“Crazy thing to do,” Sims said, “go way out there where there’s nobody to help if you need help. Hell, everybody needs help in this life.” He went back into the bare, rose-papered room. Dave went after him. Sims said, “When I had my heart attack, hadn’t been for the folks next door I’d be dead. Heart attack’s why I’m the Avon lady. Easy work. I don’t need much income. Keeps me moving and gives me something to occupy my time.” He pulled open the wooden front door. “No, she never had any caution. And now she’s mixed up in some man dying in Los Angeles. How?”
“How did he die?” Dave said. “A broken neck. Someone attacked him and broke his neck.”
Sims shook his head. “Maybe Billy Jim’s got a point about the cities,” he said.
“What’s the address up there?” Dave said.
“It’s not an address at all,” Sims said. “I’ll tell you how to get there.”
“Did she write to you about the baby?” Dave said. “Telephone you? What?”
Sims peered past Dave out the screen door. “Billy Jim brought it here to be buried from the church. He’s a religious fanatic. I didn’t tell you that, did I? Not that wanting to bury your own child with a preacher in charge of things makes you a religious fanatic. I don’t mean that. I just mean I didn’t tell you before. He’s a religious fanatic. I don’t hold with that. I don’t hold with going to extremes. Take it easy, you live longer. What kind of car is that?”
“A Triumph,” Dave said. “British make.”
“About as big as a baby buggy,” Sims said. “No, they don’t have telephones up that way. Now, I have to tell you how to get there.”
23
THE MOUNTAINS SHOULDERED UP black against the stars. Estaca seemed a long time ago. First the vineyards had stopped, then the sleeping cattle, the red steel fence posts, the barbwire. Now there was only the wind. There was only the worn strip of blacktop, only the little car hustling along it, whipped by the wind, chasing its pitiful outstretched lights. There was only him. It was big country. It was a big, empty night. He wondered if he’d understood Sims, if Sims had made a mistake. The martinis were putting him to sleep, the drone of the engine, the sameness of the rise and fall of the rock-strewn, parched-grass foothills. He switched on the radio. Gospel music twanged at him. He switched off the radio. He checked his watch and was surprised. It wasn’t yet eight. He looked up.
And the headlights showed him a tin mailbox on a steel stake. TACKABERRY. He pressed the brakes but he’d been traveling fast and the Triumph went on by. He fought the unfamiliar shift knob, got the car into reverse, backed up to the mailbox. A little dirt trail cut off toward the mountains. He swung the Triumph into it. It ran flat for a while, then started to climb. Chaparral and tumbles of rock showed themselves in the headlights when the track took twists. Dead windfall branches littered the ground under old live oaks. The road grew steeper. He shifted gears. The headlights shone at the sky. Then they tilted downward sharply. And out there, below, in the massive darkness, a tiny light showed.
He stopped the car, dry brush scraping its sides, switched off the headlights, got out and stood to let his eyes get used to the night. Wind blew his hair into them. He pushed it back. The light came from a window. Maybe he made out the shape of a house. It was so far off it was like a toy left by some lost child. He wished there were a moon. But even without its lights, the car would warn them he was coming. It was noisy. Noisier even than the wind where the wind had only scrub and rock to sound itself on. He got back into the Triumph, switched on the headlights again, and drove. This is a mistake, he thought.
Three old oaks sheltered the tin house. A tin porch ran along one side. On the other side, a lean-to roofed by stiff rippled plastic put in shadow a tractor and big sharp-edged shapes he couldn’t name. He walked around the house in the wind. A generator hummed inside a corrugated iron pumpshack. There was no truck. That made him feel easier. He stepped up on the porch and banged the door. Just the wind—in the oaks, and making the house creak along its riveted seams. He banged again. Nothing. He tried the knob. The door was locked. The windows showed him blackness. He shouted, “Hello! Anybody here?” The wind took his voice out into the dark and lost it.
