TC: When?
JAKE: Yesterday. (He laughed, not with pleasure but excitement, released energy) Bad news for Jaeger but good news for me. My plan was to stay up here till after Thanksgiving. But boy, I was going nuts. All I could hear was slamming doors. All I could think was: Suppose he doesn’t go after Jaeger? Suppose he doesn’t give me that one last chance? Well, you can call me at the Prairie Motel tomorrow night. Because that’s where I’ll be.
TC: Jake, wait a minute. It has to have been an accident. Addie, I mean.
JAKE (unctuously patient, as though instructing a retarded aborigine): Now I’ll leave you with something to sleep on.
Sandy Cove, where this “accident” occurred, is the property of a man named A. J. Miller. There are two ways to reach it. The shortest way is to take a back road that cuts across Quinn’s place and leads straight to Miller’s ranch. Which is what the ladies did.
Adios, amigo.
NATURALLY, THE SOMETHING HE HAD left me to sleep on kept me sleepless until daybreak. Images formed, faded; it was as though I were mentally editing a motion picture.
Addie and her sister are in their car driving along the highway. They turn off the highway and onto a dirt road that is part of the B.Q. Ranch. Quinn is standing on the veranda of his house; or perhaps watching from a window: whenever, however, at some point he spies the trespassing car, recognizes its occupants, and guesses that they are headed for a swim at Sandy Cove. He decides to follow them. By car? or horseback? afoot? Anyway, he approaches the area where the women are bathing by a roundabout route. Once there, he conceals himself among the shady trees above Sandy Cove. Marylee is resting on a towel reading magazines. Addie is in the water.
He hears Addie tell her sister: “I’m going to swim around the bend and sit on the waterfall.” Ideal; now Addie will be unprotected, alone, out of her sister’s view. Quinn waits until he is certain she is playfully absorbed at the waterfall. Presently, he slides down the embankment (the same embankment the searching Marylee later used). Addie doesn’t hear him; the splashing waterfall covers the sound of his movements. But how can he avoid her eyes? For surely, the instant she sees him, she will acknowledge her danger, protest, scream. No, he obtains her silence with a gun. Addie hears something, looks up, sees Quinn swiftly striding across the ridge, revolver aimed—he shoves her off the waterfall, plunges after her, pulls her under, holds her there: a final baptism.
It was possible.
But daybreak, and the beginning noise of New York traffic, lessened my enthusiasm for fevered fantasizing, briskly dropped me deep into that discouraging abyss—reality. Jake was without choice: like Quinn, he had set himself a passionate task, and his task, his human duty, was to prove that Quinn was responsible for ten indecent deaths, particularly the death of a warm, companionable woman he had wanted to marry. But unless Jake had evolved a theory more convincing than my own imagination had managed, then I preferred to forget it; I was satisfied to fall asleep remembering the coroner’s common-sense verdict: Accidental death by drowning.
An hour later I was wide awake, a victim of jet lag. Awake but weary, fretful; and hungry, starved. Of course, due to my prolonged absence, the refrigerator contained nothing edible. Soured milk, stale bread, black bananas, rotten eggs, shriveled oranges, withered apples, putrid tomatoes, a chocolate cake iced with fungus. I made a cup of coffee, added brandy to it, and with that to fortify me, examined my accumulated mail. My birthday had fallen on September 30, and a few well-wishers had sent cards. One of them was from Fred Wilson, the retired detective and mutual friend who had first introduced me to Jake Pepper. I knew he was familiar with Jake’s case, that Jake often consulted him, but for some reason we had never discussed it, an omission I now rectified by calling him.
TC: Hello? May I speak to Mr. Wilson, please?
FRED WILSON: Speaking.
TC: Fred? You sound like you have a helluva cold.
FRED: You bet. It’s a real granddaddy.
TC: Thanks for the birthday card.
FRED: Aw, hell. You didn’t have to spend your money just for that.
TC: Well, I wanted to talk to you about Jake Pepper.
FRED: Say, there must be something to this telepathy stuff. I was thinking about Jake when the phone rang. You know, his Bureau has him on leave. They’re trying to force him off that case.
TC: He’s back on it now.
(After I recounted the conversation I’d had with Jake the previous evening, Fred asked several questions, mostly about Addie Mason’s death and Jake’s opinions pertaining to it.)
