Dave Brandstetter 3 - Troublemaker

by Joseph Hansen

  The skin-crumpling smile again. It looked ghastly in the bright sunlight. "I'm good-hearted but I'm no fool. It's been thirty years since I let a drunk get into me for that kind of loot. No—maybe a hundred, two hundred at the outside. I kissed it goodbye when I gave it to him. You seen him?"

  Lighting a cigarette, Dave nodded.

  "Then you know a man wouldn't expect loans back from Billy Wendell. He'd work overtime for me when the wife and I had a date or went to Vegas for the weekend or whatever. I got it back that way —when he was sober enough to trust."

  Dave gazed off across the dully glinting car tops, watched the anxious, frantic flutter of the little ragged flags, calling no one from the empty sun-stark boulevard beyond. "You thought I might be a bill collector. Why? Did they come around? Did they want you to garnishee his wages? Say for a bill like that. A thousand, fifteen hundred?"

  "You telling me his son was murdered? For money?"

  "Possibly." Dave shrugged. "Fifteen hundred is missing. Off his desk. He lay dead by the desk."

  "Naw." Pat Farrell shook his head decisively. "He wouldn't kill anybody. Not Billy Wendell. He had his faults but he wouldn't kill anybody."

  "He didn't need a large sum of money to stay out of jail?" Dave asked again. "Nobody was closing in on him?"

  "Nobody knew he existed," Farrell said. Then he saw at the far corner of the lot a Mexican youth in a buttoned shirt without a tie, a fat brown girl carrying a baby in her arms, peering into a broad, low-slung maroon convertible with high tail fins and flashy hub caps. He bolted past Dave down the steps and, suit flapping, jogged across the tarmac, holding out his hand, grinning. His voice drifted back to Dave on the warm breeze. "Howdy. Buenas dias. What can I do for you folks this beautiful morning? Isn't that a beauty? That's what I call a sharp automobile. And a steal at that price. An absolute steal."

  The street was broad with a center divider where abandoned streetcar rails turned to rust among dry weeds and clumps of sunflowers. Across the way, a chain-link fence with barbwire closed in vast gas storage tanks. Up the block, boxy stucco buildings made a corner— Lucky's bar and grill, the others empty, FORRENT signs curling in the windows. Here, in the middle of the block, a red neon anchor and the word MOTEL tilted at the top of a steel post above a square of cement-block units painted clay color. Ivy geranium struggled in the hard dirt between a cracked sidewalk and the small-windowed walls. Blacktop covered the inner courtyard, where a greasy motorcycle stood with pieces of itself scattered around its wheels and there was an automobile that would have discouraged even Pat Farrell.

  Spiky upthrusts of tired Spanish bayonet guarded the car entrance. A red-and-white sign beside a Dutch door on the cabin to the left said HI! RING BELL FOR SERVICE. He rang bell and a cat came from somewhere and rubbed its yellow stripes against his legs. He crouched and scratched its ears. It purred. The top of the Dutch door opened and a knobby-jawed woman gave him a smile. She wore a crisscross halter and shorts of a Hawaiian material whose hibiscuses had faded many voyages ago. There was nothing Hawaiian about her look or her talk. They were strictly Little Rock, Arkansas.

  "We got lots of room," she said. She rattled up a clipboard on a chain from inside and laid it on top of the lower shelf. There was a ballpoint pen on a braided nylon cord. "Take your choice."

  "I'm looking for Billy Wendell." Dave handed her his Medallion card. "Unit nine, someone told me."

  "That's right." She opened the lower half of the door and stepped out. Her skin in the sun was dead white. She was all elbows, knees, collarbones. "But he's not in it. Hasn't been here two, three days. I don't expect him. You gonna find him? Cause when you do, remind him he owes me three weeks' rent. Place is nigh empty. I got to eat too, tell him."

  "Isn't this your good season?" Dave asked.

  "I don't have a good season," she said.

  "Can I see his room?" Dave asked. "Before the police?"

  "Police!" She gawked. "What's he done?"

  "A member of his family met with an accident," Dave said. "That person was insured by my company. We have a set investigative routine, you know?" He gave her a smile. "All right? Or is the room rented?"

  "Fat chance. Here." She reached inside the door, where keys jingled. "Nope. Forgot. Maid's got it. Cleanin' up today. Look for her." She turned her head, sniffed. "Damn! I boiled that coffee." She vanished back inside. The cat jumped up on the shelf, knocked down the clipboard, followed her.

