The Do-Re-Mi Page 20

  “Maybe X.”

  “Don’t tell the sheriffs.”

  We celebrated the good news with coffee, orange juice, and chili omelets. “I’m thinking your mama and I need a day of rest,” Pop said, “before we drive four hundred miles. I’m going to check out that Riverside Lodge, where we can get a real bed and I can fish myself to sleep. Whatever loose ends need tying up here in Evergreen, I’ll take care of them.”

  “We can do it together.”

  “What I’m saying, Clifford, is you should get out of town. Put some miles between you and your enemies. Your mama agrees. Invite Ava up to the lake. She could use a vacation, I’ll bet.”

  I grumbled, “So you think we can count on Willis to figure out who was in the woods with Jimmy Marris?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yep.”

  “To Ava, you mean.” Pop watched me eat and shook his head. “Tell me something. What good will it do your mom and me to find out one of our boys is in the clear if the other gets knocked off by motorcycle thugs?”

  I smeared berry jam on my toast. “They’ll back off.”

  Pop fished for his pipe. “Maybe. And maybe Little Vic will give up the wild life and go to librarian school. Maybe Ava’s sister will join up with Mother Teresa. Maybe."

  I BELIEVED I couldn’t rest until I had the whole truth about the death of Jimmy Marris, though I didn’t understand why finding the truth obsessed me. I might need to prove to myself, beyond any doubt, that my brother was as innocent as Roy claimed. Or maybe I hoped to win points with Ava. Or, I was in love and just wanted to help Ava feel better.

  The rest of that Monday, I hung around Quig’s, mostly talking to residents about Jimmy Marris, Quig, the Cossacks, and the sheriffs, and listening for clues. Hippies asked to hear the story of our solving Jimmy’s murder. Ava told me she wanted to visit her mother and Delene Marris. After she left, I tried to distract and untangle my mind by reading a biography of Clarence Darrow Pop had given me.

  Simon’s microbus sputtered into the compound. I caught him before he went into his trailer. On his rusty lawn chairs, he smoked while I told him about Roy Van Dyke shooting Jimmy. He flicked the roach in a fire pit. “Good story.”

  Then he appeared to get lost in space, probably contending with some profound metaphysical issue.

  I tried to catch him off guard, using my friendliest voice. “How come Ava says you and Jimmy Marris were tight when you told me you hardly knew him?”

  He cocked his head and stared. “Define tight.”

  “Yeah, right, so I misunderstood on account of semantics. Anyway, I’ll bet you could give me some names, kids he hung with who might’ve gone with him to the woods.” If he gave me names, I thought, he might be trying to deflect suspicion from himself. If he stonewalled me, either he was innocent or plenty shrewd.

  “No good with names,” he said.

  I stared at him. He floated into space again.

  “So you buy Roy’s story?”

  “It’s a good one,” he said. “But try this. The plantation belongs to Alvaro. Jimmy knows about it. Alvaro tries to pick up Jimmy’s girl at Foster’s. Jimmy figures an eye for an eye. A man goes to take from him, he’s going take from the man, so him and a homeboy of his go out poaching, and what happens is like Roy told you, only it’s Alvaro that shoots the kid. And Roy — see, Roy, there’s somebody I was tight with, till he caught the faith and shied away from my pagan self.

  “S’pose Roy figures he can take the heat off his amigo Alvaro by sneaking off before the cops show up to question him and staying gone long enough for Alvaro to get himself on down the road. See, what Roy said to you and your ol' man and the preacher, he’s way smart enough to know that’s no legal confession. All he’s got to do is deny, man.”

  “Right,” I said. “So when you were out there in the woods with Jimmy, you saw my brother?”

  His laugh was high and giddy. “Poachers have got pockets full of cash, my man.” He turned his front pockets inside out then waved toward his rusty trailer and pointed at the ’57 microbus with blotches of rust on the doors and fenders. “You think I’m sending my share of the loot to a Swiss bank?” He stood and wandered off toward the bathhouse.

  Again, I tried to read about Darrow, but Simon’s version of Roy’s story had poisoned me with dread that Willis would hear or conjure the same version, that Roy was covering for Alvaro.

