Skinflick

by Joseph Hansen

  “He claims he never saw her,” Dave said, “never heard of her, never came near her.”

  “What? It was him who brought her here. What the hell does he mean?” Odum took a step backward. “Oh, now, wait. That son of a bitch. Did he send you here tonight?”

  “You see?” Dave said. “You do fit into this, don’t you? And tightly, too. Where is she, Odum?”

  “No, I swear. Fullbright brought her in here and put his proposition to me and I said okay and I never saw her again. It didn’t surprise me. I asked him for time. To raise the money. To write the script.”

  “She wasn’t sleeping with Fullbright,” Dave said. “She was sleeping with Dawson. She was with him when he was killed. Now, what do you know about Dawson?”

  “He was a religious maniac,” Odum said.

  Junie and Harold were sitting side by side on the bed, like good children waiting for their bath. Their nakedness made them look more innocent than children. Junie said, “Wasn’t he the one that came in and ripped down the sets and threw stuff around?”

  “When was this?” Dave asked.

  “Who knows?” Odum shrugged big, soft, round shoulders inside the bulky bobby’s jacket. “This was a sinkhole of vice and corruption.”

  “A stench in the nostrils of decent people.” Harold went past them into a washroom and came out with two cans of Coke. “A plague spot of filth, an open sore.”

  “Jesus was coming,” Junie said, “with a flaming sword.”

  “Not a spray can of Lysol?” Randy said. “When is he due? I’d like to look my best.”

  “The little man didn’t give us a date,” Junie said. Harold sat down beside her and handed her a Coke.

  “Funny voice,” Odum said. “He wanted to roar, but the madder he got, the more strangled he sounded.”

  “You couldn’t stop him?” Dave asked.

  “Spence ran and hid in the van,” Harold said.

  “I wanted a different perspective,” Odum said. “He wasn’t having his stuff used to make dirty movies. He hauled it all out of here—lights, cameras, the works. He was throwing it into the Superstar truck when Fullbright drove up. They had a big brawl, pushing, yelling, grabbing. Dawson threatened him all over the place. The police. The IRS. I don’t know what all. Fullbright looked pretty sick. Dawson slammed the truck doors and took off.”

  “No words about Charleen?” Dave asked.

  “You’ve got a one-track mind,” Odum said. “Look, can I shoot my picture now, please?”

  “Losing your sets must have slowed you down.”

  “Fullbright was back the next morning. With the equipment. He knocked the damages off the bill and he gave me cash to cover the extra day’s studio rent. He apologized. I thought he meant it. Now suddenly he’s trying to wreck me.”

  “He isn’t,” Dave said. “He never mentioned his deal with you. He claims he hasn’t seen you in weeks.”

  “He hasn’t,” Odum said, “and neither has the girl. I wasn’t mixed up with her. The only kind of girls I’m interested in turn out to be boys when they take their clothes off.” Maybe it would have sounded funny anyway. It certainly sounded funny coming from a big, stolid symbol of British law and order. The only thing that saved it was that the uniform smelled of mothballs. “Fullbright was mixed up with her—that I can tell you. You can tell me Dawson was mixed up with her. I wasn’t. I don’t want any part of it.”

  “I don’t know yet what Fullbright’s part was,” Dave said. “But Dawson’s was to die. And so was yours.”

  “What?” Odum went pale. His big pudgy fingers shook as they worked loose the buckle on his chin strap. He took off the helmet His hair sprang up frizzy again. He half turned away his head, watching Dave from the corners of his eyes. “What are you trying to say?”

  “That Herman Ludwig was killed by mistake,” Dave said. “Did you two ever stand and look into a mirror together? That parking lot out there is dark. Somebody was waiting in the dark with a shotgun. The same somebody who killed Gerald Dawson. On the same night. He saw a big, overweight, middle-aged man with thick hair standing up all over his head come out that door”—Dave pointed—“and he thought it was you, and he blew Herman Ludwig’s brains out.”

  “No.” Odum touched his lips with his tongue. He swallowed. His voice came hoarse, stammering. “It—it was the—the communists. From Hungary. He was always talking—talking about how they were following him, trying to kill him.”

