The Bohemian Connection (8 page)

The mud from the sewer hole still caked my feet; leaves stuck to the mud; and my feet seemed part of the earth beneath. I felt a surprisingly easy affinity with the other inhabitants here. A cool dusk breeze lifted the leaves and passed like a shawl over my arms. It was nice to be here in the silence, with no awkward questions to ask, no sheriff to threaten me. I sat down on a long flat stone, picked up a dead pine branch, and began half-heartedly dusting the mud from my jeans.

The man I had followed had eluded me. But suppose that man wasn’t Ross. I had only my own assumption to say that he was. It was reasonable to assume that a man who merely looked like Ross might have been walking down the street—but standing in Ward’s backyard? What was he doing there if he wasn’t Ross?

Assuming he was Ross, why would he have left Henderson so suddenly as to miss his father’s funeral, and then return eight years later to kill a girl he had dated when she was in high school? Was there more to it than that? Alison Barluska hadn’t mentioned any letters or phone calls from Michelle when she was living with Ross. But Ross might have kept in contact. Alison, as she had said, wasn’t the love of Ross’s life. His living with her wouldn’t have precluded visits to Michelle. Perhaps he had come to Henderson when Craig was away. Perhaps Michelle had told Craig she was going to visit her sister in Santa Rosa and gone on to San Francisco to meet Ross. But even if that were so, even if they had carried on a clandestine romance all these years, why would Ross have killed her now?

The branch cracked halfway. I tore the end loose and continued to brush.

According to Ward, Michelle hadn’t had enough to do now that her children were in school. Craig spent long hours at the plant nursery. Michelle was irritated about Alison working there. Was this then the time that Michelle had decided to run off with Ross? Had Ross objected (was it more than he had in mind?), Michelle insisted, and he killed her? Wait—rather than kill her, wouldn’t it have been easier for Ross just to stay out of Henderson?

It would, unless Michelle had had some hold on him. Suppose she had known he was the Bohemian Connection. He had told Alison; maybe he also bragged to Michelle. Whatever he did as the Bohemian Connection included the illegal.

But it had been eight years since he had been the Connection. Unless he was involved in something more felonious than Alison had intimated, the statute of limitations would have run out on any crime he had committed.

I pushed myself up and strolled along the overgrown path between the families of gravestones. The path was thick with pine needles, so that even the sound of my steps was muffled. I felt like I was walking on pillows. A redwood tree, older than any of the dead beneath the ground, shaded the nearer plots. In winter it would shield them from the driving rain. Now its shade was dark against the patches of bright setting sun. I walked to the farthest plot, that of Maria Keneally and her five children, all of whom had died before the age of ten. She had outlived the last of them by thirty years. When I worked the hillside route the cemetery was a good place for lunch. I had sat here many times before when I wanted to sort things out. I had wondered about Maria Keneally and her sad life.

I sat again on her stone and stared beyond the cemetery at a log house thirty yards away. The house was owned by her niece, an old woman of the same name. When I came to read her meter, she always rushed out, offered me tea (an offer no one who works outside all day can afford to accept), and invariably stated that it was good for an old lady to live so close to the cemetery. Not so far to go.

After the initial shock, I had smiled at the old refrain. I hadn’t mentioned that this old cemetery was full and her remains would have to be taken to the new graveyard across the river.

As it turned out, she went to neither, but in May had gone for a summerlong visit to a niece, yet another Maria Keneally, in County Cork. Her yard, however, was so clearly untended that it looked as if she had been deposited in the graveyard.

A squirrel ran across the yard in front of the house and toward the giant redwood.

Enough of houses and rodents, I told myself. Why would Ross have killed Michelle? Even though Ross hadn’t been the Bohemian Connection for eight years, the need he had filled in that job still existed. Men still had rendezvous, doubtless still coveted a lid of grass or a snort of coke. So if Ross were no longer the Bohemian Connection, who was? Craig? Ward? Or some other man?

Or did the Connection have to be a man? A chairman of the board might be unnerved to discover his illicit rendezvous was arranged by a woman, but his minions wouldn’t care. And marijuana farmers and coke dealers will sell to anyone. No, there was no reason the Bohemian Connection couldn’t be a woman.

