The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller (8 page)

"What did you find out?"

"Like I said, I have to check them out. Now why don't you just fix yourself a stiff drink and go to bed?"

She smiled bleakly. "Yeah. Maybe I will."

I went on down to the car. Near the bottom of the road I saw lights on in a small frame bungalow. More interesting was the glow of a cigarette being passed from one person to another on the front porch of the place. I stopped the car and got out. The people on the porch quieted as I crossed over to them.

"Xumbra?"

"What is it?"

"It's Peter Bragg. The guy who was just up talking to Marcie Lind."

"So?"

"I've been hired to find Jerry. By his sister. But Marcie seems pretty anxious to have him back too, so I figure I'm trying to do her a favor at the same time. Marcie said you're a pretty good friend. I'd like to talk to you."

"All right," she said after a minute's reflection. "Sam, honey, how about waiting inside?"

Sam, honey, was the white dude with long hair sitting beside her with his cowboy boots up on the porch railing. He exhaled a lungful of smoke and got to his feet haltingly.

"Leave the joint, please," she told Sam firmly. Sam handed it to her with a grunt and went on inside.

"One thing you might as well know right now," she told me. "I don't much like white people. Sam there's a cool dude who goes back a long way in my life and mind. But as for all you others..."

"Yeah, I know, it's a bitch," I agreed, climbing up the stairs and resting on the railing. "I didn't used to think that way. Thought it would happen sooner. But I figure now it'll take at least another generation to make us comfortable with one another. Cal Gentle is a little more pessimistic. He figures closer to half a century. But I told him I thought..."

"Cal Gentle?"

"Yeah."

"The Oakland Panther?"

"Ex-Panther. He's trying some other things these days."

"How come you know Cal?"

"I testified at a trial. About a cop he was supposed to have roughed up."

"Sheeeit! You're the one who got old Cal off."

"I might have helped. At least it got that particular cop off the Oakland force, where he had no business being."

"What's your name again?"

"Peter Bragg."

"Well, Pete, you just lost some of your paleness," she said, holding out her funny smelling cigarette. "Want a toke?"

"Not now, thanks."

"I went to school with Cal. How did you get to know him?"

"We ran into each other a couple months after the trial. Took time out for a talk. A pretty long one. Since then we've done some things together."

"Work or play?"

"Both."

"Huh. What do you know. Marcie still calls me Mary. She just laughs at Xumbra. How about you?"

"I'll call you Mother Superior with a straight face if you want, so long as you'll talk to me."

She made a cackle and put aside the dope to light a legal cigarette. "Call me Zoom, then. I really like that. I'll bet you're a mean dude too, huh Pete?"

"I can be brought to that point."

"Extraordinary. I could see it in your face up at Marcie's. You came in looking ready to beat up on people."

"How long have you known her, Zoom?"

"As long as she's lived here. A couple years. We hit it right off."

"How about Jerry?"

"Oh, you know, he's her husband. We say hello."

"But the two of you don't really hit it off."

"Neither of us goes out of the way."

"How come?"

"I don't know. I guess I might have intimidated him some. Not meaning to, but some things are my nature. And I think he puts on some. If not Marcie and the rest of us, maybe himself."

I waited in the stillness. "I was hoping you'd go on to give an example."

"I'm trying to think of one. Bear in mind, Marcie and I have a tight time together. We would even if she was married to the neighborhood zero. So I haven't spent all that much time trying to figure out Mr. Jerry Lind. But he's a strange dude. A couple of things do come to mind. Some days around here in the summer it gets wickedly hot, and I sort of drift around without my clothes on. Marcie was here visiting on one of those days, and Jerry came down to fetch her for some reason or other. So he comes on in and gets a little peek of my fine black skin. And whoooeee! He gets all stammery and red in the face..."

"That's usually just upbringing, Zoom. Doesn't mean much."

"Now you hear me out, Peter Bragg. I don't care what sort of hangups he has, he just isn't consistent that way. Another time they were both down here at a party I threw one night. I had just a whole lot of people in. Some a little spaced out. Some from here, some from there. Even had some gay lib types I'd met in the city. They didn't come on hard about it, more funny and arty. Anyhow, there was a little black girl tagging along with them. Called herself Moxie or Foxie or something."

"Did she go the gay route?"

"I think she went whichever way the boat was going. Anyway, Jerry Lind picked up on that chick the minute she came through the door. She was a little girl with a big grin for everyone, wearing a sloppy pullover and a pair of cut-off jeans that just barely covered her tight little ass. Jerry was pretty cool about it, but I
saw him watching her. Then, I guess after he'd had enough to drink inside himself, he made his little move. I was hustling ice or something out in the kitchen when I saw them through the screen door over in a comer of the back yard necking up a storm. I didn't have time just then to worry about it. That sort of thing happens at parties. But a few minutes later I was out getting something else from the refrigerator and I heard them coming back toward the house. They seemed to be having some sort of argument. I heard her tell him, 'Not now. Call me in the city some time.' Mind now, Pete, I haven't even told Marcie about this, but later on in the night, before little steamy buns left, I cornered her in an out-of-the-way place and sort of interrogated her to find out what Jerry was after. I suspected sex, but I wanted to confirm."

"And what did you find out?"

"He wanted her to go down on him out in my back garden there. Sheeeit, the boldness of some of you crackers."

"I'd like to talk to this Moxie or Foxie. Know where I can get in touch with her? Or the friends she came with?"

"Unnecessary. She was just playing him for laughs. I heard her telling somebody later. Besides, she didn't live where she told him. She was just passing through the area from L.A. She was on her way to visit people in Tacoma, then she was going back to New York. I just wanted you to realize why I figure there was a little put-on involved when he made such a to-do over seeing my own backside. I guess you'd have to say he's a man of many parts, and I never bothered trying to sort them through. My friendship is with Marcie."

