I bought a Bud Light to go with my sandwich and had my lunch sitting in the car. I did some ruminating while I ate. Despite what Fuller had told me about Danny Martinez’s honesty, it seemed pretty clear-at least to me-that Martinez was the man Tom Washburn had talked to on the phone. He was of Mexican descent and he spoke with a slight accent. He had been at the Purcell house the night of the party, at the approximate time of Kenneth’s death; he could easily enough have seen or heard something incriminating. And he had had a run of bad luck that might have made him bitter enough to throw up a life of honesty in favor of one big grab at a tarnished brass ring. The run of bad luck also explained the six-month hiatus between Kenneth’s death and the phone call to Leonard’s home: Martinez hadn’t needed money back then, had had a job and a family. As for why he hadn’t gone to the police with what he’d seen or heard-maybe it wasn’t all that incriminating or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to get involved.
And now he was gone, probably somewhere in Mexico by this time. If Leonard had paid him the missing two thousand dollars, as it seemed likely he had, that would explain the sudden departure.
But there were still questions. Had he actually seen or heard anything that night? It was conceivable he had pulled the whole thing out of his imagination, although that struck me as improbable for a simple-living deliveryman whose life was crumbling around him. If Kenneth had been murdered, and if Martinez did know who was responsible, had he given the name to Leonard? Had he confided it to anyone else-his wife, maybe, or a close friend? And exactly where was he now?
Well, maybe there was something at his farm, something he’d left behind, that would give me a clue. I finished the last of my sandwich and the last of the Bud Light, got the car started, drove back into the village proper, and hunted up Sunshine Valley Road.
It was a winding, two-lane country road that led back into the foothills to the east, past scattered homes- some new and well-maintained, some not so new and not so well maintained; past a couple of sprawling ranches that specialized in the breeding of quarter horses. After a couple of miles, the road made a sharp loop to the north and took me across a bridge that spanned a vegetation-choked creek. Just beyond the bridge a dirt road cut back to the east, up into another series of low hills thickly wooded with eucalyptus, madrone, and fir trees. Fuller had told me this would be Elm Street and a sign at the intersection confirmed it.
I turned up the dirt road, past the only visible house around and through more trees, none of which was an elm. Another of those irritating little mysteries: Why Elm Street if there weren’t any elms on it? Moss Beach seemed to be full of enigmas, large and small. Beyond the trees to the south, where the land fell away into a tiny valley, I could see different kinds of flowers blooming in cultivated fields. They would belong to one of several ranches down there that specialized in growing flowers for sale to various nursery suppliers in the area.
When I had gone a fifth of a mile, a green wooden mailbox appeared on the south side of the road. Directly opposite on the north side, a pair of ruts that passed for a lane angled up through the trees. Those ruts, Fuller had said, would take me to Danny Martinez’s farm. But I didn’t make the turn right away. Instead I stopped alongside the mailbox-Martinez’s, presumably, since it was the only one in the vicinity-and got out and poked inside. There were two pieces of mail, both addressed to Daniel Martinez, but neither was worth tampering with: a PG amp;E bill and a mail-order catalogue. I put them back into the box and got into the car again.
The ruts took me along the shoulder of a hill and then around and down into a good-sized clearing flanked on three sides by woods. The fourth side was a field that had been planted with vegetables and melons and that contained a couple of fruit trees. There were two buildings in the clearing-a sagging barn and an old farmhouse set back against the wooded slope to the east. A chicken coop stood adjacent to the barn but there weren’t any chickens in it.
I stopped the car in the middle of the dusty yard and hauled myself out of it again. It was quiet; the only sound was a jay scolding something in the fir trees behind the house. I walked over that way, up a slight incline to where a child’s battered wagon was lying upside down near the stairs. The stairs had a newish look and the white paint on them was fresher than on the rest of the house; some of the roofs shingles also looked new. Until the events of the past month, Martinez had evidently kept the place up pretty well.
At the top of the stairs was a shallow porch with a geriatric swing and a rickety table on it. There was a screen door into the house, and a regular door behind it that stood ajar; the screen door wobbled open when I tugged on it. I called out, “Hello, inside,” and waited a while, just to be safe. Nobody answered me, so finally I went on in.
