"I'll put out the APB." Yoshiba went to the door. "But only for California."

"It was an Indian Head camper," Larry Johns said. "On an old orange Chevy pickup with a smashed headlight."

Yoshiba opened the door. "License number?"

"You're kidding," the boy said. Yoshiba grunted and left. The boy looked at Dave with tear-filled eyes. "You're really something else," he said. "You're going to get me out of this."

"Don't count on it," Dave said. "Not yet."

Outside in the corridor, a knee-high child bumped into him. It wore a T-shirt with orange juice stains and little Levi's that looked ready to fall off. A fist held a grubby string. The string dragged a yellow wooden duck. On its side. Dave crouched and set it on its red wooden wheels. The child went off down the hall without any change of expression. The duck's head turned around as it traveled. The wheels made a clacking sound and a small bell jingled.

Dave was watching it and laughing to himself when a door opened near the end of the hall. Vern Taylor came out in his nice new sneakers. He didn't look Dave's way. He went ahead of the child toward open doors at the end of the corridor. He went out the doors down a walk between hibiscus bushes with flowers red as his wind-breaker jacket. He went off up a sunlit street.

Dave thought he wanted to look at the door, parole was lettered on its fogged glass. That was interesting. He hadn't expected anything interesting from Vern Taylor. He went inside. A woman with faded red hair worked an electric typewriter at a desk off the same assembly line as Yoshiba's and Khazoyan's, even to the piled-up papers. She bent her head and looked at him over wire-rimmed goggles she'd pulled down on a long, thin nose. Her eyebrows asked what he wanted.

He laid down a card. "The P.O. handling Vern Taylor?" The offices were boxed off by partitions, wood below, frosted glass above. The one the woman nodded him to was big enough for what it held and no more—a file cabinet, a desk, two chairs. And a small man who looked no heavier than the weight of his bones, there was so little but bones to him. He pushed a manila folder into a file drawer, rolled the drawer shut, turned. And jerked his bald head in surprise. "Dave Brandstetter! Long time."

He came around the desk, smiling, holding out a hand. Dave shook it carefully. It felt fragile. "Years," he said. "So this is where they stuck you."

The man's name was Squire. It had been a couple of decades since Dave had begun asking him questions. He made a wry face. "I asked for it. Thought it would be different from L.A. It's the same." He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk. "Probably be the same anyplace. Sit down. You like coffee or something?" He started to get up again.

Dave shook his head and dropped onto the other chair. "What I'd like is what I always like from you. Information that's none of my business. I just saw Vern Taylor walk out of here. Why?"

"He'll be walking in and out of here every week for the next two years. I'm not sure it'll be enough. On the record, he needs a keeper." Squire took the folder out of the cabinet again and sat down again. "He just came out of Chino." Squire opened the folder, put on dime-store reading glasses, the kind with lenses like dry half moons, leaned forward, blinking while he leafed over the papers the folder held. "Ah, it's pathetic. Felonies, yeah, but 288.A, for Christ sake." The number was from the California Penal Code. It stood for oral copulation. "Plus 290." That meant failure to register as a sex offender. "Because his record goes back. A long time." He took the glasses off. "You want it all?"

"I don't know why," Dave said. "But yes, if you're not too busy. I'm into a case that's like a jigsaw too many little kids have fooled with on too many rainy Sunday afternoons. Half the pieces are missing. Taylor probably isn't one of them. I can't see where he'd fit but he is underfoot. Let's hear it."

Squire put the glasses back on, peered at the papers again, drew a deep breath and let it out windily. "Okay. He's been in sex scrapes starting twelve, fifteen years ago. Parks, bus station men's rooms, the old familiar places. The Astor Bar on Main Street. Always 647.A." It was the code, for solicitation to commit a lewd act. "Misdemeanors, right? You pay a little fine and walk out after a night in the slams. But if your employer learns about it you can lose out. He had a good job. Civil service. Second bust, they found out and shed him."

"Drafting," Dave said.

Squire's mild eyes peered at him over the glasses. "You know all this?"

"Almost none of it," Dave said. "Go on."

"By not mentioning his arrest record and because nobody checked, he got on with a private building contractor. Three more arrests. Somehow he kept it from them. But on number four some bastard in the Department made sure they heard all about it."

"Friendly," Dave said.

"Well, Christ," Squire said. "Taylor had to know it was a losing game. Didn't he? Dave, what the hell is the matter with those people?"

"They're crazy," Dave said. "Like the rest of us."

"Not like the rest of us," Squire said, "or there wouldn't be laws against it." He sighed and picked up the papers again. "Then, believe it or not, he tried teaching. No shit. Summer term, high school. I doubt they'd ever have found out except a bar was raided. The Black Cat, on Sunset. You remember that?"

"How many arrests did they make that night? Twenty?"

"And all the names got in the papers," Squire said. "Which put an end to his teaching career. And respectability, if that's the word. The next arrest was a 647.B."

"Prostitution?" Dave said.

"I guess he still looked young," Squire said. "Anyway, he was living off it. If you call a room at the Ricketts Hotel living." The place was six sagging stories of dingy brick standing to its knees in a wash of greasy neon on Los Angeles's skid row. "He'd score in the Astor downstairs and take the Johns up to the room. Only one night he chose the wrong trick. A vice squad officer."

"A felony," Dave said. "What did he draw?"

"That woman lawyer, the one with the two Persian cats she always took into court on silver chains," Squire said. "She bargained him out. But it cost him."

"The Duchess," Dave said. "Those Pershing Square faggots worshiped her and she exploited them down to their last rhinestone. We should all have friends like May Sweeny."

"So he tried for a real job again. Through one of those gay social service agencies. They put him in a candy factory run by two old aunties who didn't give a damn about his record. But they only paid a buck an hour."

"I know the place," Dave said. "And how privileged the boys feel. So how did he end in Chino? When?"

"A year ago last December," Squire said. "Christmas Eve, God help us. They busted him on 288.A. In an alley doorway back of a garment place on Broadway. In the rain. Oral copulation in the rain, no less. He came up before Judge Macander and you know what happened. Macander read his record"—Squire rattled the typed sheet at Dave—"and gave him five years and a thousand dollars."

"And he just got out?" Dave asked.

"About a month ago," Squire said. "Back to the Ricketts but not for long. He changed bases and he's in Surf, so I inherited him."

"Macander wanted jail to straighten him out," Dave said. "Forty years of disappointments haven't dimmed his faith in jails. Did it work?"

Squire shut the folder and got up to put it away again and to shut the file drawer. "He thinks it was bad luck. All his life it's been bad luck. Not bad judgment, not stupidity, not failure to learn from life. Just bad luck."

"Yup." Dave rose. "If he'd been born rich, none of it would have happened, right?"

Squire dropped the dime-store glasses on the desk. "You've talked to him. You didn't need all this."

"I guess not," Dave said. "I don't know what to do with it." He went to the office door. "Come on, let me buy you a drink."

"Like old times," Squire said, and came with him.

CHAPTER 9

 

A square package stood on his desk. Brown paper. Twine. It was alone there. He kept the desktop empty. It was a good-looking desk that he'd hunted a long time to find. Slabs of oiled teak hung in a brushed steel frame. Door whispering shut behind him, he frowned and went grimly down the long, cold room. He kept the thermostat low. Somebody had asked him once, "What do you do—hang beef in here?" Doug, he supposed. Doug had accused him before and since of subnormal warmth.

He put on his horn rims and picked up the package. The label was neatly lettered but without a return address. He held it to his ear. Nothing ticked inside. But maybe this one wasn't meant to tick. Maybe opening it was what would trigger it. He dropped into a saddle leather chair that turned its back to a glass wall that showed blank blue sky, a lone helicopter. Out of a deep drawer he lifted his phone but he didn't dial. His father came in.

Carl Brandstetter was a straight, ruddy man of sixty-five with handsome white hair, blue eyes and an expensive tailor. He turned back to say something out the door, let it fall shut, nodded to Dave and walked to a cabinet where liquor, ice, glasses hid themselves behind insulated steel finished to look like wood. He bent to open doors and take out bottles. "Go on with your call."

"It can wait." Dave stood. "What did the doctor tell you?"

"To stop smoking." Carl Brandstetter snorted, dropped miniature ice cubes into a pitcher of thick Danish crystal. "And drinking." He measured gin with a squat glass jigger. "And working." He measured vermouth, set the bottles back, found ajar of stuffed olives, shut the door. "And sex." From the snowy little cave that was the freezer compartment he took stem glasses and dropped an olive into each.

Dave said, "That doesn't leave you many options."

"Backgammon." His father moved the crowded ice with a glass rod. "At the senior citizen center. And a little light shuffleboard, maybe once a week." He poured from the pitcher, turned, smiling, holding out a frost-crusted glass to Dave. "But no tournaments. Nothing to work up the adrenaline."

"Heart?" Dave took the glass, tasted the drink.

"It appears to be broken." Carl Brandstetter sat in a white goat-hide chair and placed his glass on a low glass-and-steel table where an Aztec metate—rough gray stone on three legs—was the ashtray. "That would give some women in this city a laugh."

"It was always their hearts," Dave said. There had been nine of them, if you included only wives. Carl Brandstetter wasn't a collector —he was a discarder. Dave watched him start a cigarette with a gold lighter that for shape and incising matched his cuff links. "You're smoking. You're drinking."

The older man said, "I feel fine. When I'm dead I'll no doubt think giving it up would have been worth it. Right now, it's unreal. The sun is shining. I have a lovely and devoted young wife who will stop in the Bentley shortly to drive me to dinner at—"

"The women," Dave said, "it won't matter a damn to. It will matter to me."

The board chairman of Medallion Life raised white brows. "Sentimentality? From you?"

"Just fact," Dave said. "Why not cut down a little?"

"What's in the package?" his father wondered.

Dave sipped his drink. "Do we own a metal detector?"

"Not that I know of. Why?" Carl Brandstetter rose, hefted the parcel, read the label. "Hmm. Anonymous."

"It's possible somebody would like me dead," Dave told him. "It's happened before—remember?"

"On this Wendell matter?" Carl Brandstetter set down the box, went to pick up his glass. "I'm told there's been static. The mother is turning attorneys loose on us. The business partner wants you fired."

"I'm still not sure those two didn't kill him." Dave lit a cigarette, sat on a desk corner, spelled out his reasons. "But there are new characters in the drama. A little ex-wife from Texas. The suspect's. Her baby and her backwoods lawyer, demanding fifteen hundred dollars in delinquent child-support payments."

He went on with that part of the story while Carl Brandstetter took a gold penknife from a pocket and cut the twine on the package. He folded back the brown paper. More twine bound the carton inside. He cut this too, folded the knife blade with a click, put the knife away. He grinned at Dave.

"You don't want to leave the room?" Dave said, "You never did have any imagination."

"You've got enough for both of us," his father said. "The Johns boy killed him. It's more obvious now than before. The fifteen hundred dollars was the motive."

"He didn't get it," Dave said.

"Who did?"

"I'd suggest you ask the first police officer on the scene. They're badly paid."

Carl Brandstetter opened the flaps of the carton and pulled out fistfuls of shredded paper. Dave leaned to look inside. What rested there was a handsome pot in brown and black glazes. A three-inch envelope gleamed in the bottom of the pot. He thumbed it open, slid out a linen-finish card. With half my love—Kovaks.

His father was watching him quizzically. Dave handed him the card. "Half?" Carl Brandstetter asked.

"The other half is for Doug," Dave said.

His father grimaced and handed back the card. "You should get out of that life." He went back to the goat-hair chair, walking heavily, sitting heavily. Magazines lay on the table, three issues of Apollo, large and thick and glossy. He leafed one over. Dave glimpsed Queen Anne legs, broken-faced Greek marbles, plummy 1890s English genre paintings. Carl Brandstetter said without looking up, "You plan to go free lance when I die, I hope. Because you know the board will fire you. And why."

Dave shrugged. "I like the job," he said. "But I feel about it the way you feel about your heart. I'm not ready to give up my sex life for it."

When he opened the palsied aluminum screen door of Sawyer's Pet Shop, small birds flew up like scraps of colored paper in the window. The window was backed by wire mesh. The space made a flight cage for parakeets and finches. There were crooked stick perches, little wooden ladders, hanging gourds, hollowed out and gaily painted. The sheet-metal floor was graveled, strewn with grain and dried corn. Button quail pecked there.

Along one wall of the shop bubbled aquariums filled with wavery green light and the dim dream dartings of improbable fish. Along the other wall shelves held cans of dog food, boxes of birdseed, cuttlebone, catnip, spray-can deodorants and mange cures. Wire racks on swivels were hung with plastic-bagged sticks and knots of hide for dogs to chew, rubber bones, flannel mice, collars rhinestoned, studded, belled, bright leashes of dyed leather, glittering chain leashes. Shiny new cages hung from the ceiling. Cat pans in gaudy molded plastic were stacked on the floor between dog baskets and heaps of heavy printed paper sacks of cat sand and kibble.

Canaries sang. The little parrots and finches kept up a shrill clamor. Kittens mewed. Pups whined. Gerbils ran in squeaky wheels. Tiny spotted mice pirouetted in the sawdust of glass boxes. Cavies hopped over the backs of stony gopher tortoises munching trampled lettuce.

Doug Sawyer punched a cash register, blinked at Dave, and went on talking with a woman in pants and hair curlers who held by its leather handle a cat carrier of new plywood and bright screen.

Doug's little mother, in her flowered smock, peered with her one bright bird eye from the back room. A brown-and-white young rabbit was cradled in her arm. Her free hand held a medicine dropper. She gave Dave a smile of bright false teeth and lifted her chin, summoning him. The back room smelled of wood shavings and alfalfa. Tarnished cages went up the walls—parrots, monkeys, a hunched and scraggly raven, a cross-eyed Siamese cat who paced.

"I hope you can forgive me," Belle Sawyer said. She kept a hot plate on a shelf and a glass pot of water always simmered for coffee. Bottles of instant mix and powdered cream substitute and a box of cube sugar grew dusty there. A small pan with some glutinous carroty substance covered the second burner now. Into this the pet shop woman dipped the medicine dropper, filled it, edged its tip in at a corner of the young rabbit's mouth. The brown nose twitched. The plush little body struggled. "I'm always keeping Doug." The thick glasses glittered up at Dave. One lens had white cloth neatly pasted inside it. She'd lost an eye to a hawk's talon years ago. "He can't get on with his own life at all. I hope you know I don't mean it." She rubbed the rabbit's fur throat, smiled satisfaction when it swallowed, and murmured comfort to it.

"Maybe it's over for a while now. It's my circulation. Old age. Too many years on my feet here, I suppose. Whatever, the veins don't let the blood through to my brain." She filled the dropper again and gently squeezed the liquid into the rabbit's mouth. It shook its ears. They made sounds like big moth wings. "There, that's enough for now." She bent, dropped it into a cage, where it crouched in shavings and shredded paper. She clicked the wire door shut. There was a stained and meager sink with a steel tap. The plumbing shuddered when she turned it on to rinse the medicine dropper. „ "Coffee?" She didn't wait for his answer. She used a cracked plastic spoon to dip brown powder into a plastic mug. Pouring in water, she said, "It's so maddening, because it all seems quite serious and normal when I'm going through it. I was President this week—I expect Doug told you. And I really did issue orders, stacks of them, that everything was to be 'all right.' Can you imagine?" She clicked the spoon busily in the mug and handed it to Dave. Her bright eye mocked. "I felt so confident, so secure. I haven't felt that way since Mr. Sawyer was alive." Her mouth turned down in a wry smile. "But of course it was all a delusion. Even the Capitol at Mount Rushmore. You know, where the Presidents are carved in the mountain?"

"The Black Hills." Dave blew at his sudsy coffee.

"That's it." She nodded. "I'd moved the government to the Black Hills. For safety. The coasts are sinking into the sea." She laughed.

"Aren't they?"

"Hold the thought."

Dave lit a cigarette. "But it goes away?"

"Exactly like a dream," she said. "I'm nervous, of course. I must have mailed those presidential orders. I don't have the least idea to whom. I hope I simply made up names and addresses but it seems to me one went to the Queen of England. Dr. Simpson says I probably didn't stamp them—a President doesn't have to. Heavens! The Black Hills. I've never even been there!"

