Nightwork (18 page)

The spur of Torcido Canyon to which Melvil pointed him would have been easy to miss. Its road was a narrow strip of blacktop that the rain had damaged. It followed a crooked creek along the bottom of a canyon whose walls went up steeply, covered in dry brush showing new tips of green, with occasional clumps of live oak and outcrops of rock. The ridges were high above. The creek ran rough and swollen among boulders and twisted white sycamores hung with scraps of yellow leaf.

“Hard to imagine a semi negotiating this road,” Dave said. “How much farther is this dump?”

“Dad, he took it real slow, change gears a lot.” Melvil frowned ahead through the afternoon rain. “Not too far now. Look a little different in the daytime.”

“You sure you can find it?”

“I think so. Yeah. There. See that turnoff?”

The Jaguar scraped bottom, following ruts carved by the giant tires of tractor-trailer rigs. Oaks grew large and close here, very old. The wheels of the Jaguar slurred in mud and wet grasses. And here was the dump, in a declivity circled by dead ferns. Filled with steel drums like those they had watched trucked out of Millex last night—this morning. Tumbled there, labels peeling, rusting in the rain.

“Smell it?” Melvil put a hand over his nose and mouth. “Make you sick, you breathe that for long.” His eyes clouded. He turned his face away. “Worse than sick. Kill you.” He whispered. “Killed my daddy.”

“I need the camera,” Dave said, and got out of the car. The smell was strong, caught in his throat, stung his eyes. Melvil pulled the camera from the glove compartment, lay across the seat, handed it out to Dave. “Thanks. I’ll make it quick.” He fiddled with the camera, uncertain, hoping he was making the correct adjustments for the poor light. He took twenty shots, got back into the car, passed the camera to Melvil. He slammed the door, started the engine. “What a nightmare,” he said. He pressed the throttle, and the rear wheels spun.

Melvil sighed. “One more time,” he said, and got out into the rain to have a look.

Dave got out too. “I’m a slow learner,” he said.

“Be all right,” Melvil said, and looked around him. “If we can find something to put under the wheels.” He made a face. “Don’t like touching nothing here.” He rubbed his hands on his pantlegs. “How about this?” He took a few steps, slipping a little in the mud, then bent and heaved up from among the brittle, rust-brown ferns the end of a four-by-four, six feet long. He wrestled it loose from creepers that had gripped it. They were dead and dry too. The end of the timber came loose with a ripping sound.

A signboard was bolted to that end. Melvil wrestled the four-by-four toward the car. “‘No dumping,’” he said. “How about that?” With a disgusted laugh, he let the post drop behind the car. Dave went to help him. Muddy-handed, they wedged the four-by-four under the rear wheels. Halfway back to the road, the rear of the car slewed and the wheels mired again. They hiked back for the post. In small print across the bottom of the sign were numerals from a County ordinance book. And below that,
TORCIDO CANYON HOMEOWNERS ASSN.

Back in the car, inching it warily along the muddy ruts, Dave said, “No homeowners in this part of the canyon.”

“Up there.” Melvil sat forward on the seat, peering upward through the glass. “One. Look new to me.”

It hung two hundred feet above them on the brushy canyon wall, all alone, raw cedar and tall glass, sharp roof angles, decks thrusting out like bony wings. Tall pin oaks grew around the house. It looked beautiful in the sifting rain—a picture for an architecture magazine. But there was something desolate about it.

Dave checked his watch. No time to go up there. Salazar expected him at four. He’d be late as it was. The Jaguar lurched heavily onto the potholed blacktop of the trail. He drove it as fast as he dared, the tires spraying water at places where the creek overflowed onto the paving. He skidded at the boulevard stop where the spur canyon opened on Torcido Canyon road. The spur canyon had a name—Concho.

Darkness was coming early again. The shift was changing. Men were leaving the squad room in dry raincoats. Men in damp raincoats were coming on duty. They brought whiffs with them of the moist air of the streets, the smell of rain on sidewalks. Phones rang. Voices spoke, laughed, swore. Typewriters rattled. From outside, above the steady growl of home-going traffic, sirens wailed and faded.

“Who led you into this?” Salazar looked and sounded pained. His hand slapped a stack of papers in front of him. “Do you realize how big this is? And how nasty?” Dave blinked at him. Salazar said, “What took you in? And I don’t mean the Myers matter.”

