The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning: 11 (The Dave Brandstetter Mysteries)
Page 21
Leppard said to Dave, “Wouldn’t Vickers love that?”
“So you didn’t make any noise?” Dave called.
Zach looked at him again as if he was a fool.
A sharp voice echoed off the walls and galleries. “Zach. Zach Gruber? Is that you? Where the hell have you been? Len will beat the shit out of you—” A young woman came at a run—brassy dyed hair, too much makeup, too-tight slacks, fake-fur jacket over bulging breasts, bare feet in spike-heeled sandals, toenails brightly painted. Zach had hopped into the lean-to and was pulling the doors shut. She snatched them open, grabbed him, yanked him out. “I been looking all over for you. I was half crazy.” She had him by the arm and was propelling him away, his feet in the new jogging shoes barely touching down, when Leppard called:
“Hold it, please, lady. Police officers.”
She threw them a look as scared as Zach’s had been when he saw her. For a minute, Dave thought she was going to pick Zach up and make a run for it, but she changed her mind. “What for? You brought him home, did you? Where’d you find him? Where’d he get to this time?”
Leppard went to her. “Run away a lot, does he?”
“He—he—” She broke that off, took a breath, worked up a smile. “No, not really. He’s a pretty good kid.” She gave him a hug. He was like a rag doll, letting her hug him if that was what she wanted. He looked away at nothing. “I’ve been frantic, is all. You can understand that, can’t you?” She searched their faces. Dave twitched her a smile.
“It wasn’t his fault this time,” he said.
“You ought to teach him his address and telephone number,” Leppard said. “And his last name. Gruber?” He looked at Zach. “Your father’s last name is Gruber. His full name is Len Gruber. That means your name is Zach Gruber. Now, you’re a big enough boy to remember that, aren’t you?”
Zach pushed at a crushed cigarette pack with his foot.
Tessa Gruber frowned at Dave. “What do you mean, it wasn’t his fault?”
“He didn’t go on his own,” Dave said. “Someone took him.”
Leppard said, “There was a shooting here last night.” He pointed with a thumb toward the breezeway. “There.”
She looked and saw the chalk marks on the ground and winced. “I didn’t know. I work nights.” She looked anxiously at her watch. “And I’m going to be late if I don’t get moving. Listen, thanks for finding him.” She grabbed Zach’s arm roughly and started off with him. “I’ve been out looking for you since breakfast.”
Leppard walked after her. “We found him at the beach. Malibu.” That stopped Tessa. She turned back, surprised. Zach skipped off out of sight. Leppard went on, “A young woman neighbor of yours took Zach down there. After the shooting. He came running here when he heard the shots and he saw her. Her name is Rachel Klein. Zach seems to know her. What about you? Apartment one-oh-seven-two.”
She shook her head. Quickly. Maybe too quickly. “Never heard of her. There’s a lot of apartments in this place, lot of people. Most of them I’ve never even seen.”
“You don’t seem very curious,” Dave said.
“About what?” she said. “If I don’t get to Shadows by four, Mr. Zinneman could fire me. Then there’ll be two of us out of work. What will we eat on? How’ll we pay the God damn fantasy land rent here? Zach, where are you? I haven’t got time to be curious. What am I supposed to be curious about?”
“About who was shot,” Dave said.
She snorted. “People get shot in this neighborhood all the time. It was bound to happen inside here sooner or later. Management won’t fix the outdoor lighting. It’s drugs, isn’t it? He was a crack dealer, right?”
“Right,” Leppard said. “Name of Cricket Shales.”
Dave thought he saw fright in her eyes, but her face was blank, and she said in the steadiest of voices, “Never heard of him. Weird name. Look, I really gotta go now. Zach, you come here, right now.” Zach came, dragging his feet. “We’ll trail along,” Leppard said. “Your husband home?” She glanced wryly over her shoulder as she prodded Zach ahead of her. “You think he’d help me look for the kid? He’s got television to watch. He didn’t watch television”—she climbed stairs—“it would go out of business, wouldn’t it?” She zigzagged past beach balls and spider bikes and skateboards along a balcony to a door she flung open. She pushed Zach inside. “You know where he was? At the fucking beach. Cops brought him home.” Dave and Leppard went along the gallery after her. They heard her say, “No, Len, not now. They’re right behind me. They want to talk to you. I gotta get ready for work.” An inner door banged. Leppard and Dave stepped into a blank-walled room of meaningless furniture and lamps where a muscular, unshaven young man in ragged jeans sat in an easy chair with a beer can and a bag of potato chips, and stared at a noisy television set. The images were of men shooting at each other in a warehouse.
Leppard picked up the remote control from the chair arm and switched off the set. “Your son was kidnapped, Mr. Gruber. By a young woman who lives in these buildings. Her name is Rachel Klein. Do you know her?”
