Troublemaker

Troublemaker

A Dave Brandstetter mystery

by
Joseph Hansen

HARPER
 
&
  
ROW,
  
PUBLISHERS

NEW
  
YORK,
  
EVANSTON

SAN
 
FRANCISCO

LONDON

A HARPER NOVEL OF SUSPENSE

Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to reprint the following:

Lines from the song "Sunshine on My Shoulders" by John Denver, Mike Taylor, and
Dick Kniss. Copyright © 1971 Cherry Lane Music Co. Used by permission.

Lines from "The Waking" from
Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke,
published by
Doubleday & Co., 1958.

troublemaker.
Copyright © 1975 by Joseph Hansen. All rights reserved. Printed
in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quota-
tions embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper & Row,
Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y, 10022. Published simultaneously
in Canada by Fitzhenry & Whiteside
Limited,
Toronto.

FIRST EDITION

Designed
by
Gloria Adelson

Library
of
Congress Cataloging in Publication
Data

Hansen, Joseph, date
Troublemaker.

ISBN 0-06-011758-3

CHAPTER 1

She wore jeans,
high-top work shoes, an old pullover with a jagged reindeer pattern. Somebody's ski sweater once, somebody even bigger than she was. Her son? She was sixty but there was nothing frail about her. The hands gripping the grainy rake handle were a man's hands. Her cropped hair was white. She wore no makeup. Her skin was ruddy, her eyes bright blue.
Hearty
might have described her. Except for her mouth. It sulked. Something had offended her and failed to apologize. Not lately
—long ago. Life, probably.

He said, "Mrs. Wendell?" and held out a card. She took it, read it. It named the insurance company he worked for, Medallion Life. His own name, David Brandstetter, was in a corner,
death claims division
under it. He didn't try to say it. His throat was dry. The morning was hot. It had been a hike from Pinyon Trail up crooked steps in a steep, pine-grown slope
—rusty needles slippery underfoot —to the rambling redwood house where no one answered the bell, then out back here to this one-time garage.

It was a kind of stable now. Beside it, in pine-branch-splintered sunlight, a sorrel gelding no longer young nosed a heap of alfalfa back of an unpainted paddock fence. A cleated board ramp fronted the garage doors, canted to reach a wood floor laid on studs over the original cement. Inside, Heather Wendell raked manure and trampled straw out of a stall. In farther stalls, shadowy horses breathed and shifted hoofs on hollow planks. The big woman pushed the card into a pocket, turned away, went on with her work.

"Murders," she said, "inquests, grief. They don't mean anything to horses." It was a man's voice. Not pleased. "What is it you want?"

"Your son, Richard, had a policy with us."

"At my insistence." She jerked a nod, grim but self-satisfied. "He'd never have thought of it. It wasn't that he was selfish. He simply had no imagination. It never entered his head that he could die. I'd be destitute today. Well, I've had that, thank you. From my father. I wasn't going through it again. Not at my time of life." Her thick elbow nudged Dave. "Excuse me." She raked the pile past his feet, paused, blinked at him. "You've brought the check
—is that it?"

"Wrong department." Dave smiled apology. "My department asks questions."

She grunted and began raking again, out into the light. She traded the rake for a stump of broom and pushed the waste off the ramp to the side. "There were a dozen police officers, in
and
out of uniform. That night, the next day. At least half of
them asked
questions. The same questions. Over and over again."

She leaned the broom beside
the rake against a
stud-and-board wall. Above sawhorses that held
saddles, a tangle of tack
trailed from rusty spikes.
She
took
down a bridle and carried it
to the stall beyond the one she'd
cleaned. A bit clinked against teeth,
a buckle tongue snapped.
She led out a little paint mare who threw
her head and blew when she
saw Dave.

"Step back
in there a minute, would you? Men
make Buffy nervous. Thank you."

She held the
sidling Buffy by a cheek strap
and shouldered her out the door. Rusty
hinges creaked on the
paddock gate. It closed with a wooden clatter.
She came back in and took the
rake to Buffy's stall.

"I assume one
of those officers was bright
enough to write. That Japanese one, surely. Or don't the police let insurance companies see their reports?"

"Lieutenant Yoshiba," Dave said. "I saw the report."

"Good. Then there's no need to waste your morning. Nor mine. These horses haven't been groomed or exercised in days. That's not right. And I'm pressed for time. The funeral's this afternoon."

"You'd gone to a film that night," Dave said. "In Los Santos. Left here a little after seven. The film screened at eight and ran three hours but you were back here before ten and it's a forty-minute drive. What happened?"

"I walked out. The movie was disgusting. They're all like that now
—cruel, bloody, degenerate. I tried to make myself stay, it cost so much to get in. And Rick keeps telling me I'm letting myself get old, stuck away up here, that I ought to get out in civilization once in a while." The rake clunked at the back of the dark stall. She snorted. "Civilization! Do you know what they do to horses in those pictures? The S.P.C.A. here in the States won't let them use trip wires—you know, to make them stumble and fall. But they go out of the country now to film, and they don't care. They break their legs, their necks, kill them. To make a cheap, sordid movie. Don't talk to me about
civilization."

