“They took one bend in a mountain road too fast and went three hundred feet down into a ravine. Burned.

“I was just back from college. I had just started teaching a month before. Susyn and I were dating. She was nineteen, and wild. Really wild. When she got word that Deke was dead, I thought she was going to lose her mind. It just tore her up. Old Man Davis wasn’t any help. Jim and Alan raged around with a big load of mean and no one to aim it at. Finally, she came to me and by the time I had finished comforting her, we were married.”

“When was this?”

“Nine years ago November.”

Johnson was almost pathetically eager to tell his story. I had sympathy for him, within limits. He wore his wounds too much like medals for my taste, but the pain was genuine.

“It didn’t last. She wanted more that I could offer. But she was all I ever wanted.”

“And now you’re her business partner.”

“No, not really. Old Man Davis owns all that property. He just uses my name, and pays me some rent.”

“According to the deed, you own it.”

Johnson shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. Cameron likes me because I was good to his daughter, but if I tried to take away anything he considers his, he would have me killed.”

He said it with no particular inflection, like he might say, “The sun will rise tomorrow.”

It was getting too dark to see Johnson. He fumbled for the makings and put together another joint. He shoved the bundle across the coffee table toward me. It was a test. Was I his enemy, or just another guy like him? I reached for the makings, and said, “Tell me about Cameron Davis.”

Chapter Thirty-four

I don’t know how I got back to the motel. After a certain point, Johnson got hazy, his whole house slid south, and I found myself hallucinating my way back to where I grew up in Wisconsin. Vague images of Donal and Sharon stayed around until morning, and when I found rationality returning, I was on the floor of the shower in my motel room with the water running hard and warm on my face. I had spent the night with shades of my brother and sister, begging Donal to tell me why he ran away when I was young and needed him, and praying forgiveness from my sister for the hell I put her through the year Dad abandoned us. And for abandoning her in turn, when neither of us could stand the other any more.

I turned off the shower and toweled dry. My skin was red and wrinkled. My head was a hot air balloon. I looked out through the curtain and winced at the sunlight. The Pinto was parked neatly between the lines in the space outside. Thank God for reflexes.

It was past ten o’clock. I called Wilkes. He was out. I lay on the bed while I waited for him to return the call, because the room still had a tendency to move. The phone woke me up again three hours later. It was Ed. Through gritted teeth, with a pounding head, I told him what I had learned and what I wanted. more tomorrow

Johnson staggered to his feet and crossed to the library, hesitated and looked over his shoulder. I said, “Go ahead.” I already knew where his stash was, but it had seemed too petty to mention. Everyone in Garberville had a stash.

He came back to the sofa, put bud and papers on the coffee table and built a cigarette. He sucked it in fast, controlling the smoke between puffs, holding his breath as long as he could. When it was gone, he said, “I really love this stuff. I wish I didn’t.”

“She’s killing you, isn’t she.”

He nodded. “She is worse for me than pot, and harder to get loose from.”

“I know.”

“Do you really?”

“Oddly enough, I do.”

I sat down across from Johnson and said, “Tell me about her.”

“Oh, God. I’ve known her all our lives. We grew up together. I fell in love with her when she was twelve and I was sixteen, and I have never gotten over her.”

“Here? Garberville?”

“Here. She had four brothers. Two of them were killed – three of them now. Only Crazy Alan is left. And Susyn, who is as crazy as all four of them put together, but cold. Thinking. Mean, sometimes. And sometimes the sweetest, kindest thing that ever lived. But you never knew, any time you saw her, what way she was going to be.

“Carter – her oldest brother – got killed in a territorial dispute. Someone raided one of his fields, so he raided back. Got the wrong field, hurt a woman who was taking care of it when she tried to stop him. This woman’s old man was just back from Viet Nam. A Marine, unreconstructed. A lot of the unreconstructeds end up in these hills. He caught Carter in a bar down in Leggett and put a knife in him. Susyn was fourteen at the time. Her Daddy, Cameron, the old bull of the woods, put out the word and the Marine who killed his oldest boy disappeared. The cops never found him, and his family never saw him again. Me either; but Susyn told me she went to the shed where Cameron had him taken and saw the body after they had finished with it. If must have been really ugly. Susyn wasn’t herself for months after that.”

Johnson rolled another joint before he went on.

“Susyn was close to all her brothers. Worshipped them, really. She took Carter’s death hard and when Deke got killed a few years later, it really put her over the edge.

“Deke was the second brother; the smart one. He was the one the old man was grooming to take over the family business. Sent him to college down in Sonoma. Made him into an accountant.

“Deke was up in the Sierras. Cameron had expanded his operations, and it was just after harvest. They had a cabin back in some valley somewhere, with a couple of tons of pot getting trimmed out by some itinerants Deke had hired. Deke was cutting corners, using some of that fancy bookkeeping he learned in college to cheat the trimmers. They beat him up, stuffed him into the trunk of his car, and took off for Sacramento. Nobody knows what they had in mind, but they took one bend in a mountain road too fast and went three hundred feet down into a ravine. Burned. Some rangers pulled the bodies out two days later and got a big surprise when they checked in the trunk. more tomorrow

Who is Jim Davis?” I asked.

“Her brother.”

“I killed him. Stomped him into the pavement and left him in a pool of his own blood. Susyn set me up and Davis was going to kill me, but he couldn’t pull it off.”

A little fear couldn’t hurt. Johnson had been about to curl up in a ball and go limp on me. Now he sat up straighter and his sorrow got pushed aside by his instinct for survival.

“I’m going to stop Susyn. I don’t want to kill her – but if I have to, I will. Do you understand?”

“Who are you? How did you get in here?”

Fear was helping Johnson grow a backbone. 

