Early Graves (18 page)

“We’ll all stay here together,” Gerda Nilson said.

“No. I’m not putting the children through that. The cruelty’s already started at school. Take them to Minneapolis now. You promised. I’ll clear things up here, sell the house, and come along back there as soon as I can.”

Gerda Nilson’s voice was harsh with tears. “I could kill that man for what he did to you.”

Dave stepped down into the lanai and pulled the house door shut behind him.

T
HE SHADOW OF THE
church had turned and shortened. It fell on the cars in the parking lot now, Dave’s brown Jaguar, and the off-white LAPD car. The detective with the moustache stood beside this one, smoking a cigarette, and talking to Tom Owens. Owens had shed the trenchcoat but still wore the Irish hat. Dave parked the BMW, took the keys from the ignition, climbed out of the car, slammed the door, and walked over to the men.

“They said you were slippery.” The detective pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his nose. “But you shouldn’t have done it to me.” He pushed the handkerchief away. “You shouldn’t have involved Mr. Owens, here. You know that.”

“And I apologize,” Dave said. “But let’s count our blessings—I wasn’t shot and I wasn’t stabbed.” He brought out the letters—both typewritten on crisp stationery—and peered at them. The one with Berman’s letterhead he passed to the detective. “Call Lieutenant Leppard about this man. He’ll want to question him.”

The detective sneezed. “Damn. I think I’m getting a cold.” He got the handkerchief out again, sneezed again, blew his nose, put the handkerchief away. He dropped his cigarette, stepped on it, read the letter and blinked at Dave, tilting his head. “Where did you get this?”

“You don’t want the to answer that,” Dave said. “Berman came after it himself. I got it just in time.”

“I’m sketchy on the case,” the detective said. “What does it mean?” Dave told him what it meant, and added, “He may be lying about the boy. He may have hired the boy to scare Dodge. And the gun made it turn out wrong.”

“I’ll go myself,” the detective said. He shook Dave’s hand. “Morales,” he said. He walked around to the driver side of the car, opened the door, paused. “Where do I catch up with you?”

“The Oaktree Inn. I’ll light there sometime.”

Morales nodded. “I’ll spot your car. There aren’t a lot like it. Be careful, now, all right?”

“Arrest Berman, why don’t you?” Dave said. “The scare might do him good. Witnesses to murder are supposed to come forward. Aren’t they?”

“I can’t arrest him,” Morales said. “Wrong jurisdiction. I’ll turn him over to the local authority, whoever that is.”

“County sheriff,” Dave said. “The station faces the town square. On the west side.”

“Thanks.” Morales got into his car. The motor thrashed raggedly to life. He backed out of the parking slot, clanked the gears, rolled onto the empty highway.

“I thought you’d never come back,” Tom Owens said.

“I’m sorry to have worried you,” Dave said. “I hope Morales didn’t get too unpleasant.”

“Only with himself.” Owens grinned. “Nobody likes to be made a fool of. He cussed himself out. Spanish is not invariably the loving tongue.” He passed the hat back to Dave, ran fingers through his hair. “Where did you go?”

Dave told him. “Dodge gave his wife AIDS.”

“Dear God,” Owens said. “He can’t have meant to. Can he?” The yellow eyes pleaded for an assurance no one could give. “It’s easy to have it and not know. That’s what’s so horrible about it.”

“One of the things that’s so horrible about it.” Dave laid the BMW keys in Owens’s hand. “Thanks for your help. It was even more important than I thought.”

“You’re not coming back with me to the beach?”

“I’d like that,” Dave said. “Thanks. But there’s another of Dodge’s victims I have to talk to.”

“You really going to put up at a motel?” Owens gazed around him at the valley, the green hills hemming it in, the emptiness. “With television for company?”

“Not if I can help it,” Dave said. “Tell Larry to mat those watercolors of his he’s got in the workroom. I want to buy them.”

Owens’s face lit up. “He’ll be thrilled.” He moved off to the BMW and got inside. “That’s a nice gesture.”

“It’s no gesture.” Dave walked to him, fitting on the hat. “When I got home, I’d regret I hadn’t brought them along. Didn’t you ever see anything, and know you couldn’t be happy without it?”

“Yes—Larry.” Owens laughed, closed the car door, then rolled the window down, stuck out a hand. “Almost forgot your keys. We’ll see you then, on your way home?”

