Die For Me Page 16

  “Do you think he’s helping her?”

  “I don’t know. But I think he’s being pretty pompous about it all. I mean, what is he, an artist or a psychiatrist? That’s a very complicated little problem your lady friend has. A lot of cop families go through that sort of thing. I think it would take somebody very highly trained to try getting inside of her head and find the nooks and crannies that create the problem. I don’t think Little Bob back there has that kind of background or knowledge.”

  I had to laugh. “Little Bob. I love it.”

  But that was the last laugh either of us had for some while. The mood at the Whitley house was deadly somber. The Whitleys lived off a road that ran back into the coastal hills behind Barracks Cove. George Whitley was a tall, quiet-spoken man nearing his fifties. He looked like he was carrying a lot of old scars around inside, as if it had been his own brother who had been killed and buried up in Jack London State Park. He didn’t want to let us in at first. He said his wife wasn’t in any shape to speak with anybody.

  Rachel was patient and understanding with him. She also made it very plain that we wouldn’t be leaving until we had a chance to talk to her.

  “I’m going to leave most of this to you,” I told Rachel, while Whitley went in to warn his wife she had company.

  “That’s all right with me, but Maribeth said she saw you talking with somebody up here.”

  “I’ve already talked to somebody up here. Allison and Little Bob. That’s enough talking on my part.”

  Ellen Whitley was a much younger woman than her husband. She was a small figure wearing a bathrobe, sitting up in her bed with pillows propped up behind her. There was a lot of torment on her face and she had a wad of paper tissues in her hand she used to dab at her eyes.

  Rachel introduced us and promised we wouldn’t stay long. Then she brought over a chair from a nearby dressing table and settled down in it alongside the bed. The room was small. I hung back in the doorway and looked around at prints of huge red chrysanthemums on the wallpaper. It made me think of funerals. George Whitley had wandered back to the front of the house and I heard the screen door slap shut.

  Rachel asked the Whitley woman about her brother, and she told us that Carl William James had been an electronics distributor back in a suburb of St. Louis. She said he traveled fairly regularly, and sometimes when he came to the West Coast he would manage a side trip to Barracks Cove. She said he had grown fond of the area and sold out his business in the Midwest and was planning to open a new operation in this area. There were other, family reasons for his move as well, she told us. She said her brother had had some business to conduct in San Francisco. That had been ten days back, she said. That had been the last she had seen of him.

  Ellen Whitley told us that her brother had been the only remaining, really close person in her life. The telling of the last time she had seen him seemed to punch a leak in whatever reservoir she had where she carried around old grief. She told us her parents had both died of cancer, three years apart. Lingering deaths, they had been. She talked about childhood friends who had died, and other relatives. She said she and her husband George had tried to have a child, but the infant had been stillborn, and their physician had recommended against her trying to bear another. She said the marriage with George was hanging by a thread, and he was looking around to see if he could get work down in Santa Rosa. They decided the time had come for them to separate.

  “We tried a second honeymoon, even,” she told Rachel. “At a guest ranch down south. The Horse Around Ranch they call it. That turned out to be a disaster. Things have gone downhill between us in the months since. That’s what got my brother to thinking about moving out here. We were close and he knew the problems I was having. He knew I could use some support.” She sobbed once. “Instead, it got him killed, coming out here.”

  Rachel got to her feet. “Just one other thing, Mrs. Whitley, then we’ll be going.” She reached into her handbag for a sheet of paper, unfolded it and handed it to Ellen Whitley.

  “I’d like to know if you recognize any of the names on this list. Besides your brother, I mean.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “They’re the other victims.”

  She glanced down it. “I think I recognize two of them, from the newspaper stories. That young boy, Donald McGuire, I’m sure I saw his name.”

  “But other than the newspaper stories or on television, do you think you ever met or knew any of these people?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  Rachel thanked her and we got out of there.

  “I wouldn’t look forward to doing much more of that,” I said, as we headed back south down the coast highway.

  “You talking about your girlfriend or Mrs. Whitley?”

  “Specifically, Mrs. Whitley.”

  Rachel grunted. “It isn’t a great deal of fun. The McGuire boy’s dad was even worse, for me at least. But back there with the Whitley woman I had that standoffish attitude you need. And I’m beginning to get just a little glimmer of something else in all this. There is something very pervasive going on here. Almost the shreds of a pattern we’ve been looking for.”

  “To do with what?”

  “If I knew that I’d feel I had my first real handle on things. I think we’re right at the edge of something. And I think when one of us in the department or you or Maribeth tumble to what it is, this thing is going to conclude very quickly. I don’t think it’s going to be drawn out.”

  We went back to our separate thoughts. “I certainly don’t see what we learned back there,” I said finally.

  “Not much on the surface,” Rachel agreed. “But I still had the feeling we were close to something when that woman started rambling on about all the people she’s known who’ve died.”

  I grunted. “That’s similar to what the woman who runs my office said to me last night.”

  Rachel glanced at me, then stared back at the road.

