Q is for QUARRY Page 12

  “He wasn’t wearing nothing,” William said. “You make it sound like he was nude when he was no such thing.”

  She reached in her tote and pulled out a glossy calendar filled with color photographs. “I heve right here. You take a look and see for yourself. The mans got no clothes. Only underpents.” She flipped to the month of February and turned the page so I could see it. The candid shot showed Henry on the upper deck, leaning against the rail with his back to the ocean. A distant palm-dotted island was visible to his right. He wore red shorts, no shoes, a white dress shirt hanging loose and unbuttoned down the front. A captain’s hat was tilted forward at an angle. His grin was unaffected, showing a flash of white teeth against the tan of his face. The effect was rakish, the perfect combination of charisma and sex appeal. Henry, in the kitchen with us, blushed from ear to ear.

  “Ooo, I love this. I have to have a copy of my own,” I said.

  “Is yours. You keep. I heve more for ladies in the neighborhood.”

  “Thanks.” I flipped through the pages, checking the other entrants.

  While some of the photographs showed moderately attractive men – all octogenarians, by the look – not one was as dashing as Henry. I laughed with pleasure. “I never knew you were so photogenic. No wonder the phone’s ringing. You look fabulous.”

  “The phone’s not ringing,” he said.

  At that moment, the phone did, in fact, ring.

  “I get,” Rosie said, heaving herself to her feet.

  “No, you won’t. That’s what machines are for.”

  We waited out the three additional rings until Henry’s answering machine kicked in. From the other room, we heard the outgoing message, followed by the usual beep. “Henry? This is Bella, ‘ma petite belle.’ Remember me? I promised I’d call you so here I am. I just wanted to say how disappointed I was we didn’t have a chance to visit again before you left the ship. You bad boy. When you have a chance, you can reach me at… “

  Dinner was punctuated by two additional calls, which Henry ignored. He kept his eyes on his plate, cutting his chicken with a concentration he rarely lavished on his food. The third time the phone rang, he left the table and went into the living room, where he turned off the ringer and lowered the volume on the answering machine. None of us said a word, but Rosie and William exchanged a look as she smirked at her plate. I could see her shoulders shake, though she pretended to cough, a napkin pressed to her lips.

  “It’s not funny,” Henry snapped.

  Chapter 9

  *

  With Stacey back in the hospital for a second time in five days, I volunteered to take the Monday interview with Lorenzo Rickman. Dolan had offered to do it, but I knew he was eager to be on hand when the doctors talked to Stacey about this latest round of tests. As it turned out, my chat with Rickman was brief and unproductive. We stood in the service bay of an import repair shop that smelled of gasoline fumes, motor oil, and new tires. The floor, work benches, and all available countertops were littered with a jumble of tools and equipment, parts, manuals, blackened spark plugs, cracked cylinder heads, valves, fan belts, drive shafts, alternators, and exhaust manifolds.

  Rickman was in his late thirties with an angular face and a neck that appeared too thin to hold his head upright. His dark hair was receding, a few feathers combed down on his forehead to form a fringe of sparse bangs. A beard, closely trimmed, ran along the line of his jaw, and he stroked it reflexively with fingers blackened by oil. His uniform probably wasn’t any different than the outfits he’d worn in prison, except for the machine-embroidered name above his left shirt pocket. He made a show of being cooperative, but he had no memory of incarceration with Frankie Miracle.

  He shook his head. “Can’t help. Name doesn’t ring a bell. I was only in jail the one night. First thing the next morning, a friend of mine bailed me out, but only after I promised to join AA. I’ve been on the wagon-well, more or less ever since.” He smiled briefly while he smoothed his hair toward his forehead. “I still get in trouble with the law, but at least I’m clean and sober – condition of my parole. Right now, I do, you know, five, six meetings a week. Not that I like hanging out with dudes hyped up on coffee and cigarettes, but it sure beats incarceration.” He put his hands in his back pockets and then changed his mind and crossed his arms, fingers drifting back to his beard, which he stroked with his thumb.

  “What about the other guys in the cell that night? You remember anything about them?”

