The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning: 11 (The Dave Brandstetter Mysteries)

by Joseph Hansen

  She stared. “You mean that’s his alibi?”

  “Off in the hills. Nobody saw him.” Dave set the menu back in its place. “The barbecued ribs, please.”

  Writing it down, she looked glum. But professional cheerfulness chirped in her voice. “I’ll bring a hot towel with them for your fingers, sir. We’re world famous for our ribs.” She breezed off. “You won’t be sorry.”

  He was sorry, but not surprised.

  8

  ON THE EDGE OF town, the hospital and its parking lot took up maybe two acres of what had once been an avocado grove. The building was a new one of pale brick, with glass doors, aluminum-framed windows, a roof of brown fake tile, fireproof, rainproof, wind-proof. The plan was simple. The building surrounded a patio. He could see the tops of four avocado trees above the roof line.

  He left the Jaguar on the tarmac in a slot marked VISITORS and pushed into a lighted reception area where the temperate air smelled of disinfectant and vitamin B. The nurse at the reception desk had her back to glass sliding doors that opened onto the patio, where light escaping from hospital rooms showed flower beds and wooden seats under the trees. Maybe patients sat out there sometimes. The patio was tiled in terra-cotta squares, and it looked a pleasant place, as places in hospitals went.

  For his part, he’d had his fill of hospitals. It was another good reason he’d retired. Home safe in the canyon reading books and listening to music and sometimes hauling his little typewriter out of a deep desk drawer and trying to write about his cases—doing these harmless things, minding his own affairs instead of those of resentful strangers, he wasn’t so apt to be shot, stabbed, drowned, burned up, car-wrecked as he’d been when he worked. He laughed grimly to himself. So what was he doing here?

  The nurse was plump, gray-haired, wore no makeup, and probably sang in a church choir. When he told her it was little Mike Engstrom he’d come to see, she smiled sentimentally and explained to him, with gestures, how to find the room. Her smile faded. “Poor little thing. Mother shot to death right in front of his eyes.” She clucked. “How is he going to get over that? A person would never forget a thing like that. Not their whole life long.”

  “He remembers, then?” Dave said.

  “Not yet. He hasn’t woken up yet.”

  Dave went to the room anyway. A sheriff’s deputy sat on a brown molded plastic chair with spindly black iron legs outside the room door. He was one of the boy children who had escorted Barney Craig out of his house this afternoon, scared even though the man was in handcuffs. A tattered Reader’s Digest was in the deputy’s hands. He looked up at Dave. Without recognition. Dave showed him his license, and told him:

  “I’m hoping he can describe the one who shot her.”

  “So’s Sheriff Rose,” the boy said. “He’s having his supper.” He looked at his watch. “Be here soon.” He held out his hand for Dave to shake, and said, “I’m Bob Lowry.” Rubber soles squeaked on the clean hallway floor, and a balding young man in white stepped around them and pushed into the room. Dave got a glimpse of the small boy in the big bed. A nurse got up off a chair beside the bed, above which hung a bottle. A tube from the bottle connected to Mike’s arm. What were they piping into him? Whatever it was, Dave hoped it would wake him. The door clicked shut. Dave sat on a chair like the deputy’s, across from him, against the other wall, beside a window on whose sill other ragged magazines were stacked. Lowry said, “Insurance?”

  Dave lied. “Vaughn Thomas’s—the man Jemmie was living with in L.A. He was killed in what the police claim was a shooting accident. I think it was murder, and whoever killed him killed her.”

  “What for?” the deputy asked.

  “When we find him,” Dave said, “maybe he’ll tell us.”

  “We’re looking for her husband”—Lowry’s fair, childish forehead wrinkled—“Dallas Armstrong?”

  “Engstrom,” Dave said. “No luck yet?”

  “Not that I heard. Armed and dangerous, Sheriff Rose says. Hell, lots of armed and dangerous around here now. Crazy people.” He wrinkled his nose. “You ever seen one of those skinheads?”

  “You’re talking about George Hetzel’s crew? Vaughn Thomas was part of it for a while.”

  The boy cocked his head. “For a while? What happened? Did Hetzel throw him out?”

  “On the contrary,” Dave said. “Thomas had a wealthy father, not only wealthy but old. Hetzel was counting on Vaughn for heavy financial help in the future. He made the boy a major in his lunatic brigade. I gather he was free to do anything he liked. And when he up and left in the middle of the night, Hetzel was furious.”

