Man on a Leash - Charles Williams(3)

“There was never any question of marriage. I was in no hurry
to be married again, and certainly not to him, and he said from
the start he’d never try it again, that he wasn’t cut out for
domesticity—which I could see even then was probably the
understatement of the century.
“I have no doubt he had another girl, or perhaps several of
them at different times, in San Francisco, but whether she or
one of them was Jeri Bonner, I don’t think so. She was only
twenty-four, for one thing, and surprisingly, he didn’t go for
very young women. I know this is contrary to the classic pattern
of the aging stud, needing younger and younger girls to get it
off the runway, but maybe he was saving that phase for his
eighties and nineties; his theory was that no woman under thirty
even knew what it was all about. And there was the drugs; if she
was using heroin, he wouldn’t have had anything to do with her
at all.”
And still the stuff had been in the house, and she’d known it
was and just where to find it, Romstead thought. You never
came up with any answers, only more questions. And though he
liked her, the sexy Mrs.

Carmody’s hymn to his father’s
virtuosity as a lover was beginning to bug him; he’d been twenty
days at sea. He thanked her for the drink, went back to the
motel, and called Mayo.
“What did you find out?” she asked.
“Nothing you’d believe,” he said. “I’ll tell you all about it when
I get there. Around eleven P.M.”
“I’ll wait for you at your place.”
“Good thinking.”
“Sure. I thought it would be convenient. So if you’re going to
whizz through town in five minutes again, you can tell me about
it while you’re taking a cold shower.”
“Let’s make that ten instead of eleven.”
He went out to the office, paid the toll charges, and left a call
for five P.M. It was still a few minutes to ten that night when he
emerged from the elevator in the high-rise complex overlooking
the Embarcadero and the bay and padded quietly along the
carpeted hallway to his apartment.
The lights were dim in the living room. Mayo Foley, clad in a
housecoat with apparently nothing under it, was listening to
Ravel with her feet and long bare legs up on the coffee table
Man on a Leash — 46
beside a champagne bucket. She smiled, with that smoky look in
the deep blue eyes he’d come to know so well, and said, “You’re
just in time, Romstead; I was about to start without you.”
Man on a Leash — 47
5
Mayo, whose real first name was Martha, was thirty-three,
divorced, a creamy-skinned brunette with eyes that were very
near to violet, and a registered nurse who’d always wanted to
be a doctor but hadn’t quite been able to make it into medical
school after four years of premed at Berkeley. In spite of the
med-school turndowns, she was only mildly hung up on women’s
lib, but she was a dedicated McGovernite and a passionate
advocate of civil rights and environmental causes. She was also
sexy as hell and possessed of a vocabulary that could raise welts
on a Galapagos tortoise, as Romstead had learned early in their
acquaintance when he’d jokingly called her a knee-jerk liberal.
So far he had asked her at least three times to marry him, but
she had refused, always gently, but decisively. Her first
marriage had been a disaster, and she had reservations about
him as a candidate for a second attempt.
He turned now and looked at her. She lay on her back, nude
beside him in the faint illumination of the bedroom, totally
relaxed, fluid, and pliant, a composition in chiaroscuro with the
soft gleam of the thighs and the triangular wedge of velvet black
at their juncture, the dark nipples of the spread and flattened
breasts, pale blur of face, and the dark hair and the shadows of
her eyes. This began to excite him again, and he turned and
kissed her softly on the throat. It was after two in the morning
now, and they had made love three times already, the last time
Man on a Leash — 48
very slowly and lingeringly, during which she had had a whole
series of convulsive orgasms. Well, you could always try.
She pushed his hand away. “You’ve got a hell of a nerve,
calling your father a stud.”
“Cut it out. I haven’t slept with another woman since I met
you.”
“Well, I should hope not. I don’t see how you could work one
into your schedule.”
“It’s just that I’ve been three weeks at sea. And I’m crazy
about you.”
She reached over on the nightstand and lighted a cigarette.
The tip glowed red in the darkness. “What are you going to do?”
she asked.
“Wait a few minutes and try again.”
“Oh, that I know. If there’d been even the faintest doubt you’d
keep trying, I’d have engulfed you like a Venus flytrap. You poor
innocent, growing up in military schools.” She puffed on the
cigarette. Her nipples looked purple in the glow. “I mean, what
are you going to do about your father and the money he left
you?”
“Three things,” he replied. “I thought about it all the way
driving down tonight. I’ll tell you the third one first, since it
involves you. Instead of selling them, for a change I’m going to
buy a boat. I mean, one whole hell of a lot of boat. Money will be
no problem. I get about a hundred and fifty thousand from the
estate, and I’ve got a little over that myself, savings and so on
and the money I got for my franchise in Costa Rica—”
“You mean from the CIA.”
“Are you still on that? I tell you I was working for myself.”
“All right, all right, you were just an innocent businessman.
Go on about the boat.”
“Say a thirty-five to forty-foot ketch, which is about all two
people can handle without having to work too hard at it.
Everything on it—self-steering vane, radiotelephone,
fathometer, Kenyon log, diesel auxiliary, tanks for a cruising
range of four hundred miles under power, generator,
refrigerator. You can do all that with a fairly small boat if you’re
just putting in cruising accommodations for two, and you can do
it for sixty thousand or less.
