Where Echoes Live (33 page)

“Hy, I'm—”

“Apologize one more time and you'll never get a second chance with me.”

“Chance for what?”

He merely gave me a look—long, level, and full of possibilities.

My flesh rippled pleasurably along my backbone, and I said, “Then I guess I'll skip the apology and tell you all about it.”

When I finished, Hy ordered another round of drinks, his eyes hooded, gaze turned inward. “Let me think a little bit on this, McCone.” He was still considering when the drinks arrived. After the waitress departed, he said, “I had my suspicions of Sanderman from the day he got here. Nothing all that definite, but he seemed to be just going through the motions, and he was never around. Back and forth to Sacramento, generally unavailable. And the day before you got here—Thursday—when I was making one last stab at locating Earl Hopwood, I spotted Ned's car on the access road to the mine site, where it had no business being. When I asked him what he'd been doing there, he said I must be mistaken. But all the same he was damned flustered.” He paused. “Now, what about Lionel Ong? Any developments there? Ransom demands?”

“I've been monitoring the news, and nothing's been made public. A little while ago I spoke with an inspector on the SFPD about some checks I'd asked him to run; Ong's name was one of them, and I think he'd have reacted differently if anything had broken about a kidnapping.”

“Not if the feds were called in rather than the police.”

“I know someone who has a source in Ong's office.” I glanced at my watch. Five-thirty, but as overburdened an employee as Marcy Cheung might still be at work. “I'll try to call her.”

There was a pay phone near the rest rooms. I dialed the Sino-American Alliance, gave the operator my credit-card number, and was not surprised to hear Marcy herself answer. “Hey,” she said, “I was hoping you'd get my message.”

Damn—I'd forgotten all day to call in to All Souls! “What's up?”

“I talked with my friend Lynn—Lionel Ong's secretary— again. No ransom demands, but Ong still hasn't shown, and they're panicked over at Transpacific headquarters. The wife is flying home from Hong Kong, and the board's meeting to decide whether to go to the police.”

“For God's sake, why do they have to deliberate on it? The man's been missing for two days now.”

“Something to do with a big issue of Transpacific stock on the Tokyo exchange; if word gets out about Ong, it'll look like the corporation's in trouble and sink the price per share. Besides, the police require seventy-two hours before opening an investigation.”

“Given Ong's influence in the city, if the family demands an immediate investigation, I'm sure they can get one going. Will you let me know if you hear more?”

“Sure. Where can I reach you?”

I thought, then took out my notebook and read off Hy's home number as well as that of the Friends' trailer. After I hung up I checked with All Souls for messages and received only the one from Cheung; Ted told me he was about to go to my house to feed Ralphie and Allie, and that I owed him five dollars for hair ball medicine. I noted it on the last page in my notebook, in the running tab I keep for small amounts due to friends. Then I went back to the lounge.

Hy had turned his chair to face the lake, propped his feet on the ledge below the window. The water was purpled now, flame from the setting sun searing its surface; the tufa towers' black reflections seemed to penetrate clear to the lake bottom. Unbidden, the line I'd read in Hopwood's bedside Bible came to me: “And the devil that deceived them was cast into the lake of fire and brimstone….”

When I sat down Hy turned back to the table. Quickly I told him Cheung's news. He nodded thoughtfully and drained his beer. “Well, that situation's out of our hands.”

“Yes, and there's no way we can reach Sanderman until he gets back to Sacramento—if that's where he's headed.” I sipped wine, thinking about the Coalition's troubleshooter. “Hy, were you keeping a close watch on Ned?”

“Uh-huh. Like I said, I suspected something wrong about him from the first.”

“Let's go over what you know of his movements for the past week. Start last Friday morning.”

“He went to Lee Vining with Anne-Marie to talk with the Mono Lake Committee people. Ate take-out pizza—I think he subsists on the stuff—in the trailer; then we had our meeting. Saturday …” He shrugged. “First I saw of him was when he came to your cabin that night after Anne-Marie woke him so we could talk about the murder.”

