Shackles

“-but did he ever talk to any of the other neighbors? Somebody who might give me a line on where he is now?”

“No way,” she said positively. “I know everybody here, I get along with everybody, we’re always yakking with each other. That bum didn’t talk to anybody around here except the bums that came to visit him.”

“He drives a Chrysler, is that right?”

“Right. ’Eight-six LeBaron. Tobacco brown.”

“License number?”

“Personalized. MR F T. MR BUM would have been better.” She shifted the bag of groceries from one arm to the other. “Anything else you want to know? This bag is getting heavy.”

“Not unless you can think of something, some little detail, that might help me find him.”

She tried. I watched her round face screw up, the heavy flesh around her eyes draw tight and the eyes themselves disappear behind slits so narrow they might have been incisions. Then her whole face seemed to pop open again, like some kind of exotic flower, the eyes reappearing wide and black-an effect that was almost startling-and she said with genuine regret, “No, nothing. I wish I could, that bum ought to be back in jail, but I already told you everything I know.”

Dead end.

Now what was I going to do?

I left Mrs. Ruiz to her groceries and her managerial woes and drove around for a while, aimlessly. Then, because I hadn’t eaten yet today, I stopped at a cafe on Merchant Street that accepted credit cards and brooded over coffee and a steak sandwich. Lawrence Jacobs, Frank Tucker, an Italian guy with no neck named Dino, a fat man who drives an ’85 cream-colored Cadillac Seville… but where were they now? A possible Folsom prison connection… but I didn’t have enough information yet to identify Jacobs or his motives. And no way to get it soon unless I picked up his or Frank Tucker’s trail again.

Three options, as far as I could see. There was a fourth-go back up to Deer Run and stake out the Indian Hill cabin-but I wasn’t ready to do that yet. Would do it only as a last resort. It might be another three to four weeks before Jacobs decided to return to the cabin; I couldn’t live up there anywhere near that long, alone, doing nothing except waiting. It would be almost as much of an ordeal as the one I had already been through. It would put me right over the edge.

Three options. One: Canvass the other residents at 210 Poplar Street, even though Mrs. Ruiz had seemed certain that none of them knew any more than she did about Frank Tucker and his activities. Two: Return to Sacramento, to 4719 K Street, and find out if Maggie Barnwell had held anything back from her husband. Three: Run a DMV check on Tucker’s Chrysler LeBaron with the MR F T license plate, see what address turned up. The first two choices struck me as a waste of time. And the only way I could accomplish the third was to contact Harry Fletcher at the DMV’s San Francisco office. I could swear Harry to secrecy-but he had a big mouth and he might let something slip, something that would get back to Eberhardt or Kerry or into the news media. Besides, Tucker had owned the car while he was living in Sacramento, might have put the K Street address or some other old address on the registration. And if he moved around as much as it seemed he did, he wouldn’t bother to notify the DMV each time he changed residences.

One person he probably would notify was his parole officer… if he was out on parole. In the old days I could have gone through channels, got hold of his prison record, and if he’d been paroled, the name of his parole officer. But these weren’t the old days. I had fewer resources available to me now, and therefore fewer options than I would have had on a normal investigation-

Susan Belford, I thought.

Something I should have asked Susan Belford and hadn’t.

Her name and the question popped into my head at the same time, an obvious question that had somehow failed to occur to me when I spoke to her on the phone. That wouldn’t have happened if I’d been myself-my old self, the one with the sharply honed professional instincts. Maybe the answer to the question was no, but if it was yes…

I pushed up from the table, paid my check, and followed the cashier’s directions to a public telephone back by the restrooms. I spent most of my change on a call to Richards and Kirk in Carmichael. Susan Belford wasn’t in, but the man I spoke to, a Mr. Unger, said she was due to “check back in around three.” It was two-thirty now. I gave him my name and asked him to tell Ms. Belford that I’d called, that I was on my way up to see her, and would she please wait until I got there. He said he would relay the message.

It was twenty minutes to four when I finally found my way to the shopping center where Richards and Kirk had their offices. Susan Belford wasn’t there. Yes, she’d checked in as expected. Yes, Mr. Unger had given her my message but she’d chosen not to wait. No, Mr. Unger would not give me her home address or telephone number… which meant that she’d told him not to. Usually real estate agents are more than willing to give out their home numbers, to the point of listing them on their business cards.

I drove to a service station and looked in the telephone directories for Carmichael and several other nearby communities, including Sacramento. If she lived in one of those places, she was either unlisted or listed under another name. The only Belford in any of the books was Leon Belford and Son, Manufacturers of Quality Brass Fittings.

The Third Day

MORNING

Susan Belford showed up for work at five minutes to ten the next morning. I had been waiting since nine, when Richards and Kirk opened for business, and I was fidgety and trying hard to conceal my irritation when she walked in.

Today I wore a hound’s-tooth sports jacket, the loose-fitting kind with deep pockets so I could carry the.22 without any telltale bulges, and a white shirt and a pair of gray slacks-items I had bought the night before at a cut- rate clothing store in this same shopping center. One reason was that the too-tight clothing I’d taken from the Carder A-frame was beginning to both chafe and smell after three days of constant wear; the other reason was that if I was going to convince the uncooperative Ms. Belford to answer another question, I would need to look as well as act like a reputable private investigator. I had thought so last night, anyway. One look at her, and I knew that neither I nor anyone else would ever have to dress up on her account.

La Belford was a frumpy blond in her late forties, sloppily outfitted in a baggy gray skirt and a white sweater with little spots and streaks of cigarette ash on the front of it. She had mannerisms that were as twitchy as her voice, and such a preoccupied air that she almost ran into me before she realized I had moved into the path she was taking from the front entrance. And in almost running into me, she also came within an inch of setting fire to my new sports jacket with the lighted cigarette she was brandishing in one hand.

She was not glad to see me. She scowled when I identified myself, and made a violent waving gesture with the cigarette that sent particles of ash flying. “You again,” she said. “Why do you persist in… what is it you want now?”

“Five minutes of your time, that’s all.”

“I answered all your questions yesterday-”

“Not quite. There’s one other I should have asked.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. I’m a busy woman, I don’t have time for this sort of thing…”

“One question, Ms. Belford. Please, it may be important.”

“Important, it’s always important. Well? What is it, then?”

“Did the man who rented Mr. Lanier’s cabin supply any personal references?”

“The man who… you mean Lawrence Jacobs?”

“Yes, ma’am. Lawrence Jacobs?”