“Well, I’m not sure.” He frowned, thinking about it. “Seems to me it was a sports name.”
“The same as an athlete’s, you mean?”
“Yeah. Baseball or basketball player… no, both. White guy used to play for the Giants. And a black guy played in the NBA, does those Lite Beer commercials you see on TV. The guy with the big feet; you know, they keep making jokes about his big feet.”
Talk, talk, talk. The impatience had built a jangling inside me; I clenched my hands tight to keep them still. Hennessey was enjoying himself, playing a little riddle game with me, and the only thing to do was to play along with him. If I pushed him he might decide I wasn’t such an interesting specimen after all and close up on me. You either encourage people like him or you leave them be and let them get it out in their own sweet time.
I shook my head and shrugged and smiled and said, “Guess I don’t watch enough sports on TV.”
“My wife says I watch too much,” Hennessey said. “She says sports on TV breaks up more marriages than nookie. Not that she knows much about nookie,” and he winked at Wilma again.
She smiled her dutiful smile. I waited.
“Lanier,” he said finally, as if he were answering a big-prize question on a TV game show. Proud of himself, because he knew something a private eye didn’t. “Hal Lanier, pretty good infielder with the Giants once, manages the Astros now. Bob Lanier, the black basketball player with the big feet.”
“Lanier,” I said. It was a letdown because the name meant nothing to me. “You’re sure that was his name?”
“Pretty sure.”
“What was his first name?”
“That I don’t remember.”
“Did he live in the cabin year-round? Or did he give you another address?”
“Don’t remember that either,” Hennessey said. He glanced at the woman. “Look it up, Wilma, will you? Lanier. Must have been ’eighty-one. That was the year we had the slow spring.”
“Those files are in the storeroom,” she said. There was mild disapproval in her voice. But she was too placid to argue; and when he said, “Won’t take a minute, you know where they are,” she released a small sighing breath and went through the door into the warehouse.
I asked, “What did this Lanier look like?”
“Look like? Well, I don’t have much of a memory for faces…”
“It’s important, Mr. Hennessey.”
“Important case, huh?”
“Yes.”
“He do something crooked, this Lanier?”
“He might have.”
“Up at the cabin in Deer Run? Some kind of crime happen up there?”
“Yes,” I said, “some kind of crime.”
“Can’t say what it is, huh?”
“I’d rather not.”
“Sure, I understand. Well, let’s see. I think he was bald… yeah, that’s right, bald as an egg.”
“Big man? Medium? Small?”
“Kind of medium, I guess.”
“Was there anything unusual about him? Scars, moles, mannerisms, the way he talked?”
“Not that I can remember.”
“How old was he?”
“Oh… around our age.”
“You’re sure? In his fifties?”
“He was no spring chicken, that’s for sure.”
Not my man, then. If this Lanier had been in his fifties seven years ago, he would be close to or some past sixty now. The whisperer hadn’t been anywhere near that old; there had been a quality of relative youth about him, of that I was certain.
“What else can you tell me about Lanier?”
“That’s about all. Hell, it’s been so long…”
Wilma came back in from the warehouse, carrying a slender file folder in one hand. “Here it is,” she said in her placidly disapproving way. “James Lanier.”
“James, that’s right,” Hennessey said. “James Lanier.”
I asked Wilma, “What address did he give?”
She consulted the file. “Spruce Cabin, Indian Hill Road, Deer Run.”
“Is that the only one?”
“No. There’s another here. But it’s not local.”
Jesus, these people! “What is it, please?”
“It’s in Carmichael,” she said. “Two-one-nine-six-three Roseville Avenue, Carmichael.”
I repeated it, committing it to memory: “Two-one-nine-six-three Roseville Avenue, Carmichael.”
“That’s right.”
“Did he give a telephone number?”
“Yes, I think so…”
She found it and read it out, and I repeated it, too, so I wouldn’t forget it.
When I thanked the two of them for their help, Hennessey said, “Any time. Wait’ll I tell the wife we helped out a private eye. She’ll wet her pants.” He winked at me, winked at Wilma, and said, “She might even give me a little tonight.”
Wilma sighed, pursed her lips, and sat down at her desk. Hennessey grinned. And I went away from both of them.
AFTERNOON
There were no rental car agencies in Sonora; I had learned that last night, from the desk clerk when I checked into the motel. So after I left Rite-Way Plumbing and Heating, I found my way to the bus station. The next bus to Sacramento wasn’t until tomorrow morning, but there was a one o’clock coach to Stockton. I spent nearly ten of my remaining dollars on a one-way ticket. Stockton was some sixty miles south and a little west of Carmichael, a sprawling northern suburb of Sacramento; it was also about the same distance from Sonora. I could rent a car there this afternoon and be in Carmichael sometime early this evening. The sooner I had a car and the freedom of mobility it provided, the better off I would be.
From a phone booth I called Sacramento County information and asked for a Carmichael listing for James Lanier. I half expected to be told that there wasn’t one, after seven years, but the operator punched in his computer without comment and an electronic voice gave the same number Wilma had read to me. So Lanier was likely still at the same Roseville Avenue address. I could confirm that by checking the local directory when I got to Carmichael.
I had gotten several quarters and I used those to call Bates and Carpenter in San Francisco. I had tried dialing Kerry’s home number twice more last night, the last time at a quarter to eleven, and she still hadn’t answered. Nothing ominous in that, or even significant, but it preyed on my mind just the same.
When the call went through I said to the woman on the switchboard, “Kerry Wade, please.” There was a click, another ringing sound, and then another click and Kerry’s secretary, Ellen Stilwell, said cheerfully, “Ms. Wade’s office.”
She knew my voice, Ellen did-I had called Kerry often enough at the agency-so I deepened and roughened it when I asked, “Is Ms. Wade in?”
“May I ask who’s calling?”
“Then she is in?”
“Yes, she is. Your name, please, sir?”
Relieved, I tapped the box with the handset, jiggled the cradle at the same time to make it seem as though there was something wrong with the line, and then hung up. All right. Kerry was alive, safe, well enough to be at her job; now I could put my mind at ease at least where she was concerned.
I went to a café not far away and drank coffee and made myself eat a piece of apple pie. Back at the bus station, I bought a newspaper and caught up on the news. Nothing much had changed in three months: political scandals, corporate scandals, religious scandals, small wars like rehearsals for another big one, all sorts of killing on the individual level. Lots of changes taking place everywhere-change is systemic in all walks of life, sometimes subtle and sometimes not so subtle-and yet certain fundamental things never change. I thought of the line from the Peter, Paul, and Mary song: When will they ever learn? Rhetorical question; moot point. We’ll never learn. We’ll never learn our way smack into the middle of Armageddon, and then we’ll say, with the last words we’ll ever speak, “How could this have happened? How could we have let this happen?”