Early Graves (2 page)

“They didn’t.” Dave sniffed his fingers. They smelled of the man’s cologne. And tobacco. He lit a cigarette and waited, phone to his ear, to get through to Jefferson Leppard, Lieutenant, Homicide Division, LAPD. Leppard was a blunt-shaped, blunt-spoken young black with a passion for high-style clothes. “Brandstetter?” he said. “I hope it’s simple.”

“I doubt it,” Dave said. “I have a body for you.”

“What kind of body?” Leppard said.

“The dead kind,” Dave said. “Sitting in my patio.”

“I meant, give me a description,” Leppard said.

“Male, well-dressed, about thirty-five years old, fair hair, weight about one thirty, height about five eleven, a stab wound in the chest.”

“You didn’t touch it.” Leppard sounded alarmed.

“I only touched his skin to check his temperature,” Dave said. “He didn’t have a temperature.”

“Right,” Leppard said. “This sounds like number six.”

“I guess you’ll have to explain that to me,” Dave said.

Cecil came down the stairs at a loose-jointed run, sideways, two steps at a time. He lifted the coat from Dave’s shoulders, took it to a standing rack by the bar under the north sleeping loft. He hung the coat up, and began to rattle bottles. Dave sat in the desk chair and told Leppard:

“I’ve been out of town. Up in Fresno for a week. On a case. Arson to cover murder. I just now got back. Cecil picked me up at the airport. What do you mean—number six?”

“We have a new crazy in town,” Leppard said. “Serial killer. All stabbings, quick and clean and deadly.”

“That’s how this one looks—very little blood.”

“Victims all young males, in West LA and Hollywood mostly. Any reason for this one to end up at your place?”

“He had my business card,” Dave said, “but I don’t know him. He must have got the card from someone else.”

“Are you gay?” Leppard said.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Dave said.

Leppard laughed. “Sorry about that. But it’s the connection. All the victims have been gay. We’ve checked them all out. Families, friends, fellow workers, lovers, bars, bathhouses, hospitals.”

“Hospitals?” Dave said.

“That’s the other connection,” Leppard said. “That’s why I was worried you might have touched the wound. It’s blood that transmits the virus.”

“Are you talking about AIDS?” Dave said.

“They all had it,” Leppard said. “Every damned one.”

“You coming to collect him?” Dave said.

“With my latex gloves,” Leppard said, and hung up.

Cecil set a snifter on the desk. The brandy in it had a golden glow. Dave lifted the fragile bulb of glass and studied it. “Isn’t this for after lunch?”

“I’m not staying for lunch. It’s brandy because you said it’s our last drink, and brandy was what we drank first, the night I blew in here four years ago. Never had brandy before. Remember that night? You got home late. I’d waited hours for you. Sat out there where that dead man is sitting now. In the night like him. Cold like him.”

“Not cold like him,” Dave said. “Cheers.”

“Yeah,” Cecil said glumly, “cheers.”

And they drank together.

L
EPPARD DRESSED SUBDUED TODAY
, to match the weather—eggshell brown oxford shirt, knitted tie and sweater in cinnamon, charcoal gray two-piece suit, Tuscan brown shoes. A clear plastic raincoat protected his clothes. They merited protection—he had a month’s wages on his stocky body. A detective named Samuels arrived with him, a pale, fleshy youth in a fly-front coat. A lab man named Funt stepped around in puddles and snapped photographs of the dead man on the bench. Then he used a grubby little battery-powered vacuum cleaner on the dead man’s clothes, scraped his shoe soles, clipped fingernails and hair.

Carlyle was the medical examiner. Dave had met him a number of times over the years. He had his helpers move the plants off the bench and do what they could to change the position of the body. Rigor mortis made the change grotesque. Dave turned away. So did Leppard. They walked out to the front, which was crowded by an unmarked police car, a black-and-white with a light strip on its roof, Carlyle’s car, and a coroner’s wagon. Two young uniformed officers sat in the black-and-white. Leppard leaned down and talked to them.

He looked at his gold Rolex, and walked back into the courtyard. Carlyle adjusted the clothes on the corpse and closed his kit. A bony man with gray skin and long teeth, he told Leppard, “Body’s lost all heat.” Rain beaded his glasses. He took them off and dried them on a handkerchief. “Stomach contents will tell me the time of death when I get him downtown. But it sure as hell won’t be breakfast. He didn’t arrive here this morning. He arrived in the night.”

