Skinflick (14 page)

“Thanks.” Dave gave him a smile. “Well done.”

“Anything else?” Delgado sounded eager.

Dave shook his head. “It’s over. The son did it. Don’t feel bad. You always have to chase a lot of wrong answers before you get the right one. You know that.”

“Yeah,” Delgado said but he sounded forlorn. “I know. What about the teenage girl—Charleen?”

“She was a witness,” Dave said, “but we’re not going to find her. The last time she was seen alive—if she was alive—was with Bucky.”

“You said you liked it,” Amanda said. “I think it’s horrible. How can you go through it again and again?”

“It doesn’t always turn out this depressing.” Dave set his plate down, pushed to his feet, stepped over the plate, and went to where his slacks and jacket hung over a loudspeaker. He came back with his wallet and pushed into Delgado’s shirt pocket a fold of fifty-dollar bills. “Pay off your motel so there’ll be someplace I can get you when I need you—right?”

Delgado’s face darkened. He handed back the money. “Stop acting guilty, will you? You didn’t take my job. That wasn’t me talking. That was Jim Beam.”

Dave tucked the money into Delgado’s pocket again. “I didn’t say I was giving it to you. You’ll earn it.” He looked down at unhappy Amanda. “Forget it,” he said. “I’m sorry for talking about it in front of you. Smile, okay? And go forth and destroy?”

“Just old two-by-fours,” she said. “Not lives.”

“Come on, now,” he said. “It’s not that simple.”

“I’m sorry.” Her smile was wan. “I didn’t mean it.”

He went to rummage in cartons for fresh clothes. “You meant it and it means you’re a very nice lady, but I knew that anyway. I promise to wash the blood off my hands before I come back to you.”

“Oh, Dave,” she said. “I said I was sorry.” He headed for the bathroom to dress. Before he shut the door he said to Delgado, “Write down your address and phone number and leave it for me, okay?”

“A man’s voice,” Mildred Dawson said. She was no more than a tall, dim shape in the middle of a room darkened to keep out the sunlight, to keep out the heat. The room was hot and stuffy all the same. Dave wore a light knit soccer shirt, blue-and-white striped, and blue linen trousers, also light, but he was sweating. So was Bucky, sturdy and afraid in cutoff jeans, shirt open on his woolly chest. He kept sitting down and standing up again. Lyle Shumate kept murmuring to him. The woman, leaning crooked on her cane, said, “It sounded a little like Bucky. I asked who it was. He wouldn’t say. All he would say was that my husband was at that apartment with that girl. Fornicating.” She whispered the word.

Dave said, “Was that his expression?”

“Do you think I’d forget it?” she said. “He told me if I wanted to save him, I must come and take him away.”

“Save him from what?” Dave looked at Bucky. “From death? Did he threaten to kill him?”

“From eternal damnation,” she said.

“That means death, doesn’t it, Reverend?” Dave peered through the shadows at the lanky man on the couch. “Didn’t it occur to you that Gerald Dawson wasn’t killed by Lon Tooker at all? That nobody jumped him out here on the street? That the voice on the phone belonged to his killer? That you were letting the wrong man suffer, possibly even die?”

“Any of us can buy eternal damnation any day,” Shumate said. “Outside the redeeming grace of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, there is nothing but eternal damnation.”

“That’s not an answer,” Dave said. “That’s a sermon.” He swung back to Mildred Dawson. “So you went. How?”

“I have my own car,” she said. “You know that. It has automatic shift. I manage.”

“How did you manage the main door at the apartment complex?” Dave asked. “It locks itself. Only tenants have keys. Was your husband waiting in the lobby to let you in?”

“No. I pushed the door and it opened.”

“It was braced,” Bucky said, “just a crack. With a brown rubber wedge. The kind made to put under doors, you know? Only it wasn’t under this one. It was stuck in the crack. At the hinge side, where it wouldn’t be noticed.”

“But you noticed it,” Dave said.

“I was noticing everything that night,” Bucky said. “Nothing like this ever happened to me before.”

“It isn’t going to happen again,” Dave said.

“Don’t be abusive.” Shumate put his arm around the boy’s thick shoulders. “This boy has done nothing wrong.”

“You’ve all done wrong and you know it. Or I hope you do. If you don’t, that church of yours is in trouble.” He turned back to Mildred Dawson. “He’d given you the apartment number, this anonymous man on the phone? You went there, right? Up all those stairs by yourself?”

“It was a struggle,” she said, “but the Lord gave me the strength. Number thirty-six, yes.”

