Kathy watched Winston struggle with the request. She knew he wasn’t much for confrontation, especially with a woman like Violet. On the other hand, she knew her dad had given him explicit instructions: No test drive without a salesman. No leaving the floor unattended.
“What’s your commission on a sale like this?” Violet asked, as though the sale were a foregone conclusion.
“Somewhere in the neighborhood of four percent.”
“Enough to cover your tuition and books for the next two years, or am I wrong about that?”
“That seems about right,” he said.
Even Kathy was transfixed by the notion of all that money coming to him.
“So do you want the sale or not?”
Winston glanced at his watch. “I don’t know what to tell you, Mrs. Sullivan. Mr. Cramer’s due back any minute now…”
“Oh for Christ’s sake! Give me the keys and let’s get on with it. I’m just taking it around the block.”
Kathy closed the file drawer, rolling her eyes in disgust. Pushiness was unbecoming in a woman—everyone knew that—but blasphemy was inexcusable. She returned to her desk and took a seat. The woman was insane. There was no way Winston was going to let her drive away in that car. Without so much as a dollar changing hands? Very funny. Ha ha. Kathy picked up a stack of papers and tamped them against the desk, then opened and closed a drawer, pretending to be absorbed in her work.
Winston appeared at her desk. There were big damp circles under his shirt sleeves, and she could smell his sweat. “I got a problem.”
“I know. She is so full of herself, it makes me sick.”
“Can I have the keys to the Bel Air?”
She stared at him, blinking. “Why ask me?”
“Could you give them to me, please? She’s buying the car and she wants to see how it drives.”
“I don’t have them.”
“Yes, you do. I saw him give them to you.”
Kathy didn’t move because she’d suddenly had a thought. At dinner the night before, her dad told her mom he was top-heavy on inventory and light on cash. What if Violet really had the money and the sale got messed up? If Kathy made a fuss and then the deal fell through, she’d never live it down. She could feel her face burn.
Exasperated, Winston leaned over and opened her pencil drawer. There, big as life, were the keys on a ring with the Chevrolet logo, the make and model of the car inked on a round white tag. He helped himself to the set.
“You’ll be sorry,” she said, not looking at him.
“No doubt,” he said, and then returned to the floor. Violet was still sitting in the car.
Kathy’s dad would have a fit the minute he found out, but what was she supposed to do?
Winston held out the keys to Violet. She took them without a word and then started the car. She put the gear in reverse and began backing toward the wide steel door at the rear of the showroom. Kathy watched as Winston crossed to the door and gave the handle a yank. The door ascended on its track with a low rumbling sound. He leaned toward the driver’s-side window, probably to offer her advice, but Violet swung the car into the alley and took off without so much as a backward look.
Kathy saw Winston glance at his watch, and she felt a little thrill of fear because she knew exactly what was on his mind. Even if Violet took the long way around, the drive couldn’t take more than five minutes. Which meant he could have the car on the floor again before her dad returned from lunch.
6
I found Sergeant Timothy Schaefer in a workshop at the back of his property on Hart Drive in Santa Maria. The house itself was built in the 1950s by the look of it—a three-bedroom frame structure so uniformly white that it had been either freshly painted or recently covered in vinyl siding. His workshop must have been a toolshed at one time, enlarged by degrees until it was now half the size of a single-car garage. The interior walls were all raw wood and exposed studs. He’d used layers of newspaper as insulation, and I could probably read a year’s worth of local news items if I peered closely enough.
Schaefer had told me he’d retired from the Santa Teresa County Sheriff’s Department in 1968 at the age of sixty-two, which made him eighty-one years old now. He was heavyset, his loose gray pants held up with tan suspenders. The brown and blue in his plaid flannel shirt had been washed to a blend of softly faded hues. His hair was a flyaway white, as fine as spun sugar, and he wore bifocals low on his nose, fixing me with an occasional sharp look over the rims.
In front of him, on a chunky wooden workbench that lined the shop on three sides, he’d set a newly refinished rocking chair, its seat in need of recaning. His tools were neatly lined up: a pair of needle-nose pliers, two ice picks, a knife, a ruler, a container of glycerin, and loops of cane held together with clothespins. On the chair he was currently caning, he’d used golf tees to hold the cane in place until he could tie them off underneath.
“My daughter got me into this,” he said idly. “After her mother died, she thought a hobby would keep me out of trouble. Weekends, we make the rounds of flea markets and yard sales, picking up old beat-up chairs like this. Turns out to be a money-making proposition.”
“How’d you learn?”
“Reading books and doing what they said. Took a while to get the hang of it. Glycerin helps the cane slide. Don’t soak it long enough and it’s hard to work with. Soak it too long and it’ll start to weaken and break. Hope you don’t mind if I keep on with this. I promised a fellow I’d have his rocker ready by the end of the week.”
“Be my guest.”
For a while, I was content to watch without saying a word. The mechanics of it reminded me of needlepoint or knitting, something close to a meditation. There was a certain hypnotic quality to the process, and I might have stood there observing for the better part of the day if time had permitted.
