The Last Annual Slugfest (24 page)

But suppose I had that backwards? Suppose Bert had planned to kill Edwina. Suppose he decided the Slugfest was the safest place to do it. If the Slugfest had been held anywhere else, Bert would never have had access to the food. He wasn’t important enough to be a judge. Judges were people of influence in the community, people whom the average citizen would enjoy seeing uncomfortable. It was one thing to see your parish priest or the head of a local business squirming at the taste of slug. It was not so amusing to see the handyman of a dilapidated lodge eating something that was probably tastier than what he threw together for dinner every night. If Bert planned to poison Edwina, having the Slugfest at the lodge was essential. It was the only way he could be on the stage and have it seem natural.

Did Rosa suspect that too? Anyone but Rosa wouldn’t shield Bert, if baring her suspicions would help her son. But Rosa wouldn’t believe Bert could have killed Edwina, so she wouldn’t think whatever she knew could help Chris.

Rosa glanced back at Joey, but said nothing.

“You’ve known Bert for years,” I prompted her.

“Oh, yes,” she said, “he’s my cousin’s cousin. I’ve known him all my life.” She started to look back at Joey, then stopped midway and turned to the window.

Of course! If Bert was Rosa’s cousin’s cousin, and Joey was a distant cousin of hers, then Joey was probably related to Bert, too. And whatever Rosa had to tell, she wasn’t about to announce it in front of someone who was both a relative and a member of the sheriff’s department.

I caught Father Calloway’s eye, and glanced at Joey and back. But if he perceived that relationship and its significance, he gave no indication. He continued to gaze idly at his wine glass. He looked like he was settled in waiting for the next serving.

To Rosa I said, “Don’t you need more logs for the fire?” In this area that was always a safe bet.

Rosa showed none of Father Calloway’s obtuseness. Without hesitation, she said, “Yes. Joey, Father, I hate to ask you to go out in this weather, but—”

“No, no. Of course we’ll take care of that.” Father Calloway pushed himself up and headed for the door. A reluctant Joey Gummo followed. Rosa took his place stirring the sauce.

Rosa leaned toward me. “Like I said, Vejay, I’ve been around Bert all my life. You know, when I was a girl, Bert was quite a handsome man. I had a crush on him for a while then. Sounds silly now, after all these years. It’s probably hard for you to imagine anyone finding Bert handsome, the way he keeps himself now.”

I wanted to hurry her to the point before Joey returned, but I hesitated to disturb her’ train of thought.

“Bert is ten years older than I am. So when I was fifteen, he was already a man, quite a dashing man. He was working. He could dress well, and go places. There were ladies who had their eyes on him.”

“How come he never married?”

Rosa lifted a strand of spaghetti out of its pot and tasted it. “Another couple of minutes.”

“Was there some problem with a woman?”

Panting under the weight of two logs, Joey walked in.

“Why are you carrying both of those?” Rosa demanded. “We won’t need four.”

“Father Calloway had to go. It’s after midnight. He said to say good night. He’ll see you at Mass.” Joey shifted the logs, grunted, and moved on to the living room.

“Rosa,” I said, “we don’t have much time.”

She leaned the spoon against the side of the sauce pan. “Well, Vejay, what I know is in confidence. And you don’t think Bert of all people would hurt Edwina?”

I began to see what she was concealing. “Rosa, was there something between Bert and Edwina? They were about the same age.” I tried to picture Edwina as a young woman. Could she have been attractive? It was hard to picture that hawklike face softened by infatuation, that tobacco-cured skin still fresh and taut.

“Vejay, Bert would be horrified if he knew I told you this. He promised Edwina he would never tell a soul. But, like I said, I was taken with him then, and I hung around him a lot, and I guess he viewed me like a kid sister, which was the last thing I wanted. But sometimes when he was depressed, he wanted to talk to someone, and I was always there. So he told me.”

“Told you what?” I could hardly contain my impatience.

“Bert and Edwina were married in 1944.”

B
EFORE
R
OSA COULD SAY
anything else about Bert Lucci’s marriage to Edwina Henderson, Joey Gummo strode back into the kitchen and announced that the fire was blazing and some of the guests were ready to eat again. “Want me to call them in?”

“Walk me to my truck, Rosa,” I said quickly. Once the mob in the living room invaded the kitchen my chance to talk to Rosa about anything, much less this sensitive subject, would be over.