Man on a Leash — 49
“We’ll take a long cruise, down the west coast as far as
Panama, across to the Galapagos, back up to Hawaii, and then
out through the Marianas and Carolines. How about it?”
“Mmmmm—I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”
“Why?”
“Let’s don’t go into that now. What are the other two things
you’re going to do?”
“The first is I’m going to find that son of a bitch who
murdered the old man. And then I’m going to light one of those
Havana cigars and smoke it very slowly right down to the end
while he’s begging me to call the police.”
“And you wonder why I’m doubtful about marrying you.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’re just as arrogant and self-sufficient and ruthless as he
was. Make up your own laws, and the hell with civilization.”
“You ever hear of a place called Murmansk?” he asked.
“Sure. It’s a Russian seaport in the Arctic. Why?”
He tried to tell her—dispassionately, of course, since this was
hardly the setting for the kind of cold rage that had kept
growing in him driving down from Nevada—tried to tell her of
the gales, the snow, sleet, ships solidly encased in ice, divebomber
attacks, submarine wolf packs, and the eternal, pitiless
cold that could kill a man in the water in minutes. He hadn’t
known any of this at the time, of course; he was only a very
young boy leading a very easy existence in an upper-class
Havana suburb, but he’d learned it later through reading about
those convoy runs in World War II and what it was like to carry
aviation gasoline and high explosives up across the top of the
world while the Germans and the merciless Barents Sea did
their level best to kill you. His father had done it, for months on
end, along with a lot of other men who could have found cozier
backwaters to ride out the war if they’d tried.
“He was out there taking his chances where some real hairy
people were gunning for him, and then he winds up on a
garbage dump, tied up and blindfolded so some chickenshit
punk can shoot him in the back of the head.”
“Well, the police are looking for them, aren’t they?” she
asked.
Man on a Leash — 50
“Oh, sure. After a fashion, and for the wrong people for the
wrong motives.”
“What do you mean?”
“The heroin angle. I think the whole thing was a plant. And it
worked, at least so far. They got just the situation they wanted:
The sheriff’s department in Coleville has jurisdiction because
that’s where it happened, but they’re convinced the crime was
committed by professional hoodlums from San Francisco. The
San Francisco police will help as much as they can, but they’re
not about to run a temperature over a dead man in Nevada;
they’ve got a dead man of their own—a whole morgue full of ‘em
and more coming in by the hour. We’ll be in touch, fellas; how’s
the weather up there? And neither police force, Coleville or San
Francisco, is going to start a crusade over a rubbed-out heroin
dealer: Well, that’s one son of a bitch we don’t have to contend
with anymore; they ought to do it more often.”
“Then you think he was killed for that money he drew out of
the bank? Somebody knew about it.”
“No. He was forced to draw it out of the bank; and then the
same people killed him. You can futz around with it until you’re
blue in the face, and you’ll never make a case for his having
drawn that money out voluntarily.”
“You mean extortion?” she asked. “A threat of some kind?”
“Right.”
“But how? They said he came into the bank alone. What was
to keep him from calling the police?”
“Richter just has to be wrong about it, that’s all. Somebody
was covering him, and they missed it. What other forms of
extortion are there? He was too tough to pay blackmail, even if
they had something really serious on him, which I don’t believe
for a minute. Kidnap? I’m the only family he had, and nobody
tried to kidnap me.”
“Maybe they’d read ‘The Ransom of Red Chief,’ “ she said.
“Smartass.”
“How are you going to find out?”
“Go talk to Richter and Winegaard, to begin with.”
“Did they teach you investigative techniques in the CIA? Or
just interrogation—the iron maiden—bastinado?”
“Will you cut it out? CIA!”
Man on a Leash — 51
“Didn’t you know you talk in your sleep?”
“I do?”
“Scared you, didn’t I? Well, you do, but it’s always in Spanish.
I’ve been thinking of enrolling at Berlitz.”
“I’m probably talking to the other drivers; Berlitz doesn’t
teach that kind of Spanish. Anyway, why wouldn’t I speak it? My
mother was Cuban, and I lived in Havana most of the time until
I was fourteen, when she died.”
“I know. And then you gave up a career in professional
baseball to become a stodgy old businessman in Latin America
—”
“You’d be surprised how easy it is for a catcher hitting one
sixty to give up a career in professional baseball.”
“Stop interrupting me. And this was just before the Bay of
Pigs. Odd, wasn’t it?”
“If I plead guilty to all charges, can I make love to you again?”
“Well—”
“Now we’re getting somewhere. Why didn’t I think of copping
out before? Did you know I also fomented the Boxer Rebellion
and started the War of Jenkins’ Ear?”
* * *
He arose a little before nine, showered and shaved as quietly as
he could, and took a fresh suit and the rest of his clothes out
into the living room to dress. This was accomplished with only
one or two drowsy mutters from the depths of Mayo’s pillow,
largely undistinguishable except for something about a
goddamned rhinoceros.
