Man on a Leash (7 page)

South on the highway there were two possibilities. About thirteen miles out the pavement was crossed by a gravel road running east and west. North there were also two, twelve miles out and sixteen, both dirt roads taking off in a generally westerly direction. East there were three. Nine miles from town a graded dirt road left the blacktop running north, and after about four miles it forked, one branch veering off to the northeast. Also, at about seventeen miles from town another gravel road left the pavement in a southerly direction. Out and back each time, if he had to cover all of them, added up to 108 miles of chuckholed and dusty off-the-pavement driving. It was going to be a long day. He rang the office and left a call for five thirty in the morning.

Dialing the long distance operator, he put in the call to Mayo. She apparently grabbed the phone up on the first ring, and it was obvious from her voice that something was wrong.

“Eric! I’ve been poised over this phone for hours!”

“What is it?”

“Your apartment’s been burglarized. I didn’t know what motel you were in, so all I could do was wait—”

“All right, honey, just simmer down; he probably didn’t get much. But how do you know?”

“Know?
How do I know? Eric, I’m trying to tell you. I talked to him—I walked right in on him—”

He broke in swiftly. “Are you hurt?”

“No. He didn’t do anything at all. I pretended to believe him.”

He sighed softly. Thank God for a smart girl. “Okay, Crafty, just start from the beginning.”

“All right.” She took a deep breath. “On the way back from the airport I decided while I had the car out I might as well do some grocery shopping, and I bought some things for you too—a steak and a bottle of rosé and some tonic water, oh, a bagful of stuff. After I’d put mine away, I thought I’d take yours over and tidy up the apartment a little. So I went over and took the elevator up, and when I opened the door, I almost dropped the bag and my purse and everything. There was a man standing right there in the living room, with a kind of tool bag open on the rug. But it was funny—I mean, I was scared blue, but he didn’t seem to be startled at all. With my arms full like that I must have fumbled around for maybe fifteen seconds getting the door open—I had the wrong key at first—so he had some warning. He just smiled and said, ‘Good afternoon, are you Mrs. Romstead?’ and leaned down to get something out of the tool kit.

“By then I’d got my heart down out of my throat and could speak, so I asked him what he was doing there. He took a slip of paper out of a breast pocket—he had on a white coverall—and said, ‘Mr. Romstead called us to check out the simalizer and put a new frammistat in his KLH.’ That wasn’t what he actually said, of course, but some technical jargon that didn’t mean a thing to me, and he had the console of the KLH pulled out from the wall as if he were going to work on it. He said the manager let him in, which I knew was a damn lie—the office wouldn’t let
anybody
in an apartment when the tenant’s not there—but I didn’t know what to do. If I started to run, he might grab me and drag me inside to keep me from calling the police.

“And, believe me, I didn’t want to go on into the kitchen with those groceries, either, because then he’d be between me and the door, but there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do without making him suspicious. He’d know I’d opened the door for something. Anyway, he was so cool and professional that by then I’d about decided he really was an honest, card-carrying burglar and not a creep of some kind, so I told him I was just a friend that had stopped by with this stuff for you. So I went into the kitchen and shoved the things in the refrigerator—I mean, all of it, and fast, in case you ever wonder why there’s a package of paper napkins and two bars of toilet soap in your freezer. I came back out. He was humming under his breath and fiddling with the back of the KLH. I said something about being sure the door was locked when he left and eased out. I didn’t think my knees would ever hold up till I made it to the elevator.

“When I got to the office, of course, I had to explain what the hell
I
was doing in your apartment. We got that straightened out, and they called the police. A squad car pulled up in two or three minutes, and the manager went up with the two officers. He was gone by then, of course, but they found enough evidence he’d been there so they didn’t write me off as some kind of nut. It seemed to be your desk he was interested in—or that’s as far as he’d got—because everything in it had been pretty well shuffled. Of course, they don’t know if anything’s missing, but they said the chances were he got the hell out of there the minute I was out of the corridor.”

Alarm circuits were tripping all over the place, but he was merely soothing—and admiring. “Honey, you handled it beautifully; you really used your head. Anyway, there was nothing in the desk but correspondence, old tax returns, bank statements, and so on. Could you describe the guy?”