Funt’s bulbous nose was red. He blew it on tissues and stuffed the tissues into a black raincoat pocket. He had a rubbery look, did Funt. His necktie knot was always crooked. “He didn’t die here.” Funt’s voice was a wheeze. “There’s grease, grit, old tire residue on him. He was stabbed in a garage, parking facility, maybe the street.” He held up flakes of yellow in a plastic pouch. “Off his shoes.”

“Some kind of flower?” Leppard said.

“Locust tree.” Funt coughed. “At a guess.”

Leppard grunted thanks, and now it was his turn with the body. He pulled a watch from a wrist, a chain from around the dead man’s neck, rifled pockets for keys, coins, checkbook, wallet, an amber vial of pills. He opened the wallet and frowned. “No money. That’s a switch. None of the other victims was robbed.” Leppard passed a driver’s license to Dave. Harold Andrew Dodge, born September 10, 1954. The photo showed a man thirty pounds heavier than this one but the same, no mistake. The address was in Rancho Vientos, formerly Fergus Oaks, now an expensive development. Dave gave the license back to Leppard, and put away his reading glasses. “I still don’t know him.”

“Ever heard the name?” Leppard tucked the license back into the wallet. “Still can’t say how he came by your card?”

“Never heard the name,” Dave said. “Still can’t say.”

The two men from the coroner’s wagon were young, one Asian, one Latino. The Asian had skin like ivory. The Latino’s face was scarred by acne. He was trying to grow a beard to cover the scars, but the hairs were sparse and silky. He said, “Lieutenant, can we have the body now?” A body bag hung folded over his arm. A collapsed gurney leaned against the leg of the Asian kid, raindrops twinkling on its chrome-plated frame.

When Leppard nodded his head, the Asian kid clicked and clacked the gurney open. The Latino boy laid the body bag on it and ran its zipper down. The Asian boy took the rigid shell of Harold Andrew Dodge in its rain-sodden clothes under its arms, the Latino lad took it under the bent knees, and they shifted it onto the gurney on its side, and worked the body bag over it and zipped the body bag. They wheeled the gurney away, rattling and tilting over the uneven bricks. “What about Cecil?” Leppard said. “Does he know him?” Dave said, “He doesn’t know him.” But was that a fact?
I’m not sleeping around.
Why had he said that? Dave had never suggested it. He trusted Cecil totally, as if a long life in a harsh business had taught him nothing. Cecil was startled to find Dodge’s body here. But more startled than normal? Dave hadn’t thought so. Yet he had cleared out fast after that drink. He had been in a tearing hurry to get away. Dave shook his head angrily to clear out the doubts. Leppard was manipulating him.

“He does live here with you.” Leppard put watch, chain, the rest of the trove from the dead man’s pockets into a five-by-eight manila envelope. He wrote on the envelope in ballpoint ink that the rain began to smear at once. He lifted the envelope to his mouth to lick the flap, then didn’t lick it. Instead, he folded the flap and fastened it with the little metal prongs provided.

Dave said, “You’re afraid of catching it.”

“You damn right,” Leppard said. “Aren’t you?” Dave felt cold in the pit of his stomach. Not for himself. For Cecil. Suppose that cry of denial had been false this morning. Suppose his shock at seeing Dodge sitting here had been deeper than he showed. Suppose Dodge had been Cecil’s answer to a need Chrissie couldn’t fulfill. And Dave wouldn’t fulfill out of a stubborn sense of rectitude.

“It kills you in eighteen months,” Leppard said. “But that’s not the worst.” His expression was wooden. Dave knew a joke was coming. “The worst is, you lose all this weight. I couldn’t wear any of my clothes. Hell, half of them aren’t even paid for yet.”

“Eighteen months makes killing them seem pointless,” Dave said. “Who is this crazy with a knife?”

“Somebody who always hated queers. Like the religious nuts. All he needed was AIDS to set him off. I don’t know. But eighteen months gets precious when it’s all you’ve got. You said Cecil brought you home from LAX.”

“But he doesn’t live here anymore. He’s got an apartment in Mar Vista. He married Christina Streeter, remember? The foreign correspondent’s daughter?”

“Pretty blind girl,” Leppard said. “Slipped my mind.”

“Because it didn’t fit your equation,” Dave said.

Out in front, the heavy rear door of the coroner’s wagon thudded shut. The side doors slammed. The starter whinnied, the engine rumbled, and in the damp noon quiet they could hear the tires crunch twigs as the black car rolled off down the canyon.

“What equation is that?” Leppard said.

“That I was homosexual, which meant Cecil was homosexual, and homosexuals don’t marry. You don’t want to think in accepted patterns, Lieutenant. Not in your job. Not about people in crises. I’ve been dealing with them for forty years. They seldom do what you expect.”

