Where Echoes Live (8 page)

Ripinsky held the door open for me, and we stepped inside. The noise was deafening; people shouted in order to be heard over the band, and in the lounge a crowd was cheering on a pair of arm wrestlers. The temperature and humidity were close to tropical; the smoke level rivaled L.A. smog on a bad day.

I glanced up at Hy. He gave me a “What can I say?” look and nudged me toward the lounge. A howl went up from the spectators as one of the wrestlers forced his opponent's arm to the table. The loser groaned loudly, then shouted that the next round of drinks was on him.

We found places at the end of the bar near the lakeside windows and ordered a couple of Buds. When they came we leaned with our backs against the plank, looking for Nickles. We had seen her Jeep outside, but there was no sign of her. It was too noisy for conversation, so we merely sipped beer and I noshed on pretzels—I'd had nothing to eat since eleven that morning. When we finished, Ripinsky leaned toward me and shouted, “Maybe she's dancing. Let's you and I give it a whirl.”

I hesitated—it had been a couple of years since I'd done much dancing—then said, “Why not?” and followed him from the bar. While I hooked my jacket on a coatrack near the door, he scanned the crowd on the floor for Nickles. The bobbing and dipping mass of humanity was tightly packed; individual faces were indistinguishable in the dim light and low-hanging haze of smoke. Hy shrugged, grabbed my hand, and pulled me after him.

At first I felt awkward but soon found his lead easy to follow. He moved with agility and a certain western flair without trying anything fancy that might have tripped me up. His lean, hard body fit comfortably against mine; it seemed natural to be close to him.

George, I reminded myself. George.

And my inner voice retorted,
Don't be an idiot
—
you're only dancing!

The band segued into “Cobwebs in the Attic of My Mind.” I put my lips close to Hy's ear and admitted my relationship by marriage to its author. That amused him, and he told me about his teenage cousin who was trying to be another Dolly Parton. “Looks like her, big tits and all,” he said, “but the only gigs she can get are singing the national anthem at Little League games.” The band played another Ricky Savage hit—“You Can Leave My Bedroom but Not My Heart”—and then I spotted Nickles.

She was at the far side of the floor near the windows, draped against a short fellow in western wear. Her close-cropped head lolled on his shoulder, and the arm he had slung around her pulled up the back of her sweater, exposing a few inches of bare skin. The man nuzzled her neck, and Lily giggled and stumbled. I tapped Ripinsky on the shoulder and pointed them out.

He glanced their way and grimaced. “I doubt we'll get much information out of her in that condition. Shithoused, both of them—and it's early, too.”

I nodded, watching the man whisper in Nickles's ear. She giggled some more, and he began to dance her toward a side door. When they stepped off the floor, she lurched and he had to steady her. The two went outside, leaving the door open behind them.

“Where does that go?” I asked Hy.

“Balcony, and then down to the dock.” He was frowning now. “Normally I wouldn't butt in, but I know that guy. Tank-truck driver who delivers to the filling station that Earl Hopwood used to run. Mean son of a bitch, for a little guy. And I've never seen Lily so drunk she could barely stand up.”

“Why don't we get some air ourselves? You go ahead. I'll grab my jacket and join you.”

When I caught up with him on the balcony, there was no sign of Nickles and her friend. We walked along the plank flooring to the stairway that descended to the dock. At first I could make out nothing but the swath of moonlight on the lake; then I spotted Nickles's light-colored sweater and the man's hat. They were at the end of the dock.

I touched Hy's arm and pointed to them.

He nodded and quickened his pace.

And then the man with Nickles yelled. It wasn't a drunken whoop, mere noisemaking; the sound held an element of horrified surprise.

Ripinsky and I began to run. Down on the dock, Nickles sank into a crouch. The man yelled again.

On the steps I bumped into Ripinsky and stumbled, missed two before I righted myself. I could see Nickles's partner standing behind her, frozen now. They were staring over the dock's edge into the water.

I raced down the dock, Ripinsky behind me. It bucked and swayed under our weight. I pushed past the still-frozen man, grabbed Nickles by her hunched shoulders.

