Nightwork (12 page)

“Lieutenant Salazar reasons this way,” he said. “No sooner is Silencio out of prison than Paul Myers is murdered. And where is Silencio? Nobody knows. He sees his parents only once, fails to report to his parole officer, sees nothing of his gang. He vanishes. That is suspicious.”

“Thank you for the drink.” Gifford held it to his mouth and sipped from it, small sips, one every few seconds. He was gazing out the window. “It was not quite, I think, the most shocking thing I ever saw. No, it wouldn’t be, would it? Nothing can shock us as things do in childhood. I told you how I used to creep down by the creek at night. Interesting things went on down there under the oaks and in the brush close to the water. I remember it had rained for days. Then the storm passed and we had a glorious day. That night, the stars were bright, the moon was very full. It shone on me and woke me, and I crept out. The house was asleep. The ground, of course, was still wet. So I thought no one would be out there, making love as they liked to do. There’d be nothing interesting to watch. Nothing educational.

“But there was. A young woman—a girl, really, as I see her now—probably fifteen, sixteen. I was perhaps ten or eleven. And something seemed to be wrong with her. I was vastly ignorant. She was all alone, half hidden in the undergrowth, writhing on the ground, moaning, whimpering to herself. In Spanish. Prayers. I won’t go on with the details. She was giving birth. I can’t tell you how dumbfounded I was when this wet, struggling thing came from her in the moonlight. The scream she gave is still in my ears. I understood and didn’t understand. I turned my face away. I’m afraid I threw up.

“And when I looked again, she was on her feet, clutching the baby. It was gasping, crying. Like a sick cat. And she ran down to the creek with it. And without a sound, without a moment’s pause, she threw it into the rushing water. I heard a scream and looked around to see who it was, but of course it was me, wasn’t it? It frightened the girl. She ran away, slipping, sliding, falling.

“I rushed down to the creek, stumbled in up to my waist. The current was very strong. I wanted to save the baby. I couldn’t see it. I called and called. As if a newborn child would know it was being called to. I knelt in the rocks and splashed around for it with my hands. But I didn’t find it. It was gone. The creek had it.”

“Sounds like a dream,” Dave said. “You sure it wasn’t a dream?”

“I hoped so, next morning. But my clothes were still wet. And they found the baby. Miles downstream. The story was in the newspaper. I clipped it out and kept it. I suppose I still have it somewhere. They never found the girl. My God, she’s an old woman by now. Or dead. At my time of life, you look around, and everyone you ever knew is dead. My glass is empty.”

Dave rose and took the glass. “Silencio’s gang killed five people. Not one of them was a member of The Edge.”

“It’s not Silencio’s gang,” Gifford said sharply.

“He was there. The minister’s wife says so. You saw it too. Wasn’t he there?”

“If I were Silencio,” Gifford said, “I should be hiding somewhere. He must know they believe he killed Paul Myers. He’s such an obvious suspect. He’d be a fool to add to his troubles by leading that raid.”

“Mrs. Prentice says he was trying to stop it. The Sheriff won’t believe her. She needs a backup. Silencio needs a backup. You sure you didn’t see what she saw?”

“I told you.” Gifford motioned at the window. “The tree-tops. I only got glimpses. But Silencio didn’t lead that raid. He was through with gangs. Prison cured him of that. He came to see me, briefly, the day he returned from San Quentin. He told me, and I believed him. Now could I have my drink?”

Dave fetched it. “Last night at six, a tall, bald man in a Mercedes stopped at Myers’s. You notice fine cars. Did you see it? Did you happen to get the license number?”

Gifford drank from his glass. “I was watching the church, the walnut grove.”

Going out through the shadows of the garret, Dave jerked his head aside to avoid the pale canvas corner of the old life raft. The elevator creaked him down to the deserted pantry. He stood frowning while the elevator door slid shut. He listened. No dogs whined or snuffled behind closed doors. The looming old house stood hollow, silent, empty of life. He walked out into the hallway beside the great, gloomy staircase, thinking his footfalls might rouse the dogs. No such thing.

He opened doors and peered into shrouded rooms that breathed dust, mildew, neglect at him. He went back the way he had come and into the gaunt, disused kitchen. It smelled of dogs. He crossed scuffed linoleum, pulled open a door, and found himself on a screened porch where an old oaken icebox lurked, and an old Maytag washer with gray, crumbling wringers. A strong latch was on the screen door. A pair of bolts of bright new metal. But not fastened. He pushed the door open. Wooden steps, frail with age, went down to what must once have been the kitchen garden Gifford had mentioned—where there was always fresh mint. It was weeds and creepers now, matted, brittle.

