An Equal Opportunity Death (7 page)

“What about the woman you assumed Goulet was talking to on the phone? You were mad enough about that to stalk out of the bar.”

“I was …” I took another breath and started again, calmer. It was one of those things they taught me in “executive school”: never let the client get you rattled, or at least never let him know he’s got you. “I think I explained that yesterday. Is there anything else you wanted to ask me?”

“Not now.” He stood up.

But I remained seated. I didn’t want to leave him with nothing but my life to ponder. “You said I was the last person at Frank’s. The Chinese Laundry truck was there when I left. Have you checked with them?”

He sat back down. “We have only your word for that.”

“Ask the old people across the street. They’re famous for spotting any unusual activity on South Bank Road.”

“We did. They didn’t see a laundry truck.”

“What?”

He waited.

“Did you check with the laundry? The laundry must have records.” Panic was beginning to be evident in my voice.

“We’re checking.”

“What about drugs?”

He picked up the pen and leaned toward me. “How do you mean?”

“Suppose Frank was a middleman or someone wanted him to be.”

“Do you have information you want to give me on that?”

I wished I did. “Well, no. I just wanted to raise the speculation. There are plenty of drugs around here. It’s not unreasonable to think Frank might have been involved in trafficking drugs. I mean, even the authorities admit they can’t keep up with the marijuana growers to the north, that they just burn their fields for show.”

“Your point, Miss Haskell.”

“There are a lot of drugs going through Henderson, and as a bartender and owner, Frank was in a good position to distribute them.”

“Do you have anything to indicate that he was?”

“No.”

“Any reason for suspicion?”

“Only that he was killed.”

He sighed. “You can rest assured that we at the sheriff’s department are aware of the drug traffic, perhaps even more aware than you. You may assume that we give it serious consideration in any crime of this nature.”

I stood up.

“For the record, Miss Haskell, is there anything more you can tell me?”

“No.”

“I assume you will keep yourself available,” he said.

“I’ll have a lot of free time, at least for the next three days.”

I walked out quickly, looking at neither the man at the desk nor the wanted posters. Once outside I felt relieved, as if I’d escaped. But my stomach still churned with the midnight terrors. Less than twenty-four hours ago I was a normal, middle-class woman. Since then I had been suspended from my job—a matter that now seemed almost trivial—and the sheriff suspected me of murdering a man.

As I walked to the pickup I shifted back to thinking that surely he couldn’t envision me as a murderer, surely this questioning was just for show, surely … but it wasn’t. He manipulated me as he would any suspect.

And from what I knew of this type of investigation (learned mainly from prime-time police shows), I suspected that the sheriff would focus on his best lead until something better was presented to him. In other words, he was going to concentrate on me.

B
Y THE TIME
I left the sheriff’s department, the air was thick with the threat of rain and the sky was dark, though it was just a bit after four.

I considered driving into Santa Rosa. Probably the Chinese Laundry was there, but I wasn’t sure. I also wasn’t sure the hand launderers would speak English. Probably not. And I had purposely avoided the laundry truck at Frank’s Place. So even if the driver had noticed Frank, he wouldn’t know whether that was before or after I was there.

I shifted the pickup into reverse and backed out. The Chinese Laundry could wait till tomorrow. Better I should concentrate on what and who might have caused Frank’s death.

I turned onto North Bank Road toward Henderson. Live oaks hung over the road from both sides. Even at midday the pavement was shaded by a wonderfully verdant canopy. I loved this section of road.

Frank, I thought. He wanted to get out of San Francisco, and he’d heard about Henderson from Chris Fortimiglio, so he came here and bought the bar and ran it for two years, until he was shot. That left a lot of questions. Why did Frank want to leave the city? Had I asked him? I couldn’t remember doing so. No. When he mentioned wanting to leave, it seemed natural to me, since I had left. But Frank could have had more pressing reasons than a change of scenery. Still, he had enough money to buy, or at least put a down payment on, the Place. So he wasn’t leaving the city because of bad debts or anything like that. And Henderson was too close to the city, with too many city people coming back and forth, for Frank to consider hiding out here—particularly in a job as visible as tending bar.

