minute.”
He quit hoeing, squinted at me for a couple of seconds, and apparently decided I looked respectable enough to deal with. He started in my direction. There was a lot of bounce in his step; he may have been old in years, but he had some spark left.
“What can I do for you?” he said when he got to the gate.
“I’m trying to locate a woman named Hannah Peterson,” I said. “She-”
“Who?”
“Hannah Peterson. She lives a couple of blocks down that way”-I gestured-“in the house with vineyards on one side and the horse pasture on the other.”
“Oh, her,” he said, and grinned. He glanced over his shoulder at the round woman on the porch. Then he winked at me. “The blonde with the big tits,” he said.
“Uh-huh. Right.”
“Well? What do you want with her?”
“I’m a friend of the man she’s engaged to. Harry Runquist. He’s pretty worried about her; she’s been missing since Friday night.”
“She has? Missing, you say?”
“Yes. I was wondering if maybe you’d seen her sometime Friday evening. Or any time since.”
“Saw her yesterday morning,” he said. “So how could she be missing since Friday night? Don’t make any sense.”
“Are you sure it was yesterday morning you saw her?”
“Sure I’m sure,” he said. “I may be old, but I ain’t senile. I know one day from another.”
“What time yesterday morning?”
“Around nine o’clock. I was on my way to the grocery. Edna-that’s my wife-needed some milk.” He frowned. “Ain’t got a cow,” he said regretfully.
“Where was it you saw Mrs. Peterson?”
“Inside her garage.”
“You mean the garage door was open when you drove bay?”
“That’s what I mean.”
“What was she doing?”
“Looked like she’d been loading something into her car,” he said. “Trunk was up.”
“Was she alone?”
“Not exactly. Another car’d just pulled into the driveway. Company, I reckon.”
“Did you see who was in it?”
“Nope. I was too busy looking at the blonde’s tits.” He winked at me again. “Man never gets too old to look at a nice set of tits.”
“Had you ever seen the car before?”
“Which car?”
“Not Mrs. Peterson’s; the other one.”
“Can’t say that I had, no.”
“Do you remember what kind it was?”
“Hell, I don’t know nothing about cars,” he said. “They all look alike to me. Just a car, that’s all.”
“New, or an older model?”
“More new than old, I guess.”
“What color?”
“Green. Dark green.”
“So you drove on past,” I said, “and went to the store. How long was it before you came back?”
He shrugged. “Twenty minutes, give or take.”
“Was the dark green car still in Mrs. Peterson’s driveway?”
“Nope.”
“How about Mrs. Peterson’s car?”
“I dunno. Garage door was down.”
“Did you see any sign of her?”
“Nope. And believe me, son, I was looking. Tits like she’s got.. ” He sighed, glanced back at his wife again, sighed a second time, and said, “Sure must be nice,” in the same regretful voice he’d used when he said he didn’t have a cow.
I thanked him and started back toward Hannah’s house. I thought I could take his story pretty much at face value; he was a long way from being senile, and he hadn’t struck me as the type to make up stories. And if it was the truth, then Hannah Peterson hadn’t disappeared Friday night but sometime yesterday.
But that fact only clouded the issue even more. Why hadn’t her bed been slept in Friday night? Why, if she’d stayed away all night, had she come back to her house yesterday morning? To load something into her car, maybe-but what? And who had been in the other car, the dark green one?
Chapter 20
When I got back to Hannah’s house I rang the doorbell and Runquist let me in. He’d found some wine here, too; there was a big glass of it, red this time, in his left hand.
“No calls, nothing,” he said. He gave me a painfully hopeful look. “You find out anything?”
“Maybe. But I don’t know yet what it means.”
I repeated the gist of my conversation with the elderly neighbor. But I still kept my speculations about Hannah and Lester Raymond to myself.
“I don’t get it,” Runquist said. He sounded even more bewildered and worried than before. The wine was starting to get to him; you could see it in the glaze of his eyes. “If she was all right yesterday morning, why didn’t she call me? And where was she Friday night?”
More rhetorical questions, just like the ones I’d been asking myself. I said, “Do any of Mrs. Peterson’s friends drive a dark green, late-model car?”
He shook his head as if to clear it and paced around for fifteen seconds or so. Then he said, “No. None of them I know own a green car. Who the devil…”
“Just take it easy, Mr. Runquist. Do you mind if we go out into the garage?”
“The garage? What for?”
“I want to take a look around.”
There was an entrance to the garage off the kitchen. Most of the floor space was empty and swept as clean as the interior of the house; there weren’t even any oil spots on the cement. I wandered around with Runquist at my heels. Washer-and-dryer combination, a small stack of firewood, some pieces of lawn furniture, a workbench that looked as though it hadn’t been used in a long time, and not much else. From what was in here now, I couldn’t even begin to guess what Hannah might have been loading into her car yesterday morning.
“What kind of car does Mrs. Peterson drive?” I asked.
“Toyota Tercel,” Runquist said.
“What year?”
“This year. She’s only had it a few months.”
“What color?”
“A sort of beige.”
“Do you know the license plate?”
“I think so… Seven-three-five NNY.”
I jotted that down in the notebook I carry. While I was doing that I remembered what he’d told me earlier about driving over here Friday night to put gas in Hannah’s empty tank. I asked him if the five-gallon can had been full or if he’d put in less than that amount.
“Less,” he said. “I emptied the can, but there couldn’t have been much more than a gallon in it.”
