I paid for my lunch, including a substantial tip, and left.
Bridgeport, the county seat and the town where the man who had left Hobo’s with Miri lived, was some thirty miles northwest on Highway 395. I knew of a cutoff that would take me there from this road. It was early yet, and I didn’t feel like going back to the ranch-there would surely be a call from Ted pleading for me to open up to him-so I decided to drive up north and see if I could find the hardware store owner, Cullen Bradley.
Bridgeport is a charming town, with its stately eighteen-eighties courthouse, old homes, and steepled churches. Once known as Big Meadows because of the vast grazing land around it, it’s also an outdoor person’s paradise, surrounded by pristine lakes and streams for fishing or boating. Its greatest claim to fame is that it was used as the location for many of the scenes in the classic 1947 film noir Out of the Past. Hy disputes that; he says its claim to fame is being the only place that a drunken young man succeeded in lassoing and pulling down a street lamp from the bed of a moving pickup. The young man, of course, was Hy-whose reward for his feat was having to perform community service and pay for a new light pole. Every now and then when we’re there we visit it, and he says someday he’s going to mount a plaque on it.
I found Bradley’s Hardware on a side street two blocks from the courthouse. It had a graveled parking lot in back; I pulled in, left the Land Rover there, and entered through the rear door. I love hardware stores and this smelled like a good one: not the sanitized, filtered odor of a Home Depot, but a mixture of wood and metal and paint and other unidentifiable but appropriate items. The bare floors were warped, the shelves sagging under their wares. I had to weave my way through a warren of aisles to get to the front. Immediately a friendly young clerk appeared and asked if he could help me find anything.
“Is Mr. Bradley in?”
“He’s in his office, but… If you’re selling something, I wouldn’t bother him today.”
“How come?”
He leaned forward and said in a whisper, “Bad night. He had me bring him some of what he calls ‘hair of the dog’ a while ago.”
“Well, this is a personal matter. I’ll take my chances.”
“Back that way.” He jerked his thumb toward a door behind the sales counter. “Good luck.”
The door was slightly ajar. I knocked and called out to Bradley.
“What?” A shade irritable, but not too bad. The dog’s hair must have been working.
“May I come in?”
“If you must.” As I moved through the door, he added, “Who the hell are you?” He was a red-faced, fortyish man with a shock of gray-blond hair, and his skin had that flaccid look that a night of hard drinking will produce.
I introduced myself, said I was looking for a friend of his who had been with him at Hobo’s in Vernon the night before. “The bartender said you called him Dino.”
“Dino Martin. His parents named him for the singer. Funny thing is, he can’t hold a note. Sounds like my old hound dog when he tries.”
“Where can I reach him?”
“Why do you want to?”
“A friend of mine left the bar with him. She hasn’t come home, and I’m worried.”
“You must mean Miri Perez.”
“Yes.”
“Well, she’s probably shacked up with him someplace. It’s kind of what she does.”
“Still, I’d like to talk with him.”
He hesitated. “Okay. Try Martin Realty, a block west.”
I thanked him and left him to his hangover.
Martin’s Realty was a small storefront whose windows were plastered with fliers featuring their listings. There were two desks arranged in the front room, but no one was seated at them. A pair of doors opened to the rear, one of which bore a placard saying DINO MARTIN. I knocked and a gravelly voice said to come in.
Martin could not have less resembled the famed singer after whom he’d been named. He was bald except for a badly dyed fringe of black hair and a short, sparse beard. His eyes were red and puffy; purple veins stood out on his large nose. I judged him to be on the far side of fifty. As I stepped into the office, he picked up a coffee mug with a shaking hand and gulped its contents.
More dog hair?
I introduced myself, said I was a friend of the Perez family.
“And who the hell’re they?”
“Miri Perez’s relatives. You were with her last night in Hobo’s-”
“Oh, that crazy bitch.”
“You left with her, said something about going to the Outhouse.”
“Yeah. I figured it was the only bar between Vernon and Bridgeport she hadn’t been thrown out of yet.”
“But you didn’t go there.”
He put a hand over his eyes like a visor, as if it hurt to look up, and motioned for me to sit down on the chair across from him. “No, we didn’t. I was reasonably sober when we left Hobo’s, but after what happened, I tied one on when I got back to town. The wife’s ready to kill me.”
“What happened?”
“Wait a minute. Why’re you so interested in Miri?”
“She hasn’t been seen since you two left the bar together.”
“Hey, I don’t know where she is.”
“No? Why’d you tie one on after you got back here?”
“… I… She… Oh, dammit!”
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
“Why should I?”
I took out one of my cards and slid it across the desk to him. “Legally I’m bound to report what I know to the sheriff’s department. The deputies will get around to you soon.”
“Oh, God. Okay, okay. We were a ways out of town. She was getting cozy, putting her hands on me, you know what I mean? I thought I was gonna get lucky, take her to a friend’s cabin near there that I’ve got a key to. But all of a sudden she’s screaming for me to pull over. I did, right quick-thought she was gonna puke.”
“And?”
“Across the highway there’s this rundown trailer park. Cop cars all over the place, and an ambulance was pulling out. Miri went nuts. Jumped out of my Jeep and ran across the highway without even looking. Lucky there wasn’t anybody coming.”
“Did you follow her?”
“Shit, no. I don’t mess with cops if I can help it. I’ve already had two DUIs. And if what was going on was as bad as it looked, I sure didn’t want to get involved. The wife-”
“So you just left Miri there.”
“Damn right. I didn’t owe her a thing. She was just this bitch I picked up in a bar.” He took a vodka bottle from the shelf behind his desk, poured into the mug, and drank, flashing me a childishly defiant look. “How much would it cost me to keep you from telling the sheriff?”
“No sale, Mr. Martin. It doesn’t work that way.”
For some reason my cellular was out of range in Bridgeport, so I found a phone booth-one of the few of that endangered species-and called Drew Warnell, the sheriff’s deputy I’d talked with last night at the crime scene. He confirmed that Miri Perez had run across the highway as the ambulance containing her daughter’s body was pulling away.
“She went into a total meltdown when I told her what had happened. Assaulted me and another deputy.” He sounded as if he were still shaken by the incident. “We had to restrain her, and now she’s up here in the Bridgeport psych ward on a seventy-two-hour hold.”
I took down the information about Miri, then called the Perez house. Sara answered and said Ramon had come home shortly after I’d left.
“The fool went all the way to Bridgeport and checked out some bars and a few off-hours places he knows about, but Miri hadn’t been to any of them. Then he started back, but was too tired to drive all the way and fell asleep in Miri’s van at a rest stop.”
That was a relief. Now Ramon could deal with the mess I’d uncovered.
I said, “Well, he can stop worrying about Miri. I’m in Bridgeport, and the sheriff’s department tells me she’s in the psych ward up here.” I explained what Drew Warnell had told me. “She wouldn’t give them any information about next of kin, so they couldn’t contact you.”