Man on a Leash by Charles Williams 1973(1)

1
Dawn was just breaking when he pulled into town after the latenight
drive from San Francisco, and it would be hours yet before
officialdom was astir. A boy in an all-night service station
worried the spattered insects off his windshield while the tank
was being filled and told him how to find the cemetery. It was
about two miles south of the city limits, he said, and if he
wondered why an out-of-state license wanted to visit Coleville’s
burying ground at this strange hour, he made no mention of it.
Romstead wasn’t sure himself, since he had no flowers to
deposit on the grave and would have felt too uncomfortable and
self-conscious in such a lavender gesture anyway, knowing the
Rabelaisian laughter this would have evoked in the departed.
Maybe he simply had to see the grave before he could accept it.
Certainly Sergeant Crowder’s few facts over the telephone
had sounded as improbable as a bad television script, and the
big stud was indestructible anyway. Nobody who’d survived
waterfront brawls, typhoons, picket-line battles, a lifetime of
exuberant and extramarital wenching, torpedoings, western
ocean gales, and fourteen months on the Murmansk run in
World War II could have got himself killed in this plastic desert
town on the edge of nowhere. And not merely killed, Crowder
had said, but executed.


“Six ten,” the boy said. Romstead passed him the credit card.
He made out the slip, imprinted it with the card, and then broke
stride, looking up suddenly as the name struck him in the midst
Man on a Leash — 2
of this boring and automatic routine. He seemed about to say
something but changed his mind, filled in the license number,
and passed the clipboard in through the window. Romstead
signed and drove out.
The business district was only six or eight blocks, with traffic
lights at three of the intersections. South of it were several
motels, all showing vacancy signs, a residential area of modest
houses and green lawns, and then a highway maintenance depot
and some oil storage tanks. For a mile or so beyond the city
limits there were small irrigated farms on both sides of the
highway, but after the blacktop climbed a slight grade out of the
valley, he was in open rangeland again. Almost immediately he
saw the cemetery ahead of him and slowed.
It was on the slope of a rocky hillside to the right, with a row
of stunted cedars along the fence in front and a pair of
fieldstone pillars framing the entrance. He pulled off and
stopped, and when he cut the engine and got out, he was aware
of profound silence and the odor of sage. It was full daylight
now, the sky washed with pink and gold above the waste of
flinty hills and desert scrub to the east, while to westward the
thrusting escarpments of the Sierra stood out sharply in the
clear desert air. The cooling engine made a loud ticking sound
in the hush, and miles overhead an invisible jet drew its contrail
across the sky. He sighed and shook his head as he walked over
to the entrance. It was a hell of a morning to be dead.
The iron grillwork gates were closed but not locked. Then,
when he was already inside and walking slowly up the avenue
between the rows of graves, it suddenly occurred to him there
was no way to identify it when he found it. There wouldn’t be
any headstone yet. How could there be, since he was the only
one to place an order, and he hadn’t even known about it until
eight hours ago?
But surprisingly there was one. Just ahead and to his left was
the raw mound of a new grave, the only one in sight from here,
and when he approached, he saw the simple inscription chiseled
into the granite slab at the head of it:
GUNNAR ROMSTEAD
1906-1972
He walked over and stood looking down at this final resting
place of what had possibly been the world’s most improbable
Man on a Leash — 3
parent, not quite sure what his feelings were. There was no
profound sense of grief or loss, certainly, for a man he’d seen so
few times in his life. It was more a sense of wonder, he thought,
at all that vast energy’s having been stilled at last or the
incongruity of prosaic burial in a country cemetery so far from
the sea when anything less than a Viking funeral pyre would
have been an anticlimax.
Mayo had asked him once about his relationship with his
father. The question had surprised him, for he hadn’t even
thought about it in years, and now that he did the best answer
he could give her was that aside from mutual respect, he didn’t
think there had ever been any. From the onset of puberty both
had grown up in a totally male environment where selfsufficiency
was a prerequisite to survival—the one at sea and
the other in a succession of military schools and the locker
rooms of college jocks—so it would never have occurred to
either of them that young men really needed anybody. As a girl,
of course, she couldn’t believe this or understand it, and he had
despaired of trying to explain it to her.
