Troublemaker

A Dave Brandstetter mystery

by Joseph Hansen

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

HARPER  &   ROW,   PUBLISHERS

NEW   YORK,   EVANSTON

SAN  FRANCISCO

LONDON

 

A HARPER NOVEL OF SUSPENSE

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following:

Lines from the song "Sunshine on My Shoulders" by John Denver, Mike Taylor, and
Dick Kniss. Copyright © 1971 Cherry Lane Music Co. Used by permission.

Lines from "The Waking" from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, published by
Doubleday & Co., 1958.

troublemaker. Copyright © 1975 by Joseph Hansen. All rights reserved. Printed
in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quota-
tions embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row,
Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y, 10022. Published simultaneously
in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside Limited, Toronto.

FIRST EDITION

Designed by Gloria Adelson

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Hansen, Joseph, date
Troublemaker.

ISBN 0-06-011758-3

CHAPTER 1

 

She wore jeans, high-top work shoes, an old pullover with a jagged reindeer pattern. Somebody's ski sweater once, somebody even bigger than she was. Her son? She was sixty but there was nothing frail about her. The hands gripping the grainy rake handle were a man's hands. Her cropped hair was white. She wore no makeup. Her skin was ruddy, her eyes bright blue. Hearty might have described her. Except for her mouth. It sulked. Something had offended her and failed to apologize. Not lately —long ago. Life, probably.

He said, "Mrs. Wendell?" and held out a card. She took it, read it. It named the insurance company he worked for, Medallion Life. His own name, David Brandstetter, was in a corner, death claims division under it. He didn't try to say it. His throat was dry. The morning was hot. It had been a hike from Pinyon Trail up crooked steps in a steep, pine-grown slope —rusty needles slippery underfoot —to the rambling redwood house where no one answered the bell, then out back here to this one-time garage.

It was a kind of stable now. Beside it, in pine-branch-splintered sunlight, a sorrel gelding no longer young nosed a heap of alfalfa back of an unpainted paddock fence. A cleated board ramp fronted the garage doors, canted to reach a wood floor laid on studs over the original cement. Inside, Heather Wendell raked manure and trampled straw out of a stall. In farther stalls, shadowy horses breathed and shifted hoofs on hollow planks. The big woman pushed the card into a pocket, turned away, went on with her work.

"Murders," she said, "inquests, grief. They don't mean anything to horses." It was a man's voice. Not pleased. "What is it you want?"

"Your son, Richard, had a policy with us."

"At my insistence." She jerked a nod, grim but self-satisfied. "He'd never have thought of it. It wasn't that he was selfish. He simply had no imagination. It never entered his head that he could die. I'd be destitute today. Well, I've had that, thank you. From my father. I wasn't going through it again. Not at my time of life." Her thick elbow nudged Dave. "Excuse me." She raked the pile past his feet, paused, blinked at him. "You've brought the check —is that it?"

"Wrong department." Dave smiled apology. "My department asks questions."

She grunted and began raking again, out into the light. She traded the rake for a stump of broom and pushed the waste off the ramp to the side. "There were a dozen police officers, in and out of uniform. That night, the next day. At least half of them asked questions. The same questions. Over and over again."

She leaned the broom beside the rake against a stud-and-board wall. Above sawhorses that held saddles, a tangle of tack trailed from rusty spikes. She took down a bridle and carried it to the stall beyond the one she'd cleaned. A bit clinked against teeth, a buckle tongue snapped. She led out a little paint mare who threw her head and blew when she saw Dave.

"Step back in there a minute, would you? Men make Buffy nervous. Thank you."

She held the sidling Buffy by a cheek strap and shouldered her out the door. Rusty hinges creaked on the paddock gate. It closed with a wooden clatter. She came back in and took the rake to Buffy's stall.

"I assume one of those officers was bright enough to write. That Japanese one, surely. Or don't the police let insurance companies see their reports?"

"Lieutenant Yoshiba," Dave said. "I saw the report."

"Good. Then there's no need to waste your morning. Nor mine. These horses haven't been groomed or exercised in days. That's not right. And I'm pressed for time. The funeral's this afternoon."

"You'd gone to a film that night," Dave said. "In Los Santos. Left here a little after seven. The film screened at eight and ran three hours but you were back here before ten and it's a forty-minute drive. What happened?"

"I walked out. The movie was disgusting. They're all like that now —cruel, bloody, degenerate. I tried to make myself stay, it cost so much to get in. And Rick keeps telling me I'm letting myself get old, stuck away up here, that I ought to get out in civilization once in a while." The rake clunked at the back of the dark stall. She snorted. "Civilization! Do you know what they do to horses in those pictures? The S.P.C.A. here in the States won't let them use trip wires—you know, to make them stumble and fall. But they go out of the country now to film, and they don't care. They break their legs, their necks, kill them. To make a cheap, sordid movie. Don't talk to me about civilization."

"I won't," Dave said. "You got home around ten?"

"Parked the car where I always do. Down below, by the mailbox. You can see we don't use the garage for cars anymore." The rake quit a moment while she jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "When we did, we drove down from the trail above —same trail but it climbs and bends back on itself. Only take horses up and down the driveway now. Hardly a patch of blacktop left on it. Anyway, the climb up the steps is good exercise. My father always said, 'Walking is for horses,' and he died at forty-nine."

"Right," Dave said. "You heard a shot?"

"When I was partway up the stairs. Didn't know what it was. Sounded like a backfire from down on the main road. These hills echo so. And my mind wasn't on it. I was furious about that movie." Now she backed past Dave again, dragging the litter from Buffy's stall with the rake. "I set some milk in a pan on the stove to heat. To calm me down, let me sleep. I thought I'd change for bed while it warmed up and I started for my room. And I saw across the way there was a light in Rick's den. That wasn't right —he was at work. Then I remembered his VW was down by the mailbox when I'd parked. Shows you how that movie upset me. Normally he doesn't get home till three." She added without pride, "It's a bar he owns, you know. With Ace Kegan."

"The Hang Ten," Dave said. "A gay bar. On Ocean Front Walk in Surf."

"Yes." She eyed him thoughtfully for a second, then went on scraping the stall muck toward the sunlit doorway. "Well, I was afraid Rick must be ill. I thought I'd better step across and check. It's a separate unit, you understand. It was a guesthouse originally —two bedrooms and bath. Rick remodeled one room so as to have a place where he could relax, listen to music, watch TV and not disturb me. Our hours are different. Were. The door was open. And there was this boy, this creature—what's his name?—Johns. Standing at the desk, stark naked, tissues in his hand, wiping off a revolver. While my son lay dead at his feet."

"Also stark naked," Dave said.

"No." She stopped in the doorway, a bulky silhouette, and raised her head. Against the light, he couldn't read her expression. But her voice changed. It belonged to an old woman now. "There was a great, gaping hole in his chest. I remember that. Was he naked? Yes." Her shoulders sagged. "I suppose he was."

"Can I see that room?" Dave asked.

"The police took photographs." The rake handle knocked the wall. She broomed the dirty straw. Angry now. Probably at herself for showing human weakness. "They left the fireplace littered with those ugly little burned-out bulbs."

"I've seen the photographs," Dave said. "Now I need to see the room. Don't stop what you're doing. Just point me the way." Wincing against the hard light, he started down the ramp.

She squared herself in front of him. "I'm not sure I have to do that. What is it you want here? No —don't bother to lie. I know insurance companies. I got acquainted with them in 1937. When all the policies my father had kept up for years were canceled. Because he'd missed some payments at the end. When he was helplessly ill. You'd like to find a way to stop my getting the money my son meant for me to have. To go on with. Lord knows, twenty-five thousand is little enough these days. Would you care to try to live the rest of your life on that amount?"

"No," Dave said. "There's going to be a delay, though, Mrs. Wendell. Till after the trial. You understand that."

She stared. "Indeed I do not. Why? The police know that boy did it. The district attorney knows."

"A jury has to know," Dave said. "Beyond a reasonable doubt. And juries aren't predictable."

"But there he stood with the gun!" she cried. "The gun that killed my son." Her lip trembled and she bit it sharply.

"Your son's own gun, wasn't it? You told the police he kept it in his desk."

"Hippies infest this canyon." She stepped past him into the stable dark. Tack jingled. She was taking another bridle off its nail. "We're isolated up here. Help's a long way off. Nowhere, if the telephone's out. And that happens, you know." Her work shoes thumped the planks. Her voice came muffled from the back of the stable. "Los Santos hasn't the most up-to-date equipment. A rainstorm, a Santana —it breaks down." A small window showed grimy light above the farthest stall. He saw her lifted hands work the bridle over a big, dark muzzle. "It would be foolish not to keep a gun up here."

"Guns are for television actors," Dave said. "Not real people. The wrong ones always get hurt. Your son could be alive this morning."

She didn't answer. She spoke to the horse, coaxing, soft. Hoofs came on, a halting stumble. Dave stepped down onto the pine-needle mat of the yard and watched her steer this one into the paddock.

Ganted, knob-kneed, mane and tail stringy. The sun showed newly healed scars along sides and flanks. A rip between the eyes was still jagged and red. Heather Wendell closed the gate and over it stroked a hammer head. "Beaten with barbwire," she said. "By a crazy man. The county would have destroyed him. Not the man —oh, never. The horse. I couldn't let them do that. He'll be all right soon." There was crooning tenderness in the words. Not for Dave. For the horse. She turned to face Dave again and he told her:

"It's not the only thing, but the gun worries me. The jury's going to snag on it too. A police lab man will tell them there were powder burns on your son's hand. And his chest. It was fired point-blank. They could come up with suicide." "But the coroner's jury didn't say so."

"They said Johns had to stand trial. That's all. It doesn't bind the jury that will hear his case. They won't even know about it. And if they acquit Johns, it complicates things for my company. If Richard Wendell took his own life, we can't pay. It's in the policy."

"Yes." Her mouth twisted in a sour smile. "And that would suit your company, wouldn't it?" She bunched her fists. "Well, it won't happen. It's not common sense. A man doesn't commit suicide with someone else present. A stranger." She stepped toward Dave and her words came like thrown rocks. "The explanation for the powder burns is obvious. Rick was holding the gun. Probably found the boy trying to steal. They struggled. The gun went off. Right against Rick's chest."

"Maybe," Dave said. "Johns tells it a little differently." The sun beat down. Dave shed his jacket, hung it over an arm. "He claims they were in bed and Richard Wendell heard a sound in the den. He went to investigate. Johns heard voices —your son's, another man's—and a shot. He was frightened and it took him a minute to move. When he came out of the bedroom, your son lay on the floor. He bent over him, shook him. No sign of life. Blood. The gun. He picked it up because he Was too dazed to be careful. Then he realized he'd made a mistake and what he had to do was wipe his prints off it, get his clothes and run. Only the clock ran out on him. You walked in."

"And took the gun away from him." Her mouth twitched contempt. "Six feet tall, one of those long mustaches, long hair. He cried like a girl, begged, pleaded. Oh, I heard his story. Half a dozen times while we waited for the police." Her laugh was brief and scornful. "Lies. Pointless. He killed Rick."

"For money?" Dave asked. "Your son's wallet lay on the chest in his bedroom, undisturbed. Two hundred dollars in it. Ones, fives, tens, twenties."

"In case they ran short of change at The Hang Ten," she said. "He always carried it. Of course it was there. The boy hadn't taken it because there wasn't time. I interrupted him."

"What about the open door?" Dave said. She looked blank and he told her, "You found the door open, remember? What they were doing they wouldn't leave the door open for, would they? They wouldn't only have closed it, they'd have locked it."

"There's no lock," she said. "There is —but there's no key. And the spring lock's painted shut. This is an old place. When we bought it, there wasn't any need for locks up here. Too remote. And we had Homer, our big Dane. Dead now."

"But it was standing open," Dave said. "That's going to help Johns's defense."

"He has no defense," she said flatly. "He'd opened it himself and left it open and Rick heard him out there and came out and —"

"Naked?" Dave said gently.

"I don't know what that means," she said, "but he's a hippie. They're all over up here. Why hadn't he wandered in? Who knows what goes on in their heads? It's common knowledge they've ruined their minds with drugs. He didn't come by car. At least the police haven't found a car."

"He says your son picked him up and brought him here," Dave said. "And his clothes weren't in the den, Mrs. Wendell. They were in the bedroom."

She opened her mouth and shut it hard and turned to tramp off up the board slope into the stable. "I have work to do." When she came out, her big fingers clasped a square wood-backed brush, a coarse-toothed metal comb that glinted in the sunlight. She let herself into the paddock and began working on the sorrel.

Dave walked to the fence, put a foot up on the lowest bar, crossed his arms on the top bar and rested his chin on them. "I went to the theater last night," he said. "In Los Santos. Talked to the night crew. You're not somebody who'd go unnoticed, Mrs. Wendell. Nobody remembers seeing you."

The brush stopped its motion. She turned. "Mr. Brandstetter, my fingerprints are also the only ones on that gun. Neither circumstance means anything. Since you don't appear to have the wit to see that, I shall explain it to you. My son earned twelve to fourteen thousand dollars a year. Gave me a roof over my head, clothes for my back, food to eat. He let me indulge my hobby, which is an expensive one. Not without protest —but he never in the end denied me anything. Now ... why would I kill him? For twenty-five thousand dollars insurance money?"

"It doesn't add up," Dave admitted. "Neither does anything else about this case. That's what bothers me." He sighed, straightened, turned from the fence. "But it will. It will." He looked down at the gray shake roofs tree-shadowed below. "Are those his rooms, in the L of the house there?"

 

CHAPTER 2

 

She didn't answer and he went down broken flag steps between terraced beds where wild oats, passion vine, sunflowers choked out iris, carnations, nasturtiums, and where fat white roses strewed cankered petals from neglected canes. A lizard scuttled ahead of him down the mossy passage between house and guesthouse and lost itself in a rattle of dry leaves among flowerpots where leggy geraniums withered. She'd gardened last year. There must have been fewer horses then.

The guesthouse door had square glass panes, a reed blind on the inside. He turned the knob, which was faceted, paint-specked glass, and went in. Richard Wendell had used lumberyard bargain birch paneling on the walls. Modular shelves held stereo equipment, a portable television set, a slide projector, records, books, stacks of magazines. The carpeting was mottled blue green. So were the curtains.

At the room's near end, basket chairs faced a fireplace. At the far end, a blue couch looked at windows that framed ferns and the trunks of big pines. The windows stood open. They had square panes too and went out on hinges and stayed out by means of long rods hooked through eyes dense with old paint. The screens were on the inside. A little light desk backed the couch. Next to the desk the carpet had been scrubbed and was still wet. Papers littered the desk.

There were bills, subscription blanks, an opened gaudy advertisement for a book about Renaissance Italy, with off-register reproductions of famous paintings. Blue Kleenex poked up out of a wooden housing meant to hide the box. A ballpoint pen stamped in cheap gilt the hang ten lay by a brown envelope. On the back of the envelope somebody had worked arithmetic problems, taking percentages of twenty-five thousand. Heather Wendell must have sat here last night sweating out her prospects. At a passbook five and a quarter percent, she'd about be able to feed the horses.