Rosa didn’t even seem surprised that I wasn’t staying to eat. Perhaps she was relieved. Telling Joey to hold the fort, she grabbed a slicker off one of the pegs and followed me out. We hurried past the hodgepodge of vehicles and found shelter behind a camper van. According to Bert, she explained, Edwina loved him, but she couldn’t reconcile a Henderson marrying a Lucci. Bert’s family were fishermen, but they didn’t even own their own boat; they crewed on the boats of relatives or friends. In the caste system of pre-war Henderson, the Luccis were near the bottom. Probably Edwina would never have done anything so impulsive as to marry Bert had it not been for the Second World War. Even Bert had admitted to Rosa that he had played on Edwina’s fears, sympathies, and patriotism before he went to fight in the Pacific. She had agreed to marry him, on the condition that he tell no one. And when he came back two years later, her ardor had cooled, but her insistence that he keep his word had not. Why Bert had allowed the situation to stabilize there, Rosa didn’t know. The time of their (Bert and Rosa’s) closeness had passed. She didn’t even know if Bert and Edwina were divorced.

Both Bert and Edwina were Roman Catholics, I thought as I watched Rosa hurry back to the kitchen. If Edwina had viewed Church doctrine with the same rigidity as she had the Henderson heritage, she wouldn’t have sanctioned divorce. When she made her decision to be rid of Bert, she would have applied for an annulment. She would have applied through Father Calloway.

I ran to my truck, ready to charge out to St. Agnes’s after Father Calloway. No, wait, I thought. Father Calloway had been at St. Agnes’s only twenty years or so. If Edwina had sought to annul her marriage, it would have been right after the war, in 1946 or 1947, way before Father Calloway arrived.

In any case, Bert Lucci and Edwina Henderson had never lived together. It was hard to imagine them indulging in a couple of nights of passion. Did they steal away to San Francisco? Or did Bert sneak up to Edwina’s in the dark, maybe on a stormy night like this?

But that didn’t matter. What did matter was that if they were never divorced, then Bert stood to inherit. He might not get her house or the Tobacconist’s, but it was fair to assume he would get Steelhead Lodge.

Till now I hadn’t given much thought to Bert’s job performance running Steelhead Lodge. If I had, I would have wondered why Edwina would hire a man who did so little in the way of maintenance. Why would she allow him to use the lodge for fishing parties that apparently didn’t pay much because of the rundown condition of the place? The lodge could have been revamped for the tourist season and brought in three or four or maybe more times the profit. Why? Because she dared not say no lest their marriage be exposed.

I had wondered why Edwina had chosen a seedy place like Steelhead Lodge for the Slugfest and for the site of her announcement before the television cameras. Did she want to force Bert to fix it up? Maybe she just figured it was hers and she was finally going to get some use out of it.

Or maybe, as I had speculated in the kitchen, Bert insisted on holding the Slugfest there so he could poison her.

I shivered, half at the thought and half because the truck was freezing. I couldn’t stay here. What I needed was to go home, stand under the shower, and sort things out. I put the truck in reverse and concentrated on the exacting task of backing out between the trees of the copse. At North Bank Road, I turned right toward town and home.

Not only was it hard to think of Bert poisoning Edwina, it was almost impossible to consider him planning that carefully. But, I reminded myself, before last night, I would never have imagined Bert could be so professional an emcee either. Maybe I really didn’t know Bert. Maybe none of us did.

Stopping at the light, I thought of Bert, and of Rosa’s porch roof. There was something odd about his fixing that. Not just doing it today, in the storm—you can still patch in the rain. I knew that from a stint on my kitchen roof Christmas Day. But why was Bert doing the patching? Why didn’t he assume Chris would? It wasn’t salmon season yet. Chris was home. The sheriff hadn’t arrested him till after Bert left. Why was Bert there? Had he been around enough to know about the leak? Had Rosa asked him to fix it?

The light changed. I stepped on the gas. “Damn!” I muttered. When Rosa had said I was bad luck for her, she was right. I had thought there was no way I could make things worse, but if Bert had been at Rosa’s not so much because of the roof as to be with Rosa—Rosa, who had had a crush on him once, who had flushed when I asked about him now—then I was on my way to making things plenty worse for her.

“Damn!”

My driveway was to the right. I hadn’t been concentrating enough on my driving to slow down. I was already past it when I lifted my foot off the gas.