  “The same night Dawson was killed? Dawson, who, like you, was a friend of Charleen Sims—if friend is the word? You see why I seem to have a one-track mind? You see why I have to find her?”

  “If whoever it was tried to kill me for messing with her,” Spence Odum said, “he had the wrong man. I swear to you I never saw her but that one time, that one time only.” He looked away, was silent for a moment in a silence kept by everyone else in the big room. He gazed around at the room, the stretches of brick wall painted different colors, the torture instruments, the body in the barber chair, the glass-jeweled chest of costumes, the mummy case in a far corner. It was as if he were inventorying his life. He turned back to Dave. “Why not Fullbright, then?”

  “I guess I’d better go ask him,” Dave said.

  19

  THE MANAGEMENT DIDN’T WASTE a lot of money lighting up the Sea Spray Motel at night. It was a bleak pair of oblong stucco boxes facing each other across a blacktop parking lot. The wooden stairs swayed as Dave climbed them. At the top, he squinted up at the white plastic circles set in the roof overhang. He gauged the power of the bulbs they hid to be twenty watts. The gallery he walked along sagged. The merry blue paint on the wooden railings was peeling. The varnish was scaling off the door of unit Twelve. Curtains were across the aluminum-framed window, blue-and-white weave with an anchor. Light was not leaking around the outside of the curtains. But Delgado’s wreck of a car was parked below. Dave knocked. Someplace a small dog barked. No one stirred beyond the door. Dave knocked again louder. A door opened across the way. Television sounds came out. The door closed. Dave knocked again. And was rewarded by moans. He felt footsteps thud. The door jerked open.

  “What the hell?” Delgado blinked. “Oh, shit. Dave?”

  “I’m sorry.” Dave looked at his watch. It was nine. “Were you asleep?”

  “Yeah, well—informally.” Delgado tried for a laugh. “I, uh, dozed off with the television on.” He’d lost the crisp, clean look he’d had this morning. There was an orange stain on the front of the white shirt. Pizza sauce? The jeans Dave had lent him day before yesterday were crumpled. “Something on your mind? Something I can do?”

  “You thought I didn’t mean it,” Dave said. Delgado stank of whiskey. The air that came out of the shut-up unit stank of whiskey. “You thought I’d paid your rent and thrown you away. What made you think that?”

  “You said the case was over,” Delgado said. “You’ve got your house to fix up. You’ve got Amanda. You don’t have to work—only when you want. How did I know you’d ever have another case? I haven’t got forever.”

  “It will seem like forever,” Dave said, “on skid row, sleeping under newspapers in doorways.”

  “Yeah, well, I can take the stuff or leave it alone. What happened? The son didn’t do it after all?”

  “I don’t know what he did. I need that girl to tell me. And I still can’t find her. Odum doesn’t know where she is. I’m going to see a man I think maybe does. The last time I saw him, he fell over my foot and broke his nose. I’m about to act very nasty to him. It came to me it might be a good idea to have someone along. Strange as it seems, I thought of you. Are you sober?”

  Delgado half turned to peer back into the unit. For a clock? “I don’t remember anything after the four-thirty news. That makes four hours. I must be sober, yeah.” He looked down at himself. He brushed with a hand at the stain. “I need a shower and a change.” His brown dog eyes begged Dave. “Can you wait?”

  “You going to let me in?” Dave said. />
  “It’s a mess,” Delgado warned him, “a pigpen.” But he turned resignedly and Dave followed him inside. The bed was unmade. Soiled T-shirts, shorts, socks, were strewn around. The peeled-back lids of sardine tins glinted in the weak lamplight, the ragged lids of half-empty bean cans, soup cans, crowding a coffee table with merry blue legs and a glass top. A big pizza with one slice out of it drooped in its tin on the television set. A whiskey bottle rolled from under Dave’s foot. Its label said it was a cheap supermarket house brand. It clinked against another bottle in the shadows. Delgado said, “I’ll make it as fast as I can so you don’t have to sit around looking at it.” He rattled blue paper laundry bundles on a merry blue chest of drawers and went away into the bathroom.

