she did, she greeted me with a question. “If DeVarnay went on to Denver, why are you still in St. Louis?”
“There are odds and ends that need cleaning up here,” I objected. “Did something happen that sent DeVarnay winging into the blue? Did he meet someone? It would be a great help to know why he’s on the run.”
“Tell Mara to give it another day and then report directly to me. I have something else for you. DeVarnay was carrying traveler’s checks, and he’s cashed some of them. Four that we know about. He always carried a small reserve of money in traveler’s checks when he traveled, five hundred dollars in fifty-dollar checks. They’re issued by a New Orleans bank, and four of them have been returned to the bank in the usual way.”
She dictated the names and addresses of the four firms that had cashed them and the dates they were cashed. When I finished writing, I looked at the list and whistled. Three of the checks had been cashed the day he disappeared: One in Denver, one in Reno, and a third in San Francisco. One was cashed in Seattle on the following day.
“Do you still want me to go to Denver?” I asked. “Obviously Seattle is the last place he surfaced—as far as we know—but that was two weeks ago. Today he may be cashing checks in Nome or Beijing.”
“I have someone trying to pick up his trail in Seattle. See what you can find out along the way.”
By then it was late afternoon, and the people DeVarnay had encountered in his travels would no longer be on duty. I stayed overnight in St. Louis, working with Mara in a vain attempt at finding out how DeVarnay spent his one free evening there.
The next morning, taking the same flight DeVarnay had, I was off on the next lap of the great DeVarnay goose chase. In Denver, no one at the gift shop that had cashed his traveler’s check remembered him. I asked about the shop’s procedure with traveler’s checks. The check had to be no larger than fifty dollars, and DeVarnay had to purchase something, show his driver’s license, and sign the check in the clerk’s presence.
He had parted company with MidAmerican Airlines when his plane landed, and no employee remembered him. After more recourse to airlines computers, I placed him on a Sierra Western flight bound for Reno. Again he paid for the ticket with cash.
He had taken an afternoon flight to Reno, and so did I. I spent the flight pondering his unnatural preference for small airlines. In Reno, he had cashed another traveler’s check—this time in a downtown casino where gamblers cash checks of all kinds as fast as they run out of money. He had shown his driver’s license and endorsed the check in the presence of the cashier. No one remembered him. I hoped he had taken time off from his frantic dash west to play a few slot machines. Otherwise, he wasn’t getting any more fun out of this trek than I was.
He had taken a Sierra Western night flight to San Francisco, and so did I. He had checked in at the Golden Sunset Motel near the airport, paying for one night with a traveler’s check plus some cash. I stayed at the same motel.
Early the next morning, which was a Saturday for me, I caught a Pacific Northern Airlines flight to Seattle, the same one DeVarnay had taken on Sunday two weeks earlier. The last traveler’s check we knew about had been cashed at an airport gift shop in the Seattle terminal.
Mort Morris, the Seattle agent for Lambert and Associates, met me at the airport. He was a big, bristly man with a disarming smile, and it was said he could talk his way through a brick wall. He had already done the obvious.
Marc DeVarnay had not booked any flight under his own name, nor had he rented a car or stayed at any hotel or motel near the airport or in downtown Seattle. We set about systematically eliminating everything that was left. That done, we started over again, and the next step was harder. Instead of merely asking about a name, one of us had to call personally and see if anyone recognized DeVarnay’s photo.
We had an almost nibble from a bus driver on the Los Angeles run. At first he thought he’d had DeVarnay as a passenger. Then he changed his mind.
And that was all. When we finished, Marc DeVarnay was just as thoroughly missing as he had been in the beginning. All we had established was that he now was missing from a different place.
On Wednesday night, precisely one week after she had cancelled my Savannah vacation, Raina Lambert telephoned. She listened to my report without comment. Very little can be said about a long, extremely thorough list of negatives.
“What do you think?” she asked finally.
“Is there any insanity in the DeVarnay family?”
“Not that I know of. What does that have to do with it?”
“There is now. No one but an insane person behaves this way.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“I still think this search should have begun in New Orleans. DeVarnay very neatly led us all the way to Seattle and left us here. Then he went wherever he intended to go all along, using an assumed name.”
“So why look in New Orleans when he was last seen in Seattle?”
“Because the reason he disappeared is in New Orleans, not here.”
“Maybe so,” she mused. “All right. Come to New Orleans.”
“I didn’t say I wanted to look for him in New Orleans. I’d rather go to Savannah. If DeVarnay wants to disappear that badly, let him.”
“Catch a night flight if there is one,” she said firmly. “Call me back and give me your flight information.”
She was still the boss. I hung up and dialed an airline.
So I arrived in New Orleans and was immediately launched on a second wild goose chase. During the three hours I spent sitting on Old Jake’s porch, guarding his corpse and communing with undiluted nature, I had ample time to ask myself why I didn’t find a job that occasionally made sense.
CHAPTER FOUR
The police took an unconscionable amount of time getting there, and it seemed much longer than that because I had nothing to do but wait. They also took their time in getting around to dealing with Tosche and me, and we almost had to find our way back to Pointe Neuve in the dark.
They weren’t quite finished with us then. A deputy met us at the dock, and, after we had refilled the motor’s gas tank and located Ed to return his key, we were escorted into the presence of the sheriff himself. He had set up a temporary headquarters at his parked police car, and he was directing the questioning of every Pointe Neuve resident about the stranger Old Jake had been seen with.
He looked more like a folksy used car dealer than an officer of the law, but he certainly was no one’s fool in police matters. He already knew all about me from reports his men had radioed, but he wanted a peek for himself.
From his questions, I gathered that all of the local residents except the witnesses we had already talked with were disclaiming any knowledge of either Old Jake or the stranger.
First he cross-examined me on my testimony. Then, as though he half suspected I might have dented Old Jake’s skull myself, he turned his attention to my own movements two weeks previously.
“Jay Pletcher?” he asked finally, giving me a searching look. “Is that J-A-Y?”
I’d
