D is for DEADBEAT Page 4

  Quickly, I prayed this wasn’t wife number three. I tried the optimistic approach. “John Daggett’s daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  She was one of those icy blondes, with skin as finely textured as a percale bedsheet, tall, substantially built, with short coarse hair fanning straight back from her face. She had high cheekbones, a delicate brow, and her father’s piercing gaze. Her right eye was green, her left eye blue. I’d seen a white cat like that once and it had had the same disconcerting effect. She was wearing a gray wool business suit and a prim, high-necked white blouse with a froth of lace at the throat. Her heels were a burgundy leather and matched her shoulder bag. She looked like an attorney or a stockbroker, someone accustomed to power.

  “Come on in,” I said, “I was trying to figure out how to get in touch with him. I take it your mother told you I stopped by.”

  I was making small talk. She wasn’t having any of it. She sat down, turning those riveting eyes on me as I moved around to my side of the desk and took a seat. I thought of offering her coffee, but I really didn’t want her to stay that long. Even the air around her seemed chilly and I didn’t like the way she looked at me. I rocked back in my swivel chair. “What can I do for you?”

  “I want to know why you’re looking for my father.”

  I shrugged, underplaying it, sticking to the story I’d started with. “I’m not really. I’m looking for a friend of his.”

  “Why weren’t we told Daddy was out of prison? My mother’s in a state of collapse. We had to call the doctor and have her sedated.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  Barbara Daggett crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt, her movements agitated. “Sorry? You don’t know what this has done to her. She was just beginning to feel safe. Now we find out he’s in town somewhere and she’s very upset. I don’t understand what’s going on.”

  “Miss Daggett, I’m not a parole officer,” I said. “I don’t know when he got out or why nobody notified you. Your mother’s problems didn’t start yesterday.”

  A bit of color came to her cheeks. “That’s true. Her problems started the day she married him. He’s ruined her life. He’s ruined life for all of us.”

  “Are you referring to his drinking?”

  She brushed right over that. “I want to know where he’s staying. I have to talk to him.”

  “At the moment, I have no idea where he is. If I find him, I’ll tell him you’re interested. That’s the best I can do.”

  “My uncle tells me you saw him on Saturday.”

  “Only briefly.”

  “What was he doing in town?”

  “We didn’t discuss that,” I said.

  “But what did you talk about? What possible business could he have had with a private detective?”

  I had no intention of giving her information, so I tried her technique and ignored the question.

  I pulled a legal pad over and picked up a pen. “Is there a number where you can be reached?”

  She opened her handbag and took out a business card which she passed across the desk to me. Her office address was three blocks away on State and her title indicated that she was chairman and chief executive officer of a company called FMS.

  As if in response to a question, she said, “I develop financial management software systems for manufacturing firms. That’s my office number. I’m not listed in the book. If you need to reach me at home, this is the number.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I remarked. “What’s your background?”

  “I have a math and chemistry degree from Stanford and a double masters in computer sciences and engineering from USC.”

  I felt my brows lift appreciatively. I couldn’t see any evidence that Daggett had ruined her life, but I kept the observation to myself. There was clearly more to Barbara Daggett than her professional status indicated. Maybe she was one of those women who succeeds in business and fails in relationships with men. As I’d been accused of that myself, I decided not to make a judgment. Where is it written that being part of a couple is a measure of anything?

  She glanced at her watch and stood up. “I have an appointment. Please let me know if you hear from him.”

  “May I ask what you want with him?”

  “I’ve been urging Mother to file for divorce, but so far she’s refused. Maybe I can persuade him instead.”

  “I’m surprised she didn’t divorce him years ago.”

  Her smile was cold. “She says she married him ‘for better or for worse.’ To date, there hasn’t been any ‘better.’ Maybe she’s hoping for a taste of that before she gives up.”

  “What about his imprisonment? What was that for?”

  Something flickered in her face and I thought at first she wouldn’t answer me. “Vehicular manslaughter,” she said, finally. “He was drunk and there was an accident. Five people were killed, two of them kids.”

