Dave Brandstetter 3 - Troublemaker

by Joseph Hansen

  "I don't think you're a trouble saver," Yoshiba said. "I think you're a trouble maker, and I bet I'm not the first person who's told you that. How did you find Wendell's? Did you follow him and Johns up there?"

  "Nope." With a sigh, the big old man dropped onto his chair again. "First I figured to call in on him at his place of business, but time I got her and BB into a movie she was half willin' to see—you think combin' and fixin' all that pretty yella hair don't take time, you ain't lived much with women—I got there too late. There was some sissy boy back of the bar and I asked him. Wendell had left. So—I looked up Wendell in the phone book and took me a little drive up there. Nice night for it."

  "I thought you wanted us to get to bed," Khazoyan complained. "You want to cut to the good part?"

  "All right," Huncie said agreeably. "I got up there and seen 'em through the window, standin' by the desk. Wendell took this envelope out of his jacket and tore it open and took out these bundles of bills and showed 'em to Larry. They left the room. I stepped in, picked the money up off the desk, stepped out again. There it is, all of it, the plain and simple truth. Not only wasn't there no murder in it; there wasn't no theft, neither. Ask her—don't he owe you that money, Jomay?"

  "Not anymore," she said. "You do."

  "Hold on," Yoshiba said. "Johns says they heard you. Wendell came out, there was an argument and a struggle and a gun went off. You didn't walk out of there with that money. Not till Wendell had pulled a gun on you and you'd wrestled with him and it had gone off and killed him. Then you left. But I'll bet it wasn't at a walk."

  "It was," Huncie said. "And nobody come out of that other room. The door stayed shut." He tilted the straw hat back, tilted the chair back, ran a thick finger along the stubbly edge of his tobacco-working jaw. "But somebody did run."

  "Somebody?" Khazoyan made a waking-up sound.

  Huncie looked at him. "Sure. You didn't think I'd open up and tell you all this if I didn't think I had some chance of provin' it, do you? There was a witness. I seen him runnin' away, up the back there."

  Yoshiba picked up a pen. "Description?"

  "Aw, now, Lieutenant—you know better'n that. It was pitch dark up there. Big pines all around."

  "But you did say 'him,' " Yoshiba said. "You know it was a man." He glanced back and up at Dave.

  Huncie said, "Well, no. Now that you mention it, guess I don't." Scowling to himself, he let the chair legs down with a clack, got up and went to the window again to spit. "Could have been a she-male. Did have a big handbag, the kind they wear on a strap over their shoulder. Seen it bangin' against her hip when she run off through the trees. Her, him."

  "You didn't follow?" Dave asked.

  "What for? I had what I come for, purely legal. But I can give you a lead." He paused, chewing, watching their faces. "When I got down to the camper, there was another car parked there. One of them fancy pickups, you know? Look more like a sports car than a truck?"

  "El Camino," Yoshiba said.

  "That's it. Was a truck, though. Little name lettered real modest on the door—Thomas Owens, AIA. My Lord! Why, that's the name of that fella Larry was eatin' off of in that beach place, ain't it? Owens?"

  "What does this mean?" Gail Ewing blocked the doorway. Far down the room at her back, light from a wicker-shaded swag lamp islanded the grouped furniture by the hooded fireplace and made black mirrors of the tall glass wall panels. She wore a housecoat and no makeup. Her eyelids were swollen, her speech thick. She pushed at rumpled hair. "Do you realize what time it is?"

  On the deck, the dark dunes at their back, Yoshiba, Khazoyan, Larson and Dave watched sea wind play with the long yellow hair of Jomay Johns, who had pressed the bell push. Yoshiba held his wallet above the girl's head, let it fall open. "Police," he said. "Like to come in and talk to you a few minutes."

  "No, not tonight." Gail Ewing backed, started to shut the door. "There's an invalid in the house. Everyone else is asleep. I've taken a sleeping pill myself, and I simply wouldn't be—"

  "Sorry, Mrs. Ewing, but it can't wait." Yoshiba put square, thick hands on the Johns girl's little shoulders and pushed her ahead of him into the room. Gail Ewing was forced to back up. Yoshiba moved in. Larson and Khazoyan followed. And Dave. Gail Ewing narrowed the yellow eyes at him. "You!" she said. "You're responsible for this."

  "You know better than that," Dave said. "If anyone's responsible, it's you. If you'd gone to your brother with Larry's problem, he'd have given the boy the money he needed, or gotten him a lawyer, done what was necessary. None of the rest of it would have happened."

