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

by Joseph Hansen

  “Oh, yes.” Sylvia’s voice was a trembling whisper. “Oh, God, yes.” The whisper grew sharper, more urgent. “Oh, how I’ve wanted, how I waited, how I—” She gave a low, panting moan. “Oh, my God, yes, yes, no, no, don’t stop. Yes, yes. Ah, you’re so wonderful, so wonderful. Oh, my lover, oh my darling, oh, yes, oh, yes.” Now the words shuddered out of her. “Oh, God, I love—you—love—love—oh—Neil.” The last word was a cry. Then there were no more words. Human sounds, sighs, murmurs, soft laughter, not words. Then there was silence.

  Dave watched the second hand go around the face of his watch. Fifteen seconds. Thirty seconds. Thirty-five. Forty. Then there was rustling, and he felt under his feet their feet moving on the floor beyond the door. “All right, now,” Sylvia said, “you still haven’t answered me, God damn it. Where the hell were you Monday night? You promised you were coming back. And I wanted you, Neil, I needed you. You know how exhausted I was. Completely stressed out, working like a demon for three bloody months day and night on that damned Shopwise campaign. And then it was all over and you swore you’d be here to hold me.” Now it wasn’t lust but tears that made her voice unsteady. “I needed you. You know how I am. I get so fucking tired of being boss lady, all the responsibility, all the tension, all the fights—I’m a woman, Neil, like any other woman, and I have wants and needs and God help me hungers, and I needed you then, naked and strong to hold me. And you promised you’d be back.”

  “Sylvia, be reasonable. Haven’t I been with you every minute since this thing began? I begged you for Sunday off, and it wasn’t even noon before you beeped me in. By Monday night, I was totally wrung out. And I just fell asleep.”

  “Bullshit,” she snarled. “You forgot all about me. You always do. The minute we part, I’m out of your thoughts.”

  “Wrong. The only thing on my mind was coming back to you. I took a shower, unplugged the phone, and lay down for half an hour. I shut my eyes and, wham, it was morning. That shows you how tired I was.”

  “Tired of me, you mean. Who were you out with?”

  “Oh, please. Sylvia, you’re the only woman in my life. Be fair. You know I’m always thinking of you—”

  Below, the horn of the gray limo sounded discreetly.

  “Oh, God,” Sylvia said, “look at the time.” The door burst open and she was rattling down the staircase, Neil O’Neil close behind her. “Damn that boy.” Both of them wore black. From a small black hat of woven straw, a black net veil covered her face. Dave watched from above as she yanked open the house door and charged out into the sunlight. “He goes on being a pain in the ass even when he’s dead.” O’Neil pulled the door closed behind him.

  The room surprised Dave. There was no bed. It was an office—desks, phones, typewriters, computer, lots of paper, printouts, drawings, photographs. No carpet. Slick pages lay on the drafting table, off prints of a full-page newspaper ad, headlined in red. THE SHOPWISE SUPERMARKET SWEEPSTAKES/PRESENTING THE WINNERS. The list of names and addresses was long. Dave folded one of the sheets and tucked it into a jacket pocket, turned, and saw a tiny, brown, wrinkled Asian woman in starchy white blinking at him from the doorway, folded sheets in her arms.

  “Can I help you, sir?”

  “I came to see Mrs. Thomas,” he said. “But she’s out.”

  “She out.” The woman nodded. “Funeral of son. Very sad day, very sad.”

  “Did you know the boy?” Dave said.

  She shook her head. “Í work here only short time.”

  “I see. Thank you.” Dave moved to leave the room, and she stepped out of his way.

  “Who I say call?” she asked.

  “Don’t bother.” He went down the stairs. “I’ll come back.” And he too went out into the sunlight. The mockingbird had quit. Dave got into the Jaguar, switched on engine and air conditioning, and sat frowning. Neil wasn’t asleep at his house Monday night. Dave and Cecil were there. At least until two A.M., Neil was out. Dave grunted and let go the handbrake. A lie to a jealous woman? Was he really trying to make something of that? Disgusted, he drove off.

  14

  “AT TEN TWENTY-FIVE A.M. last Friday.”