“An informant.” Dave hung his raincoat on a hook by the door of the glass box that was Salazar’s office, off the squad room. “On the understanding that I wouldn’t disclose his name or whereabouts.” He sat down facing Salazar across the desk. “The pictures came out, then?”

“The pictures are lousy. You can’t take telephoto pictures without a tripod. Handheld is too jittery.” Sourly, Salazar passed the pictures across. They looked as if they had been taken at night in the rain. “But he got one that wasn’t too bad. Even with the hat.”

“Of the Duchess.” Dave studied it.

“We got responses on that from all over the state, all over the country. Clara Blodgett, née Leopardi. In twenty-five years, eleven arrests, no convictions.”

Dave handed back the pictures. “Why? Her operation depends on a great many people she can’t really know well enough to trust.”

“She doesn’t trust them. She scares them.”

“She ever blow anybody up before?” Dave said.

“Maybe.” Salazar thumbed through the papers. “Your license number didn’t lead us anywhere. Belongs to a car junked years ago. Owner, no connection.”

Dave laughed wryly. “My witness thought the owner would be dead.”

Salazar said, “Sounds like he knows her. Don’t feel bad. Even if we located her and took her to trial, nobody would testify against her. They got a witness once in—where? Florida? Texas? I forget.” He scowled at the papers, sat back, gave his head a dismissive shake. “Doesn’t matter. They registered him under a false name in a motel. Officers around the clock, eating with him, sleeping with him. They didn’t go to the bathroom with him. Somebody shot him through the bathroom window. But mostly, by the time law enforcement gets a line on a witness, the poor bastard is already dead—accident, suicide. You know.”

Dave reached across and touched the papers. “In all of that, did you run across an associate of hers, a hitman maybe, named Smithers? Using that name, that alias?”

“I spent the whole day with this file.” Salazar found a flat box on his desk, lit a dun brown cigarette. “I’d have noticed that.” He pushed the papers around for a minute, regarded Dave through blue smoke. “Smithers? Smith? That’s a dumb alias.”

Dave lit a cigarette of his own. “So you’re saying I wasted a night and risked pneumonia for nothing? She can’t be touched?”

“You get this witness of yours to drive a truck there, get an assignment from the Duchess, the signs, the warning stickers, the phony documents, the trailer full of chemicals, and bring them all to us, and—”

“She already wants him dead,” Dave said. “His mother’s been shot. I sent Amanda down there. The woman told her it was Smithers. San Diego County’s got deputies in the hospital now, guarding her.”

Salazar went straight on: “And even then, we’d haul fat Clara in, she’d have a high-powered lawyer with her, be out on the street in an hour, and when it came to trial in a couple of years, there’d be ten witnesses that she wasn’t even there. Nobody at the truck stop would talk. Who wants to end his life wrapped up in razor wire? As for the company that shipped the stuff—maybe they’d get fined a few thousand bucks for illegal dumping. And they’d be right back at it the next week.”

“My witness heard Paul Myers say he was going to expose the Duchess.” Dave stretched to use the ashtray. “You know what happened. Myers’s wife was beaten up, and when that didn’t work, Myers was killed.”

Salazar swiveled in his chair to gaze at the rain running down his window. “The witness, Dave.”

“Give me back my report.” Dave rose wearily. “And the pictures. I’ll turn them over to the grand jury. I’ll testify to the grand jury.”

Salazar swiveled around and gazed up at Dave with pity. “They’ll jail you for refusing to divulge your source. And if you get out of jail alive, you’ll turn the ignition key to start your car, and blam! Instant cremation. No waiting.” He slipped the envelope of photographs from the stack of papers, along with Dave’s typed pages fastened with a paperclip. “Here you go.” He passed them over. “But don’t do it. It’s not worth it.”

“It might save some lives,” Dave said. “This is going on all over the country, been going on for decades. They make more and more laws against it, federal, state, local. Talk about it, write about it, but it just gets worse.” He went for his coat. “The air is poisoned, ponds, rivers, lakes, whole oceans. The water under the land. The land itself. Farms, the animals on the farms. People. Whole towns have to be abandoned. Somebody has to stop it.” He shrugged into the coat.

Salazar came to take down his own coat. “Did you see that picket line out at the Foothill Springs dump? They had it on TV.” He put his coat on.

