"N" Is for Noose (16 page)

"I donate the extras to charity. Speaking of pain relievers, how's your hand?"

"Good. Much better. It hardly hurts," I said. "I take it Rosie's attitude doesn't bother you."

"Rosie's Rosie. She's never going to change. If it bugs you, tell her. Don't complain to me."

"Oh right. I see. You want me to take the point."

"Battle of the Titans. I'd like to see that," he remarked.

At six, I left Henry's, stopping by my apartment to pick up my umbrella and a jacket. Once again, the rain had eased off, but the cold saturated the air, making me grateful to step into the tavern. Rosie's was quiet, the air scented with the pungent smell of cauliflower, onions, garlic, bacon, and simmering beef. There were two patrons sitting in a booth, but I could see they'd been served. The occasional clink of flatware on china was the only sound I heard.

Rosie was sitting at the bar by herself, absorbed in the evening paper, which was open in front of her. A small television set was turned on at the far end of the bar, the sound muted. There was no sign of William and I realized if I was going to catch her, this would be my only chance. I could feel my heart thump. My bravery seldom extends to interactions of this kind. I pulled out the stool next to hers and perched. "Something smells good."

"Lot of somethings," she said. "I got William fixing deep-fried cauliflower with sour cream sauce. Also hot pickled beef, and beef tongue with tomato sauce."

"My favorite," I said dryly.

Behind us, the door opened and a foursome came in, admitting a rush of cold air before the door banged shut again. Rosie eased down off her stool and moved across the room to greet them, playing hostess for once. The door opened again and Colleen Sellers was suddenly standing in the entrance. What was she doing here? So much for my confrontation with Rosie. Maybe Colleen had decided to give me some help.

"I don't even know what I'm doing here," she said, glumly. Her blond hair drooped with the damp and her glasses had fogged over from the heat in the place.

"Talking about Tom."

"I guess."

"You want to tell me the rest of it?"

"There's nothing much to tell."

We were seated in the back booth I usually claim as my own. I'd poured her a glass of wine that was now sitting in front of her untouched. She removed her glasses, holding them by the frames while she pulled a paper napkin from the dispenser and cleaned the lenses in a way that made me worry she was scratching them. Without the glasses, she looked vulnerable, the misery palpable in the air between us.

"When did you first meet him?"

"At a conference up in Redding a year ago. He was there by himself. I never did meet his wife. She didn't like to come with him, or at least that's what I heard. I gathered she was a bit of a pain in the ass. Not that he ever admitted it, but other people said as much. I don't know what her gig was. He always spoke of her like she was some kind of goddess." She pushed her hair back from her face and tucked it behind her ears in a style that wasn't flattering. She put on her glasses again and I could see smears on the lenses.

"Did you meet by chance or by design?"

Colleen rolled her eyes and a weary smile played around her mouth. "I can see where you're headed, but okay… I'll bite. I knew he was going to be there and I looked him up. How's that?"

I smiled back at her. "You want to tell it your way?"

"I'd appreciate that," she said dryly. "Until the conference in Redding, I only dealt with him by phone. He sounded terrific so naturally, I Wanted to meet him in person. We hit it off right away, chatting about various cases we'd worked, at least the interesting ones. You know how it is, trading professional tales. We got talking department politics, his experiences versus mine, the usual stuff."

"I don't mean to sound accusatory, but someone seemed to think the two of you were very chummy."

"Chummy?"

"That you were flirtatious. I'm just telling you what I heard."

"There's no law against flirting. Tom was a doll. I never knew a man yet who couldn't use a little boost to his ego, especially at our age. My god. Who the hell's telling you this stuff? Someone trying to make trouble, I can tell you that."

"How well did you know him?"

"I only saw him twice. No, correction. I saw him three times. It was all work at first, starting with the case he was on."

"What case was that?"

"County sheriff up in Nota Lake found an apparent suicide in the desert, an ex-con named Ritter, who'd hung himself from a branch of a California white oak. Identification was confirmed through his fingerprints and Tom tracked him back as far as his release from Chino in the spring of 'eighty-one. Ritter had family in this area; Perdido to be precise. He talked to them by phone and they told him Ritter'd been traveling with a pal."

"Alfie Toth," I supplied. I was curious to hear her version, but I didn't want her to think I was completely ignorant of the facts.

"How'd you hear about him?" she asked.

"Hey, I have my sources just like you have yours. I know Tom drove down here in June to look for him."

"That's right. I was the one got a line on the guy. Toth had been arrested here on a minor charge. I called Tom and he said he'd be down within a day. This was mid-April. I told him I'd be happy to make the contact, but he preferred doing it himself. I guess he got caught up in work and it was June by the time he made it down here. By then, Toth was gone."

