Death in Donegal Bay Read Online Free PDF Page B

as usual. So what? It wasn’t my case.
    Which Corey made clear to me on the phone just before dinner.
    “Some friend you are,” he said. “You and your big mouth!”
    “Could I have a translation of that?”
    “Telling Mr. Baker my father was worried about me, trying to make me look like a punk. When I reported to Mr. Baker from Lompoc this afternoon, he was steamed. I had to talk fast to save my job.”
    “I didn’t tell Mr. Baker that.”
    “No, you told the maid to tell him. Why the hatchet job?”
    “Corey, I was worried about you, and so were your parents. And let me tell you, if you tangle with Mike Anthony, you’ll find out I had reason to worry.”
    “Who is Mike Anthony?”
    “The man who owns that bar near the beach in Donegal Bay. Didn’t you talk with him?”
    “You’re not making sense,” he said.
    “Corey,” I asked, “are you still in Lompoc?”
    “No. I’m home. Why?”
    “Come over after dinner. I have some things to tell you that might help you on your case.”
    Nothing from him.
    “Okay, forget it,” I said. “You don’t need me. You’re a big boy now. Good-bye and good luck.”
    “I’ll be over,” he said. “I’m sorry I … blew up, Brock.”
    “You were entitled,” I told him. “I do have a big mouth.”
    When he came, an hour later, we went into the den. In there, I said, “You first.”
    This is the way it was: He had followed Felicia’s car to one of the big homes on the bluff, a house he later learned belonged to Mr. and Mrs. Duane Detterwald. Because Felicia had carried her luggage into the house, he’d assumed she would be staying for a while. But he couldn’t be sure of that. So, instead of driving down to the beach to use a phone there, he had gone back to a filling station on the road that led into 101.
    It was the only road into the area and he would be able to watch for her car if she left the Detterwalds. He phoned Baker at a Los Angeles number Baker had given him and reported.
    Felicia’s car was still in the driveway when he came back, so he took a chance and went down into town for lunch.
    “At a bar,” I asked him, “with an anchor mounted on a concrete base in front of it?”
    He nodded. “You know the place?”
    “It belongs to Mike Anthony.”
    “I’ll ask you again—who’s he?”
    “A fighter. A very rough nut who missed the middleweight crown about two bouts short of a title fight. He is also a former boyfriend of Felicia Baker’s.”
    “Well, he wasn’t behind the bar. A woman was tending bar.’
    At six o’clock, he went on, Felicia and another woman and a man had come out of the Detterwald house and climbed into a Cad DeVille and driven down to one of the ranches in the valley for a big outdoor barbecue. Corey had watched the scene from a higher point in the road.
    A little before midnight, the Cadillac had come back up the road and he’d followed it to the Detterwald house. When the lights had gone out in the house, he’d taken his sleeping bag into some shrubbery on the vacant lot across the street and gone to sleep.
    When Felicia left the house the next morning, he followed her to Lompoc. He couldn’t get the name of the occupant: there. He phoned Baker from there, and that’s when he got the bawling out. From there, he followed Felicia home.
    “What blarney did you feed Baker when he blew up?”
    “I told him my grandmother was dying up in Sonora Creel and my father was anxious to get in touch with me so the family could go up there together.”
    “And he bought it?”
    “I guess. I phoned him when I got home and said my grandmother had made a turn for the better, so we weren’t going up İ could stay on the case.”
    “You’ll still be shadowing Mrs. Baker?”
    “Yes. Mr. Baker is still down in Los Angeles, and he didn’t tell me to stop. He sure didn’t pay a five-hundred-dollar retainer for two days of work.”
    “A working day is eight hours,” I pointed out. “You worked longer days than that. Are you