  I couldn’t think of a response and she didn’t seem to expect one. She stood up, closed the conversation with a perfunctory handshake, and then she was gone. I could hear her high heels tapping away down the corridor.

  Chapter 5

  *

  By the time I closed up the office and got down to my car, the clouds overhead looked like dark gray vacuum cleaner fluff and the rain had begun to splatter the sidewalk with polka dots. I stuck Daggett’s file on the passenger seat and backed out of my space, turning right from the parking lot onto Cannon, and right again onto Chapel. Three blocks up, I made a stop, ducking into the supermarket to pick up milk, Diet Pepsi, bread, eggs, and toilet paper. I was into my siege mentality, looking forward to pulling up the drawbridge and waiting out the rain. With luck, I wouldn’t have to go out for days.

  The phone was ringing as I let myself in. I put the grocery bag on the counter and snatched up the receiver.

  “God, I was just about to give up,” Jonah said. “I tried the office, but all I got was your answering machine.”

  “I closed up for the day. I can work at home if I’m in the mood, which I’m not. Have you seen the rain?”

  “Rain? Oh yeah, so there is. I haven’t even looked out the window since I got in. God, that’s great,” he said. “Listen, I have some of the information you’re looking for and the rest will have to wait. Woody’s got a priority request and I had to back off. I’m working tomorrow so I can pick it up then.”

  “You’re working Saturday?”

  “I’m filling in for Sobel. My good deed for the week,” he said. “Got a pencil? Polo’s the one I got a line on.”

  He rattled out Billy Polo’s age, date of birth, height, weight, hair and eye color, his a.k.a., and a hasty rundown of his record, all of which I noted automatically. He’d picked up the name of Billy’s parole officer, but the guy was out of the office and wouldn’t be available until Monday afternoon.

  “Thanks. In the meantime, I’m nosing around on my own,” I said. “I bet I’ll get a line on him before you do.” He laughed and hung up.

  I put groceries away and then sat down at my desk, hauling out the little portable Smith-Corona I keep in the knee hole. I consigned the data Jonah’d given me to index cards and then sat and stared at it. Billy Polo, born William Polokowski, was thirty years old, five-foot-eight, a hundred and sixty pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, no scars, tattoos, or “observable physical oddities.” His rap sheet sounded like a pop quiz on the California Penal Code, with arrests that ranged from misdemeanors to felonies. Assault, forgery, receiving stolen property, grand theft, narcotics violations. Once he was even convicted of “injuring a public jail,” a misdemeanor in this state. Had this occurred in the course of an escape attempt, the charge would have been bumped up to a felony. As it was, he’d probably been caught scratching naughty words on the jail house walls. A real champ, this one.

  Apparently, Billy Polo was pretty shiftless when it came to breaking the law and had never even settled on an area of expertise. He’d been arrested sixteen times, with nine convict
ions, two acquittals, five dismissals. Twice, he’d been put on probation, but nothing seemed to have affected the nature of his behavior, which appeared nearly pathological in its thrust. The man was determined to screw up. Since the age of eighteen, he’d spent an accumulated nine years in jail. No telling what his juvenile record looked like. I assumed his acquaintance with John Daggett dated from his latest offense, an armed robbery conviction, for which he’d served two years and ten months at the California Men’s Colony at San Luis Obispo, a medium security facility about ninety miles north of Santa Teresa.

  I pulled out the telephone book again and checked for a listing under the name Polokowski. Nothing. God, why can’t anything be simple in this business? Oh well. I wasn’t going to worry about it for the moment.