Ross had had the necessary contacts both at the Grove and in town. Whoever had taken over after him needed to know those people. The locals would deal only with someone they could trust, and the visitors would be even warier. The only way both groups could feel sure of the new Connection would be if that person were Ross’s hand-picked successor.

Besides having Ross’s trust, what would someone need in order to be the Connection? A working relationship with the local suppliers. A good knowledge of the area. No one who wandered in cold from San Francisco or Oakland could find a suitable rendezvous for a company president and his lover and know where to get good grass from the backwoods gardens to the north of here. And the Connection would need his time to be flexible. A sudden rush of demands couldn’t be handled in half an hour. It was hardly work that could be farmed out.

Of the people I had met asking about Michelle’s disappearance, it was Michelle herself who most nearly fit this description. Michelle had had more time than she could handle. She had grown up in Henderson, gone to school here, known all the winter people. And perhaps more importantly, she alone had trusted Ross. It was she whom he could trust in return. It was she to whom he could turn over the Connection trade knowing it would stay as he had left it.

Or could he? Eight years can alter a lot. In less time than that every cell in the body changes. In those eight years the Michelle who had been an adoring high school girl had become a woman. In that time the Bohemian Connection might no longer have been Ross’s gift to her, but have become her own business. That didn’t seem like something Ross would comprehend easily.

Had Ross come back wanting a share of his trade? Or perhaps all of it? Had he viewed the intervening years as a period when Michelle ran a business for him, just marking time till he returned and took charge again? Had he announced as much and Michelle objected? Had they had a few drinks, walked back to Michelle’s house, argued, and he killed her?

Leaves crackled. I looked toward the empty house. The screen door was open and by it stood Alison Barluska.

“Maria Keneally’s not home, Alison,” I called.

Alison turned abruptly. I couldn’t make out her expression at that distance. From her movements she seemed startled.

I stood up and called to her again. Alison was just the person I needed to see. She could tell me if Ross had received letters from Michelle. I hadn’t asked her specifically. And she could tell me in greater detail—much greater detail—what Ross had done as the Bohemian Connection. I glanced down, looking for the path through the underbrush. When I looked up Alison was hurrying around the side of the house toward the driveway.

“Alison, wait!” I called.

She disappeared behind the house and in a minute I heard her truck pull away.

I hurried across to the house. Vines grew up the wood sides. The yard was a scramble of low weeds and pine needles. There was another old redwood at the edge of the property that shaded the yard and allowed it to survive untended without being totally overgrown.

Before she left, Maria Keneally had told me she would unplug all her electric appliances. I had asked her if she wouldn’t feel safer leaving a light on a timer. Housebreaking was an ongoing business in the river area. Each winter, after the summer people had left, a changing crew of winter residents began breaking in. Anyone who went off in September leaving a television or stereo should have been surprised to find it still there when he came back in June. The occasional house was guarded by alarms, a few even connected to the sheriff’s department. But alarms were impractical, particularly for houses as isolated as this one.

Maria Keneally had been pleased at my concern. She’d made a point of taking me into her living room and showing me her father’s antique pistol that she kept by the door to her garage. “Still shoots ’em dead,” she’d assured me. She wasn’t about to let any shiftless layabout from Guerneville or Monte Rio break into her house and steal her television when she was there, nor did she intend to pay the electric company for light when she wasn’t. And that was that.

I checked the windows now. No wires were visible. But I hardly expected Maria Keneally to have paid for an alarm system. So it would have been easy for anyone to break a windowpane and let himself in.

I walked around the house till I found the broken window, a bathroom window shielded from view by overgrown bushes.

Had Alison broken in here? I had only seen her at the door. Had she been canvassing and knocked, waited, and was leaving when I spotted her?

I hurried down to the end of the driveway. The Davidson’s Plants truck was not parked by any of the other houses down the road. Alison wasn’t knocking at doors there.

So, if not canvassing, what had Alison been doing here?

