Death in Donegal Bay (4 page)

“What’s so funny?” I asked him.

“You are, Callahan,” he told me. “What’s the scam?”

I
SAID NOTHING, STARING
straight ahead.

“Greg Hudson!” he said. “What hat did you pick that name out of?”

“I was thinking of calling myself Duane Detterwald,” I explained, “but I was afraid people would laugh.”

“Some people have. A few learned to regret it.”

“Midgets?”

“You’re really nasty, aren’t you? I went along with your gag to find out what your pitch was. Hell, man, I must have seen you dozens of times when the Rams were still playing in the Coliseum. Mike was never a football fan. Is he having husband trouble again? You’re a peeper now, right?”

“Wrong,” I said.

“You were afraid to go up against Mike,” he went on, “so you thought you might get some dirt from me. Well, you won’t. Mike is my friend.”

I said nothing.

“A twenty-eight-hundred-square-foot house in Brentwood and driving a seventeen-year-old Ford? How dumb do you think I am?”

“Dumb enough. That Ford has six thousand dollars’ worth of Spelke conversion on it in 1966 dollars. I turned down thirteen thousand for it just last month. How about a guy with a Cad DeVille and a 280-Z sharing an office with a bait store?”

He laughed. “You got a point there. What married woman is Mike messing with now?”

“I don’t know. I came to town to look for a friend who is missing. He was least heard of up here. I didn’t find him. I saw the Einlicher sign just before I was about to start for home, so I dropped in. I didn’t know Anthony owned the place. He didn’t recognize me, and I didn’t want to be recognized by the owner of the only bar in town. My friend could still be here, and word gets around in a town this size. That could mean trouble for him.”

“Okay, you’re beginning to make sense. You
are
still a peeper then?”

“Not on this. As for being afraid to go up against Mike Anthony, you and he can round up all the friends you both have and I’ll take you on en masse or one at a time.”

He smiled. “I hit a nerve, didn’t I? Look, I believe you. And I won’t tell Mike who you are. He’s got too much mouth. What does your friend look like?”

“Tall and skinny. He’s twenty-one years old and he’s driving a nine-year-old Plymouth, a gray two-door sedan. His father is worried about him, so I came here. I’ll give you my phone number, and if you spot the kid, you can call me—collect. I live in San Valdesto now.”

“Fair enough. Now about me. The Datsun is mine, the Cad is leased. I don’t need a bigger office. I make a very satisfactory income out of the office I have. I sold two ranches so far this year. You know what the commission was on that?”

“Plenty, with the prices in this area.”

“The package went for four and a half million.”

“At six percent,” I said, “that reads out to two hundred and seventy thousand dollars. You ought to buy that bait store.”

“I own the building,” he told me stiffly. “My nephew and his live-in girl friend run the tackle shop and boat rental that you keep calling a bait store. They don’t pay me
any
rent. Now, God damn you, get off my back!”

I patted his knee. “Okay, Duane. I apologize for the things I said. “I was embarrassed. I … overreacted.”

He smiled. “I should have expected that. I’ve watched you overreact plenty of times on the field. Trust me, you dumb jock! I’m your fan. Now I’m going to take you over to meet my only nephew. He was a footballer, too. An all-state high-school tight end. He played in the North-South Shrine game.”

It was the blond youth I had seen at the Rusty Anchor. His name was Jeff Randolph. He shook my hand and asked, “How are the Rams going to do this year?”

“All right, if they can settle the quarterback question. Are you going to college now?”

He shook his head. “I had a year at S.C. That was enough. This is my life, the surf and the beach and the sailboat.”

A girl came out from the storage room at the rear of the shop. It was the blonde I had seen with Jeff. Duane said, “And this, Brock, is Laura Prescott, Jeff’s bride-to-be.”

She shook my hand and smiled. “Don’t mind what Uncle Duane says. We’re trying to drag him into the twentieth century.”

As we walked toward my car, Duane muttered, “Twentieth century! Don’t they think I ever played house? But you can’t go on like that forever. What if they have kids? They’ll be bastards!”

“They mean a lot to you, don’t they?”

“Jeff does. I have no kids. And I like Laura, too.” He shook his head. “Oh well, they can change. We can hope.”

