“Do you know whether she’d ever been in the house here?”
Bonner’s face was savage. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well, obviously she knew the stuff was in here and right where to find it.”
It was Paulette who answered. “No, I don’t think she was ever in here. As far as I can recall, a few days last Christmas was the only time she’s been home since Captain Romstead moved here, and he was in San Francisco then.”
Brubaker nodded, his face thoughtful. “That still leaves the question, then, of how she was so sure she’d find it here ... But I guess that’s all, Lew, except I’m sorry as hell about it.”
Bonner started out. He turned in the doorway and asked Paulette, “You want a lift home?”
“No, thanks, Lew. There’s something else I want to see Mr. Brubaker about.” She got up, however, and went out with him.
“How old was she?” Romstead asked.
“Twenty-four or twenty-five. Jesus Christ, that’s what tears you up.” Brubaker took a cigar from his pocket and started removing cellophane. They heard the Porsche go down the drive, and Paulette came back in.
“Good God, not that smudge pot,” she said to Brubaker, “unless you want us to yell police brutality. Here.” She flipped up the top of the black case, dug in it for the box of cigars, and held it out. He took it, completely deadpan, lifted out one of the tubes, and pulled the cap off, watching as she started to close the case again. Innocence itself, she flipped the robe out full length, folded it carefully, and replaced it so she could bring the lid down. He sighed.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s hear it.”
She told him about the trip to Las Vegas. He went out to the garage to verify the mileage on the Mercedes. When he came back, he looked thoughtful, but he shook his head.
“So he just went to San Francisco with somebody else,” he said. “Probably one of the outfit he was dealing with.”
“But where did he go on that dirt road?” Romstead asked. “And why? If we could find the place—”
“You got any idea how many old ruts there are out there through the sagebrush and alkali flats in a radius of twenty-seven miles? To windmills and feeding stations and old mining claims? And if you did find it, I think what you’d see would be the wheel tracks and tail-skid marks of a lightplane.”
“Why?”
“A lot of junk comes in from Mexico that way. And it could be how your father got to San Francisco.”
Romstead tried once more, with the feeling he was only butting his head against a wall. “Look—he got back here at five A.M., and two hours later he was on the phone to his broker to raise two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash. There hadn’t been a word about going to San Francisco or about a business deal. I think something happened in those two hours we don’t know about.”
“Sure. Because he hadn’t said anything,” Brubaker said wearily. “You ever hear of anybody on his way to pick up a shipment of junk that bought time on TV or took out an ad in the paper? Anyway, what is there to argue about now? I’d say Jeri Bonner had settled it once and for all.”
It would always come down to that, Romstead thought, and it was unanswerable. Brubaker went on, “I’ll admit I goofed to some extent; I searched the house, and I didn’t see it; but I was looking for something the size of that suitcase, not a teabag.”
“Incidentally,” Romstead asked, “where was the suitcase? Did you find it right here?”
“No. It was in the trunk of the car. We brought it inside. They must have been waiting for him when he drove in.”
“Since you keep begging me for my opinion—” Paulette said.
“All right. Go ahead.”
“Your whole theory’s horseshit. I don’t have the faintest idea who killed Captain Romstead, or why, but he wasn’t a drug peddler. And if Jeri found that heroin in this house, I say he didn’t know it was here.”
* * *
“Why?” Romstead asked. He had brought Paulette home, and they sat in the air-conditioned living room of her house with the bloody Marys she had promised. It was too hot now to sit out by the pool, and neither was interested in lunch with the death of Jeri Bonner weighing on their spirits. The Romstead house was locked up again, and Brubaker had said he would notify Sam Bolling so the broken window could be replaced. Romstead had given him the key to return. “I don’t think he knew the stuff was there either,” he went on, “but what makes you so sure of it?”
“Because I knew him. Better than anybody here.” She set her drink on the coffee table between them and lit a cigarette. “I’ve heard his views on the subject, and like all the rest of his views, they were pretty strong. He had nothing but contempt for people who used drugs of any kind—except, of course, for his drugs: Havana cigars, brandy, and vintage champagne—and an even worse loathing for pushers and smugglers who dealt in any of it, even marijuana. On the Fairisle, his last command, he arrested one of his own crew for trying to smuggle some heroin in on it. I mean, right out of the eighteenth century, locked him up like Bligh throwing somebody in the brig, and turned him over to the federal agents when they docked. High-handed, oh, brother—he could have been fired for it or picketed by every maritime union in the country, except that the man was guilty, he had the heroin to prove it, and the guy was convicted and sent to prison. That’s no wild sea yarn, either; I knew the nut myself. He was out in orbit, a dingaling with a hundred and sixty IQ. But I was going to tell you how we met, almost five years ago.”
She hesitated a moment, rattling the ice in her drink; then she looked up with bubbling amusement. “This is a kooky experience—I mean, telling a son about your affair with his father. I feel like a dirty old woman or as if I were contributing to the delinquency of a minor.”
“It’s all right,” Romstead said. “I’m precocious for thirty-six.”
“Good. I felt fairly certain you might be ... Anyway, this happened in 1967. Steve—my husband —was a businessman, mostly real estate and land development, here in Nevada and in Southern California; but his health was beginning to give him trouble, and he was semi-retired. We lived about half the time at our place in La Jolla and did quite a bit of sailing. Steve had been an ocean-racing nut since he was a young man, but he’d given that up when his health began to fail. He sold the Ericson thirty-nine and bought a thirty-six-foot cruising sloop a couple could handle, and we planned to sail it to Honolulu, just the two of us.
“Then Lew Bonner asked us if we’d take Jeri, Lew was working for Steve then, running a lumberyard and building supply here in Coleville, and we both knew Jeri, of course, and liked her. She was a real sweet kid, but becoming something of a hippie, and it bothered Lew a little. Most jocks are as square as Smokey the Bear, anyway—oops. The good old Carmody tact, but then I don’t think of you as a jock, somehow.”
Romstead shrugged. “Neither did the National League.”
“Their parents were dead, and Lew had looked after her since she was sixteen. She’d been going to school at San Diego State but dropped out and was hanging out with a bunch of kids in Del Mar. She liked sailing and thought the trip would be groovy, or whatever the word was in 1967, so she came along.
“Everything went along fine until about a thousand miles out of Honolulu when we ran into a real bitch of a dustup. I don’t think it ever reached gale force, actually, but it kept freshening while we were running before it, and before we knew it, we were carrying too much sail and had already carried it too damned long. We broached to, got knocked down, lost the mast and sails overboard, and shipped enough water to soak everything below. But the worst of it was Steve. He was badly hurt. He’d got thrown across the deck and landed on something that caught him just below the rib cage. He was in awful pain and could hardly move. The radio was drowned, so we couldn’t call for help, and Jeri and I alone couldn’t cope with that mess over the side. We made Steve as comfortable as we could with the pain-killers from the medicine chest, but we were absolutely helpless.