Death Claims: A Dave Bran[d]stetter Mystery

by Joseph Hansen

  "And you don't care"—she blotted the tears, blew her nose— "who you hurt in the process."

  "I won't hurt anyone the way John Oats was hurt."

  "I didn't hurt him. Why would I? I loved him. I don't understand how your mind works. You say he was killed for his insurance money. I wouldn't have gotten that. I suppose it must have been me he was going to write in as his beneficiary. But he hadn't."

  "In my job, money is almost always the motive for murder. But police statistics put money way down on the list. And I don't like long odds. You were closest to him. Lovers kill each other with depressing regularity, Miss Stannard. For all kinds of reasons."

  "You are a terrible man," she said.

  Kellogg lumbered up. "Something wrong?"

  "Miss Stannard and I are friends. We're having a small misunderstanding. It won't take long."

  Kellogg blinked, worked his jaw, grunted. He took a nervous step backward. A pale little boy squatted at a book rack. His floppy gray T-shirt was stenciled PROPERTY OF SAN QUENTIN PRISON. Kellogg bumped him, sidestepped. "Well, look, it's not busy. Why don't you go out and get a cup of coffee?"

  "We'll do that," Dave said.

  She walked sullen, wordless beside him, head bent as if she were reading the brass celebrity names set into red stars on the gray terrazzo sidewalk. She wasn't reading them. At a corner, a big, glistening white stall had its front open to the street. While he ordered coffees at a high counter from a white-aproned girlboy with a purple bruise on his neck, she sat at a narrow shelf facing windows cheerful with morning sun, her mouth tight, her eyes half shut in outrage. When he set coffee in a disposable cup in front of her and took the stool next to hers, she said:

  "We are not friends."

  "Did Captain Campos phone you?"

  "Yes. That creepy boy didn't kill John."

  "But he did deliver morphine to him. Where did John get the money to pay for it? I checked his bank, his former bank. The account had been closed and empty for a long time. I had my office check your bank this morning. You're broke, Miss Stannard."

  "I told you that. What good does it do to tell you anything?"

  "That card on Kellogg's desk shows you've worked more often than I'd gathered from what you told me—but still not enough to meet the going price for illegal morphine. Where did the money come from?"

  "I don't know. Peter wasn't earning anything." Her hand shook, lifting the cup. "Sometimes we could hardly buy food." She sipped at the coffee. "I just can't believe John would have hidden money for—that."

  "You forget—he broke into a drugstore to try to steal 'that.' Drugs do unattractive things to people." He took a new cigarette pack from his pocket, stripped the cellophane, thumbnailed the silver-paper corner, tapped the pack on the heel of his hand, held it toward her. She shook her head. He lit a cigarette for himself, tried the coffee. It tasted like cardboard. "Yesterday you showed me the mail that had come to your house since he died. Among the envelopes was a telephone bill. I'd like to look at that."

  "Really?" Puzzled frown. "I don't see—" She didn't finish. She shrugged and gave a little baffled laugh. "All right. Why not? It just happens I brought it with me. I get my pitiful wages today. I was going to the post office on my lunch hour, buy a money order and pay it." Her handbag was soft natural leather lashed with rawhide thongs. Out of it she dug a fold of flimsy blue-andwhite paper and passed it to him.

  He got out his glasses, slid them on, opened the bill. Only two toll calls were listed, with their dates and times. He put a finger on them and slid the bill toward her. "Did you call these numbers?"

  She peered. "No. And Peter only called the Stage—that's local. And, of course, John wouldn't."

  "Why wouldn't he?"

  "He wasn't in touch with anyone. I've told you, we were alone down there. The three of us until Peter left. The two of us after that."

  "And sometimes"—Dave stretched for an ashtray down the shelf among yellow and red plastic squeeze bottles of mustard and ketchup—"only one of you, when you were up here working. Do you recognize the numbers?"

  She took a quick gulp of coffee, set the cup down, frowned at the bill. "Let me think. The Hollywood one?" Her neat little teeth worked on her lower lip. She gave a sharp child's sigh, shook her head. "No. I think I've called it. Back when I worked for Oats and Norwood. But I can't remember whose it is. This one, though"—her face cleared—"'has to be Dwight Ingalls's. He teaches at Los Collados College. American Literature. He was an old customer. One of those John thought of as friends—till he didn't show up after the accident."

