Don't Turn Your Back on the Ocean Page 16

  I slipped the autopsy report back into its envelope. “Where did Ariel go? Back to her parents’ house? Out to dinner? Is that why she went down to Rocky Point? I wouldn’t go to that particular restaurant for a quick bite to eat. It’s a spot for a romantic dinner, a place to watch the sunset. Maybe Ariel was meeting someone.”

  “The housekeeper saw her before her meeting with Bobby. And her parents were out of town.” Errol leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together. “From what I can glean by talking to the Carmel police the neighbors didn’t even notice that Ariel was staying at her parents’ house. She didn’t announce her presence in any way, didn’t call attention to herself, didn’t phone or visit any friends. Except Bobby. What did he do after the fight?”

  “He went looking for Karl Beckman. But first he went to see his ex-wife. He was supposed to have his son that weekend, but he asked Linda if he could pick up Nicky Saturday morning instead of Friday night Linda thought he was headed for Beckman Boat Works right after he talked with her. But Karl Beckman says he didn’t see Bobby until the next week, after Ariel had been reported missing. Nor will he tell me where he was.”

  “Did anyone at the Boat Works see Bobby?” Errol asked.

  I shook my head. “I talked with Lacy Beckman and some employees on Saturday. No one recalls seeing Bobby. When he couldn’t find Karl, he probably went home to get some sleep. Remember, he’d just brought the Nicky II in before he and Ariel went to the Rose and Crown, which meant he’d been up for close to eighteen hours. Normally he’d have gone home to sleep.”

  “Except Ariel showed up.” Errol fingered his wineglass. “She cut her Friday classes at Cal Poly to drive up here to see Bobby. Whatever her reason, it must have been important. It comes back to Bobby. He’s the key, Jeri. You must get him to talk.”

  “He can be pretty damn stubborn, even in the face of a murder investigation.”

  Nineteen

  I WENT BACK TO MONTEREY, PAST READY TO CHANGE out of the dress and heels I’d worn to the funeral. I was supposed to meet Mother later at Café Marie, where the industrial hygienist from Seaside was trying to sort out what had happened yesterday. The firm’s lab was doing a rush job to identify the substance found in the ventilating system, promising a twenty-four-hour turnaround for which Mother was paying dearly.

  Mother was paying in other ways, too. Sunday afternoon’s disaster made the front page of this morning’s Herald.

  With a sigh of relief I kicked off the shoes and the dress and pulled on a white T-shirt and a well-worn pair of blue jeans. I carried my purse to the kitchen, dug out my address book, and used my telephone credit card to call an Oakland number.

  Fortunately Cassie Taylor was in her office. We’ve known each other for years, since we were both secretaries in an Oakland law firm. Later I became a paralegal, then one of Errol Seville’s investigators, and Cassie went to law school. Now she’s a partner in the firm of Alwin, Taylor and Chao, which takes up the front suite on the third floor of a Franklin Street building, just down the hall from my own office.

  “Your plants are fine,” she told me. “Your cat, however, wishes you would hurry home.”

  I sighed. Abigail is a fat brown tabby, ten years old and imperious. She doesn’t like it when I don’t come home at the same time every night, let alone when I leave town for several days. My function in life, in cat terms, is to provide food and a lap on a regular basis. When I’m away, Cassie, who has my extra key, takes on daily cat-care duties. As far as Abigail is concerned it just isn’t the same.

  “Abigail will have to cope for a while longer. I hadn’t been here twenty-four hours when my cousin Donna asked me to look into some pelican mutilations. But the pelicans got put on the back burner.”

  “Good lord,” Cassie said when I’d finished telling her about Ariel’s murder and the incidents at the restaurant. “Jeri goes to Monterey and all hell breaks loose.”

  I sighed. “Something like that. The incidents at the restaurant have been going on for a while. So have the pelican mutilations, for that matter. I’ve got to nail whoever is sabotaging the restaurant. Mother’s losing business. But the most serious situation is Ariel Logan’s murder. There’s a sergeant in the sheriff’s department who wants to pin that on my cousin Bobby.”