He expected to find the kitchen barren of anything edible, the
way he’d left it when he had taken off for Baja California, but
discovered she’d restocked it, at least for breakfast. He put on
coffee, mixed some orange juice, and toasted a cinnamon roll in
the broiler of the oven. It would be an hour yet before the bank
opened, so he’d have time to talk to Winegaard first. He looked
up the number and dialed. Yes, the secretary said, Mr.
Winegaard was in and would be glad to see Mr. Romstead. In
about fifteen minutes. He scribbled a note to Mayo saying he’d
be back before noon and walked over to Montgomery Street. It
was a sunny morning, at least downtown, but cool enough to be
typical of San Francisco’s summer.
Man on a Leash — 52
There was a customer’s room with a number of desks and big
armchairs where men were watching stock quotations on a
board, with the partners’ offices at the rear of it. Edward
Winegaard’s was large and expensively carpeted, with a massive
desk, and a mounted Pacific sailfish on one wall. Winegaard was
a man near his father’s age, trim and in good shape and tanned,
with conservatively cut silvery hair. He arose to shake hands
and indicated the armchair before his desk.
“It was a very tragic thing,” he said. “And I don’t understand
it. I don’t understand it at all.”
“Neither do I,” Romstead replied. “But all I’ve had so far is
secondhand information, which is why I wanted to talk to you.
You’ve known him for a long time?”
“Twenty—ah—twenty-seven years now.”
“Then there’s no question he made that money in the stock
market?”
“None at all. Why?”
“The police seem to have some doubt of it.”
“I don’t see why. It was quite easy, looking at it in retrospect;
anybody with a good job and a little money to invest every
month could have done it. All he’d have to do is study stocks the
way your father did.” He smiled faintly, like a man remembering
some golden age that was gone. “And get into the market when
the Dow was in the two hundred to three hundred range, good
solid shares were selling at five or six times earnings, and the
big glamour issues were still to come.

“I first met him in New York in 1945. I’d just got out of the
Army and was with Merrill Lynch. He had about twelve
thousand dollars in savings and what I thought were very sound
ideas on how he wanted to invest it. I’ve handled his business
ever since. We had arguments, plenty of them—most of which
he won—and I’ll have to admit that more than half the time he
was right.
“Traditionally, you think of shipmasters and seamen as
shellbacks and old fogies about a century behind the times, but
in the matter of investments Captain Romstead was oriented
toward the future all the way. He believed in the new
technology—electronics especially, computers, and aerospace.
He’d been a radioman himself—”
“I didn’t know that,” Romstead said.
Man on a Leash — 53
“Yes. You see, when he first got his officer’s papers, he was
still sailing in Norwegian ships, before he became a U. S.
citizen. And in those days it was quite common—as he explained
it to me—for one of the mates of a Norwegian ship to double as
wireless operator. So he had both tickets then.
“It was more or less natural then—especially after he started
sailing out of here—for him to see the potentialities of the new
electronics issues like Ampex, Varian, and Hewlett-Packard. He
also bought IBM and Xerox at prices—and before multiple splits
—that would make strong men break down and cry if you
started talking about them now. And of course, shipmasters
were making very good salaries by then; he was working
steadily and buying more stock all the time. His portfolio was
worth a million or a little over as far back as 1965.”
“Good,” Romstead said. “Now, for the second part—the
pruning job when he liquidated that two hundred and fifty
thousand. How does that jibe with your twenty-seven years’
experience with him?”
“It doesn’t,” Winegaard said flatly. “As my grandchildren
would say—no way.”
“It was that bad?”
“A child with a pair of scissors could have done just as well.”
Winegaard took from his desk a list consisting of three pages
clipped together. “This is a copy of our latest statement to him—
that is, the shares we held for him in street name. What he did
was simply to sell everything on the first page, except for one
minor item at the bottom of it. Without going into detail about it,
this included two issues we’d bought for him only the week
before and that we were very high on, and another he’d had for
less than a month and that was performing even better than
we’d expected. It makes no sense at all that he would sell these.
“And on the next two pages there were three stocks we’d
already more than halfway decided to unload. Approximately the
same amount of money involved, around ninety thousand. I
argued with him, or tried to, but he cut me off very abruptly. He
didn’t want to argue about it, he said. Sell at the market
opening and deposit the proceeds in his checking account as
soon as possible.”
Romstead was conscious of growing excitement. Now they
were getting somewhere. “Well, look—did he specifically
Man on a Leash — 54
mention the sum two hundred and fifty thousand as the amount
he needed?”
“No, he didn’t. He’d know, of course, from the previous
closing quotations within a few thousand what the list would
bring—barring some upheaval in the market overnight. Actually,
the proceeds after commission came to something a little over
two hundred and fifty-three thousand.”
“And what was the item at the bottom of the first page that he
didn’t sell?”
“Some warrants. Fifteen hundred dollars altogether, around
that.”
“In other words, he completely ignored everything on the
other two pages. And when you tried to bring up some stocks
that were listed on these pages is when he cut you off?”
“Hmmmm, yes. That’s about it.”
“How did he sound to you? Was there anything unusual about
his voice or mode of expression?”
“No. Not at all. Your father, let’s face it, could be quite
brusque and impatient when he wanted action instead of
conversation.”
