Dead Seed (3 page)

I thanked her and considered phoning the Smithsonian. Then I realized it was almost six o’clock in Washington and the place would be closed.

It was possible that the van was stolen. This picture formed in my mind of poor Carl being bludgeoned to death by the overweight woman and buried in a shallow desert grave, while her son looked on, horrified.

It was also possible that the woman in the van could be his wife. That would be reason enough for him to spend only a week or two a year in Skeleton Gulch—to visit his son. It was an incongruous pairing, but not all marriages are made in heaven.

I was putting together patterns without substance, building an incident into a drama. Carol could have been telling the truth; the woman might be a disgruntled former maid. But I doubted it.

For the second day in a row Jan came home looking unhappy. “I have decided,” she told me, “to let Audrey handle that woman. She and I are never going to agree on anything!”

Audrey Kay of Kay Décor was Jan’s boss. I said, “Take off your shoes and relax. I’ll bring you a drink.”

When I brought our drinks back, I advised her, “Don’t quit. Stick with that woman.”

She shook her head. “I know your philosophy—try, try, and try again.”

“Right.”

“My daddy added a line to that adage. ‘Try, try, and try again—and then stop making a damned fool out of yourself.’ I’ve given her three tries. She’s had it! Has anything new happened next door?”

“Nothing.” I hesitated, and then told her about my call to Arizona, omitting the lie about my presidency of a camera club.

“I thought you weren’t going to play nosy neighbor.”

“I thought of my role as that of a concerned friend.”

Mrs. Casey came out of the house then to tell us Lieutenant Vogel was at the front door. “Tell him to come out here,” I said.

He wore the same weary expression Jan had worn when she came home. “I thought I’d drop in on the way home,” he explained.

“You took a strange route.”

“I know. But you’re the only friends I have who pour good Scotch. Do you want me to leave?”

“You’re always welcome here,” Jan said. “Don’t mind Brock. Sit down.”

He nodded and sat on the chaise next to Jan. I went to get him his drink. He had gone four miles out of his way for a drink? Baloney! He was a devious man, at times.

“Bad day?” I asked him as I handed him his drink.

“They’re all bad,” he said. “I’d retire if I could afford it.”

Poor-mouth Bernie Vogel. His father had left him three small old buildings in the heart of the business district. They were now worth twenty times what his father had paid for them. His father had run the only kosher delicatessen in town right up to a month before his death. Plotkin was now renting two of the buildings from Bernie.

He sat there silently, sipping his drink and staring out at the hills.

“We sure need rain,” I said. “Those hills are dry as tinder.”

He nodded.

“Speak up,” I said. “You’ve got better Scotch than that at home.”

“Okay, okay. Mrs. Carl Lacrosse dropped in to see us this afternoon.”

“Was she a heavy woman in a caftan?”

“She was plenty heavy. But she was wearing jeans and a T-shirt.”

“God, what a sight that must have been! What did she want?”

“She wanted us to get her son back.”

“Back? From where?”

“Oh, that crazy cult up there off San Marcos Pass Road. I forget the name of it. I guess the kid has deserted her.”

“So—?”

“So what can we do? They call it a religion. We stick our noses into that and we’ll have the ACLU crawling all over us.”

I laughed. “But you figured old Brock might go up there and check it out. That’s why you dropped in—on your way home.”

“Not for one second! I simply wondered how much you knew about those two.”

“I didn’t even know the woman was Mrs. Lacrosse. She never identified herself to me. Since I talked with you at lunch yesterday I’ve learned that her husband doesn’t spend more than a couple of weeks a year in Skeleton Gulch.”

“Where did you learn that?”

“From an assistant editor at
Arizona Highways.”

“You phoned them?”

I nodded.

“Why?”

“Because the people next door are not only neighbors. They are friends. Another drink?”

“Thank you. Make it weaker this time.”

I took my glass along and added some vodka to my martini. When I came back and sat down again, he asked, “Isn’t this Carl Lacrosse an artist?”

“In a way. He’s a photographer.”

“Which is an artist,” Jan explained, “to anyone who spends more than nineteen dollars for a camera.”

I smiled at her tolerantly and agreed with a nod and asked Bernie, “Who will Mrs. Lacrosse go to next, an attorney?”

