Charles Williams: Man on a Leash

“No,” Romstead replied. “Just some cruising and fishing in the Gulf of California. A friend of mine had a motor-sailer down there, and we brought it back to San Diego. I flew up to San Francisco last night, and your wire was waiting for me along with the other mail.”

“So you were on this boat at the time? Where?”

“If it was two weeks ago, we’d have been somewhere around Cape San Lucas.”

“Where’s that?”

“The southern tip of Baja California.”

“I see. What do you do for a living?”

“Nothing at the moment. I’ve been in Central America for the past twelve years but sold my business there about four months ago.”

“And what was that?”

“Boats. I had the distributorship in Costa Rica for a line of fiber glass powerboats—runabouts, fishermen, cruisers, and so on.”

“And when’s the last time you saw your father?”

“About four years ago. I came up to Southern California to visit the plant, and his ship was in Long Beach. I went aboard, and we had a couple of drinks.”

“The two of you sure as hell didn’t live in each other’s pockets, did you? You didn’t know he had an apartment in San Francisco?”

Romstead shook his head. “I didn’t even know he’d retired or that he’d bought a place here until I talked to Crowder last night. I wrote to him in care of the steamship company when I sold out and came up to San Francisco, and I guess they forwarded the letter. He hardly ever wrote at all; I’d get a card from him once or twice a year, and that was about it. But just how did it happen? And have you got any leads at all as to who did it?”

“No. We were hoping you might be able to help us, but if you didn’t keep in any closer touch than that—”

“What about identification?”

“No problem.” Brubaker gave an impatient wave of the hand. “What the hell—a man six feet five with snow-white hair? Anyway, his stuff was still in his wallet. But just for the record you might as well verify it.”

Romstead mentally braced himself and took the two large glossies Brubaker held out. The first was a full-length view of a man lying on his back in a sordid litter of trash: empty bottles, newspapers, a headless doll, charred magazines, and rusting cans, and beyond him, just above the rumpled mane of white hair, a burst sofa cushion and some twisted and half-rotted shoes. It was his father. He was clad in a dark suit, light shirt, and tie, and his ankles were hobbled with a short length of rope. His hands and forearms were under him, twisted behind his back. There were no visible signs of violence except that there was something in his mouth and on his face.

The second was a close-up, just the head and shoulders, taken in the same location. The eyes were open, staring blankly upward with the dry and faintly dusty look of death. The mouth was spread wide, apparently having been pulled open while the substance, whatever it was, was poured in until it overflowed in a small mound. It looked like flour or confectioners’ sugar. There was more of it in the nostrils and on the chin and some on the ground on each side of the face. Romstead’s eyes were bleak as he pushed the two photos together and handed them back.

“That’s him. But what is that stuff in his mouth?”

“Lactose,” Brubaker said. “We had it analyzed.”

“Lactose?”

“More commonly known as milk sugar.”

“But why? Some psychopath’s idea of good clean fun?”

“Oh, the message seems to be clear enough, but why us? We’re just old country boys.”

“I think you’ve lost me,” Romstead said.

“Don’t you know what they use it for?”

“No—” Romstead began. Then he gestured impatiently. “Oh, for Christ’s sake!”

“Exactly. To cut heroin. I’d say he tried to burn somebody, only he did it to the wrong crowd.”

“What the hell kind of pipe dream is this? He never touched the stuff in his life. He was a shipmaster.”

“I know that. But how many retired ship captains you ever hear of—or any other working stiff on a salary—that managed to save a million dollars?”

2

Romstead stared in disbelief. “Million dollars? He didn’t have anything like that.”

“You don’t seem to know anything about your father at all.”

“Oh, I don’t doubt he was pretty well fixed for his retirement—but not these boxcar figures you’re talking about.”

“Listen!” Brubaker picked another sheet out of the file and scanned it for what he sought. “On July twelfth, just two days before he wound up on the city dump here, he went into his bank on Montgomery Street in San Francisco and drew out two hundred and fifty thousand dollars—”

“What?”

“In cash. Said he needed it for a business deal. Now you tell me what kind of business transaction you need currency for.”

Romstead sighed. “Okay, the whole thing’s crazier than hell, but go on.”

“Right. Early in the morning of July fourteenth two men on a garbage truck found his body there. Two of us went out first and then called the county coroner. Your father’s wallet was still in one of the inside pockets of his coat, with all his identification in it and about forty dollars in cash. His legs were hobbled together with that rope so he could walk but not run, and his hands were bound behind him with two-inch adhesive tape. He was still a powerful man for his age—sixty-six, wasn’t it?—but a gorilla couldn’t have broken that tape the way they had it wound on there.

“As soon as we started digging that lactose out of his mouth, we found that his lower lip was cut, one lower incisor was broken, and the one next to it was gone altogether. We’d already found the entrance wound in the back of the head, of course— You want all this medical who-struck-John about the trajectory?”

“No. Just a rough translation.”

“What it amounted to was that the bullet had entered fairly high up in the back of the head and exited through the rear part of the palate and on out the mouth. As tall as he was, it meant that unless the gunman was standing on a stepladder, your father was on his knees. It doesn’t show in the pictures, but there was some carbon on the knees of his pants from those charred magazines, and there was another, secondary wound on top of his head, the scalp split open as if he’d been hit with something.

“The ground was too hard and there’d already been too many people milling around to make out any tracks, but the logical supposition was that he’d been taken out of a car, duck-walked over to the edge of the dump, slugged and knocked to his knees, and then held while he was shot in the back of the head like a Chinese execution. A real homey crowd. Could have been two of ‘em, or three, or even more. We started sifting the place and found tooth fragments and finally the slug itself. It was too beat-up for any chance of ever matching it to any particular gun, but we could arrive at the caliber. It was a thirty-eight, which of course is no help at all; there are thousands of ‘em everywhere.

“We’re pretty sure he must have been blindfolded when they took him out there, and then they removed it because it was something that might possibly be traced. He was too big a bull to go quietly when he saw where they were taking him; there’d have been some bruises and torn clothing and plowed-up scenery before they ever got him there, even tied up the way he was.”

Brubaker paused to relight his cigar. He puffed and dropped the match in the ashtray. Romstead winced, trying to push the too-vivid scene out of his mind. “When did he leave here?” he asked.

“Nobody knows for sure. He lived out there alone and came and went as he pleased and seldom told anybody anything—though I wouldn’t bet there weren’t a few women around here could fill in a lot more blanks than they’ll ever admit. Your old man must have been one hell of a swordsman when he was younger—say only around sixty—and from what I gather, he hadn’t slowed down a great deal.