Death at a Fixer-Upper (17 page)

“What's that white stuff?”

“Low-flying egret,” he said.

“Wow. Bad day, huh?”

His crooked smile lit up his face. “Best
ever.
”

Max was planning to stay for the end-of-race potluck and catch a ride back with the Boyles, so I promised him a take-out feast and walked back to the van. Much of the crowd had thinned; a few diehards waited under umbrellas for the last few stragglers. I fired up the bus, turned the heat up full blast to zero effect, and headed north.

I was just passing the wildlife refuge when lights flashed in my rearview mirror. My heart leaped and I twisted around, looking for the silver pickup. Instead, I saw a black-and-white patrol car. I moved to the edge of the lane, hoping it would pass me, but it stayed right on my tail. After a minute, the siren gave a quick bleat. Shit. Just what I needed.

I pulled onto the shoulder and rolled to a stop. Registration, proof of insurance—where did I keep all that? I ransacked the glove box, tossing old receipts and candy wrappers on the floor. I'd just located my registration in the ashtray when there was a tap on the glass. The officer standing there made a rotating motion with his hand.

I cranked down the window. “Good afternoon, Officer, uh, Stephens.”

“License and registration,” he said. He was clean-shaven, with a sandy buzz cut and a thick neck like a wrestler's. A light rain misted his face. I handed him the registration and my driver's license.

“Do you know how fast you were going?” he said.

A trick question, but, as it happened, I knew the answer. “Fifty-three miles per hour.”

“Close. How'd you come up with that?”

“My speedometer cable's a bit stretched out,” I explained. “When the gauge reads sixty-two, my actual speed is fifty-five. Unless there's headwind. Then I just put my foot to the floor and hope for the best.”

His lips twitched. “Had a '67 split-window in college. I used to drive it over to Trinity Lake every weekend with my girlfriend. We took our honeymoon in it. Didn't have the camping kit like this one, but it was a sweet ride. I traded it in for a minivan after the kids came along. Kinda wish I'd held on to it.”

I gave him my best don't-ticket-a fellow-Volkswagen-owner smile.

“Listen, the reason I pulled you over? Your plate's missing.”

“It is?” I flashed on a picture of Wayne attaching it with a bit of wire. Apparently nothing he did lasted for long.

“Yeah. Now I gotta write you a ticket, but it's a fix-it ticket—you replace your plate and take this to the Highway Patrol offices just south of Arlinda in the next ten days, they sign off, and you're good to go. If you get stopped again today, just show this ticket.” He did some writing and tore the ticket off the pad, handing it to me through the window. “Get yourself to the DMV soon as you can and get that plate replaced. You shouldn't be driving without one.”

“Okay, I will. Thanks.”

“Be safe now.” I watched his figure recede in my side mirror and waited for my pulse to slow down. Could've been worse. A lot worse.

It was 2:45 by the time I passed through Grovedale, turning west over the Salmon Bay Bridge just north of town. The wind was picking up, churning the water into foamy whitecaps. A row of pelicans sat on a log boom, their long beaks resting on their breasts like old men with their chins on their chests, indifferent to the world around them. The waves were dotted with black dots—sea ducks, I remembered from some field trip or other.

A heavy fog that out-of-towners might mistake for rain settled on the windshield. I turned south onto a narrow highway, catching a glimpse of the steel-gray Pacific between the dunes on my right. Somewhere along here was the wreck of the USS
Milwaukee,
a 426-foot-long naval vessel that had run aground in 1917. More than four hundred men had been brought to safety by a team of local volunteers and professional surfmen. I'd taken Max to see its rusted hulk, still visible at low tide. It always gave me the willies.

I passed the weather-beaten cottages of Salmon Bay, a ghost town built for the pulp mill workers back in the early 1900s. An elementary school stood silently, its paved yard crosshatched with fading foursquare grids. The swings at the playground moved back and forth, as if ferrying invisible children.

