Bill Pronzini - Zigzag

The officer in charge, a county sheriff’s department lieutenant named Heidegger, came around and finally told me I was free to leave. He’d been brusquely efficient in his questioning earlier, but now he just seemed solemn and tired. He was about fifty, thick bodied, square shouldered — a career law officer who’d evidently dealt with as much if not more violence than I had and almost but not quite become inured to it.

“Regular shooting gallery in there,” he said. “We counted nine rounds fired, four hits and five misses.”

“Gunslingers,” I said.

“Yeah. One of the dead guys is Floyd Mears. I guess you figured that. The other, according to the wallet we found on him, is Ray Fentress, F-e-n-t-r-e-s-s, address in your city. Name mean anything to you?”

“Ray Fentress. No.”

“And you’d never seen him before?”

“Never saw either of them before.”

“Reason I asked is that I called in for a computer check on the name and he’s an ex-con, less than a week out of Mule Creek after doing eighteen months on an assault conviction.” Mule Creek was a minimum-security prison in Ione, up in the foothills east of Sacramento. “What I can’t figure is why he’d come all the way up here to buy dope from a small-timer like Mears.”

“Some past tie between them, maybe.”

“Sure, but why come armed? Why deal with a man, even one you knew personally, if you thought you needed self-protection?”

“Self-protection might not be the reason.”

“Robbery?”

“Could be, if there was a lot of cannabis and money at stake.”

“But there wasn’t,” Heidegger said. “Not that we’ve been able to find. Just a small amount of weed in one of Fentress’ pockets, couldn’t be worth more than a few hundred dollars at street prices, and a stash in Mears’ bedroom worth about the same. And less than seventy-five dollars cash total on the two of them, their vehicles, and the premises.”

“Well, the get-together last night could’ve been to set up a deal for later, and for some reason it went prematurely sour.”

“That’s a possibility.”

“I can think of another explanation,” I said. “Third party involved. Somebody who shot both men and then the dog for however much dope was stored in the shed.”

“Yeah, that occurred to me, too,” Heidegger said. “But there doesn’t seem to be much doubt that Mears and Fentress blew each other away, and unless we find out Mears’ cottage industry was a lot bigger than what’s in that shed, there wouldn’t have been enough weed or cash to make anybody in his right mind commit homicide.”

“Then who shot the Doberman? And why? And when?”

“Fentress, so he could get into the shed to get the dope we found on him. Mears came home and caught him, Fentress threw down on him, they went into the cabin to talk things over—”

“—and Mears pulled his piece and the shooting started. Makes sense, I guess.”

“As much as any other explanation,” Heidegger said. “I’ll tell you, I hate complicated crimes. I sure hope this one turns out to be just what it looks like.” He sighed heavily. “None of your worry in any case. I’ll need a written statement from you, but we can do that by fax. Unless your accident investigation brings you back up to the county in the near future.”

“Doesn’t look as though it will, now.”

And finally I was out of there for the long drive home.

I faxed my statement to the Sonoma County sheriff’s department the following day, and that should have been the end of my involvement. But it wasn’t. The world is a sometimes strange and perverse place, as we all know from experience, and my profession occasionally fraught with the kind of unforeseen twists that had led me to Floyd Mears in the first place.

It was nearly three days before I found this out. Little enough happened during those sixty-some hours. I wrote and delivered the deposition, then wrote and delivered my report to our client, the attorney representing Arthur Clements, in which I provided a brief explanation of how I’d learned of the now-dead third witness to the Rio Verdi accident and what had transpired afterward. All that remained of that case would be delivery of subpoenas to George Orcutt and Earline Blunt once the trial date was set, should the attorney decide to utilize us for the task. Probably not, though; independent process servers come cheaper than a small but upscale private agency.

There were no new developments in the double homicide. Tamara followed the news stories on the Internet and gave me capsule summaries; I have a long-standing aversion to daily doses of current events in the media, crime news in particular, and so actively avoid reading both newspapers and online news sites. There was additional proof, though not conclusive proof, that Floyd Mears and Ray Fentress had shot each other during an argument over money or marijuana or both: the Saturday night special in Fentress’ hand had done for both Mears and the Doberman, the.45 by Mears’ body had taken out Fentress, and nitrate tests confirmed that both men had discharged firearms. Lieutenant Heidegger hadn’t yet ruled out the possibility of a third party as either shooter or thief; however, the investigation was ongoing.

As for criminal records, Mears had none of any kind and the assault conviction that had landed Fentress in Mule Creek for eighteen months was his only offense and had nothing to do with drugs. He’d been spotted speeding on Mission Street not far from his Excelsior District home, for some reason tried to outrun the police cruiser and sideswiped two parked cars, and then stupidly resisted arrest by assaulting one of the officers and breaking his arm in the ensuing struggle. Fentress’ blood alcohol level was 0.28, well over the legal limit. As a first-time offender he might have been given a lighter or even a suspended sentence at his trial, but he’d had the misfortune to draw an inexperienced public defender and a hard-nosed judge. Fentress’ refusal to provide a satisfactory explanation for his panicked behavior also mitigated against leniency.

How Fentress and Mears had come in contact was a mystery. Nothing had turned up to indicate they’d known each other prior to that night, or linking them in any other way. Fentress’ wife had no idea and in fact vehemently denied that her husband was in any way involved with marijuana. Based on his photograph, nobody in the Russian River area owned up to having seen him before. A couple of Rio Verdi residents admitted to having heard rumors that Mears grew and sold pot to a carefully selected group of local customers. Who those customers were they couldn’t or wouldn’t say.

All pretty standard stuff, at least on the surface. Ex-con is released from prison, gets a dealer’s name somewhere, goes off to make a buy, there’s trouble over price or amount, and both men end up dead. Still, there were a lot of unanswered questions. The ones Heidegger and I had discussed. And others: Why would Fentress have driven all the way up to the Russian River to make a buy, even if he knew Mears, when you can score pot on just about any street corner in San Francisco? Why had he taken a gun with him? Protection? To rip off Mears? Neither of those answers seemed likely: small-time dealer, relatively small amounts of weed, no large amount of cash on the premises, and Fentress had no record of violent crime other than his drunken assault on the cop. Before that Fentress had worked for a Millbrae-based landscaping firm — from all indications, just another average law-abiding citizen.

The media played up the mystery angle a bit, especially in Sonoma County, but there wasn’t enough juice for the story to have legs. It was already beginning to fade under the weight of more sensational news by the morning of the third day. Fading in my mind, too, by force of will as much as anything else. Too many crime scenes, too much blood and gore for me to dwell on it as it was.