The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller (24 page)

"I bought them, at various places. First one I saw was at an art fair down at Laguna Beach. Picked up another at a little gallery in Long Beach. Different places like that."

"How about Santa Barbara here?"

"No. Never saw any in this area."

"I'm curious why you're so fond of them."

"Fond? You think I'm crazy, young man? No, not fond. Fascinated, perhaps. I'm a doctor of psychiatry, Bragg. When I was active at it, I spent very little time in private practice. I couldn't find the stimulation there. I did a lot of work in prisons, with disturbed children, things like that. I didn't make as much money that way, but I left it all with a feeling of satisfaction at my life's work. And these paintings you ask about, or at least the man who did them, fascinate me the way some dark and twisted mind would fascinate me. I take em out and look at them from time to time, but good heavens, it isn't the sort of thing you hang over your bed now, is it?"

"No, it isn't, Doctor."

"Call me Bo. What's your name?"

"Pete."

"Okay, Pete. I'm thirsty. Want a beer?"

"Sure, I'd love one."

"I have five more of those Pavel things. Want to see them?"

"I'd appreciate it."

He led me across a patch of lawn to a basement door. He went over to a refrigerator. It was filled with beer and white wine and fruit juices.

"The paintings are under that tarp over there," he told me, indicating a bench along one wall. "Bring 'em on outside."

The paintings were all about two-by-two-and-a-half feet. I lifted them in a stack and carried them outdoors.

"Gotten so I don't even like to look at them inside any more," Smythe told me. "They give me the willies. Just stand them up against the serving cart over there."

I did as he asked. It was a dark undertaking even among the bright greenery and chirping birds overhead. They were the way the other paintings had been described. They showed men of various ages and means in different settings. Only the terror on their faces was the same. One of them depicted a man in front of a cabin. There was a patch of grass beside it, and it had the telltale
details that Artie, back at the museum, had described. Individual blades grew from a thin, reedy base to a thick, outer blade. Even the broken blade pattern was there. Artie had it just backward. From the lowest broken blade, the others were three blades over and four up. I went back to my chair and took the beer Smythe handed me.

"Beauties all, hey?"

"What do you make of them?"

"Oh, God, who knows? Obviously something haywire about the man who did those. I could see a fellow trying one or two of those things, to get something dark out of his soul, but not a whole string of them. I tried to run down the man who did them, unsuccessfully."

"Did you learn his name?"

Smythe took a tug at his beer, then lowered it with a nod. "John Roper, it was. At least that's what somebody at one of the galleries told me."

"What else did they tell you about him?"

"Very little. Nobody I talked to had ever met him. There was always a third party of some sort, either peddling the work at art fairs, or approaching the galleries about displaying them."

"Did you find out where he lived?"

"Nope. Found a lot of places where he used to live. He seemed to be one of those fellows who moved around a lot."

I took out my picture of Dempsey and handed it to Smythe. "Do you recognize this man?"

Smythe stared at it with a frown. "I ought to. It's a hard face to forget. I can't place it, but I'm sure I have seen him somewhere."

"He was a police detective."

"Oh sure, he came by here a couple years ago. He was interested in my collection of Pavel stuff too."

"How so?"

"He was a little more blunt about it than you are, young man. He wanted to know why any man would want to collect this sort
of stuff. I told him about the same thing I told you. Introduced him to Thelma and she charmed him some. Showed him my old medical degree, stuff like that. He finally accepted my story."

"Did you ask why he was curious?"

"Sure, but he was here to ask questions, not to answer any. He just told me he'd heard I had a little collection of the stuff, and that he'd always had an abiding interest in the man's work himself."

I caught a flight to the small Rey Platte airport, and from there took a cab out to Coral Dempsey's home and asked the driver to wait. I didn't want to spend long with the widow. Just long enough to find out what she might know about her late husband's interest in art.

It was the middle of the afternoon. Sounds of children came from behind a house across the street. At the Dempsey house the blinds were closed and there was no response to my ringing and knocking. I went around to the driveway beside the house. The carport was empty. I went back to the street in front. I was about to go across to the house where I heard the kids playing when the screen door on the house next door opened and an overweight woman of thirty or so in a white halter and pink shorts came out.

"Were you looking for somebody?"

"I wanted to see Mrs. Dempsey."

The neighbor shook her head. "She left this morning. There was—a terrible accident in the family."

"You mean Mr. Dempsey?"

"Yes."

"I know about that. When will Mrs. Dempsey be back?"

"She didn't say. She packed up the kids and left first thing this morning. Wasn't it awful?"

"Yes it was. Did she say when she'd be back?"

"She didn't know for sure. They went to Barstow. She has folks there. I'm sort of keeping an eye on the house for her. Would you like to come in?"

She was the concerned neighbor, with the morbid curiosity that concerned neighbors have. She figured she would find out more about what happened to Dempsey than Mrs. Dempsey would have told her. On that score she was right, but I didn't want to ruin the rest of her day by telling her about it.

"No, that's all right. Do you know the name of her folks in Barstow?"

She shook her head. "But she'll phone later in the week."

I nodded. "Thanks anyhow."

I took the cab back downtown to the police station. Chief Porter was deep-bottomed into his chair as if he hadn't moved since I was there Sunday night. But he showed some strain, as if he hadn't been getting enough sleep, and he indicated what had been bothering him when he asked me to describe in detail the condition of Dempsey's body when I'd found him. I did it as clinically as I could, but I'm not a coroner's deputy, and the telling of it bothered us both.

