Blowback(17)
After a while one of the deputies appeared and told the tow-truck guy that they were ready for him. He took the truck along the trail and out of sight, and pretty soon I could hear the sound of the winch. Bright whitish light from the searchlamps back-lit the screen of trees, silvered their upper boughs so that they looked frosted.
Harry said, “This on top of the mess at the camp-Christ.”
“Everything okay when you got back with the skiff?”
“Seemed to be. I didn't see anybody around.”
“The Jerrolds' Caddy there?”
“No. But I still don't like being away like this.”
“I guess I don't either.”
“How much longer, you think?”
“Depends. Not too long, probably.”
The winch shut down after ten minutes, and there was ten minutes of silence broken only by the low fiddling of crickets, and then it started up again. Shortly after that, Cloudman came out of the woods and signaled to the ambulance driver. When the ambulance had vanished along the trail, he walked over to where Harry and I were at the cruiser.
“Looks like murder, all right,” he said. Even though he was somewhere in his forties, he had a reedy voice with a catch in it now and then, like a kid whose voice is just starting to change at puberty; it made him seem deceptively less authoritative than he was. “Skull crushed with a tire iron, and no way it could have happened accidentally.”
Harry and I had nothing to say.
Cloudman took his hat off and dug at his own scalp with a fingernail, brought the finger down and squinted at it in the darkness, then wiped it on his trousers. “Victim's name is Vahram Terzian, resident of San Jose,” he said. “Armenian, I guess. Either of you know him or ever see him before?”
Harry said, “No.”
I said, “His van was parked in front of the General Store in The Pines this afternoon.”
“What time was that?”
“Around three.”
“You see any sign of Terzian?”
“I'm afraid not.”
Cloudman said to Harry, “You know anybody in the area has an interest in Oriental rugs, Mr. Burroughs?”
“No, nobody.”
“Same goes for the people staying at your fishing camp, I take it.”
Harry nodded.
“Uh-huh. Well, let's see now,” Cloudman said. “You didn't notice anyone on the bluff either before or after the van went off, that right?”
“That's right, yes.”
“Nor hear the sound of another car?”
“No.”
“You touch anything when you came up to have a look?”
I said, “Nothing. But we found a peacock feather on the trail over there; it seemed out of place in these surroundings.”
“I thought so myself. No wild peacocks around here that I ever heard of.”
“You find anything else that might help?” Harry asked.
“Too early to tell.” Which meant they hadn't.
I said, “Was there anything in the back of the van?”
“Nope. Empty.”
“Then it might be a hijacking.”
“Rugs and carpets?”
“Some Orientals can be pretty valuable.”
“I suppose so,” Cloudman said noncommittally. He studied me for a moment. “Hope you don't mind, but I'll have to see some identification. For my report, you know.”
“Sure.”
I got my wallet out and thought about letting him see just my driver's license; but he would probably still ask me what I did for a living, if Harry hadn't already told him. So I gave him the photostat of my investigator's license and watched while he clicked on his flashlight and read it in the beam. Behind the whitish glow, his thin face told me nothing at all of what he was thinking.
When he finished reading the license, he copied information from it into a notebook that he dug out of his jacket pocket. Then he put the notebook and his pen away and gave the photostat back to me. “So you're a private eye,” he said, and there was nothing in his tone, either, that gave me any idea of his reaction to the fact.
“Private detective, yes.”
“Like one of those TV boys, huh?”
“Not hardly. I've never been in a car chase in my life.”
He liked that: it got me a faint smile. “We don't get many private eyes up here. But then, we don't get many Armenian rug peddlers or many homicides either. Mr. Burroughs tells me you're a guest at his camp.”
“Right. I just got in today.”
“Business or pleasure bring you up from Frisco?”
“Pleasure. Harry and I are old friends.”
“We were in the South Pacific together during World War II,” Harry said.
“That so? I tried to enlist for Korea in '49, but they wouldn't take me. Asthma. Hell of a thing, asthma. Still bothers me when the weather turns cool.” He sighed. “Well, I guess that's about all for now. Getting pretty late. I'll have one of the deputies run you back to The Pines.”