Trouble in Rooster Paradise (19 page)

“
Suit yourself, Len. But if I have
to find out your whereabouts by digging around, there’s no telling
who else will find out. So, whatever you’re trying to hide, is it
really worth the possible ballyhoo?”

I heard him groan on his end. He was silent for
a moment.

“
We … we were at the … the
Menagerie. But it’s not what you think. And we’ll both deny it if
you make an issue of it.”

It was my turn to be silent. When people tell
you it’s not what you think, it usually is. But I pegged Len as the
unusual exception to that rule.

“
Keep your shirt on, Len. Your
secret’s safe with me.”

“
But it’s not
my
secret! You
don’t understand. It was strictly
Jack’s
idea. He’s always
been somewhat of a skylarker. We went as a joke. A gag. I
do
have a wife and kids, after all. You … you
do
believe
me, don’t you?”

“
Yeah, Len, I believe
you.”

And I did believe him. He was too readily
befuddled. He told the truth needlessly. He could just as easily
have lied and told me he was simply at a girlie show. But he
didn’t. Plus, I was pretty sure I’d read him right at our first
meeting. His unbridled gazes at Britt Anderson and his pathetic
yearning for her were too oafish to be anything but
genuine.

In San Francisco before the war, I’d gone once
to see a drag show at Finocchio’s. My youthful curiosity and wet
earlaps didn’t make me one of nature’s misfires. But Len’s pal Jack
was no longer making his first grand tour. His salad days were long
over. I wondered how well Len really knew his old buddy.

“
Were you driving your Packard last
night, Len?”

“
The whole night. I swear it. Look.
Jack is staying at the Meany Hotel. I’ll give you his number if you
like. He’ll tell you the same story. Just be discreet about this.
Swear you will.”

I swore I would and hung up.

I wrote down the number Len gave me but
scrunched up the note a minute after the phone was back in its
cradle. Len was suited for the role of unwitting tour guide to a
double-gaited pal, but he didn’t strike me as a killer—at least not
one nervy enough to kill on the fly. Too high strung. A guy like
Len would need weeks, maybe months to plan. And I didn’t think
Christine’s murder took that kind of calculation. But I’d been
wrong before. So, I unscrunched the note and put it in my
wallet.

“
You have two messages,” Cissy said
when I opened the door to Dag’s office. “One from Detective
Sergeant Milland. The other is from Rikard Lundeen.”

Cissy stood in front of a filing cabinet, her
chest level with an open drawer. She turned and reached for some
notes on her desk.

I took the slips of paper from her. I could
feel her watching me as I read.

“
When did Milland’s come in?” I
asked.

“
About an hour ago.”

It was 2:30 by my Longines.

“
How about Lundeen’s.”

“
Twenty minutes ago.
Tops.”

I thanked her and headed to my pigeonholes and
telephone.

Cissy’s note from Milland read, “Call. Urgent.”
Lundeen’s message was simply, “Call me.” You had to admire their
economy of words if not their imaginations.

I rang Milland first.

“
About time you called.”

“
Been busy. What’s up?”

He told me someone took a shot at Addison
Darcy.

“
When? Did you catch the
guy?”

“
Not so fast. Me first. I want an
account of your whereabouts. Darcy says you left his house around
eleven. Where’d you go from there?”

“
Straight to Fifth and Pine, and
Fasciné Expressions. After I talked with Miss Anderson I went and
talked with Guy de Carter. Made a couple of phone calls after that,
and now I’m talking to you. So what happened to Darcy?”

“
He says he left his place about
thirty or forty minutes after you took off. He was no more than a
hundred yards outside the front gate of The Highlands when someone
put a bullet through his windshield.”

“
Was he hit?”

“
Nah, but he wrapped his Lincoln
around a telephone pole. He’s all right, but the Lincoln needs
major surgery. Lucky for him he wasn’t going too fast. Guard on the
gate phoned it in.”

I recalled Darcy saying he’d received some kind
of summons just before I’d arrived.

“
Where did Darcy say he was
headed?”

“
To a hotel downtown. He said one of
his son’s war buddies had phoned him. The guy said he was going to
be in town just overnight, and had a few things that belonged to
Darcy’s son. Wanted to know if Darcy would meet him.”

I told Milland about Cissy’s call from someone
posing as one of my war pals.

“
That army buddy ploy is no
happenstance. It’s got to link both attempted murders,” I
said.

“
Damn.” I took that for agreement.
“A little
too
coincidental,” Milland added.

“
Just a tad.”

“
Any good ideas who’d want to kill
both you and this Darcy?”

“
Nary a one, Frank.” It wasn’t
really a lie. He’d asked for
good
ideas. “But I have a
suggestion for you we both might profit by.”

“
Spill it.”

“
Like I told you, the car that
tailed the Johanson girl and me was a late model Packard. Walter
said the car that nearly pulverized me could have been that model
as well.”

“
I sense a hunt for a needle in a
haystack coming my way,” he said.

“
Not really. Come up with the
registrations for all Packards for the past couple of years in the
greater Seattle area. Check the owners’ names against the Johanson
girl’s repeat customer list. See if you come up with a
match.”

He let out with an animal noise of
approval.

“
You carrying?” he asked.

“
Yep.”

“
Well, keep your powder dry and your
eyes peeled, you dumb Swede.”

“
Why Frank, I’m touched. If people
should overhear us, they’d think you care.”

“
Ah, shaddup.”

I called Rikard Lundeen.

He’d heard the news about Addison Darcy. I told
him about my own close call.

“
Well son, it looks like a tiger’s
getting beat out of the brush. It also goes to help young Dirk’s
case, don’t you think?”