"So Tom never talked to him?"

"Not that I know of. As it turned out, Toth's body was the one found in January of this year. The minute the ID was made, I called Tom. The MO was the same for both Ritter and Toth and that was worrisome. The two deaths had to be related, but it was tough to determine what the motivation might have been."

"From what I hear, the murders were separated by a five-year time gap. You have a theory about that?"

I could see her mouth pull down and she wagged her head to convey her ambivalence. "This was one time when Tom and I didn't agree on anything. It could have been a double-cross… you know, a bank heist or burglary with Ritter and his sidekick betraying an accomplice. Fellow catches up with them and kills Ritter on the spot. Then it takes another five years to hunt down his pal, Toth."

"What was Tom's idea?"

"Well, he thought Toth might have been a witness to Ritter's murder. Something happens in the mountains and Pinkie Ritter dies. Toth manages to get away and eventually the killer catches up with him."

I said, "Or maybe Alvin Toth killed Ritter and someone else came along and avenged Ritter's death."

She smiled briefly. "As a matter of fact, I suggested that myself, but Tom was convinced the perpetrator was the same in both cases."

I thought about Dr. Yee's assessment, which was the same as Tom's. "It would help if I knew how to get in touch with Ritter's family."

"I can give you the phone number. I don't have it with me, but I could call you later if you like."

"That'd be great. One other thing. I know this is none of my business, but were you in love with Tom? Because that's what I'm picking up, reading between the lines," I said.

Her body language altered and I could see her debate with herself about how much to reveal. "Tom was loyal as a dog, completely devoted to his wife, which he let me know right off the bat. Ain't that always the way? All the good men are married."

"So they say."

"But I'll tell you something. We had real chemistry between us. It's the first time I ever understood the term soul mate. You know what I mean? We were soul mates. No kidding. It was like finding myself in this other guise… my spiritual counterpart… and that was heady stuff. We'd be in a room together with five or six hundred other people and I always knew where he was. It was like tentacles stretching all the way across the auditorium. I wouldn't even have to look for him. The bond was that strong. There wasn't anything I couldn't say to him. And laugh? God, we laughed."

"You go to bed with him?" I asked, casually.

A blush began to saturate Colleen's cheeks. "No, but I would have. Hell, I was so crazy about him I broached the subject myself. I was shameless. I was wanton. I'd have taken him on any basis… just to be with him once." She shook her head. "He wouldn't do it, and you know why? He was honorable. Decent. Can you imagine the gall of it in this day and age? Tom was an honorable man. He made a promise to be faithful and he meant it. That's one of the things I admired most about him."

"Maybe it's just as well. He wouldn't have been good at deceit even if he'd been willing to try."

"So I've told myself."

"You miss him," I said.

"I've cried every day since I heard about his death. I never even had the chance to say goodbye to him."

"It must be tough."

"Awful. It's just awful. I miss him more than I missed my own mother when she died. So maybe if I'd slept with him, I'd have had to kill myself or something. Maybe the loss and the pain would have been impossible to bear."

"You might have had less respect for him if he'd given in."

"That's a risk I'd have taken, given half a chance."

"At any rate, I'm sorry for your pain."

"No sorrier than I am. I'm never going to find another guy like him. So what can you do? You soldier on. At least his wife has the luxury to mourn in public. Is she taking it hard?"

"That's why she hired me, trying to find relief."

Colleen looked away from me casually, trying to conceal her interest. "What's she like?"

I thought for a moment, trying to be fair. "Generous with her time. Terribly insecure. Efficient. She smokes. Sort of hard-looking, platinum blond hair teased out to here. She has slightly gaudy taste and she's crazy about her son, Brant. This was Tom's stepson."

"Do you like her? Is she nice?"

"People claim she's neurotic, but I do like the woman. A few don't, but that's true of all of us. There's always someone who thinks we're dogshit."

"Did she love him?"

"Very much, I'd say. It was probably a good marriage… maybe not perfect, but it worked. She doesn't like the idea of his dying with unfinished business."

"Back to that," she said.

"I'd do the same for you if you hired me to find answers."

Colleen's gaze came back to mine. "You thought it was me. That we were having an affair."

"It crossed my mind."

"If I'd had an affair with him, would you have told his wife the truth?"

"No. What purpose would it serve?"

"Right." She was silent for a moment.

"Do you know why Tom was so distressed?" I asked.

"I might."

"Why so protective?"

"It's not up to me to ease her mind," she said. "Who's easing mine?"

