Crazybone (16 page)

“I know enough,” I said. “I’d have to tell them what you did to Emily, too.”

“...What?”

“Emily. Locking her up in that studio of yours. No heat, no toilet facilities — that’s abuse, Mrs. Meineke. Child abuse and child endangerment.”

“You... found...” She choked on the rest of it. Her face was splotched with red now, as if droplets of blood had been stirred into the milk-white.

“That’s right, I found her. And I let her out.” I raised my voice. “Emily, you can come over now.”

Karen Meineke stared as her niece appeared. Emily stopped beside me, as close as she’d stood before. She didn’t say anything; she just looked at the woman with those wide, tragic eyes.

“I never touched her,” Karen Meineke said. “I never hurt the kid. You tell him I never laid a hand on you, Emily.”

“She already told me,” I said.

“I had to put her in the studio. Her mother... Oh, shit, I never wanted her here in the first place!”

Emily said, “I don’t want to be here. I want to go home.” Her small fingers clutched at my coat sleeve. “I want him to take me home, Aunt Karen.”

The woman stared at her with cringing amazement. “What’s the matter with you? Your mother’s coming back for you.”

“No, she’s not. She’d’ve been here by now if she was. Please, Aunt Karen?”

“Ellen... your mother... she’s coming, I tell you. She has to. If you’re not here, she’ll... No, you’re staying right here with me.” Karen Meineke was sweating now; she reached out with her free hand to clutch at the porch railing, as if she might suddenly be feeling dizzy. “God, I wish I’d never... I wish...”

“Never what?” I said. “Never had a sister? Never done what you did ten years ago?”

“I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t me, it was them... Ellen and that bastard she... It wasn’t our idea, they talked us into it.”

“You and your husband, Charles Willis.”

She winced at the name.

“What did they talk you into doing?”

“I can’t tell you. I won’t.”

“I’ll find out one way or another. And soon. You know that. You know you can’t keep on lying and pretending.”

“Damn you, leave me alone! If you don’t, I’ll—” Hot little flicker in her eyes; she’d had a sudden thought. It straightened her up, gave her the impetus to push past me and start up the stairs.

When she’d gone partway I called. “If you’re going after a weapon, say a handgun, I don’t think you’ll find it where you left it.”

The words stopped her. She pivoted, both arms hugging the remaining grocery bag to her chest. “You... you were in my house. You broke into my house!”

“Did I? Front door doesn’t seem to be locked. Besides, you weren’t here — you don’t know if I was inside or not.”

“Broke in and stole my gun—”

“I’m not a thief,” I said. “Misplaced weapons have a way of turning up. Empty, even though you think you’ve left them lying around loaded.”

“You son of a bitch!” She screamed the epithet at me. And lumbered up the rest of the way and banged into the house.

As much to myself as to Emily I said, “It’s no use. I’ll have to find out some other way.”

“Do I
have
to stay here with her?”

“I’m afraid so. There’s no other choice.”

“For how long?”

“Until your mom comes or I find her first. If she does show up, you tell her to take you straight home. Tell her she can’t run and hide anymore, I’ll find her wherever she goes.”

“She isn’t coming back here,” Emily said.

Ah, Christ. I had my doubts, too, but I didn’t want her to know it. I said, “You’ll be all right here. Your aunt won’t lock you up anymore.”

Those dark, pained eyes moved over my face; I could almost feel them like a feather touch on my skin. “
You’ll
come back, won’t you? You won’t just leave me here?”

“I’ll be back. As soon as I can.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Eye contact for a few more seconds. Emily broke it, took a couple of hesitant steps away from me — and changed her mind and came back and threw her arms around my waist, hugged me briefly and very hard. Then she ran up the stairs and into the house without looking back.

I fell lousy, standing there alone in the sun. I felt like the world’s biggest shit.

All the way into Gualala I beat myself up about leaving Emily to the not very tender mercies of her aunt. But it was the only option, just as I’d told her. If I had taken her with me and Karen Meineke decided to be vengeful, I’d be wide open for a kidnapping charge. And I couldn’t keep doing my job if I had a kid to watch out for, could I? Verities, sure, but they didn’t make me feel any better about it.