Doug stood in the doorway. "She's okay," he said.

"Looks that way," Dave said. "That's good."

"I'll be all right now." But her chirpiness didn't last. "Oh, dear. I've said that before, haven't I?"

Doug said, "Don't worry about it. That's the main thing. It's not your fault. And it's not hurting anybody, right?" He put an arm around her shoulders, kissed her frizzy dandelion hair. "Whoo! Glover's dog soap!" He wrinkled his nose, rubbed it with the back of a hand.

"You know that's what I've always used. Made you use it too, when you were little enough for me to boss you."

"They barked at me in third grade," Doug said.

"Nonsense," she said. "It's a good, clean smell. And it's very healthy for the hair."

Doug looked at his watch and at Dave. "Four forty-five. You want to finish that?"

"There's no need," Belle Sawyer said. "I know it's terrible stuff." She reached for the mug and Dave let her take it because she was right, it was terrible.

Doug crouched by the rabbit cage. "How's he doing?"

"Who can say? They're so delicate." She touched his shoulder. "You run along. I'll close up. I feel absolutely sane." She smiled at Dave. "It's not as much fun as being President." She frowned to herself. "I don't think I even had a Congress. Just me, in the oval office, signing orders. And everything was going to be just fine."

They left her standing in the shop doorway, a small hand lifted, and smiling wistfully at nothing.

The stereo components sat on the bare floor in the big, empty front room. From them echoed the heartbreak of the Haydn Symphony 93 largo cantabile. The old gent had been homesick in the London of 1791 and mocked his loneliness with that wry bassoon honk at the end. Dave smiled at it when he came out of the shower and shrugged into his terry-cloth robe. He lit a cigarette, picked up from the floor beside the bed this week's New York Review and headed for the kitchen. Before he got there, the whine of the blender motor cut through the music. Wincing, he walked into the good onion, garlic, fried chicken smells of the high, tiled room.

"You like pottle a la mexicaine?" Doug, in a faded denim happy coat, mop of gray hair still wet from his shower, went to the refrigerator. "Then don't make faces. I have to puree the pimientos."             Dave eyed the little orange-pink storm in the jar atop the infernal machine with its row of color-coded push buttons. "That's pureeing?"

"Among us twentieth-century types." Doug handed him a martini. "It'll be over in just a minute."

Dave grunted, took the martini and, with the paper tucked under his arm, wandered out to crank the painty old latch of the twin French doors to the roof deck. He shouldered them open and started for the redwood chaise, chair, table in the big leaf shadows of the rubber trees. He stopped. At the far end of the deck, something glared in the downing sunlight. Squinting, he went toward it. It was square, about four feet high, maybe a yard wide, forty inches deep—pale brick sheathed in shiny plate steel, a rectangular opening in the top, steel doors in the front, stumps of lead pipe at the side.

Around this were piled cartons full of big Mason jars, labeled with chemical names, holding colored powders. There was a gathering of plastic trash barrels in dull green dribbled with duller gray. Slip was what they'd held, liquid pottery clay. Under a shelter built of four-by-fours and roofed with rippled sheets of hard opalescent plastic, where plank shelves were meant for potted plants—a project he and Doug hadn't got to yet—terra-cotta-colored molds for pots and jars waited beside a clay-crusty potter's wheel with a little electric motor under it, trailing a cracked rubber coated cord.

Dave blinked, frowned, worked his teeth together gently. He drank the martini, slowly, smoked the cigarette down. He took it to the ashtray on the table to crush it out. Leaving the paper but taking his empty glass, he went back into the apartment, back into the kitchen. He said very mildly, "Doug?"

Doug, at the stove, wiped sweat from his face with his sleeve. "Something wrong?"

"What does a potter's kiln look like?"

"Kind of like an oven." Doug reached down a can of chicken broth from a cupboard shelf. The electric can opener sang and danced with it. "Brick, I think. Why?"

"There's one on the roof deck." Dave opened the fridge and refilled his glass. Doug's stood cradling a drying olive on the tile counter next to the stove. He floated the olive again and put the pitcher back. "At least I think so. Whatever it is, it must weigh a ton."

Doug emptied the gold-lumped broth into the skillet, where it sizzled gently. He poured in the pimiento puree. "On our roof deck?"

"Yonder." Dave pointed. "You didn't know?"

"How would I know? I've been away since eight-thirty this morning. I hope that old idiot in the bicycle shop is more alert than he looks. I told him to keep an eye on her and let me know." Doug spooned into the skillet yellow-green powder from a small jar. Cumin. He opened his eyes at Dave. "You think I put it there?"

"We both know who put it there," Dave said. "I just had a laughable idea that he might have asked permission. But of course that's ridiculous."

Doug carried the cumin jar and the spoon out of the kitchen, out' the French doors, and down the deck. He stopped, shook his head, said something about merde.

"He didn't have permission?" Dave asked. "Of course not."

Doug touched the pale brick, the steel sheathing. "My God, how do you suppose he got it up here? Look at the thing."

"At least a ton," Dave said. "And he's moved his whole shop here with it—molds, wheel, clay, the works."

"It was default," Doug said suddenly. "He told me, Dave. I thought it was fact. It wasn't fact, it was a warning, only I was too dense to take it in. The place where he had his shop is being torn down. Some old warehouse in east Santa Monica. He had to get out."

"Fine," Dave said, "but he didn't ask—"

"If he'd asked, I'd have asked you," Doug said.

Dave eyed him. "But you'd have considered it."

"Maybe." Doug shrugged. "I don't know. It never crossed my mind." He smiled, touched Dave's face. "What do you think? I don't want Kovaks. I like his work is all. We've been over that."

"He intends to stay," Dave said.

"Well, I guess it wouldn't hurt, would it? I mean, if he wants to work here, there's plenty of space."                                                  

"You tell him he can work here, and next week he'll be living here. That's all it's about." Dave went back into the hollow rooms, into the shimmer of Haydn's strings, and fetched the pot in its carton from where he'd set it down at the stairhead. Doug was in the kitchen again,  Dave showed him the carton, the pot, the card. "The lunatic wants to sleep between us."                                                                         

"I guess so." Doug frowned while he used a long-handled wooden spoon to move the chunks of chicken around in the thick pale-red sauce with its snippets of green pepper. "I got one too. Yesterday. It came with the rest of the gallery packages. By United Parcel."

"Same card, right?" Dave asked.

"Same card." Kovaks showed his beautiful teeth in the kitchen doorway. "Am I in time for a drink? I'm pooped." He wore dirty white duck shorts. A dirty white yachting cap was stuck on the back of his bushy hair. Sweat greased his pale skin. He held out grimy hands. "Why aren't you cheering?"

"How long did it take to get that kiln up here?"

"Over four hours, a power winch, and three hairy hardhats. Tell you the truth, I didn't think we'd get done before you showed up. They weren't expensive enough. They kept stopping for beers."

"Let me guess," Dave said, "Paying them took your last dime, correct?"

"Absolutely correct. You're uncanny." Kovaks found the martini pitcher in the refrigerator and a frosty glass in the freezer compartment. He filled the glass. "I don't know where I'd have turned to if it wasn't for friends like you."

"Help yourself to a drink," Dave said. "Make yourself right at home. But you look tired and hot. Wouldn't you like a shower? Sure, you would."

Kovaks stood very still, watching him. Doug watched him too. He asked Doug cheerily:

"There's plenty of chicken, isn't there?" He didn't wait for Doug's answer. Doug's jaw looked dislocated. "Sure—stay for dinner, Kovaks. We'll open some champagne. Go ahead, have that shower. There's time, isn't there, Doug?"

"Oodles." Doug mismanaged a smile.

Kovaks came to Dave and put a hand on the pocket of the terry-cloth robe. The hand was warm. "Cigarette?"

"On my dresser," Dave said. "Help yourself. Find clean clothes in there too." He sized Kovaks up. "I think my stuff will fit you. Anything at all."

Kovaks narrowed his long-lashed eyes, turned his head slightly away, worked his tongue skeptically behind closed lips. Then grinned and shrugged. "Okay—right, thanks." He walked out.

Doug said, "What are you up to?"

Dave picked up the pot in its carton. "I'll be down in the gallery for a little while," he said. "The packing room."

 

CHAPTER 10

 

Ragged plastic pennants fluttered overhead—yellow, red, orange —on slack wires between corroded floodlight poles. Dave walked among secondhand cars toward a small wood-and-glass building in the weedy rear corner of a blacktop lot. pat farrell good used cars, the tin sign read, we carry our own contracts. The cars were filmed with dust. Lettered on their windshields in chalky pink paint were false claims: low mileage, clean, factory air, all power, stick shift, sharp, even cherry—along with prices the dealer knew better than to expect.

Pat Farrell's was the kind of lot you walked onto with cash if you were smart. You chose what you wanted and didn't listen to why it was worth the three hundred fifty dollars it was marked. You pressed down on the upholstery, frowned under the hood, kicked the tires while the salesman followed you around, talking. Then you waved a hundred-dollar bill under his nose and drove out with twenty-five dollars' worth of scrap steel, cracked plastic, thin rubber, and the pink slip in your pocket.

At the foot of the plank stairs to the sales office was parked a European mini like the one that had died under Vern Taylor on the coast road yesterday morning, gas saver was lettered on the glass.  Especially when it stalls, Dave thought, and climbed the steps. The office door stood open because it was another hot morning. Inside, a' man sat at a yellow wood desk whose top was covered by the spread-" out classified ad pages of the Examiner. The man was circling ads with a felt-tip pen. His suit hung loose on him. A cigar was clenched in his teeth. An electric fan blew from the top of a tin file cabinet in a corner, ruffled his greenish toupee, chased the cigar smoke out; through the glass louvers of a side window. He looked up, dropped the pen, laid the cigar on the desk edge, where earlier burns had made black fluting.

"Morning." He stood up, held out a hand. Where thick flesh must have padded out his cheeks once, a smile gathered back loose folds on either side of his mouth. The show of teeth was tobacco dingy. But the voice had warmth and a high gloss. "Pat Farrell. What can I do for you, sir?" Eyes like cheap green glass measured Dave and the smile died. "No—you don't want a car from me."

Dave laid a business card on the gray-print pages. It was the card Billy Wendell had given him day before yesterday. "When will he be in?"

"He won't be." Farrell dropped into his creaky swivel chair again. Above his head a flyspecked sign read your credit is good with us. "I fired him last week. That's not the way to put it. Makes me look bad. He fired himself. I warned him a dozen times, if he came on the lot drunk again, he had to go. But"—shoulder bones moved inside the bulky suit—"you feel sorry for them. Hell, Billy knows this business. He's good when he's sober."

"And when would that be?" Dave asked.

"Yeah." Farrell breathed a sour laugh. "Well, I just hoped the shock might help him. I hated to do it. He's old. Nobody else is going to take him on. Everybody in the business knows him. I was his last chance. And I put up with a lot for a long time. I'll take him back too. Told him so. If he'll quit the bottle. Nobody can do that for him. Man's got to do that for himself. Look at me." He put fingers inside his shirt collar to show how loose it was. "I know what I'm talking about. Not drink; no. Food. Loved to eat. Doc told me it was killing me. Either I lost a hundred pounds or I could plan on dropping dead here one of these days."

"You lost the weight," Dave said.

"Congratulations." Farrell wagged his head. "Haven't lost it all yet. That's why I'm wearing my old clothes. Looks like I borrowed this suit from somebody, doesn't it?" He plucked at an ample sleeve, laughed, picked up the cigar, clamped it in his teeth again. "I'm just waiting till I get down to one sixty-five. Then I'll buy new duds."

"I need Wendell's home address," Dave said.

"Don't think he's there." Farrell stood up again. "I went over there yesterday. To try to find out a little more about a contract he wrote that somebody skipped on. His landlady thinks he took a runout."

"She could check with his ex-wife," Dave said.

Farrell's eyebrows went up. "Never knew he had one. He never said anything about her."

"Their son died," Dave said. "He saw the notice in the paper. He hadn't known where they were, so he says. Close to forty years. He went to the funeral."

"Never mentioned them." Farrell opened a file drawer, brought a manila folder to the desk, sat down and copied an address on a note pad. He tore off the slip, pushed it across the open newspaper to Dave. "That's the dump where he was living. Always made me feel bad when I saw it. I mean, I was paying the man a decent wage. He didn't have to live like that."

"Liquor is expensive." Dave folded the paper and pushed it into a pocket. "Thank you."

"What's your interest in Billy?" Farrell followed Dave to the door. "You're not a cop. You're not a bill collector. What's your line?"

"Insurance," Dave said. "Death claims."

Farrell squinted. "Something wrong about the boy's death?"

"Everything." Dave started down the steps, turned. "Did Billy Wendell owe you money?"

Farrell turned down the corners of his mouth. "I advanced him twenty here, fifty there. Never kept count."

"You weren't pressing him hard for fifteen hundred dollars?"

The skin-crumpling smile again. It looked ghastly in the bright sunlight. "I'm good-hearted but I'm no fool. It's been thirty years since I let a drunk get into me for that kind of loot. No—maybe a hundred, two hundred at the outside. I kissed it goodbye when I gave it to him. You seen him?"

Lighting a cigarette, Dave nodded.

"Then you know a man wouldn't expect loans back from Billy Wendell. He'd work overtime for me when the wife and I had a date or went to Vegas for the weekend or whatever. I got it back that way —when he was sober enough to trust."

Dave gazed off across the dully glinting car tops, watched the anxious, frantic flutter of the little ragged flags, calling no one from the empty sun-stark boulevard beyond. "You thought I might be a bill collector. Why? Did they come around? Did they want you to garnishee his wages? Say for a bill like that. A thousand, fifteen hundred?"

"You telling me his son was murdered? For money?"

"Possibly." Dave shrugged. "Fifteen hundred is missing. Off his desk. He lay dead by the desk."

"Naw." Pat Farrell shook his head decisively. "He wouldn't kill anybody. Not Billy Wendell. He had his faults but he wouldn't kill anybody."

"He didn't need a large sum of money to stay out of jail?" Dave asked again. "Nobody was closing in on him?"

"Nobody knew he existed," Farrell said. Then he saw at the far corner of the lot a Mexican youth in a buttoned shirt without a tie, a fat brown girl carrying a baby in her arms, peering into a broad, low-slung maroon convertible with high tail fins and flashy hub caps. He bolted past Dave down the steps and, suit flapping, jogged across the tarmac, holding out his hand, grinning. His voice drifted back to Dave on the warm breeze. "Howdy. Buenas dias. What can I do for you folks this beautiful morning? Isn't that a beauty? That's what I call a sharp automobile. And a steal at that price. An absolute steal."

The street was broad with a center divider where abandoned streetcar rails turned to rust among dry weeds and clumps of sunflowers. Across the way, a chain-link fence with barbwire closed in vast gas storage tanks. Up the block, boxy stucco buildings made a corner— Lucky's bar and grill, the others empty, FOR rent signs curling in the windows. Here, in the middle of the block, a red neon anchor and the word motel tilted at the top of a steel post above a square of cement-block units painted clay color. Ivy geranium struggled in the hard dirt between a cracked sidewalk and the small-windowed walls. Blacktop covered the inner courtyard, where a greasy motorcycle stood with pieces of itself scattered around its wheels and there was an automobile that would have discouraged even Pat Farrell.

Spiky upthrusts of tired Spanish bayonet guarded the car entrance. A red-and-white sign beside a Dutch door on the cabin to the left said hi! ring bell for service. He rang bell and a cat came from somewhere and rubbed its yellow stripes against his legs. He crouched and scratched its ears. It purred. The top of the Dutch door opened and a knobby-jawed woman gave him a smile. She wore a crisscross halter and shorts of a Hawaiian material whose hibiscuses had faded many voyages ago. There was nothing Hawaiian about her look or her talk. They were strictly Little Rock, Arkansas.

"We got lots of room," she said. She rattled up a clipboard on a chain from inside and laid it on top of the lower shelf. There was a ballpoint pen on a braided nylon cord. "Take your choice."

"I'm looking for Billy Wendell." Dave handed her his Medallion card. "Unit nine, someone told me."

