“Oh, stop,” Alexander said wearily. “All right. I’ll tell you the truth.” He trudged off toward the house. “I couldn’t tell you the other morning. The kids were here. Come inside.” His keys were in his hand. He unlocked the front door, and went in, leaving the door open for Dave. Dave wished he had the Sig Sauer. Heart thudding, he followed slowly, hoping that rifle still lay in the darkness under the roof. Whether it did or not, it wasn’t in Alexander’s hands when Dave found him in the kitchen, heating coffee. Alexander said, “I was at my brother’s. I think I mentioned him to you before. A lawyer? Louis—the youngest of us.” Alexander glanced at Dave over a shoulder. “He’s gay. Sit down, please. I’ll have us coffee in a minute.”
Dave went into the family room, pushed cereal boxes, muffin packages, jam jars aside, and stacked some of the breakfast dishes so there’d be room on the table for coffee mugs. He sat down, and looked out at the sun glinting on the pool, and in a couple of minutes Alexander was there with the coffee. He dropped heavily onto a chair opposite Dave, and said bleakly, “It was never a subject you could bring up in the presence of my father. And Anne still doesn’t want to hear about it. Oh, she’s a sophisticated woman. She knows it’s not Louis’s fault—that you’re born gay or you’re not. It’s that he told Daddy. That’s what she can’t forgive.”
“Isn’t there another sister?” Dave said.
“Arletta.” Alexander nodded glumly. “Yes, well—she never had a mind of her own. What Daddy felt, she felt, and Daddy was crushed. He wasn’t educated, you know. He thought Louis was sunk in perversion and filth, and until he got down on his knees to God and begged His forgiveness and changed his life, no way was his father going to speak to him again. And Arletta went along with that and she still does.”
“Which makes you his only contact with his family?”
Alexander nodded, lifted his cup. “And it hurts him, you know. It grieves him.” He sipped coffee. “For all those years we were so close—all of us, and then suddenly, in law school, he makes this discovery about himself, and he’s not one of us anymore, he’s an outcast.”
“But you see him,” Dave said. “And that was where you were Sunday morning? That was why you told Anne and the others you’d got lost jogging? To explain why you were late getting back for the barbecue?”
“I see him as often as possible, but I never tell them, never mention his name. It always caused unhappiness, but the way things are now—” Alexander gave a bitter smile. “I wouldn’t normally have been late. There was an emergency. When I arrived, Milton was trying to carry Louis down the stairs from their apartment. Louis can’t walk by himself anymore. He weighs ninety-three pounds. Louis has AIDS, which means in his case about a dozen different infections. He’s out of his mind much of the time.” Tears blurred Alexander’s eyes. To try to get his voice under control he stopped for a moment and drank from his coffee mug. “They met in law school and they’ve lived together ever since. I don’t know what Milton will do when Louis dies, and he’s going to die—any day now, any night. This time it was the pneumonia—it keeps coming back. Milton was trying to take him to the hospital. Again.”
“And you went along to help,” Dave said.
“I drove them. I suppose you’ll want proof, witnesses? Not Louis—a brother will lie for a brother. And Milton, he’ll say anything, he’s so pitifully grateful to me for any little thing I do for them. But you try that hospital.” He gave a brief, dry laugh. “They’ll remember me. I’m not like Milton. The staff can walk all over him. He weeps, screams, carries on, but they’re used to that, they don’t even notice. When I lose my temper, they notice, and they’ll remember. Junipero Serra Hospital. You check.”
“I will,” Dave said. “But none of it changes the real reason you went to Los Angeles on Sunday, does it? You went for a showdown with Vaughn Thomas.”
“Well, I didn’t have it, did I? And most certainly I did not kill him. Yes, I got that address from the television station, so I could find him and make him admit he burned the project and killed my father.”
“If he did, it was on orders from George Hetzel. Thomas got his punishment. But Hetzel is very much alive. Hetzel is a free man. Hetzel is guilty as hell. I think I can prove it, but I’ll need your help.”
“I’m listening,” Alexander said.
