The Bohemian Connection (7 page)

He glanced at the hole. “One board wasn’t even on it.”

“I know. I moved it.”

“You what?”

“Well, I needed to see down there. I wasn’t looking for a body—” I caught myself before admitting I was looking for Ross’s picture. “I explained all this to your deputy.”

“How close were the boards then?”

I held my hands about a foot apart.

“That’s what you remember now?” he asked.

“Give or take.”

“Uh-huh. ‘Give or take.’ Six inches Or twelve or fifteen. She was a small woman. She could have fallen through.”

“No, she couldn’t have.”

He shook his head. “I have only your very inexact recollection for that. I can’t base an investigation on that, not this week.”

“You can’t just let this go so you can have more men patrolling the streets. Michelle Davidson had a family. It will make a big difference to them whether she came home so drunk that she fell into a sewer and died, or whether she was murdered. If you leave them with that question, it’s like sticking her body in their living room until you’re ready to deal with it.”

Under his suntan his face flushed with anger. “I said I’ll handle this investigation. That’s what I do. That’s why I’m a sheriff and you are a meter reader. So leave it alone, okay?”

“Are you through with me then?” I said, matching the anger in his voice.

“I just want you to tell me that you’re going to stay out of this.”

But that was the one thing I couldn’t do.

I sat in the cab of my pickup and watched Sheriff Wescott drive back toward town.

I hadn’t realized till I blurted it out to the sheriff how undignified Michelle Davidson’s death was. In life she had been the pompom leader, the prom queen. Once it became known she died from a drunken fall into a sewer that would be all people would remember. If people did think beyond that epitaph, they would add that she got that drunk with a
man.
There would be plenty of speculation about that.

Would this occur to the sheriff? I doubted it. Sheriff Wescott was a decent man. I knew he was competent and fair, and would do the best he could. But even the most conscientious lawman couldn’t do everything at this time of the year. He himself had said the Sheriff’s Department was wildly overworked during Bohemian Week. Besides the drunk driving, there were the confrontations that came when the mighty and the servants thereof strolled into town expecting special consideration. There might not be many, but one or two was all the Sheriff’s Department needed. When they ran afoul of the local people who were barely scratching out a living legally, or making ends meet by forays into the not-so-legal, there was little tolerance on either side. The Russian River area had its share of mountain men who were no respecters of chairmen of the board or assistants to chairmen. And there were the tourist families and gays. With the festival atmosphere in town and the river of beer that accompanied it, there was a big potential for violence. It was much too great a potential to leave the sheriff time to investigate something that looked like an accidental death.

Still, it was possible that Sheriff Wescott might come around to thinking Michelle’s death was murder. But he wouldn’t do that until after the lab report came back, and that might be days. By that time Ross would be gone. He would be out of town, out of state, or even out of the country.

Right now the sheriff would be heading for the nursery to tell Craig Davidson his wife was dead. What I had to do was find Ross. But first I had to see Father Calloway. For him to identify the man Michelle had met last night he would need to see Ross’s picture. And that was still down in the sewer hole.

I climbed out of my truck and reluctantly walked back to the hole. I scanned the edges of it, hoping that somehow the photo had got stuck within reaching distance. It hadn’t.

There was nothing to do but climb down. That meant crossing the sheriff’s cordon. It also meant getting a ladder out of the garage.

I tried the garage door. Not surprisingly, it was locked. Only those who wished to let their belongings circulate left garages unlocked. But there was a window on the side by the staircase. It was open, probably to air out the smell of the cesspool runoff and the mosquito larvae. I hesitated only briefly. If I were seen crossing the sheriff’s cordon and climbing into the sewer, being spotted breaking into the garage wouldn’t make things much worse.

Hoisting myself through the window was no problem. Once inside, I found an extension ladder hanging on hooks on the far wall, right above the slimy patch. The garage door pushed up easily, and in a minute I was back outside.

I lowered the ladder into the hole and, without looking to see who might be watching, climbed down.

