Dead Seed (12 page)

“Feisty old bastard,” Jerry said, “around seventy. He grew up there. He was about as close to being a friend of Lacrosse as any person is likely to get. Morgenstern used to stay with him when he came here, about once a year. That’s when Morgenstern took an interest in Joel, when Lacrosse left town for good. That’s why Wendell suspects Morgenstern was lying when he told Joel the camera was a present from his father.”

“He thinks Morgenstern would spend three thousand dollars on a—on a whim?”

Jerry shrugged. “Who knows? The guy was loaded.”

“Are Carl Lacrosse’s parents still living?”

“His mother is dead. Last I heard, his father is in a rest home in Phoenix.”

“Does Carl ever visit him?”

“I don’t know. Probably not. The picture I get of him, Carl Lacrosse is one self-centered bastard.”

The Holland guest house held a large combination bed-sitting-room, a kitchenette, and a bathroom. The refrigerator was stocked with seltzer water, tonic water, ginger ale, and beer. The cupboard held two bottles of Wild Turkey and one of imported Russian vodka. The quarter-horse business must be doing very well.

The Morgenstern revelation had been more than a surprise; it had been a shock. I added another imaginary line to my pattern sheet.

It suggested that it hadn’t been Carol that Mrs. Lacrosse had traveled from Arizona to haunt; it had been Grange. They could have come to blackmail Grange—and Carol had picked up the tab.

The impression Morgenstern had left with me after our talk was that he had gone to see Carl Lacrosse because his client had complained to him. There had not been the slightest hint in his conversation that he knew the family. Why not?

In suburban Montevista, we could hear the big trucks blatting on the distant freeway. When I lived in Los Angeles, every night had held a variety of noises. There was not even a whisper of a breeze through the pines in Prescott. It was hard for me to get to sleep. When it is too quiet I have this irrational feeling that something is creeping up on me.

At breakfast, I asked Jerry if Morgenstern had been a close friend of the Lacrosse family.

“Not Carl or his wife. It was Carl’s parents he came to visit. I didn’t know either one of them, but Wendell told me that Carl’s mother had been a script girl and his father a still cameraman. They came here because Carl’s mother had emphysema.”

“And Wendell Welch met Morgenstern through them?”

Jerry nodded. “After Carl left and Mrs. Lacrosse was alone with Joel, Morgenstern started staying with Wendell. He’d go to Phoenix first and spend several days with Carl’s father and then come up here to visit the kids. I understand he never had any children of his own.”

Lydia said, “I thought you had retired, Brock.”

“For a while. I got restless.”

She smiled. “You always were. A nice peaceful place like this would drive you insane, wouldn’t it?”

“That’s no drive, it’s a putt,” Jerry said. “He was always half kooky.”

She smiled. “That’s why I loved him.” She stuck her tongue out at Jerry. “And still do.”

“I guess I do, too,” Jerry said. “Another waffle, fatso?”

“No, thanks. I’ll want to rent a car tomorrow. Will it be possible to rent one in Prescott?”

He shook his head. “Not the kind you’ll need if you intend to prowl through that Skeleton Gulch area. We’ll use one of mine when we go to visit Wendell today. You can use it as long as you need it.”

It was Sunday and the rurals were driving into Prescott to church. I soon understood why we needed Jerry’s four-wheel-drive Scout. Time and again, we were forced to move over onto the soft shoulder of the narrow road to allow oncoming cars to pass. Several times, only two of the wheels would find traction there.

The flora that bordered this torture trail was not impressive to my Southern California eyes; alligator-bark juniper, salt cedar, grama grass, manzanita.

But the Bradshaw Mountains loomed over us and the tall ponderosa pines. To the son of a still photographer who hoped to follow his father’s trade, those mountains probably had been the challenge and the dream. What vistas, he must have wondered, would open on the far side of them?

“What are you thinking?” Lydia asked me.

“I can see now why Carl Lacrosse turned into a wanderer. He must have run out of pictures here.”

“We didn’t come here for the scenery,” she said. “We came here for the air.”

“Some of his best work was shot in Arizona,” Jerry said stiffly. “Look who is suddenly an art critic!”

Lydia nudged me. “I’m looking, dear, but there is none in sight.”

“You two,” he said. “You two and your nasty tongues.”

