Fadeout (2 page)

But as a book,
Fadeout
has proved durable. Not that dismal artifact a classic, which Mark Twain defined as a book no one reads. These days, if no one is reading it, chances are a book goes out of print and stays that way. How many publishers has
Fadeout
had? I've lost count. In its thirty-four years, it has always been in print somewhere. People keep reading it. The old standard German translation was recently recrafted for a new edition. In France, when Gallimard first published
Fadeout
in 1971, they timidly cut four chapters in fear of the censors. In 2001, came a new translation with the cuts restored, an event judged by
Le Monde
as meriting a front-page review. 

Most writers hope their work will outlast them. I'm no different. 

So it is gratifying that the University of Wisconsin Press has decided to give
Fadeout
a place on its list. Universities have a solidity few other American institutions enjoy, certainly not book publishers. And I now have the luxury of dreaming that, once my little life is rounded with a sleep, Dave Brandstetter will go on engaging the imagination of new generations of readers, long after his once-startling sexual bent has ceased to unsettle anyone. 

Joseph Hansen
Laguna Beach, California
February 2004

[ fadeout]

Fog shrouded the canyon, a box canyon above a California ranch town called Pima. It rained. Not hard but steady and gray and dismal. Shaggy pines loomed through the mist like threats. Sycamores made white, twisted gestures above the arroyo. Down the arroyo water pounded, ugly, angry and deep. The road shouldered the arroyo. It was a bad road. The rains had chewed its edges. There were holes. Mud and rock half buried it in places. It was steep and winding and there were no guard rails.

He drove it with sweating hands. Why? His smile was sour. Why so careful? Wasn't death all he'd wanted for the past six weeks? His mouth tightened. That was finished. He'd made up his mind to live now. Hadn't he? Live and forget—at least until he could remember without pain. And that would happen someday. Sure it would. All the books said so. The sum of human wisdom. Meantime, he was working again.

And here was the bridge. It was wooden, maybe thirty feet in span, ten feet wide. Heavy beams, thick planks, big iron bolts. Simple and strong. The right kind of bridge for this place. He stopped the car and got out. Cold. He shivered and hunched his shoulders. The rain laid a quick, eager surface on the road. It splashed over his shoes. His feet were wet when he walked out on the bridge. 

Its railings on the downstream side had been replaced. The new two-by-fours looked pale. They still bled sap. A car had smashed out the old ones. He shoved his hands into the pockets of his trench coat and stood staring down. There was a lot of raw power to that water. It was muddy and seething, so he couldn't see the boulders tumbling, but he could hear them, feel them. The bridge vibrated. That water could tumble a car as easily. It had. Five days ago. Three days later, when there was a letup in the storm and the water level fell, police had found the car. A mile downstream. Battered, flattened, glass smashed out, doors half tom off. They hadn't found the driver. 

That was why Dave Brandstetter was here. 

He walked to the far side of the bridge, where the road angled off and climbed steeply. It was a hell of an unsafe arrangement. But the whole road was unsafe, no more than a poorly paved deer track. Still, no one used it but the few people who lived in the canyon. Knowing it, they didn't fear it. Which could have been a mistake. At least for one of them. On a night of rain and darkness, Fox Olson's white Thunderbird might have hit the top of that slope too fast. It had certainly hit the bottom too fast. 

Dave slogged back to his car. 

He found the house a mile beyond the bridge. It stood back and up from the road under towering, ragged-barked eucalyptus trees. The dark ivy that covered the slope in front was glossed by rain. So were the two cars in the drive—new red Mustang, battered old Chevy. He left his own car under a manzanita by the road. The house was onestory, rambling, sided with cedar shakes that hadn't been painted and hadn't had time yet really to weather. The place looked comfortable and expensive. He pressed the button beside the front door. 

The woman who opened it was small, not much above five feet. Thin, fine-boned, in her early forties, like himself. Her hair was brown with some gray in it. She had cropped it like a boy's, smart and simple. Her hips were narrow as a boy's and looked right in the brown corduroy Levi's. She wore a brown checked wool shirt. No jewelry, no makeup except lipstick. She couldn't have looked more feminine. 

"Mrs. Olson?" he said. "I'm Dave Brandstetter." 

