The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller (27 page)

"That covers it," I agreed, hunching forward to stare at the screen. Big Mike settled heavily in an overstuffed chair to my left while Minnie stood behind me tsk-tsking and murmuring something about the things that go on in the world today.

The show's anchorman came on and began talking about the day's events. I only half listened, and complimented Minnie on a vase of camellias atop a sideboard across the room.

"Shhhh," said Big Mike abruptly, then clapped one hand to his mouth. "That was rude of me. But I thought you wanted to hear the news."

"What I'm interested in doesn't come on for another minute or so. It'll be right after the commercial break."

Big Mike turned to me with interest. "My golly, how do you know something as precise as all that?"

"I rigged it up with a girl on the show. She's the missing man's sister. They're going to show me something that might lead me to the man I'm after."

Big Mike shook his head in wonder and took a great gulp of beer. "If that ain't a sensation."

And then Janet Lind's face was on the screen, staring at me with a fleeting, startled expression, as if the camera had caught her before she was quite ready. She started talking about the killings. It tickled the thing that had been eluding me. And finally it dawned on me like a thunderclap just as somebody in the control booth at the television station punched up the taped image of the stolen museum painting. My heart beat started to run away with itself and I tried hard not to show it, because there on the screen, in the painting of the woman gazing horror-stricken from the front porch of a house, with her hair a different color and styled a bit longer, was the woman standing directly behind me who called herself Minnie Parsons, Big Mike's wife.

The blood was rushing through my head and I couldn't even hear what Janet Lind was saying. I could feel the emotions sparking through the room, and then Big Mike got to his feet and crossed to turn off the television set.

"Well," I said as flatly as I could manage, "I'm afraid that didn't tell us much."

"On the contrary, Mr. Bragg, on the contrary," said Big Mike Parsons in a firmly toned voice that had lost all of its gosh and gee and big howdy lummox ways. "I'm afraid it told us everything we all needed to know."

He raised his eyes to Minnie. "And I'm afraid also, old girl, we'll have to make another of our lightning quick disappearances. They've just gotten too close."

"Damn you," Minnie said bitterly, and I knew she wasn't addressing her husband.

I glanced over my shoulder. She was standing there glaring at me with menace on her face and a small automatic pistol pointed at the middle of my back. She gripped it as if she'd had practice. "We'll have to tear up roots once again."

"Easy, Minnie," soothed Big Mike. "It's not all his fault. He's just the best of them we've seen so far. But there will be others in his wake. We just can't beat them back anymore. Not here." He opened a drawer in the sideboard beneath the camellias and brought out a .45 like the one out in the trunk of my car.

"On your feet, Mr. Bragg."

"Where are we going?"

"At the risk of sounding trite," he said sadly, "we are taking you for a ride."

TWENTY-ONE

J
erry Lind, I learned soon enough, was dead. My own situation, as I thought about it a few minutes later, sitting with my arms trussed behind me on the passenger side of my own car with Big Mike driving, was not too hopeful. It was true I had a revolver he didn't know about jammed down in the cushions beneath me, but I didn't see how it would do me much good even if I could dig it out. He'd done a good job of tying me up. I tried to wriggle my arms some and decided it would be some time the following winter before I got free that way. Even if I did reach the hidden weapon, I didn't know what I'd be able to shoot with it outside of my own calf.

Following us along an old dirt road up into the hills was Minnie, driving the Parsons' trail vehicle. He'd pointed out to me that while her main purpose was to provide him with a lift once my car and I were disposed of, she also would be Johnny-on-the-spot in case I did something cute with my feet and caused Big Mike to crash.

"You must know," he reminded me gently, "she would just love to empty that pistol of hers into your body, Mr. Bragg. She is really quite angry that we have to move once more."

On the other hand I did have one very large thing in my favor. He hadn't already raised his gun and drilled me between the eyes the way he admitted he'd done to Dempsey. He'd been forthright about it. Dempsey had scared him.

So I slouched down in the seat in dejected fashion and went fishing with my fingers for the .38 revolver. You do whatever there is left to do.

"I used to get headaches, you know," Big Mike told me. He'd been garrulous since we left his place, as if we were going camping together or something.

"It doesn't surprise me."

"The painting thing, it all started from that. It helped make the pain go away. But it was dangerous, you know. Forewarning somebody that way to bring out that meaty expression on their face. So the painting of Minnie was an experiment. She's a good little actress. She pretended terror; I painted. There was no risk that way."

"Did it work?"

"For a time."

"You would have been smart to have destroyed the painting. All of them, for that matter."

"Have you ever created a work of art, Mr. Bragg?"

"I don't have the eye for it."

"Then you wouldn't understand."

"So the Minnie painting turned up in San Francisco and you were afraid somebody from this area would go down to look at the show and recognize her. You already knew Dempsey, in Rey Platte, had made the Pavel-Hobo connection."

"Exactly. I read a review of the show that mentioned the Pavel works and that one of them was of a woman. She was the only woman I ever painted. I couldn't dare take a chance that the painting would somehow be tied to us in our present identity. So I went down there and stole the painting, without any bother whatsoever. It should have been the end to it."

"Yeah, it's tough how things go sometimes."

By arching the right side of my back in an unnatural way and straining my right arm until I wanted to yelp with pain, I managed to nudge a part of the holster with one fingertip. I didn't know what part of the holster it was and I wasn't near getting a decent grip on it. If I stretched myself any more Parsons would think I was attempting to commit suicide by breaking my back. I sat up and tried to think of something different.