Leppard looked at him but didn’t answer. He drew breath. “The connection could be Junipero Serra hospital. The first five were all in there, one time or another. Maybe this one was too. They get sick a lot. That’s what the virus does.”

“Right,” Dave said. “Knocks out the immune system.”

“So they go in for swollen lymph glands,” Leppard said. “Or night sweats. Or diarrhea that won’t stop.” The rain began to come down hard. He winced up at it, hunched his shoulders, moved toward the cookshack at the side of the courtyard. Dave followed him. “Or sudden weight loss. Or weakness—can’t stand on their legs to get dressed to go to work.”

Dave opened the cookshack door for him, reached in and switched on lights, followed Leppard inside. Leppard un-snapped his raincoat. The stiff plastic rattled as he got out of it and hung it on a brass wall hook by the door. Dave closed the door, and began to look into cupboards.

Leppard said, “Or they get pneumonia. Or blue spots on the skin that turn into lesions.”

“Kaposi’s sarcoma.” Dave brought sour rye bread from a cupboard. “Intestinal parasites. Brain parasites.” He found butter, cheese, mayonnaise in a big refrigerator whose state-of-the-art works were disguised behind the oaken doors of a very old icebox. “I know they go in and out. Until they’re too sick, too blind, or too crazy to go out again alive.” He set the stuff from the refrigerator on the counter. “Sit down. A drink? They didn’t go to any other hospitals?”

“Sure.” Leppard drew out a pine chair at an old deal table scoured white, and sat down. “But Junipero Serra is a constant. I’m thinking of that male nurse a few years back, who killed all those dying old people.”

“Not out in the street,” Dave said. “Not in some parking garage, some driveway. In a hospital—with injections.”

“Right.” Leppard sighed. “Sure, a drink. Thank you.”

Bottles stood in sleek ranks on a counter. Dave looked at them and raised his brows at Leppard. “Bourbon, please.” Dave got glasses and ice. He poured Wild Turkey over ice cubes in a stocky Swedish glass for the lieutenant, and Glenlivet over ice cubes in a glass like it for himself. He took the bourbon to Leppard, who tasted it, opened his eyes wide, and said, “Now, that is something. Tell me, how do I go about becoming an insurance investigator?”

“What you want to ask”—Dave cut butter onto a grill—“is how do I get hold of thirty percent of the shares of a big insurance company. And the answer is, be the founder’s only son—all right?”

“I’ll start arranging that today,” Leppard said. He drank lovingly again, and frowned. “If people act the opposite of what you expect, can you ever get so smart beforehand you know what the opposite is going to be?”

Dave shrugged. “Time and a long history of hit and miss help. And luck at the moment you need it.” He busied himself stroking mayonnaise onto slices of bread. He rummaged out a bottle of Dijon mustard and smeared some of this on too. He poked inside the refrigerator again, hefted out half a ham, cut thick slabs from this, laid these on the bread. He grated crumbly yellow cheese and piled this on the ham, closed the sandwiches, used a spatula to lay them in the sizzling butter on the grill. Now and only now, he shed the trenchcoat, hung it beside Leppard’s coat, and brought his drink to the table. “Someone had a reason for bringing Dodge to me.” He sat down opposite Leppard, lit a cigarette, tasted his Scotch. “It wasn’t to threaten me. I don’t know the man. I don’t have AIDS. So it wasn’t the killer who brought him.”

“According to your theory”—Leppard reached across and drew a cigarette from Dave’s pack on the tabletop, and used Dave’s slim steel lighter to light the cigarette, and laid the lighter down again—“it was the opposite. Which means his mother brought him, right?”

“You’ll have to ask her, won’t you?” Dave said. “If she exists, you’re the one who has to tell her that her son is dead. You have to do that, even if she already knows it.”

Leppard shifted unhappily on his chair and sighed. Smoke blew out of his nostrils. He looked at the cigarette in his thick fingers. “You know, I haven’t smoked in three months? See what this is doing to me? I hate that. I hate that part worst of all. Telling the family.”

“Be blunt.” Dave went back to the looming stove, took a look at the sandwiches, and turned them over with the spatula. His timing was right. The downsides were golden and crisp. The cheese was beginning to melt. “If you upset them, they may blurt things out they’d keep secret otherwise.”

“I read the interrogation textbook,” Leppard said.

“Forgive me,” Dave said. He came back to the table for another swallow of Glenlivet, a pull at his cigarette. He didn’t sit down this time. “I’m getting old. The old think nobody knows anything but them.”