Zigzag (6 page)

Buckner said, “You going to walk out under your own power, or you want me to carry you?”

“Well, all right, you don't have to get tough about it.” She lifted herself off the stool with the aid of the beveled edge of the bar. “I'm never coming back here again. Pay my tab with a check. You'll never see me again.”

“Promises, promises,” one of the beer drinkers said. For some reason the other two thought this was funny. The blonde glared at them, straightened her skirt, and went out with a slow, walk-a-straight-line kind of dignity.

Buckner came back to me. “Drunks,” he said. Then he said, “I'll tell you something about Doreen. Woman's a saint. Ray, well, he was no world-beater, but she stood by him through the rough patches, waited for him while he was in Mule Creek. Visited him whenever she could; I drove her up there a couple of times myself. Loyal, you know?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So you do a good job for her, man; don't try to take advantage.”

“I won't. You don't have to worry about that.”

He nodded his head, then flicked it sideways. “That's another thing I can't figure,” he said. “Ray doing what he did that got him put in prison. Driving drunk, resisting arrest, assaulting a cop. Just not like him at all.”

“No?”

“Hell, no. He wasn't a heavy boozer, didn't usually drink more than a few beers. I only seen him drunk a couple of times in the ten years I knew him. Not aggressive, neither. No fights, no trouble. Easygoing.”

“Why was he drinking heavily that night?”

“He never told nobody. But he wasn't his old self for a month or so before it happened, all wound up about something and hitting the sauce kind of hard—I figure it must've been money worries. You know, bills piling up and all that.”

“One of those rough patches you mentioned.”

“Yeah. Him and Doreen, they were doing all right until she had some female problems a few years ago that cost a bundle. They didn't have no health insurance.”

Like too many others in this best of all countries. “How often did you see Ray after he got out?”

Buckner hesitated before he said, “Twice. We had a meal together a couple of days after.”

“Did he say anything at all about the Russian River?”

“No.”

“Ask you for a loan?”

“A loan? No. Why should he?”

“He told his wife he was going to.”

“Yeah? That doesn't make sense. I don't have an extra pot to piss in and he knew it. What would he want a loan for?”

“To help finance a move to Arizona or New Mexico. You knew about that?”

“Sure, Ray told me. He was stoked about it, making a new start somewhere that was better for his asthma, buying an orchard farm. That was always his big dream.”

“Buying a farm? How would he pay for it?”

“Money Doreen saved while he was away. She worked two jobs after he went to jail. Worked like a dog.”

I didn't doubt that. But her two jobs were department store clerk and part-time housecleaner, neither of which paid well enough to cover monthly bills and leave enough left over to build the kind of stake it takes for a property purchase. The impression I'd had from her was that the amount of her savings was modest at best. And their chances of getting a bank loan, with his record, were slim and none. Ray Fentress might just have been blowing smoke. Either that, or he expected to make a substantial score on his own. By robbing a small-time pot dealer at gunpoint?

While I was ruminating, one of the beer drinkers called for a refill. Buckner went to accommodate him, and when he returned he said, “Listen, I probably shouldn't tell you this, but I guess you oughta know as long as you don't say anything to Doreen about it. She's had enough grief as it is.”

“That bad, whatever it is?”

“No. It's just … ah, hell, I don't know if it means anything or not. Just keep it to yourself, all right?”

“If I can. I'm obligated to inform a client of anything directly related to my investigation.”

“I don't see how this could be related.”

“Then it'll just be between you and me.”

“Okay, then. Second time I saw Ray was in here two days before he was killed, with a woman I never seen before.”

“You know who she was?”

“Mary something, that's all. Thing was, Ray didn't expect me to be here.”

“Oh?”

“Late afternoon and I was working nights that week. I come in early, like I do sometimes, and the two of them was in one of the booths over there, drinking beer with their heads together. Ray jumped a little when he saw me, had this kind of guilty look on his face. You know, like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.”

“You think she might've been a working girl?”

