Skinflick (3 page)

“Did Lonny kill Dawson?” Dave asked.

“Over ten bucks’ worth of magazines wholesale?” The kid bent and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Forget it.”

“Over trying to wreck his business,” Dave said.

“You don’t know Lon. All he wants is to play his guitar and ride his horses.”

“Does he come to work in the clothes he rides in?”

“No way. Never. Always right out of the shower, always neat and, what do you say, crisp? You smell horse in here? Never. Look, he’s stupid, but sweet stupid, okay? Not mean stupid. You should hear the songs he writes. They make ‘Feelings’ sound like a Nazi march or something. And what he never wants is trouble. Not with anybody.”

“He picked a troublesome business,” Dave said.

“To help people feel good nobody cares about.”

“A kindly philosopher,” Dave said.

“Yeah, well, the money’s not that bad. And Lon hates to worry about money. It gives him headaches.”

The girl called from below, “Car’s loaded. I’m off.”

“Don’t drive under any trucks,” the kid called.

“Did Lon go home that night?” Dave asked.

“If you had something like her waiting for you”—the kid jerked his lank-haired head at the stairs—“where else would you go?”

“She wasn’t there,” Dave said. “According to the police report, Karen Shiflett didn’t reach Tooker’s Topanga Canyon place until morning. She’d been with a sick brother at a hospital all night.”

“He’s a hype. He tried to OD. Yeah.”

“So there’s no proof Lon didn’t kill Dawson.”

“He set himself up,” the kid said glumly. “Asshole. He should never have called the cops after that raid and told them it was Dawson.”

“He couldn’t foresee Dawson would be murdered.”

“He could stop believing in uniforms,” the kid said.

B
ETHEL EVANGELICAL CHURCH WAS
a clumsy hulk on a backstreet corner. From outside, the stained-glass windows looked muddy. The structure was old frame, and the dazzling new white paint that covered the shiplap siding didn’t hide that the lines were all off kilter. What didn’t lean sagged, and what didn’t sag bulged. Pigeons waddled in and out of latticework high on a bulky steeple. They made pigeon noises. Dave came down the off-line cement steps he’d climbed to a pair of brightly varnished doors that wouldn’t open. He winced up at the pigeons. Then he walked a strip of new cement along a sun-hot side of the building to another set of steps that went up to a door.

It was marked
OFFICE
and he opened it and stepped into cool air that smelled of mice and mildew. The place had stood empty and neglected for too long, but now new paint was in here too, a sprayed fiber soundproof ceiling. The same sort of deep carpet covered this floor as the floor at Lon Tooker’s sex shop, only here it was holy blue. Wood-grain Formica made the desk in front of him glossy. It held a white pushbutton phone. Beside the desk was a sleek electric typewriter. Slick-paper color pamphlets on alcoholism, abortion, divorce, narcotics, stood in a plastic rack.

Behind the desk, a closed door had a brown plastic tag on it incised in white,
PASTOR’S STUDY.
He knocked on the door. Silence. A third door faced the one he’d come in. He opened it and was on the platform of the church auditorium. There was a square pulpit. Back of a railing were blue-plush theater seats for the choir. Organ pipes went up, the new gilt on them looking crusty. On the carpeting, plastic buckets waited, filled with cut flowers. For the funeral tomorrow of Gerald Dawson? He turned around. Out in the stained-glass dimness, varnished pews ranked a half acre of newly carpeted flooring. The emptiness was big.

His father’s widows would have liked it. The tiny, crowded mortuary chapel hadn’t let them sit far enough apart in their gloves and veils. None of them had dared fail to show; attorneys, executors, were there as witnesses. Absence would have conveyed indifference to the millions in cash and shares Carl Brandstetter hadn’t been able to take with him. To have claimed not to know of his death wouldn’t have convinced anyone. A long obit had appeared with his Viking-handsome picture in a weekday
Times
business section, recounting his single-handed building of one of the nation’s life-insurance giants, Medallion. A Sunday
Times
article had focused on his splashy not-so-private life. His death from a heart attack while driving his Bentley on a two
A.M.
freeway was on every TV newscast.

Dave pictured the widows scattered in the jammed pews. One had stood through the ceremony, at the rear, beside a fake twelfth-century baptismal font. Evelyn, if he remembered rightly. The stepmothers of his childhood were clear enough in his mind, whether he wanted them there or not. The later ones blurred. Most had been buxom blonds in their twenties who’d run to fat on their alimony payments, waiting for this funeral, when Dave had seen them together for the first and only time. But three or four, like the latest and last, Amanda, were dark. One of these, nineteen, his own age at the time, he’d almost fallen in love with. Lisa.

