The Dark Place (7 page)

"What’s it about, Abe? That interview in Quinault?"

"You bet it is. Give a listen. First the headline. You ready?" There was some theatrical throat clearing, then: "Quote. Unknown Creature Stalks Quinault. Could Be Bigfoot, Says Noted Skeleton Detective Gideon Oliver. End quote."

"Oh, boy," Gideon said and sighed, sinking into a plastic armchair with the drink and the telephone.

"Gideon, tell me, what’s a skeleton detective, something new? This I never heard of."

"Come on, Abe, let’s hear the rest." He kept his voice irked to please Abe, but he was more amused than annoyed. He understood now what Julie had been talking about.

"Believe me, even better it gets. But look, what are you doing tonight? Why don’t you come over to Twilight Harbor Estates? You can read it yourself, and Bertha’s got already a pot roast on the stove. We’ll drink a bottle beer, have a nice glass tea. And then…"

That singsong "and then" meant that something besides pot roast was cooking. Not that there would be a pot roast or bottle of beer at Professor Emeritus Abraham Goldstein’s house. The dialect remained, but the street peddler’s tastes were long gone.

"And then what, Abe?"

"
Nu,
so come on over, you’ll see. What else better you got to do? Come on, make happy an old man’s heart."

Gideon laughed. The accent was growing more atrocious by the second. "Okay," he said, "but I have to clean up first. May I bring something?"

"A bottle of red wine would be fine, a Cabernet, but California, not Washington. French I wouldn’t ask."

"What happened to the bottle beer and the glass tea?"

"For me, good enough, but you’re a guest; I got to treat you right. Hurry up, it’s depressing here at the old folks’ home."

   Abe lived neither at Twilight Harbor Estates nor at an old people’s home. He lived in SunLand, a peaceful, wooded community of sumptuous homes grouped around a golf course on which he never played. SunLand, as the name implied, lay in the famed rain shadow of the Olympics. Storms moving in from the Pacific would drop most of their moisture on the windward slope of the mountain range, leaving only about fifteen inches a year to fall in the "banana belt" on the other side. Thirty-five miles away the annual rainfall might be fifteen feet.

Abe complained frequently that there was too little excitement and too many sun-seeking old people (most of whom were decades younger than he), but Gideon knew that Abe had found his earthly paradise there in the green, soft hills between Sequim and Dungeness.

Abe met him at the door. "Welcome to Restful Acres," he said. "Come in the study." He led the way, his soft old slippers whispering over the gleaming hardwood floor. With a sigh he eased himself into one of two leather armchairs in front of a wall filled with photographs of an unbelievably young Abraham Goldstein peering at a skull in Kenya, surrounded by shy Pygmies in the Congo, crawling out of an Aleutian igloo, and arm-in-arm with a grinning, frizzled-haired Melanesian with a bone through his nose and Abe’s own pith helmet perched atop his head.

At seventy-five, the old man in the chair had aged better than most. He was arthritic and terribly frail now, but he hadn’t put on weight and was easily recognizable as the young man in the photographs. The kinky mat of black hair had turned white without thinning, and Abe wore it in an outrageous, flamboyant Afro. The eyes were still playful and sprightly, if anything enhanced by the papery wrinkles that nearly buried them.

"Mix yourself a drink," he said, "and one for me, too."

"What would you like," Gideon asked, "a glass seltzer? A cup prune juice?"

"Don’t be funny. Give me a Chivas, but light. The old liver ain’t what it was."

Gideon mixed two Scotch-and-waters and sat down next to Abe. Then he picked up the copy of the
Chronicle
on the coffee table and followed Abe’s jabbing finger to the article on the second page.

UNKNOWN CREATURE STALKS QUINAULT. COULD BE BIGFOOT, SAYS NOTED SKELETON DETECTIVE GIDEON OLIVER
by Nathaniel Hood
QUINAULT—Experts say that a charred skeleton found buried in the Quinault Valley is that of Norris Eckert, twenty-nine, one of two hikers who disappeared there in 1976. Physical anthropologist Gideon Oliver, a highly paid consultant to the FBI, said that Eckert had apparently been killed by a large bone spear point which was found still imbedded in the skeleton’s backbone, at the seventh cervical vertebra. "It would take superhuman strength to drive that bone point in so deeply," the California scientist said. When questioned about what sort of creature might have such strength, Oliver said, "I suppose Bigfoot could have done it," and further described the creature as "eight or nine feet tall and built like a gorilla."
Eckert’s remains were discovered during the continuing search for Claire Hornick, eighteen, of Tacoma, reported missing in the same area last week.

