The Other Side of Silence (15 page)

“What about your other piece?”

“I don’t have another piece.”

“Small caliber, twenty-two or thirty-two.”

“No. I never owned one of those.”

Fallon said, “We’ll see about that. Don’t move.”

He backed up around the open passenger door, slid into the bucket on one hip. The glove compartment was locked; the ignition key unlocked it. He shined the flashlight inside. Pint bottle of sloe gin. Unopened packet of condoms. Handful of papers that he held up one at a time for brief looks, keeping Bobby J. in sight with his other eye. Registration. Insurance card. Unpaid parking tickets.

No gun. No drugs, either.

Fallon lifted himself out again, shut the door, and backpedaled to the rear. He unlocked the trunk, aimed the flash beam in there. The trunk floor was covered with a rubber mat; nothing on it that could be dried blood, and no signs of recent cleaning. Spare tire. Jack. Toolbox. He opened the box, felt around inside. Just tools—no sidearm. The only other object in the trunk was a gray, rough-weave blanket. He pulled it out, shook it open, ran the light over it. Dirt, but no stains.

He switched off the flash, tossed it into the trunk. Then, leaving the lid up, he went to stand again at the front fender.

Bobby J. said, “I told you I got no other gun.”

“That’s not all I was looking for.”

“What the hell else?”

“Evidence that Casey Dunbar and her son were in the car, alive or dead.”

“Oh, man, you really are nuts. I haven’t seen her since . . .”

“Since you raped her at the Rest-a-While.”

“It wasn’t rape. She asked for it. And I never even laid eyes on that kid of hers.”

“The boy was in the house when Spicer was shot. He’s missing now. So’s his mother. Whoever killed Spicer kidnapped one or both of them.”

“It wasn’t me!”

A thin, raw wind was blowing now, kicking up little whorls of sand that glinted mica-like in the headlights. You could see Bobby J. shiver when the wind gusted, but he didn’t wrap his arms around himself. To him, it would have been a sign of weakness. The blood had stopped running out of his nose, but there were streaks of it like Indian warpaint on his cheeks, his bare chest.

“I’m being straight with you,” he said, “I swear to God. Let me put my clothes back on, all right? I’m freezing here.”

“No. You weren’t home last night. Where were you?”

“Losing three bills playing Texas Hold ’Em. Javelina Casino in Hender-son, from around five until after midnight.”

“People there know you? Players, dealers?”

Bobby J. jumped all over that. “Yeah, sure, they know me. Dealer’s name is Ruiz, Hector Ruiz. Ask him, he’ll tell you.”

“Where’d you go after you quit playing poker?”

“With a woman, to her place. Annie Harris, blackjack dealer at the Javelina.” Pain and cold had put a whine in the growly voice. “Ask her, she’ll tell you.”

Fallon said, “Tell me about you and Spicer. How the two of you hooked up. What kind of deal you had with him.”

“He put the word out he needed some new ID. I heard about it, got in touch. I got connections, I know people do that kind of work.”

“When was that?”

“Five, six months ago.”

“Where’d you deliver the ID to him? Laughlin? His place in Bullhead City?”

“No. Here in Vegas. I never saw him down there. Didn’t have no idea where he was living.”

“What else you do for him? Help him work his blackmail scam?”

“Blackmail? Christ, I don’t know nothing about blackmail. I didn’t see him again till ten days ago. He called me up, said he was going to a party at some rich guy’s place in Henderson. Said meet him there, he had a proposition for me.”

“Beating up and raping his ex-wife.”

“No. Knock her around a little, deliver a message to lay off trying to find him. The other thing . . . she asked for it, I told you that—”

“Shut up,” Fallon said. “No more lies.”

A long way off, a coyote bayed; the sudden sound made Bobby J. twitch and shiver again.

“How much did Spicer pay you?”

“A thousand. He said ask her for another two K, she’d bring it. You want it back? I still got most of it stashed away—”

“He knew he’d been traced to Vegas. How?”

