Blowback(56)

I paused to clear my throat; my voice sounded thick, rusty. At length I went on: “After Jerrold was through with the van, he'd have realized he also had a problem with the carpet. He couldn't hide it in the trunk of his car because of its size, and he couldn't leave it out in the open somewhere because of its fragile nature; and for some reason-guilt, fear of discovery through a prolonged absence-he didn't want to drive it down to Los Angeles right away. So his decision was to bring it back here and hide it for the time being.”

Harry said, “Here at the camp?”

“Yeah. Inside your shed in those rolls of canvas.”

“That's where it was all along?”

“That's where it was and still is,” I said. “He planned to take it away with him today, which is the reason for the U-Haul trailer he brought back from Sonora. He'd get you to help with his luggage, make sure no one else was around, and then drag the carpet out and put it inside the trailer.”

“I'm beginning to follow now,” Cloudman said. “When Jerrold got back here Sunday night, he ran into Bascomb-that it?”

“I make it that way. He didn't see anybody in the immediate vicinity when he arrived, so he carried the carpet from his car to the shed. Only Bascomb happened to be having a beer from the cooler on the other side of this cabin-that was where he was when Knox last saw him-and noticed Jerrold and probably went over to ask him what he was doing. Jerrold panicked again and murdered Bascomb with a wrench. Which left him with another body on his hands and nowhere to get rid of it easily.

“Maybe he thought of the pocket mine then, or maybe he just covered Bascomb's bloody head with towels from the fish-cleaning sink back there, then dragged the body into his car and started driving and hit on the mine that way. He took the wrench with him too. Harry found a bloody handkerchief nearby early Monday, and we both thought it belonged to either Knox or Talesco because they'd gotten into a fight; but there was a lot of blood on it, and neither ore of them was cut very badly. So it figures the handkerchief was Jerrold's, and he'd used it to wipe the wrench off and then dropped it accidentally, just like the peacock feather. He had to have been in a frenzy by that time.”

Cloudman asked, “Where does the sketch fit in?”

“Jerrold was deteriorating rapidly, probably plagued with paranoid guilt, and anything connected with the mine must have seemed like a potential threat to him. It could be Bascomb showed Jerrold his sketch of the mine, or showed it to Mrs. Jerrold and she told him about it; anyway, he remembered it twenty-four hours later, and went after it, tore it out of the pad and destroyed it. That was where I came in-and I guess he might have crushed my skull, too, with that tree limb he was carrying, if I hadn't heard him in time and scared him off.”

I lapsed into silence for a moment, fighting down the need to cough; I did not want them to hear me and watch me having an attack. The deputy's pencil still scratched, but that was the only sound now and I realized the rain had stopped. It was stuffy in the room: I got up to turn on Harry's fan.

I had one more thing to say, and as if reading my thoughts, Cloudman provided the question: “Why did Jerrold go back to the mine today? He couldn't have known you'd be there, could he?”

“No,” I said, “he couldn't have known.”

“Then?”

“It was probably because he'd been going back there off and on since Sunday night. I can't know that for certain, but that's how it looks. He was gone all day yesterday, and his car wasn't anywhere in The Pines; he'd been drinking too heavily to have just been driving around.”

“If you're right, what was he doing there?”

“Watching the body,” I said wearily. “Sitting in or around the mine shaft and drinking gin out of a bottle and guarding it in case anybody came.”

“Jesus,” Harry said. “Sweet Jesus Christ.”





Twenty




It was after seven o'clock before the last of it was finished and Cloudman left, taking his deputies and the Daghestan carpet with him, to have a look at the pocket mine and determine what could be done about Bascomb's body; the ambulance had gone a few minutes prior to that, Mrs. Jerrold sitting up in the front seat and snuffling into a handkerchief. Cloudman's final words to me were a request to stay on until tomorrow, so I could come in and sign another statement, but I was prepared to do that anyway because I was in no shape to drive a hundred miles. Creeping lassitude made my motor responses jerky and dulled my thoughts again. I felt that if I did not get to bed pretty soon I was going to suffer that collapse I had been worrying about.

I asked Harry for a glass of milk and something else light to put in my stomach, since I had not eaten all day and I was bothered by hunger pangs on top of the rest of it. He found half a melon to go with the milk, and stood watching me while I ate it. Neither of us said much; I sensed that he wanted to be alone as badly as I did. Exposure to horror has a way of driving a temporary wedge between even the closest of friends-you need time to get over the aftershock of it, time to blot out its effects inside yourself.