"That's right." She opened the lower half of the door and stepped out. Her skin in the sun was dead white. She was all elbows, knees, collarbones. "But he's not in it. Hasn't been here two, three days. I don't expect him. You gonna find him? Cause when you do, remind him he owes me three weeks' rent. Place is nigh empty. I got to eat too, tell him."

"Isn't this your good season?" Dave asked.

"I don't have a good season," she said.

"Can I see his room?" Dave asked. "Before the police?"

"Police!" She gawked. "What's he done?"

"A member of his family met with an accident," Dave said. "That person was insured by my company. We have a set investigative routine, you know?" He gave her a smile. "All right? Or is the room rented?"

"Fat chance. Here." She reached inside the door, where keys jingled. "Nope. Forgot. Maid's got it. Cleanin' up today. Look for her." She turned her head, sniffed. "Damn! I boiled that coffee." She vanished back inside. The cat jumped up on the shelf, knocked down the clipboard, followed her.

Next to the door of nine stood a square canvas laundry hamper on wheels. Sheets draggled from it. The door was open and inside the room a vacuum whined. He peered in. A shadowy female with a white cloth tied over her hair sullenly pushed furniture. Dave stepped inside. The maid was black and young. She didn't appear even to glance at him but she said, "Ain' ready yet."

Closet doors stood open on emptiness. Big shabby slacks and jackets lay across a grudging upholstered chair with greasy arms. Hats, a worn raincoat, two pairs of cracked shoes. Dave picked up and dropped a tangle of stained neckties. "Did he leave anything else?"

"You the Man?" She glanced at him this time but without much interest. "Ain' been through the drawers yet." She jerked her head at a brown-painted thrift-shop chest under a wavery mirror. Dave found underwear and socks, empty bourbon bottles with supermarket labels, candy-bar wrappers, a cellophane bag with three dried-out doughnuts, moldy bread in white wax paper. He shut the drawers. "Nothing else?"

"Wastebasket out there." She ran the shiny tube of the vacuum over faded plaid window curtains that matched the spread on the sagging bed. "He dead or somethin'?"

"Or something," Dave said. In the morning sun glare he squatted by the wastebasket—cardboard papered in plaid—and lifted out another whiskey bottle and a cigarette carton. Under these was a folded section of newspaper. He put on his glasses and looked it over. Circled in red pencil was the story of Rick Wendell's murder. The page number was 17 and Billy hadn't lied—the address of the canyon house was there. Dave tore off the sheet, folded it, pocketed it, took a second newspaper section from the basket.

This wasn't from the Times. It was from a local advertising throw-away. And there was a spread on the Mr. Marvelous contest to come, with pictures of, among others, Rick Wendell. He and Ace Kegan flanked Bobby Reich, who wore the little white shorts. A lot of other men were in the pictures—owners, contestants, most of whom Dave had met on his tour of the bars. Captions identified them and named their places of business. The text didn't say what kind of businesses they were—this was a family paper. It was dated a week ahead of the murder. So Billy had lied about one thing—he'd known his son was alive and well and where to find him. Dave tore off this sheet and pushed it in with the other one.

The wastebasket held another bottle, a pizza tin gummy with sauce, wadded paper napkins, a waxed cup with the Coca-Cola trademark —and then the torn-up pieces of a letter. Dave fitted the ragged edges together on the gritty blacktop. My Dear Son—you will have forgotten me and no wonder since your mother and I came to a parting of the ways years ago but I want to say how proud I am to read in the paper that you are a success in life even though your father has not. . . The writing, sprawling and unsteady, broke off there.

Dave tucked the fragments into the pocket with the news sheets and poked into the wastebasket again. A half-eaten hamburger in its gold-foil Jack in the Box wrapper, a corn chip bag, last week's TV Guide. And that was all. Dave dumped the trash back into the basket, got to his feet, brushing his hands together. He called thanks to the vacuuming girl and walked back to the motel office, where the bony woman leaned on the lower half of the Dutch door, drinking coffee from a mug with the yellow round "Smile" face on it, and eating a pastry.

Dave asked, "He had a home away from home—right?"

She nodded. "Lucky's," she said. "Right up at the corner. You can't miss it."

A glass-and-steel phone booth waited beside the Spanish bayonets. He stepped into it, dragged the phone book on its chain from under the little corner shelf and thumbed the gritty pages. The yellow ones. He found the listing. Hang Ten. It had a red pencil mark around it, like the mark around the story of Rick Wendell's death in the paper. He dropped the directory on its chain and got into the Electra. The radio went on with the ignition. A Beethoven quartet, one of the Rasoumovskys, he thought. He sat and listened to it for a minute before he let the brake go and rolled along the block to the lonely buildings huddled on the corner in the sun.

Out the open door of Lucky's came an eye-stinging smell of pine disinfectant. Inside, someone short and fat, cocooned in a big white apron, mopped a floor of worn black vinyl tile. Like big metal insects stunned by the smell, stools stood legs up on the bar, chairs on little tables. There was a big metal bucket with rubber rollers on top. When the stubby being dropped the drizzly gray strings of the mop between these, levered them closed and pulled, there was loud squealing. Dave coughed. The mop wielder turned. The face was round, white, withered, like an apple forgotten in a cellar.

"You're just a shade early for a drink."

"I don't need a drink," Dave said. "I'm an insurance investigator and I've got a question or two about one of your regulars. Billy Wendell."

"Insurance?" The popping of dirty soap bubbles was audible in the hush. 'That mean he's dead?"

"Do they die a lot?" Dave wondered.

"They're not young, most of 'em." The mopping began again. Cigarette butts fled from side to side. "Billy hasn't been around last couple nights was why I asked."

"He's not dead," Dave said.

"Gone off to find his wife and kid, then." The mop went into the bucket again. The cigarette butts drowned. "I didn't think he'd have the nerve. They talk like that, you know. Daydreams, drink dreams. I've got customers been planning to break out, change their lives, for years. Never do it. Truth. Most of 'em. Never did do nothin', never will. I only know two kinds of people in this life—them that make things happen, them that things happen to." The mop went to work again.

"And Billy Wendell?" Dave asked.

"He'd been talking about his son. Read a piece in the paper about him, how he's got his own business." Chunky elbows bent and straightened. "Billy was proud of him. Success, he says. Not a failure like his old man." Dave backed from the wet sweep of the mop and the little figure bowed into sunlight from the door. The voice hadn't let him be sure of it, but he decided now that she was female, a fat little woman of fifty in men's clothes, with a man's haircut. "When he got fired from the used car lot, Billy says it was okay with him. He could go back to his son, his son would look after him, his son wouldn't let his old man go down to destruction."

"Billy was here every night?"

"About. Oh, he'd get economy spells. Scuse me." She nodded and Dave stepped out onto the sidewalk while the mop spread dirty suds across the doorsill. The woman leaned the mop against the door, wiped fat little hands on the wraparound apron, stepped out blinking into the sun. "There'd be a night or two he'd drink in his motel room." A stubby thumb jerked in the direction of the cinder-block buildings under the neon anchor up the weedy block. "But he'd miss the company. We'd miss him too. It gets like a family, place like this. So he'd soon be back. TV's poor company, you know. Nothin' to drinkin' alone."

"Monday night," Dave said. "Was that one of the times he tried TV?"

"Monday?" She looked back into the dark bar as if the answer might come from there. Then she looked at him again and her face puckered into a grin. "Naw, not Monday. Hell, we had a celebration Monday. Birthday party. For Lilian. Lilian Drill and her old man. They been coming in here must be live, six years. Lilian's just the most fun. Everybody loves Lilian. No—Hilly was here till two, till closing. All the regulars was here. Billy especially. They're a set, him and Lilian."

"How's that?" Dave asked.

"The Beautiful People," the pudgy woman said. "You heard that expression. Naw, I don't mean these days, but once. Lilian was in pictures in the thirties. And Billy—everybody's seen his photos, polo playing, horse shows, yachts. He was handsome. Money, high life. Yup, him and Lilian. They're a set."

"What time did he get here Monday? Late?"

"Five in the afternoon. He built sandwiches while I frosted the cake. I always bake the cakes myself. Store bought, they're sawdust. Baked it, decorated it myself. My old man was a baker. Before he decided there was more money in booze." She poked inside the apron and brought out a crushed pack of cigarettes. She lit one with a paper match and blew the smoke at the sidewalk. She wore tennis shoes, child size. "Thing he couldn't remember was the booze was for the customers. Killed him. Anyway, I decorated the cake." She gestured in the air. "Lucky's Own Movie Queen—that's what I wrote on it."

She gave a little sad laugh and shook her head. "Lilian cried."

CHAPTER 11

 

Dwayne Huncie said, "I don't need no lawyer. I am a lawyer." He wore new cowboy boots, the tooling dyed deep reds and purples. His pants were striped and sharply creased. His belt served as a sling for his pink-satin-shirted belly. It was a new belt with a wrought silver buckle the size of a pack of playing cards. He stood, big and bow-legged and blinking under a crimped-brim straw cowboy hat in Yoshiba's night office, two uniformed California highway patrolmen, guns on hips, guarding the door behind him. "I can handle this."

"You were a lawyer," Yoshiba said, "but that was in Texas and some time ago." He leafed over a Xeroxed record file. "You were disbarred in 1957. For bribing jurors. You served time for it." He sat back, laid a hand on the file, blinked through the desk light. "You served time pretty often. Didn't anybody ever tell you the man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client?"

"Man don't need no lawyer that tells the simple truth." Huncie shifted a lump of tobacco from one whiskery cheek to the other, nodded, eyeing a chair. "Can I set down? That was kind of a long ride from Saugus."

"Help yourself," Yoshiba said. "You understand that this is serious? A case of murder?"

"I didn't figure you'd have every lawman in the state scourin' nickel and dime trailer camps to haul me back here just for pissin' in some alley. But you got the wrong man. I never killed nobody." He dropped his loose bulk onto a hard chair. "Who is it's dead?"

"Richard William Wendell," Yoshiba said. From a corner, a deputy district attorney in Levi's and a Little League cap asked, "Know the name?"

"Heard of it." Huncie jerked a nod.

"We've got a suspect locked up," Yoshiba said. "Lawrence Henry Johns. You know that name too, right? Right. The mother of the victim found Johns standing over the body cleaning off the gun the victim was shot with."

"Well, almighty Gawd," Huncie said moderately. "Ain't that enough?"

"It's a little too much," Dave said. He leaned on a file cabinet, nursing a paper cup of coffee and smoking. "The only fingerprints on the weapon belong to the mother. There are powder burns on the hand and chest of the deceased, whose gun it was. And fifteen hundred dollars is missing from his desk."

"Oh?" Huncie said. "Who are you?"

Dave told him. Wind that smelled of warm night ocean breathed in at the open window next to him. "No one else can account for that fifteen hundred. We have an idea you can."

"Me?" Huncie tried for a laugh but it broke and there was fear in his watery blue eyes. "How the hell did you scrounge up that idea, will you tell me?"

Yoshiba looked at the armed men. "Open that door, will you, and tell them to send in the witness?"

Jomay Johns was blond and scrubbed as a child. But her jeans and blouse were grubby. She didn't look more than twelve. Her hair was a baroque complex of yellow upsweeps and downfalls. "You son of a bitch," she said to Huncie. "You run off and left me without no clothes or nothin'. Me and BB. Plus, you stole that money. You dirty old bastard. You didn't just steal it. You stole it twice!"

Huncie eyed her and shifted the chaw again. "Where did you get to? I left you and BB gettin' malts and French fries at that there McDonald's and when I come back, you was no place to be seen."

"You're a liar," she said. "You drove off in the camper. When you didn't come for your food, I went out in the lot and looked. Wasn't no camper there. I had seventeen dollars change and didn't know nobody in town."

Huncie spread big hands. "I discovered I didn't have no more tobacco. I went lookin' for some. This here ain't chewin' tobacco country, sweetheart. I had one hell of a time. Then I come back and you're gone."

"Bullshit," she said. "Bullshit." She looked, outraged, from one to another of the shadowy figures in the office. "Do you believe this old bullshitter?"

"Take it easy," Yoshiba told her. "Larson, give her a chair, will you? Sit down, Mrs. Johns." While the Little League D.A. got up and fumbled in the crowded half dark, getting the chair out of the corner, Yoshiba said to Huncie, "This witness says you had in your possession at eleven o'clock Monday night a large bundle of twenty-dollar bills."

"I had 'em," Huncie said.

"Where did you get them?"

"They was owin' and I collected 'em," Huncie said.

"Owing," Yoshiba said, "to whom? For what?"

Back of him, propped against the window ledge, the public defender, Khazoyan, in a black mohair suit and a ruffled shirtfront, yawned noisily.

Huncie squinted at him past the glare of the desk lamp. "We can get this over with quick and let that man get home to bed," he said. "I got 'em off the desk in that little house next to the big house up there on Pinyon Trail in that canyon—house belonging to, way I understood it, this here Wendell, the fella which her little runaway husband"—he nodded at dim Jomay—"the one you call Lawrence Henry Johns, says he was going to get the money from he owed." "Just as simple as that," Yoshiba said.

Huncie nodded, rose, creaked in the new boots to the window. Khazoyan stepped aside. Huncie spat a long brown stream of tobacco juice into the night. Wiping his mouth with a hand, he turned back. "Just as simple as that. Not a dead body in it. Larry was to collect the money and I was to drive out to that barny-lookin' place on the beach and get it off him next mornin'. Hell, I saved him and me both trouble, that was all. You too, Jomay honey. If you'd only kept your pretty little ass on that there plastic stool in McDonald's."

"I don't think you're a trouble saver," Yoshiba said. "I think you're a trouble maker, and I bet I'm not the first person who's told you that. How did you find Wendell's? Did you follow him and Johns up there?"

"Nope." With a sigh, the big old man dropped onto his chair again. "First I figured to call in on him at his place of business, but time I got her and BB into a movie she was half willin' to see—you think combin' and fixin' all that pretty yella hair don't take time, you ain't lived much with women—I got there too late. There was some sissy boy back of the bar and I asked him. Wendell had left. So—I looked up Wendell in the phone book and took me a little drive up there. Nice night for it."

"I thought you wanted us to get to bed," Khazoyan complained. "You want to cut to the good part?"

"All right," Huncie said agreeably. "I got up there and seen 'em through the window, standin' by the desk. Wendell took this envelope out of his jacket and tore it open and took out these bundles of bills and showed 'em to Larry. They left the room. I stepped in, picked the money up off the desk, stepped out again. There it is, all of it, the plain and simple truth. Not only wasn't there no murder in it; there wasn't no theft, neither. Ask her—don't he owe you that money, Jomay?"

"Not anymore," she said. "You do."

"Hold on," Yoshiba said. "Johns says they heard you. Wendell came out, there was an argument and a struggle and a gun went off.  You didn't walk out of there with that money. Not till Wendell had pulled a gun on you and you'd wrestled with him and it had gone off and killed him. Then you left. But I'll bet it wasn't at a walk."

"It was," Huncie said. "And nobody come out of that other room. The door stayed shut." He tilted the straw hat back, tilted the chair back, ran a thick finger along the stubbly edge of his tobacco-working jaw. "But somebody did run."

"Somebody?" Khazoyan made a waking-up sound.

Huncie looked at him. "Sure. You didn't think I'd open up and tell you all this if I didn't think I had some chance of provin' it, do you? There was a witness. I seen him runnin' away, up the back there."

Yoshiba picked up a pen. "Description?"

"Aw, now, Lieutenant—you know better'n that. It was pitch dark up there. Big pines all around."

"But you did say 'him,' " Yoshiba said. "You know it was a man." He glanced back and up at Dave.

Huncie said, "Well, no. Now that you mention it, guess I don't." Scowling to himself, he let the chair legs down with a clack, got up and went to the window again to spit. "Could have been a she-male. Did have a big handbag, the kind they wear on a strap over their shoulder. Seen it bangin' against her hip when she run off through the trees. Her, him."

"You didn't follow?" Dave asked.

"What for? I had what I come for, purely legal. But I can give you a lead." He paused, chewing, watching their faces. "When I got down to the camper, there was another car parked there. One of them fancy pickups, you know? Look more like a sports car than a truck?"

"El Camino," Yoshiba said.