“A lawyer won’t touch it if he knows the law. She’ll probably go to Dwight Kelly and his hoodlum associates.”

“Who is Dwight Kelly?”

“An ex-cop. He was a crooked cop, which is why he is an ex-cop. He calls himself a deprogrammer, but what he really is is a kidnapper.”

“What’s a deprogrammer?”

“A person,” Bernie said, “who is trained to straighten out the thinking of those troubled kids who are rescued from all the weird cults that infest Southern California. To my thinking, that would require an M.A. in psychology or an M.D. in psychiatry.”

“Is Kelly qualified to do that—or any of his associates?”

“I don’t know much about his associates, but Kelly is trained in only two disciplines, dishonest police work and larceny. We have been trying to nail him for two years.”

“What stymied you?”

“The rich people who hire him, mostly. He is not cheap, only crooked.”

“You mean like a private eye?”

“I’d say ‘yes’ to that if I wasn’t drinking your booze.” He finished his drink and stood up. “Are you sure you’ve told me all you know, Brock?”

“All I know about Mrs. Lacrosse and her son. Cheer up, Bernie! It’s a crazy world, but we have to adjust to it.”

He left. Jan said, “Poor Bernie.”

“Poor, hell! He’s loaded. And he enjoys putting the bad guys into the clink. Even if he wasn’t paid, he’d want to do it. He is a moaner, a poor-mouth moaner.”

“That’s no way to talk about a friend, Brock.”

“I love the bum! Do I have to whitewash him? He is what he is.”

We sat in silence for a while, and then Jan said, “Let’s eat out tonight.”

“Isn’t it a little late to tell Mrs. Casey?”

“I told her when I came home,” she informed me.

While she was taking her shower, I looked up the address of Dwight Kelly. It was on Cathedral Oaks Road, a fairly logical route to Charley’s Chowder House, where I would suggest eating.

When I turned off our street onto Cathedral Oaks Road, Jan asked, “Why this way?”

“Less traffic,” I explained, “and it’s more scenic.”

We were half a block from the Kelly address when she said, “Doesn’t that look like the same van on that driveway up there?”

“Check the license plate as we go by,” I said.

“Arizona,” she said as we went by. Then, “I hope you’re not going to tell me this was a coincidence.”

“What else?”

“You!” she said wearily. “Once a peeper, always a peeper.”

I said nothing.

Silence the rest of the way, silence while I parked. She made no move to get out, staring through the windshield.

I went around to her side and opened the door. “Well—?”

She looked up at me. “I have really been bitchy lately, haven’t I?”

I shrugged.

“I knew what you were when I met you,” she said. “I
despise
women who marry men and then try to make them into something they aren’t. You never tried to change me.”

“Why would I? If I wanted a different kind of partner, I would have married one. You had a lot of offers, remember. Personally, I think you made the right choice.”

“So do I. I’m going to be nicer. I’m going to work at it.”

“Don’t do it for me. I love you just the way you are. You, feisty, are my favorite person.”

I had clam chowder, she had broiled red snapper. She had Pinot chardonnay, I had beer. Calories, calories, calories.

“We’ll get as fat as pigs,” she said.

“Ma’am, if you were as fat as Mrs. Lacrosse, I would love you still. And look at the big fish she hooked.”

“You don’t know what she looked like when he married her,” Jan pointed out. “It had to be about eighteen years ago if the boy is his son. She might have been thin then.”

“It isn’t her weight so much. She looked so—so
sloppy.”

“Maybe he does, too. I’ve never seen a picture of him.”

True enough. I had been building patterns again. The sensitive artist, the flaccid wife, the rebellious son; I had been writing a scenario in my mind.

The van was still on the driveway when we drove home. Maybe she was shacked up with Kelly. Maybe she didn’t have enough money to go to a motel. Kelly had been a crooked cop. It was possible some crooked cop friend of Kelly’s had recommended him to her when she was down at the police station. Stop it, peeper!

There was music coming again from the Medford house when we got home, soothing music.

“Do you think they’re home again?” I asked Jan.

“I doubt it. The maid tunes in to the same station. What is the name of that song? Something about yesterday, isn’t it? ‘I remember yesterday, all my troubles seem to fade away.’ Is that it?”