"And soaking wet," she apologized. "I'm sorry about that. Come in." With a glance at the weather and a shiver, she shut the door. "Give me those and I'll hang them in the kitchen to drip. You go make yourself comfortable." 

She took the trench coat and canvas hat away. He stepped down into the living room. It was long. Pitched roof, hand-hewn beams, knotty-pine paneling. Logs blazed in a fieldstone fireplace flanked by loaded bookshelves. He took a wing chair close to the fire, hoping his feet would dry. Above the fireplace hung a big painting. He couldn't quite make it out—some kind of white trestle thing rearing up nightmarish against a black sky. 

"What is it?" he asked her when she came in. 

"Fox painted it. Quite recently. It's very different from anything else he ever did. It's called 'The Chute.' He won't—wouldn't tell me what it means. He just says, 'It's a memory.' " 

A bottle of brandy warmed on the hearth. Christian Brothers. She poured splashes from it into two small snifters' handed him one and sat down across from him, feet tucked under her. On the coffee table between them, the mechanism of a lighter glinted in a burl of polished wood. When he set a cigarette in his mouth and reached for the lighter, she got it first and worked the flame for him. Automatically. Habit. Nothing meant. Except, evidently, that she had lit her husband's cigarettes. Funny. She wasn't the type. Not mousy enough. Not mousy at all. 

"Thank you," he said. 

She sat back and gave a little businesslike smile. "Now, what's this all about, Mr. Brandstetter?" 

"Routine." He smiled back. 

"You said that on the phone. What does it mean?" 

"That my company—every insurance company—sends out investigators in cases like this." 

"Like this?" 

"Where the policyholder's body can't be found." 

"Can't be—" She blinked. "Oh, but it will be. I'm sure it will. When the storm's over." 

"There was a lull in the storm day before yesterday," he said. "They were able to find the car—" 

"And have you seen that car?" she asked. 

"Yes. This morning. At the police garage." 

"And you drove up here just now. Which means you've seen the force of the water in the arroyo. Does it seem strange to you that Fox's body wasn't in that car?" 

"No. But it ought to have been in the arroyo." The ashtray was black Mexican pottery. He put ashes into it carefully. "Twenty men searched for it. Police, sheriffs. They didn't find it, Mrs. Olson." 

"I know," she said quietly. "I was with them.... But at the foot of the canyon is a storm drain that carries the arroyo water under the town to the river." 

"A body reaching a storm drain," he said, "would be caught in the gratings." 

A corner of her mouth tightened in a kind of smile. "Have you been in that storm drain, Mr. Brandstetter?" 

"In it?" He raised an eyebrow. "No. Have you?" 

"Many times. I played there as a child. It was built when I was about ten. Before that the arroyo itself cut right through Pima. Every time there was a storm like this, it nearly washed the town away. Lloyd Chalmers built the drain. It was his first big job. He was just starting out in the contracting business. He couldn't have been much older than twenty. He's the mayor now, in his fourth term. My husband is running against him. Was." 

"I know." The posters were pasted up allover Pima, flaring reds and oranges, paper wrinkled in the rain.
CHALMERS . . . GROWTH
. Rugged, white-maned man.
OLSON . . . HONESTY
. Laughing man with thinning blond hair. "I've seen the posters. You were telling me about the storm drain." 

"Well, we children used to play in it, as I say. It's huge and shadowy and cool. And of course, in summer, dry and completely safe. But there are no gratings, Mr. Brandstetter. It's simply a concrete tunnel. Oh, there are overhead gratings, from the streets. But cross gratings would only defeat the drain's purpose. They'd be choked with debris in no time." 

Dave nodded. "Scrub, tree branches—yes, I can see that. But it's that sort of material that ought to have caught .and held your husband's body in the arroyo itself. Someplace in the four or five miles between the bridge and town." He swallowed his brandy. "The police agree with me. A human body is a heavy, clumsy, floppy thing. A dead body. With clothes to snag. It should have been in the arroyo." 

"Well, it wasn't." She got up for the brandy bottle. "Which means that Fox—" But she couldn't manage that. She stood with her back to him, rigid, for a minute. When she turned it was abruptly and her voice was harsh. "The body was swept through the drain into the river. That's all. He'll be found after the storm, when the water level falls. Of course he will." She put an inch of brandy into his glass and her own. Her hand shook. 