  Next to the door of nine stood a square canvas laundry hamper on wheels. Sheets draggled from it. The door was open and inside the room a vacuum whined. He peered in. A shadowy female with a white cloth tied over her hair sullenly pushed furniture. Dave stepped inside. The maid was black and young. She didn't appear even to glance at him but she said, "Ain' ready yet."

  Closet doors stood open on emptiness. Big shabby slacks and jackets lay across a grudging upholstered chair with greasy arms. Hats, a worn raincoat, two pairs of cracked shoes. Dave picked up and dropped a tangle of stained neckties. "Did he leave anything else?"

  "You the Man?" She glanced at him this time but without much interest. "Ain' been through the drawers yet." She jerked her head at a brown-painted thrift-shop chest under a wavery mirror. Dave found underwear and socks, empty bourbon bottles with supermarket labels, candy-bar wrappers, a cellophane bag with three dried-out doughnuts, moldy bread in white wax paper. He shut the drawers. "Nothing else?"

  "Wastebasket out there." She ran the shiny tube of the vacuum over faded plaid window curtains that matched the spread on the sagging bed. "He dead or somethin'?"

  "Or something," Dave said. In the morning sun glare he squatted by the wastebasket—cardboard papered in plaid—and lifted out another whiskey bottle and a cigarette carton. Under these was a folded section of newspaper. He put on his glasses and looked it over. Circled in red pencil was the story of Rick Wendell's murder. The page number was 17 and Billy hadn't lied—the address of the canyon house was there. Dave tore off the sheet, folded it, pocketed it, took a second newspaper section from the basket.

  This wasn't from the Times. It was from a local advertising throw-away. And there was a spread on the Mr. Marvelous contest to come, with pictures of, among others, Rick Wendell. He and Ace Kegan flanked Bobby Reich, who wore the little white shorts. A lot of other men were in the pictures—owners, contestants, most of whom Dave had met on his tour of the bars. Captions identified them and named their places of business. The text didn't say what kind of businesses they were—this was a family paper. It was dated a week ahead of the murder. So Billy had lied about one thing—he'd known his son was alive and well and where to find him. Dave tore off this sheet and pushed it in with the other one.

  The wastebasket held another bottle, a pizza tin gummy with sauce, wadded paper napkins, a waxed cup with the Coca-Cola trademark —and then the torn-up pieces of a letter. Dave fitted the ragged edges together on the gritty blacktop. My Dear Son—you will have forgotten me and no wonder since your mother and I came to a parting of the ways years ago but I want to say how proud I am to read in the paper that you are a success in life even though your father has not. . . The writing, sprawling and unsteady, broke off there.

  Dave tucked the fragments into the pocket with the news sheets and poked into the wastebasket again. A half-eaten hamburger in its gold-foil Jack in the Box wrapper, a corn chip bag, last week's TV Guide. And that was all. Dave dumped the trash back into the basket, got to his feet, brushing his hands together. He called thanks to the vacuuming girl and walked back to the motel office, where the bony woman leaned on the lower half of the Dutch door, drinking coffee from a mug with the yellow round "Smile" face on it, and eating a pastry.

  Dave asked, "He had a home away from home—right?"

  She nodded. "Lucky's," she said. "Right up at the corner. You can't miss it."

  A glass-and-steel phone booth waited beside the Spanish bayonets. He stepped into it, dragged the phone book on its chain from under the little corner shelf and th
umbed the gritty pages. The yellow ones. He found the listing. Hang Ten. It had a red pencil mark around it, like the mark around the story of Rick Wendell's death in the paper. He dropped the directory on its chain and got into the Electra. The radio went on with the ignition. A Beethoven quartet, one of the Rasoumovskys, he thought. He sat and listened to it for a minute before he let the brake go and rolled along the block to the lonely buildings huddled on the corner in the sun.

  Out the open door of Lucky's came an eye-stinging smell of pine disinfectant. Inside, someone short and fat, cocooned in a big white apron, mopped a floor of worn black vinyl tile. Like big metal insects stunned by the smell, stools stood legs up on the bar, chairs on little tables. There was a big metal bucket with rubber rollers on top. When the stubby being dropped the drizzly gray strings of the mop between these, levered them closed and pulled, there was loud squealing. Dave coughed. The mop wielder turned. The face was round, white, withered, like an apple forgotten in a cellar.