When she’d taken his hand in her small gloved one between flowering shrubs outside the mortuary doors, and turned up to him big doe eyes that didn’t glow anymore, it was as if he saw her on old movie film, faded, scratchy. Her voice hardly reached him, and then it sounded ugly, guttural, all the long-ago romance of the foreign accent now scrap. Lines marred the beautiful bones and shadows of her face. She’d been slim and soft. She’d become scraggy. They’d tried reminiscing—this ballet with Eglevsky, that Heifetz concert at Hollywood Bowl—but not for long. His father’s ashes weren’t the only ones in that damp, fern-murky little chapel. Ah, the hell with it.

“Hello!” he shouted. To no one.

Outside, at the rear of the church, where the sun hammered an almost empty blacktop parking lot, he found a set of steps down into an areaway. The door at their foot opened into a hallway of small meeting rooms with steel folding chairs, now and then a piano, little red chairs, a hamster rustling in a box with a wired front. A sound reached him from double doors at the end of the hall. Loud slaps. They were swing doors. He pushed through them and was in a gymnasium where a tall man of maybe forty, jacket off but still wearing his tie, was dribbling a basketball, pivoting, shooting. Dark sweat patches were under his arms and down his spine. He saw Dave and let the ball ricochet off the backboard and bounce to the other end of the court where long church-supper tables with folded-up legs leaned against the wall. The man came at a lanky jog to shake Dave’s hand. He panted. He mopped his face with a handkerchief.

“Tuesday morning ordinarily nobody comes,” he said, “nobody phones. I sneak down here to see whether it’s come back or not. I had it in high school. I got a college scholarship on it—Wheaton, Illinois. But by the time the term started in the fall, I’d lost it.”

“You probably grew,” Dave said. “It happens.”

The tall man compressed his mouth and shook his head. “I don’t know. Eye-hand coordination, whatever—it was gone, simply gone. I was frantic. I worked. I prayed. It never came back.” He laughed at himself. “In my secret dreams, one of these days I’ll come down here and it will be back the way it was.” He raised a warning finger and his grin was a kid’s. “‘Call no man a fool,’” he said.

“All right.” Dave watched him pick up a seersucker jacket that matched his trousers. “My name’s Brandstetter. I’m investigating the death of Gerald Dawson. For Sequoia Life and Indemnity.” He almost said Medallion, a twenty-five-year habit. But the morning after his father’s death, he’d cleared out his handsome office high up in Medallion’s glass-and-steel tower on Wilshire. This was his first free-lance assignment. “The police don’t seem sure of where he was the night he was murdered. That bothers me.”

“I don’t know, myself,” the tall man said.

“You’re the minister here?” Dave said.

“Lyle Shumate,” the tall man said. Jacket over his arm, he headed for the double doors. “We’re going to miss Jerry Dawson. A born leader. True Christian.”

“He had a men’s group.” Dave followed the preacher. “They didn’t meet that night?”

“Their meetings were frequent but not regular.” Shumate went into the kindergarten room under pink and blue crepe-paper streamers and crouched to squint at the hamster. It came out of a heap of wood shavings and looked at him, bright-eyed. It was chewing. Shumate touched a bottle hung on the wire of the cage. There was water in it. “You’re okay, my friend,” he said, and stood.

“The Born-Again Men,” Dave said.

“They’d get together by telephone,” Shumate said, “and set a time.” He pulled open the outside door. Heat and glare struck in. He let Dave go out before him and pulled the door shut. “But they didn’t meet that night.” His soles went gritty up the steps. “Some of our kids have a gospel rock group. They used the Born-Again Men’s room that night.” He climbed to the door marked
OFFICE
and again motioned Dave through it ahead of him. “It must have been noisy in the basement that night.”

“Basketball practice too,” Dave said.

“You know about that?” Shumate said.

“But you weren’t here,” Dave said. “You can’t tell me whether Bucky Dawson practiced with the team.”

“If he says so, he did.” Shumate went into
PASTOR’S STUDY,
sat behind a desk that didn’t look busy, and waved Dave to a chair upholstered in nubby blue-and-orange tweed to match the curtains and carpet.

“It’s a team that works hard,” Dave said. “According to Bucky, they didn’t quit till almost midnight.”

