“Smithers came here.” Barker stubbed out his cigarette in a brown pottery ashtray on the bar. “This is City.”
“Amanda had tucked the kids in.” Dave tilted his head. “You’ve been here. You know the layout.”
Barker nodded. “Loft in the rear building.”
“And she thought she’d like to relax with television,” Dave said, “and she didn’t want the kids to wake up again, so she turned down the lamps back there, put on her raincoat, and started for this building.”
“And she saw a guy skulking around with a revolver,” Barker said, “and she was closer to this building by then, so she ran for it.”
“And he saw her,” Cecil said, “and chased her.”
“He didn’t shoot at her,” Barker said.
“It was me he wanted to shoot.” Dave took the pot and filled the mugs. “Amanda and I don’t look alike—not even in the dark.” He set the pot back in place.
“She locked and bolted the door there.” Barker’s somber eyes measured the door, unhappy at all those glass panes, thick though they were, and even though the old wood that clinched them was heavy and strong. “And she very sensibly did not turn on the lights.”
Dave slid one of the mugs at him. “She started for the phone over there. To summon your people.”
“But he banged on the door.” Cecil came to the bar, still wrapped in his blanket. “And gave his name—if that is his name,” He was tall enough to bend far over the bar and peer beneath it. “Sugar?” he asked Dave. “Cream?”
From the little refrigerator Dave brought a brown pottery sugar bowl, a cold spoon leaning in it. “Afraid you’ll have to rough it.” He showed Cecil a blue pint carton. “This cream is dated two months ago.”
Making a face, Cecil spooned sugar into his coffee.
Barker said to Dave, “So he yelled through the door that he had to see you. It was urgent. He knew you were here because your car was here. He meant the van out there with the flames painted on it.” Barker gave the semblance of a laugh. “He doesn’t know you very well.”
“It’s Cecil’s van.” Dave tried his coffee and it made him feel better right away. “I drive a brown Jaguar these days. It’s in the repair shop for the moment.”
“She insisted you weren’t here and told him to go away and he went away,” Barker said, “but only out to his car, to wait for you to show up. That’s what bothers me. He had to know she’d call the police.”
“He wasn’t here when they got here,” Cecil said.
Barker nodded, frowned, worked on his coffee. “But it’s as if he meant to be. At first. Then changed his mind. That’s puzzling.” With a thick finger, Barker dug out his cigarettes again, extended the pack to Dave, to Cecil. Dave’s cigarette still burned. Cecil wanly shook his head. Barker’s lighter was an old Zippo, embellished with a small police badge in worn gold and silver. He lit his cigarette and put pack and lighter away. He lifted his coffee mug and frowned at Dave over it. “Has it occurred to you that Smithers might be an investigator? Federal, state? Even County? The grand jury’s investigating the illegal dumping of toxic wastes.”
“If the grand jury wants me,” Dave said, “sending a prowler with a gun in the middle of the night seems an odd way to go about it.”
“And that isn’t all,” Cecil said. “That same man—”
Dave reached to clap a hand over Cecil’s mouth, when the door opened and Melvil came in with an armload of clothes wrapped in dry-cleaning-shop plastic. “I didn’t know what you needed, so I brought everything I could think of.” Melvil looked around the big, comfortable, multilevel room. “Where shall I put them?”
“Thank you,” Dave said. “On that couch is fine.”
Barker turned to watch Melvil carry the clothes to the couch and lay them down. Behind Barker’s muscular back, Dave frowned at Cecil and put a finger to his lips. Cecil showed bewilderment, but he gave a shrug of acceptance. The blanket slipped off his shoulders again. He pulled it up.
“This plastic wet,” Melvil said, and began to unwrap the clothes. “Listen, those babies want breakfast. Be all right with you, if I was to—?” The telephone rang. It sat on a table at the end of the couch. Melvil didn’t wait for Dave. He stepped to the phone and picked it up. He started to say “Hutchings,” but caught himself and said, “Bannister residence,” instead. Then he listened. It was quiet in the room. The rain pattered on the roof, splashed on the bricks outside, pinged on the parked cars. Melvil’s face lit up. He put a hand over the mouthpiece and said, “She all right. My mama going to be all right.” He said into the phone, “Mama? How you doing? No, they fine. We all fine. Mr. Bannister looking after us. I will. I’ll thank him. I want to see you too. Soon as it safe. Won’t be too long now. You take it easy, hear me? I be calling you.” He put the phone into Dave’s hand.