  “Maybe Hetzel killed him,” the deputy said. “I sure as hell wouldn’t want him furious at me.”

  “I thought Hetzel was all mouth,” Dave said.

  Lowry moved his eyebrows skeptically. “So did I—till that housing project burned down.”

  Dave sat straight. “The one he’d been talking against on television, got up petitions about, lobbied Sacramento?”

  Lowry nodded. “Burned down one night, a few months back. Wasn’t finished. They just had the framework up, you know, roof, wiring, plumbing. Big place—you should have seen it. Fire companies from all over. No use. Forty-, fifty-mile-an-hour winds. I never saw anything burn so fast and so hot.”

  “And you think it was Hetzel’s doing?”

  Lowry shrugged. “He was the one who tried to turn everybody against it, said welfare drones would be moving in, upping our taxes, and they’d be black, and that meant crime and drugs and gangs. Winter Creek would be ruined.”

  “Wasn’t it federally funded, at least partly?”

  “Oh, hell, yes. And the FBI was down on Hetzel like a grasshopper plague. He just smiled and opened his files for them, and they never got a thing on him. But it was a set fire, all right. Started with gasoline on a slope below the project, dry grass and brush. Wind swept the flames up the hill, whoosh. Probably didn’t take a minute.”

  “You said it wasn’t finished,” Dave said. “No one had moved in yet. So there were no casualties.”

  “One. Night watchman, security guard. Old man.” Lowry whispered a sorry laugh. “Black man, wouldn’t you know? He didn’t stand a chance. Maybe he was asleep. We found him in his little guard shed. There’s insurance on a project like that, isn’t there? Sure. It can be rebuilt. But nobody can give Mr. Alexander his life back, can they? Hetzel got himself a bonus. Killed a ‘nigger,’ right?”

  The room door opened. The young doctor leaned out and said to Lowry, “He’s awake.”

  “I have to stand guard here,” Lowry said, and touched the big brown .45 revolver in a holster on his hip. “Can you phone the sheriff and tell him?”

  “I can’t leave him,” the doctor said. “We’re not sure if he even knows his mother is dead. It’s a delicate time. He has to be handled with great care.”

  Dave stood up. “Tell me the number. I’ll phone.”

  A half hour later, Dave sat on a bench in the patio under the rustling trees and smoked a cigarette. Leaves came down from the trees, blown off by a wind that had nighttime chill to it, surprising after a hot day to anyone not used to these inland valleys that were, after all, almost desert before men had piped in water and made them fruitful. He liked to picture them as they used to be, the scattered oaks casting shadows on the soft, mossy green of the spring hills, the tawny hills of summer, the dry brown hills of winter, lost and empty under the sky, before the coming of roads and towns and orchards, when this chunk of the Pacific Shelf was by geographical, linguistic, religious, and every other logic part of Mexico, and where, those rare times when smoke rose into this high and lonely sky, it came from a mesquite fire built by the women of some scruffy, wandering Indian family, for roasting rabbit or quail, or stewing deer meat with berries to twist into pemmican.

  His cigarette burned him. He dropped it hastily and put his fingers to his mouth, and Sheriff Rose stepped onto the patio. He looked glum, came and sat down on the bench next
to Dave, pushed back his hat, shook his head, sighed. “It’s no use my talking to him,” he said. “He’s scared of me. I don’t know why he should be, but you can tell, you know? A little kid’s face shows everything they’re thinking.”

  “What did you ask him?”

  “I went careful—you heard what the doctor said. I just give him a smile and said I was sorry he was hurt, but he seemed like a brave boy to me, and the pain would let up soon and he’d feel fine again. Before he knew it, he’d be up and out of the hospital.”

  “He didn’t ask for his mother?”

  Rose glanced at Dave and away. “You’d have thought that would be the first thing. ‘My mama’s hurt, is she all right?’—something like that. But nope. Not a word. He just glanced at me a second with those blue eyes of his and turned his head away on the pillow. I talked to him awhile longer. Asked him if he liked horses. And did he know his grandpa had a lot of horses. And his grandpa was coming to see him. He looked at me again for a second there. It was plain to see he couldn’t make any sense out of that.”

  “They’ve never met,” Dave said. “Jemmie refused to have anything to do with Charlie Pratt after he tried to keep her from marrying Engstrom.”

