Death Claims: A Dave Bran[d]stetter Mystery

by Joseph Hansen

  "Was it the last time you saw him too?"

  The boy straightened, wary, turned his head, watched Dave from the corners of his eyes. "I said—"

  "I heard what you said. But John Oats was on morphine. Morphine is a prescription drug."

  "He didn't have any prescriptions. He bought shaving cream here. Tooth powder. That's all."

  "Bought isn't what I'm talking about. You liked him. He was your best friend's father. Did you give him what he needed?"

  "Shit!" The boy hit the release bar on the cash register with his fist. The drawer opened with a jingle. He slammed it shut. "Okay. I guess it can't hurt him now. No. I didn't give it to him. But he asked me. I found him in here one morning when I opened up. Poking around in the dark"—the boy jerked his head—"back there. He was in bad shape, sweating. He'd broken in. He wanted to steal it, but he couldn't find it. He begged me for it. Sad. Christ, how sad!"

  "You didn't report it."

  "He was Pete's father," the boy said. "He was a good man, a fine man. I wouldn't do it to him. How could I? Would you?"

  "What did you do?"

  "Offered to phone his doctor. De Kalb. He wouldn't let me. I couldn't make sense out of hisreasons. I don't think they were reasons. He was just scared, sick, ashamed. I ended up driving him home. Nice of me, wasn't it?'' Self-contempt soured the words.

  "You know the answer to that," Dave said.

  "No, I don't. Not what you mean. He's dead. Maybe it was because I didn't help him."

  "Somebody helped him," Dave said. "If that's the term for it. Don't blame yourself."

  "I couldn't make myself give it to him. If he got caught, it could be traced. I worked hard to get to be a pharmacist. And I'm working hard to get to be a doctor. I'd be finished. That was all I could think of. Me." His smile was miserable. "Makes me one of the good guys—right?"

  "Did you tell Peter?"

  "Christ, no. How could I tell Peter?"

  "And you don't know where he's gone?"

  "Sometimes when things got bad in his life-he and his mother didn't get along too well—he'd take a sleeping bag and drive off alone. It was bad, his father drowning. He really loved his father."

  "So they tell me," Dave said.

  He stepped out of the car into a wind that was cold and damp. He shivered, turning up his collar and crunched across the sand to the pink house that was no color in the night. The warped garage door hadn't been pulled down. The old station wagon was still there, a pale hulk in its stall. He climbed the high flight of wooden steps and at the top felt for the corroded button and pushed it. The buzz came back too loud. He squinted, pawed for the door, touched space. Open.

  And no one came. He lifted and tilted his wrist. His watch said greenly 9:50. Twelve hours since his first time here this morning. Had she tired herself out with housecleaning and gone to bed early? He poked the buzzer again. It echoed on emptiness. But then he heard footsteps below. Backed by the dark wash of night surf only a few yards off, her voice came thin.

  "Peter? Is that you?" She set a quick foot on the steps. Dave felt the rickety framework shiver.

  "Sorry to be a disappointment twice."

  She halted. Down where she was, a disk of light showed. Feeble but evidently strong enough to reach him. "Oh, it's Mr. Brandstetter." She didn't care. The light went out, but she didn't come up. He waited a second, then he went down. She was wearing a man's corduroy jacket, much too big for her, the cuffs clumsily turned back. John Oats's jacket? She turned away and her voice sounded as if she'd been crying. "I was walking on the beach when I saw your headlights. I thought it had to be Peter this time."

  "I haven't found him. No one else ever comes?"

  She shook her head, stepped down onto the sand, moved off. "No. And that was fine when John was here. It's not fine now."

  He went with her down the softening slope of dimly white sand toward the black shift and whisper of the bay, its chill breathing. At its inmost curve the window lights of houses rippled yellow on the water. Shadow boats rocked asleep at shadow jetties. He said, "Dr. De Kalb came Christmas week. Jay McPhail."

  "That was a good day," she said. "John was really pleased, really happy."

  "But no one else? No one since?"

  "Someone ate supper with him the night he—" But she couldn't say it. She walked more quickly, hunched inside the bulky coat. He lengthened his stride. She changed the wording. "That last night. But it must have been Peter. I told you—John's friends never came."

  "What about strangers?"

  She halted, turned. "I thought you wanted Peter. He killed his father—isn't that what you said? For the precious insurance money your company doesn't want to pay him. Now it's strangers. Why?"