He opened a shallow center drawer. Stamps, paper clips, rubber bands, address labels in a little plastic box, pencils, more of the souvenir pens. He opened side drawer left. Envelopes, writing paper, an address book in fake leather. He lifted these out. Underneath was a scatter of little Kodachrome slides. He held one up to the light. Naked boys in a basic sex position. He tried some others. Same boys but the positions changed. He dropped them back and laid the stationery on them.

The address book had letter tabs along the page edges. He picked the letter J. There were three names that meant nothing to him. But at the bottom of the page were two numbers unattached to any name. One had been scratched out. He looked for a telephone. It crouched on a low shelf by a cluster of brown-glazed clay pots. Handsome. The kind that came out of local kilns. The kind Doug Sawyer's new shop was waist deep in. Most of those had been thrown by a lank, bushy-haired youth named Kovaks. Dave shrugged Kovaks away. He was going to mean trouble but he wasn't trouble yet and right now Dave had work to do. He dialed the number.

It rang once and the connection opened with a crash and dogs barked into his ear. He flinched and held the receiver away. A girl's voice scolded the dogs and yelped, "Hello?" The dogs kept barking. The girl called, "Will you please get them out of here?" Someone swore. The dogs barked. A door slammed. Silence. Dave asked, "To whom am I speaking?"

"To whom did you want to speak?" Quick, sweet and wary. This wasn't some kid he could con information out of. He'd better cut his losses.

"Larry Johns," he said.

"I'm sorry, he's not here now."

Dave felt himself grin. The only address the Los Santos police had for Larry Johns was off his driver's license. A cheap hotel in Brownsville, Texas, the kind of place that didn't know where you'd come from or where you'd gone. Especially not if it was the law asking. Where Larry Johns had gone was, of course, Los Santos, a quiet town that clambered the tree-green oceanside hills northwest of L.A. But small as it was, Los Santos had thousands of street numbers. And Larry Johns wasn't telling which was his. Why didn't seem to interest Lieutenant Tek Yoshiba. It interested Dave. He said carefully, "When do you expect him?"

She did it again —answered a question with a question. Sweetly. "Who's calling, please?"

He told her and she asked him to wait and he waited, watching a bluejay hammer a pine cone on a rock outside the windows. Then someone picked up an extension. A male voice said, "What about insurance? I've got insurance. I'm collecting on it right now."

"I'm not selling it," Dave said. "I'm trying to reach Larry Johns. Does he live there?"

There were five dead seconds. "How the hell did you get this number?" Back of him, women exchanged loud words in a place that echoed. Heels clacked. Dave said, "It's in Richard Wendell's book." "Oh, Christ," the man groaned. Then he said sharply, "No, Gail, wait!" And a female spoke into the phone. Not the one who'd answered first, with the dogs. This voice was older. "You have the wrong number," it said, and the receiver slammed. But only on the extension. On the other phone he heard remote man-woman shouts. Then the dogs barked again. The heels neared. The connection broke. He hung up.

He'd lapped his jacket over the back of the desk chair. Out of it he dug a small notebook and checked a number he kept there. Dialing it got him Ray Lollard at the central office of Pacific Telephone. Lollard was a plump, feminine man who collected antiques and had been a friend of Rod Fleming, a decorator Dave used to live with, who had died last fall. Rod had restored an old mansion —porches, cupolas, stained glass—on West Adams for Lollard. It was a showplace.

"Davey!" Lollard sounded pleased but he always sounded pleased. "I keep thinking we'll run into each other at Romano's." He meant the West Los Angeles restaurant where they'd met in 1948. "But it seems you don't eat these days. Rod always said you'd starve to death if he didn't remind you. But of course, that's how you keep that elegant figure."

"We'll set a date," Dave said. "Listen, Ray —find out who owns this number." He gave it. "If you can get it for me in say ten minutes, call me back here." He read Richard Wendell's number off the dial plaque.

"Pleasure," Lollard said. "How are you? How's Doug? Happy? The new gallery flourishing, is it?"

"He's lonely," Dave said. "Try to get around there, will you? None of it's old but he's got some really beautiful stuff. And he needs customers."

"I gather you don't lack for customers."

"People keep dying," Dave said. "Look, if I don't hear from you, I'll get back to you later. I don't know just where I'm headed."

Lollard said something amiable that amounted to nothing. So did Dave. He hung up and went back to the desk, frowning. The envelope with the figuring on it was tough and bulky. He turned it over. Security Bank, 132 Pier Street, Los Santos was in the upper-left-hand corner. That was all. No addressee. It hadn't gone through any mail. And it wasn't quite empty. Inside, his fingers found three paper straps, each with "$500" rubber-stamped on it. He glanced at the phone but he didn't have a friend at Security Bank's central office. He'd have to go through channels. He tucked the straps into a jacket pocket.

The right-hand desk drawer was an indifferent shambles of canceled checks, paid bills, tax forms, wish-you-were-here postcards, snapshots. He thumbed through these. Most were of the sorrel horse and a harlequin Great Dane. A couple caught Heather Wendell sitting the horse or holding the dog's leash. Here was a big, grinning young man leaning against a car. As that ski sweater had suggested, a giant.

At the back of the drawer were red, silver and blue rosetted ribbons. Los Santos Dog Show: 1950s, 1960s. On the bottom of the drawer lay a yellowing eight-by-ten glossy of a dark, curly-haired little youth in boxing trunks. He scowled above raised fists that were wrapped in gauze. Across the picture's lower corner an ungifted penman had written: To Rick —All My Love—Ace. Dave laid the picture back and covered it up again with the waste paper of Rick Wendell's life.

Suits, pants, jackets off the X-large rack hung in the bedroom closet. Big towels lay wadded on the checkerboard tiles of the bathroom floor. The shower dripped behind a plastic curtain. The bed was a scrimmage of creased sheets. The blankets had half fallen to the floor. By the head of the bed was an eight-millimeter projector with reels on it. Facing the bed foot, a spring-roller screen glittered on a metal tripod. Dave drew the blue-green curtains across the windows and flipped the projector switch.

On the screen boys naked except for cowboy hats, gun belts and tooled boots had sex with each other on what looked like a Baja beach. Some such sunburned place. Sweat stuck sand to their pale city skins. They acted bored. Dave snapped off the projector, opened the curtains, walked around the bed, looking at the floor. A comb, a leather packet of keys, a dime and two pennies. And a pair of Jockey shorts. He picked them up. Size 32. No giant's. He dropped them and something changed the light in the room. He looked at the door.

A giant stood there, a big-boned old man. His thick gray hair needed cutting. His cheap suit needed pressing. The white shirt, the black tie, looked as if they'd just been bought, though. And he'd used a lot of polish to fill the cracks in the uppers of his shoes. Dave smelled Shinola. The man's eyes were pouchy and the skin over his cheekbones and nose was a river map of small broken veins. But a carefully tended mustache said he'd been vain once. He asked, "Who are you?"

"Brandstetter," Dave said. "Medallion Life." He held out his hand. The man folded it in a grip that had long ago given up trying to hold on to anything.

"This is the Wendell house, isn't it?" He licked dry, cracked lips and his bloodshot eyes fidgeted around the room. Looking for something. A drink, probably.

"It's the Wendell house," Dave said. "I'm trying to find out what happened here."

"Thought the police had the son of a bitch locked up." The man turned back into the living room. Dave rounded the bed and went after him. He was opening cabinet doors below the modular shelving. He found a bottle and glasses. "Join me?" He lifted them at Dave. "I'm Billy Wendell. Rick's father. I don't think he'd mind his old man having a blast, do you?"

"It's a little late to ask him," Dave said. "Don't you know?"

"Hadn't seen him for a while." Wendell poured three thick fingers into a glass and handed it to Dave and poured five for himself and set the bottle down. "His mother and I weren't speaking." He jerked his long jaw up in silent ironic laughter. "Not for some years." He drank, studied his glass, looked at Dave. "Insurance, huh? That's a good racket. I was in it once." He made an unamused sound and drank again. "I was in about everything once. But it's been used cars lately. Lately? Last twenty years. Now it's dying under me. You don't need a gas hog, do you?" He handed Dave a card, looked him up and down. "You don't look like money gives you bad dreams."

"I drive a company car," Dave said. "You've come back for the funeral, right?"

Wendell nodded. His voice went to pieces. Tears leaked down his face. "My boy. My only son. Jesus —least I could do. Poor kid. Not forty, years old yet and some crazy pervert murders him." He wagged his head. "The one thing I could be a little bit proud of —fine son." He gulped the last of his drink.

"Sure," Dave said. "How did you find out about it? Your wife write to you?"

"Hell, she wouldn't know where to reach me. No, I saw it on television. The Times was where I got the address. Had to look sharp to find it. Guess there are too many murders anymore for it to be news."

"There were always too many," Dave said. "You live in L.A., then?"

"Torrance," Billy Wendell said. "If you could call it living." He set clown the glass where it would make a mark in the finish. "Is there a bathroom?"

Dave jerked his head. Wendell went out, moving his long legs as if they pained him. Dave checked his watch, looked at the phone. It didn't ring. He tasted the whiskey, walked to the bottle and turned it so the label showed. Right. They didn't cart this in by the truckload for the bar. He rummaged his jacket for a cigarette, lit it with a narrow steel butane lighter, and the scuff of clumsy shoes outside turned his head toward the door. Heather Wendell stopped there, the withering geraniums flaring red behind her.

"You see, Mr. Brandstetter, I know about death. It's not the dead we ought to mourn for. It's the living. When my father died, his troubles were over. Mine had only started. I was twenty-five —a grown woman. But he'd sheltered me like a child. I'd never had to lift a hand. Everything I'd needed or imagined I needed was given me. Then suddenly it was all taken away. I had nothing. And a three-year-old boy to raise."

"You had a husband," Dave said.

She shook her head. "When the money stopped, he left. He was no better equipped to face reality than I was. It was no surprise to me." The corner of her mouth tightened in a kind of smile. "Do you know how I managed? By doing for a living exactly what you found me doing this morning —cleaning stables, grooming horses. Horses were a ll I knew. Then came the war and the aircraft factories. They hired women because women were what there were to hire. Whether they knew anything or not. I bucked rivets for four years." The crooked smile tried itself again and failed. "Well, you don't want to hear the rest. I don't want to remember it. At last Rick took hold and my nightmare was over." Her shoulders lifted a little, as if shedding the weight all over again. "Naturally, if I'd had my choice, it wouldn't have been the kind of business it was. But I didn't have my choice, did I? Come to think of it, never once in my life did I choose —"

The toilet flushed. She frowned puzzlement at the bedroom door. Dave picked up his drink and tasted it again and Billy Wendell came in, zipping a fly that didn't work well. He stopped, blinked. "Heather," he said heavily.

She squinted, head craning forward. "Billy?" She took a step into the room, a hand half held out. "Dear God —what's happened to you?"

"Happened?" he said. "I'm sixty-five years old."

"I'm sorry," she said. "It's such a shock is all. Where did you come from?" She looked at him, grieved.

"Not far." He made for his glass like a drowning man for a piece of driftwood. He gulped from it, wiped his mustache with the back of his hand. "You want a drink? It's your booze."

"You mean you've been close by" —she didn't say it angry, she said it sad—"and never come around, never shown your face?"

"I didn't know where you'd got to." He bent creakily for another glass. "Not till I read about Rick in the paper." He dumped whiskey into the glass, set the bottle by, carried the glass to her. "You landed on your feet. Pleasant place here, nice furnishings." He tilted his head. "Portrait of you on the wall in there, with a big dog." He looked her up and down as he'd done Dave, smiled to himself as he walked back to put more whiskey into his glass. He was wasting a beautiful bottle in a hurry. "Horses again, eh? You know" —he drank—"I'm happy about that. I was afraid you'd never have them anymore. Costs a lot of money to keep horses."

"You worried about me?" What she wanted in her smile was disbelief but her damp eyes showed she was touched. "I worried about you, Billy."

"You had a right," he grunted. Back to her, he opened the top magazine in a stack on a shelf. Dave caught a glimpse of naked male bodies. In color. Billy Wendell shut the magazine fast. He turned to face his wife. "I didn't land on my feet. Charm and good looks weren't in a seller's market in those days. By the time they were, I was an old wreck."

"No," she protested gently. "Ah, Billy. There's so much to talk about." She glanced back at the open door, the morning light. "Will you come with me? To the stable up the hill?"

Dave said, "In a minute, Mrs. Wendell." He picked up his jacket, dug out the flattened paper straps. "These were in that empty envelope on the desk. From the bank." He laid them in her hand. "What do they mean? Where's the fifteen hundred?"

She frowned at the straps, then at him. "Fifteen —" She paled, then reddened. "That damned boy!"

"He was naked, remember?" Dave said and took back the straps. "Each of these held twenty-five twenty-dollar bills. They'd make a bulge even if he'd had pockets."

"Then —" She looked at her hand as if surprised to find the glass there. She drank from it. Her blue eyes on Dave's were uncertain. "It —it must have gone with Rick to the bar. Of course." "Out of the envelope?" Dave said. "Obviously," she said.

"All right." Dave shrugged into the jacket. "Thanks for your help." He went to the desk for the envelope, tucked the straps into it, held it up. "I'll take this if it won't inconvenience you."

For a moment she looked doubtful. Then she shrugged. "Why not?"

"Why not?" Billy Wendell said. Loudly but to himself, rattling bottle against glass. Then softly. "Why not? That's what I say. What does anything matter now? Rick's dead. My son's dead." He turned toward his wife and the tears were streaming now.

"Billy, Billy!" She went toward him with her arms held out. Big strong arms he'd made a mistake ever to leave. They embraced him, held him.

Dave went out into the sun.

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER 3

 

Ace Kegan said, "It's a hassle to change names."

The years had taken the curl and most of the black out of his hair and there wasn't a lot of it left. What there was he combed forward into bangs. His waist had thickened but he still looked hard and muscular. He stood shirtless and barefoot in faded Levi's and watched through open glass slide doors while outside on a slatted deck a slender suntanned kid of maybe eighteen in very short shorts fisted a punching bag on a shiny spring-steel pole. His shoulder-length yellow hair flopped. He had a silky yellow mandarin mustache. Backgrounding him, the Pacific wrote white scribbles to itself on a blue slate under a wide smile of sky. The surf lipped pale sand beyond a stagger of red dune fences.

Kegan went on, "I'd have liked to take The Square Circle with me when we bought the place. But what the hell, who knows boxing down here? Down here it's surfing. And the Hang Ten sign was already there and neon costs like you wouldn't believe. Anyway, fags aren't into prize fighting." His sidelong grin at Dave showed chipped teeth that were very white. His nose was mashed. Scar tissue was thick over his eyes. An ear was crumpled. He still managed to be handsome. Dave let himself grin back.

