The Do-Re-Mi Page 11
We parked beside Ava’s yurt. I walked with Mama and Pop to the creek. We sat on the grassy bank while Ava hustled around until she found a couple who agreed to rent their A-frame for ten dollars a night. For as long as we needed or until the October rains came, they would stay in a tent somewhere. Ava walked us to the A-frame.
The couple, already packing to leave, were scrawny people and older than most hippies. Their home was ornamented with sketches of sailboats and jumping fish, seascapes, two rusted anchors, and knickknacks from Africa, Asia, and the South Seas. Pop introduced us, complimented the house, one downstairs room with a rough wooden floor and a sleeping loft. He gave them fifty dollars. The man crammed the bills into his pocket as though fearful they would disappear. While the woman showed Mama and Pop around, the man nudged me aside. “You’re the dude that messed up Hound Dog?”
I said, “That’s the rumor going around, like the one that says Bob Dylan’s going to show up at the jamboree with The Band.”
Pop had overheard. Touching my arm, he walked me outside and into the shade of a madrone. “Your mama feels good around Ava. We’ll leave the girls here and see if we can get to the crime scene without playing Pied Piper to the motorcycle rats. That is, if Ava’s willing.”
She agreed. After Pop and I kissed Mama goodbye, I took Ava’s hand, then leaned and pecked her cheek. She dropped my hand, lowered her head, and backed away. The last time our eyes met, while Pop and I were pulling away, she was shaking her head. I wondered whether she meant "Don’t you dare kiss me anymore" or "Don’t get yourself killed."
POP drove. I worried about Mama. Always, what she needed to recover from the episodes doctors referred to as catatonic or schizo-affective was peace for a long time and home in what she half-believed was heaven, on the shore of Lake Tahoe, which a strangers' shack in an Evergreen hippie commune wasn’t.
But all I could do was try to help get her home soon. So on the drive I outlined everything I had done and heard since Wednesday’s sunset. I began with the sight of the father and his three cupids beside the roadside shrine. About my search for the trail to Alvaro’s camp and the night sleeping out beside the river, I detailed everything I could pry out of my memory and stressed my recollections of the gunshots.
I listed the events of Thursday morning, and tried to quote everything Alvaro said before the posse showed up. About most of what I had learned and done, I included even details that seemed irrelevant, just in case Pop found some meaning in them I didn’t. I cataloged the jail’s inmates, the hippies, Little Vic, the other Cossacks and the farm worker who got busted for unionizing. I recounted my interrogation by Willis and Knudsen and the warnings Knudsen issued when he followed me outside, that any thread of evidence connecting me to the murder, the sheriff would use to lock me away.
I passed along Steph’s assessment that the cops were harassing the hippies largely because they feared the bikers and hoped if they chased off the hippies, the bikers would follow. I confessed my blundering attempts at questioning hippies and locals at the jamboree and then recalled my only success, my first encounter with Ava, how I won at least some of her trust. “Unless she’s a genius at lying,” I said. “I guess she might be a pretty, shrewd, bad guy.”
Pop said, “I like that girl.”
“She likes you. How is it all the girls fall for you? I mean, you’re quite a dude but you’re pushing a hundred and you’re not all that cute.”
He glanced my way. “It’s a mystery all right.”
After summarizing the praise and mild complaints Ava had offered about Jimmy — he was brilliant, ambitious, troubled on account of his absent father and his mom’s poverty — I gave a blow by blow account of my run-in with Brady Barker at his sister’s house.
Pop grumbled, “Soon as we snoop around the crime scene and vicinity we’ll go have a talk with that deputy.”
I mentioned Simon as my first contact with Quig’s and the guy who had picked me up hitchhiking. He probably knew more than he allowed, I contended. Because, according to Ava, Simon and Jimmy had been tight and Jimmy was maybe half-black and Simon lots more than half, and there were more Sasquatch than blacks around Evergreen. About Simon procuring the pistol and my subsequent adventure with Hound Dog, I didn’t confess. If Pop wanted the truth about last night, he would ask. Besides, we had arrived at our turnoff.
