Chapter 13 Chapter Thirteen Cliff Road

Eric Collinson wired me from Quesada: The telegram was sent to the detective agency on Friday morning.I wasn't in San Francisco that morning, but I was in Martinez haggling with the divorced ex-wife of Phil Rich—a gentleman with many aliases.The agency wanted Phil because the guy was running around the Northwest Territories writing bad checks, and we wanted him badly.His ex-wife was a petite, sweet, blond operator who had a recent photo of Phil and offered to sell it. "He didn't care about me at all, and he never thought of writing a bad check to get me something," she complained. "I have to earn my own money. Anyway, some shameless person must be getting a lot of sweetness now." , then what's wrong with me earning some pocket money from him? How much do you think you paid?"

She overvalued the picture to us, but in the end I managed to make a deal with her.It was past six o'clock when I returned to the city, and I couldn't catch the train that would get me to Quesada that night.I packed my bags, drove the car out of the garage, and headed south. Quesada is a one-hotel town on the rocky side of a young mountain range eighty miles from San Francisco that stretches all the way to the Pacific Ocean.The beaches here are steep and hard, not suitable for sea bathing, so the summer vacation is not profitable.Because of the smuggling of rum, it was once a beautiful place for a while, but now it is no longer noisy.When bootleggers later discovered that local bootlegging was more profitable and less risky than importing it, Quesada fell silent again.

I arrived in town just after eleven o'clock that night, parked the car in the garage, and walked across the street to the Sunset Hotel.It was a low, cluttered yellow building, and the night watchman sat alone in the hall, a sissy man in his sixties, trying to get me to see his shiny pink nails. He glanced at my name on the register and handed me a hotel envelope with my name on it, in Eric Collinson's handwriting.I tore it open and took out the letter to read: "How long has the letter been here?" I asked. "Arrived about eight o'clock. Mr. Carter waited for you for more than an hour until the last train came from the station."

"Does he not live here?" "Oh, God, of course not. He's staying with his bride at the Tucker Hotel, just over the bay." I didn't care much about instructions from people like Collinson, so I asked, "How do I get there?" "You can't find it at night," the night watchman assured me, "unless you take a long detour on the East Road, but you have to be familiar with this place." "Really? How did the day pass?" "You go down the street up ahead, and then you turn onto the side road by the sea, and go down that cliff road. It's not really a road, it's more like a trail. It's about three miles from here. Far—a brown wooden house, on a little hill. Just remember to keep walking on the right side toward the coast, and it's easy to find in the daytime. But I bet you never, never—"

"Thanks." I said.I don't want to listen to it all over again. He led me to a room and told me to get up at five o'clock, and I fell asleep in the middle of the night. When he woke me up in the morning, it was cold and foggy outside and the sky was overcast.I said "OK, thank you" into the microphone.By the time I got dressed and went downstairs, the weather was still nowhere in sight.The front desk said it was absolutely impossible to find something to eat in Quesada before seven o'clock. I stepped out of the hotel and down the street until the street turned into a dirt road.I followed the dirt road to the intersection, then turned up the fork that led to the bay.This fork in the road didn't look very good at first, but it didn't take long for it to simply become a rocky road against the side of the cliff, approaching the sea bit by bit.At the foot of the cliff the foot became steeper and steeper, until at last the trail simply became a raised skirt on the face of the cliff—sometimes eight or ten feet wide, sometimes only four or five feet wide.Above and behind the trail, the cliffs rose sixty or seventy feet high; and below and in front of the trail, the cliffs dropped a hundred feet or so down to the sea.The light wind blows from the direction where China is located, pushing the mist over the top of the cliff, and causing the sea to rush towards the root of the cliff with noisiness.

Rounding the corner at the steepest point of the cliff—indeed, the road went almost straight up and down for about a hundred yards—I stopped to look at a jagged cave at the outer edge of the trail.The pit was about six inches wide, a small semicircular mound of freshly excavated earth at one end, and loose soil at the other end.It's nothing to look at, but even a city guy like me knows: a bush was pulled out of here not long ago. But I don't see uprooted shrubs here.I stubbed out the cigarette, threw it away, and got down on my hands and knees, looking down over the edge of the path.The bush was twenty feet below, on a broken trunk growing almost parallel to the cliff, fresh umber still clinging to the roots.The next thing I noticed was also brown—a floppy hat stuck inside out between two pointed gray stones, about to fall into the sea.I continued to look at the bottom of the cliff, and saw human legs and feet.

