CHAPTER THIRTY

 

 

We next inquired at Cedar Glen’s general store. The woman who owned the place remembered Al Smith and his sudden departure but claimed not to have much interest in it, as she’d never extended Smith credit. That comment reminded me of Prescott’s sister-in-law who rented rooms. The general store owner directed us to her house. We rang the bell there and knocked and got no answer. So either the landlady was out or she’d been forewarned by her sociable brother-in-law.

My next stop would normally have been the nearest police station or sheriff’s substation, but I couldn’t be sure our names and descriptions wouldn’t be hot off a Teletype, courtesy of Captain Grove. So we drove back to Lake Arrowhead.

“Why do you suppose that motorboat repairman recommended a restaurant to us?” Ella asked as we followed the lakeshore.

“For a kickback, I guess. In a city, restaurants pay off cabbies and hotel doorman. Up here, they pay off motorboat repairmen and maybe lumberjacks.”

“Scotty.”

“Okay, I suppose he recommended the Yellow Rose for the same reason you’re supposing. But if we hang around to find out, we’ll get back pretty late.”

“It would make more sense to stay the night,” Ella said.

“Yes,” I said. “It would.”

We checked in to the Saddle Inn. I asked for two rooms and waited for Ella to correct me. She didn’t. I asked that they be connecting rooms and waited for Ella to object. She didn’t.

She went off to buy toothbrushes and other supplies while I placed a call to Hollywood Security. To my own direct line, to be specific. Vickie answered, as I hoped she would. So far, the operatives she’d pulled off paying jobs hadn’t traced Agnes Brown. But someone was trying to trace me, Captain Grove. So my half-day’s grace was gone with the wind. Vickie closed her report with a question.

“Do you want to speak with Mr. McLean?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Do I?”

“You do not,” Vickie said.

“So long, then.”

Ella hadn’t come back, so I canvassed local businesses for people who remembered Al Smith. I collected a couple of vague memories of a little man who never spoke and one bit of cryptic testimony. It came from a shopkeeper who was giving up for the day. I caught her as she was unlocking her Pinto.

“Al Smith? Little guy? Blond hair that was almost white? Wasn’t he the guy they were calling ‘the laddie in the lake’?”

She laughed at that until she was safely locked in her car and rolling away. I noted the name of her antique shop, in case Ella and I were wrong about the mechanic’s dinner advice. Then I made a point of finding the Yellow Rose.

It was a big place for that small a town, a rambling ranch house whose exterior design featured wagon wheels and whose shake-shingled roof had drifts of pine needles so deep they were sprouting baby trees.

The place opened at five for happy hour, and Ella I were there shortly afterwards, nursing longnecks at the bar.

“Instead of toothbrushes,” I said, “you should’ve bought us ten-gallon hats.”

“You’re just sore because they don’t have any Duke Ellington records in the jukebox.”

“I’d settle for Spike Jones. I don’t remember this place from our last visit, but it must have been here. It must have been here for the gold rush.”

“Cowboy bars are the coming thing,” Ella said. “We’ll have them in LA before too long. You’ll be rooting for disco then.”

“I’ll be rooting for the next earthquake then.”

A new song started playing on the jukebox, a popular one, if the number of couples who headed for the dance floor was any indication. Ella took my hand.

“Come on, cowboy. They’re playing our song.”

I didn’t argue, even though our song had always been “I’ll Get By.” The name of this one, to judge by the chorus, was “World of Make Believe,” so Ella might have been onto something. I know she was as light in my arms as she’d been the first time we’d danced, and she was nestled just as close. And given our recent history and the spot we were in, that felt a lot like make believe.

The Saturday night crowd was grabbing up tables, so we traded the bar for one of the last open ones. To pass the time, I told Ella about the rumors that had circulated in the LAPD after Ted Mariutto had driven himself into a canyon, rumors about some mobster arranging it.

Ella said, “Poor Ted,” and I let it pass.

