The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller (25 page)

The one person locally who'd given me the biggest break was the man calling himself Joe Dodge. Maybe he could tell me more, now that he'd had a day to think about it. I looked up his phone number and dialed it. The line was busy, which told me he was home, so I got my car out of the airport parking area and drove up to Barracks Cove and out Cupper's Road. What I found at its end displeased me. Joe Dodge's old car was gone, but parked just up the road from the house was a tan late model Cadillac with the license number I'd jotted down the day before during my encounter with Emil Stoval.

It was a further complication I could have done without. I went up to the front door of the Dodge home and rapped on it loudly enough to stir apples in the orchard down the road. Nobody answered. I couldn't hear anybody moving around inside. I went around and tried the back door. It was unlocked. It opened into a kitchen with dirty dishes in the sink and the musty, old, kick-around aroma of bachelor quarters.

I shouted Dodge's name a couple of times, getting no response. Then I noticed a small, reddish stain on the kitchen linoleum near the doorway leading into the rest of the house. It could have been painter's oil, burgundy wine or a dab of catsup. Or it could have been blood. I bent down for a closer inspection. It was still tacky and it wasn't one of the innocent substances.

I went on through the doorway and stepped into a room that looked as if a couple of bears had done battle there. Shattered glass covered the floor, chairs were overturned and a wooden table with a couple of busted legs knelt to the floor with lost dignity. Something or somebody had gone through a side window that had a torn roller curtain ripped half off of its wooden staff. The room breathed violence. I went on through to the studio where Dodge worked. Things seemed innocent enough there. I went back to the living room and searched for more of the telltale
reddish stains, but couldn't find any. In one corner was a telephone with its cracked plastic receiver off the hook. So much for the busy signal I'd heard. I went on back through the kitchen and outside. I found another splotch of blood on a lower step of the back porch. The land behind the house sloped up toward a grove of trees. There appeared to be a recently made track through the wild grass, where something might have been dragged.

I went back around to the front of the house and over to my car. I opened the trunk and got out the shoulder holster and the .45-caliber automatic it held. I don't like having to wear it, but it wasn't just a missing person case any longer. It hadn't been since I found Dempsey's body. I took off my jacket and wrapped and tied myself in the leather gear. I vividly remembered the way Dempsey had looked, up by the Stannis River, with his gun snug in its holster. I thought about that for a moment then got out my revolver also and clipped its holster to my belt before putting my coat back on. If I'd had an old cavalry saber I would have hung that on me as well.

I closed up the car and went over to Stoval's Cadillac. It was unlocked and the window on the driver's side was rolled down. Inside, the car was clean and empty. I went around to the side of the house with the broken window. In the weeds nearby was a smashed table lamp that had been pitched through the glass. I continued on around to the back and started up the slope with .45 in hand. At the tree line the grass gave way to a ground cover of pine needles and earth. I took a good look and listen around the area, assuring myself nobody was lurking nearby, then continued on into the grove of trees where the drag marks led me. I knew how it had to turn out, as if I were taking part in an old familiar play. I rounded a tree and stopped. Emil Stoval wouldn't be bothering anybody's wife again, not even his own.

He was wearing the same jacket and slacks he'd had on the day before. He was lying face up with his unbuttoned jacket scrunched up under his shoulders from being dragged feet first
up the slope. His dead eyes were staring into the trees overhead. His mouth was slightly ajar and a big soggy patch of drying blood caked his shirt front. I put away my pistol and got down on my hands and knees to try seeing the shape of his back. The scrunched jacket propped him up from the ground so I could pretty well see he hadn't sustained much damage there. I got back up and brushed off my clothes. There was a mark over his left eye that could have been made by a blow to the head, but it wasn't anything sensational. I leaned over to study his hands. There was matter beneath several fingernails. One of the nails was even torn. It appeared he'd come to grips with his foe, and probably put up a fair scrap before somebody shot him in the back. At least that's how it looked from the mess on his shirt front—shot with a heavy-caliber weapon that made a nasty exit wound, just as in Dempsey's case.

I searched the ground surrounding the body without seeing anything important. I studied the body some more and wondered if a rough idea of the time of death would be important enough to me to justify fooling with it. Rigidity, or coagulation in the muscles, generally is first noticeable in the neck and jaw, but I didn't feel like messing with his face or head. I bent over and touched one of his hands. It had cooled off some. I tried moving a couple of his limbs. There was some stiffness in his leg, but the arms still moved freely. Which meant it was early in the stiffening process. Emil probably had been killed five to six hours earlier, around noon.

I left the body and went back to the Joe Dodge house. It probably wouldn't matter, but I used a handkerchief to hold the phone receiver and dialed Chief Morgan to tell him what I'd found. He wasn't at all happy about it. I agreed to hang around until he and his men got there, then made a couple more phone calls. I dialed Allison's number to ask her if she'd seen Joe Dodge that day. There was no answer. I made a collect call to check in with my answering service in San Francisco. They said Allison had
called, trying to get a message to me, soon after I'd spoken to Ceejay that morning. Allison had wanted me to phone her at another Barracks Cove number. It was the number of the phone I was using right then, in Dodge's smashed-up living room. My stomach felt as if it wanted to go to pieces on me again.

They hadn't had a case of known murder in Barracks Cove for several years. It brought out just about everybody in the department. They all were tramping up to the grove of trees behind the house to get a look at the body. They were giving fits to an area physician who served as county coroner. For that capacity he dealt mainly with the victims of auto collisions and hunting accidents. While it didn't take a medical genius to determine Stoval's primary cause of death, the doc wanted to employ correct preliminary investigative procedures he'd read about over the years, and he wasn't being helped any by the gawking local cops.

