Dave worked on the coffee and brandy again. “What do you think was going on?”
Cowan shrugged. “She was Dawson’s old lady, wasn’t she? Man must’ve been her lawyer. Anyway, it wasn’t over. Around nine-thirty, it started up again. Men shouting. I went to snoop and Dawson shoves this kid out. I mean hard. He hit that iron railing out there and I thought he’d go over it. But he didn’t. Stocky kid, very black eyebrows. He was crying. He went and hammered on the door awhile but they didn’t let him back in, and next time I looked, he was gone.” Cowan nodded to himself, drank coffee, sipped brandy, blew out smoke. “Yeah, lively night.”
“No developments beyond that?” Dave wondered. “Or did you lose interest?”
“I scrambled some eggs and watched some TV. I had a late date. My girl friend was house-sitting in Beverly Hills, kid-sitting, dog-sitting. The people were going to be home at midnight. We planned to hit the discos. So around eleven I started getting ready. And all hell broke loose next door again. I was shaving, so I didn’t go look right away. But when I did, the kid was back. Charleen came running out on the gallery and he came out after her and dragged her back inside. She must have been drunk as hell. She was just barely able to stand up. He practically carried her.”
“And Dawson?” Dave said. “Where was he?”
“I didn’t see him,” Cowan said.
14
OLD NAILS SHRIEKED, OLD lumber cracked. He lay face down, eyes shut tight, wanting to sleep again. He’d been too many places yesterday, all of them too far apart. The Triumph didn’t ride easy. He felt bruised. That he could probably soak out in the shower. What wouldn’t soak out were the faces, the voices, the sad facts. The trouble with life was, nobody ever got enough rehearsal. He groped out for the stereo and didn’t find it. He turned his head and opened an eye. Knots in the pine wall stared at him. He pushed the power button. Harpsichord, Bach, Wanda Landowska. He blew out air, threw back the sweat-soaked sheet, sat up. He ran a hand down over his face, tottered to his feet, staggered to the bathroom.
“What a treat!” Amanda said when he came out.
He stepped back inside and took an old blue corduroy robe off a hook on the bathroom door. He put it on and tied the sash and came out again. He took the mug of coffee she offered and said, “The thing that is going to make you a success is that you get everything to happen right away. Nobody gets building materials delivered in two days. Nobody gets workmen on the job that fast.” He went out into the courtyard. The big speechless sons were on the roof of the front building ripping up shingles and kicking them off the eaves. Showers of dry leaves, seeds, dirt, fell with each kick. The one-armed father sat under the oak grouchily knocking old mortar off bricks with a trowel.
“Did you want it to happen later?” Amanda asked.
“Only if they invent a way to do it without sound.”
“If they don’t start early, they don’t start.” She studied him over the rim of her coffee mug. “Are you all right? I could send them away.”
“No, I’m all right.” From the cookhouse came the smell of bacon, the sound of bacon sizzling. He went that way. “It’s the case that’s all wrong. I said yesterday that if I were the man’s wife and kid I’d run away.”
“I remember,” she said. “Have they?”
“I doubt it.” Dave stopped at the cookhouse door. Delgado was in there. He looked rested and clean. He was turning bacon with a fork. Dave smelled coffee, heard the drip of it in the pot. Delgado smiled at him. It made Dave unhappy. Unhappier. He’d forgotten Delgado. He said to Amanda, “But now I know they should have.”
She stared. “You don’t mean they killed him.”
“Respectability.” Dave stepped into the cookhouse. “You remember respectability? No, you’re too young. Everybody lived by it once. It never meant much, it hardly means anything anymore. It didn’t bear any relation to reality. Today most people know that. But not everybody. Gerald Dawson found it out and it killed him. Now it’s going to destroy his wife and son.”
“Decency,” Amanda began.
“Not decency. Respectability.” Dave watched Delgado lay the bacon slices on paper toweling on the stove, watched him pour beaten eggs from a yellow bowl into a frying pan where butter sizzled. “What the neighbors think of you. Only there aren’t any neighbors anymore. And if they think, they don’t think about you, they think about themselves.”