“But they weren’t fornicating when you got there,” Dave said, “were they? They were eating supper.”

“If you know, why do you ask?” she said.

“Habit,” Dave said. “I sometimes get the truth. You asked him to come home, did you?”

“I don’t believe you have any authority to question us,” Shumate said. “I don’t believe any of us is compelled by law to tell you anything.”

“You might as well practice on me,” Dave said. “It will get you used to the process. A detective lieutenant from the sheriffs office named Salazar will be repeating it soon.”

“Gerald wouldn’t come,” Mildred Dawson said. “He’d found ‘happiness’ and he wasn’t going to give it up. No matter what it cost. Him or me or Bucky or anyone. He was completely changed. I hardly knew him.” She made a bitter, mocking sound. “A little stick of a thing, and she had him bewitched.”

“Did he strike you?” Dave said. “Someone fell down. My witness heard it.”

“He wouldn’t,” she said. “It was the girl.”

“So you came home and called Shumate,” Dave said.

Shumate said, “He wouldn’t come for me, either.”

“I didn’t want Bucky to know,” Mildred Dawson said. “I was so ashamed. But Gerald would come for Bucky. He loved Bucky and if Bucky asked him, he’d come home. So I told Reverend Lyle to send Bucky, and Bucky went.”

Dave looked at the black-browed boy. “They weren’t eating when I got there,” Bucky said. “They forgot to lock the door. They were naked in bed together. And he hit me. Knocked me down, hard. He picked me up and threw me out. I banged on the door and cried. He wouldn’t let me back in.”

“But later he did,” Dave said. “Around eleven.”

“What!” Bucky stood up again.

“And you tried to take him by force and you broke his neck. My witness didn’t see how you got his body out of there. But he did see Charleen try to run away. He saw you drag her back into the apartment.”

“He’s lying!” Bucky shouted. “I wasn’t there then.”

“He thought she was drunk because she staggered. But that wasn’t it, was it? You were trying to kill her. She was half dead, wasn’t she? Then, when you got her back inside, she was all the way dead—just like your father.”

“No!” Bucky wailed. “I didn’t kill anyone.”

“You couldn’t burn her up like your father’s dirty magazines, Dave said. “What did you do with her, Bucky?”

“She was alive when I left there. My father was alive.” Bucky choked on tears. He held out his hands, begging. “You have to believe me. Please! Please!”

“His father’s car was here.” Shumate stood and put an arm around Bucky. “Doesn’t that convince you?”

“Not that he drove it,” Dave said. “Anyway, it’s Salazar you have to convince.” He went to the door. Bucky ignored Shumate. He stared wide-eyed at Dave. Mildred Dawson stared. Dave opened the door and went out into the heat.

P
IñATAS HUNG FROM THE
old black rafters of a lean-to roof above Salazar’s beautiful head. They seemed to float there like animals in a Chagall painting—papier-mâché goats, burros, chickens, furred and feathered in shredded tissue paper, colors bright and clashing, red, orange, green, blue, bubble-gum pink. With flat tissue-paper eyes, they watched Indianans in Bermuda shorts and sundresses inch their way along the narrow bricked lanes between the huarache booths, sombrero booths, serape booths, the cactus-candy and woven-basket booths of Olvera Street. Mariachi music twanged and tin-trumpeted from loudspeakers. The hot air was thick with chili smells from greasy taco stands. A quartet of rouged children with paper roses in their hair and spangles on ruffled skirts danced to the music.

Behind Salazar, strings of shiny painted gourds framed a dark restaurant doorway. He sat across from Dave at a gingham-covered table and ate enchiladas, as Dave did, washing them down, as Dave did, with orange soda from thick, lukewarm bottles. “I can’t arrest him. How can I arrest him?” He wiped his chin with a paper napkin. He looked like a silent-movie idol—Gilbert Roland? “Ken Barker says he was murdered on his own street in LA. Ken Barker says this porno-shop owner killed him. Now I’m supposed to come barging in and say he was killed in some apartment on the Strip. His own kid killed him?”

“His own kid admits he was there,” Dave said. “Cowan saw him there.”

“Cowan didn’t see any murder,” Salazar said.

“But nobody saw Gerald Dawson alive after that. The Medical Examiner says he was killed between ten and midnight. And Bucky lied to Barker.”

Salazar shook his head and moodily poked at his refritos with his fork. “It doesn’t make a murder case,” he said. “All it makes is a family fight.”

“Come on, now,” Dave said. “You don’t believe that. What’s the matter? Is it the car you’re worried about? Why didn’t the wife, the widow, think of it afterward, get into her own car with Bucky, drive back there, so Bucky could drive Dawson’s car home while she followed in her own car?”

