“No problem. I’ll tell Miss Irwin to work up something for you.”
“Who’s Miss Irwin?”
“Shirley Irwin, our secretary.” He looked at his watch again. “Well,” he said. Then he paused, looking at me as if he expected me to get up and shake his hand and tell him how much I appreciated his cooperation. I stayed where I was, shaking hands with myself. He said, “Well,” another time, and followed it with, “I’ll be going then. I should be back in Redding myself the day after tomorrow. I expect we’ll see each other again soon.”
“I expect we will, Mr. Treacle,” I said.
He nodded and smiled-earnest and hopeful all the way-and turned for the door. Before he got there, though, it opened and Eberhardt came in looking grumpy. Eb ran into him, and Treacle reacted by hopping awkwardly out of the way like a ruptured jackrabbit. They looked at each other for a couple of seconds. After which Treacle said, “Excuse me, I’m sorry,” and beat it out through the door.
Eberhardt said to me, “What was that?”
“Martin Treacle. Real estate developer from Redding.”
“Yeah? Him?”
“Minor-league,” I said.
“Client?”
“No. One of the objects of a new case.”
“That’s good. Or is it?”
“I’m not sure yet. Could be.”
“Don’t tell me about it yet,” he said. “I got to sit down first and unwind.”
“Unwind from what?”
“That goddamn drive over to Stinson Beach. I hate that goddamn drive. That road scares me to death.”
I nodded sympathetically. The road scared me to death, too. It wound along the cliffsides for miles of sheer-sided dropoffs to rocks and ocean, and it wasn’t in very good repair.
Eberhardt sat down, put his feet up on his desk, and rubbed the scar behind his ear. The scar was from one of the bullets a gunman had pumped into him last August, putting him into a coma for seventeen days; the same gunman had pumped a bullet into me, too, and laid me up in the hospital for a while, and gave me a bad left arm that didn’t quite work the way it used to. The shooting was also the direct reason-there were several indirect ones-for his taking an early retirement from the San Francisco cops. Things had been bad for him for a while after that, until I gave in out of friendship and a smattering of pity and took him into my agency as a full partner. The partnership had worked out much better than I’d imagined it would. Eb was happy, I was happy, neither of us was starving to death as a result of having to split the profits, and that pirate Sam Crawford was getting his blood booty right on time the first of every month. Everything was just dandy-knock wood.
He sighed and ran a hand over the angles and blunt planes of his face. He was a year younger than my fifty-four and looked his age. Kerry said I didn’t look my age now that I’d taken off weight; but she also said the mustache made me look like Brian Keith trying to play Groucho Marx. Kerry has an acid wit sometimes. An off-the-wall wit, too: half the things she thinks are funny I don’t even understand.
“Better,” Eb said, pretty soon. “It’s been a hell of a day.”
“You find your missing heiress?”
“Not yet, but I’m getting close. I found a girlfriend of hers out there at Stinson Beach; the girlfriend lives with a guy who collects driftwood and has hair down to his ass and they put Trudy up for a few days last week. She left on Saturday to go to a retreat up in the Napa Valley.”
“What kind of retreat?”
“What kind you think? It’s called the Temple of Good Karma and Inner Peace, and it’s run by a guru named Mahatma something-or-other-not Gandhi. He’s probably got hair down to his ass too.”
“Your prejudices are showing, Eb.”
“Prejudices? Hell, I got nothing against guys with long hair. I got nothing against good karma or inner peace or gurus, either-unless the whole thing’s a scam to bilk money out of rich kids like Trudy Bigelow, which it usually is.”
“I guess. So you’ve pretty much got things wrapped up, then?”
“Maybe. Depends on whether or not she’s still at the retreat; I’ll go up tomorrow and see. If she is I’ll have to call her old man to find out how he wants to handle it.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s the matter? You sound disappointed.”