  “Nope. Sorry. I was eighteen years old, drunk and stoned the night they picked me up. My second or third blackout, I forget which. Third, I think. I could’ve been in with Charlie Manson and you couldn’t prove it by me.”

  I tried priming the pump, claiming we had a witness who was there at the same time and said Frankie’d bragged about a killing. This generated no response. I handed him the packet of photographs, which he shuffled through carelessly. He shook his head and handed them back. “Look like a bunch of thugs.”

  I tucked the photos in my bag. “I know this is none of my business, but what’d you do to warrant a prison sentence?”

  His fingers became still and then he pulled at a thatch of beard growing under his chin. “What makes you ask?”

  “No reason. I’m just curious.”

  “I don’t really care to say.”

  “Ah. My fault. Sorry. It’s your business, of course. I didn’t mean to step on your toes.” I gave him my card, offering the standard line. “Thanks for your time. If you think of anything, will you let us know?”

  “Sure.”

  “Can I ask one more thing? You think you’re out for good?”

  He considered my question and then smiled to himself. “I doubt it.”

  I stopped off at the hospital on my way into town. Stacey was back on 6 Central, in another private room located down the hall from the room he’d had before. When I glanced in, his bed was empty. Beside it, a wide window looked out on a view of the ocean, maybe two miles away, across the shaggy treetops. An occasional glimpse of a red-tile roof punctuated the thick expanse of green. The room was airy; spacious enough to accommodate a forty-eight-inch round table and four captain’s chairs, where I found Dolan sitting with a tattered copy of Road & Track.

  “Oh, hi. Where’s Stace?”

  “In X-ray. He should be back in a bit.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Don’t know yet. What’d Rickman say?”

  “Regrettably, not much.” I filled him in on my conversation. “I think we can safely write him off. Probably Pudgie as well. He’s cagey, but dumb, and I don’t trust the combination. So now what?”

  Dolan set his magazine aside. He wore a dark blue windbreaker and a Dodgers baseball cap. “Stacey never got a chance to call Joe Mandel to see if he can lay hands on Jane Doe’s effects. Soon as he’s got a minute, he’s going to do that. Meantime, we thought you might have a phone chat with this C. K. Vogel fellow that Arne was talking about. You might try Directory Assistance –”

  “Dolan, this is what I do for a living.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry.”

  “I’ll go down to the lobby and find a public phone. You want anything while I’m there?”

  “I don’t suppose they sell Camels in the gift shop.”

  “I don’t suppose they do.” When I got to the door, I hesitated. “What was Rickman in prison for?”

  Lieutenant Dolan picked up his magazine and wet his index finger. He turned the page, paying close attention to a full-page ad for a fuel additive that required the presence of a blonde in a bathing suit. “Well, let’s see. Molestation, sodomy, oral copulation, lewd and lascivious acts with a child. I’m surprised he wasn’t killed in prison. As a rule, inmates don’t have a lot of tolerance for guys like that.”

  Geez, I’d been picturing a bit of B&E. I took the elevator down and made my way through the maze of corridors to the lobby. I found a bank of public phone kiosks outside the front entrance, sheltered by a marquee that ext
ended from the lobby door to the passenger loading ramp. While I looked on, a young nurse’s aide helped a new mother out of a wheelchair and into a waiting van.

  I couldn’t see the baby’s face, but the bundle wasn’t much bigger than a loaf of bread. I scrounged around in the bottom of my bag and came’ up with a handful of coins. Lompoc was in the same area code as Santa Teresa, so I knew it wasn’t going to require much. I dialed directory , assistance while the young husband loaded flower arrangements into the back of the van, along with a cluster of bobbing pink and silver helium balloons. I got C. K. Vogel’s number and made a note of it before I dialed. When he picked up on his end, I identified myself. Judging from the sound of his voice, he was in his eighties and possibly in the midst of an afternoon nap. I said, “Sorry to disturb you.”

  “No, no. Don’t worry about that. Arne called on Friday and said someone might be in touch. You want to know about the van I saw, is that correct?”

  “Yes, sir. It is.”