"Are they into surfing?"

"Into surfers" —Kegan laughed—"they wish." He raised his sandpaper voice. "Bobby, come in here and make the man and me a drink." He took Dave's elbow and steered him among barbells, a rowing machine, an Exercycle, to a couch that was long and low and covered in white fake fur. "Sit down, Mr. Brandstetter. What did you want to know?"

Dave said, "What excuse did Richard Wendell give you for not being at work that night —Monday?"

"He was at work," Kegan said. "Half an hour early: three-thirty. He didn't split till nearly eight." He told the boy, "On the double, Bobby, please," and dropped onto the other end of the couch. "What'll you have to drink?"

"Whatever you're having," Dave said, hoping for coffee. But what the boy brought from the kitchen beyond a chest-high room divider banked with plastic flowers was a tall, thick, creamy mixture colored orange. Kegan took a long gulp of his and smacked his lips. Dave watched him, doubtful. "Go ahead, try it. Every vitamin and mineral you can name. One glass and you can go fifteen stand-up rounds." Bobby stood in front of them, straddling barbells and staring at Dave's glass with willful, empty brown eyes. Kegan asked him, "Right, baby?"

"Aw, shit," Bobby said. "A piece of dry toast and black coffee for breakfast. I'm hungry, Ace."

"Yeah, and you're also a lard collector. You know what it does to you. Bobby Reich, shake hands with David Brandstetter. Check his build. I'll bet he doesn't even eat breakfast." Ace turned over a thick wrist to check a multidialed watch. "Go run for half an hour. But when you get to the pier, keep away from the chili dogs, right? I got you looking like Apollo Belvedere now. Don't wreck it before the big night." ,

"Yeah, okay." Bobby headed eagerly for the door.

"And no Cokes, either. None of that lousy sugar water. When you get back here, I'll build you a salad, broil you a steak."

"Gee, thanks." Bobby made a six-year-old's face.

"You'll thank me when you walk off with all the marbles," Ace said. "You got T. S. Eliot this afternoon, remember? Before we hit the funeral. And La Boheme after. Did you read about Puccini last night, like I said?"

"I fell asleep," Bobby answered.

"Yeah," Ace said. " 'I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.' Recite that on your way."

"Jesus!" the blond youth said and left.

"That's a Theodore Roethke poem," Dave said. "What kind of boxer are you trying to make?"

"Boxer! Bobby?" Kegan laughed, shook his head and downed more of the orange-color drink. "That's very funny. No, it's for the Mr. Marvelous contest. Between the gay bars. Each one puts up a beautiful kid. But he's also got to have something in his head, you know? Culture?"

"Correct his handshake," Dave said. "People with limp handshakes are takers."

"He only did it not to hurt you," Ace said. "Don't worry about me. Nobody takes Ace Kegan."

"Somebody took Richard Wendell," Dave said.

Kegan looked morose. "Yeah. All the way down." He nodded at the doors through which Bobby had vanished. "You think that kid is dumb? You should have known Rick. Only he was big and stubborn and he wasn't any kid. Heather and I did our best to keep him grounded, but . . ." He let it trail away.

"How do you mean —grounded?" Dave didn't trust the drink. He set it on a low steel-legged glass table where magazines like High Fidelity and The New Yorker jostled comic books—Batman, Creepy —and where the records were Stevie Wonder and a box of four Brahms symphonies. "Was it a question of odds? Did he take home a lot of boys like Larry Johns?"

"Hah!" Kegan got up and stepped over the exercise equipment to punch a button on a record changer. A German half-gram pickup slowly settled on a record. The same pianist played Erik Satie from four corners of the room at once. Kegan turned back. "That would have been no problem. I tried to get him on the bath circuit. In one night you can get enough sex for a year. I bought him memberships. He wouldn't go."

"He owned pictures, magazines, slides," Dave said. "Yeah. Dependable. You turn on the projector, they're always the same. That was what he wanted, somebody permanent. Only what he picked —they'd never be. Talk about takers. Jesus—the last one!? " Weights on pulleys were steel-framed against a wall. Kegan began to haul on them, this arm, that arm, thick muscle sliding under the brown skin of his shoulders and upper back. "Mickey Something. I forget his last name. I never called him Mickey. I called him Monkey. That was what he looked like. Took Rick down to his socks. In about six weeks' time. I mean it." The pulleys squeaked. "Damn near wiped Rick out and me with him."

"When was this?"

"Three, four years back. Summer. Hot like this one. Long, hot summer. Maybe that was what did it."

"It might have been simpler," Dave said. "It might have been fifteen hundred dollars." Kegan let the weights crash and turned. Dave held up the brown envelope. "I stopped by the bank on my way here. He drew it on Monday, just before closing time —three."

"Yeah. Well —" A nerve twitched beside Kegan's eye. He scratched his belly, shifted his feet. "That was for—uh—for the bar. Alterations. Yeah. I forgot about that." He leaned across the table to take the envelope. He turned it over in clumsy fingers, staring at it. "Where's the bread?"

"That's what I came to ask you," Dave said. "I found the envelope on the desk in his den. Empty except for the straps that had held the bills. Twenties, I'd guess. Why should he get cash in small bills for alterations? Why not a business check?"

"Mmm." Kegan's tongue pushed at his shut mouth. Then he let go it helpless grin. "Okay. But understand —he was handling it. See, we're lowering the bar. No, raising the floor, really. So what we needed would be chairs, not stools. What we had in mind were barrel chairs on swivels, deep leather, you know? But they cost a lot. He must have got some deal right off the truck, you know? Lost shipment? You'd need cash for that kind of deal."

"You were his partner," Dave said.

Kegan looked at him hard and handed back the envelope. "I didn't know anything about it. Who got the money? The Johns kid?"

"There was a house key, three dollars and change in the pants the police found on Wendell's bedroom floor. A pack of cigarettes and a throwaway lighter in his shirt. The sarape didn't have pockets."

"What does Heather say?" Kegan picked up his empty glass and Dave's full one and took them to the kitchen. The smack of rubber stripping said he'd opened a refrigerator door. Ice cubes rattled into a glass. The door clapped shut. Kegan stood beside the flowers with what looked like whiskey in an Old Fashioned glass. Tasting it made him wince.

"She says it must have been for the bar."

"Yeah, well, like I said . . ." Kegan gave Dave a wan smile on his way to the doors to stand looking out. "Fifteen hundred. That hurts."

"Maybe Wendell delivered the money." Dave got up from the couch and went to stand by the short man. "Maybe the chairs will show up today."

Kegan shook his head. "That kind of deal, they get the bread when they turn over the goods." He looked at Dave. "Jesus, I'm a hell of a host. Here. This is for you. I don't even drink." He pushed the glass at Dave. "It's Canadian. All right?" Dave took it to keep it from falling. The breeze off the sea was warm. Sandpipers hemstitched the wet edge of the sand.

He said, "What happened with Monkey, exactly?"

"He walked into the bar out of nowhere —the way Savage did before him. Now, you have to understand Rick. Ten thousand guys come and go in our place. The Hang Ten and The Square Circle before that. Out of that number, some are on the hustle. And that big, soft bear —all you had to do was look at him to know he was a mark. And listen to him—talk, talk, talk. No secrets."

"If the weather was hot," Dave said.

"Yeah, well —" Kegan watched a gull swoop on a potato chip bag the wind was tumbling along the sparsely populated beach. "He could smile and talk and leave nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine of them strictly alone. Then along would come a Monkey or a Savage and he'd be gone. Right out of his skull. And you never knew when it would be. You had to watch him. Every minute."                        

"How did Larry Johns get past?" Dave asked.

"I never heard of him," Kegan said, "till that night. We were on to Rick. But he was on to us, it looks like. Normally, he'd have yakked on and on about the kid. Not this time. Sneaky."

" 'We'?" Dave said. "Meaning you and his mother?" Kegan nodded glumly and Dave tried the whiskey. Nice. "Maybe the fifteen hundred was for him —Johns. Another Monkey, another Savage. 

" When was Savage?"

"Christ, who remembers? Maybe sixty-four, -five. See, years could go by. You could forget about it —what a jackpot Rick could turn into when he saw something he wanted. He gave Monkey a car, a new MG.  Savage wanted to jet to Rome. They went together. For a month. For Monkey, Rick damn near sold the house in the canyon. I mean it. Heather would have been out on her ass. Monkey didn't like the place, the horses, the dog—and especially he didn't like Heather." Kegan's  smile was wry. "Not that she made it any secret, how she felt about him."

"What stopped it?" Dave asked.

"The escrow took too long on the new place," Kegan said. "A condominium. By the marina. Way out of Rick's price class. But like I say, when he was what he called 'in love,' he couldn't count." Kegan lifted his hard shoulders, spread his hands. "Monkey must have just got tired of waiting. He took off in his MG and didn't come back. We lucked out. He'd wasted fifteen, twenty big bills by then —Rick's, mine, Heather's. It could have been thirty and—look, Ma, no business, no house, no partnership, no nothing." He closed flat hands tinder his armpits and shuddered. "Makes me sweat now to think of it; I mean, it was that close."

"It's that close now for Mrs. Wendell," Dave said. "The bank says he had less than two hundred in his savings account. With those horses to feed —"

"She's as big a mark as he is." Kegan stepped out on the deck and began tapping the punching bag. "That little paint horse? Came from some ten-year-old girl in the canyon. Her parents said she could have it but only if she looked after it herself. Ten years old." He punched the bag hard. "Crazy. What did they really expect? So —they were going to sell it. But Heather stepped in, said she'd board it at her own expense and the little girl could come ride it when she wanted. Then that big, mud-color horse—"

"She told me about him," Dave said. "She's going to have to stop. All she's got now is the twenty-five thousand from Wendell's life insurance. If my company decides he didn't kill himself. Or that she didn't kill him."

"What!" Kegan stepped back from the lunging bag.

"Her prints are the only ones on the gun," Dave said. "The defense attorney will hammer on that."

"Christ." Disgusted, Kegan swung away to lean his fists on the rail. He turned back. "Why? Why would she kill Rick? Why not Johns?"

Dave shrugged. "Maybe she meant to kill Johns and her son tried to stop her and the gun went off."

Kegan put his hands on his hips. "Why would she want to kill anybody?"

"If she thought Johns was going to be another Monkey —to get rid of him. While she still had a roof over her head."

Mouth tight at one corner, Kegan gave his head a shake and went back to punching the bag. "You've got quite a mind."

"Will she inherit her son's partnership? That would solve her financial problems."

"Be serious." Kegan made a face but didn't break the rhythm of his fists. "I need a working partner. You probably saw her in overalls but she's a very classy lady. She wouldn't set foot in the place. Anyway, she's too old. The hours would kill her. Besides, you don't want a woman in a gay bar." He made the bag stop bobbing and came to Dave. Taking away his empty glass, he looked into his eyes. "You know that." He headed for the kitchen.

"I know that." Dave went after him and leaned in the doorway. "Wendell's door was open. Johns and Mrs. Wendell at least agree on that. Leaving the fifteen hundred out of it for the moment, who could have gone there? Johns says he heard a voice arguing with Wendell. Whose voice was it?" Kegan dropped ice cubes. They ran away from each other across sleek yellow vinyl tiles. "Had Wendell had any fights with anyone? Tried to throw anybody out of The Hang Ten? Made enemies?"

"Enemies? Rick?" Kegan chuckled, tossing the ice cubes into the sink, opening the fridge for more. "If ever there was a guy you could say it about —that everybody loved him—it was Rick Wendell." He got two cubes safely into Dave's glass and poured bright new whiskey over them. "You be at that funeral. They'll be lined up around the block. He was a sweetheart." He handed Dave the glass.

Dave took it to the couch and sat there again. "Your sweetheart once," he said. "I saw the inscription on an old photo of you in his desk."

"Ancient history." Kegan bit into a shiny green apple and talked while he chewed. "Yeah, I was crazy about him. Crazy as I can be, for as long as I can be. I'm a Libra with the moon in the seventh house." He looked wanly toward the sunlit beach. "I can't be what they used to call 'faithful.' I hated hurting him, and believe me, nobody could look hurt the way Rick could. I just couldn't do anything about it. Wrong. I did what I could. I financed The Square Circle. I was a good lightweight." Remembering, he instinctively lightened his stomach muscles. "Well, maybe not so good, but good-looking, you know what I mean. They paid to watch me. And Rick didn't have a dime. So I set up the bar and let him run it for me. I made good bread in the fifties. They televised fights a lot —remember? Bitched it was ruining the fight game. Hell, it didn't hurt me." He left-jabbed an imaginary opponent, and went into the kitchen to get rid of the apple core. "No, if there was anybody to throw out, I'd be the one to do that. He hated confrontations."

"He was right," Dave said. "The last one was bad for him." He drank again, lit a cigarette. "The fifteen hundred dollars —if he didn't pay off the furniture trucker, then it was in the envelope, right? Who else could have known about it?"

"I told you." Kegan came, wiping apple juice off his fingers onto his Levi's, to stand facing Dave. "I didn't know about it myself."

"That's what you told me. And you also didn't know Wendell had jumped the rails over a new boy. You didn't even suspect it?"

"Second-guessing it, I should have." Kegan lifted a foot and pushed with a brown toe at the crooked stacks of magazines and records. "Soon as I opened at noon, a phone call came, asking for him. Young sounding. Wouldn't leave a name. But shit —that's not too unusual. Kids get it in their mind we're their buddies, you know? It's part of the business—everybody who buys a forty-cent beer is your friend. They choose one or the other of us. Usually Rick—he was so open about himself, easy talker."

He sighed and put a foot on the floor. "So —they get into scrapes or get depressed, they get on the phone. But when Rick came in at three-thirty, he said, yeah, he'd gotten the call at home. Then he phoned home and, the way it sounded, took up an argument he'd been having with Heather about her not getting out enough. He kept asking her to promise him she'd take in a flick that night, The Sundown Studs. She'd like the horses."

"She didn't like what they did to them," Dave said.

"But she went," Kegan said. "He really gave her a hard sell, argued with her for a half hour, telling her what a great movie it was. And I happened to know he'd never seen it. It only opened Friday. He hadn't got a night off to see it. Or an afternoon either. Not on a weekend." He frowned to himself, nodded. "Yeah, I should have figured out what he was up to." He gave Dave a bleak smile. "But frankly, Bobby was on my mind. That damn contest. On looks, he can win it going away. But a couple of dudes in that line-up have got a little intelligence, a lot of charm."

"When Wendell left early that night," Dave said, "that didn't add it all up for you —that there might be another Monkey in the picture?"

"No," Kegan said, "and I'll tell you why. It was Monday. Business was slow. We were just standing around. He said he might as well see the flick with her. It was natural."

Feet thudded on the deck outside. Bobby stood in the door opening. His long, blond muscles were slick with sweat. "Salad?" he panted. "Steak? I don't smell any charcoal."