I moved us on instead to my theory that it might have been Alsip who’d shown Mariutto the door. Ella said nothing to that, and I got around to noticing that she’d stopped listening. I followed her gaze and saw that the leatherneck mechanic had arrived.

In addition to getting crowded, the Yellow Rose had gotten noisy and dark, which may have been the atmosphere our contact had been waiting for. He picked up a beer at the bar and then wandered our way. His off-duty attire was jeans and a Western shirt, complete with piping across its shoulders and pocket flaps. He nodded at our spare chair, and Ella nodded back.

“Spotted your MIA bracelet back at the shop,” he said to me. He extended his arm, displaying a bracelet of his own, in silver.

“I didn’t notice that earlier,” I said.

“Don’t wear it at work. Can’t even wear a wristwatch. Catch it on the wrong piece of an engine that’s running, and my arm would be MIA.”

He gave his wrist a gentle shake. “This is for a buddy of mine from Camp Pendleton. We were sent to Vietnam as replacements and ended up in different outfits. He never came home.”

He didn’t ask after the history of mine, luckily, perhaps assuming that I was carrying around a stranger’s name, as many people did. Instead, he extended a big hand. “Ben Travois.”

I introduced myself and Ella. That got Travois’ sleepy eyes fully open. “Husband-and-wife detectives? I thought that only happened in the movies.”

“That’s where Scotty gets all his best ideas,” Ella said. “Was there something you wanted to tell us about Al Smith?”

“Yes, ma’am. I mean, I wanted to tell you that you won’t hear much about Al from the locals. There’s a kind of unwritten law around here against anything that could hurt the tourist business, including any kind of gossip that could hurt it. That goes double if the gossip concerns the lake itself. Biggest stretch of holy water you ever saw, that lake.

“This whole referendum thing has been a revelation to me. In the old days, they would’ve fixed it on the q.t., but I guess you can’t build a new dam when nobody’s looking.”

“How about sinking somebody in the lake when nobody’s looking?” I asked. “Is that what happened to Al Smith?”

“That’s one popular theory. I guess I should back us up a ways. Al was working at the shop when I got home from ’Nam. Old Ned had saved a place for me in the garage, but he’d taken on Al as a driver. Anyway, all we knew about Al was that he’d come up from Los Angeles and he’d been a driver, maybe for somebody in the movie business. I thought he might’ve come up here for his health—his chest was about as big around as my thigh—but when I suggested that to him, he just gave a little laugh. Only laugh I ever heard out of him. The laugh and the way he watched his back made me think he was hiding from something.

“Whatever it was caught up to him in the fall of ’71. He didn’t show up for work one day and wasn’t at the room he rented. We found his car parked at the foot of an old gravel boat ramp that’s not used much anymore. No sign of Al himself. Never has been any sign. Ned Prescott and the others I call ‘town elders’ decided that Al had just gone away, maybe faking a suicide to cover his trail. Other people think he’s in the lake. These cold mountain lakes, they don’t give up their bodies so easy.”

“What do you think, Ben?” Ella asked.

Travois drank off his beer with a flourish. “I think if the referendum fails and they have to lower the lake as much as they’re saying, we may see Al again.”

 

It wasn’t that late when we got back to the Saddle Inn, but Ella said good night immediately. I’d felt all day that I’d been pushing my luck with her, so I didn’t argue. I did unlock my side of the connecting door, in case trouble visited us in the night. And I placed my gun on the nightstand. Then I settled in to watch my room’s television, a portable with weak vertical hold that could just pick up a single San Bernardino station.

A little after ten, the deadbolt snapped back on Ella’s side of the connecting door. I was reaching for the thirty-eight when the door opened, revealing Ella, wearing only her blue blouse, and that buttoned in the Sugar Stapert manner.

For a moment, she just stood in the doorway. Then she said, “A screenwriter friend of mine once told me that if your plot hits a dead-end, you should have a man enter carrying a gun.”

“I like your approach better,” I said.