The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller (12 page)

I went over to the booth. "Okay, we can go now."

My breathing was still a little ragged. Allison stared at me while she finished her drink. She got up, hesitated, then turned and walked over to the alley door. She opened it and peered outside. Then she closed the door and rejoined me with a little smile. Out on the street she touched my arm.

"What did you hit him with, a telephone pole?"

"Just a secret punch I learned from the comic books when I was a kid." I opened the car door on the passenger side and held it for Allison to get in, then straightened and stared around the Square.

"Come on," she said, reading my thoughts. "There's nothing else open now. Take me home and I'll see what's in the refrigerator."

She lived in a funky old frame home on the edge of town. The front walk ran between a pair of willow trees that shielded the house from the street. Allison had difficulty opening the door.

"I think this woman's been drinking," she told me, rattling her key around the lock.

We went into a cluttered room lit by a lamp in one corner with a red shade. The place wasn't untidy or dirty, it was just very full of furniture on the floor and paintings, portraits, posters and prints on the walls.

"This is where I do my proper entertaining. The kitchen's out this way."

We went through a small dining room to the kitchen. It was large and airy compared to the other two. Allison opened the refrigerator and poked around.

"I can give you a cold roast beef sandwich with leftover potato salad. Or there's some cold chicken. Or I can heat a can of soup." She turned, blowing a whisp of hair from in front of her face. "I'd
offer to fix bacon and eggs, only I'm out of bacon and I'm afraid I'd burn the eggs tonight."

"The roast beef and potato salad sound great."

"Coming right up," she told me, taking stuff out. "There's some Scotch in that cabinet over your head. Why don't you fix us a couple, if you can drink the stuff."

I took down a bottle of Red Label. "I can drink the stuff, but are you sure you want another?"

"You bet, mister. I don't do this very often."

I found a couple of glasses in another cupboard and got some ice. She had the sandwich made and salad scooped out by the time I had the drinks poured. I sat at a small wooden table and ate.

"This is very good, Allison. Have you ever been married?"

"Yup." She was fiddling with a radio atop the refrigerator. "For a couple of lean years. Were you?"

"How do you know I'm not now?"

"I just do."

"Well, I was once. For about ten years."

She turned her head. "That's too bad. After that long."

"I was a lot dumber then. It took a while to figure out I'd done something wrong."

The radio station she tuned in was an all-night San Francisco station that played old dance band music. She brought her drink to the table and sat across from me.

"I didn't know you could get that station up here."

"I couldn't at first. But I strung some wire and stuff on the roof, so I can get all the big city stations."

"You're handy."

"Sure. I can carpenter too, mister. Turned an old shed out back into a studio with skylight and everything. It's the fanciest room I have now. But then I spend most of my time there, so why shouldn't it be?"

"I was wondering where you worked. Did you do any of that stuff you have hanging on the walls in the front room?"

"Nothing of note. You can look through the studio in the daylight sometime, if you're around."

"I'll make a point of it. I forgot to ask. Did Jerry say whether his trip up in this area could have had anything to do with his job?"

"No. It never has though, the other times he's been up."

"Had he been up on a weekday before?"

She thought a moment. "No, I guess that's right. It was always a weekend before." She ran one hand through her hair. "Pete, I'm tired of talking about Jerry."

"What do you want to talk about?"

"You. Me. Why we're here. Name it. Did you have any children?"

"No, thank God."

"Why the thank God?"

"Because my wife and I were bound eventually to split up. Having kids couldn't have changed that. And it wouldn't have been fair to them, if we'd had any." I finished the food and pushed away the plate. "Outstanding, Miss France. Truly outstanding."

"Thank you very much, Mr. Bragg. I like my gentlemen company to feel at home. The bathroom's through the other doorway, halfway down the hall on your left, if you want to wash up. And there's a new toothbrush on the upper shelf of the medicine cabinet you can use."

"You're pretty thoughtful."

"I'm pretty selfish. If I decide I want you to kiss me goodnight I want you, not roast beef and potato salad."

I went on down the hall and washed up. When I came back out, Allison was standing in a doorway across from me.

"I have one of my pop art pieces in here, if you'd like to see it."

"Sure."

She stood aside. It was her bedroom, with a large bed along the far wall. The room was lighted by some candles. The wall alongside the bed had been paneled with squares of mirrored glass.

"Over here, on the wall opposite the bed," she told me.

I stepped into the room, turned and very nearly blushed. It was a poster-sized depiction of a girl's torso. At first I thought it was a blown-up photograph, but closer inspection showed that only the head was a photo, and that was of Allison herself. She had a length of straw in her mouth and was winking. The rest of the piece was a very life-like painting of a girl's body from the hips up. The figure wore an unbuttoned shirt. One hand held back a flap of the shirt revealing a round, golden breast. I tried to whistle but my lips went dry on me.

"Pretty tantalizing," I told her.

"Thanks."

I followed her back out to the kitchen.

"I sell a lot of that sort of thing at art fairs." She refreshed her drink and handed me mine.

"Do they all look like that one?"

"No. I use different poses and scraps of clothing. Maybe show a bare bottom instead of a breast. And I never use my own face, as on that one."

"I'd like to meet your model sometime."

"You already have. I never found anybody's body that was any better for that sort of hush puppy than my own. I do it with mirrors and things." She put down her drink and began moving with the music. "Let's dance, mister."