  I needed to corner Jimmy’s partner and get the truth. I took a walk to the river and along its bank past Big Dan’s, where residents tossed horseshoes and played volleyball and school was in session, with two groups of a dozen children each sitting on grassy knolls drawing or writing on tablets.

  From the sandy beach at bend of the river near the jamboree ground where one crew stabbed trash and another loaded portable stages onto a flatbed truck, I spied on Sugar Hill. I sat trying to convince myself that Roy was a heroic fellow who would stick by his conscience and confess to the law if they caught him. I watched Harley Davidsons with black skull flags waving from their sissy bars coast down the hill and chug up it, one every few minutes, none in a pack or pair, which alarmed me. Before, I hadn’t noticed any of them riding alone. I imagined Vic had sent them out as scouts, trying to catch me away from Quig’s.

  And I realized something that should’ve come clear over breakfast. What was keeping Pop in town wasn’t fishing. At home in Incline, our cabin was on the lake. We had a dock and two canoes. All that kept Pop in Evergreen was an idea that Little Vic might be waiting for the crazy old gunslinger to leave before he dedicated his gang’s efforts to wasting me.

  I found Quig on the deck behind the Chattagua Hall. A middle-aged woman with pigtails and sun-blistered skin was reading his fortune with Tarot cards. I leaned on the deck rail nearby and eavesdropped. She saw water and air in his future.

  When she concluded and left, he called me over and motioned to the flimsy wicker chair that matched his. “Roy Van Dyke, huh?”

  “And you got it right,” I added. “Jimmy was a poacher.”

  “Makes it double tough on a bright-eyed kid like Ava who thought he walked the straight and narrow.”

  “It’d be easier on her if she knew who was out there with Jimmy. Then she could blame Jimmy’s death on somebody. It’s tough to blame Roy, with all the stuff he had on his heart and mind. Who do you think was with him?”

  He shook his head. “When you find out, if they don’t bust him, I’ll see he gets chased out of town.”

  “Powerful, are you?”

  He winked. “I’ve got some power, like Big Dan does, and Paul McNees, and Vic. Like Woody told us and Dan sang, it’s all about the Do- Re-Mi.”

  WHEN Ava returned, the sight of her cheered me. Besides, I thought, if we sat by the river and reviewed everything we knew, maybe answers would arise.

  But she had troubles of her own. She had caught her mom drinking vodka earlier in the day than usual. Her mom had encountered Lola and Vic in an aisle in the Safeway. Lola turned a caustic look on her and strutted past, holding Vic’s arm. “And,” the mom told Ava, “your sister looked half-dead.”

  Ava had found Delene Marris chain smoking and biting her nails, only able to talk in peeps. Ava finally gleaned that Delene feared a meltdown at Jimmy’s funeral tomorrow morning. “It’ll kill me,” she peeped, over and over until Ava worried Delene would make the fear come true. If not physically, then in some spiritual way.

  We were sitting on the bench by the playground when a guy Ava called Whit, my age with a chipmunk face and bangs, brought a message from the Bend in the River Chapel. Midweek Bible studies and the Wednesday evening service had been cancelled, and next Sunday, a Baptist from Eureka would preach. Because Bob got called to minister to an old friend in Toronto.

  “Did somebody talk to Bob?” Ava asked.

  “Ginger got a telegram.”

  Ava rushed off. She drove to Ginger’s house. I walked back and forth along the riverbank from where I could watch Sugar Hill and the
road that led down to Moonshine Trail. Ava wasn’t gone more than twenty minutes. When I heard her car, I hustled back to the yurt.

  She looked bewildered. “The telegram came unsigned from New York City. It only asked Ginger to arrange for a substitute preacher and didn’t explain anything except that Bob’s supposed to be ministering in Toronto.” In those days, draft evaders and drug fugitives saw Canada as home free.

  “Does that mean Roy and his kids went to Canada with him?” Ava asked.

  “Could be,” I said, though I believed otherwise. I thought Bob and the Van Dykes had gone separate ways and Pop was right about Alvaro helping Roy and the cupids flee. But I wasn’t ready to tell Ava my brother was aiding Jimmy’s killer, though I knew she would learn soon enough.

  As soon as dark made it harder for the Cossacks to spot Ava’s car from their lookout on the hill, she drove us to the Riverside Lodge. Pop already had steaks on the grill, on the river view deck of their cabin. He wrapped ice cubes with a towel, which he smacked against the deck until the cubes were shards. He fixed Ava her first Scotch Mist ever. “Even if you’re underage,” he said, “you’ve got more sense than any of us.”

