Games to Keep the Dark Away Read online

  I stiffened, then moved the flash a couple of feet. There was more red, and a foot in a tennis shoe.

  Slowly I moved the flash again, up a leg to the torso and finally to the face of John Cala. He lay on his back in the trench. The front of his windbreaker was soaked with blood. It had to be a stabbing, since I hadn’t heard a shot; and the knife had apparently hit an artery, because the blood had spurted all over.

  I stepped back and almost tumbled down the steps from the platform. Grasping the railing, I leaned against it, closing my eyes and forcing down the bile rising in my throat.

  Blood. So much blood. Not a clean killing, like Jane Anthony. A messy killing. Blood. A sickly-sweet smell. And the rising stench of feces...

  My stomach lurched and I ran down the steps, fell to my knees, and retched. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything since the two beers on Keller’s boat that morning, so what I ended up with was a fine case of the dry heaves. After a minute they stopped and I felt around for where I’d dropped the flashlight.

  My fingers encountered it and I shone its beam around me. There had once been public phone booths in the park and I wondered if they were still in working order. I had to call the police, had to get them out here, had to explain...

  Explain what? Explain why I was the one who found all the corpses in Port San Marco? How was this going to look? What if, in the course of questioning me, Barrow asked to talk to my client? If he found out I didn’t even have one...

  Well, that couldn’t be helped. All I could do right now was find a phone booth. There didn’t seem to be any in the park and, in a way, that relieved me. I’d just as soon get out of here. When I reached the stairs to the beach, I gave the Tunnel of Love a final glance. Its mouth yawned at me, like the door of a crypt.

  Chapter 15

  Music poured from Don Del Boccio’s apartment as he came out and looked over the banister at me. It sounded like Tchaikovsky—great, surging crescendos. I stood, my hand on the railing, looking up.

  Don wore a forest green terrycloth bathrobe and a huge grin. His black hair was tousled and fell onto his forehead. “Now, this time it’s sure to be a social call!”

  “I hope it’s all right to drop by this late.” I remained where I was, still clutching the railing. “I got your message at the motel and I...I need someone to talk to.”

  His bushy brows drew together in an expression of concern. “Sure. Come on up.”

  I climbed the stairs, feeling terribly weary. When I got to the top, Don’s eyes searched my face and then he ushered me in. He motioned for me to sit on the blue rug and went to the stereo. “Let me turn this down.” I dropped to the floor.

  The music sank several decibels and then Don came over and sat in front of me. “What’s wrong?”

  “I stumbled onto another murder.” Quickly I told him about John Cala.

  Don was silent for a moment. “John. My God. Didn’t the police suspect him of having something to do with Janie’s death?”

  “Apparently he found her body before I did.”

  “And now someone’s killed him.”

  “In the same way, and in the same kind of deserted place. Did you know Cala?”

  He nodded. “Everybody from Salmon Bay knows everybody else. John was kind of a troublemaker, and not very bright. He dropped out of school in tenth grade and went into his father’s fishing business. I guess he did all right.”

  “Really? He lived in a little house with a dreadful assortment of junk in the front yard.”

  “That doesn’t mean much; it’s the way his family lived. In Salmon Bay, nothing ever changes from generation to generation.”

  “I guess not. Did he have a family?”

  “No. He married twice, that I heard of. The first wife was killed in an auto accident, the second left him. Claimed he beat her.”

  “Do you think he did?”

  “Maybe. I know he was a confirmed male chauvinist; goes with the territory, I guess.”

  I sighed. “It really doesn’t matter now. He’s dead. And his murderer escaped. And the police think somehow it’s all my fault.”

  Don’s eyes widened. “They don’t suspect you?”

  “Oh, no. They just think I bungled everything. If I hadn’t found Cala, his body might have lain there until demolition on the amusement park started next spring. But do they appreciate that fact? No, because I’m a private operative, I bungled it. I suppose if a real cop had followed him there and found his body, they’d have given him a medal.” My voice broke, from weariness and frustration, and Don took my hand.

  “Why don’t you let it go for now?” he said softly.

  “How can I?”

  “Relax. Have some wine.”

  “That sounds good.”

  He stood up. “How about some food?”

  My stomach was still uneasy. “No.”

  “Yes.”

  “Please, no.”

  “You need to eat. A little salami, some cheese. It’s good for you.”

  “Mother Del Boccio.”

  “Humor me. I’m Italian.”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Everything.”

  He went to the kitchen and quickly produced red wine, cheese, crackers, a dish of black olives, and a foot-long salami.

  “You’re always feeding me,” I said.

  “I know.” He sat back down and gestured at the food. “Eat.”

  Surprisingly, I was able to get down a respectable amount. It did make me feel better, but didn’t relax me enough to get my mind off Cala’s murder.

  “If only I knew why he went out on that pier,” I said. “And why he went to the amusement park. I know he was meeting someone there. But who?”

  Don smiled, leaning back against a pillow. “Full of questions, aren’t you?”

  “It’s my stock in trade. Somehow, I’ve always known the right questions to ask. And people open up to me. I’m a complete stranger, but they’ll still tell me things they wouldn’t tell their best friend.”

