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

by Joseph Hansen

  “‘Within and without,’” Dave finished for him.

  Rose gave a quick laugh. “You know how he talks.” He sobered, took the pipe from his teeth. “No, Barney was up there, and he could have done it, blended in, like you says, with the rest of the players at that there Combat Zone, with a real gun, and blew Thomas’s head off, and nobody would have been the wiser.”

  “He could have. But I have a problem with it. What’s his motive?”

  Rose moved his narrow shoulders in a shrug and drank coffee from the paper cup. “They got so many secrets out there at Hetzel’s, it could be anything. Something Thomas knew he couldn’t be trusted to keep quiet about? Who knows?”

  “But if Barney was going to kill Jemmie, why not kill her in L.A.? If he knew where to find Vaughn, he knew where to find Jemmie. Unless she knew he killed Vaughn, what reason had he to kill her? And if she knew that, she wouldn’t have run to his house to hide, now would she, sheriff?”

  Rose wagged his head. “Beats me. Makes no difference, one way or the other. He’s in for possession of illegal firearms, if not for murder. I’m hanging on to him. You got a better suspect for me?”

  “What about Ralph Alexander?” Dave said.

  Rose’s eyebrows rose. “You serious? I know he blames Hetzel for his father’s death, but—”

  “He was up in L.A. Sunday morning and can’t account for his time. Yesterday, he claims to have eaten lunch out at the marina, the Old New Bedford Lobster place. The staff there should be able to confirm it, if it’s true. But he still could have stopped off for a brief two minutes at Barney Craig’s on his way to pick his children up from school. And he owns a camouflage outfit.”

  “And a red car.”

  “Isn’t there a Hertz or Avis office in Fortuna? I’ll bet there is. He could have rented the little gray car after he dropped the kids off at school in the morning, and returned it before he picked them up in the afternoon.” Dave lit a cigarette, blew smoke away, said, “He lied to me this morning when I went to see him. Claimed he didn’t know Vaughn Thomas or Jemmie Engstrom.”

  “And he did?”

  “I saw pictures of them both at his house, and he paid a visit to Barney’s place the morning after Jemmie got there. That red car was seen parked outside.”

  “You don’t mean it.” Shaken, Rose laid down his pipe. “But why would he kill her? Why would he kill Thomas?”

  “To frame Hetzel,” Dave said. “He’s getting nowhere trying to prove Hetzel was behind his father’s death. Maybe he ran out of patience.”

  “Dear Lord.” Rose rocked back in his chair and rolled his eyes at the ceiling. “What next?”

  “He also owns a rifle. Large-caliber. Hides it in the crawl space under his roof.” Dave stood up. “Since Barney isn’t talking, ask little Mike what Alexander wanted, when he paid that morning call.” Dave stepped to the door, reached for the knob, turned back. “Any sign of Engstrom yet?”

  “Not a sign,” Rose said, and his smile was weary. “But I’m not going to let it trouble my mind unduly. This case is enough of a mare’s nest already.” Dave swung open the door, and Rose sat forward. “Do me a favor, Brandstetter. Don’t pull any more fool stunts like last night.”

  “They weren’t going to kill me,” Dave said. “They were only trying to scare me out of town.”

  “Maybe—in an ambulance.” Rose grunted. “But maybe in a hearse. They’re mean, my friend, no conscience at all. Take you out to some deserted place and kick you to death? They’d enjoy the hell out of that. Word has it, Hetzel keeps ’em on a short leash. Way I figure it, that’s a good way to turn ’em even meaner.”

  Dave twitched a grin. “Why didn’t you arrest them?”

  “Because I was alone, and I value my hide.” Rose lit the pipe again and smiled slyly. “You want to press charges?” He leaned back in his creaky chair and blew a smoke ring. “I’ll form a posse and go round ’em up.”

  Dave shook his head. “Let’s save the taxpayers’ money,” he said, and left.

  He drove along Persimmon Street. Because Barney Craig wasn’t talking, Dave needed another look inside his house. But a deputy sat tilted back on a kitchen chair on the porch. It was Bob Lowry, the baby-faced kid Dave had met at the hospital last night. He was in uniform, hat pushed back on his fair hair, and he was reading again. Dave walked up the cement strip to the foot of the porch steps. Lowry heard him and looked up from the book. It was a thick book, and its shiny jacket said it was new. “Mr. Brandstetter.” Lowry’s child eyes searched Dave for damage. “You all right?”