“Lily, what's wrong?”

She twisted around, her face shocked and bewildered. I dropped down and put my arms around her.

Ripinsky moved past us. I heard him grunt in surprise.

Nickles remained very still. She smelled of beer and smoke. I held her and looked over her shoulder at Hy.

He stepped back from the dock's edge and motioned down. I leaned out, peering into the blackness.

A body floated in the water. Bumped against the dock on the waves its bucking had set in motion. A man's body, from the size of it, clad in light-colored clothing. Face down, shoulders humped. Bumping and bumping …

I looked away, said to Nickles's dancing partner, “Take her back to the restaurant. Get somebody to call the sheriff's department.”

He snapped out of his frozen state and stepped forward, pulling Nickles to her feet. Shock had sobered him up; it seemed to have turned her to jelly. He had to support her as they moved slowly along the dock.

Ripinsky was squatting down, trying to get a grip on the body. Reluctantly I went to help him. At first it floundered out of reach, then drifted back. Together we grasped it, hauled it onto the dock. I recoiled as it hit the planks.

My eyes met Ripinsky's. His were as black and glittering as the water. He hesitated, then took hold of the corpse's shoulder and heaved it onto its back.

The man's face stared up at us, blank with death. It was round, handsome in a pug-nosed way, and much too youthful for the abundance of white hair that was slicked to the skull and forehead. He couldn't have been in the water long; there was no odor or bloating. Two dark holes marred his pale shirtfront—the entry holes of small-caliber bullets.

I asked, “Do you know him?”

“I've never seen him before.”

Ripinsky squatted again and began going through the corpse's pockets. When he reached inside the tan jacket, he came up with a wallet. He stood, took matches from his own pocket, and handed them to me. I lit one and held it so he could examine the wallet's contents.

“Driver's license,” he said after a few seconds, “issued to Michael M. Erickson. Address in Barbary Park in San Francisco. Lots of plastic: American Express, Visa, Master Card, department stores. Blue Shield health plan I.D.”

“Have you ever heard of him?”

“No.” He continued to search the wallet.

The match I held burned my fingers. I dropped it into the water, lit another, and stared down at the dead man's face.

Michael M. Erickson. A San Franciscan, like me. Barbary Park was a newish residential development in the financial district—town houses perched atop a few floors of offices and shops and linked to the nearby Golden Gateway and Embarcadero Center by pedestrian walkways. Perhaps not a prestigious address by the standards of the city's social mavens, but an expensive one. Here in Vernon, Erickson was about as far from his usual milieu as he could get. As far from life as anyone gets …

I shuddered, feeling the sense of horror and futility that violent death brings.

Ripinsky whistled suddenly. Said, “Hel
lo!
”

I dragged my gaze away from the dead man. “What have you found?”

“Hidden pocket inside the cash compartment. Second set of ID.”

“Whose?”

He looked at me. In the instant before the match in my fingers went out, I saw his amazement.

“Ask and ye shall receive,” he said. “Meet Mr. Franklin Tarbeaux.”

The sheriff's detectives who came down from the Mono County seat at Bridgeport were Dwight Gifford and Kristen Lark. Gifford, a taciturn man in his mid-thirties who had the look of a bodybuilder, seemed to be compensating for premature baldness with his boar's-bristle mustache. Lark was younger—late twenties—and possessed of incredible nervous energy. Her slender frame was in constant restive motion; when she spoke she barely paused for breath. Her blond curls looked as if they were charged with static electricity; even the freckles across the bridge of her upturned nose appeared as if they might suddenly shift alignment. At first I thought the partners badly mismatched, but as I watched them work I realized they functioned exceptionally well together.

The man from the county medical examiner's office determined that Michael M. Erickson, a.k.a. Franklin Tarbeaux, had been shot twice in the chest at close range with a small-caliber weapon. He couldn't yet accurately estimate the time of death, but he did confirm that the body had not been in the lake very long. “And it didn't drift far, either,” he added. “There's not enough current, even at night when the wind kicks up.” While the lab crew set up floodlights on the dock, the two detectives, Ripinsky, and I pushed through the crowd that deputies were holding at bay on the balcony and went into the restaurant.