“Private cop she hired asking questions. Some musician he knows told him about it.”

“Did he know the private cop? Have any contact with him?”

“Didn’t say nothing about that. Just deliver the message, that’s all.”

“After you delivered it—then what? You see him again?”

“No. Talked on the phone a couple of times.”

“After I showed up using his name?”

“Yeah. He thought you must be another private cop.”

“Make you a proposition to take care of me too?”

“No. That thing Sunday night . . . my idea. Just a talk, like I said. Find out who you were, convince you to lay off.”

“Beat me up. Dump me somewhere. Then hit Spicer up for more money.”

“No! I told you—”

Fallon said, “Back up a few more paces.”

“Why? What happens now?”

“Back up.”

Jablonsky obeyed haltingly. Fallon moved forward into the light, bent to scoop up the pile of clothing and boots.

“You gonna let me get dressed?”

“No.”

“Come on, man, I told you everything I know. I got to get to a doctor . . .”

“No.”

“Hey, come
on
! I told you everything I know . . .”

Fallon retreated to the trunk, threw the armload inside. Before he slammed the lid, he removed the dirty blanket. He went around to the driver’s side, tossed the blanket onto the sandy ground. Then he opened the driver’s door.

“Hey,” Jablonsky said, “hey, you ain’t gonna just leave me here with a busted nose and a lousy blanket? I’ll freeze to death out here!”

No, he wouldn’t. The blanket and the long walk would keep him warm enough. Once he got to the highway, a police patrol or Good Samaritan would come along and he could make up a story about being robbed and stripped and beaten up and his car stolen at gunpoint.

Fallon got into the Mustang, fired it up. Over the engine roar he heard Bobby J. yell, “Motherfucker! I’ll get you for this!”

Like hell he would.

He backed up until he came to a hardpan area at the foot of the sandhill where he could turn around. The last he saw of Bobby J., the last he ever wanted to see of him, Jablonsky had picked up the blanket and was swirling it around himself like a wounded albino bat with dirty gray wings.

FIVE

F
RUSTRATION CHEWED ON FALLON again as he drove back into Vegas. Bobby Jablonsky was a liar, a pimp, a rapist, an all-around sleaze-bag, and there wasn’t much doubt that he had the capacity for cold-blooded murder under the right circumstances, but he hadn’t shot Court Spicer. Or taken Kevin. Or been responsible for Casey’s disappearance. He wasn’t bright enough to fake his surprise. He hadn’t been scared enough for a coward guilty of homicide. And he wouldn’t have thrown out all those alibi names so readily if he hadn’t been where he claimed he was last night. Another girlfriend might lie for him, but not a Texas Hold ’Em dealer or a roomful of poker players at a Henderson casino.

Fallon retraced Bobby J.’s route back to Sandstone Street, nosed the Mustang to the curb around the corner behind where he’d parked the Jeep. Left it unlocked, with the keyring dangling from the ignition, Candy’s cell phone on the seat, and the Saturday night special cartridges strewn on the floor. As he drove away, he had an image of Jablonsky, wrapped in that blanket, hoofing it alone out there in the cold desert night. The image gave him no satisfaction. Bad night for Bobby J., but it was a lot less punishment than he deserved.

Well, that could be remedied. Maybe there was nothing Fallon could do about David Rossi’s hit-and-run felony, but Jablonsky was a different story. When he found Casey and her son, and he was his own free man again, he’d put an anonymous flea in the ear of the Vegas cops: Bobby J., Max Arbogast, the teenage drug parties at the Rest-a-While. That way, his conscience wouldn’t bother him so much and he’d sleep better at night.

By the time he reached his motel, he’d decided something else, too. There were no answers in Vegas. Wherever Casey and the boy were, it wasn’t here, any more than it was in Laughlin or Bullhead City.

One other place to look.