  Mama sat close beside Ava on a bench and stared across the river as though any second Alvaro would dash out of the forest.

  Pop said, “I made some calls. Guy at the San Francisco Chronicle. A Reuters fellow. So X might read that the charges against him got dropped and the search is off."

  He looked old, fatigued. Beneath a yellow bug light, his face was lavender. I said, “You and Mama need to go home in the morning. Get Evergreen off your minds. Think about stuff besides Alvaro. I mean, he came home from Vietnam in one piece. And I’ll join you in a day or two.”

  While Pop finished his drink and sucked the ice, he stared at me. At Mama. Back at me. “We’ll sleep on it,” he said.

  He refilled his drink, turned the steaks, and walked to the edge of the deck. I guess he hoped we wouldn’t see him take out his pillbox. After he shook a pill into his hand, swallowed it and chased it with Dewar’s, he came back and sat beside Mama.

  IN Ava’s car, when she asked me how long Pop had been taking nitro-glycerin, I said, “What nitro-glycerin?”

  She told me about her grandpa, who suffered from angina until he died last year. Right then I knew she was right. And I saw what I should have seen all along — when Pop tried to put me in charge of investigating, he considered that a strategy that could help him impart to me all he could before he died.

  The idea laid siege to my heart. Now I wanted to go home and spend every minute I had left before law school with Pop. Memorize his every word. Pry every secret out of him. Make him feel deeply loved and needed by driving home to visit every weekend.

  But I still wasn’t ready to leave Evergreen. Whether I needed to vindicate Alvaro or score points with Ava and help her through grief, neither of those answers felt like the whole story. Maybe something in my DNA made me need to grasp the truth, for no other reason than because it was true. And Pop knew me so well, he believed I would always be pursuing answers, about crimes or mysteries of the heart or spirit. Maybe that was another reason he tried to make a detective out of me.

  TUESDAY morning, when Ava and I stopped at the lodge on our way to Jimmy’s funeral, Pop and Mama were sitting beside their packed luggage on the riverbank, waiting for us.

  Mama rushed to meet me. Her eyes looked glazed, like when she felt prophetic. “Clifford, go home, please,” she said. “The motorcycle boys are mean.”

  I looked at Pop and raised my eyebrows. He said, “Only a moron would ignore your mama.”

  From the way Mama kissed me and Pop shook my hand, I discerned that things had changed between me and them. They believed their boy was a man, whose judgment they trusted as much as their own. Or possibly more.

  Pop hugged Ava, then Mama did the same but held onto her for several minutes as if she were Claire Poverman returned from the dead. Pop took me aside. “Were not going right home,” he said. “Maybe tomorrow we will. Today we’re going to the coast, eat a fancy meal, walk on the beach. Your mama misses the big waves.

  “And,” he said, “I’m taking the Chevy. You’re going to keep the Eldorado.”

  I started to object but he held up his hand. “Fred Swank, used to work at the casino, he’s got a body shop in South Lake now. I called him. He owes me a couple favors. Before you go to USC, that Chevy will look showroom new. What color do you want?”

  “Sky blue,” I said, because I didn’t care and that was Mama’s favorite color.

  Though I suspected his desire to get the body work done was real, I knew he had another motive. He was putting me in a vehicle a half dozen Harleys might play kamikaze with and not make a dent.

  Along with the car keys, Pop slipped me a hundred-dollar bill. “The Eldorado’s a gas hog,” he said. “And, I left a pistol and the shotgun in the trunk. Leave them there.”

  Twenty-two

  THE funeral service was at the Congregational Church on Sherry Lane, a block north of Manhattan Avenue. I felt unworthy to attend, since all along I had cared more about clearing Alvaro than exposing the killer. Besides, I had allowed the Van Dykes to escape. But I hoped Jimmy’s partner in the woods would show up at the funeral and somehow give himself away. And Ava wanted me to accompany her.

  I had borrowed a suit from a giveaway closet in Quig’s Chattagua hall. It was tight all over. Ava wore a simple cotton dress and a touch of makeup. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her mournful, angelic face.