"That's it. Was a truck, though. Little name lettered real modest on the door—Thomas Owens, AIA. My Lord! Why, that's the name of that fella Larry was eatin' off of in that beach place, ain't it? Owens?"

"What does this mean?" Gail Ewing blocked the doorway. Far down the room at her back, light from a wicker-shaded swag lamp islanded the grouped furniture by the hooded fireplace and made black mirrors of the tall glass wall panels. She wore a housecoat and no makeup. Her eyelids were swollen, her speech thick. She pushed at rumpled hair. "Do you realize what time it is?"

On the deck, the dark dunes at their back, Yoshiba, Khazoyan, Larson and Dave watched sea wind play with the long yellow hair of Jomay Johns, who had pressed the bell push. Yoshiba held his wallet above the girl's head, let it fall open. "Police," he said. "Like to come in and talk to you a few minutes."

"No, not tonight." Gail Ewing backed, started to shut the door. "There's an invalid in the house. Everyone else is asleep. I've taken a sleeping pill myself, and I simply wouldn't be—"

"Sorry, Mrs. Ewing, but it can't wait." Yoshiba put square, thick hands on the Johns girl's little shoulders and pushed her ahead of him into the room. Gail Ewing was forced to back up. Yoshiba moved in. Larson and Khazoyan followed. And Dave. Gail Ewing narrowed the yellow eyes at him. "You!" she said. "You're responsible for this."

"You know better than that," Dave said. "If anyone's responsible, it's you. If you'd gone to your brother with Larry's problem, he'd have given the boy the money he needed, or gotten him a lawyer, done what was necessary. None of the rest of it would have happened."

"I refuse to believe that." Her chin thrust out stubbornly. She turned to the squat policeman. "Lieutenant Yoshiba, I've told you my brother's an invalid. He's not to be disturbed."

"I don't think we'll have to disturb him." Yoshiba shut the door quietly, firmly. "You can probably answer our questions."

"I don't have to." She clutched the robe at her throat. "I'm entitled to an attorney." Yoshiba's eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. "You're not charged with anything."

Larson stepped forward, taking off his Little League cap. He was going bald under it. "I'm George Larson, Mrs. Ewing—deputy district attorney. This is Art Khazoyan. He's an attorney also—public defender's office. We'll see that your rights are protected in every way."

Her mouth twitched but she didn't answer him. She turned her anger on the little blond girl. "What are you doing back here? Haven't you caused enough trouble?"

"Mother! Are you out of your mind?" Trudy's voice came from the shadowy top of the wooden bird-flight stairs. She was a slim silhouette, something bulky in her arms. Down the high gallery behind her, light made a yellow rectangle of a doorway. "She's come back for her baby."

"Oh, God." Gail Ewing shut her eyes, rubbed her forehead.

"For Christ sake!" Mark Dimond was a jerky shadow in the lighted doorway, kicking into pants. He came fast along the gallery, buttoning his fly, to stand beside Trudy. "Tom wants her to stay here, anyhow. You know that."

"It's the damn sleeping pill!" Gail Ewing shouted at him. "I loathe the things. I wouldn't have taken one if it weren't for all this—" She finished the sentence with a frantic nipping of her hands. She said to Jomay, "Go along, child—I'm sorry."

Jomay glared sourly at her and went for the stairs. Trudy called down to her. "It's all right. She slept all the time you were gone."

Jomay climbed the stairs.

Yoshiba told Gail Ewing, "What we need to know is about Mr. Owens's car—the El Camino, the one parked up in the port now. Who drove it Monday night? He didn't."

"With two broken legs?" Her tone scathed him. "Your powers of deduction are amazing, Lieutenant."

"Sarcasm is wasted on Orientals, Mrs. Ewing," Yoshiba said. "We're extremely impassive. Slights and abuse run off our backs like water off a duck—a mandarin duck, of course."

"Forgive me," she said stiffly. "I don't know anything about the car. I was at a City Council meeting that night. I drove my own car."

"I thought Trudy smashed up your car," Dave said.

"I have a replacement," Gail Ewing said. "Thanks to Sequoia Accident and Indemnity Corporation, Mr. Brandstetter." She smiled coldly. "Insurance, remember?"

Larson said, "On halting offshore oil drilling."

"What?" Yoshiba looked at him.

"That was what the City Council session was about," Larson said. "I was there myself. I saw Mrs. Ewing."

She studied him, nodded. "Yes. That's right."

"So who had the car?" Yoshiba asked again.

"No one," she said.

"Mark Dimond," Dave said. He looked up the stairs. The boy wasn't standing beside the girls and the baby anymore. Dave started to turn for the door. Yoshiba stopped him. "Don't sweat it. They're out there." He meant two uniformed officers who had followed them up the dark coast road in a patrol car.

"Who's out there?" Gail Ewing asked sharply and tried to push past them to the door.

Someplace out of sight and half out of hearing, the dogs began to bark.

"Take it easy, Mrs. Ewing." Yoshiba stepped in front of her. "We just want to talk to the boy."

"What do you mean!" Trudy came down the stairs at a run. She was barefoot again, in the same gray bells and appliqued shirt, breasts showing firm through the thin cloth. She didn't wear the sunglasses tonight, though, and the bruises around her eyes, along with the missing teeth, made her young face an old mask. "Talk to him about what? He didn't do anything. He couldn't!"

"He wasn't here Monday night," Dave said. "Your uncle said you were alone in the house with him when Larry turned up missing. Where was Mark?"

She said defiantly, "He went to see a man in the Audio-Visual Department at UCLA. Someone he had a letter of introduction to from his department head. He'd been putting it off. That night he decided to go and get it over with."

"And not take you?" Dave asked.

"I had to be here." She explained it to him as to a little child. "To look after Tom."

The door swung inward. They all looked at the black oblong. Sea wind came in and so did two uniformed men holding Mark Dimond by the arms between them. He was bare-chested, barefoot. "He was going to take off, Lieutenant. In the El Camino."

"Let go of him!" Trudy flung herself at them.

Yoshiba caught her. "Easy," he said. "It's going to be all right. We just want to ask him a couple of simple questions."

Trudy stared frightened past the lieutenant's bulky shoulder at the boy with the helmet of black hair. She was asking her own questions. Not aloud. With her eyes.

Larson said, "You were up at the Wendell house on Monday night, weren't you?"

Dimond was very pale. "I don't get this," he said. "I don't get this at all." He squinted, twisted his face. "What house?"

"Wendell. He was killed that night, remember?" Yoshiba said. "A kid who lived here, kid by the name of Larry Johns, is being held for his murder. Does that clear it up for you?"

"Oh, Christ," Dimond breathed. His eyes were on Trudy's face. They seemed to plead.

"So you do know who I'm talking about?" Yoshiba asked.

Dimond tried a mystified laugh. "What would I be doing up there? I went to UCLA that night."

"Is that right? Did you see the man you had the letter of introduction to? What's his name?"

Something went out of Dimond's face. "He wasn't there. Nobody was there. But that doesn't mean—"

"Somebody was at Wendell's," Yoshiba said. "He tells us a pickup with the name Thomas Owens on the door was parked at the foot of the stairs. By the mailboxes. On Pinyon Trail. Mrs. Ewing, here, didn't drive the car. Mr. Owens didn't drive it. He told Brandstetter his niece was here with him that night. She says you weren't. And you do have a key to that car. That's the key, there, in your hand, isn't it?"

"I want a lawyer," Mark Dimond said.

"Mark!" Gail Ewing gasped. "Oh, my God!" She was very white. She caught at Larson's arm. He steadied her. Mark Dimond watched her, bewildered.

"What's wrong with you? You hated Larry Johns as much as I did. More."

"Oh, but, Mark—the death of an innocent man—"

"What! What the hell are you saying?" Dimond struggled in the grip of the officers. "Now, wait—wait just a fucking minute, Gail. I didn't kill anyone." He looked wildly from Yoshiba to Larson to Khazoyan to Dave. "I never said that. I didn't, I didn't!" "He didn't,"

Trudy said. "He couldn't have."

"Fine," Yoshiba said. "So what were you doing there?"

Dimond sulked. "I want a lawyer."

"I think I can tell you what he was doing there," Dave said. "He followed Larry Johns. And he took along his trusty tape recorder. It's a portable, hangs in a case on a shoulder strap. That was what Dwayne Huncie mistook for a woman's handbag when he saw him running off through the trees."

"That how it was?" Yoshiba asked Dimond. Sick, the boy turned his head. After a moment's disgusted silence he drew breath, let it out and said wearily, "Yeah. I'd brought the dogs inside. There's a room for them at the back, under the carport. And I heard Larry on the kitchen phone. Asking for money. Agreeing to meet this Rick on the coast road, eight that night. It proved what I knew he was." He looked at Trudy. "A hustler. The kind that peddles sex to perverts."

"You're eating Tom Owens's food," Dave told him. "Sleeping under his roof. That's a hell of a word."

The dark boy flushed. "Okay. Homosexuals, gays—whatever you want. I'm sorry." He looked at Trudy again. "I told you, but you wouldn't believe me. He was so sweet, he'd had such a lousy life. I had to prove to you what he was. So"—he faced Yoshiba again—"I look my recorder and stood outside Wendell's windows and I got a tape."

"Mark!" Trudy said. "You didn't! That's revolting. Sneaking, spying. What are you?"

"In love with you, dummy." Mark struggled to break from the officers again. He said to Yoshiba, "I've still got it. I kept it. Didn't play it for Trudy because after that night Larry was gone anyway. If you'll let me, I'll get it and you can hear it. You'll love it, Trudy. You'll really love your fair-haired cracker when you hear that tape."

Yoshiba said, "Go with him, Ramirez."

Minutes later, the tape recorder, black leather case laid open like the lid of a coffin, stood on the big low deal table under the light, its five-inch reels of clear plastic winking as they turned. Gail Ewing sat stone-faced on the long wicker couch, Trudy next to her, biting her nails, watching Mark, who stood over the machine. Yoshiba and Dave flanked him. Larson and Khazoyan stood at the end of the table. The uniformed officers leaned by the front door. Jomay Johns sat in the dark at the top of the stairs with BB asleep in her lap. Their hair glowed like that of angels in a painting darkened by centuries of soot. Dave wished he had a drink.

The tape stopped hissing to itself. Distances of crickets skirred. There was the far, lost drone of a jet plane. A voice deep and rumbling that still managed to have something feminine about it said, It's in here, safe and sound. I haven't even opened it. Fifteen hundred dollars in small bills. Wasn't that what you said? Paper rattled and tore. See? There. Do you want to count it? Go ahead, count it if you want to. Another rattle of paper.

Aw, Rick, I don't want to count it, man. This was Larry Johns's voice, hard and echoey in the room. And look, I'll pay it back. I promise. I mean it. There was a knocking sound. Perhaps a shoe had kicked a desk leg. Wendell's voice again above a rustling whisper of cloth: Oh, Larry, no. It's my gift. You don't know what it means to have you come back. How I've dreamed, hoped, wished, prayed. When you phoned today, I cried, I really cried with happiness. I—

Larry Johns's voice cut across Wendell's. No, I don't take money for sex, Rick. It's a loan, man. I'll get a gig and pay you back. Otherwise—

All right, Larry, all right. Now just let me hold you. Oh, God. Along silence. A low moaning. Then a whispered, Now, Larry? Please—now? Yes, in here. Yes, yes. A latch rattled, a door swung, brushing carpet, hinges squeaking slightly. A door closed. The crickets went on with their shrill plaintive pulsing. There was a scuff of shoe leather on cement, a crackling of leaves under soles. The tape clicked. The empty hissing started again. Mark Dimond leaned, reached, punched a plastic key. The reels halted.

Yoshiba stood frowning for a moment in the sea-sighing silence, then touched the machine with a shoe. "They don't exactly beat the camera, do they? What went with the dialogue?"

Dimond flushed darkly, shifted his feet, rubbed his smooth brown chest. "Well—he, uh, took the envelope out of his jacket. He tore it open and took out packs of bills. He tried to give them to Larry but he wouldn't touch them. So the big stud, Wendell—he, like, thumbed the edges, you know? As if to show Larry the bread was all there or something—right?" The dark boy gestured uneasily. "What do you want me to say? I mean, okay, he dropped the envelope and money on the desk and—" Dimond glanced unhappily at Gail and Trudy on the couch, up into the dimness where Jomay sat silent. "Well, it was kind of freaky to watch, you know? Made me feel a little nauseated. I mean, he started running his hands over Larry. Like he was a girl. Wow! Through his hair and all that." Dimond looked at the floor, blew air out through his nostrils, mumbled, "Held his head, tipped it back, you know, and kissed him on the mouth. Took him in his arms, you know?" Dimond looked up. "Hell, Lieutenant, I don't want to—"

"Yeah, okay, kid. They went into the other room?"

"Right. And I was relieved when they did."

"And you left, did you?" Dave wondered.

"I wanted to but the windows on that other room were open too because it was a hot night. I knew I ought to go there if I was going to get real proof for Trudy. And I took a step in that direction when I see the door from outside open and this lifelike, inflatable Gabby Hayes pokes his head in. Whiskers, chewing tobacco—you could smell stockyards twenty feet off. He takes a quick look around, walks straight to the desk, picks up the bread, and walks out with it. Wow! I didn't know what to do. I couldn't do anything, could I? I mean, I was in a very ridiculous position."

"That wouldn't be my word," Dave said.

"It was contemptible." Trudy sprang up and walked into the dark. "Disgusting. It makes me sick."

Yoshiba said, "So you ran, did you?"

Dimond was looking worriedly after Trudy. "What? Yeah, I ran. Waited up in the trees till I heard his truck drive off down the road. Then I got out of there."

Yoshiba looked at Larson. "I want to book him on failure to report a felony."

Larson glanced at the beautiful expensive room. "He'd be out on O.R. tomorrow morning." He put the Little League cap on again. "Waste of time."

"Nobody saw him leave," Yoshiba said.

"Ho," Larson said. "You want to book him for the murder? You'd have to let Johns out, then."

Khazoyan said, "That sounds good to me."

"Forget it," Yoshiba said.

"I should think so," Gail Ewing said indignantly.

"Just don't go anywhere," Yoshiba told Mark Dimond.

 

CHAPTER 12

 

Below Pinyon Trail, at the foot of a fern slope where a summer-scant creek threaded among moss-rusty boulders, deer lay in the morning shadows of the pines. Three of them. When Yoshiba drove the unmarked Los Santos Police Department car past above them, they didn't get up. They only raised their heads, swiveled big soft ears. Their eyes were wide and calm.

"Will you look at that?" Yoshiba said. "What are we—twenty miles from downtown L.A.?"

"If that," Dave said. "We forget—the interloper is man. Hold it. This is the place."

Three cars crowded the patch of yellow dirt in front of tin mailboxes on paint-chalky posts. One car had the high rear fender fins of the fifties. That would be Billy Wendell's. One was a station wagon, a broad one from the sixties, the tailgate down, weighted with baled alfalfa. Heather's, of course. The third was a VW with a cloth top. Rick's. Dave had seen it here the other morning. Was she going to let the weeds and creepers have it? Yoshiba slowed but didn't stop.

"What's on up the trail?" he asked.

"I'm told it makes a loop," Dave said.

Yoshiba moved the lever to "L" and put a square foot on the accelerator pedal. The car climbed a wide, bumpy half circle in the cool shadows of the pines. At the top, where Heather Wendell's ruined blacktop driveway raked downward from the trail, he braked the car, killed the engine. In the sudden quiet, a quail called. Yoshiba opened his door and stepped out. Dave did the same. Yoshiba nodded lo where gray wood shingling showed through the trees below.

"That's the place."

"Garage," Dave said, "where she stables her horses." He shifted ground. "Here. From here you can see part of the house, farther down."

Yoshiba came, looked, grunted. His blunt shoetip nudged the dust of the road edge where footprints showed. "Looks like somebody waited around up here. Deck shoes. New ones. Kegan?"

"Probably." Dave checked his watch. "We'd better catch her before she gets out on those horses. There's country up here where you can't follow by automobile."

But Yoshiba was crouching. "Two cars were parked here lately. Look. Different sets of tires, side by side. Both small cars. This one" —a short, thick finger made a circle in the air above a dark patch soaked into the dust—"had a bad oil leak."