Whatever his reasons for leaving San Francisco, they couldn’t have been too pressing. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to know more about them.

But if the motivation behind Frank’s murder wasn’t something in San Francisco, then it must be here. I recalled the conversation at the Fortimiglios’ the night before—was it that recent? Madge Oombs said if the killer couldn’t have been a stranger trotting down South Bank Road for all the world to see, then it must have been someone local, slipping in along the river.

Then, too, the cause must have been something local. What? What had Frank done in his two years here? He ran the bar. And? Well, he dated a lot of women, but most of them were tourists, who would see him as a summer fling. Even if they hoped for more, it was unlikely that they would arrive one afternoon in flood season and shoot Frank in the forehead.

Of course, he dated local women, but not many. The only one I could think of who had even been speculatively linked with him was Patsy Fernandez, and I felt sure there was no truth to that rumor. She and Paul were too close. Surely. Well, pretty surely. Of course, Paul and Patsy were from San Francisco. Could they have known Frank there? I should find out about that.

If the cause was not women, what about men?

A truck passed me and cut in front of me, missing my bumper by inches. I hit the horn, but by that time the truck was yards ahead of me. Glancing at the speedometer, I saw that I was driving twenty-five miles an hour. The speed limit here was fifty-five, and few drivers observed that. I stepped on the gas.

But Frank and men; Frank gay? It seemed impossible. If he had been gay, he had been hiding in the back of his closet. Considering the growing gay population in the Russian River area, there would have been no advantage in pretending to be straight, and such deception would have created plenty of resentment in the gay world.

A sports car swerved around me. I was doing thirty-five. Obviously, I could think or I could drive, not both. I pushed down on the accelerator and turned the radio on, loud.

By the time I got to Henderson it was raining in earnest. I pulled up in front of Thompson’s grocery. The sidewalk was raised here, up two steps from the street. Puddles from the last few days of rain surrounded it. I jumped from the truck to a dry spot four feet from the curb and walked twenty feet along the road before I found a narrow enough stretch of water to leap over.

In Thompson’s I bought a can of beef stew (inability to cook was one of my business executive attributes that stuck with me) and a bottle of brandy. But as I made my way back to the pickup, I realized that even heating the stew was more than I felt like doing. I put the bag in the cab and walked across the street to the café.

I was not hungry when I was here for breakfast, but now I was starved. Perhaps fear burned calories. One of the café’s fine qualities was their menu—it offered all kinds of food at any time of the day. That, I believe, had been forced upon them by the sewer laborers who usually wanted what was normally considered dinner at seven in the morning. Now, at four-thirty, I ordered scrambled eggs, sausage, and sauerkraut.

I sat in the same secluded corner I was in this morning, propped a discarded newspaper in front of me to discourage conversation, and returned to thoughts of Frank. If he wasn’t killed because of his social life, then why? What had he been doing at the Place to necessitate someone killing him?

I pondered that till the eggs arrived, but I came up with no more reasonable speculation than that Frank was involved in drugs. When I suggested that to Sheriff Wescott, I was merely tossing out the first thing on my mind to distract him from me. But now, considering it, with a mouth full of sauerkraut, it made a good deal of sense. There were a lot of drugs in this area. Marijuana was the biggest cash crop in Humboldt County to the north, and Humboldt was a large county. Each autumn the authorities (combinations of local, state, and federal), surveyed the area from helicopters, sprayed paraquat, and burned fields. They watched the roads for suspicious vehicles heading toward San Francisco, Berkeley, and beyond to Los Angeles. But, as I smugly pointed out to Wescott, that was all for show. So many people were involved with marijuana in one way or another that any effort to eradicate it was useless.

Suppose Frank had been involved in dealing, maybe in a minor way, when he lived in San Francisco? Suppose he had a source north of here? Suppose he had found out that he could run a profitable way station at the Place—that suppliers could bring the weed there, either for Frank to distribute to smaller dealers in the area or in larger quantity to “tourists” from the city? Suppose Frank had gotten greedy, or one of his suppliers or customers did? That would make sense. Frank wouldn’t have had any qualms about dealing drugs, at least not recreational drugs. Marijuana was the most likely contraband because of the location, though, I supposed, he might have arranged for cocaine to be smuggled off a ship in the ocean and up the Russian River. I’d have to ask Chris about that possibility.