We floated in the Caddy along Highball Trail looking out for camps and residences. Pop wanted to question every camper and resident within two or three miles of the campsite where I heard the murderer’s gunshots.
“Who owns this land?” he asked.
“Government on this side.” I pointed north. “Private property across the river.” A month ago, on the phone, Alvaro had told me that the forest where he lived, between the south and the middle fork of Whiskey River, belonged to the state. It would turn into campgrounds, hiking trails, and a commercial tourist village once the lease details were agreed to by the state and a developer, one Paul McNees of McNees Lumber.
Our first stop was at the site where Jimmy washed ashore, according to the sheriffs. We walked past the kite-flag tied onto a branch, the tire tracks, and the chaos of boot-prints leading up and down the bank. The only place that remained un-stomped was at the water’s edge. Parallel to the water, on a gradual incline, the outline of a tall man was sketched in chalk on muddy grass and around an impression in the mud. Jimmy Marris had lain face down. His nose, brows, even his belt buckle had etched themselves so clearly, somebody could make a cast and resurrect him in a wax museum. I remembered Ava saying Jimmy looked somewhat like me. I sat on an outcropping and pressed my stomach to make the snakes settle down and behave. Pop said, “We ought to view the body and talk to the coroner, right?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“Where’s he located?”
“Probably Eureka.” I imagined a morgue, the corpse, the smell. “Why do we need to see him?”
“I’d like to know how bloated Marris was.”
“Why?”
He gave me a look that meant, Think about it. “If he isn’t all that bloated, should we wonder if he might’ve got dumped here, not been in the river at all?”
I grumbled, “Why are you wasting time asking me questions? You’re the detective.”
“Retired,” he said, and tiptoed along the riverbank, studying the ground.
I followed him. “Well I’m no detective at all.”
“You could be.”
“No way. Pop, I’m not you, and I don’t intend to be.”
“Sure,” he said, “I know you want to make a living with your songs.”
“And you think I can’t?”
He stopped and stared at my face then stepped to my side and hung his arm across my shoulders. “Not for a minute do I think that. You’ve got more talent than most . . . But . . . do you think I wanted to be a cop?”
“I know, you wanted to play music, same as I do. But the Depression knocked you out.”
“And something might come along and send your dreams packing. The fact is, most of us can’t be what we want to be.”
“Why not?”
He frowned like a war reporter giving yesterday’s body count. “Because life has a habit of making us be who we are.”
Twelve
FOR a half hour Pop and I tried to make sense of the footprints that led away from the mud-cast of Jimmy Marris. We especially looked for deeper ones that might indicate men carrying the body from somewhere else and down the bank to where the sheriffs had found it. When we gave up, Pop asked, “Besides the gunshots, did you hear anything else peculiar?”
“I told you everything I remember.”
“Yeah, I forgot it takes a cannon to wake you up.”
Back at the car, we heard the Cessna. A few hundred feet up, it appeared in our vision gliding due west. Directly above us it coughed and stalled before making an upward loop then swooping down like a crop duster.
Pop stared in that direction long after the plane was gone.
He said, “I bet that kamikaze’s in radio contact with the sheriff. Keep an eye out for visitors.”
“I’ll bet it’s Knudsen,” I said.
Pop asked what was up ahead. I told him I had seen more camp trails along the dirt road beyond Alvaro’s, though they looked overgrown. Up those trails we might find strange hermits with the solution to the murder or the answers to other great mysteries or we might hike all day and see only wildlife and deserted campsites. But on the other side of the river were some houses.
Pop said, “Where you’ve got more people, you’ve got more cause to murder.”
We crossed the bridge, a sturdy one, concrete with steel rails and supported by concrete pillars. Long ago, it might have featured train rails. The river was several yards below the high- water-line but still it churned twice as foamy as the middle fork that ran through town. Pop let the Cadillac idle to the middle of the bridge then he threw it into park and climbed out. We leaned over the side-rail and shaded our eyes from glare off the water.