“Amanda?” Dave said.
“She saw the man who shot her,” Amanda said. “He stepped from behind the store. It was Smithers.”
17
AFTER HE HAD DELIVERED the film to Salazar, along with his clumsily typed report of last night’s watch—bearing his own fingerprints in bacon grease because he had been too hungry to forgo breakfast, and in too much of a rush not to work while he ate—after he had delivered these, he didn’t wait around. The Jaguar was ready. The agency had telephoned just as he was going out the door of the back building in Horseshoe Canyon—or trying to go out the door, hobbled by Melvil’s giggling little brothers clinging to his legs. From the Sheriff’s, he drove out the Santa Monica Freeway to Beverly Hills, the junkyard car developing croup as the wet miles passed. He left the snooty dealership the embarrassment of returning the Valiant to his house, and himself drove the Jaguar to a gun shop.
It stood on a quiet street in West L.A., in a row of shops climbed on by vines that gave them a cozy look. Knitting yarn should have been sold in this one, or dolls. The place was hushed by carpeting. The paneling looked almost real. Gentility seemed to be the aim. The salesman wore a quiet, high-priced, three-piece suit, a handsome white mustache, an English accent. His coloring harked back to that old rhyme about the good roast beef of England. He was affable and ready to chuckle. He was selling death.
Dave let him place on top of a glass showcase several brands of death—Colt, Smith & Wesson, Browning—snubnosed .38 Detective Specials, the .45s favored by television cops. Dave hefted them by turn, let them nestle cold in his hand. The man found good and bad to say about each one, his bloodshot blue eyes watching Dave closely, sensitive to the slightest signal of acceptance or rejection. To relax the man, Dave said the gun should be simple and reliable, and be able to shoot many times without reloading. The cost didn’t matter.
He walked out onto the dripping, tree-lined street with a Sig Sauer nine-millimeter automatic, pride of the Swiss army, able to fire eight thousand rounds in the field without a hitch. It held thirteen rounds in the clip, one in the chamber, cost five hundred fifty dollars, and rode snugly in a Bianchi holster against his left ribs. He would never be comfortable with it. He had never wanted a gun. For decades he had managed without one. But times had changed. The game he loved had turned lethal. People kept trying to kill him and his.
As he unlocked the Jaguar, folded himself into its comfort, started the quiet, powerful engine, listened to it purr, the notion came to him again that had surprised him often lately—that he ought to quit. That would be sensible. He wasn’t getting any younger. He didn’t need the money; his father had left him a great many shares of Medallion stock. But sensible was boring. What the hell would he do with his days and nights? He grimaced, read his watch, looked in the side mirror for a break in traffic, swung the Jaguar in a fast U-turn, and headed back to Horseshoe Canyon to pick up Melvil.
The spur of Torcido Canyon to which Melvil pointed him would have been easy to miss. Its road was a narrow strip of blacktop that the rain had damaged. It followed a crooked creek along the bottom of a canyon whose walls went up steeply, covered in dry brush showing new
tips of green, with occasional clumps of live oak and outcrops of rock. The ridges were high above. The creek ran rough and swollen among boulders and twisted white sycamores hung with scraps of yellow leaf.
“Hard to imagine a semi negotiating this road,” Dave said. “How much farther is this dump?”
“Dad, he took it real slow, change gears a lot.” Melvil frowned ahead through the afternoon rain. “Not too far now. Look a little different in the daytime.”
“You sure you can find it?”
“I think so. Yeah. There. See that turnoff?”
The Jaguar scraped bottom, following ruts carved by the giant tires of tractor-trailer rigs. Oaks grew large and close here, very old. The wheels of the Jaguar slurred in mud and wet grasses. And here was the dump, in a declivity circled by dead ferns. Filled with steel drums like those they had watched trucked out of Millex last night—this morning. Tumbled there, labels peeling, rusting in the rain.