Silence, as we twisted and turned up the narrow road. Then Jerry laughed. “My God, I’m still jealous!”

“So am I,” I admitted. “‘This too shall pass away.’”

“Who said that?” Lydia asked.

“Abraham Lincoln,” I informed her, “in a speech in Wisconsin in 1859.”

“Bartlett again?” she asked suspiciously.

“You and your nasty tongue,” I said. “But I cannot lie to you. Jan told me.”

“You got the right woman and I got the right man,” she decided. “After Jerry showed up, you were never in the competition, Brock. I owe you a finder’s fee for him.”

Wendell Welch’s ranch was on a gentle slope below a high and threatening cliff. The white frame house was about a fourth as large as the stables behind it. There were half a dozen sleek horses grazing in his immense corral, and one lonely looking cow.

He was a thin man of medium height with a face weathered as brown as saddle leather. His grip was strong as he shook my hand. Jerry had said he was around seventy; he had probably looked like this for the last thirty years. His dark hair had very little gray in it, his eyes were an unclouded dark blue.

“Too early for a drink?” he asked.

“Not for a beer,” I said.

Jerry and Lydia agreed. The sun was hot; we drank our beer on a shaded patio behind the house. Welch pointed at a small adobe-brick building on the flat land south of his place.

“That’s the Lacrosse house,” he told me. “Nobody is there now. Are they still in San Valdesto?”

I nodded, “Joel left her. He joined a cult up there. I don’t think he went to get converted. I have this feeling he was only trying to get away from his mother.”

“It’s about time,” Welch said. “What a monster. I see her cousin Alvin is home again. He must have done all right up there. He left here in a 1963 Dodge and came home in a 1983 Ford pickup.”

Another revelation. “Is it yellow?” I asked.

He nodded. “You know about it? Is it stolen?”

I told him about the fire that had threatened the cult and the police search for the suspected arsonist.

He said, “If there was a Chitty in town, they should have grabbed him. Maybe we ought to alert the sheriff here?”

“Not yet,” I said. “There are an awful lot of yellow Ford pickups. What does he do for a living, if anything?”

“Odd jobs. He’s handy around cars. He ran a one-man garage in Prescott for a couple of years.”

But they had taken the van to a garage for new points and plugs. Even I could put in new points and plugs.

“I don’t know Joel,” I said, “but a young friend of mine who does thinks well of him.”

“He’s a good kid,” Wendell said. “He worked for me a couple of summers, and after school in the fall. I never found any trace of Chitty in him.”

I told him about the money Mrs. Lacrosse had come into and her boast that now Joel could go to college.

Wendell smiled. That would be a big thing to her. She was the only Chitty who ever finished high school. And Carl had four years down there at Tempe, at Arizona State, before he went off to photography school in New York. You see, after she hooked Carl, she wasn’t a Chitty anymore. She was a Lacrosse.”

I said nothing, staring down at the Lacrosse house. That was the place the head of our photography school had called a shrine. So, Abe Lincoln’s log cabin wasn’t a mansion, either.

“You’re here because of the Morgenstern murder?” Wendell asked.

I nodded.

“I’ll help you all I can,” he promised. “Sydney Morgenstern was as fine a man as I have ever known in my seventy-one years.”

H
ERE WAS WHERE IT
had all started. Here is where I should have started. The seed was here. It had been dumb to suspect Kelly of starting that fire in order to get Joel out; he had an ally inside the fortress.

There were other deprogrammers, possibly, who might have risked arson, but why hadn’t we thought of the obvious? Mrs. Lacrosse had her money. What she wanted now was her son. But probably not at the price Kelly would charge her.

Another unsubstantiated pattern. As I had told Wendell, there was a host of yellow Ford pickup trucks roaming the golden West.

I had learned more here in one day than we had learned in a week in San Valdesto. The Morgenstern involvement was a shocker to me. I reminded myself that he was an agent, a loyal agent. His job was to protect his client. I had to leave myself at least one hero.

Wendell phoned in the morning to tell me that the yellow pickup was now parked in front of the Lacrosse house and Alvin was unloading his belongings. Apparently he was moving into the deserted house.

“Does he know you?” Wendell asked.

“I was with a police officer who questioned him. He might remember me.”

“Was he sober at the time?”