And one other possibility for the shooter. It had come to him out in the desert while he was questioning Bobby J.—a name he’d have considered before if he hadn’t been so focused on Jablonsky and the Rossis.

The private detective, Sam Ulbrich.

PART V

SAN DIEGO

ONE

F
ALLON WENT OVER IT and over it on the five-hour, three-hundred-and-fifty-mile drive to San Diego, and Sam Ulbrich was the only way he could make it all fit together. Ulbrich had traced Spicer to Las Vegas; he could have traced him to Laughlin and Bullhead City, too, using his own resources and making his own luck. If his one brush with the state board of licenses was any indication, the man didn’t have a lot of scruples. So he might’ve gone to Spicer’s rented house to try a shakedown of his own— blackmail the blackmailer. Only something had gone wrong and Spicer had ended up dead, with the boy as a witness.

Casey might have been another witness, but that explanation still didn’t ring true. There was a more likely answer: Ulbrich had contacted her on her cell phone right after the shooting, told her he had her son and offered her a deal, Kevin in exchange for some kind of guarantee of the boy’s silence and hers. She’d have jumped at it. Agreed to any terms to get her son back safely.

Best-case scenario, and logical enough as far as it went. But there was a flaw in it. If that kind of deal had been made, she and Kevin should be home by now. And nobody had picked up when Fallon called the Avila Court number again before leaving Vegas.

Near dawn he stopped in Quartzsite, halfway down Highway 95, for gas and a packaged sandwich, and tried her number once more. Nobody picked up this time either.

Where were they, then?

One possibility: part of the deal between Ulbrich and Casey was that she didn’t return to San Diego, that she take the boy and disappear the way Spicer had. It didn’t satisfy Fallon because it didn’t explain why her Toyota was still parked at McCarran International, but he clung to it anyway. The other alternative, that they were both dead, he refused to consider.

San Diego.

Another land-gobbling urban creature, its concrete arteries bloated with morning commuters. Speed up, slow down, stop and go, crawling toward the city’s heart—to be pumped out again in eight or nine hours, then pumped back in tomorrow in an endless loop. Early sunlight already beating down on the segmented lines of metal bodies, throwing off laserlike glints and flashes that stabbed the eyes. Highway 95 might have been one of the freeways in L.A. and he might be on his way to work at Unidyne, as on every weekday morning for the past dozen years. One of the faceless multitudes, robbed of his identity for the duration of the ride. No longer free. Engulfed by noise.

Engines. L.A., Vegas, here—all the same. Vast humming, throbbing, roaring man-made turbines composed of millions of interchangeable moving parts. Running in perpetual motion, never still.

This was when he heard them loudest, when he was one of those moving parts. This was when his hunger for escape was the greatest.

Confidential Investigative Services was in the North Park section of San Diego, between University Avenue and the upper corner of Balboa Park. The building, three stories, nondescript, housed a mix of a dozen small professional services—personal injury and family lawyers, certified public accountants, and the like. Ulbrich’s office was on the third floor, front. And closed up tight when Fallon arrived there a little after nine. The lettering on the door gave no hours, just the agency’s and Ulbrich’s names.

The office across the hall housed a firm of CPAs. He tried that door, found it open, and walked in. Behind a desk in the anteroom a middle-aged woman sat making an appointment with somebody on the phone. When she finished, Fallon told her he was looking for Sam Ulbrich and asked what time he opened for business.

“Well, I don’t believe he has set hours,” the woman said. “Catch as catch can. Have you tried reaching him by phone?”

“Not yet. Would you know if he’s been in his office the past couple of days?”

“No, I’m sorry. I haven’t seen him, but that doesn’t mean he wasn’t in.”

“Do you have a phone book I can look at?”

She did. There was a small ad for Confidential Investigative Services in the yellow pages, and a white pages listing for Ulbrich, S., on Descanto Street in National City. Fallon wrote down both numbers and the address.