"I won't," Dave said. "You got home around ten?"

"Parked the car where I always do. Down below, by the mailbox. You can see we don't use the garage for cars anymore." The rake quit a moment while she jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "When we did, we drove down from the trail above
—same trail but it climbs and bends back on itself. Only take horses up and down the driveway now. Hardly a patch of blacktop left on it. Anyway, the climb up the steps is good exercise. My father always said, 'Walking is for horses,' and he died at forty-nine."

"Right," Dave said. "You heard a shot?"

"When I was partway up the stairs. Didn't know what it was. Sounded like a backfire from down on the main road. These hills echo so. And my mind wasn't on it. I was furious about that movie." Now she backed past Dave again, dragging the litter from Buffy's stall with the rake. "I set some milk in a pan on the stove to heat. To calm me down, let me sleep. I thought I'd change for bed while it warmed up and I started for my room. And I saw across the way there was a light in Rick's den. That wasn't right
—he was at work. Then I remembered his VW was down by the mailbox when I'd parked. Shows you how that movie upset me. Normally he doesn't get home till three." She added without pride, "It's a bar he owns, you know. With Ace Kegan."

"The Hang Ten," Dave said. "A gay bar. On Ocean Front Walk in Surf."

"Yes." She eyed him thoughtfully for a second, then went on scraping the stall muck toward the sunlit doorway. "Well, I was afraid Rick must be ill. I thought I'd better step across and check. It's a separate unit, you understand. It was a guesthouse originally
—two bedrooms and bath. Rick remodeled one room so as to have a place where he could relax, listen to music, watch TV and not disturb me. Our hours are different. Were. The door was open. And there was this boy, this creature—what's his name?—Johns. Standing at the desk, stark naked, tissues in his hand, wiping off a revolver. While my son lay dead at his feet."

"Also stark naked," Dave said.

"No." She stopped in the doorway,
a
bulky silhouette, and raised her head. Against the light, he couldn't read her expression. But her voice changed.
It belonged
to
an old woman now. "There
was a great, gaping hole in his chest.
I remember that. Was he
naked? Yes." Her shoulders sagged. "I suppose
he
was."

"Can I see that room?"
Dave asked.

"The police took photographs."
The rake handle
knocked the wall. She broomed the dirty straw.
Angry
now. Probably at herself for showing human weakness. "They left
the
fireplace littered with those ugly little burned-out bulbs."

"I've seen the photographs," Dave said. "Now I need to see the room. Don't stop what you're doing. Just point me the way." Wincing against the hard light, he started down the ramp.

She squared herself in front of him. "I'm not sure I have to do that. What is it you want here? No
—don't bother to lie. I know insurance companies. I got acquainted with them in 1937. When all the policies my father had kept up for years were canceled. Because he'd missed some payments at the end. When he was helplessly ill. You'd like to find a way to stop my getting the money my son meant for me to have. To go on with. Lord knows, twenty-five thousand is little enough these days. Would you care to try to live the rest of your life on that amount?"

"No," Dave said. "There's going to be a delay, though, Mrs. Wendell. Till after the trial. You understand that."

She stared. "Indeed I do not. Why? The police know that boy did it. The district attorney knows."

"A jury has to know," Dave said. "Beyond a reasonable doubt. And juries aren't predictable."

"But there he stood with the gun!" she cried. "The gun that killed my son." Her lip trembled and she bit it sharply.

"Your son's own gun, wasn't it? You told the police he kept it in his desk."

"Hippies infest this canyon." She stepped past him into the stable dark. Tack jingled. She was taking another bridle off its nail. "We're isolated up here. Help's a long way off. Nowhere, if the telephone's out. And that happens, you know." Her work shoes thumped the planks. Her voice came muffled from the back of the stable. "Los Santos hasn't the most up-to-date equipment. A rainstorm, a Santana
—it breaks down." A small window showed grimy light above the farthest stall. He saw her lifted hands work the bridle over a big, dark muzzle. "It would be foolish not to keep a gun up here."

"Guns are for television actors," Dave said. "Not real people. The wrong ones always get hurt. Your son could be alive this morning."

She didn't answer. She spoke to the horse, coaxing, soft. Hoofs came on, a halting stumble. Dave stepped down onto the pine-needle mat of the yard and watched her steer this one into the paddock.

Ganted, knob-kneed, mane and tail stringy. The sun showed newly healed scars along sides and flanks. A rip between the eyes was still jagged and red. Heather Wendell closed the gate and over it stroked a hammer head. "Beaten with barbwire," she said. "By a crazy man. The county would have destroyed him. Not the man
—oh, never. The horse. I couldn't let them do that. He'll be all right soon." There was crooning tenderness in the words. Not for Dave. For the horse. She turned to face Dave again and he told her:

"It's not the only thing, but the gun worries me. The jury's going to snag on it too. A police lab man will tell them there were powder burns on your son's hand. And his chest. It was fired point-blank. They could come up with suicide." "But the coroner's jury didn't say so."