But before I could step on the brake, I spotted a car parked beside the road, with a man in the driver’s seat—a sheriff’s department car!

The sheriff’s car was facing my driveway. Easing my foot back on the gas, I drove on. Had Angelina reported my breaking and entering at the fish ranch? How many years could I get for that? Where did they put breakers and enterers—state prison? I pushed harder on the gas pedal, knowing it would make no difference. If Angelina had reported me, the sheriff had simply to wait, unless I was planning to keep driving till my money ran out and take up a new identity in Fresno.

I drove through Guerneville, and Rio Nido, and along the dark stretches of River Road that led past the grape orchards. Somewhere in that darkness, I realized that Joey Gummo had probably called the sheriff and reported my story about the fake treaty, and, just as I had feared, the sheriff decided to bring me in to question. The fact that it was the middle of the night would have seemed an ironic sort of justice to him. When Joey Gummo had told him that I had been back to Rosa’s, hunting around for Leila and probing deeply enough into the treaty to discover it was a fake, the sheriff was probably just sorry he couldn’t storm into my house and drag me out of my bed. If a deputy came across me now and took me to the sheriff’s department, it would be many hours before I saw the outside again. (Assuming Angelina hadn’t reported me. If she had, I’d be inside for a lot longer than hours.) By the time I got out, Leila Katz could be dead.

I thought back through all I had been told during the day.

Suddenly, I didn’t want to chance driving into Santa Rosa, or onto Route 101 where Highway Patrol cars would be used to check for fleeing vehicles, and a brown pickup truck would be more unusual than on the truck-laden back roads that led west. I turned south. Bert Lucci. Hard as it was to imagine him having been married to Edwina, it was twice as hard to think of him killing her and kidnapping Leila.

But the person who kidnapped or lured Leila away was Bear. Could Bert be Bear?

Had Leila chosen the name Bear because it was so close to Bert? Was that a flash of bravado? Or a cautious choice in case she spoke his name by mistake?

But Bert as Leila’s lover! Even considering that the affair had taken place ten years ago, and that Rosa had said Bert was quite a handsome man once, I couldn’t picture him appealing to a young girl. I couldn’t imagine Edwina could picture it. But, of course, Edwina was the one person who would be able to picture it. She had married him.

I turned west, toward the ocean. The rain hit the windshield. And though there were fewer trees to cover the road here, it was still dark. The wind hit the side of the truck. I held more firmly onto the steering wheel. Red specks of taillights ahead were invisible till I was almost on top of them. I braked, skidded to the right, nearly off the road. Ahead was another logging truck. I’d have to watch my driving; counting my driveway, this was the second thing I had almost misjudged tonight.

Married! If I needed to find a motive for Edwina’s vengeance and for Bert’s revenge, I didn’t have to look farther. Bert was not only old enough to be Leila’s father, but he was Edwina’s husband. It might not be incest, but it would certainly be an unforgivable betrayal! Middle-aged Bert seducing adolescent Leila would be something Edwina would never have forgiven. She would have held it against him till he died. She’d have made him pay. She’d certainly have exerted every ounce of her prodigious effort to make him take second best. Well, Steelhead Lodge wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice. And the Bert Lucci I had seen emceeing at the Slugfest could have done lots more with his life than managing a ramshackle fishing lodge.

It made a good case. Even the fish ranch fit in. I remembered Maxie Dawkins telling me that Bert was one of the two people who had given their names as references for the night guard when he applied for his job. The night guard had said there was nothing he wouldn’t do for them. Certainly he wouldn’t deny Bert access to the fish ranch.

But still, it didn’t quite fit. Why would Edwina hold the affair against Leila? Why had she, as Leila said, written
her
off? Would she be embarrassed that her own husband had seduced her? Or was it the other way around? Had Leila seduced Bert? Had she chosen that method to get back at Edwina for all those years of being treated like a poor relation?

What I needed was proof. And, I realized, the person who might have that proof was Harry Bramwell.

I
PRESSED HARD ON
the gas, racing toward the ocean, slamming on the brakes behind a convoy of logging trucks, then pulling out to pass them even though I couldn’t see as far as the first in line. I took curves too fast, and skidded back onto the straightaway, rushing to get to Harry Bramwell’s cabin. As if he would find my waking him up at three in the morning more acceptable than at four. As if he wouldn’t slam the door in my face again.