"The next thing I knew," Big Mike continued, "that detective was in town. And somehow, incredibly, he discovered I lived in the area."

"He was in town working on another matter," I told him. "What tipped him to your being here was the cute trick you pulled in the town mural in Wiley Huggins' window."

It visibly startled him, a reaction that encouraged me. "You know, the funny grass, thick on the top, with the blades broken in progressive placement."

"That's impossible! I never told anybody about that little signature. Not even Minnie."

"Maybe you didn't, but a lot of people know about it now. And it shows up on paintings that have been tied to your murder victims. Frankly, Parsons, or whatever you want to call yourself these days, I think you and Minnie can forget about putting down roots anywhere. It's my guess the two of you are just in for one prolonged run."

"Now you're bluffing, Mr. Bragg."

I was, but he had no way of knowing it. I had another desperate thought and dipped a couple fingers into the rear pocket where I carried a comb. I had a small knife in a front pocket, but I couldn't get my hands within half a foot of it. I had trouble enough getting my comb out and down into the crease of the seat.

"No, I'm not bluffing, Parsons. I don't see much future for myself. Why bluff? It's just a plain fact. Your cover is becoming all unraveled. I suspect that within a couple more days there'll be several hundred law enforcement people looking for you. You'll see soon enough that I'm not bluffing."

"It won't matter by then. We will be far away. With new identities. We have had vast practice. But tell me, Bragg. Barring the incredible misfortune of Minnie's painting being recorded on tape at the television station, do you think you would have found me out?"

"I had already found you out."

He glanced quickly at me. I had to quit fiddling with the comb down in the seat.

"Not quite soon enough," I admitted. "About a half a second before the painting was shown on the screen. Something that had been bothering me locked into place. By the time Jerry Lind got to Barracks Cove he was curious about Dempsey's moves, and Dempsey's great curiosity about the stolen painting. Lind wasn't the world's foremost investigator by any means, but he knew the rudiments. The Frame Up was the logical place for him to visit to see if he could get a line on Dempsey. But Wiley Huggins hadn't seen Lind. The reason, of course, is the same as why he didn't see Emil Stoval earlier today. He was away from the shop both times. Minnie was minding the store. She was a great early warning system for you throughout the whole thing."

"Yes," he agreed, glancing in the rear-view mirror. "She was indeed."

"But Wiley was at the shop when Dempsey got there. How did you learn about him?"

"Minnie was there as well. And we knew about that Dempsey fellow. He was the one who nearly caught up with us down south. We took measures to learn his identity, and obtain a photograph of him. It cost us some money, that. But, as it turned out, it was well worth it. Dempsey asked a great many questions about the town mural. He wanted to learn more about the people who had worked on it. So Minnie stepped forward and suggested he drive out and query me. When he left the shop she phoned to alert me."

"And you must have shot him soon after he arrived."

"The moment he stepped from his car. I could take no risk there."

"But he wasn't in his car when I found his body, he was in Lind's. How come?"

Big Mike snorted. "The cars! Always the cars. They were very nearly more trouble than the people who drove them."

He took a deep breath and thought about it. I probed around with my comb some more.

"It was growing dark when the detective came to the house," he resumed. "I concealed his body and auto on our property for the night, planning to decide the next day what best to do with them. But before I could make that decision, Lind showed up at the Frame Up. Minnie sent him along to our place. I didn't plan to kill him. I simply told him I had never seen Dempsey. It seemed to satisfy him, and he could have turned and left at that point and have been alive today. But then he made the profound error of disclosing that he had a small transparency of the stolen painting. Once he had seen Minnie, if he ever studied it in a projector, he might well have recognized her.

"And so, I shot him. I now had two bodies and two automobiles on my hands. I had searched through the Dempsey vehicle and learned it was a rental. That made it less incriminating. So later that day, with Minnie's help, I drove Lind's car with Dempsey's body in it to where you found them. They should have remained undiscovered there for years. And then we drove the rental car to Willits and abandoned it, as if the man who rented it had flown out from there."

"So it must have been you who saw me and the boy at the Stannis River the other day, near where you'd concealed the auto. You cut my rope so it would break when we tried to cross, sweeping us downriver from the car."

"Of course. The plane crash, all those men thrashing around on the mountain—it could have ruined everything."

"But Fairbanks told me this evening it was Whelan who searched the lower river."

"It was Whelan he sent. Two minutes later, without a word to Fairbanks or anybody else, I followed Abe in my own vehicle. I passed him on the highway and signaled for him to stop. I told him that Fairbanks had sent me as well, and we were to explore a more extensive area. I suggested how we could divide
the territory. Abe agreed, and of course he searched a section of the river miles from the auto. Meanwhile, I myself made straight for a high point where I could keep an eye out for anybody approaching the crucial terrain. Yes, I cut the rope. I only wish now the two of you had drowned."

"Cute. I can understand your wanting me out of the way. But that little kid? That takes stomach."

Big Mike smiled grimly, concentrating on the road ahead. My comb was feathering across something I hoped to be the holster and gun. I settled deeper and fished away.

"Where my own welfare is concerned, Mr. Bragg, I can hardly let age enter into it, now can I? And believe me, one does not toil in the vineyard where I have toiled, for as long as I have, without proper mental toughness."

"What did you do with Lind's body?"

"I brought it out this very road. To an old cabin a few of us in town share ownership in. There are streams nearby. One can fish and do a bit of hunting in season. It is remote enough. I dug a shallow grave in the woods nearby. Unfortunately, I have been pushed for time recently."

"That's where you're taking me?"