“He wasn’t real big, a little less than six feet, anyway, around a hundred and sixty pounds. About thirty years old. Very slender and dark, Indian-looking, with black hair and brown eyes. And cool, real cool.”

“Well, you’re pretty cool yourself, Hotshot,” Romstead said. While he didn’t like any of it, he still didn’t want to scare her over what so far was just a feeling. “But don’t let it go to your head. If there are prowlers working those apartments, keep the chain on your door the way I told you, and don’t let anybody in until you’ve finished the first two volumes of his biography. I’ll call you tomorrow, and I’ll be back early tomorrow night.”

They talked a few minutes more, and as soon as he’d hung up, he put in a call to Murdock. His answering service said Mr. Murdock wasn’t at his office or at home yet, but that he should report in shortly. Romstead gave her the number of the motel. “Ask him to call me as soon as he comes in.”

All he could do then was wait. And wonder about it. Too many things were wrong with the picture, Naturally, any prowler could get names off the mailboxes down below, but this guy wasn’t some punk who’d wandered in off the street with a strip of plastic or a credit card. He couldn’t have got in. Those were dead-bolt locks, and he’d turned the key when he left. Then there were the other touches, the coverall, the prop toolbag—both disposable down the nearest garbage chute—the calm assurance, the plausible patter, all of which bespoke a real professional—except that no professional in his right mind would waste his time prowling a single man’s apartment, even if you left him a key under the doormat. No furs, no jewelry—all the expensive baubles belonged to women. He’d get three or four suits that some fence might give him two dollars apiece for and the cleaning woman’s eight dollars if he could find it.

He could call Paulette Carmody, but he didn’t want to have the phone tied up if Murdock called.

He waited. He unpacked his bag and studied the maps some more. It was about twenty minutes before the phone rang. He grabbed it up. It was Murdock.

“I just got your call,” he said. “Anything new?”

“Yeah, some guy shook down my apartment this afternoon,” Romstead replied. “I can’t figure what he was after, but let’s take up your end of it first. You get any line on the girl?”

“Yes, we’ve had pretty good luck so far. I’ve just talked to Snyder again—he’s the man I put on her. He picked up her trail at Packer Electronics right off the bat. It’s a big outfit on upper Mission, handles everything in the electronics line: hi-fi components, radio and TV parts and tubes, transistors, ham equipment, and so on. She worked in the office there for about a year and a half, until last March. They let her go for tapping the till; apparently her habit was pretty expensive even then. Snyder got her last known address and checked that out. She’d been sharing an apartment with another girl named Sylvia Wolden out near the Marina, but she’d moved out of there in April. The Wolden girl didn’t know she was on junk but suspected she was shoplifting, from the things she’d bring home.

“She left no forwarding address, but Sylvia was able to give Snyder the name of an old boyfriend, Leo Cullen, who tends bar at a place on Van Ness. Cullen told Snyder he’d broken up with her along about Christmas, when she first got hooked on the stuff, and hadn’t seen her since but had heard she was shacked up with a guy named Marshall Tallant, who ran a one-man TV repair place in North Beach. Snyder went out there and found the place; but it was closed, and nobody in the neighborhood had seen Tallant in over a month. The girl had been living with him, though, and they’d both disappeared from the neighborhood about the same time.”

“Any idea how she was supporting her habit?” Romstead asked. “Tallant couldn’t have made much out of that shop.”

“No,” Murdock replied. “We haven’t got any line on that yet. If she was hustling, it apparently wasn’t in that neighborhood, though she might have been shoplifting downtown. And you’re right about the shop—Tallant couldn’t have paid for any forty- or fifty-dollar habit unless he had other sources of income. I gather he was plenty good, could fix anything electronic, but snotty and temperamental. He’d turn down jobs if they didn’t interest him, and some days he didn’t even open the place.