He stood for another minute or two, his face impassive,
feeling somehow lacking that there didn’t seem to be anything
to say or do. Then he lifted one hand in a slight gesture that
might have been a farewell and turned and walked back to the
car. The sun was coming up now, and he remembered the line
from Ecclesiastes. A hamfisted ex-jock quoting the Preacher, he
thought; the old man would say he’d gone fruit.
Executed? What in hell had Crowder meant by that? And by
whom? Then he shook his head impatiently. Racking his brains
was a sheer waste of time until he could talk to somebody who
had the answers. He drove back to town.
He’d better get a place to stay. The chances were he’d be here
all day, and he should try to get some sleep before he made the
drive back. Upcoming on the right was the Conestoga Motel,
which seemed as likely a prospect as any. He swung in and
stopped under the porte cochere in front of the office. Beyond
the glass wall a row of slot machines lay in wait for the tourist
with the patient inevitability of snares in a game trail, and a
woman with blue-white hair sipped coffee and flipped through a
newspaper at the desk. She looked up with a smile as he
entered. Yes, there was a vacancy.
Man on a Leash — 4
“And a king-size bed, if you’d like one,” she added, with a not
entirely objective appraisal of his size.
“Fine.” He began filling in the registration card while she
plucked a key from the pigeonholes behind her.
“How long will you be staying, Mr.—”
“Romstead,” he replied. “Just one day, probably.”
“Oh.” As the boy in the service station had, she glanced up
sharply and appeared on the point of saying something, but did
not. “I see.” The smile was still there, but something had gone
out of it; it was now straight out of the innkeeper’s manual. He
passed over the American Express card, wondering at this
seemingly unanimous response to the name around here. Well,
the old man had never been one to blush unseen, even in larger
places than Coleville, and whatever his hangups might have
been, awe of community opinion wasn’t one of them.
He signed the slip and went out with the key. Room 17 was on
the ground floor at the rear of the U which enclosed the
standard small swimming pool and sun deck with patio furniture
and umbrellas. Several of the cars parked before the units were
being loaded now as travelers prepared to hit the road again.
The day’s heat was beginning, but the room was cool, dim
behind the heavy green drapes, smelled faintly of some aerosol
gunk masquerading as fresh air, and was wholly
interchangeable with a million others along the concrete river.
He dropped the bag on a luggage rack and switched on a light.
Sitting on the side of the bed, he reached for the thin directory
beside the telephone. It covered the whole county, rural
subscribers and the other small towns in addition to Coleville,
but there was no Gunnar Romstead in it, no Romstead of any
kind. Unlisted phone, he thought. The yellow pages revealed
there were two mortuaries in town, but no monument works or
stonecutter. The stone no doubt had come from Reno then, but
he could probably find out from the sheriff’s office and see if
there were any accounts to settle.
He shaved and showered and came out of the bath scrubbing
himself vigorously with the towel, a heavy set figure of a man
with haze-gray eyes, big, beat-up hands, and an all-over leathery
tan except for a narrow strip about his middle. He ran a comb
through the sun-streaked blond hair without noticeably
improving an indifferent haircut, shrugged, and tossed the comb
back into the toilet kit.
Man on a Leash — 5

He put on slacks and sport shirt. It was only a short walk to
the center of town; there was no need to take the car. He went
up the sidewalk under the increasing weight of the sun,
accustomed to it and scarcely noticing it but aware at the same
time of the unfamiliar dryness of the air and the faint odors of
dust and sage. Not many of the places of business were open
yet, and the pace was unhurried along the street.
Just ahead was a coffee shop with a couple of newspaper
vending racks in front. One of them held the San Francisco
Chronicle. He fished in his pocket and was about to drop in the
coins when he saw it was yesterday’s; it was too early yet for
today’s. Something half forgotten nudged the edges of his mind
as he went inside and ordered coffee. What was it? And where?
Then he remembered, and grinned, but with a faint tightness in
his throat.
It was in New York. He’d got permission from the military
academy he attended in Pennsylvania to come down to meet his
father for a day while his ship was in port. They’d had lunch
somewhere, and afterward out on the sidewalk his father had
flagged a taxi to take them to the ball game at Yankee Stadium.
