“And you didn’t, of course.”
“Oh no.”
I turned my hat around in my fingers. “Would your husband happen to have an interest in electronics, Mrs. Shanley?”
“Electronics?”
“Yes.”
“Do you mean stereo equipment?”
“Generally, yes.”
“Glen isn’t very interested in things like that, really,” she said. “His only hobby is his work.”
“I see.”
“But Art fools around with stereo equipment,” she said. “He’s built a couple of things from component kits or whatever you call them. Why do you ask?”
I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. “No special reason,” I said noncommittally. “Would you happen to have your brother-in-law’s address, Mrs. Shanley? You did say he lived in Half Moon Bay?”
“Yes,” she said. “He has an ocean-view cottage on Dreyer Road-that’s a little winding lane a couple of miles south of the village; there are only two cottages at the end of the lane, and his is the nearest one at the fork.”
“What does he do for a living?”
“Well, he’s unemployed at the moment. Usually he works as a plumber’s helper, but there’s been such a building depression lately that he can’t find work.”
“All right, Mrs. Shanley,” I said. “Thank you for your time. You’ve been very cooperative.”
“I’m afraid I didn’t have much to tell you,” she said. “Will you still be wanting to talk with Glen?”
“It’s very likely,” I said. “I’ll be by tomorrow-or perhaps one of the District Attorney’s investigators instead.”
“He should be home until about noon,” Mrs. Shanley said. “He doesn’t have an appointment until one o’clock.”
“Thanks again, Mrs. Shanley,” I said, and managed a small smile for her and then turned around and went out to the street again. I sat in the darkness inside the Valiant and thought: Well, what have you got now? A brother who dabbles in electronics like a million other people in this country, who is unemployed like a few million others on top of that, and who may or may not have known about the kidnapping the same day it happened. That’s all you’ve got, too, because if that girl was lying about her husband being home with her the night of the hijack, she’s as good as Hepburn and twice as good as Taylor.
So what now? A talk with Art Shanley? Well, you’ve got nothing better to do tonight, and no place better to go than Half Moon Bay, because home is no more appealing than it was a little while ago. If it’s a dead end, then you’ve made a full cycle out of it and you’ll have something to report to Donleavy and Martinetti in the morning, even if it is negative.
I sat there awhile longer, thinking, but Erika came into my thoughts with her whispering words and her softness and her rejection, and abruptly I started the car and put the heater on high; it had grown very cold in there.
I drove over to Skyline Boulevard, and it took me fifteen minutes to make the nine-mile drive across the mountains to Half Moon Bay. I turned into one of the service stations at the Highway 1 junction there, got gas for the Valiant, and went into the attendant’s office to look at a posted area map on the wall. Dreyer Road was a thin black line extending erratically south in a rough parallel to Highway 1; it began on Cliffside Drive, a road which right-angled seaward off the highway about three miles south, and according to the map scale, dead-ended less than a mile after it commenced.
I went out and paid the attendant and turned south, passing on the outskirts of the village of Half Moon Bay-a small cluster of buildings huddled seaward like old ladies under the tattered gray shawl of the coastal fog. The mist, which had been thick and fleecy on the road coming over, was higher and thinner here at sea level. It made the highway as slick as polished black glass under my tires and headlights, and spotted the windshield with the kind of liquidity you get from an aerosol spray can.
The section of the coastline beyond the village was barren and sparsely populated. To the left, undeveloped and thinly vegetated land stretched away into the wet gray-black of the night; to the right, the soil was rocky and grown with cypress and eucalyptus in a kind of windbreak well removed from the road. Deep, slope-sided, element-eroded ravines split the high cliffs overlooking the Pacific in hundreds of places, some of them extending inland as far as half a mile. You could see the lashing assault of the wind-swept sea on the jagged rocks from certain spots along the highway, but at others your vision was cut off by the trees and the rocky terrain and you were as much as a mile from the ocean itself.
I knew the area a little; there were a few homes and cottages strung out on the bluffs, or set back along the sides of the ravines-man-made blemishes on the awesome face of nature. Most of them had access to narrow strips of driftwood-strewn beaches along winding paths down the steep gorge slopes. It was in one of these dwellings that Art Shanley apparently lived.
I reached Cliffside Drive and turned off and followed its narrow, pitted expanse past a few lighted homes and a lot of wet, shiny ice plant that was greenly opalescent in the diffused radiance from my headlamps. A quarter-mile in, a wooden sign loomed on the left and the wordsDreyer Rd. were visible on it in small black lettering. I swung down there, and it was nothing more than a graveled cart track winding in a southwesterly direction, hugging and skirting two of the shallower ravines without any sign of habitation. Then the road straightened out onto a fog-shrouded bluff face, and split into two forks. There was a lot of thickly bunched scrub oak and cypress growing in the crotch of the fork and paralleling the branch which wobbled its way further southwest and ended a few hundred yards distant at the vaguely discernible outlines of a darkened cottage. The second branch hooked back to where another cottage squatted dimly at the edge of the near ravine; that would be Shanley’s, from what his sister-in-law had said. Bars of pale light shone through straight-louvered shutters over a long front window, glowing eerily through the shimmering wetness of the fog.
I turned the Valiant in that direction and coasted into a wide circle before it. A black or dark blue Rambler American, sheened with wetness and rust-scarred by the perpetually damp salt wind, was parked with its front wheels touching one of three logs which had been set as brakes thirty feet in front of the cottage. I parked beside it at a second log.
The building, I could see in the shine of the headlights, was weather-beaten pineboard, a dull eroded gray with a lot of humps and knots like a beachcomber’s shack. It was enclosed in front by a similar board fence, and off on one side was a small matching shed. There was a look of instability to it all, as if a good stiff storm wind would hurl the cottage and the shed out over the cliffs and into the ocean.
I switched off the lights and got out of the car. Cold wind whistled in from the sea, eddying the fog like mildewed garlands around my head. The sound of the turbulent Pacific seemed unnaturally loud out here, as if the bluff were a tiny atoll and the ocean was all around it, hammering at it, chipping it apart and consuming it piece by piece, inexorably. I shivered a little and pulled the overcoat tight around my neck, moving quickly to the unlatched gate in the fence.
A crushed oyster-and-clam-shell path, grown through with coarse grass, extended into a wide rectangle before the door; on both sides of it, ice plant caressed the rough boarding of the cottage with shining green fingers. I went up to the rectangle and reached out and knocked on the door.
No answer. I waited half a minute, and then knocked again, listening for some sound from within. There was nothing except the stentorian and relentless roaring of the wind-lashed Pacific flinging itself on the rocks beyond and below.
I worked saliva into my mouth and took a couple of careful steps sideways, into the ice plant. My shoes crushed the wet pulpy tendrils with the same sound as when you step on a thick-shelled beetle. I leaned forward, retaining a breath, and put my eye up to one of the bars in the louvered shutters and looked inside the cottage.