He stepped off the porch and walked around to the lighted window. It was set high and the glass was opaque. Under the lean-to he found an empty fuel drum and rolled it through the weeds until it stood under the window. He climbed up on it and tried to push the aluminum-clinched panel along in its aluminum groove. It wouldn’t budge. He jumped down off the fuel drum and thought he heard a sound. But the wind was rattling the thick plastic roofing of the lean-to, and he couldn’t be sure. He stood very still and strained his ears. There it was again. A cat? The sound was thin and plaintive. A hurt cat? Then the wind let up for a second and he heard the sound right and knew that it was human. It came from inside.
“Oh, help. Please? Help me?”
“Hold on,” he called, and jumped up on the porch again. But this time the little blade from his key case was no use. It worked the lock in the brass-plated knob all right, but there was another keyhole in the door and nothing he had would even slide into it. When the wind let him, he kept hearing her crying and begging. He went back to the fuel drum, climbed up on it, rapped the glass. “I can’t get in the door,” he said. “Open the window.”
It slid back. He was looking into a very small bathroom—toilet, shower stall, washbasin, mirror. She stood with her back against the door, staring at him, eyes large with fear. Her head was shaved. She was in dirty jeans and a dirty sweatshirt. He wondered only for a second, scared as she looked, why she didn’t run. She was chained by the ankles. The ankles were thin, and the skin on them was rubbed raw. When he started to climb in she began to scream. He made a clumsy job of getting through the opening. He damn near fell on his head. And all the time she stood against the door and screamed. He twisted the cold tap handle of the washbasin, filled his hands with water, and threw it in her face. She stopped screaming.
For a few seconds she held her breath. Then she began to make the sick cat noise, a whimpering, keening sound. He knelt at her feet. What clamped her ankles were handcuffs from a dimestore play-detective kit. The chains attached were for holding dogs. They ran under the little veneered doors of the vanity that held the washbasin. He pulled open the doors. The chains were padlocked to the faucet pipes. He used the blade from the key case to unlock the handcuffs. He stood and pushed aside with his foot the chains and cuffs. He reached past her for the doorknob. She cringed away from him, both hands covering her mouth. He turned the knob but the door wouldn’t open.
“He puts an iron pipe across it,” she said. “I have to stay in here all the time he’s gone.”
“Billy Jim?” Dave said. “Where is he?”
“Off with the truck, working someplace. I don’t too much care. When he’s here all he does is read the Bible at me and pray at me.” She sat on the closed toilet fixture and rubbed her ankles, wincing. “All that scares me, he could just forget me and never come back and I’d die in here. Or there could be a brush fire. It’s dry and all this wind all the time. I’d shrivel up like bacon.”
The wind made it hard to hear her. The sheet metal the place was built out of hummed. Dave said, “What right has he got to preach at you? You didn’t break any necks. You didn’t shoot anybody.”
She looked up quickly. “Who are you?” Dave wet a washcloth in the basin and gently wiped the tears from her dirty face. He knelt and washed the sore ankles. She said, “You come from LA, don’t you? You’re a policeman.”
“Gerald Dawson’s insurance man,” Dave said. “I’ve been hunting you for days. I almost thought you were dead.”
“I been wishing I was dead,” she said. “Him treating me like he does. Locking me up. Won’t let me eat but once a day. Shaved off my hair. Threw out my makeup. Won’t let me wear nothing nice. Not till I repent, he says.” Through her tears she looked angry. “It’s him needs to repent. All I done was go with men.
I didn’t kill nobody.” She sniffed, unrolled toilet paper, and blew her nose. “And he keeps praying to God to forgive me.”
“Your father warned you against him,” Dave said.
She shrugged. “I thought it was just he didn’t want me to do something I wanted to do. That’s how he was. Always at me not to do things. Turned out”—she made a wry face—“Billy Jim was no different. Men.”
“Was that why you ran off to LA?” Dave asked.
She said, “We done fine right at the start, there. Lived in my daddy’s house. Billy Jim worked at the farm-machinery place. He screamed in his sleep sometimes, and being around people made him sweat. He was always talking about how he wanted us to get out of Estaca, out in the country, alone by ourself. I thought it was the war and the hospital and he’d get over it, thought it was just talk, but it wasn’t.” She’d been staring at memories. Now she looked up at Dave. “Have you got a cigarette?”
