The Boys from Santa Cruz

“Golfer, eh?”

“I try,” said Pender. “Who got kidnapped?”

“Actually, it’s a homicide now. Some backpackers found the body early this morning, down in Big Sur.”

“So what are you doing all the way up here?”

“The victim was an attorney. His last case involved rewriting the will of an old couple whose grandson had been a patient here. He was supposed to have been killed in the explosion, this grandson.”

“Only you’re not all that sure he was,” said Pender, trying not to sound smug.

Epstein looked surprised. “That’s right. And neither is the coroner. Because just last week-”

“The grandparents were both murdered,” Pender broke in. “I know-that’s why I’m here, too.”

Epstein raised an eyebrow. “Luke Sweet?” he said carefully.

“Luke Sweet.”

“Well, fuuuuck me,” Skip muttered.

“How ’bout if I just buy you lunch,” suggested Pender, “and we’ll see how it goes from there.”

4

Pender followed Epstein’s Buick down out of the mountains to a retro-style diner on Ocean Street in Santa Cruz. They sat in a red vinyl booth with its own Seeburg jukebox outlet and ordered from a laminated menu featuring fifties-style comfort food at mid-nineties prices. Skip had a tuna melt, side slaw, and fries; Pender made his selection in accordance with the set of road rules he’d worked out over many years of traveling, which he was more than happy to share with Skip.

“One, it’s not cheating if you’re at least a day’s travel from home. Two, always memorize where the bathroom is before you go to bed, in case you have to get up in the middle of the night to piss. Three, when in doubt, order the club sandwich. It’s hard to screw up a club sandwich.”

“I’ll keep it in mind.”

“So how long have you been a P.I.?”

“A little over ten years.”

“Do you like it?”

“It’s okay. When I was a kid, though, adults’d ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up-I’d tell ’em a G- man.”

Pender chuckled. “Now, there’s a term you don’t hear much anymore.”

“The thing is, I’d always get this weird look back. It wasn’t until I was ten or twelve that I realized you never see an FBI agent with a limp on TV or in the movies.”

Pender gave him a whaddaya-gonna-do? shrug. Then after a vaguely uncomfortable pause in the conversation: “You know, I wasn’t going to ask. But since you brought it up…?”

“Polio. I was one of the control subjects in the first trials of the Salk vaccine-you know, one of the kids who got an injection of saline solution instead of the vaccine. We were all supposed to get the real thing after the trials, of course, only by then it was too late. Which makes me one of the last, possibly the last, polio case in the USA. So to quote Abe Lincoln quoting the guy who got tarred, feathered, and ridden out of town on a rail: ‘if it wasn’t for the honor of the thing…’”

“Well, shit, buddy!” Pender sounded impressed.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining.” Skip added hurriedly. “I like being a P.I. I have my own agency now, with a dozen operatives, I set my own hours, I’m making a decent living. But compared to what you do, going after serial killers and shit, it makes tracking down deadbeats and repoing cars look kind of, I don’t know, kind of… blah.”

“Trust me, it’s not that exciting. I spend a third of my time on the phone, another third going over computer printouts, and most of what’s left dealing with Bureau-crats and bullshit.”

By the time the waitress arrived with their orders, the conversation had turned to business. Since Pender had an appointment with a Detective Klug from the Santa Cruz PD at two o’clock, while Skip had promised to show up in Salinas to identify Brobauer’s corpse no later than three, they had to talk while they ate-never a good idea when scarfing American comfort food.

“Luke and I actually got along pretty well, once he got over the idea he could con me into cutting him loose.” Skip was fighting a losing battle trying to keep the overstuffed filling of his tuna melt from squishing out the other side every time he took a bite. “But the second I handed him over, he went bananas. Split this one orderly’s nose wide open with a head butt, knocked another one on his ass before they got a needle into him.”

Pender’s triple-decker sandwich was presenting him with the usual dilemma: take out the toothpicks and have the sandwich fall apart, or leave them in and risk spearing his palate. He compromised by moving the toothpicks outward in increments, which only postponed the inevitable structural failure. “I’ve seen the bananas act. He tried to get to me after I interviewed him at his grandparents’ house-it took two big Santa Cruz cops to bring him down.”

“Yeah, he told me about that,” said Skip. “Then he said they sent him to some wilderness training school, and he and his girlfriend escaped, then she fell over a cliff.”

“Thrown over, more likely,” said Pender, picturing the eyeless corpse in the rescue basket. But like many sewer workers, Pender had long ago erected a fire wall between his job and his appetite; he ate on as he talked. “I went through her autopsy report on the plane this morning. The M.E. determined she died from the fall, but her body also showed signs consistent with rape-abrasions on the hoo-ha and so on-and there were bruises on her neck. My guess is that he probably strangled her until she was unconscious, raped her either before or after or both, then tossed her over the cliff, either thinking she was dead or making sure of it.”

“Well, he sure fooled my ass,” said Skip. “I totally bought it.”

“Oh, he’s convincing, all right. Most psychopaths are. But I’ll bet you anything he didn’t tell you about his pal Brent.”

“Who?”

“Yeah, I didn’t think so.” Pender used the side of his pinkie nail to work a scrap of toothpick cellophane from between two teeth, then flicked it away. “Brent Perry was one of the other Mountain Project kids. Our boy Luke clubbed him over the head, left him by the side of the trail with his brains leaking out. Then there was this Indian pot dealer up in Humboldt whose family took the Lukester in after he ran away from the Mountain Project. He was found stabbed to death in a motel room near Stockton, and guess whose fingerprints were all over the room?”

“The Lukester’s?”

“You got it.”

Pender plucked a scrap of bacon off his napkin, popped it into his mouth, then looked up slyly. “So what do you say, Magnum, P.I.? You want to work with me on this, find out whether catching serial killers for the FBI really beats repoing cars? I can’t promise to pay you anything, but I can probably score you an FBI sweatshirt or a cap or something.”

Skip briefly considered whether Pender might be making the offer out of…well, out of the P word. But Pender didn’t strike him as the pitying type. And besides, since he was already involved on behalf of a client, who was to say it wasn’t a matter of the FBI helping him? “Man, I’d be honored,” he told Pender.

When they’d finished eating, Pender grabbed the check and Skip left the tip. Skip took a toothpick from the dispenser at the cashier’s counter; Pender pocketed a handful of mints. They left the diner together, and shook hands out in the parking lot. “It’s a lucky thing we happened to run into each other back there,” said Pender.

“As we say in California, there are no accidents,” Skip told him.

Pender laughed. “That must make your insurance companies awfully happy.”

5