Before he went downstairs, he spoke to people in two other third-floor offices. No one could tell him anything about the detective’s business hours, or remembered seeing Ulbrich on Monday or Tuesday.

A call to the detective’s home number got him an answering machine. That could mean Ulbrich was in transit. Fallon went to a nearby coffee shop, forced himself to take his time eating a light breakfast—the first food other than the packaged sandwich he’d had in nearly twenty hours. Half an hour later, he was back at the door to Confidential Investigative Services.

Still locked.

He couldn’t keep hanging around here, on the chance that Ulbrich would show up. Better try to press it. Back in the lobby he called the Confidential number—another answering machine—and then Ulbrich’s home number again. He left brief messages on both machines, giving a made-up name and asking for a callback and an appointment ASAP to discuss a professional matter.

As tired as he was from the long drive, he was too keyed up to sit in one place. He let the Jeep’s GPS guide him to National City and Ulbrich’s home address, an apartment building just below the San Diego line. Lower middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood, the building a three-story walkup and as nondescript as the one where Ulbrich had his office. So his business couldn’t be all that profitable. Scraping by, probably, on domestic and insurance work. The kind of small-timer who’d overcharge a client if he thought he could get away with it, even though he’d been exonerated on the one charge five years ago. Who’d be inclined to cross the line into blackmail if the situation looked ripe enough.

Fallon rang Ulbrich’s bell, got nothing for the effort. Two other tenants answered their bells, but neither would talk to him about Ulbrich. On the same block were a small grocery store and a dry-cleaning place. Better cooperation there, but no information. The merchants knew Ulbrich, but not well enough to remember seeing him recently or to describe his habits. Evidently he didn’t spend much time in the neighborhood, kept pretty much to himself when he was there.

North Park and the Confidential office again. Running around in zigzag loops, going over and over the same ground the way he had in Vegas when he was hunting Bobby J. But what else could he do?

When he walked into the lobby this time, a fat, tired-looking man in overalls was perched on a tall ladder replacing a burned-out fluorescent ceiling tube. Fallon rode the elevator to the third floor. Ulbrich’s office was still closed tight. He rode back down to the lobby, where the overalled man was just coming down off his ladder. Fallon asked him if he worked here regularly. Affirmative; he was the building’s maintenance superintendent.

“So then you must know Sam Ulbrich.”

“Oh sure, I know Mr. Ulbrich. Been here almost as long as I have.”

“Last time you saw him?”

“Couple of days ago.”

“Monday?”

The super’s face screwed up in thought. “No, it wasn’t Monday. Must’ve been last Friday. That’s right, last Friday around noon. He was on his way out to lunch at O’Finn’s.”

“A place he goes regularly?”

“When he’s here. He’s away a lot on business. I guess you know Mr. Ul-brich’s a private eye. He doesn’t like you to call him that, but that’s what he—”

“Where is it, this restaurant?”

“Not a restaurant,” the super said. “They serve food, but it’s a pub, Irish pub. I go there myself sometimes. Great corned beef and cabbage.” He glanced at his watch. “Almost noon. Some of that corned beef and cabbage would go good today, now I think of it.”

“O’Finn’s. Where?”

“Up on University, half a block east.”

Fallon found it easily enough. Typical urban Irish pub, with shamrock-and-shillelagh décor inside and out. Long, brass-railed bar, clusters of tables covered by Kelly green cloths, a row of high-backed wooden booths parallel to the bar. Most of the lunch trade hadn’t come in yet; the score or so of customers were either grouped at the bar or occupying the booths.

He bellied up to the plank. When the bearded bartender came his way, he said, “You know Sam Ulbrich? Has an office over on Chenango Street, comes in regularly for lunch.”

“Sure, I know him.”

“Seen him recently?”

“That I have.”

“When?”

“Oh, about three seconds ago.”

“. . . What?”

The bartender laughed. “Right behind you. Third booth from the front.”