In the village, because my empty stomach was giving me hell, I stopped at a seafood restaurant that looked as though it catered to local trade and made short work of a bowl of clam chowder. Emily had said she thought her uncle still lived somewhere in the area; there was no listing in the local phone book for a Mike Meineke — I’d checked the restaurant’s pay-phone copy on the way in — so I asked my waitress if she knew him. No. Same response from the handful of other patrons.

From there I made the rounds of other local businesses. The fourth place I tried was The Fisherman’s Bar and Grill, on Highway I north of Port Creek Road. The bar was presided over by a big, bearded gent with hair as thick as fur on his arms and hands. When I asked him he if he knew Meineke, he said, “Looking for the man why?”

“Good news for him,” I lied. I handed over one of my cards. “I work for an attorney in San Francisco, executor of the estate of one of Mr. Meineke’s relatives.”

“Left him some money, this relative?”

“A small bequest, yes.”

The only customer within earshot, a wizened little guy drinking draft beer, leaned toward us and said, “If it’s more than five bucks, you can leave it right here with Hank. This is where Meineke’ll come spend it anyways.”

“You know him, then.”

“Sure, we know him,” Hank said. He winked at the customer. “Mike’s been known to take a drink now and then.”

“That’s a fact,” the little guy agreed. “If he has to knock you down to get hold of the bottle.”

The two of them thought that was pretty funny. I didn’t, particularly, but I laughed with them so they’d be inclined to answer my next question.

“Where can I find him?”

“Well, if he’s sober,” Hank said, “he’ll be up at the Wilkerson property. Hollywood people, the Wilkersons, come up here two weeks out of the year. Must be nice to be rich.”

“What does Meineke do there?”

“Lives there, takes care of the place.”

“Far from here?”

“Six, seven miles. Up north of Anchor Bay.”

“I’d appreciate directions.”

He asked shrewdly, “Get you something to drink first?”

I ordered a beer I didn’t want, bought a refill for the little guy and a shot of bourbon for Hank. That made the three of us drinking buddies and got me directions explicit enough for a backward child to follow.

Anchor Bay was a few miles above Gualala, and the winding stretch of Highway I north of there was a pretty one — thickly wooded slopes to the east, the ocean close on the west and visible in snatches through more pine woods running along the cliff tops. Wisps of fog threaded the blue sky now; but the wind had slacked off and the offshore bank was moving slowly. The lowering sun had lost some of its brightness, so that its rays among the trees had a pale, filtered look.

At the six-mile point on the odometer I began scouting for the landmarks I’d been given. When the last of them appeared near the top of a rise — somebody’s mailbox built large to resemble a birdhouse — I slowed down. The Wilkerson driveway was just beyond the crest, half hidden by trees and undergrowth. I almost missed it, braked just in time to make the turn ahead of an oncoming logging truck.

Some nice piece of oceanfront property lay ahead of me, spread out behind a gated fence. At least two wooded acres, with an ultramodern wood-and-stone house squatting at the edge of the cliff and a couple of outbuildings in the trees closer to the highway. The security gates were open — I seemed to be lucky in that respect lately. The reason here was a stakebed truck parked midway along the drive, its bed mounded with dry brush and tree branches. A man dressed in overalls was clearing out more dead wood under the pines nearby.

I drove on through and stopped behind the truck. The man had straightened and was coming my way by then, dragging a six-foot limb in one gloved hand. I got out, walked around to meet him.

“Afternoon,” I said. “I’m looking for—”

“Wilkersons ain’t here. Not expected, either.”

He was thirty-five or so, all bone and gristle. Gray stubble flecked hollow cheeks and a weak chin. Broken capillaries made a tracery of red and blue lines across nose and cheekbones; the whites of his eyes had blood in them, like the albumin of a fertilized egg. You had to look close to see that he was the same man in the wedding photo, and not because he was lacking the beard and his hair was cut short. Even then I couldn’t be a hundred percent positive.

“Your name Meineke? Mike Meineke?”

“Why? I don’t know you and I’m not buying anything.”

“I’m not selling anything. I’m here about your sister-in-law.”