Dave glanced around. Across the road a hill climbed to a crest maybe thirty feet above. A few dying pines but mostly scrub and rock. Nothing was built there, nothing to the left or to the right. Only below. "It could be a place where kids park to make out."

"Almost have to be." Yoshiba grunted, got to his feet. "Let's go down this way."

At the foot of the drive, beside the garage-cum-stable, Heather Wendell and her gaunt husband sat horses, she the little paint mare (Buffy doesn 't like men) and he the sorrel gelding. The woman wore a plaid shirt, jeans, a black charro hat; the man Levi's pants and jacket stitched for someone bulkier—his son, no doubt. A bowl-brimmed straw sombrero shaded his long, rutted face. The horse hoofs moved noiselessly on the pine needle cushion of the yard. The man and woman drew rein and stared.

"What is it?" Heather Wendell asked Yoshiba. "I told you to keep him"—she jerked an angry nod at Dave—"away from here."

"You don't want to be ungrateful," Yoshiba said. "He got you back quite a chunk of money you'd never have seen again. Close to twelve hundred dollars."

She sat up straight, blinking puzzlement.

"From that brown bank envelope on Rick's desk," Dave said.

"Remember? You let me take it away the other morning, with the wrapper tabs, each marked five hundred dollars. A check with the bank showed Rick had withdrawn that amount Monday afternoon."

"What for?" she said.

"Rick had promised it to Larry Johns. On the telephone at noon. You picked up the phone for that call. He told you his name. But you made out to me you'd never heard it until that night." Her mouth twitched. "I'd forgotten."

"Come on now, Mrs. Wendell," Yoshiba said.

"Now, look here!" Billy Wendell tried to make himself sound ominous. He shifted in the saddle, kicking a foot free of its stirrup, as if he were going to dismount. But he didn't. He finished lamely, "I don't like your tone."

"It's possible the name didn't mean anything to you at that point," Dave said. "Johns says he was up here before with your son. A few weeks ago. But it was after the bar closed. You told me your hours differed, so maybe you didn't know about it. But if you did and then Larry Johns turned up again, you'd have had reason to suspect he represented the same threat to you other boys had done—Monkey, Savage."

She paled and seemed to sag in the saddle. "You're guessing," Billy Wendell blustered. "Based on this," Dave said. "That your wife and Ace Kegan had a conference Monday night." He looked at Heather. "You didn't go to that horse film as you told me. You went to the Chardash restaurant next to the theater and talked the situation over with Ace. He'd had a phone call where Larry Johns gave his name too. And you both knew it spelled trouble. Possibly disaster. That was why neither of you ate."

She touched dry lips with a dry tongue.

"Then you drove up here," Yoshiba said. "To try to stop the thing before it could get under way. Your son didn't like being interrupted and browbeaten and he went for his gun to run you off. Kegan rushed him and your son ended up dead. Wasn't that how it was?"

"No!" she said loudly. "Ace wasn't even here. He has a dreadful temper. It was still under control when he got into his car in the theater parking lot but by the time he got up here to the house, he'd worked himself into a fury. He said if Rick didn't listen to reason, he'd beat it into him. And he could do it. He was a prize fighter. His fists are like hammers. Yes, I know Rick was bigger, but he hadn't any fight in him."

"He had the gun," Dave reminded her.

"The gun never came into it." Heather swung out of the saddle. The stocky little horse took a step backward, shaking her head, clinking bridle fastenings. "Because Ace didn't see Rick that night. He was raving. I won't repeat what he said he'd do to that boy."

"Raving," Dave said. "But you made him go?"

"It wasn't easy but he respects me and finally through his rage he heard me. He knew what had happened before. He's very nearly gone to prison for beating people. And he'd be heartsick afterward if he hurt Rick. They were very close."

"And he left?" Yoshiba asked.

"With bad grace," she said, "but yes, he left. I watched him get into his car and start it before I went on up the stairs."

"What about this twelve hundred dollars?" Billy Wendell's big hand smoothed the sorrel's mane. "Have you got it with you?"

"It's evidence," Yoshiba said. "The court will hold it till the man who stole it is tried."

"Who was he?"                                                                             Dave told the story of Dwayne Huncie.

Yoshiba said, "It's too bad about the three hundred. Especially when you see the clothes he got himself with it—if you could call them clothes. But the balance—once the trial's over, it'll be released to you. I don't know how soon that will be."

"What do they need with it?" Billy Wendell asked. "The bank won't have a record. Not if the bills were only twenties. They don't record them unless they're hundreds or larger."

"You've been watching 'Police Story,' " Yoshiba said. "But you're right. I'll see if I can shake it loose for you."                                   

"There's a feed bill," Heather explained.                                       

"There's also three weeks' back rent at Billy's motel," Dave told her. "You didn't see anyone, hear anyone, after you shed Ace?"       

She shook her head. "Was there someone?"

"There had to be someone, Heather," Billy said.

"There did not!" she snapped at him. "All there had to be was that boy Larry Johns. Yes—I saw him." She shut her eyes a moment. "I'll never forget it."

"Are you absolutely sure Ace Kegan left the area?" Yoshiba tilted his head. "Up at the top of your driveway there are tire marks that indicate cars parked beside the road. He didn't drive up there and  walk down the back way, here, so you wouldn't see him? He didn't get to your son before you did? You stopped to fix hot milk, remember?"                                                                                                 

"Ace had shaken me. I'm aware I don't look as if anything could, but you've never had to deal with him when he's angry. I wanted to calm down before I confronted Rick."

"Should have had a drink," Billy Wendell grunted.

"So," Yoshiba began, "it's possible that Ace—"

"It is not!" she cried. "I heard the shot while I was climbing the stairs. Ace had driven off and Rick was dead when I got to the door of his room. I told you."                                                                    

"You did," Dave said. "Was it true? Do you know why Lieutenant   

Yoshiba came with me this morning?"

"Because of you." The heavy old woman pulled herself into the saddle again. "Because you won't rest until you can involve me in my son's death. Or prove it was suicide. To save your company twenty-live thousand dollars. Which I'm sure it desperately needs."

"Wrong," Yoshiba said. "I'm here because you lied to me. Innocent people don't have to lie."

Billy Wendell snorted. "They do if they want to stay out of trouble."

Dave asked, "Why couldn't it have been suicide? He wasn't so humiliated when you burst in on him that he shot himself? It's been known to happen. Your kind of mother love can get to be too much to live up to."

Yoshiba jerked his head back, like a batter from a high inside fast ball. "What the hell does that mean?"

"It's abnormal psychology." Dave smiled thinly. "Not your field— remember?"

"It wasn't like that," Heather Wendell said stubbornly. "He was dead on the floor and Larry Johns was standing over him with the gun." She slapped the pinto's rump and it stepped out, startled, past the standing men. Billy Wendell nudged the sleek sides of the sorrel with the heels of cowboy boots that must also have belonged to his dead son. Nodding, the sorrel followed the paint.

"Not Ace Kegan?" Yoshiba asked.

Heather Wendell's back stiffened but she didn't answer. Above the clop of hoofs, she and her scarecrow ghost of a husband swayed on up the scabby drive, leather creaking. Yoshiba looked at Dave, shrugged, stepped off in their wake—not to follow them but to reach the car.

"Let's go find out," he said. "Who's the old joker?"

"Ex-husband," Dave said. "Father of the deceased."

"Back to cash in?" Yoshiba frowned. "Where was he?"

"Forget it," Dave said. "He was at a birthday party at a tavern in Torrance. For a long-lost small-time movie star named Lilian Drill."

"Who?" Yoshiba said.

"Sorry," Dave said. "Before your time."

Floor-to-ceiling curtains blinded the glass front of Ace Kegan's apartment. The deck was blanker than the beach. The sun had possession of both. But the sand had a few gulls and sandpipers. Yoshiba found a bell button in the redwood frame to the right of the glass sliding panels and pushed it. Nothing happened. He pushed it again. And a third time. Then there was sound from the apartment. Dave felt the deck shock faintly under him. The curtains jerked back. Kegan winced at them. His broken hands knotted the tie of a short gold velour robe. He clicked the lock on the aluminum doorframe and threw the panel aside. "For Christ sake!" he said to Dave.

"Yes, early," Dave said, "right. This is Lieutenant Yoshiba of the Los Santos police." Yoshiba looked at his watch. "It's after ten."

"I work till two," Ace Kegan said, "but if I didn't, I still wouldn't want to see you."

"We don't want to see you, either," Yoshiba said. "It's duty. You've heard of duty?"

Kegan said, "I told you to get him off my back." He glowered at Dave from under his lumpy brows. "Instead, you jump on too."

"And I'll tell you why," Yoshiba said. "You didn't tend bar at The Hang Ten Monday night. You sent your friend, there"—he nodded, Kegan turned, Bobby Reich dodged out of sight, Dave had an impression of blond nakedness and scared eyes—"to fill in for you."

Kegan's fists made clean, bumpy little clubs. He took a step. "Bobby!" he roared. A door slammed and no answer came. Kegan drew breath, turned back, working at a wry, broken-toothed smile. "All right. So Bobby filled in for me. It wasn't the first time."

"No, but it was the first time your partner got murdered," Yoshiba said. "And I doubt if you had dinner that often with his mother."

Kegan's mouth fell open a little.

"At the Hungarian place next to the theater where she was supposed to be seeing a film in which they mistreated horses," Dave said.

Kegan gave a grim little laugh, pushed his hands into the pockets of the robe, turned away. "Okay. Come on in. I'll tell you all about it." He shouted, "Bobby, come and make coffee." He jerked his head at the long, shaggy white couch. "Move the books and sit down." He went into the kitchen and ran water. A kettle clattered onto a stove burner. He stood beside the bank of false flowers. "She was worried about Rick, afraid he was up to something."

"And she wasn't the only one," Dave said. "You told me he wasn't bright, that he didn't have any defenses, that he couldn't keep his mouth shut. Or words to that effect. Isn't that what you said?"

"You remember just fine," Kegan said.

"He'd talked to his mother about Larry Johns, hadn't he? After he'd first met the boy. That was why she was upset Monday. She'd recognized Johns's name when he gave it on the phone."

"She hoped he'd gone away," Kegan said. "Yeah, Rick met the kid in the bar—how long ago? Six weeks, couple months? Rick took him home. I wasn't supposed to know but Rick was clumsy. He sent the kid to wait for him up the beach at the all-night coffee stand and after we closed he picked him up in the VW. Just by watching him, I knew he was up to something. I followed him and I saw it happen. Next day, Rick was off his head, like the other times, with Monkey, with Savage. Couldn't talk about anything but Larry Johns. When the kid didn't come back, it died down. But Heather remembered."

"And so did you," Yoshiba said. "And we've got a witness that Johns gave his name when he called her to try to get hold of Wendell."

Kegan looked sourly at Dave. "All right, so he gave it. So I also knew there was going to be trouble. It doesn't change anything. We got together to talk it over, figure out a way to stop it."

"And you didn't waste any time," Yoshiba said.

"We decided to catch him in flagrante delicto and show him what a fool he was making of himself before it could go any farther."

"So you left the cafe without eating and each of you took your own car. Yours is a Fiat sports model, right? The new one parked in your space out back here?"

Kegan turned his head, wary, watching from the corners of his eyes., "Yeah. That's the one. I followed her. That was the first mistake. I could have been there ten minutes sooner. Then, when we did get there, she had to argue with me."                                                    ;

"Right. You had a fight at the foot of the stairs. She didn't trust you because you were too angry. She was afraid you'd hurt her son. She was also afraid of what you'd do to Johns. You made a lot of threats."                                                                                           

"He gets hysterical." Bobby Reich came out of the hall and went into the kitchen. He wore the white shorts.

"Oh, you're a real help," Kegan said.

"It's true." Bobby opened cupboards, rattled metal, crockery. "You know it's true. And why do you keep lying, Ace? They know all about  it, you can tell."                                                                               

"Deliver me from my friends!" Ace kicked a medicine ball. It rolled  sluggishly a few inches on the thick white carpet. "Okay, I was boiling. And she got in my way. Christ, what football lost when Heather Wendell was born female! I couldn't get past her."

"She waited till you got back into your car," Yoshiba said, "and started the engine."

"But you didn't go home," Dave said. "You drove around back of  the property, parked and—"

Kegan opened his mouth to protest.

"The tire marks are there," Yoshiba said. "Little Pirellis. Brand new."

"Mr. Moto lives." Kegan snorted disgust, wagged his head. "Yeah, little Pirellis. Okay, I parked and got out and went down the hill. Because I was damned if I thought she'd be enough. She might not even try. His sex life scared her. I was going to control my temper and it was going to work out like we planned. Only when I got down there I could see through the back windows. Rick was on the floor by the desk, Heather was holding a gun on the Johns kid and talking on the phone. Saying Rick was dead. There was no way I could help him. I'd only mess myself up. I got my ass out of there."

"Was the gun a surprise to you?" Yoshiba asked.

"I knew he had one. Heather made him get it. She had a fixation about hippies. They're thick up in that canyon and when the big dog died she wanted protection."

"Did you know where he kept it?" Yoshiba asked.

"Desk," Kegan said, "top drawer. He showed me."

"So it didn't shock you too much when you and Mrs. Wendell broke in on his lovemaking and he reached into the desk and came up with a gun. You were ready."

"He was dead on the floor when I got there," Kegan said. "Anyway, he'd never do that. Not to me."

"Never is a big word," Yoshiba said. "You rushed him to get the gun away from him and it went off, right?"

"Wrong," Kegan said. "I didn't even go inside."

"Does that road get a lot of use?" Dave asked. "That loop around in back of the Wendell place?"

"People go too far up the canyon—it's a way to get back out," Kegan said. "Kids used to park up there—to have sex. Heather used to go up with a big flashlight and try to run them off. But kids have changed. Lately they just laughed at her and went on fucking. So she phoned the police, let them handle it. I guess they did. She hasn't complained about it lately."

"Is that what you thought it was?" Dave wondered. "Necking kids? That car you found parked up there on Monday night?"

"I did?" Kegan turned, took coffee mugs from Bobby, came at Yoshiba and Dave with them. He was frowning to himself. "Yeah. I did." He grimaced. "I didn't really notice. My mind was on Rick and Johns and Heather." He handed the mugs to the men on the couch. He looked at the sky-bright window wall. "But I don't think there was anyone in it. No. Empty." He snapped his fingers. "Wait. They were down below the road. At least, he was." The boxer's broken face cracked a grin. "Yeah, I must have shook him. He ran like a rabbit. Back up to the road, right past me. Jesus!" Bobby came and handed him a steaming mug. He blew at it, chuckling. "What do you think? He left the girl there with her pants down under the trees in the dark?"

"What kind of car was it?" Yoshiba asked.

"Small." Kegan shrugged. "I don't know, didn't pay any attention. Besides, it was dark. I'd driven up with my lights off". So Heather wouldn't see."

"She heard a shot when she was climbing the stairs," Dave said. "You didn't hear it?"

"I might have," Kegan said. "It didn't register. Car isn't exactly quiet. I don't think so."

"Okay." Yoshiba set down his mug among the record albums and magazines on the table. He pushed his hard, square bulk up off the couch. "Thanks for the coffee." He began stepping over the bodybuilding equipment, heading for the door. "I don't think you've got anything to worry about anymore. But keep yourself available. Don't take any sudden trips, okay?"

On the coast road, aiming back toward the Los Santos Civic Center, sun glinting off the curve of the windshield, Yoshiba said, "You didn't make it better, you made it worse."

"For Johns." Dave nodded glumly, slouched in the seat, staring without seeing at the flat blue surf. "Yes. I'm ahead of you."

"The kid is guilty as hell. And Larson's not going to have any trouble proving it. Not now."

"In his Little League cap?" Dave asked.

"He could wear a strait jacket," Yoshiba said, "and the jury would believe him. They'd have to. The kid laid down for Wendell for money. Then the money wasn't there. He attacked Wendell. Wendell tried to defend himself with the gun. It went off and Wendell was dead."

"That's not murder," Dave said.

"It's manslaughter," Yoshiba said, "and what you get for that is not a pat on the butt."

"I still don't believe it," Dave said.