It was a man's, in black leather shoes and dark trousers; his feet rested on sea-rounded stones, both sideways, six inches apart, both pointing to the left.Legs in dark trousers stretched diagonally into the water, disappearing below the surface a few inches above the knees.That's all I can see from the cliff. I went down the cliff—but not from there; it was too steep for a middle-aged fat man to take the risk.Two hundred yards behind, the trail crosses a rugged gorge that runs obliquely across the cliff.I went back down the canyon, stumbling, sweating, and cursing, but finally made it to the bottom of the cliff unharmed, except for cut fingers, soiled clothes, and ruined shoes.

The rocky road between the cliff and the ocean is actually not suitable for walking, but I still tried to walk most of the way, only wading through the water once or twice, and the water was not deep enough to knee.It's just that when I got to the scene where the legs were, I had to immerse the whole lower body in the Pacific Ocean to fish out the body.The body was lying on its back on a slope of boulders that had been scoured for years and was mostly submerged in water, and the tide submerged the parts above the thighs.I put my hands under the man's armpits, and pulled him up hard with my feet.

It was Eric Collinson's body.His back was broken, bone piercing through muscle and clothing exposed.The back of the head was crushed, only half intact.I dragged him out of the water and set him down on dry rocks.In his wet pockets were one hundred and fifty-four dollars and eighty-two dollars, a watch, a knife, a gold pen, pencils, some sheets of paper, two letters, and a blotter.I spread out the paper, letter, and notebook, and read the contents, only knowing that the contents had nothing to do with his death.Apart from the uprooted bushes, the hat stuck between the stones, and the posture of his corpse, I found nothing in or around him to connect with his death.

I left him there and went back to the canyon, panting all the way up the ledge to where the bushes had grown, but found no obvious marks or footprints or anything like that.The trails are mostly made of hard rock.As I walked down the trail, the cliffs began to curve away from the ocean, and the trail followed.After walking another half mile, the cliff disappeared entirely, leaving only the lush ridge winding away.The sun still hasn't come out.The pants stuck to my cold legs and were uncomfortable.Water rattled in my worn-out shoes.I haven't had breakfast yet, and my cigarettes are all wet.I sprained my left knee sliding down the canyon and it still hurts.Cursing my business as a detective, I trudged along the road.

