Shephard recognized the process as what his father called a “Dick Probe.” He was fourteen when he had asked Wade what made a good detective. Wade was sitting at the kitchen table, halfway through a quart of bourbon. A good detective works behind his eyes, he had said. When you look at something, don’t think about it. See it. Think it later. Close your eyes and let it come back. Then you can hold it as long as you want and give your brain a chance to catch up. Especially with people; first impressions are usually wrong. Your mind knows more about what you see than it lets on, so you have to be able to bring things back. Some people call it imagination; the quacks at the Academy called it meditation on evidence. Me? He had smiled drunkenly. I call it a Dick Probe.
Shephard, old enough to get the joke, blushed, then laughed heartily to cover his embarrassment. Wade had retired to his room a short time later, bottle in hand, and when the door to the bedroom closed, Shephard did his first Dick Probe — on his father. When he closed his eyes, he saw not Wade but a bourbon-colored stallion galloping through the desert, dragging a lifeless body behind it.
Shephard lit a cigarette, stepped over Cal, and went into the living room, where he dug out a dictionary from a box of books.
cobalt, n [G kobalt, goblin, demon of the mines; term applied to cobalt by miners from ignorance of its value or because it was troublesome], a hard, lustrous, ductile, metallic chemical element, found in various ores: it is used in the production of alloys; its compounds are used in the production of inks, paints, and varnishes: symbol, Co.
cobalt blue, n: 1. a dark-blue pigment made from cobalt. 2. a dark blue.
Cal lifted a sleepy head when the phone rang. Shephard reread the cobalt entry as he lifted the receiver.
“Tom, it’s Carl here.” Pavlik sounded breathless. “The prints on the turpentine can match the ones on the glass at Algernon’s. Whoever drank with him last night left that can in the Sebastian. I picked up some soil trace from the bedspread and got ferrous earth, the same as around the stables. The water under the drain had blood in it, type O, same as Algernon’s. I called Yee. Robbins is working two hairs I got from the pillow and told me that the material fragments from the body haven’t told us anything we didn’t know at noon. The cobalt isn’t radioactive to any degree that would matter, but it’s the kind of thing someone might pick up if he worked with metal alloys. Some kind of light industry, maybe. Or, of course, if he mined the stuff. Robbins kept saying it was real weird shit here in Laguna.”
Pavlik stopped, breathed rapidly, then continued. “Now get this. Sacramento says that Edward Steinhelper is an ex-con. He’s done time for burglary, assault, embezzlement. He’s been clean for three years but his wife told me he disappeared two nights ago with the car. Still gone. He worked for a shop in Sacramento until last month. His job was finishing furniture. Mr. and Mrs. Hylkama say the guy who checked in isn’t the guy on the license, but maybe they’re wrong. Steinhelper stinks.”
Shephard considered the cobalt, its use in varnishes. “You lift any prints from the kitchen, near the window?”
“Nothing to lift, but I shot the boot marks. They eyeball like the tracks we found this morning. Right down to the broken heel. You found the sonofabitch, Shephard.”
“Who’s working the stakeout?” he asked.
“Grimes. Said he needed the overtime.”
“The whole night?”
“He said no problem. Slobin is meeting with the Hylkamas at nine tomorrow to do the Identikit.”
“Good work, Carl, chum.”
“Same back. I’m dead. See you tomorrow.”
The idea of Grimes working the stakeout irritated him. He poured another Scotch and stared again at the unpacked boxes that constituted his new life. He smoked and paced the apartment, went to the patio to view the lights of the city below, and paced some more. Finally, just after midnight, he went downstairs to the garage.
He eased the Mustang onto Thalia Street and followed Thalia down the hillside to Glenneyre. The night breeze cooled his face, and he noted that the moon was nearly full. The tree-lined streets of Laguna seemed strange to him after years of working in the bright lights of L.A. Was there anywhere in L.A. as dark as this at night, he wondered? As he approached Serra Street, the smell of the eucalyptus engulfed the car and Shephard realized for the thousandth time just what it was that had brought the painters to Laguna at the turn of the century. Peace and quiet and a place to work. Even now, he thought, with the millions of tourists who swarm the town in summer, it was still the best place in the world to retreat, regroup, start again. He thought of the boxes stacked in his living room as he pulled into the courtyard of the Hotel Sebastian.
He cut the headlights and U-turned in front of a white sedan parked diagonally across from cottage five. Slowly he completed the turn and dipped back out of the courtyard to park on the street. Retracing his way on foot, he approached the sedan and had his worst fears confirmed. Even through the closed windows he could hear Grimes snoring. The rearview mirror had been angled for a clean line of sight to the cottage door, but Grimes’s big head was wedged comfortably between the window and the headrest. Shephard stooped to the glass and studied the bulldog face, babylike now, at rest. He noted that the windows were filthy and wondered what Grimes could hope to see, anyway. What a way to earn your overtime, he thought. There were no lights on in the cottage, and no sounds except the occasional hiss of cars down on Coast Highway. Steinhelper could have come back any time, he thought. Be asleep inside right now. Might have been for hours.
He trod lightly across the gravel to the back side of the cottages. And as he rounded the corner of the first, he stopped short at the figure of a man, outlined in moonlight, standing behind the back window of cottage five. A beam of light appeared in front of the figure, then climbed to the window. Whoever it was took a step closer and pressed his head to the lilting curtains. The beam vanished.
Shephard marched toward the cottage, eucalyptus leaves crunching underfoot, and shouted, “Hey, bud. Out for a midnight stroll? Stay put a second, will ya?”
In the clear moonlight he saw the man pull away from the window and freeze. Shephard could make out a head of curly hair, rounded in outline. He looked big. Then he turned and lumbered across the backlot toward the sloping hillside that rose behind the cottages.
“Hey, don’t go away! Laguna cops here! Hold it, sonofabitch.” Shephard pursued, reaching cottage five and angling up the hillside. Eucalyptus loomed around him, and as he peered into the dark, he could see the big man’s body zigzagging through the trees, his arms pushing off the cream-white trunks.
The hillside was covered with iceplant. Shephard sprinted, slipped to one knee, rose, and slipped again. Down the second time, he saw that the man ahead of him had gone down, too. A muffled curse trailed back to him in the darkness. Up again, Shephard hugged the tree trunks for balance, launching himself from one to the next. Ahead he could see the man on all fours now, clawing up a steep embankment. Shephard dashed toward him and found himself on his face. He righted himself, churning his legs deep into the iceplant for footing. Somehow the man was widening the distance. Shephard was twenty yards behind him, down on all fours himself, pulling with his hands as his feet slipped and skidded. Everything seemed slick, as if drenched in oil. He saw the man disappear over the rise. Shephard reached the top a moment later and stopped to get his bearings.