The Missing and the Dead: A Bragg Thriller Read online

  "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

  The 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 missi
ng 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.

  "Miss Westover?"

  "Yes?"

  I opened my wallet. "My name's Peter Bragg. Jerry Lind's secretary over at Coast West said you might be able to help me on a matter."

  The small girl in white glanced around, looked in the doorway of a nearby room and motioned me in. It was unoccupied. Donna Westover closed the door and turned like a young lynx.

  "What is this? Are you working for his wife?"

  "No, his sister. Did you know that he's missing?"

  It surprised her. "No, I didn't."

  "When was the last time you saw him?"

  "He was in the hospital last December."

  "That isn't what I asked."

  "What you asked isn't really anybody's business, is it?"

  "Suppose he's lying dead somewhere, Miss Westover? Then the last few months of his life would be police business. Maybe I can keep it from going that far if people cooperate. So maybe I've learned Jerry was seeing other women. It doesn't exactly scandalize me. All I want to do is find him. Honest."

  Her mouth softened a little. "What is it you want to know?"

  "When was the last time you saw him?"

  "Three or four weeks ago."

  "Can you pin it down any closer?"

  She took a wallet out of her purse and looked at a calendar. "Friday, three weeks ago."

  That had been a week before Lind dropped out of sight. "What did you do?"

  "We had dinner together."

  "That's all?"

  "That's all you're going to hear about. I'll admit that I saw him from time to time. I thought he was cute. But I don't intend to tell you anything more than that. I don't know where he is, and I don't know what happened to him."

  "I'll accept that. But I'd like to know if you went to bed with him."

  "You're out of your mind."

  "It would help if I could learn he was apt to do that."

  "You can believe he was apt to do that, or at least to try. Whether or not he did with me I won't tell you. It doesn't matter now anyway."

  "What makes you say that?"

  "Anything we might have had between us is finished."

  "You quarreled?"

  "No, we didn't quarrel. He just phoned one night to tell me it was all over. He said he'd been chatting with an old art school pal about his life, and had decided to give another try to being an honest husband. That's how he put it. As if I had tainted him somehow."

  "Don't let it bother you, if it still does. From what I've learned about Jerry, and what I've seen of you, I think you could do a whole lot better."

  "Thanks so much. Anything else?"

  "Yes. When did he phone to tell you this?"

  "That one's easy. It was a Monday evening, a week after our last date."

  "You're sure of that?"

  "Yes. Unlike most people I try not to repress the bad in my life. I had to work the entire following week after the dinner we had together. Two other girls on the floor were out sick. Jerry and I had a dinner date for the next Tuesday evening. I was looking forward to it. But he phoned just the night before. It was the shining end to a wonderful work week."

  "Did he call from in town here?"

  "I wish he had. He called collect. I accepted because I figured he was stuck somewhere without change. And of course I didn't know then he was about to call off the Whole Big Thing."

  "Where did he call from?"

  "A town up north on the coast. A place called Barracks Cove."

/>   From a downstairs telephone booth I made calls to Janet Lind and Marcie. So far as either of them knew, Jerry didn't know anybody living in Barracks Cove. They both wanted to ask questions of their own, but I stalled and said I'd get back to them later. I left the hospital, drove over to Park Presidio and turned north toward the bridge. It was beginning to shape up into a nice day. Donna Westover seemed pretty sure of her dates; she had good reason to be. And if she were right, she had spoken to Jerry Lind more than twenty-four hours after he'd dropped out of everybody else's life.

  Fifteen minutes later I was in my Sausalito apartment, packing. It didn't take long. I figured all I needed was enough for a day or two of motel living. In the event of emergencies, I always have junk in my car trunk for living off the land. Just before snapping shut the suitcase I went to the locked desk in a work alcove off the front room and took out a couple of holstered handguns and some ammunition. There was no indication I'd need them, but if it should turn out that I did, I wanted them in my suitcase rather than in my Sausalito apartment.

  There were two ways to drive to Barracks Cove. One was up the winding coast highway, and the other was to take Highway 101 north for about 150 miles, then turn onto the slow, loopy road over the coast range to the ocean. It was about a five- to six-hour drive either way, but I went up Highway 101 because during the early part of the journey it gave the impression you were making good time. Of course I paid for that heavily on the loopy road part of the trip. I had forgotten that there was some serious logging going on east of Barracks Cove. The government was about to take possession of several thousand more acres of prime timber land to add to a national park. The lumbering people were working day and night and weekends to harvest as many redwoods as possible before the deadline and its ensuing cutting restrictions. As a youth driving roads on the Olympic Peninsula up in the state of Washington I had learned that there are few things as humbling as seeing 80,000 pounds of truck and timber in your rear-view mirror roaring up behind you and whipping past. Those people should have their own roads. But they don't, and several of the rigs made me hunch my shoulders on my way over to Barracks Cove, just like in the old days.

  It was early evening when I got there. I bought a tankful of gas and consulted a local phone directory. There was only one art supply store listed. It was called the Frame Up, and a small advertisement in the Yellow Pages said it was "On the Square." The Square turned out to be a great plot of lawn and trees in the center of town. It probably had been a parade ground back in the town's Army days. The town hall and police headquarters were at one end, and the rest was given over to a playground, picnic benches and a small rose garden. Across the surrounding streets on all four sides were the shops, restaurants and stores that marked it the hub of Barracks Cove. By now the sun had dipped behind an offshore fog bank, and a sharp breeze was blowing in from the sea. People were deserting the park as if a quiet warning had been passed. Most of the shops already were closed.