Early Graves

by Joseph Hansen

  “The original was an archangel,” Dave said.

  “Guardian of the Jews,” Stein said. “I know. Well, not this one. I’m not surprised he killed six people.”

  “I’m not sure about that,” Dave said. “But I’d like to ask him. Where will I find him?”

  Stein got out of his chair. “Eddie kept an address book.” He had his own glass in his hand, and he took Dave’s. He went off to the towering cabinet again. “Of course,” he called across the vastness of the gloomy room, “he didn’t list all his tricks in it. That would have required seven stout volumes.” Glass chimed again. “But he confessed to me that Demure Cock had held a fascination for him for weeks—until I broke them up.” Stein moved to another corner of the room. Hollow rattlings suggested he’d opened and closed a drawer. When he brought the new drinks, a leather-bound book was tucked under his arm. He set Dave’s drink down, and handed him the book. Dave took out his reading glasses, found the M listings in the book—the handwriting was studied, a schoolboy try at Italic calligraphy—and there was Mike Moorcock and a telephone number. He closed the book, put the glasses away.

  “Excuse an indelicate question,” he said. “You don’t have to answer it. But didn’t you know about AIDS when Eddie was chasing around, tricking with strangers? Didn’t you worry that he might get it, that you might?”

  “I warned Eddie. What else could I do? As for me?” Stein gave a laugh. “Oh, my dear. I only do safe sex. I never knew there was any other kind until I was almost thirty—can you believe it? Once or twice I tried to oblige with the variations, but it didn’t take.” His smile was sad and wry. “That must explain why I was so satisfying as a lover to poor Eddie.”

  “Don’t blame yourself.” Dave peered into the shadows. “May I use your phone?”

  Stein brought it to him, set it on the table, left the room. The phone was a fancy contraption of ebony and gilt. He laid the receiver aside and with his good hand turned a silent gold and ivory dial to reach Ray Lollard. An old friend in a powerful job at Pacific Bell, Ray queened it in a handsome restored mansion of turrets and stained glass on Adams Boulevard. In a refurbished stable building behind the house, he kept a wild-haired, antic young potter named Kovaks. They made an odd couple. Ray and Dave had met in high school, and still saw each other now and then. And Ray always matched up scrappy telephone numbers with addresses and names when Dave needed him to. Now, receiver in his good hand, Dave got Moorcock’s address from him.

  “What’s it about?” he asked. And Dave told him of the knifing deaths of five young men with AIDS in the past three weeks, and of his finding of Drew Dodge’s body under his oak tree. Lollard drew a shocked breath. “Dave, no. Let the police handle it. It’s too dangerous. You’ll end up in the hospital again.”

  “Thanks, but I’ve already been in the hospital and out. Someone like Moorcock jumped me in the dark and tried to run a knife into my heart—like the others. Luckily, he only cut my shoulder.”

  “Dave,” Lollard wailed, “when are you going to realize you are no longer a young man? What are you planning now—to go confront this creature in his den?”

  “Don’t worry,” Dave said. “I’ll have the police right behind me. I can’t seem to shake them.”

  “And a good thing too,” Lollard said strictly. “You need somebody looking out for you. You’ve taken leave of your senses. When can we have dinner?”

  “When you stop dieting,” Dave said.

  “Oh, that’s over with. I fell from grace months ago.”

  “Good,” Dave said. “When I’m through with this case, I’ll ring you. I’ll have a bucket of raw meat to toss to Kovaks, too. Fresh, juicy bones. You tell him.”

  “He’d pace his cage all night. You be careful, now. I don’t want that phone call to come from the morgue.”

  “I’ll be careful,” Dave said, and placed the overwrought receiver back on its hooks. He got to his feet, put on the Irish hat. Stein came back into the room. “Thank you,” Dave told him. “I’ll go see if I can find Moorcock.”

  Stein frowned. “Shouldn’t you leave it to the police?”

  “I don’t want to waste their time.” Dave fumbled, trying to get the coat across his shoulders. Stein helped him. Dave said, “After all, there’s more than one stringy child with long hair running the streets at night, cruising, hustling, peddling drugs, peddling disease.” The coat felt secure now. He moved toward the door. “I’m grateful for your help.”

  “I’m grateful you came.” Stein walked with him and opened the door. “It was good to talk to someone human.”