  "I refuse to believe that." Her chin thrust out stubbornly. She turned to the squat policeman. "Lieutenant Yoshiba, I've told you my brother's an invalid. He's not to be disturbed."

  "I don't think we'll have to disturb him." Yoshiba shut the door quietly, firmly. "You can probably answer our questions."

  "I don't have to." She clutched the robe at her throat. "I'm entitled to an attorney." Yoshiba's eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. "You're not charged with anything."

  Larson stepped forward, taking off his Little League cap. He was going bald under it. "I'm George Larson, Mrs. Ewing—deputy district attorney. This is Art Khazoyan. He's an attorney also—public defender's office. We'll see that your rights are protected in every way."

  Her mouth twitched but she didn't answer him. She turned her anger on the little blond girl. "What are you doing back here? Haven't you caused enough trouble?"

  "Mother! Are you out of your mind?" Trudy's voice came from the shadowy top of the wooden bird-flight stairs. She was a slim silhouette, something bulky in her arms. Down the high gallery behind her, light made a yellow rectangle of a doorway. "She's come back for her baby."

  "Oh, God." Gail Ewing shut her eyes, rubbed her forehead.

  "For Christ sake!" Mark Dimond was a jerky shadow in the lighted doorway, kicking into pants. He came fast along the gallery, buttoning his fly, to stand beside Trudy. "Tom wants her to stay here, anyhow. You know that."

  "It's the damn sleeping pill!" Gail Ewing shouted at him. "I loathe the things. I wouldn't have taken one if it weren't for all this—" She finished the sentence with a frantic nipping of her hands. She said to Jomay, "Go along, child—I'm sorry."

  Jomay glared sourly at her and went for the stairs. Trudy called down to her. "It's all right. She slept all the time you were gone."

  Jomay climbed the stairs.

  Yoshiba told Gail Ewing, "What we need to know is about Mr. Owens's car—the El Camino, the one parked up in the port now. Who drove it Monday night? He didn't."

  "With two broken legs?" Her tone scathed him. "Your powers of deduction are amazing, Lieutenant."

  "Sarcasm is wasted on Orientals, Mrs. Ewing," Yoshiba said. "We're extremely impassive. Slights and abuse run off our backs like water off a duck—a mandarin duck, of course."

  "Forgive me," she said stiffly. "I don't know anything about the car. I was at a City Council meeting that night. I drove my own car."

  "I thought Trudy smashed up your car," Dave said.

  "I have a replacement," Gail Ewing said. "Thanks to Sequoia Accident and Indemnity Corporation, Mr. Brandstetter." She smiled coldly. "Insurance, remember?"

  Larson said, "On halting offshore oil drilling."

  "What?" Yoshiba looked at him.

  "That was what the City Council session was about," Larson said. "I was there myself. I saw Mrs. Ewing."

  She studied him, nodded. "Yes. That's right."

  "So who had the car?" Yoshiba asked again.

  "No one," she said.

  "Mark Dimond," Dave said. He looked up the stairs. The boy wasn't standing beside the girls and the baby anymore. Dave started to turn for the door. Yoshiba stopped him. "Don't sweat it. They're out there." He meant two uniformed officers who had followed them up the dark coast road in a patrol car.

  "Who's out there?" Gail Ewing asked sharply and tried to push past them to the door.

  Someplace out of
sight and half out of hearing, the dogs began to bark.

  "Take it easy, Mrs. Ewing." Yoshiba stepped in front of her. "We just want to talk to the boy."

  "What do you mean!" Trudy came down the stairs at a run. She was barefoot again, in the same gray bells and appliqued shirt, breasts showing firm through the thin cloth. She didn't wear the sunglasses tonight, though, and the bruises around her eyes, along with the missing teeth, made her young face an old mask. "Talk to him about what? He didn't do anything. He couldn't!"

  "He wasn't here Monday night," Dave said. "Your uncle said you were alone in the house with him when Larry turned up missing. Where was Mark?"

  She said defiantly, "He went to see a man in the Audio-Visual Department at UCLA. Someone he had a letter of introduction to from his department head. He'd been putting it off. That night he decided to go and get it over with."

  "And not take you?" Dave asked.

  "I had to be here." She explained it to him as to a little child. "To look after Tom."