  "Maybe he did," Dave said.

  12

  MESQUITE TRAIL CLIMBED narrow and crooked between steep slopes overgrown with orange-pink lantana, blue plumbago, stands of lavender joe-pye. Old oaks cast speckled shadow on the worn blacktop. Warmed by noon winter sun, tall, rough-barked Japanese pines dropped pungency. Back from the road, up scaffolded flights of paintless wooden steps, or down steps cut into the earth, old redwood houses, deep-eaved, dark-windowed, low-porched, half hid themselves in green winter brush. Magenta bougainvillaea glowed on a shake roof. Scarlet geraniums blazed in a clump of sun beside a shed.

  Here a pair of goats was tethered, there a burro. RABBITS, a hand-lettered sign said. FRESH EGGS. Inside a paddock knocked together out of secondhand lumber a pair of dun horses turned their heads and pricked up their ears as he passed. With a scissoring of blue wings a jay cut past the windshield. A ground squirrel hopped and halted across the road. Dave tapped the horn, frowned, looking for a name on a mailbox. And there it was, outside a gate in a redwood grape-stake fence, where a bright-red pickup truck waited with its tailgate down.

  He swung his car around and parked behind the truck on the dusty road shoulder. He got out, shut the door, read the lettering on the truck. SICKROOM SUPPLIES. A striped mattress lay trussed in straps on the truck bed. The gate hung partway open. Nailed to it was an enameled tin sign. FOR SALE. A realtor's name, phone numbers. DO NOT DISTURB OCCUPANT. He pushed the gate. Two men in white coveralls carried up toward him sections of a brown metal bed. Below, on a square porch where ferns died in hanging baskets, the chrome tubing of a wheelchair glinted. Next to it a pair of chipped green oxygen tanks stood strapped to a red dolly. Dave stepped off the cracked cement steps onto a thick mat of dark ground ivy so the men could pass. Then he went on down, the drooping branches of old pepper trees brushing his shoulders, dried berries crunching under his shoes.

  Dwight Ingalls blinked at him through a dusty, bulging screen door. He was a bald, spare man in an old turtleneck pullover, old corduroy pants, linty corduroy slippers. In one of his hands was a sheaf of typed papers, in the other a half-empty glass of milk. A smear of peanut butter was at a corner of his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, frowned.

  "Mr. Brandstetter? It's not one o'clock."

  "I'm sorry," Dave said. "Getting here didn't take as long as I thought it would." It was a lie. Los Collados, tucked in folds of the Sierra Madre foothills east of Pasadena, was twenty minutes from the freeway. He'd known that, starting out. But to reach a place early meant you learned things you weren't supposed to learn. Mostly they were useless things. Now and then they helped. He made the offer he always made but rarely got taken up on. "I'll go away and come back later if you like."

  "No need. Come in. I'm just finishing my lunch." He knocked back the rest of the milk and with the hand that held the empty glass pushed open the screen. "Can I offer you anything? Anything simple, that is. I'm down to basics. Crackers, sardines. Alone, you tend to let the larder go to hell."

  "I know," Dave said. "Thanks—I've eaten."

  The screen door lapsed shut behind him. There was no hall. They were in a broad, low-ceilinged living room, redwoodpaneled chest high, white-plastered above. Built-in bookcases. Window seats. Arched brick fireplace. Chairs, couch, coffee table were Mission style, flat-armed golden oak, fifty, sixty years old. Comfortable, the cushions covered in good-looking plain fabrics. Vast would have had
to be the word for the carpet. Oriental, rich plums and russets, scuffed in places but still darkly splendid. The colors repeated themselves in stained-glass panels above the wide windows. Art Nouveau flowers and leaves.

  "Sit down. I'll be with you in a minute."

  Ingalls went away into the rear of the house. Old plumbing shuddered. Tapwater splashed. Dave put on his glasses and crouched to look at the books on the shelves. Wright Morris. Nathanael West. H. L. Davis. And Thomas Wolfe, first editions again, as at April Stannard's. There was a hefty volume of Wolfe's letters too, the wide backstrip in soft black cloth. And next to it, in hard-finish beige buckram, Thomas Wolfe's Western Journal: The Lost Pages. A slim book. He took it down, opened it. Edited with an introduction by Dwight Ingalls, Los Collados College Press, 1958.