“There’s one possibility, though, and that brings me to my end of it. She could have had some kind of hustle going with your father. What, I don’t know, but she definitely had been in his apartment a good many times. Three people I talked to had seen her going in or coming out of the building over the past four months, but never with him. She might have been working as a high-priced call girl, with him as one of her list; I just don’t know. But I do think she had a key. One of the tenants I talked to saw her in the corridor on that floor on the Fourth of July, and you remember your father was in Coleville then. And I think it’s definite your father was never in the apartment any time between July sixth and fourteenth. Nobody saw him at all, not even the apartment house manager, and he and your father were good friends. He’s a retired merchant marine man himself, mate on a Standard Oil tanker, and when your father came to town, they always had a couple of drinks together.

“But here’s the strange part of it. You’re not the only one interested in her. There’s another guy; Snyder crossed his trail twice, and I saw him myself when he came to the apartment house. And that’s not all. Unless Snyder and I both are watching too much cloak-and-dagger on TV, this guy himself had a tail on him. We were a whole damn procession shuttling around town.”

“Are you sure of this?” Romstead asked.

“We’re sure of the guy; the tail’s only a guess. He was right ahead of Snyder at the electronics place and then came into the bar on Van Ness—where Cullen worked—while Snyder was still there. Real bruiser, big as you are but mean-looking, apparently just been in a fight. Had a cut place over one eye and a swollen right hand—”

“Wait,” Romstead interrupted. “Driving a green Porsche with Nevada plates?”

“That’s right. Then you know him?”

“I’ve met him. He’s her brother, Lew Bonner. I don’t get it, though, why he’s poking into it. He had it all worked out; my old man was to blame for everything that happened to her. But what about the tail?”

“As I say, we’re not sure. Could be just a coincidence, but seeing him in Bonner’s area three times in different parts of town is stretching it. Name’s Delevan; he used to be in the business but had his license yanked and did a stretch in San Quentin for extortion—”

“Can you describe him?” Romstead cut in quickly.

“He’s pretty hefty himself, about six two, over two hundred pounds, partially bald—”

“Okay,” Romstead said. “He’s not the one.”

“That shook down your apartment, you mean? When did it happen?”

“Just after I took off for Reno. I think he must have clocked me out, made sure I was on the plane, and then came back and let himself in.” Romstead told him the whole thing. He was puzzled also.

“Sounds pro to me, too, but what the hell would he be after? That’s a furnished apartment, isn’t it?”

“The only things in it that are mine are clothes, luggage, and that hi-fi gear and some records.”

“Planting a bug, maybe?”

“I thought of that, but why? They wouldn’t know I’m interested in them. I didn’t know it myself until this morning. You haven’t got a description on Tallant?”

“No, but I can get one damned fast. Let me call you back in about ten minutes.”

“Fine.” Romstead hung up, frowning. What was Bonner doing in San Francisco, checking back on Jeri? Had he held out on Brubaker or learned something new? He waited, consumed with impatience. When the phone rang, he snatched it up.

“I just called Snyder,” Murdock said, “and he checked back with one of the people he’d talked to in North Beach. Tallant’s about thirty or thirty-two, medium height, slender, black hair, brown eyes—”

“That’s enough,” Romstead cut in. “Have you got an extra man you can get hold of this time of night?”

“Sure. You want Miss Foley covered?”

“Like a blanket, every minute till I get back there. I don’t know what the son of a bitch is up to or what he had to do with the old man, but he sounds wrong as hell to me.”

“We’ll take care of it. What’s her apartment number? And description?”

Romstead told him. “That retainer I gave you won’t begin to cover this, but for references you can check the Wells Fargo Bank on Montgomery Street or the Southland Trust in San Diego.”

“That’s all right. You’re coming back tomorrow?”

“Sometime tomorrow. I guess I should have stayed there; that seems to be where it is. But as long as I’m up here, I might as well go ahead and finish what I started to do. Don’t let her out of your sight. And see what else you can find out about Tallant.”

After he’d hung up, he debated whether to call Mayo again but decided there was no point in getting her upset over something that could be miles into left field. He had complete confidence in Murdock, anyway.

He called Paulette Carmody’s number. She was out, playing bridge, Carmelita said, and would be back around midnight. Well, he could talk to her tomorrow.