"Fine," Yoshiba said, "but do me a favor, okay? Don't come to me with your doubts anymore. I'm busy, you know? Really busy."

CHAPTER 13

 

Bulldozers chewed raw dirt flats out of brown-grass summer hillsides where live oaks grew old and green. The tire treads of graders, the cleats of rollers, stirred yellow dust the wind took. Cement trucks climbed dirt trails, tanks turning, turning, like pregnant iron girls in sleep. Lower down the slope, racks of new two-by-fours framed the shapes of houses to come. Under a stand of tall and shaggy eucalypts, bench saws whined and threw arcs of yellow sawdust into the clean blue air. On plank rooftops, young men, shirtless and sunburned, stapled down shingling with guns that made quick, hard slapping sounds. Hammers beat imperfect rhythms in the heat.

The silver Electra had brought Dave, air conditioned, to the far and still nearly empty end of the San Fernando Valley. He parked the car now next to a long aluminum office trailer that waited this side of the work area. A set of aluminum steps where a lot of boot-scraping had taken place led to an aluminum screen door. He stepped up, rapped the doorframe, spoke to the darkness beyond the screen. No one came. But he heard a scuff of shoes behind him and turned. A bullish man walked toward him in a scarred yellow hard hat.

"What can I do for you?"

"I'm looking for Elmo Sands." Dave stepped down and held out a card. "It's about Thomas Owens—the accident he had at his house on the beach at Los Santos."

The man's hands were busy managing blueprints the wind wanted to take away from him. He didn't reach for the card but he read it. It didn't appear to cheer him up. Still, he freed a hand to unlatch the screen door, nodded Dave inside and followed. He laid the blueprints on a long, crowded drafting table under fluorescent tubes in chain-hung flat white enamel reflectors. The blueprints began to curl up. The man stooped to an ice chest.

"I'm Sands. You want a beer?"

Dave didn't have a chance to answer. A cold, wet can was in his hand. The contractor hiked his barrel bulk onto a tin stool, thumbed the opener tab on his can and took a long pull at the beer.

"Ah, that's good. Really work up a thirst in this weather." He lifted off the hard hat and set it on the drawing table. Out of a damp mat of gray hair, sweat trickled down his leathery face. "Insurance, huh? Tom said he'd keep them off me. I told him it wouldn't work. I know insurance companies."

"They like to pay out money the way anyone else does," Dave said. "That was an expensive accident."

"Not my fault." Sands yanked a handkerchief from a hip pocket and mopped his face and neck. "That rail was bolted according to specifications. That's how I work—nothing gets overlooked. That's why Tom Owens wants me. I've built every square foot he's designed since he went on his own. It's not that we're friends. He's got nothing but friends in this business."

"He said you don't make mistakes." Dave swallowed beer. "I'm willing to believe you both. But you personally can't set every bolt. You have people working for you." He nodded toward the sunny screen door, the sawing and hammering noises, the roar and complaint of machinery up the hills. "They can forget. Or just not give a damn. The facts say it happened. There were only loose nails stitching up that rail."

"Yup." Sands worked thirstily on his beer again. "I couldn't believe it and I went and looked."

"So it was your fault," Dave said.

"I thought so. And I fired the kid. I took him with me and showed him the nails and I fired him. He worshiped Tom. He couldn't face it that his carelessness had hurt the man. He got soaked through in the water around those rocks, trying to find those bolts."

"But he didn't come up with them," Dave said.

"He didn't come up with them." Sands took another quick pull at his beer, set the can down, began pawing among the papers and glints of blade and tooth on the drawing table. "He came up with this." He pulled out a thin, square, floppy magazine and held it toward Dave. It was the Home section of a Sunday Los Angeles Times. Even without his glasses, Dave recognized the color photo on the cover. It showed Tom Owens's dune house sharp-angled against a sea sky streaked with sunset. "There's a two-page spread inside," Sands said.

Dave put on his glasses and turned pages. The stool gave a snap and creak of relief when Sands got off" it to stand next to Dave, smelling of hops and Brut deodorant. Dave found the spread, text and five pictures, three of houses Owens had designed for film and television personalities, and two more of his own house. Sands's thick index finger tapped a small photo in the lower right corner. Tom Owens, gaunt, high-shouldered, and wearing a bright striped sarape and western hat, rested elbows on the deck rail above the tide rocks where he'd fallen and broken both legs. The caption read: Nightly custom: architect Owens watches spectacular sunset from cantilevered outpost.

Sands said, "Look at the date on that magazine."

The date was a week before the accident. Dave handed back the section, folded up his glasses, pushed them into a jacket pocket. "You've shown this to Tom?"

"Haven't found the time," Sands said. "But it wouldn't matter to him. He didn't blame me for what happened. You were the one I kept it for. I knew there'd be an insurance investigator around sooner or later."

"Actually," Dave said, "he'd be from another outfit—Sequoia. They're the ones sending him checks. I'll save you the bother, though. I'll be talking to them today. I'll tell them about the magazine."

"Another outfit!" Sands scowled. "Well, then, what the hell are you doing here?"

"A friend of Tom's has been accused of murder," Dave said. "Tom doesn't think he did it. The dead man was insured by my company. That's where I come in. But none of my leads has gone anywhere. I haven't helped Medallion. I'd begun to think I couldn't help Tom. Coming to you was a long shot."

"If it's for Tom," Sands said, "I want to help."

"I think you have." Dave tilted back his head to finish off the beer. By the door a small black-enamel barrel that had once held roofing tar now held trash. He dropped the can into it. "Thanks."

"It's something about the bolts," Sands said.

"About the bolts," Dave said, "and about an accident that wasn't an accident and a murder that I'm pretty damn sure was." He unlatched the screen, hinged the bright door outward, stepped down into hammer strokes of sun. He turned back. "I hope you rehired that workman."

"Hell, yes," Sands said.

A mile west of the Medallion tower on Wilshire, a low-slung building of narrow red brick whose flat roof was a rubble of white rock housed Sequoia Accident and Indemnity. A handsomely kept jungle of leather-leaved greenery grew against the walls. Inside, no one sat at the glossy reception room desk where a multibuttoned green telephone winked lights and softly buzzed. Dave went past into a square patio sheltered by a big rubber tree. Glass doors led off the patio into offices.

Dave found Johnny Delgado in a corner room where open-flap cardboard cartons on the floor suggested departure. The desk was strewn with folders. Delgado, a trim little man who was Sequoia's claims investigator, stood with his back to the door, a foot up on a brick indoor planter, elbow on knee, chin on hand, head bowed as if he were studying the lush greenery. Without turning, he said in a beaten voice:

"Don't say anything, Marie. Whatever you want, it's yours. I can't fight anymore. Certainly not face to face. Certainly not today. Just go away."

Dave said, "It's not Marie, Johnny."

Delgado lifted his head, straightened his back, put the foot down, turned. He didn't look trim anymore. Beard stubble darkened his hollow cheeks. His eyes looked burned out. His suit looked as if he'd slept in it, and nowhere clean. He twisted Dave a wry smile of apology but didn't step around the desk, didn't make an effort to shake hands. He just said, "Christ," to himself and dropped into the chair back of the desk and waved a hand at another chair. Dave took it and Delgado said:

"When you're a kid, you get the idea there's only one female of the species in the world. You can't wait to marry her. Then you think what she's giving you instead of just the sex anybody's entitled to is her life or something." He laughed without amusement. "Oh, there's giving going on, all right. Only you don't know it. You think you're collecting a home, some money, a future, a comfortable retirement. Then she springs it on you. You've been collecting, all right. But not for the both of you. For her, exclusively for her."

"It's California," Dave said.

Delgado grunted, bent to open a drawer, to bring out a bottle. Jack Daniel's. Built into the brick wall over his head were clock hands in black wood. They made the time only minutes past noon. But Delgado, with hands that shook, poured steeply from the bottle into clear plastic throwaway glasses, put the bottle out of sight again, pushed one of the glasses toward Dave, between the clutter of files. "And what's on your mind?" he asked. The tone was meant to be resentful but it was too tired.

"They're all after you, are they?" Dave asked. 

Delgado drank. "There's a reason." His smile was wan. "I'm not doing any work." He shook his head like a man jarred. "I don't understand it, Dave. We were getting along fine. No change. Not in ten years. I still can't believe it." He shut his eyes and emptied the glass and shuddered. It was probably six straight ounces. "Never could have believed we'd split. And if I could have believed it, I sure as hell wasn't ready for what it's doing to me. I can't function." He pushed savagely at the files. "I can't even read these fucking things. You're just lucky I happened to be here today. I haven't been in this office three hours running, not in a month." He took out the bottle again. His bruised and sorrowing eyes flicked at Dave's glass but Dave hadn't touched it. Delgado refilled his own glass. "I should have knocked her up. That's what my old man says. Keep 'em pregnant and you'll keep 'em. In the old country a woman was fat and ugly after five years of marriage. Nobody else would want her. That was how they did it." He drank again. "Repulsive, right?"

"Buried there"—Dave nodded at the files—"have you got reports on two accidents to a household on the beach in Los Santos? Owens? Ewing?"

Delgado squinted, pushed at his thick, expensively cut black hair, hunched forward, began shifting the folders around. He did it sweating, slow, as if they were too heavy for him. He pulled this batch out from under that batch, peered at labels, dropped the first bunch in another place, pulled a second batch. But he grew impatient after half a minute, slammed the last handful down. Papers slithered out of them and lisped to the thick carpet. "Christ, I don't know. When? What's it about?"

"Gail Ewing, the woman, owned a Vega that her daughter drove." He named the Sunday of the rock festival. "She ended up rolling down a hill into a tree in Topanga Canyon. The brakes had failed. Now . . . I've just come from the police garage. They said you hadn't been there. And I believe them. Because you're good at your job and even if you weren't, you couldn't have missed on this one. Johnny—there wasn't any brake fluid in the master cylinder."

"A leak?" Delgado frowned, rubbed his stubbly face.

"No leak," Dave said. "Somebody drained the fluid and didn't replace it."

"Car been in for repairs before that?"

Dave said, "Never. It was a new car and nothing had gone wrong with it to warrant a checkup."

Delgado groaned and finished off his drink.

"Why don't you stop that?" Dave asked. "Work will do the same thing. And you come out into daylight."

"Yeah, right." Delgado nodded. "Right, but too late. I'm out. I just got the word. Very kindly, very understandingly, but I'm fired. All I'm in here for is to get my personal stuff and get the hell out."

"One more thing and I'll leave you to it," Dave said. "This Ewing woman's brother, Thomas Owens, two days after the car accident, fell from a deck of his house that overhangs rocks in the surf and broke both his legs. The bolts that held the deck rail in place had been removed. I have proof."

Delgado for the first time looked out of his eyes, past the blur of pain. "I remember," he said. He glanced at the pile of folders. "They're not here. I signed them, Dave. I signed a lot of stuff. It was the second week. Everything had accumulated, like now. I just signed them all. I walked in here after receiving a very choice letter from my wife's attorney. And I was smashed and I sat down in this chair and I said, 'The hell with it,' and I took 'em all on. I didn't read 'em— I signed 'em, signed 'em all."

"That's costing Sequoia," Dave said. "Which doesn't much matter. What does matter is that somebody was trying to kill Thomas Owens. Both those times they missed. I think there was a third time. They missed Owens then too. But someone else got a bullet in the chest and died. It wouldn't have happened, Johnny—not if you'd looked at that car, looked at that deck rail."

Delgado was a bad color. "Get out of here," he said thickly. "Just get out, will you, please?"

The plank roadway that crossed the dunes to the stiff wooden sails of Tom Owens's house was too narrow for cars to pass on it. So when the Vega came out of the shadow of the port now, Dave braked the Electra and pushed the lever to Reverse. Then he saw Jomay's bright hair through the windshield and shifted to "N" instead and stepped out. Gail Ewing halted her car, tapped the horn, called sharply:

"We have a plane to catch!"

He walked to her. Larry Johns was in the cramped rear of the little car, where there was no room for his legs. He sat crossways on the fake leather seat, head pulled down to his shoulders to avoid the low ceiling.

"Where did you come from?" Dave asked.

"Tom got his lawyer on my case," Johns said. "Mr. Greenglass. It was only manslaughter if it was anything, he says, and that's not like murder, where they can hold you without bail."

"Legal technicalities had nothing to do with it," Gail Ewing snapped. "It was Tom's fifty thousand dollars. That was where the judge set bail—which shows you what he thinks of the case."

"It's not a case yet," Dave said. "And I'm not sure it's ever going to be."

"Doubt away," Gail Ewing said, "but right now I must ask you to move your car."

Dave looked across at Jomay. BB lay asleep in the girl's narrow lap, golden head between her little breasts, rosebud mouth drooling on a fresh white blouse, probably one of Trudy's. Dave asked, "Back to Texas?"

Jomay nodded sulkily. "I give my statement about Huncie to that man in the baseball cap. They had it typed up. I signed it. They don't need for me to stay." She glanced bitterly at Gail. "I would have stayed. Tom—he says I'm more'n welcome."

"He gave you the fifteen hundred," Johns said. "That's what you come out here to get, isn't it?"

Jomay twitched her mouth, tossed her hair.

Dave asked Johns, "You're going to the airport to say goodbye? I thought you said goodbye in Austin fifteen months ago."

"I want to see that Delta jet take off," Johns said. "Watch it till it's out of sight."

Jomay turned sharply on the seat. "It was Mama drove you off," she yelled. "Wasn't that what you said? Makin' you clean up her beauty parlors and never payin' you? Now you talk like it was me you hate."

He sighed and said gently, "I don't hardly remember you, Jomay. Why don't you try that? Just forget me."

Jomay picked up the limp baby under its arms and shook it at him. "This here is yours!"

The baby began to cry and Johns turned his thin child face to look out the rear window.

"It's good flying weather," Dave told him. "The plane will get off all right. I'm sure Mrs. Ewing here will report back accurately. I need to talk to you. And Tom. There are some developments."

"For heaven sake!" Gail Ewing threw open the door, got out of the car, yanked the bucket seat forward against the steering wheel. "Get out if you're not going. We've got less than an hour now."

Johns half crawled, half fell out of the tight little car. Gail slid behind the wheel again, slammed the door, raced the engine. Dave returned to the Electra, backed it along the hollow-sounding planks to the wide place on the coast road shoulder where the drive began, swung it out of the way. The Vega shot past, Jomay's face flushed, BB still wailing. Her cries mingled with those of the gulls wheeling the emotionless blue sky above the dunes.

Dave rolled the heavy car to where Johns stood waiting, squinting up at the gulls, his hands in the hip pockets of the worn Levi's. They came into the house down stairs into the kitchen, where the dogs jumped and barked around Johns. He dropped his Levi's and the pumpkin-color dog snatched them and the others ran after him barking. Johns wasn't quite naked. He wore very small yellow swim trunks. He peeled off his T-shirt as he led the way along under the gallery to the room at the far house corner, where Tom Owens said from his hospital bed:

"Good—you didn't go."

He held out his arms to Johns, then saw Dave and dropped the arms and dropped his smile. It was the best smile Dave had seen in a long time and he hated to see it go.

"What is it?" Owens said. "Larry's free. Isn't that fine?" The boy perched on the bed edge. Owens stroked his shoulder. He cocked an eyebrow at Dave. "Aren't you pleased?"

"It's too early," Dave said. "I'll be pleased when they refund your bail money and he crosses home plate, but he hasn't crossed home plate—not yet. And that's only half of it. The other half is you."

"Me? I'm fine—now."

"You're a target," Dave said. "Someone tried to kill you. Not once but twice." He eyed the boy with the blond mustache. "And possibly three times." Owens tried to interrupt. Dave didn't let him. He told about the brake fluid, the deck bolts, about how Johnny Delgado had neglected his job, about how the kid who worked for Elmo Sands hadn't.

Owens was pale against his pillows. Reaching for cigarettes on the magazine- and book-strewn blankets, his hand shook. He fumbled the pack and dropped it. Larry Johns took it, lit two cigarettes from it, handed one to Owens. The architect looked bleakly at Dave. "That's right. The photographer posed me leaning on that rail. Backward and frontward. It was his idea."

"So the caption was fiction," Dave said. "You didn't go out there every night at martini time to watch the sunset."