Gideon folded the paper and put it back on the low table. Abe picked it up and pretended to read it again, shaking his head and clucking. "Such a thing," he said. "Eight or nine feet tall, hah?
Oy, oy, oy
." He was practically singing. "Like a gorilla, yet." He laughed outright. "God forbid, you really said this?"

"Well, they got the vertebra wrong, as you know. It was T-7, not C-7. And I’m afraid they were very much mistaken about the ‘highly paid.’ Other than that, they were pretty accurate, I’m sorry to say. I’m going to have a heck of a time living this down at Northern Cal."

Abe patted his knee. "Live and learn," he said. "Come on, time to eat. Bertha said six o’clock."

Bertha was Abe’s unmarried, fifty-year-old daughter, who had lived all her life in the shadow of her brilliant father. She had gotten an M.A. in anthropology and had taught for a while in a community college but had long ago settled with apparent complacency into the role of his housekeeper. She was a superb cook and had prepared a luscious dinner of
boeuf a la mode
(pot roast after all, but what a pot roast!) with broiled tomatoes and buttered, homemade noodles.

As usual, talk of anthropology ceased over the meal, and the three of them chatted like the old friends they were of past times and old acquaintances. Bertha and Abe frequently used Yiddish expressions which Abe would laboriously, and for the most part unnecessarily, explain to Gideon.

As soon as Bertha cleared the dishes and went to get coffee, Abe said, "Listen, I want to talk to you about this Bigfoot business."

"Abe," Gideon said, "I was quoted out of context; you know that. I don’t really—"

"I know, I know." His thin hand fluttered dismissively. "You know a Professor Chace from Berkeley?"

"An anthropologist? No."

"You heard of Roy Linger?"

Gideon shook his head.

"You never heard of Roy Linger?"

"Abe, if you have a point to make, I wish—"

"All right, hold your horses, don’t get excited. This Roy Linger is a famous explorer, a hunter, a rich man. In textiles or something—"

"Your old line."

Abe looked confused for a moment, then laughed delightedly, slapping his hand on the table. "You’re right. Maybe his father had the next pushcart! Anyway, this Linger, he’s very active in the Sasquatch Society; always making expeditions to go off in the mountains to find Bigfoot."

"Has he had any luck?" Gideon asked dryly.

Abe waved his finger under Gideon’s nose. "Don’t be so smart, mister. You’re a young man yet; you got a lot to learn. Listen, this E. L. Chace from Berkeley, he’s supposed to be the number one expert on Bigfoot; he’s all the time talking in some seminar, or on the television. Wrote a couple of books. You sure you never heard of him?"

Bertha came in with the coffee but stood politely in the doorway, holding the tray while her father continued.

"So this Professor Chace, yesterday he gave a lecture in Seattle, and he’s staying tonight with his old friend Mr. Roy Linger in Port Townsend. And guess what? He reads that wonderful article about you, and he wants to meet you. So this Mr. Roy Linger calls the university to see if they know where you are, and they refer him to me, and so on and so forth."

"I hope," Gideon said, "that you’re not about to tell me that you’ve invited him here. Abe, I really don’t want to meet the number one expert on Bigfoot."

"Certainly not. Of course not." He looked over his shoulder. "Bertha, don’t just stand there. Bring in the coffee."

She poured the coffee, a rich, black Italian roast, into tiny green and white cups that Gideon had once sent as gifts from Sicily. Abe sucked in half a cupful with a smack of the lips.

"Certainly not," he said again. "Would I invite him here without asking you first? Hah?"

"I apologize," Gideon said somewhat dubiously, sniffing the coffee and taking a small sip. "I jumped to conclusions."

"You certainly did." Abe swallowed the rest of his coffee. "No. I told him we would go there… Bertha, what time is it?"

She twisted to look behind her at the wall clock he could have seen merely by looking up. "Eight-thirty."

"In three quarters of an hour."

"Go where?" Gideon said.

"To Port Townsend, to Linger’s house. For after-dinner brandies. Very fancy."