  The door swung inward. They all looked at the black oblong. Sea wind came in and so did two uniformed men holding Mark Dimond by the arms between them. He was bare-chested, barefoot. "He was going to take off, Lieutenant. In the El Camino."

  "Let go of him!" Trudy flung herself at them.

  Yoshiba caught her. "Easy," he said. "It's going to be all right. We just want to ask him a couple of simple questions."

  Trudy stared frightened past the lieutenant's bulky shoulder at the boy with the helmet of black hair. She was asking her own questions. Not aloud. With her eyes.

  Larson said, "You were up at the Wendell house on Monday night, weren't you?"

  Dimond was very pale. "I don't get this," he said. "I don't get this at all." He squinted, twisted his face. "What house?"

  "Wendell. He was killed that night, remember?" Yoshiba said. "A kid who lived here, kid by the name of Larry Johns, is being held for his murder. Does that clear it up for you?"

  "Oh, Christ," Dimond breathed. His eyes were on Trudy's face. They seemed to plead.

  "So you do know who I'm talking about?" Yoshiba asked.

  Dimond tried a mystified laugh. "What would I be doing up there? I went to UCLA that night."

  "Is that right? Did you see the man you had the letter of introduction to? What's his name?"

  Something went out of Dimond's face. "He wasn't there. Nobody was there. But that doesn't mean—"

  "Somebody was at Wendell's," Yoshiba said. "He tells us a pickup with the name Thomas Owens on the door was parked at the foot of the stairs. By the mailboxes. On Pinyon Trail. Mrs. Ewing, here, didn't drive the car. Mr. Owens didn't drive it. He told Brandstetter his niece was here with him that night. She says you weren't. And you do have a key to that car. That's the key, there, in your hand, isn't it?"

  "I want a lawyer," Mark Dimond said.

  "Mark!" Gail Ewing gasped. "Oh, my God!" She was very white. She caught at Larson's arm. He steadied her. Mark Dimond watched her, bewildered.

  "What's wrong with you? You hated Larry Johns as much as I did. More."

  "Oh, but, Mark—the death of an innocent man—"

  "What! What the hell are you saying?" Dimond struggled in the grip of the officers. "Now, wait—wait just a fucking minute, Gail. I didn't kill anyone." He looked wildly from Yoshiba to Larson to Khazoyan to Dave. "I never said that. I didn't, I didn't!" "He didn't,"

  Trudy said. "He couldn't have."

  "Fine," Yoshiba said. "So what were you doing there?"

  Dimond sulked. "I want a lawyer."

  "I think I can tell you what he was doing there," Dave said. "He followed Larry Johns. And he took along his trusty tape recorder. It's a portable, hangs in a case on a shoulder strap. That was what Dwayne Huncie mistook for a woman's handbag when he saw him running off through the trees."

  "That how it was?" Yoshiba asked Dimond. Sick, the boy turned his head. After a moment's disgusted silence he drew breath, let it out and said wearily, "Yeah. I'd brought the dogs inside. There's a room for them at the back, under the carport. And I heard Larry on the kitchen phone. Asking for money. Agreeing to meet this Rick on the coast road, eight that night. It proved what I knew he was." He looked at Trudy. "A hustler. The kind that peddles sex to perverts."

  "You're eating Tom Owens's food," Dave told him. "Sleeping under his roof. That's a hell of a word."

  The dark boy flushed. "Okay. Homosexuals, gays—whatever you want. I'm sorry." He looked at Trudy again. "I told you, but you wouldn't believe me. He was so sweet, he'd had such a lousy life. I had to prove to you what he was. So"—he faced Yoshiba again—"I look my recorder and stood outside Wendell's windows and I got a tape."

  "Mark!" Trudy said. "You didn't! That's revolting. Sneaking, spying. What are you?"

  "In love with you, dummy." Mark struggled to break from the officers again. He said to Yoshiba, "I've still got it. I kept it. Didn't play it for Trudy because after that night Larry was gone anyway. If you'll let me, I'll get it and you can hear it. You'll love it, Trudy. You'll really love your fair-haired cracker when you hear that tape."

  Yoshiba said, "Go with him, Ramirez."

  Minutes later, the tape recorder, black leather case laid open like the lid of a coffin, stood on the big low deal table under the light, its five-inch reels of clear plastic winking as they turned. Gail Ewing sat stone-faced on the long wicker couch, Trudy next to her, biting her nails, watching Mark, who stood over the machine. Yoshiba and Dave flanked him. Larson and Khazoyan stood at the end of the table. The uniformed officers leaned by the front door. Jomay Johns sat in the dark at the top of the stairs with BB asleep in her lap. Their hair glowed like that of angels in a painting darkened by centuries of soot. Dave wished he had a drink.