I held my hands up in surrender. "I'm just asking the question. You have to do as you see fit."

"I have to go," she said abruptly, gathering up her coat. "I'll call you later with the phone number for Ritter's daughter."

I held a finger up. "Hang on. I just remembered. I have something for you if you're interested." I reached into the outer zippered compartment of my shoulder bag and pulled out one of the black-and-white photographs of Tom at the April banquet. "I had these done up in case I needed 'em. You might like to have something to remember him by."

She took the picture without comment, a slight smile playing across her mouth as she studied it.

I said, "I never met him myself, but I thought it captured him."

She looked up at me with tears rimming her eyes. "Thank you."

When I returned from my run the next morning, there was a message from Colleen Sellers on my answering machine, giving me the name and Perdido address of a woman named Dolores Ruggles, one of Pinkie Ritter's daughters. As this represented the only lead I had, I gassed up the VW and headed south on 101 as soon as I was showered and dressed.

On my left, I could see fields under cultivation, the newly planted rows secured by layers of plastic sheeting as slick and gray as ice. Steep hills, rough with lowgrowing vegetation, began to crowd up against the highway. On my right, the bleak Pacific Ocean thundered against the shore. Surfers in black wetsuits waited on rocking boards like a scattered flock of sea birds. The rains had moved on, but the sky was still white with a ceiling of sluggish clouds and the air was thick with the mingled scents of brine and recent precipitation. Snow would be falling in the high Sierras near Nota Lake.

I took the Leeward off-ramp and made two left turns, crossing over the freeway again in search of the street where Dolores Ruggles lived. The neighborhood was a warren of low stucco structures, narrow streets intersecting one another repeatedly. The house was a plain box, sitting in a plain treeless yard with scarcely a bush or a tuft of grass to break up the monotonous flat look of the place. The porch consisted of a slab of concrete with one step leading up to the front door and a small cap of roofing to protect you as you rang the bell, which I did. The door was veneer with long sharp splinters of wood missing from the bottom edge. It looked like a dog had been chewing on the threshold.

The man who opened the door was drying his hands on a towel tucked into the waist of his trousers. He was easily in his sixties, maybe five-foot-eight, with a coarsely lined face and a thinning head of gray-white hair the color of wood ash. His eyes were hazel, his brows a tangle of wiry black and gray. "Keep your shirt on," he said, irritably.

"Sorry. I thought the bell was broken. I wasn't even sure anyone was home. I'm looking for Dolores Ruggles."

"Who the hell are you?"

I handed him my card, watching his lips move while he read my name. "I'm a private investigator," I said.

"I can see that. It says right here. Now we got that established, what do you want with Dolores? She's busy at the moment and doesn't want to be disturbed."

"I need some information. Maybe you can help me and we can spare her the imposition. I'm here about her father."

"The little shithead was murdered."

"I'm aware of that."

"Then what's it to you?"

"I'm trying to find out what happened."

"What difference does it make? The man is D-E-A-D dead and not soon enough to suit my taste. I've spent years coping with all the damage he did."

"Could I come in?"

He stared at me. "Help yourself," he said abruptly and turned on his heel, leaving me to follow. I scurried after him, taking a quick mental photograph as we passed through the living room. Not to sound sexist, but the room looked as if it had been designed by a man. The floors were bare hardwood, stained dark. I noted a tired couch and a sagging upholstered chair, both shrouded by heavy woven Indian-print rugs. I thought the coffee table was antiqued, but I could see as I passed the only patina was dust. The walls were lined with books: upright, sideways, slanting, stacked, packed two deep on some shelves, three deep on others. The accumulation of magazines, newspapers, junk mail, and catalogs suggested a suffocating indifference to tidiness.

"I'm doing dishes out here," he said, as he moved into the kitchen. "Grab a towel and you can pitch in. You might as well be useful as long as you're picking my brain. By the way, I'm Homer, Dolores's husband. Mr. Ruggles to you."

His tone had shifted from outright rudeness to something gruff, but not unpleasant. I could see he'd been rather good-looking in his day; not wildly handsome, but something better-a man with a certain amount of character and an appealing air. His skin was darkly tanned and heavily speckled with sun damage, as if he'd spent all his life toiling in the fields. His shirt was an earth brown with an elaborately embroidered yoke done in threads of gold and black. He wore cowboy boots that I suspected were intended to add a couple of inches to his height.

By the time I reached the kitchen, he'd turned on the water again and he was already back at work, washing plates and glassware. "Towel's in there," he said, nodding at the drawer to his immediate left. I took out a clean dish towel and reached for a plate still hot from the rinse water. "You can stack those on the kitchen table. I'll put 'em up when we're done."