  There was no noise from the soft-soled slippers on the thick rug, but a creaking board made Dave aware of Ingalls passing through the room. He set the book back. The screen door made a wooden sound. Dave stood with a snap of knee joints. Outside, Ingalls said something. One of the truckers answered him. Dave pushed the glasses back into his pocket. There was the hollow bump of the wheelchair down the porch steps. Dave dropped onto the couch. The screen door closed. Ingalls came back.

  "And that's that," he said bleakly. "That's that."

  He'd left the milk glass, the peanut-butter smear and the handful of papers somewhere. He sat in a chair by a lamp that was a pear-shaped Arab water jar of hammered copper, shaded by a drum of rough brown burlap. The table the lamp stood on was crowded with paperback books; pamphlets, literary quarterlies. Among them Ingalls found a crumpled Tareyton pack. He dug into it with a thin finger. Empty. He twisted it, dropped it into a hammered-copper ashtray already glutted with butts. Dave held out his own pack.

  "Thank you. What's this about John Oats?"

  "He's dead." Dave scratched a match.

  Ingalls sat forward to get the light. He nodded. "They told me at the bookstore. Drowned. A shame."

  "He was a strong swimmer. My company isn't satisfied it was an accident. Oats and Norwood is a hundred miles from here. You still go there?"

  Ingalls turned down the corners of his mouth. "I telephone occasionally. There's not much point in going anymore. The shop slipped badly after John left."

  "It didn't look prosperous to me," Dave said. "Dusty. Gaps in the shelves. Why?"

  "John was the bookman," Ingalls said. "Norwood really only went into the business out of friendship." Faint smile. "He was selling insurance before." Thoughtful frown. "Oh, he might have managed, I suppose, but buying John out hurt his cash reserves."

  "Do you know the figure?"

  Footsteps thudded on the porch. There was a shrill squeak of little wheels, a jarring of the hollow steps again. Ingalls turned his head toward the sound. Squeak and jolt, squeak and jolt, the dolly with the oxygen tanks went up toward the street. It took a full minute, a long time. Then there was a clatter and bang of metal, the tinny slam of the tailgate on the red truck, its cab doors closing, the splutter and roar of its engine. Ingalls kept listening till there was nothing more to hear. Then he remembered Dave.

  "I'm sorry. What did you say?"

  "Do you know how much Norwood paid Oats?"

  "I only know that the last time I was in the shop"—he squinted at the ceiling—"a month, six weeks ago, Eve Oats was, as my students would put it, chewing Norwood out about it. They were in the back room, hadn't heard me open the front door. She called Norwood a sentimental fool for giving her husband, her ex-husband, too much."

  "It went for medical bills," Dave said. "That and a lot more."

  "Norwood told her that. She said the county hospital was where he belonged. A charity case. Since he owned no part of the business, had no income, he qualified. Money was being wasted, thrown away."

  "Delightful woman," Dave said.

  "She's always been the hardheaded member of the firm. Money is what she understands. A shop like that has to be able to buy when the opportunity arises. Which can happen at any time. Oats and Norwood had a reputation. Fine books, scarce books. Ah, I don't know. . . ." Ingalls sighed, mouth a twist of regret. "Probably even with capital Norwood couldn't have kept things up. John did all the buying."

  "What about Eve?"

  Ingalls shook his head. "She'd know the price to pay. But not what to buy, when, where. You see, it's a talent, an instinct. Either you have it or you don't. John had it. And because neither Eve nor Norwood has, I don't think the shop can last. They used to put out exciting catalogues."

  Squinting in the smoke from the cigarette fastened in a corner of his mouth, he shuffled printed matter, pulled out a saddlestitched white booklet and passed it to Dave.

  OATS & NORWOOD

  Ernest Haycox: West-Northwest

  Original serial publications / first editions / autograph letters / holograph manuscripts / typescripts and galleys with author's changes

  "That's the kind of coup John was famous for," Ingalls said. "He did it repeatedly. Not every catalogue had a collection like that. But the individual items were always first-rate. There were catalogues four times a year. Since he left"—Ingalls took the booklet Dave handed back to him and laid it down—"there hasn't been one."

  "They're trying to get something together," Dave said. "I saw a box of file cards by the typewriter in the back room. Books stacked up with slips of paper in them on the desk. Along with bottles."

