Wrong Place, Wrong Time Read online

  “Rafferty, my love, you’ve been saying it for thirty minutes! The mall shooting never had anything to do with Thorney, and this Wells person must be on that list of pool owners or swimmers or whatever.”

  “Well, probably on the list. Connected to Ortega’s Aqua-Tidy job, anyway. Won’t be long now.”

  Hilda put her hand on my arm. “I only wish you weren’t quite so … enthused because you’re going to hunt—your word!—hunt this man like an animal.”

  “Eight hours ago, he was hunting me,” I said.

  “I know, dear, and believe me, I dislike that much more. But you should hear yourself.” She sipped her wine and smiled at me. Wistfully? Ruefully? “You sound like a Little Leaguer before the big game.”

  “Speaking of kids, did I mention that with Jerry Gortner shipped off to military school, Thorney’s vandalism problems are over?”

  “You mentioned it once or twice.”

  “And you were right about Judge Gortner, Hil. He was never involved in the shooting. It’s funny, though. He reacted so—”

  “Imagine waking up to find a rattlesnake on your chest,” Hilda said. “You’d react. And so would most people if you and Cowboy attacked their house.”

  “Maybe so …”

  “Trust me, Ugly.” Hilda finished her wine and stood up. “Come on, big guy. It’s food or fall-down time for me.”

  “Thimble-belly,” I said. “Wanna go to my place? We can pick up steaks on the way; I’ll make potato skins. Double cheese and heavy on the sour cream?”

  She grimaced. “Cardiologists resurface their tennis courts because people eat like that.”

  We ate out instead, at an Indian restaurant not far from her store. I told Hilda that curry had a strong taste so you couldn’t detect the trillions of tiny cholesterols hidden in there. She didn’t believe me.

  It was a good evening. Quiet, which was what I expected. Wells wouldn’t be back right away, not with his left hand turned to hamburger. Even so, I was careful. I made Hilda sit behind a column in the restaurant; I got the car out of the parking lot myself; I checked each car that stopped beside us at traffic lights; I kept my car gun, the .45, in my lap. Nothing very special, just the normal precautions anyone takes when a nut is after you with a shotgun.

  Nine o’clock Saturday morning. I sat in my office, holding a list that outlined the final working months in the short and horny life of Luis Ortega.

  According to my theory, one of those Aqua-Tidy customers was Wells, the ersatz bounty hunter who had a hot temper and a wife with an itch between her big toes. Had to be. Betcha.

  It was a long list. Three-and-a-quarter typed pages. Eighty-three names and addresses.

  Maybe I’d had too much of Hilda’s fancy wine last night; maybe chapattis slow the blood flow to the brain. For some reason, I couldn’t come up with a good way to work through the list.

  There were so damn many people! Door knocking would take forever. And I would have to see only the men in each house to make that work. Unless wifey answered the door in a negligee while hubby fired a shotgun in the background.

  The telephone was the quickest way to whittle the list down to a manageable size. My only problem was deciding on what pitch to use.

  Good morning, and speaking of adultery …

  Or maybe Hi, I’m doing a survey on shotgun killers?

  Or even Please mail a recent photo of yourself in a cowboy hat to Box—

  Then Beth Woodland burst in, laughing and grinning and wiping her eyes. “I just came from Thorney’s house and he’s okay and you’re wonderful and, and … thank you very much!” She hugged me, then stiffened and backed away hurriedly. She grinned, embarrassed. I think she, too, felt uncomfortable about that hug. It was a trifle too reminiscent of Honeybutt and Hotstud McGoodbuns.

  “Anyway,” she said brightly, “Thorney says thank you, too, and he wants you to come over.”

  “I’ll do that,” I said. “Really. But I still have to—”

  “Of course! God, what a dummy I am. That man is after you, not Thorney, so … May I help?”

  I handed her the Aqua-Tidy customer list and said seriously, “Sure. Phone these people. Ask whoever answers if they are, perchance, a tall fellow who likes to shoot people.”