16
IT WAS NOON WHEN he left Alexander’s. He stopped at the filling station where he’d come upon Dallas Engstrom cooling off his rattly pickup truck the other day. He filled the tank of the Jaguar with gas, paid for it, found a gritty coin phone in a dusty blue plastic shell beside the station office, rang the LAPD and asked Joey Samuels to check Alexander’s hospital alibi, then rang Cecil’s number at work.
Jesus Salcido answered, a squat, good-humored film editor who always wore a Dodgers cap. Dave had met him a few times. “He’s out on that supermarket giveaway story,” he said now. “About half the winners live in the L.A. area, you know? He’s been ringing doorbells all morning. Funny thing. He checked in by phone a half hour ago, and he told Dot Yamada he thinks he’s on to something sensational. See, he only found a couple real people, Dave, you know what I mean? Those winners—half of them don’t exist.”
“You’re kidding,” Dave said.
“Cecil wants an explanation, right?” Salcido said. “But Thomas Marketing is closed today. Nobody there. The woman who runs it, Sylvia Thomas, Vaughn’s mama—the kid who worked here, you know, who got shot?—she’s out of town. Finally, Cecil got hold of her assistant. So he’s on his way to Burbank now. That’s where the dude lives.”
“Neil O’Neil,” Dave said.
“That’s the one,” Salcido said. “Cecil took the van, the crew, he’s gone to ask him on camera how come so many winners are ‘no such address,’ ‘nobody here by that name.’”
“I’ll be fascinated to hear the answers,” Dave said. “He can reach me through the sheriff’s substation in Winter Creek. Or at Ralph Alexander’s house, same town.”
“I’m writing it down,” Salcido said. “I’ll tell him.”
“Thanks, Jesus.” Dave hung up, crunched over gravel to the Jaguar, and drove up the road to the Twin Oaks Café for lunch, too hungry to worry about how awful the food would be.
A fiftyish, straw-haired woman in faded jeans, hippish and saggy in the butt, pulled open the door of George Hetzel’s office at the rear of his house. Chatting back into the room, she rolled down the sleeves of a dime-store checked flannel shirt, buttoned the cuffs, pulled on a thin green windbreaker. “We’ll finish up tomorrow, easy. ’Specially if we get them extra girls in. Ruby Nagel delivered a week’s eggs today. She’ll be free.” The woman stepped down to the driveway and halted, blinking through glasses that looked too big for her, at the sight of Dave, splayed against the little gray compact again, being searched again by the pretty skinhead with the tattooed arms. Now Hetzel looked over the woman’s head.
“God damn—excuse my language, Nola.” He pushed the woman out of his way and came outside. “Brandstetter. What the hell are you doing here?”
“The sheriff says you won’t give back my gun,” Dave told him. “I thought I’d better ask you myself.”
“I told Rose, I’ll tell you—I haven’t got it.”
The skinhead finished his frisking and backed off in his heavy boots, looking, listening. A second skinhead stood by, holding an AK-47 pointed at Dave. His right hand was bandaged. Dave jerked his chin at him, and said to Hetzel, “Have you asked him? He was part of the housekeeping crew that practiced their skills on my room day before yesterday at the Ranchero motel. I’d left the Sig Sauer there, hidden in a heating vent. He remembered to leave me a note but not to thank me for the gun. Am I to take it he kept it without telling you about it? I thought you believed in strict discipline. Most military commanders frown on looting, as I understand it—unless they get the loot.”
Nola stood there gawking, chewing gum, knobs swelling at the hinges of her jaw. “You go ahead on home,” Hetzel
told her, helping her start down the walk. “And we’ll see you tomorrow morning, early as you can make it.”
Nola went, but reluctantly, looking back at the drama, if that was what it was. “I’ll bring Ruby if I can,” she called. “Her eggs’ll be all delivered today.”
“Yes, you told me,” Hetzel called. “Thank you, Nola.”
“Goodbye,” Nola said. “See you tomorrow, Mr. Hetzel.”
Hetzel waved, smiled. “Bless you for all the hard work. And for staying so late too. Don’t you ever forget I’m grateful. You’ll see. You and I, we’re going to clean this country up and give it to the white people again.” He swung back, grabbed Dave’s arm, and snarled, “Get inside here.”