“I didn't get that hit off her,” Buckner said. “Hell, this is the last place he'd have met up with her if she was. Besides, Ray, he wasn't the type to traffic with whores.”

“How about other kinds of women?”

“You mean was he a chaser?” Buckner barked a scornful laugh. “Not Ray, uh-uh. As faithful to Doreen as she was to him, swear it on a Bible.”

Faithful before he got sent up, okay, but prison changes a man. In some cases gives him appetites he didn't have before. But I kept the thought to myself. “What do you suppose their relationship was?”

“Beats me. I asked him, ‘Who's your friend?' and he said, ‘Mary,' kind of blurted it out. She didn't say anything, just glared at him as if she didn't like him saying even half her name. They left right after that. I asked Larry, the day barman, how long they'd been there and he told me about fifteen minutes. They didn't come in together—her first, then Ray.”

“What did she look like?”

“Around thirty-five. Blond hair, the dye job kind. Not bad looking if you like the hard type. Nice figure”—Buckner lifted his hands ten inches or so from his chest—“gazongas out to here.”

“Well dressed?”

“Not as if she had money, no.”

So what did this mean? And did it have anything to do with Fentress' trip to the Russian River and the shootings in Floyd Mears' cabin?

 

8

Pete Retzyck lived with his wife in a small, somewhat dilapidated old house on Persia Street. He was home, working inside an attached, single-car garage with the door raised. The door was what he was working on, up on a ladder doing something to the automatic opener mechanism. He was brusque at first, but when I explained that Joe Buckner had given me his address and told him the reason I was calling on him his irritation morphed into a kind of grim bewilderment and he was cooperative enough.

“I still can't believe Ray's dead,” he said when he came down off the ladder. “Or how he died. Craziest damn thing I ever heard of.”

“So you're in agreement with his wife and Joe Buckner.”

“Damn straight.” Retzyck picked up a rag, wiped grease off his hands. He was somewhat younger than Fentress and Buckner, late thirties—a lean, long-armed guy with a mop of walnut-brown hair and a nose like a bent and elongated hook. “If Ray was into anything, it wasn't buying pot or stealing it at the point of a gun.”

“Why do you say ‘if he was into anything,' Mr. Retzyck?”

“… Well…”

“Did he give you the impression he might have something going when you saw him last week?”

Retzyck hesitated again, looked away from me and up at the opener mechanism. “Goddamn thing never has worked right,” he muttered. “Sticks halfway open sometimes no matter what I do to it. You know anything about garage door openers?”

I said, “Afraid not,” and then prodded him back to the subject of Ray Fentress by repeating my question.

“Ah, shit, I don't know. Ray had something on his mind, that's for sure. All revved up, couldn't seem to sit still.”

“You ask him what it was?”

“Sure I did. The move to the Southwest, he says, starting a new life.”

“He told you he was planning to buy a farm?”

“Yeah. What're you gonna use for money to buy a farm, I asked him. Doreen saved enough while I was away, he says, but he got kind of shifty eyed when he said it. So I pressed him a little.”

“And?”

“And nothing,” Retzyck said. “All he'd say was money wouldn't be a problem. But I'll tell you again, mister—whatever he was up to, it didn't have anything to do with pot or using a gun to get himself a stake. No way.”

“Do you have any idea what his connection to Floyd Mears was?”

“No.” Then, after a pause, “Well, there was a guy had a name something like that, met him once at this hunting camp Ray and me went to, but that was a couple of years ago.”

“Where was this camp?”

“Lake County. Up by Lake Pillsbury. Good hunting in that area, plenty of blacktail deer.”

Lake County and Sonoma County are contiguous, though Lake Pillsbury is a considerable distance from the Russian River resort area. A long way from the city, too. “How did you and Ray happen to go there?”

“Guy I know invited us. Old army buddy of mine, lives up that way. We keep in touch.”

“You and Ray go just the one time?”

“No, twice. I think he went another time or two by himself.”

