Crazybone (21 page)

“Crazybone Cotter is still alive,” she said, “still living in Billington, Illinois. But my guess is, his hunting days are over. As of Christmas Eve two years ago. Man had a stroke, left him mostly paralyzed.”

“Brain damage?”

“No word on that. Pretty much bedridden, though. Wife number three’s taking care of him. Ellen Coombs, a.k.a. Sheila Hunter, was number two. He divorced her a year after she split, grounds of desertion.”

“Any publicity on the bond theft or her running off with Pete Stoddard?”

“Not a whisper. Whole thing was covered up.”

“How about links between Cotter and organized crime?”

“Oh, yeah. He was brought up on money-laundering charges by the feds in ’96, tried and acquitted for lack of evidence the following year.”

“Strong mob ties?”

“Didn’t come out that way. His lawyer didn’t seem to be connected, either. Just a poor innocent victim of bad judgment, man claimed, and the jury believed him.”

“Uh-huh”

“Not long after the trial he sold his manufacturing company outright to some Chicago outfit, maybe controlled by the wiseguys, maybe not. No way I could find out for sure.” Wiseguys. Tamara tossed off slang terms like that as casually as a seasoned task-force vet. Working for me hadn’t educated her that way; her father was a Redwood City police lieutenant. “Also couldn’t turn up anything on whether Cotter’s still connected or if the feds are still investigating him.”

“My guess would be no on both counts,” I said. “The trial publicity would’ve made him useless as a laundryman, and without strong ties they’d have cut him loose in a hurry. Doesn’t matter in any case, as far as we’re concerned.”

“What about the Hunters?” she asked. “I mean, I got all of this stuff pretty much straight off the Net. They must’ve been keeping tabs on Cotter all along, right? Wouldn’t make any sense for them not to.”

“I figure they were, but what you and I read into the information and what they read into it are two different things. They may have relaxed some after Cotter’s stroke — Jack Hunter, at least. That’s probably why he let Twining talk him into taking out the life insurance policy. He was the smarter and more level-headed of the pair, the glue that held them together all those years. Without him she just couldn’t handle the pressure, and her fear and paranoia took over.”

“Suppose you don’t find her, alive or dead? Suppose nobody does? What happens to the kid then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Tamara, I just don’t know.”

At Redwood Village I parked in the visitors’ lot and walked over to the double-winged building that housed the rec center, dining hall, administration offices, and clinic. Before I went to tell Cybil the news about Jocelyn Dunn and John Klinghurst, I wanted to check with Dr. Lengel on a couple of things: whether Dunn had teen on duty the night Archie Todd died, and whether a supply of the pink, 0.10 digitoxin pills was kept on hand at the clinic. The more information I had when I talked to Evan Patterson and then to the local authorities, the more likely it would lead to an immediate official investigation.

But I didn’t get to talk to Lengel. Turned out this was one of his days off. And the physician on duty was out visiting a patient. The desk nurse was not Jocelyn Dunn, fortunately, though I learned Dunn was on the premises today. When I identified myself as a detective and the relative of a resident, the desk nurse consented to answer my question about the digitoxin. Affirmative. I didn’t ask the other question; there was not much chance she would check a past duty roster without permission. Let police investigators follow through on that one.

From the clinic I walked through the landscaped grounds to Cybil’s bungalow. The sun was out, but it was windy and cool; the only other people I saw were two elderly joggers in sweatsuits and a gardener making a lot of noise and fouling the air with a leaf-blower. Leaf blowers and back-up beepers are two of my pet peeves. Gross noise polluters, both, the intrusive kind that grate on your nerves after a while. If it were up to me, the inventors of both would be locked up in enclosed spaces with the things going nonstop until they either went deaf or admitted their sins and vowed to invent quieter replacements.

I walked faster, not that you can escape a racket like that on foot. And when I got to Cybil’s, I saw that the front door of her unit stood partway open. It gave me pause. The day was too chilly for open doors, and I happened to know that she had little tolerance for drafts or flies. I climbed the three steps, knocked and called out her name just as the leaf-blower went mercifully silent.