Dave got inside. Hetzel closed the door, locked it, walked to his desk between long tables heaped high with form letters, hand-addressed envelopes, return envelopes with printed addresses. The colorless man in his colorless white shirt and tie and gray business suit trousers waved a hand at this stuff. He said, “Fund raising for an all-out campaign against network television, the sewage the so-called entertainment business is emptying into American homes, day in, day out, morning noon and night, into the eyes and ears of innocent children, women, old people.” He slammed himself down into the padded executive chair at his desk. “There’s no limit to how low those Jew perverts will stoop to make money. Sex, horror, garbage not fit to feed to pigs.” Sunset light from the windows flared red off the very clean lenses of his glasses. “It’s got to stop. America is fed up with it. They’re not going to take it anymore.” He swept his arm to indicate the worktables again. “Ten thousand pieces of mail there, telling decent people how to protest, write the sponsors, the advertisers that keep TV going, tell them to make the producers clean up their act or we’ll stop buying their products.” He paused to catch his breath.
Before he could start again, Dave said, “It wasn’t the FBI that broke into this office and tossed it.”
“What?” The change of subject confused Hetzel for a minute. “Oh, back there after the housing project fire?”
“Back there.” Dave nodded. “It wasn’t the FBI.”
“How do you know who it was?”
“I’ve been finding the answers to questions like that longer than you’ve been alive. It’s how I earn my living. I know who broke in here and went through your files and what he took from them and the use he made of what he took, and the use he plans to make.”
“Plans—?” Hetzel lost color. He stared. He licked his lips. Then he took a breath and blustered, “You’re lying. He got nothing. Whoever it was didn’t find anything. Nothing was missing. I went over it all myself.”
Dave shrugged. “He has documents with the ARAMMO letterhead. I’ve seen them. Not many. And maybe you wouldn’t have regarded them as important, even if you’d noticed they were gone when you were cleaning up after the raid. But they prove he’s telling the truth, don’t they? After all, where else could they have come from?”
“What documents?”
Dave glanced around. “How did he get in here? It’s a challenge, this place, isn’t it? All those guards with guns? Cast your mind back to that night, will you, please? What happened? My guess is it started with a diversion—right?”
Hetzel looked wary. “Maybe—why should I tell you?”
“Because those documents connect you to that fire and to the murder of Vaughn Thomas, and only I can tell you where they are.”
“I wasn’t even in California when Thomas was killed.”
“Barney Craig was,” Dave said. “He was up in L.A. running errands for you. Why wasn’t one of them to the Combat Zone to gun down Vaughn before he could tell secrets you didn’t want told? Vaughn was bragging he was about to get rich. He was blackmailing you, wasn’t he?”
“No,” Hetzel said, “and there were no secrets.”
“They’re in those documents. And they can destroy you.”
“I don’t keep documents around that could destroy me.
“You should have kept these,” Dave said. “Proof that young Thomas was a pyromaniac. Copies of newspaper stories, copies of his juvenile arrest records. Not only did they suggest to you a means of winning your fight against the housing project, they were proof you could use to shift blame for the fire onto him if the case began to look bad for you.”
“What?” Hetzel’s laugh was scornful. “You’re a liar.”
“Then why did Vaughn run away right after the fire? No, it wasn’t Jemmie’s doing. The next morning, you showed him those papers, didn’t you? And you turned from a father figure into an ogre, and he raced to Engstrom’s to get Jemmie and Mike, and drove to L.A. and hid from you.”
Hetzel shook his head stubbornly. “I tell you, I never had any such papers.”
“Then where did this man get them?” Dave said. “They’re in his files, clipped to Vaughn Thomas’s personnel sheet from this office. Can you prove they didn’t come from here? How? If you know any law at all, you know proving a negative is next to impossible. And that you had a known firebug in your ranks the night the housing project burned down—do you think the district attorney is going to ignore that?”
Hetzel sat glowering for a minute. “You dog from hell.”
Dave smiled faintly. “I told you I still had my teeth.”