“No,” Romstead said. “I don’t think that’s the reason he cut
you off.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think he was being forced to liquidate those stocks, and the
people who were leaning on him didn’t know—for some reason
—that there were two more pages. Otherwise, they’d have got it
all.”
“Good God! Do you think a thing like that is possible?”
“What other explanation can you think of?”
“But how could they hope to get the money? It would be in the
bank. And bankers, before they cash checks for a quarter
million dollars, are apt to ask for a little identification.”
“No. They expected to get it in cash—which is exactly the way
they did get it. Before they killed him.”
* * *
The double glass doors of the Northern California First National
Bank were at street level, and with the wide windows on each
side it was possible for anyone to see the whole interior. It was
Man on a Leash — 55
high-ceilinged with ornate chandeliers and a waxed terrazzo
floor. On the left, in front and extending more than halfway
back, was a carpeted area behind a velvet rope which held the
officers’ desks. On the right in front was more of the terrazzo
lobby extending to wide carpeted stairs leading downward, no
doubt to the safe-deposit vaults. Beyond these areas there were
tellers’ windows on both sides, and then at the back a railing,
several girls at bookkeeping machines, and the iron-grille
doorway into the open vault. Down the center there were three
chest-high writing stands with glass tops.
One uniformed guard was on duty at the desk at the head of
the stairs to the safe-deposit vaults, and he could see another
tidying up the forms at the rearmost of the writing stands.
Three of the tellers’ windows were open, and there were six or
seven customers. This is where they did it, Romstead thought, in
front of everybody. They had to be good. He went in.
Owen Richter’s desk was just inside the entrance to the
carpeted area. Richter himself was a slender graying man with
an air of conservatism and unflappable competence, and
Romstead was forced to concede it didn’t seem likely the eyes
behind those rimless glasses ever missed much that went on in
the bank or were often fooled by what they saw. He introduced
himself and explained why he was here. Richter shook his head.
“There’s not a chance, Mr. Romstead. It’s exactly as I told the
police, and the executor—Bolling, isn’t it? Your father, when he
came in and picked up that money, was sober, entirely rational,
and alone.”
“He couldn’t have been,” Romstead said. “It was completely
out of character, something he simply wouldn’t do.”
“Oh, as for that, I couldn’t agree with you more. I’ve known
Captain Romstead for close to ten years. He was very sound and
conservative and highly competent in managing money. And
because I did know him and knew this was totally unlike him, I
was suspicious myself when he first telephoned me, that
Monday before the withdrawal, and said he was going to want
that amount of money in cash. It’s irregular. And also foolish
and highly dangerous. I tried to talk him out of it, but got
nowhere. He simply said to expedite the clearance, that he
wanted the money by Wednesday, and hung up.
“As you’re probably aware, there are certain types of
swindlers who prey on older people, and while I was sure the
Man on a Leash — 56
con man who’d pick your father for a victim would be making
the mistake of his life, I made a note to be on the lookout when
he came in, just to be sure there was no third party lurking in
the background. I also alerted Mr. Wilkins, the security officer
on duty in the main lobby here. He knew the captain by sight, of
course.”
“You don’t know where he called from, that Monday?”
“No, he didn’t say. And of course there’s no way to tell; it
came through the switchboard, and nowadays with longdistance
dialing they wouldn’t know either.”
“He said he’d call back Wednesday to see if the deposit had
cleared. Did you by any chance offer to call him?”
“Yes, I did. But he said not to bother; he’d call.”
“And what time did he?”
“Around ten thirty Wednesday morning. I told him clearance
had just come through, so he said he would be in in about ten
minutes.”
“Did he specify any denominations for the money?” Romstead
asked.

“Yes. In fifties and hundreds. I gave instructions to have it
counted out and ready for him in the vault. As you’ll see, from
my desk here I can see the whole lobby, from the vault on out to
the front doors, and even the sidewalk outside, through the
windows. I told Mr. Wilkins he would be here in a few minutes,
so he was on the lookout, too. I think it was just ten forty exactly
when your father came in.”
“Was there anybody behind him?” Romstead asked.
“No. Not immediately behind him. By the time he’d walked
over to my desk there was another man came in, but I knew
him. He owns a restaurant down the street and has been a bank
customer for years. The captain came on over to the desk here.
He was carrying a small bag—”
“Do you remember what kind it was?” Romstead interrupted.
“And what color?”
“Gray. It was just the common type of airplane luggage you
can buy anywhere, even in drugstores. I asked him to sit down,
but he refused; he seemed to be impatient to get on with the
transaction. I tried again to tell him how dangerous it was,
carrying that much money around the streets, but he waved me
off rather abruptly. So I told him if he’d write out the check, I’d
Man on a Leash — 57
go back to the vault and get the money for him, but he said he’d
go with me. Mr. Wilkins came over, and the three of us walked
back. The captain took out his checkbook and stopped at one of
the stands out there to write the check and sign it. We went on
to the railing there outside the vault, and I asked to have the
money brought out. It was banded, of course, and the captain
accepted our count as we put it in the bag. He thanked me, and
Mr. Wilkins and I walked to the front door with him.”
“And nobody followed him out?”