  “Sharon Rapler is her name. She’s the one who makes me and the attorneys I share offices with keep our eyes on the ball. She phoned the office last evening while I was there. We hadn’t seen each other for a few days. She asked if I wanted to talk about things, so I tried to tell her everything that had been going on. And then she focused in on the grief this is causing. I mean, you expect it among surviving friends and relatives. But she said, follow the grief and we’ll find the killer. That doesn’t sound all that different from what you were just saying.”

  “We’ll get it eventually,” Rachel said. “One of us will get it.”

  We had finished our Barracks Cove business in less time than I had thought it would take when we had driven north. It was just after four o’clock when we started back. Rachel was headed back to Santa Rosa, and when she stopped for gas I phoned Max Bolero down at the Sausalito seaplane base and asked if he wanted to make a couple of bucks ferrying me home from the Sonoma County Airport just outside of Santa Rosa. Max agreed to happily. He was a man with a normally morbid curiosity, and after picking me up at the airport he pumped me during the flight home about what they had been finding out about the bodies.

  It was dark by the time Max circled Richardson Bay and brought us in over the water from the west so that any obstruction in his landing path could be seen against the backdrop of town lights in the distance.

  Max waited until we were taxiing back down the bay toward the tie-down float before he let me know his morbid curiosity extended beyond the work I was doing. “Sounds like you and the lady cop are hitting it off pretty well.”

  “We seem to work okay together, and thank God for that,” I told him. “Very little else is going right.”

  After Max hosed tidal mudflat off the undercarriage of the plane he went in to close up the hanger office then drove me home. I didn’t bother going inside, but just threw the overnight bag into my car and drove on into San Francisco.

  Sharon had left me a note along with a little surprise that was typical of her. The note sa
id that when we had talked the night before, she had taped the conversation on a recorder she kept hooked up to her phone at home. Since then she had typed up a transcript of that conversation on her computer and left me a printout. It was, in effect, a summing up of everything I had learned up until that time. I read through the transcript she had left me, then went to the computer and awkwardly tapped out an account of developments since the talk with Sharon. When it was finished I made a printout and went over the two of them a couple of times, thinking about this and wondering about that. And then I thought some about Sharon’s advice the night before. Follow the grief and we’d find the killer.

  I phoned the Sonoma County Sheriff’s office in Santa Rosa and asked for Rachel. She wasn’t in and they wouldn’t give out her home telephone number, but they said they didn’t think she had gone directly home anyway after she left the office a half hour earlier.

  I asked if Sergeant Barry Smith was around, but they said he had gone home and left word not to be disturbed unless an emergency came up. I said that it wasn’t, but left word for Rachel to call me if she checked in. I left both home and office phone numbers.

  I hung up and thought a moment more, then stared down again at the printouts of events, and that was when a little something slipped into a different place in my mind.

  I got out the sheet of paper with names Barry Smith had given me, the one that listed not only homicide victims but also the people who had been closest to them. Parents. Lovers. And in Carl William James’ case, sister. I looked in the phone book and dialed 707-555-1212, directory assistance for Mendocino County. When I got the operator I asked for the number of George Whitley in Barracks Cove. When I had it I dialed it, and Whitley answered.

  “Mr. Whitley, my name’s Bragg. I’m an investigator who was with the woman detective your wife talked to this afternoon. I hate to disturb you again, but something very important has occurred to us, and your wife might be in a key position to help out. It might help us find her brother’s killer.”

  “Oh God, Mr. Bragg, I couldn’t ask her to come to the phone now.”

  “No, you don’t even have to do that. I want to read you a list of names. I would like you to copy them down, then take them in and see if your wife recognizes any of them.”

  “She said you showed her the names of the victims this afternoon.”

  “That was a different list, Mr. Whitley. Please. This could be very important.”

  Whitley sighed and muttered but finally agreed to do it. When I read off one of the names, Whitley said he thought he recognized it himself, but he continued with the list and then left the telephone. He was back a few moments later.

  “She recognized just one of the names, Mr. Bragg. The same one I thought I recognized. It’s a woman who was staying at a guest ranch down near Bodega Bay the same weekend we were there a few months back. We remembered her because she was so flashy looking. We asked somebody there at the ranch who she was. They said she ran a modeling agency in San Francisco. They said her name was Karen Ellis.”

  TWENTY

  It was decision time. I wanted to talk to the Ellis woman again, that night if possible, but I didn’t feel right about it without having somebody from the Sonoma sheriff’s office with me. I had no business playing catch the killer, but at the same time I couldn’t have told Rachel or Smith what made me feel the woman might have a bigger role in things than we thought. It was more than a hunch but less than a certainty.

  I dialed the home number that her agency receptionist had given me. She had an answering machine on the line. I left my name and number, told her I was at the office and said I would like to talk to her again, that night if possible. Then I hung up and wondered just what I would talk about if she called back. Nancy Dobbs, of course, but how to go about it? It was my day for asking myself that one. And the next thing I knew any thoughts of Nancy Dobbs and Karen Ellis blew out the window and I found myself thinking about Allison France and the man Rachel called Little Bob up in Barracks Cove.