As it was pulling to the curb, he dropped a coin in a vending
machine for a newspaper. There was no sign on it warning that
it was out of order, but it refused to open, and punching the coin
return was of no avail. It didn’t work either. Passersby turned to
gawk at this familiar scene of man’s being bilked by another
complacent, nickel-grabbing machine, and while somebody else
might have given it a shake and retreated muttering, his father
stepped back, calmly shoved a size-12 English brogue through
the glass front, lifted out his paper, folded it under his arm, and
strolled over to the cab while he, Eric, watched aghast in his
cadet’s uniform. By the time he’d got into the cab and they
pulled away his father was already immersed in the financial
section, and when he ventured some doubt about the legality of
this direct action, the old man had looked up, puzzled.
“What? Oh— Son, never expect anything free in this world;
you pay for everything you get. But at the same time make sure
they give you every goddamned thing you pay for.”
The sheriff’s office was on the ground floor at the rear of the
new courthouse and city hall, a long room with a wide double
doorway. A blond girl came out carrying a sheaf of papers and
nodded as he went in. There was a railing just inside, and
beyond it five or six desks and banks of filing cabinets. At the
Man on a Leash — 6
back of the room were two barred windows and a door that
presumably led to the alley and the parking area for official
cars. From an open doorway into another room at the left there
issued the sound of static and the short, staccato bursts of
police-band voices. There was a corridor at the right end of the
room, and next to it a bulletin board, a case containing shotguns
and rifles, and a small table holding a percolator and some
coffee cups. A dark-haired man of about thirty was typing at one
of the desks near the railing. He got up and came over.
“Good morning. Can I help you?”
“I’d like to speak to the sheriff,” Romstead replied. “Is he in
yet?”
“No. He’s got to go to court today; he may not be in at all. But
if it’s a complaint, I can take it. My name’s Orde.”
“No complaint,” Romstead said. “It’s about Captain
Romstead.”
“And you are?”
“Eric Romstead. He was my father.”
There was no reaction this time unless it was the total lack of
any expression at all, which was probably professional.
Romstead went on, “There was a wire from your office. I called
last night from San Francisco and talked to a man named
Crowder.”
“Yeah. Well, Crowder doesn’t come on till four, but the man
you want to see is Brubaker, chief deputy. He’s in charge of the
case. Just a minute.”
He went back to his desk and spoke into the phone. He
replaced the instrument and nodded. “Just have a seat there.
He’ll be with you in a couple of minutes.”
There was a bench along the wall beside the doors. Romstead
sat down. A teletype clattered briefly in the communications
room. Orde lit a cigarette and stared at the form in his
typewriter.
“What happened anyway?” Romstead asked.
“Didn’t Crowder tell you?”
“Just that he’d been shot. Executed is the word he used.”
“Crowder watches a lot of TV.” Orde leaned back in the swivel
chair and dropped the book of matches onto the desk. “But then
I guess you can’t argue with it, even if it is a little Hollywood.
Man on a Leash — 7
He was found on the city dump, shot in the back of the head. I’m
sorry.”
“But for Christ’s sake, who did it?”
“We don’t know. Except that it was real professional and some
action he brought here with him. We could have done without
it.”
This made no sense at all, of course, and Romstead was about
to point it out but did not. He’d come this far to get the facts
from somebody who knew what he was talking about, so he
could wait a few more minutes. At that moment the door opened
at the rear of the room, and a white-hatted deputy came in,
ushering ahead of him an emaciated middle-aged man whose
face was covered with a stubble of graying whiskers. The latter
looked around once with an expression that managed to be sly
and hangdog at the same time and then down at the floor as he
shuffled forward when the deputy released his arm and
gestured toward the chair by Orde’s desk. “Park it, Wingy.”
“Not again?” Orde asked.
“Again,” the deputy replied.
The prisoner sat down, still looking at the floor, and began to
pat his clothing for nonexistent cigarettes. Orde tossed the pack
across the desk.
“Who’d he unveil it for this time?” he asked. “The League of
Women Voters?”
“Rancher’s wife out on the Dennison road.” The deputy sighed
and went over to the table to pour a cup of coffee. “I wish to
Christ I had one I was that proud of.”
The prisoner was now patting his pockets for matches. Orde
tossed him the book. “Here.” He shook his head as he rolled a
new form into his typewriter and spoke in the tone of one
addressing a wayward child.
