The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller (4 page)

"You're not from the regular police, then?"

"No."

"Those bastards. I never heard back from them." She blew a sharp spike of smoke through her nostrils, made a face and glared at the tip of her cigarette. "Goddamnit, these things taste awful today." She looked about her, then got up again. "I have to get something to drink."

She was wearing high clogs and they were a little clumsy for her. She reminded me of a kid playing grownup as she stumped across to the kitchen doorway. I listened to her clinking ice and pouring things. She seemed to be bearing up well. She clumped back outside and sat down with a tall, clear drink.

"Why is it the regular police don't help?"

"They have a fairly hard-nosed approach to cases involving a missing husband or wife, if there's no history of mental illness involved. A lot of married people get fed up with their lives and decide to do something about it. They don't always want to go through the hassle of divorce or the big scenes at home so they just up and take a hike. The cops know all this so after some
routine steps don't turn up anything, they're not apt to spend much more time on it. They have a lot to do."

"Do you think that's how it is with Jerry?"

"I don't know, I just started working. What do you think might have happened, Mrs. Lind?"

She gave her mane of hair a backward toss. "I don't know. I've been through a lot of heavy trips thinking about it. Worrying. Imagining things. It didn't really start to hit me for two or three days. I thought he'd left town on business. He does that sometimes on Sundays, to get a start on a case the first thing Monday."

"Doesn't he phone you when he's out of town?"

"Not always. It's how he does his job. He takes it very seriously. I guess he likes to drop out of sight when he's working on something." She shrugged and made a little face, then took another drag of her cigarette. "You know, I don't like to mention all this, but if you're trying to help—see, I don't know what's reality and what's fantasy when Jerry's on a case. He used to talk sometimes about trying to get into the CIA or something. I think lots of times he pretends things are more important, or at least something different, from whatever it really is he might be doing. Does that make any sense?"

"Sure it does. But it's more the sort of assessment I'd expect from an older woman. Mind telling me how old you are?"

She gave a wave of her hand. "I'm twenty-three, but don't give me any of that flattery bullshit. You can't live with a guy without figuring out some things about him."

"This fantasy element, does it extend to other parts of his life, or just to his job?"

"I don't know. But then he's really into his job. He spends a lot of time at it. I can't figure it, to tell you the truth. He doesn't get paid any overtime, just some travel expenses. But he's always working. I mean, a lot more than other young people I know."

"Could you tell me his salary?"

"Three hundred a week. That really isn't very much money anymore. I used to ask him what the job was going to lead to. How much more he could expect to make if he stayed with the company. But he doesn't like me nagging him like that. He says it's a perfectly fine job. Not the CIA, but he's satisfied."

She flicked ash off the cigarette. "Big deal. I should let him do the grocery shopping some time."

"Maybe he figures he'll come into half a million bucks some day."

The girl snorted. "He never told me about it if that's what he thinks."

"But all in all, Mrs. Lind, would you say that yours is a reasonably successful marriage?"

She waved her hand again. "Oh, you know..." She stopped speaking and stared at me as if I'd just thrown a handful of dice that rolled funny.

"You know, there's something very important I forgot to find out. Who hired you?"

"Jerry's sister."

"Jesus," she cried, getting out of the recliner. "I might have known. Well, you can just go and dig up your dirt somewhere else."

"Hey, wait a minute, Mrs. Lind. Why can't you be as shrewd about this as you are about the way your husband does his job?"

"What do you mean?"

"I'm not trying to dig up any dirt. Only to find Jerry. It would seem to me you'd want to do the same. My job will be easier if you can figure I'm doing it for you, only his sister is the one paying for it."

"She's paying you to snoop into our private lives."

"She's paying me to find Jerry, but to do that I need to know everything you can tell me about him. The bad along with the good. I don't even have a jumping off place on this one yet."

She took a little breath and ground out her cigarette. "All right. So Jerry and I don't get along like love birds all the time. So what? A lot of young couples have trouble adjusting. You married?"