  “You’d better check the messages on your office answering machine,” Cassie advised. “You’re losing business, too. I’ve gotten calls from Bill Stanley and another attorney you’ve worked for, wondering where you are. As for Abigail, I’ll just fuss over her more than I already do.”

  “Thanks. Before you hang up, get out your Martindale-Hubbell Law Directory and look up an attorney named Ryan Trent. He practices in Carmel.”

  Cassie set the phone down and went off in search of the thick volume that contained information on lawyers and their firms. “Trent, Trent. Here it is. Undergraduate work at UCLA, law school at USC. Business law, mergers and acquisitions, contracts, with some entertainment law thrown in. Before he was in Carmel he was in Los Angeles, at one of those huge law firms downtown.”

  Another Southern California refugee, I thought, just like the Logans.

  “Office in Carmel,” Cassie continued, “somewhere in the vicinity of Fifth and Lincoln. You’d think people down there would have street addresses. Locating someone must be like going on a treasure hunt. Why is Mr. Trent important?”

  “Mr. Trent used to be Ariel Logan’s boyfriend. And I had to step between him and Bobby after the funeral this morning.”

  “Sounds like you’ve got your hands full. Keep me posted, especially about when you’ll be back. Remember, Eric and I are going away in a couple of weeks.”

  Which meant Cassie wouldn’t be able to take care of my imperious cat. I fervently hoped it wouldn’t take that long to sort things out in Monterey. After Cassie hung up I got a dial tone and called my office machine, punching the keys so it would play back my messages. I wrote them down and returned several phone calls. Cassie was right, I thought as I turned down a job. The longer I stayed in Monterey, I was losing business in Oakland. And I was working for free down here. So much for my vacation.

  I made one more phone call, this one to Morro Bay. The phone on the other end rang several times. I was just about to hang up when my cousin Angie picked up the receiver, with a quick “hello” that sounded like she’d been running.

  “Jeri! I just walked in the door,” she said after I’d identified myself. “Let me catch my breath and sit down. It’s great to hear from you. What’s up?”

  “I need a bed for the night, Angie.” I planned to drive down to San Luis Obispo first thing tomorrow morning and I told her why.

  “Murder? Oh, my God.” The cheerfulness in Angie’s voice turned into alarm. “I talked to Mom and Dad this weekend but they didn’t say anything about murder. They just said Bobby’s girlfriend had died and didn’t go into details. I thought Ariel had been swept off the rocks and drowned.”

  “She was struck over the head and her body was dumped in the ocean.” There was no way to soften the words or the images they brought forth.

  “And the cops think Bobby had something to do with her death? Impossible,” Angie declared. “Not my baby brother, not even on his worst day.”

  “I’ve got to find someone else with a reason to want Ariel dead. I didn’t connect with her roommate at the funeral, so I’ll have to track her down and hope she can give me some information. Ariel lived with another Cal Poly student, a woman named Maggie Lim. I assume they had an apartment together, somewhere in SLO.”

  “I’ve got the phone book right here. Let me see if there’s a listing for Logan or Lim.” Angie was quiet for a moment and I thought I heard the rustle of pages. “Well, several Logans, no Ariel, but one A. Logan, no address. And an M. Lim, no address, with the same phone number as A. Logan. That must be the Lim you’re looking for.”

  “I’m sure it is. Give me the number.” I quickly wrote it down. “She left Monterey after the funeral, so she won’t
be back in SLO until later this afternoon. This is a start. Now all I need is an address.”

  “I can find out where she lives. Our college admin office talks to the university admin office all the time.” Angie taught at Cuesta College, between Morro Bay and San Luis Obispo. “I’ll pull a few strings. What time do you think you’ll get here? I’ve got classes in the morning but I’ll plan to come home for lunch.”

  “Depends on when I get on the road. But I should be there by noon.”

  I looked at the digital clock on the microwave and grabbed my keys. The phone rang before I made it to the front door. When I picked up the receiver, I heard the voice of Stella the barmaid, her British accent competing with the fifties rock tunes blaring from the speakers at the Rose and Crown.

  “You remember I told you about that fellow, came into the pub right after Bobby and Ariel left,” she said. “He’s the one who said they were going at it hammer and tongs outside.”