Farther ahead on the left were the empty shells of the big pulp mills that used to churn out paper by the ream but had gone belly-up a few years back. Vast mounds of sawdust remained, carved into peaks by the wind coming off the ocean. I checked my rearview mirror for a silver pickup or any other vehicle that might be on my tail. There was no traffic on the road, adding to the air of abandonment and desolation that overlay the area's sheer beauty. My heart thumped and I felt a little sick to my stomach, both from the anticipation of learning what had happened almost fourteen years ago and from the dread. I'd invested a lot of time in dark imaginings, trying to make sense of Wayne's decampment. But suppose the reason was so awful I'd failed to imagine it?

I passed an RV camping area and saw a few hardy fishermen perched on the pier overlooking the bay, trying their luck. A little farther south was the Coast Guard station, a grand old building with a light tower on top. A lighthouse had stood out here once upon a time, but the pounding elements had knocked it down to its foundation, leaving only rubble.

The road narrowed and veered toward the beach. I bounced over rude pavement slicked with sand into a parking area and cut the engine. Now I could hear the plaintive note of the foghorn, warning ships to stay away. This was a dangerous section of coastline, possibly the most dangerous in California: dozens of ships had gone down here, their captains unprepared for the extreme fog and violent surf I could hear now, booming against the shore. Mine was the only car in the lot.

I locked my doors and started off through the dunes. Hillocks of sand and coarse vegetation marked the sites of the ammunition bunkers, built during World War II to ease the fears of defenseless coastal residents. I followed a rough track past the first bunker. It looked like a roofless garage with sloping shoulders, decorated with graffiti and garbage. My path petered out and I picked my way along a narrow animal track to the second bunker. A cold certainty settled over me. This was another wild-goose chase. But I turned the corner and he was there.

He was leaning against a backdrop of graffitied concrete, smoking a cigarette. In full daylight, he looked older than his forty-two years. His skin was the color of sliced turkey left out of the package too long, and there were pouches of dark skin under his eyes.

“Thought you quit,” I said sourly.

He pinched out his cigarette and tucked it in his pocket. “You gonna lecture me about my health?”

“Probably.” Now that I was here, anticipating the answers to all the questions that had haunted me for so many years, I felt a disconnect in my brain. I kicked my feet against the concrete to knock the sand off my shoes. Broken beer bottles littered the bunker floor, along with discarded condoms and paper coffee cups. In one corner I spotted a disposable syringe half buried in the sand. A big iron door eaten away by corrosion was built into the bunker wall. Idly I gave it a test pull, but it was rusted shut.

“I don't even know where to start,” Wayne said.

“Let me help. You left to pick up a pizza. Pepperoni, olives, extra cheese. Maybe mushrooms—my memory's a little unclear about that. How about you start there.” A little current of some emotion rippled down my shoulders. My fingers were curled so tightly the nails dug into my palms. “Where have you been for the last fourteen years?”

“Here and there. Not far away. I passed through Arlinda a couple of times to see how you were doing. And—and Max. To see him growing. He's a fine kid.”

“Don't talk about him like you know him. You're a stranger.”

“I hope to change that. That's why I came to your door. To make things right.”

I stared at him and something clicked. “Oh, hell. It was you I saw through the window. At the estate.” Of course. I remembered the eerie sensation of being watched in the gloom of the lane.

“Just wanted to make sure you were doin' okay. That no one—well, I'm getting to that.” He cleared his throat. “Uh, listen, speaking of that, the past coupla days I've been living al fresco, if you get my drift. I just mention that on the off chance you could spot me a few bucks. Real short-term. I'm good for it.”

I just looked at him.

He broke eye contact. “You're a hard woman.”

My temper flared. “You know
nothing
about hard.”

Fishing in his pocket, Wayne drew out the cigarette. “You mind? Helps my nerves.” Without waiting for an answer, he bent over it. A match flared, then he tipped his head back and took a deep drag. He smoked in silence while I waited.

“When I was twenty-five, I did some time,” he said suddenly.

“Really.” Great, just great. Max's dad, a jailbird. “You never mentioned that.”

“Must've slipped my mind.” He flashed me a smile so much like Max's it made my chest hurt. “Anyway, it was a bum rap, just to be clear. I had a punk public defender and he pushed me to take a plea.”

