When I entered the lobby, Marvin stood staring out the window, lost in thought. I tapped him on the shoulder to let him know I was there, and he started as though he’d been miles away.
“What’s up?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Looking for ghosts, I guess,” he said.
“How so?”
He glanced around the lobby. “The last time I was here was for my honeymoon,” he explained. “Lisa and I were both eighteen, and she was three months pregnant. We got married by a judge with only our two sets of parents as witnesses. We were young and broke, and the best we could do for a honeymoon was to spend our wedding night here. Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t last. Lisa divorced me and moved to Seattle when my son was six.”
Lars Jenssen, my stepgrandfather, emigrated from Norway when he was in his early twenties. When Jeremy, my son-in-law, first met Lars, he did his best to get to know the old guy. At one point I happened to enter the family room in time to overhear a conversation between the two of them.
“What did you do in the old country?” Jeremy had asked, making a stab at engaging Lars in conversation.
“In the summer we fuck and fish,” was the curt reply.
For a moment Jeremy had been too stunned at hearing those completely unexpected words that he couldn’t say a thing. “So what did you do in the winter?” he asked finally.
“Too cold to fish,” Lars answered.
That was good old plainspoken Lars in a nutshell, and boy, do I miss him, but the look of shocked dismay on Jeremy’s face at the time is something I’ll never forget. Now, based on what I knew about Danitza Adams and Christopher Danielson’s history and about Marvin Price’s own shotgun wedding, it occurred to me that teenagers in Homer were still in much the same fix as those kids in Norway, with the emphasis most definitely on something other than fishing.
“Where’s your son now?” I asked.
“He’s a pilot in the air force, stationed at Nellis Air Force Base near Las Vegas. He doesn’t speak to me—hasn’t for years. He maintains everything that happened between Lisa and me is all my fault and considers me to be the devil incarnate.”
When it comes to dealing with estranged offspring, I have more than a little experience. “Give him time,” I said. “Maybe he’ll come around. My kids all did eventually.”
“Really?” Marvin asked hopefully.
“Really,” I said. “Now, where are we going?”
“Just up the road apiece,” Marvin said. “Red Bolger’s place is right on the water.”
Marvin’s work car, an Interceptor, was parked outside. It was a big step up from Twink’s Travelall. Along the way I told him about my conversation with Tracy Hamilton. It was good news, but not enough to pull Marvin out of his dark mood.
When we parked in the driveway at a house on a bluff overlooking the bay, I followed him around to the back of his vehicle and watched while he mixed up a concoction of Blue Star and water, which he poured into a spray bottle. According to experienced forensics folks, Blue Star does a better job of illuminating older bloodstains. With the bottle prepared and in hand, he passed me a flashlight-shaped instrument that I knew to be a Bluemaxx alternate light source that makes luminesced bloodstains visible. He also passed me a small video camera. Laden with the tools of the trade, we approached Red Bolger’s front door, where he stood waiting.
In my experience guys who bear the nickname handle of “Red” usually start out in life with red hair. That might have been true in this case, too, but at this point in life Red Bolger was completely bald.
“Hey, Red,” Marvin said. “Good to see you.”
“Same to you, Marve,” Red said. “Who’s this?” He nodded in my direction.
I kept forgetting this was a small town.
“He’s my associate, J. P. Beaumont.”
“He a cop, too?” Red wanted to know.
“I’m a private investigator from Seattle,” I told him. Since both my hands were full, I couldn’t very well offer a handshake.
“Well, come on through,” Red said. “What kind of crime do you think Nate’s car might be mixed up in—a homicide?”
The question was addressed to Marvin, and I left him to answer it.
“Yup,” he said. “An unsolved case from 2006.”
“When Nate called, he told me Shelley Hollander might be mixed up in something. No surprise there. I thought that gal was trouble from the time Jack first hooked up with her,” Red said. “She’s always been a looker, all right, but if some female looks too good to be true, she probably is.”
The tangle of personal connections in town made me grateful I’d spent my entire career working in a large metropolitan area rather than in this kind of a fishbowl, where literally everybody knew everyone else. And I was also struck by the fact that so many people still referred to Shelley by her maiden name as opposed to either of her married ones.
Red led us through the cluttered, dingy house—a living room, dining room, and kitchen—that hadn’t seen a woman’s touch in many a year. I didn’t know if Red was divorced, widowed, or even a lifelong bachelor. No doubt Marvin could have told me, but it wasn’t any of my business. As soon as Red stepped into the garage, the door opener’s automatic lighting system came on, revealing two parked cars—a ten-year-old white Jeep Cherokee and an even older Subaru Forester. The vehicle was covered with a thick layer of dust with a hint of red paint visible beneath that.
“The key’s under the floor mat,” Red said. “Do you want me to disconnect it from the charger?”
“No need,” Marvin said. “We won’t have to start it.”
“All right,” he said, “but be prepared. After it’s been locked up for a while, the smell of bleach will knock your socks off.”
Marvin and I both stopped short, but he was the one who spoke first. “Bleach?” he asked.
Red nodded. “Shelley told Nate that a friend of hers borrowed the car to go fishing and ended up spilling a bucket of fish bait in the luggage compartment. He tried to clean it up, but the smell of dead fish is tough as hell to get rid of.”
So’s blood, I thought.
I was afraid Red was going to hang around and dog our heels the whole time, but instead he turned and went back inside. Marvin handed me a small video camera. “You ever used one of these?”
“Once or twice,” I said.
“You’re on camera duty, then,” he told me. “We need to start by time-dating this. Go ahead and start filming.”