  "John Oats used morphine. You heard that at the inquest. What you didn't hear was that he had no prescription. I checked that out with Dr. De Kalb tonight. And with Jay McPhail."

  "At the drugstore? In the shopping center?"

  "He found John Oats there early one morning. He'd broken in. He was looking for morphine. He begged Jay for it."

  "No. Ah, no."

  "He brought him back here. Where were you?"

  "Driving to work, I suppose. I never knew him to leave here, not without me, without the car. It's such a long way."

  "Farther than he thought."

  "He never said a word to me. And I never saw—I mean, he didn't want me to look at him. Because of the scars. It's the arms where they put the needle, isn't it? He kept them covered—longsleeved shirts, pullovers, pajamas. I told you he swam at night. He always wore a robe down. And he wouldn't let us swim with him. Not me, not Peter. Dr. De Kalb that once, but that was different, he was a doctor." She drew a breath. "And when we—made love, it was always dark."

  "In more ways than one," Dave said.

  She shut her eyes and nodded. "Yes." She turned from him to stand, hands in the jacket pockets, wind fluttering her hair, staring. At what? Dave narrowed his eyes. Rocks. Thirty feet from shore, black and ragged in the starlight, edged by a dim embroidery of foam. The place where she'd found John Oats's body. "It hurts," she said. "You always bring pain with you."

  "Who brought him the drug, Miss Stannard?"

  "I don't know." She stared away silent for a minute longer. Then she turned to him, laid a light hand on his arm. Her eyes pleaded. "Come up to the house with me? Have a drink?"

  "Thanks," he said, "but someone's expecting me."

  It was the third station. Floodlit yellow metal, plate glass. A black boy in a yellow jumpsuit squatted on his heels, hosing down tarmac that was already immaculate. He used his thumb to make a stiff spray. It seemed important. But when Dave braked beside the shiny pumps he dropped the hose and came jogging, smiling.

  "Whatever it will hold," Dave said, got out and watched him flap open the gas hatch, twist off the tank cap, shove the nozzle in. The pump hummed. Dave said, "A few nights back a girl driving an old Ford station wagon broke a fan belt along this road. Was it here she got a new one? It was raining. It was after nine."

  The smile died. The brown eyes looked him up and down. Stonily. "If it was a new car, would you ask? If she was over thirty?"

  Dave didn't answer. The boy turned his head to watch the numbers rolling up like martyrs' eyes behind the pump's glass. When they quit, he put everything back. Dave handed him a credit card. He took it to a yellow cashbox at the end of the row of pumps, wrote on a thick form pad, brought the pad for Dave to sign, gave him back his card, gave him his receipt and met his stare. He took a deep breath, held it, let it out. Not happily. "All right. I put it on for her, yeah. I hope it don't cost her twenty to life or something."

  Dave shook his head. "Only what you charged her."

  The station had a pay phone, encased in a blue plastic shell like an outsize crash helmet. He used it to phone Madge. To tell her he wasn't coming.

  9

  THE HOUSE WAS dark. He checked his watch. Not midnight yet. And the Ferrari was in its stall. Odd. He shut down the ga
rage, used the service-porch door, stepped up, passed a hand over the small glow of a thermal wall switch and lit the kitchen. On the bricked-in burner deck a glass coffeemaker glinted half empty beside a big red-enameled cast-iron fry pan gummy with tomato sauce, a red-enameled cast-iron pot that had held wild rice. In the sinks lay carbon-steel knives, for chopping, for carving, big metal spoons. On the counter a pair of long wooden forks slept in a wooden bowl with scraps of lettuce, circles of onion. A gold can of olive oil, a thin-necked bottle of tarragon vinegar stood guard with a wooden pepper mill.

  He swung toward the shutter doors into the dining space and noticed a square of paper Scotch-taped to the red wall phone. CAMPOS was lettered on it in felt pen, bold and quick, Doug's writing. Under the name was an El Molino number. He peeled it off the phone, tucked it in a pocket, pushed the doors. While they did their wooden butterfly imitation behind him, he lit the room. Two settings at the table. Tomato-stained plates crisscrossed by Danish flatware. Empty cups and glasses, empty wine bottle. A thicket of frail candles melted halfway down. Had Doug brought his mother for dinner? His hand was bandaged, but it wouldn't be like Mrs. Sawyer not to wash up afterward.

