One Grave Too Many (9 page)

Easy climbed the two padded steps and pulled open the booth door.

Gary was sitting in a tube chair, a reel of recording tape in his lap. He was taking an uneasy drag on a cigarette. “Started smoking again this afternoon,” he said. “Settles my nerves. I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t. We went ahead and did the dog food spots. Selfish of me. Not for the money involved, but I mean I did them to give me something to fill the hours with. Maybe we should have closed up shop.”

“People mourn in different ways.” Easy sat in the engineer’s chair.

“You … didn’t see Sandy?”

“No, they’ve got him in the morgue at San Amaro.”

“I know. I put Marlis to trying to work out some kind of funeral arrangements,” said Gary, inhaling some smoke. “Sandy’s folks are dead … I understand we can’t have … can’t bury him yet anyway.”

“The cops’ll give the body back when they’re finished.”

“My father died and I never broke down,” said Gary. “Now Sandy and I still can’t … you saw Ellen, though?”

“Yeah.”

“My time in the army … I never went anywhere except up to Ord and then to Kentucky. I never saw anybody dead or anything. Except for one poor bastard who had a truck flip over on him. But I’ve never seen that many dead people.”

“It’s nothing you have to keep score on.”

Gary looked at the cigarette, watching the smoke curl out of it. “Guy who used to do some copy for us, he was only forty-seven. Went into the hospital one day with this fever and never came out. Turned out he had cancer, didn’t even know it. He was dead in four days. Jesus.” He stubbed the butt out on a bright silver leg of his chair. “It’s right on top of you all the time, isn’t it? You can die any time.”

“What happened to Feller and his wife wasn’t an unexpected accident,” said Easy. “What happened to them happened because other things happened first.”

“It all ties in with my dad, you mean?”

“With the money he left buried out at the Thorpe Ranch.”

“I don’t … you think Sandy found that money?”

“No.”

“But … you think he was the one who was out there doing the digging last night?”

“Yeah,” answered Easy. “Feller figured out that message faster than you did. He recognized it as tying in with your father’s archeology hobby, and he must have thought of that stone angel right off. It could be he remembered something, something from the days when you all used to hang around there, you and Danny and your sister and Bill Goffman.”

“Sandy came out to the ranch a lot.” A pack of cigarettes sat on the control panel next to the turntable. He picked it up, shook out a new cigarette. “He was sort of interested in Gay there for a while, but nothing happened ever.” After lighting the cigarette with a paper match, he said, “That’s a lot of digging to do by yourself.”

“He thought there was a million bucks down in the ground,” said Easy. “He must have snuck in there after dark and got the squares laid out. Then he got to digging.”

“Those kids are pretty rough about strangers.”

“At night they let the dogs do most of the policing.”

“The dog who got hurt … Sandy did that?”

“Yeah, he did.”

“That’s not like him.”

“A million dollars can change your character some,” Easy said.

“You know, I told Sandy if I found the money I was going to give it over to the authorities. He said he thought that was a good idea.” He sighed out smoke. “I guess he really didn’t … Wait a minute, though. You said he thought the money was there. Wasn’t it?”

“Once, not lately.”

“But … you thought it was going to be there, too.”

“Until I saw that piece of bone,” said Easy. “Do you know where Danny is?”

“I don’t understand about the bones … was someone …?”

“Do you know where she is?”

Gary puffed at his cigarette. “Playing games someplace.”

“What’s that mean?”

“She called me here an hour or so ago,” answered Gary. “While I was right in the middle of taping the last spot. Told Marlis it was urgent and got the booth number here. She’s got a great flair for dramatizing herself. Used to phone me at my place at all hours. She’d say she was hiding at Marineland from her husband and could I meet her. Or she only had a minute to talk before …”

“What did she say this time?”

“That she missed me and wanted to see me. But that they’d taken her away from San Amaro.”

“To where?”

“Where’d they take her? I don’t know,” he said. “I … I hung up on her. I don’t know … with everything that’s happened, and the way she just left me to get carried off by Chatto. I’ve been thinking … I don’t know. I hung up on her.”