“Smell it?” Melvil put a hand over his nose and mouth. “Make you sick, you breathe that for long.” His eyes clouded. He turned his face away. “Worse than sick. Kill you.” He whispered. “Killed my daddy.”
“I need the camera,” Dave said, and got out of the car. The smell was strong, caught in his throat, stung his eyes. Melvil pulled the camera from the glove compartment, lay across the seat, handed it out to Dave. “Thanks. I’ll make it quick.” He fiddled with the camera, uncertain, hoping he was making the correct adjustments for the poor light. He took twenty shots, got back into the car, passed the camera to Melvil. He slammed the door, started the engine. “What a nightmare,” he said. He pressed the throttle, and the rear wheels spun.
Melvil sighed. “One more time,” he said, and got out into the rain to have a look.
Dave got out too. “I’m a slow learner,” he said.
“Be all right,” Melvil said, and looked around him. “If we can find something to put under the wheels.” He made a face. “Don’t like touching nothing here.” He rubbed his hands on his pantlegs. “How about this?” He took a few steps, slipping a little in the mud, then bent and heaved up from among the brittle, rust-brown ferns the end of a four-by-four, six feet long. He wrestled it loose from creepers that had gripped it. They were dead and dry too. The end of the timber came loose with a ripping sound.
A signboard was bolted to that end. Melvil wrestled the four-by-four toward the car. “‘No dumping,’” he said. “How about that?” With a disgusted laugh, he let the post drop behind the car. Dave went to help him. Muddy-handed, they wedged the four-by-four under the rear wheels. Halfway back to the road, the rear of the car slewed and the wheels mired again. They hiked back for the post. In small print across the bottom of the sign were numerals from a County ordinance book. And below that, TORCIDO CANYON HOMEOWNERS ASSN.
Back in the car, inching it warily along the muddy ruts, Dave said, “No homeowners in this part of the canyon.”
“Up there.” Melvil sat forward on the seat, peering upward through the glass. “One. Look new to me.”
It hung two hundred feet above them on the brushy canyon wall, all alone, raw cedar and tall glass, sharp roof angles, decks thrusting out like bony wings. Tall pin oaks grew around the house. It looked beautiful in the sifting rain—a picture for an architecture magazine. But there was something desolate about it.
Dave checked his watch. No time to go up there. Salazar expected him at four. He’d be late as it was. The Jaguar lurched heavily onto the potholed blacktop of the trail. He drove it as fast as he dared, the tires spraying water at places where the creek overflowed onto the paving. He skidded at the boulevard stop where the spur canyon opened on Torcido Canyon road. The spur canyon had a name—Concho.
Darkness was coming early again. The shift was changing. Men were leaving the squad room in dry raincoats. Men in damp raincoats were coming on duty. They brought whiffs with them of the moist air of the streets, the smell of rain on sidewalks. Phones rang. Voices spoke, laughed, swore. Typewriters rattled. From outside, above the steady growl of home-going traffic, sirens wailed and faded.
“Who led you into this?” Salazar looked and sounded pained. His hand slapped a stack of papers in front of him. “Do you realize how big this is? And how nasty?” Dave blinked at him. Salazar said, “What took you in? And I don’t mean the Myers matter.”
“An informant.” Dave hung his raincoat on a hook by the door of the glass box that was Salazar’s office, off the squad room. “On the understanding that I wouldn’t disclose his name or whereabouts.” He sat down facing Salazar across the desk. “The pictures came out, then?”
“The pictures are lousy. You can’t take telephoto pictures without a tripod. Handheld is too jittery.” Sourly, Salazar passed the pictures across. They looked as if they had been taken at night in the rain. “But he got one that wasn’t too bad. Even with the hat.”
“Of the Duchess.” Dave studied it.
“We got responses on that from all over the state, all over the country. Clara Blodgett, née Leopardi. In twenty-five years, eleven arrests, no convictions.”
Dave handed back the pictures. “Why? Her operation depends on a great many people she can’t really know well enough to trust.”
“She doesn’t trust them. She scares them.”
“She ever blow anybody up before?” Dave said.
“Maybe.” Salazar thumbed through the papers. “Your license number didn’t lead us anywhere. Belongs to a car junked years ago. Owner, no connection.”
