Fadeout: A Dave Brandstetter Mystery

by Joseph Hansen

  Thome’s mouth went bitter in the firelight. “Of course. He would have told him.”

  “He was too decent to tell you. Till it was over.”

  McNeil sat cross-legged on the hearth, big, handsome, assured. “Decent?” he scoffed.

  “Damn decent. And a lot of other old-fashioned words. Kind. Faithful.” They didn’t like that one. So he told them the Ito incident. “And it was the same when Doug Sawyer came. Sawyer wanted him. He wanted Sawyer. But he sent him away. For you. Both of you. Even knowing what was going on between you . . . It’s rude as hell, but we all know manners aren’t what they once were. . . . Why, when everything was coming your way, when everything you’d dreamed of for him came true—why did you stop with him?”

  “It is rude,” Thorne said. “But at least you care, which is more than he did. Or seemed to.” She got up from the couch, walked to the edge of the firelight and stood gazing down the room to where the flames were reflected in the glass doors to the patio. She said, as if reciting something long memorized, “He needed me. All those years. Trying and trying and getting nowhere. He needed me. Then . . . he didn’t need me anymore.” She gave a sad shrug.

  “Some marriages,” Dave said, “should be called on account of darkness.”

  “That’s very clever.” She came back into the light. “And very true. I thought I was making him happy. He thought he was making me happy. And we were both wrong.” She blinked into the fire. “Neither of us got what we wanted. Not for each other. Not for ourselves.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Dave said. “You got McNeil.”

  She turned sharply, stung. “He got Doug Sawyer.”

  “Not soon,” Dave said. “And not for long.”

  “For a lifetime,” she snapped. “Not that I was bright enough to realize it.” Her laugh had a rusty edge. “Twenty-four years and I never understood. The shine in his eyes when he used to talk about him . . . Of course he was in love with him. Had been long before I met him. Would be forever.” The hurt was still new, still raw. She dropped down by McNeil. His arm went around her. He drew her head against his chest, stroked her hair. She gave a long trembling sigh. “How good it is not to have to be the strong one anymore.”

  “They’re all alike,” McNeil said. “No guts.”

  “I’m sorry about your bad luck with your son,” Dave said. “But you don’t want to let it short-circuit your brain. Olson had guts.”

  “Not enough to knock Chalmers down and take those pictures away from him.”

  “Knocking people down doesn’t occur to everybody as a way of solving problems.”

  “It doesn’t occur to faggots,” McNeil said.

  “I can name you a welterweight faggot who beat an opponent to death in the ring a couple of years ago. . . . But I’m interested in your philosophy. Does it extend to guns? Are they another problem-solving device you endorse?”

  McNeil’s eyes narrowed. “What the hell do you mean?”

  Dave tilted the little globe, watching the brandy swirl in the red firelight. “Say the little .32 Fox Olson was cleaning when you got to his room last night.”

  McNeil started to get up.

  “No . . .” Thome’s bandaged hand stopped him. “He wasn’t cleaning the gun. He wasn’t there. No one was. The door was standing open. It was the loneliest-looking place I ever saw. He’d tacked a note to the door. Felt pen on yellow paper.”

  Dave nodded. “ ‘On the pier.’ Right?”

  She frowned. “Yes. How . . . did you know?”

  “Terry saw it. And her boyfriend. She made him drive her to Bell Beach. I take it he couldn’t leave until his shift was up. They got there after you. The papers were still smoking. When did you leave here?”

  She grimaced. “I . . . hate the mail. Fox loved it, adored all those funny little people with their grubby little pencils.”

  “Pretended to,” McNeil growled.

  “Yes . . . that’s right—pretended to.” She gave a wan headshake. “Anyway, I didn’t want to face it. And I found other things to do. Nothing things. For hours. Finally, long after Terry left, I went out and tackled it. But it was three by the time I found Fox’s letter. Since it was addressed to me, I should have guessed Terry had been up to something. She normally sets my mail aside. This was in with all the fan mail.” Her mouth made a thin, pained line. “God, when will it ever stop?”

  “I wouldn’t have gone,” McNeil said. “He was drunk when he wrote it. He was probably already sorry he had. But Thorne insisted.”

  “So you left when?” Dave asked. “It was before four. I tried to telephone you then. From Los Angeles. About something that doesn’t matter anymore.”

