Early Graves (20 page)

“I like the pictures,” Dave said, “and I want them, but I can’t take them if you won’t let me pay you for them. Don’t spoil it for me.”

Johns laughed. “Okay. I won’t spoil it for you.”

“Was it Mel Fleischer who called?”

“About forty-five minutes ago. I didn’t understand exactly what it all meant, but I wrote it down. Just a second.” The phone clanked against something. Papers lisped. Johns picked up the phone again. “He said Bud Hollywell does have accounts in the Western States branch in Sacramento. Two. A personal account, and a campaign fund account. And on November twelfth, like you said, he did transfer money from the campaign fund to his personal account. And the next day he withdrew that money.”

“In cash,” Dave said.

“You got it,” Johns said. “Half a million bucks.” He sounded a little awed. “Who is this guy?”

“One of our esteemed public servants,” Dave said.

“Sounds more like a drug dealer,” Johns said.

“Drug dealers aren’t as dangerous,” Dave said. “Thank you. Tell Tom I hope to see you in a couple of hours.”

“Yeah. Good. I hope he gets here soon. It’s starting to rain.”

It was starting to rain on Dave too. He paid for the gas, got back into the Jaguar, and drove off.

A big maroon Cadillac sat on the curved drive at the Hollywell house. The house had no style. Sterile arches. Showy double entrance doors. Not a window to be seen. Shrubs neatly trimmed to boxy shapes. On the flagstone doorstep stood an attaché case and what Dave judged to be a case for a lap computer. He got out of the Jaguar, dragging the trenchcoat after him. He put this on, hurting his shoulder. One of the double doors opened, and a lean man came out, white raincoat over a tweed jacket and wool slacks, shirt and tie. A small leather suitcase was in his hand. When he saw Dave, he stopped dead.

“You’re early,” he said.

“And you planned not to be here when I arrived.” Dave walked to him and held out a hand. “Brandstetter.”

“Yeah, well, I have an emergency call from my office at the capital,” Bud Hollywell said. “We’ll have to meet at a later date.”

“I’ll fly up with you,” Dave said. “I have nothing important to do.”

Hollywell brushed past him, unlocked the trunk of the Cadillac, threw in the suitcase. “I’m driving.” He went back for the two smaller cases, set them in the trunk, shut down the lid of the trunk, withdrew the keys. “Sorry.”

“We should discuss this letter.” Dave took it from inside his jacket, rattled it at Hollywell. “It could make any more trips to Sacramento superfluous for you.”

Hollywell narrowed his eyes. He half reached out to snatch the letter, but thought better of it. “Matilda said something about a letter I’d supposedly written Drew Dodge. Is that it? Where did you get it?”

“That doesn’t matter now. What matters is what the letter says. It says you’d invested half a million dollars in the shopping mall project. Now you had to have it back. The money came from your campaign fund. And that fund was about to be audited.”

“I never wrote such a letter,” Hollywell said. “How could I? It’s a lie, a frame-up. I know you’re the best in your profession. I’ve seen you on TV, read about you in magazines. But you don’t know politics. It’s a very specialized field, and sometimes a very dirty one. I had opponents in this last race who’d do anything to stop me.”

“I believe it,” Dave said, “but what I’m interested in is what you’d do to stop Drew Dodge. Someone stopped him. You’ll agree with that.”

“Some mugger, a senseless street killing.” Hollywell winched up at the rain, moved off. “And this is a senseless conversation.” Fitting the key into the lock, he glanced scornfully at Dave. “Stop Drew Dodge from what?”

“From telling the world where that half million came from you’d invested in his project for your own profit.”

“He wouldn’t have dared. That letter is a forgery.”

Dave shook his head. “I’ve had your bank records in Sacramento checked out, Senator. The date of the withdrawal was in November, only a week after you got reelected. You transferred the money from the campaign fund to your personal account, then withdrew it next day. In cash.”

“There’s no way to trace where it went.” Hollywell’s face was white, and his hand shook so the car keys rattled in it. “You can’t prove I gave that money to Dodge.”

“I expect his records will show it,” Dave said. “You can bet those records will be thoroughly checked out by the police or the sheriff in the next few days. A half million dollars in cash is hard to conceal.”

Hollywell pulled open the car door. “This is pure speculation on your part. I haven’t time for this.” He got into the car, slammed the door, glared out at Dave as the window came down. “You show that letter, and everyone will know it for what it is. A fake, meant to discredit me. It won’t work. The voters trust me.”