  “Tell you the truth, I didn’t say much at the time. I had a brother-in-law worked for the Sheriff’s Department – this was my sister Madge’s husband, fella named Melvin Galloway. He’s since died. Two of us never did get along. He’s a damn know-it-all. Had an opinion about everything and hear him tell it, he’s always right. I couldn’t abide the man. Might not sound Christian, but it’s the truth. I told him twice about that van, but he pooh-poohed the idea, said if he stopped to track down every half-assed theory the John Q. Public volunteered, he wouldn’t get anything else done. Not that he did much to begin with. He’s the laziest son of a gun I ever came across. After ‘while, I figured I’d done what I could and said to hell with him. What struck me afterward was not the hippie van so much as that other car I saw. Snappy-looking red convertible with Arizona plates.”

  “Arne mentioned the red car, but I got the impression it was the van you thought was suspicious. Did I get that wrong?”

  “No, ma’am. I noticed the van on account of the paint job-peace symbols and that sort, in the wildest colors imaginable. It was parked right there in that fork in the road when I first became aware of it.”

  “I know the location.”

  “Reason the other car caught my attention was because I later read in the paper they recovered a stolen car matching that description.”

  “You remember the make?”

  “I don’t, but I saw that car on three occasions. First time near the quarry, just a little piece down the road, and the second time over town. I was driving to the doctor’s office to have a cyst removed and passed the wrecker pulling it up out of the ravine, all banged up. Looked like whoever took the car let the handbrake loose and pushed it down a hill into a bunch of brush. Must have hit a goodly number of trees on the way, judging from all the scratches and dents. Wasn’t spotted for a week, but the fella where I take my car for repairs was the one the Sheriffs Department called when they needed it towed. I saw it at the repair shop the next day when I was having work done on my carburetor. That was the third time. Never saw it again after that.”

  “I remember mention of a stolen car. Was there anybody in it when you saw it the first time?”

  “No, ma’am. It was setting on the side of the road just inside the entrance to your grandma’s property. Top down, sun beating hard on those fine black leather seats. I slowed as I went by because I wondered if someone’d had engine trouble and had wandered off to get help. I didn’t see a note on the windshield so I drove on. Next time I passed, the car was gone.”

  “Did you tell Melvin about that one?”

  “I told Madge and she told him, but that’s the last I heard. I didn’t want to force my observations on a fella doesn’t want to hear. He’d have pooh-poohed that, too. Trouble with Melvin is he didn’t believe a thing unless it come from him. He’s the type if he didn’t know something, he made it up. H he didn’t feel like doing something, he claimed he did it anyway. You couldn’t pin the man down. Ask him a question, he’d act like he’d been accused of negligence.”

  “Sounds like a pain.”

  “Yes, he was. Madge, too.”

  “Well. I appreciate the information. I’ll mention this to the guys and see if it’s something they want to pursue.” Inwardly, I was still hung up on the fact that he’d mentioned my “grandma.” I never thought of Grand that way. I had a grandmother. How bizarre.

  As though reading my mind, he said, “I knew your mama once upon a time.”

  “Really.”

  “Yes ma’am. You know Arne Johanson worked for the Kinseys from the age of seventeen. He was sweet on her himself, but Rita wouldn’t give him the time of day. He figured it’s because he was too old for her and then she up and marries your dad, the same age as him. He got his nose out of joint, I can tell you that. I told him don’t be ridiculous. In the first place, she was never going to take up with a cowpoke. Second place, she’d rather die than get stuck where she is. She was wild, that one, and pretty as they come. Restless as all get out. She’d have taken up with anyone to get off the ranch.”

  “That’s flattering,” I said. In truth, this was the first concrete image I’d ever had of her. In that careless vignette, he’d captured the entire story of her life. My cousins, Liza and Tasha, had spoken of her in ways that seemed larger than life. She’d taken on the aura of family myth, a symbol of that legendary clash of wills. “I understand she and my grandmother didn’t get along.”

  “Oh, they tangled, those two. Rita was Cornelia’s pride and joy. I felt sorry for her in a way…”

  “Who, my mother?”