I glanced at the table. "Uhm, Mr. Ruggles, the table needs to be wiped. Do you have a sponge?"

Homer turned and gave me a look. "This is a telling trait of yours, isn't it?"

"Oh, sure," I said.

"Skip the Mr. Ruggles bit. It sounds absurd."

"Yes, Sir."

That netted me half a smile. He wrung out the cloth and tossed it in my direction with a shake of his head. I wiped off the table top, setting several items aside: newspaper; salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like the Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood; a clutch of pill bottles with Dolores's name plastered on them, along with various warning labels. Whatever she was taking, she was supposed to avoid alcohol, excessive exposure to sunlight, and the operation of heavy machinery. I wondered if this referred to cars, tractors, or Amtrak locomotives. When I'd finished, I handed him the rag and then picked up the dish towel and resumed wiping the plate.

"So what's the deal?" he said belatedly. "What's your interest in Pinkie Ritter? Nice girl like you should be ashamed."

"I didn't know anything about him until yesterday. I've been tracking down a friend of his, who may have been… Could we just skip this part? It's almost too tricky to explain."

"You're talking Alfie Toth."

"Thank you. That's right. Everybody seems to know about him."

"Yeah, well, Alfie was a birdbrain. Women thought he was attractive, but I couldn't see it myself. How can you think some guy's handsome when you know he's dim? To my way of thinking, it spoils the whole effect. I think he hung out with my father-in-law for protection, which just goes to show you how dumb he was."

"You knew Alfie was dead?"

"You bet. The police told us about it when his body turned up. They came around asking the same question you probably want answered, which is what's the connection and who did what to whom? I'll give you the same answer I gave them. I don't know."

"What's the story on Pinkie? I take it you didn't think much of him."

"That's a gross understatement. I really hated his guts. Whoever killed Pinkie saved me life in prison. Pinkie had six kids-three sons and three daughters and mistreated every one of them from the day they were born 'til they got big enough to fight back. Nowadays there's all this talk of abuse, but Pinkie did the real thing. He punched them, burned them, made 'em drink vinegar and hot sauce for talking back to him. He locked them in closets, set them out in the cold. He screwed 'em, starved 'em, threatened them. He hit 'em with belts, boards, metal pipes, sticks, hairbrushes, fists. Pinkie was the meanest son of a bitch I ever met and that's goin' some."

"Didn't anybody intervene?"

"People tried. Lot of people blew the whistle on him. Trick was trying to prove it. Teachers, guidance counselors, next-door neighbors. Sometimes Children's Services managed to take the kids away from him and foster them out. Judge always gave 'em back." He shook his head. "Pinkie knew how the game was played. He kept a clean house-the kids saw to that-and he did like to cook-that was his specialty. It's what he did for a living when he wasn't breaking their heads or breaking the law. Social workers came around and everything looked fine. Kids knew better than to open their mouths. Dolores says she can remember the six of them lined up in the living room, answering questions just as nice as you please. Pinkie wouldn't be in the room, but he was always somewhere close. Kids knew better than to rat on him or they'd be dead by dark. They'd stand there and lie. Said social workers knew, but couldn't get anything on him without their assistance. Only thing saved 'em was his getting thrown in jail."

"What about his wife? Where was she all this time?"

"Dolores thinks he killed her though it couldn't be proved. He claims she ran off with some barfly and was never heard from again. Dolores says she remembers as a kid waking up in the dead of night. Pinkie was out in the woods behind the house with a power saw. Lantern on the ground throwing these big shadows up against the trees. Moths fluttering around the light. She still has nightmares about that. She was the baby in the family, six years old at the time. I think the oldest was fifteen. She went out there next day. The ground was all turned, probably to hide the blood. She still remembers the smell-like a package of chicken when it's gone funny and has to be thrown out. Mom was never seen nor heard from again."

"Pinkie sounds like a very nasty piece of work."

"The worst."

"So anybody could have killed him, including one of his kids. Is that what you're saying?"

"That would cover it," he said. "Of course, by the time he died, they were out from under his control. The rest of the kids had scattered to hell and gone. Couple of 'em still in California, though we don't see 'em all that much." Homer finished the last dish and turned the water off. I continued drying silverware while he put away the clean plates.

"When did you see him last?"

"Five years ago in March. The minute he got out of Chino, he headed straight up here, arrived on the Twenty-fifth and stayed a week."

"Good memory," I remarked.

"The cops asked me about that so I looked it up. How I pinpointed the date is I withdrew five hundred bucks from a bank account the day Pinkie left. I counted backward from that and the date stuck in my mind. Anything else you want to quiz me about?"

