious damage.

My name was Cliff.

Heathcliff.

My voice came from somewhere in the deep past:
Me Tarzan, you Janeway.

The literary references should have told me something, but at the moment only nonsense wafted through my brain. Then I knew I had not been shot and I was not in that bedroom. But the more consciousness returned, the less I could see. No curtains, only black in this room. For a terrifying moment I thought I was blind.

I was in the trunk of a car, eating rubber. I felt the flat spare tire under my cheek and the jack beside my arm and finally I figured it out. I was in the trunk of Cameron's car.

I still couldn't remember Cameron's last name or who he was.

Geiger.

Mr. Cameron Geiger was a horse trainer. He had a brother I had never met and his father was two hundred years old. A page from
Ripley's Believe It or Not
fluttered in the wind.

I had a concussion at least. This had a floating dreamlike quality. Sometimes I floated; sometimes I spun, like something from a movie.

Like
Vertigo.

I heard footsteps. I heard him cough and hawk up a spit. The perp, whoever he was, got into the car and tried to start it. He kept grinding away and I was just about to give up on his behalf when it caught, coughed, backfired, and started.

This was not good news. I reached for my gun but of course he had taken it.

I remembered I kept it on the other side. Carefully, making no noise, I shifted my ass and reached for it, but he had taken it from there as well.

I felt around on the floor of the trunk. The only thing I could use for a weapon was the jack. That made a lousy fit in my hand, it would be awkward in small confined places, but I gripped it and waited for Cameron to come open the trunk. Instead I felt the car jerk forward. I could almost see where we were going by how it felt. The car made a left turn and I could see the road in my mind's eye, I could see he was going around the house. There was another road up ahead, the road out through the gate. He would turn left here, but he turned right and I knew I was still working through the effects of the concussion; I knew he had stopped and turned left after all, it was left he had turned and I was simply in no shape to know the difference. He had stopped and turned
left,
goddammit, left was what he had turned, and now we were rolling down that short road to the main gate.

He stopped again. I heard his keys jingle and a moment later I realized that the car had been turned off. The door opened and slammed shut on the driver's side, at least I
thought
it was the driver's side, it could have been God driving his angels across heaven and I wouldn't have known the difference. I pictured him standing at the gate in his long flowing robe, fumbling through his key chain, his lovely white beard billowing in the breeze like an endless ribbon around the world, his eyebrows bushier than Andy Rooney's, furrowed in anger. Angry God. Impatient God. He could just say,
Let there be the damn key in my hand,
or,
Let the nitwit gate be open in the first damn place,
but he had bigger stuff on his mind and he didn't do that. None of this was funny, it's just part of the craziness you see when your brains have been scrambled. I saw him in my mind's eye as he opened the gate; he came back to the car and got in and started it. It started easier this time. He pulled forward a few feet, stopped, and got out to lock the gate. Then he was back and we were off down that dirt road out of there.