  “Your grandma. She liked to maintain she didn’t have a favorite among the five girls, but Rita was her firstborn and Cornelia doted on her. You know the story, I suppose.”

  “Well, sure. I heard it once,” I said, lying through my teeth. Somehow gossip seems less pernicious if the person telling the tale thinks it’s one you’ve already heard.

  “Cornelia married Burton Kinsey when she was seventeen, exactly half his age. That’s one more reason she didn’t want Rita to marry young like she did. She lost three babies in a row, all of them boys and not a one went to term. Rita was the first of her children to survive. Cornelia’s boys were stillborn. Only the girls made it through alive.”

  “What was that about?”

  “I don’t think the doctors determined the cause. In those days, medicine was largely good luck and guesswork. People died of diabetes until those two fellows discovered insulin in 1923. Folks died of anemia, too, until liver therapy came along in 1934. Think of it. Eating liver was a cure. We forget things like that; forget how ignorant we were and how much we’ve learned.” He stopped to clear his throat. “Well, now. I didn’t mean to run on at the mouth. Trouble with getting old is you lose all the people you tell your stories to. You let me know if that red car turns out to be anything. I’d like to have a laugh at Melvin’s expense after all these years.”

  “Thanks for your time. I’ll be in touch.” I replaced the handset in the cradle and headed for the elevator, which I took to 6 Central. The doors slid open and I stepped off just as Dolan approached, having exited Stacey’s room. He took a seat on a couch positioned under a window. The area wasn’t designated as a waiting room, but it probably served as a getaway for friends and family members who needed a break. He rose when he caught sight of me.

  “Don’t get up,” I said.

  “What are you doing out here? I thought you’d be down the hall with Stace.”

  Dolan sat down again on the couch. “The doctors are in there. Oncologist, radiologist, and another specialist nobody bothered to introduce.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Beats me. All three had on those long medical faces so the news’ couldn’t be good. How’d the phone call go? Did you talk to Vogel?” He scooted over on the couch to make room for me. “Here. Have a seat.”

  I perched on the near arm and propped my hand on the back of the couch. “For starters, in the small-world department
, it turns out C. K. Vogel was Melvin Galloway’s brother-in-law.” I went on, summarizing the information C.K.‘d given me about the red convertible. “He could be confused. Frankie’s car was red.”

  “I know, but he was very specific about it’s being a convertible with black leather seats.”

  “Let’s run that by Stacey and see what he says. It can’t hurt to check.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the three doctors emerge from Stacey’s room. I pointed in their direction as they rounded the far corner and disappeared. “Looks like they’re done. You want to go down and find out what they said?”

  “No. But I will.”

  I let Dolan take the lead as we entered Stacey’s room, thinking that if Stace was upset, I could ease out without calling undue attention to myself. He was in bed, having cranked up the head so he could see the view. He had his knit cap off and I was disconcerted by the sight of his bare head. His hair was wispy, a cross between duck down and baby fuzz, scarcely half an inch long. The watch cap had given him an air of manliness. Without it, he was just a sick old man with a scrawny neck and ears that protruded from the bony shell of his skull. He turned from the view with a smile that came close to merriment unless you knew him. “Never let it be said God doesn’t have a sense of humor.”

  Dolan said, “Uh-oh.”

  “It’s really not too bad. No meningioma or neurofibroma; in other words, there’re no metastatic tumors along my spine. The business with my back’s benign. Probably a herniated disc, which is the result of degenerative changes not uncommon in a man my age. I’m quoting the doc here just in case you think I’ve started talking strange. The treatment of choice is bed rest, which is something I’m already well acquainted with. Analgesics, a mild tranquilizer, possibly Valium as you suggested. That doesn’t work, they go to plan B, which they haven’t laid out as yet. I’m guessing surgery, but they haven’t actually said as much. Doctor did suggest exercises to strengthen my back once the pain subsides. Fair enough. Unfortunately, the very same X-ray that showed my back problem’s no more than a pain in the ass also revealed a lesion. I’m supposed to be in remission, free and clear.”