Early Graves (22 page)

“You interfered with a police officer in the performance of his duty,” Barker said stubbornly. “If Abe Greenglass wasn’t your lawyer, I’d nail you for that.”

“Samuels may never be the same,” Dave said. “If you get off his case, all Morales has is a bad cold.”

Barker’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t answer. He picked up Max’s big menu and studied it through glasses with heavy horn rims. “Samuels doesn’t hold what happened to him against you. You’re oversensitive.” Barker lowered the menu. “I do not think.” He raised the menu again, and said from behind it, “When are you going to stop being a pain in the butt to me? When are you going to retire?”

“Maybe when you do.” Dave took a brown envelope from inside his jacket, and laid the envelope in front of Barker. “Somebody official ought to do something with that. And Jeff Leppard isn’t speaking to me, won’t let me near him, won’t return my calls.”

“Smart kid.” Barker picked up the envelope, untucked the flap with thick fingers, peered inside. “What is this stuff? Bank statements?”

“And a letter.” Dave told Barker about Bud Hollywell. “I’d have put it in the hands of the local district attorney but I don’t know him. I don’t know where his loyalties lie. I thought if LAPD gave it to the State’s Attorney here, and he turned it over officially to the man up there, something useful might happen.”

Barker grunted. “Something had better.” He pushed the envelope info his pocket. “I’ll see to it. Thanks.”

“Now you tell me something,” Dave said. “What was in those manila envelopes in Duval’s trailer?”

“Aha. Now we get to the real reason for all this.” Barker gestured at the handsome, shadowy room. “You don’t prize my company. You just lured me here to pump me.” He showed his teeth in a kind of smile, and laid the menu down. “Okay. Pay for it. I’ll have the Maine lobster and filet mignon.”

Dave said, “Hell, you can get that anywhere. Let me tell you about Max’s scaloppine, his incomparable—”

Barker said, “I’m ordering it for the price.”

Dave grinned. “Tell me about those envelopes.”

“There was the kid’s birth certificate,” Barker said. “Barely readable, I understand. Wine spills, coffee stains. But his mother was May Ellen Stubblefield, his father was Henry Arthur Duval.”

“Same initials as Harold Andrew Dodge,” Dave said.

“He had documents of his own, Dodge did.” Barker took a swallow of his drink. “They’re fakes, the sheriff says, but he hasn’t traced where they came from yet.”

“But he was the same man?” Dave lit a cigarette.

“The fingerprints on record with the California Department of Motor Vehicles match those of Duval the police have in Hackett, Arkansas, the last place he served time.”

“For those ‘wickednesses’ the kid was going to tell about unless Dodge paid him?”

Barker made a face. “Dodge was in and out of jails all over the Deep South for check-kiting and various confidence games. He had the good looks that cause silly women to fall over themselves to trust him with their money.”

“And silly men,” Dave said, “Dodge himself at the head of the line. He could have grown a beard, couldn’t he, but he wouldn’t hide those looks. So he settled for not letting himself be photographed. It wasn’t enough.”

“He was vain, all right. Did you know—he wasn’t thirty-five, he was forty-two.” Barker smiled wryly, shook his head, and finished off his Old Crow. “The kid was born in 1970, and Duval didn’t stay around much longer. May Ellen became an alcoholic and part-time prostitute. Somebody right out of Tennessee Williams, mooning over her lost love. She hung onto every scrap of newsprint about his checkered career while they were together, read them over and over year after year till they’re falling apart. Dragged little Cary Dean all over the map, trying to find his dad. And when she was dying of cirrhosis, she made the kid swear on the Bible that he’d never stop looking.”

“And he never did,” Dave said. “Photographs?”

“Clipped from the papers. Also snapshots. Cary Dean must have studied them. He sure as hell knew his daddy when he saw him on the TV in that Venice bar. High school pictures. Wedding pictures. Baby pictures. Picnics. A canoe trip. Up until Daddy walked out of that jail in Hackett, Arkansas, when nobody was looking.”

“And all the way to California and a shiny new life.”

“Shiny and short,” Barker said. “Ah, here’s Max.”

