“VERY NICE.” FARNSWORTH’S PLUMP face registered a small, mock-cherubic smile. With a fat forefinger he pushed Bernhardt’s plastic identification plaque across the desk. Next he allowed himself the pleasure of staring at the visitor until, finally, the man from San Francisco frowned, looked briefly away, began to shift uncomfortably in the office’s only visitors’ chair. Yes, he’d been right about Bernhardt. A Jew, unmistakably. The face was dark and lean and hollowed out, a Semitic face, beyond all doubt. Dark, thick, half-long hair, flecked with gray. And, yes, the aviator glasses, the intellectual’s trademark, a dead giveaway.
“So what can I do for you, Mr. Bernhardt?” Farnsworth pushed his swivel chair back from his oversize desk, braced one foot on an open desk drawer, tilted the chair back, clasped his pudgy hands comfortably across the mound of his stomach. “I’ve been thinking about what you said on the phone. When was that? Monday?”
“Yes. Monday.”
“And you were asking about Jeff Weston, about how we’re handling the case. Is that right?”
“Yes. You see, I wanted to know whether—”
“Wait.” Farnsworth held up a peremptory hand. “I’ll ask the questions.” Once more, coldly, he stared at the other man until, yes, control was achieved. “Okay?”
Gracelessly, Bernhardt was nodding. “Fine.” It was a hard, clipped monosyllable. Behind the aviator glasses, brown eyes snapped. Would Bernhardt be more troublesome than he’d first appeared?
“You said on the phone that Daniels was involved. What’d you mean by that?”
“Before I answer, I’d like to know—”
“Ah-ah.” Farnsworth raised a forefinger, naughty, naughty. “You’re forgetting again.”
Jaw tightly clenched, eyes still snapping angrily, the other man drew a long, grim breath. “Sorry.”
“Daniels,” Farnsworth prodded gently. “Start with Daniels.” Complacently, he watched the other man as he struggled so obviously to get a grip on his temper. Finally, tight-jawed, Bernhardt began to speak:
“On Sunday, July fifteenth, Diane Cutler drove up to Cape Cod from New York. She got here about ten at night. She connected with Jeff Weston at a bar called”—Bernhardt drew a folded sheet of paper from an inside pocket, glanced at it—“called Tim’s Place. Then they took a drive in Diane’s dark-green BMW.”
“Ah.” Farnsworth nodded. “The girl with the BMW. Right.”
“They apparently ended up at the Danielses beach house,” Bernhardt said. “As I understand it, they’d been drinking, and they’d smoked some grass. They’d probably popped a few pills, too. So they were high, and they decided to spy on Daniels. That was probably about midnight. And they saw Daniels carry something out to his car”—he glanced again at the notes—“a Jeep Cherokee. They thought it was a body, wrapped in a rug, or a blanket.”
“They thought, you say. They weren’t sure.”
“When I talked to Diane, she was sure.”
Farnsworth snorted. “It sounds like she could’ve been hallucinating.”
“She could’ve been imagining the body, I suppose. But it’s hard to imagine Preston Daniels deciding at midnight to move a rug. Besides, he took a shovel with him, in the back of the Jeep. And, furthermore, Diane saw a hand and an arm, that worked free.”
“Or so she imagined.” Farnsworth’s voice was flat, his eyes expressionless.
“We’ll never know whether it was imagination or not. There were only two witnesses. Diane and Jeff. Jeff’s dead. And now Diane’s dead.”
“Meaning,” Farnsworth said, “that all I’ve got is a secondhand story, which you probably know is worth about as much as a pitcher of warm spit, in a court of law.”
“I’m telling you exactly what Diane told me.”
“Did she ever tell her story to a policeman?”
“Not that I know of.”
Signifying that the answer was a foregone conclusion, Farnsworth grunted. Saying: “Let’s get back to Daniels. What happened after Daniels put the, ah, bundle into his car?”
“And the shovel,” Bernhardt insisted. “Don’t forget the shovel.”
“The shovel.” Broadly, Farnsworth nodded. “So noted.”
“After he’d done that,” Bernhardt said, “then he drove out to the landfill, east of town. The one with the cyclone fence around it.”
“The landfill …” As Farnsworth said it, images began to materialize: Preston Daniels, digging a shallow grave, bent to his task beneath the night sky like some common laborer. Preston Daniels, tumbling the body into the grave.
Carolyn Estes, beyond all doubt.
Carolyn Estes, dead and buried on the night of Sunday, July fifteenth. Dump trucks, coming and going the next day, and the next, and the next, each truck creating its own mound of dirt and construction debris, mound after mound after mound. Followed by the bulldozers, leveling it all out so the process could begin again. And again. And again.