Kegan looked at his watch. "It's not half an hour," he said. "Okay, okay. Go shower. It'll be ready when you get out." He watched the boy disappear down a dim white hallway, hopping, shedding the little shorts. Between the sun brown of his torso and legs, his butt gleamed white. Kegan sighed and started for the kitchen. "Steak for you?"

"Thanks but I've got to go," Dave said. "What about the Mr. Marvelous contest? How serious is it?"

"It's ridiculous." Kegan opened the refrigerator again. From beside the plastic flowers Dave watched him turn, arms loaded with lettuce, scallions, cucumbers, tomatoes, and dump them on a yellow Formica counter. "You mean, how serious do they take it?"

"You read me," Dave said.

"Well —it means a lot of free publicity for the bar that wins." Kegan found a paring knife in a drawer and sliced cucumbers. "That is, if they can keep the kid around for a few weeks, which isn't always easy. The kid himself wins clothes, cuff links, sporting goods, maybe a bicycle. You know, stuff put up by local merchants. It was mostly gay businesses at first. Now the straight ones ante up too." He flashed Da ve the sidelong wise grin again. "Pardon the word. And" —he brought a big yellow bowl out of a cupboard and started tearing lettuce leaves up and dropping them into it—"maybe a spot in a fuck film. Plus cash. Not much—whatever the participating taverns chip in. Last year it was maybe four, five hundred."

Dave said, "How stable are the kids?"

Kegan laughed. "They're hustlers, from anyplace, everyplace — dropouts, orphans, losers. Pathetic nobodies." He began work on the scallions with the paring knife. "Would-be movie actors who can't even memorize their own names, would-be rock stars who don't know a guitar from a frying pan."

From the end of the hall came the splash of a shower. Over the noise, Bobby sang in a cracked falsetto, " 'Sunshine on my shoulders makes me hap-peee!' " Dave looked that way and said, "You know, Bobby is the same type as Johns —build, coloring, hair, mustache. Prettier, but the same type. Could somebody have it in for your entry?"

The knife rattled out of Kegan's fingers. He stared at Dave and he was pale under his tan. "Jesus," he breathed. "I never thought of that." His eyes narrowed. He drove a thick fist into a thick palm. "Yeah. What if one of those sick bastards decided they couldn't go up against Bobby? They could have tried to kill this Johns, thinking it was him, and got poor Rick by mistake. Christ —if Rick picked up Johns outside The Hang Ten and they drove off together ..." Kegan looked sick. "Man, there's all kinds of animals around these days."

"And the other contestants would know Bobby?"

"Sure. Their pictures are in all the bar magazines." Wiping his hands on the Levi's again, he went past Dave to the coffee table and picked up a slender fold of coated stock. He flapped it open and pushed it into Dave's hand. Bobby was there with his unsure smile and not much else. So were eleven others. Kegan was right. None of them was as handsome as Bobby —unless the photos lied. Kegan said, "Take it along, if it'll help." He blinked up at Dave from under those swollen brow ridges. "You think there's really anything to it?"

At the hall's end, Bobby sang, " 'Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry.'"

Dave folded the magazine into a side jacket pocket. "If I were you," he said, "I'd cancel the runs up the beach. Unless you run with him."

Ace was gazing unhappily down the hall. But he heard. "Yeah," he said faintly. "Thanks."

CHAPTER 4

 

Seven draft beers and the glare of sunlight off windshields on freeways had given him a headache. He left the car under an old fig tree by someone's board back fence in a corner of the lot where he and Doug had leased spaces, and walked, tie loosened, jacket over arm, up Robertson past awninged shops where worm-eaten rocking horses, wicker dog baskets, brass bedsteads crowded the sidewalk, to ft blue stucco building they'd rented that let Doug's gallery face the street and left the two of them big, ungainly sunlit rooms to echo around in upstairs.

The gallery doors were a pair, tall, carved, unvarnished and locked. He squinted at his watch. Only a quarter past four. He turned, lifted a tired hand to the portrait of himself, tall and alone in the Spanish arch window, and used a key on a blue door at the building's corner. It opened on narrow, straight stairs, the one feature of the place he disliked. As the door shut behind him and he started to climb, he heard voices. The acoustics in the hall were bad. There was loud rock music. He couldn't make out words.

When he reached the top of the stairs he went to where the voices were. Doug's room —skylight, easels, a paint-clotted zinc-top table with multiple shallow drawers for paints and brushes, blank canvases, on stretchers leaning against a wall. Kovaks sat on the edge of an open bed, naked —pale urban skin, black stand-up hair, scraggly mustache. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, head hanging, a can of beer in one hand. Doug Sawyer, compact, dark-skinned, gray-haired, stood in the open doorway to a long roof deck where rubber trees rooted. in plank boxes threw shadows on redwood garden chairs. Kovaks raised bloodshot eyes to Dave, gave him a crooked smile and said groggily:                                                                                           

"Hi, Dave."

Dave only looked at him and only looked at Doug when Doug; turned to face him. Doug said, "He had lunch and fell asleep. I've been at my mother's." The beaky little woman kept a pet shop on a lost L.A. side street between a bicycle store and a beauty parlor. She'd begun having trouble with her mind lately —forgetfulness, delusions. The doctors said it had to do with poor circulation. Doug was having to spend more and more time looking after her.                               

Dave crouched and picked up a shallow bowl of thick bubbly amber glass from a scatter of ash on the floor beside the bed. In it lay the twisted butts of handmade cigarettes, burned down short. Dave held it out toward Doug. "Joints. I make it three."                              

"I'm coming down," Kovaks said sullenly, then giggled. "That's what the brew is for." He drank from the steamy can.                  

"I didn't ask you," Doug said. "You volunteered, remember? Gung ho. You were going to frame those awful daubs for Mrs. What's-her- name." He walked to a farther room and the rock racket did an audial downcurve and quit. "I didn't expect that, but I did expect you to be there."

"I was there from nine-thirty to one," Kovaks said. "Then I got hungry. Yeah, I also felt like a low, lazy high afterwards. Then I got sleepy. I was only going to shut my eyes."

Doug leaned in a doorway and with a sad smile shook his head at Dave. "He was spread out there like smorgasbord."

"Come on," Kovaks said. "Kosher smorgasbord?"

"I want a shower," Dave said and passed Doug in the doorway. Doug brushed his ear with a kiss.

"Whew! You smell like a brewery."

"I have been interviewing gay-bar owners," Dave said. "It's a long, dull story. I'll tell you later." He went on into his own room, which was the right size and shape to play jai alai in, and began dropping his clothes, hearing Doug say to Kovaks:

"See these? Cards. Stuck in the door. Madge Dunstan and Ray Lollard. Friends. Both of whom would probably have bought something if the gallery'd been open. They might even have bought one of your pots."

"Forgive," Kovaks said in a broad and phony Russian accent. "Kovaks bad. Do better next time. He promise." The accent quit. "Oh, God," he moaned, and metal crumpled. "The can's dry. Get me another beer and I'll give you a kiss. Anyplace you name."

Dave went into a big bathroom that was paved, walled and domed In gaudy flowered Spanish tile. He took three aspirins, cranked the shower handles and stepped under the spray. He'd forgotten Ray Lollard after phoning him at noon from a sun-hot booth of salt crusty glass on Los Santos Pier. He'd gone to the pier, remembering how good the food used to be at a white wooden shack there called The Abalone. He hadn't reached Lollard —out to lunch. And The Abalone's management had changed. For the worse.

Sand dabs sauteed in butter and sprinkled with sesame seeds had been his favorite. These were uneatable, half cold, half raw. He made the best of the view, the good feel of the slow blue surf shaking the old pier stakes under the floorboards, and a cup of coffee, and laid open the bar magazine to study the addresses of the sponsors of entrants in the Mr. Marvelous contest. He made himself a mental map to follow. With some to-ing and fro-ing, he could hit seven on his way from Los Santos back to L.A. A fair start. He could get to the remainder tonight.

There'd been a sameness to them that was already blurring the places in his aching mind. Decor ranged from raw plywood (The Bunkhouse) to flocked crimson wallpaper (The Queen and Court). But the sad, aging patrons were interchangeable. So were the tunes on the jukeboxes. And so were the owners —around forty, too fleshy or too bony, in clothes too young and wigs styled sharply for last year —men long in the tooth and chatty. Dave had met five of the contestants too. All gathered at The Rawhide.

Kegan had been right. There was some charm, even some wit among them. The night Rick Wendell was murdered, this bunch had been together at a party in the Hollywood hills, celebrating the completion of a film in which they'd acted —if that was the word. Dave suspected it of being the same kind of film he'd rolled on Rick Wendell's bedside projector this morning. The sponsors of the other two boys said they'd been in the bars that evening, which, if it was true, narrowed down his list. He didn't regret that—not the way the bad beer and the worse bar air had left him feeling now.

He lathered, let the shower wash him down, first hot, then cold, and decided he'd live. He stepped out of the shower and Kovaks was standing at the toilet. Still naked. He pushed the flush handle, turned, looked Dave up and down. "You've got a nice body for a geriatric case."

"My heartfelt thanks," Dave said. "Excuse me." He reached past the lanky youth to get down a towel and walked out into the bedroom, using it. He heard, or maybe felt, Kovaks at his back and asked, "Where's Doug?"

"Down in the gallery." Kovaks blew on the back of Dave's neck and, chuckling softly, ran a hand along his shoulder, down his arm. "We won't be disturbed."

Dave pushed the towel at him. "You're already disturbed. Hang that up, please, then go get your clothes and drift back to your clay and wattles."

"There's a wattles shortage." Kovaks fell backward across Dave's bed and dropped the towel over his face. "Every wattles station in L.A. is closed. They paste up signs on the pumps —crooked, faltering, childlike lettering: 'Out of Wattles.' It's a conspiracy on the part of the wattles producers to bring the American economy to its knees."

In the mirror over the chest where he was poking into drawers after underwear and socks, he saw Kovaks throw off the towel and sit up. His dark, long-lashed eyes went grave and pleading. He held out his hands. "Come on, Dave. Let's make it. I have this need."

Dave pulled on shorts. "It's all in your mind." Picking up the towel, he went back into the bathroom, rehung it and started brushing his teeth at the basin. In the doorway behind him, Kovaks said:

"It's a four-letter word for a part of the human anatomy but it's not m-i-n-d."

Dave spat peppermint suds, rolled his eyes up, said, "Aiee!" and rinsed his mouth. Pushing past Kovaks, he told him, "Try a cold shower." He went back to the chest for denims.

"I need a warm body," Kovaks said.

"Sorry." Dave kicked into the pants. "Only one to a customer." He zipped the pants, found his little book in the discarded suit jacket, sat on the bed and picked the phone up from the floor. There wasn't much furniture yet. He and Doug had moved in only six weeks ago and most of their time, energy and money had gone into fitting out the gallery. Up here, things were still bare. He dialed Ray Lollard again. A girl said:

"He left early, Mr. Brandstetter. I thought he was going to see you."

"He tried," Dave said. "I missed him. Thanks."

He hung up, pulled on a light jersey turtleneck, found Kovaks in Doug's room, seated on the bed again, in clay-stained dungarees, buckling warped sandals. He grumbled, "I feel like Bette Davis in The Old Maid."

"You'll never be an old maid," Dave said. "Not while the role of fifth wheel is open."

"I don't reject easy." Kovaks yanked a red-and-black-striped tank top over his flat torso. "I belong here somewhere. I know it. It's karma. If you —"

The street door opened below. A voice called, "Davey?" That had to be Madge Dunstan. She was Dave's oldest friend, a successful designer of textiles and wall coverings, a lean, handsome woman, sharp, tough-minded, good-humored. It always pleased Dave to see her. It pleased him something extra now because he'd had enough of Kovaks. And he didn't want to mishandle him. His pottery was exceptional and about the only thing bringing Doug any business yet. If Kovaks was to be dumped, it was up to Doug. Was Doug up to it?

Dave gave his head an impatient shake as he crossed the vast open space they'd decided was the living room. Two sets of shoes climbed the stairs. From the hall he looked down. Behind Madge, whose head was bent because she was watching her feet, came Ray Lollard, who smiled and said, "We met at Doug's fast-closed door and decided to bide our time over a drink across the street. You're back, just as I predicted. Both of you."

Kovaks stood by Dave. "All three," he said.

Madge's head came up. Lollard's eyebrows came up. And as they reached the stairhead, Dave told them, "This is Kovaks. He's trying to adopt us."

"Both of you?" Madge gave the bushy-haired youth her strong handshake and her best warm smile but the tilt of her head told Dave that Kovaks hadn't made a new friend. Not yet. "I thought," she said, "the menage a trois went out with Noel Coward."

"It's back." Kovaks showed big white even teeth. "With ragtime piano and the John Held look."

"Kovaks," Lollard mused. "Then those would be your ceramics downstairs, no? Handsome. There's something so alive about them."

"I'm oversexed," Kovaks explained, and shook hands with Lollard.

"Maybe you'd better go turn down your kiln," Dave said, and took Lollard's elbow and began steering him back toward the kitchen. "Were you able to get me that name and address?"

Lollard moved reluctantly, looking back over his shoulder. "Aren't you lucky," he murmured enviously. "He's a dream."

"Of one kind or another," Dave said. "The name?"

"What? Oh. Yes. I'm sorry it took so long but it's new and unlisted." He handed Dave a slip of paper.

"Thomas Owens," Dave read aloud.

Kovak's flat soles were slapping down the stairs and Madge joined Dave and Lollard. "What about him?"

In a big old kitchen shiny with flowered tile, Dave began collecting gin, vermouth, pitcher, glasses, ice cubes. "I seem to know the name."

"Of course you do," Madge said. "You've met him at my house. More than once. An architect, remember? Nice guy. Until lately, too damn sad."

"How's that?" Dave made spiral cuts in a lemon rind. "He's the gaunt, kind of intense one with the yellow eyes, right? What was so sad? I forget that."

"We'd all given up on him," Lollard called. He stood at the front windows, peering down at the street, probably hoping for another glimpse of Kovaks. "Professionally, I mean."

Madge said, "He kept getting commissions, then losing them by insisting things would be done either his way or not at all."

"That can keep an architect poor, yes." Dave loosened ice cubes from a tray and dumped them into the pitcher, which had been living in the freezer and was coated with snow. "It's not the freest of the seven deadly arts, is architecture."

"It's curious too," Madge said. "He's so sweet and giving, so gentle and kind personally. I guess a word might be yielding. Everybody loves him. Even other architects. And I don't mean just respect. They've got that too, but tenderness, a kind of sheltering attitude, protective. Everybody wants to help him. That's the mystifying part. Nobody could."

Dave began turning the ice with a glass rod. "Did he ever bring a Larry Johns to your house? Maybe twenty, twenty-one, blond, about five eleven, hundred fifty pounds, long yellow hair and mustache?"

