The Bohemian Connection (12 page)

Still holding my arm, he said, “If you’re right, then this man is dangerous.”

Ross stood at the bar, his back to us.

“Are you going to let him get away because he might be dangerous?”

“Look—”

I jerked loose and started for the bar. “Ross,” I called.

Ross didn’t move.

I reached out to touch his shoulder.

Wescott pushed in front of me. He flashed his shield and grabbed Ross’s arm. “Sheriff’s Department. Come outside quietly, Remson.”

“Hey, wait!”

“I said outside.”

The bar was silent. No one moved.

“Officer, you’re making a mistake.”

“Outside!”

“Just let me talk, Officer.”

Wescott shoved him through the swinging doors. I followed.

“Hands up against the building. Spread your feet.” Wescott moved in behind him and patted him down. “No weapon,” he muttered.

“Listen, Officer. Listen to me. You’re making a mistake. Look at my driver’s license. My name is David Sugarbaker.”

I
HAD HEARD ABOUT
pockets in time, and the concept that time could be stretched like a rubber band, but rarely had a minute extended so long as the one after David George Sugarbaker handed his driver’s license to Sheriff Wescott. We stood in the alley next to the bar where Wescott had parked. At the edge of the sidewalk by North Bank Road a small crowd of onlookers formed, watching as Wescott called in for a make on the license.

The call came back after that minute. Sugarbaker was clean. And he was Sugarbaker, not Ross Remson.

Now that I could examine his face, the differences were obvious. Superficially he looked a lot like Ross—both were six feet tall, both had sandy hair that was just curly enough to notice—but Ross had a space between his front teeth and a sardonic look about him. Sugarbaker had neither. His teeth were even, his stance shaky. And his expression teetered between anger and fear. He looked like a dog who had soiled the parlor rug.

And Wescott looked like the dog’s owner. “How long have you lived at this address, Sugarbaker?” he demanded.

“Well, I guess you could say eight months.” His words weren’t slurred yet, but he wasn’t sober either.

“What do you mean, ‘you guess’? Don’t you know how long you’ve lived there? Maybe you don’t really live there?”

“I do. It’s just that I’ve lived there before. I didn’t know if you wanted that time too.”

“So you stayed there before, you moved away, and now you’re back, is that it?”

Sugarbaker glanced nervously at the crowd. “Yes,” he mumbled.

“What kind of place is this, Sugarbaker? What kind of people live there? Any the Sheriff’s Department knows?”

Sugarbaker didn’t say anything. I came close to praying his house was crammed with wanted felons. Only a discovery of that magnitude could rescue this fiasco.

“Who lives there?” Wescott repeated.

Sugarbaker’s voice was even lower than before. “My parents.”

“What?”

“I live with my parents. It’s just been since my divorce. It doesn’t cost much. I have my own entrance. It’s almost like an apartment.”

From the crowd behind me I could hear a few chuckles followed by the rumble of conversation.

Wescott spun toward them. “This isn’t a side show! Move along.” Turning back to Sugarbaker, he said, “Where are you staying locally?”

The crowd had broken up. Sugarbaker’s voice seemed louder as he said, “I don’t know. I was going to check in somewhere later. I thought about the Winding Road Inn.”

Wescott swallowed. “Well, Mr. Sugarbaker,” he said almost paternally, “let me give you a bit of advice. You’re not in any condition to drive that far. I’m sure you don’t want to be a danger on the road. You’d do much better to choose one of the quieter spots within walking distance, like Genelle’s.”

“Yessir.”

“Good.” As he turned back toward the car, Wescott had that condescending look of a lawman who has given the gift of a warning instead of a ticket. It was only when he turned to me that his fury was evident. And that was just for a split second. Then he climbed into his car and left.

Both Sugarbaker and I stood watching the car pull away. At least, I thought, he didn’t ask Wescott who he had mistaken him for. He was so nervous he seemed to have forgotten about that. He acted as if Wescott had a good reason to arrest him, as if he had something to hide—perhaps living with his parents.

He turned and stared down at me. “Fucking asshole!” he exclaimed. “What kind of place is this? Who does he fucking think he is? Dragging people out of public establishments with no reason.”

