Stardust (26 page)

“Who?”

“The man I sent over to check the house.”

“No one’s been here.”

Ben looked at his watch. Cutting it close or not coming. Or maybe he’d been there without announcing himself, playing burglar.

“That’s a lot of food. Are people coming?”

“No, just us,” she said, looking at him, her eyes soft. “It’s going to rain, I think. So it’s cozy, eating in.”

He held her stare for a second, trying not to smile in front of Iris, then headed to the study.

The photographs were just as he’d remembered, Danny lying with a dark smear around his head, people huddled at the edge of the flash. Two angles with two backgrounds, one of the parking area, the other leading to the street. He looked carefully at the faces in front but still didn’t recognize anybody. They’d be neighbors, rushing out at the sudden sound, then the police lights, something more exciting than the radio. But who were the people right behind them? He slipped out the written reports, leaving the prints and negatives in the envelope.

“When will you be home?” Liesl said, then flushed, the simplest domestic question now somehow suggestive. “I only ask because of the chicken.”

“I’m supposed to see Riordan after work. If he shows. Eight, eight-thirty?”

“Yes, all right. But you’ll call if you’ll be late? So I know.”

This time he did smile, not caring whether Iris saw. Something any couple might say.

H
AL LOOKED
at the pictures, waiting for Ben to explain.

“What exactly are we looking for?”

“People you can’t see clearly in the prints.”

“They’re dark.” He held up one of the negatives to the light, then turned it on its side, looking at the numbers in the margin. “These are police? Where’d you—?” He stopped, still waiting. “Who’s the victim?”

“My brother.”

“I thought—”

Ben nodded. “I want to see who was there. Somebody from the building, maybe. Anybody I could talk to.”

Hal looked at him, skeptical, then took up the negatives. “Okay, let’s go to work.”

Ben watched, fascinated, as Hal manipulated the negatives, enlarging, then disappearing into the darkroom with its trays of solutions. But even the studio couldn’t produce a miracle. In the shot looking toward the parking lot, faces were barely visible, even blown up. The alley angle
was better, street lamps at the end providing a kind of backlight. They looked at the enlargements together, Ben hoping that Hal, familiar with everyone on the lot, might suddenly recognize somebody. But they were all anonymous, caught unexpectedly in suspenders and house dresses, one woman in curlers, hand over her mouth.

“You can tell the cops by the hats,” Hal said, examining a new print. “Everyone else just rushed out, I guess. Look, back there in the alley. You can always tell, can’t you?”

“So why is he in the alley, not with the others? He’s just someone off the street. Who’s the woman next to him? Can we get in closer on her?”

“Closer? Not much. A few more degrees, you’ll get a blotch. But let’s try one.”

When the print was done, it was just clear enough. Ben looked, then went rigid, stunned.

“She looked better in the dark,” Hal said. “But the hat—pure cop. You still think he’s in off the street?”

“No, he’s a cop,” Ben said slowly. “Ex-FBI.”

H
IS PARKING
space was behind Admin B, but when he got there he put the keys back in his pocket. He could use the walk to clear his head. He passed the choked line of cars at the gate, all heading home at once, then the small knot of picketers, and turned down Gower. Where they used to shoot Westerns, under roofs of cheesecloth. Today they wouldn’t need to filter the light—the day, cloudy before, was overcast and thick, already growing faint. How long had Riordan been in the alley? In the picture, he’d been craning his neck to see, just another curious bystander. But how could he have been? Someone Danny knew. Who had never made himself known, not on any of the reports, a hat in the crowd. Wanting to see, maybe wanting to make sure.

Lucey’s was more than a few blocks, a longer walk than he expected, so he was late when he pushed open the door and took a second to adjust to the dim light inside. The after-work drinkers had already piled in
from Paramount, but Riordan had managed to get a table and he signaled Ben through the crowd with a two-finger wave.

“I went ahead and ordered,” he said, pointing to two glasses. “Try getting a waitress in this. Beer okay?”

Ben sat down, putting the envelope next to Riordan’s hat. “So,” he said, letting Riordan take the lead.

“So you need to do something about the pool doors.”