“No. We were particularly on the lookout for that, but it was a
minute or two before anybody else went out, and again it was a
customer I knew. I still didn’t like the transaction, so I stepped
out on the sidewalk myself just to be sure there was nobody
waiting for him outside. He went up to the corner, waited for
the light, and crossed Montgomery. He was still alone, nobody
following him.”
Romstead glumly shook his head. “Well, that seems to be it.”
“Yes, there’s not a chance in the world he was being
threatened or coerced in any way. All the time he was here at
my desk he could have told me without being overheard. And
back there by the vault Mr. Wilkins and I were both alone with
him. Also, when he crossed Montgomery, he passed right in
front of a police car, stopped for the light.”
But, damn it, Romstead thought, it had to be. There was no
other answer. “How many people were in the lobby altogether?”
“Several came in and went out during the whole period, but I
don’t think there were ever more than eight at one time.”
“Was there anybody who was strange to you? Who wasn’t a
customer and you couldn’t remember seeing before?”
“Yes. There were two.” The answer was unhesitating and
precise. “One was a young woman with blond hair, wearing dark
glasses. I think she was buying travelers’ checks. The other was
a hippie type with a big bushy beard, a headband, and hair
down to his shoulders. He was wearing one of those poncho
things and had a guitar slung over his shoulder.”
“What was he doing? He doesn’t sound much like a regular
bank customer.”
“He was counting his change. I guess he’d been panhandling.”
Distaste was evident in Richter’s tone. “He came in just a few
minutes before the captain and was at that middle stand there
Man on a Leash — 58
with a double handful of nickels, dimes, and quarters spread out
on it, counting them.”
“He didn’t have one hand under the poncho, any TV routine
like that?”
“Oh, no. Anyway, he was still here after the captain went out.
He was at one of the tellers’ windows. Getting currency for all
that silver, I suppose.”
“I just don’t get it,” Romstead said. “There’s only one thing
that strikes me as a little odd. You asked him to sit down here
and write the check, but he refused. Then he stopped at one of
the stands and wrote it. Didn’t he have a pen?”
“Oh, I offered him one.”
“Did it strike you as strange?”
“No-o. Not really. It was my impression, I think, that he didn’t
want me to go after the money—that is, it’d be quicker if he
went too.”
“Well, when he stopped to write it on the way back to the
vault, was it the stand where the hippie was?”
“No. It was the one at the rear.”
“Then the hippie couldn’t have seen the amount?”
“No, not unless he had exceptional eyesight—” Richter
stopped, his eyes thoughtful. “Yes, he might have. As I recall
now, he finished his counting and had gathered up his silver
while your father was writing out the check, and he went past
on the other side of the stand, going to one of the tellers’
windows. But I don’t think that’s significant; he could just as
easily have seen, or guessed, what the three of us were doing
back there by the vault with the bag, if he had robbery in mind.
Anyway, as I said, he was still in the bank after your father left.”
Romstead walked back to the apartment, feeling baffled and
frustrated. How could he be right and wrong at the same time?
Man on a Leash — 59
6
“If the first supposition is right, then the second one has to be
too,” he told Mayo. “Richter missed it, and now I’ve missed it;
but it still has to be there.”
“Not necessarily,” she replied. She was wearing the housecoat
and a pair of mules, but she’d combed her hair and put on
lipstick. She was perched crosswise in a big armchair in the
living room, sipping coffee. “You’re projecting your hypothesis
from an opinion, not a known fact, when you say it couldn’t have
been kidnap. It could have been a girlfriend.”
“A quarter million dollars?”
“Men as tough and as promiscuous as your father have turned
out to be vulnerable, the same as anybody else, thousands of
times. In which case he’d have come in alone to get the money.
It wouldn’t have been voluntary, by any stretch of the
imagination, but they wouldn’t have to be there.”
“No.” He shook his head. “You’re missing the key to the whole
thing. They wouldn’t have had to be there to force him to sell
the stock either. You ever hear of kidnappers coming in to
discuss the thing in person? The threat comes by note or
telephone. We couldn’t care less how you raise the money, Jack;
just raise it.”
“But you don’t know they were there. Opinion again.”
“Yes, they were there. He wasn’t alone when he was talking to
Winegaard; that’s implicit in the whole conversation. There are
Man on a Leash — 60
two phones in that house, one in the master bedroom and a
wall-mounted extension in the kitchen, and one of the bastards
was listening in while the others applied the pressure.
“Look—in kidnap or blackmail, a specific sum is demanded,
and you raise it to suit yourself within the time limit. That being
the case, he would have sold selectively, or at least he’d have let
Winegaard express an opinion. But he wasn’t trying to raise a
specific sum; he was selling a list of stocks with a gun against
his head, knowing Winegaard was going to protest in a minute
and he had to shut him up before he could mention some stocks
that weren’t on the list.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I guess that’s right.”
“Sure. And utterly pointless, so far. After they’d done all that,
there was no way in Christ’s world they could get the money.
Except that they did.”
“Well, what are you going to do now?”
