Man on a leash - By Charles Williams Page 0,11
a blue Mercedes. It bore a heavy coating of powdery white dust, and the windshield was smeared with spattered insects. It had been on a long trip at high speed, all right, but he frowned, wondering how it had got that dusty driving to San Francisco. Well, maybe it had been that way before the trip.
There was no doubt Brubaker had already done it, but he opened the left front door and checked the lubrication record stuck to the frame. “Jerry’s Shell Service, Coleville, Nevada,” it said, and the date of the last service was July 4, 1972. Oil change and lubrication at 13,073. He leaned in and read the odometer. It stood at 13,937. That was more than 800 miles. San Francisco was—call it 270, round trip 540. So the old man had driven another 300 miles somewhere in that time between July 4 and 14. Well, that could be anything—or nothing.
He switched off the lights and went back into the kitchen, pushing the button in the doorknob to relock the door. There was another entrance to the combined living room and dining room from this end of the kitchen. It was a long room with a deep shag carpet, and most of the opposite wall was covered by drawn white drapes. At the right were a dining table and then a teak buffet and a long sofa sitting back to back to divide it from the living-room area. In the latter there were two large armchairs and a coffee table and a white brick fireplace, but the first and overall impression was of books, record albums, and hi-fi equipment.
He started toward that end of the room, but as he passed the end of the sofa, he saw a piece of luggage sitting on it. There was a faintly jarring incongruity about it in this otherwise neat and well-ordered room, and he stopped, for some reason remembering his question to Brubaker on whether there had been any sign of a fight. Why would somebody with a seaman’s passion for a-place-for-everything-and-everything-m-its-place leave his suitcase in the living room?
It was a small streamlined case of black fiber glass with no identification on it of any kind. He flipped the latches. It was unlocked. On top was a folded brown silk dressing gown. He lifted it out of the way and poked through the contents beneath it: pajamas, a rolled pair of socks, a laundered shirt in plastic, a couple of ties, a pair of shorts, and a plastic bag containing a soiled shirt and some more underwear. At the bottom were a zippered leather toilet kit, a half-empty box of Upmann cigars, and some books of paper matches variously advertising a San Francisco restaurant, a Las Vegas hotel, and a savings and loan association. He shrugged. There was nothing of interest here, and Brubaker had no doubt already searched it anyway.
But why was it here? He idly lifted one of the aluminum tubes from the cigar box, twisted off the cap, and slid the cigar out. It was encased in a thin curl of wood veneer and then a tightly rolled paper wrapper. He removed these and sniffed it. He’d smoked cigars for a brief period in his early twenties before he’d given up smoking altogether, but even after all these years he could still appreciate the aroma. He went out into the kitchen, found a knife in one of the drawers, cut the tip off it, and lighted it with one of the paper matches.
He took a deep, appraising puff, removed it from his mouth, let the smoke out slowly, and gestured with judicial approval. If you had to kill yourself, do it in the imperial manner; arrive at the operating room for the thoracotomy on a stretcher of royal purple borne by Nubian slaves. He picked up the silk robe to put it back in the bag; something slithered out of its folds, something golden and soft that might have been the pelt of some unfortunate honey-colored animal or the scalp of a Scandinavian settler. It was a hairpiece; a fall, he thought, was the correct terminology.
He looked at it helplessly for a moment and then sighed. That certainly didn’t raise any doubts it was the old man’s case; if you looked at it in the light of history, it merely confirmed it. No doubt his mother, unless she’d forsworn the practice early in the game, could have suited up an average sorority by filtering the old rooster’s bags