Pop mused, “Willis estimates the body drifted a few hours and a couple miles before it washed up. Anything’s going to float stronger and faster if it’s in midstream. Along the bank it’ll bump and snag. But he’s saying Alvaro dragged the body to the edge and tossed him in. Then how would he get the body out to the middle unless he dove in and towed it? And if he’s that calculating, why wouldn’t he sink it? No, it’s a case of mistaken identity, son. If they think Alvaro heaved the body out to mid-stream, they’re confusing him with King Kong.”
“What if the killer threw him off this bridge?”
Pop nodded long and slow. We watched the plane I believed was Knudsen’s return and circle. I waved for him to come down and hoped he was using strong binoculars. I was more anxious to talk to him than to anybody, to demand he tell us what the FBI had against my brother. Or against Phil Ochs and his friends and associates, including Alvaro. The plane swooped out of sight.
“Worried?” Pop asked, and read my face for his answer. “Clifford, think like X would.” Since my brother’s middle name was Xavier, our nickname for him was X. “You’re wanted, where do you run?”
“Mexico.”
“And how do you get there? What’s the fastest, safest way? Land, air, or water?”
“Right," I said. "Water. So he doubled back and headed for the ocean?”
“If I were tracking Alvaro, I’d go to the coast and ask if anybody borrowed a sailboat yesterday.”
Though a philosophy minor should have taught me to avoid hasty conclusions, I had only imagined Alvaro in the mountains, because he started that direction, and because he was at home there. But we had lived both on the shore of Tahoe and thirty yards across the sand from San Diego’s Mission Bay, where generous neighbors used to lend us their catamaran. Still, I suspected Pop had stooped to wishful thinking.
Across the bridge, we turned east and crawled the Eldorado over cavernous dips. In less than a mile, we stopped beside a footpath that led through a meadow to a stand of fir behind which stood a compound of three ancient travel trailers in horseshoe formation. An American flag drooped from a branch above one trailer. A pair of yellow cats perched like sentries atop a pile of composting garbage alongside a forest of corn stalks and droopy sunflowers.
We were between the car and the compound when an army of niños burst out of the trailer and rushed us. Dark with round, flattish features. The oldest was twelve or so, the youngest no older than two. None of them wore shoes. Three tiny ones wore nothing. As they neared, they skidded to a stop, in a bunch behind the tallest, a boy in jeans and a Ricky Nelson T-shirt.
“You guys cops?”
“Want to see our badges?” Pop asked.
“Your guns.”
“Locked in the car. My name’s Tom, this is my son Clifford. You are?”
“Pedro Marti.”
“Good name. These your brothers and sisters?”
“The baby’s my big sister’s.”
“Any of you the kids who found the body day before yesterday?”
A boy a head shorter than Pedro jumped out of the bunch and raised his hand. Pedro said, “Yeah, Joey got there first. He screamed.”
“Did not,” Joey yipped.
The kids dispersed from behind Pedro to cluster around Pop and me. A tiny girl leaned against my knee. I patted her dusty hair.
When Pop asked, “Who saw the body?” all except the baby shouted “Me,” or raised a hand.
“Did your mama or papa come look?”
Pedro nodded.
“Are they home?”
“Course not,” Pedro said, as though Pop had asked if they owned a Ferarri. “They’re picking cherries.”
“Sure. Tell me, guys, what’d the body look like?”
“Dead.”
“Bloody.”
“Not bloody.”
“Ugly.”
“Gray.”
“Big? All puffy?” Pop asked them.
“Just real white,” Pedro said.
“Gray,” Joey corrected.
“Who called the police?”
Pedro jabbed a finger at his own chest. “We got no phone,” he snapped, as though blaming us for the lack. “I had to run to the Crossroads, that payphone out front. Cost me a dime, and it didn’t do no good. Somebody else called first, ‘cause I heard the sirens even before I hung up.”
Joey shouted, “We don’t even got a TV.”
AT the car, Pop said, “I did it again. All the talking. Next time, kick me.”
I climbed into the Caddy. He joined me and fired it up. “So who found the body before these kids did?”
