Fadeout: A Dave Brandstetter Mystery (Dave Brandstetter Mysteries (University of Wisconsin Press))

by Joseph Hansen

  “And there was you,” Dave said.

  Sawyer leaned out the window and dragged in the chair. The leg wasn’t broken. It had come out of its socket. He set it on the floor, crouched, and tried fitting it back in. Frowning, he answered, “Yes. There was me.” He laid the chair on its side and rammed the leg at the socket. It went in. He stood it up and hammered on the seat with his fist.

  Downstairs the tambourine jingled.

  Sawyer rocked the chair tentatively, then sat on it. “He called me Wednesday—week ago. I never wanted anything in my life the way I wanted that call. I never expected anything less.”

  “You were on his mind,” Dave said. “You and this place and that summer. He painted a picture of the Chute after he’d seen you. It’s hanging over the fireplace in his living room.”

  “Yes. Coming back here was important to him. To me too. Just to see the place again.”

  “I think I’d have moved on,” Dave said. “Hurriedly.”

  “We weren’t rational.” Sawyer shook his head in wry self-disgust. “Forty-four years old and like a couple of moonstruck adolescents. Wonderful! He was going to write. Did write. Honestly, at last. I . . . was going to paint again. Most of all, we were going to love each other. That went without saying. . . .”He leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands hanging, head drooping. “And that was the part that didn’t work. Twenty-five years is a long time. Fox . . . was like a man starved. It was all right at first. Fine. But—well, by Sunday night, I’d had it. I’m okay now. We can talk it out. We will. Because it’s worth it.” He got off the chair. “Only now I’ve got to find him. Don’t know where he could have gone. He didn’t have a cent of money.”

  “You better sit down,” Dave said. “I’ve got bad news.”

  But footsteps were coming up the stairs and Sawyer was at the room door in three strides with the expectant grin on his face again. He stopped, gripping the doorframe. Behind him, Dave stopped too. At the top of the stairs stood two young deputies in crisp tan uniforms. They looked big-eyed, like children sent alone to the barber for the first time. One of them started to speak and cleared his throat and started again.

  “Douglas Sawyer?”

  “Yes?”

  “I have a warrant for your arrest.” A scared hand brought it out of a breast pocket. “You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.” The boy’s forehead furrowed in the effort to remember the long speech. “You have the right to speak to an attorney and to have an attorney present when we question you. If you desire an attorney and cannot afford one, an attorney will be appointed without cost to you, before questioning.”

  “For what?” Sawyer asked. “Arrest for what?”

  “The murder of Edward Fox Olson,” the boy said. “On the evening of Wednesday, October twenty-fifth.”

  Dave saw Sawyer’s knees give for an instant, then straighten. He swung toward Dave. Under the stubble, his face was the color of pale clay. The eyes accused.

  “You knew,” he said.

  “I’ll get you a lawyer,” Dave said.

  The deputies clinked when they moved. They handcuffed Sawyer’s wrists behind his back, took his arms, turned him and went down the stairs with him, one on each side.

  At the foot of the stairs the bearded boy, the blond girl and the baby with the tambourine stared. The baby had stuck something into his mouth like a cork, the small, brown something Mrs. Kincaid had picked up off the floor of Fox Olson’s room half an hour ago. Dave knew now what it was. The rubber tip for a cane. He went down to get it.

  19

  In the glass-and-steel box of the Signal station they looked like school pageant chrysanthemums. Their hair. Hers yellow white, his yellow orange. Shag heads. They sat in the 150-watt glare at ten-thirty at night and stared at each other, with nothing flowerlike in their child faces. Grief in hers, sullenness in his. And fear when they turned to see Dave in the doorway. The boy stood up. Fast.

  “Gas?” he said. “You want gas?”

  “It’s Mr. Brandstetter.” The girl tried to smile.

  The boy tried to edge past Dave. “Regular or ethyl?”

  Dave stood in his way. “In a minute. First I’d like to hear about the letter.”

  Under his freckles the boy’s skin went green. The girl jerked to her feet. The tin chair she’d sat on hit a tin shelf of quart motor oil cans. They fell with heavy liquid thuds like tabla. They rolled on the green cement.

  “Wh-what letter? I don’t understand.” It was unrehearsed and badly delivered.

