Labyrinth (The Nameless Detective) (18 page)

“Thanks.” I finished my stew, gave him some more money for that, and slid a dime tip under the plate when he wasn’t looking. The stew had not been all that good and neither had he.

As I started out he called after me, “Tune in ‘The Rockford Files’ one of these nights. That Jim Garner’s a real good detective. ”

Me too, I thought wryly. Even if I don’t have my own TV show.

I headed the car north on Highway 1. The winding two-lane road had little traffic for a Sunday afternoon, but the fog had come back again, heavy and wet, and it made the pavement slick and visibility poor; it was forty-five minutes before I crossed the bridge spanning the Russian River and approached Jenner.

The hamlet—what there was of it—was located at the mouth of the river, where it widened out and joined the ocean. To the west, between the road and the water, were a lot of tide flats and a few houses. The last house south of Jenner matched Ingles’ description: a ramshackle twenties-style structure that seemed to list inland, as if the constant wind off the sea had been too much for it. A lone cypress tree grew in the muddy front yard, wind-bent and leaning companionably in the same direction; parked near it was a 1940s vintage Chevvy pick-up. Lights glowed behind chintz curtains in one front window.

I took my car into the yard and put it next to the pick-up. When I got out a fat lazy-looking dog came around from behind the house, barked once in an indifferent way, and then waddled off again. I climbed sagging steps onto the front porch and rapped on the door.

Nobody answered. Ingles had said Zach Judson was all but deaf, I remembered; I tried again, using my fist this time, pounding hard enough to rattle the wood in its frame. That got results. The door creaked open pretty soon and a guy about seventy peered out at me through wire-framed spectacles. He had a gnarly face, a mop of unkempt white hair, and one of those big old-fashioned plastic hearing aids hooked over one ear.

He said, “Yep?” in a tone that wondered if I was going to try to sell him something.

“Mr. Judson?”

“Yep?”

I told him my name. “I’m a detective, and I—”

“You say detective?”

“Yes, sir. Investigating the disappearance of Jerry Carding.”

“Who?”

“Jerry Carding.”

“Never heard of any Jerry Carling.”

“Carding, Mr. Judson. Jerry
Carding
.”

“Never heard of any Jerry Carding.”

“The story’s been in all the papers and on TV—”

“Don’t read the papers. Don’t own a TV.”

“He vanished from Bodega last Sunday night, between nine and ten o’clock,” I said. “A young fellow about twenty, dark hair, Fu Manchu mustache. I understand you were in Bodega around that time and I thought you might have seen him.”

“Yep,” Judson said.

“Sir?”

“Yep. Did see him.”

Well now. “Where was this, Mr. Judson?”

“On the highway. Near Ingles’ cafe.”

“Was he alone?”

“Yep. Hitchhiking.”

“He thumbed you, then?”

“Yep.”

“But you didn’t stop for him?”

“
Did
stop for him. Used to hitch rides myself, back when. Decent young fella. Polite, good manners. Missing, you say?”

“Yes.” There was a tenseness inside me now; this was the kind of break I had been looking for. “You took him where, Mr. Judson?”

“What?”

“Where did you take him?”

“Not far. Just up the road a ways.”

“How far up the road?”

“To the Kellenbeck Fish Company,” he said.

I did some hard thinking on the way back to Bodega Bay.

Jerry Carding had hitchhiked to the Kellenbeck Fish Company last Sunday night. All right. Zach Judson had not seen him approach the plant, but it was a safe assumption that it had been Jerry’s destination; there was nothing else in the vicinity, no other businesses or private homes. Meeting someone there? Could be. But then why not meet in Bodega instead? As it was, Jerry had had to walk partway and hitch a ride the rest of the way.

The other possibility was that he had gone to the fish company to look for something, either inside the building or somewhere around it. Something connected with the article he’d written; that seemed likely. Ten o’clock on a Sunday night—a nocturnal prowl. It was the kind of thing an adventurous kid, a kid who wanted to be an investigative reporter, might do.

But what had happened then? Had Jerry completed his search, with or without finding what he’d come after, and later hitchhiked away from Bodega Bay? Or had somebody found him there and been responsible for his disappearance?

And the big question—why? What was there about the Kellenbeck Fish Company that would inspire a “career-making” article and a secret late-evening visit? Yes, and why go there
after
he had finished the article?

I focused my thoughts on Gus Kellenbeck. According to Mrs. Darden, the past couple of years had not been a boon for anyone in the fishing business; yet Kellenbeck had managed to keep his plant operating at a profit. It was possible that he was mixed up in some sort of illegal enterprise, such as price-fixing or substituting and selling one kind of processed fish for another. But that sort of thing had little news value; it happened all the time, in one form or another. Even a novice like Jerry would have known that.

What
else
could it be?

What else . . .

There was an itching sensation at the back of my mind, the kind I seem always to have when there’s something caught and trying to struggle out of my subconscious. Something significant I had seen or heard. It gave me a vague feeling of excitement, as if I were poised on the edge of breakthrough knowledge: remember what it was, take that one right turn, and I would be on my way into all the other right turns that led out of the labyrinth.

Only it would not come, not yet; the harder I tried to get hold of it, the tighter it seemed to wedge back. Let it alone, then. It would pop through sooner or later, the way nagging bits of information you can’t quite remember—names, dates, titles of books or movies—come popping through once you stop thinking about them.

It was four-thirty and just starting to get dark when I neared the Kellenbeck Fish Company. On impulse I swung the car onto the deserted gravel area in front. The building had a dark abandoned look in the fog and the late-afternoon gloom; closed on Sundays, I thought, nobody here. But I got out anyway and went around onto the rear dock.