Inside, somebody made a low, groaning sound.

I shouldered my way in, fast, squinting because the light in there was dim. The living room looked as though a small tornado had come swirling through. End table toppled, coffee table kicked askew, lamp and books and sofa pillows and a scatter of other items over the carpet. The sofa had also been knocked sideways — and a pair of bent legs and foot were poked out behind it.

I sucked in a breath and ran over there. And then stopped and stood gawping a little with both confusion and relief, because the woman down there on the floor was not Cybil.

Nurse Jocelyn Dunn.

She lay sprawled on her back, one hand curling and uncurling spasmodically, her head twitching from side to side. There was a puffy bruise on her left temple, another on her cheekbone, and two or three cuts leaking blood in thin streams down into her gray-blond hair. Her eyelids were at half-mast, the eyes rolled up so that only the whites showed. She made another groaning sound; the curling and uncurling, the head twitching, went on unchecked. Conscious, barely, but not aware of me or anything else.

I veered away from her, to look into the kitchen. After that I checked the bedroom, bathroom, study, and peered out into the back patio. No sign of Cybil. In the living room again I took a quick second look at Nurse Dunn. The blood on her was fresh; she hadn’t been there very long. Then I ran out onto the front porch, thinking to try next door—

And there was Cybil, just walking out of Captain Archie’s place across the street.

She stopped when she spotted me and stood waiting as I ran over to her. Some sight she was, too. Hair disheveled, face flushed, eyes as bright as new pennies. In one hand she carried the bald-knobbed hickory walking stick that had belonged to her late husband. She didn’t need it to get around; she’d kept it for sentimental reasons, and possibly for use as an emergency weapon. She was holding it weaponlike now, in the middle with the big knobbed head jutting forward.

“Cybil, are you all right?”

“Of course I’m all right. What are you doing here?”

“Never mind that now. What happened?”

“I saw you come out of my bungalow. Is that woman still unconscious?”

“More or less. You did some job on her — looks like she has a concussion. What’d you hit her with, that stick?”

“This? No. I brought it along for protection. I didn’t want to call the police from my phone, in case she came to, so I took her master key and came over here to do it. They’re on the way. I told them to bring an ambulance—”

“Will you please tell me what happened?”

“That fat cow tried to smother me, that’s what happened. With one of my own sofa pillows.”

“Why, for God’s sake?”

“To shut me up, of course.
She’s
the one who murdered Captain Archie. Her and her boyfriend, John Klinghurst.”

“I know all that. I—”

“You know it? How did you find out?”

“By doing what you asked me to. Investigation. How did
you
find out?”

“I finally remembered where I’d heard the Klinghurst name,” Cybil said. “Dunn was showing off a ring to Dr. Lengel a few months ago, while I was at the clinic. She said her fiancé gave it to her. Klinghurst is an unusual name and it stuck in the back of my mind. So when I saw her right after I remembered, I invited her in for a cup of coffee. I thought I’d do a little detective work myself. I guess I went too far and tipped my hand.”

“I guess you did. Why didn’t you call me instead of putting yourself at risk—”

“Don’t scold me. I made a mistake, don’t you think I know that?”

“You’re lucky to be alive. How’d you manage to get away from her?”

“Samuel Leatherman. He saved my bacon.”

I blinked at her. “Did you say—?”

“That’s just what I said. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for him.”

“Cybil... are you sure you didn’t get a whack on the head yourself?”

“Don’t be silly. I’m perfectly fine.”

“Then what’re you talking about? You mean you used one of the tricks Leatherman uses in your stories?”

“No, that is not what I mean. I mean,” she said slowly and distinctly, as if she were trying to get a point across to a halfwit, “that Samuel quite literally saved my life.”

“And just how did he do that?”

“The same way he dealt with the murderer in
Dead Eye
, essentially. He and I smacked that top-heavy tramp upside the head and kept right on smacking her until she was out cold.”

“Cybil...”

“My book, you ninny,” she said with a mixture of exasperation and triumph. “
That’s
what I picked up and hit the woman with while she was trying to smother me — my brag copy of
Dead Eye.”