Easy leaned toward him. “I want to talk to her. Did she say anything to give you any idea where they’d taken her?”

Gary rubbed his forehead with the hand holding the cigarette. “She said … she said in spite of all the phony quaintness there was a phone there. She managed to sneak away by pretending to go to the john and she found a phone which had been put in for the workmen. I thought she was simply making something up, playing a game again. You think she’s in trouble?”

“Could it be their hunting lodge in Russian River?
Workmen
might mean Goffman’s having it rebuilt.”

“No, they haven’t even started doing anything on the lodge yet.” He bit his lip, eyes half closing. “Quaintness … sure, it must be the park.”

“What park?”

“A year or so ago Goffman decided to build an amusement park, aimed at kids, in the Disneyland vein though much less ambitious,” replied Gary. “I think it’s supposed to recreate various periods of the past … you know, colonial times, the Civil War era, the Nineties.”

“Is it in operation?”

“No; about three months back, old Goffman halted the whole project, needed to throw dough into another area for awhile.”

“Where is the park?”

“Out around San Bernardino somewhere, near an area called Coulson Woods.”

Easy got up. “If she calls again, find out exactly where she is.”

Gary stood, too. “She really is in some kind of danger?”

Easy left without answering him.

P
IECES OF THE PAST,
jumbled together. A Western fort rising next to a Victorian mansion, a Civil War battlefield beside a string of covered wagons. It looked like a dumping ground for old movie sets and props, except that there was a new unfinished feel to it. Workmen’s scaffolds still fronted some of the park’s incomplete structures.

Easy was on a low hillside above the unfinished Goffman enterprise. High alder trees surrounded him. The night was clear and warm. The full moon had a blurred fuzzy look.

A raw wood fence, about six feet high, surrounded the twenty-some acres of the unfinished amusement park. There were lights showing inside the place, but only in the windows of the narrow Victorian houses which made up the 1890s sector. Two of the houses, each with many spires and cupolas thrusting up, had fight glowing at their second floor windows. The windows were uncurtained, though from this distance Easy could see nothing inside either house.

A black limousine was parked on the Victorian street, just behind a carriage. The horse that went with the carriage was stuffed.

There didn’t appear to be any nightwatchman on duty. Maybe Goffman’s people had sent him away.

Easy unbuttoned his jacket, so that he could reach his shoulder holster, and commenced working his way down through the trees. He scared some roosting birds and stood still while they went fluttering away up through the branches overhead.

Reaching the wooden fence, Easy moved along it for a while. There were no breaks in it. He came to the gates finally, discovering that he could use the iron handles as footholds. He did that and pulled himself over the fence.

He landed on a dirt road. Directly ahead was a colonial village, complete with a small square white church. Easy suddenly halted.

There was a large white police dog standing wide-legged in front of the blacksmith shop.

“Stuffed,” Easy realized. He moved on.

A plump old man with shoulder-length hair was peering out of a doorway at the end of the street. It was Benjamin Franklin.

Easy nodded at the wax figure as he passed.

He could hear music now. Electric guitars, honking saxophones, nasal black voices.

“You all remember that one, gang, of course, and what else could it be, get ready for this, and who could forget them, but the immortal Sadtones, doing for us their classic big one from the late 50s, and where were you when you first heard it, nothing else but
Do I Love You, Little Girl
?” A tiny voice was drifting across the darkness. “And this, of course, sitting mikeside with you whilst the Great One hisself, who else can I mean but the one and only Sleepy Joe Bryan, is off on one of those much-needed vacation-type jaunts to some sunnier southern clime, is none other than the American girl’s favorite jock, yours truly Pete Goodwin. Lest we forget, gang of mine, your ear is glued to, what else could it be, that mecca of music KMAR. Nuff said, he sez. Now let’s us …”

Easy was approaching a small cobblestone plaza. Trees, fenced by wrought-iron, grew up out of the cobblestones. He ran to the miniature park and, masked by the trees, looked up at the lighted houses.

The radio was playing inside the house on the right, up on the second floor. A dark young man with shaggy hair passed in front of the undraped window. It was Ennis, the gatekeeper from the Goffman estate.