  “You have an open face. You look like you won’t judge people.” Don’s eyes moved over my face, in the same appreciative but inoffensive way they’d appraised my body when he first saw me. I smiled back and lay down, my head on a pillow, feeling warm and finally relaxed. The wine had made me drowsy and a little disconnected from my surroundings.

  “I’ve always asked too many questions,” I said, aware I was almost repeating myself. “My mother used to get mad at me. ‘Why, why, why?’ she used to say. ‘Why are you always asking why?’ ”

  Don chuckled and got up. He turned off the lights, brought a candle from the kitchen, lit it, and set it on the rug. Then he lay down, his elbow on the pillow next to me, head propped on his hand.

  “Tell me about you,” he said. “You asked me the right questions earlier this week and I gave you my life history. Now it’s your turn.”

  “There’s not a whole lot to tell. I’m from San Diego, got a sociology degree from Berkeley, couldn’t find a job. I’d done security work part-time while I was going to school, so I went back into that and got training as a detective.”

  “And your family—what are they like?”

  “An average middle-class clan.”

  He traced one finger along my hairline. “I find it hard to believe that an average middle-class clan produced someone like you.”

  “Hmmm. Well, I guess you’re right. Now that I think of it, I’m the most normal of the lot.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  I shut my eyes, visualizing my parents’ old rambling house in San Diego and all the people who had lived there at one time or another. “I have two older brothers. One’s married with two kids, the other’s single. They get in trouble with the law a lot.”

  “The kids or your brothers?”

  “My brothers. The kids are too young yet.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Minor things. Overdue traffic tickets. Getting rowdy in bars. My brother John once punche
d out a cop. Then I have two younger sisters.”

  “Do they beat up on cops?”

  “No. Their specialty is pregnancy.”

  “Oh.”

  “One of them lives on a farm near Ukiah. She has three kids, each by a different boyfriend. My other sister lives in a suburb of L.A. She’s got four kids and is married to a musician.”

  “Are all the kids his?”

  “Oh, yes. Unlike Patsy, Charlene is very monogamous. That’s the problem.”

  “Problem?”

  I opened my eyes. Don had a bemused smile on his lips and the candlelight flickered over his tanned, handsome face. “Charlene’s husband keeps leaving her. Not for anything like other women—just to go on tour with this country-western band. He’ll go off for six, eight months at a time and then, when he shows up, bingo! She’s pregnant again.”

  “It sounds serious.”

  “Oh, it is. They’ve only been married five years. God knows how many kids they’ll end up with.”

  “What about you?” Don ran his finger down my cheek and along my jawbone. “Do you want kids?”

  “I never think about them. Good Lord—I don’t even know if I want to get married.”

  “And I’ll bet your mother worries about that.”

  “Oh, yes. That, and the fact that I’m always getting mixed up in murders. My poor parents! All they ever wanted were good Catholic kids—and look what they got.”

  “How do they handle it?”

  “Well, my mother’s an expert at coping. She holds the family together through the worst trials and traumas.”

  “And your dad?”

  “When we were younger, he wasn’t around all the time. He was a chief petty officer in the navy and managed to pull a fair amount of sea duty. Now he’s retired and works as a cabinetmaker. When things get to be too much for him, he just goes off to his workshop in the garage and plays his guitar.”

  “What? Another musician?” Don’s finger stopped moving along my chin and he stared down at me.

  I grinned. I loved to tell people about my eccentric family. “Only amateur.”

  “What does he play? Rock?”

  “No. Irish folk ballads.”

  “I thought McCone was a Scottish name.”

  “Scotch-Irish.”

  “But you look Indian.”

  “Shoshone. One-eighth.”

  “Ye gods.” He brushed a tendril of hair away from my face and wound a thick lock of it through his fingers. “Did you know your family was, uh...not usual when you were growing up?”

  “Oh, no. For years, I thought we were just like everybody else. It wasn’t until high school that I became aware of certain...oddities.”

  “What enlightened you?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “We have all night.”

  “Yes, we do, don’t we?”

  Don and I exchanged solemn looks for a moment. Then I said, “Well, I really figured it out because of our Corvair. You know, one of those little compact cars with the engine in the rear?”

  Don nodded.

  “One day, in tenth grade, I was telling a girlfriend about it. You see, there was so much junk in our garage—my father’s guitar included—that we couldn’t drive the car in all the way. During the winter, its rear end stuck out and the engine got cold and wouldn’t start.”

  “All right. So far I can picture it.”

  “Every night,” I went on, “when it was time to go to bed, my dad would take this torchlight out to the car. He’d plug it in and turn it on, and then he’d open the rear hood and stick the light in there to keep the engine warm. And then he’d take a couple of old quilts and tuck the back of the car in for the night.”

  Don opened his mouth, but I held up my hand. “I know what you’re going to say. Just what my friend in high school did. There I was, telling her this story about how clever my dad was to keep the car’s engine warm in spite of everything, and she said...” I started to laugh. “She said, as logical as could be, ‘Why doesn’t he just back the car into the garage?’”