I pictured Sanderman entering the cabin, fresh from the shower. “Okay, early the next morning I talked with him on the dock there about how he'd known Erickson from before. That story, along with the personal things he told me, was mostly lies.”

“And Sunday afternoon he packed up his computer and went back to Sacramento because he needed to access some files.”

“When did he come back?”

“Not until yesterday afternoon.”

“And he was in Sacramento the whole time?”

Hy frowned. “We thought so. Anne-Marie spoke with him a couple of times on both Monday and Tuesday, but Wednesday nobody seemed able to reach him. I suppose he could have been anywhere.”

Anywhere, I thought, including San Francisco, beating up Margot Erickson or abducting Lionel Ong. But what possible motive could Sanderman have for either?

“Think back to Saturday,” I told Hy. “You came into town that morning, and we spoke at the trailer. Ned wasn't there. What did you do after I left?”

“Went over to the airstrip and did some maintenance work on the Citabria. Had a couple of beers with the guy who runs the place. Came back to town and picked up some groceries. I ran into Anne-Marie and one of the Friends outside the Swifty Mart. They were going up to Bridgeport for dinner and taking Rose Wittington along so she could attend her Bible study group. Anne-Marie asked where you were, and I said I didn't know. Then she invited me to come along, but I didn't feel like making the drive. I went home, and you arrived a couple of hours later.”

“So this was around … ?”

“Four o'clock, thereabouts.”

“Are you sure Ned wasn't going with them?”

“God, no. He's not much interested in socializing with people here; seems to consider us beneath him.”

“Actually, it's all people he considers beneath him. He told me he greatly prefers his own company.” I was silent, mentally reviewing the timetable we'd constructed. “Hy, how'd you like to do me a couple of favors?”

“Sure—what?”

“Check around town to see if anyone saw Earl Hopwood after he left Dr. Mahoney's office on Saturday morning. And then go back to the Friends' trailer and wait for me. My contact in San Francisco promised to call there if she hears anything more about Ong.”

“And where will you be if I need you?”

“At the lodge. I want to check something out, and then I'm going to have a talk with Margot Erickson.”

Rose's car once again stood in front of the lodge, and lights glowed behind the curtained windows of the public rooms. I left the Land Rover under a willow tree and walked downhill as if I were going to my cabin. When I reached the shelter of the grove, I crossed to the one Sanderman had occupied.

Its door still stood open, and the key remained on the coffee table. Since Rose hadn't collected it and locked up, I assumed she was unaware that Ned had left for good. I closed all the draperies, turned on the lights, and began prowling through the rooms.

Dust lay so thick in one of the bedrooms that I doubted Sanderman had set foot in there. The bathroom contained an abundance of damp towels and a lone aspirin decomposing in the sink. In the larger bedroom the bedclothes were rumpled, the hangers in the closet empty. The wastebasket contained only a menu from the take-out pizza parlor next to the Swifty Mart.

The living room showed even fewer signs of Sanderman's occupancy: a blackened light bulb on an end table, a pile of Sacramento
Bees
next to the woodbox. I peered into the potbellied stove; it looked as if he'd never used it. I lifted the cushions of the couch and chair; not even a stray coin had slipped beneath them. Finally I turned to the kitchen, sure I'd find nothing. Sanderman had been emphatic in his distaste for that room: “I wouldn't boil water in there; God knows what germs are lying in wait.”

The room certainly didn't look unsanitary. Rose Wittington took pride in her cabins; as she'd told me when I arrived, you couldn't find cleaner rentals. But the kitchen
was
hard on the eye: the same unfortunate orange tile as in mine predominated; cabinets painted a glossy turquoise clashed violently with it and with the bilious green floor and walls. I shook my head as I looked around.

Something about the room, besides the decor, struck me as peculiar, but at first I couldn't figure what. Then I realized that the refrigerator and a metal cabinet were slightly out of position. I went closer and saw scrape marks on the linoleum where they'd been moved. I pulled the cabinet a little farther from the wall, but saw nothing behind it. I took my flashlight from my bag and peered behind the refrigerator. Nothing there, either. Then I began to examine the entire room, beginning with the walls and floor. They were scrupulously clean, but a section near the door to the living room looked even cleaner, as if it had very recently been scrubbed. Rose wouldn't have done that—she provided no maid service.