Dave laughed wryly. “My witness thought the owner would be dead.”
Salazar said, “Sounds like he knows her. Don’t feel bad. Even if we located her and took her to trial, nobody would testify against her. They got a witness once in—where? Florida? Texas? I forget.” He scowled at the papers, sat back, gave his head a dismissive shake. “Doesn’t matter. They registered him under a false name in a motel. Officers around the clock, eating with him, sleeping with him. They didn’t go to the bathroom with him. Somebody shot him through the bathroom window. But mostly, by the time law enforcement gets a line on a witness, the poor bastard is already dead—accident, suicide. You know.”
Dave reached across and touched the papers. “In all of that, did you run across an associate of hers, a hitman maybe, named Smithers? Using that name, that alias?”
“I spent the whole day with this file.” Salazar found a flat box on his desk, lit a dun brown cigarette. “I’d have noticed that.” He pushed the papers around for a minute, regarded Dave through blue smoke. “Smithers? Smith? That’s a dumb alias.”
Dave lit a cigarette of his own. “So you’re saying I wasted a night and risked pneumonia for nothing? She can’t be touched?”
“You get this witness of yours to drive a truck there, get an assignment from the Duchess, the signs, the warning stickers, the phony documents, the trailer full of chemicals, and bring them all to us, and—”
“She already wants him dead,” Dave said. “His mother’s been shot. I sent Amanda down there. The woman told her it was Smithers. San Diego County’s got deputies in the hospital now, guarding her.”
Salazar went straight on: “And even then, we’d haul fat Clara in, she’d have a high-powered lawyer with her, be out on the street in an hour, and when it came to trial in a couple of years, there’d be ten witnesses that she wasn’t even there. Nobody at the truck stop would talk. Who wants to end his life wrapped up in razor wire? As for the company that shipped the stuff—maybe they’d get fined a few thousand bucks for illegal dumping. And they’d be right back at it the next week.”
“My witness heard Paul Myers say he was going to expose the Duchess.” Dave stretched to use the ashtray. “You know what happened. Myers’s wife was beaten up, and when that didn’t work, Myers was killed.”
Salazar swiveled in his chair to gaze at the rain running down his window. “The witness, Dave.”
“Give me back my report.” Dave rose wearily. “And the pictures. I’ll turn them over to the
grand jury. I’ll testify to the grand jury.”
Salazar swiveled around and gazed up at Dave with pity. “They’ll jail you for refusing to divulge your source. And if you get out of jail alive, you’ll turn the ignition key to start your car, and blam! Instant cremation. No waiting.” He slipped the envelope of photographs from the stack of papers, along with Dave’s typed pages fastened with a paperclip. “Here you go.” He passed them over. “But don’t do it. It’s not worth it.”
“It might save some lives,” Dave said. “This is going on all over the country, been going on for decades. They make more and more laws against it, federal, state, local. Talk about it, write about it, but it just gets worse.” He went for his coat. “The air is poisoned, ponds, rivers, lakes, whole oceans. The water under the land. The land itself. Farms, the animals on the farms. People. Whole towns have to be abandoned. Somebody has to stop it.” He shrugged into the coat.
Salazar came to take down his own coat. “Did you see that picket line out at the Foothill Springs dump? They had it on TV.” He put his coat on.
“I saw it in person.” Dave folded the useless photos and report and jammed them into a pocket
“Yes, well,” Salazar said. “It will be them that stop it, Dave. Not you. Not the grand jury. The grand jury has been promising a report for months. It never comes.” Salazar opened his door. The noises of the large room—telephones, typewriters, voices—were suddenly loud again. He led the way between busy desks. “Why don’t you forget it, and do something you can do? Sign the papers on the Myers case and get the widow her check.” He opened another door, and they were in a bright hallway. “Whoever killed him—the Duchess or Silencio or Kilgore—he’s just as dead. And she can use the money. She’s got kids.”
“Also a sick old father,” Dave said. “Damn it, I wish the man hadn’t been hauling dangerous cargo. On that two-year conditional clause, Pinnacle won’t pay her a dime.”
Nightwork Page 14