Gideon put down his coffee cup and rotated it slowly, between thumb and forefinger, in its saucer. "Abe, you don’t give any credence to the Bigfoot stories, do you?"

"No, but I don’t rule it out either. It seems crazy to me, but maybe I don’t know everything."

"I did check those prints near Quinault, you know. They were obvious fakes, very amateurish."

"And if you found some fake human footprints, that proves there’s no such thing as human beings?"

"I know, but there’s so much junk written about Bigfoot, so much charlatanism and plain bad science… I just don’t want to get involved in it."

"Look," Abe said gently, "a man who’s written books about it, a professor at a big university, I’m willing to give him a little of my time. Maybe I’ll learn something."

Gideon smiled and turned to Bertha. "How old is this man now?"

"Seventy-five years young last July."

"Don’t patronize, goddamn it," Abe said testily.

"Seventy-five and still giving me lessons in open-mindedness."

"That goes for you, too," Abe snapped. "You’re coming or you’re not coming?"

"Okay, let’s go," said Gideon, still smiling. "But I’m warning you, I’m going to take some convincing."

Abe brightened immediately. "Fair enough. Come, give a listen, keep an open mind. Unless you got some other answers?"

"Answers?"

"To how this Eckert guy got a spear stuck through his T-7. If not a nine-foot gorilla, what was it? Bertha, where’s my black shoes with the buckles that don’t need shoelaces?"

   Roy Linger and Port Townsend were made for each other; a pair of handsome, elegant anachronisms only faintly gone to seed. The town, especially the part on the hill, would not have been out of place a hundred years before. The houses were all Victorian, most of them modest, but many with French mansard roofs, gabled cupolas, and widows’ walks that looked far out over Admiralty Inlet and Port Townsend Bay.

Linger himself was pure F. Rider Haggard, an extraordinarily good-looking, silver-haired man in bush jacket and cream-colored ascot.

"Professor Goldstein?" he said in a polished Bostonian accent. He pronounced it the German way:
Goldshtine
. "Professor Oliver? How good of you to come."

He led them through a long entryway, the walls of which were covered with mounted heads of tigers, leopards, deer, ibex, and animals Gideon couldn’t name. Below each head was a small gold plaque. Gideon managed to read one, under an open-mouthed tiger’s head, as they walked by:
Bihar, May 7, 1957, 440 lbs
.

The living room, down two carpeted steps, was completely modern, with a huge, rectangular fieldstone fireplace in the middle, rising twenty feet to the canted ceiling. The carpet was a pale rose, most of the furniture white.

Linger paused, smiling, at the entrance. "I’d like you to meet my good friend Professor Earl Chace."

In a deeply upholstered white couch sat a large, beefy, smiling man in a three-piece peach-colored suit that might have been chosen to go with the rose and white and gray of the room.

"A pink suit?" Abe murmured in Gideon’s ear. "Already I don’t like him."

Chace strode forward to greet them, hand extended. "Professor Goldstein?" (He said
Goldsteen
.) "Professor Oliver? I’m truly glad to meet you, truly privileged."

He had very white teeth, a great many of them, and abundant black hair that was slicked back, except for full sideburns down to the corners of his jaw and a single, curling lock that tumbled boyishly over his forehead. A big, strong grip with a palm so clean and dry that it rustled when he shook hands, a redolence of musky cologne, and a palpably oleaginous aura made him seem half country singer, half country preacher, and not at all Berkeley professor. When he shook hands he revealed a large expanse of smooth, lilac-colored French cuff with a diamond-spangled cuff link that matched a heavy gold ring on his pinkie.

Already I don’t like him either, Gideon thought, as they seated themselves in the white sofa grouping.

"We were having some Courvoisier," Linger said. "Eighteen sixty-five. Remarkable stuff. Would you care to join us?"

He went to a fieldstone bar built into a corner of the room and poured four generous measures from an old bottle. While the others were turned in his direction, Gideon saw Chace quickly pick up one of the two snifters on the coffee table and toss off most of it, choking slightly before it all got down. Linger brought them their cognacs and then noticed with a small frown the two glasses on the coffee table. He took them to the bar and poured their contents down the drain.

It might well have been meant to impress—the cognac had to be wildly expensive—but his action seemed to come naturally to him. So, for that matter, had Chace’s.

In near-unison, they all raised their glasses, swirled the dark, golden liquid, sniffed it appreciatively, drank, and said, "Aah."