“Go on.”
“Some of ‘em didn’t even bother going through the motions. Just picked her up and took her out to the beach. They didn’t even take her out on a date.”
“But you did.”
He lowered his gaze. “I took her out a few times. I felt guilty even doing that. She was kind of pathetic … and scary at the same time. She was bright enough, but she wanted desperately to believe someone cared. It made you feel sheepish, so you’d get together with the guys afterward and bad-mouth her.”
“For what you’d done,” I supplied.
“Right. I still can’t think about her without feeling kind of sick. What’s strange is I can still remember things she did.” He paused for a moment, eyebrows going up. He shook his head once, blowing out a puff of air. “She was really outrageous … insatiable’s the word … but what drove her wasn’t sex. It was … I don’t know, self-loathing or a need to dominate. We were at her mercy because we wanted her so much. I guess our revenge was never really giving her what she wanted, which was old-fashioned respect.”
“And what was hers?”
“Revenge? I don’t know. Creating that heat. Reminding us that she was the only source, that we could never have enough of her or anything even halfway like her for life. She needed approval, some guy to be nice. All we ever did was snicker about her behind her back, which she must have known.”
“Did she get hung up on you?”
“I suppose. Not for long, I don’t think.”
“It would help if you could tell me who else might have been involved with her.”
He shook his head. “I can’t. You’re not going to get me to blow the whistle on anybody else. I still hang out with some of those guys.”
“How about if I read you some names off a list?”
“I can’t do that. Honestly. I don’t mind owning up to my own part in it, but I can’t implicate anybody else. It’s an odd bond and something we don’t talk about, but I’ll tell you this-her name gets mentioned, we don’t say a word, but we’re all thinking the same damn thing.”
“What about guys who weren’t friends of yours?”
“Meaning what?”
“At the time of the murder, she was apparently having an affair and got herself knocked up.”
“Don’t know.” *
“Make a guess. There must have been rumors.”
“Not that I heard.”
“Can you ask around? Somebody must know.”
“Hey, I’d like to help, but I’ve probably already said more than I should.”
“What about some of the girls in your class? Someone must have been clued in back then.”
He cleared his throat again. “Well. Barb might know. I could ask her, I guess.”
“Barbara who?”
“My wife. We were in the same class.”
I glanced at the photograph on his desk, recognizing her belatedly. “The prom queen?”
“How’d you know about that?”
“I saw some pictures of her in the yearbook. Would you ask her if she could help?”
“I doubt if she knows anything, but I could mention it.”
“That’d be great. Have her give me a call. If she doesn’t know anything about it, she might suggest someone who would.”
“I wouldn’t want anything said about …”
“I understand,” I said.
I gave him my card with a little note on the back, with my telephone number at the Ocean Street. I left his office feeling faintly optimistic and more than a little disturbed. There was something about the idea of grown men haunted by the sexuality of a seventeen-year-old girl that seemed riveting-both pitiable and perverse. Somehow the glimpse he’d given me of the past made me feel like a voyeur.
11
At two o’clock I slipped up the outside stairs at the motel and changed into my running clothes. I hadn’t had lunch, but I was feeling supercharged, too wired to eat. After the hysteria at the courthouse, I’d spent hours in close contact with other human beings and my energy level had risen to an agitated state. I pulled on my sweats and my running shoes and headed out again, room key tied to my laces. The afternoon was slightly chilly, with a haze in the air. The sea blended into the sky at the horizon with no line of demarcation visible between. Southern California seasons are sometimes too subtle to discern, which I’m told is disconcerting to people who’ve grown up in the Midwest and the East. What’s true, though, is that every day is a season in itself. The sea is changeable. The air is transformed. The landscape registers delicate alterations in color so that gradually the saturated green of winter bleaches out to the straw shades of summer grass, so quick to burn. Trees explode with color, fiery reds and flaming golds that could rival autumn anywhere, and the charred branches that remain afterward are as bare and black as winter trees in the East, slow to recover, slow to bud again.
I jogged along the walkway that bordered the beach. There was a sprinkling of tourists. Two kids about eight were dodging the waves, their shrieks as raucous as the birds that wheeled overhead. The tide was almost out and a wide, glistening band divided the bubbling surf from the dry sand. A twelve-year-old boy with a boogie board slid expertly along the water’s edge. Ahead, I could see the zigzagging coastline, banded with asphalt where the road followed the contours of the shore. At the road’s end was the Port San Luis Harbor District, a fuel facility and launching area that serviced the local boats.
I reached the frontage road and angled left, jogging along the causeway that spanned the slough. Up on the hill to my right was the big hotel with its neatly trimmed shrubs and manicured lawns. A wide channel of seawater angled back along the fairways of the hotel’s golf course. The distance was deceptive and it took me thirty minutes to reach the cul-de-sac at the end of the road where the boats were launched. I slowed to a walk, catching my breath. My shirt was damp and I could feel sweat trickling down the sides of my face. I’ve been in better shape in my life and I didn’t relish the misery of regaining the ground I’d lost. I did the turnaround, watching with interest as three men lowered a pleasure craft into the water from a crane. There was a fishing trawler in drydock, its exposed hull tapering to a rudder as narrow as the blade of an ice skate. I found a spigot near a corrugated metal shed and doused my head, drinking deeply before I headed back, my leg muscles protesting as I increased my pace. By the time I reached the main street of Floral Beach again, it was nearly four and the February sun was casting deep shadows along the side of the hill.
I showered and dressed, pulling on jeans, tennis shoes, and a clean turtleneck, ready to face the world.
The Floral Beach telephone directory was about the size of a comic book, big print, skimpy on the Yellow Pages, light on advertising space. There was nothing to do in Floral Beach and what there was, everybody knew about. I looked up Shana Timberlake and made a note of her address on Kelley, which, by my calculation, was right around the corner. On my way out, I peered into the motel office, but everything was still.
I left my car in the slot and walked the two blocks. Jean’s mother lived in what looked like a converted 1950s motor court, an inverted U of narrow frame cottages with a parking space in front of each. Next door, the Floral Beach Fire Department was housed in a four-car garage painted pale blue with dark blue trim. By the time I got back to Santa Teresa, it would seem like New York City compared with this.
There was a battered green Plymouth parked beside unit number one. I peered in the window on the driver’s side. The keys had been left in the ignition, a big metal initial T dangling from the key ring-for Timberlake, I assumed. Trusting, these folk. Auto theft must not be the crime of choice in Floral Beach. Shana Timberlake’s tiny front porch was crowded with coffee cans planted with herbs, each neatly marked with a Popsicle stick labeled with black ink: thyme, marjoram, oregano, dill, and a two-gallon tomato sauce can filled with parsley. The windows flanking the front door were opened a crack, but the curtains were drawn. I knocked.
Presently, I heard her on the other side. “Yes?”
I talked through the door to her, addressing my remarks to one of the hinges. “Mrs. Timberlake? My name is Kinsey Millhone. I’m a private detective from Santa Teresa. I wonder if I might talk to you.”
Silence. Then, “You the one Royce hired to get Bailey off?” She didn’t sound happy about the idea.