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The Do-Re-Mi Page 3
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“Why I’m asking,” he said, “your brother left a fat wallet behind. Fat as a pusher’s.”
“Or a guy who found a couple nuggets.”
He lifted his open hands. “Hey, it’ll be a damned shame, your brother getting shot down, which he most certainly will if he won’t stop running, when all he’s got to do is come in and cop a plea. Maybe he walks.”
“Yeah, maybe,” I said. “If I run into him, I’ll tell him these sheriffs are the kind of guys he can trust with his life.”
“Clifford, you’re going to feel responsible if the deputies have to kill your brother. That sort of guilt can be tough to live with.” He assumed a dark grimace and waited for his words to sink in. “Now, how about coffee or a soda while you’re making up your mind?”
“No thanks.”
The sheriff bolted up and marched out of the room. Knudsen observed, “The way this town’s going south, people want a scapegoat. I’m betting — if they don’t nab your brother — it’ll be you."
Three
ALONE in the interrogation room for the first time I imagined the worst. Alvaro bleeding to death in a forest arroyo. My stomach cramped as though I had eaten rattlesnakes and forgotten to kill them first.
When boot-steps sounded in the hall, I decided to remind these lawmen they had best be quite sure, and have exhausted every other possibility, before they risked harming Alvaro — because they were not only messing with him, but with Pop, who had brought down far tougher hombres than they likely were. And, though I wouldn’t mention it, they were messing with Mama who had the ear of God.
Lighter steps sounded. The door creaked open. Agent Knudsen stepped in and tossed me a paper sack. Inside were my wallet, keys, loose change, everything Barker had confiscated. Knudsen motioned with his arm toward the door. “As we walk out of here, don’t even look at anybody.”
I minded my manners and watched my feet shuffle all the way down the hall and out the Manhattan Avenue door. On the sidewalk in the golden light, Knudsen said, “One reason why the sheriff and deputy hate your guts is, they know you’re going to a fancy law school, and your dad was a hotshot big city cop and then a private detective. When they busted your brother for fighting in the bar and some deputy called him a wetback, he told them about your family.”
“Barker called him a wetback?”
“I don’t know which deputy it was. Look, even though your dad being ex-police and your law school might impress other people, to the sheriff, all law school makes you and big city police work makes your dad is snooty sons of bitches. And the only reason he’s cutting you loose is that one piece of evidence indicates Alvaro did the shooting on his own.”
He waited for my reaction but I gave him none. “From the turnout where tire tracks indicate Jimmy’s truck was parked, the sheriff’s men found boot prints leading to the river that match prints all around your brother's camp, including some taken from the woods he ran into when they showed up this morning. Only difference is, the ones leading to the river are deeper, indicating the guy who wore them carried extra weight."
"So what?"
"Hmm," Knudsen said. "Maybe you're not all that smart. Think about it.
“But these locals — I know them some, and I doubt they’ll stop with Alvaro. If there’s a single thread to tie you to Alvaro last night, they’ll find it, and down you go.”
Knudsen slipped a card out of his coat pocket and passed it to me. The dollar-a-thousand kind. It only gave his name, “Department of Justice, Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs,” and a phone number.
“Sticking around for the jamboree?” he asked.
I almost slipped and told him I was on the bill and that I needed to get to my Hummingbird before a deputy or some other lowlife broke or stole it. But Pop had often warned me against trusting strangers with any information I didn’t need to give. “Maybe,” I said.
“Ought to be a good show until the hippies and bikers go to war while some dipstick’s singing about brotherly love. You know what’s wrong with the world?”
“People.”
He laughed and patted me on the shoulder. “I was going to say ignorance. Look, if you run into Brady Barker, duck and hide until he’s long gone. And when you find your brother, call me, will you? If my service answers, she can reach me even when I’m in the air.”
I didn’t answer. He said, “I’d take you to your car but as soon as the sheriff and his boys suspect you and me are chums, I lose their cooperation.”
With a shrug of apology, he ambled away.