  The tape stopped hissing to itself. Distances of crickets skirred. There was the far, lost drone of a jet plane. A voice deep and rumbling that still managed to have something feminine about it said, It's in here, safe and sound. I haven't even opened it. Fifteen hundred dollars in small bills. Wasn't that what you said? Paper rattled and tore. See? There. Do you want to count it? Go ahead, count it if you want to. Another rattle of paper.

  Aw, Rick, I don't want to count it, man. This was Larry Johns's voice, hard and echoey in the room. And look, I'll pay it back. I promise. I mean it. There was a knocking sound. Perhaps a shoe had kicked a desk leg. Wendell's voice again above a rustling whisper of cloth: Oh, Larry, no. It's my gift. You don't know what it means to have you come back. How I've dreamed, hoped, wished, prayed. When you phoned today, I cried, I really cried with happiness. I—

  Larry Johns's voice cut across Wendell's. No, I don't take money for sex, Rick. It's a loan, man. I'll get a gig and pay you back. Otherwise—

  All right, Larry, all right. Now just let me hold you. Oh, God. Along silence. A low moaning. Then a whispered, Now, Larry? Please—now? Yes, in here. Yes, yes. A latch rattled, a door swung, brushing carpet, hinges squeaking slightly. A door closed. The crickets went on with their shrill plaintive pulsing. There was a scuff of shoe leather on cement, a crackling of leaves under soles. The tape clicked. The empty hissing started again. Mark Dimond leaned, reached, punched a plastic key. The reels halted.

  Yoshiba stood frowning for a moment in the sea-sighing silence, then touched the machine with a shoe. "They don't exactly beat the camera, do they? What went with the dialogue?"

  Dimond flushed darkly, shifted his feet, rubbed his smooth brown chest. "Well—he, uh, took the envelope out of his jacket. He tore it open and took out packs of bills. He tried to give them to Larry but he wouldn't touch them. So the big stud, Wendell—he, like, thumbed the edges, you know? As if to show Larry the bread was all there or something—right?" The dark boy gestured uneasily. "What do you want me to say? I mean, okay, he dropped the envelope and money on the desk and—" Dimond glanced unhappily at Gail and Trudy on the couch, up into the dimness where Jomay sat silent. "Well, it was kind of freaky to watch, you know? Made me feel a little nauseated. I
mean, he started running his hands over Larry. Like he was a girl. Wow! Through his hair and all that." Dimond looked at the floor, blew air out through his nostrils, mumbled, "Held his head, tipped it back, you know, and kissed him on the mouth. Took him in his arms, you know?" Dimond looked up. "Hell, Lieutenant, I don't want to—"

  "Yeah, okay, kid. They went into the other room?"

  "Right. And I was relieved when they did."

  "And you left, did you?" Dave wondered.

  "I wanted to but the windows on that other room were open too because it was a hot night. I knew I ought to go there if I was going to get real proof for Trudy. And I took a step in that direction when I see the door from outside open and this lifelike, inflatable Gabby Hayes pokes his head in. Whiskers, chewing tobacco—you could smell stockyards twenty feet off. He takes a quick look around, walks straight to the desk, picks up the bread, and walks out with it. Wow! I didn't know what to do. I couldn't do anything, could I? I mean, I was in a very ridiculous position."

  "That wouldn't be my word," Dave said.

  "It was contemptible." Trudy sprang up and walked into the dark. "Disgusting. It makes me sick."

  Yoshiba said, "So you ran, did you?"

  Dimond was looking worriedly after Trudy. "What? Yeah, I ran. Waited up in the trees till I heard his truck drive off down the road. Then I got out of there."

  Yoshiba looked at Larson. "I want to book him on failure to report a felony."

  Larson glanced at the beautiful expensive room. "He'd be out on O.R. tomorrow morning." He put the Little League cap on again. "Waste of time."

  "Nobody saw him leave," Yoshiba said.

  "Ho," Larson said. "You want to book him for the murder? You'd have to let Johns out, then."

  Khazoyan said, "That sounds good to me."

  "Forget it," Yoshiba said.

  "I should think so," Gail Ewing said indignantly.

  "Just don't go anywhere," Yoshiba told Mark Dimond.

  CHAPTER 12