  “Okay,” she said quickly. “And—I know you’re only kidding about what I should say—is it okay if I pretend to be a nurse? I could say I have the test results on his hand injury. Because Thorney said the man’s hand was hurt, and I think—”

  Rafferty’s Rule Fourteen: To feel really dumb, be a smartass once too often.

  Larry Davis had given me only names and addresses, so I looked up the phone numbers and she made the calls.

  Beth was in the wrong business. She’d have made a great conwoman. “Good morning,” she said each time, with just the right flavor of professional disinterest. “This is the clinic. About the tests on your hand, the doctor wants you to …”

  She got the first bite on the sixth call. I was ready to hit the street, but it turned out the guy had lost three fingers in an industrial accident and was halfway through a physiotherapy program.

  After she’d hung up from that one, I said, “I thought we’d nail this down easily, but now I wonder. Come to think of it, having a busted hand is a pretty good reason not to clean your own pool.”

  “What’s the next number?” Beth said briskly. I hoped that insurance guy paid her well; she was a hard worker.

  At noon I went out for hamburgers. While I was gone, she went back through the busys and no answers. She wouldn’t stop for more than ten minutes to eat. By four-fifteen her doggedness had paid off. She had eliminated the last name on the list.

  Which did not mean we were finished.

  I totaled up the separate lists I’d kept. “Okay, that’s forty-six we can forget about—for now, anyway. There were nine apartment buildings. The managers all have both hands, but Jack the Ripper could be living there and how would we know? There were twenty-three busys and no answers; they have to be re-called. And, wonder of wonders, five people bit on the injured-hand medical-report gimmick. Two you’ve pretty well cleared up; but three need checking out.”

  Beth rubbed the back of her neck and rocked her head from side to side. “Ouch. It’s a lot of work for just three names, isn’t it?”

  “Yep. And if I strike out on these three, we’ll have to work through that big batch you never reached. Do you mind?” I gathered up the list and picked up my jacket.

  “Oh no. Anytime.” She got up, too, and as we left the office, she said “Are you going out right now to, uh, check out those people? On a Saturday night?”

  “You bet schweetheart. Ya see, it ain’t all fast cars and a schlap inna face with a forty-five.”

  “Oh, cute,” Beth said. “Ricardo Montalban, right?”

  “Forget it,” I said.

  Chapter 37

  Door-knocking is a very slow way to gather information. You spend so damn much time going someplace, and once you’re there, you usually find out you’ve wasted your time. Police departments are good at it; they have all that manpower. When there’s one of you, it’s sheer drudgery.

  At last count there was only one of me.

  But the three hand injuries had to be checked out, so …

  I went to the most likely sounding one first. In his conversation with Beth, Harold Locklear had claimed it was a dog bite. Oh, yeah. You wouldn’t believe how often emergency-room doctors dig shotgun pellets out of “dog bites.”

  A woman answered the door. I told her I was the district rabies control officer for U.S.O.D.C.P.—I have no idea what that meant—and waited, smiling, with the .45 held behind my back while she yelled for Harold to “come out here.”

  When Harold showed up, he was nineteen years old and definitely not Wells. But I was already inside by then, and fumbling to put the .45 away before they saw it. So I had to look at an ugly black and brown creature chained to a tree in the backyard. I don’t know what it was about Harold
, but that dog went berserk when it saw him.

  So okay, that one was a real dog bite.

  “Yes?” the second man said when he answered his door. His left arm was in a sling. His hand and wrist were heavily bandaged. But he was short and square and black.

  I said, “Uh, did my wife come here and ask to use your phone?”

  “No,” he said, leaning forward to look out past me. “Why? Is something wrong?”

  “Car broke down. She went to look for … but she’s been gone for … well, thanks, anyway.” I started to turn and leave.

  “Are you sure—”

  A soft voice called from inside the house. “What is it, Ross?”

  “Nothing, dear.” Then, to me. “No one’s come to the door but you.” He shrugged. That jiggled his arm and he winced.

  I pointed to his bandages. “Dog?”