It was full daylight when Romstead emerged from Logan’s Cafe on Aspen Street after a breakfast of scrambled eggs, orange juice, and two cups of coffee and got into the rented car. He had put on lightweight slacks and a sport shirt, and the water cooler was filled and stowed on the floor behind the front seat. Beside him on the front seat were the Steadman County map and his 8 X 30 Zeiss binoculars. He read the odometer and jotted the mileage on the map: 6327.4. The street was almost deserted, the traffic lights flashing amber in the still-cool air of early morning as he drove out of town, headed south.

The sky was growing pink in the east, the same as it had been that morning two days ago, when he passed the cemetery. He glanced toward it, his face impassive, and went on. He thought of Jeri Bonner and wondered if her funeral would be today. All the unanswerable questions started invading his mind again, but he shut them out. He didn’t intend to spend the day guessing and theorizing from the meager facts he had; too many of them were contradictory, and he was here to do something else, a specific task that might turn out to be futile but still had to be done.

In a few minutes the peaks of the Sierra, far off to his right, began to be tipped with yellow sunlight. The two-lane blacktop, which in reality was a good three lanes wide, ran straight down a wide valley floored with sage and rimmed with buttes and ridges on both sides. Ahead and behind there was nobody else in sight. He bore down on the accelerator until he was cruising at seventy.

He began to watch the odometer, but he saw the gravel road a good mile before he reached it. He turned right into it, stopped, and read the mileage: 6341.1. He subtracted and wrote 13.7 on the map at the juncture of the two roads. Eight miles each direction would cover it. He looked behind and then ahead. You could see almost the full eight miles both ways, he thought. He cranked the windows up, opened the wings a crack, and went on. It wasn’t hot enough yet to need the air conditioning.

The road was badly washboarded and chuckholed, and he had to keep his speed down. A boiling cloud of dust rolled up behind, and he was thankful there was nobody ahead of him. Gravel roared against the underside of the car. A sage hen ran across the road, and several times he saw jackrabbits bounding out through the sage, raising and lowering their great ears like semaphores; but there was no sign of human habitation anywhere. After five miles he topped a low ridge and saw another immense flat spread out ahead of him. He stopped and got out to study it with the glasses. The road ran straight on, diminishing in the distance. There was no house, no shed, windmill, or structure of any kind. There was no use going any farther in this direction. Wherever his father had gone or had been taken, there had to be a habitation of some kind.

He turned around and drove back to the highway. Checking the mileage there, he continued on east on the gravel for eight miles. Nothing. He returned to the highway again and drove back to town. As he went past the motel, he wanted to stop and call Mayo but knew it was too early. It wasn’t even eight o’clock yet; she wouldn’t be up.

Traffic was still light in the streets, but the signals were in operation now. Stopped at Third Street, he checked the odometer and wrote the new reading on the map: 6380.8. He went on through town and out the highway, north this time. A few cars were abroad now, and he passed a couple of big diesel rigs. In about ten minutes he came to the first of the dirt roads leading off to the west. He had to wait for an oncoming car to turn left into it. He stopped, checked his mileage again, and entered it on the map; 6391.1.

The road curved down a slight grade and across a flat, rough and corrugated and full of axle-breaking chuckholes for the unwary, maintained for pickup trucks. Dust boiled up behind him. He checked the rearview mirror and could see nothing at all through the swirling white cloud. An old pickup came clattering toward him and passed, and he had to slow to a crawl until the dust of its passage began to settle. There was no wind at all, and it was growing hot now. He switched on the air conditioner. After eight miles on the odometer he topped another ridge and stopped. He got out with the glasses.

The road swung down from the ridge and turned north up another sagebrush flat. In the distance he could see a clump of cottonwoods, a corral, and tiny ranch buildings. At least four more miles, he thought. Too far, even allowing for slight differences in the odometers of the two cars. He turned and went back to the highway, picked up his new mileage reading, and continued north to the second road. It was only a dusty and monotonous repetition of the first. When his odometer reading added up first to twenty-one, and then twenty-two from town, he stopped and turned around.

