Early Graves

by Joseph Hansen

  “Why didn’t he pay, and get it over with?”

  “He didn’t have the money. He’d been in the hospital, a long stay, with pneumonia. He was broke, needed time to get back on his feet. And this bastard wanted big bucks. Drew grabbed at your card. He was scared.”

  “What scares us isn’t necessarily what kills us.” Dave got to his feet. “And blackmail’s a lousy motive for murder. You can’t get money from a dead man.” He studied glassed drawings on the wall. Only the shapes of the buildings were familiar, not the lawns, walks, landscaping. “Somebody else is scared now—the kid who tried to kill me. Which is why I won’t stay here tonight.” Lettering below the drawings read: SHOPPING MALL, RANCHO VIENTOS, 1987. “Handsome,” Dave said.

  “There’ll be more trees,” Owens said. “The city council is sore about the oaks we took down. They’re making us replace them with twice the number.”

  Dave said, “So—Larry hung on, did he? You’re still together? I didn’t know for sure. You haven’t talked about him, and I didn’t like to ask. You never know when you’re going to give pain with that question.”

  “We’re together,” Owens said. “I never thought I’d be so lucky, but it happened, and it’s wonderful. He tried to learn drafting so he could work with me.” Owens gave a sorry laugh and shook his head. “The math sank him. But he’s turned into a pretty fair artist—commercial, freelance. It lets him earn his own money, and that’s important to him. And he can work at home. And that’s more important to him, not ever to have to leave here.” Owens gestured to indicate ocean, rocks, dunes, the house. “The only arguments we have are when I ask him to go out with me—to a restaurant, the music center, the museum. He’d rather stay home. Worse than that, he’d rather I stayed home, never went anyplace.”

  “That’s why he never came with you to my house,” Dave said. “Well, there had to be something.” Through a rainy window, he watched breakers crash on rocks for a moment; “The interpretation you put on Dodge’s visit—could it have got in the way of your remembering anything he said or did?”

  “I suppose, but I don’t think so. It’s hard to forget opening the door at midnight to a man you only know in a business way, and hardly recognize, disheveled, soaked with rain, at his wit’s end, begging for your help.”

  “I’m told the shopping mall is in deep trouble. He didn’t mention that?”

  “Elmo Sands keeps mentioning it. But, no, Drew didn’t talk about it. He’d have known how to handle that, young Drew would. Extortion he didn’t know how to handle.”

  Dave mused, working on his drink. “You didn’t advise him to buy a gun?”

  “Good God, no.” Owens peered at Dave. “What made you think that? I told you—I gave him your card. I had a time finding it. Rummaged it out of a drawer in here, at last. Couldn’t remember where the hell I’d put it. I only parted with it because he seemed to need you as badly as I once did. May I have another?”

  Dave took out his wallet, slid a card from it, passed the card to Owens. To reach across the table made his shoulder hurt. “But don’t get into trouble.” He pushed the wallet away. “I’m retiring.”

  Owens stared. “You’re joking.”

  “No, I’m fed up with hospitals. The world is getting meaner by the week. And I’m not quick enough anymore.” Dave told him about the shooting at Haven House. “I don’t want to die on some rainy sidewalk. I want to die in bed. With Cecil holding on to me.”

  “How is he?” Owens said. “I missed him at the hospital.”

  “He’s living with a young lady, these days,” Dave said. “I’m waiting for the situation to resolve itself. It’s taking longer than I like. Longer than I’ve got to spare for it.” The subject troubled him, and he lit a cigarette. “Sorry.” He held the cigarette up. “Is this all right?”

  “With fifty million Americans,” Owens said. “It’s a death-wish thing, you know. Slow suicide.”

  Dave laughed. “A simple yes or no will do.”

  “Yes, of course,” Owens said. And frowned, remembering. “I just can’t bring this skinny twenty-year-old kid of yours into true with what Drew said. He said the blackmailer came from long ago and far away. Wouldn’t that mean he’d have to be older, Drew’s contemporary? He said, ‘I thought I’d left all that behind forever. I wasn’t even the same person then.’ What do you suppose that meant?”

  “Where did he hail from?” Dave said.

  “I don’t know.” Owens found on the drawing table a high-sided blue glass dish of pushpins and paper clips. He emptied these into a drawer, and handed the dish to Dave for an ashtray. “I met with him pretty often while I was designing the buildings, but those were work sessions. A few times socially, mostly at parties. We never had an intimate conversation.”