"Sunsets," Owens said, "are usually in bad taste."

"But you fell off there," Dave said. "How?"

"Trudy and Mark were recording." Owens gave an ironic laugh. "I was minding their business."

"The night before," Dave asked, "you don't remember the dogs barking? Somebody was out there removing those bolts. It had to be under cover of darkness."

"We were catching a play at the Mark Taper—Larry and I. Gail?" He creased his forehead. "Where was she?"

"Free child-care centers for working mothers," Johns said. He squinted in the smoke from his cigarette, probing for and finding the brown pottery ashtray. "What would happen to Gail if she ever had to mind her own business for a week?"

Owens laughed without hope or humor. "The world would be up to its ears in stray infants and oil slicks." He frowned. "Mark and Trudy weren't home that night either. Where were they?"

"Poetry marathon," Larry Johns said. "At that far-out bookstore in Santa Monica. Ninety-nine poets, or something, reading steady for two days and two nights. The store wanted to get it in the Guinness Book of World Records. They used up about fifty tape cassettes and found out afterward the mike wasn't plugged in. Remember?" This time Owens's laugh was real. "Yes—right."

Dave said, "So whether the dogs barked or not, there was no one home to hear them. How about when the brakes on your sister's car were tampered with?"

"That was no way to kill me," Owens said. "I never drive that car."

That was on a weekend." Larry Johns tugged at the ragged ends of his blond mustache, frowning, thoughtful. "Maybe they weren't here. We left them for shots at the vet's one Saturday." He went to a file cabinet and brought Dave a slip of paper headed los santos animal clinic. The scrawled date was right. Dave handed back the slip and the boy put it away again. Owens watched his thin nakedness. The yellow eyes smiled and looked hungry. Dave told Owens, "Madge Dunstan and Ray Lollard picture you as someone everybody likes. So does Elmo Sands. He says you have only friends."

"I'd have thought so," Owens said. "In that way, at least, I've always been lucky."

"Think. There's no one you've crossed?" Dave sat in one of the orange canvas director's chairs. "Suppose you hadn't come along— who would have built those expensive beach houses that made you famous?"

"Anyone and no one." Johns sat on the bed edge again and Owens stroked his back. "It really doesn't add up, Dave."

"Does Larry ever drive your sister's car?"

"No." Owens stopped his moving hand. "Gail and Trudy. Larry drives my car, the El Camino. What are you getting at?"

"You look alike—fair, slender, long hair, mustaches," Dave said. "And on the night Rick Wendell was killed, Larry wore your sarape and hat."

The two on the bed watched him, puzzled.

Dave told Johns, "Try to remember. We know now that Mark followed you that night. You evidently didn't notice him. Did you notice anybody else when you left the house and headed for the road where Wendell was waiting to pick you up?"

"No. But I went out the driveway. In my cowboy boots. They made a lot of noise on the planks. If somebody went on the sand underneath I wouldn't have heard."

"And you didn't notice a car following you when you drove up into the canyon with Rick?"

"Tell you the truth"—Johns blushed scarlet, got off the bed, went to stand looking out the window—"Rick had kind of busy hands. Well, one hand, anyhow. A couple times I thought we'd go off the road."

"So you weren't watching the rear-view mirror. You didn't see the headlights of the El Camino that Mark was driving. You didn't see headlights from another car?"

"Sorry." Johns stepped to the bed to put ashes into the brown pottery tray. "What you think is the same one that tried to kill Tom by rigging those brakes and the deck rail came back and saw me leaving and mistook me for Tom and followed along to try to kill me?"

Owens, pale again, took the boy's hand, gripped it hard. He looked at Dave. "You think he went right into Wendell's place and that was what Larry heard and—"

"And that Wendell came out to investigate, found a stranger, snatched the gun from the desk, the stranger tried to get the gun away from him and it went off. Yes."

"Jesus," Johns whispered. "He saved my life."

"It was someone who didn't know me that well," Owens said with sudden conviction. "He tampered with the wrong automobile, then with that deck rail, where it was only by bad luck I happened to lean." He breathed in sharply. "He'd seen that magazine picture."

"And believed the caption," Dave said. "And you wore the sarape and hat. Also on television, right?"

"For color." Owens's smile was self-mocking.

"But you can't think of anyone who wants you dead." Dave got up grimly from the director's chair and went to the door with the high wall break above it. "Try, Tom. Give it hard thought. There's got to be someone. And if we don't find him, Larry isn't going to stay free."

Johns wasn't listening. Worried, he tugged at his mustache again. "Tom? They're running in a memorial to Rick at that Mr. Marvelous shuck tonight. I know Gail and the kids will be out. But I ought to go. I won't stay late. I mean—hell, he did save my life."

"A friend." Owens's voice was heavy with irony but his smile was kind. "Sure, go. I'll be all right."

"I couldn't go to the funeral," Johns explained.

"Don't sweat it," Owens said. "It's okay." Watching them, the boy standing by the bed, the man in the bed holding his hand, smiling up at him, Dave had a sudden nightmare sense of deja vu.

"Wear the sarape and hat," he said. He left them staring blankly at each other.

CHAPTER 14

 

Along a stretch of wide West Santa Monica Boulevard where the city criminal code didn't reach, signs, red, blue, yellow, flashed names at the rental cars of tourists that crawled past, bumper to bumper, while the Iowans inside, eyes circled by white from desert sunglasses, marveled. The signs read institute OF oral sex, do it modeling STUDIO, PEEK IN ADULT BOOKS, PUSSYCAT THEATRE. In calligraphies of glass, girls girls girls wrote itself on the wide black slate of the night sky—topless, bottomless, go-go dancers, boys boys boys, total, the signs said, nudity. And there were neon drawings of gigantic naked hips and breasts and smiles.

Surprisingly, but only to those who didn't know Los Angeles, in the midst of all this loomed an old-time livery stable, newly painted red with white trim—the big barn. It was the largest L.A. gay bar, logical host to the Mr. Marvelous contest. Day-Glo banners fluttered on its country front. A swivel klieg light mounted on a noisy flatbed truck sent a blinding blue-white shaft into the high darkness. Barbra Streisand wailed from loudspeakers over an entryway lit by electrified ranch-house lanterns.

A strip of incongruous red carpet crossed the sidewalk. At the curb, glossy rented limousines halted and discharged beautiful youths who looked nervous and a little too muscular for their hired tuxedos. The way traffic inched along gave Dave time to study them. He'd met the majority. But the clothes, the grooming, varnished them to sameness. And they hadn't glowed like this in their jeans and work shirts at the bars. Only Bobby Reich. Clothed or unclothed, Bobby dazzled. He stepped out now from Ace Kegan's shiny little Fiat.

A crowd five rows deep behind red silken ropes made a gantlet of the stretch from curb to door. They gasped and sighed. Camera bulbs flashed. Microphones glittered toward smiling mouths like drunken missiles toward the moon. A bored-looking man with a motion picture camera saddling a shoulder pushed onlookers. Dave reached a corner and idled up a side street where the dense leafage of old acacias dimmed the street lamps. He was three blocks off before he found a parking space that would take the Electra.

When he got back to The Big Barn, the crowd was funneling inside. Ahead of him, he glimpsed the cheap red windbreaker and childlike brown hair of Vern Taylor. When he himself got inside and handed money to a rosy-cheeked boy-man in the oiled and hand-rubbed horse stall that was making shift as a box office, Dave turned to search the press of men and boys behind him. In the doorway stood Kovaks and Ray Lollard—Lollard beaming with pride and joy, Kovaks unshaven, in clay-stained bib overalls. Dave chuckled. It was to Lollard he had mailed Kovaks's gift pot. Tonight at dinner with Madge, Doug had told him that Kovaks was moving his workshop into the carriage house back of Lollard's old mansion.

The main room of The Big Barn was enormous, propped by splintery posts and overhung by haymows. The wired barnyard lanterns glowed everywhere, amber mostly but sometimes red and green, now and then even white. Sawdust was thick underfoot. Sets of spurs, cracked oxen yokes, lariats coiled and lacquered into uselessness, hung against the walls. Dave's foot kicked a brass spittoon. Strictly ornamental—it sprouted plastic flowers. This was the West—but only West L.A.

On the room's far side, long mirrors in old mahogany frames, probably bought on the back lot of some defunct film studio, reflected glittering bottles. Maybe he could get a drink. He began muttering excuses and using a shoulder and an elbow. In five minutes he had reached the long bar that matched the mirrors. Brunswick would probably have been the manufacturer's name but too many elegantly clad pelvises were in the way—he couldn't look for the label.

He had to wait awhile but a double Scotch came to him at last. It tasted like a prescription by a dropout pharmacist. But the commingled smells of strong colognes around him overpowered the taste and he drank it. He felt himself grin at the painting above the bar. No buxom Gay Nineties lady on a tufted red velvet sofa but cowboys taking each other's Levi's off in a moonlit bunkhouse—cowboys pretty as girls and hung like stallions. A voice at his ear said:

"I haven't seen you in here before."

Dave didn't look around. "Just passing through," he said. "As quickly as possible."

The owner of the voice turned away. "You're right—she's vice."

"Vice?" someone else said. "Impossible. She's wearing matching shoes."

A change came in the dense warp and weft of talk that stretched across the huge room. He glanced at his watch, then looked toward the end of the place where spotlights fingered down. There on a makeshift stage under the planking of a loft, a slim man in a white tuxedo, shirt ruffles, a silver wig sprinkled with mica, clutched a chrome microphone stand. A sunburst of colored foil backgrounded him. On a table beside him three brass trophy cups gleamed above watches and cuff" links in jewelers' boxes and a display by an expert window dresser of shirts, sweaters, pants, jackets.

The man on the stage moved his mouth but no sound reached across the wide blue lake of tobacco smoke. Laughter and shouts pelted him. We can't hear you, Vic, darling! He visored his eyes with a hand on which rings sparkled. He peered toward the darkness beyond the end of the stage. Suddenly, electronic feedback howled through the room. There were shrieks. Then, "Welcome!" came from the man in white. It came too loud and folded back on itself in a ringing echo. He stepped away from the mike, laughing, put a hand on his hip and squinted into the darkness again. He tried again. And this time all was well—or as well as could be expected.

"Welcome to the Third Annual Mr. Marvelous Awards! I'm your host, Vic Waverly. These have always been superb evenings. This one will top them all, I promise you, my dears. From the point of view of entertainment, from the stunning quality of the men—and I lay stress on that word, oh, do I lay stress on that word, darlings!—who have become finalists in the competition. You'll meet them in a minute. But first, I want to ask the judges to stand up so you can meet them. They're distinguished members of the Southern California Gay Community. Taking them in alphabetical order—"

First was a minister, complete with dog collar, though he'd got his training in backwoods Baptist seminaries in the deep South. Next was a moon-faced man with a belly who had begun as a gay activist at fifty after a lifetime of bailing out likely youths from jail, and now spent his nights on television talk shows explaining the gay mystique, whatever that was. Last was an acne-scarred publisher who served the homosexuals of fifty states with a sleek magazine that glamorized sadism and Texas mass murderers. There wasn't much applause but Dave knew better than to be gratified—the reason was, everyone held drinks and glossy program books.

Music came through loudspeakers. Hawaiian, of all things. Dave flinched, tilted up his glass, found only ice and asked for another drink. While he waited he ran a troubled look over the room again. And smiled grim satisfaction to himself. There was the white Stetson, the gaudy sarape. He dropped bills on the counter, picked up his glass. The time had come to move. If there was going to be action, he didn't want anyone hurt. Or dead. He began shouldering his way with apologies through the crowd.

But when he reached the spot by a post with fake cattle brands burned into it where he'd seen Larry Johns, the boy wasn't there.

Dave pushed on, craning to get another glimpse of the hat through the acres of fashionable haircuts, edging and jostling first to one side of the room, then the other. He ended up in an open area in front of the stage. It surprised him. There were even empty chairs, two rows of the folding kind, gray metal tubing, white padded plastic seats. They faced the backs of the judges, huddled over charts and photographs.

A fat little black-bearded man hung with straps and leather cases crouched, flashing camera bulbs at them. Behind the stage more bulbs flared. This space, these chairs, were for the press, of course, when they finished with the shiny-headed contestants back there and the gray-headed managers. Dave glimpsed Ace Kegan's knotty hands fidgeting with Bobby's tie. Dave dropped onto a chair and lit a cigarette. Maybe Larry Johns would find him. But it wasn't Larry Johns who touched his shoulder. He turned and looked up into the silver-marred smile of Vern Taylor. Taylor said:

"I saw you come in and I was pretty surprised. I mean, I knew you were gay—I can always tell. But I didn't think you'd come for this. I thought your life style would be different. You'd have a lover, somebody permanent. And you'd go places like ballets and operas and plays and art galleries. Together. You wouldn't cruise bars like this, and baths, and all that."

"I'm working," Dave said. "Still trying to find out about Tom Owens's accident."

Taylor didn't answer. He eyed Dave for a moment, then looked at the stage. So did Dave. A trio of slim little Polynesian youths, brown, sleek, smiling, had come out of the dark. They were wrapped to the waist in bright missionary cotton. Their small hands did graceful flower-in-the-wind turns, their narrow hips twisted dreamily. Taylor made a sound. Dave looked at him. His eyes were bright. He licked his lips.

The tempo of the tune quickened. As one, the boys gave slow winks. Slowly, not missing a beat or a gesture, they turned their backs. Slowly their hands found the cloth knots at their sides, twitched them, and the bright print wraparounds dropped. They were naked. Whoops. Whistles. They waggled little brown butts and, still keeping time with the music, slowly turned to face the crowd. Cheers. Jeers. Someone shouted, "My God, it's an invasion of field mice!" The boys joined in the laughter.

Dave turned to check Taylor's reaction but Taylor had moved off. The red jacket showed among a knot of people that had formed where steps came offthe side of the stage. But Taylor wasn't watching the dancers. He was watching Dave. From here he looked about sixteen. Except for his expression. Dave didn't know what it meant. Startlement but something else too—something ugly. And the look wasn't at him. It was at something past him. He turned. Larry Johns stood there, not sure how much to smile, fingers nervous at his ragged young mustache. He plucked at the bright sarape. "I did like you asked," he said. "I don't know why."

Dave stood. Maybe simply to shield the boy from that basilisk stare of Taylor's. He said, "Your photo was in the Times. Evidently before Yoshiba got you away from there, reporters came. You were on those long cement stairs down from the Wendell place. Wearing that outfit."

"Yeah." Johns's clear brow wrinkled. "So?"

"Have you thought," Dave asked, "why someone tried three times to kill Tom—then didn't try anymore?"

"Oh, wow." Johns sat down as if maybe his legs were unsteady. He watched the bare brown boys a moment without really seeing them. He blinked at Dave. "No, not really. It's kind of funny, though, isn't it?"

"I hope it stays funny," Dave said. "But I'm betting it won't. Keep close to me—right?"

"What's wrong?" Johns looked around, alarmed.

"Take it easy," Dave said. "I'm working on a hunch. They're not always reliable."

The music reached a final whining upslide of guitars, the brown boys snatched up their fallen sarongs and fled the stage, giggling like the three little maids from school. Applause clattered off the wooden walls. For this, people had abandoned their drinks. Confetti showered from the lofts. A few colored balloons wagged toward the high, shadowy rafters. Someone on a loft reached out and punctured one. It popped like a shot.

The man in the white tuxedo returned, applauding, to the microphone. "Our thanks," he said, "to the management of The Flower Lei for sending us Mei Mei, Tei Tei and Laverne." Laughter. "Seriously, if that didn't get you in the mood, lie down, dears—you're dead. All right. So much for foreplay." Laughter, his own with the crowd's. "Now, I know you're all dying for a look at the stars of the evening —those handsome and talented and sexy finalists for the title 'Mr. Marvelous.' What?" He turned from the mike, stepped toward the back of the stage. "Yes, right." He faced the crowd again. "They're ready—isn't that nice? They've only had four months. Anyway—take a good look at them with their clothes on. It will be your last chance tonight." Cocked eyebrow, open hand on breast. "Did I say that? All right—here we go. First, from The Barracks, contestant number one, Skeets Mclntyre—five eleven, one sixty, actor, bronco buster, Texan from top to toe. Let's hear it for Skeets Mclntyre!" He backed from the microphone, applauding. Mclntyre appeared in the spotlights. His eyes were too close together.