  “Your boss told you, did he?” Dave said. “How I was rousted by Hetzel’s storm troopers last night, and he rescued me?” He climbed the steps. “What’s the book about?”

  “Vietnam—what a shuck that was.” Lowry closed the book and laid it on the porch planks. “Everybody lied. Everybody was rotten. Right from the start, right from Kennedy on.”

  “Politics is a profession of liars,” Dave said. “Why are you here?”

  “Rose asked L.A. to send a forensics team to go over the house to see what we missed, only they got busy and”—Lowry read his watch—“they won’t be here till three.” He grimaced. “I hope they make it. This gets boring.”

  “Then everything’s still the way it was?” Dave said.

  “Everything but the body and that ammunition dump of Craig’s off the back porch.”

  “I’d like another look at the house,” Dave said. “I won’t disturb anything.”

  Lowry frowned, doubtful. “I don’t know … ”

  “You can come with me to see that I behave.”

  “Okay.” Lowry sighed, let the front chair legs down, stood up. “It’ll make a little break in the monotony.” He opened the screen door, unlocked the house door, stood back for Dave to go in ahead of him.

  “Thank you,” Dave said. “Now when your children ask you, ‘What adventures did you have when you were a deputy sheriff, Daddy?’ you can tell them about this moment.”

  Lowry grinned and closed the doors. “I don’t think they’re old enough to stand the excitement.”

  The place was very still. It smelled faintly of beer, cigarette smoke, Mexican food. Dave pretended interest in the living room, where the outline of Jemmie Engstrom’s small twisted corpse was still bold on the worn carpet. In the dining room where, like Neil O’Neil, Barney had his office, typewriter, calculator, racked rolls of blueprints, table strewn with invoices, files in pasteboard boxes made to look like big, thick books. In the kitchen, where an old refrigerator buzzed, and a sheet of taped-down plastic covered Mike’s bloody little footprints on the lusterless linoleum.

  But he wasn’t interested in these. Nor the hallway, the bathroom, Barney’s room, where boots and sweat socks and locker room smells mingled with whiffs of Clarice’s perfume, and the sheets on the open bed were in a lavender and pale-pink floral pattern, with ruffled pillow cases. No, what he wanted to see was the room Jemmie had occupied.

  It was at the back, separated from Barney’s by the bathroom. She had unpacked a few things—comb, hairbrush, blow drier, jars and bottles of cosmetics, not many, nothing fancy. But the dresser drawers were empty. She hadn’t unpacked her clothes. The suitcase stood on the floor at the foot of the bed. He laid it on the bed, zipped it open, searched it. Nothing but clothes. He closed it, set it back where it had been, and looked around, frowning. Lowry, leaning in the doorway, asked:

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Where’s her handbag?”

  “I don’t know.” Lowry came into the room and opened a closet with no clothes in it except for a cheap flannel bathrobe hanging on a hook inside the door. It looked as if it had hung there unused for years. A cross pole held empty wire hangers. A pair of dried-out work shoes lay on the closet floor. On the shelf above lay a dusty, collapsed basketball. He took it down, put it back, looked at Dave.

  Dave said, “She left Los Angeles with a suitcase”—he knocked it with his shoe—“and a large, o
ver-the-shoulder handbag.” He knelt and looked under the bed. Dust and balls of fluff and the cellophane from a long-ago pack of cigarettes. “Now, where the hell is it?”

  Lowry tilted his head, puzzled. “Why does it matter?”

  “Because when the police in L.A. searched her apartment, there were no papers—letters, bills, receipts, check stubs, bank statements, licenses. She was in a panic to get out of there, running for her life, yet she stopped to gather up the papers. Why?”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” Lowry said.

  “It made sense to Jemmie,” Dave said. “That’s why it matters. The papers aren’t in the suitcase, so they must have been in the handbag. And if the handbag is missing, then that was what the killer came here for.”

  “Bills, receipts, canceled checks?” Lowry scoffed.