“People get hysterical, they forget details.” Glumly Salazar drank orange soda. “Even details as big as a car.”

“Alone, maybe,” Dave said. “A kid, especially. But he wasn’t alone. His mother helped. So did the preacher. They even remembered a detail as small as the keys.”

Salazar’s mouth was full of pink rice. He looked his question with big, smoldering brown eyes.

“If Dawson had driven himself home and was in the process of opening the garage, the keys would have been in his hand. They weren’t. Or in his pocket. Or on the street. They weren’t anywhere. Lon Tooker didn’t have them. I suggest you search Bucky’s room.”

“You’re kidding.” Salazar paused with a forkful of enchilada halfway to his mouth. “Why hide the stupid keys?”

“Because two of them fitted the Strip apartment—the street door, the door to unit thirty-six.”

“Why not get rid of them and leave the car keys?” Salazar put the forkful of food into his mouth.

“Because he didn’t know which they were. There would have been keys to Superstar Rentals there too. Anyway, you mentioned hysteria.”

Salazar washed the food down with orange soda. “And you mentioned presence of mind. You can’t have it both ways, Brandstetter. If it was like you say, he could have stripped off all the keys but the ones for the car.”

“Not without prompting a lot of questions,” Dave said. “It was better to take the chance of the cops assuming the killer had taken the whole bunch and thrown them away.”

“And why didn’t he?” Salazar said.

“Because Bucky drove the car and he still has them.”

Salazar cocked an eyebrow, pressed his mouth tight, shook his head. “Barker says you’re very, very smart. But there are different kinds of smart, aren’t there? What I hear in all this is the rattle of a cash register. You’re trying to save that insurance company that hired you money. Tooker can’t help you. But the widow and orphan can, right?”

“Tooker didn’t have anything to do with this.”

“What about the horse stuff on the deceased’s clothes?”

“Check the closet in unit thirty-six,” Dave said, “the shoes there, the dirt on the floor.”

“Yeah, unit thirty-six.” Salazar brushed a fly away from the guacamole bowl. “What did the widow and the kid care about unit thirty-six?”

“They didn’t care about anything else,” Dave said. “If you can’t grasp that, no wonder you don’t believe me. Let me explain it to you one more time. What they were trying to do by losing the keys to the place, bringing the body away from there, bringing the car away from there, wasn’t just to avoid a charge of murder one. They wanted it to look as if Gerald R. Dawson had never set foot in that apartment, never touched that girl. To them, the Strip is Sodom and Gomorrah. Gerald R. Dawson was a saint.”

Salazar didn’t say anything. He only looked. He dipped a chip of fried tortilla into the guacamole, put it into his mouth, and munched. He licked his fingers.

Dave said, “They wanted the police, the
Times,
the
Examiner,
the ‘Eyewitness News’, everybody, the world, to think their beloved husband and father was, in death as in life, the same upright and unsullied crusader for Christ they’d always believed he was. Hell, Bucky showed me that the first morning I saw him. He claimed those porno magazines he was burning were his. They weren’t. His father had ripped them off at Lon Tooker’s shop. But Bucky didn’t care about bringing what his unreal little world would call disgrace on himself. No matter what it cost him—he was going to protect his father’s image.”

“Even if he had to kill him to do it.” Salazar picked up his orange-soda bottle and set it down again. He laughed. Not happily. Hopelessly. “Wow, that is weird, Brandstetter. You know that, don’t you? Weird.”

“If your lab people will take their little vacuum cleaners and go over that apartment,” Dave said, “you’ll see it’s not all that weird. Mrs. Dawson wasn’t able to save her husband from hellfire. Lyle Shumate was his minister and friend but he failed. Bucky failed, and he couldn’t accept it. Maybe he talked it over with mama, maybe not. But he went back there and tried to use force and something went wrong. Bucky claimed his dad couldn’t fight but he must have tried. Anyway, he ended up dead.”

“Weird,” Salazar said again, and stacked his dishes. “I mean, even if you accept it as accidental—it’s still weird. And, anyway, what about the girl? You’ve been in that unit. Her body’s not there. Where is she?”

“Damned if I know.” Dave got off the creaky wooden chair. “I can’t see Bucky killing her in cold blood.” He picked up the check, took out his glasses, and read it. “But where did she go? I keep seeing twiggy little girls under haystacks of hair and hoping they’re her. They never are.” He tucked the glasses away. “I don’t find Bucky easy to believe but I can’t shake the feeling she’s still alive.”