  In a cupboard in the kitchenette, Dave found a dusty box of trash bags. He flapped open one of the big green plastic things and went around the place with it, picking up greasy hamburger, hot-dog, french-fry wrappers, fried chicken boxes, pizza tins, half-eaten candy bars, half-eaten slices of dried-out bread. There were two ashtrays. Both of them overflowed. He emptied them into the bag and with the edge of his hand scraped into the bag the butts and ashes strewn around them. More junk littered the kitchen, beside the sink, under the sink. He stuffed this into the bag too, twisted the neck of the bag, and looped it with the yellow plastic collar the bag-maker furnished. He set the bag on the gallery outside the door.

  Food-crusty plates, cups of abandoned coffee, smeared glasses were heaped in the sink. He poked around till he found a bent box of elderly soap powder. Maybe he would startle Delgado in the shower when he ran hot water into the sink, but he took the chance. He didn’t hear a yelp, so maybe Delgado was out of the shower by now. Or maybe the management of Sea Spray was more generous with hot water than with wattage. He had to explore again to find a rinse rack. A spider was living in it. He opened the window over the sink and let the spider go down outside on a strand of web. He splashed dust off the rinse rack, set it on the counter, and began drowning glasses in suds and steam. Delgado let out a long low whistle of surprise. He came fast into the kitchenette.

  “Hey!” he said. “You didn’t have to clean up for me. You don’t have to wash my dishes. What is this?”

  “You cooked my breakfast,” Dave said. “Several times.” He shook dust out of a blue dish towel and held it out. “You can dry, if it will make you feel better.”

  “I never played cleaning woman for you,” Delgado said.

  “I didn’t need it.” Dave began setting glasses in the rack. Delgado reached for a glass. Dave stopped him. “You don’t know how to be a cleaning woman. Those have to be rinsed, first. Marie spoiled you. And your mother before her, I expect. Just wait a minute.”

  “Who is this guy we’re going to see?”

  Dave found a saucepan, ran hot water into it, poured the water over the glasses. “Now you can wipe,” he said. He put the pan down and went back to washing dishes. “His name is Fullbright. He and Dawson were partners.”

  “Where do I put these?” Delgado said.

  “On the shelf where you found them when you moved in,” Dave said. Delgado looked helpless. Dave opened a cupboard. “There. That should put them in easy reach.”

  “You never give up,” Delgado said, and set a shiny glass on the empty shelf. “Why did you break his nose?”

  Dave told him about Fullbright.

  Delgado said, “Maybe he owns a shotgun. You didn’t go through every cupboard, every drawer. Dawson threatened to expose him for taking money out of the company, for not reporting his under-the-counter earnings to the IRS. Why didn’t he break Dawson’s neck to keep him from talking? Why didn’t he try to wipe out Spence Odum when he realized Odum had heard the quarrel with Dawson?”

  “Because it’s been twelve days,” Dave said.

  “Maybe he doesn’t look at the news,” Delgado said. “He was surprised when you told him it was Ludwig who was killed by the shotgun blast.”

  Dave set cups dripping with suds in the rack. “He’d have known the difference.” He filled the pan again and sloshed steaming water over the cups to wash the suds off. “Odum’s dark, Ludwig was fair. It would take somebody not sure, somebody who’d never seen them together, or never seen Ludwig at all, to mix them up.”

  “Did you ever think maybe Charleen had the shotgun?” Delgado touched a cup and drew his hand back sharply and shook it. “She’d only seen Odum once.”

  Dave loaded saucers and plates into the sink. “She couldn’t break a man’s neck.”

  “Fullbright could.” Delgado picked up a cup using the towel to shield his fingers from the heat, dried the cup, hung it on a hook in the cupboard. “It wasn’t just that Dawson was going to the IRS and the police or DA or whatever. You’re forgetting—he had Charleen to start with, then Dawson had her.”

  “I’m not forgetting anything,” Dave said. “I’m remembering too much. That’s what’s wrong.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to do the silverware before the plates?” Delgado asked. “I seem to remember Marie saying—”

  “Marie was right,” Dave said, picked up handfuls of stainless-steel knives, forks, spoons, and dumped them into the soapy water. “He didn’t have anything to do with horses. I don’t think he took those records out of his office to keep me from running to the Feds about him. He had to have a likely reason. That was farfetched.” There was a bin at the end of the dish rack for silver. He began putting it clean into this bin. The rattling punctuated what he said. “What he was afraid of was that I’d figure Dawson had learned he was cheating him and dealing in smut and had reacted as Dawson would naturally react and I’d figure this was a motive for Fullbright to kill Dawson.” He splashed hot water over the shiny knives, forks, spoons. “Which doesn’t mean he did kill him.”