She gave him one of her long, thin brown cigarettes. The pack came out of a pocket in a chambray workshirt with pearl buttons. She lit it for him. “It’s more widespread than you think,” she said. “People pretend not, but it is.”
Delgado said, “I located him for you.” His glance at Dave was brief. He got busy laying toast on plates, bacon strips, spooning out the eggs. But the look was that of a kid wanting praise, needing praise, lots of it. “Nothing orthodox went far. Driver’s license, I mean, that stuff.” He turned and held out plates to Dave and Amanda. “But I thought about his business. And I started around places where they develop movies and record sound and that kind of thing. I didn’t pick the big ones.”
They went out into the heat and brightness of the morning. They trailed back across to the fencing room. They didn’t sit on the bed today. They sat on the floor, backs against the wall, in a row, Amanda in the middle. Delgado looked past her, eager, pleased with himself. “I picked the little ones. And, sure enough, down Wilcox, across from the park, there’s this dark little doorway kind of hidden next to one that opens into an honest-to-god shop—knitting? lamps? sandals? something. Anyway, behind the other door is a place where you can edit film and dub sound tracks and all that. Two, three rooms jammed with equipment, run by this little wall-eyed guy. And he wasn’t going to give me shit.” Delgado broke off, flushed, and said “Excuse me,” to Amanda. He said to Dave, “Only there was this poster on the wall. A Spence Odum production, no less.” Delgado washed down a big fast bite of toast with coffee.
“All the Way Down?” Dave asked.
“Sisters in Leather,” Delgado said. “A lot of pudgy broads in nothing but crash helmets and boots on big black badass motorcycles. Dikey.”
“Watch it,” Dave said.
“So Odum’s got this place he usually shoots,” Delgado said. “He runs around to locations in a white van. He doesn’t pay for permits. He shoots and runs. But the thing he calls his studio is out on the Strip. Back of a real-estate office. One room. Some producer.”
“You didn’t go there,” Dave said.
“I banged on the door,” Delgado said. “Nobody came. In the real-estate office, they never heard of Spence Odum. Talk about respectable. It could have been a church.” He poked into the pocket of a very crisp white short-sleeve shirt—he must have redeemed a bundle of laundry someplace—and handed Dave a slip of paper. “There’s the address.”
“Thanks.” Dave gave him a smile. “Well done.”
“Anything else?” Delgado sounded eager.
Dave shook his head. “It’s over. The son did it. Don’t feel bad. You always have to chase a lot of wrong answers before you get the right one. You know that.”
“Yeah,” Delgado said but he sounded forlorn. “I know. What about the teenage girl—Charleen?”
“She was a witness,” Dave said, “but we’re not going to find her. The last time she was seen alive—if she was alive—was with Bucky.”
“You said you liked it,” Amanda said. “I think it’s horrible. How can you go through it again and again?”
“It doesn’t always turn out this depressing.” Dave set his plate down, pushed to his feet, stepped over the plate, and went to where his slacks and jacket hung over a loudspeaker. He came back with his wallet and pushed into Delgado’s shirt pocket a fold of fifty-dollar bills. “Pay off your motel so there’ll be someplace I can get you when I need you—right?”
Delgado’s face darkened. He handed back the money. “Stop acting guilty, will you? You didn’t take my job. That wasn’t me talking. That was Jim Beam.”
Dave tucked the money into Delgado’s pocket again. “I didn’t say I was giving it to you. You’ll earn it.” He looked down at unhappy Amanda. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m sorry for talking about it in front of you. Smile, okay? And go forth and destroy?”
“Just old two-by-fours,” she said. “Not lives.”
“Come on, now,” he said. “It’s not that simple.”
“I’m sorry.” Her smile was wan. “I didn’t mean it.”
He went to rummage in cartons for fresh clothes. “You meant it and it means you’re a very nice lady, but I knew that anyway. I promise to wash the blood off my hands before I come back to you.”
“Oh, Dave,” she said. “I said I was sorry.” He headed for the bathroom to dress. Before he shut the door he said to Delgado, “Write down your address and phone number and leave it for me, okay?”