Beyond it, a hurricane fence crossed, barbwire-topped. And a few yards farther off, an old stable building reared up, jigsaw work along its eaves, slats broken out of its cupola. The stable door stood open. The glare of the setting sun was in Dave’s eyes, but he thought he saw movement inside the stable. He waited, squinting, straining his ears. But the building was too far off. He started to take a step down, then thought better of it. It looked to him as if the gate in the fence was ajar. The stable and the yard were probably where the dogs stayed when not on duty. He didn’t want to meet the dogs. He stepped back onto the porch and was just letting the screen door fall shut when he heard a dog bark.

A man yelped, “Lady, no! Damn it, come back here.”

Out the stable door, dragging a large, heavy, green paper sack, came a big, lean Doberman. The man appeared. He was slender, brown-skinned, curly-haired. He lunged for the sack, grabbed it, tugged, and the sack split open. Kibbled dog food rattled on the hard ground. The young man took a laughing swing at the dog, who dodged away. The young man hung for a moment on hands and knees, wagging his head in amused despair over the spilled food, the torn sack—then jumped to his feet and went back into the stable. He spoke the dog’s name, but she didn’t respond. She stood at the fence, staring through at Dave.

Dave let the porch door close softly and went back through the dark house and let himself out through the front doors, with their etched-glass panels.

It wasn’t far to the hospital, but by the time he reached it, all light had gone from the sky. He left the van in the parking lot slot of some doctor he hoped had gone home for the day or wouldn’t arrive too soon. The parking lot was otherwise filled, unbroken rows of cars—a number of them Mustangs in various stages of repair—among the long strips of ivy geranium and the decorative palms. The long, curved fronds of the palms blew in a southeast wind that had risen with the coming of night. The wind was cool and Dave turned up his jacket collar, making his way toward the lighted glass side doors of the hospital. He looked up bleakly at the ten stories of shining windows, and lowered his eyes. He didn’t want to think about the misery behind the glass. His horror of hospitals had been sharpened by Cecil’s recent ordeal. But it had originated when Rod Fleming died slowly in a hospital a dozen years ago—of a kind of cancer they were now learning how to cure. There was no humor in the irony of that. He had lived with Rod for twenty-two years. He would never stop missing him.

But his spirits lightened when he found Cecil in a big, lamplit room of couches and easy chairs, where the sick and the well made ready to leave this place. Cecil sat talking with Luther Prentice, whose glasses and bald head gleamed. Cecil saw Dave coming, making his way through a clutter of empty wheelchairs, and smiled and waved. Dave smiled back. He shook Prentice’s long, kindly hand. The preacher said, “My wife tells me you have made a generous donation to the victims of the shooting. Please accept my gratitude. It was a terrible thing to happen. I don’t know what I was thinking of, bringing all those people there, putting them in danger of their lives.” Behind the shiny lenses, his eyes misted. “I have asked the Lord to forgive me for my foolishness, and I expect He has, but I don’t know that I will ever be able to forgive myself.”

“You only wanted to feed people,” Cecil said.

“You couldn’t know what would happen,” Dave said.

“Someone more worldly-wise than I am”—Prentice shook his head sorrowfully—“would have realized that with their leader back out of prison, that gang would get up to something evil again.”

“Your wife doesn’t think it was Silencio’s doing,” Dave said. “She thinks he was trying to stop it.”

Prentice’s smile was gently tolerant. “She is even less worldly-wise than I am.” He sighed. “No, I’m afraid this is only the beginning of the shootings, ambushes, deaths. The Edge will want revenge. And then—” He straightened. “Ah, here comes Mrs. Prentice now.” He looked at an old silver watch on a bony wrist. “She is behind time. Prayer meeting begins at seven.”

She came and spoke in her soft, musical voice to Dave and Cecil, her gentle brown eyes reflecting the suffering she had just been witness to, even while she smiled politely at these two strangers. Then she and her stilt-tall husband excused themselves and went away into the night. Luther Prentice’s voice drifted back as he pushed open the heavy glass door for her. “We’ll be late.”

“The Lord will wait,” she said. “He always has.”

Dave said to Cecil, “Is he right? Are there going to be more ambushes, more deaths?”

“It’s a good thing all the G-G’s are in jail,” Cecil said. “If The Edge ever gets hold of any of them, they won’t live through it.”

