Winter Tides (35 page)

He tossed the newspaper down and sat smoking, watching the cars out on Beach Boulevard. He realized that he knew absolutely nothing about Edmund Dalton. Half of what Dalton had told him had turned out to be lies. Why
shouldn’t
he be a murderer? Why shouldn’t he be any damned thing at all, including the worst kind of crazy man?

He dug out the white pages, found the 800 number for Mastercard and punched it into the phone, then punched in the digit for account information. A woman came on the line and asked for his name and card number. “What can I help you with?” she asked finally.

“I recently lost my card,” he said. “I hope it’s not stolen. Can you tell me if it’s been used within the past couple of days?”

He gave her his name, and there was the sound of a keyboard momentarily. “Day before yesterday,” the woman said. “A car rental agency in Long Beach, called … I guess it’s Cheapskate Rent-a-car.”

“Of course!” Ray said. “Cheapskate! That’s a relief.”

“Do you want to report the card stolen?”

“No. I guess I was mistaken. I think I left it on the counter down there. I’ll swing past and pick it up. Goodbye.” He hung up, his head spinning. Someone had rented a car using his stolen Mastercard. Dalton. It had to be Dalton. The bastard had stolen the card and license out of his wallet when he’d been in the office day before yesterday. He had rented a car for the purpose of murdering a man, and then come back around in his own good time to dump the cards back through the mail slot. He probably thought it was funny. Dalton had killed Mayhew and then mutilated his body, and the whole thing was a joke to him.

He found the directory for the Long Beach area and looked up Cheapskate Rent-a-car. He ripped the page out of the book, took fifty-odd dollars in petty cash out of the office drawer, locked the place up, and climbed into his car. Long Beach was thirty minutes away, and it suddenly seemed to him that time was short.

M
IFFLIN CIRCLED THE 800 BLOCK OF
N
ORTH
C
HERRY, PASSING
Cheapskate Rent-a-car the first time in order to look the place over. He half expected to see police cars, but there weren’t any, just a dumpy stucco building in front of a gated yard with several rentals parked in back and a tired curb tree in front. He drove carefully, signaling a hundred feet before turning, checking the rearview mirror every twenty seconds or so. It was the kind of excessive care he took in driving when he’d had too many drinks, when it
was absolutely paramount that he didn’t get pulled over.

When he approached the building for the second time, he parked on the street, well out of sight of the front window, just to play it safe. He had a couple of half-baked routines worked out, depending on whether the clerk recognized his name or not. He thought about the Jimmy Stewart-Jones character again, about his nervous, turnip-truck detective work. The poor bastard apparently didn’t have a clue about what kind of monster he was dealing with in Edmund Dalton. Whatever else happened, Mifflin decided, he at least owed the man Jones a phone call.

He pushed in through the front door of the rental agency and smiled at the man behind the counter.

“Need a car?” the man asked him.

“I just brought one back.”

The man simply nodded. “When was that?”

“This morning.”

“Problem of some sort?”

“That’s right,” Mifflin said. “I bought a gift for my wife, and I think I left it in the car.”

“Small package?” The man looked through a bin of carbon-copy receipts.

“A pair of diamond earrings, in a small box. I’m not certain, but I think that maybe I left them in the trunk, or else maybe they got shoved under the seat.” He gestured helplessly. “I did a lot of shopping, made a few stops. I
hope
to hell I left them in the car. Is the gentleman here who helped me before?” He was taking a chance with this one. The
last
thing he wanted to do now was talk with anyone who would know he
hadn’t
rented a car night before last.

The clerk found a receipt in the bin and looked it over. “No, that’s Ronnie. Ronnie went home at noon today. He doesn’t work again until …” He looked at a schedule on the wall, tracing dates with his finger. “Thursday. He’s got a couple days off.”

“I was hoping maybe he’d found it. Would he have cleaned the car out?”

“Not very likely. I doubt anyone cleaned the car out, since it only came back in this morning. It’s out back. That was the white Ford, wasn’t it?”

“That’s right,” Mifflin told him.

“Well, if you left it in the car, it’s still in the car. Take a good long look.” He picked through several rings of car keys, found a Ford set, and handed them to Mifflin.