The transformation from the fearful, servile man of a minute ago was almost total. Now Sugarbaker did look like Ross Remson. His eyes had that same crazed intensity, his jaw the same hard set.

“Who did he think I was anyway? Some punk? Somebody who’s going to upset the big shots here this weekend? Huh? Huh?”

I tried to decide how best to explain what had happened. Should I admit that it was my fault? That I was the one who mistook him for Ross? Would he be calmer for knowing that? Or would it make him even angrier to discover that it wasn’t even the sheriff who had made the mistake?

“False arrest! That’s it, false arrest!”

“You weren’t arrested.”

“Well, false imprisonment then.”

“False being yanked out of a bar?” I offered.

“What? Huh?” He looked down at me and the pugnacious set of his jaw eased. “God knows what that jerk would have done if you hadn’t been here.”

It took me a moment to realize that he hadn’t connected me with Wescott. There was no reason he should have. Before Wescott grabbed his arm we had been behind him, our conversation covered by the noise of the bar. After that he had other things to think about.

“Are you a reporter or something?” he asked me. “Or do you just keep a citizen’s watch on the sheriff?”

“Neither really.”

He paused, then smiled, a knowing look. “Just watching out for me then?”

“You remind me of someone,” I said.

He looked at once surprised, a bit deflated, yet curious. “You know you’re the second woman who’s said that.”

Surely he meant Michelle. She must have mentioned it to him last night. Despite the heat of the day it was chilly now. I pulled my sweater tighter around me.

“Cold, huh? Look, the least I can do is buy you a drink. I can sure use one after dealing with that jerk. Boy, can you believe that? Does that happen a lot here, that kind of harassment?”

His little encounter with the sheriff was definitely a subject I didn’t want to reopen. On the very slim possibility that he might run into the sheriff again, I didn’t want him to be able to quote one word of mine on that topic. I walked back into the bar and asked for a beer.

On a less busy night my reentry with the man Wescott and I had hustled out of there minutes earlier might have attracted some comment, but if anyone remembered it tonight amidst the shouts and laughter and clanking of glasses, they didn’t mention it loud enough for me to hear. I followed Sugarbaker to a table near the back of the bar. I would have preferred one against the wall where it would have been quieter, but those had been snatched up by the few other people who had intentions of being heard. Sugarbaker pulled out a chair for me and sat in the opposite one, facing into the room.

Before he could return to the topic of the sheriff, I checked my assumption, asking, “The woman who said you looked like someone else, who was she?”

It took him a moment to readjust his thoughts. “A complainant.”

A complainant! How bad could my luck be? “Are you a lawyer?” No wonder he had thought of false arrest.

“No.”

“A legal assistant?”

“No.”

“Well?”

“I’m a field investigator for the Department of Environmental Health.”

The mosquito man! I laughed so hard the beer slopped over the edge of my glass and onto my hand.

Sugarbaker, the mosquito man, stared. “What’s so funny?”

“Sorry,” I said. And when I was more composed, I said, “You investigate things like complaints about mosquitoes, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“One of my friends had a complaint about mosquitoes—Michelle Davidson on Half Hill Road.”

“Hey, that’s her. She’s been calling in every month since Christmas.”

“Every month?”

“Residents are only allowed to complain once a month.”

I laughed again. Was this rule Environmental Health’s answer to Follow-up? Did each bureaucracy have its own special system for avoiding having to deal with grievances? I suspected Mr. Bobbs would gladly trade Follow-up for the joy of restricting me to one complaint a month.

“I’ll bet that limits your work.”

He smiled tentatively. “It’s a practical rule. Our investigations take time. You have to come out and look the situation over. That’s what I was doing yesterday, looking at your friend’s garage. Then I had to take a sample—”

“So you met Michelle then?”

Now he did smile. It wasn’t hard to see what he thought of Michelle. “Real looker, your friend. Real interested in her problem.”

“The mosquito larvae?”

“Yes.”

“So what did you conclude?”

He took a swallow of his beer and leaned forward. Behind him three men pushed between the tables. To the right a group burst into laughter. It was all I could do to hear Sugarbaker. I leaned closer.

“Real nice lady,” he said.

“Did you make a date to see her last night?”