When I’d called the day before, I’d mentioned Stacey Oliphant by name, thus according myself instant credibility since the two had worked together for a number of years. Schaefer and I had spent a few minutes on the phone discussing the man. When I told him I was looking for information about Violet Sullivan, I’d asked if he needed to clear anything with the department before we spoke. “Nobody cares about that anymore,” he’d said. “Only a few of us remember the case. She’s still classified as a missing person, but I don’t think you’ll have much success after all these years.”
“It’s worth a try,” I’d said.
“Did you know her?” I asked now.
“Sure did. Everybody knew Violet. Feisty little thing with that fiery red hair. She was a beautiful girl with a defiant streak. If Foley blackened her eye, she made no attempt to hide it. She’d sport a bruise like a badge of honor. Damndest thing you ever saw. Black and blue, she was still prettier than any other woman in town. I wasn’t smart enough to keep my trap shut, and my wife was so jealous I thought she’d spit nails. Violet was the kind of woman men fantasize about. A lot of wives ended up with their noses out of joint.”
“How well did you know Foley?”
“Better than I knew her, given his numerous contacts with law enforcement. That’s how I ended up dealing with him in the first place, because of his smacking her around. I probably went to the house half a dozen times. None of us liked going out on domestic calls. Dangerous for one thing, and for another, it made you wonder what the hell was wrong with folks. Violet and Foley were skating close to the edge. Bad situation. Her little girl was of an age where she’d end up standing in the line of fire. Abuse spills over. It might start with the spouse, but the kids aren’t far behind.”
“What about Violet? Did she have any criminal history?”
“Nope.”
“Foley never had her arrested for assault?”
“Nope. If she hit him, he must have been too embarrassed to call us.”
“Shoot. No mug shots and no fingerprints. That’s too bad,” I said.
“She was clean as they come. She didn’t have a Social Security
number because she never held a job, so that’s one more dead end. The only outside dispute she had, she took Jake Ottweiler into small-claims court. His pit bull attacked her toy poodle and killed it outright. I think she collected a couple hundred bucks. Foley probably borrowed every cent of it to pay the bills.”
“Daisy remembers the two brawling. She says neither one went after her, but it had an effect.”
“I don’t doubt that,” he said. “We sat Foley down more than once and gave him a talking-to, but like most abusers, he was busy blaming someone else. He maintained Violet was provoking him, which made it her fault, not his.”
“This was over what period of time?”
“Two, three years, running right up to the last anybody ever saw of her. After we spoke yesterday, I called one of the deputies and had him pull the old file. He went back through the reports and says the two got into a bad one on June 27, a Saturday, the week before she disappeared. Foley flung a pot of coffee at her and it caught her on the chin. She called us. We went out to the house and arrested his sorry ass and then held him overnight until he had a chance to cool down. Meanwhile, she filed a complaint charging him with misdemeanor battery…”
“Why misdemeanor?”
“Injuries weren’t that serious. He’d broken her jaw, it’d have been another matter. We advised her right then to get a restraining order out against him, but she said she was fine. Minute he got out, he went straight to the house. He begged her to drop the charges, but before anything could come of it, she was gone and that was that.”
“When did he report her missing?”
“July 7. In those days, the law required a seventy-two-hour wait if there was no suggestion of foul play, which there wasn’t. So Sunday passed, and then Monday without a word from her. Tuesday morning, Foley came over to the station and asked to file a report. I was the one who took the information, though the story was already out by then, and we knew we had a problem on our hands.”
“How did he seem?”
“He was obviously upset, but in my estimation, mostly for himself. Given his history, he had to figure he’d be first in line when it came to close scrutiny. We put out a countywide bulletin, giving a description of Violet and the car she was believed to be driving, and then expanded that to statewide within two days. We contacted the papers up and down the coast. Didn’t generate much interest, to tell you the truth. Most ran two column inches in the second section, if they bothered at all. Radio, same thing. The story got some local airplay, but not that much.”
“Why no splash? What was that about?”
“The media wasn’t prone to jumping on stories the way they do now. Violet was an adult. Some had the feeling she’d run off of her own accord and she’d come back when it suited her. Others leaned toward the notion she’d never left at all, at least not alive.”
“You think Foley killed her?”
“That’s what I thought at the time.”
“Why?”
“Because the violence had escalated and she was serious about pressing charges, which would’ve been bad news for him. It’s like the deputy DA told me, ‘You don’t have a witness, you don’t have a case.’ If he’d gone to trial, chances are he’d have ended up in jail. It certainly worked to his advantage that she was gone.”
“I’m assuming there was an investigation.”
“Oh, yes. We could pretty much trace her activities up until the time she left the house that night. This would have been six fifteen or so, after the babysitter showed. It wasn’t dark yet and wouldn’t turn dark until closer to nine o’clock. Couple of people saw her drive through town. They said it looked like she was alone except for her little dog, standing in her lap yapping out the window. She stopped and bought gas, filling up her tank at a service station near Tullis, so we know she made it that far.”
“What time was that?”