"He never brought anyone." Madge wandered into the hall and out onto the roof garden. Her words drifted in through the open kitchen window. "He lives with a widowed sister he supports, has for years.

But she has a child and they never came. I suspect she'd be uncomfortable in a room not filled with reliably heterosexual matrons. Anyway, his fortunes have changed at last. He's built some stunning beach houses."

Lollard came the long walk back across the living room. "For film people," he said, "show business people. He finally found one too busy with road shows or Las Vegas or something to bother him. What he built was marvelous. After that, everyone wanted one."

"He just lately finished a lovely place for himself, only a couple of miles from me," Madge called. "What's the name of this big, climbing thing with the perforated leaves. Monstera something, right?"

"Deliciosa, " Dave said. "Do you know anybody in the bar, restaurant, hotel supply business, Madge?"

"Any number." Madge came back in with a kite-size green leaf in her hand. She leaned against the refrigerator, holding it up, studying it. "What's on your mind? Yes, this place is big and empty, but surely —"

"No, no." Dave put a glass into the bony, freckled hand that wasn't busy with the leaf. "What I need to know is if you've heard of any ripoffs lately, like a truckload of padded leather chairs on swivels."

Madge had taken a mouthful of martini. She shook her head and swallowed. "That was last year. A renegade truckdriver sold it for his own profit instead of delivering it where it had been ordered."

"Good." Dave put a glass into Ray Lollard's hand. He asked Madge, "Do you remember who bought it?"

"Well, now, but wait." She frowned. "It wasn't chairs. It was high stools, the big, deep, cushiony kind. Yes —a gay bar in Surf. What's it called? They were remodeling, raising the bar, putting in walnut paneling, padding everything in leather. Naturally, when the police came around, they gave the stools back. They hadn't known they were stolen."

"The Hang Ten?" Dave asked.

She nodded quickly. "That's the one."

 

CHAPTER 5

 

It lay in the dunes like elegant wreckage. Nearing, he saw that the crazily angled upthrusts of varnished boards were walls and roofs. When he topped the last dune, clumped grasses snagging his pants legs, what had looked to be broken and strewn by accident shaped into a structure. Under wooden wedges of overhang, triangles of smoke-dark glass drank light. The same kind of glass in very tall panes, sill to roof beam, mirrored surf, sky, horizon. A deck of gapped and biased planking reached high out over jagged rocks. Blankness watched from towers bleak as prairie storefronts.

When he climbed wide, shallow board steps, dogs barked indoors. They were assorted. Two small ones clawed the dark panes of a broad wood-frame door. One was slick-haired, pumpkin-colored, with a curled tail. He jumped like a dwarf acrobat. The other bared fierce little fangs. He was ruffed. Behind them, a big one stood square and solemn and barked basso. He was marked like a German shepherd but was lop-eared.

A girl came among them. She wore sunglasses. Her mouth was darkly bruised and swollen. She'd parted her taffy-color hair in the middle and tied it back. The man's shirt she wore had random appliques of peasanty flowers. Its tails hung out over gray bell bottoms. Her feet were bare. She smiled at Dave. Startlingly, her two upper front teeth were missing. In mock despair at the racket of the dogs, she put her hands over her ears. Then she waved them at the big dog, who backed off, looking hurt. She grabbed the collar of the slick little one, the harness of the ruffed one, and dragged them, cringing, over a sleek floor into a place out of Dave's sight, where they stopped barking. When she came back and opened the door she was panting a little and bright pink was in her cheeks. "What can I do for you?"

"I'm Brandstetter. I phoned yesterday, remember? To talk to Tom Owens. That didn't work out. I thought I might have better luck in person. Will you tell him I'm here? He'll remember me. We met at Madge Dunstan's."

"Oh?" She made her mouth small, half apologetic, half resentful. "You didn't say that on the phone."

"I didn't have his name at the time," Dave said. "Only his number. Can I see him?"

"Well..." Her forehead puckered. She glanced over her shoulder. "He's got somebody with him now. Vern Something. An old school buddy." Her mouth turned down. "They act like they never graduated. People don't get old, do they? On the inside, I mean. They're, like, sixteen all their lives."

"We try to keep it secret," he said. "I'll wait." He stepped toward her. She wasn't as good at blocking off a door as she was at blocking off a phone. She stepped back. "Well —okay."

The room he came into was long and lofty and full of sea light. Raw wicker furniture with sailcloth cushions was grouped around a black cowl fireplace in a corner. A long wicker couch with a long, low deal table in front of it looked at the beach. A fastness of glossy plank floorboards was islanded by Navajo rugs, big ones and good. They were bringing scary prices now. He knew. In the shop full of silver and turquoise and Polynesian feathered masks under the old L.A. Museum, he and Doug had priced rugs like these. Priced them and given up.

The girl went away noiselessly. Dave counted sailboats tilting between the beach and hulking offshore oil-drilling platforms misted by distance. Wood creaked above and behind him and he turned. A tremendous painting that might have been gulls in a storm or simply slashes of white on ultramarine went along the room's back wall under a gallery. A youth of maybe twenty came along the gallery. Sun had turned him dark brown. A helmet of black hair covered his ears. He wore a tie-dyed shirt in faded yellows and oranges, sleeves torn off at the armholes, baggy surfer trunks. A leather case on a shoulder strap jounced at his hip when he came down stairs that were like a flight of wooden birds.

"Trudy!" he called and saw Dave and stopped, turned his head slightly, mistrustful. "Who are you?"

"Brandstetter," Dave said.

"It's about Larry, isn't it?" the boy said.

"Yes. Who are you?"

The boy laughed without humor. "She thought nobody would find out. I told her they would. A murder. They're going to find out because they're going to try. Tom knew it. But not Gail, not Gail."

"They're not trying," Dave said. "I'm trying. They're willing to settle for Johns. I'm not."

The boy squinted disbelief. "Not a private eye. They don't really have those, do they? Cannon? Barnaby Jones? All that fantasy shit on the schlock box?" His laugh was loud and forced. His eyes were watchful.

"Not so far as I know," Dave said. "I work for an insurance company. Money, not fantasy. You live here? You know Larry Johns?"

"I'm here for the summer. Trudy's guest. From college. Yeah, I know him. Tom kept sending Trudy drawings and stuff of the house. He never mentioned Larry. I'd have used my plane ticket, only it's got a forty-day stipulation on it."

"You didn't like him?"

The boy worked his mouth as if he'd tasted something rotten. "Did you like Midnight Cowboy? I didn't."

Dave cocked an eyebrow. "Was that how you saw him?"

"That's what he was. Only in the movie, the dude wasn't any good at peddling his ass. Larry made out." The boy's glance measured the soaring room. "Look where he landed."

"He landed in trouble," Dave said. "The worst kind. Why did you want to use your plane ticket? This is a big place. Did you have to trip over him?"

"I didn't," the boy said sourly. "Trudy did. Sickening. A Texas redneck." He creased a square forehead above thick black brows. "What have they got, for God sake? I mean, they're dominating the stupid culture, all of a sudden. Seriously —everything's country western now. Have you noticed? Even politics. Washington's wall-to-wall fatback and collard greens. That nauseating down-home twang. Even reporters. It's like all the TV sets were made in Amarillo, or something. His old man worked in the oil fields, could barely write his name. He bragged about it."

"You wouldn't be jealous?" Dave asked.

He narrowed his eyes, flared his nostrils, showed his teeth. " 'Brown eyes,' " he hissed, " 'say, love me, or I keel you.' " He dropped the act. "No. I told her what he was. A hustler. Taking her uncle for all he could get. Didn't faze her. She felt sorry for him."

From somewhere beyond wooden bulkheads she called, "Mr. Brandstetter?" Dave took steps, craned to see. She stood by a distant doorway, Vermeer light pouring over her. "Excuse me," he said and went there. The boy came after him, bare heels thumping.

The light came through a tall gap in the wall above the door. The room beyond the door held a high hospital bed but it was meant for an office, a workroom. Drafting table. T squares, straightedges, triangles. Plywood bins out of which poked rolled blueprints, floor plans, elevations. Half-empty shelving. Tall stools from an unfinished-furniture shop, price tags still hanging off rungs. Roof windows funneled down north light. Low in a corner, a window framed surf breaking on jagged rocks. The tunnel you looked out into was the sun-ribbed shadow of the deck above.

Tom Owens lay in the bed. About thirty-five, long-boned, with long pale-red hair, long pale-red mustache. Yellow wasn't the accurate word for his eyes. Tawny would probably do it. A bolted framework on the bed foot was strung with weights and pulleys to keep his legs raised. The legs were in bulky plaster casts. The bed was strewn with magazines, paperback books. A man stood at its far side. Chinos, T-shirt, thin red windbreaker jacket —boyish, all new. He was laughing. But sad was the impression he gave. He could have been younger than Owens but life had used him harder. Owens had been smiling at whatever he'd said. Then he turned his head on the pillows, saw Dave and lost the smile. But he held out his hand.

"Dave Brandstetter. After your call yesterday, I remembered you."

Dave shook the hand. "We met at Madge Dunstan's."

"How is Madge?" Owens picked up a cigarette pack from a folded newspaper. The Los Santos Tide, rites for murdered tavern owner. "You've met my niece, Trudy?" He lit a cigarette. "And Mark Dimond? Her" —he blinked amused bafflement at her—"do they still say 'fiance'?"

Trudy shook her head. " 'Lover,' " she said.

" 'Old man,' " Mark Dimond said.

"Right!" Trudy laughed and kissed his nose. She looked at her uncle. "Are you okay? Can I get you anything? I don't know why Mother's not back. We want to go tape sea gulls and waves and like that."

"Go." Owens smiled. "I'm fine."

They went. "We'll take the dogs," Trudy called back, and Mark Dimond groaned.

Dave said, "Madge is all right but what happened to you?"

"I leaned on the rail of the deck." He jerked his head up to show which deck he meant. "It wasn't bolted in place. Temporary nails holding it. A detail Elmo Sands overlooked. My contractor.  I wouldn't have believed it. He doesn't forget anything. Ever. But —the rail gave and I landed on those rocks. Not gracefully."

Dave winced and the man on the far side of the bed said, "Listen, Tommy, I better split." He looked at Dave with soft, long-lashed child eyes. "You've got more important things to do."

"Vern" —Owens reached out, gave the man's arm a squeeze—"it's been good. Dave Brandstetter, Vern Taylor. Vern's just turned up after seventeen years. How about that?" Owens's eyes smiled at the man. Gently affectionate. As at a backward child.

"We were in high school together. West L.A." Taylor came around the bed to shake Dave's hand. "Lived on the same tacky street. Both our dads sold appliances at Sears." He looked Dave up and down. It gave Dave the feel of being wistfully priced, like candy behind glass. Taylor smiled a sixth-birthday smile that was marred by bad silver dentistry. "Now he's a big-time architect. Is that what you are too?"

"Insurance," Dave said. "Claims investigator."

Something happened to Taylor's smile. He said guardedly, "Oh? Yeah?" He worked up his euphoria again. "Well, it must seem crazy to a stranger but I'm really excited. Nobody else in our class turned out to amount to a damn. Me especially." His laugh didn't even try for irony. "I've got failure down to a system. Like my dad. But look at this." He lifted his hands and let them fall. "Just look at it! Isn't it great? Last time I saw him, he was stumbling over hurdles in gym, just like the rest of us. And where do I see him next? On a big TV talk show. Magazine color spreads —beach homes for movie stars, swanky town-house condominiums. He's a celebrity." He grabbed Owens's hand and shook it hard. "Listen, Tommy—I'll come back. But you're busy. I mean, important people. What time have you got for nobodies like Vern Taylor?" At the room door he turned back. He pleaded, "We had some laughs, though, didn't we? Talking over old times?"

"It was a good morning," Owens said. "Do it again."

"Get better, now." Taylor lifted a hand, went away.

Owens told Dave, "Sit down." His voice was heavy. Dave put himself in one of a pair of new director's chairs —orange canvas, varnished pine. Owens said, "So now you've found out where he lived. Does it matter? Does it have to matter? He wanted to keep it secret."

"Wanted to and did," Dave said. "Why?"

"To protect me," Owens said. "You've probably got an opinion about Larry. Everybody has. The same one. A hustler. No morals. Well, it's not so."

"What was he doing in Rick Wendell's bed?"

Red flared in the taut skin across Owens's cheekbones. "That's not what I'm talking about. I don't know but I know he would have explained it."

"And you'd have accepted what he said?" Dave asked. "A nice arrangement. For him."

"I meant he wouldn't kill anybody. He didn't have it in him."

"Why did he go with Wendell?" Dave glanced around. "I've seen the Wendell place. Johns was better off here. You kept him, right?"

Owens said defensively, "He'd never had a family. Father deserted his mother when he was born. Mother put him in a home, then vanished. He got passed from hand to hand until he was old enough to go out on his own. No education to speak of, no opportunities. I wanted to turn things around for him."

Dave said, "Every hustler on Hollywood Boulevard tells that story."

"Maybe it's true." Owens was combative. "Maybe that's why they're on Hollywood Boulevard."

Dave grunted, leaned forward, held out his cigarette pack. "Was Wendell a friend of his? Or did he just get lonely for the life, walk out on the highway, stick out his thumb? And Wendell stopped. He was supposedly on his way to see a film with his mother."

"I don't know." Owens had taken a cigarette. He rolled it in long, knuckly fingers, watching it grimly. "If you think I've been able to sleep for wondering, you're wrong." Dave clicked a slim steel lighter and Owens hung the cigarette in his mouth and turned his head against the pillows for the flame. "Thanks. Maybe the coffee in that thing is still hot." On a pivot table next to the bed pottery mugs waited beside a stout plastic vessel with a handle. Dave went to it, turned the screw top, poured into two mugs, screwed the top back. Owens worked a button on the bed frame that set a small motor humming and got him into a more upright position. Dave handed him a mug. Owens said, "Wendell owned a gay bar. Larry might have known him."

"The Hang Ten," Dave said. "Were you ever there?"

"No. I've seen the sign. On the beach in Surf."

"That's it. Did Johns ever mention it?"

"Not that I remember." Owens sipped at the coffee, tightened his mouth, shook his head. "Larry was vague about a lot of things. Including how long he'd been on the scene here. I didn't pry, I didn't care. I was too happy to have found him."

"Let me guess," Dave said. "He was the first."

"There were baths, back seats of cars, cheap motels. When it got unbearable." Owens laughed sadly without sound. "But yes, the first at home. We were in pretty close quarters, Gail and Trudy and I." He looked at the spacious room. "It seems like a bad dream, remembering. The way we used to live. Mostly on unemployment. I'd get a draftsman's job. Government projects —county, state, schools, hospitals. I'd last till some so-called architect handed me something too stupid. I wouldn't say anything. That's not my style. I'd just walk out and hunt another job. Nights, I kept designing stuff on my own." He gave a shamed shrug. "Sure, I dreamed of a Larry Johns but it wasn't rational. I hadn't the time. To say nothing of money. I had a family to look after."

