Crucifixion River Read online

  “Mister Worthington,” I said, “were you and Miz Adams getting along at the time of her death?”

  “Better than ever. That last weekend we spent together was…well, I’ll never forget it.”

  “I understand you were planning to leave your wife, marry Miz Adams.”

  “I had hoped to.”

  “And the delay was because of your marital situation?”

  He rubbed his hand across his stubbled chin, nodded. “My wife…has her problems. I was trying to find a way to leave the marriage without exacerbating them.”

  “She drinks.”

  “…Yes. I’ve been trying to convince her to get help, so has our family doctor. Until she does…” He spread his hands.

  “I understand. Is your wife the sort of person who becomes violent when she drinks?”

  “Betsy? God no! She’s constantly sedated.”

  “Perhaps she’s drinking to sublimate anger?”

  “I don’t…oh, I see where you’re going. No, Miz McCone, Betsy didn’t find out about Darya and kill her. She hasn’t left the house, except when I’ve forced her to accompany me, in five years. And those occasions were not successful ones.”

  “What about your children…did they know about your affair with Miz Adams?”

  “Jeannie, my daughter, didn’t. She’s too caught up in her drugged-out little world. Kent did. He’s visited at the cabin, and he liked Darya. She had a calming effect on him.”

  “I understand he has anger-management problems.”

  “Yes. Anger toward his mother, primarily. But he’s working on them.”

  “Mister Worthington, are you aware that Miz Adams was afraid of something or someone? And that it was connected with your cabin?”

  “Darya? Afraid?”

  I explained what Kathy Bledsoe had told me.

  Worthington shook his head in a bewildered way. “Why didn’t she confide in me? Or in Jeb? If somebody’d been bothering her while she was down there, he would’ve taken care of them.”

  “Jeb’s a good friend?”

  “The best. He’d do anything for me. Or Darya.”

  “He claims he was advising you on how to conserve your assets in the event of a divorce.”

  Worthington had been grim-faced through most of our meeting, but now he smiled. “Jeb? He’s the one who needs advice when it comes to financial matters.”

  “Why d’you say that?”

  “Jeb nearly lost his shirt in a real-estate deal a couple of years ago. High risk, and I warned him not to get into it, but he wouldn’t listen. Now he’s got a big balloon payment coming due, and he can’t cover it. Jeb’s a sweet guy, but…” He spread his hands. “He introduced Darya and me, you know.”

  “I thought Kathy Bledsoe did.”

  “We deliberately gave her that impression. I went up to meet Darya at an opening at the Lakes Gallery…turned out Kathy was the artist. I was taken aback to see an old acquaintance, and find out she worked for Darya. Darya sensed my discomfort and played along when Kathy introduced us. But no, I met Darya about six months before that at Jeb’s house in Big Pine.”

  “And how long had Jeb known her?”

  “His whole life. Darya was his cousin.”

  “No, Shar,” Mick said over the phone. “Jeb Barkley has no cousin. And neither does Darya Adams.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “My computer doesn’t lie.”

  “Why not? Mine does, all the time.”

  “That’s because you don’t use the right databases.”

  That was probably true. I sighed.

  “Shar? Anything else?”

  “Yes. I need deep background on Jeb Barkley and Darya Adams. Specifically, if either has a criminal record.”

  The scenario that came together in my mind as I drove back to Big Pine was a disturbing one. Jeb Barkley had no cousin; Darya Adams had none, either. But Tom Worthington was under the impression they were related.

  Barkley had introduced Adams to him as his cousin. Why?

  Wealthy man with an unhappy home life. Young, attractive single woman. Old friend who has lost money in a real-estate deal and has a large balloon payment coming up in a year and a half. He introduces the woman as his cousin. The wealthy man is induced to leave his wife for her. The woman then has a community-property stake in those assets…which she can share with her “cousin.”

  Not cousins-partners in crime.

  But something had gone wrong.

  My phone buzzed. I pulled to the side of the road, picked up. Mick.