"I didn't mean to interrupt. Go on."

"Dolores was the only kid of his still living in the area so naturally, he felt she owed him room and board for as long as he liked."

"She agreed to that?"

"Of course."

"Didn't you object?"

"I did, but that was an argument I couldn't win. She felt guilty. She's a hell of a gal and what she's endured, believe me, you don't want to know-but the upshot is, she's anxious to please, easily manipulated especially when it came to him. She wanted that man's love. Don't ask me to explain, given what she suffered. He was still Daddy to her and she couldn't turn him away. He was just like he always was: demanding, critical. He refused to lift a finger, expecting her to wait on him hand and foot. I finally got fed up and told him to clear out. Pinkie says, 'Fine, no problem. I won't stay where I'm not wanted. To hell with you,' he says. He was sore as a boil and feeling much put upon, but I was damned if I'd back down."

"Toth was with him at the time?"

"Off and on. I think Alfie's ex-wife lived in town somewhere. He mooched off her when he wasn't here mooching off us."

"And the two left together?"

"As far as I know. At least, that was the plan."

"And where were they headed?"

"Los Angeles. You piece it together later and it turns out they stole a car in Los Angeles and drove up to Lake Tahoe."

"What about Pinkie's parole officer? Wasn't he supposed to report in?"

"Hey, you're talking a career criminal. Following the rules wasn't exactly his strong suit. Who the hell knows how he got away with it? Same with Toth."

"You think someone could have been after them?"

"I wouldn't know," he said. "Pinkie didn't act like he was worried. Why? You think someone might have been trailing them?"

"It's possible," I said.

"Yeah, well it's also possible Pinkie overstepped his bounds for once. He was one of those little guys, chip on his shoulder and feisty as all get out. I can't say that about Alfie. He seemed harmless. Pinkie's another matter. Whoever killed Pinkie should get a medal, in my opinion. And don't quote me. Dolores gets upset if she hears me talkin' like that. I notice I'm doing all the talking."

"I appreciate that."

"This is good. I appreciate your appreciation. Now it's your turn. What's a private investigator doing in the middle of a homicide investigation? Last I heard they didn't have a suspect so you can't be working for the public defender's office."

Given his cooperation, I thought he was entitled to an explanation. I filled him in on the situation, beginning with Selma Newquist and ending with Colleen Sellers. The only thing I omitted were details of the two killings. He didn't seem curious about specifics and I wouldn't have revealed the information for all the money in the world. In the meantime, on an almost subliminal level, I could hear an odd series of voices from another room. At first, I thought the sound was coming from a radio, or television set, but the phrases were repeated, the tone lifeless and mechanical. Homer heard it, too, and his gaze caught mine. He tilted his head in the direction of the short hallway that seemed to lead into a back bedroom. "Dolores's back there. You want to talk to her?"

"If you think it's okay."

"She can handle it," he said. "Give me a second and I'll tell her what's going on. She might have something to add."

He moved down the hall to the door, tapping once before he entered. As he eased through the opening, I felt a moment's unease. Here I was in a strange house in the company of a man I'd never laid eyes on before. I had taken him at face value, trusting him on instinct though I wasn't sure why. Really, I only had his word for it that Dolores was in the other room. I had one of those flash fantasies of him emerging from the bedroom with a butcher knife in hand. Fortunately, life, even for a private eye, is seldom this interesting. The door opened again and Homer motioned me in.

At first sight, I thought Dolores Ruggles couldn't have been a day over twenty-five. Later, I found out that she was twenty-eight, which still seemed too young to be married to a man Homer's age. Slim, petite, she sat at a workbench in a room filled with Barbie dolls. Floor to ceiling, wall to wall, dressed in an astonishing array of styles, these bland plastic women were decked out in miniature sun dresses, evening clothes, suits, furs, shorts, capes, pedal pushers, bathing suits, baby doll pajamas, sheaths-each outfit complete with appropriate accessories. There was a whole row of Barbie brides, though I'd never thought of her as married. The row below showed twenty Barbies uniformed as flight attendants and nurses, which must have represented the entire gambit of career options available to her. Some of the dolls were still in their boxes and some were freestanding, affixed to round plastic mounts. There was a row of seated Barbies-black, Hispanic, blonde, brunette-their long perfect legs extended like a chorus line, all shoeless, their unblemished limbs ending in nearly pointed toes. Their arms were long and impossibly smooth. Their necks must have contained extra vertebrae to support the weight of their tousled manes of hair. I confess I found myself at a loss for words. Homer leaned against the open door, watching for my reaction.