"You raised Trudy?" Dave said. "That was kind." Owens brushed the words aside. "It was the way things worked out. She was four when her father died in Korea. Not in the war. Afterward —the occupation. Jeep accident. His lieutenant's pension wasn't big enough for the two of them to live on. Gail would have had to work. She had no skills. Anyway, there was no one to leave the baby with."

"Then she wasn't a baby anymore," Dave said, "and you had time. And money. And privacy. So there was a Larry Johns, right? Where did you find him?"

Owens flushed again, looked away, mumbled, "Hitching a ride at a freeway on-ramp. I'd been to an AIA dinner. I was smashed." He looked back. "In the morning it would figure I'd be sorry, wouldn't it? I wasn't."

"Are you sorry now?" Dave asked. "You didn't exactly jump to help him."

"I picked up the phone when I saw the eight a.m. news Tuesday." He eyed a neat television set on one of the empty shelves. "Gail grabbed the phone and set it out of reach. Just as she hung up on you yesterday. She's always known what was best for me." He grimaced. "I've let her get away with it too long. Over the years it's become a habit. A bad one. For both of us."

"She's trying to protect you," Dave said. "You respect that in Johns."

The yellow eyes blinked. "Okay —touche. You're right. She loves me. In her she-bear way."

"You were going to phone a lawyer?" Dave asked.

Owens nodded. "All Gail could see was that I'd be smeared. Scandal. Homosexuality. Murder. I didn't care. I love him. He loves me."

Dave said, "He went to Wendell."

"But he loves me." Owens was stubborn. "The way he kept my name out of it proves that. And day by day — There are things you can't fake."

"That depends who's watching." Dave turned to the window, drank from the mug. Trudy crouched over the tape deck on the rocks while the dogs wagged around her and Dimond stood in the swirling surf holding a microphone. "Where did he tell you he was going that night?"

"He didn't. I'd taken pills." He nodded at his casts. "The itching can drive you crazy. When I woke, he wasn't with me. Wasn't in the house at all. Trudy was home. I had her look for him."

"What happened to Trudy's face?"

"She smashed up her mother's car. A Vega, less than six months old, never given a bit of trouble. Then —the brakes failed. She and Mark were up the canyon, headed for a rock festival. Totaled the car but they got off. He cracked some ribs, she lost those teeth, blacked her eyes. But considering—"

Dave frowned. "When was this?"

"Week ago Sunday. Two days later, I fell." Owens finished off his coffee. "I'd had a lot of luck. Suddenly it reversed itself. Still —I'm alive, the kids are alive. Gail might have been driving. She's alive. Sequoia Insurance paid up without any questions. We're all right. Then came this thing about Larry. They say bad luck runs in threes. I'm hoping it's over."

"Not for him," Dave said. "It's only started. The police and the district attorney don't share your blind faith. They want him locked up forever."

"And you?" Owens studied him. "What do you want?"

"To find out what really happened. No insurance company likes a murder. Not with so much wrong with it. For instance, did Johns need fifteen hundred dollars?"

Owens was stubbing out his cigarette in a brown pottery ashtray on a stack of magazines. His head jerked up. "The news reports didn't mention robbery."

"And he hadn't asked you for money?"

"Not then or ever," Owens said. "Which makes him a pretty strange kind of hustler, doesn't it?" He gave a short laugh, then frowned. "What would he want with fifteen hundred dollars?"

"I don't know and he didn't get it." Dave bent to put out his cigarette. "But Wendell had drawn it from his bank on his way to work and the empty envelope was on his desk at home and I've been lied to about what the money was for." Reminded of Ace Kegan, he read his watch, gave Owens his hand to shake. "I've got to go. I'm sorry if this has been tiring."

Owens kept hold of the hand for a moment. "You can help him, can't you? Madge says you're tops in your field. You find answers when the police don't."

"Only if the answers are there." Dave went to the door with the upreach of open wall above it. Hand on the knob, he turned. "Is he stable? Emotionally? Does he have hangups?"

"You mean, would he have gone out of his head and killed Wendell for making a pass at him? No. He's easy and uncomplicated. There was a catch phrase a while back that sums up his attitude pretty accurately: If it feels good, do it.' "

"That couldn't include killing people?" Dave said.

"No way," Owens said.

 

CHAPTER 6

 

The car was a ten-year-old mini —Swedish, French, Italian? The color of dried blood. It stood by the guardrail, a broad steel band bolted to squat posts that divided road shoulder from beach. At the rear of the car a leaf-shaped flap of slatted steel was raised, showing a dirty little motor. Vern Taylor stood staring at it, sea wind flapping his flimsy red jacket. Dave pulled his car onto the gravel and got out. Taylor frowned at him, then smiled.

"Oh, hi. Thanks for stopping. I'm not sure just what's wrong. It suddenly quit." Gulls wheeled screaming overhead. He looked at them as if it were their fault. "Hell, I only bought it a couple weeks ago." His half smile was shamefaced. "No, it didn't cost much. But you'd think it ought to stagger along for a month."

"Just long enough for the dealer to move to another lot and change names." Dave leaned to look at the works. "You've tried everything?"

"I worked in garages for a while but I don't know everything." Taylor had given up. He gave the empty sky a look, the empty hills, the empty sea. "Way out here. Listen, can you give me a lift? Into Surf?"

"No problem." Dave slammed down the tinny engine cover, led the way to the Electra glistening silver in the sun, opened the passenger door, walked around and slid behind the wheel. Taylor got in gingerly, as if afraid he'd soil the new upholstery. He shut the door with soft caution and sat rigid like a child in church. Dave pulled the car back into the coast-road traffic.

"Nice car," Taylor said. "There's a lot of money in insurance, isn't there? I read that somewhere. Richest corporations in the country."

"My father's the corporation," Dave said. "I'm only an employee. It's a company car."

"Medallion," Taylor said. "That's that tall glass-and-steel tower on Wilshire. Beautiful. You know what my father did?"

"Sold appliances at Sears," Dave said.

"Right. I read someplace that if your father was a success, you'd be a success too."

"He worked hard for it," Dave said.

"I guess you'll get it all when he dies." Taylor found a crumpled cigarette in the red jacket and lit it with a paper match. "When my dad died, you know what I got? I got to pay all his bills. I'd made out a little better than he did. No wife and kids to support. I made a liar out of that book. For a while, anyway. Of course, that was quite a while ago." He was holding the burned match. Dave tilted open the ashtray under the dash. Taylor put the match into it carefully. "I was in architecture too, you know? Well, contracting, really. Draftsman. Tom and I took drafting together. Sat right next to each other. Anyway, I had enough to pay what my dad left owing. Then. If he died today, I don't know what I'd do. I'm no draftsman anymore."

"What do you do?" Dave asked.

"Wash dishes," Taylor answered in a thin voice. But when Dave glanced at him, he was smiling. Hard. Like a brave little kid with a skinned knee. "At the marina. They've got a lot of fancy restaurants there. I mean, what I do, really, is load up these big machines. They do the washing. But what they call you is still a dishwasher. I'll bet Tom eats where I wash dishes. How about that for a joke? His dad worked at Sears too. Lived in the same kind of crummy little house right up the block from us."

"He won't be eating in restaurants for a while," Dave said.

"Oh, you mean his legs. Was that why you were there today? Looking into the accident? Boy, that was really careless of that contractor. Imagine —a beautiful house like that. A hundred thousand dollars, I'll bet. And he couldn't even bolt the porch rail."

"It could have been worse," Dave said. "Owens could have been killed."

"I don't think so," Taylor said.

Dave glanced at him again, brows lifted.

"Seriously. I read in some book how if you've got a lot of money, you rarely have fatal accidents. Or illnesses. Unless you're old, of course. And they don't even age as fast as other people. Isn't that interesting? I mean, there are statistics about it, charts. There's magic in money. It's the magic of our acquisitive society. Protects you from all evil. Nothing can get the better of money. Suppose Tom killed someone."

Dave squinted. "You think he killed someone?"

"No, no. But I mean, what if he did? He'd get off. People like that can hire expensive lawyers and they know how to delay and delay, and appeal and appeal. They can go right up to the Supreme Court if they have to, you know? And if they still said he was guilty, all he'd get would be a light sentence. He'd be out in a few months, maybe. Poor, you're jailed for months even before your trial can come up." Suddenly he wasn't chattering like a wound-up kid. He sounded bitter. "And then they really nail you."

At a traffic halt where, on the right, the charred stakes of a collapsed and burned-out amusement pier stuck up through the flat blue slide of surf, Dave swung the Electra left onto Jetty Street. At the corner a chili stand raised a make-believe lighthouse, plaster scaling off it, grimy windows red-framed at the top. In lots with rusty chain-link fences, forgotten boat hulls reared up on scaffolds deep in weeds.

Auto junkyards shouldered vacant store buildings. Tiller wheels tracked and warped in the fretwork of cottage porches. "Maybe you should read another book," Dave said.

"Oh?" Taylor pulled a little dime-store notebook from a hip pocket and began patting his jacket for something to write with. "What's the title?"

"Any title," Dave said. "Just a different book."

Taylor put the note pad away. "You don't agree? No. You're rich yourself. I mean, psychologically, that would be natural. Just like it's natural for me to believe what the book said. Because I'm poor."

"Where do you want me to drop you?" Dave said.

"Oh, turn at the next stop. Cortez. Right. It's down in the middle of the block." On a bleak, sunlit corner, black women in bright headcloths waited in a skirmish of small children outside a brick store building where a cardboard window sign said food stamps. Taylor's arm came up stiff. "There." The building he pointed at was square-cornered, pale-brown shiplap, three stories. Rickety outdoor stairs climbed the side and faded lettering crossed a high false front. SEA-view rooms weekly rates. Dave pulled to the curb.

"It's a lie." Taylor used his silver-filled little-boy smile. "You can't see a square inch of ocean. Not from my room, for sure. The cheap ones are at the back. What I see is oil wells. But it's great being at the beach. I always lived in L.A. before. Listen, thank you very much for the ride. You really rescued me. I hope I didn't take you too far out of your way. It's really nice to have met you." He put out a hand for Dave to shake. "You're the only new friend of Tom's I've met. And you're just what I expected."

"Yup," Dave said. "I wear three-hundred-dollar suits and drive an eight-thousand-dollar car. Mr. Taylor —stop measuring people that way."

"It's American," Taylor said defensively.

"And Nigerian. And Bolivian," Dave said. "It started in Sumer."

"Don't misunderstand me," Taylor said. "I'm glad about Tom's success. I mean, we started out life together. We were close." His soft eyes looked into Dave's. Too steadily. "Very, very close. One summer, especially." A flush darkened the time-etched skin of his cheekbones. "You understand what I'm saying."

Dave edged him a smile.

"Sure you do. I knew you would. So you can understand how happy it makes me that one of us got someplace in life. It's the truth. I couldn't be happier if it had happened to me."

"Right." Dave pushed his cuff back.

Taylor read the gesture and fumbled the car door open. "You have to go. You're busy. When people get in your income bracket, they work all the time. Anybody who thinks money lets you take it easy is an idiot. I read. I know." He got out, eased the door shut, crouched so the window framed his used boy face, the wind fluttering his soft hair. "I guess you'll be talking to that contractor now, about that deck rail."

"Not now," Dave said, "but sooner or later."

"He'll blame it on some workman," Taylor said. "The poor bastard will get fired."

"What about your car?" Dave asked.

Taylor looked doubtful. "I'll figure out something. Have to have a car. Gosh, I have an important appointment today too." He used the ragged smile again. "Besides, I have to get around, catch up on things. Did you know, they've got movies now where they show everything?" His leer was prepubic. "And boys dancing naked in the bars? They call them go-go boys. The bars are having a contest for the most beautiful boy." He patted the window ledge, stood. "Don't want to miss that." He turned away. "And my friends," he said dreamily. "I have to see my friends."

Wind had strung Bobby's long yellow hair across his face. He lay asleep in the small white trunks on a big towel printed with gaudy flowers. The beach was crowded —surfers, girls in next to nothing, babies in nothing, dogs. But even from the distance of Ace Kegan's deck—no one home in the apartment behind it—Dave had picked the boy out easily. He shone. Dave waded through a wash of guitar discords and bongo drums and sat down next to the towel. He took off a shoe, emptied sand out of it, put it back on. Into Bobby's ear, a battery radio sang in a bright bad-ass voice about soft drinks. Dave tied the shoe and asked: "Didn't Ace tell you it's risky to be out here alone?"

The boy didn't open his eyes. His beautiful mouth muttered, "Not alone. Five thousand people."

"Where's Ace?" Dave emptied the other shoe. "I want to ask him a question."

"He's talking to some lawyer." Bobby used his fingers to rake the hair off his face. He pushed himself up on his elbows, squinting against the brightness of the sky. "Something wrong?"

"Probably." Dave put the shoe back on and tied it. "Unless it's about remodeling he's seeing that lawyer?"

"What?" Bobby's face twisted. He switched off the radio. "Remodeling? The Hang Ten?"

"That's what he told me," Dave said.

"You must have heard him wrong. They remodeled last year. Did it all over in leather." On the towel lay an empty soft drink can, Kleenex in a little box printed with antique cars, a brown squeeze bottle of suntan lotion, a pack of Marlboros. Bobby groped among them for sunglasses, hooked them on. Polaroids. They mirrored Dave in silver. "Why would they remodel it already? It cost a bundle and it still looks like new."

"Right." Dave picked up the books, shuffled them. 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. Contemporary American Poetry. A Zen Primer. The Best and the Brightest. "At a guess, you're supposed to be studying."

"Yeah, well, Christ. I'm tired. I was in that God damn bar till two." Now he probed a cigarette from his pack and worked at lighting paper matches the sea wind blew out. "You know, Ace is great on working you. All energy, you know? He really can't figure somebody it doesn't mean the world to to win that stupid contest."

Dave brought out his lighter, cupped the flame, held it till Bobby got the light. "It's for your own good," he said.

"Shee-it." Bobby turned onto his belly, rested his chin on folded arms. The smoke blew away from his mouth along the sand. "Anyway, he doesn't see I can't do three things at once. He wants a bartender, a college student and a body-building freak all in one."

Dave set the books down. "You tend bar much?"

"Ace is nervous, runs around like a white rat in one of those labs. He'll phone anytime and say, 'Get your ass over here.' "

Dave watched surfers crest a long blue swell and vanish in a kick and flail of arms and legs. He said very carefully, "Like Monday?"

"Yeah, for instance," Bobby said, "All of a sudden, about eight. I mean, he's stacked up operas and symphonies for me to listen to, half a library to read. Not just read, man —memorize, you know? Then he calls and I've got to take over The Hang Ten for the night." He turned onto his back again, onto his elbows. "And at seven the next morning he starts asking questions with my boiled eggs. Big treat, two days a week—boiled eggs. Quizzing me on the music, on the books. How could I read the fucking books? I was working. You slop beer for a hundred faggots all by yourself sometime—you'll know what work is."