“Shall we go?” Dave said, and moved back toward the wheelchairs, toward the parking-lot doors beyond the wheelchairs. Cecil came along behind.

He said, “I’ll be glad to get out of here. I’ve had enough of hospitals to last me the rest of my life.” Dave pushed the door open. Wind gusted in. “Whoo! That is cold.” The door closed behind them. Cecil put his head down and hugged himself. They trotted toward the van. “Spooky wind, too. Can’t make up its mind where it’s coming from.” They climbed into the van and slammed the doors. “Hot today, too.” Cecil shivered and rubbed his arms.

“Looks like the end of summer,” Dave said. He started the engine. “You talked to The Edge. Which ones?”

“Rollo Poore. He’s the head honcho. He’s got a bullet in his thigh. Must have been some bullet. I would judge him to be made of some very tough alloy. I tried to talk to the ones leaning around looking mean in the hallways, but Rollo—he the spokesman. Nobody else gave me squat. All they did was point at this particular room and say, ‘Talk to Rollo Poore.’”

Dave backed the van, changed gears, joined the red and yellow lights of traffic heading away from Gifford Gardens toward the freeway. “And what did Rollo say?”

“You should have seen that room. Like something out of an old Edward G. Robinson movie, only all black, of course. The heavy standing outside the door. The heavy leaning against the wall by the window. Sulky. Watching me like he was thinking up ways to take me apart and put me back together again all wrong. Mrs. Prentice—I saw her before I saw Rollo. She said the authorities won’t let The Edge carry weapons. No weapons in the hospital, she said. But I swear, the one in the room had a gun stuck in his pants. His jacket covered it, but it was there.”

“I’m sorry,” Dave said. “I ought to have gone.”

“You’re the wrong color. He’d never have talked to you.” Cecil had stopped shivering. “It’s a good heating system in this van. Rollo said, when he gets out of bed, he and the rest of them are going to find Silencio Ruiz and kill him. How was your crazy old peeper today?”

“Makeup an inch thick,” Dave said. “He denied it before, but he has a man around the house. I wondered who smoked the cigarettes, who washed the windows, kept the kitchen and the bathroom spic and span. I wondered who looked after the dogs. I saw him today.”

“Hired hand?” Cecil asked.

“They take their meals together,” Dave said. “I don’t know what else they do together. What does Silencio Ruiz look like? Did you see his picture on the news last night? Well built, six feet, curly hair? Ramon Novarro?”

“I don’t know who that might be,” Cecil said, “but if you mean is he pretty, you got it.”

“He was feeding the dogs,” Dave said. “It figures. Gifford’s been looking out for him for a long time.”

“That was why he paid off Bruce Kilgore not to leak it about the bail and the expensive lawyer. To keep Silencio’s gang from suspecting what was between him and Gifford. It wouldn’t fit the macho image.”

“That’s the explanation that makes sense,” Dave said.

“And when Silencio learned about Paul Myers’s death, he ran to Gifford’s enchanted castle to hide out, right? Lucky old Gifford.” They sloped onto the freeway. “What are you going to do?”

“Tell Salazar.” Rain began to spatter the windshield. “Get Silencio into jail with the rest of the G-G’s. To keep The Edge from killing him.” Dave switched on the wipers. “And that silly old man.”

I
T WAS A LAZY
rain, the warm, tropical sort that now and then drifts up from Mexico. It fell all night on the shingles above the loft and made sleeping good. It was still coming down from ragged, gray-black clouds when they went their separate ways next morning. Cecil took his van. Dave took the sideswiped car. Rain had leaked into it, probably because the rubber around the doors was rotten. The floor was puddled. The rubber of the wiper blades was also shot. He stopped at a filling station for new ones, then wheeled onto the first of three freeways that would take him out east of Pasadena to a plant called Tech-Rite. That name, and the names Chemiseal and Agroplex on the new batch of waybills taken from Paul Myers’s closet drawer, had interested Dave.

Tech-Rite occupied long buildings far off across empty land backed by rain-shrouded mountains. The buildings were flat-roofed, windowless, featureless. Big white storage tanks loomed behind them. To a security guard in a black rubber hat and poncho, Dave showed his license and explained his business. The guard made a phone call from inside his white stucco booth. Light flickered off his rain-slick poncho from a small black-and-white television set in the booth. He hung up the phone and came down out of the booth and leaned to the car window. A gnarled hand pushed something shiny at Dave, a card enfolded in clear plastic, printed with the name
TECH-RITE,
the word
VISITOR,
and some blank lines.