  “Pratt didn’t tell me that. I went and told him what had happened to his daughter, you know. That’s not the part of sheriffing I like. Mostly in Fortuna County, it’s high school kids killed drunk driving Saturday nights on the highway you got to tell their folks about. And it never gets easy, no matter how often it happens—and it happens, I get to thinking, damn near every weekend of the world.” He sat forward, elbows on knees, hands dangling. He took off his hat, stared at it, turning it in his fingers. “Beautiful children, smashed to a pulp, their blood all over the road. My God, my God—what’s the point of it?”

  “What about Pratt?” Dave said.

  “He took it hard. Didn’t let on—not with words. He went right on measuring oats into tin feed bins he had set out there beside the stable building. A man like that, a jockey, you know, that’s a dangerous way to make a living. They can get hurt bad. I suppose they learn early not to show pain. But the news about the girl broke him up inside. I knew it. And I thought I won’t ask him to come look at her for a positive ID, you know. Not till tomorrow. But he excused himself to me, went and got a youngster to come finish with the oats, picked up his hat, and says, ‘I guess you’ll want me to see her, won’t you?’

  “And I drove him into town, to Cole’s Funeral Home—which is where we take the dead bodies here in Winter Creek—and I walked him into the cold room. And she’s laying there under a sheet on a table, and he stopped, and I went and turned back the sheet from her face, and he stood staring for a minute, not a flicker in his face, then he nods and says, ‘That’s her. That’s my Jemmie,’ and there’s kind of a tremble in his voice when he says her name, and he turns away real quick and leaves—got a limp, you know, but he walked fast. I didn’t catch up to him till he was outside, climbing in my car. He stared out the window, didn’t speak a word on the ride back out to his ranch. Not even goodbye, when I dropped him off.” Rose sighed. “Yup. He’s hurt bad. Oh”—he stood up and kicked at leaves on the tiles—“I tell you, I hate that part of sheriffing.”

  Dave stood too. “I’ll go talk to Mike.”

  Gauze and tape swathed his skull. Their whiteness gave his pale skin a touch of color just by contrast. He lay propped on pillows. Distrust was in his eyes, which were Dallas Engstrom’s eyes but without the anger. Dave hoped the anger would never come, but that was against common sense, against the way life really went. From the doorway, Dave said, “Hello, Mike. My name is Dave.” He dipped into the pockets of the leather jacket and brought out the bright plastic toys and held them up. “I brought these.”

  The eyes livened up. “Transformers!” the little voice squeaked. “Oh, boy. For me?”

  Dave went into the room. “I’ve been in hospitals a lot myself. And I know there’s not much to do.” He found a white straight chair and sat down on it. “I thought you might like playing with them.”

  Mike held out his hands. Kaminsky had been right—they were big hands for a five-year-old. “I love Transformers,” he said. Dave gave them to him. He turned them over and over, laughing at his luck. He looked at Dave. “Wow, I never saw these ones before.” He laid the tank aside, and began a close, frowning study of the mixed cement truck. “Wow,” he whispered to himself.

  “I didn’t bring the instructions,” Dave said, “but I learned how to work them myself, and I can show you. Oh, I almost forgot.” He dug out of his pocket two tiny figures, one yellow, one blue. “These go with the truck. They’re called Boomer and Ricochet. They’re robots, but they turn into guns.”

  Mike took them. “I know that,” he said scornfully. “That’s what Transformer means.” He fidgeted with the figures. Gun barrels popped out. He examined the truck again, then inserted pegs on the robots into holes on the truck’s cement drum. “See? An armored vehicle.”

  Dave said, “It’s a big robot too. Let me show you.”

  “It’s okay,” Mike said. “I can do it.” He turned the truck’s cab inside out, upside down. “There’s his feet.” He clicked a pair of arms out from under the rear wheels, then popped the robot’s head out of the end of the cement mixer barrel. He detached Boomer and Ricochet from the barrel and fastened them in the robot’s fists. He lowered and raised the arms. “Zap,” he said, “zap.” He turned one arm outward from the body. “Zap,” again, and the other arm, “zap.” He looked at Dave, eyes shining. “They’re cool.”

  “I think so,” Dave said. “I never had any before. I almost didn’t bring them. I wanted to keep them and play with them myself.”

  Mike giggled. “Be serious. You’re too old.”