  "You're just a shade early for a drink."

  "I don't need a drink," Dave said. "I'm an insurance investigator and I've got a question or two about one of your regulars. Billy Wendell."

  "Insurance?" The popping of dirty soap bubbles was audible in the hush. 'That mean he's dead?"

  "Do they die a lot?" Dave wondered.

  "They're not young, most of 'em." The mopping began again. Cigarette butts fled from side to side. "Billy hasn't been around last couple nights was why I asked."

  "He's not dead," Dave said.

  "Gone off to find his wife and kid, then." The mop went into the bucket again. The cigarette butts drowned. "I didn't think he'd have the nerve. They talk like that, you know. Daydreams, drink dreams. I've got customers been planning to break out, change their lives, for years. Never do it. Truth. Most of 'em. Never did do nothin', never will. I only know two kinds of people in this life—them that make things happen, them that things happen to." The mop went to work again.

  "And Billy Wendell?" Dave asked.

  "He'd been talking about his son. Read a piece in the paper about him, how he's got his own business." Chunky elbows bent and straightened. "Billy was proud of him. Success, he says. Not a failure like his old man." Dave backed from the wet sweep of the mop and the little figure bowed into sunlight from the door. The voice hadn't let him be sure of it, but he decided now that she was female, a fat little woman of fifty in men's clothes, with a man's haircut. "When he got fired from the used car lot, Billy says it was okay with him. He could go back to his son, his son would look after him, his son wouldn't let his old man go down to destruction."

  "Billy was here every night?"

  "About. Oh, he'd get economy spells. Scuse me." She nodded and Dave stepped out onto the sidewalk while the mop spread dirty suds across the doorsill. The woman leaned the mop against the door, wiped fat little hands on the wraparound apron, stepped out blinking into the sun. "There'd be a night or two he'd drink in his motel room." A stubby thumb jerked in the direction of the cinder-block buildings under the neon anchor up the weedy block. "But he'd miss the company. We'd miss him too. It gets like a family, place like this. So he'd soon be back. TV's poor company, you know. Nothin' to drinkin' alone."

  "Monday night," Dave said. "Was that one of the times he tried TV?"

  "Monday?" She looked back into the dark bar as if the answer might come from there. Then she looked at him again and her face puckered into a grin. "Naw, not Monday. Hell, we had a celebration Monday. Birthday party. For Lilian. Lilian Drill and her old man. They been coming in here must be live, six years. Lilian's just the most fun. Everybody loves Lilian. No—Hilly was here till two, till closing. All the regulars was here. Billy especially. They're a set, him and Lilian."

  "How's that?" Dave asked.

  "The Beautiful People," the pudgy woman said. "You heard that expression. Naw, I don't mean these days, but once. Lilian was in pictures in the thirties. And Billy—everybody's seen his photos, polo playing, horse shows, yachts. He was handsome. Money, high life. Yup, him and Lilian. They're a set."

  "What time did he get here Monday? Late?"

  "Five in the afternoon. He built sandwiches while I frosted the cake. I always bake the cakes myself. Store bought, they're sawdust. Baked it, decorated it myself. My old man was a baker. Before he decided there was more money in booze." She poked inside the apron and brought out a crushed pack of cigarettes. She lit one with a paper match and blew the smoke at the sidewalk. She wore tennis shoes, child size. "Thing he couldn't remember was the booze was for the customers. Killed him. Anyway, I decorated the cake." She gestured in the air. "Lucky's Own Movie Queen—that's what I wrote on it."

  She gave a little sad laugh and shook her head. "Lilian cried."

  CHAPTER 11

  DWAYNE HUNCIE SAID, "I don't need no lawyer. I am a lawyer." He wore new cowboy boots, the tooling dyed deep reds and purples. His pants were striped and sharply creased. His belt served as a sling for his pink-satin-shirted belly. It was a new belt with a wrought silver buckle the size of a pack of playing cards. He stood, big and bow-legged and blinking under a crimped-brim straw cowboy hat in Yoshiba's night office, two uniformed California highway patrolmen, guns on hips, guarding the door behind him. "I can handle this."

  "You were a lawyer," Yoshiba said, "but that was in Texas and some time ago." He leafed over a Xeroxed record file. "You were disbarred in 1957. For bribing jurors. You served time for it." He sat back, laid a hand on the file, blinked through the desk light. "You served time pretty often. Didn't anybody ever tell you the man who acts as his own lawyer has a fool for a client?"