The rain was only a drizzle this noon, but steady. The splintery old pier was deserted except at its far end, where a solitary brown-skinned woman bundled in sweaters under a yellow slicker and sou’wester patiently held a long fishing pole, and leaned on the white wooden rail, a bucket at her rubber-booted feet. Dave passed the carousel where the orgatron wheezed, drummed, clashed its mechanical cymbals for no visible ears, where the sleekly lacquered horses rose and fell on their brass poles, and the mirrors framed in gilt and crimson flashed back the pewter light of the dreary day. Nobody rode.

The booths were shut up behind scarred, painted plywood—the baseball toss, the dart throw, the shooting gallery. No one wandered the creaky aisles of the penny arcade. The gypsy lady automaton in her glass box gazed blankly at the rain from under her faded purple satin turban. At her back, electronic games flickered fitfully and beeped, begging quarters from absent pockets. In their tall, metal-raftered pavilion, the bumper cars in carnival blues, reds, yellows, squatted in disarray. Nobody rode.

But a white-painted outdoor lunch counter was open. The flaking tin sign above it read
FRIED SHRIMP HAMBURGERS HOT DOGS
. Rain wept down the letters. Dave smelled the grease and onions before he reached the counter. Chrissie sat there in a plastic hooded raincoat on a rusty stool, shrimp and french fries in an oval red plastic basket in front of her, coffee steaming in a wax-paper cup, a paper napkin crumpled in a fist. Her white cane with the red tip hung off the edge of the counter, and she looked about as cheerful as the weather.

Dave said, “Friends are always recommending unpretentious little places to eat nobody knows about.” He climbed onto a stool next to her. The stool creaked and tottered. “Where the food is scrumptious. Is the food here scrumptious?”

“Thank you for coming.” For a minute her face lit up with a smile. Her eyes were hidden behind dark glasses. But they wouldn’t have lit up anyway. “No.” She poked with a thin, nail-bitten finger at the shrimp and chips. “Not scrumptious. I only ordered so he’d let me sit here and wait for you.” She pushed the basket in Dave’s direction. “You want to eat them so they don’t go to waste?”

“I’ll pass, thanks. Chrissie, I would have come and collected you. There’s no reason to sit out in this weather.”

“The reason is,” she said, “that he’d never look for me here. He knows I hate the pier.” The sea moved under the planks beneath them. The massive old pier stakes shuddered. “The noise, and all the people bumping into you. He brought me here once. It panicked me. I try not to let that happen. I’ll learn. But I haven’t learned yet. Anyway, it’s the last place he’d look for me.”

“And why shouldn’t he look for you?”

“Because—I had to see you alone. Mr. Brandstetter, this is terrible.” Without thinking, she groped for the basket and began to eat. Mouth full of shrimp, she said, “You’re going to think I’m a real bitch.”

Dave laughed. “I guess not. What’s the matter?”

“You’re going to think”—she chewed, swallowed, gulped coffee—“I’m the most ungrateful person that ever lived on this earth.” Tears leaked down her face.

“Come on, Chrissie.” Dave pulled napkins from a corroded dispenser on the counter and wiped the tears. “If you believed that, you wouldn’t have called me.”

“It had to be you. There’s nobody else.” She sniffled, took the napkins from Dave, wiped her nose, and stuffed her mouth with chips. She sat dolefully chewing for a minute, got the mouthful down, and cried to him, “You’re his best friend. I can’t tell him myself. You have to tell him for me. Please?”

“Tell him what?” Dave said.

“That I don’t want to be married to him anymore,” she wailed. “I don’t want to be married to anyone. I’m too young. I have to finish growing up first. He is the kindest, gentlest person in the world. And I hate myself for this. He saved my life. I mean, you don’t find people like that in real life. Only in books.”

“He’s real, Chrissie,” Dave said.

“I know, and that’s why I feel so awful. I can’t bear to hurt him. I can’t bear it.” She began crying hard now, choking the words out. “I shouldn’t have let him do it. But I couldn’t see any way out, to escape from Brenda and Ken Kastouros and foster homes and all that. And he said, ‘If you’re married, you’re your own woman, nobody can harm you, I’ll protect you, Chrissie.’ And it wasn’t right”—she groped out to touch Dave’s arm now—“but I was in a panic and I said yes. And he loved me and—and—and I let him think—think—”

“I know what he thought,” Dave said. “You’re right. You did the wrong thing. But so did he. He was older. He should have known better. He didn’t love you, Chrissie. He played that part because he thought you loved him.”

