Dead Seed (9 page)

“Work, work, work?”

“Right. For the glory and profit of Father Sarkissian. He makes money on the kids who leave and on the kids who stay.”

“You’re doing a real professional job, Corey,” I told him. “Do you want a beer?”

He smiled. “On your time or mine?”

“Corey—!”

“Just a little joke,” he lied. “Can’t you take a joke?”

He left and I remembered Sarkissian’s clever ploy. “I have to assume,” he had said, “that you are working with Dwight Kelly.”

That man was almost devious enough to be a private eye.

W
HY, I WONDERED, WOULD
a nice girl like Penelope continue to work for Sarkissian after learning about his tie-in with Kelly? My naïveté was showing again. Nice girls work for all kinds of bosses. Nice girls, too, are people. And people have to eat.

Jan came home around four. “How was your putting?” I asked her.

“Terrible, just terrible!”

I smiled.

“Don’t you dare think what you’re thinking,” she warned me.

“Calm down,” I said. “Let me make you a drink.”

“It’s too early for a drink,” she said. “I’m going to take my shower.”

She was still in the shower and I was out in front, picking up the evening paper, when Bernie drove up.

“Thanks for phoning me at noon,” I said. “I just this minute ran out of booze.”

“I’m sorry,” he said wearily. “I’ve been on a merry-go-round all day. I never even got to talk to that Lacrosse woman until an hour ago.”

“What did she tell you?”

“She denied that Morgenstern had phoned her. I think she’s lying.”

“Come on in,” I said. “There’s still an ounce or two of Scotch left.”

Over his drink he related the tedium of his day, trying to learn from informants and neighbors where Kelly had spent Saturday night.

“And finally,” I guessed, “you had to ask him directly.”

“Yes. He was up in Pismo Beach Saturday night talking with some parents whose daughter was at the cult.”

“And the parents confirmed it?”

He nodded. “And I believed them. The father is a judge up there.”

“I hate to sound critical,” I said, “but you could have saved a lot of time and labor by asking Kelly first.”

“Don’t I know it? It was Dahl’s idea.”

“But you went along with it.”

“I had to.
He
is a captain.”

I didn’t pursue that line. I said, “I think I have some ammunition for you.” I told him what Corey had learned about the Kelly-Sarkissian profit-sharing plan.

“Great!” he said. “The kid’s no slouch, is he?”

“He’s a tiger. I’ll work with him and you stick with Captain Dahl.”

He glared at me.

I smiled at him. “Just a little shot. I apologize. I’m glad you didn’t phone me. Plodding around town with Dahl isn’t my idea of a joyous afternoon.”

“He didn’t plod around with me. He gives the orders and I plod around.” He finished his drink and stood up. “How could we check Corey’s story? Who would we ask?”

“We’ll have to find somebody up there who might crack under pressure. Let’s hold off for a while to see what Corey learns.”

He nodded in agreement. “On Morgenstern, we’re nowhere, aren’t we?”

“So far.”

“For all we know, it could have been some transient, some mugger.”

It could. And writing it off, I thought, could save the police a lot of legwork. “Maybe,” I said, “but I doubt it.”

He left. I sat there, remembering somebody up at the cult who might crack under pressure. Penelope. But Bernie wasn’t going to get her name from me. I didn’t want her to be a victim of his current obsession.

When Jan came out, she looked at his empty glass and said, “You could have waited for me.”

“I did. That’s Bernie’s glass. He just left.”

“Damn him! I enjoy his company.”

“Not today, you wouldn’t. He had a bad day. His putting was sour.”

“No more of that, please.” She stretched out on a chaise lounge.

I told her about my morning talk with Grange.

When I had finished, she said, “How stupid does he think you are? Where would Mrs. Lacrosse learn down there in Arizona that her husband was planning this montage?”

“He’s scared,” I explained. “An unlikely story is the only one he could come up with. I must admit he handled it like a pro. He can still act.”

“He must be protecting Carol,” she said. “It was Carol’s house they were watching. It had to be Carol’s money that paid them off.”

“I tend to agree with you, Madame Sherlock. Now let’s have a quiet drink and talk of other things.”