“The man with the name that might've been Floyd Mears. Was he there the second time you went?”

“I'm not sure. Might've been.”

“Can you describe him?”

“After two years? Besides, I'm no good at that,” Retzyck said. “One face is the same as another to me. And there were maybe a dozen guys at the camp, all strangers except for Ray and my buddy Anthony.”

“Did Ray spend much time with this man?”

“Can't tell you that, either. My memory of those times is pretty hazy. There was a lot of drinking when we weren't out in the woods hunting … you know how it is when a bunch of guys get together stag away from home.”

Well, no, I didn't. Not where blood sports were involved.

“All I remember for sure,” Retzyck went on, “is that I didn't nail a buck and neither did Ray, not either time we went together.”

“The friend who invited you to the camp—Anthony, was it?”

“Anthony Bellini.”

“Still in touch with him?”

“Sure, off and on.”

“I'd like to talk to him. Would you call him, pave the way for me?”

“What, you mean now?”

“If you don't mind. You can use my cell phone.”

Retzyck shrugged. “Okay, but why bother? I mean, even if it was Mears at the camp and that's how Ray knew him, what difference does it make?”

“Probably none,” I said, “but I don't have much else to go on right now. That's the way my job works sometimes. Grab at any thread you can find and hope it leads you where you want to go.”

“Some job.”

He went into the house to get his friend's phone number, and when he came back I gave him my cell and he made the call. But Anthony Bellini wasn't answering his cell; the call went to voice mail. At my request Retzyck left a message explaining who I was and what I was after, and saying that I would make direct contact later on.

When he was done, he handed my phone back saying, “You really think you can find out why Ray got himself killed in that pot dealer's cabin? You're not just taking Doreen's money?”

“That's not how I operate. I won't take her money at all if I can't find out.”

“Yeah? Freebie? How come?”

“Because I feel sorry for her—”

“Sorry don't pay bills.”

“—and because I'm the one who found the bodies. I don't like loose ends, Mr. Retzyck, particularly not when I'm personally involved.”

“So you're doing this for yourself as much as Doreen.”

I hadn't thought of it that way before, but in a sense it was true. “Partly,” I admitted, “but my clients come first. Always.”

Retzyck said again, “Some job,” this time with the sort of mild wonder people have for a breed they don't quite understand.

*   *   *

It was Sunday morning, on my third try, before I reached Anthony Bellini. He was cooperative enough, but he didn't have much to tell me, at least not yet. He hadn't known Floyd Mears, couldn't recall if that was the name of the man who'd been at the hunting camp when Ray Fentress was there two years ago.

“I sort of remember him,” Bellini said. “He wasn't a regular. One of the other guys brought him a couple of times—Sam Patterson, I think it was.”

“Do you have contact information for Patterson?”

“Not where he is now. Sam got himself killed in a hunting accident up in the Sierras about a year ago.”

Another reason to avoid blood sports, at least to my way of thinking. “Did he live in Sonoma County?”

“No, here in Lake County. Kelseyville. But he got around pretty good, Sam did. Knew a lot of people, brought more than a few guests to the camp. The more the merrier, that's our policy.”

“Uh-huh. Anyone else in the core group who might remember the man?”

“Jason Quinones. He owns the property, started the camp years back. He'd know if anyone does.”

“Would you ask him for me?”

“No problem. Give me your number; I'll get back to you.”

*   *   *

Late afternoon when Bellini called. “The guy at the camp was Floyd Mears, all right,” he said. “Jason keeps a list of everybody comes there and how often. Mears was there half a dozen times over three seasons.”

“How many when Ray Fentress was also there?”

“Three, according to Jason's records.”

“The last time was when?”

“Couple of years ago. Middle of May.”

“Of 2014.”

“Right.”

Middle of May. Four weeks before Ray Fentress was arrested on the drunk driving, resisting arrest, and aggravated assault charges. If there was any significance in that, I had no idea what it could be.