“We lost the playoffs last year to the Nazarenes from Arcadia,” Shumate said. “We don’t want that to happen again. If Bucky told you they worked till midnight, they worked till midnight. He’s the straightest boy I know. Intelligent, well-balanced, decent. We all look up to Bucky—youngsters and grownups alike.”

“He acted troubled when I saw him,” Dave said. “A lot of torment about sex.”

“What?” Shumate stared, mouth working at a smile of disbelief. “We can’t be talking about the same boy. I’ve heard Bucky on the subject—no one could be better informed and clearer headed. He talks to youth groups all the time. Sex, narcotics, abortion, alcoholism. All those matters the church used to stick its head in the sand about when you and I were kids. It’s a different world. Those things have to be faced squarely and honestly today and dealt with.”

“And Bucky Dawson faces them squarely and honestly and deals with them?” Dave said.

“And helps other youngsters to do so.” Shumate nodded. Then he frowned and sat forward. “You’re not trying to say that Bucky was somehow mixed up in his father’s murder.”

“Not if he was here playing basketball,” Dave said. “The medical examiner says his father was killed between ten and midnight. And I’ve got a problem with that. Bucky didn’t find the body when he got home. His mother found it in the morning. Now, look, Reverend—”

“Call me Lyle,” Shumate said.

“The police checked with the other men in Dawson’s group, and they each told the same story. They didn’t meet that night. They didn’t go out on one of their vigilante forays—”

“Vigilante forays?” Shumate’s face went stiff.

“You’ve heard about them. Harassing the customers going in and out of the massage parlors, the gay bars? Ripping out the shrubbery in the park? Setting fire to Dash Hummer’s automobile? Throwing books around at Lon Tooker’s place, pouring paint on the carpets?”

“There’s no proof of any of that,” Shumate said.

“No legal proof, no,” Dave said. “But you’re not a lawyer or a judge. You’re a minister.”

“The law has fallen into Godless hands in our country,” Shumate said. “It protects evildoers. Decent people haven’t a chance. I’m talking about human law. But there’s a higher law—God’s law.”

“And Dawson and his raiders carried out that law—right? And they didn’t see anything wrong with lying to the police about their activities, covering up for each other, because the police are trapped in a corrupt system, isn’t that it?”

“I don’t know about that,” Shumate said stubbornly. “I never heard it from Jerry or any of his group or from anyone else in this church. Only from outsiders, barging in here with wild charges, people totally depraved, every one of them.”

Dave gave him a one-cornered smile. “I didn’t think See-No-Evil, Hear-No-Evil, Speak-No-Evil were Christians,” he said. “I thought they were monkeys.”

“You and I both know where the evil is in this neighborhood,” Shumate said, “and it’s not in Bethel Church.”

“Did Dawson have a high-pitched, gravelly voice?”

Shumate blinked. “You could describe it like that.”

“Easy to mistake for anyone else’s voice?” Dave asked.

“You couldn’t miss it,” Shumate admitted. “Why?”

“He captained the raid on Lon Tooker’s shop,” Dave said. “Six men. Masked. They all claimed afterward they were downstairs here, praying. Now—if they lied to the police that time, they could have lied to them about Dawson’s whereabouts on the night he was killed. Now, I’m asking you—did they have some action planned for that night?”

“And I’m telling you,” Shumate said, “I don’t know. If Tooker believed Jerry Dawson raided his shop, then why doesn’t that suggest to you what it suggests to the police—that Tooker killed him?”

“For one thing, the raid took place ten days before Dawson’s death. Why would Tooker wait?”

“Maybe Jerry went there that night?”

“A witness says no. And Dawson didn’t see relatives that night. He didn’t see friends. He didn’t come here to the church. He wasn’t at his business. Where was he? Whom did he see and for what reason?”

“His life was an open book,” Shumate said. “I knew the man almost as well as I know myself. He was uncomplicated, straightforward. He had a successful business, gave God the credit, contributed generously to this church—and not just in money; in works, good works of all kinds.”

“He was around here a lot,” Dave said. “All right, then tell me this—did you notice anything out of the ordinary about him before he was killed? Was there any change in him? Did he make any out-of-the-way remarks? Was he—?”

“Hold it.” Shumate frowned, pressing his temples with his fingertips, eyes shut. “There was something. Yup. I’d forgotten about it.” He gave Dave a look that was half smile, half frown. “You must get high marks in your job, Mr. Brandstetter.”