  By now, I could hear the rain tapping on the glass-enclosed breezeway that connects my place to Henry Pitt’s house. He’s my landlord and has been for nearly two years. In dry weather, he places an old Shaker cradle out there, filled with rising bread. When the sun is out, the space is like a solar oven, warm and sheltered, dough puffing up above the rim of the cradle like a feather pillow. He can proof twenty loaves at a time, then bake them in the big industrial-sized oven he had installed when he retired from commercial baking. Now he trades fresh bread and pastries for services in the neighborhood and stretches his Social Security payments by clipping coupons avidly. He picks up additional income constructing crossword puzzles which he sells to a couple of those pint-sized “magazines” you can purchase in a supermarket checkout line. Henry Pitts is eighty-one years old and everyone knows I’m half in love with him.

  I considered popping over to see him, but even the fifty-foot walk seemed like too much to deal with in the wet. I put some tea water on and picked up my book, stretching out on the sofa with a quilt pulled over me. And that’s how I spent the rest of the day.

  During the night, the rain escalated and I woke up twice to hear it lashing at the windows. It sounded like somebody spraying the side of the place with a hose. At intervals, thunder rumbled in the distance and my windows flickered with blue light, tree branches illuminated briefly before the room went black again. It was clear I’d have to cancel my 6:00 A.M. run, an obligatory day off, so I burrowed into the depths of my quilt like a little animal, delighted at the idea of sleeping late.

  I woke at 8:00, showered, dressed, and fixed myself a soft-boiled egg on toast with lots of Lawry’s Seasoned Salt. I’m not going to give up salt. I don’t care what they say.

  Jonah called as I was washing my plate. He said, “Hey, guess what? Your friend Daggett showed.”

  I tucked the receiver into the crook of my neck, turning off the water and drying my hands. “What happened? Did he get picked up?”

  “More or less. A scruffy drifter spotted him face down in the surf this morning, tangled up in a fishing net. A skiff washed ashore about two hundred yards away. We’re pretty sure it connects.”

  “He died last night?”

  “Looks like it. The coroner estimates he went into the water sometime between midnight and five A.M. We don’t have a determination yet on the cause and manner of death. We’ll know more after the autopsy’s done, of course.”

  “How’d you find out it was him?”

  “Fingerprints. He was over at the morgue listed as a John Doe until we ran the computer check. You want to take a look?”

  “I’ll be right there. What about next of kin? Have they been notified?”

  “Yeah, the beat officer went over as soon as we made the I.D. You know the family?”

  “Not well, but we’ve met. I wouldn’t want to be quoted on this, but I think you’ll find out he’s a bigamist. There’s a woman down in L.A. who also claims she’s married to him.”

  “Cute. You better come talk to us when you leave St. Terry’s,” he said and hung up.

  The Santa Teresa Police Department doesn’t really have a morgue of its own. There’s a coroner-sheriff, an elected officer in this county, but the actual forensic work is contracted out among various pathologists in the tri-county area. The morgue space itself is divided between Santa Teresa Hospital (commonly referred to as St. Terry’s) and the former County General Hospital facility on the frontage road off 101. Daggett was apparently at St. Terry’s, which was where I headed as soon as I’d rounded up my slicker, an umbrella, and my handbag.

  The visitors’ lot at the hospital was half empty. It was Saturday and doctors would probably be making rounds later in the day. The sky was thick with clouds and, high up, I could see the wind whipping through like a fan, blowing white mist across the gray. The pavement was littered with small branches, leaves plastered flat against the ground. Puddles had formed everywhere, pockmarked by the steady rainfall. I parked as close to the rear entrance as I could and then locked my car and made a dash for it.

  “Kinsey!”

  I turned as I reached the shelter of the building. Barbara Daggett hurried toward me from the far side of the lot, her umbrella tilted against the slant of the rain. She was wearing a raincoat and spike-heeled boots, her white-blonde hair forming a halo around her face. I held the door open for her and we ducked into the foyer.

  “You heard about my father?”

  “That’s why I’m here. Do you know how it happened?”

  “Not really. Uncle Eugene called me at eight-fifteen. I guess they tried to notify Mother and he interceded. The doctor has her so doped up it doesn’t make any sense to tell her yet. He’s worried about how she’ll take it, as unstable as she is.”

