“That I don’t remember.”
“Did he live in the cabin year-round? Or did he give you another address?”
“Don’t remember that either,” Hennessey said. He glanced at the woman. “Look it up, Wilma, will you? Lanier. Must have been ’eighty-one. That was the year we had the slow spring.”
“Those files are in the storeroom,” she said. There was mild disapproval in her voice. But she was too placid to argue; and when he said, “Won’t take a minute, you know where they are,” she released a small sighing breath and went through the door into the warehouse.
I asked, “What did this Lanier look like?”
“Look like? Well, I don’t have much of a memory for faces…”
“It’s important, Mr. Hennessey.”
“Important case, huh?”
“Yes.”
“He do something crooked, this Lanier?”
“He might have.”
“Up at the cabin in Deer Run? Some kind of crime happen up there?”
“Yes,” I said, “some kind of crime.”
“Can’t say what it is, huh?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Sure, I understand. Well, let’s see. I think he was bald… yeah, that’s right, bald as an egg.”
“Big man? Medium? Small?”
“Kind of medium, I guess.”
“Was there anything unusual about him? Scars, moles, mannerisms, the way he talked?”
“Not that I can remember.”
“How old was he?”
“Oh… around our age.”
“You’re sure? In his fifties?”
“He was no spring chicken, that’s for sure.”
Not my man, then. If this Lanier had been in his fifties seven years ago, he would be close to or some past sixty now. The whisperer hadn’t been anywhere near that old; there had been a quality of relative youth about him, of that I was certain.
“What else can you tell me about Lanier?”
“That’s about all. Hell, it’s been so long…”
Wilma came back in from the warehouse, carrying a slender file folder in one hand. “Here it is,” she said in her placidly disapproving way. “James Lanier.”
“James, that’s right,” Hennessey said. “James Lanier.”
I asked Wilma, “What address did he give?”
She consulted the file. “Spruce Cabin, Indian Hill Road, Deer Run.”
“Is that the only one?”
“No. There’s another here. But it’s not local.”
Jesus, these people! “What is it, please?”
“It’s in Carmichael,” she said. “Two-one-nine-six-three Roseville Avenue, Carmichael.”
I repeated it, committing it to memory: “Two-one-nine-six-three Roseville Avenue, Carmichael.”
“That’s right.”
“Did he give a telephone number?”
“Yes, I think so…”
She found it and read it out, and I repeated it, too, so I wouldn’t forget it.
When I thanked the two of them for their help, Hennessey said, “Any time. Wait’ll I tell the wife we helped out a private eye. She’ll wet her pants.” He winked at me, winked at Wilma, and said, “She might even give me a little tonight.”
Wilma sighed, pursed her lips, and sat down at her desk. Hennessey grinned. And I went away from both of them.
AFTERNOON
There were no rental car agencies in Sonora; I had learned that last night, from the desk clerk when I checked into the motel. So after I left Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating, I found my way to the bus station. The next bus to Sacramento wasn’t until tomorrow morning, but there was a one o’clock coach to Stockton. I spent nearly ten of my remaining dollars on a one-way ticket. Stockton was some sixty miles south and a little west of Carmichael, a sprawling northern suburb of Sacramento; it was also about the same distance from Sonora. I could rent a car there this afternoon and be in Carmichael sometime early this evening. The sooner I had a car and the freedom of mobility it provided, the better off I would be.
From a phone booth I called Sacramento County information and asked for a Carmichael listing for James Lanier. I half expected to be told that there wasn’t one, after seven years, but the operator punched in his computer without comment and an electronic voice gave the same number Wilma had read to me. So Lanier was likely still at the same Roseville Avenue address. I could confirm that by checking the local directory when I got to Carmichael.
I had gotten several quarters and I used those to call Bates and Carpenter in San Francisco. I had tried dialing Kerry’s home number twice more last night, the last time at a quarter to eleven, and she still hadn’t answered. Nothing ominous in that, or even significant, but it preyed on my mind just the same.
When the call went through I said to the woman on the switchboard, “Kerry Wade, please.” There was a click, another ringing sound, and then another click and Kerry’s secretary, Ellen Stilwell, said cheerfully, “Ms. Wade’s office.”
She knew my voice, Ellen did-I had called Kerry often enough at the agency-so I deepened and roughened it when I asked, “Is Ms. Wade in?”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Then she
“Yes, she is. Your name, please, sir?”
Relieved, I tapped the box with the handset, jiggled the cradle at the same time to make it seem as though there was something wrong with the line, and then hung up. All right. Kerry was alive, safe, well enough to be at her job; now I could put my mind at ease at least where she was concerned.
I went to a cafe not far away and drank coffee and made myself eat a piece of apple pie. Back at the bus station, I bought a newspaper and caught up on the news. Nothing much had changed in three months: political scandals, corporate scandals, religious scandals, small wars like rehearsals for another big one, all sorts of killing on the individual level. Lots of changes taking place everywhere-change is systemic in all walks of life, sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle-and yet certain fundamental things never change. I thought of the line from the Peter, Paul, and Mary song:
The bus left on time. I sat in the back and stared out the window and tried not to fidget. The impatience that Wilma and Hennessey had rearoused in me this morning wouldn’t go away. Outside the bus there were green trees and hillsides and then long, barren stretches of cattle graze as we came down out of the foothills into the upper reaches of the Central Valley; inside me there was turmoil, and the knowledge that I was no different from the rest of mankind. Each of us likes to believe we’re unique, special. But when something profound happens, something like being chained up alone in a mountain cabin for ninety days, you realize the truth-that in you, as in everyone, there is a thing that crawled up out of the primordial slime a hundred million years ago, a thing so savage and elemental that it can, if you let it loose, overwhelm your humanity and reduce you to its level. This is the thing that causes war, that brutalizes and destroys, that keeps us from ever really being civilized creatures. This was the one thing I