As in my cabin, the door was a swinging one whose mechanism allowed it to be propped open against the kitchen wall. I pushed it shut and looked at the section of floor and baseboard behind it. A brownish substance had seeped into the crack between the linoleum and the board, had dried and caked there, just as the blood had congealed between the floorboards in Earl Hopwood's living room.

Even the most meticulous housekeepers miss things, especially when performing a distasteful task that needs to be done in a hurry. Someone had carefully cleaned blood from the linoleum and wall here, but hadn't taken into account that the sag of the floor had permitted it to flow into the crack next to the baseboard.

Quickly I stood and surveyed the room. Assume, I thought, that the person who shed the blood was shot. Where would the shooter have stood? There, by the sink, or over there by the refrigerator. Near the end of the counter, anyway. What had the shooter—

No, Ned Sanderman. Who else? And the victim? Mick Erickson.

All right, then, what had Ned been doing in the kitchen? Getting a drink for a visitor, perhaps. And where was the gun? On him or somewhere in this room. Regardless, he stood in that general area.

I remained where I was, scrutinizing the other side of the kitchen. Then I went over there and squatted down to take a better look at the end of the counter. On the curve of the tile at about waist level was a chip. While the ceramic was cracked and marred in many places, those marks were gray with age. This chip was white—new.

I straightened, held out my hand as if aiming a gun, and measured its height against the counter. Sanderman was no taller than I; he would have held the gun at the same level.

It fits, I thought. He came in here. Erickson followed. He took the gun out, turned, and fired. But he didn't brace himself against the recoil. His hand was deflected … like so. The gun hit the tile and nicked it.

But why had he moved the refrigerator and metal cabinet? He hadn't needed to do that to clean up the blood. And if he'd been that careful, surely he'd also have noticed the encrustation behind the swinging door. Why else would he have gone to the trouble—

And then I remembered that Mick Erickson had been shot twice with a .22 automatic. Automatics ejected spent shell casings. What if one of them had landed where Sanderman hadn't seen it fall, and he'd had to hunt for it?

I leaned against the counter, considering. The medical examiner had fixed the time of Erickson's death at around seven on Saturday evening. The lodge was relatively isolated, and with Mrs. Wittington and Anne-Marie in Bridgeport, no one had heard the shot. It would have taken Sanderman some time to dispose of the body, even if he'd merely dragged it down to the lake and pushed it in. Then he'd have needed to park Erickson's rented Bronco on the highway near Zelda's, wipe it of prints, and walk back here. Even if that had taken until eight-thirty or nine, it allowed three hours before Anne-Marie had come to get him around midnight—more than enough time to mop up the blood and destroy any other evidence.

Yet after Anne-Marie's summons, Sanderman had taken time to shower, and when he'd appeared at our cabin he'd seemed exceptionally alert for a man who supposedly had been fast abed. Alert and somewhat agitated. Why?

1 thought of those spent shell casings again. There had to have been at least two. A man who was looking for a casing would have moved anything that wasn't fastened down; the search would have added time to a normal cleanup. And if he hadn't found one, it might still be here.

I began a search of my own: first in the more obvious places, then in others that were possible but not probable. Nothing was caught in the faded gingham curtains at the window. The sink's drain was covered by mesh too fine for anything larger than a crumb to have passed through. The grease trap under the stove burners was empty. None of the drawers contained anything but utensils. The cupboards were bare of all but the basics. I tipped the metal cabinet and shone my flash under it to see if there was a ledge onto which a shell casing could have bounced, looked into the oven, checked inside the fridge. The countertops were clear of everything but a small electric coffee maker like the one in my cabin….

I looked closer at the coffee maker. Saw that the plastic cap that usually covered the place where you poured the water was missing. It couldn't have worked too well; a lot of the water would have turned to steam.