Dave said, “Pete McCaffrey has a copy of the letter. Dodge gave it to him in a sealed envelope. With instructions to print it if anything happened to him.”

“Well, something happened to him, all right,” Hollywell said, “and McCaffrey didn’t print it, did he? You want to know why? Because he knows me better than you do. He knows that letter can’t be legitimate.”

“He knows you? Or he’s afraid of you? Or is it the same thing?” Dave asked. “He’s only waiting for more proof, Senator. Those bank statements will help.”

“Just what is it you want?” Hollywell said.

“I want to know who killed Drew Dodge,” Dave said, “and who slashed me with a knife a couple of nights later because I’d been out here to Rancho Vientos nosing around, getting too close to the answer.”

“Well, I didn’t kill him,” Hollywell said. He pushed the key into the ignition. Dave reached into the car, grabbed his hand, wrenched the keys away from him. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“We haven’t finished our conversation,” Dave said. “There’s more. After Dodge left the letter with McCaffrey, he came to you. In the rain. Like today. And he told you he would use that letter against you unless you coughed up the two hundred fifty thousand still sitting in the campaign fund. He’d been a long time in the hospital. Contractors and suppliers were demanding their money. Worse than that, an investor called Murray Berman had found out Sears-Roebuck and Safeway stores weren’t coming into the mall, and was going to tell all the rest of you, if Dodge didn’t give him back his money. Dodge told Berman he knew someone he could hit up for the money. It was you, wasn’t it?”

“He tried,” Hollywell said. “I laughed at him.”

“And then you went and had a heart-to-heart talk with your daughter, right?”

Hollywell jerked with surprise. “What? Matilda? What the hell has she got to do with this?”

“You tell me. You couldn’t give Dodge what he asked for. You knew this audit was coming. You were facing problems enough rigging receipts to convince the auditors that the half million went for campaign debts. But you also couldn’t let Dodge go public with the truth. He had to be stopped. A tall, skinny adolescent with long blond hair and a knife stopped him.”

Hollywell made an animal sound, burst out of the car, lunged at Dave, fists flailing. Dave stepped aside, put out a foot, and tripped him. He went sprawling on the rain-wet tarmac of the drive. Dave said, “Beating up a man twenty years your senior isn’t going to help your image, Senator.” Hollywell didn’t answer. He pushed up off the paving slowly, sullen. He wiped his hands on a handkerchief, put it away, brushed at the sleeves of his white raincoat. He said between clenched teeth, “I apologize. But it’s one thing to say outrageous things about me. I’m used to it. It comes with the job. It’s another thing to attack a man’s family.”

“I only surmised,” Dave said. “You attacked.”

“Matilda wasn’t even in the State of California when Drew Dodge was killed,” Hollywell said. “Or when you were wounded. She’d gotten into serious trouble, here. Running with a pack of spoiled, rich brats we’d warned her against. Robberies. Can you imagine that? For the thrill of it, the mischief of it. What the hell is this generation coming to?”

“Where was she, exactly?” Dave said.

“At my mother’s, in Seattle,” Hollywell said. “We sent her up there to calm down and come to her senses. She always was a handful. But I think Mother straightened her out. I hope so. You phone Mrs. Virginia Hollywell in Seattle. It’s a listed number. She’ll confirm that Matilda was with her. And now, I’d like my keys back.”

Dave handed them to him. “What are you going to do when McCaffrey publishes that letter?”

“Worried about me, now, are you?” Hollywell got into his car, slammed the door, started the engine. “I’m touched. But save your pity. McCaffrey hasn’t got the guts. As for you—tomorrow you’ll have forgotten all about me. I don’t figure in your case, right?” The window rolled up and began to collect raindrops. Hollywell drove off.

T
HE WOMAN IN TIGHT
jeans, cowboy boots, a red and yellow satin cowboy shirt was painted up to look young. “We don’t rent units,” she said in a country western accent, “we rent suites.” She slid a registration card to him. Her nails were long. The blood-red color would have been okay at roundup time, but the nails would have broken branding the first calf. Her hair was crow black. Her teeth were capped. The strip of neckerchief around her stringy throat was fastened by a bolo crusted with tiny glass emeralds, rubies, diamonds. Her cuff links matched this. She blinked sooty false lashes. “No luggage, Mr.—uh—Branflakes?” She grinned, a good old boy.

He grinned back. “Brandstetter,” he said.