I put down my own glass and she moved in close, locking her hands behind my neck. I held her lightly. After a while I held her a little closer. I didn't know if she was just particularly susceptible to the drinks, or I reminded her of her father or what. Whatever it was, we both were enjoying it.

"Any special reason for this?" I murmured.

"Nope. Just wanted to, captain. It was my idea and not yours. That's the big difference between now and when Jerry was here. After all, I'm not exactly neuter, you know."

I smiled and just let our bodies go with it. I had put in a couple of long days. I could afford to shut down the business without any guilty feelings. I hadn't expected anything like this to happen, but there it was, and that sometimes was best.

"You're my sort of dame," I told her softly.

"Why's that?"

"You wash your face. You brush your hair. You smell nice."

"Glad you like it. You're my sort of guy too."

"Why's that?"

"You hold onto me nicely."

"I was brought up that way."

"And you're bold and tenacious."

"Now how can you know a thing like that?"

"I just do. From the way you do things. I'm going to make me a baby boy, someday. When I do, I'll want him to be bold and tenacious too."

We drifted for a few miles, and when I kissed her she responded as if she'd been waiting a while for me to do it.

"I think we should go to bed," she said finally

I followed her back to her bedroom. She hung up her tan jacket, then turned with a little frown. "Hmmm. There is something, after all, and I'd better tell you now before we do something to make me forget."

"To do with what?"

"You asked if Jerry's job could have had anything to do with his being up here. I do remember now," she said, lifting the Lodi Buckeyes over her head, "that he said something about being on the trail of a cop."

"A cop?"

"Uh-huh, a detective, he said." She unbuckled the belt of her Levi's, unzipped them and stepped quickly out of them. As I had suspected they would, her legs looked grand.

"A local cop?"

"Well now I hardly think so, Mr. Bragg. If it were one of the locals, he would have just gone down to the police station and asked for him, wouldn't he? No, it was somebody from out of town."

"But he didn't say where?"

"Nope."

She was staring me straight in the eye as she reached back to unsnap her bra and shrugged out of it. She threw it to one side and stepped up to me and began sliding the end of my belt through its buckle.

"And don't think for a minute that you're going to do anything more about it tonight, Peter Bragg. What does a girl have to do, flog you?"

TEN

A
t a little past eight o'clock on the following misty, gray morning, I drove back to the Square in downtown Barracks Cove and turned into the parking area behind the town hall and police headquarters building. I hadn't been sure I would find anybody up and around that early, but the parking lot was crowded with cars, trucks, vans and trail vehicles. Knots of men stood talking, and people were entering and leaving the building. The town hall parking lot appeared to be the place to go on a Sunday morning in Barracks Cove.

I parked my car and went inside. The police offices were at the far end of the building. A small outer office was divided by a counter. Voices came from the room behind the counter off to the right. An elderly woman clerk in khaki uniform sat at a desk doing battle with an old typewriter. She got up and came over. I showed her my photostat and gave her a card.

"The name is Bragg. I'm from San Francisco, on a missing person case. I've traced the individual to this area. I'd like to chat for a minute with the person in charge."

"The chief himself is here this morning, Mr. Bragg, but he's terribly busy right now."

"It won't take long."

She glanced at the doorway. "Well, I'll see."

She went into the inner office. One of the voices from in there said something about telling the men outside. It half sounded as if they were forming a posse. A minute later a rangy, middle-aged man wearing outdoor clothing came out and passed through a
gate at the end of the counter. He frowned at me, as if something weren't quite right.

"You here to help?" he wanted to know.

"Not that I know of."

The man grunted and continued on out of the office. The woman clerk came back out, opened the gate and motioned me in. "The chief's in there, over in the corner," she told me.

The inner office was more spacious. It had a long wooden table with chairs around it, lockers along one wall and a rack of rifles and shotguns along another. The chief sat at a dull metal desk that looked as if it had come from a surplus store. Another woman clerk sat at a radio set across from him. The sign on the chief's desk said his name was William Morgan. He was a large man in his fifties. He looked fit despite a bulge at the belt line. He got out of his chair and came around to shake my hand.

"Bragg? I'm Morgan. Always happy to meet a fellow law officer, even if he's in business for himself. Especially today."

"Why today, especially?"

The chief sat on the corner of his desk and folded his arms. "Because I need help, that's why."

He said it in a voice that indicated I should be falling all over myself to lend a hand. Being a fellow law officer and all.

"We believe that there's a plane down somewhere in the coast range between here and Willits. Apparently it's been there since the storm of Thursday night. An old fellow who lives back up there came into town early this morning to tell us he'd heard it circling around, as if it was trying to make up its mind which way to go. He said it sounded pretty low for back in there. Then he lost track of it. Friday, off and on, he heard what he thought were shouts, but they drifted down from all different directions. Sounds carry weird back in those canyon areas. The important thing is that he heard them, and decided he'd better tell somebody about it. He doesn't have a phone and it took him another day to get his old truck started. Then
we had a call early this morning from the sheriff's office, saying an airline pilot headed for San Francisco reported seeing a dropping flare. He circled around some but didn't see anything more. The only problem is he figured it to be quite a distance from where the fellow who heard the plane lives. Come on over here a minute."

The chief had a way of sweeping you up in things. I followed him over to a large wall map.

"Here's where the old man heard the plane, sounding as if it finally went off up a gorge here. Over here is the general vicinity of where the flare was seen. As near as we could make out, the shouts the old man heard could have carried down from here, or over here, or even up there."