"Maybe," he said. "My company doesn't think so." 

"What in the world do they think?" 

"They won't know what to think till I'm through." 

She set the bottle back on the hearth. It clinked. "And when will that be?" 

"After I've asked a lot of questions." 

"Captain Herrera asked a good many. Couldn't you—" 

"I've talked to Captain Herrera." 

"I was honest." She managed a dry smile and she was in control of her voice again. But when she sat down this time she kept her feet on the floor. "No, Fox wasn't sober, not quite. He was on his way to KPIM to tape some commercials. He hated them. Kept putting them off. That was why he left so late. But ... he'd driven this canyon many times less sober. When my father stayed here sick and we'd come back from a late party, for example, Fox would drive the nurse home and not even remember it the next morning." 

Dave interrupted her. "I wasn't going to ask whether he was drunk." 

"No?" She frowned and tilted her head. "Well, then, perhaps you think he committed suicide? You're going to ask me if he was worried about money." 

"He wasn't. I've checked with the bank." 

"Well, then, his health. Had he told me of some awful pains he was having—?" She broke off. "What's wrong?" 

Bright and fierce he pictured again Rod's face, claywhite, fear in the eyes, as he'd seen it when he found him in the glaring bathroom that first night of the horrible months that had ended in his death from intestinal cancer. 

"Sorry." He got up quickly, blindly, and walked down the long room to stare out the glass doors into the flagged patio, rocks and moss, where rain wept into a dark lily pond under mournful ferns. He said savagely, "No, I'm not going to ask you questions like that. Because I don't think your husband had an accident, Mrs. Olson. I don't think he committed suicide. I don't even"—he swung around to look at her—"I don't even think he's dead." 

She was facing him, standing. Her mouth sagged open. She looked the way people her age, his age, wish they didn't when they see themselves in the bathroom mirror first thing in the morning. "What did you say?" 

"I think he shifted that white T-bird of his into neutral at the top of that slope down to the bridge, stepped out, let the hand brake go, watched the car crash into the arroyo, and then walked off and didn't come back." 

"But why? Why should he do such a thing?" 

Dave shrugged. "That's what I'm here to find out." 

"But . . . that's mad. You can't be serious." She almost laughed at him. "You honestly believe, because poor Fox's body can't be found, that he—he and I"—she groped for words—"have concocted some James M. Cain sort of scheme to collect his life insurance?" 

"It's one explanation," Dave said. "A hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, Mrs. Olson." 

"Not enough," she said, and stopped smiling. "If Fox Olson were alive, he'd be here, Mr. Brandstetter. And I'm going to show you why." She came toward him, her mouth tight with scorn, her eyes looking straight and hard into his. She slid back the glass door to the patio. Cold wet air came in. She nodded and he stepped out into it and she followed him and shut the door behind her. "Come with me, please. We'll clear this nonsense up right now." 

The deep eaves of the house formed a sheltered walkway around the patio. Then they were in the rain, climbing flagged steps between rock-walled flower beds under Japanese maples. Fallen leaves clung to his shoes. Sheltered again, this time by the overhang of a shake-sided cabana, they passed the swimming pool, rain whispering into it. At the far end of the pool, a tall hedge of bamboo partly hid a two-story double garage. They climbed its outside stairs. The door at the top wasn't locked. She swung it open. 

He heard Fox Olson's voice singing inside. 

In the Daffodil Café in Pima, where he'd stopped for coffee this morning after the long wet drive from L.A., that voice had come from a nine-dollar radio on top of a refrigerator. The pudgy, white-haired woman in starched yellow gingham, tending the counter, had stood in front of him with the glass coffeepot forgotten in her hand, while she listened, her faded blue eyes staring far away. 

Wanting the coffee, he'd naturally paid attention to what she was listening to so hard. A catchy, forgettable little Western song. Guitar, clip-clop hoofbeats. Mild baritone. Pleasant, whimsical delivery. But nothing special. Yet tears were running down her soft old cheeks when the song ended. With a sad little smile she shook her head as she poured Dave's coffee. 

"Wasn't he wonderful?" she sighed.