“What do you think it’s been like for me the past twenty years, Eb? A lot of hard, mostly crappy work, no glamour, and damned little money. I barely made enough to get by when things were going good.”
“I told you before, I can bring in some business.”
“But would it be enough to support both of us? These are tough times, you know that. I don’t see that they’re going to get much better either.”
“If you’re going to say no,” he said, “go ahead and say it. I won’t hold it against you.”
The hell he wouldn’t. I could see that in the hard, bitter shine of his eyes. “I’m not going to say no yet; I’m not ready to say anything yet. Give me a few more days, will you?”
“Sure. A few more days. But I got to have something to do pretty soon or I’ll start climbing the goddamn walls.”
Silence settled between us. But it was not the good companionable silence of the old days; it was strained, like that between two strangers.
I broke it finally by saying, “There’s an American League playoff game on TV. You feel like watching it?”
“Nah. Greedy jocks, greedy owners, stupid announcers-who the hell cares about professional sports these days? Not me, that’s for sure.”
“Yeah.”
“You don’t have to hang around, you know,” he said. “You probably got a hot date with Kerry coming up anyway.”
“Sure,” I lied. “That’s right.”
“Call me when you make up your mind,” he said, without looking at me. “I won’t bug you again, meanwhile.”
There wasn’t anything more for me to say. I nodded, gripped his shoulder, and left him sitting there in his lawn chair staring at something only he could see.
I was in a low mood when I got back to my flat, and ten minutes on the telephone shoved it all the way to the bottom. Kerry was the first person I called, to see if she wanted to have dinner with me; she said no, she was still working and she didn’t feel much like company tonight. She sounded grumpy, so I asked, “Are you still miffed about Jeanne Emerson?” and she said, “Don’t be silly.” But then she said, “Why don’t you go have dinner with her? I’m sure she could whip up an Oriental delicacy or two for you.” After which she muttered something about talking to me later and rang off.
So then I called Hannah Peterson’s number in Sonoma; she still wasn’t home. But Arleen Bradford was, and in a pretty emotional state. The first thing she said to me was, “It’s all your fault,” in a shrill, angry voice. “Why did you have to let Lester Raymond get away? Why couldn’t you have gone to the police?”
“Look, Miss Bradford-”
“He murdered my father!” She almost shouted the words, so that I had to pull the receiver away from my ear.
“The police will get him,” I said. “He’s not going to-”
“I won’t pay you any more money. You hear me? I won’t pay you another cent after what you did!”
And bang, she slammed the receiver down in my ear.
I sighed, went out of the bedroom, turned on the TV, and tried to watch the baseball game for a while. But nothing much was going on, and when one of the announcers said in response to a fielding error, “He gets paid a million dollars a year to catch popflies like that,” I got up in disgust and shut the thing off.
I drove down to Union Street and bought myself an anchovy-and-pepperoni pizza for dinner. But by the time I drove back up the hill, found a parking place, and walked to my flat, the pizza was cold. I put it into the oven to warm it up, left it in too long, and burned the crust. Then I discovered I was out of beer.
It was one of those days, all right. And there was only one way to deal with days like that.
I took two aspirin for my headache and went to bed with a hot pulp.
The telephone jarred me out of sleep on Sunday morning, just as it had on Saturday morning. The nightstand clock said a few minutes past nine. It wasn’t anybody I knew this time; a youngish-sounding male voice gave his name as Harry Runquist and then said, “I’m Hannah Peterson’s fiance. I’m calling from Sonoma.”
I said, stifling a yawn, “What can I do for you, Mr. Runquist?”
“Do you know where Hannah is? You’re the last person I can think of who might know.”
“Where she is?”
“Because if you do, you’ve got to tell me. I’ve been half out of my head worrying about her.”
There was a kind of controlled desperation in his voice; it made him sound hoarse. And it woke me all the way up. “I don’t know where Mrs. Peterson is,” I said. “I’ve only talked to her once and that was three days ago. How long has she been missing?”
“Since Friday night.”
“Have you tried calling her sister?”
“I tried calling everybody,” Runquist said. “Nobody’s seen her, nobody knows where she might be. I even went to the police last night. They said you had to wait forty-eight hours before you could file a missing-person report. I tried to tell them about her father, about this son of a bitch Raymond, but they wouldn’t listen.”
“What about Raymond?”
“They said they hadn’t had any reports of him being in this area; they said I was worrying about nothing-she was upset about her father and she probably just went off somewhere to be by herself. But they don’t know Hannah. She wouldn’t do that, not without telling me.”
“Are you saying you think Lester Raymond might be responsible for her disappearance?”
“No. I don’t know. There’s just no other reason I can think of for her vanishing like this.”
I remembered the telephone message I’d had from Hannah Peterson on Friday night. She had sounded pretty distraught, all right, almost pleading-and maybe frightened. But of Lester Raymond? It just didn’t make sense that he would try to harm one of Charles Bradford’s daughters.
“You’re a detective,” Runquist said. “Maybe you could find her, find out what’s going on. I want to hire you.”
“Well, I’m not sure that I-”
“I love Hannah, mister,” he said, and his voice had dropped to a tense, gravelly whisper, like a man coming down with laryngitis. “I’m wild about her. And I don’t know what else to do. Somebody’s got to do something. Come up here and talk to me about it, will you? I’ll pay you whatever you want. Only for God’s sake help me find her!”
What can you say to that kind of emotional plea? Only one thing, if you’re somebody like me.
“All right, Mr. Runquist,” I said. “I’ll come up and talk to you. I’ll see what I can do.”
Chapter 17
It was a little better than an hour’s drive to Sonoma, forty miles northeast of San Francisco, and my watch said eleven-fifteen when I got to the big, tree-shaded plaza in the middle of town. It’s a pretty place, Sonoma, located at the lower end of the Valley of the Moon and surrounded by wooded hills, orchards, farmland, and vast acres of vineyards. Although the wines of the Napa Valley to the east are more prominent, a lot of people who know about such things say that the Sonoma Valley produces wines of equal if not superior stature. There are a trio of wineries within the city limits of Sonoma, in fact, one of which, Buena Vista, has the distinction of being the first winery in California; it was founded in 1832 by a Hungarian named Agoston Haraszthy, who selected and imported thousands of cuttings from the finest vineyards of Europe and who was responsible for creating the type of wine called zinfandel. I knew all of that because I had spent a fair amount of time up here over the years. If I ever moved out of the city, which wasn’t likely, Sonoma was the place I would come to.
I turned right in front of the city hall. As early as it was, there were a lot of people out and around-picnickers in the plaza, the inevitable tourists wandering around gawking at the place where California’s independence from Mexico had been declared in 1846 and at the Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma, and the other old frame and adobe brick buildings that flanked the square. Church bells echoed in the distance. The air was warm and heavy with the smell of growing things and, faintly, of pulped grapes: this was the time of year the crush takes place. All
