Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective) (15 page)

She led me into the house and then into a parlor appointed with forties-style furniture and an odd combination of feminine and masculine objects: hand-painted glass paperweights and a rack of well-used pipes; porcelain figurines and an old cavalry sword hanging above the fireplace mantel; oval cameo portraits in delicate frames and an oil painting of a square-rigged clipper ship. I declined her invitation of something to drink, waited until she had shed her coat and the sprigs of rosemary and seated herself in a padded Boston rocker, and put myself down on the couch.

I asked, “When did you last see Jerry, Mrs. Darden?”

“The night he disappeared. Around nine o’clock.”

“What was his mood?”

“Oh, he seemed very excited—very intense. He’d been in his room all day, working; he didn’t even join us for meals.”

“He was writing something, is that right?”

“Yes,” she said. “He’d borrowed Sharon’s typewriter a few days before and I could hear it clacking away during the evenings and all day Sunday. I asked him what he was writing, and so did Sharon, but he wouldn’t tell us. He was just like a little boy with a secret.”

“When he left the house, was it on foot?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

“Oh yes.”

“Did he say where he was going?”

“To the post office, he told Sharon. He had two envelopes with him.”

“What sort of envelopes?”

“Large manila ones.”

“Both stamped and addressed?”

“Only one, I believe. Seems to me the other was blank.”

“Did you or Sharon notice the name on the addressed one?”

“No, we didn’t.”

“I understand the police found nothing helpful among Jerry’s belongings,” I said. “No carbon of what he’d been writing, no discarded papers of anything like that.”

“Nothing at all, no.”

“Did they take his things away with them?”

“They didn’t seem to feel that was necessary. I’ve left everything in Jerry’s room, just as it was. We’re still hoping he’ll come back.”

‘“Would it be all right if I looked through them?”

“Surely. I was just going to suggest that you do.”

She took me upstairs, into a spacious room at the rear of the house. Jerry Carding had added no personal touches to the furnishings, except for a stack of books on the writing desk set between the room’s two windows, and a framed photograph of Christine Webster on the nightstand. The photo gave me a cold hollow feeling: I had only known her in death.

The rest of Jerry’s belongings did not amount to much, as Eberhardt had said. Enough clothing to fit into the suitcase in the closet, all of it casual, mod-styled and inexpensive. A pair of sneakers and a pair of old fisherman’s boots. A cheap pocket calculator. A packet of wheatstraw cigarette papers, the kind kids use nowadays to roll marijuana joints. So maybe he smokes a little grass, I thought. So what?

So nothing.

I looked at the books on the writing desk. Dictionary, thesaurus, college journalism text, a couple of novels, and the rest a selection of popular accounts of investigative reporting. There was nothing hidden between the pages of any of them; the cops would have found it if there had been.

The typewriter was an old Smith-Corona manual that had seen a lot of wear. Beside it were several sheets of white dime-store paper. On a hunch I took one of the sheets, rolled it into the platen, and typed out the words “Jerry Carding” with one forefinger. But the “a” key was not tilted and the “r” key was not chipped; the threatening letters to Christine Webster had not been written on this machine.

I lifted the typewriter and looked at the rubber pad underneath. All that was there besides some dust was a small corner torn off a piece of thin paper. But not typing or book paper; the corner was glossy and colored brown with a line of black. I picked it up and took a closer look. Off a label of some kind, I thought. Or maybe a decal. The back of the glossy side was gummed.

I held it out to Mrs. Darden on the tip of my finger. “Can you guess what this might have come from?”

She peered at it. “I’m afraid not, no.”

It may or may not have had any significance; I decided I ought to keep it just in case and put it into my shirt pocket.

We went downstairs again. In the foyer I said, “Would you mind if I came back and spoke to your daughter?”

“Of course not,” Mrs. Darden said. “But I’m afraid Sharon won’t be back from Santa Rosa until late this evening.”

I had already given some thought to spending the night in Bodega Bay; it seemed like a reasonable idea, assuming I did not turn up anything conclusive in the next couple of hours. I said, “I think I’ll probably stay over until tomorrow. I could drop by again in the morning.”

“That would be fine. You could come around ten-thirty, we’ll be home from church by then.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Darden.”

“Not at all,” she said gravely. “Sharon and I both want to do everything we can to help.”

The Kellenbeck Fish Company was a long narrow red-roofed building set at a perpendicular angle to the shore, so that most of it extended out into the bay on thick wooden pilings. A salt-grayed sign hanging below the eaves in front stated its name and said that Gus Kellenbeck was owner and proprietor. There were a couple of ancient, corroded hoists off to one side of a gravel parking area; wedged in between them was a dusty green Cadillac. One other vehicle, a well-traveled Ford pick-up, sat with its nose at an angle to the highway.

I took my car in alongside the pick-up, got out and went to a shedlike enclosure built onto the front of the main structure. The door there was locked. So I walked around to the side, where a narrow catwalk followed the building’s length. The catwalk took me onto a dock about fifty yards square, with a pier in somewhat ramshackle condition attached to it. The pier jutted another fifty or sixty yards into the bay; a lone salmon troller was tied up at the end of it, bobbing in the choppy water.

A middle-aged guy was doing something with a seine net near a row of iron crab pots. I crossed to him and asked where I might find Gus Kellenbeck.

“His office,” the guy said laconically. “Inside.”

I went into the building through a pair of open hangar-type doors made out of corrugated iron. The warehouse was cluttered with much the same type of equipment and storage facilities as inside The Tides Wharf, except that there was more of it. A bank of machinery, with a crisscross of conveyor belts fronting it, took up a portion of the wall at the upper end. On my left was a cubicle that would be the office; a single grime-streaked window was set beside a closed door. I could not see inside it from the entrance.