“A man’s voice,” Mildred Dawson said. She was no more than a tall, dim shape in the middle of a room darkened to keep out the sunlight, to keep out the heat. The room was hot and stuffy all the same. Dave wore a light knit soccer shirt, blue-and-white striped, and blue linen trousers, also light, but he was sweating. So was Bucky, sturdy and afraid in cutoff jeans, shirt open on his woolly chest. He kept sitting down and standing up again. Lyle Shumate kept murmuring to him. The woman, leaning crooked on her cane, said, “It sounded a little like Bucky. I asked who it was. He wouldn’t say. All he would say was that my husband was at that apartment with that girl. Fornicating.” She whispered the word.
Dave said, “Was that his expression?”
“Do you think I’d forget it?” she said. “He told me if I wanted to save him, I must come and take him away.”
“Save him from what?” Dave looked at Bucky. “From death? Did he threaten to kill him?”
“From eternal damnation,” she said.
“That means death, doesn’t it, Reverend?” Dave peered through the shadows at the lanky man on the couch. “Didn’t it occur to you that Gerald Dawson wasn’t killed by Lon Tooker at all? That nobody jumped him out here on the street? That the voice on the phone belonged to his killer? That you were letting the wrong man suffer, possibly even die?”
“Any of us can buy eternal damnation any day,” Shumate said. “Outside the redeeming grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, there is nothing but eternal damnation.”
“That’s not an answer,” Dave said. “That’s a sermon.” He swung back to Mildred Dawson. “So you went. How?”
“I have my own car,” she said. “You know that. It has automatic shift. I manage.”
“How did you manage the main door at the apartment complex?” Dave asked. “It locks itself. Only tenants have keys. Was your husband waiting in the lobby to let you in?”
“No. I pushed the door and it opened.”
“It was braced,” Bucky said, “just a crack. With a brown rubber wedge. The kind made to put under doors, you know? Only it wasn’t under this one. It was stuck in the crack. At the hinge side, where it wouldn’t be noticed.”
“But you noticed it,” Dave said.
“I was noticing everything that night,” Bucky said. “Nothing like this ever happened to me before.”
“It isn’t going to happen again,” Dave said.
“Don’t be abusive.” Shumate put his arm around the boy’s thick shoulders. “This boy has done nothing wrong.”
“You’ve all done wrong and you know it. Or I hope you do. If you don’t, that church of yours is in trouble.” He turned back to Mildred Dawson. “He’d given you the apartment number, this anonymous man on the phone? You went there, right? Up all those stairs by yourself?”
“It was a struggle,” she said, “but the Lord gave me the strength. Number thirty-six, yes.”
“But they weren’t fornicating when you got there,” Dave said, “were they? They were eating supper.”
“If you know, why do you ask?” she said.
“Habit,” Dave said. “I sometimes get the truth. You asked him to come home, did you?”
“I don’t believe you have any authority to question us,” Shumate said. “I don’t believe any of us is compelled by law to tell you anything.”
“You might as well practice on me,” Dave said. “It will get you used to the process. A detective lieutenant from the sheriffs office named Salazar will be repeating it soon.”
“Gerald wouldn’t come,” Mildred Dawson said. “He’d found ‘happiness’ and he wasn’t going to give it up. No matter what it cost. Him or me or Bucky or anyone. He was completely changed. I hardly knew him.” She made a bitter, mocking sound. “A little stick of a thing, and she had him bewitched.”
“Did he strike you?” Dave said. “Someone fell down. My witness heard it.”
“He wouldn’t,” she said. “It was the girl.”
“So you came home and called Shumate,” Dave said.
Shumate said, “He wouldn’t come for me, either.”
“I didn’t want Bucky to know,” Mildred Dawson said. “I was so ashamed. But Gerald would come for Bucky. He loved Bucky and if Bucky asked him, he’d come home. So I told Reverend Lyle to send Bucky, and Bucky went.”
Dave looked at the black-browed boy. “They weren’t eating when I got there,” Bucky said. “They forgot to lock the door. They were naked in bed together. And he hit me. Knocked me down, hard. He picked me up and threw me out. I banged on the door and cried. He wouldn’t let me back in.”
“But later he did,” Dave said. “Around eleven.”
“What!” Bucky stood up again.
“And you tried to take him by force and you broke his neck. My witness didn’t see how you got his body out of there. But he did see Charleen try to run away. He saw you drag her back into the apartment.”
