“If there’s a connection.”
“The more I think about it, the more likely it seems.”
“We’ll see.”
“Did your man find out anything new in Bodega?”
“Nothing positive,” he said. “The Carding kid left all of his belongings behind when he disappeared, but that may not mean much; none of what little stuff there is is worth anything. And if anybody up there knows where he is or why he left, they’re not talking. Friend of his, Steve Farmer, did say that he’d been kind of secretive for a few days. Maybe writing an article of some kind; that’s what Farmer thinks.”
I remembered Lainey Madden saying that Jerry had not come down to San Francisco last weekend for that same apparent reason. I said, “Farmer didn’t have any idea what this article might be about?”
“No. There wasn’t any sign of it among Jerry’s effects, either.”
“Well, I’m going up there tomorrow myself. Maybe I can nose up something. Okay with you?”
“Go ahead. But it’ll probably be a waste of time.”
“I know. One thing I can do, though, is ask Farmer about a girl named Bobbie Reid. He used to date her, and she was also a friend of Christine Webster’s. She committed suicide about a month ago, because of some sort of personal problem.”
Eberhardt cocked an eyebrow. “You find all that out today?”
“Yes. From Lainey Madden and Dave Brodnax.”
“You can be a pretty good cop when you set your mind to it,” he said without irony. “What else do you know about this Reid girl?”
I filled him in on what few other details I had learned. “The suicide report ought to tell you her next-of-kin,” I said, “and maybe who some of her other friends were.”
“I’ll have Klein check it out.”
It was another fifteen minutes before one of the lab guys put his head out and said they were finished. Eberhardt and I went back inside. Most of the file papers and folders had been gathered up into loose stacks, and the rest of the wreckage had been stirred around in a methodical sort of way; the desk and chairs and file cabinets and a few other things had a fine dusting of fingerprint powder on them.
“We found two dominant sets of latents,” one of the lab boys said, “but one set is bound to be yours. Are your prints on file with the Department?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. We’ll just have to hope the other set is on file too-somewhere. And that they belong to whoever laid into this place.”
“How long will it take to run a check?”
“Not too long, local and state. If we have to go to the FBI,” he said wryly, “it could take days.”
Eberhardt said, “Call him at home later tonight or first thing in the morning, either way. I’ll give you the number.”
“Right.”
“Anything else?”
“Not much,” the other guy said. “Lock on the door wasn’t jimmied; probably picked with a credit card or something. Smudges on a couple of the papers that seem to be oxblood shoe polish. No help in that, though, unless it’s a rare brand that can be traced to certain dealers.” He shrugged. “And that’s it.”
The three of them left not long afterward. When they were gone I spent some time scraping the dried glue off the desktop, putting things back into the drawers. But my heart wasn’t in it. It would take me at least a day to sweep up the floors, scrub the walls and furniture, sort out the files, get somebody to cart away the slashed chair and somebody else to bring in a new one. Next week-when some of the pain and anger had dulled and I could face the task with a sense of detachment.
I got out of there at eight-thirty. And home a little before nine. I forced myself to eat a sandwich I did not want and thought about calling Laura Nichols; but I had nothing of substance to report and no desire to talk to her in any event. I did call Dennis Litchak again, to tell him I would be away tomorrow and to ask him to check on the flat for me from time to time. He said he would.
At a quarter of ten, just as I was about to head into the shower, the phone rang. It was one of the lab guys: they had run the second set of latent prints through the state and local computers. No card match, no ID. Whoever the prints belonged to had never been fingerprinted in the state of California.
Terrific.
So I took my shower and went to bed and eventually to sleep. And had a nightmare about coming home, opening the front door, and being inundated by toppling stacks of pulp magazines, all of which had been ripped to pieces. Voices kept screaming accusations at me, saying things like, “Look what you’ve done to us! You’re supposed to be the last of the lone-wolf private eyes; why didn’t you protect your own kind?” Then the voices became eyes, thousands of eyes that glared balefully at me while I fought to keep from drowning in a sea of shredded pulp paper.
It was absurd stuff, of course, with comic overtones. But it scared hell out of me just the same.
THIRTEEN
Until the early sixties Bodega Bay had been a quiet and old-fashioned commercial fishermen’s province. People from the bigger Sonoma County towns like Santa Rosa and Petaluma went there to buy fresh crabs and other seafood, or to use one of the nearby beaches, and families came up from San Francisco once in a while to take in the scenic beauty of the Sonoma coastline; otherwise the natives had the place pretty much to themselves.
But then Hitchcock filmed his suspense movie, The Birds, on and around the bay, at the village of Bodega close by, and at the complex of bayfront buildings called The Tides and that resulted in a good deal of publicity and national prominence. Before long Bodega Bay became something of an “in” place to visit or even to live at, and it began to change accordingly. Along with streams of sightseers in the spring and summer months, artists of one type or another, enterprising merchants, retired couples, sport fishermen after salmon or sea bass all flocked there; land developers built a couple of fancy motels and at least one expensive community of homes, called Bodega Bay Harbor; antique and souvenir shops sprang up everywhere. Today, less than two decades later, it was a different place. The rugged coastline was still the same, and most of the old buildings and landmarks along Highway 1 were still there, but all the charm and attractiveness seemed to be gone. The impression you got was one of creeping suburbia: another twenty years and all the hills and cliffs and beaches would probably be covered with houses, fast-food franchises, shopping centers.
That was the feeling I had, anyway, when I got up there a few minutes past noon on Saturday-my first visit to Bodega Bay since a Sunday outing with Erika Coates eight years ago, in the good days before the breakup of our relationship. But then, maybe part of the feeling was my mood, and part of it, too, the heavy low-hanging fog that shrouded the coast and gave everything new and old a cheerless aspect. The mist was so thick it was almost like rain; I had to use my windshield wipers since passing through Valley Ford ten miles back.
I turned off the highway into the parking lot around which The Tides was built. There were only three other cars in the lot and nobody out and around that I could see; even the road was more or less deserted. I parked in front of the Wharf Bar and Restaurant and got out into the fog and an icy wind.
This place, at least, did not appear to have changed much. All the same buildings-The Tides Motel, the small ice house, the Union 76 dock, the barber shop and souvenir shop-and all of them still painted white with garish orange roofs and trim. Even the weathered signs on the front of The Tides Wharf, a long low structure that housed the restaurant and a fresh-fish market, looked to be the same.
I went over and onto the pier that led around and along the Wharf’s backside. The bay was an oily grayish- black color, windrumpled into whitecaps; the red-and-white buoys that marked the crossing channel and three high-masted fishing boats, anchored downwind, rocked in the swells. You could not see much of Bodega Head across the bay, and the narrows that led into the ocean at the southern end, bounded by a pair of rock jetties, were all but obliterated. The sea air smelled sharply of salt and dark rain: another storm building somewhere out on the