  Don started to laugh too, and then I laughed harder, and he laughed harder still. He buried his face against my neck and put his arms around me and we laughed and laughed. Finally we lay there, holding each other, panting and bursting into occasional giggles. After a few minutes, Don raised his face, looked down into mine, and kissed me.

  What with the wine and the weariness, I almost felt I was floating. I kissed him back, aware of nothing but his lips and the soft fabric of his robe. And then I felt the rough-but-gentle touch of his hands on my body. And responded, my own hands on him.

  Soon my clothes and his robe lay heaped on the floor next to us, and we merged together in slow but powerful motion on the blue rug. And the aftermath of its climax brought shared peace and a shield from the haunting shadow of violent death.

  Sometime during the night we moved to the bed in the alcove and slept, close in each other’s arms. And, toward morning, I awoke with a start from dreams of Corvairs wrapped in blood-spattered quilts. Awoke thinking of one thing that might have made John Cala go out to the old pier.

  A car. The presence of a car he’d thought he recognized.

  Chapter 16

  The morning sunlight shining on the water at Salmon Bay had that pale quality I associated with autumn, and there was a slight chill in the air. I parked my car by the side of the main road and contemplated Rose’s Crab Shack.

  An hour earlier, after calling Barbara Smith’s sister and still getting no answer, I’d allowed Don to feed me a disgraceful amount of scrambled eggs, sausage, hash browns, and toast. But I supposed a cup of coffee wouldn’t hurt me, and here at the Crab Shack it might open the door to a conversation about the night that Jane Anthony died. I got out of the car, crossed the road, and went into the hole-in-the-wall restaurant.

  There were several people in there—the same white-haired old man behind the counter, two men in fishing clothes, and a woman with a little girl of about ten. I started to sit down at the counter, but the old man rose and said, “What are you doing here?”

  The room grew very still.

  “I thought I’d have a cup of coffee,” I said.

  “Not in here, you won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  The old man came around the counter and stopped within two feet of me. He was my height and frail, but with his hands on his hips and his white-stubbled chin jutting out, he was forbidding enough to keep me from sitting down. He merely stood there, glaring at me with watery blue eyes.

  “Why not?” I repeated.

  “We don’t want your kind in here.”

  “My kind?”

  “Troublemakers. That’s what you’ve brought us—trouble.”

  “How did I do that?” I was aware of everyone else in the room watching us.

  The old man reached for a folded newspaper lying on the counter and shook it at me. “It’s all in here. First Miz Anthony’s girl, and now John Cala.”

  “I only found them, you know. I didn’t kill them.”

  “That’s what you say.”

  “Look, I’m trying to help the police find out who did it. I came in here to ask you if you’d seen any cars going out to the old pier the night Jane died.”

  He took a step closer. “I was in here behind the counter the whole time. You ought to know that.”

  I backed up, looking around. “Well, what about everybody else? Did any of you see a car that night?”

  They were all silent. The little girl put her hand to her mouth.

  The old man kept coming and I kept backing up. He held the newspaper rolled in his hand, as if he were about to discipline a puppy.

  “Come on,” I said, “somebody must have seen something.”

  “That’s what the cops said. And I told them the same thing. Nobody saw nothing.” We had reached the entrance now, and the old man held the screen door open.

  “Don’t you care if the killer’s caught?” I asked.
r />   He motioned impatiently, shooing me outside. “All we want is to be left alone, lady. That’s all anybody here wants.” He slammed the door and hooked it shut.

  I stood there peering through the screen at him and frowning. “What are you afraid of?”

  The old eyes shifted. “Nobody here’s afraid of nothing.”

  “Are you afraid one of you might have done it? Is that it—you think somebody who lives here in the village is the killer?”

  He stared to turn.

  “Look at it this way,” I said. “Do you really want to live with a killer on the loose among you?”

  In a flash, he had the screen door open and was outside, coming at me. “Get out of here!” He waved the paper in the air, then took aim at my behind. I ran just like a puppy would.

  At my car I stopped and looked back. The old man stood in front of the Crab Shack, glaring at me. The other customers had come outside and were watching in silent amazement. The scene suddenly seemed funny to me, and I chuckled ruefully as I got into my car and continued down the road. Once out of sight of the restaurant, I parked again and began canvassing on foot.

  At the first house, an old woman in a striped housedress told me she hadn’t seen anything. She minded her own business, she said, and didn’t see why others couldn’t do the same.

  At the second house, a younger woman with a baby on her hip said she didn’t have time to pay attention to what went on outside her own yard. Besides, if this was a come-on to get her to buy something, I could forget it. Her husband had lost his job at the supermarket, and they were collecting unemployment.

  No one was home at the next house, and the one after that had two German shepherds in the yard. They barked and jumped on the fence and looked at me hungrily. I decided to bypass that one.

  Crossing the street, I found an old man working in his garden. No, he said, he hadn’t noticed anything, but had I ever seen such beautiful marigolds as his?

  Truthfully I said I hadn’t.

  The old man plucked one and gave it to me. I slipped it through the buttonhole of my jacket and went on.

  The neighboring house was vacant. At the next, a woman shouted from behind a closed door for me to go away. Two little boys playing in the yard of the last house said their mother wasn’t home.