“Wingy, someday you’re going to wave that lily at some
woman’s got a cleaver in her hand, and she’s going to chop it off
and stuff it in your ear.”
A phone rang. Orde punched a button on the desk and
answered it. “Okay,” he said. He looked over at Romstead and
gestured toward the corridor. “That was Brubaker. Second door
on the left.”
“Thanks.” Romstead let himself in through the gate in the
railing and went up the hallway. The door was open. It was a
Man on a Leash — 8
small office. Brubaker was at the desk with his back to a closed
Venetian blind, removing the contents of a thick manila folder.
He stood up and held out his hand, a heavy, florid-faced man
with spiky red hair graying at the temples. The handshake was
brusque and his manner businesslike, but he smiled briefly as
he waved toward the chair in front of the desk.
“You’re a hard man to get hold of.” He sat down, picked up his
cigar from a tray on the desk, and leaned forward to study the
material from the envelope. “We’ve been trying to run you down
for two weeks.”
“I was out of town,” Romstead said. “I just got back last
night.”
“I know. We got your address from your father’s attorney. We
kept trying to call you and finally asked the San Francisco police
to check your apartment. The manager said he didn’t know
where you were. Crowder’s note here says you were on a boat
somewhere. You a seaman, too?”

“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.”
Man on a Leash — 9
“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.”
Man on a Leash — 10
“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?”
Man on a Leash — 11
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
Man on a Leash — 12

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 beatup
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.
Man on a Leash — 13
“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.
“Sometimes he drove to San Francisco, and sometimes he just
went over to Reno and took the plane. We checked the airlines,
and they have no record of a reservation for him any time in July
at all, so he must have driven all the way. As far as we can pin it
down, the last time he was seen here was on the Fourth, when
he had his car serviced at his usual place, the Shell station on
Aspen Street.
“When he planned to be gone more than a few days, he
usually made arrangements with a kid named Wally Pruitt to go
out to the place and check on it now and then, make sure the
automatic sprinklers were working, and so on, but this time
Wally says he didn’t call him, so apparently he wasn’t intending
to stay long when he left or else he just forgot—”
The phone rang. “Excuse me,” Brubaker said, and picked it
up. “Brubaker ... Oh, good morning ... Yeah, he did. As a matter
of fact, he’s here in my office right now ... Okay, I’ll tell him.
You’re welcome.”
He hung up. “That was your father’s lawyer, Sam Bolling. He’s
been trying to get hold of you, too, and he’d like to see you as
soon as we’re through here.”
“Right,” Romstead said. “Thanks.”
“His office is in the Whittaker Building at Third and Aspen. It
was through Sam, as a matter of fact, that we first learned
about the money and also that your father had an apartment in
San Francisco. He’s the executor of the estate, and as soon as
he learned Captain Romstead was dead, he notified the tax
people, the banks, any possible creditors, all that legal bit. The
bank in San Francisco told him about that whopping
withdrawal, and he immediately notified us. He was worried
about the money, of course, but we already had a pretty good
idea nobody was ever going to find it.
“We asked the San Francisco police to check out his
apartment while we searched the house here to see if we could
turn up any trace of it just on the off chance he still hadn’t
Man on a Leash — 14
consummated the so-called deal. There was no money in either
place, but we did find evidence of just about what we expected
—or that is, San Francisco did. All we found in the house was a
thousand Havana cigars stashed in a closet. But the apartment
was the payoff.
“It had just been thoroughly cleaned, with the exception of
one item he overlooked. In a closet there was an empty suitcase
that had some white powder spilled in the lining. The police
vacuumed it and had the stuff analyzed. It was heroin, all right,
and it had been cut with milk sugar.
“So there you are. All the evidence says he must have been
mixed up in smuggling junk when he was going to sea and still
had connections. Somebody brought in a consignment for him,
he drew out that money to pay for it, but before he sold it as
pure heroin to the next bunch of bastards along the pipeline, he
cut it, or cut part of it, to increase the take. Sound business
procedure, I suppose, as long as you don’t do it to the wrong
people. He apparently did, and they caught up with him after he
got back here.”
“No,” Romstead said. “I don’t buy it. Maybe in a lot of ways he
wouldn’t qualify as Husband of the Year or the thoroughly
domesticated house pet, but junk—no.”
“I wouldn’t call you an expert witness,” Brubaker pointed out.
