I didn’t answer.
“Oh, boy,” he said. “I’m embarrassed.”
“You’re no more embarrassed than I am, Bob.”
“But Jesus — ” he said. “I mean, Scooter’s a friend of yours. Who the hell could hire you to snoop on a friend?”
I said nothing.
Bob Dunne stared at me wordlessly for seconds and then turned once more to stare at the house and the car in front of it. Finally, he said in a whisper, “I think I’m getting a picture. Horse isn’t in there, is he? He didn’t drive that Buick up here.”
I maintained my silence.
“Jesus!” he said again. “That Calvin — he’s crazy!” He shook his head. “The broads that come up here night after night and he has to fool around with — ”
“Bob,” I interrupted, “I’m not charging anybody anything for this job. And I’m not going to make out a report on it. As soon as it’s — convenient — I’m going in to have a private word with Scooter. And then you and I will forget we ever met here. Am I coming through?”
“Strong and clear,” he assured me. “I should have stayed home. Good night, Brock. Good luck.” He went back to the street and down toward his house.
I only knew him from the poker games; I hoped he was closer with his mouth than he was with his money.
I went back to watching the traffic on the highway, trying to think of anything but that dark bedroom window. When I heard the door open, I crouched behind the rock.
I heard them call their parting pleasantries as I squeezed myself into a package small enough to be shielded from her headlights by the rock. When all was dark again, I made my way to the front door of Scooter Calvin.
He opened the door and recognized me and for a flashing moment there was anxiety in his eyes. Then he smiled. “What brings you way up here? Come in, come in.”
We went through his entrance hall to an enormous living room. There I said, “I’m here because I was following Linda Malone.”
Shock, surprise, and then anger in his face. “I didn’t know you handled that kind of work.”
“I’m not doing it for money. I did it for Horse. And I’m not going to tell him she came here. I just wanted to tell you you saw Linda for the last time tonight, Scooter.”
His chin lifted and the old arrogance was back in his eyes. “Oh? You’re threatening me?”
“If you see her again,” I told him evenly, “I’ll break your back. Is that clear?”
His face hardened. Scooter had always been most unreasonable when he knew he was wrong. He said, “Don’t let those extra forty or fifty pounds of blubber you drag around give you any dangerous illusions, Brock. I don’t scare.”
I said patiently, “I’m not trying to scare you. You’ve got your pick of a hundred hungry starlets. Stay with them.”
His smile was thin and mean. “Moral judgments from you? That’s a laugh! When are you going to make an honest woman out of Jan, Brock?”
The redness in my mind as I counted slowly to five. My hands trembled; an aching knot was growing between my shoulder blades. I managed to say, “Easy. Watch it.”
“You run your dirty little business,” he said, “and I’ll run my own love life. Now get out of here.”
There was nothing in his eyes but contempt.
I would like to add some moral tone to what happened next by insisting it involved Horse and Linda and the violation of their marriage. Or perhaps his snide remark about Jan. But I’m sure it was his contempt that was the trigger, the contempt of a hallowed halfback who had made it for a grimy guard who hadn’t.
There was a full eight hours of resentment in the punch I threw into his belly.
It doubled him up. He went back and down, crouching all the way. He slammed to the floor and sat there with both arms held tightly in front of his injured stomach. A sick glaze had replaced the contempt in his eyes.
He wasn’t gutless; he simply lacked the strength to get up. I turned my back on him and went down the long hall and out into the clean night.
Ashamed and disturbed, I was just opening the door of my car, next to Dunne’s driveway, when a white Peugeot came gunning up the hill and into the top turn with tires squealing.
I held my breath but it was a car with amazing traction and went singing safely through the bend. Somebody was in a hurry to see Scooter.
I didn’t turn off in Westwood, where I live, but continued on Sunset toward Beverly Glen and the pleasant little cottage of my love. There was a light in her kitchen when I pulled into the driveway.
