“Sure, we know him,” Hank said. He winked at the customer. “Mike’s been known to take a drink now and then.”
“That’s a fact,” the little guy agreed. “If he has to knock you down to get hold of the bottle.”
The two of them thought that was pretty funny. I didn’t, particularly, but I laughed with them so they’d be inclined to answer my next question.
“Where can I find him?”
“Well, if he’s sober,” Hank said, “he’ll be up at the Wilkerson property. Hollywood people, the Wilkersons, come up here two weeks out of the year. Must be nice to be rich.”
“What does Meineke do there?”
“Lives there, takes care of the place.”
“Far from here?”
“Six, seven miles. Up north of Anchor Bay.”
“I’d appreciate directions.”
He asked shrewdly, “Get you something to drink first?”
I ordered a beer I didn’t want, bought a refill for the little guy and a shot of bourbon for Hank. That made the three of us drinking buddies and got me directions explicit enough for a backward child to follow.
15
Anchor Bay was a few miles above Gualala, and the winding stretch of Highway I north of there was a pretty one — thickly wooded slopes to the east, the ocean close on the west and visible in snatches through more pine woods running along the cliff tops. Wisps of fog threaded the blue sky now; but the wind had slacked off and the offshore bank was moving slowly. The lowering sun had lost some of its brightness, so that its rays among the trees had a pale, filtered look.
At the six-mile point on the odometer I began scouting for the landmarks I’d been given. When the last of them appeared near the top of a rise — somebody’s mailbox built large to resemble a birdhouse — I slowed down. The Wilkerson driveway was just beyond the crest, half hidden by trees and undergrowth. I almost missed it, braked just in time to make the turn ahead of an oncoming logging truck.
Some nice piece of oceanfront property lay ahead of me, spread out behind a gated fence. At least two wooded acres, with an ultramodern wood-and-stone house squatting at the edge of the cliff and a couple of outbuildings in the trees closer to the highway. The security gates were open — I seemed to be lucky in that respect lately. The reason here was a stakebed truck parked midway along the drive, its bed mounded with dry brush and tree branches. A man dressed in overalls was clearing out more dead wood under the pines nearby.
I drove on through and stopped behind the truck. The man had straightened and was coming my way by then, dragging a six-foot limb in one gloved hand. I got out, walked around to meet him.
“Afternoon,” I said. “I’m looking for—”
“Wilkersons ain’t here. Not expected, either.”
He was thirty-five or so, all bone and gristle. Gray stubble flecked hollow cheeks and a weak chin. Broken capillaries made a tracery of red and blue lines across nose and cheekbones; the whites of his eyes had blood in them, like the albumin of a fertilized egg. You had to look close to see that he was the same man in the wedding photo, and not because he was lacking the beard and his hair was cut short. Even then I couldn’t be a hundred percent positive.
“Your name Meineke? Mike Meineke?”
“Why? I don’t know you and I’m not buying anything.”
“I’m not selling anything. I’m here about your sister-in-law.”
“Who you talking about?”
“Sheila Hunter. Or I should say Ellen. Lynn’s sister. Their real names, right. Mr. Willis?”
He stared at me. The bloodshot eyes showed fear now, but it was not the consuming terror I’d seen in Emily’s mother and aunt; it was a shadow, a wraith, of something that had grow n weak and shriveled with age.
“So it’s finally happened,” he said. “All along I figured it would someday. A man like Cotter never gives up, no matter how long it takes.”
I let the name slide by for the moment. “Ten years,” I said.
“Yeah. Almost eleven.” His mouth worked as if all his spit had dried up. “What happens now?”
“To Ellen?”
“Her, Pete, Lynn. Me.”
“Pete. Ellen’s husband.”
“Who the hell else?”
“He’s dead. Two weeks now.”
“Jesus,” Meineke said. “Cotter do it? You?”
“No, he died in a head-on collision with a drunk driver.”
That confused him. He shook his head.
I said, “Nobody told you? Your ex-wife knows.”
“Her. We ain’t said a word to each other in two years.”
“Tell me about Ellen and Pete.”
“Tell you what? If you work for Cotter—”
“I don’t work for Cotter. I don’t know Cotter.”
“Listen,” Meineke said, and shook his head again, and worked his dry mouth. “Just who the hell are you?”
“A private detective. Working for Jack Hunter’s insurance company. And for his daughter.”
“Emily? She’s a kid. That don’t make sense.”
“You make sense for me, I’ll do the same for you.”
“I don’t have to talk to you. You’re not from Cotter, you said you don’t even know him.”
“Talk to me or to the police. Your choice.”
“Police? Oh, no, you don’t. I didn’t do nothing wrong. Lynn and me, we had nothing to do with stealing those bonds—” He broke off, his gaze sliding away from mine.
“What bonds, Mike?”
“No,” he said.
“Pete and Ellen stole them, right?”
“No.”
“And you knew about it, maybe shared in the profits—”
“No.”
“Either way, you’re an accessory to a felony. You can go to prison, minimum of five years, if I report it to the authorities.”
That was more bluff than not. If theft was the only serious crime here, it had happened long enough ago for the statute of limitations to have run out. If Meineke knew that—
But he didn’t know it. He still wasn’t meeting my eyes and there was a slump to his hotly now, a loosening of his facial muscles — all signs of defeat in a man. He’d talk to me. All I had to do was give him back a little hope.
“I don’t want to make trouble for you, Mike. Facts are what I’m after. Give them to me and I’m out of your life as fast as I came into it.”
He ran a gloved hand over his face; I could hear the scraping of cloth on heard stubble. His eyes flicked up. “No cops?”
“No cops.”
“All right. What the hell. But I need a drink first. Christ, I need one bad.”
He put his back to me and shambled down the driveway. I followed him to the nearest of the outbuildings, a small, square cabin made of redwood logs and shakes that could not have contained more than two rooms. I went all the way into the doorway to make sure a drink was all he was after. A full pint of cheap bourbon stood on a table next to a bunk bed; he snagged it and took a long pull, then put the cap back on and came outside with it.
He didn’t say anything to me or even look at me. He walked around the side of the cabin, onto a beaten path that cut through the trees to the cliffs edge. A bench had been anchored there facing the ocean; Meineke sat down on it and slugged again from the bottle. It seemed colder out there, in the pale sun with the vanguards of mist curling in overhead. I buried my hands in my coat pockets, went around and stood on the other side of the bench. From there you could look down a hundred feet of eroded rock wall to a white-water cover where waves broke over offshore rocks and kelp beds. The big main house was about fifty yards away and partially screened by pines. If you sat with your back to it, I thought, as Meineke was sitting, you’d have a sense of what it was like to be all alone on the edge of the world.
“Come out here every chance I get,” he said. “Ocean’s about all I got left now. Ocean and booze.”