  A pass at another thermal switch brought circles of light from chrome Bauhaus lamps below in the living room. They gleamed on Parsons tables in high-gloss orange and blue, on long white couches strewn with color-swirled cushions, on a snow prairie of white carpet, a scatter of gaudy record covers in front of a turntable hooded by smoked Plexiglas. He went down the three wide steps. At the room's far end white shutter doors closed off a short hall, linen closet to the right, bathroom to the left, bedroom at the end. He started for the doors and stopped.

  Over a couch arm lay a jacket, windbreaker type, glossy purple satin orlon. Frowning, he picked it up. Words were stitched across its back in pale lavender script: European Motors. He turned it around. In matching script but smaller, high and to the left of the zipper, was the name Lorant. Dave knew European Motors. It was where Doug had the Ferrari tuned. All the mechanics were born overseas, factory-trained overseas for work on foreign cars. Lorant wasn't French but, Dave supposed glumly, close enough to it-Belgian. He'd shaken hands with him at the garage. Lean, blond, blue-eyed. With beautiful square shoulders. Dave dropped the jacket. Turning off lights as he moved, he went back to the kitchen and dialed the number on the note.

  In blue on a wrist no thicker than a ten-year-old's a tattoo needle had punctured the words BORN TO LOSE. Another kind of needle had punctured the chalky skin of the arm farther up. The boy kept rubbing the place. He sat in T-shirt, jockey shorts and fallen dime-store socks on a tan metal chair in an old room where tan paint was new on bare walls. On a tan metal table in front of him lay his coverall, green starched cotton, El Molino Hospital stitched in white on the breast pocket. With eyes the color of dirty water he stared across the table at Jesus-Maria Campos, who sat, and at Dave, who leaned in the doorway, smoking. He wasn't aware he was rubbing his arm.

  "You got an infection there?" Campos asked.

  "Fuck off," the boy said, and stopped rubbing.

  "No—you wouldn't have." Campos was slim, even delicate. His hair was going. It lay across his scalp like black fishbones. He wore a Mexican bandido mustache and sideburns. His sandcolor uniform was tailored and knife-edged, but it had been a long night and patches of sweat were dark on its back and under its arms. "You wouldn't get an infection—not using hospital needles."

  "I sell my blood," the boy said, "to the Red Cross. Needles is how they get it."

  "Once every three months." Campos shook his head. "Too many marks." "I got small veins. And the nurses they got are all trainees. They keep jabbing around till they find the place."

  "Yeah, and so do you." A paper lay in front of Campos. In its upper right corner were pasted two Polaroid photos of the boy, front face, profile, scared, sulky. Along the bottom margin, fingerprints were black in ruled boxes. Between the photos and the fingerprints, typing filled in blanks. Campos turned the paper over. Writing in blue ballpoint took up one and a half lines on the back. "After they brought you in and put you through the routine, a doctor saw you, remember? You pissed in a bottle for him. The lab ran a stat on that sample. It's called a naline test. Your urine showed opium derivatives. Morphine is an opium derivative. The dispensary at the hospital keeps missing morphine. In quantity."

  "It puts you to sleep." The boy wanted to make friends with a clock over the door above Dave's head. His look kept going to it. It didn't seem to give him any satisfaction. "I'm not sleeping."

  "You will be," Campos said, "but you'll hate it."

  The boy's voice went shrill. "The dispensary! Everybody helps theirself at the dispensary. But you don't bust none of them. You bust me."

  " 'Born to lose,' " Campos said. "Right?"

  "You better believe it. Plenty of doctors in that place are hypes. But if a doctor pissed in that bottle, your lab would tell you it was full of tropical fish."

  "One law for the rich, one law for the poor?" Campos said. "I know about that. You grow up a Chicano in this town and you know about it. But if you want to change it, you're starting at the wrong end."

  A tough brown nine-by-twelve envelope lay under the paper with the photos and fingerprints. Campos pried up its little tin clasp, opened its flap, upended it. A wallet fell out, plastic that had never even tried to imitate leather. A rattle of pennies, dimes, quarters. A limp matchbook, a crumpled Kent cigarette pack, a nail-clipper, a little loop of tarnished ball chain with three keys on it. Campos took one of the keys off and tossed it in his palm. It winked in the cold overhead light. The boy watched it as if it were the only object in the room. Pale, like something from under a stone, his tongue came out, touched his lips, went back into the dark again.