At the doorway she said, “I thought you had to work.”
“I did. I’m finished. I thought you were going to the Adlers.”
“I did. I left early.” She sighed wearily. “And now I’m going to bed. I’m beat.”
“So am I, tired and lonely. Couldn’t we at least have some cocoa and cinnamon toast? I don’t want to neck or anything. It’s been a bad day, Jan.”
“Come in,” she said. “I’ll listen.”
I came in. “There’s nothing to listen to. The wife of a friend has been unfaithful and I spied on her. I won’t tell you any more than that. It — depressed me.”
We were walking through her living room toward the kitchen and she paused to look up at me anxiously. “Somebody I know?”
“Yes. No more questions now. How were the Adlers?”
“The same.” She continued toward the kitchen. “You make the cocoa; I’ll make the toast.”
We did that without conversation. When we were finally seated, Jan said, “Dave Adler’s nice, isn’t he? I’m not comfortable with Jenny, though.”
“She’s all right,” I said. “She’s sure sold on Dave.”
“That makes her all right?”
“Tonight it does.”
Jan shook her head and sighed. “Men — you smug monsters. If a man is unfaithful, he’s just a red-blooded live wire to the boys. But if a woman is, she’s a tramp. To hell with men and their idiotic world.”
“Men and women are different,” I said.
“Oh, good Lord!” she said. “Really? Is that all you learned in four years at Stanford?”
“Don’t ride me, Jan. I mean a man is — emotionally constituted so adultery has less meaning for him; it doesn’t degrade him as much as it can a woman.”
Her chin came up and she stared at me steadily. “Are you saying I’m degraded?”
I explained patiently, “You’re single. Only married people can commit adultery.”
A silence while she sipped her cocoa. Then, “Brock, how do you know this woman you followed — did that? How much did you watch?”
“I saw her go in the man’s front door and I saw her come out.”
“And that’s grounds for divorce?”
“I wasn’t trying to get grounds for divorce. Jan, let’s not talk about it. Please?”
She sipped her cocoa and stared at some point beyond me.
I asked, “Could I sleep in your living room tonight?”
“Of course.” Her eyes came back from the distance and looked at me softly. “You’re a moody Irishman, Brock (The Rock) Callahan. You let people get to you.”
“People without loyalties frighten me,” I said, “people who live for themselves alone.” I stood up and tried to stretch the aches out.
“That’s most of us,” she said, “self-centered little nothings.”
“I know. And that’s why I’m lonely and why I want the thought of you nearby tonight.”
“Kiss me,” she said softly.
I leaned over and kissed her forehead. I said pointedly, “I’m tired. I’m very tired.”
“I get the message,” she assured me. “Good night. To-morrow will be better.”
A real loser’s philosophy — tomorrow will be better. I couldn’t believe it. I had a lie to prepare for Horse; I had the knowledge that Scooter would probably tell Linda about my visit. The Malone house had been a sort of second home to me; I wouldn’t be comfortable there any more
.
I slept and wakened, slept and wakened…. About three in the morning, I heard the sirens going up Sunset but there was nothing new about that.
At six-thirty I heard more sirens, and then from the direction of Jan’s bedroom I heard the bedsprings creak and in a few seconds a crack of light showed under her door.
Through the windows to the west I could see a red glow in the sky. I slipped out of bed and into my trousers. The Bel-Air fire of 1961 had come very close to Jan’s cottage and she had been fire-conscious ever since. That little holocaust had resulted in a property loss of twenty-five million dollars, destroying almost five hundred homes.
Light splashed into the living room as her bedroom door opened. “Brock — ?”
“I’m over here,” I said, “by the window.”
Her voice was anxious. “I’ve been listening to the sirens.”
“I don’t think it’s close,” I said. “Turn on the radio.”