  “Ross?” The woman sounded concerned; now there were footsteps coming closer.

  He looked at his hand and sighed. “Skateboard. Believe me, leave those things to the kids.”

  As I went down the steps, he was closing the door and saying to his wife, “… funny day. Crazy telephone calls, then—”

  They were having a party around the pool at the third address. It was a large, noisy party, and it absorbed me without question. I worked my way around to the booze table, where a sour-looking man in his forties seemed to be the unofficial bartender.

  With a totally neutral expression he gave me a Scotch on the rocks and the news that, yes, Barney, “he’s over there by the diving board,” had suffered a gunshot wound the day before.

  Well, well, well. Except …

  Except Barney wasn’t Wells. Barney was a stumpy, bald man with a drinker’s red nose and a booming laugh. He didn’t seem at all perturbed that he’d lost two fingers.

  The guest/bartender held up a plate of chips and crab dip until I took some. He eyed the swirling throng morosely for a while, then said, “Barney’s such a dumb son of a bitch. He did it himself, you know. Rabbit hunting.” He shook his head wearily. “Couldn’t even take a shotgun through a wire fence without shooting himself.”

  He gestured at the crab dip; I shook my head.

  “Barney’s a dentist,” he said. “I mean, come on! Will people go to a dentist who has two fingers missing?” He sniffed. “He can’t see it coming, but I think his practice will suffer. He won’t be able to afford parties like this a year from now.”

  “It’ll be your turn, then,” I said. “Let him drink your booze.”

  He shook his head. “No way. Barney’s an asshole.”

  “I see.”

  “I only screw his wife sometimes, that’s all.”

  Oh, no, I thought, what have we here? Barney wasn’t Wells, the bounty hunter, but if his wife was messing around …

  I said, “What would Barney say about that, if he found out?”

  “Found out? Barney likes to watch.” The man shrugged. “Like I said, he’s an asshole.” He thought about that for a moment, nodded, and added, “She’s quite a nice person, though.”

  He gestured at the crab dip again; I shook my head again. When I put my empty glass down and moved away, he raised his hand in a casual farewell.

  I let the chattering mob float me toward the way I’d come in. Barney was still whooping it up by the diving board.

  Sunday, before I went to work, I stopped at Thorney’s house to see how he was.

  He was pretty damned angry, that’s how he was.

  “Look at that!” he roared. “You said this crap was over.”

  Someone had sprayed red paint on his front steps. Not much paint, no dirty words. Little kids, I thought. Thorney didn’t care how little they were.

  “Miserable, pus-gutted, stinking …”

  “Do they have courses in swearing for sailors?” I said. “Look, it’s not Gortner or his gang, that’s obvious. I’ll do what I can today, but you’ve got to give me a little slack. I’m closing in on that fake bounty hunter.”

  Thorney glared at his red-streaked steps. “I’ll close in on the rotten little …”

  I found a hardware store open and bought a can of magic goop absolutely guaranteed to take paint off concrete. When the salesman shook his head and said, “Good luck,” I bought a can of paving paint, too. If Thorney couldn’t take the red off, he could paint over it.

  I left both cans at Thorney’s house, then went to the nine apartment buildings on the Aqua-Tidy list. That took the rest of the day. At each one I’d hang around for a while, blending in, people-watching. It’s surprising what you can learn that way.

  Four times I was approached and asked, with varying degrees of courtesy, what I wanted or who I was looking for.

  The other five times, I gave up first and found the manager myself.

  Not that it mattered. Either way it happened, I struck out. I didn’t see a single injured hand. The managers didn’t know of any, either.

  I taught the Mustang’s steering wheel a long string of new words on the way home that night. Some of them were especially inventive, I thought.

  The sky was gray and gloomy on Monday morning. It was trying to rain, but not yet doing a very good job at it when I went up the stairs toward my office.

  Beth Woodland was already at her desk on the other side of the big window; she saw me and came over. I put the coffee on. She smoothed out the crinkled Aqua-Tidy list. We went to work.