  On a rough round table in a log-framed booth on Olvera Street, a plate of beef enchiladas steamed in front of Cecil. He spread a stingy paper napkin on his knees, tucked the corner of another in at his throat. Bowls of green and red chili salsa stood on the table. He spooned some of each onto the red sauce and melted cheese that smothered the enchiladas, and added a spoonful of chopped onion.

  Dave munched tortilla chips dipped deep in guacamole and watched him with amusement. He was a dedicated eater. Yet he remained rail thin. Cecil picked up his fork, threw Dave a grin, growled, and set about eating. There were three enchiladas. When he’d made away with the first, he wiped his mouth, swallowed some dark Dos Equis beer, and said:

  “It was Ralph Alexander, all right. He claimed to be with Status Electronics, upscale audio stuff, Pasadena. You ever hear of it? No, neither did I. Anyway, Alexander claimed they wanted to buy commercial time. Not through any agency. Status would package their own spots. And he had to talk to Vaughn Thomas right away. The deal had to be closed before the weekend. Where could he reach him?”

  Dave stopped eating. “He didn’t have a phone at that apartment. Oh, no—she didn’t give him the address?”

  Cecil had filled his mouth again, but he nodded and mumbled, “Vaughn had told her it was private, not to be given out to anybody.” Cecil gulped down the food. “But she saw dollar signs and figured it was urgent.” He drank some more beer, took a tortilla chip, dipped it in the green mixture, held it dripping over his plate. “It was going to be a very big account, to hear Alexander tell it.” Cecil popped the scoop of guacamole into his mouth. “And there was nobody around to ask, so she finally just gave it to him.”

  “Ah, hell,” Dave said. He looked out of the shady booth into the sun where, under gnarled olive trees, tourists in baseball caps, Bermuda shorts, dark glasses shuffled along on sloping terra-cotta tiles between rickety stalls of leather goods and silver buckles, gaudy serapes and woven straw figures, chattering in twenty languages and dialects, pausing to watch painted children in fancy Mexican costumes dance to the music of trumpeters, guitarists, concertina players in silver-embroidered sombreros and boleros. It was not very real, but what Cecil had told him was real, and he liked it a lot less. He sighed, picked up his fork, started on his own enchiladas. When he stopped to cool his throat with beer, he said, “Do one more favor for me?”

  Cecil poured the last of his beer from the brown bottle into his glass. “Downtown?” he guessed. “Within a few blocks of here? Which is why we came here to eat?”

  “Well, I do have to see Abe Greenglass,” Dave said. Greenglass was Dave’s attorney, scrupulously upright but of deep cunning and a daunting reputation. Over the years, he’d rescued Dave from scrapes that would have flattened other lawyers. Today, Dave had questions for Abe about Max Romano’s restaurant. “But you’re right. In the back files of the L.A. Times, find me items about small boys in trouble—on May twenty-first, nineteen—”

  “It’s okay—I remember the dates.” Cecil pushed back the bench he sat on and carried his empty plate away. Dave ate. Cecil came back with mugs of coffee and saucers of caramel flan swimming in thick cream. “I’ll make Xeroxes.”

  “Please.” Dave used his napkin, laid it down.

  Cecil said, “Won’t be any name, Dave. Law says the names of children accused of crimes can’t be printed.”

  “I know. I’ve got another source for the name.”

  “Not Ken Barker,” Cecil said. Barker had retired lately, with the rank of captain. He was another friend Dave missed—even remembering how often they’d got in each other’s way, how often they’d disagreed. “He might have got it for you, nobody else. Juvenile records are sealed.”

  “How about a juvenile court judge?” Dave said.

  Cecil tilted his head, cocked an eyebrow. “You never told me yo
u knew any juvenile court judges.” Dave looked at his watch. “I am about to,” he said.

  She was a vast woman, huge breasts and buttocks, a neck thick as an NFL guard’s, but handsomely groomed, and clothed quietly and expensively. Dave figured her for at least fifteen years older than her brother. Gray streaked her hair. It added distinction, but not dignity. She was as dignified as possible. She would have been dignified in rags and with her head shaved. Her office was not a judge’s chambers in the usual sense. On the walls, among certificates and plaques honoring her past work, were posters from learn-to-read and say-no-to-drugs campaigns. In a glass-fronted cabinet, below rows of books, lay an assortment of children’s playthings, balls, stuffed animals, blocks, toy trucks, dolls. On the desk stood a jar of lollipops. A secretary, one of a team of serious-looking young women, white, black, Latino, Asiatic, from a large front office, announced him, went out, and closed the door.

