Fadeout (17 page)

"I phoned the radio station and he was there and he came right over. He walked in the door of that motel room and we looked at each other, and it was as if there hadn't been any years between. Not for me. Not for him, either." 

"But," Dave said dryly, "you went back to L.A." 

Sawyer narrowed his eyes and studied Dave through the smoke. "You know the answers to all these questions, don't you?" 

"Not all," Dave said. "For example—what about Ito, the Japanese houseboy? What happened between him and Fox?" 

"Nothing," Sawyer said. "But Fox was afraid it would, afraid he'd make a mistake. He almost did make one that first night. Ito was beautiful." 

"I've seen him." Dave nodded. "He was. Is." 

"Well, he was standing there naked when Fox went to his room to thank him for making it a good day. That's like Fox. But it was Christmas and he was more than a little smashed. He almost couldn't keep his hands off." Sawyer's smile was thin. "I suppose that's the answer to your other question too—why he sent me back to L.A." 

"He'd always fought it?" 

"For Thorne. But he hadn't always won. There'd been a couple of sorry little affairs. In the bookstores, after closing. Brief, a night, two nights. Then some boy in the film plant. But they only made things worse. And things didn't need worsening. Those were bad years." 

Dave said, "His wife told me." 

"She was everything to him. Cheered him on, gave him reasons to work, live, hope. Gave him a child he loved. Finally gave him a career and wealth and popularity and a future like Disneyland." Sawyer shook his head. "And stopped loving him." 

"He knew about the affair with Hale McNeil?" 

"He found out. Which told him McNeil had only given him the break on his radio station to get next to Thorne. It didn't matter. Fox didn't let it matter. Thorne had wanted this. He owed her for all those years of nothing. And whatever McNeil's motives, Fox couldn't deny the debt. Didn't try. He knocked himself out to make good. For them. Went around grinning, clowning, to show them how happy they'd made him. It began taking more and more booze to make the act convincing. . . ." 

Sawyer drove a fist into his palm, rose, walked to the window again. "She'd say, 'You always wanted first editions,' so he'd buy first editions. Fancy microphones, electric typewriters, the kind of piano he'd admired in some store window when they were first married. She'd been eating her heart out for him to have all those shiny symbols of success. That junky, pretentious white car ... " 

Dave squinted. "He didn't want any of it?" 

Sawyer swung around. "He wanted one thing. To write great novels." 

"Why didn't he do it?" Dave asked. "He had years." 

Sawyer shook his head impatiently. "Wasted. Look at it this way. Suppose Dostoevsky had never mentioned his epilepsy, his compulsive gambling. How far would he have gotten?" 

Dave said, "He was going to have a book." 

"A comic book," Sawyer snorted. "Cartoons and funny sayings. That made him sickest of all." 

Dave heard footsteps crunching on the sand outside, the murmur of male voices. 

"Then Chalmers came along with those old snapshots." 

"To make Fox stop running against him. That was all." Sawyer began carefully breaking slivers of glass from the window frame. "I think he could have. He says he couldn't. Too awkward to explain. That's what I meant by an excuse. To clear out. He was fed up anyway." 

"And there was you," Dave said. 

Sawyer leaned out the window and dragged in the chair. The leg wasn't broken. It had come out of its socket. He set it on the floor, crouched, and tried fitting it back in. Frowning, he answered, "Yes. There was me." He laid the chair on its side and rammed the leg at the socket. It went in. He stood it up and hammered on the seat with his fist. 

Downstairs the tambourine jingled. 

Sawyer rocked the chair tentatively, then sat on it. "He called me Wednesday—week ago. I never wanted anything in my life the way I wanted that call. I never expected anything less." 

"You were on his mind," Dave said. "You and this place and that summer. He painted a picture of the Chute after he'd seen you. It's hanging over the fireplace in his living room." 

"Yes. Coming back here was important to him. To me too. Just to see the place again." 

"I think I'd have moved on," Dave said. "Hurriedly." 

"We weren't rational." Sawyer shook his head in wry self-disgust. "Forty-four years old and like a couple of moonstruck adolescents. Wonderful! He was going to write. Did write. Honestly, at last. I . . . was going to paint again. Most of all, we were going to love each other. That went without saying. . . ." He leaned forward, elbows on knees, hands hanging, head drooping. "And that was the part that didn't work. Twenty-five years is a long time. Fox ... was like a man starved. It was all right at first. Fine. But—well, by Sunday night, I'd had it. I'm okay now. We can talk it out. We will. Because it's worth it." He got off the chair. "Only now I've got to find him. Don't know where he could have gone. He didn't have a cent of money." 