“Can I see the receipt for a second?” Mifflin asked.

“Sure.” He handed that over, too. The phone rang, and he nodded toward the yard in back before picking up the receiver.

The signature on the receipt was apparently his signature. Dalton had forged it like a pro. Mifflin laid the receipt on the counter and went out through the side door and up the asphalt drive. Four cars were parked in the back lot. Thank God the man hadn’t asked
him
what car he’d rented. Straight off he saw that the Ford had been washed, if not by Ronnie, then by Edmund Dalton. Why? Bloodstains? He walked around it, taking a good look. There was no dust on it at all, no flattened bugs. The windows were clean. Even the chrome was polished. The car looked as if it had been detailed. There was no indication that anyone had driven it anywhere, let alone off-road. Dalton had evidently kept it an extra day in order to clean it up.

Mifflin opened the trunk, but it was empty—no telltale bloodstains, just an owner’s manual. He looked back toward the office. There was a rear window, but it looked out of a back room. No one could see him. As long as he was quick, the man in the office probably wouldn’t give a damn about him.

He opened the passenger door and stuck his head in. There was a faint odor just discernible beneath the car-wash smell. He was no kind of detective, but it smelled to him like Mayhew’s crappy old sports coat—the urine and body odor smell of a longtime drunk. He opened the glove box, but there was nothing inside except a few papers. The car had been vacuumed, and the dash was slick with vinyl polish. He glanced back toward the office again, then bent over and sniffed the seat and seat back. Mayhew again. Goddamn Mayhew. That’s where the smell was. He was damned well certain of it. It occurred to him then that
Edmund might have cleaned the car up in order to get rid of fingerprints, and he looked at his hands, abruptly aware that he must be smearing his own damned prints all over everything….

Leaving the door open, he moved around to the front of the car and got down onto his hands and knees on the asphalt. He looked under the chassis. There was dust and oil, but who could say where the hell the dust had come from? The answer occurred to him immediately: a police lab.

He saw something then—vegetation of some sort caught in the strap that held the muffler. He hurried around to the rear of the car, crouched on the asphalt again, and reached underneath, feeling around with his hand. He found it, grabbed on tight, and yanked it out. It was a piece of a bush, some kind of goddamn bush. And it was mostly green, too. Some of it had been dried brown by the muffler heat, but part of it was fresh. Someone had driven the car through shrubbery, and recently, too. No good could come from anyone else finding dried weeds tangled in the undercarriage of a murderer’s car, not when Ray Mifflin’s credit card had rented it, not when he was taking a percentage of illegal money from the murderer himself.

“What the hell are you up to?” The man’s voice startled him, and he scuttled back out from under the car, still clutching the weeds he’d first pulled clear of the muffler.

“I couldn’t find it,” Mifflin said lamely.

“
Under
the car?” The man hunkered down by the bumper and looked underneath. Mifflin shoved the weeds into his pocket. “What were you doing under there?”

“To tell you the truth,” Mifflin said, “last night the exhaust pipe or the muffler was banging around. I forgot to say anything to Ronnie when I brought it back in.”

The man reached under and pushed on the muffler. “Feels tight.”

“Yeah, to me too. I don’t know.”

“You say it was banging around?”

“Only for a half mile or so, when I got off the freeway.”

“You ran over something. Probably dragged some piece of junk for a ways and then dropped it.”

“Sure. Of course.”

“No earrings?”

“No. I guess I dropped them somewhere else.”

“If they turn up, we’ll call you. You want to leave a number?”

“Sure,” Mifflin said. He followed the man back into the office and gave him a bogus phone number. He left immediately, got into his car, and headed back up toward the freeway. It was three o’clock, and traffic on the 405 past Signal Hill was thickening up. It would only get worse as he got into Orange County, but he couldn’t help it. There was no use getting frustrated. He had places to go—a lot of places to go.

T
HE SUN WAS LOW IN THE SKY WHEN HE PULLED OFF THE
road at Scotchman’s Cove, near Laguna Beach. The parking lot was deserted, which wasn’t surprising this late on a weekday afternoon, and the empty bluffs were lonesome and foreign. Strangely, it seemed to him that it had literally been years since he had driven this far east. Unless he was going somewhere on business, he rarely got more than a few miles from home. He hardly ever got down to Mexico any more, which was the only place he was even close to being happy. The depressing picture of his life owed more to desktop ashtrays and IRS forms and worn-out commercial carpeting than to anything suggested by this empty coastline and the sea wind.