  “Not till the night before he was killed.”

  “Not till then. And then he was holding back a lot.”

  “Oh? What made you think that?”

  “The way he couldn’t sit still, kept jumping up and pacing. He wanted to tell me all about it. I could sense that, the whole story wanting to be told. But he couldn’t work up his nerve.”

  “Which is why you suggested me,” Dave said.

  “He jumped at that. I could see the relief in his face. You’d be a stranger, right? He could tell you on a professional basis, no fear of a friend’s disapproval—if that’s what I was, a friend. No fear it might go farther—back to his wife, say. Or his business associates.”

  “Did he tell you he had AIDS?”

  Owens bleakly shook his head. “Not that, either.”

  “He never mentioned his childhood to you—South, Midwest, New England? Farm, city? Did he name a college?”

  Owens moved his bony shoulders. “I’m sorry. If he did, I don’t remember. He seemed—well, so rooted in California. It never occurred to me he might come from someplace else. Funny. Most of us do, don’t we? Don’t you?”

  Dave laughed, shook his head. “Pasadena,” he said.

  Larry Johns appeared in the doorway, hair bleached by the sun, skin toasted by the sun, eyes bright blue. He was no longer a willowy boy. He’d thickened. His voice had got deeper. Nor was he pretty anymore. Still, his face had a pleasant, open look to it. “Hi, Mr. Brandstetter.” He came in and held out his hand. He brought a tang of the kitchen with him, onions, cheeses, peppers. Dave shook the hand. Johns said, “Nice to see you again. Been catching a lot of killers lately?”

  “Not the one I want,” Dave said. “You look fine.”

  “I had long hair and a moustache when we met.” Johns laughed. “How long has it been? Ten years, right?”

  “Tom says twelve,” Dave said.

  Johns looked at Owens. “Lunch will be ready in twenty minutes. I’ve got time to have a drink with you.”

  “Well planned.” Owens smiled, gave him a quick hug and kiss, got off the stool, took Dave’s glass to the cabinet with his own, and this time made three drinks. Dave lit another cigarette. He missed Cecil.

  Seated at a shelf facing rainy glass that looked out on the ocean from high up in the house, they ate the guacamole, enchiladas, refritos Larry had cooked, washing them down with Mexican beer. Dave liked this tower room, shelves of books, tapes, records. An armatured lamp bent over a drawing table. Pinned to the plank walls were nice loose watercolors of the dunes, the sharp rocks in the surf, the house. A pine cabinet held art supplies, another one games. They rotated bouts of chess, played to a time clock. Dave left at four.

  But when he rumbled the Jaguar out onto the rock-strewn coast road, an unmarked police car waited for him. He pulled up beside it, tapped his horn, triggered a switch to lower the window on the passenger side. The leathery Dugan was in the car, slouched down behind the wheel, hat tilted forward over his eyes. But not asleep. He sat straight, pushed the hat back, winced at Dave, rolled down his window.

  Dave said, “I’ll sleep here tonight. Tomorrow morning I’ll drive to Drew Dodge’s funeral in Rancho Vientos.”

  “Sure y
ou will,” Dugan said.

  “Can I bring you coffee from the house? A sandwich?”

  “I’m okay.” Dugan held up a thermos bottle for a second. “What you could do for me is go home and stay there.”

  “You don’t enjoy the beach?” Dave said.

  Dugan gave a sour snort, rolled up his window, pulled the hat over his eyes, and slouched behind the wheel again.

  16

  THE STORM BLEW ON inland overnight. The morning sky was the scrubbed shiny blue of Dutch tiles. The hills to the right of the coast road were napped in fresh spring green. All this corner of the continent needed was a little rain, and the grass sprang up. To the left, the breakers crashed, foam ran up the dark, sleek sand. Trailers and campers parked along that sand. Kids and dogs ran around them. A young couple unhitched bicycles from racks. Wind flapped the hat brims of an old couple fishing from canvas chairs.

  After an hour, Dave cut back through the hills, and the valley he dropped down into was also green in the morning light. Quiet still held the main street of Rancho Vientos, dew sparkling on the roofs of a few cars at the curbs. Passing the hardware store, Dave wondered if Drew Dodge had bought a handgun there. Tom Owens’s black BMW didn’t turn off toward the residential section in the hills, but led Dave on out the highway, northwestward. The church stood in a wide meadow. Newly built to an old design. Frame. Steeple. Gray with white trim.