“‘Of shoes and ships and sealing wax,’” she chirped, “‘and cabbages and kings.’ I’ll get our drinks.”

Jan and Mrs. Casey played gin rummy after dinner; I went over my patterns again. Nothing, nothing, nothing. There were too many connecting lines in this mess and no discernible motive. It seemed clear that blackmail had been involved. The blackmail had been paid. Why, then, the murder?

The rock that had been identified as the murder weapon had been stained with blood but devoid of fingerprints. It could have been a transient mugger, now long gone from here. Bernie was right; Morgenstern’s had been only one of a number of muggings on our long stretch of beaches. It was possible that the blackmailing had nothing to do with the murder.

Jan and Mrs. Casey were watching the eleven o’clock news when I went to bed. Jan was sleeping and Mrs. Casey was probably sleeping when I got up at one-thirty to warm a glass of milk. My long dormant ulcer was acting up again.

From the window of our breakfast room I saw a glow of red beyond the ridge to the north of us. Fire in the hills? It had to be. I switched on the kitchen radio to a local station.

“—and two units are now on the way up from Ventura,” the announcer was saying. “So far no homes or other structures have been seriously threatened, but there is a report from our San Marcos Pass lookout that some campers from Los Angeles are known to be in the area. And now to Greg Atwater at the scene—”

“Our earlier report about the campers has been confirmed,” Atwater said, “but I have an unconfirmed report that all of the campers except one are now out of danger and being treated for smoke inhalation at the temporary medical station set up at the San Sebastian school. The only identification I have on the missing camper is that he is a twelve-year-old boy. I’ll head down there to get the complete story. Back to you, Al.”

The reports went on. The fire had started in a gulley about a quarter of a mile below what the reporter called the New Awareness church. The occupants there had been alerted to evacuate, but a shift in the wind had taken them out of danger. The rescued campers were in sound health, but the boy was still missing. Arson was suspected. The police were looking for the driver of a yellow Ford pickup truck.

The fire was contained at two o’clock, under control at two-thirty. I went back to bed. Jan was sleeping soundly. Most of the town’s citizens were probably sleeping soundly. I kept thinking about that missing twelve-year-old boy and the man in the pickup truck.

The boy was still missing, the radio told us at breakfast. The driver of the Ford pickup was still being sought by the police.

If the police didn’t have any more identification than that on the truck, it was a hopeless search. This was pickup country and Ford was the biggest seller of the breed. The police obviously had no license number. The public would have gotten it from the media and been advised to be on the lookout for it.

Four thousand acres had burned, four thousand acres of rain gulleys and arroyos and barrancas. Twenty officers and several dozen volunteers were now tracking through that charred wasteland, searching for the missing boy.

I went down to the station after breakfast. Vogel was talking with a uniformed officer in his office. “I
know
Kelly’s pickup is a light green Chevrolet,” he was saying heatedly to the uniformed man, “but how many people can tell a Ford from a Chev, and light green could look yellow at night, couldn’t it?”

“This witness could tell the difference,” the officer said patiently. “He’s a Chevrolet mechanic. And Captain Dahl told me to tell you to forget it.” He turned his back on Vogel and left.

Bernie looked at me. “What do you want?”

“I was wondering about the boy. Have they found him?”

He shrugged. “I haven’t heard. I’m sorry I was—gruff. Sit down. I’ll get you a cup of coffee.”

“I’ll get them,” I said.

When I came back with the coffee he was standing by the window, staring out at the traffic. He took the cup of coffee from me and went over to sit behind his desk.

I sat on the chair nearby. I said, “That fire could be one way to get those kids out from behind that fence so a deprogrammer could grab one—or more. But Kelly doesn’t need to drive them out. He and Sarkissian are partners.”

“I know, I know! I hate that man so much that I’ve lost my sanity.” He sipped his coffee. He picked up a package of cigarettes from his desk and put them down again.

I asked, “Have you found out how much extortion money Mrs. Lacrosse picked up?”

He shook his head. “Not all of it. We know she deposited ten thousand dollars in the San Valdesto Savings and Loan. We went to a few other places after that and at some of the places we went, the manager would make a phone call, then refuse to cooperate.”

“A phone call to one of Miss Medford’s attorneys, probably. The district attorney could put some heat on them, couldn’t he?”