  “Is your uncle coming down?”

  She shook her head. “I said I’d do it. There’s no doubt it’s Daddy, but somebody has to sign for the body so the mortuary can come pick it up. Of course, they’ll autopsy first. How did you find out?”

  “Through a cop I know. I’d told him I was trying to get a line on your father, so he called me when they got a match on the fingerprints. Did you manage to locate him yesterday?”

  “No, but it’s clear someone did.” She closed her umbrella and gave it a shake, then glanced at me. “Frankly, I’m assuming somebody killed him.”

  “Let’s not be too quick off the mark,” I said, though privately, I agreed.

  The two of us moved through the inner door and into the corridor. The air was warmer here and smelled of latex paint.

  “I want you to look into it for me, in any event,” she said.

  “Hey, listen. That’s what the police are for. I don’t have the scope for that. Why don’t you wait and see what they have to say first?”

  She studied me briefly and then moved on. “They don’t give a damn what happened to him. Why would they care? He was a drunken bum.”

  “Oh come on. Cops don’t have to care,” I said. “If it’s homicide, they have a job to do and they’ll do it well.”

  When we reached the autopsy room, I knocked and a young black morgue attendant came out, dressed in surgical greens. His name tag indicated that his name was Hall Ingraham. He was lean, his skin the color of pecan wood with a high-gloss finish. His hair was cropped close and gave him the look of a piece of sculpture, his elongated face nearly stylized in its perfection.

  “This is Barbara Daggett,” I said.

  He looked in her direction without meeting her eyes. “You can wait right down here,” he said. He moved two doors down and we followed, pausing politely while he unlocked a viewing room and ushered us in.

  “It’ll be just a minute,” he said.

  He disappeared and we took a seat. The room was small, maybe nine by nine, with four blue molded-plastic chairs hooked together at the base, a low wooden table covered with old magazines, and a television screen affixed, at an angle, up in one corner of the room. I saw her gaze flick to it.

  “Closed circuit,” I said. “They’ll show him up there.”

  She picked up a magazine and began to flip through it distractedly. “You never really told me why he hired you,” she said. An ad for pantyhose had apparently caught her
eye and she studied it as if my reply were of no particular concern.

  I couldn’t think of a reason not to tell her at this point, but I noticed that I censored myself to some extent, a habit of long standing. I like to hold something back. Once information is out, it can’t be recalled so it’s better to exercise caution before you flap your mouth. “He wanted me to find a kid named Tony Gahan,” I said.

  That remarkable two-toned gaze came up to meet mine and I found myself trying to decide which eye color I preferred. The green was more unusual, but the blue was clear and stark. The two together presented a contradiction, like the signal at a street corner, flashing Walk and Don’t Walk simultaneously.

  “You know him?” I asked.

  “His parents and a younger sister were the ones killed in the accident, along with two other people in the car with them. What did Daddy want with him?”

  “He said Tony Gahan helped him once when he was on the run from the cops. He wanted to thank him.”

  Her look was incredulous. “But that’s bullshit!”

  “So I gather,” I said.

  She might have pressed for more information, but the television screen flashed with snow at that moment and then flipped over to a closeup of John Daggett. He was lying on a gurney, a sheet neatly pulled up to his neck. He had the blank, plastic look that death sometimes brings, as if the human face were no more than an empty page on which the lines of emotion and experience are transcribed and then erased. He looked closer to twenty years old than fifty-five, with a stubble of beard and hair carelessly arranged. His face was unmarked.

  Barbara stared at him, her lips parting, her face diffused with pink. Tears rose in her eyes and hung there, captured in the well of her lower lids. I looked away from her, unwilling to intrude any more than I had to. The morgue attendant’s voice reached us through the intercom.

  “Let me know when you’re done.”

  Barbara turned away abruptly.

  “Thank you. That’s fine,” I called. The television screen went dark.

  Moments later, there was a tap at the door and he reappeared with a sealed manila envelope and a clipboard in hand.