"Does she talk about Jerry much?"

"Not in depth. She'll mention funny little things that happen, but not much more than that. And I don't pry."

"One last tough one, Zoom. I have to ask them where they might help."

"I know."

"How about Marcie? She's a very pretty girl. She could have guys stumbling all over themselves to spend time with her. Do you think she ever does?"

"No, I don't. She likes to be seen. Likes to be admired. But the times I've seen anyone try to come on a little bit, and there have been some really pretty fellows too, she just lets them know it's a nice compliment, but no thanks. She seems to be a definite one-man woman."

Zoom put aside the regular cigarette and relit the other. She inhaled deeply and held it for the better part of a minute before exhaling.

"And that," she said, "leaves me with a chill when I think about what went on out in the garden that night."

SEVEN

T
he next morning I phoned the Legion Palace Museum and made an appointment to see Dean Bancroft, who ran the place. The museum was in a magnificent setting up behind the cliffs on the south side of the Golden Gate, just seaward of the bridge itself. I arrived a little before eleven and was sent down a long marble corridor to Bancroft's office. The museum director turned out to be a wiry, middle-aged man with his sleeves rolled up and a cigarette between his lips. He rose from behind a cluttered desk and extended one hand.

"Bragg, what can I do for you?" he asked, waving me to a chair.

"I'm doing some work involving Coast West Insurance. I understand they had a policy on a painting that was stolen here last month."

"Right. I talked to another Coast West man about it."

"The painting hasn't been recovered?"

"No. The exhibit itself is up in Portland now. The missing painting was just a minor piece of the whole traveling show. It was called New Directions. Frankly, it's the sort of stuff I call woodshed modern. Real out of the mainstream pieces. To tell you the truth, I wouldn't have given you a thousand bucks for the lot. And that's what we'll get for just the one piece. Or rather the owner will."

"How come you even had the exhibit if you didn't like it?"

Bancroft coughed a couple times and ground out his cigarette, then groped through things on his desk until he found the
rest of the pack. "I'm just one of the voices around here. That damn collection was like a Herb Caen column. Most everybody found one or two things in it they liked. So we brought it in. Besides, it was put together by a friend of mine, Sy Norman at the L.A. Museum of Modern Art. I figured if he liked the thing, there must have been some merit in it somewhere, although I'll tell you, bud, it wasn't apparent to this tired old gent."

"You sound kind of hostile."

"Well I feel hostile about a lot of that stuff. To my mind it's worthless. A lot of these people will put in a few years trying to learn the craft and some of them do a good job of it, but a lot of them don't, and they don't have anything in their heads or their hearts to say in the first place, or a sense of humor or eye for design or anything else. So they're apt to fluke around until they stumble on some gimmick and exploit it as if they'd started a whole new movement. Now in its own way that's fine, if they want to show it along with a lot of other third-rate stuff at a supermarket parking lot art festival. And I guess it's all right if the solid Americans from the suburbs want to be taken in by it all and pay cash money to own a piece of it. But I don't think it's all right to put a collection of that stuff inside the same walls that exhibit Rodin or Matisse or Degas."

Bancroft blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. "Jesus Christ, what set that off? If I were a girl I'd suspect I was getting my period."

"Did you feel the stolen painting was as bad as the rest?"

"I knew I'd be wide open after that outburst," he said with a wan smile. "Actually, no. It was a repelling piece, but fascinating at the same time. One of four works in the exhibit done by somebody who worked under the name Pavel. I don't know if that was his real name. They were life-like and showed some unusual techniques, but the most startling thing about them was that they all portrayed individuals looking out at you with expressions of startlement bordering on terror. It was as if they had stumbled
onto something catastrophic. They were scary numbers. One actually raised the down on the back of my neck. But who the hell could live with something like that staring out at you? They looked like the product of a crafts wing in the nut house."

"Do you know anything more about the painter?"

"Heard he lived in Southern California someplace. Want the name of the guy who owns them?"

"Sure, it might help."

Bancroft picked through stuff on his desk, then went into a desk drawer and finally pulled out a black binder. He paged through it. "Here it is, a guy named Bo Smythe, in Santa Barbara."

"Bo?"

Bancroft nodded. "That's it. Sounds like the sort of bird who'd buy paintings in a supermarket parking lot, doesn't it?"

"Do you have a copy of the missing piece?"

"No," said Bancroft, going through the desk drawer again. "But here's a brochure we had on the show. It has a reproduction of one of the other Pavel works that was in the exhibit."

He gave me a pamphlet on brown, grainy stock. The reproduction wasn't large, but it effectively showed a man's face looking out at you as if he'd just had the biggest scare of his life.

"Can I keep this?"

"Be my guest."

"Was the man from Coast West that you spoke to named Jerry Lind?"

"Something like that. He came around a few days after it happened. Couldn't tell him much more than I'm telling you. The snatch was on a Wednesday evening, when we're open till nine. One of the guards just noticed on his rounds that somebody had cut the thing right out of its frame. It was simple enough to do. The painting was on treated canvas."

"How big was it?"

"It was a little larger than the other Pavel pieces. About twenty by thirty inches. Showed a woman looking over a porch
railing as if she'd just seen her little boy swallowed up by a hay baling machine."

The Horace Day Hospital was two blocks from the Sears store on Geary. At a little before noon I was lounging around the third-floor corridor. I was in time to see the girl Laurel Benson had described coming into work. She bordered on the petite, but had a brisk manner.