  Campos said, "This is a key to the dispensary. You aren't supposed to have a key to the dispensary."

  "You said 'in quantity'!" the boy shouted. "Even if I was a user, how could I use it in quantity?"

  Campos let the key fall. "You could sell it."

  The boy had come in sallow. Now he looked made out of cheap wax. "Jesus!" he whispered.

  "I wouldn't waste ten seconds on youw-Campos held open the brown envelope and dropped the wallet into it, the rest of the stuff, the keys—"if it was only yourself you were hurting."

  "You're out of your skull," the boy said. "If I was a pusher, would I be swabbing up shit at that hospital all night? At a dollar-sixty-ass-five an hour?"

  "It's your source." Campos fitted the hole in the envelope flap over the upright tin prongs and flattened them. "And your cover."

  The boy laughed. There was despair in it. "You seen the dump I live in? You seen the car I drive? A beat-up '58 VW."

  "It got you to Arena Blanca. To John Oats. Not once. Several times. Beginning when he left the hospital, back around Christmas."

  "Who?" The boy squinted. "Arena what?"

  Campos sighed. "Put on your coverall." He turned his head. Not far. He was too tired to turn it far. Just enough so Dave knew the words were meant for him. "Bring her in, will you?"

  He found her in a room where vending machines, battered but flashy, stood against the walls like images left over from a religious procession. In a corner was a tan swing-top waste receptacle, but it was jammed and the floor was a trash map of candy wrappers, sandwich scraps, striped waxpaper cups. Arm desks of tan steel tubing and varnished plywood made a back-to-back row that divided the room. In the flat 2:00 A.M. glare of naked fluorescent ceiling lights, four people kept apart from each other at the desks. A bald black man leaned forward, big hands hanging, staring at his paint-stained shoes. Over the thick knees of a Mexican grandmother a frail brown little boy climbed, whining in Spanish to go home. April Stannard waited, pale, her girl hands knuckled together in her lap. When she saw Dave, she frowned and stood up. She wore a coat of her own now.

  "You're here," she said. "So it's not good news."

  "I don't know what kind of news it is. It may not be news at a
ll. Captain Campos will fill you in."

  She went with him down a hall that was a tunnel of echoes. The dying moan of a siren from outside. Jangle of a telephone nobody wanted to answer. A woman's voice, arguing, insistent. Chatter of teletype machines. Sudden male laughter. Campos waited outside the shut door of the small room. In one delicate hand he held the typed and fingerprinted sheet and the brown envelope. The other hand was on the doorknob. He gave April a smile too tired to last.

  "Sorry to keep you waiting so long. I want you to look at somebody for me. He's in this room. When I open the door, don't say anything, please. All I want is for you to get a good look at him. Then we'll go to my office and talk about it. All right? Ready?"

  April started to say something. About melodrama? She changed her mind and nodded. Campos twisted the knob, swung the door inward. The boy had put on the green coverall. It was too big for him. He stood, rubbing his arm again, staring out a window whose heavy steel mesh was clotted with years of repainting. At the sound of the door latch he turned. He saw April and his head gave a sick twist away.

  Campos shut the door and shouted, "Johnson!" It brought a young officer with hair cut so short his pink scalp showed. He was large and solid and he came at a jog that jarred the floor. Campos jerked his head at the door. "Sit in there with him. Don't give him cigarettes. Don't give him water. Don't give him anything."

  He moved off down the hall and into a tan room of tan file cabinets where a tan steel desk held two telephones, a shuffle of manila folders, coffee-stained Styrofoam cups, a choked glass ashtray. Back of the desk a tan metal swivel chair was upholstered in fake leather. He dropped into it and nodded at straight chairs that matched it, waited for April and Dave to sit, then asked her, "Have you seen him before?"

  "Of course," she said. "At the hospital. He mopped, he pushed those big metal wagons they take away the patients' dirty dishes in, he brought bed linens, took patients in and out in wheelchairs, stretchers. He was on at night. Sometimes I'd find him there visiting with John. He'd always slide out as soon as he saw me." She gave a little shiver. "He reminded me of a snake. I couldn't see how John could stand him. I supposed he was lonely. I couldn't be there all the time."