“I know it’s not much, but it’s all we have. If you need anything else, just give me a call. And tell Charlie we’re pulling for him.” The machine clicked to a stop.
I took what Al had faxed outside to the deck that overlooked the beach. I dropped into a chair, slipped off my boots, and propped my feet on the rail. It didn’t take long to read the little that was there, but when I was finished, my palms were sweating and there was a lump in my throat the size of a softball.
I lay the pages in my lap and looked toward the water. There was a young die-hard on a surfboard a few hundred feet out doing his best to snag one of the pathetic waves that stumbled toward shore. He was a very small man — tiny, really; the board was much too big for him, and despite all his effort, he wasn’t having any luck. I watched for a while; then I picked up the papers and reread that portion of Tragovic’s autopsy report that described the deceased.
I gave Lou Bickman until six o’clock that night to call; when he didn’t, I set my telephone to forward calls to my cellular in case he tried while I was out, and I headed back to El Cajon. I parked in front of the Bickman house and made my way up the cracked walk. There was a pickup truck in the carport, and I could hear voices coming from the open windows that lined the front of the house. They must have heard me climb the three steps to the small stoop because the voices went silent, and just as I raised my hand to ring the bell, a large man came to the door.
“What do you want?” he asked. He had wide, heavy shoulders and a neck as thick as my thigh.
I heard a soft voice from behind him say, “It’s him, isn’t it, Louis?”
“It’s okay,” the man said over his shoulder. “I’ll take care of this.” The man was at least two inches taller than my six-one, and he must have outweighed me by sixty pounds. “What’s on your mind, mister?” he asked.
“I’m John Pryor,” I said. “I’m the guy who left the note in your mailbox this afternoon. I’m looking for a woman by the name of Marlee Tragovic.” It was a long shot, but I decided to play a quick bluff. “I know you’re her brother, Mr. Bickman. I’d like to talk to her about the death of her husband back in the 1960s.” I could tell by the expression that hit his face that I had found the right man. “I don’t mean you or your family any harm. I just need to find your sister; that’s all.”
The voice spoke again. “Please, Louis, let him in.”
He turned in the doorway, and I got a look at the woman behind him. If she was who I thought she was, she couldn’t have been more than fifty-two, but she looked a decade older. She was thin and frail, and she leaned with both hands on an aluminum walker. “You gotta trust me,” Bickman said. “This is a bad idea.”
Her voice had an even, resigned tone. “You’ve been a good brother, Louis, but, please, just let the man in.”
Bickman hesitated, but finally he moved back, and I stepped into the house.
“Have a seat,” the woman said. She motioned toward a couch across the room, and I sat down. She was wearing a terrycloth bathrobe, and she pulled it tighter around her slight frame. She touched her limp hair and said, “I have a back problem. Sometimes it’s worse than others.” I took this as an excuse for her appearance. “It’s been very bad lately,” she added as she eased herself into a chair across from the couch. Bickman continued to stand at the front door, his large arms folded across his chest.
“Your name is Marlee, isn’t it?”
She held the lapels of the robe so tightly her knuckles were white. “Yes,” she said.
“Is it still Tragovic?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said again. “I never married after Duane.”
I glanced across the room at Bickman. “Where’s Bud?” I asked.
“We don’t have to talk to this man, Marlee.”
“I know, but it’s okay. Bud died of a heart attack in 1983,” she said. “Why are you here, Mr. Pryor? What is it you want?”
“What I don’t want is to hurt you, Mrs. Tragovic. If it wasn’t for a friend of mine, I would not be here at all. I think I understand what happened to your husband, some of it, anyway.”
“It’s been a long time,” she said. “It’s been a lifetime.”
I waited for her to offer more; when she didn’t, I said, “Duane Tragovic was a difficult man to live with, wasn’t he?”
She didn’t speak; she just gave a quick nod.
“He used to hurt you.”
“Yes,” she whispered.
“I’ve seen his record, Mrs. Tragovic. He was charged a half-dozen times with battery against you. Twice he served jail time for it, but he didn’t stop, did he?”
She shook her head.
“Finally he did it once too often, and either you or one of your brothers killed him.”
Bickman’s arms came unfolded, and he moved to the center of the room. “Marlee, you do not have to talk to this man. You don’t have to tell him a thing.” He turned to me and came to the couch. Looking down, he said, “I don’t know who the hell you think you are coming in here like this.”
“I’m not the police, Mr. Bickman. I don’t intend to go to the police. I’m here for my friend, nothing more. I’ve read the reports, Mrs. Tragovic, and what I think happened is that your husband was not killed in the alley behind the Silk Hat Lounge as everyone assumed at the time. I think he was dumped there by your brothers.” I looked at Bickman. “How big was Bud, Mr. Bickman?”
He hesitated but finally answered. “I don’t know. Five-eight, five-nine. Hundred and seventy-five pounds.”
I nodded. “I believe that you and your brother wanted to throw the police off. To do that, one of you — and I think it was you, Mr. Bickman — picked a fight with a young, drunk sailor. You wanted the fight to be witnessed, but you also knew who those witnesses would be, and you were confident that they would not be able to give the police a very good accounting of what happened.”
The big man stood silent, staring down at me, his eyes wide and unblinking.
“You picked a fight, Mr. Bickman, but it was never your intention to win that fight. You just wanted the winos to see someone getting worked over in that alley, and when Tragovic’s body was found, the police would look for a sailor.”
“You have no way of knowing that,” Bickman said, but he said it softly, without force.
“The sailor you picked for your fight was my friend. He explained to me that the man he fought that night was big, but according to the fella who owned the Silk Hat at the time, Duane Tragovic was a runt. The autopsy report put him at five-foot-four and a hundred and forty pounds. My friend said he hit the man repeatedly in the face, but Tragovic had no injuries to his face. The only injury he had was to the back of the skull, as though he had banged his head against the pavement in a fight, or—” I looked to Marlee Tragovic. “— maybe someone hit him with something from behind.”
“He’s guessing, Marlee,” Bickman said.
Marlee whispered, “He’s a good guesser, though, isn’t he, Lou?” When she said that, a rush of air escaped from the big man, and he dropped, deflated, to the couch. We were all silent for a long moment.
It was Bickman who broke the silence. “All right, smart guy,” he said, “I killed the son of a bitch. You figured it out. Good work.”
“Oh, stop, Louis,” Marlee said. “Just stop it. You and Bud have taken care of me all my life, even to the point where you had no lives of your own, but it’s time I faced what happened.” She turned to me. “My brothers would do anything for me, Mr. Pryor. They devoted themselves to me. They would have gladly killed Duane — Bud even threatened to more than once — but they didn’t. I did. I was only seventeen, but every time I moved, I ached from Duane’s beatings. He would hit me in the small of the back where it was particularly painful, but where the marks wouldn’t show. The last time was especially bad, and I have never recovered from it. I’ve lived in constant pain all these years because of that last beating. But it was the last beating, Mr. Pryor. When Duane turned his back, I took a saucepan from the kitchen counter, and I hit him. I just hit him once, but I hit him hard. When I realized he was dead, I called my brothers. They said they would take care of it, and they did. They took care of it then, and together they’ve taken care of me ever since.” She reached over and placed her small hand on her brother’s massive forearm. “When one passed on,” she added, “the other took care of me by himself.”