“I saw it in person.” Dave folded the useless photos and report and jammed them into a pocket

“Yes, well,” Salazar said. “It will be them that stop it, Dave. Not you. Not the grand jury. The grand jury has been promising a report for months. It never comes.” Salazar opened his door. The noises of the large room—telephones, typewriters, voices—were suddenly loud again. He led the way between busy desks. “Why don’t you forget it, and do something you can do? Sign the papers on the Myers case and get the widow her check.” He opened another door, and they were in a bright hallway. “Whoever killed him—the Duchess or Silencio or Kilgore—he’s just as dead. And she can use the money. She’s got kids.”

“Also a sick old father,” Dave said. “Damn it, I wish the man hadn’t been hauling dangerous cargo. On that two-year conditional clause, Pinnacle won’t pay her a dime.”

“The truck was empty.” Salazar pushed a wall button to bring an elevator. “Why isn’t that enough for them? You don’t have to tell them everything you know.” The elevator doors opened. Two uniformed women stepped out. Salazar stepped in, waited for Dave, pushed a button. The doors slid shut. The elevator moved. “You don’t really know much, the way I see it. Not that you can prove.”

Dave smiled bleakly. “I’ve made a lot of trouble for a lot of people. It would be pretty sad if it all added up to nothing.”

“You’re not going to quit. Right?” Salazar said.

“I guess I don’t know how,” Dave said.

T
HE LITTLE BISHOPS SLEPT
in the big bed in the loft again. Cecil had stuffed them with lasagne Bolognese until they nodded. “They liked it better than Spaghetti-O’s,” Melvil said. Melvil was in the back building with them. Cecil had lent him a big portable radio and cassette player. Wearing headphones, and wrapped in blankets because it was another cold, wet night, Melvil lay on the long corduroy couch in front of the fireplace where logs flamed low, and listened to Blondie. He could watch the door from the couch. It was bolted and chained, but he was afraid, just the same. Of Smithers.

In the front building, Dave sat relaxed with a drink on an-other couch, facing another fire. Cecil lay stretched out on the couch, his head in Dave’s lap. The sing-along recording that Glenn Gould had made of the Goldberg variations just before his death was on the turntable. No light was in the room except that from the fireplace. The gain was low on the stereo equipment. Dave wanted to be able to hear cars on the trail. Passing, he hoped. Of course, if Smithers came back, his headlights would swing across the clerestory windows. But only if he left his lights on. He might not do that.

The Sig Sauer automatic lay on Cecil’s belly. Its bronze metal gleamed in the firelight. His hands rested on it. He grumbled, stirred, laid the gun on the floor, out of sight. “You want me to say it’s a beautiful piece of machinery?” Dave didn’t answer. Cecil was quiet for a long time, touching whiskey to his mouth from a squat glass in which ice trapped the color of the flames. “Ought to be,” he said. “Cost enough.” Dave made a noncommittal sound and absently traced a fingertip over the intricacies of one of Cecil’s tight little ears. “Man who trained me with the targets at LAPD,” Cecil said, “told me that in this country law enforcement says a .45 stops a man best. But in Europe it’s the nine-millimeter. Don’t you love thinking about the kind of research that went into forming conclusions like that?” He touched the glass to his mouth. “They could have used me—if I’d just been a little deader.”

Dave laid fingers on his mouth. “Please,” he said.

“I don’t want to shoot anybody,” Cecil said.

The telephone rang. It was at Dave’s elbow. He picked it up, grateful he’d remembered to unplug the two instruments in the rear building. The little Bishops would sleep on. “Brandstetter,” he said.

“They’re breaking in here.” The voice was hoarse, quiet, shaky, distorted because the mouth was too close to the instrument. “They’ve cut off the electricity. The alarms aren’t working, the electrified fence.”

“Gifford?” Dave frowned at the phone. “What are you talking about? Who’s breaking in?”

“The Edge, of course,” Gifford snapped. “That black gang. I don’t know what’s happened to the dogs. They raved and raved, and now it’s silent out there.”

“What does The Edge want with you?” Dave didn’t need to ask. “It’s not you. It’s Silencio, isn’t it? Ruiz. He’s there with you.”

“Of course. You know that. You knew it all along. You’ve protected him as much as I have. We had an understanding, didn’t we? No need for words—not between us. You’ll help me now. I know you’ll help me now.” Something crashed in the background. “No, wait! Silencio!” A voice spoke, but too far off for Dave to make out what it said. Gifford had the phone to his mouth again. “They are on the porch. They’re breaking down the doors.”

“Phone the Sheriff,” Dave said.

“How can you say that? You know what the Sheriff will do to Silencio. Are you coming to help me or not?”