  “Shar, I called Adah Joslyn at the SFPD.”

  Adah, an inspector on the Homicide detail, and a good friend. “And?”

  “She accessed Barkley’s and Adams’s criminal records for me. The two of them…Adams was Darya Dunn then, her maiden name before she married the marine…were arrested over in Nevada fifteen years ago on a bunko charge. Barkley did time. From what I’m reading between the lines, he took the rap for Adams.”

  “Why didn’t this show up in your original backgrounding?”

  A silence. Then, reproachfully: “You didn’t specify deep backgrounding, Shar. Criminal records’re hard to access unless you want to use contacts like Adah. And you’ve warned me not to abuse the privilege.”

  I sighed. “Well, it didn’t occur to me to go deep on an old friend who sold them a house…or on the victim.”

  “Which leads us to private investigator’s lesson number one…”

  “Right. Suspect everyone.” I thanked Mick and broke the connection. Pulled back onto the road.

  Jeb Barkley finds his former partner in crime running a boutique up in Mammoth Lakes. He needs money badly, and his friend Tom Worthington has refused to help him out. Darya is attractive, just the sort of woman who might attract a man like Worthington, who is trapped in a dead marriage. So Barkley reminds Adams of the old days and puts pressure on her to begin a relationship with Worthington, with an eye to getting her hands on his assets. Adams agrees, because she values her reputation and position in her community. But then Adams and Barkley have a falling out, maybe because she’d actually fallen in love with her victim. Now she’s afraid of someone down at the cabin.

  Barkley, who demonstrated this morning that he was familiar with the place-so much so that he even knew where she kept the hummingbird food-and who also had a set of keys.

  And she’d had good reason to be afraid. He’d found her alone on July thirty-first, they’d quarreled, and he’d killed her. Then he’d planted evidence to implicate his friend.

  Now what I needed was concrete evidence to implicate him.

  As I drove the rest of the way to Big Pine, I kept thinking about the tree that Darya Adams’s body had been found under. On impulse, when I reached the intersection of Routes 395 and 168, I turned east into the foothills.

  The bristlecone stood alone on the rocky slope, clinging to the poor, coarse soil. I got out of the Jeep and walked around it, ducked under its low-hanging branches. Even though the sun was dipping below the ridge to the west, it felt uncomfortably warm there, and the air was dusty enough to make me sneeze. I went out the other side where the branches were bent and sheared off, sap congealing on their broken tips.

  Emergency vehicles, I thought. They did this damage getting the body out.

  Or…?

  I took out my cell phone, called the local sheriff’s department substation. The officer I’d spoken with the previous afternoon, who had been one of the first at the murder scene, took a look at the official photographs and confirmed my suspicion.

  “Our people did some damage after the photos were taken,” he told me, “but the tree was already ripped up on that side, probably by your client’s truck when he dumped the body.”

  “Was there damage to Mister Worthington’s truck? Chipped paint, scratches?”

  A pause. “I don’t see any photos or mention of it.”

  “In your opinion, if his truck was scratched, would the paint contain traces of the t
ree’s DNA?”

  “Well, I’m not a lab technician, Miz McCone, but I’ll hazard a guess that it would.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be in touch.”

  Jeb Barkley’s house was on a quiet side street in Big Pine: a small stucco bungalow on a small lot with a patch of lawn out front. A sprinkler was throwing out lazy arcs of water, and light glowed behind blinds in the windows. Barkley’s Outback stood before the closed doors of a single-car garage. I parked down the block and waited until it was fully dark before I approached.

  Armed with a paint scraper and one of the plastic bags I’d earlier purchased at a hardware store, I crept up to the passenger side of the car. I switched on my pencil flashlight and, holding it between my teeth, began removing flecks of paint from the scratched area on the door. When I had a respectable amount, I sealed the bag.

  I glanced at the house. No visible activity there. Slowly I began to move around the car, shining the beam over it. Nothing distinctive about the tires-and the sheriff’s people hadn’t been able to take any impressions at the scene, anyway. A few more scratches on the front panel, nothing lodged under the bumper.