It was dark in the hole. Tomblike. My eyes adjusted slowly. It made me shiver to realize that this
had
been Michelle’s tomb. It was also wetter than I had expected. Half Hill Road is partway up the hill. Even a fifteen-foot hole wouldn’t be below water level. But there are springs, and the ground holds water from the winter rains. For whatever reason, the bottom of the hole was squishy with mud. Gingerly I put a foot down, still hanging onto the ladder.

The place where Michelle’s body had landed, next to the end of the sewer pipe, was a mound of earth higher than the surrounding areas. On either side of the pipe was a shallow ditch. It was in one of these that I stood, now ankle-deep in mud. I turned, forcing myself to survey the near wall of the hole foot by foot, looking for the picture. But it had not stuck to that wall.

I took three careful steps, positioning myself in front of the wall opposite the end of the pipe. It was a bit better lighted and it took me less time to conclude the photo wasn’t there either.

The far wall was also bare. I turned back around. The mud was cold and had splattered my jeans. I glanced at the mound of dirt, sure the picture would not still be lying on it. Had it landed there the sheriff would have spotted it and taken it out with the body.

But it had to be in this hole. I had seen it go in. Now I looked at the pipe,
in
the pipe as best I could, and beneath the sides of it. And there, stuck under the pipe, was the photo. My hands were muddy. I picked up the photo by the edges and started up the ladder, moving carefully, afraid of dropping it back into the hole.

The sunlight hit me all at once. I closed my eyes against it and felt its warmth on my cheek. Turning away from the light, I opened my eyes and climbed the rest of the way up the ladder. It wasn’t till I was about to step out that I saw Craig Davidson staring down at me.

Behind him was Sheriff Wescott.

I
JAMMED THE PHOTO
in my pocket, wiped my hand on my jeans, and climbed out of the sewer hole.

Before I could speak, Sheriff Wescott said, “Didn’t you hear me before? Not half an hour ago? I said stay out of this case. Out! And I barely leave the street before you climb down into the one place that’s off-limits.”

I said nothing.

“I could book you for this. You know that, don’t you?”

I nodded.

“Okay, but I expect you to tell me, honestly and without withholding as much as a thought, what you were doing down in that sewer hole.”

I had no choice. “I dropped something into the hole. That’s how I happened to be looking down there when I spotted Michelle’s body.” I glanced uncomfortably at Craig. He had moved back a few steps and was leaning against the stair railing. If he noted anything either of us said, he gave no sign of it. He merely looked dazed.

“What did you drop?” the sheriff demanded.

I extricated the snapshot of Ross and Michelle from my pocket and handed it to him, feeling like a naughty child. The photo was creased from being jammed into my pocket and was smudged with mud, but both the faces were still recognizable.

Sheriff Wescott looked down at it a moment and then, almost involuntarily, glanced at Craig. Motioning me to the far side of the hole, away from Craig, he said, “Who is this man?”

“The one I tried to tell you about, the old boyfriend.”

“The one you’ve decided makes this a murder case, eh? So you took it upon yourself to break through our cordon, climb down into the secured area, and get it, is that it?”

“That’s it,” I said, involuntarily mimicking his tone. “And since it’s so irrelevant to your case, I’ll take it back.”

“Anything in the hole is evidence.”

“Evidence of what, if you don’t think there was a crime?”

“Evidence.”

“If I hadn’t searched for that you’d have never known it was there,” I said, realizing as I said it, that this line of complaint was going to get me nowhere.

Instead of giving me back Ross’s picture, Wescott made me describe my search for it, where I had looked, where I’d stepped. The photo he deposited in a plastic bag.

“I want you to understand that this is the last time for anything like this. The next time you do something that is not thoroughly legal, completely above-board, you can count on being a guest of the county. Is that clear?”

“What?” Behind Ward McElvey’s house a man stood looking down at us.

“I said, the next time I catch you at anything illegal, you go to jail. Understand now?”

I was sure the man was Ross Remson. Or almost sure. It was that flicker of doubt that kept me from pointing him out to the sheriff. Then he turned and walked behind Ward’s house.

“Is that all?” I said to the sheriff.

“It had better be.”

