“What sort of work did you do for him?”
“Well, that’s confidential...”
“Under the circumstances you won’t be violating client confidentiality by telling me. We’d appreciate your cooperation.”
“Are you investigating some sort of felony involving Mr. Erskine?”
“Accident, the way it looks right now. But we don’t have enough information yet to close the books on it.”
“Serious accident?”
“As serious as they come. Fatal shooting. Early this morning at the Pinecrest Motel outside Healdsburg.”
Uh-oh. “Who was shot?”
Battle said, “Ira Erskine. Apparently got careless cleaning a .38 Police Special in his room and blew off the back of his head.”
10
I cooperated fully with Sheriff’s Lieutenant Battle. It would have been foolish to do otherwise even if Ira Erskine was still among the living; cooperation with police agencies is vital to a private investigator if he wants to maintain friendly relations and avoid any official complaints to the State Board of Licenses. I gave him a quick rundown of Erskine’s reasons for hiring me and the results of my investigation, and offered to fax him a copy of my report; he said that might be helpful and provided their fax number. Whatever Erskine had done with his copy of the report, it hadn’t been among his effects in the motel room or in his rental car. What had been found that led Battle to me was my business card, tucked inside Erskine’s folder of traveler’s checks.
Even after the lieutenant rang off, I had some difficulty coming to terms with Erskine’s sudden death. I hadn’t liked him much, but I had empathized with his problems, and for him to die the way he had was a bitter nut to swallow. Cleaning a .38 Police Special with a round in firing position... stupid as hell. But it happens more often than you might think, and the fact that a cleaning woman and two guests had heard the shot and within minutes found the body locked inside the ground-floor room seemed to support an accidental-shooting explanation. What gnawed at me was that Erskine had had the weapon in the first place. Why bring it with him from Santa Fe? Or if he’d gotten hold of it out here somehow, that made the situation even odder. Had he had some screwball idea of trying to force his ex-wife into returning to New Mexico with him? A man as in love with an ideal as he’d been was capable of something like that. Yet if she was any kind of human being, with even a shred of compassion or maternal feeling left in her, she’d have gone willingly to be with their dying son. From the impression of Sondra Nelson I’d been given by the hostess at Silver Creek Cellars, she was anything but cold-hearted.
Still... I’d told Erskine where to find her late Thursday afternoon. He’d had three full days to contact her, tell her about the boy. So why had he still been at a Healdsburg motel this morning unless she’d turned him down flat? And not just hanging around there, waiting, but cleaning that .38 Police Special?
Strange dude, Tamara had called him. No argument there. Well, maybe the .38 hadn’t had any direct connection to his reunion with his ex-wife. Maybe he’d been one of these paranoid gun nuts who see menace lurking everywhere they go and can’t travel ten miles without packing heat for protection. And San Francisco, after all, as everybody east of Reno knows to be gospel fact, is a wicked, wicked city.
I asked Tamara to fax a copy of the Erskine report to Lieutenant Battle, and while she did that she offered her take on the situation. Which was suicide. Sondra Nelson had blown him off; refused to go back to Santa Fe to be with their son, given him no hope of reconciliation. And he’d been “whacked out” enough to take himself out. I said I didn’t buy it, but that was because I’d had enough of people ending their own lives with handguns; I didn’t want to deal with the issue even in theory. It was possible, though. At this stage anything was possible.
Ira Erskine was dead, that was all anybody knew for sure. And his son was still dying alone back in Santa Fe. Sondra Nelson’s past had caught up with her with a vengeance. Yes, and I was more than a little responsible.
Feelings of guilt began to build in me, to the point where I considered contacting her and expressing my regrets. But I didn’t give in to the urge; I was the last person she’d want to talk to, now or ever. In a few days I could call Battle, get a follow-up on Erskine’s death and find out what Sondra Nelson’s plans were regarding her son. Otherwise I was out of a tragic and difficult situation and I’d be smart to keep it that way.
Wrong.
I wasn’t out of it. Not by a damn sight.
Sheriff’s Lieutenant Battle called again early Tuesday morning. He said without preamble, “The Erskine shooting. It’s not as cut and dried as I thought. There’re inconsistencies.” His tone put me on alert; it was more official-sounding today. “Conflicting information that needs clarifying.”
“How can I help? I told you everything I know yesterday—”
“I’d prefer we talk in person this time, if it’s all the same to you. What’s your schedule like today? Can you free up time to come to Santa Rosa?”
“I think so. What’s convenient for you?”
“Say one o’clock. Our offices are at six hundred Administration Drive. You know where that is?”
“I’ve been to the courthouse.”
“One o’clock,” he said, and left me sitting there holding the receiver and thinking, What the hell?
Half a century ago, Santa Rosa — fifty-some miles due north of San Francisco — was a sleepy little town with a population of under twenty thousand, built close around the then two-lane Highway 101. Alfred Hitchcock considered it such a perfect example of prewar small-town America that he picked it for the location shooting of one of his best films, Shadow of a Doubt. Even twenty-five years ago its growth rate was relatively slow and it retained much of its quiet, homegrown ambiance. Since the early seventies, though, spurred on by high birth rates and thousands of new residents pouring into California every year, not to mention that old debbil greed, hordes of real estate developers descended on Sonoma County and have since turned a few million acres of open farmland and rolling wooded hills into look-alike housing tracts and shopping centers and “luxurious hillside homes with spectacular views.” The perfect example of small-town America has evolved into the perfect example of late-twentieth-century urban and suburban sprawl. Santa Rosa’s population has ballooned to 150,000 and shows no sign of leveling off, and right along with its rampant growth, the burgeoning new city has been plagued by the usual assortment of urban social ills: ghettoization of poorer neighborhoods, homelessness, widespread drug and gang activity, and a steady upsurge in violent crime.
The newish complex built around Administration Drive, off the freeway north of downtown, was an inevitable result of the urbanization of Santa Rosa and population increases throughout Sonoma County. All of the county’s administrative buildings and offices are located there, in an area that covers several acres. There are parking facilities for a few thousand cars, but I couldn’t find a spot anywhere within a short hike of the courthouse and sheriff’s offices. I had to walk nearly half a mile from where I finally deposited the car. Not that I minded the exercise but Battle’s second call had put an edginess in me and the sooner I found out what was back of it, the better I’d feel. Maybe.
The parking hunt and the walk made me ten minutes late. Battle didn’t seem bothered; he waved away my apology, told me to have a seat, and spent a few seconds taking my measure while I did the same with him. His office was not much larger than a cubicle and the two of us pretty much filled it; he was a couple of inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than me, which made him a very big man. Forty-some years of living and somewhere around half that number in law enforcement had lined and toughened his-face, and his eyes, dark brown under heavy brows and a low-hanging shock of iron-gray hair, said that he couldn’t be pushed or fooled and you’d be well advised not to try to do either.