“You’ve practically admitted you didn’t know a damn thing
about where he was or what he was doing.”
“No, but I don’t see that you’ve got any evidence, anyway.
Who says that suitcase was his? You know as well as I do he
wasn’t using that apartment alone. Christ, with his track record
there could have been a half dozen girls in and out of it at one
time or another, any one of ‘em a possible junkie or with a
junkie boyfriend on the side.”
“And I suppose he was just keeping those forty boxes of
Upmann cigars for some girl? Maybe she didn’t want her
mother to know she smoked.”
Romstead gestured impatiently. “Cigars are not heroin.”
“No, but they’re contraband.”
“Only in the United States. He smoked ‘em all the time. Said
tobacco had no politics.”
Brubaker removed his own cigar and looked at it. “And I have
to smoke these goddamned ropes.” He shrugged. “Oh, well, if
Man on a Leash — 15
Castro was chairman of the Republican National Committee, I
still couldn’t afford his cigars.”
“Well, look,” Romstead said. “It seems to me there’s a big hole
in your reasoning somewhere. If he bought this crap for a
quarter million dollars, as you say, and then sold it to somebody
else at a profit, he must have got more than forty dollars for it.
It wasn’t at the house, and it wasn’t in the apartment, so what
happened to it?”
“Those hoods got it, obviously. The same time they got him.”
“It must have been at the house, then, if they came up here
looking for him. Was there any sign of a fight?”
“None at all. But don’t forget, he was playing with
professionals. They don’t come on like Laurel and Hardy.”
“You’re convinced of that? Then there’s not much chance of
catching them?”
There was a sudden darkening of anger in the chief deputy’s
face, gone just as quickly as he got it under control. “Jesus
Christ, Romstead, I know how you feel, but look at the hole
we’re in. It wasn’t anybody here that killed your father. We’re
just a geographical accident; all we’ve got is a dead body and
jurisdiction. Everything leading up to the crime and everybody
connected with it came from a metropolitan area in another
state.
“The police down there are cooperating with us all they can,
but they’re shorthanded and overworked the same as everybody
else, and every detective on the force has got his own backlog of
unsolved cases as long as a whore’s dream. Our only chance is
to keep questioning people, the same as we have been ever
since it happened, till we locate somebody who saw that car that
night, to get some kind of description of it, a place to start. Your
father had an unlisted telephone number and a post office box
address, so they had to ask somebody to find out where he
lived.”
Brubaker began to put the file back into the folder. There
were several questions Romstead wanted to ask, but they could
be answered by Bolling just as well or maybe better. “We’ll let
you know when we come up with anything,” Brubaker
concluded.
Romstead stood up, and they shook hands. “Thanks for your
time.”
Man on a Leash — 16
“Not at all. Incidentally, who’s the owner of that boat you
were on?”
“A man named Carroll Brooks. You can reach him at the
Southland Trust Bank in San Diego.”
Brubaker shrugged. “Just standard routine.”

“No sweat.” Romstead went out and walked over to Aspen
Street, trying to collect his thoughts. What in God’s name had
the old man intended to do with a quarter million dollars in
cash, even assuming he had that much in the first place? Why’d
he bought a farm here, or ranch, or whatever it was, and then
rented an apartment in San Francisco? The whole thing seemed
to get murkier by the minute.
* * *
Bolling’s office was on the third floor of the Whittaker Building,
a large corner room with windows on two sides. The desk was a
massive one of some dark wood, the carpet was gray, and there
were two leather armchairs. The walls were lined with
identically bound volumes of an extensive law library. Bolling
himself appeared to be well into his sixties, but erect, with a
homely, angular face and sparse white hair. The eyes were a
sharp and piercing blue. He smiled as he got up from behind the
desk. “By God, you’re almost as big as he was.”
“Not quite,” Romstead said.
“Somehow I expected you to be darker, since your mother was
Cuban, but you look exactly like him.”
“She was blond, too.”
“He said you were quite a baseball player.”
“Prep school and in college,” Romstead replied.
“Professional, too, I understand.”
“I only lasted one season; I couldn’t hit big-league pitching. It
was a way to get through school, but I couldn’t see minor-league
ball as a career.”
“You put yourself through college?”