Tiny front hall, with a kitchen opening on one side and a living room or parlor on the other. I turned into the parlor first. Salvation Army furniture, all right-sofa, two chairs, three tables, an old desk with papers strewn over its surface, some of which had fallen or been tossed on the worn carpet. One of the inner walls had been decorated with crayon marks, red and green, in a kid’s nonsense pattern that seemed more aesthetic to me than the Chagall painting in the Purcell house. A crucifix made out of dark wood and a painting of a Mexican village adorned the other inner wall. The two outer walls were mostly windows with cheap chintz curtains drawn back from the glass; the set to the north looked out on the open field and the set to the west gave you a view of the yard, of the barn-
I was looking that way, toward the barn, when the man came out of it. His sudden appearance brought me up short; he was moving in a furtive way, his face and eyes turned toward the house. Bulky guy, sandy hair done up in a frizz-familiar even at this distance.
Richie Dessault.
What the hell? I thought. I ran back into the hall and out onto the porch. He was no longer by the barn and no longer moving furtively; he had started to run up into the woods on the far slope, being more or less quiet about it. I thought about yelling at him, but it wouldn’t have done any good: he was building a good head of steam, dodging this way and that through the trees, and he wasn’t looking back. I pounded down the stairs and across the yard in front of the barn. But by the time I got to the foot of the slope he had vanished near the crest.
I didn’t see any point in chasing after him; he had thirty years on me and a lot more wind and stamina. And I couldn’t have caught him anyway because after a minute or so there was the distant sound of a car engine revving up, over on the other side of the hill. Another road, probably, invisible from here.
What the hell? I thought again. What was Dessault doing here? What was his connection with Danny Martinez? And why hadn’t he driven his car into the yard, as I had, instead of leaving it out of sight and skulking over here through the woods?
I swung around and went into the barn, to see if I could tell what he’d been doing in there. The interior was gloomy and nurtured a sour smell composed of dust, dry rot, manure, and other things I couldn’t define. On the packed-earth floor just inside the doors was a large stack of lumber, a couple of sawhorses, a scatter of carpentering tools; it looked as though Martinez had bought the lumber with the idea of making additional repairs on both the house and the barn. Along one wall was a workbench cluttered with all sorts of junk, from spools of wire to a radio in a cracked plastic case; propped against another wall were a hand plow and some gardening tools. At the rear were three horse stalls, two of them empty, the one in the far corner containing another, smaller stack of plywood sheets and two-by-fours. A ladder gave access to a hayloft; it looked sturdy, so I climbed it far enough for a look into the loft. The only things up there were a rusty pitchfork and some remnants of old hay.
Dessault hadn’t been doing anything in here, the way it looked. Except hiding, maybe. Caught here, or out in the open nearby, when he heard my car; so he’d waited, watching, until I entered the house, and then made his escape through the trees.
But I still couldn’t figure a reason for him being here. Did he know Martinez? The way he’d reacted yesterday morning, when I’d asked Melanie if she knew anyone who spoke with a Latin accent… now that I thought about it, his reaction had been a little too sharp and edged with surprise. Maybe he did know Martinez. But that still didn’t explain his presence here today, or his furtiveness.
The barn was oppressive, somehow; I went back out into the sunshine and took a look at the chicken coop. Nothing there. I crossed to the house again. And prowled through its five rooms and bath, starting with the parlor.
The loose papers on and around the desk weren’t particularly interesting. Old bills, some paid and some not; a couple of personal letters written in Spanish to “Eva cara mia” and signed “Mama,” but with no address or envelope to tell me where they’d come from; some crayon drawings similar to the one on the wall, the kind of stuff proud parents save. What was interesting was the way the papers were strewn around, as if they had been pawed through by somebody in a hurry. Martinez? Or Dessault? And if it had been Dessault, why? What was he looking for?
The kitchen was next. Pots and pans, a few dishes, some packaged and canned foodstuffs in the cupboards-Martinez hadn’t bothered to take any of that. Or clean out the refrigerator, either: a couple of things in