“So far as I could tell. We were only there for a couple of minutes.”

“I think it would be safer,” he said, “if we saw him together tonight. There’s a wingding at the Ponderosa Rifle Club, and I’m a member. He won’t be sober there for long. Come here and we’ll go together. Make it around seven.”

“Fine.”

“In the meantime,” he suggested, “you might talk with the man that Carl’s father sold his shop to. His name is Prentice Coldwell. He knew the family well. The new name of the shop is Coldwell Camera. Tell him I sent you.”

I phoned the shop and told Coldwell that I was interested in the history of the Lacrosse family, and that Wendell Welch had given me his name. I asked if I could take him to lunch.

He said I could. “The Rooster’s Roost Cafe,” he suggested, “at a quarter to twelve, before the tourists begin to crowd in. I’ll be standing near the front door and wearing a brown-and-white polka-dot bow tie.”

In a cornball movie, Prentice Coldwell would have been typecast as a small-town editor who stands up for what he believes, supports unpopular causes, braves the scorn of his fellow citizens, and loses the advertising of the town’s merchants and the support of his closest friends; a Jimmy Stewart type.

He was more than thin; he looked dried-out, not unusual among the citizens of Arizona. I expected him to order a bourbon and branch water before lunch. He ordered a daiquiri.

Carl’s father, he told me, had every bit as much talent as his son. But being a free-lance photographer in the depression of the thirties was the road to starvation. He had jumped at the chance to get a weekly paycheck at the studio. Morgenstern had wangled him the job.

“And then,” I said, “his wife got emphysema and they came here?”

He nodded.

“How about Carl junior’s wife?” I asked.

He gave me the Henny Youngman line. “Compared with what?”

I had heard it a hundred times, but I forced a small laugh.

“She was a ripe beauty when she was young,” he told me. “And probably the only Chitty who could read without moving her lips. As she got heavier, she got grosser, and she got meaner. I think she must have realized she had married too far above her. She turned into a vicious, bitter woman.”

“And Joel?” I asked.

He shrugged. “The jury is still out on him. Morgenstern was more his father than Carl was. Morgenstern had this dumb genetic theory that the seed had to be carried down from Carl and Carl junior. He spent a lot of time with Joel. He had no kids of his own, you know, and all his natural fatherly instincts were centered on Joel. He offered to send him to college, and his mother was willing to go along with it, but Joel wasn’t interested. I have a feeling there is more Chitty than Lacrosse in Joel. He was not at all interested in photography. He is one bitter kid.”

“Wouldn’t you be bitter,” I asked him, “if
your
father had deserted you when you were young?”

He shook his head and yawned. “He did and I’m not. I recommend the mountain-brook trout for lunch.”

This was no Jimmy Stewart. An hour later, I thanked him and drove back to the home of my first true love in her husband’s four-wheel-drive Scout.

Prentice had told me at lunch that he was the man who had sold Morgenstern the camera new. He was also the man who had bought it back from Joel for eight hundred dollars. He had then resold it, used, to a tourist for twenty-three hundred dollars.

Would Jimmy Stewart do that? Not in a million years!

“Learn anything?” Lydia asked.

“A little. He confirmed some things I suspected.”

She sighed and smiled sadly and asked, “Do you really enjoy this kind of work, Brock? I mean—the messy people you have to get involved with, and the dangerous people?”

“I must enjoy it. Nobody is paying me. Do you think that’s crazy?”

“A little. Do you still have dreams about your father?”

“Occasionally.” I smiled at her. “That’s not why, Lydia. Does Jerry have dreams about horses?”

“I fail to see the connection,” she said. “You know we came here for Jerry’s health.”

Jerry’s physical health, at a rough estimate, should put him into the top ten percent of the country’s healthiest citizens. His health problem was purely mental. It is called hypochondria in the medical dodge. It has made a lot of doctors rich.

A man must do what he has to do. If Lydia had been a decade younger she would have realized that a woman must do the same.

Instead, we stood with Jerry that afternoon and watched a kid from town test out a few of his colt hopefuls on the short track Jerry had laid out in the valley below.

It was almost as much fun as questioning Alvin Chitty.

Jerry’s rare fall from grace had been expended Saturday night. He sipped a glass of grapefruit juice while Lydia and I enjoyed our martinis on the deck.