He considered. At the moment he could see two possible
leads, both very tenuous and both calling for a hell of a lot of
legwork. One was Jeri Bonner, and the other the Mercedes. He
couldn’t explore both avenues at once, so the best thing would
be to get some help doing the bloodhounding and backtracking
here while he went back to Nevada. He had an idea about the
car, something Brubaker had overlooked or dismissed as
unimportant, and he had a hunch he could find the place. It
would just take a lot of driving. He’d had enough of that
highway up through Sacramento and across the Sierra, so he’d
fly up and rent a car in Reno. He told her.
“When will you be back?” she asked.
“Tomorrow night, probably.”
“Can I go too?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“That desert’s hotter than the floor plates of hell. And you’d
just be bored, and choked with dust—”
“Spare me the bullshit, Romstead. I can’t go because it might
be dangerous, right?”
“Dangerous? Of course not.”
“You’re looking for a place, but you don’t have the faintest
idea what the place consists of or who’s going to be there. If it’s
Man on a Leash — 61
the people who killed your father, they’ll invite you in for a drink
—”
“I don’t intend to carry a sign.”
“So of course they’ll think you’re the Avon lady. Or you could
disguise yourself as a jockey. You and your goddamned CIA ... I
might as well get dressed and go home.” She got up and
flounced out of the room but reappeared in the doorway a
moment later, looking contrite and worried. “You will be careful,
won’t you?”

“Sure,” Romstead said. He brought out his address book and
looked up Jeff Loring’s number. Loring was a college classmate
who’d been with the FBI for a while and now was practicing law
in San Francisco. They’d had lunch together a couple of times in
the months Romstead had been in town. Loring was in, and if
the question surprised him, he concealed it.
“Private investigator? Sure, I know several, personally or by
reputation, but they specialize a lot: divorce, skip tracing,
background investigation, security—”
“Skip tracing, in that area. General police experience.”
“Murdock sounds like your man. Larry Murdock. He runs a
small agency on Post Street. I haven’t got his number handy,
but you can get it from the book.”
“Thanks a lot, Jeff. I’ll tell you about it later.”
“No sweat. Give me a call, and we’ll have lunch.”
He looked up the number and dialed. He introduced himself
and said he was calling on Loring’s recommendation. “I’d come
there, but I’ve got some more phone calls to make.” He gave the
address. “Could you send one of your men over?”
“I’ll come myself,” Murdock replied. “Half hour be all right?”
“That’ll be fine.”
Mayo came out dressed for the street while he was looking up
the Nevada area code. “You want me to call about flight times?”
she asked.
“Yeah, if you would, honey. I’ll be tied up here for the next
couple of hours.”
She leaned down to kiss him and went out. Her apartment was
in another building of the same complex.
He called directory assistance in area code 702 for Mrs.
Carmody’s number and dialed, praying she’d be in. The
Man on a Leash — 62
information he could give Murdock would be sketchy until he
could get hold of her. Carmelita answered. Mrs. Carmody was
out by the pool. One moment, please.
“Eric? Where in the world are you? I thought you went back to
San Francisco.”
“That’s where I’m calling from. How are you?”
“Fine. But still a little shook about Jeri.”
“I know. But she’s why I called. Do you by any chance know
what her address was here? Or where she worked?”
“No-o. I don’t think I ever did. The only person who would
know would be Lew, but for God’s sake, don’t tackle him. I know
what you’re trying to do—”
“Right. It’s almost a cinch there was something between her
and the old man. And Bonner suspected it. Remember, he was
bitter as hell even before he knew she was dead, there in the
house.”
“Well,” she said hesitantly, “that’s right. But it wasn’t entirely
over Jeri.”
“I understand.” He’d suspected that already; Bonner had a
thing for Paulette Carmody himself and was jealous. Sister and
girlfriend both, he thought; it was no wonder he hated the name
Romstead. “It seems to me he’d have been one of Brubaker’s
prime suspects.”
“Oh, he might have been except he was in his store until two
o’clock that morning and then in a poker game with five or six
other men until after daylight. No, it wasn’t Lew. He’s violent
and pugnacious as hell, but straightforward about it. If he’d
done it, it would have been on the steps of city hall in front of
two hundred witnesses. Which is why I said don’t even think of
calling him about Jeri. He’s out on bail now for beating a man
almost to death in a bar last night. Some ranch hand he
overheard say something about Jeri and Captain Romstead.”
“Don’t worry,” Romstead said. “I intend to give him all the
room he needs ... Well, could you give me a description of her?”
“She was about five feet five, around a hundred and ten
pounds. Blue eyes, dark-red hair, nose just a little on the baby
side, but cute. Leggy for a girl who wasn’t very tall.”
“Good. You don’t know what type of work she did?”
Man on a Leash — 63
“Clerical. She’d had some business courses—typing and so on
—at San Diego State. Wait—I just remembered something. Last
winter she bought Lew a tape deck at employee discount; she
was working for some electronics supply outfit.”
“You can’t recall the name?”
“No, I’m sorry. But it seems to me he said it was on Mission
Street.”
“Fine. That’s enough for a start. Thanks a million.”
After he’d hung up, he remembered something else he’d
intended to ask her. It was about the crewman the old man had
turned over to the narcs for having heroin aboard his ship. Until
you had a solid lead to follow, you had to consider everything a
possibility. Well, he’d call her tomorrow from up there.
He brought out a bag and began to pack. The phone rang. It
was Mayo. There was a flight at three o’clock, with space
available. He asked her to make the reservation for him.