He drove back to town and parked in front of his unit at the motel. When he got out, he saw the car was as dusty now as the Mercedes had been. He went inside and put through a call to Mayo. There was no answer. He let the phone go on ringing for a full minute before he gave up and broke the connection, uneasy in spite of himself. Hell, there was nothing to worry about. Wherever she’d gone, Murdock’s man was right with her.

He called Murdock’s office. Mr. Murdock was out, the receptionist said. So was Mr. Snyder. He identified himself and asked if there were any word from the man assigned to Miss Foley.

“No,” the girl said, “he hasn’t called in since he took over at eight. But he wouldn’t, anyway, unless he’d lost her.”

He was forced to admit this was right. Reassured, he thanked her and hung up. He dialed for a local line and called Paulette Carmody. She answered herself.

“Oh, Eric? You caught me just as I was going out the door.”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ll call back later.”

“Oh, that’s all right. It’s the church service for Jeri, but I’ve got a few minutes. What is it?”

“Nothing important. It was just about that crew member you said the old man locked up for having heroin on the ship—”

“Oh, that kooky radio officer. Was he ever out there in space? Look—where are you now?”‘

“Here in Coleville. At the Conestoga.”

“Fine. Honey, I’ll be home all afternoon; why don’t you come out for a drink and I’ll tell you about the dingaling? It’s quite a story.”

“I’ll be there,” he said.

“Bye now.”

He hung up.
Radio officer?
Then he shook his head angrily and went out to the car; there was no use indulging in any wild speculation until he had more than that to go on. Finish the job first, he told himself; find the place or admit you were wrong. He wrote the odometer reading on the map, drove up Aspen, turned right on Third Street, and was on the blacktop road headed east out of town.

The country was rougher in this direction, flinty hills and ridges and twisting ravines. The sun was high overhead now, and heat waves shimmered off the pavement. He came to the dirt road leading north and pulled off into it. A weathered signpost bore arrow markers saying KENDALL MTN 19 and LADYSMITH SPRGS 22. He checked the odometer and wrote 9.2 on the map. The road went up over a ridge and along a high flat with ravines on both sides. It was as rough as the others, the dust a grayish white and as fine as talcum. It was impossible to see anything behind him.

He came to the fork and stopped to read the mileage again: 13.4. He entered it on the map. The old signs, gouged and riddled with gunshots, indicated the road bearing off to the right led to Ladysmith Springs. He shrugged. It didn’t matter which he took first. A pickup truck came into view down the other, leaving a swirling plume of dust behind it. The driver lifted a hand, and it went on past toward the highway. Romstead took the Ladysmith road and went on. After about a mile there was a small fenced enclosure on his left and a shed that had probably been used for the storage of winter hay in the past but was now empty and falling in ruin. After that there was nothing but sage and rock and powdery dust and the endless succession of low hills. When the odometer indicated he’d come twenty-three miles and there was still nothing in sight, he stopped, poured a drink of the water, waited a minute for his own dust to settle, and turned back.

He checked his mileage again at the fork and turned up the Kendall Mountain road, discouraged now and facing defeat. This was his next to last chance. The road ran for two or three miles up a shallow canyon, and when it climbed out, there was a fence on his right. The fence continued as the road went up over another ridge and out across several miles of rough mesa, still running north. As his mileage was beginning to run out on him, he passed a gate through the fence, a wooden gate on high posts, with a single-lane road leading through it and disappearing over a slight rise about two hundred yards away. The fence turned at right angles shortly after the gate and ran off to the east across a continuation of the low ridge.

He was twenty-two miles from town when the road began to drop down from the mesa and he could see out across another wide flat ahead. There was no habitation visible anywhere. He noted the odometer reading and turned and went back. It was three miles to the gate. Nineteen miles from town, he thought. He stopped and got out.