  “Ten minutes to four,” McNeil said. “But I fouled up the detail. Drove a good twenty miles past it on the freeway. Had to backtrack. Must have been nine-thirty by the time we got there. Hell of a place to find.”

  “A lot of people found it,” Dave said.

  “And so there was the note,” Thome said. “And we went out on the pier. And he was there. . . .” Her voice wobbled. She got up and went quickly into the dark. “Dead.”

  “Under the Chute.” Dave tilted his head at the blank chimney facing. “What happened to it, by the way?” He raised eyebrows at McNeil. “Your incendiary propensities at work again?”

  “If you mean did I burn it”—McNeil scowled—“hell, yes, I burned it. Why should she be reminded?”

  “It was a good painting,” Dave said.

  “Not when you knew what it meant.”

  “Yup.” Dave set down the brandy. It didn’t taste good anymore. “So you left him lying there. Right? He was great, wasn’t he, as long as he was making a mint for you? He was great to be so obliging about his wife—” A sharp sound came from Thorne somewhere. “But when he turned out to be queer, and a murdered queer at that, very possibly murdered by another queer . . . then he wasn’t a friend anymore, a husband anymore. He was just another corpse, like some dead wino in a skid-row doorway.”

  “That was what he wanted,” McNeil said stubbornly. “That was why he left Pima—to protect Thorne and the rest of us. You don’t know what a scandal like that can mean. I do. The one over Tad killed my father. . . . We didn’t have any choice. We had to leave him there. To have gone to the authorities would have canceled out what he himself did, made it worthless, meaningless.”

  “Neat.” Dave stood. “All right. You live with it. I’m glad I don’t have to.” He headed for the hall, the way out. Thorne stood there in the dark, hunched, miserable.

  “There’ll be a scandal anyway,” she said tonelessly.

  “Just one nice thing,” Dave said. “It can’t hurt Fox Olson. Not now.”

  He went out and shut the door.

  21

  The shack slept under its ragged walnut trees. He put the car where he had put it last time. He climbed the broken stoop again and rapped the new aluminum screen door. But no light went on. Nobody came. In the weeds ten acres of crickets sang. The sky was the scoured black of an iron frying pan, with stars like spilled salt. He knocked again. Waited. Nothing. Frowning, he opened the screen and tried the warped door. Locked. He left the stoop then and, stumbling on rutted ground, walked around the shack. The kitchen door was locked too. But from a window at the far back yellow light poured. Buddy’s window? He found a weathered orange crate and stood on it.

  The boy sat in the shiny wheelchair. Still dressed. His face was white with tiredness. Dave rapped the glass. The beautiful head came around in an agonized twist and after a blank second a smile of recognition worked the mouth. But the rain-colored eyes didn’t smile. They were frantic. The window lacked half an inch of being shut. Dave wedged his fingers under. It went up easily but started down again right away, shuddering in the crooked frame. It made climbing through awkward. His knee toppled a stack of paperback books.

  “What goes on? I thought your bedtime was nine.”

  “It is. Look . . . can I ask you . . .” The young face colored. “I
. . . need to go to . . .”

  “The bathroom,” Dave said. “Sure.”

  He pushed the wheelchair. When he had the boy set on the fixture, he went through the house. Angry, moving fast. In the front room he found Mildred Mundy. She was sprawled face down on the sofa in her pink kimono. A wine bottle had dropped from her puffy fingers. It lay on the braided rug. Some of the contents had spilled. The room stank of muscatel. He shook her. The loose flesh shuddered but the bloated face was inert. Saliva ran from a corner of her mouth. She wouldn’t be any good—not for hours. The television was on. No sound. Just the picture. An old gangster movie. He shut it off and returned to the bathroom. Getting the pants back up the sad useless little legs, setting the boy back in the wheelchair, he grated:

  “Where the hell is your brother? Where’s Gretchen? How could they do this to you?”

  “Gretchen didn’t . . . know . . . Mama had . . . mon . . . ey for wine. If she . . . does . . . n’t . . . have wine . . . she’s all . . . right.”