"Used to be. I know what you're talking about."

She liked that and gave me a small smile. We were friends, or at least fellow veterans of the same old campaigns.

"But we don't fight all the time, either," she continued. "His job is the biggest pain in the ass. For me, at least. I'm a little jealous of it. We don't go out enough. I mean, I know who and what I am. Men have been watching me since I was twelve years old. I've been dating since I was fourteen. You'd think Jerry would want to show me off a little or something. I like to get out and have a little fun sometimes. But it gets so I might as well be living with a sailor who's shipping out all the time. And for a lousy three hundred a week."

"Could he be seeing other women?"

"Are you kidding?" She stood and opened the terry cloth robe. Beneath it she had on a string bikini. She tossed the robe aside and posed with her hands on her hips. I had to work some to keep from swallowing my tongue. She was, as they used to say in the movies, quite a dish.

"Tell me," she said, "would you be out chasing other girls if you had this waiting at home for you?"

"No, Mrs. Lind, I don't guess I would. But then a lot of guys are funny that way. They can't seem to settle down in their heads with any one mate."

"Hey, I like the way you put that. One mate." She sat back on the recliner and ignored the robe. "Okay with you if I sit here like this?"

"Sure, just so long as you don't expect me to be staring you straight in the eye all the time."

She giggled. "No, that's okay. I like to turn men on. What's the sense of having a nice body if you can't show it off a little?" She grinned at me. "I feel like a peacock."

"Does it ever go beyond showing it off?"

She took away the grin. "If it did I wouldn't tell you. Unless I decided I wanted you. Let's change the subject."

"Okay, Mrs. Lind."

"Call me Marcie. All my friends do. What's your name?" She looked at the card again. "I'll call you Pete, okay?"

"Sure. How come you don't like Jerry's sister?"

"That snob bitch? She's full of phony bullshit airs, that's why. Like she was last season's Miss Bryn Mawr. And she thinks I'm common. Not good enough for her fucking brother. Of course I don't think of Jerry that way."

"How do you think of him?"

"Lots of ways. As my husband, mostly." She tucked her feet up on the recliner. "But that sister of his is too much. I never finished high school. I got into some trouble down in Santa Barbara. I was holding a guy's stash when the cops stopped us one night. It was no big thing, but I had to drop out of school, and by the time I got that hassle straightened out I decided why bother?

"Well, Miss Bitch holds that against me. And she doesn't like some of the language I use, but I figure fuck her, it's the best way I express myself. And of course she's jealous of my looks and how I like to show them off."

"How did you and Jerry meet?"

"I met him on the beach at Santa Barbara. We both like to surf. And we just sort of felt mutually attracted. He was going to school at Isla Vista. He was a little more straight and clean-cut than most of the boys there then. I mean, I guess it's part of my vanity. I've got a good, healthy body and I didn't want to sleep around with guys who had crabs or were all strung out on speed or something. We lived together the last six months of his schooling, then he went into the Army for two years. We wrote regularly and saw each other when he came home on furlough. And during that time I didn't meet anybody I liked better. So we just started going together again when he got out of the Army.
When he got the job with Coast West we got married. He went through a training program, then he was assigned to the office in San Francisco. And here we are."

She lapsed into thought, and it lasted for a while.

"What is it, Marcie?"

"I was thinking about what you asked. If he could be chasing around with other girls. He's gentle and shy, most of the time. Oh, he can lose his temper when he's at home here, but I don't think he'd have the guts to cheat on me. He might, once, if he was drunk or something, and things just happened that way. But he'd blurt it out to me in a day or two."

She thought about it some more. I don't think she was quite as sure of all that as she used to be.

"But what if it turned out that he was seeing somebody?"

She reached for her cigarettes and gave me a weak grin. "I don't think we should pursue that." She made a little gesture of apology and lit her cigarette. "It's just that I got some pretty strong passions. I get emotional about things sometimes. Since I don't have any reason to think that Jerry's playing around, why think about it and have a nervous breakdown in front of you?"

