The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller (17 page)

"I talked to her again just before catching a plane down here. She didn't learn where Lind had stayed, but she did find out he'd stopped by several of those same motels asking if they had a record of this out-of-town cop. By then I'd learned that Dempsey was missing, so I telephoned some of these motels myself, and the manager of one of them has in-laws named Dempsey, so he remembered the name. And it was the name of the officer Lind had been asking about."

"So you figure that your man's disappearance is linked to Dempsey?"

"That's right. I take it that you and Dempsey's wife still haven't heard from him?"

"That's true. But I've tried to tell Coral, that's his wife, that it's too early yet to start worrying about him. I expect Bob to surface in time."

"What makes you so sure?"

"Because he's the best man at his work I've ever run into, here or anywhere else. He's big and hard and smart. He's an able
detective. He's worked on some big cases. Both here and in Los Angeles. But he has his own way of doing things. After events get to a certain stage he likes to operate with a degree of secrecy. I guess it was a hard-won lesson from having to contend with departmental leaks early in his career. And I think another reason is that he's a politically ambitious man."

"Did the two of you ever talk about that?"

"No, but the last time he telephoned Coral, I guess it was the call from Barracks Cove, he told her things were going well enough so's he'd end up the next sheriff of the county."

"What could he have been working on that was that big?"

"I'm just not sure, and I've been giving it some thought too. Of course it could be something from his days with the LAPD, but if he's got eyes to be sheriff around here, I don't know how something from back then could help him much. There was one thing of the past to come up recently, but Bob didn't seem all that excited about it at the time."

"I'd like to hear about it."

"Well, about five years ago we had a rather spectacular bank robbery just down the street. At the Rey Platte Union Bank. We never knew if it was planned or if the robbers—there were three of them—just hit it lucky that day. Anyway, they struck around eleven in the morning, just as the Corrigan Security armored car was delivering a big cash shipment from Santa Barbara. Back then we had an electronics firm right here in town that had started out thirty-five years ago as a fix-it shop. Mathews was the man who started it. One of his boys went away to the war in Europe and worked on radar equipment. When he came home he went back to school and the next thing you knew old Mathews and the boy were in the electronics business. They got a lot of government contracts and things.

"Well, sir, they did prosper. Had to move around town two or three times, expanding. Finally, about three years ago, they put up a new plant ten miles south of here. The point of all this
is that at the time of the bank robbery, old Mathews, to the consternation of his accounting department, still paid all the folks who worked for him in cash, in pay envelopes. Said it had always given him a thrill to get a pay envelope when he was a boy, and he thought his help deserved the same.

"He finally changed his thinking when the fellows who held up the bank got not only the bank's cash but the Mathews payroll from the armored car as well. Nearly half a million dollars.

"It gave me a fit too," the chief recalled somberly. "The bulk of the payroll money was in hundred dollar bills, the serial numbers in sequence and recorded by the Corrigan Security firm and the bank in Santa Barbara. But except for right after the robbery, we never heard of any of those recorded bills turning up, until just about three weeks ago when one of them surfaced at a bank up north, in Santa Rosa. It was kind of a fluke that anyone there even bothered to check it against the lists. But somebody did and we were notified. Seems it came from some doctor in the town of Willits."

I whistled softly. "It's beginning to sound good."

"Well, granted it's the sort of thing that would make Bob Dempsey's ears stand up, but I didn't think too much of it myself."

"Why not?"

"I called Santa Rosa. Asked about the condition of the bill. They told me it had been put to some use. But those bills were mint fresh when they left town here."

"It could have been purposely made to look more used than it was."

"Maybe, but all things considered, I doubt it. I also called the doctor in Willits, a man name of Nelson. He said he got the bill from some hippie character as part of what he charged for an abortion he performed. It was a young girl who had something wrong inside her, so's a full-term pregnancy would have killed her. Least that's what the doc said. The only address he got from either the girl or the hippie fellow was a post office box
number the girl had in Barracks Cove. I phoned there too, and learned the girl has given up the box and didn't leave a forwarding address. I figure her hippie boyfriend was one of the rich ones. Plays in a band or deals in dope or something. I've seen 'em around here, looking like they was just run over by a truck, but carrying enough cash to buy the both of us."