I stayed with Cybil for a few minutes after the police left and the ambulance took a semicoherent Jocelyn Dunn off to the hospital. Not that Cybil needed me, once I’d added what I knew to her statement about the nurse, John Klinghurst, and Captain Archie. As a matter of fact, she barely knew I was there. She was surrounded by an eager crowd of other residents, regaling them with a salty account of Dunn’s attack and her Samuel Leatherman counteroffensive. She listened when I told her I was leaving to keep an appointment — it was after three by then — but only long enough to nod and then give me a peck on the cheek. She was holding court again as I walked away.

She’d said she would tell Kerry what had happened, but I figured it would be better if Kerry heard it from me first. I called her on the way out of Larkspur.

“I really shouldn’t be surprised,” she said when she got over the initial shock. “We both know that’s the way Cybil is — headstrong, a fighter, and absolutely fearless.”

“You forgot shameless.”

“I didn’t forget it, I just didn’t say it. What do you bet she turns up on the evening news, and uses the opportunity to plug her book?”

“No bet.” A local TV news van had been pulling into the lot as I was leaving it. “Guaranteed.”

Tough old meat, all right, I was thinking fondly. As tough as it comes. And I wasn’t too sure anymore about what Tamara had called the real sweet center.

I needn’t have hurried getting down to Greenwood; George Agonistes turned up twenty-five minutes late for our appointment. I was in the fidgety, clock-watching stage of waiting when his unmarked white van finally pulled into the library lot. I got out to talk to him as he swung into an adjacent space.

“Sorry about that,” he said. “I got hung up.”

“I was beginning to think you weren’t going to show.”

“I never stand up paying customers. You bring me cash?”

“After you do the job.”

“Sure. How far is it?”

“Not far. I’d ride with you, but you probably want to make a fast getaway before I do what I have to.”

“See no evil,” Agonistes said piously. “Lead on.”

I led on. A woman was walking a standard poodle near the foot of the Hunters’ driveway. She stopped to look as I made the turn, so I smiled and waved at her; she waved back. When I got up to the parking area, the white van grinding along on my tail, I glanced into the rearview mirror. The woman was still in sight, her attention on the poodle taking himself a squat by the side of the road. I considered it a positive sign that she found her dog crapping of greater interest than tandem visitors to the Hunter home.

Everything here was status quo; I’d swung by before going to the library to make sure. I joined Agonistes, who stood looking over the property with a jealous eye, his thin, gnarly body bent against the wind, his wild thatch of Don King-style hair blowing in different directions.

“How the other half lives,” he said. “Must be nice.”

“Not necessarily.”

He opened up the back of the van to unload his tool kit. The interior was jammed with every conceivable variety of sophisticated electronics equipment, both manufactured and self-made. Starlight nightscopes, motion detectors hooked up to infrared still and video cameras, FM wireless and infinity transmitters, recording and debugging devices, laser shotguns and surveillance spike mikes — you name it and he owned it. In his own minor way, he was something of a techno genius.

We went to the front door and he spent about ten seconds studying the alarm pad. “Uh-huh,” he said, and went to peer at the nearby windows, and came back and said. “No sweat. Fifteen minutes, tops.”

“My hero. Just don’t set the damn thing off.”

He looked offended. “You won’t hear it if I do. It’s the silent type.”

“But you’d know if you did set it off?”

“Cut it out. I don’t make that kind of mistake.” He opened his tool kit. “You might want to watch what I do. In case you run up against this kind of situation again.”

“No, thanks. I wouldn’t know what I was seeing. I need an instruction manual to change a light bulb.”

I went over to where I had an oblique view of the street below. The woman and her poodle were gone; only his calling card remained. A few cars rumbled by, none of them official-looking, and there was no other pedestrian traffic.

After twelve minutes by my watch, Agonistes called my name. He was closing up his tool kit when I reached him. The alarm pad looked exactly as it had before, the plate tight-screwed to the wall; the only difference was that now the red light was off.