He sat for another moment, listening to the silence, smelling the wind off the ocean and the wet vegetation, watching the evening fog bank that lay out over the horizon, drifting in on the onshore breezes. Finally he got out of the car, with the bits of weed still in his pocket, and walked down the trail toward the beach. Halfway down he stopped. There was no point in walking farther. The weeds in question were growing all over the place, thick and green with the fog and the spring rains. He turned around and headed back up to the car, mulling things over in his mind. He knew nearly everything that he needed to know.

Dalton’s returning his Mastercard and license was interesting. He could as easily have thrown them away. It meant simply that Dalton didn’t care if he knew. He
wanted
him to know. Dalton was up to something more than merely stealing money from his brother. He was obviously acting out some sort of twisted psychodrama that it would take a team of psychologists to understand. And the theft of the cards was meant to give Mifflin a bigger role in the man’s farce.

He was suddenly tired of playing Edmund Dalton’s games. He checked his watch: fifteen hours until his bank opened. Plenty of time, if he played it right.

D
AVE POLISHED THE CHROME ON THE KITCHEN FAUCETS
with a tea towel and then wiped down the counter before going on to the cupboard doors. The last couple of years of being single had gotten him used to putting in a lot of time alone, sitting up late reading or working in the shop. The few days that he’d known Anne, though, had wiped all that out, and without her company he was restless and marking time. He could remember a couple of times when he had left a girlfriend alone on the beach while he put in a three- or four-hour session out in the water. Now he had a girlfriend who ditched
him
for a paintbrush….

The phone rang, and he picked it up anxiously. But it wasn’t Anne’s voice; it was the cigarette-stained voice of the notary from down on Beach Boulevard, and he put the wet tea towel down on the kitchen counter and concentrated.

“Is this Jim Jones?” the man asked.

“Yeah,” Dave said. “In the flesh.”

“I’ll make this quick. What you were asking about? All of it’s true. You hit the nail on the head.”

“Okay …” Dave said. “
All
of it?”

“Just what you thought was going on, that’s what was going on. But listen to me; that turns out to be the tip of the goddamn iceberg. You seem like a nice enough guy, so I’m telling you this, but I’m only going to tell you once. My advice hasn’t changed from when we talked last. What I’m telling you here is to keep the hell out of it entirely. You don’t want to be anywhere near it. And if I were you, I wouldn’t have anything to do with our mutual friend. You know who I’m talking about?”

“Sure. I already have something to do with him. You’re not telling me much.”

“I’m telling you that he’s a very dangerous man. He’s a first-class nut case. I had to be completely off my chump ever to talk to the man, and now I find myself talking to you, which is just about as bad. Anyway, that’s the end of the conversation. Our hypothetical acquaintance with each other is through. Take my advice, and keep your nose out of a swinging door.”

Dave was still listening when he realized that the man had hung up. He put the receiver down and stood looking through the kitchen window at the green foliage of his neighbor’s banana trees. Was the phone call a threat? He decided that it wasn’t. It was a man trying to fix something that he had helped to break. Like everyone else, by the time Ray Mifflin had figured out that Edmund Dalton was a spider, he was already tangled up in the man’s webs.

M
IFFLIN’S APARTMENT IN
H
UNTINGTON
B
EACH HAD BEEN
furnished, which made getting out easy—a couple of quick trips to the Goodwill drop-off, half a dozen cardboard boxes taped up and ready to go to the post office in the
morning, and some first-rate Pontiac trunk stuffing. He had left the rest of his junk for the apartment manager with a note to throw what he didn’t want into the Dumpster. To hell with his cleaning deposit and half of his already-paid rent. Right Now Notary was locked up tight. He had mailed in rent for the next four months and closed the Levelors after cleaning out any papers and documents that he cared a damn about. Some time in the next four months, if something changed, he could blow back into town one last quick time and make any final business arrangements—in and out in a day.