“Oh, hey,” she said, “we’ve been waiting for you.” She turned to a set of pigeonholes and pulled squares of paper from one. “It got mysterious, you know. I mean, you didn’t have no reservation, and we says, ‘Who is this, getting all these phone messages?’”

Dave frowned, accepted the memo slips, read Tom Owens’s name on them, nodded, tucked them away. He was tired and disgusted and he already had the news he would get if he returned the architect’s calls. “My luggage is in the car. I’ll handle it, thanks.” He bent under the crooked branch of a leafless, varnished mesquite bush on the counter, and put his name, address, license number on the card. He pushed the card at the woman, showed her his American Express card and driver’s license. She passed him an Oaktree Inn key, studying him, sharp lines between her drawn-on brows. “I seen you on TV. That’s where. Don’t tell me I’m wrong. I never forget a face.”

“I won’t tell you you’re wrong.” He turned away.

“One of them talk shows, I bet,” she called.

“You win.” Dave pushed out into the damp day that was darkening fast, and went to find his room. Two rooms. One to sit and be lonely in, the other to lie down and be lonely in. Both smelled of new paint and carpet. When he switched on lamps, the windowpanes gleamed with a high shine. He closed the curtains. The wallpaper was unexciting. The pictures were watercolors of cattle, horses, windmills, barns. Television sets sat in both rooms. New glossy travel magazines lay on a coffee table. In a corner, a low cabinet held small bottles in a drawer.

He crouched and through his reading glasses saw that there was no Glenlivet. There was Chivas. That would do. He unwrapped a glass in the bathroom, cracked the metal twist-off cap on the tiny bottle, poured what it held into the glass, added a couple of drops of water from the very new faucet of the very new basin that still had flecks of grout in it left behind by tilers.

He went back to the sitting room and fooled for two minutes with the dial of the stereo receiver built into the television cabinet. But the only available radio stations broadcast either country western or twangy gospel music. Cassettes lay in the glove compartment of the Jaguar, but he had nothing to play them on in here. He must buy a Walkman and keep it for times like this. He switched the noise off, dropped into a chair, lit a cigarette and listened to the rain falling outside. Good music. Some of the best.

The chair was not spacious. The tweed hat bulged in the side pocket of his jacket. He yanked it out, and a piece of grubby paper came with it, fluttered to the rug. Frowning, he tossed the hat onto the coffee table, set down his drink, picked up the paper. He had to dig out the reading glasses again. He smoothed the paper on his knee. It was rumpled. The writing was childish, rain-stained.

“I cant wait no longer. You promised Friday nite and I waited in the dam rain for hours and you never come. You owe me and you no it is a rightfull dett and only a devil would treat”
—here rain had washed the words out—
“I mean it. I will tell if you make me. A hunnerd thousand aint nowheres near enuf for what I been threw but I will settel for it and it aint much to you. Not to sackerfice your hole future for is it? It dont mean
—

Dave turned the page over. Nothing. The rest of the message was on another crumpled sheet someplace in those tossed files in Drew Dodge’s dusty, deserted den. Maybe two sheets, or three—words flowed from the writer, pumped by anger, resentment, self-pity. He’d have to make do with one page. And the images in his mind of that angular figure, tense with fury, striking at him in the darkness and the rain, and the same ragged figure, this time with a gun, running away from Samuels between those sunset-bloodied apartment buildings, long hair flying.

He drank slowly, smoked the cigarette down. There was more—Catherine Dodge’s memory of the tall, skinny kid talking to her husband out by his swimming pool late on the afternoon of the day Dodge had shown his handsome, wasted face to the world on television. The kid had started toward the woman, the man had stopped him, roughly, sent him away. What had the kid wanted to say to the woman?
This bastard,
Tom Owens had said,
wanted big bucks.
For what?

He read the note again, grunted, tossed it onto the table, put away his glasses. He went to the cabinet, bent for another bottle, emptied it into the empty glass, dropped into the chair, and lit another cigarette. He sat scowling. Who was the kid? Where did he dome from? The same questions applied to Drew Dodge, didn’t they? And maybe the answers for one would fit the other. Only Dodge would never give them now. And where was the kid? How could someone so young come from the far past? Dodge’s past. What was it? A bad start left behind somewhere, a new life begun far away. Here. Dodge’s words to Owens had been
I wasn’t even the same person then.
Maybe not. But whoever he was, he’d owned the same face. And that had worried him. No snapshots in an album on the coffee table. No photos with any of those newspaper clippings about him and his shopping mall. Then he’d gone on television, and the past had jumped to catch him up.