"I'll bet," Dave said. "Did he tell you why he had to go out?"

"Wait a minute." Bobby sat up. "That was the night Rick was killed." He poked the cigarette into the sand. "Who are you?" He pulled off the sunglasses. "Some kind of cop?" He got to his knees. "Yeah. What else is new? Shit!" He punched the sand with a fist. He looked ready to cry. "Now I've got him in trouble."

"He was already there." Dave stood up, brushed sand off his suit. "That's probably why he's seeing that lawyer."

"It's about the partnership," Bobby said loudly. "There's a lot to straighten out, now Rick's dead."

Dave said, "When did he come back to the bar on Monday night?"

"He didn't. He was home when I got there. Passed out, if you want to know. He'd killed half a fifth of Canadian Club." His eyes came up suddenly, scared.

"He doesn't drink," Dave said.

"That's why he passed out," Bobby said. "Look —what do you want? To stick him for Rick's murder?"

"No. That's up to the police," Dave said. "But I'm uneasy about their present choice. It doesn't make sense. What do you think? You know Ace. Could he have murdered Rick Wendell?"

"Listen." Bobby was shaking and under the saffron mustache his mouth was a bad color. "Get away from me. Will you? Please? Just get away from me."

"Easy," Dave said. "I'm not a cop. And I can't hurt anybody. Not you. Not Ace. It doesn't work that way, Bobby. People hurt themselves. Sometimes their friends can turn that around. Like possibly now."

Bobby said sulkily, "He's got a lousy temper." He hooked the glasses on again, knelt, gathered up his traps. "Now leave me alone, will you? I don't want to talk to you —all right?" He walked off, dragging the flowered towel. Dave went after him.

"A bad enough temper to shoot somebody?"

"No. Fists are all he knows. He hits people. He's been in court about it." Bobby lengthened his stride toward the apartment deck, where the chrome-plated stem of the punching bag glittered. Dave kept pace.

"Rick had a new lover. Wasn't Ace worried?"

"What?" Bobby turned sharply. The radio fell. A lanky brown dog came from under a faded beach umbrella and sniffed at it. Was it a lunch box? Bobby kicked at the dog and picked up the radio. The dog slunk back to the umbrella, where a mound of old white flesh slept in gingham ruffles. "He never mentioned it. Anyway, he wouldn't hurt Rick. Hell, he was always protecting the big, dumb slob. They were friends. A long time."

"Till death did them part," Dave said.

"Yeah," Bobby said. "Get lost, will you?"

Two miles up the beach from Ace Kegan's, on battered benches in the sun, along a gritty walk that marked off Surfs crumbling ocean-front apartment houses and dim stores from the beach, old men argued with each other in loud Yiddish. Long-haired, bearded boys played guitars and tambourines and grinned while a bowlegged little old woman with a Day-Glo kerchief over her hair did a slow Polish village dance. A pack of breedless dogs ran past, tongues lolling.

The Hang Ten turned a blank stucco face to the scene. Bolted to its door was a wooden surfer, clumsily chiseled in low relief. Wind had piled trash at his feet, greasy burrito wrappers, Big Mac boxes, Styro-foam cups. These crunched under Dave's shoes as he put on his glasses to read a yellowed card tacked at the edge of the door. In faded felt-pen lettering, the bar's hours showed.  noon- 2 a.m. He checked his watch. Noon had passed but the door's three padlocks were clamped.

He found a phone booth and dialed his office. For messages. There'd been half a dozen calls. His secretary told him about them in a thin whimper. A terrified skinny little girl of sixty, Miss Taney had teetered on the edge of nervous collapse all her life. The names of three of the callers meant nothing to Dave. The fourth had been Lieutenant Yoshiba of the Los Santos police, upset about something. The fifth had been Heather Wendell, upset about something. The sixth had been Gail Ewing, Tom Owens's sister —upset about something.

Yoshiba was out to lunch. At the Wendell house it was the gaunt giant Billy who picked up the receiver. The lost husband and father. Found. Dave estimated it was the phone in his son's rooms he was using. That would put him near the bottles. He sounded as if he'd had one in his hand for a few hours. One or more. He tried to work up indignation. Why didn't Dave leave his wife alone? Wasn't it bad enough to have lost her son? What did Dave mean, telling Ace Kegan he thought she'd killed Rick? He, Billy, had heard Ace say it at the funeral. Where was Heather? At a lawyer's office, that's where.

"I'll get back to her," Dave said.

"You're in trouble," Billy warned him.

"I've got a lot of company," Dave said.

The dogs barked into the phone again at Tom Owens's beautiful beached ark. Gail Ewing said, "I'm extremely unhappy with you for disturbing Tom. He had nothing to do with this horrible business. It was poor judgment on his part to take that boy in. Obviously. But that doesn't mean people like you have the right to harass him."

"People like me aren't bad compared to the police," Dave said. "I haven't told them the tie-in yet, Mrs. Ewing. From what your brother said, there didn't seem much reason to. He didn't act harassed. But you do. Why? No, let me tell you. You know something your brother doesn't. What is it, Mrs. Ewing? Were you on the extension phone Monday when Larry Johns asked Rick Wendell for fifteen hundred dollars?"

Dave heard her draw a sharp breath.

He said, "That's why you called me —right? To tell me about it?"

"Yes," she said. "No."

"I can send Lieutenant Yoshiba," he offered.

She said flatly, "Where are you? I don't want to talk here."

"It's lunchtime," he said. "There's a place called the Chardash, near the Los Santos Theater. They make a standout gypsy goulash."

"I'm not hungry," she said, "but I'll be there."

 

CHAPTER 7

 

A campfire violin wept from a scratched record. Over a small, dark bar at the end of a shadowy room, a giant stein of German beer rippled in an electric sign. Dave sat on a stool with tubular metal legs that creaked and smoked a cigarette, drank gin and tonic, and talked to a stocky, middle-aged woman back of the bar. Sauces smeared her apron. Her round cheeks were flushed from stove heat. No other customers were in the place yet. She'd come out of the kitchen when the spring bell above the street door had jingled with his arrival.

"Monday night," he said. "She's a big old woman." He held out hands to measure Heather Wendell's bulk. "Big as a man. White hair. She cuts it short. It would have been around eight-thirty."

Round black eyes watched him, waiting.

"She'd have been with a small, dark man. Younger than she is. About forty. Black hair, combed forward." He stroked his own forehead. "Broken nose. Muscular." He made fists and revolved them in front of his chin. "A prize fighter, you understand? A boxer?"

"I understand," she said. "Yes, they here. I remember, because they order food and then do not eat. It make my husband angry." She smiled irony. "Not with them. Never with customer, no. But with us. Me. Son. Daughter-in-law. When people will not eat, he become always angry, my husband."

"They talked," Dave said.

"Only talk." She nodded and started for the kitchen swing door. "You will excuse? I am alone."

"Did they leave together?" Dave called.

"I am sorry?" There was a clatter of metal, a hiss of steam. There were gusts of good smells. She reappeared with a deep, heavy saucepan in her hands, a big steel spoon. "What —I am sorry—you ask?"

"Did they go out together?"

"At the same time," she said. "They do not wait even for check. My daughter-in-law had not time to add up. And no one was at cash register." She nodded at it, glinting in the shadows near the door. "They leave ten-dollar bill and they go out." She twitched a harried smile and turned away again. "Excuse?"

Dave nodded. "Thank you." He stubbed out his cigarette, drank from the tinkling mint-sprigged glass, and the bell over the door jangled again. Sea light streamed in from the street. A bony blond woman in tailored green linen stood in it. The door fell shut and she came to him through the gloom. Her eyes were like her brother's — almost yellow. Only hers had no warmth in them. Neither had her voice. She said, "You're mistaken that I wanted to keep things from you."

"Mrs. Ewing?" Dave got off the stool. "What will you drink?"

"I won't," she said, "thank you. The reason I called you, Mr. Brandstetter, was to tell you about Larry Johns. That what happened to him was his own doing and had nothing to do with Tom. Nothing."

"You mean the murder?"

She shook her head impatiently. "I don't know anything about that."

With a shrug, Dave tilted his head toward worn leather booths where unlit candles waited on checkered tablecloths. She hesitated, then went stiffly toward one in a corner. Taking his glass, he followed her, slid into the booth opposite her. "What is it you do know about?"

She laid a green handbag on the leather bench beside her, drew off green gloves and folded them on the bag. "I know he had visitors. Larry did."

Dave cocked an eyebrow. "At the beach house?"

"That morning. Monday. A man came, a big middle-aged man. In a dreadful purple satin shirt with embroidery. Cowboy outfit of some kind, I suppose. One of those LBJ hats. And the boots —tooled, you know? He needed a shave, his eyes were red. I didn't like the look of him. I don't approve of shouting in the house but I wouldn't have left him alone for a moment. Larry was with Tom." The corners of her mouth tightened bitterly. "I called his name and waited right there until he appeared. The man grinned all over his ugly face and spoke Larry's name and held out his hand but it was plain to me Larry had never seen him before. He approached with unmistakable caution."

Dave offered her a menu in a limp, fake leather folder. "What did he say?"

She shook her head at the menu. "I didn't wait to hear. I went to see if Tom needed anything. Oh." She lifted and let fall a hand. "I did hear a name. Joe May. No . . ." She frowned to herself. "A single word, I think. Jomay? Yes."

Dave took out his glasses, opened the folder, read the food-spotted mimeographed sheet inside it. "And what happened after that?"

Gail Ewing said, "They went out and walked on the dunes. Right away. Larry obviously wanted the man in the house no more than I did. I watched them. Tom hadn't needed anything. I went upstairs. They argued. It was plain from their gestures. The man kept shaking a finger in Larry's face. At one point they began shouting."

Dave pulled the glasses down his nose, looked at her over the top of the menu. "Shouting what?"

"I can't say. It upset the dogs and they were barking. It's impossible to hear anything once they begin." She drew breath. "Anyway, soon Larry followed the man out to the highway. Not, I'd say, willingly."

Dave set the menu back between the lightless candle chimney and glass salt and pepper shakers. "Out to the highway?"

"There was a camper parked there. Quite grimy. When they got near it, a girl stepped down out of the cab —a young woman. Larry stopped in his tracks. From that moment on, the only one who seemed to be talking was the man. He gesticulated a good deal. Then the girl went to the back of the camper and opened the door. At which point, Larry turned and started to walk off."

Dave tilted up the last of his drink. "Go on."

"Well, the man lunged after him and caught his arm. Larry jerked free and came running for the house. Out the plank driveway Tom had built over the dunes. The man took half a dozen steps, then stopped and just stood there with Larry's jacket sleeve in his hand. The girl climbed out of the camper. Backward. I'm sure there was someone inside, someone she was coaxing to come out. But then the man went and spoke to her and she got back into the camper and shut the door and in a minute he drove the thing away."

The stout woman loomed out of the brown dimness now, holding an order pad and pencil. She'd left the soiled apron someplace. Dave said to Gail Ewing, "Sure you won't eat?" and at her headshake ordered for himself. The stout woman picked up Dave's empty glass and went away. Dave said, "And that was when Larry Johns called Rick Wendell —right?"

"I don't know whom he called," she said sharply. "I heard him come into the house by the door from the carport. And when I got downstairs, he was using the kitchen phone. I suppose he'd heard me on the stairs. He lowered his voice. But it was obvious that he was upset and the call was urgent."

"You didn't hear him mention money?"

"I heard him say his own name," she answered. "That's all. He repeated it several times. As if giving it to someone who'd never heard it before. I didn't lurk. The dogs and the children had given the livingroom hard use on Sunday. I went to pick up. When Larry came out of the kitchen and saw me, he begged me not to tell Tom about the man who'd come to see him."

"And you didn't," Dave said. "Why?"

The yellow eyes went hard, the voice went hard. "Because he was in trouble and that was where I wanted him. Tom would only have rescued him. And I didn't want him rescued. I wanted him out."

"Which is also why you took the phone away from Tom when he saw the TV news and wanted to call a lawyer. And why you hung up on me when I phoned."

"People take advantage of Tom."

Dave's smile was thin. "Other people. Not you."

Her eyes widened, then narrowed. She said through clamped teeth, "What do you mean?"

"Why are we talking here? Why not at Tom Owens's house? At Tom Owens's bedside? Because you don't want him to know what you did to him. Not to Larry Johns —to him, your beloved brother."

She snatched up the gloves and purse. "I've never hurt Tom Owens in my life!" She slid out of the booth and stood, trembling. "Where do you think he'd be today if it weren't for me? You don't know him." Tears leaked down her face. Impatiently she knuckled them away. "He has no common sense, no sense of self-preservation. Without me to protect him —"

"Yes," Dave said. "He mentioned that. You've made a lot of decisions for him. That was a kind way of putting it. He strikes me as a kind man —taking you and Trudy in, supporting you all these years."

"He's very generous," she snapped.

"I'm not talking about nickels and dimes," Dave said. "I'm talking about sacrificing any life of his own. He told me he'd never brought anybody home before Larry Johns."

"He has too much respect for me, for his family." She tugged the gloves on, motions jerky. Her voice sulked. "He could have done as he pleased. I never interfered. He'd no right to accuse me of that."

"Did you give him any encouragement?"

"Suppose I had." She was scornful. "You've seen an example of his taste and judgment. You've seen what Larry Johns turned out to be."

"I don't think he's a killer," Dave said.

"The police don't agree with you. Nor do I."

"The police are busy. And you don't like the boy. Those don't impress me as sufficient reasons to lock him up for the rest of his life."

She dug keys out of her bag and looked at him. "And your reason for defending him? Isn't it the same as Tom's? You're another of those, aren't you?"

"I try not to let it get in the way of my work," Dave said. "Mrs. Ewing, Larry Johns was simply a catalyst. His phone call from your kitchen triggered a chain reaction that ended in a man's death." Dave pushed out of the booth and stood facing her. "If you'd told your brother what you've told me here today, it's possible that man might still be alive."

Her mouth worked but she didn't answer. She turned and marched out into the street glare. Dave used a scarred black pay phone screwed to the wall by the cash register. Yoshiba was still out. He went back to the booth and ate his goulash.

CHAPTER 8

 

Yoshiba said, "I checked you out." His hands were blocky like the rest of him. One of them shoved a bulging manila folder away from him on a crowded desktop. "With Ken Barker of the L.A.P.D. He votes for you. You're smart and you always win." He raked together a sprawl of ugly eight-by-tens —a half-naked female body dumped among ashcans—tamped their edges straight, set a telephone on them. He lifted a flat-nosed, expressionless face. "But to me you're a pain in the ass."

Dave shrugged. "You were the one who phoned me."

"Old lady Wendell wants me to post officers to keep you away from her place. Ace Kegan's lawyer wants me to get you off his back."

"Let me tell you about that pair."