  “From Fox Olson,” Dave said.

  “He’s dead,” Sandy said.

  “He wasn’t dead when he mailed it. Monday night, Tuesday morning. He was alive, in a town called Bell Beach, five hours down the coast from here. He was alive Wednesday when”—Dave looked at the girl, who had stooped and was groping after the scattered oil cans, her eyes fixed scared and blue on Dave—“you opened it. No, I don’t think it was addressed to you. I think it was addressed to Thorne Olson.”

  “I open all the mail,” she said defensively. “It’s part of my job. This letter looked—”

  Sandy made a sound and lunged at her. Dave caught his arm and twisted it behind his back.

  “Easy,” he said. “Don’t blame this on her. Blame it on your own bad grooming. A gentleman cleans and polishes his boots before going places with a lady.”

  The boy stared down at his shoes. Clumsy high tops. Old. Caked with black grease.

  “You left tracks,” Dave said. “Beside the body. Fox Olson’s murdered body. On the pier at Bell Beach.”

  “I didn’t kill him.” Sandy tried to wrench free. “He was dead when we got there. His room was empty. Something burning in the fireplace. Piece of paper tacked to his door. ‘On the pier,’ it said. So we went to the pier. He was there. But he was dead. Blood all over the front of him. Somebody shot him in the chest. Not me. I don’t even own a gun. I hated his guts but . . . I wouldn’t do that to him. I wouldn’t do it to anybody.”

  “It’s true.” Terry nodded. Tears started down her face. Her voice was a small, thin, kindergarten wail. “He was dead. All the jokes and the songs, all the kindness and—” The cans rolled out of her hands. She crouched in a corner of the green sheet-metal wall and sobbed. Heartbroken. The word was no good anymore. The trouble was, nobody had invented a better one.

  Dave let the boy go. “What was in the letter?”

  “I never saw it.” He stared miserably at the girl, rubbing the arm Dave had twisted. “She just said he needed her. She had to go to him. Her car wouldn’t make it. Mine would. Please would I take her? So”—he grimaced—“I took her. Terry . . .”He knelt by the girl and stroked her shoulder clumsily. “Baby, don’t.”

  “Then she’d given the letter to Mrs. Olson?”

  The boy nodded without looking up. “With the rest of the mail. They still get bags full.”

  “Why didn’t you go to the sheriff in Bell Beach?”

  The boy’s glance was disgusted. “What for? I didn’t know who killed him. They could decide I did it. I never kept it a secret I hated his guts. Jesus—the way the people around here loved him! Sickening.” Short sour laugh. “He was queer. Did you know that? Said so in this letter.”

  “See?” Dave said. “He wasn’t after your girl.”

  Sandy’s look was bleak. “No, but she was after him. Crazy about him. Even when she found out he was a flit.”

  A tote bag sat on the desk. Bright yellow canvas with a white Japanese symbol on it and white cotton rope handles. Girl things inside. Dave set it in front of her. “Come on, Terry,” he said, and to Sandy, “Lock up. We’ll take my car.”

  The boy straightened. Slowly. Wary. “Where to?”

  “You discovered the body.” Dave helped Terry to her feet. Shaky, still whimpering, face wet, nose runny, she poked in the tote bag for Kleenex. “That makes you witnesses. If you’re lucky, the Pima police will take
your depositions.”

  “Yeah, lucky,” Sandy said.

  “Look at it this way,” Dave said. “It saves you another trip to Bell Beach. For the inquest. Down and back. That’s fifteen dollars’ worth of gas.”

  He left them with a fat young sergeant and a stringy, painted woman who ran a stenotype machine. He went to look for coffee. He found Herrera, red-eyed, unshaven, tie loosened, collar unbuttoned. His ashtray was crammed with the black stubs of cigarillos. Another stub smoldered in the corner of his mouth. He squinted against the smoke and shuffled papers. A lot of papers.

  “What rank do you have to make before they let you sleep?” Dave asked.

  “They don’t have a rank like that,” Herrera said. “Not on a homicide.”

  “I thought that was San Diego County’s worry.”