  Dave stopped in the doorway and looked at him. “I went into mourning once, long ago. The man I’d lived with for twenty-two years died of cancer. Shutting myself away only made it worse. It didn’t begin to get better until I went back to work.”

  Stein pushed the heavy glasses up on his nose and used his woebegone smile again. “Thank you.” He shook Dave’s hand. “Maybe I’ll try that.”

  11

  NOVELLO STREET CLIMBED STEEPLY NORTH FROM FRANKLIN AVENUE, EAST OF VINE. It was lined on both sides by white stucco apartment buildings. Golden rays of slanted sunlight shone on the west-facing fronts now. The rain clouds had torn apart so that there could be a sunset. What Dave glimpsed of it between buildings and through the high, sagging strands of power and telephone lines was gaudy. The blacktop of the street was still wet. So was the canted gray concrete of the sidewalks.

  The address he wanted marked a two-story motel. Its flaking painted sign read HAVEN HOUSE and, in smaller letters Youth Outreach of Our Savior’s Church Hollywood. On the sidewalk below the sign, a lanky young woman used a roller to try to paint out graffiti—FAGS CAUSE AIDS KILL ALL FAGS. The lettering was ragged and very black. The white paint the woman used wasn’t covering it well.

  Dave eased the Jaguar into a space at the curb. It took only two tries. He was getting good with just one arm. He pushed coins into a bent meter, and walked down to the woman. She wore a navy blue watch cap, gray turtleneck, blue windbreaker jacket, black jeans, white tennis shoes. She tipped paint from a pail into a pan and, when Dave stopped beside her, straightened and smiled ruefully.

  “This is the fifth time in two weeks,” she said. “It isn’t hatred, not really. It’s fear.”

  “Those two keep close company,” Dave said. The woman dipped the roller in the pan of paint, rolled it a little there, lifted it and swiped again at the angry words. “In the end, I’ll just sandblast. But that’s expensive. We have to stretch a meager budget very, very thin, as things are. I’ll wait till the panic dies down.”

  “That could take years,” Dave said.

  “They’re working on cures,” she said.

  “Right. One of them kills the virus, but it’s toxic to the bone marrow. You have to have your blood replaced every three weeks. AIDS doesn’t kill you—anemia does.”

  “It takes forever for paint to dry in this weather,” she said, and rested the roller in the pan, its long handle against the wall. “You’re talking about AZT. But they’ve got others.”

  “One of them’s a dandy,” Dave said. “It kills the T-cells while it kills the retrovirus. There’s no hope in that, Sister.”

  “Jan Crofoot.” She worked up another smile and held out a painty hand. Dave shook it. “But it’s not sister. We’re Protestants. Rome is still nervous about homosexuality. We got over that in the sixties. It caused an awful ruckus, but charity won out in the end.” She touched the wall where the spray-painted message still showed through. She rubbed the ends of her fingers with her thumb. Her mouth twitched. “Not all Protestants, of course. Our denomination, and a few others. No, no.” She laughed sadly and shook her head. “Not the evangelicals. Talk about hatred. How that bunch can hate. It’s ignorance, you know. Just ignorance.”

  “You’re a charitable lady,” Dave said.

  “It comes with the territory. What can I do for you?”

  Dave told her his name and showed her his license. He to
ld her about Drew Dodge and about the boy who had knifed him. “It may have been Michael Moorcock. I traced him to this address because he called your phone number his.”

  Jan Crofoot was in the middle of a stroke with the roller. She stopped and frowned at Dave. “Recently? You mean in the midst of these terrible stabbings?”

  “Maybe at the end of them,” Dave said. “I hope so.”

  “No, I mean, did he give this number recently? Because that makes no sense. He left here”—she hesitated, muddling the roller in the paint pan again—“how long ago? Surely it’s been months.”

  “Do you keep records?” Dave said.

  She looked up and down the street. It was deserted. She stood the roller in the pan again, handle angled against the wall. “Come inside,” she said, and led the way. The former motel was L-shaped, the long side at the right angles to the street, the short side at the far end of the lot. Where cars used to park stood tents—olive drab, from some Army surplus store. There was also a green- and white-striped canvas marquee, the kind set up for garden parties on tubular framework. From the fringed, scalloped edges of the roof hung sheets of clear plastic, of green plastic trash bags sliced to double their width, fixed with safety pins, clothespins, staples. Within, Dave glimpsed sleeping bags, backpacks, strewn clothing, and huddled young people.