  “Sit down, Mr. Brandstetter.” Anne Alexander-Lloyd’s voice was deep, authoritative, but a splendid smile tempered its tone of command. He took a slimly padded leather-covered straight chair, and she said, “Forgive me if we only have a few minutes. I’m terribly busy. It’s always that way in September—new school term starting, the troublemakers and the uncomfortable and the misunderstood surfacing in their new surroundings. But I wanted you to come. I have seen you on television several times and read about you in the magazines, and I always say to myself, or to anyone who happens to be present, ‘I knew him when.’”

  “Is that so?” Dave was honestly surprised. He couldn’t remember everyone he’d ever met, of course, but surely he hadn’t forgotten a woman of such thundering presence. He smiled bewilderment. “I’m sorry—when was ‘when’?”

  She laughed. It was a wonderful, wholehearted laugh. She shook with it. “Well, there you have me. Twenty years ago? Twenty-five? It was in the matter of that poor child with diabetes. Her parents let her die while they prayed over her. What was her name? Phyllis something.”

  “Gardner,” he said, and frowned, “but I still—”

  “I was clerking for Judge Wheeler then,” she said. “A little bitty slip of a black girl. I expect you didn’t notice me. I didn’t have much to say for myself. You came to talk with the judge in his chambers, with two men from the district attorney’s office. I served coffee. I thought you were the handsomest man I’d ever seen outside the movies.” She laughed again. “You still are.”

  Now he had to laugh. “I’m an old wreck,” he said.

  “And I,” she said, “am no longer a slip of a girl.” Laughing again, she took a quick look at her watch, then asked, “You wanted to see me about what?”

  “A boy who was murdered last Sunday morning,” Dave said. “Not quite a boy anymore—he was twenty-one. His name was Vaughn Thomas.”

  As quickly as her laughter had come, she was somber. Also guarded. “I don’t believe I know about that.”

  “I believe you knew about him once,” Dave said. “In high school he vandalized a Jewish cemetery.”

  She shook her head quickly. “It didn’t come before me.”

  “Then let’s go back earlier, to when he was eight and nine.” He gave the dates. “What did little Vaughn Thomas get up to then?”

  “You realize,” she said sternly, “that what you are asking is privileged information. Juvenile records are closed. Only under very special circumstances, through court orders, can any information in those files be released.” She twitched a mocking eyebrow. “You haven’t come here with a court order, have you?”

  “Did your brother Ralph come with a court order?” Dave said. Her mouth dropped open, but she couldn’t find words, and Dave pressed on, “No, I didn’t think so. And yet you told him about those dates and what they meant—it had to be you, didn’t it? Who else could do it for him? Why would he try anyone else?”

  “What do you know about my brother?” she demanded.

  “That he wants very badly to find out who it was that set fire to that low-cost housing development in Winter Creek, and caused his father’s—your father’s death.”

  She sat very still. “He told you this?”

  “Yes. And that he feels George Hetzel was behind the fire. That much he told me. But that he’d come to think Vaughn Thomas was Hetzel’s agent, the one who actually set the fire—that I stumbled on myself. I’ve been slow working it out.”

  Her smile was thin. “Have you worked it out?”

  “I think so,” he said. “Vaughn Thomas left George Hetzel’s organization very suddenly only a day or two after the fire. The date was right under your brother’s nose, but it took him time to notice it and add up what it might mean. I expect it wasn’t until last week that it dawned on him. I don’t know what else he learned in that week about Vaughn Thomas’s past, but he learned from you about those episodes in nineteen seventy-six and nineteen seventy-seven. And they were meaningful, weren’t they, judge?”

  “Our father was a very special man,” she said.

  “So Ralph told me,” Dave said, “and so I believe. In his own way, Vaughn Thomas was special too, wasn’t he? George Hetzel certainly thought so.”

  The black woman snorted contempt. Her eyes smoldered.