“Well, I was hoping maybe you could take over this case up in Trinity County. On account of my vacation. But I guess that idea’s out.”
“It is if your case is a hot one.”
“In more ways than one.” I gave him a brief rundown. “So it can’t be put off,” I said. “I’ll have to leave right away. Kerry’s not going to like postponing the vacation-she’s been looking forward to Santa Barbara.”
“Why not take her with you?”
“What?”
“Take her along to Trinity County,” he said. “Nice country up there-Mount Shasta, Shasta Lake, the McCloud River. Good fishing too.”
“Hell, Eb, I can’t do that…”
“Why not?”
“Mixing business and pleasure never works out. What’s she going to do while I’m working?”
“Same things you were planning to do in Santa Barbara.”
“Not hardly. We were going to rent a cabin cruiser down there, go out to the Channel Islands. She likes boats; she and her ex-husband used to own one in Santa Monica.”
“They got boats at Shasta Lake,” Eberhardt said. “It’s not the ocean and there aren’t any real islands, but it’s pretty nice anyway. An investigation like this, you should have it in the bag in two or three days. That still gives you a week or so to rent a boat, go up one of the finger lakes and fish and drink beer. Sounds good to me.”
Well, it sounded good to me too, now that I thought about it. But I said, “I dunno, Eb. She probably wouldn’t go for it.”
“You don’t understand women worth a damn, do you? She’ll go for it. Just ask her.”
“Okay, I’ll ask her,” I said. “But I still don’t think she’ll like the idea.”
“Of course I’ll come with you,” Kerry said at dinner that night. “I’ve never been to Shasta Lake.”
“You’re sure you don’t mind? I mean, the job and the last-minute switch in plans…”
“I understand about business,” she said. “Don’t you think I understand about things like that?”
“Sure, but-”
“I understand,” she said. “I’m a very understanding person. We’ll go up to Trinity County, I’ll sit around and wait while you do your work, and if there’s any time left we’ll rent a boat and go fishing or whatever. We’ll have a gay old time. Now let’s not talk about it any more.”
I looked at her. Then I sighed inwardly and thought: Give me strength, Lord. It’s going to be a long ten days.
CHAPTER THREE
The drive to Redding takes about four hours. We left at eight o’clock on Friday morning and got up there a little past noon.
Redding is the jumping-off point for the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, Shasta Lake and Shasta Dam, and a number of other wilderness and recreation areas in the far northern part of the state. It has a population of around forty thousand, the upper reaches of the Sacramento River runs through it, and so does a main line of the Southern Pacific railroad; and that’s pretty much all you can say about it. A nice enough little city, but without any real distinctive qualities-a place you might decide to live in but that you probably wouldn’t care to visit unless you were on your way someplace else. At least that was how this reluctant visitor felt as I took the downtown exit off Highway 5 and drove across the narrow squiggle of the river. But then, I wasn’t in a particularly charitable mood at the moment.
I said to Kerry, “I guess the first thing we should do is find a motel.”
“Uh-huh,” she said.
“Unless you want to stop and get something to eat.”
“No, I’m not hungry.”
“Any preferences for the motel? You can check the Triple-A guide..”
“No. Whatever you want.”
That was the way it had been all the way up-four hours of monosyllables and simple declarative sentences. Every time I looked at her, and she caught me at it, she would smile and give me eye contact for a couple of seconds; but then I’d glance at her a few seconds later, and she’d be wearing a blank expression and staring off into space. Something was troubling her, all right. And it wasn’t just the fact that I’d taken on this job, or the switch in vacation plans; Kerry was not the type to pout over things like that. A couple of times I’d asked her what was wrong. But she’d said nothing was wrong, and when I pressed her she’d gotten a little snippy, the way women do when they don’t feel like communicating. It was starting to worry me. She was shutting me out and I couldn’t seem to find a way to reach her when she did that. Whatever was bothering her, I wouldn’t get it out of her until she was good and ready to let go of it.