"His revolver was still in his holster?" the chief asked.

"That's right. He didn't realize he'd found whoever, or whatever, he was looking for."

"And what do you think that was?"

"Until last night, I figured the insurance man I'm looking for, and Dempsey, had both been looking for the source of the stolen money. But somewhere along the line Dempsey changed directions. I've learned he had great curiosity about a painting that was stolen last month from the Legion Palace Museum in San Francisco. Dempsey visited the museum and asked a lot of questions about it. Then he continued north and eventually ended up in Barracks Cove. My boy was a couple of steps behind him all the way. I think he disappeared while looking for Dempsey. I think he wanted to ask Dempsey why the painting was so important to him."

"What kind of painting?" the chief asked.

"It was a wacky portrait. In fact, one of a whole series of weird figure studies I've learned Dempsey was interested in over the years. All of them done by somebody calling himself Pavel."

Porter just stared at me a minute, then scraped back his chair and went over to a file cabinet.

"Gone," he said finally, banging shut the drawer. "Guess Bob took it with him."

"A file?"

"Yes, but hell, it was more his than the department's, with all his own time he put in on it."

"Tell me about it."

"It started with a terrible story we heard from a local woman, Mary Madigan. It was about a painting that turned up at the art festival we have here in the fall. We got a lot of rich old boys living hereabouts, retired, you know, so this art fair attracts a lot of people from all over the state, both artists and dealers. Anyhow, one of the displays put up by a gallery from Los Angeles included one of those Pavel things. Mary Madigan saw it and nearly fainted. She said it was a painting of her brother, even down to the tip of his left middle finger that she said was lopped off in an accident when he was a youngster, and the necktie she said he wore the day he was murdered. Decapitated, to be exact. His body had been found a couple years earlier in a vacant lot back east, in Pittsburgh. The brother had been running a food specialty business that was a growing concern, supposedly making inroads on a competitor that had racket money in the operation. The Pittsburgh police told us later they believed it was a hired kill.

"Well, sir, Bob and I both went over and looked at the painting. It was a grisly thing, right enough, but a lot of what Mary thought she saw in it wasn't all that apparent to me. It wasn't as sharp as any photograph, after all. What she saw as a lopped-off finger could have been a smudge of something else. And the tie—hell, I could have found a couple resembling it in any men's
store. I figured it to be more a piece of Mary's imagination, still upset over her brother's death and all."

"And Dempsey?"

"Well, Bob was fascinated at what it could mean if she did turn out to be right, so like I said, he started putting a lot of his own time in on it trying to find out who this Pavel was. He even learned the man's true name, or at least the name he was using then, but it was a whisker too late."

"What was the name?"

"John Roper."

"That's the same information I have."

The creases deepened on the chief's forehead. "Anyway, Bob had some extensive phone conversations with the Pittsburgh police. They never caught the person who murdered Mary's brother, but they told Bob they thought it was a fellow with a terrible background who called himself Hobo. I'd heard stories about that name myself."

My mouth went dry on me. "So have I."

"Anyway, Bob nosed around a lot of art galleries along the coast, found and took photos of a number of those Pavel works. Sent copies around to a lot of major police departments, asking if they resembled victims who might have been killed in their area. He did get back a few tentative IDs, but it was all pretty iffy stuff.

"But there was one strange thing Bob found. This Pavel fellow wasn't looking for any publicity. He always worked through intermediaries to get his work displayed. Then like I said, Bob got lucky. I think it was through some dealer in L.A. he knew. Found out the fellow who painted under the name Pavel was the Roper fellow. And we were practically neighbors. He lived just southeast of here, but it took another week for Bob Dempsey to learn that, and by the time he went there this Roper had moved, just days before. Didn't leave a trace, either. Was like the earth had swallowed him. That's the last I knew of Bob doing anything about it. I didn't know he was still pursuing that theory."

"Theory?"

"Yes, that Roper and Pavel and the Hobo were all the same fellow. That he was some sort of madman who painted from memory what his victims had looked like just before he killed them."

"You personally didn't buy it?"

"No, Bragg, I didn't. Like I said, it was all so iffy. Of course now, after what's happened, I'd hate like hell to think Bob was right and I was wrong all this time."

NINETEEN

I
couldn't blame Chief Porter for his doubts, but the aggravating thing was it did make sense in light of everything that had happened in the Jerry Lind case. I had heard enough, from enough sober cops, about this individual who called himself Hobo to know he existed, that he was ruthless and that he was responsible for a lot of carnage. That he could be a painter as well was not outside the realm of possibility. And if he were a painter, that he might be driven to portray his victims made a lot of sense. Dempsey, who seemed to have been nobody's fool, had pursued that theory with vigor to the moment of his own death.

I made my way back north, by scheduled and charter flights. We were able to get back into Mendocino airport by late afternoon, just ahead of a thick, wet fog booming in from the sea.

The first thing I did was put in another call to the San Francisco homicide detail to ask John Foley the status of the guy who called himself Hobo.

"Our best information," said Foley with an edge to his voice, "is that he went into retirement a few years back. That is the word that came down in various state prisons and other places. Why do you ask?"

"There is a possibility that to avoid exposure, he has come back out of retirement."

"Jesus, pal, I hope you're wrong about that one."

I made a note of the date and time in a pocket pad I carried. By now I was pretty grimly sure that Jerry Lind was dead. If that were true, I wouldn't charge his sister for any more time I might
spend poking around in Barracks Cove. And I fully intended to spend some more time poking around in Barracks Cove.