“Oh,” Ben said, looking over at him, the same military short hair, steady eyes, but everything different now, someone who’d been in the alley. “Is that how you got in?”

“They’d be easy to jimmy,” he said, not picking up on this. “I noticed at the funeral.”

“And that’s why you didn’t bother going over today.”

Riordan said nothing.

“Or because you already knew how he got in Saturday. Did you do it yourself, or did you send someone else? In case.”

Riordan picked up his glass, staring at Ben over the rim as he drank, buying a minute.

“If I’d done it, you wouldn’t have known anybody was there,” he said finally.

“So someone else. But you’d tell him what to look for. Now you want to tell me?”

“You think I knocked over your place? What for?”

“For something you didn’t get. Maybe I can help.”

“You’re going in circles.”

“And I keep coming back here. You were tailing him. You’re
still
tailing him. A dead man. What do you want? Didn’t you have enough on him already? A nice big file down in Tenney’s office.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know you work for Tenney. Take love notes to Polly. God knows what else. Keep tabs on Liesl’s father, dangerous characters like him. So we can sleep safe at night. While you’re breaking into the house.”

“I don’t work for Tenney.”

“Were you getting stuff on Danny while he was paying you? Maybe little notes on his love life. Tenney likes that, I hear.”

“Where is this coming from?” Riordan said evenly. “Your information’s old. I don’t work for Tenney. I did. A while ago. But that’s a while ago. And by the way, I’m not tailing Ostermann.”

“You just like having lunch at the Farmers Market.”

Riordan sat back, his eyes steady on Ben.

“You going to tell me what this is all about?”

Ben slid the envelope to Riordan. “Have a look.”

Ben watched him open the envelope and take out the picture, his face registering no emotion at all, a practiced blank. But when he did raise his eyes, they had a new directness.

“Where did you get this?”

“The police had it. They just didn’t know what they had.”

“What did they have?”

“Someone he knew, right at the scene, who didn’t identify himself. Just stood there watching him bleed out. They might be interested in that. I was.”

“And?”

“And they might want to know more. Show your picture around— do those things the police do. To see what connection there might be.”

“They have any reason to do that?”

Ben shrugged. “A courtesy to the family. After they start making noise. Plus interfering with police procedures. Getting a report changed. They really don’t like that. Unless they’re the ones doing it, but that can’t be all of them, can it?”

“And I’m supposed to be the one asking.”

“Continental asked. But the studio had to get a call from somebody who was there. Otherwise it’s too late, the time doesn’t fit. I’ve been looking for the girlfriend, whoever he must have been meeting. But the girlfriend wasn’t there. You were. The meeting was with you?”

Riordan said nothing.

“So we’re back in the circle again—what were you doing there?”

“Maybe I happened to be passing by.”

“Passing by.”

“Who can say different?”

“Well, there’s the call. Why call Bunny if you’re just passing by.”

“He told you this?”

“Not a word. Loose lips sink ships. Your secret’s safe with him. I just figured. But put him under oath and he’s not going to keep ducking and weaving—he’ll have other things to think about. So will you. The police might want to change the accident report again. Make it a criminal case this time.”

“What are you saying? You think I killed him?”

“Somebody did.”

Riordan looked at him sharply. “Nobody else thinks so.”

“Just the two of us, huh?”

Riordan paused for a minute, staring at him, then nodded. “But I don’t know it. Neither do you.”

“Then you won’t mind if the police give us a hand. So we’ll all know.” Ben slid the picture back. “I can get more made, if you’d like one.”

Riordan sat forward, his shoulders hunched. “We need to talk.”

“Start.”

“You think you know something, but you have things a little confused. So let’s put them straight. First, I didn’t kill your brother. And you don’t think so either or you wouldn’t be sitting here. Kind of a dangerous thing to say to somebody if it were true.”

“Why? Because you’d plug me here in Lucey’s?”

“You won’t always be in Lucey’s,” Riordan said calmly. “And you can save the tough guy talk. I know people who really are tough.”

“What are they like? You?”

