THE VOICE CAME OUT of the ceiling. “In here, Easy.”
Easy looked across the empty recording studio at the glass window of the engineer’s booth. Gary Marks was sitting in there alone.
Despite air conditioning the smell of cigarette smoke lingered in the empty room. Three pages of loose script, a purple ditto copy, lay scattered on the thick gray rug. A half-eaten apple rested in a glass ashtray atop a mound of cigarette ends.
Easy climbed the two padded steps and pulled open the booth door.
Gary was sitting in a tube chair, a reel of recording tape in his lap. He was taking an uneasy drag on a cigarette. “Started smoking again this afternoon,” he said. “Settles my nerves. I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t. We went ahead and did the dog food spots. Selfish of me. Not for the money involved, but I mean I did them to give me something to fill the hours with. Maybe we should have closed up shop.”
“People mourn in different ways.” Easy sat in the engineer’s chair.
“You … didn’t see Sandy?”
“No, they’ve got him in the morgue at San Amaro.”
“I know. I put Marlis to trying to work out some kind of funeral arrangements,” said Gary, inhaling some smoke. “Sandy’s folks are dead … I understand we can’t have … can’t bury him yet anyway.”
“The cops’ll give the body back when they’re finished.”
“My father died and I never broke down,” said Gary. “Now Sandy and I still can’t … you saw Ellen, though?”
“Yeah.”
“My time in the army … I never went anywhere except up to Ord and then to Kentucky. I never saw anybody dead or anything. Except for one poor bastard who had a truck flip over on him. But I’ve never seen that many dead people.”
“It’s nothing you have to keep score on.”
Gary looked at the cigarette, watching the smoke curl out of it. “Guy who used to do some copy for us, he was only forty-seven. Went into the hospital one day with this fever and never came out. Turned out he had cancer, didn’t even know it. He was dead in four days. Jesus.” He stubbed the butt out on a bright silver leg of his chair. “It’s right on top of you all the time, isn’t it? You can die any time.”
“What happened to Feller and his wife wasn’t an unexpected accident,” said Easy. “What happened to them happened because other things happened first.”
“It all ties in with my dad, you mean?”
“With the money he left buried out at the Thorpe Ranch.”
“I don’t … you think Sandy found that money?”
“No.”
“But … you think he was the one who was out there doing the digging last night?”
“Yeah,” answered Easy. “Feller figured out that message faster than you did. He recognized it as tying in with your father’s archeology hobby, and he must have thought of that stone angel right off. It could be he remembered something, something from the days when you all used to hang around there, you and Danny and your sister and Bill Goffman.”
“Sandy came out to the ranch a lot.” A pack of cigarettes sat on the control panel next to the turntable. He picked it up, shook out a new cigarette. “He was sort of interested in Gay there for a while, but nothing happened ever.” After lighting the cigarette with a paper match, he said, “That’s a lot of digging to do by yourself.”
“He thought there was a million bucks down in the ground,” said Easy. “He must have snuck in there after dark and got the squares laid out. Then he got to digging.”
“Those kids are pretty rough about strangers.”
“At night they let the dogs do most of the policing.”
“The dog who got hurt … Sandy did that?”
“Yeah, he did.”
“That’s not like him.”
“A million dollars can change your character some,” Easy said.
“You know, I told Sandy if I found the money I was going to give it over to the authorities. He said he thought that was a good idea.” He sighed out smoke. “I guess he really didn’t … Wait a minute, though. You said he thought the money was there. Wasn’t it?”
“Once, not lately.”
“But … you thought it was going to be there, too.”
“Until I saw that piece of bone,” said Easy. “Do you know where Danny is?”
“I don’t understand about the bones … was someone …?”
“Do you know where she is?”
Gary puffed at his cigarette. “Playing games someplace.”
“What’s that mean?”
“She called me here an hour or so ago,” answered Gary. “While I was right in the middle of taping the last spot. Told Marlis it was urgent and got the booth number here. She’s got a great flair for dramatizing herself. Used to phone me at my place at all hours. She’d say she was hiding at Marineland from her husband and could I meet her. Or she only had a minute to talk before …”
“What did she say this time?”
“That she missed me and wanted to see me. But that they’d taken her away from San Amaro.”
“To where?”
“Where’d they take her? I don’t know,” he said. “I … I hung up on her. I don’t know … with everything that’s happened, and the way she just left me to get carried off by Chatto. I’ve been thinking … I don’t know. I hung up on her.”
Easy leaned toward him. “I want to talk to her. Did she say anything to give you any idea where they’d taken her?”
Gary rubbed his forehead with the hand holding the cigarette. “She said … she said in spite of all the phony quaintness there was a phone there. She managed to sneak away by pretending to go to the john and she found a phone which had been put in for the workmen. I thought she was simply making something up, playing a game again. You think she’s in trouble?”
“Could it be their hunting lodge in Russian River? Workmen might mean Goffman’s having it rebuilt.”
“No, they haven’t even started doing anything on the lodge yet.” He bit his lip, eyes half closing. “Quaintness … sure, it must be the park.”
“What park?”
“A year or so ago Goffman decided to build an amusement park, aimed at kids, in the Disneyland vein though much less ambitious,” replied Gary. “I think it’s supposed to recreate various periods of the past … you know, colonial times, the Civil War era, the Nineties.”
“Is it in operation?”
“No; about three months back, old Goffman halted the whole project, needed to throw dough into another area for awhile.”
“Where is the park?”
“Out around San Bernardino somewhere, near an area called Coulson Woods.”
Easy got up. “If she calls again, find out exactly where she is.”
Gary stood, too. “She really is in some kind of danger?”
Easy left without answering him.