"You better sit down," Dave said. "I've got bad news." 

But footsteps were coming up the stairs and Sawyer was at the room door in three strides with the expectant grin on his face again. He stopped, gripping the doorframe. Behind him, Dave stopped too. At the top of the stairs stood two young deputies in crisp tan uniforms. They looked big-eyed, like children sent alone to the barber for the first time. One of them started to speak and cleared his throat and started again. 

"Douglas Sawyer?" 

"Yes?" 

"I have a warrant for your arrest." A scared hand brought it out of a breast pocket. "You have the right to remain silent. If you give up that right, anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law." The boy's forehead furrowed in the effort to remember the long speech. "You have the right to speak to an attorney and to have an attorney present when we question you. If you desire an attorney and cannot afford one, an attorney will be appointed without cost to you, before questioning." 

"For what?" Sawyer asked. "Arrest for what?" 

"The murder of Edward Fox Olson," the boy said. "On the evening of Wednesday, October twenty-fifth." 

Dave saw Sawyer's knees give for an instant, then straighten. He swung toward Dave. Under the stubble, his face was the color of pale clay. The eyes accused. 

"You knew," he said. 

"I'll get you a lawyer," Dave said. 

The deputies clinked when they moved. They handcuffed Sawyer's wrists behind his back, took his arms, turned him and went down the stairs with him, one on each side. 

At the foot of the stairs the bearded boy, the blond girl and the baby with the tambourine stared. The baby had stuck something into his mouth like a cork, the small, brown something Mrs. Kincaid had picked up off the floor of Fox Olson's room half an hour ago. Dave knew now what it was. The rubber tip for a cane. He went down to get it.

In the glass-and-steel box of the Signal station they looked like school pageant chrysanthemums. Their hair. Hers yellow white, his yellow orange. Shag heads. They sat in the I50-watt glare at ten-thirty at night and stared at each other, with nothing flowerlike in their child faces. Grief in hers, sullenness in his. And fear when they turned to see Dave in the doorway. The boy stood up. Fast. 

"Gas?" he said. "You want gas?" 

"It's Mr. Brandstetter." The girl tried to smile. 

The boy tried to edge past Dave. "Regular or ethyl?" 

Dave stood in his way. "In a minute. First I'd like to hear about the letter." 

Under his freckles the boy's skin went green. The girl jerked to her feet. The tin chair she'd sat on hit a tin shelf of quart motor oil cans. They fell with heavy liquid thuds like tabla. They rolled on the green cement. 

"Wh-what letter? I don't understand." It was unrehearsed and badly delivered. 

"From Fox Olson," Dave said. 

"He's dead," Sandy said. 

"He wasn't dead when he mailed it. Monday night, Tuesday morning. He was alive, in a town called Bell Beach, five hours down the coast from here. He was alive Wednesday when"—Dave looked at the girl, who had stooped and was groping after the scattered oil cans, her eyes fixed scared and blue on Dave—"you opened it. No, I don't think it was addressed to you. I think it was addressed to Thorne Olson." 

"I open all the mail," she said defensively. "It's part of my job. This letter looked—" 

Sandy made a sound and lunged at her. Dave caught his arm and twisted it behind his back. 

"Easy," he said. "Don't blame this on her. Blame it on your own bad grooming. A gentleman cleans and polishes his boots before going places with a lady." 

The boy stared down at his shoes. Clumsy high tops. Old. Caked with black grease. 

"You left tracks," Dave said. "Beside the body. Fox Olson's murdered body. On the pier at Bell Beach." 

"I didn't kill him." Sandy tried to wrench free. "He was dead when we got there. His room was empty. Something burning in the fireplace. Piece of paper tacked to his door. 'On the pier,' it said. So we went to the pier. He was there. But he was dead. Blood allover the front of him. Somebody shot him in the chest. Not me. I don't even own a gun. I hated his guts but . . . I wouldn't do that to him. I wouldn't do it to anybody."

 "It's true." Terry nodded. Tears started down her face. Her voice was a small, thin, kindergarten wail. "He was dead. All the jokes and the songs, all the kindness and—" The cans rolled out of her hands. She crouched in a comer of the green sheet-metal wall and sobbed. Heartbroken. The word was no good anymore. The trouble was, nobody had invented a better one. 