Gruber reached for the remote in Leppard’s hand. “Give me that. You got no right—”
Leppard dropped the remote into his jacket pocket. It was a stunning jacket. The tweed was woven in some tumbledown cottage in the Scots highlands, seeds and grasses still caught in the wool. “I’d like to hear your answers.”
“Hell, I didn’t do nothin’. Ask this Ruby Shine.”
“Rachel Klein. We can’t find her. Where is she?”
“How the hell would I know? I never heard of her.”
“Zach knows her. Young, attractive? A neighbor?”
“Look—I don’t chase women, okay? I got a wife other men would kill themselves to get. And I’d kill them if they tried. I don’t chase women.” He squinted at Leppard. “What did she kidnap Zach for? Shit, we haven’t got any money.”
“He was a witness,” Leppard said. “Your wife was at work. Where were you last night?”
Gruber straightened up in the chair. His feet, bare, the soles dirty, had been up on an ottoman. He put them on the floor. “What the hell does that mean?”
“Only that there was a shooting out there.” Leppard jerked his head. “That’s what Zach was a witness to. I wondered if you heard the shots.”
“I didn’t hear nothin’. What time?”
“Preliminary medical report puts it at midnight.”
“Midnight?” Gruber laughed. “I was in bed asleep. All right, passed out. Three six-packs. Tessa says I’m turning into a pig. Sweet talk, right? Hell, you try being without a job for five months. A man loses his self-respect. I drink too much. That’s my problem.” He put the fascinating subject of himself aside and woke up to what Leppard had said. “Preliminary medical? That don’t mean a shooting. That means the guy was killed, don’t it?”
“Who said it was a guy?” Leppard asked.
“Oh, Christ.” Gruber made a face. “All right. The woman, then. Whoever it is, they’re dead, right?”
Leppard nodded. “Cricket Shales. You know him?”
Gruber slumped quickly back in the chair again. “No.” Without looking at Leppard, he stretched out a hand to him. “Now, can I have my remote back, officer, please, sir?”
“What’s wrong with you, Gruber? Your son was kidnapped. Where’s your humanity? You didn’t even report him missing.”
Gruber blinked at him. “He’s back. He’s okay. What do you want from me?”
Dave said, “That bruise on his face doesn’t worry you?”
Gruber shrugged. “Dame probably hit him. He can get on your nerves.”
“Hit him yourself, sometimes, do you?” Dave said.
Gruber glanced at him. “You got any kids?”
“No,” Dave said.
“I didn’t think so,” Gruber said, “or you wouldn’t ask.”
Leppard said, “Where’d he go now?” and left the room.
“How the hell do I know?” Gruber got
up, stepped to the television set, and switched it on. On the tube, a dog in the back of a parked pickup truck was looking longingly into the bed of the red pickup truck parked next to it. At last, the dog hopped from his truck into the new one. Of a different brand, of course. Dave wondered if the message was “Let your dog choose your next truck.” Voices reached him.
Tessa Gruber yelped, “Where are you taking him?”
“Downtown,” Leppard answered, “to police headquarters.”
“You can’t,” she said. “Zach, come here.”
Zach didn’t do that. He came into the living room, hanging onto Leppard’s hand. She came after them. She’d put on a black cocktail waitress’s outfit, very short skirt, net stockings. She had good legs. She shrilled at Gruber, “You going to let them do this?”
“I guess they want a medic to check him out.” Gruber stared at the television set. “See if he’s okay. They do that after kidnappings.” He took up his beer can and gulped from it. “It’s routine, Tessa. You’d know stuff like that if you ever watched the news.”
“Well, you go with them,” she said.
“Come on,” he protested. “What for?”
“Because I can’t go, stupid. I gotta get to work.”
Leppard passed the remote back to Gruber and went with Zach by the hand to the front door. “He’ll be all right.” Dave opened the door and stepped onto the gallery. Leppard did this, too, then turned back to say, “But don’t take any trips, Mr. Gruber, please. We may want to talk to you later.” He started off along the gallery. “Get off my case,” Gruber said. “I got enough trouble.”
“Wait.” Tessa trotted after them. “How long you going to keep him? When’ll you bring him back?”
“Do you really give a damn?” Leppard said.
“What? I looked for him all day. I told you.”
“Maybe, but you didn’t report him missing,” Leppard said. “The juvenile authorities are going to hold that against you.” He sighed regretfully and, wagging his round, sleek head, he started off again, making for the stairs. “They may not ever let me bring him back.”
She didn’t grab for Zach, go for Leppard with her nails, or wail, or curse. She just stood and watched them go. When Dave halted on the far side of the patio below, and looked back, she was still up there in her sleazy, sexy costume, gazing at them mutely and without expression.
He said to Leppard, “Bible student, are you?”
Leppard chuckled and led Zach toward the street. “You talking about King Solomon?”
“He somehow leaps to mind,” Dave said.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1990 by Joseph Hansen
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-1705-2
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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THE DAVE BRANDSTETTER MYSTERIES
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