Dave held out his pack to her. He’d crushed it, climbing through the window. The cigarettes were bent. He lit one for her, one for himself. “Go on,” he said.
“Why did you want to find me?”
“Because you saw Billy Jim kill Gerald Dawson, didn’t you? You have to tell the sheriff, the county attorney.”
“How did you know to look for me here?”
He told her about the high-school annual
“You’re smart,” she said, but she gave her head a worried shake. “Only you’re not too young, and you don’t look as strong as he is.” She stood up on the toilet seat and gripped the windowframe. “We better get our ass out of here. He comes back and finds you”—she hiked herself up and started wriggling out into the night and the wind—“he’ll kill us both.”
“Can you make it?” Dave said. “There’s a steel drum under the window.”
“I see it.” She wasn’t just small and slim, she was limber and quick. She got out a lot more gracefully than he’d got in. He felt bulky and stiff climbing out after her and tried not to meet her eyes as he mismanaged elbows and knees. When he was on the ground, the wind whipping his hair, he told her, “Wait here,” and went back under the rattling roof of the lean-to. He probed in the dark with his little flashlight and found a crowbar. He went back to her. She stood by the fuel drum, blinking against the wind, hands on her shaven skull. “What are you gonna do?”
“Break in,” Dave said. “I want that shotgun.”
The door was one of those with big diamond-shaped panes of amber pebbled plastic in its upper half. He smashed one of these with the crowbar, reached inside and worked the two locks, and turned the knob. He let her go in ahead of him and turn on a lamp beside a couch covered in hard-finish brown plaid. A chair matched it. So did the curtains. The floor was vinyl tile patterned to look like oak. A wooden television cabinet yawned empty of its works. A Bible lay on a coffee table.
“You look for the shotgun,” she said. “I’ll eat.”
She went into a little kitchen and opened a refrigerator and took out a box of eggs.
“You don’t know where it is?” Dave said.
“I don’t want to. After I seen what it done to that man in that parking lot, I don’t want to know. It was like his head exploded.”
Dave slid back plastic veneered doors on a shallow storage closet. “You were bad luck for him. You were bad luck for Gerald Dawson. You were bad luck for yourself. Why did you go?”
“What would I stay here for? How would you like it? Ripped the insides out of the TV. Took the radio with him. Said I had to cleanse my soul of all that worldly trash.”
Dave groped around on the overhead shelf.
She said, “He got to see the farmers he hired out to, but I didn’t get to see nobody. No phone, so I couldn’t talk to my school girl friends, not even to my daddy. Nothing to read except only the Bible.”
Dave pawed aside hanging clothes to look in corners.
“He wouldn’t let me have my movie magazines. Baby come and she was some kind of company when he’d be off in the truck. But then there blew up this big storm in March and caved this junky place right in on top of me and the baby died. I laid all night in the rain holding her, dead.”
Dave crouched and beamed the flashlight over the floor. Shoe leather gleamed dully but there was no gleam of a gunstock or a gunbarrel either. He stood and rolled the slide door closed. She was frying eggs. In badly burned butter. He reached around her to shine the light into kitchen cabinets. Soap powders, bottled floor wax, pots and pans. Cans, cereal boxes, dried-soup packets. Mugs, plates. No gun.
“He never once took me into town. He had to go for groceries. He says it was bad for me. Guess he thought I’d make him let me see a movie. Never a week went by in my life I didn’t see a movie. Till Billy Jim. I loved to read about the stars. I was pretty once, if you want to believe it.” She ran a forlorn hand over her bald scalp. “I was a pom-pom girl. And a good dancer too.”
Dave opened a door. A small bedroom was beyond it. There was another of the slide-door wall closets here. He searched it too, and the drawers under it. She said:
“What done it was, when the baby was dead, and he took her into Estaca to be buried, he wouldn’t let me come along.” From the corner of his eye he saw her empty a terrible brown mess from the pan onto a plate. “You want some of these scrambled eggs? You hungry?”