“Okay. I’ll drive you to the airport.”
“You’re an angel.”
“With an angel’s sex life. I might as well be having an affair
with a whaler.”
Just as he hung up, the doorbell chimed.
Larry Murdock was a lean-faced man in his middle forties with
coolly watchful gray eyes and an air of quietness about him. He
introduced himself and produced a wallet-sized photostat of his
license. Romstead closed the door and they sat down.
“You’ve had police experience, no doubt?” he asked.
“Yes. Fifteen years, here in San Francisco. What is it you want
done, Mr. Romstead?”
“Just more of the same. Ringing doorbells and asking
questions. I’m trying to backtrack two people to see if they
knew each other, and how well, and what other people they
knew. It’ll probably go faster with two men on it, if you’ve got
somebody available. Okay?”
“Yes. I think we can handle it.” Murdock took a notebook from
a pocket of his jacket and undipped a pen.
“Fine. There’s a lot of background you’ll need.” Romstead told
him the whole thing, from the discovery of his father’s body to
and including his interviews with Winegaard and Richter. He
wound up with descriptions of his father and Jeri Bonner and
Man on a Leash — 64
the address of his father’s apartment on Stockton Street.
Murdock listened without interruption, now and then taking
notes.
“I don’t think he was ever in the apartment in that period from
the sixth to the fourteenth, but I haven’t seen the building and
don’t know what the setup is in regard to privacy of access,” he
concluded. “But you can see what I’m after.”
“Sure. Whether anybody at all saw him around the place,
whether he was alone if they did, and if the girl had ever been
seen in the area or with him. Since it’s all right with you, I’ll
start another man checking out the girl, beginning with the
electronics supply places.”
“Good. Personally, I think she was on the lam from something
or somebody, or she wouldn’t have gone home. She was a
junkie, and her chances of making a connection in that town
would be close to zero.”
“Yes. Unless her, sources had dried up here and she
remembered that deck stashed in your father’s place.”
“That’s a possibility, of course,” Romstead conceded. “But
there’s another thing about that I can’t quite buy.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Murdock said. “If she knew
about it at all, why didn’t she know it was uncut? So why the
OD?”
“Right,” Romstead replied. “Maybe she didn’t run far
enough.” He was beginning to have a solid respect for the other
man. He went over to the desk by the window and wrote out a
check for three hundred dollars. “I’ll be in Coleville tonight, and
I’ll give you a call.”
Murdock thanked him for the retainer and left. Romstead
finished packing the bag, put in his binoculars, and called Mayo.
She was ready. He carried the bag down to her car. They swung
up onto the freeway and headed out Bayshore. The car was a
new Mustang, and she handled it with cool competence. He
relaxed, which he seldom did when someone else was driving.
“Very flattering,” she said, passing Candlestick Park.
“What?”
“When a man keeps his eyes on your legs instead of traffic.
Sort of overall endorsement.”
“Well, you are a good driver,” he agreed. “That’s why they
wouldn’t let you in medical school.”
Man on a Leash — 65
“And the legs?”
“They’re why you didn’t need to get into medical school.”
“Chauvinist pig.”
It was overcast at the airport with a chill wind whipping the
bay and fog pushing in over the hills above South City like rolls
of cotton batting. She had to double park at the unloading zone.
“Call me,” she said.
“Tonight.”
“And tomorrow.” They kissed, and she clung to him tightly for
a moment until the inevitable horn sounded behind them. He
lifted out the bag and watched her drive off. He went inside,
checked in, and paid for his ticket with a credit card. The flight
was only a little late in taking off, and they were down in Reno’s
heat shortly after 4 P.M. He rented an air-conditioned
Chevrolet, asked for a Nevada highway map, and drove into
town.
Finding a place to park, he unfolded the map. Coleville was in
Steadman County, but only fifteen miles from the boundary of
Garnet County, adjoining it on the south. He’d need both to give
him a radius of twenty-five miles all the way around. He looked
up a sporting goods store and bought the two large-scale county
maps of the type put out for hunters and fishermen. “Better give
me a gallon water cooler, too,” he told the clerk.
Traffic was heavy now, and it was slow going until he was past
the outskirts of town. He took time out for some dinner at a
highway truck stop, and it was a little before eight when he
pulled into Coleville. He parked under the porte cochere at the
Conestoga Motel and went inside.

A rather sour-faced man of middle age was at the desk this
time and checked him in without a smile of any kind,
commercial or otherwise. He drove back with the key and let
himself into room 16. Unfolding the two maps on the bed, side
by side in their proper orientation, he pulled up a chair and bent
over them with a frown of concentration.
No doubt Brubaker was right in that there were countless
miles of tracks and old ruts out through the sagebrush flats and
that checking them all out would have been a hopeless task
from the start, but the car hadn’t been on any of these. The
significant fact wasn’t merely that it was covered with dust, but
that the dust was unmarred by streaks along the sides as it
Man on a Leash — 66
inevitably would have been in running through brush. It had
been on a graded road, which narrowed the possible routes
immensely.
