Chase’s lips got tight and thin again. “Yeah, we’re done.”
“Good night, Captain.”
“See you around, Chief,” Chase replied.
In the rental car, Kerney drove in the opposite direction from the motel until he found a gas station, where he looked up Louis Ferry in a phone book and got an address.
He figured that Lowrey, by now fully briefed by Captain Chase, was on the road to Santa Barbara, prepared to ream him out once she arrived for meddling in her case. He decided it would be best not to meet with her until Ramona Pino and Russell Thorpe finished up with Nina Deacon and hopefully had enough information to put the spotlight on Kim Dean as a possible murder suspect or accomplice-if indeed a homicide had been committed.
He’d never completely discounted the possibility of murder, or disagreed when Lowrey took the investigation to the next level to see if it proved out. That wasn’t the issue. Kerney simply didn’t like the idea of Lowrey polishing her shield by tarnishing his reputation.
With the station attendant’s directions to Ferry’s address in mind, Kerney started off, aware that he might be on a wild-goose chase. Still, the story of Alice Spalding’s search for a son who’d been dead for thirty years continued to intrigue him. He wanted to learn more about it.
Lou Ferry lived in a trailer park on Punta Gorda Street, a dead-end lane cut off by the freeway. The rumble of traffic rose and fell as the cars and trucks rolled by.
Ferry’s residence was the first space in two long rows of small and medium-size camper-trailers that stretched down a paved drive filled with parked jalopies and older-model cars. The only modular home along the lane, it was enclosed by a five-foot-high wooden fence and gate.
Kerney knocked at the front door and a sour-looking, middle-aged Mexican woman greeted him.
“I’m looking for Lou Ferry,” he said.
“He don’t know you,” the woman replied.
“I’m a police officer,” Kerney said, displaying his shield.
“Just a minute,” the woman replied, closing the door.
Soon she was back, gesturing for Kerney to enter. “He’s in the bedroom,” she said, pointing to a passageway before walking away.
The sound of clattering dishes from the kitchen followed Kerney down the short hallway. In the back room, he found Ferry sitting up in bed watching television.
“Mr. Ferry?”
“Yeah,” Ferry said in a wheezy voice as he turned off the TV, “and don’t make any wisecracks about my name. I’ve heard them all.”
The nightstand held an array of prescription bottles and an empty drinking glass.
“My wife, who wants me to hurry up and die so she can sell the trailer park and move back to Mexico, says you’re a cop.”
“That’s right.”
Ferry made a gimme motion with his hand. “Let’s see your shield.”
Kerney handed him the badge case and watched Ferry reach for his reading glasses. He was a short man who’d lost weight and had the frail look that comes with an end-stage illness.
“Santa Fe Police Chief,” Ferry said, handing back the badge case with a slight smirk. “Impressive. What you want from me?”
“I hear you retired from the job,” Kerney said.
“After thirty-six years. I started when I was twenty-one. I’ve been on a pension for over twenty. You do the math.”
“You were a PI for a time.”
“Eighteen years, until I got sick.” Ferry dropped his reading glasses on his lap and coughed into his fist. “Get on with what you came here for. I could die before you finish asking your questions.”
“You did some private work for Clifford Spalding. I’d like to know about it.”
Ferry shook his head to ward off the inquiry. “That’s it. End of questions. Get out.”
“He’s dead,” Kerney said.
Ferry absorbed the information and relaxed slightly. “How did it happen?”
“We’re still looking into it.”
Ferry smiled sardonically. “Crazy Alice Spalding didn’t kill him, did she?”
“Why do you say that?” Kerney asked.
“For giving her the runaround all these years,” Ferry said as he adjusted the pillow behind his head.
“Explain that to me.”
Ferry propped himself up against the headboard. “Since he’s dead, I guess I finally can tell somebody. Spalding came to see me soon after he moved to Santa Barbara. Walked in the door of my office one day with a legal document he’d had drawn up. Said he would hire me to do some work for him if I agreed to do exactly what he wanted and sign a binding nondisclosure agreement. I looked it over. It basically said I couldn’t reveal any information I gathered about George Spalding or Debbie Calderwood to anyone but him, and that I’d forfeit any sums paid to me if I did.”
“And?”
Ferry took a deep breath that rattled in his chest. “I told him I needed a hell of a lot more information before I’d even consider taking on the case like that. That’s when he showed me the official Army documents of his son’s death in Vietnam and explained the situation with his wife. He said he’d tried everything to help her accept the fact that George was gone, and since that hadn’t worked he’d been forced to live with an obsessive wife who was driving him crazy and hounding cops all over the West to find her lost son. He gave me copies of missing person reports Alice had submitted to a half dozen police departments in three or four different states.”
Kerney scooted a straight-back chair to the foot of the bed and sat. “So you took the case.”
“After he put ten one-hundred-dollar bills in my hand as an advance and told me what he wanted me to do.”
“Which was?”
Ferry chuckled. “Nothing. Make stuff up. The deal was that he’d call and ask me to follow up on one of Alice’s crazy leads. Then I’d write up a report about my phony investigation into it, wait a week or two, and mail it to him. He paid me five hundred dollars a pop.”
“Easy money,” Kerney said. “How many reports did you concoct for him?”
“About twenty, twenty-five, over the next couple of years.”
“What made the cash cow dry up?”
Ferry laughed. “I blew it. When I started running out of creative ways to lie, I decided to do some actual investigating to freshen up my reports.”
“Tell me about that.”
“Alice had tracked down an old college friend of Debbie Calderwood living in Portland, who said she’d gotten a card from her about a year after Calderwood disappeared. So, I called the friend, who told me Calderwood had written to her from Taos, New Mexico, where she was living on a commune at the time. Remember, that was back in the early seventies when all that flower power and antiwar stuff hadn’t completely faded away yet.”
“What else did the note say?” Kerney asked.
“That she was moving with an unnamed boyfriend to a small town in southern Colorado. But she’d didn’t say exactly where. So, I got out the atlas and phone book and called a bunch of places trying to locate her. When that didn’t work, I phoned some town marshals, sheriffs, and police departments, and still came up empty.”
“Did you tell Spalding that you’d actually done some real work on the case?” Kerney asked.
“Nope. But I put everything I’d learned in my report. That’s when he fired me. End of story.” Ferry coughed hard into his hand again. “It got me to thinking that maybe Spalding was up to maybe something more than trying to appease his unbalanced wife.”
“Like what?”
“Don’t know,” Ferry said breathlessly, waving the question away as if it was an angry hornet buzzing around his head.
“Did you check out Spalding before you spent the retainer he gave you?” Kerney asked, switching gears.
“Smart question.” Ferry smiled slyly and held up a trembling index finger. “Rule number one for a PI, always know who you’re working for. I made some calls, but I can’t remember most of what I learned.”
“What stands out?”
“He’d made a lot of money in the hotel business in a relatively short period of time. He went from owning a mom-and-pop motel in Albuquerque to building a resort hotel outside of Tucson in something under five years. That’s what got him started playing with the big money boys.”