Yuba City has two other claims to fame. One is provocative: In a couple of quality-of-life polls to determine the most desirable place in California to live, it had come in dead last. The other is notorious: In the early seventies it had been the scene of one of the more shocking mass-murder cases-the one in which Juan Corona was convicted of cold-bloodedly slaughtering twenty-five migrant workers after having had homosexual relations with them.
Visually, Marysville is a Cinderella compared to its stepsister across the river. Its downtown is filled with attractive old buildings and it sports a huge shady part with a lake in the middle. Yuba City, on the other hand, has an unaesthetic downtown area sans park and lake, plus a couple of miles of southern California-style shopping centers and fast-food joints. But looks can be deceiving where cities are concerned, too. Marysville also harbors a well-populated skid row and has larger crime and substance-abuse problems than its neighbor. Despite Yuba’s tarnished image, if you had to live in one town or the other, and you weighed the pros and cons carefully, Yuba City would be the one to pick.
The Toyota’s buy-gas light was on when I drove into Marysville a little past noon. I took the bridge across into Yuba City and stopped at an Exxon station off Bridge Street to fill the tank and to look up Elmer Rix and the Catchall Shop in the local directory. No entry for Rix; but the Catchall Shop was listed at 2610 Percy Avenue. According to the kid working the pumps, that address was less than a mile from here, out past the nearby Del Monte packing plant. “You’ll find it real easy,” he said. And for once, somebody who told me that was right.
The building at 2610 Percy Avenue was big, sprawling, and on the brink of condemnation as a fire hazard. A cyclone-fenced yard to one side was full of things like claw-foot bathtubs, random lengths of pipe, car parts, pottery urns and ceramic garden statues, rusty stoves, a twenty-foot-high carved oak likeness of a snarling grizzly bear. On the warped wood front of the building were several signs, some large and some small, some metal and some wood, all hand-painted by somebody with not much of an artistic eye. THE CATCHALL SHOP, over the double-doored entrance. SECONDHAND ITEMS OF ALL KINDS. BURIED TREASURES. TOOLS OUR SPECIALTY. PAPERBACK BOOKS, 25¢. IF WE DON’T HAVE IT, YOU WON’T FIND IT ANYWHERE ELSE. BROWSERS WELCOME. CASH ACCEPTED FROM ANYONE.
But the most interesting thing about the place, at least externally, was the car parked inside the yard gates-a cream-colored Cadillac Seville, no more than a few years old and probably a 1985 model.
I made a U-turn and parked in front of the building. Walking inside was like entering an incredibly cluttered hermit’s cave: gloomy, dank-smelling, jammed to the exposed rafters with shelves and piles and tiers of every imaginable kind of junk. There was nobody moving around in there; but through an open side door I could see someone maneuvering an ancient forklift in the adjacent yard. I could also see what happened to be a dimly lighted office over that way.
There were no aisles as such; I had to blaze a roundabout path to the office. Along the way I saw the remains of an ancient buckboard, a beat-up Chinese gong with a faded dragon painted on it, at least a thousand dust-laden and mildewed paperbacks on bowed shelves, a wine cask that somebody had made into a child’s playhouse, bins overflowing with age-crusted hand tools, a Rube Goldberg machine with arms and legs and wires and a use I couldn’t even begin to guess at, horse collars and pickle crocks and rows of cobwebbed mason jars and radios with broken cases and a Stop sign that had been used for target practice and a mannikin with a crumbling maroon velvet dress draped over it. The whole place had the look of a madman’s museum filled with exhibits that made no sense and that had lain unattended and unviewed for decades. There ought to have been another sign on the front of the building: WE HAVE IT, BUT NOBODY IN HIS RIGHT MIND WOULD WANT IT.
The office was a wallboard and glass affair, small and as cluttered as the rest of the place, the glass so fly-specked and grime-streaked that it was mostly opaque. One of the jumble of objects inside was a desk; another was a man in the chair behind it. “Fatter than me and that’s fat,” Mrs. Ruiz had said of Frank Tucker’s last visitor in Vacaville. Her description and the Cadillac Seville outside made that man and this one the same. He must have weighed close to 350 pounds, and in the weak light from a gooseneck lamp he looked like nothing so much as a huge toad sitting on a stump. Bald brown head, rutted and warty brown face, little half-lidded eyes that looked sleepy but would miss little or nothing of what they surveyed. When he opened his mouth I would not have been surprised to see a long, thin tongue flick out and snag one of the flies that moved sluggishly through the air around him.
The only part of him that moved when I walked in was his mouth: It curved upward at the corners in a professional smile-a moneylender’s smile. He said in a deep, throaty toad’s voice, “Howdy, friend. Thanks for stopping in. Tell you right off you picked a good day. Bargain specials galore, no reasonable offer refused. What-all you interested in?”
“Elmer Rix, for starters,” I said. “Would that be you?”
“Sure would. You got business with me?”
“With someone you know.”
“Who would that be?”
“Frank Tucker.”
A change came over him, the subtle kind that you might miss unless you were looking for it. Outwardly, nothing at all happened; the smile stayed fixed, the expression otherwise blank and the eyes half-lidded. But beneath the surface he got hard, rock hard: Fat turned to stone so suddenly that he might have gazed upon the face of Medusa. Those amphibian eyes measured me, dissected me with the same emotionless precision a biology teacher uses to dissect a real toad.
He said with false geniality, “Hey, do I look like the missing persons bureau? I sell junk, not information.”
“Are you telling me you don’t know Frank Tucker?”
He didn’t say anything, just looked at me. I looked back, not giving him any more or any less than he was giving me. I had my hand in my jacket pocket, touching the butt of the.22, but it would have been a mistake to put him under the gun. Elmer Rix was no O. Barnwell; intimidation and threats wouldn’t work with him. The hardness was strength as well as stubbornness and probable veniality. A tub of guts with guts.
I said, playing it a different way, “Look, I need to talk to Tucker. As soon as possible. He won’t mind when he hears what I’ve got to say.”
“What would that be?”
“I’ve got a job for him.”
“That so? What kind of job?”
“Do I need to spell it out?”
“I’m a good listener, friend. Try me.”
“Muscle work.”
“Bodybuilding, that what you mean?”
“Come on, Rix, let’s cut the bullshit, okay? We both know what Tucker hires out to do.”
“Man in my business gets to know a lot of things,” he said. “Point is, how do you know?”
“Somebody I know knows Dino.”
“Dino who?”
“Friend of Tucker’s,” I said, and I didn’t have to feign the impatience in my voice. “The word I got was that if I wanted to talk to Tucker, I should come over here and see Elmer Rix at the Catchall Shop. So here I am. Now do you point me to Tucker or do I find somebody else to give my dough to?”
He watched me a while longer before he said, “What kind of job and how much you paying?”