"Did Dempsey show any interest in all this when the bill turned up?"

"He did somewhat, sure. He asked if I wanted him to go up to Willits, to see if he could learn anything more from the doctor. I told him no, that I didn't think it would be productive. I had the impression then that he agreed with me."

"How long after that did he ask to take a leave?"

"Almost a week."

"Was anybody hurt in the bank robbery?"

"One of the Corrigan guards was shot, not seriously."

"Could a private insurance company have had an interest in any of this?"

"I don't remember. But the Corrigan people must have had some kind of coverage. Let's look."

He got up and crossed to a file cabinet, searched through it some, then brought out a thick packet. He sat back at his desk and began paging through documents. "Yeah, there it is. The Corrigan outfit recovered some of the loss from Coast West Insurance Co."

"The man I'm looking for works for Coast West."

Chief Porter let me go through the file, jotting information. The three suspects in the case all were from Santa Barbara—Paul Chase, Randolph Hayes and Timothy Rowen. The three had been in their middle twenties at the time of the robbery. They had worn masks, but in the exchange of gunfire and fight with the Corrigan guards, the masks were torn loose from the men later identified as Chase and Hayes. Those two, and Rowen, had lived together in Santa Barbara. They all three disappeared after the robbery.

Paul Chase's brother, Wesley, was the only individual who had served time in connection with the case. They found some of the stolen money in his apartment, but they never proved he took part in the robbery itself. He spent eighteen months at a state prison.

"Have you kept track of this Wesley Chase?"

"We did for a while. He served his time then went back to Santa Barbara until his parole expired, then he dropped out of sight like the others. Can't say's I blame him. A lot of people were interested in him, what with all that money still missing."

"Do you think he knew where his brother and the others had gone to?"

"I couldn't say. Never met the man myself. Dempsey questioned him over in Santa Barbara. Anything else you need?"

I riffled through the rest of the file. "I'd like a copy of the wanted flier on the three missing men. And a photo of the brother who served time, if you have one."

"Don't have it here, but I can get one and mail it to you."

"And I'd appreciate a photo of Dempsey, and maybe a telephone call from you to his wife, to introduce me. I want to stop by and see her this evening if I can."

The chief gave me a copy of the wanted poster on the bank robbers. None of the three had ever been arrested before, so the photos on the poster were informal. They were smiling, good-looking boys. One was in an Army uniform. It said all three were Vietnam veterans. The department mug shot of Dempsey that Chief Porter gave me showed a man with a hawk nose and a strong chin. He looked tough.

Porter phoned Mrs. Dempsey for me and chatted for a few minutes. When he hung up he gave me her address.

"Her spirits don't seem to have risen much since the last time I spoke to her. But she'll see you."

"Thanks very much for your help, Chief."

"No trouble. If I'm wrong about things and Bob is in some kind of jam, I hope you can help him out."

I paused at the doorway. "Chief, you wouldn't have the names of any people Coast West Insurance sent around to look into the robbery, would you?"

"Sure," said Porter. He paged through the folder some more. "They sent up a fellow from Los Angeles. Stoval was his name. Emil Stoval." The chief squinted at me. "You look like you might know the name."

"I do. He's been transferred to San Francisco. He's now the boss of the man I'm looking for."

Porter grunted. "In that case, maybe I better let down my hair a little. You never know how one thing leads to another."

I went back and sat on the edge of a chair. "That's right, you don't."

"Well, this is unofficial, and all I can tell you is what Bob Dempsey told me after being over to Santa Barbara to question Wesley Chase, the younger brother who was convicted as an accessory. Apparently this Stoval is the man who found the money in Chase's apartment. There was some other evidence, but the money is the thing that convicted him. And the rumors around the Santa Barbara police department at the time were that the insurance fellow might not have found that evidence in a strictly legal manner, under the rules of search and seizure and all. A lot of people, Bob Dempsey being one of them, had the impression that a good lawyer might have developed that end of things and gotten the boy off. But he couldn't afford a good—I mean a high-priced lawyer. He had a public defender who wanted to plea bargain with the prosecutor's office down the hall. That's what the insurance fellow wanted too, for Wesley to cooperate and tell them where his brother and the rest of the money was. But the Chase boy refused. He denied all knowledge of the crime or his brother's whereabouts."