The band had taken an enforced break, and the dining-and-dancing section had emptied. The lounge was still full of drinkers who watched the proceedings below through the windows. The owner—Bob Zelda, a chubby little man who bore not the slightest resemblance to the exotic Fitzger-aldesque creature I'd vaguely imagined—had offered Lily Nickles and her dancing partner asylum in his office. Gifford went back there to question them, and Ripinsky and I talked with Lark at a table in a corner of the dining room.

She asked good questions, homing in on the salient facts with precision; in an interview situation, she managed to restrain her natural restiveness, and she listened well, catching nuances and probing when necessary. While Hy explained about the second set of I.D. the dead man carried and about Franklin Tarbeaux's connection to the Transpacific land deal, she took careful notes. Then she looked at me.

“You're here in a professional capacity?”

“Yes.”

“Working for who?”

“The Coalition for Environmental Preservation.” I went on to tell her about the events that had prompted Anne-Marie to ask me to come, plus what had happened since I'd been here.

“These break-ins,” Lark asked, “were they reported to us?”

“Not the one last night. Nothing was taken and, given the call to my office, it was obvious what the person was after.”

Hy said, “Deputies came out to my house, as well as to the Friends' and Coalition's trailers. I don't know about the lodge.”

Lark looked thoughtful, tapping her fingers on the table. “What I'm thinking,” she said after a moment, “is that this Erickson, or Tarbeaux, is connected with those. He also might have been the person with the off-road vehicle who was prowling around in the tufa. One of my deputies found a Bronco up the road a ways; papers show it was rented four days ago in Modesto under the Tarbeaux name.” She held up a hand before either of us could speak. “That's what I'm thinking—but there's a danger in that kind of reasoning.

“A county like this with a small population, you tend to want to blame what crime happens on outsiders, but that's not always a proper assumption. We've got a lot of wild territory here, mountains to desert, that attracts … well, weirdos. Folks like your prospector woman in there. Used-up hippies. Loners who have good reasons for wanting to be left alone. So while I'd like to think this Erickson/Tarbeaux is our perp because he's from San Francisco where things like that happen all the time, I've got enough sense to know that's only because it would make my job easier.”

Ripinsky and I nodded.

“Well,” Lark added, shutting her notebook, “we'll know more about that when we compare the victim's prints with any that were lifted from the house and the trailers—the lodge, too, if we were called. Is there anything else I should know?”

I said, “Not that I can think of, Hy?”

He shook his head.

Lark glanced at the doorway; Gifford was emerging from the lounge. She stood. “You remember anything, give one of us a call.”

I said, “I'm planning to drive back to San Francisco by way of Nevada on Monday, so I'll have to pass through Bridgeport. Okay to stop in and see what you've got?”

“Okay by me. I hope you're not planning to follow up on this yourself.”

“Only as far as it affects my case—and then only with your permission.”

She shrugged. “You got it, as long as you keep us posted.”

Gifford came up behind her, stroking his bristly mustache. “Either of you a friend of Ms. Nickles?”

Hy and I exchanged glances.

“The reason I ask, the boyfriend—if that's what he is—took off, and she's in bad shape. Not drunk so much as upset, but I still wouldn't want her driving.”

I said, “We'll take care of her.”

As the two of them left the room, Hy grabbed my arm.
“We'll
take care of her?”

“It'll probably require both of us.”

“Probably.” He sighed. “What are we going to do with her? We can't just dump her off at her place in Stone Valley.”

I thought of the awful loneliness of the valley night. “God, no. Tell you what—Rose Wittington seems like a motherly soul. Let's take Lily to the lodge.”

Ripinsky grinned. “Rose'll probably mother her to death. Gives me a kind of perverse pleasure. We ought to go over there anyway, brief Anne-Marie and Ned on what's happened.” He started for the door, then paused. “One thing, though: you take Lily in your car. Half the time she hates my guts; no telling what she'd do to me if I drove her.”