“Who you talking about?”

“Sheila Hunter. Or I should say Ellen. Lynn’s sister. Their real names, right. Mr. Willis?”

He stared at me. The bloodshot eyes showed fear now, but it was not the consuming terror I’d seen in Emily’s mother and aunt; it was a shadow, a wraith, of something that had grow n weak and shriveled with age.

“So it’s finally happened,” he said. “All along I figured it would someday. A man like Cotter never gives up, no matter how long it takes.”

I let the name slide by for the moment. “Ten years,” I said.

“Yeah. Almost eleven.” His mouth worked as if all his spit had dried up. “What happens now?”

“To Ellen?”

“Her, Pete, Lynn. Me.”

“Pete. Ellen’s husband.”

“Who the hell else?”

“He’s dead. Two weeks now.”

“Jesus,” Meineke said. “Cotter do it? You?”

“No, he died in a head-on collision with a drunk driver.”

That confused him. He shook his head.

I said, “Nobody told you? Your ex-wife knows.”

“Her. We ain’t said a word to each other in two years.”

“Tell me about Ellen and Pete.”

“Tell you what? If you work for Cotter—”

“I don’t work for Cotter. I don’t know Cotter.”

“Listen,” Meineke said, and shook his head again, and worked his dry mouth. “Just who the hell are you?”

“A private detective. Working for Jack Hunter’s insurance company. And for his daughter.”

“Emily? She’s a kid. That don’t make sense.”

“You make sense for me, I’ll do the same for you.”

“I don’t have to talk to you. You’re not from Cotter, you said you don’t even know him.”

“Talk to me or to the police. Your choice.”

“Police? Oh, no, you don’t. I didn’t do nothing wrong. Lynn and me, we had nothing to do with stealing those bonds—” He broke off, his gaze sliding away from mine.

“What bonds, Mike?”

“No,” he said.

“Pete and Ellen stole them, right?”

“No.”

“And you knew about it, maybe shared in the profits—”

“No.”

“Either way, you’re an accessory to a felony. You can go to prison, minimum of five years, if I report it to the authorities.”

That was more bluff than not. If theft was the only serious crime here, it had happened long enough ago for the statute of limitations to have run out. If Meineke knew that—

But he didn’t know it. He still wasn’t meeting my eyes and there was a slump to his hotly now, a loosening of his facial muscles — all signs of defeat in a man. He’d talk to me. All I had to do was give him back a little hope.

“I don’t want to make trouble for you, Mike. Facts are what I’m after. Give them to me and I’m out of your life as fast as I came into it.”

He ran a gloved hand over his face; I could hear the scraping of cloth on heard stubble. His eyes flicked up. “No cops?”

“No cops.”

“All right. What the hell. But I need a drink first. Christ, I need one bad.”

He put his back to me and shambled down the driveway. I followed him to the nearest of the outbuildings, a small, square cabin made of redwood logs and shakes that could not have contained more than two rooms. I went all the way into the doorway to make sure a drink was all he was after. A full pint of cheap bourbon stood on a table next to a bunk bed; he snagged it and took a long pull, then put the cap back on and came outside with it.

He didn’t say anything to me or even look at me. He walked around the side of the cabin, onto a beaten path that cut through the trees to the cliffs edge. A bench had been anchored there facing the ocean; Meineke sat down on it and slugged again from the bottle. It seemed colder out there, in the pale sun with the vanguards of mist curling in overhead. I buried my hands in my coat pockets, went around and stood on the other side of the bench. From there you could look down a hundred feet of eroded rock wall to a white-water cover where waves broke over offshore rocks and kelp beds. The big main house was about fifty yards away and partially screened by pines. If you sat with your back to it, I thought, as Meineke was sitting, you’d have a sense of what it was like to be all alone on the edge of the world.

“Come out here every chance I get,” he said. “Ocean’s about all I got left now. Ocean and booze.”

I had nothing to say to that.

“Fucking money never bought me anything but grief. Lynn and me, we were happy in Colorado before it happened. We didn’t have a pot but we had each other. We had something.”

“The bonds belonged to Cotter?” I asked.