In a minute we were treated to the blast of rock and roll and she changed stations and cut down the volume. We heard: “ — apparently started around one o’clock in a canyon below Big Rock Mesa and is already burning west and north along a half-mile perimeter toward a new subdivision of eighteen expensive homes in that area. To the south and east, a narrow fork of the same blaze is working toward Topanga Canyon. Residents in that area have been alerted. The fire is still some distance from the thickly populated Malibu Colony; that area is not considered to be in any present danger. Twenty-seven city and county engine companies and four tankers are now in action and borate bombers have been summoned. Ventura County companies have been alerted but none has been summoned as of five-thirty this morning. On Avalon Lane, two homes have already been destroyed and two more are burning. North of — ”
“Avalon Lane,” Jan said. “Isn’t that where Scooter lives?”
“That’s right.”
“How many houses are up there?”
“I don’t know. At least half a dozen. And Scooter’s would be closest to the fire if it started below Big Rock Mesa.”
“I hope he’s well insured,” Jan said. “It looks bad, doesn’t it?”
I nodded.
She stared at me in the light coming through her bedroom door. “You’re worried about something. Do you think the fire might turn this way?”
“No, not that. I was thinking of Scooter. I — nothing.” I stood up and stretched. “Is there any coffee I could heat?”
“I’ll make it And something to eat?”
“All right. There’s no point in trying to go back to sleep, I guess.”
“Brock, there’s something on your mind.”
“Yes. I think I’ll clean up. No questions, Jan.”
She went to the kitchen. I went to the bathroom and shaved with her razor and took a shower. The coincidence of my having gone to see Scooter the same night his house had probably burned was only that, a coincidence. But it nagged at me. I have certain peasant superstitions my conscious mind has abandoned but my unconscious stubbornly refuses to surrender.
I still half believe in patterns, in the full cycle, in the inevitability of retribution, the artistic necessity for revenge. They are not theories respected by the enlightened and I will not defend them. I half believe in prescience.
This dark morning a sense of doom hung in the dry, quiet air, sending my imagination along strange roads. It could have been reaction, of course, to yesterday’s revelation. Admitting that didn’t make me any more comfortable.
In the kitchen Jan was stirring pancake batter. A dozen little pork sausages were lined up on the unlighted griddle.
“Why aren’t we married?” I asked, though I knew the answer.
She said wearily, “Not this morning, please. That’s a worn-out record.”
She didn’t like my trade. She considered it a waste of my education. Also, she made a lot more money than I did and I was too old-fashioned to live on a wife’s income. Stalemate.
I brought the radio in from the living room. The announcer was explaining that yesterday’s relative humidity had reached a low of six percent and there was a possibility that the new jumbo shake roofs of the subdivision toward which the fire was heading could prove to be an added danger.
In the Bel-Air blaze, shingles and shakes from the flaming houses had flown higher than the helicopters and bombers, starting new fires as far away as half a mile, adding additional hazards for the pilots who had to fly through them.
“Turn it off,” Jan said. “I don’t want to hear about it.”
I snapped off the radio and sat there listening to the crackle of frying sausages and thinking about Scooter Calvin.
Coincidence, coincidence, coincidence….
“Stop sulking,” Jan said. “Say something. Say something cheerful.”
“I’m thinking.”
She took the hot sausages off the griddle and arranged them on a piece of toweling paper. She began to pour the pancake batter. “Would you be just as secretive if we were married?”
“Secretive is the wrong word. I’m — discreet. In my profession that’s important.”
“Profession is the wrong word, too,” she said. “Don’t try to give it more dignity than it has.”
The knot between my shoulder blades was still there but no redness. I said wearily, “Okay, okay! Do we have to fight all the time?”
It wasn’t exactly a cheerful breakfast. We are both moody but usually we weren’t both down at the same time. This morning we were.
We were just starting our coffee when I heard the car in her driveway. I stretched to look out the breakfast-room window and asked, “Do you know anyone who drives a white Peugeot?”
“No. A visitor?”
