Olan Schaeffer was a short, ruddy-faced man with thinning hair and cigar breath which he disguised inadequately with Tic-Tacs. His suit was a muted sharkskin as befitted the serious nature of the product he sold, but he allowed himself a touch of playfulness in the orange and blue figured tie.
'Well, Dr Lang,' he said after seating her in his compact office, 'I believe you said you were interested in laboratory equipment. I have our catalogue here, and several brochures you might want to glance through.'
'Actually, that won't be necessary,' Holly said, wishing she had better prepared her story. 'I'd like to talk to you about equipment ordered by a colleague of mine, Dr Wayne Pastory.'
Schaeffer's smile slipped a notch as though he felt his commission shrinking. 'Uh, was that order placed for La Reina County?'
'No. Dr Pastory is associated with us, but the equipment I'm interested in was ordered for his own private clinic'
'I see,' Schaeffer said, not seeing at all. 'May I ask specifically what it is you want to know?'
'We've had excellent reports at La Reina County,' Holly improvised, 'about the quality of Dr Pastory's equipment. And the price offered by you people, of course.'
They exchanged little insider smiles.
'Our board of directors is interested in making a similar purchase for a new wing we have under construction.'
'Ah, yes, I see. Excellent.' The commission light returned to the salesman's eyes. 'Well, we'll just punch it up on the old computer here, and see what we shall see.'
He swivelled his chair around and lifted the dust cover from a computer terminal as though unveiling a prized objet d'art. 'Everything's done on the computer nowadays. Sometimes I kind of miss poking through the old filing cabinets, but I guess that's progress.'
Holly forced herself to sit quietly and smile while Schaeffer flipped on the terminal and waited for the screen to come to life. She crossed her legs to give the man something to look at other than her smile, which was becoming strained.
The computer beeped politely and prompted him in pale green characters to get on with it.
'Would you spell the doctor's name for me?' he asked.
Holly wrote it out for him on a desk pad. Stiff-fingered he punched the proper command keys, then spelled out WAYNE PASTORY, MD. The computer beeped and buzzed and Holly began rehearsing her exit in case no information came up on Pastory. She needn't have worried, for after a final buzz and beep the screen was filled with pale green readout that listed dates, medical apparatus, prices, and other coded information.
'Dr Pastory has been quite a good customer,' Schaeffer said. 'Especially in the last month.'
'Ah, yes, that's what I understand,' Holly said, leaning forward trying to decipher the computer language on the screen.
'Can you tell me specifically what pieces of equipment you're interested in? Or I could run a printout of the whole file, if that would help.'
'Yes, yes, I'm sure it would, but I want to be certain this is not material the doctor ordered for La Reina. It's his own clinic that I'm interested in.'
'Of course. The computer knows all, tells all.' Schaeffer tapped several additional keys. 'No, all this was shipped to his clinic up near Bear Paw. Is that the place?'
Holly almost laughed with relief. 'Yes, Bear Paw. A funny name that I can never remember. That's the place.'
'Not much of a town, from what I hear,' said the helpful Schaeffer. 'A few skiers in the winter is about it. Anyway, they've got a post office and your Dr Pastory's clinic.'
Holly stood up. 'Thank you so much, Mr Schaeffer. I can't tell you how helpful you've been.'
The salesman scrambled to his feet. 'But the equipment? Didn't you want to go over the list?'
'Why don't you run off that printout and send it to me in care of La Reina County Hospital? I look forward to doing business with you.'
Holly made her second hasty exit of the morning, leaving a befuddled Olan Schaeffer wondering whether his commission had just sailed out the door.
Chapter Fourteen
While Holly Lang took hasty leave of the offices of Landrud & Co. in Ventura, Abe Craddock was draining a can of Coors in the old Whitaker place. It was a falling-down cabin set well back in the trees at the south end of Pinyon, and had not been used since old George Whitaker's Dodge slipped off a jack while he was under it down at Art Moore's Exxon station.
The cabin had been rented from old George Whitaker's widow by a smart-talking writer fella from Los Angeles who was doing a story for one of the scandal sheets they sold over at the Safeway where you paid for your groceries. This so-called writer had bailed Abe Craddock out of jail and promised him a cool thousand dollars just for telling him the story of what happened in the woods that day with Curly Vane and the wolf thing. The catch was that Craddock would tell his story to no one else.
Abe figured he flat had it made. Not only was he living fairly comfortably in the cabin with Betty out of his hair, he was taking this smart-ass LA writer for all the booze he could drink, and figured he could probably up the dollar price on him, too. As for the manslaughter charge against him for blowing up Jones, that was no sweat any more. With the kid gone and Curly nothing but raw meat, there were no witnesses. It was an accident pure and simple. Yes, things were surely going old Abe Craddock's way for a change.
The LA writer, Louis Zeno by name, was hammering away at the old typewriter he'd brought with him like he was trying to set the thing on fire. Abe had never in his life seen a man who could type so fast.
Zeno ripped out the page he was working on and handed it over to Craddock. 'All right, Abe, I want you to take a look at this and see if it sounds all right. Remember, this is supposed to be you telling the story, and I want to be sure the facts are reasonably close to what really happened.'
Craddock took the page, set aside the Coors can, wiped his mouth, cleared his throat. He began to read in a laboured schoolboy manner:
'When Curly Vane and I entered the dense, dripping forest outside Pinyon on that fateful afternoon, perhaps we should have sensed… '
Abe stopped reading and looked up, frowning.
'Something the matter?' Zeno asked impatiently.
'It's that dripping forest business. The forest don't drip. Least, I don't remember no dripping that particular day.'
'That's alliteration for effect,' Zeno told him.
'Huh?'
'Don't worry about it. Read the rest.'
Craddock went through his preliminary mouth wiping and throat clearing again and continued:
'… should have sensed a certain foreboding: an ominous presence lurking unseen in the shadows. But in our innocent good spirits, neither of us could foresee the unspeakable fate that would befall one of us before we would see the sun again… '
Abe stopped again, shaking his head.
'What now?' the writer said wearily.
'Uh, I ain't sure I get that business about the sun. I mean, it was up there all the time. We weren't in no cave, you know.'
'Never mind that,' Zeno told him. 'That's just for atmosphere. All I want you to do is make sure that what I say you say happened is more or less what happened. So if anybody asks you about it after the story comes out you can tell them sure, that's the way it was. Okay?'
'Yeah, okay. I get it.' Craddock sucked noisily at the empty beer can. 'Reading this stuff is mighty thirsty work, and damn if I don't think this is the last of the Coors.'
'Jesus, Abe, it isn't even noon yet, and you've put away a whole six-pack and part of another.'
