“Why? Because the car was in the driveway?”
“Nah,” Flynn said. “Engine and block was warm.”
“As if the car’d been driven, you mean?”
“Yeah. Or set there idling for a while before the engine quit.”
“And you say it was an old battery? Older than the car?”
“Looked that way to me. Could be the original conked out on her, too, and she had that one layin’ around and stuffed it in there instead of buyin’ a new one. Women and their cars. Jeez, you can’t never tell what one of ’em will do to a set of wheels, even a piece of crap like the Ford Taurus. I remember one time—”
“Did you say anything to her about the battery? Mention the warm engine?”
“The battery — yeah. Told her she better get a new one or she’d be callin’ us again because that old bugger wouldn’t hold a charge. Only I didn’t say bugger, not to her. Uh-uh.”
“No?”
He winked. “Stone fox,” he said. “Not that I cuss around any woman much, except my old lady, me bein’ in the public service like I am, but around a stone fox I’m extra polite. That’s just the way I am. I don’t want the babes thinkin’ I’m one of these crude guys don’t give a Frenchman’s fuck who they use shitty language to.”
“You think Gail Kendall is a fox?”
“Sure. I got an eye for good-looking women. And them skinny types with the pouty lips put a charge in my battery, if you know what I mean.”
I said, “Skinny?”
“Yeah, sure. Small, skinny, cute as a bug’s ass.”
“Pete, Gail Kendall is heavy set and thin-lipped.”
“The hell she is. You musta never seen her, that’s what you think.”
“Or you saw somebody else,” I said.
“Huh?”
“What color was her hair? What style?”
He shrugged. “Hey, man, hair’s hair. I’m a leg and ass man myself. Hers looked pretty fine to me, what I could see under that heavy coat she was wearin’.”
“Her hair, Pete. What color?”
“Couldn’t tell you if I wanted to. She had this scarf tied around her head, covered up everything ’cept her face from the eyes down.”
“How old was she?”
“Who knows from age? Old enough, that’s for sure.”
“Around forty?”
“Nah, not that old. Thirty, maybe. Yeah, around thirty.”
“Wait here a second, okay? I’ll be right back.” I hustled over to my car. I’d put the photos of Janice Erskine in the glove compartment last week, after my first visit to Silver Creek Cellars, and they were still there. I brought the set back to Flynn. “Is this the woman you saw?”
He peered at one photo, then the other, turning each a little this way and that. Finally he said, “Could be.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“Could be. Got the same pouty lips. But this fox here, she’s younger.”
“Try to imagine her older by five years or so.”
“I ain’t got much imagination,” Flynn said, but he tried. “Could be,” he said.
“The woman on Mule Deer Road — how did she seem to you?”
“Huh?”
“Was she happy, nervous, upset — what?”
“I dunno, why?”
“It might be important, Pete. Think about it.”
Thinking was a chore for him and it took him a while to get his memory cells in firing order. Then: “Kind of upset, I guess. Yeah. Wired, you know? She wouldn’t hardly look at me, now I think about it.”
“Kept her face averted? Turned away from you?”
“Yeah. I figured it was on account of I’m no Paul Newman. My face, some women like it and some don’t, what the hell. Could be she was wired on account of the battery con-kin’ out and she’s late for work. She said something about that when I got there, her bein’ late for work.”
“Did you tell any of this to the county cop you talked to? What the woman looked like, how she acted?”
“Nah, I don’t think so.”
“How about the old battery and the fact that the Ford’s engine was warm when you got there?”
“Nah. They never ast me about none of that. You ast the right questions and they didn’t.”
That was it exactly. The key to finding out anything is whether or not you ask the right people the right questions.
I had no difficulty locating Mule Deer Road. It was off Lytton Springs Road southwest of Geyserville — a narrow country lane that wound back into the low hills and then began to climb. Near the top of a rise a driveway appeared, a narrow break in a stand of scrub oak; a mailbox on a post there bore the number 215 and the name “Kendall” in paste-on reflector orange.
The house and two outbuildings were partly visible as soon as you turned into the drive, spread along the flattened hilltop above. I drove up slowly, framing what I would say to Gail Kendall if I caught her home. It was probable that she’d be at the winery, but then, not everybody works a full eight hours on Friday. Safer for me if she was home, but I wouldn’t be disappointed if she wasn’t.
At the crest of the drive was a gravel parking area large enough to accommodate half a dozen vehicles. It was empty now and so was an extension of the drive that led to a detached garage separated from the house by a flower garden in full spring bloom. The house was smallish, of redwood and glass in no particular architectural style that I could identify. A raised redwood deck ran along the rear; from there you’d have an impressive view across the valley to the east, and of a miles-long stretch of the mountain range that extended north-south like the county’s bony spine.
Nobody came out of the house when I parked or when I walked up onto a narrow front porch. And nobody responded to three long pushes on the doorbell. The screen door was unlatched, but a sturdy inner door was secure — almost a relief because I’d have been hard-pressed to resist the temptation of an unlocked door.
I stood listening to the wind mutter and bluster across the hilltop. It was strong up here, heavy with the scents of oak and sage, roses and climbing sweet pea and other blooms. Nice spot for a home, if you liked a certain isolation. I wondered if Gail Kendall had moved here from the Sonoma Valley to get away from people — a reaction to the hostage ordeal she’d gone through with her dead husband. Wondered, too, just how deeply the years and those final five hours with him had scarred her; if it had made her distrust men in general, and actively hate the abusers like Ira Erskine. If she was involved in Erskine’s death, as I now believed, then the answer was yes. No sane and functional member of society conspires with a friend to commit murder, however powerful the motive, without some sort of intense personal impetus.
I went crunching across the gravel to the driveway extension. The garage was a short redwood-walled box, large enough for two cars to be squeezed in side by side, with a peaked sheet-metal roof that might have been added on as a rainy-season afterthought; the second outbuilding stood at the edge of the garden, a privy-size shed that no doubt held hoes and rakes and the like. The main garage door was locked and appeared to be electronically operated. I walked around to the near side, where a single door flanked by big, wheeled garbage containers was cut into the wall. That one was locked, too, but it wasn’t much of a lock and the door was loose in the jamb. It wobbled and rattled when I tugged on the knob.
Here we go, I thought. And leaned my leg and hip tight against the lower half and did some strongarm lifting and yanking — what Kerry calls “animating around” — and in less than thirty seconds, without my having to exert myself enough to break a sweat, the lock tore free of its plate and the door jerked open. There wasn’t much damage: a little splintering of the wood around the plate, a bent edge, and some scrapes on the bolt. I ought to be able to relock it again when I was done inside. And the minor damage wouldn’t be noticeable without a close examination.