FRED: I’m damned surprised the Bureau would let him go back there. Jake’s the fairest-minded man I’ve ever met. There’s nobody in our business I respect more than Pepper. But he’s lost all judgment. He’s been banging his head against a wall so long he’s knocked all the sense out of it. Sure, it was terrible what happened to his girl friend. But it was an accident. She drowned. But Jake can’t accept that. He’s standing on rooftops shouting murder. Accusing this man Quinn.
TC (resentfully): Jake could be right. It’s possible.
FRED: And it’s also possible the man is one-hundred-percent innocent. In fact, that seems to be the general consensus. I’ve talked with guys in Jake’s own Bureau, and they say you couldn’t swat a fly with the evidence they’ve got. Said it was downright embarrassing. And Jake’s own chief told me, said so far as he knew Quinn had never killed anybody.
TC: He killed two cattle rustlers.
FRED (chuckles, followed by a coughing fit): Well, sir. We don’t exactly call that killin’. Not around these parts.
TC: Except they weren’t cattle rustlers. They were two gamblers from Denver; Quinn owed them money. And what’s more, I don’t think Addie’s death was an accident.
(Defiantly, with astounding authority, I related the “murder” as I had imagined it; the surmises I had rejected at dawn now seemed not only plausible but vividly convincing: Quinn had trailed the sisters to Sandy Cove, hidden among the trees, slid down the embankment, threatened Addie with a gun, trapped her, drowned her.)
FRED: That’s Jake’s story.
TC: No.
FRED: It’s just something you worked out by yourself?
TC: More or less.
FRED: All the same, that is Jake’s story. Hang on, I gotta blow my honker.
TC: What do you mean—“that is Jake’s story”?
FRED: Like I said, there must be something to this telepathy stuff. Give or take a lotta little details, and that is Jake’s story. He filed a report, and sent me a copy. And in the report that’s how he reconstructed events: Quinn saw the car, he followed them …
(Fred continued. A hot wave of shame hit me; I felt like a schoolboy caught cheating in an exam. Irrationally, instead of blaming myself, I blamed Jake; I was angry at him for not having produced a solid solution, crestfallen that his conjectures were no better than mine. I trusted Jake, the professional man, and was miserable when I felt that trust seesawing. But it was such a haphazard concoction—Quinn and Addie and the waterfall.
Even so, regardless of Fred Wilson’s destructive comments, I knew that the basic faith I had in Jake was justified.)
The Bureau’s in a tough spot. They have to take Jake off this case. He’s disqualified himself. Oh, he’ll fight them! But it’s for the sake of his own reputation. Safety, too. One night here, it was after he lost his girl friend, he rang me up around four in the morning. Drunker than a hundred Indians dancing in a cornfield. The gist of it was: he was gonna challenge Quinn to a duel. I checked on him the next day. Bastard, he didn’t even remember calling me.
ANXIETY, AS ANY EXPENSIVE PSYCHIATRIST will tell you, is caused by depression; but depression, as the same psychiatrist will inform you on a second visit and for an additional fee, is caused by anxiety. I rotated around in that humdrum circle all afternoon. By nightfall the two demons had combined; while anxiety copulated with depression, I sat staring at Mr. Bell’s controversial invention, fearing the moment when I would have to dial the Prairie Motel and hear Jake admit that the Bureau was taking him off the case.
Of course, a good meal might have helped; but I had already abolished my hunger by eating the chocolate cake with the fungus icing. Or I could have gone to a movie and smoked some grass. But when you’re in that kind of sweat, the only lasting remedy is to ride with it: accept the anxiety, be depressed, relax, and let the current carry you where it will.
OPERATOR: Good evening. Prairie Motel. Mr. Pepper? Hey, Ralph, you seen Jake Pepper? In the bar? Hello, sir—your party’s in the bar. I’m ringing.
TC: Thank you.
(I remembered the Prairie Bar; unlike the motel, it had a certain comic-strip charm. Cowboy customers, rawhide walls decorated with girlie posters and Mexican sombreros, a rest room for BULLS, another for BELLES, and a jukebox devoted to the twangs of Country & Western music. A jukebox blast announced that the bartender had answered.)
BARTENDER: Jake Pepper! Somebody for you. Hello, mister. He wants to know who is it?
TC: A friend from New York.
JAKE’S VOICE (distantly; rising in volume as he approaches the phone): Sure I have friends in New York. Tokyo. Bombay. Hello, my friend from New York!
TC: You sound jolly.
JAKE: About as jolly as a beggar’s monkey.
TC: Can you