  “Not those,” Dave said. “Not likely. But papers of some kind, the kind worth killing for. Maybe Thomas kept all his papers in one place—a drawer, even a big envelope. People do. They make a habit of it. It’s a way of having everything together come income tax time, but what they won’t need goes right in there with what they will. They can sort it out in April. And Jemmie just emptied the drawer or snatched up the envelope and shoved it all into her bag, the worthless papers, and the ones that cost her her life.” He stepped out of the room into the hallway. “If that bag isn’t in this house, then find the bag, you find the murderer—you can bet on it.”

  “Maybe she left it on the Greyhound,” Lowry said.

  “Phone and find out,” Dave said, “and after that, if you don’t mind, check in Craig’s trucks outside.”

  Greyhound had no such bag in their lost luggage room. The cabs of Barney Craig’s trucks were busy with junk, but no over-the-shoulder bag. Dave and Lowry turned out every cupboard and closet, every possible and impossible hiding place in the house and among the building supply storage sheds in the backyard. They spent an hour and twenty-five minutes at it. They didn’t find the bag.

  “Can I read my book now?” Lowry said.

  “I promised you excitement”—Dave pulled open the front door, pushed the screen, stepped out onto the porch again into the fresh country air—“and I kept my word.”

  “My heart was racing”—Lowry locked the door once more—“with the thrill of it all.” He dropped onto the chair, picked up the book. “You’re right. I’ll never forget it.”

  “If Barney changes his mind and starts to talk, have Rose ask him if he remembers that bag.” Dave stepped down into the sun. “And let me know, will you? I’m at the Ranchero motel.” He lifted a hand and made for the street. “Appreciate your help.”

  “Don’t tell Rose,” Lowry said. “I could lose my badge.”

  12

  HE LOOKED INTO THE New Corral, but the eye-stinging fumes of beer, smoke, and disinfectant that reached him, and the deafening twang of country western music, backed him off. He let the damaged door fall shut. He would have his before-lunch drink in his motel room. He didn’t get there. Three blocks on the way, he saw Dallas Engstrom. His spavined pickup truck with the weathered camper on it stood to the side of an Arco station, hood up, steam geysering from the radiator cap. Engstrom had dragged a water hose over to the truck and was playing water from it onto the radiator. His white houseman’s outfit was grimy and rumpled. A smear of what might have been axle grease ran down one side of his face. His long yellow hair was blowing in the wind. And the way he moved said he was tired or past tired. Dave drove up beside him, stopped the Jaguar, and got out. When Engstrom heard him, he turned, and was so surprised he almost dropped the hose. He did stop it running. His eyes were bloodshot.

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I came for the same reason you did,” Dave said. “To protect Jemmie. I left after you. Where have you been?”

  “Son of a bitching truck.” Engstrom kicked its front wheel savagely. A new tire was on that wheel. “Broke down on me five times. Five different times. Five different reasons. Five different little beach towns where you have to graduate in ignorance to run a repair shop. Fucking miracle I ever did get here.” He dropped the hose and peered at Dave. “Is she here? Did you find her? Is she all right?”

  “Can I see the receipts from those repair shops?”

  “What for?” Engstrom’s angry blue eyes narrowed. “What are you getting at?”

  “I think you got here yesterday,” Dave said, “around three, three thirty. I’d like proof I’m wrong.”

  “Shit.” With a disgusted laugh, Engstrom yanked open the cab of the truck, and pawed around on the seat inside for a minute, among candy wrappers, beer cans, hamburger boxes. He swung back to Dave with a fistful of grubby pink and blue and yellow flimsies. Credit card receipts. Dave put on his reading glasses and checked the dates. Yesterday, today. Many miles away from Winter Creek. He gave back the slips. Wordless, Engstrom tossed them into the mess on the truck’s seat and slammed the door. “Satisfied?”

  “Yes, thank you.” Dave pushed the glasses into the leather jacket. “But I wish it hadn’t happened.”

  “You wish. Shit, cost me a fucking fortune. I ought—” He broke into his own thought, tilted his head, asked, “Why?”

  “She needed protection, and I was too slow.”

  Engstrom grabbed him. “What do you mean? What are you saying? Is she hurt? She is hurt, isn’t she?”