  “What was so special about Vaughn Thomas?” Dave leaned forward in his chair. “It was that he had a lethal tic, wasn’t it? He liked to set fires, isn’t that right? Isn’t that what he did those long-ago summer days after his mother died? Isn’t that what you found for your brother in Vaughn Thomas’s juvenile crime jacket?”

  “I deny that,” she said. “Categorically.” Those stormy eyes brooded on him. “You are a formidable man, aren’t you? Audacious. Reckless, even.”

  “Not so reckless I’m not still here,” Dave said. “I know whom I’m up against. But I submit that someone shot Vaughn Thomas dead on Sunday morning, that your brother Ralph came to see you that same morning, then disappeared from his family’s sight for hours, that he owns clothing that could have got him unnoticed into the paintball playing field where Thomas was shot. And that your brother owns an assault rifle. Add these facts to his well-known determination to track down and destroy the man responsible for his father’s death, and I think the district attorney is going to have to ask for an indictment. What do you think?”

  She drew a measured breath. “I think my brother is innocent. I know him. He would never take another person’s life.”

  “There’s more,” Dave said. “The young woman Vaughn Thomas was living with—”

  “That’s enough.” The judge heaved her bulk up out of the chair. Instantly the door behind Dave opened and one of the strict young women appeared. The judge snapped, “Show Mr. Brandstetter out, please. And bring in the Carters.”

  Dave shrugged into the safari jacket, put into its pockets his wallet, private investigator’s license, cigarettes, lighter, and keys, and went down the pine staircase from the loft. His Stetson hung on the hat tree by the bar. He put it on. Cecil came naked out of the bathroom, drying off from the shower with a big yellow towel.

  “You leaving already?” he said.

  “Where did I put those clippings you Xeroxed for me?”

  Cecil had found the stories in the Times, all right. Vaughn’s first was only a little fire—a vacant lot, an abandoned shed. BOY PLAYING WITH MATCHES STARTS BLAZE. “Released to the custody of his parents.” But the second, the following year, ended up charring five hundred acres of brush and trees in a canyon. “Fire fighters were able to contain the wind-whipped flames before they reached the area’s expensive homes.” How disappointing for little Vaughn. Expensive homes. Just like his father’s.

  “At my end of the couch,” Cecil said. He pulled on jockey shorts. “Let me come with you this time.”

  Dave retrieved the envelope with the clippings. “I’ve got a better idea.” He walked back to his desk and picked up the off print he’d taken from the drafting table in Sylvia’s workroom/playroom. Steven Thomas’s voice said in Dave’s head, Can’t even
climb stairs anymore. Dave held the folded page out to Cecil, who took it, opened it, ran his gaze over it, frowned.

  “What kind of idea? Why better?”

  “A human interest story for you, Mr. Producer. The people on that list are suddenly, and by the luck of the draw, richer than they were before. Some of them much richer—look at that, a hundred thousand dollars, fifty thousand, twenty thousand five times over, and on down.”

  “To a measly hundred,” Cecil said.

  “It’s a better idea for two reasons. First, a man with a job ought to show up for work now and then, and I’ve kept you away too much already—and second, I came back from Winter Creek with a question I haven’t found an answer to.”

  “Keep talking.” Cecil ran up the stairs, long-legged, two at a time. “I can hear you while I dress.”

  “Vaughn told Jemmie and Mike that he was about to get a lot of money. Did you hear anything about that? Were there rumors around your store?”

  “No.” The broad bed rattled. Cecil must have sat on it to put on his shoes. “His old man is rich, though.”

  “His old man wasn’t giving him anything,” Dave said. “Sylvia wouldn’t allow it.” Dave paced. “Drugs? Drugs are a source of big money.”

  “I’d say no.” Cecil appeared at the top of the stairs, pulling on a bulky cotton sweater. “Drugs go around anyplace in show business, including the washrooms at Channel Three—or so I hear. I never saw any little plastic packets change hands myself, but you’d have to be blind, deaf, and stupid not to know who’s into the scene among my fellow elves.” He came down the stairs. “And one of them was not Vaughn Thomas.” He took Dave’s arm and steered him toward the door. “We’re going to talk—it might as well be over coffee.” They crossed the courtyard to the cookshack. Plainly, Cecil had been here before his shower, while Dave had dressed—the air was rich with the smell of coffee. He filled yellow mugs and brought them to the table.