And now he was gone, probably somewhere in Mexico by this time. If Leonard had paid him the missing two thousand dollars, as it seemed likely he had, that would explain the sudden departure.
But there were still questions. Had he actually seen or heard anything that night? It was conceivable he had pulled the whole thing out of his imagination, although that struck me as improbable for a simple-living deliveryman whose life was crumbling around him. If Kenneth had been murdered, and if Martinez did know who was responsible, had he given the name to Leonard? Had he confided it to anyone else—his wife, maybe, or a close friend? And exactly where was he now?
Well, maybe there was something at his farm, something he’d left behind, that would give me a clue. I finished the last of my sandwich and the last of the Bud Light, got the car started, drove back into the village proper, and hunted up Sunshine Valley Road.
It was a winding, two-lane country road that led back into the foothills to the east, past scattered homes—some new and well-maintained, some not so new and not so well maintained; past a couple of sprawling ranches that specialized in the breeding of quarter horses. After a couple of miles, the road made a sharp loop to the north and took me across a bridge that spanned a vegetation-choked creek. Just beyond the bridge a dirt road cut back to the east, up into another series of low hills thickly wooded with eucalyptus, madrone, and fir trees. Fuller had told me this would be Elm Street and a sign at the intersection confirmed it.
I turned up the dirt road, past the only visible house around and through more trees, none of which was an elm. Another of those irritating little mysteries: Why Elm Street if there weren’t any elms on it? Moss Beach seemed to be full of enigmas, large and small. Beyond the trees to the south, where the land fell away into a tiny valley, I could see different kinds of flowers blooming in cultivated fields. They would belong to one of several ranches down there that specialized in growing flowers for sale to various nursery suppliers in the area.
When I had gone a fifth of a mile, a green wooden mailbox appeared on the south side of the road. Directly opposite on the north side, a pair of ruts that passed for a lane angled up through the trees. Those ruts, Fuller had said, would take me to Danny Martinez’s farm. But I didn’t make the turn right away. Instead I stopped alongside the mailbox—Martinez’s, presumably, since it was the only one in the vicinity—and got out and poked inside. There were two pieces of mail, both addressed to Daniel Martinez, but neither was worth tampering with: a PG&E bill and a mail-order catalogue. I put them back into the box and got into the car again.
The ruts took me along the shoulder of a hill and then around and down into a good-sized clearing flanked on three sides by woods. The fourth side was a field that had been planted with vegetables and melons and that contained a couple of fruit trees. There were two buildings in the clearing—a sagging barn and an old farmhouse set back against the wooded slope to the east. A chicken coop stood adjacent to the barn but there weren’t any chickens in it.
I stopped the car in the middle of the dusty yard and hauled myself out of it again. It was quiet; the only sound was a jay scolding something in the fir trees behind the house. I walked over that way, up a slight incline to where a child’s battered wagon was lying upside down near the stairs. The stairs had a newish look and the white paint on them was fresher than on the rest of the house; some of the roofs shingles also looked new. Until the events of the past month, Martinez had evidently kept the place up pretty well.
At the top of the stairs was a shallow porch with a geriatric swing and a rickety table on it. There was a screen door into the house, and a regular door behind it that stood ajar; the screen door wobbled open when I tugged on it. I called out, “Hello, inside,” and waited a while, just to be safe. Nobody answered me, so finally I went on in.
Tiny front hall, with a kitchen opening on one side and a living room or parlor on the other. I turned into the parlor first. Salvation Army furniture, all right—sofa, two chairs, three tables, an old desk with papers strewn over its surface, some of which had fallen or been tossed on the worn carpet. One of the inner walls had been decorated with crayon marks, red and green, in a kid’s nonsense pattern that seemed more aesthetic to me than the Chagall painting in the Purcell house. A crucifix made out of dark wood and a painting of a Mexican village adorned the other inner wall. The two outer walls were mostly windows with cheap chintz curtains drawn back from the glass; the set to the north looked out on the open field and the set to the west gave you a view of the yard, of the barn—