  “Is he there?”

  “No, he’s not here,” Stella said. “But I think I’ve recalled his name. Last name, anyway. Porter. I flashed on it because he drinks Taddy Porter. I don’t always remember names but I remember drinks.”

  “He hasn’t shown up there since the day of the argument?” Tasked.

  “No. I think he’s sort of a regular, been in a couple of times a month, over the past year or so. He must travel, comes here when he’s in town. There’s something else. I think his job’s like his name. Can’t tell you why that popped into my head, but it did, along with the Taddy Porter. Not a porter like in a train station. But transport. A truck driver.”

  If Mr. Porter was a truck driver that would explain why he hadn’t been in the pub the past week. He could be on a run somewhere. I hoped the guy was a creature of habit, one who would show up at the Rose and Crown sooner or later for a glass of his favorite brew. For Bobby’s sake, I hoped it was sooner.

  “If he does come into the tavern, call me,” I told Stella. “I have to talk to him.”

  “Rancid butter?”

  Mother and I stared at the dark-haired man. His name was Leo Cumberly and he was the industrial hygienist from Seaside. He had twinkly blue eyes and the cheerful demeanor of someone who thoroughly enjoyed his work. He’d spent a good part of the morning combing through Café Marie’s heat, ventilation, and air-conditioning system. Now he pulled out a chair, hitched up his stained and rumpled khaki slacks, and sat down. On the table in front of him was an open briefcase containing a pile of file folders and a portable phone.

  “That awful smell was caused by rancid butter?” Mother repeated. She shook her head slowly and raked her left hand through her gray-streaked hair.

  It was almost funny, I thought. Surely the stench that had shut down Café Marie Sunday afternoon had resulted from something more exotic than a stick of butter well past its time. Of course, the butter hadn’t been left by accident on a kitchen counter.

  “Butyric acid,” Cumberly said. “It’s not quite the same thing.”

  When I walked through the entrance of Café Marie fifteen minutes ago, I found Mother and Cumberly near the bar. She was in blue slacks and a pink shirt, looking tired as she watched the industrial hygienist talk into his phone. He was getting the results of the lab analysis. While Mother and I waited for him to finish the call I looked toward the kitchen and saw two people. One was Julian Surtees. The other was a round-faced man whose identity finally registered as Eric Lopez, the county environmental health specialist who’d been here last night.

  Now Cumberly looked at the notes he’d scribbled, leaned back in the chair, and proceeded to give us a brief chemistry lesson.

  “Butyric acid smells like rancid butter, only worse. It’s a colorless liquid, soluble in water, combustible with a flash point of one-sixty-one Fahrenheit. It’s also quite corrosive to metal and tissue. Given time, it could have eaten a hole right through the ducts. It’s definitely an environmentally hazardous substance.”

  “How would I obtain butyric acid?” I asked.

  “You take a pound or so of butter, and leave it out in the sun until it’s way past ripe. Then it becomes butyric acid. It’s that simple.” Cumberly shrugged and spread his hands wide. “You’d be astonished at the number of poisons and toxins you can produce using materials from your kitchen or garden.”

  All you need is a basic knowledge of chemistry, I thought. Or a reference book. “So I can cook up a batch of butyric acid in the comfort of my own home?”

  Cumberly chuckled. “I wouldn’t think you’d want to do it inside the house. Butyric acid is a real stinker, as you and Mrs. Howard discovered yesterday. It takes a while for the odor to dissipate.”

  The odor still lingered, faint but detectable. I’d noticed it as soon as I stepped into Café Marie.

  “God, yes,” Mother said. “This morning when my staff and I came here to clean up, it seemed as bad as it was yesterday. We’ve had the doors and windows open all day.”

  “It was in one location only, where the hazardous materials team found it yesterday. They cleaned it all out of there,” Cumberly said. “As soon as the smell goes away I’m sure you’ll be able to reopen the restaurant.”

  “You say butyric acid is corrosive, in addition to having such an awful smell,” I said. “It had to be in some sort of container. How did it get from that to the ventilation system?”