JIMI Hendrix’ guitar screamed from a neighborhood park a block west of the jail. I walked the other way, looking for a pay phone even while I wondered if calling Pop would be wrong. He had troubles of his own with Mama home from the sanitarium for less than a month.
I leaned against the wall of a meat market that smelled like bologna and decided that since Pop couldn’t get here before nightfall anyway and since he wouldn’t do much investigating until morning, I shouldn’t bother him yet. If I spent a few hours snooping and turned up nothing that could make the sheriff call his troops off Alvaro, I would call Pop early this evening. He could still arrive by dawn.
I walked past the jail, toward the park. And I thought about when Alvaro and I came here for last summer’s jamboree, only weeks after his discharge, a few months after he returned from Vietnam. We arrived early because another soldier had told Alvaro that veins of gold rippled through the Trinity Mountains and on any stream a diligent seeker could pan dust and even legitimately hope for nuggets.
We spent a week in the forest, picking wild apples and berries, basking in gentle sunlight and the sweet air hippies claimed drew toxins out through our pores. We fished for trout, learned to use the gold pan, and calculated that if we banked the gold we extracted and invested wisely, after fifty years we could buy each of our dozen grandchildren a peanut. We decided our fortunes lay elsewhere. Which gave me reason to wonder if I had misread Alvaro's honesty, if his wallet might truly be fat with drug money.
After last year’s jamboree, we returned to San Diego where I would finish college and Alvaro would join a new band that played clubs both sides of the frontera. He was with them six months before the drummer and bassist went racing around Tijuana loaded on tequila. The drummer’s foot must’ve slipped off the brake onto the gas pedal. His sports car didn’t stop until it ran under the trailer of a semi on a bridge that crossed the concrete Tijuana River. The car only stopped when it hit the semi’s rear axle after the trailer had sliced off the musicians’ heads.
Alvaro was mighty fond of those guys. I believe that was when he started using again, resurrecting the opiate habit he had picked up in an army hospital.
This year, Evergreen was a different town. Last summer, in the town park that sloped down to a stream bordered in berry vines, beneath the redwoods and madrones, hippies played guitars, mandolins, bongos, harmonicas, autoharps. All day and evening they sang protests. Against war. Against racial and social injustice. About returning to innocence powered by love. They seemed to think love was easy.
Since then, the bikers had driven the hippies from the park and the few hippies in sight, going into and out of a feed store, wore long knives sheathed onto their belts. They walked stiff and shot threatening glances around.
At least twenty bikers perched on the park’s benches or sprawled on the grass drinking beers delivered by their tattooed girlfriends. Every man wore a sidearm. Half of them sported bandoliers. Now Led Zeppelin screeched out of the stereo of a pickup one of them had driven into the middle of park.
Between last summer and this one, it looked as if the Lord of the Flies had prevailed.
A hippie with sunken cheeks and a dent in his forehead shuffled along the sidewalk, watching the street for a potential ride. He didn’t bother to hitch with townies in their pickups or sedans but as I neared him a Ford Econoline with a rusted sunburst paint job approached. He waved his thumb. The van pulled to the curb. Before he jumped in, I asked, “Is there
a gun shop around?”
“McNees,” he said.
MCNEES was a builders’ and outdoor emporium in the redwood mall between Safeway and the Sears Catalog Store. A salesgirl welcomed me. She directed me to the gun section where Hal, a cheery young fellow answered my query. He estimated that over the past year, he had sold twenty Browning 30.06 rifles.
The model that murdered Jimmy Marris and that Alvaro had grabbed before he ran.
I said, “You’ve got a list, I bet.”
“It’s in the files.”
“Mind if I take a quick look?”
“Soon as you show me your badge,” he said.
From McNees Emporium, I walked toward Foster’s Freeze where I meant to hire a hippie to drive me to my Chevy. Unless the sheriffs had stolen my camping gear, instead of investigating I could pack a bedroll and hike into the forest in hopes of finding Alvaro. Which seemed like a bold and worthy action until I reasoned that finding him wouldn’t help. Alvaro was at least as able a woodsman as me and cagier. Besides, he was a trained and experienced warrior. As an outlaw, he was safer on his own. All I could offer was to look for evidence pointing another direction.