  A blacktop parking area lay to the east of the building, the white bias lines painted on it still fresh, the shrubs and trees surrounding it still new, fragile. Owens parked. Dave put the Jaguar into the slot beside the BMW. A detective with a moustache parked an unmarked LAPD car near the lot entrance. And stayed seated in the car, steadfastly looking at nothing. Dave and Owens got out into the fresh country morning air. Their car doors closing sounded noisy in the quiet. Far off a meadowlark sang. Crows cawed. Dave read his watch, and looked a question at Owens.

  “Maybe I got the time wrong,” Owens said.

  Dave doubted it, but he walked to the rear of the church. In cold shadow there stood a black stretch limousine and a hearse with curtained windows, its rear door open, a frame on rollers projecting slightly, waiting to receive a coffin. A third car was parked back here, a car he’d last seen covered with twigs, leaves, yellow blossoms on the street in LA where Art Lopez used to live. It was a sand-color late-model Mercedes four-door, the Dodge family automobile. Luggage was in the rear seat, a stuffed panda, a plastic robot. Organ music reached Dave. He read his watch and touched Owens’s arm. “You weren’t wrong about the time,” he said. “We’d better go inside.”

  Owens made a face. “I hate these things, under the best of circumstances.” Tense and unhappy, he walked beside Dave. He stopped, looked around at the empty parking lot, looked at Dave. “It’s because he was gay, right? Because he had AIDS. Jesus, the man had five hundred friends. Now look.”

  “Forget it,” Dave said. “It can’t hurt him now.”

  “Who’s the Mexican?” Owens nodded at the police car, “What’s he doing here? I never saw him before.”

  “He’s a police officer. He’s guarding me.” Dave eyed the man for a minute, and chewed his lower lip. Then he took Owens’s elbow. “Come on, let’s get inside.” The damp perfume of cut flowers hung in the church vestibule. Dave halted there, took off his hat, set it on Owens’s head, and painfully shed his trenchcoat. “I need your help. Put this on.” Owens blinked bewilderment, but he did as Dave asked. “The keys to my car are in the right-hand pocket.”

  Owens felt the pocket, nodded, straightened the hat.

  “Now, what I want you to do is go through the chancel and out the back door of the church, get into my car, and drive it away. Not toward town. North. Understand?”

  “But the funeral—” Owens began.

  “You can come back for that. All I need is five minutes with my watchdog out of the way. I’ll take your car. Give me the keys. Or don’t you want to do it?”

  “Did you save my life?” Owens put the BMW keys in Dave’s hand. “Do you think I’ve forgotten?”

  Owens opened the door into the chapel. Dave caught the door, stepped after him into a wash of organ music, sat in a rear pew. Kathy Dodge, Gerda Nilson, and two children sat in the front pew. No one else was here. In a small town to live respectably was not enough—you had to die respectably, and Dodge’s respectability had ended with his life, when his secrets were no longer secret. That was why nobody with a choice was here. Who was the dead man, anyway? No one Rancho Vientos had known. Tom Owens walked down the aisle, paused and bent to murmur a few words to Kathy Dodge, then crossed the chancel to a rear door, stepped out, and closed the door quietly behind him.

  Dave sat staring at the casket on its trestle. Flowers blanketed the casket. Only one other floral piece stood by, gladioli in a white wicker basket, probably from Owens. Dave scowled to himself. Secrets? Not all of them were out. What was the third, the one Dodge had been on his way to tell Dave when death intervened? Did others besides the long-haired skinny boy who kept raging after Dave know that one? Was the boy acting on his own? Or was someone paying him?

  The engine of the Jaguar rumbled to life outside. Dave waited, heart beating fast. Then a second engine started, and he smiled to himself. With a finger, he pushed back a jacket cuff, and watched the sweep hand of his watch tick past all the numbers. A gray-haired man in a turned-around collar and a black suit came out the door Owens had left by. A prayer book was in the man’s hand. He spread the book open on a lectern, looked at Kathy Dodge, Gerda Nilson, and the children, raised his eyes and looked at Dave. Dave got up and left the church.