“What was the charge?”

“I'm getting to that. It's—well, it's kind of a long story.”

“You know I like stories.” I leaned back against the bunker and folded my arms across my chest. “Go.”

“You're a real piece of work, you know that?” When I didn't respond, he took a last drag of his cigarette, then crushed the butt under his heel. “I told you I grew up on the East Coast.”

“You told me a lot of things.”

“Born and raised in Grover Mills, New York, an hour north of Schenectady. Went to Tri-Area High School, then Mackenzie Valley Technical Institute.”

I made a rolling motion with my hand.

“I gotta give you the background. The town of Grover Mills was pretty much built by Grover Textiles. The Mackenzie runs right through the middle of town, and the mills bought up the water rights and built plants and water wheels to power production. Things went great for a while. Grover Mills was known all over the world for its cottons. It was the first to produce denim for blue jeans, did you know that?”

“No shit.”

“Yeah. There was a good living to be had, so families moved in from all over and settled there, everyone working at the mills. But things changed after the war. Textile production was taking off down south, Georgia, the Carolinas—close to where the cotton was grown, so no transportation costs. There was cheap electricity available down there, too. The mill bosses tried to cut pay, and people got angry. Workers went on strike. In the end the company got ticked off, closed the mills, and moved their operations south. A lot of families were hurt. After some hard times, a couple of manufacturing firms moved in and there were jobs again, but there was a lot of bitterness that seemed to hang around for decades. People couldn't let it go.”

I shifted restlessly.

“I know, I know, I'm getting to it. Anyway, my best pals growing up were a couple of cousins from an old millworker family, Richie and Ray. They had a buddy, Vito, who used to hang around and shoot the shit with us.”

“Oh, my God,” I said. “Richard Ravello. Raymond Hughes. Vito Price.”

He nodded.

“You know they're dead. The first two, I mean.”

“Yeah. I heard.”

“Who killed them?”

He took a deep breath. For a heart-stopping moment, I thought he was going to confess to the crimes.

“There was a woman who was part of, the, uh—”

“Gang?”

“I guess you could call it that. She worked at the Grover Mills Savings and Loan. Not everyone knew it was still owned by Grover Textiles. They'd changed the name, but held on to it because it was a moneymaker. Not a major bank, just a little place in a strip mall, but it handled a lot of the business for the manufacturing plants. Loretta started as a teller and worked her way up to be the manager's assistant. She had a natural-born gift for sniffing out opportunities, if you get me.”

“Sure I do.”

“Couple weeks before Christmas, she hears there's going to be a ton of cash at the bank. Everyone's working overtime to make enough money to buy their kids Christmas presents. Plus all the plants pay out their holiday bonuses right around then. Loretta, she was a good listener. She found out when the money would show up at the bank. Word got back to my buddies and they hatched this crazy scheme. First they figured on breaking into the vault from the business next door. A pizzeria. They wanted me to use my tech know-how to tell them where to put the dynamite.”

“Tell me you didn't help them with that.”

“I said it was a dumbass idea and they should give it up. But it's like I was telling you. The whole culture of the town was that they'd been ripped off way back when. Kids were raised on the story of how the mill bosses stole their livelihood and took it south. Richie and Ray, they had chips as big as New York on their shoulders. They saw themselves as Robin Hood and his band of merry assholes. Maybe it wouldn't have come to anything if Loretta hadn't come back with the news that the cash was being delivered the same day as the bank's company Christmas party.”

“Oh, boy.”

He nodded. “Next thing I know, they got it all planned out. The party was held at the Red Lion a couple blocks away. Loretta cozied up to her boss and made sure he had plenty to drink. I don't know what else she did. She was a hot number back then, could turn any man's head.”

“She's holding up pretty good.”

“You don't say.” He ran a hand through his damp hair so that it stood on end. “Anyway, out she waltzes from the Red Lion with the manager's keys and a piece of paper with the bank's security codes typed on it. Found it right in the guy's wallet. She took off back to the party, and Richie and Ray and Vito just strolled into the bank.”

I held up a finger. “Just a minute. What was your role in all this?”