  Dave found pajamas on a hook on the inside of the closet door. He laid them on the bed and began helping Buddy off with his sweatshirt. This wasn’t the bright-red company one. This one was gray, much washed, much mended. Getting it off wasn’t easy. But they managed. Getting the pajama top on was even harder. But the boy was stoic with the spindly arms that wouldn’t move where he asked them to, the shining head that refused to hold still on its frail childish neck. And if Buddy had the patience for a lifetime of this, Dave had it for one night. The pajama pants were easier. And there was no problem about lifting him into bed. He weighed next to nothing.

  In the time it took, Dave learned that Mama got the money for wine in nickels and pennies from the grocery change. Phil and Gretchen both worked. They had to let her do at least some of the shopping. She hid the coins sly places until she had sixty-nine cents. Then, when they turned their backs, she got her bottle. Once she had it, you couldn’t take it away from her. The times they’d tried, she’d been too terrible. Broke things, burned things. You had to let her drink it. But . . . she didn’t always drink. Only sometimes. When she was upset.

  “What’s upset her now? Fox Olson’s death?” He said it harshly and wished he hadn’t because it made the boy close his eyes as if he’d been slapped. But they were clear when he opened them. He knew how to handle hurt.

  “No,” he said. “Some . . . thing’s wr . . . ong with Phil.” Phil had been tense, worried, not eating. Short-tempered too. He’d sworn at his mother, snarled at Buddy, slapped Gretchen. Maybe it was a good thing he wasn’t home much. He waited for the mail each morning. “He’s ex . . . pecting some . . . thing that . . . does . . . n’t come.”

  “It will be addressed to Gretchen when it does,” Dave said grimly.

  “You mean,” Buddy asked, “Fox’s . . . life in . . . surance?”

  Dave nodded. “Go on. What happens after the mail?”

  “He works . . . at Chal . . . mers Con . . . struc . . . tion Company.” There was pride in Buddy’s eyes. “He’s the . . . chief ac . . . count . . . ant.” After five he went to the apartment he was building. He worked every evening there. And weekends. Last night he hadn’t come home till two. That was why Gretchen wasn’t here now. She said he was making himself sick with overwork. She’d gone to get him, make him come home. “But that . . . was hours . . . ago.”

  The sheet was clean but tired and patched. The blankets were thin cotton. He tucked them around the boy’s shoulders. The cheap metal reflector lamp stood on the work-table shining on a plastic hot-rod model only partly assembled. Dave turned off the lamp.

  “Where is this apartment?”

  “Ar . . . royo Str . . . eet. Two elev . . . en.”

  “Thanks. You want this door open or shut?”

  “Shut, pl . . . ease.” But would Dave leave the bathroom light on and the door open? Sometimes Mama needed it in the night. She got sick. “But . . . this morn . . . ing it was Phil. When the news . . . came on the tele . . . vision . . . that Mr. Chal . . . mers was dead . . . Phil got ver . . . y . . . sick.”

  Arroyo Street was an unlighted strip of blacktop between orange groves, the trees sprawling, neglected. At places they’d been bulldozed out to make lots for houses not yet built. There were no sidewalks. Brush edged the tarmac. At crossroads, clumps of eucalyptus towered, shaggy black against the sky. Not much farther and Arroyo Street would end. At the river. He slowed to turn around. Then he saw the apartment.

  Raw new, two-story, wrapped in tar paper and chicken wire, it was scaffolded around by two-by-fours and planks. A hot naked worklight hung from a rafter end at a corner of the roof. It glared on Phil Mundy. Stripped to the waist, slick with sweat, he troweled and spread green stucco. Relentless, desperate. The scaffold shuddered. Below him on ground littered with lumber scraps, sand, bent nails and sawdust, a noisy one-cylinder gas motor turned the dribbling barrel of a mixer. Frail and incongruous in a mini-dress with swirls of bright color, Gretchen hauled a heavy bucket up a ladder.

  “Phil,” she shouted above the pop and splutter of the mixer, “please, Phil, I can’t. I just can’t. You’ve got to quit now. You can’t do it all.”

  He heard her but he didn’t pay any attention. Blank-eyed, completely self-absorbed, he knelt and reached down and grabbed the full bucket by its handle and pushed an empty one at her and got up and swung at the wall again. She came down drooping, head hanging, and stumbled toward the mixer. Dave went to her.

  “Did you get a letter from your father? Wednesday morning?”

