Bill Pronzini - Zigzag

So he must have pocketed the paper the one time he’d worn the coat last week. And the occasion hadn’t been to see Joe Buckner, I was thinking; it had been the day he’d met with the woman named Mary.

“Old Wood Road,” Mrs. Fentress said. She was still peering at the paper. “I have no idea where that is.”

Sonoma County, the Russian River resort area. MR. Mary something? Or the name of a town — Monte Rio?

“Are you sure that’s a W and not an H ?” I asked her.

“I think so. Ray always wrote such a poor hand.”

“What about the numbers? Three-five-seven or five-five-seven?”

“The first one looks like a five. Five-five-seven.”

“I’ll keep this if it’s all right with you.”

“Yes, of course.”

With my pen I wrote “557” and “Wood” below the smudged address, then folded the paper and slipped it inside my notebook.

There was nothing else for me to look at, and no more questions to ask Mrs. Fentress. The atmosphere in the small house, with its odors of lemon and dog, its almost palpable aura of grief and loneliness and shattered lives, had grown oppressive. It made me eager to get out of there, which I did as quickly as I could manage it.

It also made me even more determined to stay with this investigation as long as I possibly could. I seemed to be the only one besides Tina capable of giving Doreen Fentress something to make her empty life just a little more tolerable.

I gave Tamara the paper from Ray Fentress’ jacket as soon as I came into the agency the next morning. While she was running a trace on the address, I put in a call to Lieutenant Heidegger at the Sonoma County sheriff’s department. He wasn’t in, and the officer I spoke to didn’t know when Heidegger would return. Just as well. I really had nothing definite to report that he needed to know. Courtesy call, more than anything else at this point, to maintain the cordial relationship.

It was another fifteen minutes before Tamara came into my office, a little longer than it usually takes her to track down a location. “It’s Monte Rio, all right,” she said. “Five-five-seven Old Wood Road. Single occupant, a woman named Marie Seldon.”

“Marie, not Mary?”

“Definitely Marie.”

So either Joe Buckner had misheard the blonde’s name or Fentress had deliberately mispronounced it.

“Ties to Floyd Mears as well as to Fentress,” Tamara said. “She’s the girlfriend Mears beat up five months ago. One of her neighbors heard them fighting and called the law when she started screaming. She had to have medical attention but still refused to file a complaint.”

“She stay with him after that?”

“If she did, she’s crazy. Any man smacked me around, I’d dump him faster than a sack of garbage.”

“How long were she and Mears hooked up?”

“Three years, according to the sheriff’s report.”

“So they were together when Fentress got himself in trouble with the law,” I said. “It’s probable he met her through Mears.”

“Right.”

“And if she broke up with Mears after the beating, it seems unlikely she was acting as an intermediary for him when she and Fentress got together last week.”

“Unless they got back together again. No record of it, if so.”

“In any event, who arranged the meeting, her or Fentress? And why? Another thing: Monday was the day of the shootings and seven p.m. could’ve been the time of the meeting at Mears’ cabin. But then why did he have her home address written down?”

“You could ask her, see what she has to say. Or notify Lieutenant Heidegger and let him talk to her.”

I thought it over. “Better me at this point,” I decided. “The connections are still too tenuous to have any direct bearing on the official version of what happened at the cabin. If I can’t get anything out of Seldon, then I’ll go to Heidegger.”

“Long drive up to Monte Rio.”

“I don’t have anything better to do today. There anything else I should know about Seldon before I leave?”

The answer to that was nothing much. Born in Cloverdale; married a Guerneville resident at eighteen and moved there with him; stayed in the Russian River area after they were divorced five years later. No children. Clean slate as far as any other encounters with the law went. Employed for the past three years at a place called Millie’s Gifts and Sportswear in Guerneville. Maintained a low profile for personal or financial reasons: no social media or e-mail accounts. No phone company account, either; if she used a cell phone, it was one of those prepaid jobs.

Tamara said, “There is one other thing I found out — not about Seldon, about Vernon Holloway. Might mean something, might not. Right around the time Melanie Joy disappeared, he sold off a chunk of his stock holdings — fast, over a couple of days. Strapped for ready cash, evidently, and in need of a large wad.”

“How large?”

“Six figures.”

“Why did he need so much cash in a hurry?”

“That I couldn’t find out. Might’ve been an under-the-table business deal, the kind that doesn’t leave a paper trail. Some of these rich dudes operate that way when they figure they can get away with it.”

“Does Holloway have a history of that kind of dealing?”

“Hard to tell for sure without some major hacking, the quasi-legal kind. If he played that game before, it was spread out over a longer period of time. Easier for his accountants to cover it up that way.”

“So his need for cash could’ve had something to do with his daughter,” I said. “But not to pay off gambling debts. No casino in the world would allow a twenty-two-year-old to run up six figures’ worth of losses, no matter what her pedigree.”

“How else could it tie in?”

“To her? To Fentress and Mears?” I shook my head. “Maybe I can get a clue from Marie Seldon.”

On the drive north across the Golden Gate Bridge, I tried again to make some cohesive sense of what I’d learned so far. I went over all the pieces, one by one. At first I couldn’t put them together to form a pattern, but the more I shuffled them around, the more they began to interlock. Not all, but enough to shape an outline.

I played around with the idea all the way to the Russian River, shuffling and reshuffling, finding holes the way I had with the robbery theory and then either filling or discounting them. The upshot of all the mental gymnastics was a concept that was credible, if complicated and grim and not a little cold-blooded. I did not have enough information yet to be sure, but if the answers to a few more questions jigsawed into the pattern then I’d know.

I half-hoped I was wrong in my figuring. If I was on the right track, it would make Heidegger and some other people happy, but not me.

And not Doreen Fentress.

It was raining in Guerneville. The day had been overcast and dry in the city, but up here in redwood country there was more precipitation because most coastal storms, light and heavy both, came in off the Pacific or down from Canada and Alaska. Sixty-plus miles made a considerable difference in weather patterns, inclement and clement.

The cloud ceiling hung low, the downpour light but steady, so that the riverside community seemed to be huddled bleakly under a wet gray blanket. There wasn’t much traffic and I had no trouble finding Millie’s Gifts and Sportswear; the shop was on River Road, just beyond the turnoff that led to Armstrong Redwoods State Natural Reserve, in an old building with a prominent sign above the entrance.

There was a parking place a couple of doors down, a good thing, because I hadn’t brought an umbrella. The shop was open, testimony to the owner’s optimistic nature; at this time of year and in weather like this there weren’t going to be many customers interested in local arts and crafts and an array of inexpensive sportswear, T-shirts and sweatshirts, and low-end gift items. The only person present when I walked in was a middle-aged woman with a hairdo so weird, at least in my experience, that I couldn’t help staring at it. Short, lemony-blond hair topped by a pelt of shoe-polish-black hair, so that it looked as though some sort of amoebalike creature was clinging to the crown of her head.