“… face it, it’s no crime to admit it, so why not, lots of us are really dragged deep down, but don’t despair yet, gang, by nothing less than unsightly dandruff …”

Easy could make out now the painters’ scaffolds which still stood in front of this whole row of Victorian houses—fragile-looking structures of metal pipes and rods and wooden planks.

He sprinted from cover. He leaped, caught hold of a crossbar of piping and pulled himself up. Reaching up again, he caught the edges of a wide board. Once up on that he was almost on a level with the lighted second floor windows, which were still one house over from him.

“… have I reminded you lately, gang, stop me if you’ve heard this one, that the old Great One, who else but Mr. Sleepy Joe, esquire, is away on a, like they say, well-deserved vacation south of el bordere, olé, and that this here is everybody’s favorite golden voice, in person and in the flesh, and I wish you could see it, old PG hisself …”

“Turn that shit off, will you, Ennis.”

That was Danny Goffman’s voice.

“Oh, is it annoying you, mam?”

“Everything’s annoying me; you, this dump, the radio, the whole package.”

“Lots of ways to make the time pass more pleasantly, mam.”

Danny laughed. “You’re all talk,” she said. “If you balled me you’d be scared shitless to ever face old Jake again.”

“You don’t have to use that kind of language with me.”

Easy had worked his way along the plank to within a foot of the window.

“I’ve always figured you for some kind of fairy anyhow, Ennis,” Danny was saying. “That’s why it’s so easy for you to kiss Jake’s ass. To drag me around wherever he tells you.”

“This is all for your own good, he says, mam. He expects some kind of trouble the next few days and he thinks it’ll be better if …”

“Sure, better if I can’t talk to anybody. So he locks me up in the gay 90s whorehouse,” said the girl. “He wants me out of the way till he can get everything swept under the rug.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, mam.”

Lowering himself to his hands and knees, Easy began to move by the window. There was just enough room for him to pass without being seen by anyone in the room.

Once clear of the window he stood again, made his way over the scaffolding to the other lighted window. He wanted to know where the other man, Mullin, the sometime gardener, was.

There was no sound coming out of the room that went with this lighted window.

Easy waited a moment, then eased along the plank to take a look into the window.

What he saw was Mullin looking out at him with a .45 automatic in his hand.

W
ITHOUT HESITATING
E
ASY THREW
himself back off the plank.

The automatic went off, smashing the window and sending a shower of jagged glass down through the dark after him.

He hit the ground hard, landing on one knee and an elbow. It was his right arm and for a moment he couldn’t use it to draw out his own gun.

He rolled over the cobblestone street toward the house.

“Son of a bitch,” said Mullin upstairs.

A smaller sprinkling of shards of window glass came flickering down. Then the scaffold board buckled, swaying slightly.

Easy was under the scaffolding now. He got to his feet. He kept flexing the fingers of his right hand. He reached up with his left, catching hold of a piece of the metal frame.

“Hey, that son of a bitch is out here someplace,” Mullin shouted. His heavy footsteps shook the plank he was walking on.

Quietly, Easy pulled himself upward again. Stopping when he was directly below the board the other man was standing on, he braced his feet against a crossbar.

Ennis’ window was yanked open. “What son of a bitch?”

“That detective son of a bitch.” Mullin knelt on the board, extending his head out over its edge.

Easy had been waiting for that. He pushed up on the back side of the board hard.

The board tilted and flipped the bulky Mullin off. Reflex made him squeeze the trigger of the automatic as he plummeted down. The slug bounced off the cobblestones and bonged a length of pipe in the scaffolding.

Mullin made a great gasping noise when he hit. There was a sharp cracking. He stayed as he hit, all tucked in on himself. He didn’t get up.

“Mullin, where is he?” Ennis called out of his open window. “Hey, Mullin.”

Easy lowered himself carefully down to the street, his progress hidden by the scaffolds.

As Ennis came climbing out onto the board outside his window, Easy let himself in through the front door of the house. None of the rooms on the first floor were furnished.

He moved across the bare moonlit room and went up the staircase. There was a runner of flowered carpeting padding the steps.