"Right. That wouldn't help find him. You've lived here about two years?"

"Yes."

"Has anything out of the ordinary happened to either one of you in the past year or so?"

"What sort of thing?"

"Lawsuit, accident, a spat with your neighbors. Anything like that."

She thought carefully before replying. I wished all the people I talked to were like that. Once you got used to her cuss words she was a pleasure.

"The only thing different was that Jerry was in the hospital for about a week, in December. He'd strained his back playing handball in the Army. It never seemed to bother him until just
before Christmas. Something went wrong and he was put in traction."

"Does he get disability pay from the government?"

"No. He said he'd look into it if this becomes a regular thing. But he doesn't like the hassle of that. Forms to fill out and all."

"Are your parents living, Marcie?"

"Sure. Down in Santa Barbara. My dad's a retired postman. We write once in a while, but we're not really close."

"Who are Jerry's close friends?"

She frowned as she considered it. "He really doesn't have any, around here. There was a crowd he used to run with down south, before we started living together. But he's never met anybody up here he wanted to spend much time with. Outside of work."

"How does he spend his spare time?"

"We go out to the beach some. Surfing's pretty good out at Bolinas. And he likes to paint. He got into the art thing while he was going to school. He's happy to pack up his shit and spend a day sitting and painting a bunch of boats rotting away down in Sausalito."

"Does he gamble? Hang out in bars much?"

"No, none of those things."

"Do you know his boss, Emil Stoval?"

"I've met him."

"How do you get along?"

"You mean how do he and Jerry get along? Okay, I guess. I haven't heard anything different."

"Do you have much occasion to see Stoval?"

"No."

She got up and walked out into the center of the patio to stare at the sky. "We get shadows back here pretty soon. I'd like to get a little sun first. Without my clothes on, you know? Is this going to take much longer?"

"It doesn't have to. I would like a recent photo of Jerry, if you have one."

"Sure. Come on in, I'll get you one."

I followed her back into the house. She pointed across the living room debris. "There's a picture of us together on the wall. I'll get you a smaller one you can take with you."

I crossed to look at it. It was a photo taken of them at some beach. He was a tall, spare-looking youngster with an open face and moderately long blond hair. It must have been taken before he went into the Army. He looked a lot younger than twenty-six.

The girl returned with a pair of snapshots. One showed Lind leaning against an automobile. The other was a mug shot.

"Will these do?"

"They're fine. Is this the car he's driving?"

"Yes, a Ford Mustang."

"Do you know where he keeps the title to it? Maybe the same place he keeps the insurance policy on it."

"I'll see."

She clumped back down the hallway. I wandered over to a bookcase running the length of one wall. It had some Book-of-the-Month Club selections and a broad collection of paperbacks. They ranged from high-class soap opera with lurid covers to
Walden
, Hemingway and Ayn Rand. There were any number of one-volume surveys—world religions, Roman history and the occult included. Marcie returned with the title to the Mustang and I wrote down some numbers.

"I see Jerry's quite a reader."

"Are you kidding? He doesn't read the morning newspaper half the time. He's—you know, arty. More visually attuned. He'd rather sit and watch the color TV with the sound off, just to enjoy the images."

"Those books are all yours?"

"I bought and read them, if that's what you mean. Just because I'm a dropout doesn't mean I'm illiterate. That's what Jerry's sister can never understand. My folks turned me on to reading a long time ago."

"My apologies. I appreciate the help you've been."

"It's nothing. I'm going to feel better knowing somebody's looking for Jerry."

She followed me out onto the front porch.

"If you think of anything else that might help, I'd like you to call the number on the card I gave you. If it's after office hours an answering service will take the call. I check in with them regularly."

"I'll remember. And I'm sorry I yelled at you earlier."

"That's okay. I've had lots worse."

I went on down the stairs and climbed into my car. Just before driving off I glanced back up at the house. Marcie was still out on the porch, watching me. She saw me looking and gave me a funny little wave, as if she were throwing me a lucky wish.