“I like to think so.” Dave took the keys, backed away from the BMW. Smiling, Owens started it up, reversed it, guided it out of the silent parking lot onto the empty highway. It headed south after Morales. Dave watched it diminish, then went to a telephone sheltered by an open-sided glass-and-steel box next to the rear door of the church. He put in a collect call to Amanda at her busy shop on Rodeo Drive, and after that to Cecil at the apartment in Mar Vista. To tell them where he was, so they wouldn’t worry if they found the place on Horseshoe Canyon Trail empty. They asked for explanations. He didn’t explain. “But I think it’s nearly over. You develop a sense about these things, after a while. I’m getting close.”

“Be careful,” Amanda said. “Are the police with you?”

“Detective Morales,” Dave said. “Don’t worry.”

“How do I get there?” Cecil said. “Wait for me. You shouldn’t be alone.”

“I’m glad you realize that,” Dave said, and hung up.

Tall, blond, gangly, a figure in white tennis shorts, white short-sleeved shirt, lobbed a fuzzy yellow ball across a green net. Rubber soles squeaked on the composition surface of the court. The player on the far side was a boy of maybe thirteen, blond also, cream-skinned, blue-eyed, but he hadn’t got his growth yet, nor lost his baby fat. The hair of the tall one was long and straight and held by a headband. When little brother ignored the ball, let it bounce past him to the tall hedge that backed the yard, and pointed his racket at Dave, she turned. It was a she. Maybe seventeen. She squinted in the sun glare.

“Can I help you?”

“Senator Bud Hollywell,” Dave said. “I telephoned his office in Sacramento. They said he was at home.”

“He’s talking to a businessmen’s luncheon,” she said, “in Agoura Hills.” She read a tiny gold watch on a skinny wrist. “He won’t be home for hours.”

Dave took out his wallet, thumbed a card from it, handed it to her. “Give him this, will you please? Tell him to expect me back. When? Around dinnertime?”

“I guess so,” she said, shook back her hair, gave him a smile of straight, white teeth. She wore no makeup, her chest was flat, her hips narrow. In jeans, she could pass herself off as a boy with no trouble. “I’ll give it to him,” she said. “What’s it about?”

“The death of Drew Dodge,” Dave said.

Her face clouded. She glanced over her shoulder. Her brother was poking around the roots of the hedge, looking for the ball. She said softly to Dave, “Did you know he was gay? He had AIDS?”

“If I hadn’t already known it,” Dave said, “I’d have guessed it at the funeral. Nobody came.”

“My father had this luncheon meeting. It’s a long drive. There wasn’t time.”

“Do you know if he’d seen Mr. Dodge lately?” Dave said. “After Dodge got out of the hospital—just before he was killed? Had he come here to see your father? On business?”

“It would have had to be on business,” she said. “They weren’t friends or anything.” She stressed this. She didn’t want a stranger getting wrong ideas about her father. “I don’t think he came here. I didn’t see him.”

“Do you go down to Los Angeles a lot?” Dave said.

“What for?” She made a face. “The smog?”

“I just had an idea I’d seen you in Los Angeles lately.”

“Not me.” She gave her head a firm shake. Her long hair swung. “We moved here years ago to get away from all that. This is lovely. I’ll never go back.”

“Ma-til-da!” Her brother had found the tennis ball, and stood bouncing it with his racket. “Are we playing tennis or what? I can always go back to my computer, you know.”

“Just a minute,” she called.

“You like sports,” Dave said. “Do you take any defense training, karate, that kind of thing?”

“I’m too tall for my age group,” she said. “You have to be the right size to match up with the other kids. I’m never the right size. For anything.”

“What about knife fighting?” Dave looked away, at treetops, at the sky. “Anyone around here teach that?”

“Knife fighting?” She gave an audible shudder. “No. I never heard of anything like that. Not in this valley.”

“It’s cattle country,” Dave said. “Knives are standard equipment in cattle country.”

“No. I never did any knife fighting. Who are you, anyway? What kind of question is that?”

“If you don’t know”—Dave smiled at her—“then I’m sorry for asking.” He turned to leave, turned back. “But it’s important I see your father. He wrote a letter to Drew Dodge. He’ll want to explain it.”

“My father is a fine man,” she flared. “A wonderful man. Don’t you go making any trouble for him.”

“I’ll be back around five.” Dave walked away.

The slow
pock, pock
of the tennis ball took up again behind him.

The name of the paper was lettered in Gothic inside a plate of glass that fronted the offices,
THE WEATHERVANE
. The lettering formed an arc over a drawing in black and gold of a weathervane. Nothing like spelling things out for the folks. The office was a storefront that faced the town square. Across the square, beyond the big dark old trees and the seesaws, swings, jungle gyms, beyond the boys teetering on skateboards around the lacy steel band pavilion, rose the hardware store, Drew Dodge’s lifeless offices above it. To Dave’s left, catty corner, the sheriff’s substation was housed in brown brick.