“Nah. It wasn’t a date. Nothing like that. We just happened to meet. She has a husband, you know, not that that would have stopped her. She seemed, well, you know, hot to trot.” He finished his beer. His eyes were beginning to droop now but his speech gave no hint he had been drinking. He ordered another round even though my glass was still half full.

“I don’t want to sound like I think I’m irresistible. I got over that a few years ago.” He laughed. “Divorce makes you realize that you’re not everyone’s taste.”

“Indeed.”

“You divorced too?”

“Yes. It’s the California way.”

“How long?”

“Few years.”

“Oh. Mine was final two months ago. That’s how come I’m staying with my folks. Donna, my ex, took everything—the house, the car, the cats. We didn’t live in California. It wasn’t a community property state. If I’d known we were going to get divorced, I would have moved back here. Then I’d have a place to live or something to drive.”

Next to the sheriff, this was the last topic I wanted to hear about. My own divorce had been relatively easy. Unlike the apparent bonfire the Sugarbakers had had, mine had been more like sweeping away the ash. I asked, “Do you think it was accidental, Michelle’s seeing you last night?”

He shrugged. “I wasn’t all that surprised. Her husband works late Thursday nights. She told me.”

Two more beers arrived. Sugarbaker poured a glass and downed half of it. “Odd though.”

“How?”

“Couldn’t figure her out. I mean she sat there staring at me like she couldn’t wait, you know. Then she’d shake herself out of it and look at me like she’d never seen me before. And she’d ask me about her complaint.”

“What did you tell her?”

“About her complaint, you mean?” He gave his head a quick shake and seemed to pull himself back a notch closer to sobriety. “She had a reasonable gripe. I told her that. She wanted to know how she could speed things up. I’m not supposed to tell complainants to do that, you know. But she had this real clear complaint, so I told her, ‘Get some clout.’ That’s what I said. ‘Call your congressman.’ Boy you get one of them bugging the department for you and wham!—your complaint is number one.”

I took a sip of my beer.

“That’s what I should do about that jerk, the sheriff. I can call my congressman. And I can sue, too. What do you think?”

“Did Michelle say she would contact her congressman?”

He tried to open his eyes wide but the lids moved only halfway, then closed back to where they had been, so that his eyes were nearly slits. It was as if his eyes absorbed all the effects of the alcohol and his speech none. “Odd thing,” he said. “She said her congressman would be here, in this town, this Sunday to give a speech. Then she laughed.”

“Laughed!”

“Yeah. She said he’d get a good audience. She said the last congressman who spoke here blocked traffic or something and the people burned down his podium.” Sugarbaker was sounding less sober by the moment.

“Did Michelle say she’d ask the congressman about her problem?”

He giggled. “She said after the heat he might get from the rest of the people here, he’d be glad to talk to her about her mosquito larvae.” He downed the rest of his beer.

“What happened then—after she told you about the congressman?”

He eyed me suspiciously. “We talked. Nothing else. We were getting on real good. I told her I could tell her what to say to her congressman. We could get together, plan what she should say.”

“When were you going to do that?”

“We could have then, that night. I had this motel room—”

“Did you ask her?”

He picked up the glass and stared into it. He looked like he was having a hard time using those almost-closed eyes.

I repeated my question louder.

“Well, no. Odd thing. All of a sudden she gets real mad. I mean you don’t stare at the person you’re talking to all the time, do you? I mean, you look at other people, and some of them are women, right?”

“Yes?”

“I’ll admit it, I was looking at this blonde, at the bar. She had these dark blue eyes and this wild blond hair. She was wearing overalls, with this wild blond hair.” He paused so long I thought he was about to pass out, but he pulled himself together and said, “Then, all of a sudden Michelle gets mad. She says, ‘Do you find her attractive?’ Just like a schoolteacher or something. I say, ‘Not bad.’ And she gets up and stomps out, just like that. Not a word.”

I restrained my urge to comment, “Odd thing.” Instead, I asked, “What did you do after Michelle left?”

“I sat there, then I was going to hit on the blonde, but she left, and then there was this brunette, but…I went back to my motel. But I’m not staying there tonight. No, sir. I told them what they could do with their cesspool of a place.” He put both hands on the table, started to push himself up, then dropped back into his chair. “They sell bottles of wine here. We could get a bottle. Do you live around here?”