“No thanks.” The shotgun could lie in sections in a dresser drawer. He tried that idea. She talked with her mouth full:
“I’m starved. Cornflakes and milk is what I get. Once a day. I told you that. He wouldn’t keep the shotgun in there, not in the drawers.” She stood in the doorway, shoveling in the food. “He’d think I’d find it and shoot him when he was sleeping. He don’t believe how scared I am of that shotgun.”
Dave kept going through the drawers, fumbling under clothes, slamming this one shut, yanking open the next one. He was sweating. He was doing this wrong. Everything about it he’d done wrong. It was stupid to have come here alone. He’d been lucky Billy Jim wasn’t here when he drove up. She was right. He’d kill them both. Delgado had a gun. If he hadn’t been bright enough to bring Delgado he should have brought Delgado’s gun. He shut the last drawer.
“So I packed a suitcase and took all the money in the drawer and got out on the road and put out my thumb. And in Fresno I caught a Greyhound. He never hid money from me. Why would he? No place for me to spend it, not way out here. But it wasn’t much. I didn’t care. I thought I’d get on television right away.”
Dave stood on the bed and pushed a trapdoor in the ceiling. He set the little flashlight in his teeth and chinned himself. The metal joists creaked with his weight. He turned his head to make the flashlight beam scan. Dust was all there was. He dropped back onto the bed. The wind kept the house humming. It was like being inside a drum. He wished it would let up. He wouldn’t hear the truck if it came. He pushed past her. He’d seen another trapdoor in the front room ceiling. She said:
“I didn’t know how hard it would be. I didn’t know much. But some girl I met says you could meet all kinds of show-business people on the Strip. You know where that is? And I did. And I was going to be in a picture, too—if Billy Jim hadn’t come found me, I never thought he’d do that. He hated the city, any city. Scared him to death.”
Dave chinned himself from the coffee table this time. But the little light didn’t show him anything. He dropped.
“I know most of the story,” he told her. “What I want to hear from you is how he killed Gerald Dawson.”
“I had this apartment.” She laid the plate in the sink and opened the refrigerator again and brought out a milk carton. From it she filled a glass. “Real beautiful.”
“I saw it,” Dave said. “Charleen, we can’t stay here any longer. If that shotgun isn’t here, then he’s got it with him. And that could be very bad news.”
Carrying the glass of milk, she went out the front door and stood on the long tin porch. “If he was coming, I’d see him. A long way. Clear to
the top of the ridge.” She stepped back inside. “You want the shotgun so you can take him back too—is that right? To keep him off you with his hands. To keep him from doing to you what he done to Jerry?”
“Where did it happen? In the bed?”
“In the kitchen.” She went back on the porch. “Took hold of him, twisted his head somehow. You could hear the snap, and he was dead. I tried to run out of there.” The wind was too loud for him to hear the next sentence. “Way he was hitting me, I thought he’d kill me too. I kicked him and ran out on the balcony but I was dizzy and my legs wouldn’t hold me and he yanked me back inside.”
Dave threw the cushions off the sofa. He groped inside for the mechanism that let it open into a bed. He found it and moved it. Sheets, blankets, two pillows. No shotgun. He looked around. “I went to that apartment. The sheriff’s men went there. There was no sign of his having been murdered there. There should have been a mess.”
“There was,” she said. “I didn’t know that happened to dead people. Billy Jim made me clean it up. It made me sick to my stomach. I kept having to run to the bathroom and throw up.”
Dave went out past her. He stepped down off the porch, crouched, shone the little light under the porch.
She said, “But Billy Jim kept after me. Made me mop it twice and clean up all the signs where I washed the mop out, you know. Then he says, ‘Now wax it.’ And I laid wax on it while he was wrapping Jerry in a tarp from the truck and pulling and hauling his body out the kitchen window. Then I had to help him get it up the hill to the truck. He cut a hole in the fence so we could get through. To the street up above there.” She said, “I don’t know why. It’s not cold. But I’m cold. I have to get a sweater.”
There was nothing under the porch. Dave looked toward the dark ridge between this scoop of night valley and the highway. He went in after her. She wasn’t getting a sweater. She was in the bathroom. She’d taken down the pipe that crossed the door and barred it when it hung in the bright brackets Billy Jim had screwed into the frame.
Skinflick Page 17
