Quarry : a nameless detective mystery Read online

  QUARRY

  A "Nameless Detective" Mystery

  by

  Bill Pronzini

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  So perhaps we are in hell,

  For all that I can tell,

  And lost, and damned,

  And served up hot to God.

  — John Davidson

  Chapter 1

  Cool, windy Monday in late April. Pale sun, scattered cumulus clouds. Nice day for a long, solitary drive into the country, especially when you had a partner and best friend who was getting married in a few days and who was turning everyone concerned into basket cases with his prenuptial mania. . . .

  There wasn't much traffic on Highway 101 south of King City, and when I turned off at San Lucas there was no traffic at all. The sleepy village with its huge, dead storage silos seemed deserted; so did Cattlemen Road leading out of it to the south; so did the vineyards and produce fields that flanked the two-lane blacktop. It was as if all the people had gone somewhere else—as if I were passing through Hamelin Town not long after the piper's visit.

  But then, except for the harvest season, it was always like this down here in the central part of the state. Anybody who thinks California is just one big string of cities and suburbs, wall-to-wall people from one end to the other, has never driven through the southern reaches of the Salinas Valley, between King City and Paso Robles a hundred and fifty miles southeast of San Francisco. This is Steinbeck country: the setting of East of Eden and the stories in The Long Valley. Earthquake country: the San Andreas and Rinconada faults run right through it. Agricultural country: the "salad bowl of America," where lettuce is known as "green gold" and broccoli, beets, wine grapes, and a dozen other crops flourish under the hot summer sun. Or used to flourish, before the winter rains began to disappear a few years ago; now the worst drought in a century held the Central Coast area in its dusty thrall.

  This was Old California, too, a part of the state that has changed hardly at all over the past half century and remarkably little since the 1840s, when this was a thirteen-thousand-acre Mexican land grant called the San Bemado Rancho. The little farm towns—San Lucas, San Bernado, San Ardo, Bradley, San Miguel—look much as they did in Steinbeck's day; so do the fields, the farms and ranches, the rolling hills that stretch away to the Santa Lucia Range to the east and lift into the Gabilan Range to the west. You can even see, without looking too hard, sagging barns with Mail Pouch tobacco signs painted on their roofs and sides. Only the oil fields south of San Ardo and the four lanes of Highway 101 snaking through serve as reminders that this is the last decade of the twentieth century. Otherwise, coming here is like traveling into the past, when a kinder, gentler way of life was a reality and not a politician's wet dream.

  Yeah, I told myself wryly, and coming here turns you into a knee-jerk sentimentalist with blinders on. The past wasn't so damn great, buddy boy. Ask one of the survivors of the Dust Bowl migration in the thirties; he'll tell you about the good old days. Steinbeck, too, if you bother to reread him.

  But it wasn't much of an argument; the pragmatic and cynical side of me never has stood much of a chance against the old-fashioned side. I'm a throwback—the kind of man who hates progress, mistrusts technology, and never quite feels comfortable in any place where he can't see or touch some small piece of the past. I liked being here in the Salinas Valley, drought or no drought; it made me feel good because I had a sense of belonging. So why should I apologize for romanticizing it a little? And to myself, for God's sake!

  You're nuts, that's why, I thought. Throwback schizoid in a schizoid world, and content to be that way. Like one of the guys in the story about the bookstore browser who comes across a volume called The Dual Personality and says to the clerk, "You know, part of me wants to buy this and part of me doesn't." And the clerk says, "Buy it—it's the gospel truth and it'll change your life. On the other hand, it's probably bullshit and you don't really want to know anyway."

  Cattlemen Road unwound straight and empty. Until the freeway was built in the sixties, it had been part of the main highway through this part of the valley; now it was just a patched-up back road, paralleled by railroad tracks on the east, the narrow, winding Salinas River and then the highway a half mile to the west. The bottomland here was mostly planted in wine grapes, lettuce, and beets. Beyond the railroad right-of-way, fields and sparse cattle graze sloped up to the Santa Lucia foothills—low gray-brown mounds, barren except for patches of dry grass and sage, their sides scored with deep puckered creases, like great blobs of clay that had been tossed down as part of some master sculpting plan and then inexplicably abandoned.

  Men worked here and there among the grapevines and green vegetables. From a distance they might have been emigrants from the Depression-era Southwest; even the scattered pickups and other vehicles had an ancient, dusty look, like the truck the Joads had driven from Oklahoma to California. But when you got close enough, the illusion vanished. The men were all Mexican migrants, too many of them underpaid illegals. Time had changed, all right—but only on the surface. The exploitation was the same as it had been fifty years ago; it was only the faces and skin tones of the exploited that were different.

  I covered five miles before I encountered another moving car—a big dump truck loaded with gravel, swinging out of an unpaved road that snaked back into the hills. A sign at the intersection said that the side road led to the South Valley Gravel Company. It was also my landmark, the one that told me I was a mile outside San Bernado and a quarter of a mile from Arlo Haas's farm.