Morgan listened in grim silence to what I had to tell him about the Hobo and the curious theories to do with him that the slain Dempsey had been following. Morgan had never heard of the Hobo, but that didn't surprise me. He'd had no reason to in order to do a decent job of policing Barracks Cove. And while he found it hard to swallow the possibility that a man who had slain a vast number of people could be living in Barracks Cove without anyone becoming the wiser, he at least was professional enough to concede the possibility and not just laugh in my face over it.

"Of course," said the chief, "the killer you're talking about could be living here, right enough, but still not have had anything to do with this man Stoval's death."

"It's possible, but I doubt it. I think it's a simple case of a man killing to protect his real identity. I think the Hobo killed Dempsey. I think he probably killed the man I was hired to look for, Jerry Lind, and I think probably he killed Emil Stoval earlier today."

"This Stoval was by my office yesterday. But he told me he was trying to trace some stolen money that turned up recently."

"I know, but so was Dempsey, early on. Then he stumbled across something that put him on the Hobo's trail. The same thing could have happened to Jerry Lind, and now to Stoval."

The chief rubbed one ear, then fixed me with a gaze that told me he was about to say or ask something that he didn't like to think about. "Could Joe Dodge be this Hobo fellow?"

"Not unless he started killing people when he was about eight years old."

Morgan grunted. "Still and all," he said, looking back down the slope toward the Dodge house, "I am going to have a number of questions to ask that man when we find him."

When they let me go I drove across town to Allison's house. She'd left her back door unlocked and I went through her bedroom closet and bathroom. So far as I could tell she hadn't packed anything. I went out to her studio. If she'd left town with Joe Dodge, it appeared to have been a spur of the moment decision. Maybe the two of them had found Stoval's body and fled out of fear. Maybe they'd been killed and hauled off somewhere. I stood amidst the dichotomy of her work. Along one wall was the pop art stuff she made her living from; ships and planes and people in wacky juxtaposition. Many of the people were bare-breasted beauties. Allison herself. Elsewhere in the studio was the serious stuff. Deftly balanced, almost mathematical radiation and structure of lines that made you feel as if you might fall into the painting and become a part of its ethereal universe.

I glanced over a shoulder at one of the buxom creatures. It was Allison's body but somebody else's saucy face winking at me. A far-out hope dawned. It was something I'd almost forgotten about in the roar of events. I winked back at the saucy face and thanked Allison for triggering the bright idea. I went into the house and made another call down to San Francisco, to Janet Lind at the television station. They were putting together the six o'clock news show. She was very busy and made that plain to me.

"I'm busy too, still trying to find your brother. Or his remains."

"Is it that bad?"

"I haven't been running into many comic moments. There are some ugly murders involved in all this, but I don't have time to tell you about them right now."

"What is it you want?"

"You told me that the last time you talked with your brother you discussed a feature story you'd done about a collection of modern stuff being exhibited at the Legion Palace Museum."

"That's right. It was very trendy."

"I think that very exhibit included some scary paintings by a guy named Pavel. In fact one of them was stolen later. It showed a woman looking off a porch at something awful. She had a terrified look on her face. Is it possible your report included that piece? And if it did, would you still have it recorded on film or tape?"

"Oh, wow. I don't know. We did have a shot of that one all right, but there was some discussion about whether or not it would be in good taste to air it. It was pretty gruesome looking. If we did use it we'll still have it on tape. If not, I'm afraid we won't. How soon do you need to know?"

"If seeing it will tell me anything, I need to know immediately."

"Can you come over to the station?"

"No, I'm up in Barracks Cove."

"I don't see how..."

"You could show it on your six o'clock news."

"But there would be no justification..."

"Sure there would. Tell the viewers it was stolen June Fourth from the museum and that police suspect it to be tied lip with a couple of murders in the Barracks Cove area. If anyone has seen that painting they should contact police. One of the victims was an insurance investigator from San Francisco named Emil Stoval. He was your brother's boss. I found his body about an
hour ago. He'd been shot. But if you want to use his name you'd better try reaching his wife first, in case the police haven't gotten around to it. She models in San Francisco under the name Faye Ashton."

"All right," she said in a hushed voice. "I'll have to get the producer's okay, provided we have the picture on tape. Who was the other person killed?"

"A police detective named Robert Dempsey from Rey Platte. He'd been shot also. I found his body in a car near the Stannis River, east of here. That was yesterday."

"I'll do what I can. Where can I call you?"

"I'm moving around. I'll phone back in thirty minutes."

I left Allison's and drove back into town.

TWENTY

T
here was something else I hadn't gotten around to doing since learning that Dempsey had been on the trail of the stolen painting. I'd never checked back with Wiley Huggins at the town frame shop to ask if the big detective had stopped by there. It seemed reasonable that he would have. I found a parking space across from the shop and went on over. Minnie Parsons was up on a ladder in one corner with a feather duster.

"Hello there, young man," she called. "You're still in town, are you?"

"Not still, Mrs. Parsons, once again. Is Mr. Huggins around?"

"He's next door at the bakery. Should be back in a minute. Can I help you with anything?"

"No, thanks. I don't suppose you've seen Allison today. Or Joe Dodge?"

"No, not today. Here, help me down from this thing, will you?"

I held the ladder with one hand and braced one of her arms with the other as she made her way down, but she still fell slightly into me as she reached the floor.