  “The units are filled to overflowing.” Crofoot waved a hand at the encampment. “The police and health people don’t like this. They make us dismantle it every now and then, but we put it up again as soon as they’re out of sight. They can’t be everyplace.” She used a pair of keys in a pair of locks to open a door marked OFFICE.

  “Don’t they fine you?” Dave said. “Don’t the fines stretch that budget even thinner?”

  “Then we call on friends.” Crofoot moved through random stacks of cartons, some of them with open flaps, files inside, unsorted papers. Some cartons came from grocery warehouses, canned chili, canned hash, sardines. Loaves of bread in white wrappers were dumped in a corner, sacks of onions, potatoes, oranges. A stem of bananas lay on the desk Crofoot now edged behind. The shut-up room air smelled of bananas. She lifted the stem with an effortful grunt and held it for a grimacing moment, to say, “Care for a banana?” Dave shook his head, and she lowered the stem to the floor, out of sight. “We call on friends who drive expensive imported cars.” Her smile at Dave was sly. “They always come through in emergencies.” Her laugh was self-conscious. She rubbed her hands, sat down, pulled toward a double file box of three-by-five cards. “Now, let’s see—Michael Moorcock. He may still be in the active file”—the paint-stained fingers riffled through the cards—“because office help is catch-as-catch-can.”

  “What about the boys out there?” Dave said.

  “Ah, well, there are drawbacks to that,” Crofoot said. “Most of them can barely read. Alphabetical order—what’s that? And then they’re—some of them—shall we say, a little short on probity. For sneaky reasons, cards are apt to be misplaced, lost, let’s say, forever.”

  “Who do you get?” Dave looked toward the door.

  “Street boys, sometimes on drugs, sometimes robbed and beaten and exploited in various ways because they’re gay or country-dumb or scared and lost and hungry. Not just kids—men sometimes. Early on, things were coed, but all kinds of trouble arose from that. You can imagine.”

  “I can imagine all kinds of trouble arising from this,” Dave said. “What about weapons, knives, guns, what about drugs and violence and coercion and the rest? You don’t make good little Christians out of them all?”

  “We don’t even try. We feed them, give them a place to sleep, a place to shower. We get them medical attention at clinics and hospitals when they need it. Drug counseling. Therapy if the problems are mental or emotional. We hunt up their parents if they’re very young. We try to protect them from exploitation on the streets, and from the arbitrariness of the law, if we think it will leave them worse off instead of better.”

  “We?” Dave said. “I hope you’ve got a lot of help.”

  Crofoot smiled wearily. “I confess—it’s mostly me.”

  “But they’re not all gay?” Dave said.

  “Oh, by no means. Ah, here we are.” She pulled a card from the little wooden drawer. “Michael Moorcock.” She blinked at the card a moment, shook her head, held the card out to Dave. “Gone, left no forwarding.”

  “But there’s a date here.” Dave put on reading glasses and squinted at the card. “December tenth, last year.”

  “I told you it had been a while,” she said. “I remember Michael.” She pawed around in a welter of papers on the desk and found a cigarette pack. When she lit a cigarette from the pack, the smell of the smoke was strong. Turkish, Dave thought. “Tall, slender boy, very fair hair that he wore long, down to his shoulders.”

  Dave handed back the card. “Did he also carry a knife?” He tucked his glasses into a jacket pocket.

  “We don’t search them.” Crofoot peered into the file drawer, slipped the card back in place. “He may have owned a knife.” She pushed the little drawer shut. “But it wasn’t the knife that got him into trouble. It was drugs. A boy came to me and said Moorcock was selling crack.” She laughed bleakly. “To raise a little money for Christmas, I suppose.”

  “Did you confront him about it?” Her cigarette smoke was tough to breathe. He tried to make out the printing on the crumpled yellow pack on the desk. Could it be Fatima? Did they still make those? “Is that why he left?”