The parade ran on while the smoke thickened and the comments of the M.C. thinned and the judges squinted upward appraisingly and made notes with chewed pencils. The biggest applause came for Bobby Reich. But as Dave understood it, appearance was only a step. Somehow or other, as the evening wore on, talent and intelligence were supposed to be displayed. He set his drink between his feet on the sawdust and applauded Bobby. It might be his only honest opportunity. More balloons were loosed. Two of them banged this time. He wished that would stop. Here was a hairy lad in skin-tight wet-look black plastic from The Rawhide. And last, a lissome prince— princess?—from The Queen and Court.

He reached down for his glass and nearly bumped heads with Ace Kegan, who was crouching in front of him, trying to make himself heard over the din of clapping, cheering, stamping, music, the clatter of empty beer cans underfoot. At the same moment, Dave noticed Vern Taylor trying to come back, working his way past the knees and floor-tangled camera cases of the news people who now filled the chairs. Except that no one filled the chair next to Dave. Where the hell was Larry Johns? Dave bent toward the broken face of the little ex-boxer. If this was bad news about Bobby Reich, then his worries about this evening were off target. He cupped a hand to his ear. But what Kegan said was:

"You're wanted on the phone. By luck I was there when the call came. They won't page anybody—not with a crowd like this. Too many people afraid the boss might learn where they were. But I heard the dude who took the call speak your name. It's some kind of emergency. Somebody's mother. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. You don't exactly top my list of people I want to do favors for." He got to his feet, jerked his chin. "Phone's back of the bar."

"Thanks." Dave stood, pushed his chair aside, headed for the mirrors. While he fought his way, he squinted around him, trying to locate Larry Johns. Nowhere. He swore to himself. The phone receiver lay like a stunned thing by a silver-painted wrought-iron cash register halfway along the back bar. Dave worked the trick latch of the gate at the bar's end. A hefty youth in a leather vest and waxed mustaches blocked his way. He gave his name. The youth went back to the tall, spooled spigot handles and the foaming steins he was supposed to be minding. Dave picked up the phone.

"Get to the pet store, will you?" It was Doug. "On the double, please. Dave, she's really done it this time. She's liberated everything. The God damn sky is alive with parakeets and cockateels. Rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, white rats down every storm drain, cats and monkeys up every tree. They were political prisoners. She's Secretary General of the U.N. or something. Declared a worldwide general amnesty. I got the turtles back and a couple of toads. I'm quicker than they are. And, thank God, she didn't think of the fish. Yes, the fire department's coming. And the S.P.C.A. They say. But I need you. " While he listened, Dave watched the stage. The pastor of gay sheep came to the microphone. His sweet, swamp-water tones met a hush of beery reverence. Head thrown back, eyes closed, hands folded demurely at his crotch, he told God what had happened to big, gentle, lovable Rick Wendell. As if God let cases stack up on his desk like Johnny Delgado. The prayer ended. An electronic organ with bronchial problems and a subnormal pulse began "The Lord's Prayer." A plump, balding young man stepped up to sing the words.

And a gun went off. Not that near, but near. The sound was nothing like the bursting of balloons. Bad nerves had tricked his memory. The crowd didn't know the difference. The organ and the off-key baritone wobbled on and they listened. But Dave knew the difference and felt very sick. Larry Johns. Why had he wandered off when Dave had warned him? Where was Vern Taylor? Why had Doug's disaster had to happen now? He told the phone, "Doug, I can't. Not now. I'm sorry." He blundered the receiver into place and ran.

He didn't bother with apologies now, plowing his way backstage. He ended bruised and with a torn jacket pocket by the time he got there. In dim amber light, the contestants were stripping down to swim trunks. Silent. Out of respect for dead Rick Wendell and their own stage fright. The Big Barn's owner, bony, bucktoothed, sixty, in a silver-braided baby-blue satin cowboy outfit, was running an electric shaver over the bulging chest of his champion. Tenderly. Dave took it away from him, thumbed the switch to stop the waspish little motor, pushed the shaver into the boy's hand, took the man's stringy arm, led him away.

"There's been a shooting," Dave said quietly. "Out in back, I think. How do we get there?"

The man blinked, went pale, swallowed hard. But he moved. He led the way around a plank-and-stud partition that made a kind of hallway. To one side, doors were labeled us and them. There was a zinc-covered kitchen door with no light, no activity behind it. At the end of the hallway, a red exit sign was dim over a door with many bolts and chains. They weren't fastened. The bucktoothed man pulled the door open. The bulb outside was even dimmer, forty watts in a cage. It threw more shadow than light. There were big, scarred trash modules, stinking galvanized-iron garbage barrels, crates filled with smashed bottles. And in a chain-link fence corner clotted with soggy wastepaper—a man. He lay face down in a puddle that showed rainbows of oil. And something darker. Blood.

"My God!" The bucktoothed man put out a hand.

Dave knelt by Ace Kegan, laid fingers against the big vein in his neck. Life still beat there. But no thanks to Dave. Anger churned in him, disgust. Granted there'd been a lot of ways to be wrong in this case—did he have to try them all? And always too late? He got to his feet. "He's not dead," he told the bucktoothed man. "Phone the police. They'll bring an ambulance."

"What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to the beach." Dave headed for the glare of neons at the end of the alley. "As fast as I can get there. I hope to God it's fast enough."

 

CHAPTER 15

 

But Hollywood traffic on a summer weekend night was geared down. There was no way to get through it fast. In a three-block-long jam-up that had lasted through ten minutes of signal changes, he got disgusted. He left the car idling in the middle lane near La Cienega and Santa Monica and closed himself in a telephone booth. It stood against the curved stucco wall of a topless dance place. It smelled of marijuana smoke. He dug in his pocket. And the coins were wrong. Many yards off on an opposite corner, a Rexall drugstore promised change. There wasn't time. The signal went green. Horns began to blare behind the abandoned Electra. He dodged back to it. It was his turn at last and he made it across Santa Monica, but the achievement meant nothing. Down the long slope of restaurant row, the traffic clogged forever. When after another five minutes he reached a side street, he swung west toward Robertson. He'd phone from the apartment.

He sat on the bed, sweating, working his way out of his jacket, tugging down the knot of his tie, and listening to the phone buzz busy at Tom Owens's end. He tried twice more. Hopeless. He lit a cigarette and dialed Operator. His shirt was soaked. The night breeze through the big empty rooms made him shiver. "Look, I'm trying to reach this number." He gave it. "And it's busy. Can you break in on the line? It's urgent." "One moment—I'll give you the supervisor." The supervisor took more than a moment. And when she did get around to him, it didn't help. "I'm sorry. That number is out of order. I'll report it."

"Oh, no!" Dave said. "Look, the party's an invalid. Maybe he knocked the phone off the hook."

"I wouldn't be able to give you that information," she said. "You'd have to call Repair Service. They can check it for you. Dial 611." He dialed it and it rang a long, long time, but they checked the phone. "It is off the hook, sir. If this is an emergency, we can use a howler on it."

"Great," Dave said. "Make it a loud howler."

"They're not very loud," the girl said. Whether it was or not, Tom Owens didn't seem to hear it. "No one answers," the girl said.

"Right, thanks." Dave hung up and bent to twist out his cigarette in the ashtray on the floor. Hell, he'd only wasted time. What good would it do to warn Tom Owens someone was coming to kill him? He couldn't move from that bed. Dave dialed another number. "Los Santos police. Officer Zara speaking." Officer Zara didn't sound more than sixteen. "Lieutenant Yoshiba, please. Dave Brandstetter calling. It's an emergency."

"I'm sorry, sir. He's not here. Matter of fact, I'm the only one that is here. If you're calling about the trouble in Paradiso—"

"I wasn't. What's the matter?"

"It's the college kids again. They're trashing the mall again. They've occupied a bank. They're burning it. And somebody's sniping at the police. Everybody's there." He sounded wistful, left out.

"Well, look, Officer Zara," Dave said. "I have reason to believe there may be an attempt at homicide. The Thomas Owens house." He gave the R.F.D. address on the coast road. "Can you send somebody?

The man's alone there, laid up in bed, legs in casts."

"He hasn't called us," the boy said.

"He doesn't know the danger he's in," Dave said. "And while we're talking—"

"Okay, sir. I understand. I've written down the address. I'll try to radio a car, send them out there. He's alone like that? No nurse?"

"No nurse. The whole family's away tonight."

"What about dogs? Those people out on the dunes, they usually have a dog."

"Right," Dave said. "They've got dogs."

The big dog lay just inside the open front door. It lay on the polished floorboards among splinters of glass. A panel had been smashed out of the door. Dave crouched by the dog. The light was poor. It came a long way—from the hanging wicker lamp above the wicker furniture at the room's far end. But it was enough to show him a puddle of drying blood under the dog's head. He touched the motionless body. It had begun to lose heat in the cool beach night, begun to stiffen. The fur had lost its sheen and felt coarse. There was no sign of the other dogs.

A breeze sighed across the sand outside. There was the splash and sibilance of surf. Somewhere in the house, as in a ship, a beam creaked. He stood. And then he heard it, the sound of a voice. It came from beyond that far bulkhead, insistent, on a single pitch, no shift in tempo. It sounded not quite sane. But he knew the voice.

If he'd had any doubt about whom he was chasing out those red-taillight-streaked miles of freeway and coast road after escaping the tangle of city traffic, the doubt had been wiped out by what he'd found, a minute ago, leaking oil on the clean planks of Tom Owens's otherwise empty carport. It was a battered ten-year-old European mini. The slatted engine cover at the back was still hot.

Now he pried off his shoes and went quietly along beside the great painting under the gallery. Toward that edgy voice. The boxy hall the other side of the bulkhead was dark below but light came out through the tall opening above Tom Owens's closed door. It went high into a roof peak windowed by dark triangles of glass. The voice went up there too. And banged back down to Dave in the dark.

". . . Makes you want to vomit, doesn't it? Just hearing about it. Well, I lived it—two years of it, five months, eleven days. And you know why? Because once you get busted, they never leave you alone. They watch you all the time and they grab you. Make a mistake nobody else would notice and they grab you. Also, you have a record. You can't get a job."

"Vern," Tom Owens said patiently, "I'm sorry. Why didn't you tell me all this the other day? Hand me the phone. I'll get you a job right now."

"It's too late. Anyway, that's not what I wanted from you. I asked you for all I ever wanted from you that summer when we were seventeen. You remember. At the Cahuenga Park pool. To go on the way we had been, Tommy, the way you started us. Don't forget, it was your idea. You were the oldest."

"Vern, it was a long time ago. Forget it. All right, yes. What I did to you was heartless and I'm sorry. But, Vern, I was only a kid."

"Sure, you're sorry," Taylor sneered, "with my gun at your head. Anyway, do you think 'sorry' can wipe out seventeen rotten years? Hell, I didn't care if you took up with Nofziger and those guys with cars and rich parents. Even when they called me fag. Even when you did. All I asked was for you to save a little time for me."

Owens interrupted. For a minute they both talked at once and the echo off the high boards of the hall broke the words and Dave couldn't understand them. Then Taylor was saying:

"I smell like flophouses, cheap bars, public toilets. I can't get clean. And you—you came out all shining. Let me tell you about this gun. I bought it on Main Street in L. A. From a black guy who hustles TV's —not machines, hustlers that dress like women. He sold it to me for five dollars. I walked out of the Ricketts Hotel after I saw you on the lebby television. I bought a gun to kill you with, Tommy."

Dave put his hand on the doorknob.

Owens said, "But you didn't use it. Instead you drained brake fluid out of the car, hoping I'd crash. Then you took the bolts out of the deck rail, wanting me to fall."

"I remembered bullets can be traced," Taylor said. "But you didn't die. It would have been on the news. It wasn't. So I came back. With the gun. At night. I waited out on the dunes because the lights were on. And then I saw you leaving. Only it wasn't you, just that boy in your clothes, only I didn't know that, it was too dark out there. He got in a car on the road and that big man kissed him and I thought,  “I’ll kill them in bed together. Can you understand that, Tommy?"

"He was killed with his own gun," Owens said.

"I dropped mine," Taylor said. "He heard it. That was why he came out. And I ran at him and—"

"So you haven't used your gun," Owens said. "You can't be traced. Why don't you just—"

"Not shoot you?" Taylor jeered. "Sorry, but I have used it. Tonight. There were a lot of people around that old house. A kid outside the windows with a tape recorder. A big man in a cowboy hat. When he came, the kid ran up in the trees where I was. So close I could smell him sweating. He went after the big man went but there was someone else. A little man with a broken nose. When I ran back up to my car, I almost bumped into him. And he was at that Mr. Marvelous contest tonight. He saw me and he went straight to tell that insurance man, Brandstetter. I had to kill that little man, Tommy."

"But now Brandstetter knows," Owens said. "Vern, it's time you gave up. It's all going wrong."

"It always did," Taylor said. "For me. Everything always went wrong. It didn't seem so bad when I saw in the paper how they were holding that boy for murder. I knew what he must be to you. That's why I came to see you that day, Tommy. To watch you crying for him the way I used to cry for you. But he's out. I saw him tonight. I ought to have known he wouldn't stay locked up. You had money to get him out. Money can buy anything. There was only one way somebody like me could hurt somebody like you. Kill you and—"

Tires rumbled heavily on the driveway planks.

"What's that?" Taylor asked.

"My family's come home," Owens said. "You can still get away, Vern. Go out by the stairs just around the corner. Out there in the hall."

"No!" Taylor said. "I'll kill them all. They mean something to you. I never could, but they do. Maybe I won't even kill you, Tommy. I'll kill them instead, and you can live the rest of your life knowing you caused it."

Rubber-shod footsteps made the floor shake. Dave let the doorknob go, flattened himself against the dark wall. The door opened. Taylor moved toward the livingroom. Dave moved after him, silent, swift.

Far off, at the foot of the stairs that spiraled wooden down from the gallery, a door opened, brightness streamed out, then the long shadow of Larry Johns in the sarape and hat. "Tom?" he called. "Whose car is that up there? What's the matter with Hans and Fritz? They're out on the dunes and they won't come. They—" He broke off, ran to the dog, knelt. "Barney! Barney?" He touched the dead body, drew his hand back. "Aw, no, no!" He looked up.

And Taylor lifted a little nickel-plated revolver. Light slipped orange along its barrel. Dave struck Taylor's arm down. The gun spat fire and a bullet drew a groove in a polished floor plank. Taylor half turned. Dave chopped him across the windpipe with the edge of a hand. The gun clattered away. Taylor dropped, making a hoarse, rasping sound, clutching his throat, trying to take bites of air.

Larry Johns stood by the dead dog, staring, while Owens called from the next room, "Larry, are you all right? For Christ sake, Vern, what have you—?"

"It's all right!" Larry shouted. He came running down the room to Dave, careful to side-step the gun. He eyed the gun as if it were a snake. He looked uncertainly at Dave. "Isn't it all right?"

"As it's ever likely to be," Dave said. "Where did you disappear to at The Big Barn?"

"The men's room," Johns said. "Sorry."

Dave grunted. He touched the twisting, gasping Taylor with a foot. "Find something to tie him up with. He may be on our hands for a while. The police are busy tonight." He retrieved the gun, dropped it into a pocket. "I'll phone them again."

"Brandstetter?" Owens called.

Dave walked into the shiny plank room, picked up the phone from where it had spilled on the floor. "How did this happen?" he asked, and began to dial.

"I must have knocked it off in my sleep. It woke me, making a squawking sound. I couldn't reach it."

"Sorry about that." While at the other end of the line the phone rang and rang, Dave looked at the strung-up casts on Owens's legs. They were painted with flowers, bright primary colors, kindergarten draftsmanship, love, in happy, drunken letters. "Was that how you spent the afternoon," he asked, "when you were supposed to be remembering someone you crossed once, someone with a grudge against you?"

The taut skin of Owens's high cheekbones reddened. He gave a sheepish nod. "Larry did it. We were celebrating his being back." He shook his head. "Seriously—I couldn't think of anyone."

"There's always someone," Dave said.

And officer Zara answered the phone.