  Dave pried his fingers off. “She went to Barney Craig’s to hide. But before I could locate her, someone killed her, Dallas. I’m sorry.”

  “Killed her!” Under the grease smears Engstrom’s face went white. “Mike too? Not Mike.”

  “Not Mike,” Dave said. “He’s going to be all right.”

  “‘Someone’ killed her? Who?”

  “They’ve arrested Barney, but I don’t think it—”

  “Son of a bitch.” Engstrom slammed down the hood of the truck, climbed into the cab, started the clattering engine. “He wanted her. He always wanted her.” The handbrake of the GM clanked, the engine roared, and shuddering and bucking, it careened off the filling station asphalt into the street. Engstrom’s voice drifted back. “He couldn’t have her, so the stupid bastard killed her.”

  “It wasn’t that way,” Dave said, but with only himself to hear. He stepped back into the Jaguar and followed the pickup. Engstrom drove it fast and almost out of control, veering wildly, cutting into and out of the lazily moving vans, pickups, produce trucks that made traffic at noon in Winter Creek. A few of them squealed their brakes and stalled and shouted angrily after the camper. At the little town’s one half-important cross street, a signal light showed red. Engstrom ignored it, laid a hand on his horn, and barreled across, just barely missing an eighteen-wheeler that roared a hoarse diesel honk after him.

  Dave was no longer up to that kind of driving. Once, long ago. How many company cars had he totaled chasing or being chased by the likes of Dallas Engstrom in the course of forty and more years? No more. He was too old. It was aggravating, it was humiliating, but there it was. He waited for the light to turn green. This meant he pulled into the parking lot of the sheriff substation only in time to see Dallas Engstrom yank open a glass door and run into the building. He was shouting. An AK-47 assault rifle was in his hand. Pulling the Sig Sauer from its holster, jacking a bullet into the chamber, Dave ran after him.

  A hallway with doors on both sides went from this side entrance straight to the reception area. Dallas stood there in a half crouch, gun pointed. “Take the gun out, put it on the floor, and kick it over here,” he said.

  “Engstrom?” Dave couldn’t see him, but the voice belonged to Sheriff Claude Rose. “Where the hell have you been? What do you mean coming in here with a gun? Don’t you know the trouble that’s going to make for you?”

  Engstrom roared, “Shut up. Do what I say.”

  Back against the wall, Dave moved along the hallway, trying to keep the cowboy boots from making any sound. He held the gun up beside his hat brim, ready.

  “Are you
crazy?” Rose asked Engstrom. “Don’t you know any minute now a deputy back from lunch is going to walk in that door you got your back to and shoot you down?”

  “Give me the gun!” Engstrom bellowed, raised the barrel of the AK-47, and fired. The shots came fast. Dave thought he counted five.

  “All right,” Rose yelped. “Here’s the goddamn gun.”

  Dave heard the sheriff’s revolver hit the floor, heard it skitter across the sleek vinyl tile. He crouched and ran along the thirty remaining feet of the hallway and was in the reception area when Engstrom bent to pick up the revolver. He pushed the barrel of the Sig Sauer into Engstrom’s right kidney and said, “Drop the gun, Dallas.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the sheriff come from behind the desk and start toward them. Then Engstrom reared back with a roar, something struck Dave above the ear, and he was on the floor, stunned, blinded. He felt the pistol torn from his fingers. He struggled to speak, to get up. No good.

  Boots clattered, Engstrom shouted something about keys, the sheriff shouted back at him, a steel door clanged. His head hurt. He touched the place. His hand came away bloody. He pushed to his hands and knees, head ringing. Behind the inner door back of the sheriff’s desk was a barred jail door. Now this was open, and pushing the sheriff ahead of him, Engstrom was making his way among empty cells. “Barney, you son of a bitch. Where are you? I’m going to kill you like you killed my wife.”

  Dave tottered to his feet, stumbled around back of the counter, and grabbed up the headset of the dispatch radio. He peered at the machine. It wasn’t big or complicated but it took him a costly few seconds to dig out his reading glasses and find which buttons did what. Meantime there was a lot more shouting in the cell block.

  “Get ready to die, ol’ buddy.”