  “Huh?” Herrera scowled. “Oh, you mean Olson. Forget that.” He picked up a stained styrofoam cup. Empty. “We got our own now. Had it since nine this morning.” He pinched out the inch of cigarillo and tried his pocket for another. The pack was empty. He crumpled it and slammed it into the brown metal wastebasket. Also the empty cup. Dave gave him a cigarette. When he had the light, he sat back in the leather swivel chair and blew smoke through his nose. “Yup. When his secretary walked into the office this morning, our distinguished mayor was at his desk as usual. Just one little upsetting detail. Half his head was blown off. With a shotgun.”

  Dave winced. “Chalmers?”

  “Lab says he’d been there maybe two hours. Only man in the building then was the janitor. Old guy. Deaf. He thought he heard a noise. Went to look at the boiler in the basement. Never looked anywhere else. Seven-ten. Chalmers just about had time to get back here from your place in L.A. and he was dead. Shotgun,” Herrera repeated bitterly. “Most anonymous weapon in the world. Must be a thousand of them in this valley.” He got up, headed for the door. “You want coffee?” Dave said yes and Herrera put his head into the hall and shouted, “Any more poison in that acid vat?” Someone yelped an answer. Herrera came back. “One thing will interest you. . . .” Less tired, he would have sounded smug. “No dirty pictures of Fox Olson and his high-school buddy. Nowhere. We’ve looked at every piece of paper Lloyd Chalmers owned. . . .”

  The old man could have been a propped corpse. He sat on the edge of his bed in pajamas and a green flannel bathrobe so new the cuff still had the price tag. The Mexican woman stood beside him in a flowered quilted housecoat. She bulged inside it like steel springs. Her hair was in two thick dark braids for the night. Her eyes were large and brown and watchful. The old man’s eyes had a glitter. It was all that told he was alive.

  Dave held the little brown rubber cup out to him. “This is how I know,” he said. “This was in his room at Bell Beach.”

  The old man’s cane leaned against a straight chair that his clothes hung over. Not neatly. Things had spilled out of the pockets onto the waxed tile floor. There was no rubber tip on the cane.

  “All right,” Loomis croaked. “I was there. That don’t prove I killed him. He wrote me a letter. Says where he is. Says if—” He broke off. “Don’t matter what he says. I went. Old place on the seashore. He set there at the desk in that room, stuff all strewn around ever which way, cleaning that little six-shooter. He looked bad. We talked. I come away. I never killed him.”

  “What did you talk about?” Dave asked.

  Loomis’s bony shoulders lifted. “One thing another.”

  “I think he told you why he left Pima,” Dave said. “I think he wanted to come back.”

  Loomis studied his bony feet. The bed was high. He swung the feet a little. It didn’t remind you of a child. It reminded you of an anatomy class skeleton. When he looked up there were tears in his eyes and a break in his voice. “Yup. And I wouldn’t let him. Says stay away. You come back and you’ll wreck Thome’s life and Gretchen’s life. Everything. My life.” He laughed at that bleakly. “I took cash with me. All I had in the house. Near four hundred dollars. I give it to him. Says I’ll send you more. Regular. Not checks. Money. You keep hid. Keep moving. . . . I liked the boy. A whole hell of a lot, tell you the honest truth. But . . .” He looked at the swaying skeleton feet again. “What in the world could a body do?”

  Dave knelt to fit the tip on the cane. Under the chair lay an envelope. Black-and-white Mondrian design in the upper-left-hand corner. The Provence School of Art. He picked it up. He stood up. To the Mexican woman he said, “Señora. Saiga nos, por favor. Un poco tiempo.” She looked doubtfully to the old man and he nodded and she went, shutting the door. Dave told Loomis, “I think you knew what to do.”

  The old man’s mouth gave a hopeless twist. “Not till too late.” He didn’t look at Dave. He looked at the envelope. It was turning brown at the edges. It had a dusty feel. Inside were twelve glossy photographs. Fox Olson and Doug Sawyer, naked and young, laughing and sex up, in the daisy-papered second-story-front room of Vera Kincaid’s Bell Beach rooming house, summer, 1941. Dave sat on the chair and began tearing them up, one by one, into small pieces. “Not till too late,” the old man said again. “Not till Herrera come and told me he was dead. Then I went to do what Fox should have done in the first place. Chalmers’s car was gone. I waited. Hours. Not where anybody’d see me. Trees and brush along his private road. Stopped him on the road. He’s big and tough. I’m half dead. But a shotgun’s an equalizer. I told him flat I was going to kill him. He thought I never meant it. Thought the pictures was all I wanted. They wasn’t. I meant it.”