“They don’t talk much at all. Second, you’re not going to the cops. You don’t have anything to give them except a picture that doesn’t mean much. And you start anything, they’ll mess it up. You don’t want any mess with this. They closed it out as an accident, keep it that way.”

“Thanks to you.”

Riordan opened his hand, conceding the point.

“You don’t want anybody nosing around. Trust me on that.”

“I know what Danny was. You must, too, or you wouldn’t have been hounding him. More Red meat. Is that why you didn’t want it as a suicide? They’d blame you for hounding him?”

“I wasn’t hounding him.”

“Then what were you doing at the Cherokee? We’re back there again,” he said, tapping his finger on the photo.

“I was keeping an eye.”

“Jesus,” Ben said, turning his head in disgust. “And what did you think when you saw him there? What was in your head? One less Red? Keeping an eye.”

“You want to listen to this or just get up on a soapbox? I was keeping an eye because something was wrong. I knew your brother. We did business together. And then all of a sudden he was acting funny. Upset. And I thought, which? Is he upsetting himself or is somebody upsetting him? So I started keeping an eye, friendly, to see what was going on. That night I’m sitting in the car on Cherokee. No idea what he was doing there. A woman? Maybe. I see him go in, but I don’t see anyone else. So somebody who lives there. Then the crash. People come running out. I go take a look. And there he is.” He pointed to the picture. “The police come right away. Everybody’s talking in the alley, he’s a jumper. That fairy night clerk, carrying on. And I get that he rents there, it’s
his
place. And I think, this is going to be a mess.”

“So you decide to be the janitor.”

“You know what happens? A suicide, anything suspicious? They’re going to seal the place. Make an investigation. That’s not going to do anybody good.”

“Not you anyway. How does it look? You go after somebody and he finally runs so hard he jumps. That’s not the kind of press Tenney needs. What his files are really doing to people.”

Riordan sat back. “Whoa,” he said, putting up his hand in a stop gesture. “Look, you’re not playing with a full deck here. That’s not how it was.”

“No?”

“Nobody was chasing him. He was working with me. He was a source.”

For a second, even the sounds of Lucey’s seemed to fall away, his head stopped up with a cotton numbness.

“What kind of source,” he said quietly.

“A source. He gave me names. Things to follow up. You’ve got this backwards. He helped
make
the files.”

“I don’t believe that,” Ben said, suddenly chilled, his blood stopped for a minute.

Riordan shrugged. “That doesn’t change anything.”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“I can show you reports. In the files.”

Ben said nothing, still digesting this. Then he looked down to the photo.

“You bastard,” he said. “That’s why you thought he jumped. That he couldn’t live with himself anymore.”

Riordan looked away, embarrassed. “People are unpredictable.”

“Especially informers. They turn on everybody. Then themselves. Is that it?”

“What are you talking about? Informer. He was a patriot.”

“Jesus Fucking Christ. A patriot. What did you do to make him do it? What club did you use.”

“You’ve got this wrong. Nobody made him do anything. We were all on the same side in this.”

“He was a Communist.”

“In Germany. Was. He saw what it meant. Right here.” He held his hand close to his face. “You see it that clear, you want to do something.”

“Like shop people to you.”

Riordan took a breath. “Sometimes, you stop believing in something, you go the other way. You hate it.”

“And hate yourself.”

“No, not like that.”

“Then why did you think he’d jumped?”

Riordan looked away again. “People get ideas. You never know how they’re going to—” He stopped, leaning forward. “But that’s why. It didn’t make sense to me, the way I knew him. So I thought, what if it wasn’t? Just the way you did. I thought, what if he had help? Someone who knew. Wanted him stopped.”

“Communists, you mean. At it again. Is that the way you think Party discipline works? Throw people out of windows. You should go to work for Minot.”

Riordan looked at him. “I do.”

“You work for Minot?”

“It’s not a secret.”

Ben studied him again, as if he were moving pieces of his face, seeing him new, rearranged. “And that’s why Bunny made the call,” he said, half to himself. “Not for you.”

“Ken doesn’t forget a favor.”

“And nobody would know Danny was feeding you. Minot’s own Bureau.”

“Just one of the field agents,” Riordan said smoothly. “Tenney recommended me.”