  "It will have to be a strong list." Ingalls rubbed out his cigarette in the copper bowl. "They've lost ground. People are forgetting."

  "Not you," Dave said. "You went there at least once since Oats left. It was January third, wasn't it? The day he telephoned you?"

  Ingalls's bald head gave a slight turn to the side. He watched Dave narrowly a minute from the corners of his eyes. He moistened his lips. "Why—uh—" He worked at a little uneasy smile. "Yes, I suppose it was. Yes, it was." He nodded a quarter-inch.

  "And before you went to the shop, you saw him. At April Stannard's place in Arena Blanca, right?"

  "I didn't know whose house it was. He was alone there. Yes. At Arena Blanca. April Stannard, you say? She worked at the shop for a while. Pretty girl."

  "She says you never came to see him and it hurt his feelings. He'd thought of you as his friend."

  "I'd thought of him the same way," Ingalls said. "But my wife was ill—had been ill for years. Until last spring my daughter lived here and helped me look after her. But when she married, I had most of it to do alone. It was a progressive circulatory ailment. Before it ended, it involved several amputations. Julia grew more and more dependent. I was less and less able to get away. I could hire women to help out, but not full-time. Professors aren't paid fortunes, you know, Mr. Brandstetter. And the operations, the hospitalizations were expensive. Ah, well"—he moved a hand impatiently—"you're not concerned with my personal woes." His eyes shifted for a gray second toward the front door, the porch. "And as you no doubt have guessed, they're ended now. I didn't call the rental people right away. Julia died ten days ago." He held up a quick hand, shut his eyes, shook his head. "No, no. Don't condole. It was inevitable. I was prepared, as prepared as one ever can be. In any case"—he drew a breath and let it out—"I simply wasn't able to get away to visit John Oats in the hospital."

  "But you managed it when he phoned. Why?"

  Ingalls frowned, smoothed a brushy gray eyebrow with a finger, eyeing Dave. "I don't quite understand this interview. Your position or mine. Am I being accused of something? Ought I to call an attorney?"

  "I don't know why you'd think that," Dave said. "John Oats became addicted to morphine in the hospital and failed to break the habit. He had no money, but he was buying the drug. Illegally. Expensively. I wondered if he tried to borrow money from you."

  Ingalls didn't answer right away, but the wariness went out of him. He relaxed. "Yes." His smile was sorrowful, but not a failed attempt this time. "That was what he wanted."

  "Did he get it?"

  "He
said he needed five hundred dollars. I couldn't manage that. I went to the College bursar and drew a hundred in advance salary. I gave him that."

  "Did he tell you what it was for?"

  "I didn't ask," Ingalls said.

  Dave got to his feet, smiled. "So April was wrong. He had a friend, after all." He turned away. There was a muffled twang from a spring in Ingall's chair. He went with Dave to the door, swung it open for him. On the porch, Dave asked, "How long had you known him?"

  The light from the yard glanced green off Ingall's naked scalp. He wrinkled his forehead. "Years. 1957? Yes, that's right. I'd published some papers on Thomas Wolfe in scholarly journals. I got a letter from Oats and Norwood, from John. He had a manuscript in Wolfe's handwriting. Was I interested?" His smile at Dave was admonitory. "That, you see, explains why a reader in Los Collados began patronizing a bookshop a hundred miles up the coast in El Molino. Of course I went at once, very excited. When I saw the manuscript—notebooks, actually—I was even more excited. They were the missing eighteen thousand words of the journal Wolfe kept of his trip through the national parks in the West just before his death. Only about twelve thousand words had ever been found, but he'd told several people in letters that he had thirty to fifty thousand words written."

  "You don't have to tell me the rest," Dave said. "I saw your book"—he jerked his head—"on the shelf in there. Handsome book. Must have earned you quite a reputation."

  "It's the kind of thing a scholar prays will happen to him, but never believes can. You understand now that if I'd had five hundred dollars, I'd have given it to John. Gladly."

  "I understand that," Dave said.

  As he climbed the steep stairs to the street, a mockingbird in one of the shaggy pepper trees spilled song, spilled joy. His hand on the gate at the top, Dave glanced back down. Ingalls stood on the porch edge, peering up, but not at him. He was trying to locate the bird. He looked as if the sound gave him pain.