I took a cab to the Dempsey home. It was a tidy, stucco house in a neighborhood of neatly trimmed lawns. The front porch light was on and Coral Dempsey opened the door soon after I pushed the buzzer. Dempsey was married to a woman several years younger than himself. She was attractive in a dusky way with long, dark hair. She wore black slacks and a white blouse, and after letting me in, crossed the room to turn off a small color television set in the corner. The room lights were dim, but from what I'd seen beneath the front porch light, she hadn't been sleeping well.

"I'm glad you found Tuffy and Steve," she told me.

"I only found the boy. He was able to tell us how to find his dad."

Mrs. Dempsey sat at one end of a sofa. I settled in a chair across from her. There was a box of tissues by her side and a wastebasket on the floor. She'd been using both.

"What is it you want, Mr. Bragg?"

I told her about Jerry Lind and his search for her husband. "The main thing I'm trying to find out now is what your husband was doing in Barracks Cove."

"And that's the problem, of course. He never talked about his work to me or the children."

"Did he drive up?"

"No, he flew to San Francisco and rented a car."

"I understand that during a call you had from him, he said something about becoming sheriff."

"Yes. His last phone call." She reached for a tissue. "We did use to talk about his dreams—our dreams."

Her face started to fall apart. She got up and excused herself before going down the hallway and closing a door behind her. I could hear water running. She returned looking about the way she had when she opened the front door.

"I'm sorry, Mr. Bragg, but the evening is when I can let it all out. After the boys are in bed. They're four and six. I don't want them to see. I haven't figured out how I'm going to tell them yet."

"But tell them what, Mrs. Dempsey? Chief Porter says..."

She sat erect and spoke firmly. "I don't care what Chief Porter or anybody else says. I don't need to. I know that Bob is dead. I know that he has been for days. I could almost tell you the hour." She rose and crossed to a floor lamp to turn up the light. "Mr. Bragg, I don't mean to be rude, and I don't like people to see me when I'm looking so rotten, but there is something that I want you, or Chief Porter, or somebody to understand. The love that my husband and I had for each other was something quite extraordinary. Something quite different from what you find between a husband and a wife who have been married almost ten years. Perhaps it would be easier if you knew the terrible loneliness of a police officer's work. Do you?"

"I know something of their miseries."

"Miseries. Yes, that's what it was. And for my part, Mr. Bragg, I used to be a singer in a little club on the strip in L.A. More than a singer, I was supposed to be an entertainer, I found out. When I landed the job I told myself, God, how wonderful. My first step to fame and fortune."

She crossed to a small stand, took out a cigarette and lit it. "I soon found out it was more like the first step to being a hooker. Nothing official, you understand, but we were encouraged to mingle with certain special customers. And if one of them asked to take out any of the girls working there, when we were through for the night, we were strongly encouraged to go along. It always meant a nice little bonus in the next paycheck. But I didn't like that. I tried to get work at other clubs. Finally a fellow I met arranged for me to get an interview with an assistant producer of a TV show. Over in Burbank. The assistant producer turned out to be a very nice guy. He had me audition for him. He listened to me sing a couple of numbers, then in a very gentle manner told me that I didn't really have much of a voice. Then he asked if I could dance. He said I had nice looking legs. I had to tell him I'd never danced, so that was the end of the audition.

"But at least it made things finally fall into place in my head about how it was at the club where I worked. The attraction was my body, not my voice. So I stayed on at the club feeling miserable and sordid, but making a lot more money than I could have doing much else. Until the night I met Bob. There was a shooting at the club. A man was killed. It was some sort of minor gang feud. Bob was the detective in charge of the investigation. The shooting had happened during one of my sets. I'd seen the whole thing. Bob interviewed me two, maybe three times. After that he'd stop by the club from time to time. I assumed it was to talk to other people about the shooting, but it turned out he just wanted to watch me. I figured that out after the trial, when there wasn't any official reason for him to be there. So I went over to the bar one night when he was there, after my numbers, and said hello."