“Oh, God.” Chrissie stared at him, mouth open. “Is that true? You’re not just making it up?”

“Somebody has to tell the truth around here,” Dave said. “I’ve been trying to get him to tell you because it was the only thing to do, the only honest, decent thing to do. But he was afraid of hurting you.”

“I bore him,” she said. “I know it’s just so boring for him to be around me, to have me depending on him and being so young and he knows so much and I don’t know anything yet. And he’s so kind and so patient and—”

“He’ll be all right. What’s going to happen to you?”

“The Chapmans want to adopt me,” Chrissie said, “or have me as a foster child till I’m twenty-one.”

“That could be rough on Dan’l,” Dave said. “You know he loves you very much.” She turned to him, surprise on her face. Dave said, “I know you think he’s just a child, but he doesn’t think of himself that way. And you are very beautiful and very sweet. Having you there under the same roof—”

“I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said flatly, “but I can’t go on doing what I’ve been doing to Cecil.” She tugged at Dave’s coat sleeve. Urgently. “You will tell him for me, won’t you? I just can’t.”

“You can.” Dave got off the stool. “And you will. Come on. Let’s go find him.”

“But you said on the phone you had a plane to catch,” she cried. “Some assignment in Denver.”

Dave laughed, helped her off the stool, put the cane in her hand, and offered her his arm to walk her back up the pier. “From now on,” he said, “I’m through catching planes.” To the beat of their heels on the massive old planks, he almost started whistling in the rain.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Dave Brandstetter Mysteries

H
E WAS QUITTING
. But notifying all the insurance companies in the West he’d done death claims investigations for in recent years turned out to be a long job. He had sat down to do it after lunch, and was still typing away in a lonely little island of lamplight in the looming, raftered room when Cecil Harris walked in at midnight. A field reporter for television news, the tall, lanky young black lived with Dave. He ambled down the room, glanced over Dave’s shoulder as he passed the desk, hung his jacket on the hat tree, and rattled glasses and bottles at the bar.

“I didn’t mean for you to work so hard,” he said. “Let me put that on our computer. You only need to write one letter. Give me the list of addresses. Send the same letter everyplace, just a different salutation each time.”

Dave ground a finished sheet wearily out of the little typewriter, laid the page aside with its envelope, closed the case of the portable, put it into a deep lower drawer of the desk, and closed the drawer. He ached between the shoulder blades. “They’d know it was a form letter.”

“There’s a daisy-wheel printer in the program directors office. I can use it at night.” Cecil handed Dave a Glenlivet on ice in a stocky glass. “Daisy-wheel printer—nobody would know it wasn’t typed.”

“I’d know,” Dave said. “And no one deserves to be treated that way.” He took off the glasses he used for reading and writing, and laid them on the desk. “Not even insurance executives.” He stood, stretched, picked up his cigarettes and lighter from the desk, and carried these, with his drink, to the corduroy couch that faced the fireplace. He dropped onto it. Cecil sat down beside him and Dave put a light kiss on his mouth. “Thanks for the offer.”

“Hell,” Cecil said, “I was the one who talked you into it.” For months, he had been asking Dave to quit. Dave’s balking had been partly play-acting, but Cecil hadn’t seen that, and now he was feeling guilty. He gave Dave a worried glance. “Up to me to try to make it easy, if I can.”

“Don’t sweat it,” Dave said. “I’ll work it out.” He tasted the scotch, and lit a cigarette. “Why not look at it this way? I was sharpening my typing skills. To write my memoirs, right?” Cecil moaned. Dave changed the subject. “And what did you do today?”

Cecil took a breath. “Down in San Pedro County, there’s a place I bet you never heard of. The Old Fleet marina.” It had been there twenty-five years. Dave had heard of it, had even been there sometime, though he forgot why. But he didn’t say this. Cecil sipped brandy, hummed gratefully at the taste, leaned his head back. “Half-dead factories and warehouses all around, windows smashed out. Oil derricks. Wobbly docks, posts all crusty with barnacles below the water. Water dark and greasy. Crowd of old boats, rusting away, rotting away. Some don’t even have motors.”