Bill Pronzini - Zigzag

From the casino Mears and Seldon followed Melanie to the motel where she was staying, abducted her late-night with their faces masked, took her to Mears’ isolated property in the hills, and held her there blindfolded and drugged under Seldon’s guard. Vernon Holloway agreed to the ransom demand, believing Mears’ telephone threats to kill his daughter if he failed to follow instructions to the letter. After pulling the cash together, he drove to a midnight rendezvous on a backcountry road in West Marin and delivered it to a masked Mears, who subsequently released the girl. Holloway continued to keep everything under wraps, for his own sake as well as that of his severely traumatized daughter, and saw to it she did likewise by orchestrating the dramatic change in her lifestyle.

An attack of conscience during the planning stages of the snatch was the cause of Fentress’ heavy drinking. The night of Melanie’s abduction was the night he’d had his run-in with the San Francisco cops, his panic reaction the result of too much alcohol after leaving the Graton Casino and fear that the kidnapping scheme had gone awry and his part in it had been discovered. To ensure that he kept his mouth shut, Mears got word to him that the ransom had been paid and the girl released unharmed, and that Fentress’ share would be waiting when he’d served his time.

Any of a score of things could have and should have blown up the whole crazy scheme while it was going down. During the eighteen months Fentress was at Mule Creek, too, Mears continuing to risk growing and selling marijuana while sitting on a quarter-of-a-million-dollar stash, for one. Pretty amazing, when you looked at it objectively, that the unraveling hadn’t begun until Mears incurred Seldon’s hatred by refusing her her share of the ransom and then beating her up.

Being the type of woman who needed a man, she hooked up with Orcutt and then blabbed to him about the kidnapping and the ransom money. Why settle for a half share when they could have it all? Orcutt’s idea, so she claimed. So once again half a dozen brain cells conjoined in a witless plan, this one to hijack the $250,000 when the time came for the split.

I believed Seldon’s version of what had gone down at Mears’ cabin that night. She arranged for Fentress to pick her up in Monte Rio; that was why he’d written down her address and “7:00 Mon.” (He must have later memorized them or I would not have found the paper in his coat pocket). Orcutt, meanwhile, drove up there in his pickup and hid it in the trees near the access lane, guzzling scotch while he waited to nerve up to what lay ahead. When Seldon and Fentress showed, he followed them on foot, armed with the Saturday night special and wearing thin rubber gloves. He circled around through the trees to approach the cabin from the side away from where the dog was chained, then eased up to the front window. A couple of quick looks inside told him when Mears produced the satchel full of ransom money and emptied it onto the table. Then Orcutt had busted in and held Mears and Fentress at gunpoint.

Seldon knew where Mears kept his.45; she fetched it, turned it over to Orcutt, then gathered up the money. Her story was that Orcutt ordered her to wait outside; more likely she’d made a quick exit on her own so she wouldn’t have to watch the wet work. Orcutt claimed Mears tried to jump him and he acted in self-defense, but I figured that was bullcrap. He shot Mears in cold blood with the Saturday night special, switched guns or fired the automatic left-handed and killed a terrified Fentress. Then he went outside and blew away the Doberman so he could get inside the shed.

In the cabin again, he created the rest of the illusion of a marijuana deal gone bad. He planted some of the dope on Fentress, put the Saturday night special into Fentress’ dead hand and his own hand over it, and fired a few wild shots. And did the same with Mears and the.45. Pretty weak stage setting, all things considered, but it had held up because there seemed to be no other plausible reason for the carnage.

Afterward Seldon and Orcutt went to his apartment, where according to her he finished off the bottle of scotch. That explained his nervous hangover when I interviewed him at Rio Verdi Propane the next day.

As for the ransom money, Seldon and Orcutt had in fact split it up that night, even though their plan was to run off together. Half of it turned up in her Ford, the other half in the duffel bag in his pickup. There was not much doubt in my mind that if they’d managed to get away with the cash, some dark night one of them would have ended up dead and the entire boodle in the greedy clutches of the other.

Some pack of pea-brained thieves and murderers. Some towering monument to stupidity.

You’d think Vernon Holloway would have been happy that his daughter’s kidnappers were identified and punished and to have the entire $250,000 returned to him. But from all indications he wasn’t. He continued to make a concerted effort to keep the lid screwed down tight on the abduction, but of course it leaked out anyway. There was something of a media swarm, during which I was outed as the principal catalyst, so Holloway was well aware of the extent of my involvement. I neither expected nor received an expression of gratitude from him; I never heard from him at all, or from anybody connected with him.

The silence was welcome. The less contact I have with the one-percenters, the better.

The hardest thing I had to do was tell Doreen Fentress the truth about her husband, why and how he’d died. She took it better than I’d expected, dry-eyed despite the obvious pain it gave her; if she had any tears left, she would shed them in private.

“It’s terrible, what Ray did,” she said, “but even so he wasn’t a bad man. Just easily led. And he wanted that farm so much.”

Excuses, I thought. But I didn’t say so.

“At least now I know he wasn’t a murderer. That’s something to be grateful for.”

I supposed it was. He hadn’t left her anything else to be grateful for, had he?

He was sitting on one of the anteroom chairs when I came into the agency that morning. A rather shabbily dressed black man well up in his seventies, thin and on the frail side, with a mostly hairless, liver-spotted scalp, rheumy eyes, a long ridged upper lip, and the kind of slumped posture and pain-etched features that indicate failing health. At first glance you might have taken him for one of San Francisco’s legion of homeless street people, but only at first glance. His jacket and slacks were frayed and threadbare, but clean, he wore a tie over a patterned shirt, and his seamed cheeks looked freshly shaven. On his lap were an old brown hat with a faded red band that might once have had a feather stuck in it, and a battered case the size and shape of a trumpet. I had never seen him before.

The door to Tamara’s office was open and I could hear her rattling around in the back alcove where we kept a hot plate. Getting coffee for herself and the visitor, I thought.

“Morning,” I said to him.

“Mornin’.” His voice had traces of a southern accent and was stronger than the rest of him looked, with a gravelly quality that made me think of Louis Armstrong. “You Miz Corbin’s partner?”

“That’s me.” I added my name to confirm it.

He said his name was Charles Anthony Brown, and we shook hands. His palm was so dry it had the feel of fine-grain sandpaper. “Heard of you,” he said, then, “what you and Miz Corbin willin’ to do for poor folks. That’s why I come here. Times, they sure do change.”

I didn’t need to ask him what he meant by the first and last statements. The first referred to the advertised fact that we took on pro bono cases now and then, mainly for minorities who otherwise couldn’t afford detective services — an estimable idea of Tamara’s when the agency began to prosper under her direction. The second referred to our partnership — computer-savvy, street-savvy black woman in her late twenties, old-school white guy with forty-plus of his sixty-five years in law enforcement and detective work. It was the kind of alliance that would not have been possible back when Charles Anthony Brown was young, particularly if he was originally from south of the Mason-Dixon line.