“Yeah,” he said. “Guy in the Highway Patrol office up there told me where you were. According to him, no word on Greene yet.”
“I know. Fitzpatrick came by a few minutes ago.”
“You wouldn’t be planning to stick around up there until he’s caught?”
“Hell no. I’ll be home as soon as they’re done with me.”
“When’ll that be?”
“Sometime this afternoon, I guess. I’ve got to go sign a statement. And see a couple of Federal agents before that.”
“Me too,” he said. “I just got off the phone with one of the Alcohol and Firearms boys.”
“Have you talked to Donleavy?”
“Little while ago.”
“Is he dropping the charges against Martin Talbot?”
“That’s what he says. But the Carding murder is still officially open until Greene turns up. Or some kind of incriminating evidence does.” He paused. “The Christine Webster case is still open too, damn it.”
“Greene didn’t kill her, Eb,” I said.
“So you managed to tell me last night. You’re probably right-but I’d like it better if you weren’t.”
“I would too. But there’s just no motive for him to’ve shot the girl. Jerry Carding only had two copies of his article the night he was killed; there wasn’t a third he could have mailed to Christine.”
“Greene might have been afraid he’d told her something,” Eberhardt said, “and went after her for that reason.”
“It doesn’t add up. Why would Greene be more worried about Christine than, say, Steve Farmer or Sharon Darden-people right here at Bodega Bay? And if he had wanted to kill her, why wait until Tuesday night to do it? And why shoot her with a. 32 instead of the. 38 he used on Carding or the Browning automatic he tried to use on me?”
Eberhardt sighed. “I can’t argue with any of that,” he said. “All right, Greene didn’t kill Christine. But then who did? And why? Where’s the connection?”
“Maybe there isn’t one. Not a direct one, anyway.”
“Coincidence?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
“I don’t like coincidences worth a damn.”
“Neither do I, usually. But they do happen, Eb. They even happen in bunches sometimes.”
“Bunches?”
“I’m starting to wonder,” I said, “if maybe there aren’t a lot of coincidences in these two cases.”
“Meaning what? You got another theory?”
“No. Just a feeling so far. Did you dig up anything on Bobbie Reid, by the way?”
“Not much. She was the private type: no close friends, kept pretty much to herself. Her parents live in Red Bluff and they’re the ones who claimed the body; neither of them had much contact with Bobbie in the past year, said they didn’t know why she committed suicide. Didn’t seem too broken up about it, either. Nice folks.”
“What about the people where she worked?”
“Same thing. She was a legal secretary in a law office downtown; none of her coworkers knew her very well. Her boss, Arthur Brown, says he’d been thinking about firing her just before her death-late for work on a regular basis, withdrawn, moody, fouled up an important brief… Pause. “Hold on a second, will you?” He covered the mouthpiece but I could hear muffled voices in the background. A few seconds later he came back on. “I’ve got to go; the Alcohol and Firearms people are here. Call me when you get back to the city.”
“I may call you sooner than that,” I said.
“What?”
“Maybe inside an hour.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m not sure yet. I’ll get back to you when I am.”
I rang off and went over and stood looking out through the bayside window. More fog today, swirling heavily over the ruf fled surface of the bay. Like the thoughts swirling over the surface of my mind. Facts, memory scraps, additions and subtractions-all swirling and then beginning to coalesce into the missing part of the blueprint.
For the first time, then, I could see the complete design of the labyrinth. And it only had three connecting sides. The open end, the missing side, was nothing but coincidence-multiple coincidence.
Our stubborn refusal to accept that, particularly on this kind of Grand Guignol basis, was what had been hanging us up all along. Part of everything had begun with accidental occurrence and some of the complications had been built on it: a car driven by Martin Talbot crashing into one driven by Victor Carding; Christine Webster having my business card and Laura Nichols deciding she needed a private detective; Talbot and me arriving at the Carding house just after Carding’s murder; all the suicides real and attempted and bogus; interrelationships among the people involved; even things like Greene showing up at Kellenbeck’s house just in time to spot me last night. Three parts connective tissue to one part coincidence.
I thought I knew now who had killed Christine and I had a hunch as to why. But I needed the answer to one more question before I could be sure. Just one more question.
I put on Muhlheim’s coat again, went out and down across the parking lot. The cold wind made my eyes water and started my nose running; my chest still felt badly congested. If I was smart I would make an appointment tomorrow with Doctor White. The shape my lungs were in, pneumonia was a threat I could not afford to overlook.
Inside The Tides Wharf I walked around into the warehouse area behind the fish market. Deserted. I came back out to the counter where a balding guy in a white apron was fileting salmon and asked him if Steve Farmer had reported for work today. The guy said yes, he was in the restaurant on his break.
So I crossed over there and stepped inside. Farmer was sitting at one of the tables near the windows; he was alone and seemed to be brooding into a cup of coffee. When I went to him and said, “Hello, Steve,” he looked up at me with pained and listless eyes.
“Oh,” he said, “it’s you.”
I sat down. “I guess you know about Jerry.”
“I heard this morning. It’s all people are talking about.”
“I’m sorry it had to turn out this way.”
“Sure.” He stared into the cup. “Jerry too,” he said. “All of them-just like I was afraid it would be.”
Yeah, I thought, all of them. But I said, “I need the answer to a question, Steve. You’re the only person who can give it to me.”
“What question?”
“Why did Bobbie Reid commit suicide?”
His face started to close up again, the way it had before, but this time it did not quite make it-as if Jerry Carding’s death had taken the edge off his feelings about everything else. He rested an elbow on the table, cocked the hand against his forehead like a visor. “Why do you have to keep bugging me about Bobbie? It’s all finished now, for God’s sake. Her suicide doesn’t have anything to do with the murders.”
“Yes it does. It’s got everything to do with Christine Webster’s murder.”
He gave me an anguished look from under the visored hand. “But I thought Andy Greene and Gus Kellenbeck-?”
“No. They killed Jerry and his father, yes. But not Christine.” I paused and then asked him again, in a gentler tone: “Why did Bobbie commit suicide?”
“I don’t know, not for sure. She had hangups…”
“What hangups? Steve, why did you break up with her?”
“I didn’t. She broke up with me; she… found somebody else…”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Somebody else, that’s all.”
“Another man?”
His shoulders sagged; he dropped both forearms to the table edge and slumped over them with his head bent. “No,” he said, “not another man. She was making it with a woman. I loved her and she turned gay on me, she