I was no detective. But the man who raised me was a detective. He was also a gifted storyteller when the mood struck or a lesson he wanted us to learn called for a story or when we begged him to tell one. From Pop, I had gathered some ideas about detecting.
As I passed Babe’s Cafe, through the cramp in my stomach I recognized another discomfort as hunger. A hand-printed card in the cafe window advertised rainbow trout, for which Alvaro and I would have been fishing today if nobody had shot Jimmy Marris. I saw no reason not to eat while investigating.
Mid-afternoon, the cafe was deserted except for a cook and waitress. I sat in a booth with a juke box selector, beneath a mural of a giant blue ox.
The waitress was a stocky teen with bushy black eyebrows, peace sign earrings, a badge labeled “Steph,” and hairy legs. After she handed my order through the cutaway to the kitchen, while she stood behind the counter polishing flatware, I asked how long she had lived in Evergreen.
“Forever.” She sighed, probably meaning the minute she turned eighteen, adios Evergreen.
I said, “Last summer, Evergreen was a utopia.”
“What’s that?”
“The trippiest place around.”
“It was getting trippy all right till the Cossacks showed up. I mean, before them, you still had the shitheads like my dad and uncle who never gave the hippies a chance. I mean, if the hippies don’t work, my ol' man calls them bums. If they get a job, he calls them scabs ‘cause they work cheap and drive wages down. And he thinks a little weed’s going to kill us.”
“You think it won’t?” I said. “Even after it’s turned your town into a war zone?”
Gaping as though I had spoken nonsense, she walked around the counter, sat down across the table from me, folded her arms on the table and reclined her breasts upon them. “Weed’s groovy. If the Cossacks smoked instead of doing crystal and booze, they wouldn’t be such pricks. Anyway, the hippies only grow weed to sell ‘cause nobody’ll give them a real job.”
The bell dinged. She delivered my trout, home fries, and salad. Back to polishing flatware, she leaned over the counter and gave me a history lesson. “See, the Cossacks are out of the East Bay and they were big in dealing meth till the Hell’s Angels chased them out. They’re basically chickenshit, you know. See, Little Vic is their honcho. You know why he’s so little? Lola told me.”
“Who’s Lola?”
“Vic’s squeeze. Well, one of them anyway. She says his ol’ man used to whop him on the head with monkey wrenches and stuff when he was a baby. Anyhow, he’s got this cousin who was living at Big Dan’s ranch. That's how they heard about Evergreen. So first Little Vic and then the rest of his losers came up here.
“See, they tried to do one of those protection rackets like the mafia does on TV. They tried to shake down the hippies who were growing weed. But the hippies got together and told them to fuck off.” She glanced around, no doubt to determine if anybody had caught her profanity. “Anyway, that’s when the Cossacks started poaching. Last year at harvest time. They got so rich, they took off for a couple months and kicked back down in Mexico.
“Lots of people think bikers are these cool rebels. But I’ll tell you, they’re no cooler than the rednecks. All those creeps really care about is money.”
I remembered one of Pop’s crime solving theories — if it isn’t about sex, it’s about money.
“You’d think the rednecks would hassle the Cossacks,” Steph said, “but no way. The rednecks think they can get rid of the Cossacks and hippies both by hassling the hippies. If the hippies split, the bikers will follow, they say, ‘cause there won’t be any weed to steal and the bikers are too lazy to grow it.”
“How about the sheriff?”
“Willy Willis?” She chuckled. “What about that dufus?”
“Is he in cahoots with the rednecks?” I asked.
"Sure."
“He jailed some bikers.”
“Yeah, when they stomp somebody in a bar, he busts them for drunk and lets them out the next morning. Doesn’t even search them for dope. Gives them their guns back.”
When she finished polishing, she returned to my booth, sat and leaned forward, chin on her hand. “My mom says Evergreen’s cursed. Maybe she’s right. I mean, a crazy boozer name of Hound Dog killed Sara only about a week or so ago.” The girl’s eyes swelled and turned a shade grayer. “She was like my big sister, even got me this job. God, she only wanted to live in harmony with nature and raise her kids in a happy place and teach them to love everybody. Then this psycho biker goes and zooms out right in front of her and when she jumps on the brakes the wheels lock and she goes into the ditch. God . . .” She pinched her eyes closed and rubbed them. “And the shitheads think weed’s worse than booze.”