When Dave had learned at the front desk that Yoshiba was back from lunch, he'd dropped coins into a glossy red machine in a tiled foyer under a Spanish dome and collected tall Cokes in flower-printed wax-paper cups. He set one of these in front of the Los Santos police lieutenant now, sat down, and told about Heather Wendell and Ace Kegan.

Yoshiba drank the Coke noisily and crunched the ice chips. He dragged down the knot of his tie and unbuttoned the collar constricting his thick neck. He turned shirt sleeves up bulging forearms. He swiveled his chair to frown at the window. It was already open. Sun glared off ranks of parked cars outside.

"All right, all right," he said.

"When they got to the house in the canyon, things went wrong. They didn't want him dead. They only wanted to shock him out of wrecking everything they had together. A confrontation. It ended in a fight and sudden death. Which was why Kegan went home and drank himself senseless —a man who doesn't drink."

Yoshiba's blunt thumbnail peeled curls of wax off his cup. "And that call from Owens's kitchen —it was to the bar? And he gave Kegan his name?"

"And Kegan's lying. He knew that name. He told me himself Wendell was a loose talker. He'd told Kegan about Johns. Certainly Wendell and Johns weren't strangers meeting for the first time that night."

"So Kegan smelled trouble, the same old kind, right? And checked the bank on a hunch and learned about the fifteen hundred. Why didn't he tell Mrs. Wendell?"

"Maybe he didn't have to," Dave said. "Maybe she knew it first and told him."

Yoshiba shook his head. "No good. She'd have mentioned robbery to me."

"Why? Johns obviously didn't have the money. It would have messed up a simple case and put her and Kegan in the middle. She was careless, leaving that empty envelope there. But no more careless than you were."

Something glinted in Yoshiba's black eyes. "I wasn't trying to save my company twenty-five big bills." He shook his head. "It's frail, Brandstetter. I mean, it's abnormal psychology, for Christ sake. I've got a suspect locked in. What do I need with abnormal psychology?

I'm working sixteen hours a day now." He lifted and dropped the heavy manila folder. "This is new today. This whole stack. The gun was in the kid's hand."

"But your own lab says he didn't fire it."

"Hoo." Yoshiba blew out air and stood up. "You've only got the Ewing woman's word for the phone call. And she didn't hear anything about money. That could have been exactly like Kegan told it —to buy hot furniture off a truck."

"To revamp an already revamped bar?" Dave said. "Let's ask the boy."

"Impossible," Yoshiba said. "The D.A. —"

Dave stood up. "Owens didn't get him a lawyer, so what he's got is the public defender, right? Down the hall? What's the P.D.'s name? He'll go for this, if you won't."

"Khazoyan is his name." Yoshiba leaned out the window and drew deep breaths. He pulled his head in. "Sure, he'll go for it. A lawyer with a client who won't even talk to him? He'll kiss you on both cheeks. But you have to jump over the D.A. first."

"Not if you don't tell him," Dave said.

"You want a lot for a Coke," Yoshiba said. But he grinned.

Khazoyan's hair was silken and thinning. He was olive-skinned, had a thick, high-bridged nose and sunken cheeks. He slouched in a fake-leather swivel chair like Yoshiba's, with his feet on a desk stacked higher with paper than Yoshiba's. He wore new blunt-toed shoes with one-inch soles and two-inch heels. His shirt was lace. He ate a corned-beef sandwich on rye bread that was disintegrating. He licked mayonnaise and mustard from thin fingers and stretched a tired arm for a paper cup of coffee on his desk. His eyes were brown, bulging and luminous. His voice was tired as his motions, weak, high and hoarse. Above a very wide knotted necktie his larynx jumped as if it were trying to escape.

"Yeah, it sounds important. He won't tell you, though. He won't tell anybody anything. He must have been jolted out of his mind — always supposing he's got a mind —when that old woman walked in on him. Otherwise he'd never have told her his name. He sure as hell never told anyone else. She told Yoshiba. For all the kid said, she could have made it up. If it weren't for his driver's license, I wouldn't believe it."

"He also has a local habitation," Dave said, "and a history. Those people in the camper are part of it. Which also makes them part of his future."

"Metaphysics." Khazoyan worked black brows, pushed the last bite of sandwich into his mouth, got his feet down off the desk. He sat forward and, while he chewed, wiped his hands on a meager paper napkin. He drained off the rest of his coffee, dropped the balled napkin into the cup, let the cup fall under the desk, where a metal wastebasket clanked. He got to his feet. "Okay." A jacket with tiny flowers stitched into the weave lay over the back of a metal chair. He pulled it on. "Let's give it a try." He opened the door into the hall.

Larry Johns said, "The sarape and the hat. They're Tom's. Will you take them back to him?"

When Dave had described the boy to Ace Kegan, he'd only seen a police photograph, read a police description. Johns was slighter than Bobby Reich. He looked frail, seated in faded Levi's and wilted T-shirt and scuffed cowboy boots on a stiff chair in a bare white room. He faced Dave and Khazoyan across an empty table. His long, straw-color hair was snarled. There was patchy beard stubble at the point of his chin. His eyes looked bruised.

Dave told him, "Maybe you can take them back to him yourself soon. Why did you wear them?"

"That son of a bitch Huncie tore the sleeve off my windbreaker," Johns said. "Tom bought me a suit but you don't hustle Johns in a suit. And it's cold at the beach at night. I had to wear something. Besides —" But he moved a hand instead of finishing the sentence.

"Yes?" Dave said. "The hat?"

The boy sat forward, looked at the square red tiles of the floor, moved his thin shoulders, mumbled, "I wanted to wear something of his. I wasn't leaving. I just had to get some bread fast, that was all." He looked up. "I'd never leave Tom. Tom's the best thing that ever happened to me." The blue eyes were miserably earnest. "He liked that sarape and that hat. I don't know —it made me feel like I wasn't really going anyplace."

"But you were," Dave said. "Who saw you?"

"Nobody. Tom was asleep. Doped. He took pills when the itching got too bad —you know, his legs, those casts. There's stairs up to the deck, around the corner from his room. I left that way."

"And waited on the coast road for Wendell?"

"He was there. He said eight and I was a minute late."

"I'd like an explanation," Dave said.

The blue eyes turned reproachful. They looked guardedly at Khazoyan, who was using a yellow pencil on a long yellow pad, then back at Dave. "He said he'd give me the money I needed."

"Fifteen hundred dollars," Dave said. "For what? And why Wendell? Why not Owens? He was your friend."

The boy's face closed. "I couldn't ask him for money. Not Tom. What we had wasn't like that."

"So he told me," Dave said. "But that's not all of it, is it? You didn't want him to know what the money was for. You were afraid to tell him."

Khazoyan stopped writing and lifted his head.

The boy looked at him, at Dave. Unhappier than he'd looked till now. He got out of the chair and stood at the window, back to them. He said, "Yeah. Okay. You're right. Well, Jesus." He turned back, hands held out. "It was for child-support payments. To my ex-wife."

Dave half smiled. "What had you told Owens you were —a virgin?"

"No, but —Tom's got high standards. I'd run out on my responsibilities—right? Anyway, I'm living off him. What am I supposed to do—lay a wife and baby on him too?"

"The girl in the camper," Dave said.

"Jomay," Johns said sourly. "And BB. She dragged BB all the way here. To show me how big she is now. That was when I took off. If I wanted to know how big she was, for Christ sake, I knew where to find her. That creep Huncie. Jomay'd never have found me by herself."

"Huncie?" Khazoyan wondered.

" 'Uncle' Dwayne Huncie," Johns said disgustedly. "The turnip-nosed old son of a bitch. He's running a game. Calls himself a lawyer. Specializes in tracking down husbands that skip. But I'll bet he takes most of what he collects. Fees, you know? Plus which I bet he lays her every chance he gets, in that camper."

"Only this time he didn't collect," Khazoyan said.

"He would have. He leaned hard. And what could I do? I owed it. Jomay's old lady owns three beauty parlors. She didn't need it. But the judge said I had to pay it. So I thought of Rick and I promised Huncie I'd have the bread for him next morning. He'd have braced Tom for it otherwise. I told him there was some other dude who said he'd give me money anytime I asked. I'd get it from him."

"Did you give him Wendell's name?" Dave asked.

"I had to," Johns said. "Huncie's a mean bastard. He wasn't buying anything vague. Didn't trust me. He wanted to know exactly who and how and when."

"Did you give him Wendell's address?"

"I didn't know it then —only the bar. I gave him the name of the bar—The Hang Ten."

"The home address is in the phone book," Khazoyan said wearily. "So you told this Huncie character where you were going to get his fifteen hundred dollars."

"How did you know Wendell would come through?" Dave asked. "That's a lot of money."

Johns eyed him bleakly. "It's what he told me. The one time we made it. He took me home from The Hang Ten. Afterward he said if I'd keep doing it with him, he'd give me anything I wanted. I said I wasn't ready. Anytime, he said. All I had to do was ask. So —" He watched Khazoyan take out cigarettes, light one, put the pack away, start writing again, squinting an eye against the smoke from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Dave held out his pack to Johns. The boy took a cigarette, tried for a smile and missed.

"So?" Dave snapped the lighter for him.

Johns said dully, "So I asked." He lit the cigarette, took it from his mouth and looked at it. "Thanks."

"You telephoned the bar first," Dave said.

The door opened behind him. Johns looked over Dave's head but he answered, "He wasn't there yet. Gail keeps all the clocks set fast. Ten minutes. I kept forgetting. So I phoned his house. Rick's."

"Who answered?" Yoshiba asked from the doorway. Down the hall back of him a child was crying.

"His mother," Johns said.

Dave and Khazoyan spoke together and stopped.

The door clicked shut and Yoshiba stood at Dave's elbow. "Did you give her your name?"

"Sure," Johns said. "She asked. Why not?"

"You never gave us your name." Yoshiba swung a thick thigh onto a corner of the table. "You opened up to her. Did you tell her what you wanted with her son?"

"Watch that," Khazoyan said to his tablet.

"Forget it," Yoshiba said.

"I didn't tell her anything," Johns said. "I told Rick when he got on the phone. He was cheered up. Wow! I felt like a shit. Because I wasn't going to stay with him. I was going to do it that night and take the bread and he wasn't ever going to see me again."

"That worked out," Yoshiba said.

Johns gave him a disgusted look. He said to Dave, "But I was in a bind. What could I do? I don't mean I wasn't going to pay him back. I'd have paid him back."

"All right," Yoshiba cut in. "He gave you the money. What did you do with it? Shove it up your ass?"

"Watch that," Khazoyan droned again.

"He showed it to me when we got there," Johns said hotly. "He opened the envelope and showed it to me. In twenties, all neat, with those paper bands around the bundles, you know? That was what Huncie asked for —cash, small bills. So Rick got it that way. New twenty-dollar bills. You can tell Huncie is crooked. Who asks for money in cash, you know? That much money? Why not a check made out to Jomay? I mean, it's her bread, right? By the law—every second word Huncie says is 'law'—it's Jomay's money. And BB's."

"Beebee?" Yoshiba looked and sounded blank. "The baby. She's eighteen months old."

Yoshiba said, "He wanted you to make child payments —this Huncie?"

Khazoyan in his hoarse high voice gave the lieutenant the facts. Yoshiba said, "Good grief."

Dave said gently, "He showed you the money? Took it out of the envelope, then put it back? What?"

"Well" —Johns squirmed on the chair, his tired young face flushing —"he had his mind on"—thin fingers tugged at the straggly mustache —"on what he brought me there for. I mean, the money wasn't going anyplace."

"It went," Khazoyan said. "You didn't notice it was missing when you came out of the bedroom?"

"With him laying there on the floor with blood pouring out of his chest?" Johns frowned. "Was it missing?"

"It still is," Khazoyan said.

Dave said, "Huncie told you to deliver the money Tuesday morning. To him. Where?"

"He was coming back for it. To Tom's, the beach house. Ten o'clock."

Dave pushed his chair back. The worn rubber leg tips stuttered on the tiles. He stood up, touched Yoshiba's bulky shoulder. "May I use your phone?"

"Help yourself," Yoshiba said. And to Johns, "How come you open up today? I'm a nice fellow. What is it —you don't trust Orientals? Why cover up all this time and break out for him?"

"I was trying to protect Tom," Johns said. "Now that doesn't mean anything. He found out about Tom."

Tom Owens answered the phone. The barking of the dogs echoed off the hard inlets and tall groins of the wooden house. "Gail isn't here," he said, "but I've been trying to reach you. Shall we say frantically? There's a girl here, young woman. Claims she's Larry's wife, ex-wife. She's got a baby with her. Says it's Larry's. She says he was going to get money for her —money he owed her. Court-ordered. Fifteen hundred dollars."

"I've been talking to him," Dave said. "I know."

"There was some man," Owens said, "helping her."

"Dwayne Huncie," Dave said. "Is he there?"

"No. Wait a minute. I'll put the girl on."

When Dave walked back into the interrogation room, Yoshiba was sitting on the floor, clasping thick knees in thick arms, his back against the wall, and staring up from that bland moon face of his at Larry Johns, still on the chair. Dave told him:

"You might put out an all-points bulletin for a camper with Texas license plates, registered to Dwayne Huncie."

"He'll be back in Texas," Yoshiba protested. "It will take a month and letters from two governors to get him back here. What are you trying to say —that this Huncie walked in and picked up the money while Johns and Wendell were doing it in the next room?"

Dave looked at Johns. "Did you hear anything?"

"Before what I told the cops? Well, yeah. Yeah." He sat straight, excited. "I heard something. I said, 'What's that? Somebody's out there.' Rick just said for me to stop being so nervous and relax. So I did. But the next time, he heard it too. And we both knew somebody was out there. And he went out to see. And that was when I heard voices and the gun went off."

"How long after the first time?" Yoshiba asked.

"Aw, hell." The frail shoulders lifted and fell. He'd smoked the cigarette down short. He leaned to snub it out in the chipped ashtray on the table. "I wasn't exactly looking at my watch right then. Five minutes?"

Yoshiba stood up. "So Huncie came after the kid here to make sure of getting the money and Wendell came out and caught him and tried to stop him with the gun and Huncie turned it on him?"

"Huncie can tell you," Dave said. "Find Huncie."

"Even if we got extradition," Yoshiba said, "it would cost a bundle to get him here —jet fares for him and two guards. This is a small town, Brandstetter."

Dave shook his head. "Huncie has a brother in Saugus. He'd spoken of going there."

"Spoken? Who to? Who did you just telephone?"

"Tom Owens. Jomay Johns is at his house. Now."

Larry Johns groaned and held his head.

Dave said, "Monday night, Huncie picked her and the baby up at a theater where he'd parked them. About eleven. They went to a MacDonald's. He'd been crying about being broke but that night he peeled a twenty-dollar bill off a big fat roll and gave it to her to pay for their hamburgers. Then he excused himself to go to the men's room. And never came back."