“How’d you find out where I live?” she demanded.
“Finding things out is what I do for a living.”
“You’re the one called up yesterday. Pretending to be a cop … all that crap about Arturo.”
“Did I?” I smiled at her. “I don’t remember.”
“?Que pasa? I told you, I don’t know nothing.”
“You know Rafael Vega.”
“… What’s he got to do with anything?”
“He’s mixed up in Thomas Lujack’s murder.”
“Rafael? You’re crazy….”
“That’s not the only thing he’s mixed up in either.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“Coyotes, Teresa. You know what they are, don’t you?”
She knew. Little worms of fear crawled in her eyes now. She couldn’t quite hold my gaze; hers kept dancing away, coming back, dancing away. “Crazy,” she said again, but it came out weak and strained this time. “Demente, that’s what you are.”
“Where is he, Teresa?”
“Who?”
“Rafael Vega.”
“How should I know?”
“You’re good friends, aren’t you?”
“Pah. He’s just somebody I work with.”
“Never dated him or anything like that?”
“He’s married.”
“Uh-huh. When did you see him last?”
“Last week. This week he didn’t show up for work.”
“How come?”
Shrug. “Maybe he’s sick.”
“With the flu?”
“Who knows? He didn’t call in.”
“Then why’d you tell me he was sick with the flu?”
“… What? I never told you that.”
“Sure you did. On the phone two days ago.”
She shook her head; shook it again. Despite the cold, there was a thin film of sweat on her upper lip. “Listen, why you bothering me? Huh? Why don’t you go talk to his family?”
“I already have. His son thinks he’s been seeing another woman. Been shacking up with her.”
“Me? He says it’s me?”
“No. I do.”
“Well, you know what? You’re full of shit.”
“Why didn’t you go to work yesterday, Teresa? Why aren’t you working now?”
“I don’t have to tell you why I do anything. I don’t have to talk to you no more. Get out of here, leave me alone.”
“No reason you shouldn’t talk to me, if you’ve got nothing to hide.”
“I mean it-leave me alone. You want me to call the cops? You want me to start screaming?”
“All right,” I said. “But when you see Rafael, give him a message from me. Tell him I’m looking for him. Tell him I know all about the coyotes-”
She spun away from me, so abruptly that she lost her grip on the bag of groceries. The sack fell at her feet, broke open, spilled out a loaf of bread and a six-pack of Stroh’s and half a dozen other items. She was rattled enough, and wanted clear of me badly enough, not to care. Without even hesitating she plowed through the strewn groceries and then through a gate in the fence and was gone around the rear of the cottage.
I stayed where I was until I heard the door slam. I hadn’t been wrong, I was thinking, hadn’t been wasting my time. She was Rafael Vega’s mistress, all right. She knew what he was mixed up in-some of it, anyway-and where he was or how to reach him. She would deliver my message. And when she did, things were going to happen.
Good or bad, things were going to happen.
* * * *
I hung around the neighborhood for the better part of an hour, driving a little, parking in different locations where I could keep an eye on her house. But she didn’t leave again, and nobody came to see her. Finally, at three thirty, I gave it up and went on my way.
Snagging Rafael Vega wasn’t going to be that easy.
* * * *
Back to the office. Eerhardt was gone, and there were no messages. I considered doing some work on the home-accident case for Barney Rivera, but I was too restless for routine business; it could wait until Monday. I locked up and went away again almost immediately.
Four thirty on a Friday afternoon; a long, lonely weekend stretching out ahead of me. Unless Kerry could get away, which wasn’t likely. Cybil demanded all of her free time. I wondered again where she’d been today, if she’d consulted a geriatric specialist and what she’d been advised. Well, she’d call when she had something to tell me.
I held an image of her up in front of my mind’s eye. And as always, I felt the old sweet ache start up. A man shouldn’t love a woman as much as I loved Kerry; that much emotional attachment isn’t healthy, because there is too much dependency tied up in it. Somebody in my line of work needs to be independent. Loners don’t get distracted; loners have total focus on the job at hand; loners make the best detectives.
Loners die lonely, I thought.
The hell with that, I thought. I’m emotional and dependent. … So what? I’m also too damned analytical for my own good. Sentimental slob and deep-thinker-how’s that for an epitaph?
In the car again, I started home to my flat. And then changed my mind on the way up Pine and kept going past my turnoff at Laguna. I was in no frame of mind for a passive evening at home. When I felt like this I needed to keep moving, keep doing things, keep working.
Out There at the Beach was where I went, even though it was too early for the Hideaway. For no particular reason I drove by Nick Pendarves’s house. On the property next to the garage where Thomas Lujack had died, a man was out working busily in his garden. As soon as I saw him I pulled over to the curb. The police would have talked to him by now, without much result, but there was no reason I shouldn’t have a few words with him myself. Better that than just driving aimlessly.
Fog banks were piled up over the ocean, spilling landward, but overhead the sky was still partly clear and turning a sooty gray-black. There was maybe twenty minutes of light left, and the neighbor was making the most of it. He was in his sixties, lean and spry, wearing old clothes and gardening gloves and a Giants baseball cap. An array of tools was spread out among shrubs and flower beds and climbing-plant trellises, and he was using a pair of clippers to shape some kind of bush that looked pretty shapely already. A gardener-the manic type. The past few days of rain and soggy ground would have been hell for him. And who knew but what it would start raining again tomorrow.
I leaned on a low grape-stake fence and hailed him. A much higher board fence, along which a geometrically trimmed hedge grew, separated his property from Pendarves’s. That fence was why he probably hadn’t seen or heard much the night of Thomas Lujack’s death.
He came over with a certain amount of reluctance. But his curiosity got the better of his passion for gardening when I told him I was a detective investigating the murder next door. He assumed I meant police detective; I didn’t correct the assumption. His name was Anderson, Lloyd P. Anderson. He hadn’t ever told his wife what the P stood for, he said, so he wasn’t about to tell me.
“Told the other officers everything I know,” he went on, “which ain’t much. Hell, it ain’t anything. The wife and me missed all the excitement. Watched a damn crime movie on TV that night, while a real crime was going on right under our noses. Makes you think, don’t it?”
“It does that.”
“Nick Pendarves … it’s still hard to believe. Oh, sure, he’s got a temper, but murder? You never figure somebody you know, somebody living, right next door, is capable of a thing like that.”
“How well do you know him, Mr. Anderson?”
“Hardly at all, considering we been neighbors twelve years. He kept to himself. Not that there’s anything unusual about that. Most of us do, out here. Value our privacy more than your average city dweller.”
“So you wouldn’t have any idea where he might have gone.”
Anderson shook his head. “Still haven’t found a trace of him, eh?”