  “No, really.” Dave picked up the tank and ran it along the surface of the little bedside table. “Look at that. Fire comes out the back.”

  “Wow,” Mike said, and reached for it.

  “It turns into a robot too,” Dave said.

  “It better, or it’s not a Transformer,” Mike said, and proceeded to slide the front and back halves of the small brown killer vehicle an inch apart, stand it upright, and raise its stiff arms.

  Dave said, “The gun turret turns.”

  “Oh, hey,” Mike said, and turned it left, right. “Pow,” he said softly, “pow.” Then he laid it down on the wash-faded, very clean coverlet, beside the cement truck, and looked at Dave with his head tilted. “You know what happened to me? A man came in the house and my mother heard him and she went to see who it was and he had a gun and he shot her. Over and over. I told him to stop, and he shot me too.”

  “Who was the man?” Dave said. “Did you know him?”

  “Only I’m not dead,” Mike said, as if he hadn’t heard. “And she’s dead.” His eyes searched Dave’s. “Isn’t she?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Dave said. “It’s not your fault, Mike. You couldn’t stop him. You know that. He had the gun.”

  “I ran and hid,” Mike said. “I was afraid he’d shoot me over and over too. When they shoot you over and over, you’re a floppy. That’s what Dallas says. A floppy.”

  “Who was the man?”

  “I don’t know. He had a helmet and a face shield, and I couldn’t see.”

  “Camouflage clothes?” Dave asked.

  Mike nodded, picked up the tank, and handed it to Dave. “Run it on the table so I can see the fire again.”

  Dave did as he was told. He looked at the child watching the buzzing, sparking toy. “It wasn’t Barney, was it?”

  “No. Barney was good to us.” He frowned. “Where’s Vaughn?” He looked toward the door through which Dave had come, as if the dead boy might be the next to surprise him with a visit. “Jemmie said he’ll come when he can.”

  “The man with the gun wasn’t Vaughn. Was it your dad?”

  Mike was scornful again. “Dallas? Dallas is big and tall.” He underlined the word with his small voice and beame
d at the notion of how tall his father was, taller in his mind, Dave suspected, than anyone. “And Dallas wouldn’t kill Jemmie. They loved each other. I’m their little boy. You have to be in love to have a little boy.”

  “But he hit her sometimes,” Dave said, “didn’t he?”

  “Sometimes,” Mike nodded, “but that wasn’t him—that was just the beer—that’s what Jemmie says.” Mike folded the robot into a cement truck again. “Maybe it was a sheriff or a policeman. Maybe it was Mr. Hetzel.”

  “Was it Mr. Hetzel?” Dave said, surprised.

  “Vaughn says they’re not our friends. They want to hurt us. He made me say it over and over so I wouldn’t forget—‘we never tell anything to a sheriff, or a policeman, or Mr. Hetzel.’” He looked at Dave warily. “You’re not Mr. Hetzel, are you?”

  “No, and I’m not a sheriff or a policeman, either,” Dave said. “I’m a friend. And it’s important that you tell me who the man was, Mike. I have to find him and have him locked up, so he can’t kill anyone else.”

  Mike looked at the toys on the coverlet, touched them, sighed, and said hopelessly, “I don’t know who he was.”

  The door opened. Weatherbeaten old Charlie Pratt stood there, a very large, very new teddy bear tucked under his stiff left arm. His eyes were red and swollen. He smiled awkwardly and said, “Mike, I’m your grandpa Charlie, your mother’s daddy. It’s time we got acquainted.”

  “You’re the one with horses,” Mike said.

  “They wouldn’t let me bring a horse in here.” The old jockey held out the bear. “This was the best I could do.”

  9

  DAVE HAD EXPECTED HIGH chain-link fence with razor wire on top, armed guards at the gates, raving attack dogs. The headlights of the Jaguar showed him nothing like that. Only a modest three-bedroom ranch house set back on a lawn with big old eucalyptus trees, azalea bushes under the windows. Hung to the eaves of the shake roof were lights that pushed back the darkness a little, but they were nothing unusual. He left the Jaguar at the road edge. Surrounded by silence, he made for the house. What was that? He glanced back. A shape ducked quickly out of sight behind the car. Off to his left, a walkie-talkie crackled for a split second. He’d been right about the guards, anyway. He pressed the bell push, and a click made him look up. A camera had its glass eye on him. A voice came from nowhere, thinned by circuitry.