  The outside vent below the windshield, maybe. He would have removed anything obvious that was caught there, probably had washed the car, but deep down inside…

  Yes!

  I glanced over at the house. Still no activity. I fumbled in my bag for the pouch where I keep miscellaneous objects-chopstick, nail clippers, tweezers for the splinters I’m always getting. Took out the tweezers and fished around in the vent, until I found a slender wood fragment.

  Ten to one it came from the bristlecone pine. There was another fragment lodged down there, but I’d leave it for the sheriff’s technicians.

  I slipped back to the Jeep, headed for the substation.

  Overconfidence, I thought, that’s what always brings them down. Jeb Barkley hadn’t counted on anyone looking into his past and discovering his connection with Darya Adams. He hadn’t bothered to have his car repainted because who would suspect him-a small-town real-estate agent, and Tom Worthington’s friend-of killing anyone? He hadn’t even bothered to conceal from me his knowledge of where things were kept in the cabin.

  All of that, and irrefutable DNA evidence as the clincher.

  Glenn Solomon was going to love this. Maybe he’d even pay a bonus for my getting results in record time.

  The Carville Ghost A John Quincannon Story

  by Bill Pronzini

  Sabina said: “A ghost?”

  Barnaby Meeker bobbed his shaggy head. “A strange apparition of unknown origin, Missus Carpenter. I’ve seen it with my own eyes more than once.”

  “In Carville, of all places?”

  “In a scattering of abandoned cars near my home there. Floating about inside different ones and then rushing out across the dunes.”

  “How can a group of abandoned horse-traction cars possibly be haunted?”

  “How, indeed?” Meeker said mournfully. “How, indeed?”

  “And you say this apparition fled when you chased after it?”

  “Both times I saw it. Bounded away across the dune tops and then simply vanished into thin air. Well, into heavy mist, to be completely accurate.”

  “What did it look like, exactly?”

  “A human shape surrounded by a whitish glow. Never have I seen a more eerie and frightening sight.”

  “And it left no footprints behind?”

  “None. Ghosts don’t leave footprints, do they?”

  “If it was a ghost.”

  “The dune crests were unmarked along the thing’s path of flight and it left no trace in the cars…except, that is, for claw marks on the walls and floors. What else could it be?”

  Quincannon, who had been listening to all of this with a stoic mien, could restrain himself no longer. “Balderdash,” he said emphatically.

  Sabina and Barnaby Meeker both glanced at him in a startled way, as if they’d forgotten he was present in the office.

  “Glowing apparitions, sudden disappearances, unmarked sand…confounded claptrap, the lot.” He added for good measure: “Bah!”

  Meeker was offended. He drew himself up in his chair, his cheeks and chest both puffing like a toad’s. “If you doubt my word, sir…”

  It’s not your word I doubt but your sanity, Quincannon thought, but he managed not to voice the opinion. “There are no such beings as ghosts,” he said.

  “Three days ago I would have agreed with you. But after what I’ve seen with my own eyes…my own eyes, I repeat…I am no longer certain of anything.”

  Sabina stirred behind her desk. Pale March sunlight, slanting in through the windows that faced on Market Street, created shimmering highlights in her upswept black hair. It also threw across the desk’s polished surface the shadow of the words painted on the window glass: CARPENTER AND QUINCAN-NON, PROFESSIONAL DETECTIVE SERVICES.

  She said: “Others saw the same as you, Mister Meeker?”

  “My wife, my son, and a neighbor, Artemus Crabb. They will vouchsafe everything I have told you.”

  “What time of night did these events take place?”

  “After midnight, in all three cases. Crabb was the only one who saw the thing the first time it appeared. I happened to awaken on the second night and spied it in one of the cars. I went out alone to investigate, but it fled and vanished before I could reach the cars. Lucretia, my wife, and my son Jared both saw it last night…in one of the cars and then on the dune tops. Jared and I examined the cars by lantern light and again in the morning by daylight. The marks on walls and floor were the only evidence of its presence.”