Dave let the boy go. "What was in the letter?" 

"I never saw it." He stared miserably at the girl, rubbing the arm Dave had twisted. "She just said he needed her. She had to go to him. Her car wouldn't make it. Mine would. Please would I take her? So"—he grimaced—"I took her. Terry ... " He knelt by the girl and stroked her shoulder clumsily. "Baby, don't." 

"Then she'd given the letter to Mrs. Olson?" 

The boy nodded without looking up. "With the rest of the mail. They still get bags full." 

"Why didn't you go to the sheriff in Bell Beach?" 

The boy's glance was disgusted. "What for? I didn't know who killed him. They could decide I did it. I never kept it a secret I hated his guts. Jesus—the way the people around here
loved
him! Sickening." Short sour laugh. "He was
queer
. Did you know that? Said so in this letter." 

"See?" Dave said. "He wasn't after your girl." 

Sandy's look was bleak. "No, but she was after him. Crazy about him. Even when she found out he was a flit." 

A tote bag sat on the desk. Bright yellow canvas with a white Japanese symbol on it and white cotton rope handles. Girl things inside. Dave set it in front of her. "Come on, Terry," he said, and to Sandy, "Lock up. We'll take my car." 

The boy straightened. Slowly. Wary. "Where to?" 

"You discovered the body." Dave helped Terry to her feet. Shaky, still whimpering, face wet, nose runny, she poked in the tote bag for Kleenex. "That makes you witnesses. If you're lucky, the Pima police will take your depositions." 

"Yeah, lucky," Sandy said. 

"Look at it this way," Dave said. "It saves you another trip to Bell Beach. For the inquest. Down and back. That's fifteen dollars' worth of gas." 

He left them with a fat young sergeant and a stringy, painted woman who ran a stenotype machine. He went to look for coffee. He found Herrera, red-eyed, unshaven, tie loosened, collar unbuttoned. His ashtray was crammed with the black stubs of cigarillos. Another stub smoldered in the corner of his mouth. He squinted against the smoke and shuffled papers. A lot of papers. 

"What rank do you have to make before they let you sleep?" Dave asked. 

"They don't have a rank like that," Herrera said. "Not on a homicide." 

"I thought that was San Diego County's worry." 

"Huh?" Herrera scowled. "Oh, you mean Olson. Forget that." He picked up a stained styrofoam cup. Empty. "We got our own now. Had it since nine this morning." He pinched out the inch of cigarillo and tried his pocket for another. The pack was empty. He crumpled it and slammed it into the brown metal wastebasket. Also the empty cup. Dave gave him a cigarette. When he had the light, he sat back in the leather swivel chair and blew smoke through his nose. "Yup. When his secretary walked into the office this morning, our distinguished mayor was at his desk as usual. Just one little upsetting detail. Half his head was blown off. With a shotgun." 

Dave winced. "Chalmers?" 

"Lab says he'd been there maybe two hours. Only man in the building then was the janitor. Old guy. Deaf. He thought he heard a noise. Went to look at the boiler in the basement. Never looked anywhere else. Seven-ten. Chalmers just about had time to get back here from your place in L.A. and he was dead. Shotgun," Herrera repeated bitterly. "Most anonymous weapon in the world. Must be a thousand of them in this valley." He got up, headed for the door. "You want coffee?" Dave said yes and Herrera put his head into the hall and shouted, "Any more poison in that acid vat?" Someone yelped an answer. Herrera came back. "One thing will interest you. . . ." Less tired, he would have sounded smug. "No dirty pictures of Fox Olson and his high-school buddy. Nowhere. We've looked at every piece of paper Lloyd Chalmers owned. . . ." 

The old man could have been a propped corpse. He sat on the edge of his bed in pajamas and a green flannel bathrobe so new the cuff still had the price tag. The Mexican woman stood beside him in a flowered quilted housecoat. She bulged inside it like steel springs. Her hair was in two thick dark braids for the night. Her eyes were large and brown and watchful. The old man's eyes had a glitter. It was all that told he was alive. 

Dave held the little brown rubber cup out to him. "This is how I know," he said. "This was in his room at Bell Beach." 

The old man's cane leaned against a straight chair that his clothes hung over. Not neatly. Things had spilled out of the pockets onto the waxed tile floor. There was no rubber tip on the cane.