I
DROVE BY
DAVIDSON
’S
Plants, prepared to ask Alison Barluska what she had been doing at old Miss Keneally’s house. But the nursery was closed and the nursery truck was not in the lot. So Alison had not come back here.

No matter what Alison had been doing there, I felt sure she would tell me she was canvassing. She might have been working with Ross and checking out the isolated house to use for rendezvous. But she wouldn’t tell me that. She’d say she was canvassing for the gardening service. Or, indeed, she
might
have been canvassing.

Ross had been the Bohemian Connection. Had he been succeeded by Michelle, or Alison? Or had all three of them been in it together? Or…

Before I tried to make sense of that I needed to be sure the man Michelle had met downtown last night
was
Ross. For that I had to talk to Father Calloway.

St. Agnes’ Roman Catholic Church was nearly halfway to the Pacific Ocean. St. Elizabeth’s in Guerneville was closer to Henderson, but most of the fishing families had been parishioners of St. Agnes’ for generations. It was Father Calloway who blessed the fishing fleet. It was there that potluck dinners were organized to welcome the men back from the sea. And while the Ricollos and the Luccis, Michelle’s father’s family, no longer fished, St. Agnes’ was still their spiritual home.

Near the church the land flattened, beginning the transition from the steep tree- and fern-covered hills, which were so much a part of the Russian River area, to Pacific beachfront. Here the redwoods and eucalyptus grew farther back from the road. The underbrush thinned, replaced by grassy mounds. Small flocks of sheep grazed.

It was on one of these mounds that St. Agnes’ sat, its dark green wood unprotected from the strong ocean winds. A small plain church, it had been built when the living Maria Keneally was a girl. Climbing roses covered the west side, and a low garden of seasonal flowers was on the east. Behind the rectory was a vegetable plot, and it was there that I usually encountered Father Calloway while out on my route. In baggy corduroys and an old chamois shirt, both well coated with dirt, he was usually bending over bare soil. There was never a pea or bean in that garden. Either it was too early and he was just preparing the soil, or he had planted but nothing had come up yet, or the seedlings had broken the ground and the deer and groundhogs had eaten them. His gift to the less fortunate, he called it.

It was after seven o’clock as I pulled into the empty parking lot. I walked around the east side of the church, past the heat-wilted plants, to the rectory, knocked, and waited.

After a moment a middle-aged woman in an apron opened the door.

“I’m here to see Father Calloway,” I said.

“He’s gone off,” she said with a reinforcing nod of the head. “To see that poor family, you know.”

“When was that?”

“Five-thirty.”

“Do you expect him back soon then?”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t know. I’m just leaving, myself. I’m only a daily. Father Calloway doesn’t have a real housekeeper anymore, you see.” Her tone suggested that Father Calloway had come down in the world.

“I’ll wait.”

“As you wish. You can sit in his study, through here.” She stepped back and indicated a rather dark room on the left. “Tell him I left a casserole in the oven. All he needs to do is turn it on. Three hundred fifty degrees for an hour, tell him.”

“I will.”

She pulled the study door shut after her and in a moment I saw her clumping through the parking lot, her apron still in place like a uniform. There had been no car in the lot. Briefly I wondered how she got home.

The study had the obligatory bookcases and a desk by the window with a pair of wooden chairs facing it. The desk chair itself was padded and looked like a seat in which a priest could conjure uplifting thoughts hour after hour. Presumably, parishioners who had need to consult their priest were so unlikely to be comfortable that there was no sense wasting money padding
their
chairs. To the side of the desk on the west wall was a stone fireplace large enough to warm the room on the coldest day. Now the dark room was refreshingly cool.

I eyed the bookshelves but they held only ecclesiastical books, and in any case I was hardly in the frame of mind to read. I was just about to sit on one of the hard chairs when the study door opened.

Father Calloway was a small portly man with a round ruddy face, gray eyes, and thick white hair. No feature stood out, and there was something rather comforting about that. His was a face you could tell your problems to without dreading any sharp rejoinder. His black suit seemed oddly formal on him. And the smile that came so easily in his garden was an effort now.