The corrugated iron doors were closed and padlocked; I could see that without going over there. Instead I wandered to the foot of the rickety pier. There was nothing on it, no boats tied up at its end. Beyond, the gray water was scummed with mist. And on the opposite shore, Bodega Head was just a lumpish outline dotted here and there with ghostly lights from the houses above the marina.

I turned to look at the building again. The itching sensation came back, but with the same nonresults. Maybe if I had another talk with Kellenbeck, I thought; maybe that would help me remember. At the least I could see how he reacted when I mentioned Jerry Carding’s visit here last Sunday evening.

So I returned to the car and drove to The Tides and hunted up a public telephone. There was a listing for Kellenbeck in the Sonoma County directory with an address in Carmet-by-the-Sea. Carmet was an older development of homes a few miles back to the north, right on the ocean: I had passed by it twice on the trip to and from Jenner.

I got there inside of twenty minutes, but it was another ten before I located Kellenbeck’s place; the homes were well spread out along the east side of the highway and the fog made it difficult to read the street signs. The house turned out to be a big knottypine A-frame with a lot of glass facing out toward the Pacific. Even for Carmet, where homes would not come cheap because of the view, it looked to be worth a pretty good chunk of money. Kellenbeck was doing well for himself, all right—maybe too well for the owner of a minor fish-processing plant. You did not buy or build a house like this with just a small-businessman’s profits.

The trip here seemed to be a wasted effort, though. All the windows were dark, and so were those in the adjacent garage. Just to be sure I went up onto the porch and rang the bell. No answer.

A pair of mist-smeared headlights poked toward me as I was coming back to the car. Kellenbeck? But it wasn’t; the headlights belonged to a low-slung sports job, not the Cadillac I had seen yesterday at the fish company, and it drifted on by.

I got into the car and sat there and tried to decide what to do next. Take another room for the night at The Tides Motel and then brace Kellenbeck tomorrow—that seemed like the best idea. The other alternative, hanging around here and hoping that he
did
show up before long, had no appeal. For all I knew he was out somewhere for the evening, visiting friends or indulging his fondness for liquor; and I had no idea where to go looking for him—

The itching again.

Then, all at once, I remembered.

It came out of my subconscious clear and sharp—something I had seen, something odd—and right on its heels was another fragment. I put on the dome light, took out the torn corner I had found in Jerry Carding’s room at the Darden house, and looked at it. Then I began to construct a mental blueprint, testing it with some of the questions I had asked myself and other people the past few days. And I remembered something else then, one more fragment. And sketched in a few more connecting lines.

And there it was.

Not a complete blueprint; it didn’t explain all the twists and turns, did not show me all the way to the end. But the things it did show made sense: What it was Jerry had found out, the subject of his article. Why he might have gone to the fish company last Sunday night. Why he had disappeared.

Why his father had been murdered in Brisbane on Thursday.

Yet I had no proof of any of it. It was speculation, personal observation—just like my account of what had happened when Martin Talbot discovered Victor Carding’s body. Eberhardt and Donleavy would want to check it out if I took it to them cold, and so would the Federal authorities; but no search warrants could be obtained without some sort of evidential cause, and if Kellenbeck was alerted there might not
be
any evidence left to find. He could take steps to cover himself, bluff through even a Federal investigation, get off scot-free.

I
had
to have proof, damn it. Something solid to back up my theories. And I knew where I might be able to find it. . . .

No, I thought then. Uh-uh. You don’t break laws, remember? Or go skulking around in the night like the pulp private eyes. You want to get your license revoked?

You want a murderer to maybe go unpunished?

Call up Eberhardt. Lay it in his lap.

Not without proof. You could
try
to get it; go there, see how things look. At least make the effort.

I spent another couple of minutes arguing with myself. But it was no contest: I started the car and went away to skulk in the night.

The Kellenbeck Fish Company was still dark and so wrapped in fog now that it had a two-dimensional look, like a shape cut from heavy black paper. I drove on past it by a hundred yards, parked off the road alongside a jumble of shoreline rocks. From under the dash I unclipped the flashlight I keep there and dropped it into my coat pocket. Blurred yellow headlight beams brightened the road behind me; I waited until the car hissed past and disappeared into the mist before I got out and hurried back toward the building.

The night had an eerie muffled stillness, marred only by the ringing of fog bells out on the channel buoys and the faint lapping of the bay water against the pilings; the crunch of my footfalls seemed unnaturally loud as I crossed the gravel parking area. When I got to the shedlike enclosure I paused in the shadows to test the door there. Locked—and so secure in its frame that it did not rattle when I tugged on the knob. If I was going to get in at all, it would have to be at the rear.

I crossed to the catwalk. It was pitch-black along there; I stayed in close to the building wall, feeling my way along it until I came out onto the dock. The writhing fog created vague spectral shadows among the stacks of crab pots, brushed my face with a spidery wetness. Visibility was no more than two hundred yards. Even the lights on Bodega Head were swaddled, hidden inside the fogbanks.

The padlock on the corrugated doors was an old Yale with a heavy base and a thick steel loop. You would need a hacksaw and an hour’s work to cut through it, and I was not about to try such shenanigans anyway. I felt nervous enough as it was. Cold sweat had formed under my arms, the palms of my hands were damp, sticky. Maybe the pulp detectives were good at this sort of thing; maybe Jim Garner was on “The Rockford Files.” Not me.

I moved to the far side of the doors. In the wall there, near where the crab pots were, was a window made opaque by an accumulation of grime. When I stepped up close to it I could see it was the kind with two sashes, one overlapping the other vertically. I put the heel of my hand against the frame of the lower piece and shoved upward. Latched at the middle but not at the bottom. And a loose latch at that because it rose a quarter of an inch before binding with a creaky sound. It could probably be forced without too much trouble.