  "Man don't need no lawyer that tells the simple truth." Huncie shifted a lump of tobacco from one whiskery cheek to the other, nodded, eyeing a chair. "Can I set down? That was kind of a long ride from Saugus."

  "Help yourself," Yoshiba said. "You understand that this is serious? A case of murder?"

  "I didn't figure you'd have every lawman in the state scourin' nickel and dime trailer camps to haul me back here just for pissin' in some alley. But you got the wrong man. I never killed nobody." He dropped his loose bulk onto a hard chair. "Who is it's dead?"

  "Richard William Wendell," Yoshiba said. From a corner, a deputy district attorney in Levi's and a Little League cap asked, "Know the name?"

  "Heard of it." Huncie jerked a nod.

  "We've got a suspect locked up," Yoshiba said. "Lawrence Henry Johns. You know that name too, right? Right. The mother of the victim found Johns standing over the body cleaning off the gun the victim was shot with."

  "Well, almighty Gawd," Huncie said moderately. "Ain't that enough?"

  "It's a little too much," Dave said. He leaned on a file cabinet, nursing a paper cup of coffee and smoking. "The only fingerprints on the weapon belong to the mother. There are powder burns on the hand and chest of the deceased, whose gun it was. And fifteen hundred dollars is missing from his desk."

  "Oh?" Huncie said. "Who are you?"

  Dave told him. Wind that smelled of warm night ocean breathed in at the open window next to him. "No one else can account for that fifteen hundred. We have an idea you can."

  "Me?" Huncie tried for a laugh but it broke and there was fear in his watery blue eyes. "How the hell did you scrounge up that idea, will you tell me?"

  Yoshiba looked at the armed men. "Open that door, will you, and tell them to send in the witness?"

  Jomay Johns was blond and scrubbed as a child. But her jeans and blouse were grubby. She didn't look more than twelve. Her hair was a baroque complex of yellow upsweeps and downfalls. "You son of a bitch," she said to Huncie. "You run off and left me without no clothes or nothin'. Me and BB. Plus, you stole that money. You dirty old bastard. You didn't just steal it. You stole it twice!"

  Huncie eyed her and shifted the chaw again. "Where did you get to? I left you and BB gettin' malts and French fries at that there McDonald's and when I come back, you was no place to be seen."

  "You're a liar," she said.
"You drove off in the camper. When you didn't come for your food, I went out in the lot and looked. Wasn't no camper there. I had seventeen dollars change and didn't know nobody in town."

  Huncie spread big hands. "I discovered I didn't have no more tobacco. I went lookin' for some. This here ain't chewin' tobacco country, sweetheart. I had one hell of a time. Then I come back and you're gone."

  "Bullshit," she said. "Bullshit." She looked, outraged, from one to another of the shadowy figures in the office. "Do you believe this old bullshitter?"

  "Take it easy," Yoshiba told her. "Larson, give her a chair, will you? Sit down, Mrs. Johns." While the Little League D.A. got up and fumbled in the crowded half dark, getting the chair out of the corner, Yoshiba said to Huncie, "This witness says you had in your possession at eleven o'clock Monday night a large bundle of twenty-dollar bills."

  "I had 'em," Huncie said.

  "Where did you get them?"

  "They was owin' and I collected 'em," Huncie said.

  "Owing," Yoshiba said, "to whom? For what?"

  Back of him, propped against the window ledge, the public defender, Khazoyan, in a black mohair suit and a ruffled shirtfront, yawned noisily.

  Huncie squinted at him past the glare of the desk lamp. "We can get this over with quick and let that man get home to bed," he said. "I got 'em off the desk in that little house next to the big house up there on Pinyon Trail in that canyon—house belonging to, way I understood it, this here Wendell, the fella which her little runaway husband"—he nodded at dim Jomay—"the one you call Lawrence Henry Johns, says he was going to get the money from he owed." "Just as simple as that," Yoshiba said.

  Huncie nodded, rose, creaked in the new boots to the window. Khazoyan stepped aside. Huncie spat a long brown stream of tobacco juice into the night. Wiping his mouth with a hand, he turned back. "Just as simple as that. Not a dead body in it. Larry was to collect the money and I was to drive out to that barny-lookin' place on the beach and get it off him next mornin'. Hell, I saved him and me both trouble, that was all. You too, Jomay honey. If you'd only kept your pretty little ass on that there plastic stool in McDonald's."