  Dave stood up. “Bathroom?” Loomis nodded at a door and Dave walked into a glaring green mosque and turned the envelope upside down and watched the fragments shower into the toilet. He made fragments of the envelope and dropped those too. He flushed the toilet and went back. Loomis didn’t look at him. He lay on the bed now, staring at the ceiling, seeing something nobody else could see. “Not till too late,” he said again.

  The shotgun was on its rack in the bare white office. Dave reached for it and the Mexican woman said behind him, “It is clean, Señor. I cleaned it myself.”

  20

  When she opened the door her face looked young and flushed. Loved. Her eyes were bran-died. He didn’t give her time to say anything. He walked past her into the long, raftered room. The only light came from a fire dying in the grate. It was enough to show him that the painting of the Chute was gone. The coffee table had been pushed aside. Two snifters glinted on the hearth with the bottle. Cushions were on the deep rug. So was the black Mexican ashtray. Two brands of filter cigarette had been stubbed out in it. Gauze was wrapped around her hands.

  “I didn’t see that this morning,” he said. “You were wearing gloves.”

  “I’m not very clever in the kitchen,” she said. “What do you want? It’s after midnight. If there are papers I have to sign, I should think they could wait till morning.”

  “It didn’t happen in the kitchen,” he said. “It happened in your husband’s room at Bell Beach. You burned the pages of a novel he’d written there. Which seems a little odd, after the way you’ve hung onto all the others.”

  “She didn’t burn it.” Hale McNeil came out of the dark, tucking in the tail of an expensive wool shirt. “She burned herself trying to rescue it. I burned it. It was disgusting. The whole filthy episode is disgusting and I don’t know why you can’t leave it alone.”

  “When you took the typewriter this morning,” Dave said, “you ought to have taken the rest of the stuff, emptied the desk. Then I’d be leaving it alone. I’d agree with the deputy in Bell Beach, that only one man knew where he was, therefore that man had to be the one who killed him. But those envelopes were there. Nine of them. The kind you buy at your neighborhood friendly. In packs of a dozen. A dollar booklet holds twenty stamps. This one had only seventeen. So he’d mailed three letters. With Bell Beach postmarks. Which meant that not just one man knew he was there. That’s why I can’t leave it alone.”

  “He was writing a novel,” McNeil said. “Why weren
’t those letters to publishers?”

  “I don’t know why, but they weren’t.” Dave looked at Thorne. “One was to you. Terry not only opened it, she read it.”

  “Oh, no!” Thorne whispered.

  “That little bitch!” McNeil snarled. “All right. So Thorne got a letter from him. What does that prove? It was a pretty sad document, I’ll say that. Apology. Panic. Self-pity. His boyfriend had run out on him. He was all alone. The walls were closing in. What was he going to do? Didn’t anybody care? Help, help, help!”

  “Hale, stop it!” Thorne was white.

  “Sorry.” McNeil turned away. “But they’re all alike. I know. I had one for a son.” He picked up a wedge of eucalyptus trunk and laid it on the fire. The tattered bark sputtered. “Very nice and charming. Sweet guys. Till they get themselves into some loathsome scrape. Then they fall apart. And the people they’ve betrayed are expected to pick up the pieces.”

  “Is that why you went to Bell Beach last night?”

  “You mean this morning.” McNeil jabbed at the log with the poker. “When Captain Herrera came and told Thorne he was dead.” McNeil set the poker in the rack and walked into the shadows talking. “She telephoned me. We went together.” He came back with another snifter. He poured into all three. “This morning. You saw us.”

  “And I acted badly,” Thorne said, “and I’m sorry. But the letter wasn’t like that.” She sat small in a corner of the couch, feet tucked up, facing the fire. “It wasn’t a whine. The typing was bad. I think he was drunk when he wrote it but it wasn’t a whine. I wish I had it to show you. I don’t. Hale burned that too.” Her look was unforgiving when McNeil handed her brandy. “It was the saddest thing you ever read. Did you know . . . everything I bragged so to you about the other day, all of it, all the bright, shiny success—he didn’t want it? He was just trying to please me.”