It smelled of oil and food and age but there were no bodies in it.
At this end the boardwalk was given over to a roller coaster and other rides and it was locked up. I went down on to the sand and walked along parallel to the boardwalk wall, looking for a way up. Two men with torches and two dogs were running a metal detector over the sand. It beeped and hummed and they paid me no attention. A set of wooden steps took me up on to the boardwalk where there wasn’t a board in sight; it was a concrete walkway about twenty-five yards wide with the sand on one side and a long row of amusement places on the other-shooting galleries, ice cream parlours, a haunted castle. All closed, all deserted except for the castle which had a drunk sleeping with his back up against the portcullis and a wind bottle clutched to his chest.
I moved quickly, checking the dark recesses. The ferris wheel cast a giant shadow like a spiderweb across the cement and I could hear rats rustling in concealment. The boardwalk ended at a vast amusement parlour which was locked. I jumped down on to the sand and skirted the building which had a high Moorish dome topped by a Gothic turret with a flagpole on top of that. The stars and stripes hung limply in the still air.
Up ahead the pier was like a dark finger against the moonlit sea and sky. I squinted and saw movement on it. I sprinted across the sand dodging the volleyball posts and took the steps up to the wharf three at a time. It was about fifty yards wide with a solid white fence running along both sides. A crane loomed up about halfway out and I saw a public works sign. Then there was a flat, no-cover stretch with patches of light and shade formed by the wharf lights, of which about one in four was burning. I ran, crouched and ducking out of the light. Past a low line of fish cafes and anglers’ needs shops the wharf narrowed to its last stretch which was about seventy-five yards long by twenty-five wide. The water slapped against the pylons and I could hear a strange barking sound further on.
A woman with blonde hair was bending over the end rail looking out west over the dark Pacific. The barking was louder as I got nearer and there was splashing with it. There were some openings in the tarred surface of the pier about ten feet square with waist high post and rail fences around them. At the first opening I found out about the noise: seals were jumping on and off the pylons twenty feet below. At the second opening a man was crouched with a gun resting on the rail; he was sighting along it at the blonde woman’s back.
I moved quickly up behind him and tried to slam the side of his head with my gun butt. He heard me, very late; he fired but the flash went high, he ducked a little and my blow hit him high and glancing. He went ‘oomph’, bent over and shot himself up through the chin. I already had another punch travelling; I pulled it and it turned into a push and he went over the rail. He bounced once on a cross beam and a seal barked and jumped into the water, and then he went in too.
She was standing with her back to the rail, facing America with Australia over her shoulder. I put my gun away and walked forward.
‘Diane Holt?’
She nodded. ‘Are you going to kill me?’
‘No’, I said. I pointed down to the water. ‘But he was.’
The seals which had gone quiet after the big splash, started barking again. Closer up I saw that she had a lot of blood on her face and that she was rigid with fright.
‘Your father sent me. It’s all right.’
‘My father’, she said.
‘Are you hurt?’
She touched her face and looked at the blood. ‘No, I get blood noses when I’m upset.’
I took her arm and brought her away from the rail, we passed the opening and she pointed.
‘What’s that?’
I looked down and saw his gun lying on the tar. I kicked it into the water and a seal barked.
We got back to the van and I told her to take off her blouse and a shoe. She did it like an automaton. I wiped blood from her face with the blouse and her nose started up again and the cotton got well soaked. I put the shoe and the blouse in the VW, muffled up my. 38 and fired a shot into the passenger seat.
She came out of her trance at the sound of the shot. ‘Why did you do that?’
‘We need a mystery here’, I said. ‘We want some people to stop worrying about you. I hope it works.’
She grabbed a bag out of the van and we left Santa Cruz in a hurry.
She filled me in on the drive to San Francisco. Harvey was getting together a big show for his day in the park. He was going to put some of his films on a big screen and play some of his tapes. He was going to name names.
‘Some of the biggest people’, she said. ‘Top people.’
‘Don’t tell me’, I said. ‘Forget them’,
‘I got scared, and I didn’t trust Ramsay. He’s the one… back there. Vin and me had a fight and I split.’
When she came back to the apartment she saw what I’d seen.
‘Pedro was still alive’, I said.
‘I just ran.’
‘It was too late anyway, but he helped me to find you.’
She cried then, deep and long, most of the way to San Francisco airport. She stopped crying and wiped her face.
‘Why did you go to Santa Cruz? That boardwalk looked pretty tacky to me.’
‘It’s innocent’, she said.
She had some clothes in the bag and she cleaned up while I bought her a ticket to Los Angeles where she had an aunt. She was in some kind of shock but there was a strength in her that kept her functioning. She phoned the aunt.
‘Go straight home’, I said. ‘Tomorrow, today, whatever. I’ll cable your dad.’
She nodded, said ‘Thanks’, in broad Australian, and caught the flight.
I sent a wire to Wesley Holt from the hotel and worried about the untidy ends. I worried about things like the muscle man’s car, the clean slug in the VW seat and the tides off the Santa Cruz beach. But there was nothing I could do about any of them.