A counter crossed the front room of the newspaper offices. Beyond desks that held computer terminals or typewriters and slag heaps of paper was a Masonite partition. When Dave stood at the counter, where advertising rate sheets covered in yellowing plastic were fastened down with aged and curling transparent tape, he saw a pressroom through an opening in the partition. Offset presses whirred. A young man with a boil on the nape of his neck rattled the keyboard of a typesetting computer.

A man got up from a desk and came to the counter. He was stocky, wore plain steel-rim spectacles and a bushy red beard. He was bald on top, but the fringe of hair he still had grew long down over the collar of his checkered wool shirt. Dave took him for about forty. The 1960s had formed him. That was what his appearance said. He smiled with small, badly aligned teeth. It was the smile of a man naturally cheerful, naturally optimistic. That was, of course, too easy a judgment. Anybody trying to make a living off operating a small-town weekly newspaper simply had to be like that. “What can I do for you?” he said.

“Pete McCaffrey?” Dave held out the folder with his private investigator’s license in it. “I’m making some inquiries into the death of Drew Dodge. They tell me you were good friends.”

McCaffrey dropped the smile. Not out of decorum. “Look,” he said, “I didn’t know he was gay. Never. He never dropped a hint.”

“I didn’t see you at the funeral,” Dave said.

“It’s—it’s publication day. Busiest day of my week. We go to press tonight. I have easy days. But not this one. I was here at five this morning. I’ll be here till five tomorrow morning. No way could I get to the church.”

“I don’t think you’d have gone if it was an easy day,” Dave said. “I think you’re scared of what people would think.”

McCaffrey grimaced. “That’s one of the joys of running a small-town paper. If you look cross-eyed at somebody, they pull their advertising.”

“And if they got even the faintest idea that you were gay because of your association with Drew Dodge—?”

McCaffrey drew a stubby finger across his thick throat. “Yeah. Right. It makes a man ashamed of himself. Time was when I wouldn’t have given a damn.”

“When you wrote for the LA
Free Press
?” Dave grinned.

McCaffrey snorted. “It was
Open City,
but you’ve got the idea. Yeah, if I was dying, I’d have crawled out of bed to go to that funeral. Shit.” He wagged his head.

“Let me guess—you’ve got a family to support,” Dave said. “Responsibilities. You have to think of consequences now. The years make us cautious.”

“Yeah, well, it’s nice of you to put it that way,” McCaffrey said, “but I’m not proud of myself.”

A sixtyish woman, straw-colored hair pulled up on her head, had been rattling away at one of the scarred IBM Selectrics on a desk, copying from a dog-eared pocket notebook. Now she took off her half-moon glasses, rose, and came to McCaffrey with a question. When she’d gone back to her desk, the telephone on the counter rang, and McCaffrey talked into it for a while. Dave turned and watched small children in red and green padded jackets and jeans swing in the park. He also saw Morales lead an arm-waving Murray Berman into the sheriff’s office. McCaffrey hung up, read his watch.

“What’s on your mind?” he said. “I have to get to work.”

“Dodge left an envelope with you, didn’t he,” Dave said, “only days before he was killed? What did it say on it—‘To be opened in case of my death?’”

McCaffrey took a step backward. “Jesus,” he said. “Who the hell are you, anyway? How did you know that?”

“I didn’t. I’m guessing. But I’m guessing right, no? Is that what was written on it?”

“Nothing was written on it,” McCaffrey said. “He just gave it to me and said, ‘Keep this, Pete, and if anything should happen to me, open it and publish it.’”

“Something happened to him,” Dave said. “Did you publish it?”

“I forgot all about it,” McCaffrey said. “When he brought it in out of the rain, it was one of those days like today. My mind was on a thousand details here, and we had a computer breakdown, and the repairman was late.” He went to his desk, pulled open a rattly drawer. “I dropped it in here and didn’t think any more about it.” He rummaged an envelope out from others in the drawer, banged the drawer shut, brought the envelope back to the counter, scowling at it.
DREW DODGE ASSOCIATES
was printed in the upper left corner. The red-bearded man turned the envelope over and over in his fingers. He peered through the little lenses at Dave. “Do you think I ought to open it? Maybe I ought to phone my lawyer. Maybe I should give it to the sheriff.”