I nodded. Carol Medford’s troubles hadn’t faded away. Her yesterdays might be coming back to haunt her.

I
PHONED BERNIE AT
home next morning before he went to work. I told him about the van being parked on Dwight Kelly’s driveway.

“So what?”

“How do I know so what?
You
were the guy moaning about never being able to nail Kelly. I am trying to be of help.”

“Okay, I’ll run over there and arrest Kelly for having a van parked on his driveway. You’re mental, you know it?”

“I try to be. Why not use your brain for a change? How would that woman from Arizona find out about Kelly the deprogrammer?”

“I have no idea. I am waiting patiently for your theory on it.”

“She was at the station yesterday, wasn’t she? Maybe she got the word down there.”

“Oh, God—Callahan’s crooked-cop complex again.”

On our first case together we had uncovered a crooked cop who was now serving time for murder. I didn’t mention this.

“Why don’t you enjoy your ill-gotten wealth,” he asked me. “Why don’t you practice your natural Irish sloth?”

“Because I follow the Benedictine rule.”

“And what’s that?”

“ ‘Idleness is the enemy of the soul.’ From Saint Benedict. I’m sure you’ve heard of him.”

“Not lately. Why don’t you coach another Little League team again? You can’t finish last
every
year.”

“Sorry to have bothered you,” I said. “Good-bye.”

“Wait!” he said. “I know you meant well. I’ve got a desk full of paperwork waiting for me at the office, but I’ll check into it. One of Kelly’s best friends is still with us.”

One of Kelly’s best friends. I would put him into the scenario when I learned his name. This did not seem to be the best time to ask for it.

Jan told me at breakfast that she had decided not to turn her recalcitrant client over to Audrey.

“I’m glad,” I said. “You’re no quitter.”

“Quitter,” she said. “That’s a dirty word to jocks, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“To me, too,” she said.

We had found another area of agreement, my love and I. She went back to the war in Solvang; I went back to reading the
Times.

It had clouded up last night and the forecaster had promised us rain. A shift in the wind had made him a bad guesser. The sun was out again.

The only clouds in sight were imaginary, a presage not of rain in our area, but of trouble.

I phoned the Medford house to ask if the lovers had returned. They had not. The butler told me that they had phoned yesterday afternoon and explained that they had cancelled their reservation at the lodge in Carmel. They would phone him again over the weekend to keep in touch.

It was a clear warm day, a nice day for a drive. I headed for the San Marcos Pass Road. The route to it took me past the house of Dwight Kelly. The van was still on the driveway.

Bernie had told me Kelly’s clients were rich. Mrs. Lacrosse did not seem to fit that category. Could it be that her body had interested Kelly? I didn’t dwell on the image engendered by that fantasy.

Up the San Marcos Pass Road I drove, climbing and turning. A narrow, rutted road led off of it halfway to the top of the pass and a small white sign with gilded letters identified it as the entrance to The New Awareness. This had to be the cult that Bernie had mentioned. I turned into it.

The road got ruttier, rockier, and narrower. The Mustang labored on, groaning. But she is no quitter. We arrived finally at a wide pair of gates in a high Cyclone fence topped with barbed wire.

A short, wide and ugly man in corduroy pants and a sweatshirt was sitting in a captain’s chair inside the gate, reading
The Racing Form.
He got up as I came from the car.

“You got an appointment?” he asked me.

I shook my head. “My name is Lester Tryden. I am a cousin of Carl Lacrosse. He phoned me from Bern last night and asked me to come up here and talk with his son.”

He frowned. “Bern? Where’s that?”

“In Switzerland.”

He studied me doubtfully. Then, “What’s that name again?”

“Lester Tryden.”

He went back to the chair and picked up a phone next to it. He talked for about a minute and then came over to unlock the gate. “Go straight up this road,” he told me, “past those redwood barracks to that small white building at the end. That’s Mr. Sarkissian’s office.”

The road inside the gates was wider and paved. Not a human being was in sight as I drove past a long two-story redwood building to the small white stucco building at the end.

The white was trimmed in gold around the doors and windows. The sign next to the door read: Vartan Sarkissian, Founder.

The door opened into an outer office. A slim and flaxen-haired girl in a simple charcoal denim dress was typing at a desk in there.