“He’s lying!” Bucky shouted. “I wasn’t there then.”
“He thought she was drunk because she staggered. But that wasn’t it, was it? You were trying to kill her. She was half dead, wasn’t she? Then, when you got her back inside, she was all the way dead—just like your father.”
“No!” Bucky wailed. “I didn’t kill anyone.”
“You couldn’t burn her up like your father’s dirty magazines, Dave said. “What did you do with her, Bucky?”
“She was alive when I left there. My father was alive.” Bucky choked on tears. He held out his hands, begging. “You have to believe me. Please! Please!”
“His father’s car was here.” Shumate stood and put an arm around Bucky. “Doesn’t that convince you?”
“Not that he drove it,” Dave said. “Anyway, it’s Salazar you have to convince.” He went to the door. Bucky ignored Shumate. He stared wide-eyed at Dave. Mildred Dawson stared. Dave opened the door and went out into the heat.
15
PIñATAS HUNG FROM THE old black rafters of a lean-to roof above Salazar’s beautiful head. They seemed to float there like animals in a Chagall painting—papier-mâché goats, burros, chickens, furred and feathered in shredded tissue paper, colors bright and clashing, red, orange, green, blue, bubble-gum pink. With flat tissue-paper eyes, they watched Indianans in Bermuda shorts and sundresses inch their way along the narrow bricked lanes between the huarache booths, sombrero booths, serape booths, the cactus-candy and woven-basket booths of Olvera Street. Mariachi music twanged and tin-trumpeted from loudspeakers. The hot air was thick with chili smells from greasy taco stands. A quartet of rouged children with paper roses in their hair and spangles on ruffled skirts danced to the music.
Behind Salazar, strings of shiny painted gourds framed a dark restaurant doorway. He sat across from Dave at a gingham-covered table and ate enchiladas, as Dave did, washing them down, as Dave did, with orange soda from thick, lukewarm bottles. “I can’t arrest him. How can I arrest him?” He wiped his chin with a paper napkin. He looked like a silent-movie idol—Gilbert Roland? “Ken Barker says he was murdered on his own street in LA. Ken Barker says this porno-shop owner killed him. Now I’m supposed to come barging
in and say he was killed in some apartment on the Strip. His own kid killed him?”
“His own kid admits he was there,” Dave said. “Cowan saw him there.”
“Cowan didn’t see any murder,” Salazar said.
“But nobody saw Gerald Dawson alive after that. The Medical Examiner says he was killed between ten and midnight. And Bucky lied to Barker.”
Salazar shook his head and moodily poked at his refritos with his fork. “It doesn’t make a murder case,” he said. “All it makes is a family fight.”
“Come on, now,” Dave said. “You don’t believe that. What’s the matter? Is it the car you’re worried about? Why didn’t the wife, the widow, think of it afterward, get into her own car with Bucky, drive back there, so Bucky could drive Dawson’s car home while she followed in her own car?”
“People get hysterical, they forget details.” Glumly Salazar drank orange soda. “Even details as big as a car.”
“Alone, maybe,” Dave said. “A kid, especially. But he wasn’t alone. His mother helped. So did the preacher. They even remembered a detail as small as the keys.”
Salazar’s mouth was full of pink rice. He looked his question with big, smoldering brown eyes.
“If Dawson had driven himself home and was in the process of opening the garage, the keys would have been in his hand. They weren’t. Or in his pocket. Or on the street. They weren’t anywhere. Lon Tooker didn’t have them. I suggest you search Bucky’s room.”
“You’re kidding.” Salazar paused with a forkful of enchilada halfway to his mouth. “Why hide the stupid keys?”
“Because two of them fitted the Strip apartment—the street door, the door to unit thirty-six.”
“Why not get rid of them and leave the car keys?” Salazar put the forkful of food into his mouth.
“Because he didn’t know which they were. There would have been keys to Superstar Rentals there too. Anyway, you mentioned hysteria.”
Salazar washed the food down with orange soda. “And you mentioned presence of mind. You can’t have it both ways, Brandstetter. If it was like you say, he could have stripped off all the keys but the ones for the car.”
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