I gave him my phone number, he promised he would keep a watchful eye open for Corey, and we parted better than we had started. That ferret face of his, that was what had made me suspicious. Why did I trust him now? Maybe he had called it right; I was a dumb jock.

I phoned the Raleighs when I got home and asked Mr. Raleigh if their son had phoned again.

“He did. He phoned about twenty minutes ago from Lompoc and told us not to worry. And the missus and I decided it’s maybe time that we stopped being so … so protective. But, as you know, he is an only child and—”

“I know,” I said. “I was one, too.”

Felicia had gone on to her friends in Lompoc after a stop in Donegal Bay. If it had been an overnight stop, there was reason to believe Mike Anthony had been her host. Which made the case what it had originally seemed to be—adultery. Which could be grounds for divorce. Yet Baker had claimed that he didn’t want one. Why hadn’t he assumed the obvious? It’s not easy to con a con man. Unless, of course, he’s in love.

When Jan came home, I asked her if she remembered Duane Detterwald.

She nodded and smiled. “I remember him well. When he first came to school, the boys called him Weasel. But they soon quit calling him that.”

“Don’t tell me he scared them out of it, a man his size.”

“Mike Anthony put a stop to it. They were inseparable.” She frowned. “How do you know how big Duane is? Where did you meet him?”

“In Donegal Bay.”

“I knew you would go up there. Did you find Corey?”

“Not up there. But I phoned the Raleighs, and Mr. Raleigh told me Corey is in Lompoc now. Your old classmate Mike Anthony runs a bar in Donegal Bay. I wonder if Felicia spent the night with him.”

Jan smiled. “Felicia—does that mean faithful?”

I shook my head. “You’re thinking of Fidelia. Felicia means happiness.”

“How do you know that?”

“How do I always know? I looked it up.”

I was making a lot of assumptions on Corey’s case that were based on the obvious. The obvious is one of my strengths (or weaknesses). I was assuming facts not in evidence, as usual. So what? It wasn’t my case.

Which Corey made clear to me on the phone just before dinner.

“Some friend you are,” he said. “You and your big mouth!”

“Could I have a translation of that?”

“Telling Mr. Baker my father was worried about me, trying to make me look like a punk. When I reported to Mr. Baker from Lompoc this afternoon, he was steamed. I had to talk fast to save my job.”

“I didn’t tell Mr. Baker that.”

“No, you told the maid to tell him. Why the hatchet job?”

“Corey, I was worried about you, and so were your parents. And let me tell you, if you tangle with Mike Anthony, you’ll find out I had reason to worry.”

“Who is Mike Anthony?”

“The man who owns that bar near the beach in Donegal Bay. Didn’t you talk with him?”

“You’re not making sense,” he said.

“Corey,” I asked, “are you still in Lompoc?”

“No. I’m home. Why?”

“Come over after dinner. I have some things to tell you that might help you on your case.”

Nothing from him.

“Okay, forget it,” I said. “You don’t need me. You’re a big boy now. Good-bye and good luck.”

“I’ll be over,” he said. “I’m sorry I … blew up, Brock.”

“You were entitled,” I told him. “I do have a big mouth.”

When he came, an hour later, we went into the den. In there, I said, “You first.”

This is the way it was: He had followed Felicia’s car to one of the big homes on the bluff, a house he later learned belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Duane Detterwald. Because Felicia had carried her luggage into the house, he’d assumed she would be staying for a while. But he couldn’t be sure of that. So, instead of driving down to the beach to use a phone there, he had gone back to a filling station on the road that led into 101.

It was the only road into the area and he would be able to watch for her car if she left the Detterwalds. He phoned Baker at a Los Angeles number Baker had given him and reported.

Felicia’s car was still in the driveway when he came back, so he took a chance and went down into town for lunch.

“At a bar,” I asked him, “with an anchor mounted on a concrete base in front of it?”

He nodded. “You know the place?”

“It belongs to Mike Anthony.”

“I’ll ask you again—who’s he?”

“A fighter. A very rough nut who missed the middleweight crown about two bouts short of a title fight. He is also a former boyfriend of Felicia Baker’s.”

“Well, he wasn’t behind the bar. A woman was tending bar.’

At six o’clock, he went on, Felicia and another woman and a man had come out of the Detterwald house and climbed into a Cad DeVille and driven down to one of the ranches in the valley for a big outdoor barbecue. Corey had watched the scene from a higher point in the road.