“
It’s starting to look that
way.”

“
So, what’s your next
move?”

Hell if I knew. But what I told him was that
I’d look up Christine’s repeat male customers and check on their
whereabouts for the past couple of days.

“
What’s the connection to Addison
Darcy? Any thoughts there, son?”

I told him I had none. At least none I wanted
to share at the moment.

“
Didn’t you trust him? Was that it?”
Kirsti asked. She had stopped her recorder and was flipping the
cassette over.

“
No that wasn’t it,” I said. “Oh,
I’ll admit I didn’t care for the man, but I believed in doing a
good job for someone whether I liked him or not.”

“
Been there, done that,” she said,
nodding.

“
No, the thoughts I was mulling over
just weren’t ready to be passed on. That’s all.”

“
Well, tell me. I want to know. What
had you figured out by then?” She’d turned the recorder back
on.

“
Well, young lady, I hadn’t figured
out much of anything. It was plain Guy de Carter had lied to me.
Greenwood Avenue was halfway between Woodland Park and The
Highlands. So I knew he could easily have taken a shot at Addison
Darcy and still made our rendezvous at the rose garden.”

“
But why? What was his motive?” she
asked as she handed me a plastic water bottle.

“
That’s what I wondered. It didn’t
make sense.”

“
You make Guy de Carter out to be a
real sex addict. Did you think maybe he had a thing going with
Christine Johanson?”

“
Oh, sure. At first it crossed my
mind that they’d been lovers. I pictured Christine as the smitten
nuisance who wouldn’t let go till de Carter killed her. But I
dismissed that pretty quickly. Too drastic. To a man like Guy de
Carter, promises and hearts were meant to be broken. No, he didn’t
need to murder to end a relationship.”

“
Yeah. A little too way out there
for a theory. And besides, how would that tie in with Addison
Darcy?”

“
Exactly. Either de Carter or
Christine had to have had some tie to Darcy.”

“
Maybe they both did?”

I nodded. “Life is far less happenstance than
we care to believe, Blue Eyes.”

“
How do you mean?”

I took a big swig from the water bottle she’d
handed me. As I screwed the cap back on I said, “What I mean is
we’re not hermits living in a vacuum. We’re more like trailblazers
in a vast wilderness.”

“
Sounds like happenstance to me,”
she said as she put the bottle back in her tote bag.

“
Wrong. As we blaze our personal
trail through life, paths cross and merge. It gets
messy.”

“
Like the bumpersticker? Shit
happens? Is that what you mean?”

“
That’ll work. Look, we all do
stupid and selfish things at times. Some souls make it their
career. Most of the time our actions play out to a rather harmless
finale. As they say, we luck out.”

I could see in her eyes she’d experienced just
such luck.

“
But like it or not, our actions
touch others. Sometimes, the things people do are so half-witted or
so self-seeking, they set events in motion that quietly start to
percolate.” I switched from a coffee metaphor to a weather one:
“One day, a bolt strikes someone out of the blue. Except it’s not
out of the blue. All along the beanie they were wearing was a
lightning rod.”

Kirsti had a direct intent stare that bore
right through me.

“
A small thunderbolt you were hoping
to dodge, Blue Eyes?”

She shook her head, and the brooding moment
seemed to pass.

“
Whether it’s just plain reaping
what was sown, or taking the consequences when someone from the
past surfaces with a vendetta, the results are often unpleasant and
sometimes disastrous.”

“
So what are you saying?”

“
Well, Blue Eyes, at that point I
wasn’t saying much at all. And I’m not going to rush my story by
telling you the end out of sequence.”

She smiled.

“
No, at the time an analysis of what
little I knew didn’t provide me with a whole lot of answers. I had
more nosing around to do. Let’s see now, where was I?”

After I got off the phone with Rikard Lundeen,
I grew extremely tired. I yawned a monster yawn. I fought to keep
my eyes open.

I looked up at the picture hanging on the wall
across the room. It was a short distance, so I could make out the
details easily—although I knew them by heart. The picture showed
nubile girls in a majestic outside setting. One was dressed and
reclining. She was looking up at the other girl, who stood naked
and was leaning over the first—her arms conveniently placed to
cover up her pudenda. When I was a kid I’d make up conversations
for them. I later learned that the girl on her feet was the
artist’s daughter and the other was William Jennings Bryan’s
granddaughter. The artist called the picture
Daybreak.
It
was a favorite of my grandmother’s. Agnette had been a fan of
Maxfield Parrish. This particular print had hung above the
fireplace in the home where I was raised.

Most of the time, looking at this picture gave
me mixed feelings. At that moment it made me feel good. I needed to
feel good.

I started to nod off till I quit fighting it
and gave in to a catnap.

The clacking of Cissy’s typewriter coming in
through the transom woke me up. By my watch I must have dozed in my
chair for ten minutes.

I pulled the Damon Runyon paperback out of my
drawer. As Cissy pounded away on her machine, I spent fifteen
minutes with good guys and nice Judys before I put the book back
inside the desk.

Cissy’s typing stopped. I pictured her getting
ready to button things up and go home early. I decided to say
goodnight and head for home myself. That would give me plenty of
time to spiff up for my dinner date with Britt. It was the second
time in a week that a spur-of-the-moment decision saved my
life.

My Longines read 3:15 when I locked my outer
door and went over to Dag’s office, not bothering to knock as I
entered. As I imagined, Cissy had her coat on and wasn’t wearing
her reading glasses—indicators that she was making moves to take
off for the day.

“
Clearing out early, eh?” I
asked.

“
Dag’s still tied up in court. He
phoned and told me that when I finished my filing I could pack it
in if I wanted to. I want to.”