“Six twenty-five, round about then. The fellow at the pump cleaned her windshield and checked her tires, which he needn’t have done. The car was brand new and he was interested in hearing how she handled. They spent a few minutes talking about that. I asked him if he noticed anything unusual because I was curious about her mood. If she was leaving her little girl for good, you’d think she’d be down in the mouth, but he said she seemed happy. ‘Giddy’ was his word. Of course, he’d never laid eyes on her before, so as far as he knew, she was always that way. I was hoping she’d said something about her destination, but no such luck. Her dog was barking up a storm, jumping from the front seat to the back. She finally let it out to do its business in the grass. After she put the dog back in the car, she went in the office, paid the clerk for her gas, and bought a Coca-Cola from the cooler. Then she got in the car and off she went, driving toward Freeman.”
I opened my shoulder bag and took out a pen and my map of Santa Maria. “Can you show me the location of the service station? I’d like to take a look.”
He adjusted his bifocals and studied the map, opening it to the full and then refolding it. “That’d be here,” he said, making a mark on the page. “Place is still there, though the pump jockey and clerk have both left the area. From that point, she could have gone anyplace. Down one of these side roads and out to the 101—south to Los Angeles, north to San Francisco. She could have circled back and gone home. We calculated how far she could get on a tank of gas and checked with every station within that radius—no easy task. No one remembered seeing her, which struck me as odd. That car was a beauty and so was she. You’d think someone would have noticed if she’d stopped for anything—meal, restroom, to walk the dog. I don’t know how she could have vanished like that, literally, without a trace.”
“The papers said Foley wasn’t considered a suspect.”
“Of course he was. Still is. We put that out, hoping to coax him into telling what he knew, but he was a wily one. He went straight out and hired an attorney, and after that, he wouldn’t say a word. We never did come up with anything to hang him on.”
“He gave no explanation at all?”
“We managed to get a little bit out of him before he clammed up. We know he stopped by the Blue Moon and had a couple of beers. He claimed he got home a short time after that, which would have made it somewhere between ten and ten thirty. Trouble is, the babysitter, Liza Mellincamp, said she didn’t see him until sometime between midnight and one, which means if he killed her he had time to dispose of the body.”
“He must have done a good job of it if she’s never been found.”
Schaefer shrugged. “I imagine she’ll turn up one of these days, assuming there was something left of her once the critters got through.”
“Also assuming he killed her, which he might not have.”
“True enough.”
“Not that I’m arguing for or against,” I said.
“I understand. I go back and forth myself, and I’ve had years to ponder the possibilities.”
“Did anybody support Foley’s claim that he got home when he said?”
Schaefer shook his head. “Far from it. They know roughly when he left the Moon, but no one seems to know where he went after that. Might or might not have been home. Liza’s word against his.”
“What about the car? I understand there’s never been any sign of that either.”
“My guess is it’s long gone, probably broken down for parts. If not that, there’s always a demand for stolen cars in Europe and the Middle East. In California, L.A. and San Diego take the biggest hits.”
“Even back then?”
“Yes ma’am. The numbers might be different, but percentages are the same. Something like eighty-five thousand cars stolen out of those two cities just this past year. They steal ’em, take ’em to local ports, and crate ’em up for shipping. The other option is to drive a car across the border and dispose of it down there. Places in Mexico and Central America, if a vehicle doesn’t find a buyer, it’s left on the street and ends up sitting in an impound lot. You go down to Tijuana, you can see tho
usands—cars, trucks, RVs. Some have been there for years and never will be reclaimed.”
“Was the car his or hers?”
“He was the one signed the loan papers, but the car was hers. She made sure everyone knew that. In those days, wives couldn’t get credit even if they worked. Everything was done in the husband’s name.”
“But why would he do that? Buy her a car and then kill her the next day. That doesn’t make sense.”
“He might have killed her on impulse, struck her in a rage. Doesn’t have to be something he planned in advance.”
“But why buy the car at all? Daisy told me he could barely pay the bills. I’ve also heard she had enough cash to buy it outright.”
“I’ll tell you what I think. He did it out of guilt. That was his pattern. He’d get mad, beat the hell out of her, and then do something nice to make up for it. Maybe he realized she was on the verge of taking him to court so he tried to buy her off. She was nuts about that car.”
“From what I heard, Foley was stuck making all the payments even though he never had a thing to show for it. That seems strange.”
“Depending on his agreement with the dealer,” he said. “The fellow you want to talk to on that subject is Chet Cramer of Chet Cramer Chevrolet in Cromwell. I’ll give you his address.”
“Thanks. Daisy mentioned him. I’m surprised he’s still in business after all these years.”
“Oh, sure. He’ll never retire. He’s got his hands on the reins and he’ll be happy to drop dead before he ever lets go.”
Mentally I went back and skimmed the newspaper accounts I’d read. “One of the papers reported Violet going into a Santa Teresa bank that week and getting into her safe-deposit box. Any idea what was in it?”
“Nope. I’d assume valuables of some kind. Like you, I’ve heard she had a sizeable sum of cash, but you’d have to take that on faith. We got a court order and had the box drilled when it was clear she was gone. It was empty.”