Case File - a Collection of Nameless Detective Stories (22 page)

"So he's still on the island," I said to Jackson. "It shouldn't take us long to find him now."

He had nothing to say to that; he just turned toward the willow, spread the branches, looked in among them and at the ones higher up. I went over and did the same thing at the second tree. The red-haired man was not hiding in either of them —and he wasn't hiding among the blackberry bushes or anywhere else on or near the hump.

We started down toward Jackson's boat, one on each side as before. Rocks, more pieces of driftwood, a rusted coffee can, the carcass of some sort of large bird—nothing else. The pepper tree was on my side, and I paused at the bole and peered up through pungent leaves and thick clusters of mistletoe. Nothing. The shoreline on this end was rockier, with shrubs and nettles growing along it instead of tule grass; but there was nobody concealed there, not on my half and not on Jackson's.

Where is he? I thought. He couldn't have just disappeared into thin air. Where is he?

The eerie feeling came back over me as I neared the rock shelf; in spite of myself I thought again of O'Farrell; the murdered Gold Rush miner, and his ghost that was supposed to haunt Dead Man's Slough. I shook the thought away, but I didn't feel any better after I had.

I reached the shelf before Jackson and stopped abaft the boat. She was a sleek little lady, not more than a year old, with bright chrome fittings to go with the green-and-white paint job; the outboard was a thirty-five-horsepower Evinrude. In the stem, I saw then, was a tackle box, a wicker creel, an Olympic spincast outfit and a nifty Shakespeare graphite-and-fiberglass rod. A heavy sheepskin jacket was draped over the back of the naugahyde seat.

When I heard Jackson come up near me a few seconds later I pivoted around to face him. He said, "I don't like this at all." Neither did I, not one bit. "Yeah," I said.

He gave me a narrow look. He had that rod slanted across the front of his body again. "You sure you're not just playing games with me, mister?"

"Why would I want to play games with you?"

"I don't know. All I know is we've been over the entire island without finding this redhead of yours. There's nothing here except tule grass and shrubs and three trees; we couldn't have overlooked anything as big as a man."

"I guess not," I said.

"Then where is he—if he exists at all?"

"Dead, maybe."

"Dead?"

"He's not on the island; that means he had to have tried swimming across one of the channels. But you or I would've seen him at some point if he'd got halfway across any of them."

"You think he drowned?"

"I'm afraid so," I said. "He was hurt and probably weak—and that water is turbulent and ice-cold. Unless he was an exceptionally strong swimmer and in the best possible shape, he couldn't have lasted long."

Jackson thought that over, rubbing fingertips along his craggy jaw. "You might be right, at that," he said. "So what do we do now?"

"There's not much we can do. One of us should notify the county sheriff, but that's about all. The body'll turn up sooner or later."

"Sure," Jackson said. "Tell you what: I'll call the sheriff from the camp in Hogback Slough; I'm heading in there right away."

"Would you do that?"

"Be glad to. No problem."

"Well, thanks. He can reach me on Whiskey Island if he wants to talk to me about it."

"I'll tell him that."

He nodded to me, lowered the rod a little, then moved past
me to the boat. I retreated a dozen yards over the rocky ground, watching him as he untied the bowline from a shrub and climbed in under the wheel. Thirty seconds later, when I was halfway up to the willow trees, the outboard made a guttural rumbling noise and its propeller blades began churning the water. Jackson maneuvered backward away from the shelf, waved as he shifted into a forward gear and opened the throttle wide; the boat got away in a hurry, bow lifting under the surge of power. From up on the hump I watched it dwindle as he cut down the center of the southern channel toward the entrance to Hogback Slough.

So much for Herb Jackson, I thought then. Now I could start worrying about the red-haired man again.

What I had said about being afraid he'd drowned was a lie. But he was not a ghost and he had not pulled any magical vanishing act; he was still here, and I was pretty sure he was still alive. It was just that Jackson and I had overlooked something—and it had not occurred to me what it was until Jackson said there was nothing here except tule grass and shrubs and three trees. That was not quite true. There was something else on the islet, and it made one place we had failed to search; that was where the man had to be.

I went straight to it, hurrying, and when I got there I said my name again in a loud voice and added that I was a detective from San Francisco.

Then I said, "He's gone now; there's nobody around but me. You're safe."

Nothing happened for fifteen seconds. Then there were sounds and struggling movement, and I waded in quickly to help him with some careful lifting and pushing.

And there he was, burrowing free of a depression in the soft mud, out from under my rented skiff just above the waterline where I had beached the forward half of it.

When he was clear of the boat I released my grip on the gunwale and eased him up on his feet. He kept trying to talk, but he was in no shape for that yet; most of what he said was gibberish. I got him into the skiff, wrapped him in a square of canvas from the stern—he was shivering so badly you could almost hear his bones clicking together—and cleaned some of the mud off him. The area behind his right ear was pulpy and badly lacerated, but if he was lucky he didn't have anything worse than a concussion.

While I was doing that he calmed down enough to be coherent, and the first thing he said was, "He tried to kill me. He tried to murder me."

"I figured as much. What happened?"

"We were in his boat; we'd just put in to the island because he said there was something wrong with the ignition. He asked me to take a look, so I pulled off my coat and leaned down under the wheel. Then my head seemed to explode. The next thing I knew, I was floundering in the south-side channel."

"He hit you with that fishing rod of his, probably," I said. "The current carried you along after he dumped you overboard and the cold water brought you around. Why does he want you dead?"

"It must be the insurance. We own a company in Sacramento and we have a partnership policy—double indemnity for accidental death. I knew Frank was in debt, but I never thought he'd go this far."