  With a cup steaming beside her elbow, Beth assumed her nurse persona and began calling the twenty-three numbers that had been busy or unanswered on Saturday.

  Most of those people were available now. She went through them fairly fast, but, at noon, there were still eight names she couldn’t contact. All morning, there had been only one nibble.

  The name sounded vaguely familiar. After fifteen minutes I redialed the number myself.

  It was Fall-down Forester running another medical scam. “How goes it, Rafferty? You know, I figured one of the labs screwed up and put my name on a righteous X ray, for once. I’m in the middle of a neck injury claim, but what the hell, right?”

  “What the hell, indeed,” I said. “Keep smiling through the pain.”

  The remaining eight numbers were annoying. Three busy, five no-answers.

  Finally I got smart and called information. Aha! Since the directory was printed, all three of the perpetually busy numbers had been changed. Those numbers had gone to bucket shops, so it was no wonder they were always busy; those phones were running hot, peddling aerobics classes and bathroom renovations.

  The old places, the homes where Luis Ortega had cleaned the pools, now had unlisted numbers.

  In a perfect world I’d have been in trouble then. But it’s not a perfect world, and I know this guy who likes twenty-dollar bills more than he likes following SW Bell company policy about unlisted numbers, so …

  Beth dialed the numbers. All three calls were answered. All three thought she was crazy. Damn.

  I whittled the five no-answers down to two by checking the addresses with the cop shop. After a commendable amount of caution—we spent ten minutes playing “do you know,” and he checked my office number in the phone book—a desk sergeant called back and admitted the residents at three of those addresses were on vacation. They had advised the division and requested extra patrols.

  “Okay,” I said to Beth, “I’ll door-knock the last two to make sure. No sweat.”

  She grimaced. “Will one of them be …?”

  “I doubt it very much.”

  She went back to her office and I poured the last, tarry cup of coffee into my mug. I was fairly certain I was only going through the motions now. And if these motions didn’t conjure up Wells, what would?

  Hilda had called this an animal hunt. Maybe I should treat it that way. Maybe I should tether myself like the goat in a tiger hunt. Cowboy and Mimi could pick off Wells when he came sniffing around.

  Offhand, that didn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.

  Get hot, Rafferty, I t
hought. Hit the street.

  Partially to plead for additional suspects, and partially to invite myself over for a beer later, I called Larry Davis at Aqua-Tidy.

  “Hey, man, what’s happening?” he said.

  I reminded him of the wonderful theory we had concocted in his kitchen—

  “You concocted, man. I just listened. Like I’m listenin’ today while this honky accountant, supposed to be workin’ for me, is lettin’ them IRS dudes take too many taxes ’way from dis hard-workin’ nigger.” As he talked, he became angry. Or pretended to be. In the background a deep male voice chuckled easily.

  I said, “Honky private cops have problems, too, pal. One of which is that I’m down to the last two names on that list of Luis’s customers. You got any others you didn’t tell me about?”

  “Naw,” he said. “Dis heah white numbah-dumpah, he done put down all them names for old Larry.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “Cain’t ketch the dude, huh?”

  “Maybe not, but he won’t be catching much, either. I hope he plays softball.” I told Larry about Wells and his wounded hand. “They won’t see him around the ballpark for a long time.”

  “Uh, tell me again what this bounty hunter dude looks like.” There was no enraged black accent in Larry’s voice now; it was flatter, and slightly muffled as if he were cupping the receiver close to his mouth.

  “Tall,” I said. “Big. Dark hair, long arms—”

  There was a scuffle on Larry’s end of the phone, and hoarse shouts, and a clatter as the phone was dropped.

  Nothing for a long time, then scrapes and grunts and finally Larry Davis was back. His voice was angry now, but weary, too.

  “You’d better get over here, man,” he said. “I found your goddamn bounty hunter.”

  Chapter 38

  I dropped the phone, banged on the window, yelled to Beth, “We got him now,” and hit the street door like a twelve-year-old on the last day of school.