“It doesn’t matter how I got in here. It doesn’t matter who I am. You are going to help me solve my problems and nothing you can do or say will change that.”

“I’ll call the police.”

I could have threatened Johnson. He was a skinny little guy. You could see that he always had been. I could have broken him like a stick. So what? If I threatened him, I would just embarrass myself. I didn’t have the heart to lay a hand on him, and I wasn’t actor enough to convince anybody that I did.

I didn’t have to. I said, “You own five pieces of property on which marijuana is being cultivated. The rent goes to a holding company along with the rent from twelve other pieces owned by Jim and Alan and Susyn, and you get a kickback equal to your school salary every month. I knew most of that before I came here, and your computer records told me the rest. You aren’t very smart, Johnson. The way you keep records, a ten year old boy could find evidence enough to convict.

“I can take everything away from you. I can get your property seized, including this house and your car. I can get your teaching credential revoked. I can take away everything you own and everything you are, and turn you into a skid row bum. So reach for the phone. Go ahead.”

The sun flared suddenly as it found a hole in the trees, setting toward the end of the day. The sky beyond the window was going purple. It would be dark in half an hour. I watched the day die outside because I didn’t want to watch Johnson’s last thin dreams turn to paste in his hands.

Finally he said, “What has she done this time?”

So I told him. The assault on the cruise ship, the assault in Marseilles, her deception, the attempt on my life in Venice. When I finished, it was nearly dark. Charlie was scratching at the door. Johnson made no move to let him in so I went over and pushed the screen open, standing to one side so no one in the street would see me. The old cat rubbed circles around my legs while his master sat with his face in his hands, then went off to pursue his own business. more tomorrow

Johnson was a record keeper, with a tidy mind. It took only a minute to discover that the cabinet was mostly filled with old lesson plans, outdated grade books, notes on projects half completed, and half a hundred personal profiles of his students. Johnson was clearly a good teacher, with a real feeling for his students. After an hour I knew which students were addicts, which ones were being beaten at home, which ones Johnson suspected were being sexually abused, and which ones he thought had a real chance to make it out of Garberville.

I didn’t want to know about his students, but what Johnson chose to say about them told me things I needed to know about him.

At four-thirty, he came home, unlocked the door, dropped a pile of papers on a chair by the door, and called, “Charlie!” The chunky old gray cat that had kept me company while I went through Johnson’s records got out of my lap and loped toward his master. Johnson saw me then, sitting with my back to the wall in a shadowed corner of his living room.

He didn’t say anything. He just opened the screen door and let the cat out. Then he looked at me and waited. He knew his world had just fallen apart. He didn’t know how, or why, but he had known for years that it was coming. I could read that between every line he had written, and I had been reading his life all afternoon.

I gestured toward the sofa. He moved over and sat down.

Silence filled up the room.

I said, “Tell me about Susyn.”

He closed his eyes. Twin tears broke loose and streaked his cheeks. I had hit him hard, where he was most vulnerable. He said, “What do you want to know?”

“When did you see her last?”

“Christmas.”

“Last Christmas? Seven months?”

He nodded.

“Do you know what she has been doing with herself?”

He shrugged. I waited. There was no fight in him. She had torn the heart out of him years ago, and left this shell behind. The divorce had told me part of that. The letters that she had written him after the divorce had told me the rest.

Johnson seemed to sink into the couch. He wiped his face and shook his head. I said, “She has been trying to murder the woman I love.”

The sound that escaped him was somewhere between a whimper and a sigh. It was the saddest sound I had ever heard.

“Who is Jim Davis?” I asked.

“Her brother.”

“He’s dead.”

A look crossed Johnson’s face, like a ripple of wind across still water. Fierce joy. 

“Good,” he said. “I’m glad.” more tomorrow

It is a classic trap. Individual cops fall into it, and so do whole police departments. It’s drug money, so it isn’t real. The drug dealers don’t deserve to have it, so taking it isn’t really stealing. No one knows who the money originally belonged to, so it is free money. Like air, breathed without thought. Or like wild game, belonging to no one and free for the taking.

There is enough truth to the proposition to make it compelling and plausible. But if the money is not genuinely the property of the drug dealer, then what about the things he buys with that money. Like the BMW I hid behind. I could take the money, why not the car? Or the house?

Of course, I couldn’t. But by some new and morally questionable laws, the state of California could, and did. 

If there was a drug bust, and half a million in drugs were recovered, the police eventually have to destroy the drugs. But if half a million in money from drug sales is recovered, they get to keep it. Or if a drug dealer is driving a new car and living in a new house, and the police can make a half way plausible case that they were bought with drug money, they can seize them and sell them. And keep the money.

Joe Citizen wants drugs off the street, but he doesn’t want to pay for more police. No problem. Need a new police car? Catch a few drug dealers and take their houses. Seize and sell. Whole drug enforcement units are financed by confiscation. Never mind what it does to the cops when they know that it doesn’t matter how much drugs they get off the street. It only matters how many airplanes and mansions and BMWs they can confiscate.

Maybe the boy had done me a favor by removing the money before I had a chance to take it. I know that if he had come by ten minutes later, that money would be in my bank account right now. Maybe I was glad he had saved me from making a mistake.

Yeah, sure! 

*       *       *

Some people become addicted to burglary. They get off on the adrenaline rush. Not me. I didn’t like it a bit, but that afternoon I did it again.

William Johnson’s house was easy. He had left a back window open. I went through his house more quickly than I had Davis’. He was further out of the loop, and I had less time. Bedroom, garage with workshop, a spare bedroom set up with a small but elaborate model train layout, kitchen, and a scuttle hole to storage in the attic; none of them held anything of interest. But in a corner of the living room was a battered desk surrounded by a spill of books, with a computer on top and a file cabinet off to one side. 

Meat! more tomorrow