“Yep. Back in the hills a couple of miles.”
“Private house?”
“An old farm. Lived there ever since he came here.”
“Rented?”
Fuller nodded again. “Danny had a lease. Some fellow down in L.A. owns the property.”
“How do I get there?”
He gave me directions. Then he said, “This investigation of yours
… Danny’s not in any trouble, is he?”
“I hope not, Mr. Fuller.”
“Me too. He’s a good man, believe me. It’s just he’s had a run of lousy luck, you know?”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know.”
I thanked him for talking to me-and then, because there didn’t seem to be any hurry now, and because disappointment and frustration sometimes make me hungry, I gave him an order for a poor-boy sandwich to go. I was eating too many sandwiches these days, which was one of the reasons my weight had crept up another few pounds. But how were you supposed to eat balanced, non-fattening meals when you were out on a job like this? And I was damned if I was going to eat any more yogurt and cottage cheese and carrot sticks; Kerry had had me on that kind of starvation diet once and it had been pure torture. Russian peasants and Basque sheepherders, she’d said, lived to be a hundred eating yogurt and soft cheese and vegetables. Well, so what? What was the use of living to the century mark if you weren’t enjoying life? I was willing to bet that when those ancient Russian peasants and Basque sheepherders finally did croak, not one of them had a smile on his face.
I bought a Bud Light to go with my sandwich and had my lunch sitting in the car. I did some ruminating while I ate. Despite what Fuller had told me about Danny Martinez’s honesty, it seemed pretty clear-at least to me-that Martinez was the man Tom Washburn had talked to on the phone. He was of Mexican descent and he spoke with a slight accent. He had been at the Purcell house the night of the party, at the approximate time of Kenneth’s death; he could easily enough have seen or heard something incriminating. And he had had a run of bad luck that might have made him bitter enough to throw up a life of honesty in favor of one big grab at a tarnished brass ring. The run of bad luck also explained the six-month hiatus between Kenneth’s death and the phone call to Leonard’s home: Martinez hadn’t needed money back then, had had a job and a family. As for why he hadn’t gone to the police with what he’d seen or heard-maybe it wasn’t all that incriminating or maybe he just hadn’t wanted to get involved.
And now he was gone, probably somewhere in Mexico by this time. If Leonard had paid him the missing two thousand dollars, as it seemed likely he had, that would explain the sudden departure.
But there were still questions. Had he actually seen or heard anything that night? It was conceivable he had pulled the whole thing out of his imagination, although that struck me as improbable for a simple-living deliveryman whose life was crumbling around him. If Kenneth had been murdered, and if Martinez did know who was responsible, had he given the name to Leonard? Had he confided it to anyone else-his wife, maybe, or a close friend? And exactly where was he now?
Well, maybe there was something at his farm, something he’d left behind, that would give me a clue. I finished the last of my sandwich and the last of the Bud Light, got the car started, drove back into the village proper, and hunted up Sunshine Valley Road.
It was a winding, two-lane country road that led back into the foothills to the east, past scattered homes-some new and well-maintained, some not so new and not so well maintained; past a couple of sprawling ranches that specialized in the breeding of quarter horses. After a couple of miles, the road made a sharp loop to the north and took me across a bridge that spanned a vegetation-choked creek. Just beyond the bridge a dirt road cut back to the east, up into another series of low hills thickly wooded with eucalyptus, madrone, and fir trees. Fuller had told me this would be Elm Street and a sign at the intersection confirmed it.
I turned up the dirt road, past the only visible house around and through more trees, none of which was an elm. Another of those irritating little mysteries: Why Elm Street if there weren’t any elms on it? Moss Beach seemed to be full of enigmas, large and small. Beyond the trees to the south, where the land fell away into a tiny valley, I could see different kinds of flowers blooming in cultivated fields. They would belong to one of several ranches down there that specialized in growing flowers for sale to various nursery suppliers in the area.
When I had gone a fifth of a mile, a green wooden mailbox appeared on the south side of the road. Directly opposite on the north side, a pair of ruts that passed for a lane angled up through the trees. Those ruts, Fuller had said, would take me to Danny Martinez’s farm. But I didn’t make the turn right away. Instead I stopped alongside the mailbox-Martinez’s, presumably, since it was the only one in the vicinity-and got out and poked inside. There were two pieces of mail, both addressed to Daniel Martinez, but neither was worth tampering with: a PG amp;E bill and a mail-order catalogue. I put them back into the box and got into the car again.
The ruts took me along the shoulder of a hill and then around and down into a good-sized clearing flanked on three sides by woods. The fourth side was a field that had been planted with vegetables and melons and that contained a couple of fruit trees. There were two buildings in the clearing-a sagging barn and an old farmhouse set back against the wooded slope to the east. A chicken coop stood adjacent to the barn but there weren’t any chickens in it.
I stopped the car in the middle of the dusty yard and hauled myself out of it again. It was quiet; the only sound was a jay scolding something in the fir trees behind the house. I walked over that way, up a slight incline to where a child’s battered wagon was lying upside down near the stairs. The stairs had a newish look and the white paint on them was fresher than on the rest of the house; some of the roofs shingles also looked new. Until the events of the past month, Martinez had evidently kept the place up pretty well.
At the top of the stairs was a shallow porch with a geriatric swing and a rickety table on it. There was a screen door into the house, and a regular door behind it that stood ajar; the screen door wobbled open when I tugged on it. I called out, “Hello, inside,” and waited a while, just to be safe. Nobody answered me, so finally I went on in.
Tiny front hall, with a kitchen opening on one side and a living room or parlor on the other. I turned into the parlor first. Salvation Army furniture, all right-sofa, two chairs, three tables, an old desk with papers strewn over its surface, some of which had fallen or been tossed on the worn carpet. One of the inner walls had been decorated with crayon marks, red and green, in a kid’s nonsense pattern that seemed more aesthetic to me than the Chagall painting in the Purcell house. A crucifix made out of dark wood and a painting of a Mexican village adorned the other inner wall. The two outer walls were mostly windows with cheap chintz curtains drawn back from the glass; the set to the north looked out on the open field and the set to the west gave you a view of the yard, of the barn-
I was looking that way, toward the barn, when the man came out of it. His sudden appearance brought me up short; he was moving in a furtive way, his face and eyes turned toward the house. Bulky guy, sandy hair done up in a frizz-familiar even at this distance.
Richie Dessault.
What the hell? I thought. I ran back into the hall and out onto the porch. He was no longer by the barn and no longer moving furtively; he had started to run up into the woods on the far slope, being more or less quiet about it. I thought about yelling at him, but it wouldn’t have done any good: he was building a good head of steam, dodging this way and that through the trees, and he wasn’t looking back. I pounded down the stairs and across the yard in front of the barn. But by the time I got to the foot of the slope he had vanished near the crest.