Дэвид Балдаччи - A Gambling Man

Dash stroked his chin. “What you say makes perfect sense, only some coppers have never quite grasped that concept. So you found Fraser dead, but no sign of anyone having been in her place.”

“Right.”

“Okay, you called the cops. Then what?”

“I went back to the boardinghouse where I’m staying.”

“And then?”

“I went to sleep.”

“I thought you said you had a late night. Hell, when I was your age, late to me was the next morning. But you got up and came here in the afternoon ? So that was what, about thirteen hours’ worth of shut-eye?”

Dash stopped talking and eyeballed him in a way that was making Archer wish he’d driven through Bay Town and kept going right into the ocean.

“Before you say anything, Archer, keep in mind that if you lie to me, and I’ll know if you are, you’re fired.”

“I couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk and ended up at a diner, where I saw Mrs. Kemper.”

“What time was this?”

“Around three in the morning.”

“What was Beth Kemper doing at a diner at three a.m.?”

“Having a cup of coffee and a cigarette. She said she has a place to stay in town, had it before she was married. So I don’t think she went back up the mountain last night.”

“How did you get home? Walk?”

“She gave me a lift. Let me check my notes.” He pulled out his pad and consulted the pages, while Dash watched him with grudging approval.

“She said her old man told her about Ruby. I told her she might be a suspect, since Fraser might have been sleeping with her husband and they might assume she knew about it. But she said she had an alibi.”

“What was it?” asked Dash sharply.

“She was at dinner with friends from five to midnight. She wouldn’t tell me who with. She doesn’t know where her husband was during that time. When I went over to his office to get the list, I don’t think he was there.”

“You found Ruby’s body when exactly?”

“Ten minutes to twelve. I looked at my watch. One more thing — Ruby died from someone almost cutting her head off. But there was no blood around the body.”

“Meaning she was killed elsewhere. Did you check out her rooms?”

“There was nothing anywhere. So she was killed somewhere else and her body carried to her room. Tell me how the hell does somebody not see that.”

Dash took this all in and then focused on Archer’s facial injuries. “Who beat you up?”

“Right. Forgot about that. Armstrong’s boys did the pummeling. He was at Midnight Moods. He wanted to hire us to find out the truth behind the blackmail. I told him I’d have to take that up with you and that we already had a client paying us for pretty much the same thing. He didn’t like it that we went to talk to his daughter. He made me show him the list of suspects I got from Wilson Sheen. And maybe I said some things they didn’t like, and fists started flying and we got into it.”

“For starters, Archer, Douglas Kemper did not hire us to find the truth. I’m not sure what he did hire us to do, but I’m certain it wasn’t that.”

“Okay, but I also told Beth that her husband would be a suspect. She didn’t know if he had an alibi or not.”

“Oh, so it’s Beth now?”

“We had a cup of coffee last night. I saved her from a trio of punks. She was grateful.”

“I bet she was. Only you don’t want that kind of gratitude. And how does anyone know they have an alibi if no one knows when the woman was killed?”

“Beth said the police do. Her old man told her so.”

“Sawyer Armstrong told her when? You found the body at 11:50. You called the cops. They came while you hightailed it. You said Beth was at a dinner until midnight. Then she left, went somewhere, and then ended up in the diner at three a.m. So when did Armstrong tell her? And when and how did he find out?”

Despite the risk, Archer could not bring himself to tell Dash about seeing Kemper and her father together down near the wharf, when Sawyer Armstrong might very well have told his daughter about Ruby Fraser. “I don’t know. Maybe he phoned her. And she said he’s friends with Carl Pickett, the chief of police.”

Dash sat back and mulled over this. “That could be. Carl Pickett is as big a brown-noser as they come. But why would he give Armstrong the heads-up about Ruby?”

“He might if he knew there was a connection between Ruby and Douglas Kemper.”

Dash put out a hand. “Let me see the list Wilson Sheen gave you.”

Archer handed it across, and Dash ran his eye down the page.

“I don’t see much here, Archer. Looks to me more like a keep-us-busy list.”

“So they want to keep us busy so we won’t look where we’re really supposed to look? This is a funny town.”

“And getting funnier by the minute. Let’s take a walk.”

The sun was shining, and the breakers could be clearly heard. What looked to be a golden eagle soared above them with dizzying grace and power, while a black and white osprey spread its wings in another part of the sky and abruptly changed its vector to the oceanside as the bird no doubt went in search of lunch.

Dash had glued on his toupee before topping it with his hat. They walked for quite a few blocks in silence. One of Dash’s shoes became untied as they crossed Sawyer Avenue and turned down De la Guerra Street. Dash stopped and bent down to lace it back up. Cars passed them and ladies window-shopping graced them with smiles, even as a beggar rumbled through in his near rags, hat in hand, to see what he could get from the women.

What he got were stern looks, tosses of hatted, refined heads, and sharp waves away. He headed toward Archer with not a hopeful look. Archer handed him a half dollar and the gent ambled on with a smile.

“Booze, you know,” said Dash.

“Let’s be optimistic. Maybe some soup. Surprised to see him on the rich side of town.”

“He’s doing what we’re doing: following the money. You read up on this place before you came here, Archer?”

“Not really.”

“A good shamus needs to know the lay of the land, the people who matter here. And I don’t mean that everybody doesn’t matter, but the way the world works there are two kinds of people: those with money and/or power, and those with neither one. And those with money and power have one thing in common: They can never get enough of either one.”

“Okay.”

“The Chumash people were here before any white folks. They had villages all over. This was hundreds and hundreds of years ago, you understand. Then the Spaniards came along in the 1700s to settle the area and to also fortify it. They tried to convert the Chumash to worship God; not sure how well that worked out. But what the Spaniards brought was smallpox and that came real close to wiping out the Chumash. So I guess if you can’t convert ’em, you can kill ’em.

“After that the Mexicans came along and knocked out the Spanish, and their flag flew over this town but not for very long. That’s why you have the street names you do here. Like the one we’re on, De la Guerra, and then there’s Carrillo, Torres, Alonso, Hernandez, Navarro, Gonzalez, the list goes on and on.”

“But not the most important one, namely, Sawyer,” said Archer.

“Right. Here’s how that came about. The Mexican governors gave out land grants to prominent folks around here, like the Armstrongs. They did it to make them loyal and to cultivate allies. That’s when the ‘rancho period’ started here. And those ranchos were used for cattle raising. And then they’d ship the cattle out for slaughter and the meat went all over.”

“Beth said her grandfather, Atticus, was in that business. And she also said he got out and went into real estate. And you mentioned that the Armstrongs got out of the cattle business before it all went to hell. What happened?”