Hobart had assumed that whatever the dirt on Forrest was, it was only in Phil Kramer’s head, not hidden in his house or office or something. Otherwise, killing him would be pointless. But now that it was done, suddenly Forrest wanted Phil Kramer’s widow killed, too. That changed everything. The information Forrest was worried about couldn’t have been destroyed with Phil Kramer. It was still out there. And if it was, then there was no reason why Jerry Hobart couldn’t use it for himself.
Hobart’s impatience was growing. He needed to find out what the secret was. He already regretted that he had committed himself to finding out, but he had. If Hobart had simply stepped into Mrs. Kramer’s bedroom and shot her dead last night, then Hobart would never have a problem. But instead of killing her, he had committed himself to finding out what the hell Theodore Forrest was so anxious to keep secret.
Hobart sat up in bed. When he had broken the lock on the door of the detective agency, he had started a clock. He didn’t find the secret there, so he had to go straight to the Kramer house. He had cut the process short by trying to scare Emily Kramer into telling him, and now he was no longer certain that Emily Kramer even knew what it was.
Hobart had not done well with Mrs. Kramer. Wearing a ski mask wasn’t the same as being unseen. She knew his height and weight, had heard his voice, had seen his eyes and hands. Going to see the widow had seemed necessary to him last night, but it was a misstep. He had learned nothing about Forrest’s secret.
Hobart tried out various plans. He could walk away from the job and leave Emily Kramer alive. What she had already told the police by now was all she would ever tell. What was it? She would have told the police what he had asked her for: a piece of information, printed or recorded in some way, that was embarrassing or incriminating to a powerful man. Tonight, telling her even that much struck him as another mistake. She, possibly with their help, would already be searching the house and the office for anything Hobart had missed.
But maybe she was too smart to have told the police about that part of it. If she knew that the information was valuable and illegal, and that her husband had been hiding it, she would have lots of reasons to keep that knowledge to herself. And maybe she had known about it all along. Maybe her husband had let her in on his plans at the beginning. No, he decided. She really had not known what Hobart was talking about when he had demanded she give it to him.
Hobart had created a terrible problem for himself. He had set Emily Kramer-and possibly the police-to looking for the information. If Emily Kramer or the police found it before he did, then they would know that Theodore Forrest was the one who’d had Phil Kramer killed. The police would arrest him, or at least watch him closely and talk to him. At some point, Forrest would learn what had set off the search that led to him. When he did, what were the chances that he would not turn in Jerry Hobart?
Hobart could simply kill Emily Kramer now and collect his fee from Theodore Forrest. That would keep both Emily Kramer and Forrest quiet. But it would still leave Hobart open to an unknown risk. The police and Mrs. Kramer’s detective friends would search even harder for the piece of information.
If only he had walked into Emily Kramer’s room and blown a hole in her head while she slept. She would not have had a chance to describe him or tell anyone he was looking for something. He would have had a couple of hours, at least, to search the house and find the information. He might even have been able to stay in the Kramer house all day searching, then left sometime tonight.
Hobart stood up and dressed quickly. He had set off the search for the secret, and now he had to be the one to find it.
19
Ted Forrest looked at his watch. It was still early. The night was dark, out here away from the city lights, and stars were visible-bright, glowing blue-white dots on a sky that looked black. At one time, probably even after his great-grandfather had moved the family out to occupy the land along the San Joaquin River, there had been eight thousand stars visible on a clear night. He had read that somewhere, and it had stuck with him. Now that there was light and air pollution in the valley he supposed there were only a few hundred, but they must be the biggest, brightest ones, and they made an incredible sight on a night like this.
He opened the window of his car an inch. The air felt wonderful to him, and he pressed the button again to open the window farther and let the wind blow through his hair as he drove. At home he had felt as though he had a belt tightening around his chest, so he could barely inhale, and every time he exhaled, it tightened another notch. But now he felt free, and each breath made him feel stronger, younger.
Caroline had no feeling about the outdoors. The land was just a vast flatness that had no special shape or character or meaning for her. For their whole marriage she had spent as much time in cities as possible-San Francisco at least once a week, New York maybe four times a year, London and Paris and Rome whenever she could get any of her friends to go with her. He had never been able to understand how a woman who was so devoted to enjoying beauty could ignore what was in front of her nose, above her head and under her feet. She didn’t dislike nature or find it frightening. It didn’t exist for her. Color was the shade of a paint or a fabric.
The land that had come into his stewardship was mainly in the Central Valley south of the San Joaquin between Merced and Fresno, some of it in farms as small as a couple of hundred acres, and some of it bought up in contiguous plots. Lots of chances came up in the Depression or during World War II, or in recent years when farming stopped being something families could do themselves. Some of those pieced-together places were like reassembled Spanish land grants.
It was special land. Three-quarters of the vegetables produced in the whole country were grown in these valleys. The state was a big long animal in repose, the raised spine of the Sierras running down the middle of it. The west wind pushed the clouds from the ocean right into that wall of mountains so it rained, and the water ran back down in a set of rivers arranged at regular intervals like the ribs of the animaclass="underline" the Yuba, Bear, American, Cosumnes, Calaveras, Mokelumne, Stanislaus, Tuolumne, Merced, Chowchilla, Fresno, San Joaquin, Kings, Kaweah rivers, one after another. The water made the enormous lowland between the coast and the mountains the most valuable farmland on earth. His family had been part of that for five generations.
He might not be raising crops, but he was part of the tradition, and leaving the land fallow, giving it a rest for a couple of genera tions, was almost an act of patriotism. He was protecting and preserving it. He was also keeping the level of air pollution in the Central Valley down, not contributing to the chemical runoff into the rivers, and even keeping the prices up for other agricultural corporations. And of course, the water the Forrests didn’t use had been going to cities while they had grown, and without it they wouldn’t survive. The southern half of the state was all and savanna and desert.
He drove into the downtown area of Merced, along a block of small shops. It was after nine, so the stores that sold china and women’s clothes and the hairstylists were closed, but the restaurants were just filling up. Forrest let his BMW coast into the turn at the corner beside Marlene’s Coffee and Sympathy, and found a parking space at the curb down the street just past a tall sycamore. He was far from a streetlamp, and the tree’s broad canopy threw the car into deeper shadow. As he got out he looked up into the night sky anxiously. In hot weather old trees sometimes dropped limbs, but he didn’t plan to be here long.
He took a couple of steps and saw the back door of Marlene’s open, and a small, thin creature appear. She stood under the light near the door for a couple of seconds, looking for him. He could see the shining honey-blond hair as she shaded her eyes and looked up the street. She began to walk toward him, but as soon as she was well away from the building, allowed herself to break into a run.