I stayed away from the sea for a while under the guidance of the trail, then crossed a green belt that sheltered the coast, descended into a small valley, climbed a low hill, and then saw the night watchman mentioned to me. that house. It was a rather large two-story building, with a roof and walls of brown planks, on a knoll next to a U-shaped beach eroded by the sea, about a square mile.The house faces the sea, and when I looked from the rear, there was no one there.The windows on the first floor were closed and the curtains were drawn, while the windows on the second floor were open.At the other end of the house there are several smaller peasant houses. I went around to the front of the house, and there were wicker chairs and a table on the screened front porch.The front porch screen door was shut tight from the inside, and I shook it hard, back and forth, for at least five minutes, but nothing happened.I walked back to the house and knocked on the back door.The door opened half a foot with my knuckles, revealing a dark and silent kitchen.I opened the door a little further and knocked again - loudly.Still. "Mrs. Collinson," I called. With no response, I walked through the kitchen and the darker dining room, found the stairs, climbed up, and began to peek into the rooms. The whole building was empty. In one bedroom, a .38 automatic fell to the center of the floor.There was an empty cartridge beside the gun, and another under a chair across the room, and there was a faint smell of gunpowder in the air.There was a .38-caliber bullet hole in one corner of the ceiling, and there were bits of paint scattered on the floor directly below.The quilt was laid neatly and had not been touched.The clothes in the closet, the contents of the table and the desk all indicated that this was Eric Collinson's bedroom. By analogy with the same evidence, the room next door should be Gabrielle's room.Her bed hadn't been slept in either, or had been slept on and made again.On the bottom of her wardrobe I found a black silk dress, a supposedly white handkerchief, and a pair of black suede moccasins, all soaked in wet mud—the handkerchief was stained with blood.In her bathroom—in the bathtub—there was a bath towel, a face towel, all damp, stained with blood and mud.On her dresser was a small sheet of white thick paper, creased, with some white powder stuck to it.I licked it with the tip of my tongue, it was morphine. I went back to Quesada, changed my shoes and socks, ate breakfast, ordered another pack of dry cigarettes, and asked the front desk—a small, lean boy this time—who was in charge of the law and order here. "The sergeant's name is Dick Corden," he told me, "but he was in town last night. Ben Rowley is the deputy. You should find him in his father's office." "where?" "Next door to the garage." I found it. It was a one-story red brick building. On the large glass windows, it said: Kim Rowley, Real Estate, Mortgage, Loan, Stock Bond, Insurance, Promissory Note, Employment Agency, Notary Public, Moving Storage, There are many other names that I have forgotten. There were two people sitting in the room, their feet on the mottled tabletop behind the worn-out counter.A man in his early fifties, with cloudy, dull brown hair, eyes, and skin, with a kind expression and a wandering gaze.The other was about twenty years younger than he, and would look exactly the same in twenty years. I said, "I'm looking for the deputy." "I am," said the young man, dropping his feet slowly from the table to the ground.He didn't get up, just stretched out his legs, hooked a chair from the wall, and then lifted his feet back on the table. "Sit down, this is my dad," he waved his big toe at the other man, "he is not an outsider." "Know Eric Carter?" I asked. "Honeymoon guy at Tucker Hotel? All I know is Carter." "Eric Carter," said old Rowley, "that's the name on the rent receipt I gave him." "He's dead," I told them, "falling off a cliff last night or this morning. It may have been an accident." The father widened his brown eyes and looked at his son.My son looked at me with eyes of the same color in bewilderment, and clicked his tongue a few times. I hand him a business card.He read it carefully, turned it over to make sure there was no writing on the back, and handed it to his father. "Go and see him?" I suggested. "I think I ought to go," the deputy agreed.He rose from his chair, much larger than I had thought—about the same size as dead Collinson—and, though hunched, very muscular. I followed him to a dusty car in front of the office.Old Rowley did not follow. "Someone tipped you off?" asked the deputy sheriff after they were on the road. "I bumped into it by accident. Do you know the identities of the Carters?" "Is it a celebrity?" "Did you hear about Reese's murder at the San Francisco Temple?" "Well, I read it in the newspaper." "Mrs. Carter is Gabrielle Leggett in the case, and Carter is Eric Collinson." "Tut, tut, tut," he responded. "Both her father and stepmother were killed two weeks before the murder." "Tut, tut, tut," he said, "what's the matter with this gang?" "Family curse." "really?" I don't know how serious his question is, but he looks serious.I haven't figured out his ways yet, but whether he's playing dumb or not, he's Quesada's resident deputy, and this is his turf, and he's entitled to the facts.I told him the story as we bumped along the potholed lanes—from Paris in 1913 to Cliff Road two hours ago. "After they got married in Reno, Collinson came to see me. They had to wait for the trial of Halton's gang, and in this gap, he wanted to take this girl to find a quiet place to recuperate. She was still in a coma. Drowsy. You know Owen Fitzstephan, don't you?" "The big writer who came here for a while last year? Hmm, I know." "Well, he recommended this place." "I know, Dad mentioned it. But why do they use fake names?" "Avoid the media. In addition, you may also want to avoid this kind of thing." He frowned slightly, and asked, "You mean they estimated that this might be the case?" "Uh, although it's always easy to be smart in hindsight, we haven't solved the two muddled cases she was involved in before. If the antecedents haven't been figured out, how can we foresee the consequences? I'm not sure about their seclusion. Disapproving, because the original mystery about Gabriel—if there was one—had not yet been solved, but Collinson insisted on going. I promised him to telegraph me if anything strange happened. He really hit it." Rowley nodded three or four times, and then asked: "How do you know he didn't fall by himself?" "If he wants me to come, then something must have happened. Besides, with all the things that have happened around his wife, it's hard for me to believe that this time it will be an accident." "And there's a curse," he said. "That's right," I agreed, while continuing to ponder his ambiguous face, trying to dig out his thoughts, "but the problem is that this curse is too effective and has no flaws. This is the first time I have encountered it. .” After listening to my opinion, he frowned for a few minutes, and then stopped the car. "We have to get off here, the rest of the road is hard to drive."—Although the road just now is the same, "Anyway, there is such a thing as a curse. There are some things in the world that make us feel dark There's something in it." He frowned again as we took a step, and then came up with a word he liked. "Unpredictable," he concluded. I did not refute. He led the way up the cliff path and stopped by himself at the place where the bushes were uprooted - I didn't actually mention this detail.He bent over Collinson's body, scanned the cliff face from top to bottom, then walked up and down the path, hunched deeply, his brown eyes fixed on the ground.I have been silent all this time. He looked around for more than ten minutes, then straightened up and said, "I found nothing here. Let's go down." I started walking back to the canyon, but he said there was a shortcut ahead.Indeed there is.So we walked over to the body. Rowley looked from the corpse to the high edge of the path, and complained, "I don't see how he landed in that position." "It wasn't. I pulled him out of the water," I said, showing the deputy the exact location of the original body. "That would make sense," he concluded. I sat on a rock and smoked while Rowley went round, touching and rummaging the rocks and gravel.He seems to get nowhere.