“Maybe. If he’s lucky. But what would it prove? Miss Medford has a right to give money to anybody she damn pleases.”

There was the sound of raindrops on the window. “
Now,
it starts,” Bernie said bitterly, “after the fire. If it had started yesterday—” He didn’t finish.

If it had, the twelve-year-old boy would not be missing—or dead. God isn’t always kind about His (or Her?) timing.

“We haven’t anyplace to go, have we?” I asked.

“And no way to get there,” he added. “You may as well go home.”

The rain never got heavy, only a steady drizzle. It started to clear up early in the afternoon. The boy had been found by that time, burned to death. If it had been arson, the arsonist was now a murderer.

I had picked up a couple of photography magazines downtown on the way home, hoping to find a dated itinerary of the various artists’ showings or appearances this month. There had been none.

No place to go and no way to get there. The lovers had their moneyed shield; the wanderer held their secret. We couldn’t put out a bulletin on
him;
there wasn’t any reason to suspect he had been involved in the blackmail or the fire.

There could be another wanderer far from here by now, the vagrant killer of Sydney Morgenstern. Speculations mean nothing, peeper, and less than nothing in court. Get the facts.

Corey came for his evening beer around five o’clock. I told him about our suspicion that the fire had been started to get the kids outside the fence.

“It’s possible,” he agreed. “There have been other deprogrammers who have tried to break in. Sarkissian doesn’t talk about them, Penelope told me. He wants the law to think that Kelly is his only threat. You know—a red herring?”

“I know. Who is your crooked friend down at the station, Corey?”

“Crooked—? That’s a hell of a thing to say about my uncle!”

“I apologize. I didn’t know he was your uncle. He can’t be the same cop Vogel suspects.”

“Who is that?”

“I don’t know. Vogel won’t tell me. All he told me was that the man was a friend of Kelly’s.”

“You can be damned sure my uncle is no friend of Kelly’s. Crooked! What a rotten thing to say.”

“Calm down. I’ve already apologized once. What did you learn from Joel today?”

He made a face. “I don’t dig him. You know what his father gave him for his seventeenth birthday? A Hasselblad 2000 FC!”

I had seen that name in one of the photography magazines. I said, “That’s an expensive camera, isn’t it?”

“And how! Three thousand dollars retail. And Joel sold it so they could get the money to come here. He doesn’t give one damn about photography.”

Anyone who isn’t seriously interested in photography,
the editor at
Arizona Highways
had said, is
of absolutely no interest to Carl.
But a son?

“How old is Joel now?” I asked.

“Still seventeen. His father gave him the camera a couple of months ago. How can he resent a father who gave him a birthday present like that?”

“Money isn’t everything, Corey. Except maybe to you.”

“Me? How about you? I found out that the minimum wage is three dollars and
thirty-five
cents an hour, not three-twenty.”

“The minimum was your figure, not mine. Is that what Sarkissian pays you?”

“He does. And he only charges me one dollar for my lunch. Besides that, the cook gives me a lot of goodies to take home. I do all right.”

“I am sure you always will,” I assured him.

A
THREE-THOUSAND-DOLLAR
camera from a once-a-year father to a son who has no interest in photography? Lacrosse must have known before Joel was seventeen that he was not going to pursue photography as his career. And if he hoped to foster an interest in his field, he certainly would not have started him with equipment that expensive.

Either Joel was lying or—or what? Or he had stolen it? Or it had been stolen by Mrs. Lacrosse and she had sold it? That made some sense. A man married to Mrs. Lacrosse who came home only once a year would not be likely to leave a three-thousand-dollar camera within her reach.

Jan came home smiling. “I’ll get my twelve dollars back now,” she declared with an air of triumph.

“What twelve dollars?”

“The twelve dollars I lost to Joyce yesterday.”

“Who is Joyce? Ms. Impeccable?”

“One and the same. We played a three-dollar Nassau yesterday, and I pressed her on the seventeenth hole. That’s how she won the extra three dollars.”

“And now, I suppose, you’ve set up a game of snooker with her at the Ace Pool Parlor?”

“Aren’t you the funny one! We are going to redo her house, top to bottom.”