  “Yes. If I didn’t act promptly and strictly about drugs,” Crofoot said, “we’d be in deep trouble here.” She pulled off the white cap and ruffled her thick, honey-colored hair with her fingertips, as if her scalp itched. “The police would close us once for all. I tell them, ‘Bring drugs in here, and there won’t be a Haven House anymore—no free food, no place to sleep.’” She smoothed her hair and put the cap on again. “I encourage them to snitch. I don’t much like myself for that.”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Dave said. “You were right about Moorcock. I have a witness that he was into cocaine.”

  Before she could answer, knuckles rapped the door. She called, “Come in.” A teen-age boy poked his head in. On his shiny, shaven scalp someone had painted an ancient Celtic spiral in red and gold. Also on his flat cheeks. “We straightened up the storage room like you asked. Can we take this stuff now?”

  Crofoot said yes, and the skinhead came inside, followed by a short, black youth in an embroidered cap whose bright colors had grown grimy. His caftan needed washing too. It was of gaudy cotton print. Rain was falling again, and the long garment clung to him. His body was a tidy sculpture. The boys picked up cartons and staggered out with them, wheezing, laughing.

  Crofoot went and closed the door. She said to Dave, “I hope today’s volunteer cook doesn’t ring to tell me her baby-sitter has let her down.” She glanced worriedly at an old black telephone that squatted on the desk. “Cooking is a chore I can live without. Oh, I do it,” she added hastily, “but not, I fear, with Christian cheerfulness.” She read her watch and sighed. “It looks like the deadline has arrived.”

  “I’ve cooked meals with one arm before,” Dave said, “but not for a hundred hungry kids.”

  Crofoot smiled. “Thanks, I’ll manage. She’ll no doubt be along. The freeways are wet. That means traffic jams. I’ll just get things started for her.” She opened the door.

  The boys came threading their way through the tents from which radio music blared, shrieking guitars, thudding drums. When the boys were inside the office, Dave closed the door and asked the skinhead, “Did you know Mike Moorcock when he lived here?” He looked the same question at the black boy. They turned to Crofoot, as if to say, “Who is this? Do we have to answer him?”

  Crofoot busied herself putting out her cigarette, and Dave said, “Did he tell you where he was going when he left?”

  “What for do you want to know?” The black lad plucked the thin, soaked cloth away from his crotch. He was
embarrassed. He had nothing on under the caftan. “You police?”

  “Have you seen him since?” Dave said.

  “He peddles crack along Franklin, around Wilcox,” the white boy said in a bored voice. He picked up cartons. “He did. He got busted. That’s what I heard.”

  “Onions?” the black boy said to Crofoot. “We got those?”

  “In the corner.” Crofoot pointed.

  “When did he get busted?” Dave said.

  “Last weekend. I guess nobody bailed him out. I go past there all the time. I haven’t seen him.” He tottered toward Dave, thin arms straining with the weight of the cartons. “You want to open the door, please?”

  Dave opened the door. The skinhead went out into the rain. The black kid came laden with net sacks of onions. “Cook, she say nothing taste right without onions.” He followed the skinhead off between the tents.

  “Ah.” Crofoot glowed. “The cook’s come.”

  Dave grinned. “Saved from an awful fate, right? I’ll go. Thanks for your help.”

  Out on the sidewalk in the dying light, he saw that someone had made off with paint, pan, roller. He didn’t take the bad news back inside, FAGS CAUSE AIDS KILL ALL FAGS still showed through. Bullets struck the words now. He heard the whine of bullets past his ears. He saw the stucco shatter and fly away in fragments. He dropped to the sidewalk. Two more bullets hit the wall. Bits of stucco stung his face. Someone shouted. Dave got carefully to his feet. Across the street, Samuels in his pale coat ran away between buildings, gun in his hand. Past him, Dave glimpsed a skinny, ragged kid, running like hell, long blond hair streaming. The light was poor, but didn’t it have to be Moorcock? Whoever it was dodged from sight at a building corner, dodged back, fired a gun. Samuels fell down. Dave ran back into the court of Haven House, clutching the arm in the sling. The door to the office stood open. The boy with the shaved head came out, a gunnysack of potatoes balanced on a bony shoulder. Crofoot walked behind him, talking. When she saw Dave, her mouth closed, and her eyes opened wide. Over the shriek of radios, Dave shouted to her, “Phone the police. There’s been a shooting, tell them an officer is down.”