  The curved street lay quiet in the morning sunlight. The sprawling, low-slung houses might have been vacant under their long ramps of shake roofing. Here and there, automatic sprinkler systems sprayed lawns and flower beds as if it hadn’t rained for weeks. A square little Postal Service jeep, white with blue and red trim, puttered toward him, stopping at each curbside mailbox. There was no other traffic. If people drove to work here, if they drove their kids to school, that was finished for today.

  He parked Owens’s BMW on the street, and crunched up the white gravel of the drive. He made his way alongside the Dodge house to the rear. A tall gate in a grapestake fence let him into a spacious backyard, where an oval swimming pool mirrored the blue of the sky. Flowering shrubs and vines, clumps of quick-growing trees edged the yard. Wooden lawn furniture faced a brick barbecue in a far corner. A screened lanai had been added to the back of the house. Its aluminum door opened for him. He crossed the lanai among glass-topped tables and directors’ chairs, tried the house back door, found it unlocked, and stepped inside.

  He passed a washer and dryer, storage cupboards that gave off smells of soap, disinfectants, rubber gloves. A door stood open on a small bathroom—toilet, basin, shower. Then he was in the kitchen, a broad room with rough, crooked beams, rustic cupboards, hanging copper-bottomed pans. Dishes lay in the sink. The air smelled of the morning’s coffee and of cinnamon. A serving window showed him a generous dining room. He wanted the den. If Dodge picked and chose the paperwork he let Judith Ober handle for him, then maybe the rest came home here.

  Dave opened doors on two neat guest bedrooms before he found the den. It had a brick fireplace, a handful of shiny sports trophies on the mantel. The furniture was oak, imitation nineteenth-century American, rolltop desk, file cabinet, swivel chair, a small table that held a gleaming white late-model typewriter. Leather wing chairs faced the fireplace, a table between them holding a brass student lamp with a green glass shade. A tufted easy chair in rich brown leather dozed in a corner.

  Dust lay on everything. No one had been in here for days. Which meant Leppard hadn’t bothered. Not yet. Dave was getting first crack. At what? He opened a file drawer and wished he had more time. Funerals and graveside ceremonies didn’t take long. He’d have to hurry. He drew back curtains on leaded windows, put on his reading glasses, and went to work. He skimmed files of letters, mak
ing mental notes of names and dates. Two letters startled him, and he folded them, tucked them into an inside jacket pocket. Other files held newspaper clippings. Most dealt with squabbles between the city council and land developers, Drew Dodge among them, with angry licks from private householders against both sides. One clipping stopped him. It noticed an LA television talk show on which Drew Dodge appeared only days before his death. Dave pocketed this too. He put back the contents of drawer one, shut the drawer, opened drawer two, transferred its contents to the desk, shuffled through it, scowling. He read his watch and began to sweat. Time was running out.

  What he had here were cancelled checks, back statements, mortgage and tax payment receipts, and stacks of bills, mostly unpaid. Apart from a receipt for the purchase of a Browning 9mm pistol at a Santa Barbara gun shop dated the day after the television show, the jumble told him little he didn’t already know. He dumped it back into drawer two, and rifled drawer three. Sitting down in the twanging swivel chair to sort this out, he realized his head ached. From tension, or eyestrain? He switched on a desk lamp. And out of the corner of his eye saw a square of paper that had fallen to the rug. He leaned, stretched, picked it up. Rain-wrinkled. Handwritten. Gritty. He began to smooth it out in the light of the lamp.

  And heard someone pass outside. Breathing. Footfalls. He poked the letter into the side pocket of his jacket, swept up the piles of stuff from the desk, returned them to the third drawer. The lanai screen door rattled. Dave pushed the file drawer shut. The door from the lanai closed. Dave drew the window curtains, switched off the desk lamp, left the den for the living room. The curtains here were closed so he doubted he could be seen by the short, stout man who came down the hallway past the guest room doors and, plainly knowing right where it was, went into the den. The floor of the hallway was polished broad hardwood boards, but the soles of Dave’s shoes were soft and he moved to the den door soundlessly and put his ear to it.

  A file drawer opened. Papers rustled. Dave heard splashes of paper, as if the man were flinging the files out of the drawers in a tearing hurry. The drawer slammed shut, another slid open. More papers were thrown. Dave opened the den door. The small man jerked around to stare at him. He was clean-shaven, with a big nose, eyes set close together. He was around fifty, and wore plaid trousers, a green cardigan sweater, a golf cap. “Who the hell are you?” he said. “What are you doing here?”