  “Or that he didn’t,” Delgado said, finishing with the cups. “It could have been everything—fear of Dawson and hatred of Dawson for taking his girl—disgust with Dawson’s holier-than-thou pose. I mean—things do add up.” Delgado began to dry the stainless steel. “You can take this, you can take that.” He opened a drawer and dropped the clean flatware into it. “But then comes the next thing. It’s the total that gets you.”

  “Except—when it gets you, what do you do?” Dave set saucers in the rack, then swabbed off the plates and racked them to drain. He glanced at Delgado. “You give up and drink. Bucky loses control. What would Fullbright do?” He poured steaming tap water over the plates. He felt around in the greasy water that showed a lot of tomato sauce at its edges, found the rubber cover of the drain with his fingers, and pulled it away. He rinsed it off and laid it on the counter. The water went out of the sink with a sucking sound. He rinsed the sink. He took the towel away from Delgado and dried his hands on it “I know better than to bet on human behavior, but I’m going to do it anyway.” He hung up the towel. “Fullbright is in this up to his eyebrows, but he didn’t murder anybody.”

  “You’re on,” Delgado said. He looked at the plates steaming in the rack. “Are we through here?”

  “They’ll drain dry,” Dave said. “Come on.”

  20

  MOST OF THE BOATS rocking at the long white mooring were dark, asleep. Here and there, a light showed at a porthole and wavered in the black water beneath. But the lap of tide against hulls and pilings and the hollow knock of their heels on the planks were the only sounds there were until they neared the end of the pier. This was why Fullbright had no near live-aboard neighbors. The loud music from his big white power launch. Not the easy-listening kind that had whispered from the speakers when Dave was here last. This was some kind of rock. No lights showed. Shadowy figures sat around the sheltered afterdeck. The shifting colors of a television screen painted their half nakedness. Teenagers. They sat on the padded bench along the taffrail and giggled and murmured and passed from hand to hand a handmade cigarette. When Dave and Delgado stepped aboard, a blond boy stood up and came to them.

  “No admittance,” he said. “Private party.
” He had the bleached eyebrows, the deep tan, the muscles, that made him a lifeguard, a permanent surfer, a beach bum, or all three. The smell of sun came off him. He was taller and broader than Dave and had a wine bottle in his hand. Baggy surfer trunks hung low off his hips and he wasn’t steady on his feet. “Please leave,” he said.

  “This is urgent,” Dave said. “Tell Jack Fullbright it’s Dave Brandstetter. He’ll want to talk to me.”

  “It’s past business hours,” the boy said.

  “I didn’t ask for the time,” Dave said. “Go tell Jack Fullbright I’m here, please.”

  The boy half turned and set the wine bottle down on a low round table among other wine bottles, bowls of chips, bowls of ravaged sour-cream and cheese dips. “I can break your arms,” the boy said.

  “If you want cop-show dialogue,” Dave said, “my friend here is wearing a gun, and if you try to get cute, he will shoot you in the kneecap.”

  The boy blinked white eyelashes at Delgado. Delgado glowered and put a hand inside his jacket over the rib cage. He told the blond boy, “He means it.”

  A girl wearing a white Levi’s jacket over a bikini came around the table and took hold of the boy’s arm. “Ricky, come on and sit down.”

  “Call him on the gun,” a male voice said out of the dark. Another one said, “Yeah, let’s see the gun.”

  Delgado took out the gun, held it up, put it back.

  The boy said to Dave, “He told us not to let anybody down there. We can’t go down there ourselves. If we have to pee, we pee over the side, right? He’s got people down there. He’s very busy and doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  Dave went to the companionway, laid back the hatch doors, pulled open the short, shiny, vertical doors. Light from the brass lanterns down in the cabin made a yellow sheen on the teakwood steps and sent streaks up the brass handrails.

  “I really wish you wouldn’t,” the boy said. “He’ll have my ass for this.”