When I finished my eggs I felt better than I had all afternoon. Drugs made a lot of sense. And the people who had been involved in the drug scene, who had been in San Francisco, and who had access to boats, were Patsy and Paul Fernandez.

It was just after five. The rain was heavy now. As I crossed the bridge I looked over the railing to check the height of the river, but it was too dark to make out anything.

South Bank Road was lower than the bridge and I turned west onto it. Paul and Patsy’s canoe rental was half a mile away.

The road was dark. Houses and businesses were locked, with flood preparations made and the owners gone. The water had saturated lawns on either side of the road, and it wouldn’t be long before the road itself would be inundated.

The canoe rental was located in what once had been a large wooden barn. In summer the canoes were either at the dock or on the main floor there. Now they were suspended from the sloping roof like oblong chandeliers above the muddy dirt floor. The only dry area was the raised wooden platform behind the counter and the storeroom in the rear.

I pulled up by the storeroom door. The Fernandez’ old VW van was gone, which meant Patsy wasn’t home yet. She worked, in some clerical capacity, at Solano Construction, the company that was laying the sewer pipe. It wouldn’t be long till she arrived.

I knocked. “Paul?”

In a minute he opened the door.

“Oh, Vejay. Well, come in.”

I held out the paper bag (minus the beef stew). “I thought I might convince you guys to share some brandy.”

Paul smiled. “I’d say that was a safe guess. Come on in. Have a seat while I pour. Patsy shouldn’t be too long.” He was shouting. Music, heavy on drums and horns, came from speakers in opposite corners of the small room. Paul turned down the volume on his way to the sink.

The room resembled nothing so much as the back room at PG&E except that while the other was tan, this was boat gray. Like the PG&E room, these walls were covered with metal cases holding mysterious metal objects of odd shapes and unknown purposes, presumably canoe stuff. As a storeroom it might have been satisfactory, but as a home it was awful. And while Paul and Patsy had added a leather sofa, an oriental rug, the elaborate stereo, and a television, the effect did not convert the room into a home, but only cluttered the storage room.

Still, it was warm. Gargantuan space heaters occupied the two free corners, making the room more comfortable than any place I’d been in this month—certainly cozier than my house.

I took one of the filled brandy glasses from Paul and sat on the leather ottoman.

“What have you been up to?” he asked, settling on the sofa.

“I’ve been suspended from work and interviewed twice by the sheriff. How’s that for starters?”

“Suspended? How come?”

“My boss doesn’t believe I was sick yesterday.”

“Well, what business is that of his? You have sick leave, don’t you? What is he, a doctor or something?” Paul leaned forward, almost propelled off the sofa by his indignation.

I took a sip of my brandy, thinking that I liked Paul.

“Mr. Bobbs, my boss, feels it’s obvious to the community as a whole that I wasn’t sick, and he doesn’t want PG&E to look foolish.”

“What’s your union doing? They shouldn’t put up with that.”

“The union? I completely forgot about them. It just happened this afternoon. And then I charged down to the sheriff’s office.”

Paul pulled back the slightest bit. It was apparent that while being suspended from work was a very acceptable circumstance for a friend, going to the sheriff’s office of one’s own volition was definitely suspect.

“Sheriff Wescott told my boss that I’d had two drinks at Frank’s. I figured that was not the type of information he ought to be passing on. So I went to tell him that.”

“Chewed him out, huh? How’d he take that? I’ll bet they don’t get a lot of lip here, these sheriffs. Well, good for you. Told them where to get off, huh? Here, let me get you some more brandy.”

I hadn’t finished what I had, but I let Paul refill the glass. Which question should I ask Paul first? I wanted to take advantage of the glow of the brandy and the camaraderie we were sharing over my supposed tongue-lashing of the sheriff.