  There had to have been a better way to handle that scene earlier in the day. There had been too many people around for one thing. Allison and I had had intimate conversations in days gone by and our conversation that day should have been intimate, not conducted in a roomful of people. I should have grabbed Little Bob by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his pants and hustled him outside, and I should have asked Rachel to wait out in the car for me while Allison and I sat down like two grown adults and talked. I went over in my mind how it might have gone, how I wished it had gone. It was a pretty long conversation.

  The sound of somebody tapping at the glass door in the outer office brought me up short. I went out and unlocked the door and there was Karen Ellis, arms akimbo, small fists planted at the sides of a tan raincoat she was wearing, a black beret on her blonde head and a serious expression on her face.

  “You look as if you just stepped out of a spy novel,” I told her, ushering her inside.

  “It is going to rain some more out there, I can feel it. I was at the office. Just before leaving I call the answering machine at home. There is the voice of Bragg telling me he wants to talk and he is at the office. My own office is not far from here. So here I am.” Her European accent was a little more pronounced than it had been the night before.

  “I wish everybody I left messages for were as prompt,” I told her, leading her through the reception area and into my office. I indicated a chair for her to sit in and went back around the desk.

  It occurred to me I should have been thinking about Nancy and what I was going to ask Karen instead of mooning around about Allison, but then maybe it was better this way, to just wing it.

  Karen looked a little uncomfortable, staring around at the bookcase and maps on the wall and clutter on the desk. I glanced at her pale long legs beneath the skirt of her raincoat. I got up from the chair.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking. Can I hang up your coat for you?”

  “No, thank you. I am a little cold, I think. This is a cold little office you have.”

  “I can get an electric heater they keep out in the reception area.”

  “It is not what I mean. This is an uncomfortable office. Don’t you have somewhere nicer we can talk?”

  “There’s a client conference room across the way the attorneys use. We could go over there, I guess. As a matter of fact, they even have a bar there.”

  She was on her feet in a second. “That sounds better. If I had known you worked in such a little place I would have phoned and invited you to my own office.”

  “I don’t spend that much time here.”

  We crossed to the conference room and I switched on lamps before going over to the bar. Karen Ellis settled down in one corner of the black leather sofa and tucked her legs beneath her.

  “This is better,” she told me.

  “Good. What would you like to drink?”

  “Some Scotch, please. With some soda.”

  I mixed and carried the drink across to her and pulled over one of the red padded chairs from the conference table.

  “Aren’t you having anything to drink?”

  “Not right now. Too many things on my mind.”

  “Then this is a business talk we are having.”

  “Yes. I’d like to know a little more about Nancy Dobbs.”

  “You said somebody from the sheriff’s office would be talking to me about that.”

  “They will. I’m just trying to save some time.”

  “You disappoint me, Bragg. Another in a very long day of disappointments. After you told me last night you would not be the one to question me more about Nancy, I thought your telephone call meant you wanted to have a social visit. I would rather I think to have a social visit with you than to talk about Nancy Dobbs this night.”

  “I’m sorry it’s a disappointment. I’ve had a few of those myself today.”

  She took a sip of the Scotch and put the glass down on a low table next to the black sofa. “What is it
about Nancy you want to know?”

  “I’m curious about the partnership you two had. Who did what in the arrangement?”

  “I handle the talent end. I interview people and send them to lessons if I think they need that, and when we have a call for modeling work I select who we send over. I consult with clients and photographers and cameramen. I suggest lighting arrangements. Different ways to do things. I have a lot of experience. Nancy was the business end of things. She saw to the billing and payouts. She worked with accountants. I don’t know half the things she did. I do not have a good business head.”

  “How could you tell what sort of a job she was doing?”

  She shrugged. “I could always look at how much money was in the bank. I at least have that much of a business head.”

  “Did the two of you ever argue about things? Did your jobs overlap at times?”

  She looked at me then picked up the Scotch and had a little sip. “I am not sure what it is that you are asking there.”

  I wasn’t so sure myself, but I did know I was frustrated and a little tired of her coming on to me the way she did.

  “What I’m asking is pretty straightforward. I would like you to level with me. I don’t think you’ve done a lot of that when we talk. I think you’ve been blowing a little smoke in my direction. Was your business relationship with Nancy as calm as you make it out to be or did you fight about it once in a while? Or were you really lovers, and maybe fought about that once in a while?”

  It was one question too many.

  Karen threw her drink in my face. One of the ice cubes caught me over the left eye and I felt as if I’d been shot. I took out a handkerchief and began dabbing it here and there. At least, I told myself, she didn’t get hysterical and run for the door. She was too angry for that. She just sat there smoldering for a moment. Then she opened her mouth and talked some more.

  “I don’t know this blowing smoke you speak of. I do know that Nancy and I were very good working with each other. I never realized how very good until some stinking son of a bitch killed her and left me to try to handle the business on my own.