“Maybe Pedro’s mixed up,” I said, “or while he was on the phone, the station radioed a cruiser that was already down this way for some reason.”
We rattled east along the trail until I spotted a shack as hidden in the woods as the Marti's compound of trailers. It had a bowed roof out of which a stovepipe snaked. Pop speculated it was built by a miner prospecting Whiskey Creek a hundred years ago. A row of smallish redwoods, equally spaced like a giant fence, blocked it from the road. The only sign that anybody lived there was a mastiff on the porch lashed to a redwood post that supported what remained of a porch roof. Without a bark or growl, the giant ambled toward us, to the end of its leash, then sat on its haunches and lolled its tongue back and forth.
“Friendly?” Pop asked. “Or licking his chops and imagining how good we’d taste?”
“It looks stoned.”
Pop hollered, “Anybody home?” After two attempts, he said, “How about I distract Bluto while you creep around and find a window to peek in?”
I backtracked a few steps, strolled toward the trees to our right, hid behind one, then tiptoed to the next and so on, until I had circled the shack. Crossing the clearing, I listened for the mastiff. What substituted for a window in the rear of the shack was a porthole-sized opening so high on the wall I needed to grab the ledge and execute a pull-up to see in. I saw or heard nobody inside but the place looked as neat as though a maid dropped by every Friday. The old brass single bed was made, with a flouncy quilt and extra pillows. The only table had a tablecloth that looked ironed and a bowl full of pine cones in the middle.
WHILE we drove farther east, I told Pop we had found the lair of a female hermit. He asked how I drew that conclusion. “It’s neat,” I said.
Soon we came to the next house. It wasn’t so hidden as the others. Between the road and the double A-frame cabin were a homemade swing set, a jungle gym, and a primer-splotched ’47 Dodge pickup with a wooden camper like a miniature house with leaded glass windows and shellacked walls. A flock of white chickens pecked around the house, playground, and garden. As we neared, the three cupids darted out of the house and rushed the chickens. The flock scattered but the mid-sized cupid dove and tackled a hen. He stood, clutching the paralyzed fowl by its legs with both his hands. His brother and sister cheered. Their father stepped outside. “Othello,” he called. “Go get the powder.”
Pop gave him our names. The man nodded and said, “Yeah,” as if he already knew them. “I’m Royal Van Dyke. Roy. You know, I promised my kids we’d leave pretty soon for the jamboree.” When I looked over at Pop, he was staring at me.
I turned back to Roy. “Ten minutes?”
He motioned with a thumb toward the A-frame. We followed him in, to a storybook house. Aside from the kid-sized shirts and shorts and the jump-ropes, rag-balls, wooden paddles, and such scattered around, the place was all art. The walls and ceiling were cedar, oiled and rubbed. Mobiles of gnarled twigs, painted egg shells, and origami figures fluttered. Kitchen cabinets, a hutch, and bookshelves of oak and cedar appeared so flawlessly crafted that Pop, who had built our Tahoe cabin, sounded awed when he asked, “You do all this?”
“We did.” He motioned toward a sofa-like bench made of oak slats, where we sat facing Roy, who slouched in a chair that matched the bench. The house was dim, most of the shutters closed. Roy used a Zippo to light a sand candle. He looked as noble as his name, graceful and slender. His hair was a million strawberry blond ringlets, just a shade lighter than Ava’s. His beard was scraggly, perhaps a week old. I imagined he stopped shaving when his wife died. The hazel eyes that gazed back and forth between Pop and me flickered in the candlelight.
The top shelf of a bookcase at my elbow featured Aristotle, Bronte, Byron, Chaucer, Coleridge, Dante, de la Cruz, Dickens, Dickenson, Dostoyevski and so on. Roy watched me read the titles. He said, “We were lit majors at Berkeley before Othello came. We moved up here to get our baby out of a culture we didn’t care for.” He looked too wretched to weep.
Pop nodded at me, so I asked, “Did you know Jimmy Marris?”
Roy shook his head.
“How about Alvaro?”