  The church, one of the oldest buildings in Evergreen, had oak pews, but the altar and ceiling planks and beams were redwood. All the windows were opaque stained glass. The place was darker than Louella’s Lounge.

  Delene and Brady sat up front, close as lovers and bowed forward as though life had knocked all the life out of therm. In the next row, four deputy sheriffs and Willis fidgeted. The rows behind them were occupied by locals about Jimmy and Ava’s age. Short-haired fellows in suits as tight as mine, probably because after June graduation they became loggers and bulked up. Girls who, at eighteen, already looked like housewives, hair stylists, or second grade teachers. Behind the locals were empty pews and a few hippies. Simon in a flowered shirt. Quig, who showed up late and accompanied by the Tarot reader. They both wore muslin and sandals. No bikers came.

  From the eulogy I guessed that if the preacher had known the deceased, it was during Jimmy’s childhood. His remarks made Jimmy into a decorated Boy Scout. Not a word about his brains, dreams, or troubles.

  From the line at the casket, I didn’t see Jimmy’s face until after I saw the rest of him. His legs were extra-long. Someone had dressed him in a dark blue suit and a paisley tie. Ava clutched my arm and pulled me closer. Then I saw Jimmy’s face, with its high forehead, the skin lightened by powder, the jaw with a deep cleft. Ava squeezed my arm as if she wanted to break it. Maybe she noticed, like I did, that Jimmy could be my blood brother.

  Steph hitched a ride to the cemetery with us. I drove the Eldorado. The procession crept down River Road past the Quig's, the jamboree site, Big Dan’s, and Sugar Hill to the forest glen cemetery just across the bridge from the river bend and Bob's church and surrounded by young redwoods and blackberry vines.

  Six young loggers carried Jimmy and set him on the rack that would lower him into the ground. The preacher read from Corinthians. “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written will come true. ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory. . . . Where, O death is your victory? Where, O grave is your sting?”’

  I gazed at Ava and thought, Here, preacher. Here’s the sting. Right beside me.

  SINCE nobody at the funeral had clued me that he might’ve gone to the woods with Jimmy, I would test the one I suspected. If the test failed to convince me, I would need to go after the Cossacks again. Provided I could muster sufficient guts.

  When I told Ava I was going to Eureka to hire a l
awyer, she insisted on riding along. I didn’t argue. On our way past Sugar Hill and through Evergreen, we didn’t see any bikers.

  Eureka felt like a metropolis. College students were registering, searching for apartments, applying for jobs, buying books.

  Lots of them wore a T-shirt that demanded equal scholarships for women athletes.

  We sat in a patio cafe and studied the yellow pages. From a phone booth, I interviewed three lawyers. The first two attempted to sound genteel and fair. The third, Kevin Dalrymple, pretended to be nothing but a shark. We drove to his office, in a strip mall, next to a Speedy-Mart. His receptionist was a baby-doll brunette in a mini-skirt and a sleeveless top that was supposed to button down the front but mostly didn’t.

  Dalrymple, young, pudgy, and sickly pale, leered at Ava even while he listened to me. But he licked his lips at the chance to sue a cop. I opened my wallet and pulled out the hundred-dollar bill Pop had slipped me.

  As soon as we climbed back into the Eldorado, Ava said, “Yuch.” She repeated her assessment of the lawyer every few minutes while we drove. But she agreed Dalrymple was our man.

  Alongside the 101 near the coast loop turnoff, a pair of sheriff’s deputies had two Cossacks leaning palms-down on the trunk of a cruiser. Neither of them looked up as we passed.

  I planned to stop at the jail and leave a message for Brady Barker but we saw him on a bench outside Foster’s Freeze, eating fries and drinking a soda. I pulled to the curb. Ava stayed in the car.

  As I approached, Barker shook his head. “I used to think that girl had class.”

  I held up my bandaged right hand. “It’s still dead.” With my left, I handed him a Dalrymple business card. “I already filled out papers. We’d better talk, maybe cut a deal. Louella’s in an hour.”

  AVA wanted to go along. I argued that all her presence would accomplish was to further inflame Barker and besides, she was underage. At Quig’s, when I started to leave her, she snapped, “Why’d you tell Brady to meet you at a bar? So you wouldn’t have to take me, or is it a macho thing?”