The wooden floor was wet and slippery with fish scales; I picked my way across it to the cubicle. When I knocked on the door a hoarse voice said, “What is it?”

I opened the door and looked in. A short bearish guy sat behind a desk cluttered with papers and junk, an open ledger book in front of him and a pencil tucked over his right ear. There was also a bottle of Canadian whiskey on the desk, along with a glass half-f of liquor. The guy glanced at me, glanced at the bottle, scowled, and put his hands flat on the ledger book. He did not look too happy to have a stranger find him drinking on the job, even if he did own the place.

“Mr. Kellenbeck?”

“Yeah?”

“Okay if I come in? I’d like to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Jerry Carding.”

That made him scowl again. But he waved an admitting hand at me, closed the ledger, and got up on his feet. He was thick-featured and olive-complexioned, with blue-black hair that was a snarl of ringlets; his nose had been broken at least once, and improperly set, and it seemed to list at a forty-five degree angle toward the left side of his face. His eyes, sea-green flecked with yellow, were heavy-lidded and bloodshot.

I went in and shut the door behind me. Kellenbeck watched me come over in front of the desk; he still did not look happy. He said, “You a policeman?”

“No. Private investigator.”

When I gave him my name he said, “Oh, yeah,” and then scowled a third time. “How come you’re here? I thought the cops were handling the kid’s disappearance.”

“They are. But I’m working for Martin Talbot’s sister. With police sanction.”

“Police sanction, huh? All right, sit down.”

I took the only other chair in the office, Kellenbeck plunked himself down again in his swivel chair, pinched the bridge of his nose as if he had a headache, and looked at the bottle again. A moment later he caught it up by its bare neck and put it away inside one of the desk drawers.

“So what do you want to know?” he said.

“Well, do you have any idea where Jerry might have gone?”

“Assuming he didn’t do any killings, you mean?”

“Assuming that.”

He shrugged. “Where do kids go these days? They spend a little time someplace, pretty soon they move on like—what do you call them?”

“Nomads?”

“Yeah. Like nomads.”

“Except that Jerry didn’t take any of his belongings with him,” I said.

“No? I didn’t know that.”

“Did you see him last Sunday, Mr. Kellenbeck?”

“No. Saturday was the last time, when he knocked off for the day.”

“Did he say anything to you then? Give you any indication he might be planning to go away?”

“Not a word,” Kellenbeck said. He took a short greenish cigar from a humidor on his desk and began to unwrap it. “I was kind of surprised when he didn’t show up on Monday morning, because he’d never missed a day before and always came in right on time. So I called up the Dardens, where he was living, and that friend of his, Steve something, works down at The Tides. Trying to get in touch with him, you know? But he’d just taken off without telling nobody where he was going.”

“May I ask when you pay your employees?”

“Middle of the week. Wednesdays.”

“Did Jerry ask you for his wages on Saturday?”

“No, why?”

“Well, he had three days pay coming,” I said. “Seems a little odd that he didn’t ask for it if he was planning to leave Bodega Bay the following night. He’s not a wealthy kid; he’d need money wherever he was going.”

Kellenbeck scowled one more time. “I never thought of that,” he said. He lit his cigar with a wooden kitchen match. “Maybe he wasn’t planning to leave on Saturday. Maybe he only got it into his head the next day.”

“Maybe. But what would make him decide to go that suddenly, without waiting to collect his salary?”

“You got me. I can’t figure it.”

“Did he mention anything to you about an article he was writing?”

“Article? You mean like the one he did on salmon fishing?”

“Something he was working on before he disappeared.”

“What would that be?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to find out.”

“First I heard of it,” Kellenbeck said. “He never said a word to me about writing anything.”

“Do you know if he had trouble with anyone around here?”

“What kind of trouble?”

“A fight or an argument of some kind. Like that.”

“If he did, I never heard about it. He got along with everybody, far as I know. An easygoing kid.”

I asked a few more questions and learned nothing from Kellenbeck’s answers that I did not already know. When I got up to leave he stood, too, and put out his hand; I took it. He said, “Anything else I can do, you let me know.”

“I’ll do that,” I said, and left him chewing on his cigar and eyeing the glass of whiskey that was still on his desk.

The wind cut at me in icy gusts when I came out onto the dock. Overhead, low-flying tendrils of mist sailed inland at a pretty good clip, but out over the ocean the fog had lifted somewhat and you could see the black-rimmed clouds above it. The day had turned darker, colder; the bay was frothed with whitecaps now, and the smell of salt and ozone had sharpened. It would not be long before the storm blew in and the rains came.

And where is he? I thought. What happened last Sunday night?

What happened to Jerry Carding?

The road that curled around the northern lip of the bay was relatively new and in good condition; but it was also slick with mist, and the tires on my car were starting to bald a little. I drove at a circumspect twenty-five, squinting through the arcs made by my clattering windshield wipers.

Erika and I had taken this road, I remembered, on that longago Sunday outing. It followed the bay’s edge toward the jetty and then hooked back up to the top of Bodega Head. From up there you could watch the surf hammering at the jagged rocks below; and you could see the excavation scars where the government had begun work on a proposed nuclear power plant twenty years ago. A public hue and cry had kept them from going through with their plans: this was earthquake country and nobody wanted to be sitting in the shadow of a nuclear reactor if a big quake hit. We had talked about that, Erika and I, standing up there on the Head, holding hands like a couple of young lovers. And later we had gone back to The Tides to eat crab cioppino before driving home to San Francisco. And that night, after we had finished making love, Erika had said jokingly, “You know something, old bear? You make the earth shake pretty good yourself.”