"Frank? Then his name isn't Herb Jackson?"

"No. It's Saunders, Frank Saunders. Mine's Rusty McGuinn." Irish, I thought. Like O'Farrell. That figures.

I got out again to slide the skiff off the beach and into the slough. When I clambered back in, McGuinn said, "You knew he was after me, didn't you? That's why you didn't give me away when the two of you were together."

"Not exactly." I started the engine and got us under way at a good clip upstream. "I didn't have any idea who you were or where you'd come from until I looked inside Jackson's—or Saunders'
^-
boat. He told me he was alone and he'd put in after crayfish. But he was carrying one rod and there were two more casting outfits in the boat; you don't need all that stuff for crayfish; and no fisherman alone is likely to carry
three
outfits for any reason. There was a heavy sheepskin jacket there, too, draped over the seat; but he was already wearing a heavy mackinaw, and I remembered you only had on a short-sleeved jacket when you came out of the water. It all began to add up then. I talked him into leaving as soon as I could."

"How did you do that?"

"By telling him what he wanted to hear—that you must be dead."

"But how did you know where I was hiding?"

I explained how Saunders had triggered the answer for me. "I also tried to put myself in your place. You were hurt and scared; your first thought would be to get away as fast as possible. Which meant by boat, not by swimming. So it figured you hid nearby until I was far enough away and then slipped back to the skiff.

"But this boat—like Saunders'—starts with a key, and I had it with me. You could have set yourself adrift, but then Saunders might have seen you and come chasing in his boat. In your condition it made sense you might burrow under the skiff, with a little space clear at one side so you could breathe."

"Well, I owe you a debt," McGuinn said. "You saved my life."

"Forget it," I said, a little ruefully. Because the truth was I had almost got him killed. I had told Saunders he was on the island and insisted on a two-man search party; and I had failed to tumble to who and what Saunders was until it was almost too late. If McGuinn hadn't been so well hidden, if we'd found him, Saunders would probably have jumped me and I might not have been able to handle him; McGuinn and I could both be dead now. I'm not a bad detective, usually; other times, though, I'm a near bust.

The channel that led to Whiskey Island loomed ahead. Cheer up, I told myself—the important thing is that this time, 120 years after the first one, the red-haired Irish bludgeon victim is being brought out alive and the man who assaulted him is sure to wind up in prison. The ghost of O'Farrell, the Gold Rush miner, won't have any company when it goes prowling and swearing vengeance on those foggy nights in Dead Man's Slough.

I.

W
ednesday morning, late January.

The weather was good, clear and mostly warm, but with a nip in the air that reminded you there was still some icy wind and rain between now and spring. Nearly everybody on the streets was smiling, even the men cleaning up the last of the broken bottles, confetti and other litter from the celebration on Sunday and the victory parade to City Hall on Monday. About the only person who wasn't smiling was me.

The reason everybody was so cheerful was not the weather; it was the same reason there had been a two-day celebration on Sunday and Monday. The Forty-niners had just won the ultimate prize in professional football, the Super Bowl—San Francisco's first-ever national championship in any sport. I had watched the game myself on TV, and done some smiling and mild celebrating of my own when it was over. But I had celebrated alone, inside my Pacific Heights flat, instead of out on the streets where hordes of other people congregated.

I don't like crowds much, particularly the kind of crowd that
keeps fueling itself on alcohol. Ninety-nine percent of the people are all right, even in a riotous mass of merrymakers. It's the other 1 percent you have to worry about. That 1 percent is made up of troublemakers and vandals, criminals looking for a chance to pick pockets or loot stores or commit armed robbery, and just plain loonies. Several people had been hurt during the festivities; dozens more had been arrested.

Well, any city of substantial size has its criminal element and its lunatic fringe; San Francisco was no exception. In a sense, the outlaws kept me in business—not that I was grateful to them for the privilege. I did not mind the crooks so much; for the most part they acted in predictable ways, and if you knew what you were doing, you could deal with them all right. It was the crazies who bothered me. I didn't often get a job that involved a crazy, and for that I was grateful. But every now and then, such a job comes along. And sometimes, in spite of my better judgment, I decided to take it on.

A job involving a crazy had come along this morning. I was probably going to take it on, too, because I needed the money. At least I had agreed to go and talk to the man who wanted to hire me, an attorney named Jud Canale.

And that was why, on this clear and mostly warm Wednesday morning three days after the Forty-niners had won the Super Bowl, I wasn't smiling along with everybody else.

T
he corporate law firm of Tellmark, Graham, Canale and Isaacs was located in one of the newer high-rise office buildings on Montgomery Street, in the financial district. It occupied most of the fifteenth floor, and judging from the reception room the firm was doing very well, thank you. Oak-paneled walls, matching oak furniture covered in autumn-colored fabric, rust-brown carpeting and a decorative young lady behind the reception desk. The lady had auburn hair to match the motif; I wondered, a little cynically if that was why she'd been hired.

Jud Canale's office turned out to be similarly appointed, though his secretary was a little less decorative and had blond hair; the room was windowed on two sides, with the other two walls taken up with shelves of law books. Canale himself looked to be about my age, early fifties, and he had iron-gray hair and penetrating gray eyes. The three-piece pinstripe suit he wore, combined with that gray hair, gave him a dignified appearance. He was standing behind his somewhat cluttered desk when the secretary showed me in; beyond him, through the windows, I could see more than I cared to of the Transamerica Pyramid—a high-rise building that resembled an ice-cream cone turned upside down, as a local newspaper columnist had once aptly described it.

Canale came around the desk as I approached, stopped with his face a few inches from mine and said in grave tones, "Thank you for coming."