The sun was straight overhead now, incandescent and searing in the cloudless sky, and its weight was like a blow after the cool interior of the car. There was still no wind, and in the boundless hush his shoes made little plopping sounds in the dust as he walked over to the gate. It was secured with a length of heavy chain and a rusty padlock that looked as though it hadn’t been opened in years. He could see traces of tire treads in the dust on the other side, however, indistinct and half-obliterated by the desert’s afternoon winds. They might have been made months ago. There was no way he could get through with the car, but he could walk out to where the road disappeared over the little rise and see what was in view from there. He lifted the binoculars off the seat, crawled through the three-strand fence, and walked up beside the road. As the country beyond began to come into view, he felt a little surge of excitement.

It was a wide bowl-shaped valley or flat, and on the far side of it, among a half dozen aspens or cottonwoods, was a ranch house. He lifted the binoculars and studied it. Besides the house itself, there was a barn, a smaller shed of some kind, a corral, and off a short distance to one side a windmill and a large water tank. He breathed softly. It was a good two miles, he estimated, feeling conviction take hold of him, plus the nineteen to the gate would make it exactly right. But was there anybody there now?

No vehicle of any kind was visible, and he could see no one anywhere. Of course, there might be a car or a truck in the shed or around behind the house, but he didn’t think so. Those tire marks in the road were too old. He swung the glasses onto the windmill again. Several of its blades appeared to be missing, but he couldn’t be sure at this distance. He couldn’t tell whether there was any water in the tank or not. But there were no animals in sight, no dog, chickens, horses, or anything, not even range cattle.

His eye was caught then by movement in the sage a quarter mile in front of the house, and he brought the glasses around. It was vultures, five or six of them clustered around something on the ground. As he watched, one of them took off, flapping, and began to soar. Two or three more were circling high overhead. He returned to his scrutiny of the ranch buildings. The place, he decided, was almost surely abandoned. There was no mailbox out here at the road, no telephone or power lines leading in.

It would be a long walk in the scorching heat of midday, and he’d better have a drink of the water before he started. He went back and was about to crawl between the strands of barbed wire beside the gate when his attention was suddenly caught by the chain encircling the post. It had been cut.

Somebody had used bolt cutters to remove a quarter-inch section of one side of one of the links, and not too long ago. The clean metallic gray of the ends contrasted sharply with the rusty condition of the rest of it. It had been carefully arranged in back of the post where it would remain unnoticed by anyone going past in front. This had to be the place, he thought, and his eyes were cold as he slipped the adjoining link through the gap and opened the gate.

He could have been the only person in this end of Nevada as he drove through, closed the gate, and rehooked the chain again. There was no dust in sight along the road as far as he could see, no sound of car or truck. As soon as he had dropped down the short grade into the flat, he was out of sight of the road except for the rising dust cloud of his passage. He drove slowly, keeping his eyes on the building for any sign of life. Nothing moved anywhere except the vultures, taking off in alarm as he went past. Whatever carrion they were tearing at was hidden by the sage some hundred yards off to his right.

He was near enough now to see that most of the panes were broken in the old-fashioned sashes of the two windows in front. It was a small house, of board-and-batten construction, long unpainted, with a porch across the front and a roof of weathered shingles. There was a fieldstone chimney at the right end of it. He stopped in the shade of one of the trees in front and got out in the silence and the incandescent glare of noon.

The windmill and the big galvanized water tank were straight ahead, some fifty yards off to the right of the house. Nearly half the mill’s blades were missing, and its framework and ladder were discolored with rust. The corral fence and barn were behind the windmill, both silvery with age and fallen into disrepair. It was years, he thought, since anybody had lived here, but the place had definitely had visitors. The baked earth of the yard bore the tracks of at least two vehicles, one of which he thought must have been a truck of some kind because the tires were bigger and the treads more deeply impressed. This one had apparently been back and forth several times.

He walked around to the rear. There was a small back porch. The windows here had broken panes in them, too. The tire tracks of the heavy vehicle came on into the backyard, and the truck or whatever it was had apparently stood for some length of time in two places under the big cottonwood some distance behind the porch, judging from the accumulated drops of leaking crankcase oil. There were a great many heel marks and scuffs of shoe soles as though a number of people had been walking around, but the ground was too hard-baked and they were too indistinct for him to gather any information from them. The other building, off to one side of the barn, was apparently a chicken house, and there was an old privy farther back.