“Hound Dog was drunk?”
“He’s always drunk. He’s one of those loopy Vietnam vets that can’t handle being back in the world.”
Wagging her head, she returned to her work and mourned in silence. I couldn’t eat even half the trout or any of the fries. My stomach roiled from the thought that of all the lowlifes on earth, the ones it appeared I should investigate first were the little man who had spooked me as if he were Godzilla and his psycho sidekick.
Before I left, I asked her if the ditch where Sara died was along 101 a quarter mile south of the Crossroads.
“Yeah,” she said. “And killing Sara didn’t even make them lay low for a while. Just the other day, a Cossack they call Boomer went after these guys from Quig’s ‘cause he said they stole some parts off his Harley.”
Quig’s, I remembered from last year, was Evergreen’s other major hippie commune, besides Big Dan’s.
“And Boomer fired off his shotgun and a kid named Cisco lost an eye. And then last night, a Mexican shot Ava’s boyfriend.”
My jaw locked. Through clenched teeth, I said, “Ava’s a friend of yours?”
“Kinda. What’s the matter?”
I shook my head. “Where can I find her?”
“Why?”
“The Mexican’s my brother.”
“Oh . . . man. Sorry. I mean, you could find her at Quig’s, I guess. Or at the jamboree. She’ll be the pretty one in a flour sack dress, handing out tracts. Ava’s a Jesus freak.”
“You knew Jimmy?”
“A little.”
“My brother didn’t kill him.”
“Then who did? Bikers, right?”
“Why would they kill him?”
She hissed. “Maybe some gutless prick who liked Ava paid them fifty bucks to waste him. Or maybe Jimmy smudged the paint on somebody’s chopper.”
HEARING that Jimmy Marris’ girlfriend was a Jesus freak allowed me some hope as I knew plenty about how those folks’ minds worked.
Before the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and the crushing of
protest at the Democrats’ convention, millions of hopeful kids had changed into apathetic hippies. And then the Charlie Manson murders poisoned the last morsels of innocence from the hippie mystique and sent hundreds of thousands of hippies running to crusades and churches. At my college, San Diego Christian, I had known way more than my share of Jesus freaks.
Outside Foster’s Freeze, I bartered with a hippie named Simon, a coal-black fellow as tall as a flagpole, to drive me to my car. His chin was longer than his long nose. He wore thick wire-framed glasses. On the back seat of his VW microbus were volumes of Blake, Whitman, Burroughs, Poe, Hughes, Brautigan, Ginsberg, Baraka, Whitman, Basho, Snyder, Angelou, Cleaver. He leaned over the steering wheel and appeared to have to squint to make out the road while we crept south along the 101 and into the forest on Highball Trail.
When I asked if he knew Jimmy Marris, he turned and peered as though through a microscope. A smart, observant source among the hippies I could use. So I told him about Alvaro and me, about our troubles. Afterward, he drove a mile in silence and finally asked, “You get high?”
“Not much,” I admitted.
“Whose side are you on?”
“What’s that mean?”
“Haven’t you noticed there’s a feud going on?”
“I’m on Alvaro’s side,” I said.
“Yeah, well check this out — the man’s out to bring down Alvaro even if somebody else wasted Jimmy. They’d sooner shoot your brother anyway, ‘cause somewhere out there . . . ” He saluted toward the east. “. . . he’s got a righteous plantation. Five hundred plants, half ton of bud.”
The idea of Alvaro growing weed distressed both my mind and heart because it meant he had broken a promise to Mama and Pop. “You know for a fact that Alvaro was growing?” I demanded.
“Hey, you want me to stick to facts, I can’t tell you much of anything, about anything.”
“It’s rumor then?”
“More like common knowledge.”
I pondered for a mile or so then asked, “You know Jimmy?”