Carolyn Estes, one of Preston Daniels’s blondes.
Carolyn Estes …
As if the name had taken control, Farnsworth found himself staring fixedly at the bottom drawer of a nearby file cabinet. In that drawer, he knew, in the missing-persons file folder, was the bulletin on Carolyn Estes.
As if someone else were talking—as if someone else had made the decision—he heard himself saying, “And then what?” Conscious of the effort required, he turned his gaze from the file cabinet to the face of Alan Bernhardt, the skinny, sad-eyed Jew who talked like a professor—and who was forcing choices that could change a whole life.
“Then,” Bernhardt was saying, “the next night, Jeff Weston was killed. And Diane thinks—”
“Wait. Wait.” Farnsworth raised both hands, exasperated. “Let’s go back to the goddamn landfill. What happened next, at the landfill?”
“Apparently there’s only one way in, and Diane didn’t want to get trapped inside. Anyhow, they—”
“Or maybe they were still spaced out.”
Impatiently, Bernhardt nodded. “That, too.”
“Okay. Go ahead. What happened next?”
“They went to a motel, Sunday night.”
“A local motel?”
“Yes.”
“About what time?”
“That would’ve been about one o’clock in the morning, I’d guess. Maybe one-thirty.”
“Monday morning.”
Bernhardt nodded. “Right. Monday. Later that day, Diane drove back to New York. Whereupon she apparently had a fight with her parents—her mother and Daniels. That was about five o’clock Monday evening. So she got back in her car, and drove up here.”
“To Carter’s Landing?”
Bernhardt nodded. “Right. She got here at about eleven o’clock Monday night. And that’s when she discovered that Jeff Weston had been killed. She was sure—absolutely sure—that Daniels had Weston killed to prevent him from talking about the murder of the girl. Maybe he’d tried to blackmail Daniels. It’d make sense.”
“Did she have any idea who killed Weston?”
“No, not then. Later, though, she thought it could’ve been Bruce Kane. Daniels’s pilot.” Plainly watching for a reaction, Bernhardt was eyeing him closely. As if to carefully consider the private detective’s statement, Farnsworth nodded judiciously, then frowned as he allowed his gaze to wander away. “Did she have any proof?” he asked. “Or was she just guessing?”
“Kane followed Diane to San Francisco. He talked to her, made some kind of an oblique offer that could’ve been the first move in a blackmail try. At least, that’s how Diane interpreted it. Then, the night she died, Kane tried to attack her. That’s why she OD’d, that was the trigger.”
“Will I find that in the San Francisco police computer? Is there a police report describing the attack on Diane?”
“No, there isn’t. But I had an—an associate, guarding Diane, staking out her apartment. And she saw Kane trying to—”
“Wait a minute.” Farnsworth frowned. “This associate of yours. Was that a woman?”
Obviously irritated by the question, Bernhardt nodded. “Right. A woman.” His stare was defiant, belligerent.
“A woman. Hmm.” Farnsworth lowered his feet to the floor, returned his swivel chair to its upright position. “Okay. Go ahead.”
“Before I do,” Bernhardt said, “I’d like to ask you how Jeff Weston was killed.”
“Why’re you asking?”
“Because,” Bernhardt said, “Kane had a club in his hand when he went after Diane. Diane saw the club, and so did my associate.”
“Your lady associate.”
“Listen—” It was a tight, grim-faced challenge, a warning of worse to come. “Forget about whether it was a man or a woman. We’ve got three people dead, for God’s sake. What difference does it make whether I hire men or women? The fact is—the truth is—that if my associate hadn’t yelled when she did, Diane Cutler would probably have been killed. Just like Jeff Weston was killed.”
Farnsworth decided to smile: a resigned, world-weary smile. “You say ‘probably.’ And that’s the problem with this. It all comes down to whether we believe what a drugged-out girl told you. Isn’t that about it?” He let the smile fade as he consulted his watch.
Bernhardt sat motionless for a moment, his face registering a slowly gathering contempt. Finally: “I suppose it’s useless for me to ask whether you have any information suggesting that, in fact, a girl’s body was buried the night of July fifteenth in the landfill site about five miles northeast of Carter’s Landing.”
As Farnsworth listened to the precisely worded statement, an uneasy suspicion intruded. Was it possible that Bernhardt was wearing a wire? Was it possible—even likely—that Bernhardt was a shill, a stalking horse, perhaps for the state attorney?
At the thought, Farnsworth began levering himself to a standing position, looking down on the man from San Francisco.
“You’re right, Bernhardt. It’s absolutely useless.”