A little before midnight, the Cadillac had come back up the road and he’d followed it to the Detterwald house. When the lights had gone out in the house, he’d taken his sleeping bag into some shrubbery on the vacant lot across the street and gone to sleep.

When Felicia left the house the next morning, he followed her to Lompoc. He couldn’t get the name of the occupant: there. He phoned Baker from there, and that’s when he got the bawling out. From there, he followed Felicia home.

“What blarney did you feed Baker when he blew up?”

“I told him my grandmother was dying up in Sonora Creel and my father was anxious to get in touch with me so the family could go up there together.”

“And he bought it?”

“I guess. I phoned him when I got home and said my grandmother had made a turn for the better, so we weren’t going up İ could stay on the case.”

“You’ll still be shadowing Mrs. Baker?”

“Yes. Mr. Baker is still down in Los Angeles, and he didn’t tell me to stop. He sure didn’t pay a five-hundred-dollar retainer for two days of work.”

“A working day is eight hours,” I pointed out. “You worked longer days than that. Are you getting expenses, too?”

“Natch.” He smiled at me. “You want it, don’t you! You’re aching to get knee-deep into this case.”

“Not yet,” I told him.

It is hard to con a con man. Corey had used the hoariest excuse known, the truant schoolboy’s excuse for absence, a grandmother’s funeral. I was beginning to understand why Alan Arthur Baker had never graduated to the big con.

W
HEN I HAD ASKED
Felicia Baker what Mike Anthony was doing now, she had replied, “I have no idea.”

She had spent the night with Mike’s friend in a town where Mike lived and worked, but she had no idea of what Mike was doing now?

And then the remark of the aging redhead in the Colonial house came back to me: “Duane darling! I missed you at the Ellers’ party.”

And he had answered, “I was out of town.”

If the barbecue that Corey had watched from afar had been the Ellers’ party, I now had another scenario. Duane had been out of town. Mrs. Detterwald had phoned Anthony to tell him Felicia was at their house. While Corey was down at the filling station phoning Baker, Mike had put the woman behind the bar and gone up to the Detterwalds’.

The man and two women that Corey had followed to the party had been Mike, Felicia, and Mrs. Detterwald. When they had returned from the party and the lights went out in the house, Corey had gone to sleep in his sleeping bag, Mrs. Detterwald in her husbandless bed.

But Mike and Felicia? Ah, yes …! And then, before Corey was awake in the morning, Mike had left.

It all tied together, but it was still only a scenario, with no facts to substantiate it. Did Duane know what had gone on in the house during his absence? I doubted it; he wouldn’t have asked what woman Mike was messing with now if he had. Which could mean that Mrs. Detterwald was a closer friend of Felicia’s than Duane was.

I wondered if Jan knew her. She was in the dining room, sorting out drapery samples on the dining-room table. I went in there and asked her.

She shook her head. “I never saw Duane after I left high school. Girls liked him, but not in any romantic way. He was short and he was ugly and he had acne and he was poor.”

“He’s not poor anymore,” I said, “and he doesn’t have acne. Maybe when he got rich, he got lucky, same as I did.”

She studied me balefully.

“I am waiting for your indignant protest,” I said.

“Don’t hold your breath,” she told me. “You called it right. You got lucky.”

She stayed with her drapery samples, trying to coordinate them with some upholstery samples she had brought home with her. I went to watch Dick Cavett interview William Styron on the tube. Cavett had replaced the eleven o’clock news for us and we weren’t suffering any withdrawal symptoms.

There was a strong breeze from the ocean that night, presaging the end of our heat wave. We would be getting back to the standard June weather report that could be taped for most of the month: “Overcast in the morning, followed by clearing in the afternoon, except along the coast.”

Jan apologized in a culinary way for her caustic remark of the night before; she made me popovers for breakfast and a Spanish omelet. Mrs. Casey does windows but not breakfasts. They would interfere with her late, later, and still later old-movie shows on the tube.

“Golf today?” Jan asked me.

I shook my head.

“Why not? It’s Corey’s case now.”

I smiled a smile I tried to make enigmatic.

“Don’t simper,” she said. “You know Corey can’t handle it alone.”