  “It was in a glass jar,” Cumberly said, “right up there in that box on the roof. The jar was broken, though. It was rigged to a timing device. What we have, ladies, is a stink bomb. A very ingenious one.”

  So what happened last night was no accident, though I’d never really thought so. But a time bomb seemed like such a drastic escalation from the mouse on the plate.

  “How was the timing device put together?” I asked.

  The industrial hygienist pulled out a pencil and paper and quickly drew a sketch. “A lamp timer, with a dial and ridges for each hour of the day. Twenty-four-hour clock, twelve hours A.M., twelve hours P.M. You can buy them in any hardware store. You plug a lamp into the timer, connect the timer to an electrical outlet, and it turns on the lamp at whatever time you set. In this case, the timer was wired to some batteries and an explosive charge, set to go off at eight P.M.”

  I grimaced and so did Mother. Yesterday’s incident was bad enough but it would have been even more disastrous if the restaurant had been full of customers, as it would have been if the stink bomb had gone off on schedule.

  “Something made it go off sooner,” Cumberly continued. “Maybe the timer had a glitch. Or maybe the heat triggered it. I don’t know. What broke the glass and released the butyric acid was that explosive. Clever little gizmo. I could have made it myself.”

  “What kind of explosive?” I asked, frowning.

  Cumberly shook his head. “Small, but effective enough to smash a glass jar into fragments. I’m gonna have to analyze that further. I’ll let you know. You and the cops. You’ve got yourself one malicious character at work here, ladies.”

  “Why would anyone do this?” Mother asked after Cumberly left. She slumped in her chair, her face etched with exhaustion. “I don’t understand it.”

  “Neither do I.” Was Café Marie in fact a deliberate target? Could this be just random meanness, done for the hell of doing it? There were certainly people in the world capable of such pure cussedness. But even as I considered this I shook my head.

  No, there was an obvious intent at work here. Shut down the restaurant, ruin Mother financially, cause her a great deal of grief and pain. Marie Doyle Howard was the target. In my mind I echoed her questions. Why did the saboteur have such an animus against her? What had she done to warrant this—or what did the perpetrator think she had done?

  I had hoped that the substance used to create the stink bomb at Café Marie would have some unique quality that would point a finger directly at its source. But it appeared that anyone with a grudge and a butter dish could manufacture butyric acid, as long as that individual staye
d upwind of the stuff. Construction of the timing device required some technical knowledge; though, as Cumberly had said, I could have put it together myself. More importantly, whoever built the device had access to an explosive.

  And access to the ventilating system works on the roof. I recalled the scene yesterday when I’d theorized that someone could have made it up to the roof by climbing on the Dumpster.

  “The stink bomb must have been put in place after eight o’clock on Saturday,” I told Mother, thinking out loud. “Since it was set to go off at eight o’clock on Sunday. Whoever put the device there did it during the night. Or early Sunday morning. I should think if it was broad daylight on Sunday, someone on the roof would have been noticed.”

  I looked up from my musings and saw Julian Surtees standing next to the bar, with an odd look on his saturnine face. I hadn’t heard him approach. Suddenly I recalled that Julian had been looking at the Dumpster yesterday, drawing the same conclusion I had. Did he know something?

  He tore his dark eyes from me and looked at Mother. “Marie? Can you come back to the kitchen?”

  Mother got to her feet and we walked back to the kitchen, where Eric Lopez was examining Mrs. Grady’s plate. He’d disinterred it from the plastic bag Julian and I had slipped it into Saturday night and he was using the end of a pencil to poke at the now congealed fettuccine as he examined the tiny brownish gray corpse that lay in the middle.

  “Murine musculus,” he said in a detached voice. “Common house mouse. Not a very big one at that.” He looked up. “Thanks. You can toss it now.”

  With a barely concealed shudder, Julian swept up the offending plate and headed out the back door, toward the Dumpster.

  Lopez turned to Mother. “They call it the common house mouse for a reason. You can find it anywhere. But I didn’t find any here. You don’t have a rodent infestation. No evidence of droppings, tracks, gnawing, or burrows outside. So somebody put it on the plate.”

  “So when can I reopen?” Mother asked.