“Not entirely. I had a jock scholarship and worked summers,
but he sent me money and would have sent more, but I didn’t
need it.”
“You’re in his will, of course. Or have you seen a copy of it?”
Man on a Leash — 17
“No. I didn’t even know he had one.” Romstead paused and
then went on musingly. “I guess the reason I’ve never thought
about it is that I must’ve always assumed he’d outlive me. I
know that sounds crazy as hell—”
“No. Not to anybody who knew him. You haven’t seen his
place, of course?”
“No. I didn’t even know about it until last night. And now I’ve
just found out he had an apartment in San Francisco.”
Bolling nodded. “He rented it about five months ago. I tried to
talk him out of it, but he insisted.”
“But why?”
“Why did I advise against it, you mean? On account of taxes.”
“No, I mean the whole bit. Why did he retire here, and buy a
place, and then rent an apartment there?”
“There were several reasons, actually, but the primary one, of
course, was taxes. It’s easy to get to San Francisco, which he
loved, but still not in California, which he detested. But the sad
truth is he was bored here, and he spent more and more time in
San Francisco, going over for the opera, concerts, plays, and so
on, always having to get confirmed hotel reservations each time,
so he decided to rent the apartment. He said that as long as his
voting residence was here and he owned property here and only
spent a total of a couple of months a year in San Francisco,
California could go to hell for its income and inheritance taxes.
He was a very stubborn man, and beyond a point there was no
use arguing with him.”
“But why this obsession with taxes? Would it have made that
much difference?”
“Well, considerable. Your father’s income was in excess of
fifty thousand a year, from his retirement pay and his securities.
A lot of it was political bias, however; he loathed the whole idea
of the welfare state, Social Security, unemployment benefits,
the welfare rolls, and so on. He was a very charming and
talented man, but politically he was somewhere off to the right
of the Hapsburgs and Plantagenets.”
“And it’s true, then? He was a millionaire?”
“Oh, yes. His net worth was considerably over a million.”
“Well, you don’t believe that crap of Brubaker’s, do you, that
he was mixed up in the drug racket?”
Man on a Leash — 18
“No,” Bolling said. “Of course not. He said he made it in the
stock market, and I see no reason to doubt it.” He reached into
a drawer for a document bound in blue paper and set it before
him. “I won’t bother to read you all this at the moment because
a good deal of it is meaningless now until somebody finds out
what happened to that two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
He glanced up. “Brubaker told you about it?”
Romstead nodded. “But why do you think he drew it out in
cash? And what did he do with it?”
“I couldn’t even guess,” Bolling replied. “I’ve been racking my
brains for ten days, and I get absolutely nowhere. It was a
stupid thing to do, and your father was far from a stupid man.
But what we’re concerned with right here is that there are two
immediate effects regarding the will, and one of them, I’m sorry
to say, is very bad news for you. If that money is never
recovered, you bear the whole loss.”
“How’s that?” Romstead asked.
“All the other bequests were fixed sums, and you were to get
the residue of the estate.”
Romstead tried to think of something to say, but there didn’t
appear to be anything. There was a moment of silence, and then
Bolling asked, “You understand what I’m saying?”
“Oh— Sure. I guess I was just savoring the moment. How
many other people have lost a quarter million dollars in a few
seconds?”
There was admiration in Bolling’s smile and shake of the head.
“Well, I’m glad you don’t shatter easily.”
“Oh, it’s not all that heroic,” Romstead protested. “You might
say I didn’t have it long enough to get attached to it.”
“Our only hope is that it may be recovered yet.”
“Could he have deposited it in another bank? Or stashed it in
a safe-deposit box?”
“No. We’ve exhausted that possibility—with help from the
police, of course. We’ve checked every bank chain in California
and Nevada and even furnished a description just in case he
used another name for some unknown reason. Not a trace.”
“Doesn’t look very promising,” Romstead said. “But what was
the other effect you referred to?”
Man on a Leash — 19
“On probating the will and settling the estate. The whole
thing’s at a standstill, for the reason that we don’t know how
much the estate is.”
“I see what you mean. For federal tax purposes?”
“Sure. It would make a big difference. And the tax people
don’t accept figures like give-or-take-a-quarter-million-dollars.