“You told me,” Hetzel growled. “All right, yes, a phone call came. I didn’t take it. Barney took it. He listens, hangs up, looks like he’s going to pass out. Says it was Horace Thalberg. That nigger, Alexander—he’s kidnapped Ingrid, that’s Thalberg’s daughter, college girl, broke in and snatched her when she was home alone. He was driving off with her just as Horace and his wife swung into the driveway. He was going to rape her, sure as anything. Barney was out the door right then, and yelling for everybody else, and we all piled into vehicles and headed out for Horace’s.”
“And in the excitement you forgot to post guards here?”
“Who was it that phoned? It wasn’t Horace. Nobody was at his house, but at that time we naturally figured he and Doris had gone looking for Alexander themselves. So I laid out a plan of roadblocks and all that, and dispatched patrols to different points of the compass, and we spent the night at it, walkie-talkies, spotlights, the works. Combed the area, woods, hills, canyons. Got nowhere. My command post was a van in Horace’s driveway, and next morning, here they come, big as life—Horace and Doris and Ingrid driving up the street looking surprised as hell to see us there. Been down to San Diego over the weekend with Doris’s family—wedding or something. Then, to add to it, we get back here, humiliated, dirty, dog tired, and I find the office all torn up.” Hetzel poked his head forward. “Who was it, Brandstetter? Who was it made a jackass out of me?”
Dave had to work hard not to grin. “I’ll tell you when you give me back my gun.”
Hetzel stiffened his spine. “I can’t do that. I haven’t got it. Nobody here knows anything about it.”
Dave got to his feet. “Then we have nothing more to discuss.” He moved toward the door.
“Hold it.” Dave heard a drawer open, a heavy object knock the desk top. He turned. “Here’s your damned gun,” Hetzel said. “Now—you give me that son of a bitch’s name.”
Claude Rose laid down his knife and fork. He sat at a table in the kitchen of his house, with a supper plate in front of him—beef and noodle casserole at a guess, crusty from waiting in an oven longer than it should. Probably a lot of the sheriff’s suppers got that treatment. Though neatly kept up, the Rose house was old. However, the kitchen had been done over recently. The cabinets were covered in walnut veneer, with bronze handles. A burner deck was in the middle of the room with a hood over it. Pots and pans hung off racks. The old-fashioned touches were color photos and handmade greeting cards from grandchildren taped to the coppertone refrigerator, and a string of brightly painted gourds next to the back door. Dave leaned beside these and outlined for the sheriff his visits to Alexander and Hetzel and how things now stood. Rose stared up at him.
<
br /> “You got a hell of a nerve,” he said.
“Did you think I hadn’t?” Dave said.
“I don’t care.” Rose yanked the napkin out where he’d tucked its corner into his collar and slammed it on the table. “You didn’t have no right, and I ain’t going to be dragged into it. You set it up, you carry it through.”
“Alone?”
“What’s the matter with Alexander? Whole thing was his idea, wasn’t it? Get him to stay and help you.”
“It’s too late,” Dave said. “I’ve sent him and the children to his sister’s in Los Angeles until it’s over.”
“Well, I don’t want no part of it.”
“You don’t have a choice,” Dave said. “You insisted I tell you about this matter. And now I’ve told you. A crime has been committed. Another is going to be committed. You’re the law here. You have to make an arrest. That’s your job. If for nothing worse, for breaking and entering. What’s the matter with you?” Dave jerked out a chair and sat opposite Rose at the table. “I thought you wanted to stop Hetzel. Who’s in charge of this town, anyway?”
“I want to stop him,” Rose said. “Damn right I do. But if you’d asked me before you set this crazy thing up, I could have told you—Hetzel is in charge of this town.”
Dave squinted. The only light in the kitchen came from a low-watt bulb inside a fake kerosene lantern that hung above the eating table. The lawman’s eyes were in shadow. “Isn’t it a little humiliating to have to admit that?”
“It would be, if it wasn’t that the sheriff of Fortuna County, an elected official, who is my boss, admires the hell out of George Hetzel. And so do half the men and women on the board of supervisors, who see to it the budget has enough taxpayers’ money in it to pay my wages. So does the county attorney. This isn’t just George Hetzel’s town, this is George Hetzel’s county.”
The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning: 11 (The Dave Brandstetter Mysteries) Page 17