  “Claw marks, you said?”

  Meeker repressed a shudder. “As if the thing had the talons of a beast.”

  Quincannon said: “And evidently the heart of a coward.”

  “Sir?”

  “Why else would it run away or bound away or whatever it did? It’s humans who are afraid of ghosts, not the converse.”

  “I have no explanation for what happened,” Meeker said. “That is why I have come to you.”

  “And just what do you expect us to do? Missus Carpenter and I are detectives, not dabblers in paranormal twaddle.”

  Again Meeker puffed up. He was an oddly shaped gent in his forties, with an abnormally large head set on a narrow neck and a slight body. A wild tangle of curly hair made his head seem even larger and more disproportionate. He carried a blackthorn walking stick, which he held between his knees and thumped on the floor now and then for emphasis.

  “What I want is an explanation for these bizarre occurrences. Normal or paranormal, it matters not to me, as long as they are explained to my satisfaction. If they continue and word gets out, residents will leave and no new ones come to take their place. Carville will become a literal ghost town.”

  “And you don’t want this to happen.”

  “Of course not. Carville-by-the-Sea is my home and one day it will be the home of many other progressive-minded citizens like myself. Businesses, churches…a thriving community. Why, no less a personage than Adolph Sutro hopes to persuade wealthy San Franciscans to buy land there and build grand estates like his own at Sutro Heights.”

  A cracked filbert, Mister Barnaby Meeker, Quincannon thought. Anyone who chose of his own free will to live in a home fashioned of abandoned street cars in an isolated, wind-and-sand-blown, fog-ridden place like Carville was welcome to the company of other cracked filberts, Adolph Sutro and his ilk included. He had no patience with eccentrics of any stripe, a sentiment he had expressed to Sabina on more than one occasion. She allowed as how that was because he was one himself, but he forgave her. Dear Sabina-he would forgive her anything. Except, perhaps, her steadfast refusal to succumb to his advances…

  “I will pay you five hundred dollars to come to Carville and view the phenomenon for yourself,” Barnaby Meeker said.

  “Eh? What’s that?”

  “Five hundred dollars, sir. And an additional one thousand dollars
if you can provide a satisfactory explanation for these fantastic goings-on.”

  Quincannon’s ears pricked up like a hound’s. “Fifteen hundred dollars?”

  “If, as I said, you provide a satisfactory explanation.”

  “Can you afford such a large sum, Mister Meeker?”

  “Of course I can afford it,” Meeker said, bristling. “Would I offer it if I couldn’t?”

  “Ah, I ask only because…”

  “Only because of where I choose to reside.” Meeker thumped his stick to punctuate his testy displeasure. “It so happens I am a man of considerable means, sir. Railroad stock, if you must know…a substantial portfolio. I have made my home in Carville because I have always been fond of the ocean and the solitude of the dunes. Does that satisfy you?”

  “It does.” Quincannon’s annoyance and suspicion had both vanished as swiftly as the alleged Carville ghost. A smile now bisected his freebooter’s beard, the sort Sabina referred to rather unkindly as his “greedy grin.” “I meant no offense. You may consider us completely at your service.”

  “John,” Sabina said, “let’s not be hasty. You know how busy we are…”

  “Now, now, my dear,” he said, “Mister Meeker has come in good faith with a vexing problem. We can certainly find the time and wherewithal to oblige him.”

  “And naturally you’ll keep an open mind in the process.”

  Quincannon chose to ignore her mocking tone. He rose, beamed at the cracked filbert, shook his hand with enthusiasm, and said: “Now, to business…”

  When Barnaby Meeker had gone, leaving a $500 check neatly blotted on Sabina’s desk, she said: “I’m not so sure it was a good idea to take on this case.”

  “No? And why not, with five hundred dollars in hand and another thousand promised?”

  “We’ve a full plate already, John. Or have you forgotten the pickpocket case, the missing Miss Devereaux, and the Wells Fargo Express robbery?”