As far as they’re concerned, the last person to have possession
of that money was your father, and if that wasn’t the case, it’s
up to him—or us, that is—to prove otherwise. If he bought
something with it, whatever he bought has to be appraised and
the arrived-at value added to the tax-liable value of the estate. If
it was stolen from him between the time he drew it out and the
time he died, that might change the picture, but we’d have to
prove it was stolen, and when, where, and by whom, and if we
were in a position to do all that, we could probably recover it
anyway.
“Practically all of your father’s worth is in securities; the only
real property he owned is his place here, which consists of ten
acres, the dwelling and other structures, and furnishings. Total
assessed value, about seventy-five thousand dollars. You inherit
that, along with the car, plus whatever’s left after taxes,
bequests to the San Francisco Opera Association, the San
Francisco Symphony, and three women in Europe and the Far
East that I gather are old girlfriends. If the other money’s never
recovered, but is still taxed, that’ll be roughly eighty thousand.
“So as it stands now, you’ll get a little over a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars instead of the four hundred thousand dollars it
would have been.”
Romstead nodded. “Well, that’s considerably better than a
kick in the ass with a frozen boot. I didn’t expect anything.” He
went on. “But about that money—how’d he draw it out? He
surely didn’t keep anything like that in a checking account?”
“Oh, no. He asked his broker to sell securities in that amount
and deposit the proceeds in the bank.”
“In person or over the phone?”
“On the phone.”
“What day was this?”
“July sixth, I think—just a minute.” Bolling pressed a lever and
spoke into the intercom. “Rita, will you bring me that file on
Captain Romstead?”
Man on a Leash — 20
The gray-haired, rather matronly secretary came in with a file
folder and went back out, closing the door. Bolling consulted
some of the papers in it. “His brokers are a small firm,
Winegaard and Stevens; it was Winegaard who handled his
business. Your father called him just at seven A.M. on Thursday,
July sixth—that’s local time, of course, which would be the
opening of the New York Stock Exchange. He read him a list of
securities to sell and asked him to deposit the proceeds in his
checking account at the Northern California First National
Bank, which is practically next door on Montgomery Street. He
said to sell it all at the market opening and to expedite the deal
as much as he could; he needed the money not later than the
following Wednesday, which would be the twelfth. The deposit
would still have to clear, of course, before it could be drawn
on.”
“Then did he alert the bank?”
“Yes. On Monday, the tenth, he called and talked to Owen
Richter, one of the officers he knew personally. Told him about
the upcoming deposit, asked him to clear it as fast as he could,
and told him he was going to want it in cash, so they’d be
prepared.”
“Did he ask Richter to call him when it cleared?”
“No. He said he’d call back himself. Which he did, Wednesday
morning. The money was there, so he came in and picked it up.”
“Was he alone?”
“Yes. I specifically asked Richter about that. He said there
was nobody with him at all. He seemed to be perfectly all right,
rational and sober. He got a little abrasive when Richter tried to
talk him out of taking it in cash, and he didn’t offer any further
explanation except that it was for a business deal; but both of
these are entirely characteristic of the captain in the best of
circumstances. He seldom explained anything, and he had a
very low tolerance for unsolicited advice.”
Romstead nodded, puzzled. “And Winegaard didn’t get any
further explanation either?”
“No.” Bolling smiled faintly. “I doubt he expected much; he’d
dealt with your father a long time. The only thing he objected to
was the selection of the stocks to sell.”
“How was that?”
Man on a Leash — 21
“Well, normally, of course, if you’re liquidating part of a
portfolio for some reason, you do it selectively, that is, you
prune out the weak sisters, the indifferent performers, losers
where you want to cut your losses, and so on. He didn’t do that.
He just went straight down the list until the total added up to a
little over two hundred and fifty thousand and told Winegaard to
sell it all.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“No. Certainly not for a man who’d managed to make a
fortune in the stock market over the years. As I say, Winegaard
objected, or tried to, but he was cut off pretty sharply.”
“I don’t get it.” Romstead shook his head. “Oh, how about the
burial expenses? Are there any accounts to settle?”
“No. They’re all taken care of.”
“Then you paid them, as executor of the estate?”
“No, he did. At the time he drew up his will, just shortly after
he moved here, he made all the arrangements with the mortuary
and paid for his own funeral in advance. Also the headstone.”
“Why? You don’t suppose he had some warning this was going
to happen?”