  She was too tired to be startled. Her eyes were dull. She shook her head numbly. She said, “Have you brought the insurance check? Fox is dead now. You know that.” She looked up at Phil, squinting her eyes against the blaze of light.

  The bright torso moved, stooped, straightened, swung. The stucco grated under the trowel. Green blotted out the tar paper in wide, curved swaths. Like a flag of truce, a shirt hung from the scaffold. Dave looked around for a jacket. It was hunched on a handle of an upended wheelbarrow. There was a dim, chalky line across its front. He said to Gretchen:

  “You’d better go home. Your mother-in-law’s passed out, courtesy Gallo Brothers. Someone should be there with Buddy.”

  “Oh, God.” She picked up a flame-colored coat from a sawhorse. “Thanks. How did you know?”

  “I’m tracing some letters your father wrote. Your mother got one. Hap Loomis got one. I thought you might have. I went to your house to ask.” He told her what he’d found. “Go along. I’ll talk Phil down.”

  Her smile was hopeless. “You’re a nice man, but I doubt you can do that. Not without the check. I . . .” The smile died completely. “I’m afraid he’s . . . like, cracking up, Mr. Brandstetter. I’m kind of frightened.”

  “Is he trying to finish the place single-handed?”

  “He had to let the crew go. No money to pay them. Oh, he kept one man. But he won’t work twenty-four hours a day. Phil’s trying. But it’s killing him. He was white as a ghost when he got home last night. Two A.M. Just before” —she looked away into the darkness—“Captain Herrera came about Fox.” There was an ache in her voice.

  “Go home.” Dave took the coat out of her hands and hung it on her shoulders. “If your mother-in-law should half wake up and try to smoke a cigarette . . .”

  “I’m going.” But she held on a moment, gazing up at him, troubled. A lot of questions were in her eyes. She was too tired to ask them. When she turned to call to Phil, Dave said:

  “He can’t hear you. I’ll explain. Run along.”

  She went, tottering in ridiculous pointed-toed, flame-colored shoes. A minute after the car’s taillights faded among the orange trees, Phil turned and slammed the trowel into the empty pail. He scowled into the dark.

  “God damn it, Gretchen, where’s the next bucket?”

  Dave found the switch. The mixer motor banged, coughed and quit. “No more buckets,” Dave said into the silence. “Come down, Mundy. It’s all over.”
/>   Phil stood very still. “Who is that? Where’s . . . ?” Then, expressionless, he moved, quick and sure, along the shaky plank to the ladder. He came down it fast and easy. He didn’t look at Dave. He headed for the machine. “You shouldn’t have stopped it. I’ve got a lot more to do.” He reached for the flywheel.

  Dave caught his arm. “Too much,” he said. “You’ve run out of time. Anybody in his right mind would have left town hours ago. No forwarding address.”

  Phil didn’t hear him. “Before it rains again.”

  “I’ll see they get the word.”

  “Who?” Dully, still staring at the machine.

  “Whoever takes over. Chalmers Company, I expect.”

  “He’s dead,” Phil said. “Where’s . . . Gretchen?”

  “Your mother’s drunk again. I sent Gretchen home to look after Buddy. I would have sent her home anyway. She wouldn’t want to hear this.”

  For the first time Phil looked at Dave. With a kid’s face waking. “Hear what?”

  “The true story of Phil Mundy. Who hated being the bastard son of the town’s wartime glad girl. Who had brains and ambition. Not too much of the first, far too much of the second. Who was going to show them all. Who was going to beat the man he worked for at his own game. Who married what he thought was a lot of money, only to find out her grandfather wasn’t about to part with any of it. Not to Phil Mundy, the boy who was smart with figures. Nor her father either.”

  “Fox would,” Phil said. “He would have. It was Thorne. She hated me for marrying Gretchen. Fox was the only one in my life who didn’t spit on me.”

  “So you couldn’t get the money you thought you’d married. And you were in trouble. Because to start this place—to show Gretchen what a fireball she’d be getting if she married you—to start this place you embezzled money from Chalmers. Right? I don’t know how much, but too much for you to replace on your own hook.”

  “They’ll tell you,” Phil said in a dead boy voice. He sat down on the hard gray tire of the mixer. “Tomorrow. The state auditors. They wouldn’t have been in for another six weeks. If Lloyd hadn’t been killed.” He hung his head again.