The roads were coded on the maps: paved highways, gravel,
and graded dirt roads. Gravel, of course, could be almost as
dusty as plain dirt, so he’d have to cover those too. The main
highway, which he’d just come in on, ran roughly north and
south. This was crossed in town, at Third Street, by an east-west
blacktop, the road his father’s place was on. Beyond the old
man’s house it continued on westward for another twenty or
thirty miles to a small community on a lake, but there were no
unpaved roads leading off it. So it had to be north, south, or east
of town. From that fifty-four miles unaccounted for on the
odometer you had to subtract four for the old man’s return
home after having the car serviced. That left fifty miles round
trip from the house, or forty-two miles round trip from the
center of town.
South on the highway there were two possibilities. About
thirteen miles out the pavement was crossed by a gravel road
running east and west. North there were also two, twelve miles
out and sixteen, both dirt roads taking off in a generally
westerly direction. East there were three. Nine miles from town
a graded dirt road left the blacktop running north, and after
about four miles it forked, one branch veering off to the
northeast. Also, at about seventeen miles from town another
gravel road left the pavement in a southerly direction. Out and
back each time, if he had to cover all of them, added up to 108
miles of chuckholed and dusty off-the-pavement driving. It was
going to be a long day. He rang the office and left a call for five
thirty in the morning.
Dialing the long distance operator, he put in the call to Mayo.
She apparently grabbed the phone up on the first ring, and it
was obvious from her voice that something was wrong.
“Eric! I’ve been poised over this phone for hours!”
“What is it?”
“Your apartment’s been burglarized. I didn’t know what motel
you were in, so all I could do was wait—”
“All right, honey, just simmer down; he probably didn’t get
much. But how do you know?”
“Know? How do I know? Eric, I’m trying to tell you. I talked to
him—I walked right in on him—”
Man on a Leash — 67
He broke in swiftly. “Are you hurt?”
“No. He didn’t do anything at all. I pretended to believe him.”
He sighed softly. Thank God for a smart girl. “Okay, Crafty,
just start from the beginning.”
“All right.” She took a deep breath. “On the way back from the
airport I decided while I had the car out I might as well do some
grocery shopping, and I bought some things for you too—a steak
and a bottle of rosé and some tonic water, oh, a bagful of stuff.
After I’d put mine away, I thought I’d take yours over and tidy
up the apartment a little. So I went over and took the elevator
up, and when I opened the door, I almost dropped the bag and
my purse and everything. There was a man standing right there
in the living room, with a kind of tool bag open on the rug. But it
was funny—I mean, I was scared blue, but he didn’t seem to be
startled at all. With my arms full like that I must have fumbled
around for maybe fifteen seconds getting the door open—I had
the wrong key at first—so he had some warning. He just smiled
and said, ‘Good afternoon, are you Mrs. Romstead?’ and leaned
down to get something out of the tool kit.
“By then I’d got my heart down out of my throat and could
speak, so I asked him what he was doing there. He took a slip of
paper out of a breast pocket—he had on a white coverall—and
said, ‘Mr. Romstead called us to check out the simalizer and put
a new frammistat in his KLH.’ That wasn’t what he actually said,
of course, but some technical jargon that didn’t mean a thing to
me, and he had the console of the KLH pulled out from the wall
as if he were going to work on it. He said the manager let him
in, which I knew was a damn lie—the office wouldn’t let
anybody in an apartment when the tenant’s not there—but I
didn’t know what to do. If I started to run, he might grab me
and drag me inside to keep me from calling the police.
“And, believe me, I didn’t want to go on into the kitchen with
those groceries, either, because then he’d be between me and
the door, but there didn’t seem to be anything else I could do
without making him suspicious. He’d know I’d opened the door
for something. Anyway, he was so cool and professional that by
then I’d about decided he really was an honest, card-carrying
burglar and not a creep of some kind, so I told him I was just a
friend that had stopped by with this stuff for you. So I went into
the kitchen and shoved the things in the refrigerator—I mean,
all of it, and fast, in case you ever wonder why there’s a package
Man on a Leash — 68
of paper napkins and two bars of toilet soap in your freezer. I
came back out. He was humming under his breath and fiddling
with the back of the KLH. I said something about being sure the
door was locked when he left and eased out. I didn’t think my
knees would ever hold up till I made it to the elevator.
“When I got to the office, of course, I had to explain what the
hell I was doing in your apartment. We got that straightened
out, and they called the police. A squad car pulled up in two or
three minutes, and the manager went up with the two officers.
He was gone by then, of course, but they found enough evidence
he’d been there so they didn’t write me off as some kind of nut.
It seemed to be your desk he was interested in—or that’s as far
as he’d got—because everything in it had been pretty well
shuffled. Of course, they don’t know if anything’s missing, but
they said the chances were he got the hell out of there the
minute I was out of the corridor.”
Alarm circuits were tripping all over the place, but he was
merely soothing—and admiring. “Honey, you handled it
beautifully; you really used your head. Anyway, there was
nothing in the desk but correspondence, old tax returns, bank
statements, and so on. Could you describe the guy?”
“He wasn’t real big, a little less than six feet, anyway, around
a hundred and sixty pounds. About thirty years old. Very slender
and dark, Indian-looking, with black hair and brown eyes. And
cool, real cool.”