  You couldn't miss his place, he'd told me on the telephone; it was the only one between the gravel company road and the outskirts of town. I turned in at the open gate and bumped up over the railroad tracks. On the north, then, stood a windbreak of eucalyptus trees; on the south, a rickety barbed-wire fence, along which tumbleweeds were caught like dry brown corpses in an abandoned web. Until a few years ago, Arlo Haas had said, the fields that stretched out on both sides had been planted in beets. Now the ones to the north, leased to a local winery, nurtured vineyards; the ones to the south lay fallow. Ahead, the farm buildings—house, barn, a couple of storage sheds, an unstable-looking windmill—were arranged against a long ravinelike crease where the nearest of the barren hills came together.

  Beyond the house, an extension of the farm road curled up the side of one hill and over its crest. As I neared the farmyard, I noticed movement up there—somebody on foot, coming along the road from the other side. A woman, I thought; I could make out long, dark hair blowing wild in the wind. Grady Haas? She stopped abruptly, leaning forward, and stood poised for a few seconds, watching my approach. Then she was gone, back the way she'd come. Not walking—almost running.

  Yeah, I thought. Grady Haas.

  The house was at least three quarters of a century old— two-storied, with a pillared gallery at the second-floor level. It had once been painted a dark red, but the red had faded to the color of dusty brick; the white trim was flaked and faded as well. It reminded me of one of the old stage depots that still stand in remote comers of
the West. Fronting it was a lattice-fenced yard that had once contained flower beds and a lawn; now there was nothing much in it except dead grass, over which ancient oaks and willows cast their shade.

  The farmyard was deserted—no cars, no machinery, no animals or fowl. When I stopped the car and shut off the engine, I could hear a dog barking inside the house; otherwise, the wind had the area to itself and was making the most of it with blustery and meaningless noises. I went through an archway in the fence and onto a creaky porch under the gallery. I was reaching out to knock when the door opened and two pairs of eyes peered out at me.

  One pair belonged to a big black dog with a massive head. The other pair were sunken deeply in the seamed and oddly lopsided face of a man about sixty—Arlo Haas. Tucked under his left armpit and supporting most of his weight was a metal crutch; in his right hand was the dog's collar. The animal strained against his grip, all hungry-eyed and slobbery, as if it would like nothing better than to have me for lunch. Its tail was wagging and it didn't look particularly vicious, but I was not taking anything for granted. I'd had run-ins with canines before; I hadn't won yet, and I had no desire for any new matches.

  Haas allowed as how he appreciated my getting here a half hour early, it being only twelve-thirty. I didn't have the heart to tell him I was early by accident, not design. His voice had a raw, forced quality, as if it hurt him to talk. Maybe it did. His face seemed lopsided at first glance because the left side was stiff and withered, the result of a stroke he'd suffered four years ago. The stroke had mostly paralyzed his left hip and leg and retarded the use of his left arm. It was the reason he was no longer a beet farmer and had leased part of his land to the winery. It was also the reason he wanted to hire me to do a job he would have undertaken himself if he were able-bodied; and one of the reasons I'd agreed, at the end of his call early this morning, to drive down here and discuss the matter in detail. The other reasons were that I'd had nothing pressing to keep me in the city today, he'd offered to pay me for my time whether I went to work for him or not, and he'd appealed to my ego by saying that from what he'd read about me in the papers, I was the kind of "grass-roots detective" who would understand his problem.

  He saw me still eyeing the dog and said, "Don't worry, he don't bite. But he'll climb strangers if I don't keep a hand on him. His name's Gus. Hell of a name for a pooch, but he come to me with it. You know much about dogs?"

  "Not much."

  "Labrador's what he is. Good breed. Labs."

  "I'll take your word for it, Mr. Haas."

  "Well, come on inside," he said. "Grady's not here and my housekeeper don't come in on Mondays."

  He turned and hobbled away into the house, still hanging on to Gus's collar. I kept my distance just the same. The Lab walked with its head swiveled back my way, with that hungry look still in its eyes; maybe it didn't bite, but it wanted to do something to me—climb me or dry-hump me or pee on my leg. Just which was a mystery I didn't want solved.

  The room we went into was a big old-fashioned parlor. Faded flower-patterned wallpaper, faded carpet, faded furniture, faded oil paintings and mostly faded family photographs in gilt frames. The only modern thing in it was a television set. But it managed nonetheless to be a pleasant, comfortable room brightened by sunlight that intruded through one of two big windows.

  Haas said, "I got a pot of coffee made. Or maybe you want something cold?"

  "Don't trouble yourself, Mr. Haas."

  "No trouble. I could use another cup myself"

  "All right, then. Black for me, no sugar. I can help if you want. ..."

  "No." He said the word almost curtly, with his eyes on mine; he was a proud man and he wanted me to know it. "Sit down, make yourself at home. Anywhere except the rocker."

  He took the dog with him when he went out. The thump of his crutch and the clicking of the Lab's nails were faint, cheerless sounds in the early afternoon quiet.

