I didn’t see any point in chasing after him; he had thirty years on me and a lot more wind and stamina. And I couldn’t have caught him anyway because after a minute or so there was the distant sound of a car engine revving up, over on the other side of the hill. Another road, probably, invisible from here.
What the hell? I thought again. What was Dessault doing here? What was his connection with Danny Martinez? And why hadn’t he driven his car into the yard, as I had, instead of leaving it out of sight and skulking over here through the woods?
I swung around and went into the barn, to see if I could tell what he’d been doing in there. The interior was gloomy and nurtured a sour smell composed of dust, dry rot, manure, and other things I couldn’t define. On the packed-earth floor just inside the doors was a large stack of lumber, a couple of sawhorses, a scatter of carpentering tools; it looked as though Martinez had bought the lumber with the idea of making additional repairs on both the house and the barn. Along one wall was a workbench cluttered with all sorts of junk, from spools of wire to a radio in a cracked plastic case; propped against another wall were a hand plow and some gardening tools. At the rear were three horse stalls, two of them empty, the one in the far corner containing another, smaller stack of plywood sheets and two-by-fours. A ladder gave access to a hayloft; it looked sturdy, so I climbed it far enough for a look into the loft. The only things up there were a rusty pitchfork and some remnants of old hay.
Dessault hadn’t been doing anything in here, the way it looked. Except hiding, maybe. Caught here, or out in the open nearby, when he heard my car; so he’d waited, watching, until I entered the house, and then made his escape through the trees.
But I still couldn’t figure a reason for him being here. Did he know Martinez? The way he’d reacted yesterday morning, when I’d asked Melanie if she knew anyone who spoke with a Latin accent… now that I thought about it, his reaction had been a little too sharp and edged with surprise. Maybe he did know Martinez. But that still didn’t explain his presence here today, or his furtiveness.
The barn was oppressive, somehow; I went back out into the sunshine and took a look at the chicken coop. Nothing there. I crossed to the house again. And prowled through its five rooms and bath, starting with the parlor.
The loose papers on and around the desk weren’t particularly interesting. Old bills, some paid and some not; a couple of personal letters written in Spanish to “Eva cara mia” and signed “Mama,” but with no address or envelope to tell me where they’d come from; some crayon drawings similar to the one on the wall, the kind of stuff proud parents save. What was interesting was the way the papers were strewn around, as if they had been pawed through by somebody in a hurry. Martinez? Or Dessault? And if it had been Dessault, why? What was he looking for?
The kitchen was next. Pots and pans, a few dishes, some packaged and canned foodstuffs in the cupboards-Martinez hadn’t bothered to take any of that. Or clean out the refrigerator, either: a couple of things in there wore greenish fur coats. But again, there was evidence here of haste either in packing for departure or in a rapid search. Cupboard doors stood open, drawers had been pulled out and left that way, the shards from a broken vodka bottle were scattered across the drainboard and among a tier of dirty crockery and utensils in the sink.
A dining area opened off the kitchen, but there wasn’t anything in it except a table and some chairs and a sideboard. Nothing in the little boy’s bedroom, either, except a bunk-style bed; the closet was empty except for a couple of dropped coat hangers, a toy soldier with its head twisted off, and the remains of a balsa-wood model airplane. I moved into the bath that separated that bedroom from the one where Martinez and his common-law wife had slept. The medicine cabinet door was open, revealing two empty shelves and one containing some used razor blades. A vial of cheap men’s cologne had been dropped and broken in the sink; but there was not much odor from it, even when I poked my nose down there, which meant that the vial hadn’t been broken recently.
The closet in the master bedroom was empty, too. So were the bureau and the two nightstands flanking the bed. The bed still had its sheets and pillows and blankets, all of them rumpled and not very clean. On the wall above it was another crucifix, this one made out of bronze with silver ornamentation. An oval mirror in a dark-wood frame hung on another wall, and what drew me to it were two color snapshots wedged between the glass and the frame on one side. One of the snaps was of a laughing little boy with huge brown eyes, like a child in a portrait by Keane. Danny Martinez’s son. I wondered, for no particular reason, what his name was. The other photo was of a man and a woman and the same little boy, the man holding the child in one arm, all three of them grinning. It had been taken at a beach somewhere; the ocean, spattered with sunlight, was visible behind them.
I took that one off the mirror and looked at it more closely. The woman was slim and attractive in a narrow-faced way, with shiny black hair that fell almost to her waist. The man-Danny Martinez, no doubt-was tall, heavy through the chest and shoulders, and sported a bandit’s mustache. They had made a nice-looking family, the three of them, back when this photo was taken. It gave me an odd, sad feeling, being here in the house they’d shared, a house emptied of all but the residue, the ghosts, of their years together. No more outings on the beach, no more closeness, no more laughter. Nothing left now but bitterness and pain and the wreckage of a man’s self-respect.
I stood for a time holding the snapshot, staring at it. Then, on impulse, I slipped it into the inside pocket of my jacket and turned and left the bedroom, left the house. Nothing more for me there either. Like the barn, it too had become oppressive.
Chapter Fourteen
I drove around the area for a while after I left the Martinez farm. It took me all of five minutes to find the road and the gravel turnaround where Richie Dessault had parked his car. So he wouldn’t have had to know the area any better than I did in order to find the road himself and figure out that it was a short trek through the woods and over the hill to the Martinez place. And he hadn’t had to worry about anybody noticing him or the car because there weren’t any other houses within sight.
On the way back along Elm Street I stopped at the only neighboring house I’d seen in the immediate vicinity, the one I’d passed coming in. A middle-aged woman greeted me cordially and told me nothing useful. She knew Danny Martinez-“a nice young man,” she said-but she hadn’t seen him since his wife and son went away to Mexico, and expressed surprise to learn that he was gone too. She didn’t know any of his friends; and when I described Dessault she gave me a blank smile and shook her head. The only thing of any interest I got from her was the little boy’s name: Roberto.
From there I drove over to Highway 1 and headed up the coast over Devil’s Slide; there wasn’t anything more for me to do in Moss Beach today. I picked up the 180 freeway beyond Pacifica and followed it all the way downtown to the Fourth Street exit, where I got off and looped back around to Mission Creek. But that was a waste of time, too: if Dessault and/or Melanie were inside their houseboat, they were not opening the door for the likes of me.
I drove up Fifth, put the car briefly into the Fifth and Mission garage, and went across the street to the Chronicle building to collect the package on Margaret Prine. DeFalco had left it with the lobby guard, so I didn’t have to go upstairs; I was back in the car in three minutes, and on my way to the office three minutes after that.
Eberhardt was there when I came in, polluting the air with one of his smelly pipes. I don’t know where he gets his tobacco, but the stuff is as black as tar and smells like tar. It must be contraband, made in somebody’s basement; no reputable tobacco manufacturer would inflict crap like that on the public. Or was “reputable tobacco manufacturer” a contradiction in terms? I thought. They kept right on putting cigarettes on the market, didn’t they? Pre-fab cancer, all wrapped in nice bright packages, with sexy ads to entice teen-agers into the carcinoma fold. I wondered how many tobacco company executives had quit smoking, or never started in the first place, because they themselves were afraid the health warnings the government forced them to put on their product might be true.