I forced myself to walk, not run, around the sewer hole and down the street past Ward’s house. With each step my pace quickened. On the far side of Ward’s was an older house, the one with the yard Ward crossed. I looked between the houses, but there was no sight of Ross. I hurried on till I could see between the next two houses. Nothing moved. Ross had been walking too. How had I missed him? Maybe he had started running as soon as he was out of view of the sheriff. I rushed down past the next house, but again there was no running man, no branches waving in the still afternoon.

If these houses were like mine there would be a path behind them that led to a commonly used spring. It would be easy for Ross to lope along that but not to run all out. I couldn’t believe he had outdistanced me and still left no trace of his flight.

But if he hadn’t run beyond this spot where was he? Had he hidden somewhere along the path? Was he lurking behind an outbuilding waiting to hear the sheriff’s car leave? It might be a long wait. Even then he would have to get down without being spotted. He had grown up here. People would recognize him. They wouldn’t think of him as a murderer, but they would find it noteworthy that he had returned to Henderson after being gone so long.

Of course, he was familiar with the terrain. For someone who knew the area the sensible thing to do would be to go uphill, to come out on Cemetery Road, the street above, and stroll back to his car. And the most likely place to park without drawing notice would be at the old Henderson cemetery at the top of the hill. The graves there were old. Relatives of the entombed had long since died and been buried in the new cemetery across the river. Now the only people who visited the cemetery were those who for one reason or another wanted the solitude.

I walked quickly up Half Hill Road. My pickup was on the near side of the sewer hole. The sheriff’s car was next to it, but fortunately the sheriff himself was nowhere in sight. He must have gone into Craig’s house.

I climbed into the cab of my pickup, backed into a driveway, and turned toward town.

I took a right on Zeus Lane, up the hill toward Cemetery Road. I barely had time to slam on the brakes. A Winnebago blocked the street. Its nose was in a driveway.

“Could you pull in?” I hollered to the driver.

He looked confused. “Waiting for the wife,” he called. “Never can finish her good-byes in less than an hour. You’d think she—”

“I need to get by,” I yelled. “I’m in a hurry.”

“Oh. Sure.” He started the engine and inched the huge vehicle into the driveway.

I raced by and cut left onto Cemetery Road.

Cemetery Road paralleled Half Hill Road then cut sharply uphill to wind its way past a few dead-end streets before it reached the cemetery itself. It was possible that Ross could have driven into one of those dead ends but unlikely since he had no reason to think anyone was looking for him. If he didn’t, and if he hadn’t followed Cemetery Road down across Zeus Lane and into town at the other end of the shopping area, then he was somewhere on this street. Or in the cemetery itself.

Cemetery Road was narrower than Half Hill. Beside it the ground rose or dropped steeply. The houses were newer, had large decks, and looked precarious. The only vehicle parked on the street was a county car and it was empty. I drove slowly, checking as best I could for a tall sandy-haired man who might be hiding behind a eucalyptus tree or making his way up the street. But when I reached the cemetery I still hadn’t seen him.

The entrance to the cemetery was marked by cement pillars between which a gate may once have hung. If so, it had been stolen long ago. Now even the pillars were worn, like the teeth of an old dog. I drove along the dirt road. Clumps of stone suggested it had been covered with gravel at a time when that was as close to paving as any road in this area got. But that time was long ago. Now the road was dusty and deeply pitted and even in a pickup the going was rough.

I drove on to a flat spot at the top of the hill—the parking area. There was no other vehicle here.

Briefly I considered racing back down into town to see if Ross was there. But he wouldn’t be. That would be crazy. He wouldn’t rush away from Michelle’s house so fast that I couldn’t find any remnant of his being there just to be seen on North Bank Road.

I got out of my truck and walked toward the gravestones as I had done on many occasions when I wanted to think. After the sepulchral sewer hole the shady cemetery seemed almost cheerful. It bore no resemblance to newer memorial parks where unobtrusive memorial plaques are camouflaged so they won’t mar the landscaping. Worn, cracked, their lettering so faint as to no longer reveal who rested beneath, the gravestones here were grouped in family plots. Tarnished low brass rails enclosed the ten-by-twenty-foot rectangles.