  I started toward a hirsute brown couch, changed my mind, and went to look at the photographs on the wall. There were half a dozen of Grady Haas, from infancy to womanhood, all of them candid shots and all apparently taken here. The most recent was no more than a couple of years old. It was of the two of them, father and daughter, him leaning on his crutch, her with her arm around his shoulders, smiling at each other. In the background was a tabletop Christmas tree, a scant few presents arranged under it. She was of average height, slender, darker than her father, attractive in a subtle way. Her most striking feature was her hair—thick blue-black waves of it that flowed over her shoulders and halfway down her back. There was affection in her smile, and she might have been having an enjoyable holiday visit, but there was something remote and solemn about her just the same, as if part of her was somewhere else.

  "Pretty, ain't she?"

  I turned. Haas had come back, balancing a tray with two cups of coffee on it in his right hand. The dog wasn't with him; he'd closed it into one of the other rooms. I heard it whine and then its nails click again as it began to pace around.

  I said, "Yes, she's very pretty," and curbed an impulse to relieve him of the tray. He set it down on a table next to a heavy old rocker with padded arms and extra cushions, told me to help myself, then lowered his crippled body slowly into the rocker. One of the two coffee cups had his first name imprinted on it; I took the other one to the couch.

  "Older she gets," he said when I was settled, "the better looking she gets. She was kind of gangly as a child."

  "How old is she now?"

  "Thirty-one. Her mother was like that too—pretty but gangly when I married her at twenty, beautiful by the time she was thirty-five. Still beautiful at forty-five, even with the cancer eating at her." He stopped talking and his eyes went blank for a few seconds; then he shook his head, touched the withered side of his face, lowered his hand. "God's been hard on this family," he said, but without bitterness.

  I tasted my coffee before I said, "I saw somebody up on the hill road behind the house as I was driving in. Grady?"

  "Yeah. Spends half her time in the hills since she come home."

  "What's back there?"

  "Cattle graze, or was when we kept cattle. Nothing now except a dry creek and more hills, and the gravel outfit over north."

  "What does she do, then?"

  He shrugged. "Just wanders. Same as when she was young, always off by herself My wife called her Little Miss Lonesome. But hell, Grady was never unhappy. Just preferred her own company. Still does. That's why her coming home like this, all of a sudden, don't make any sense."

  "She's never done that before?"

  "Never. Comes down every year to spend Christmas, and once in a while on my birthday in August, if she can get away. Always calls a couple of days ahead to let me know she's coming. Not this time. No warning at all. Just showed up bright and early last Friday morning."

  "How early?"

  "Eight-thirty. She must of left the city around five."

  "She give you any reason?"

  "No. Didn't say much of anything, except she'd been working too hard and needed some time to herself, and would I mind if she stayed a week or two. Wouldn't look me in the eye when she said it. Never could look you in the eye when she was telling a lie, no matter how small."

  "And you think she's in some kind of trouble."

  "Don't think it," Haas said, "I know it. You can't always tell what's going on inside that girl; she hides her feelings pretty good. But she can't hide a thing like this. She's in shock. All busted up inside and in shock."

  "Afraid?"

  "That too. At least, I thought so when I first seen her."

  "But not now?"

  "No. Now she seems ... I don't know, like she's resigned, like she don't care anymore."

  "You have no idea what might have happened to her?"

  "None. Mary Ellen couldn't get a hint out of her neither."

  "Mary Ellen?"

  "Mary Ellen Crowley. Used to be Mary Ellen Higgins. Grady's best friend when they were
kids. Schoolteacher now, at the union school in San Bernado. I called her yesterday, asked her to come over. Grady wouldn't hardly talk to her. And after Mary Ellen left, she asked me not to tell anybody else she was back home. Didn't want to see or talk to anybody except me, she said."

  "She hasn't had any other visitors, then?"

  "No."

  "How about calls?"

  "No."

  "Has she made any calls?"

  "Not that I know of."

  "Been off the property at any time since Friday?"

  "You mean in her car? No, not even into town. She put that little car of hers in the barn when she got here and hasn't been near it since." He paused. "I went out and looked inside yesterday morning, while she was in the hills. Ain't nothing in it give me a clue to her trouble."

  I had my notebook out now, open on one knee; but so far there hadn't been anything for me to write down. I asked, "I take it Grady's not married?"

  "No."

  "Has she ever been married?"

  "No." He said the word a little sadly this time, as if the fact were a source of disappointment to him. Or maybe the disappointment lay in a lack of grandchildren to help ease his lonely existence. He'd told me on the phone that Grady was an only child.

  "Does she have a steady boyfriend?"

  "Had one a while last year. I thought it might be serious, but when I asked her to bring him down with her at Christmas, she said she wasn't seeing him anymore."

  "Did she say why?"

  "No. Just that they broke up."

  "What's his name?"

  "Ted? Todd? Something like that. I don't remember his last name. Mary Ellen might know."

  "What does he do for a living?"

  "Grady didn't tell me. And I didn't want to pry."

  "You ever meet him in person?"

  "Never met any of her boyfriends since high school," Haas said. "What few she's had. Never any she wanted me to meet."

  "What about her female friends?"