down to the Mr. Peepers angle. I checked with the housekeeper and the niece before I talked to Cox, and they both told me Murray called him by that name all the time.'
'What was Cox's motive?' I asked.
'Greed, what else? He had a chance to get in on a big investment deal in South America, and Murray wouldn't give him the cash. They argued about it in private for some time, and three days ago Cox threatened to kill him. Murray took the threat seriously, which is why he started locking himself in his Rooms while he tried to figure out what to do about it.
'Where did Cox get the piece of steel?'
'Friend of his has a basement workshop, builds things out of wood and metal. Cox borrowed the workshop on a pretext and used a grinder to hone the weapon. He rigged up the slingshot this morning-let himself into the house with his key while the others were out and Murray was locked in one of the Rooms.'
'Well, I'm glad you got it wrapped up and glad I could help.'
'You're to be even gladder when the niece talks to you tomorrow. She says she wants to give you some kind of reward.'
'Hell, that's not necessary.'
'Don't look a gift horse in the mouth-to coin a phrase. Listen, I owe you something myself. You want to come over tomorrow night for a home-cooked dinner and some beer?'
'As long as it's Dana who does the home cooking,' I said.
After we rang off I thought about the reward from Murray's niece. Well, if she wanted to give me money I was hardly in a financial position to turn it down. But if she left it up to me to name my own reward, I decided I would not ask for money at all; I would ask for something a little more fitting instead.
What I really wanted was Thomas Murray's run of Private Detective.
Dead Man's Slough
I was halfway through one of the bends in Dead Man's Slough, on my way back to the Whiskey Island marina with three big Delta catfish in the skiff beside me, when the red-haired man rose up out of the water at an islet fifty yards ahead.
It was the last thing I expected to see and I leaned forward, squinting through the boat's Plexiglas windscreen. The weather was full of early-November bluster-high overcast and a raw wind-and the water was too cold and too choppy for pleasure swimming. Besides which, the red-haired guy was fully dressed in khaki trousers and a short-sleeved bush jacket.
He came all the way out of the slough, one hand clapped across the back of his head, and plowed upward through the mud and grass of a tiny natural beach. When he got to its upper edge where the tule grass grew thick and waist-high, he stopped and held a listening pose. Then he whirled around, stood swaying unsteadily as if he were caught in a crosscurrent of the chill wind. He stared out toward me for two or three seconds; the pale oval of his face might have been pulled into a painful grimace, but I couldn't tell for sure at the distance. And then he whirled again in a dazed, frightened way, stumbled in among the rushes and disappeared.
I looked upstream past the islet, where Dead Man's Slough widened into a long reach; the waterway was empty, and so were the willow-lined levees that flanked it. Nor was there any sign of another boat or another human being in the wide channel that bounded the islet on the south. That was not surprising, or at least it wouldn't have been five minutes ago.
The California Delta, fifty miles inland from San Francisco where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers merge on a course to San Francisco Bay, has a thousand miles of waterways and a network of islands both large and small, inhabited and uninhabited, linked by seventy bridges and a few hundred miles of levee roads. During the summer months the area is jammed with vacationers, water skiers, fishermen and houseboaters, but in late fall, when the cold winds start to blow, about the only people you'll find are local merchants and farmers and a few late-vacationing anglers like me. I had seen no more than four other people and two other boats in the five hours since I'd left Whiskey Island, and none of those in the half-mile I had just traveled on Dead Man's Slough.
So where had the red-haired man come from?
On impulse I twisted the wheel and took the skiff over toward the islet, cutting back on the throttle as I approached. Wind gusts rustled and bent the carpet of tule grass, but there was no other movement that I could see. Ten yards off the beach, I shut the throttle all the way down to idle; the quick movement of the water carried the skiff the rest of the way in. When the bow scraped up over the soft mud I shut off the engine, pocketed the ignition key and moved aft to tilt the outboard engine out of the water so its propeller blades wouldn't become fouled in the offshore grass. Then I climbed out and dragged half the boat's length onto the beach as a precaution against it backsliding and drifting off without me.
From the upper rim of the beach I could look all across the flat width of the islet-maybe fifty yards in all-and for seventy yards or so of its length, to where the terrain humped up in the middle and a pair of willow trees and several wild blackberry bushes blocked off my view. But I couldn't see anything of the red-haired man, or hear anything of him either; there were no sounds except for the low whistling cry of the wind.
An eerie feeling came over me. It was as if I were alone on the islet, alone on all of Dead Man's Slough, and the red-haired guy had been some sort of hallucination. Or some sort of ghostly manifestation. I thought of the old- timer who had rented me the skiff on Whiskey Island a sort of local historian well versed on Delta lore and legends dating back to the Gold Rush, when steamboats from San Francisco and Sacramento plied these waters with goods and passengers. And I thought of the story he had told me about how the slough got its name.
Back in 1860 an Irish miner named O'Farrell, on his way to San Francisco from the diggings near Sutter's Mill, had disappeared from a side-wheeler at Poker Bend; also missing was a fortune in gold dust and specie he had been carrying with him. Three days later O'Farrell's body was found floating in these waters with his head bashed in and his pockets empty. The murder was never solved. And old-time rivermen swore they had seen the miner's ghost abroad on certain foggy nights, swearing vengeance on the man who had murdered him.
But that wasn't quite all. According to the details of the story, O'Farrell had had red hair-and his ghost was always seen clutching the back of his bloody head with one hand.
Sure, I thought, and nuts to that. Pure coincidence, nothing else. Old-time rivermen were forever seeing ghosts, not only of men but of packets like the Sagamore and the R.K. Page whose steam boilers had exploded during foolish races in the mid-1800s, killing hundreds of passengers and crewmen. But I did not believe in spooks worth a damn. Nor was I prone to hallucinations or flights of imagination, not at my age and not with my temperament. The red-haired guy was real, all right. Maybe hurt and in trouble, too, judging from his wobbly condition and his actions.
So where had he gone? If he was hiding somewhere in the rushes I couldn't tell the location by looking from here, or even where he had gone into them; tule grass is pretty resilient and tends to spring back up even after a man plows through it. He could also have gone to the eastern end, beyond the high ground in the middle. The one thing I was sure of was that he was still on the islet: I could see out into the wide channels on the north and south sides, and if he had gone swimming again he would have been visible.
I pulled up the collar on my pea jacket and headed into the rushes on a zigzag course, calling out as I went, offering help if he needed it. Nobody answered me. And there was no sign of any red hair as I worked my way along. After a time I stopped, and when I scanned upward toward the higher ground I saw that I was within thirty yards of the line of blackberry bushes.
I also saw a man come hurrying up onto the hump from the opposite side, between the two willow trees.
He saw me, too, and halted abruptly, and we stood staring at each other across the windswept terrain. But he wasn't the red-haired guy. He was dark-looking, heavier, and he wore Levi's, a plaid mackinaw and a gray fisherman's hat decorated with bright-colored flies. In one hand, held in a vertical position, was a thick-butted fishing rod.
'Hello up there!' I called to him, but he didn't give me any response. Just stood poised, peering down at me like a wary animal scenting for danger. Which left the first move up to me. I took my hands out of my coat pockets and slow-walked toward him over the marshy earth. He stayed where he was, not moving except to slant the