“It seems to be.” I waited until the driver stepped from the car. “It’s a woman.”
“Ye gods! “ she said. “And me in a robe and nightgown! You go to the door. I’ll get dressed.” She went scurrying toward her bedroom as I went to the door.
I stood there until the chime sounded and then opened it. The girl who stood there was a little taller than Jan, with light blue eyes and short dark hair. I was sure I had met her and then I remembered where.
“Do you remember me?” she asked.
I nodded. “You’re Ruth — somebody. You’re Linda Malone’s sister.”
“Ruth Hansel, “ she said quietly. “You know the police are looking for you, don’t you?”
I stared. “For me? Who told you that? Why are they looking for me? “
“It was on the radio,” she said. “ Didn’t you hear it? “
“No. And I’ve been listening to the radio since six-thirty. Is this a joke, Miss Hansel?” I paused. “Is it about Scooter? Did something happen to him? “
She said rigidly, “He’s dead. That’s why I’m here.”
“Dead? The fire? You mean he burned to — ? “
She shook her head slowly, her eyes probing my face. “He was burned some, but he was already dead by then. He was murdered.”
Chapter 3
IT WAS SO quiet I could hear the traffic on Sunset, far away. I said, “Why are you staring at me? You don’t think I killed him, do you?”
“I didn’t know,” she said softly. “I wouldn’t have come here if I thought you had, I suppose.”
I looked back toward the empty living room behind me and came out, closing the door. I said, “Miss Bonnet doesn’t know about Scooter and — and your sister. I’d prefer she didn’t.”
She said bitterly, “Everybody will know by tonight after you go to the Malibu Sheriff’s Station and explain why you were waiting outside of Don Calvin’s house last night”
I said nothing.
“I went up there,” she said tightly. “I must have got there right after you left. Don was still sick. He told me you’d been there and you had hit him.”
“Then you knew I didn’t kill him.”
“How do I know you didn’t come back later?”
“You don’t. And I can�
�t be sure you didn’t kill him. How was he killed?”
“He was beaten to death with a fireplace poker. It was one of those kind with a sharp point and the point — ”
“Enough,” I said sickly. “Never mind the details. And how did you know I’d be here?”
“Linda said you might be. If the police couldn’t find you it was logical to guess you weren’t home. I came right here.”
I said, “You knew about Linda and Scooter?”
She flushed. “I — Linda used me as — an excuse for getting out of the house. I — What could I do? She’s my sister. I argued until I was blue but — ” She broke off and there was moisture in her eyes. “Oh, God. And now?”
“You don’t want me to go to the police,” I guessed.
“You have to,” she said. “But I thought we could go together. We could work out some other reason why you went to see Don last night, couldn’t we? Does the whole damned town have to know about dirty Donald Calvin and my sister?”
“No,” I said. “But why should you go along to the Sheriff’s Station?”
“I can help to clear you. I can tell them Don was alive when I came, after you had left. We can make up some other reason why you went to see him, can’t we? You two were friends.”
“We could. But then the police will want to know why you were there.”
She said stiffly, “They can accept the obvious reason, can’t they? I dated him a few times before I learned what a lecher he was. The police won’t need any reason beyond the obvious.”
“You’ll make the newspapers,” I said. “In trying to save your sister’s reputation, you could destroy your own.”
She said gravely, “I’ll take that chance. / don’t have a three-year-old son.”
Some girl, this Ruth Hansel. I was beginning to believe in people again. I asked gently, “How about Horse? I was working for Horse and now he’ll know. He reads the papers, too.”
“He doesn’t have to read it,” she said. “He already knows it.” She breathed deeply. “He’s not getting a divorce — not yet. They’re going to try to work it out. I think we ought to give them as much help as we can, don’t you?”
“I’ll vote for that,” I said. “But I don’t think this is exactly the brightest time to go running out to the Sheriff. Will you wait here, please?”
Dead Hero Page 2
