Troublemaker (11 page)
Authors: Joseph Hansen
Tags: #Fiction, #Gay, #Mystery & Detective, #Private Investigators
"Who answered?" Yoshiba asked from the doorway. Down the hall back of him a child was crying.
"His mother," Johns said.
Dave and Khazoyan spoke together and stopped.
The door clicked shut and Yoshiba stood at Dave's elbow. "Did you give her your name?"
"Sure," Johns said. "She asked. Why not?"
"You never gave us your name." Yoshiba swung a thick thigh onto a corner of the table. "You opened up to her. Did you tell her what you wanted with her son?"
"Watch that," Khazoyan said to his tablet.
"Forget it," Yoshiba said.
"I didn't tell her anything," Johns said. "I told Rick when he got on the phone. He was cheered up. Wow! I felt like a shit. Because I wasn't going to stay with him. I was going to do it that night and take the bread and he wasn't ever going to see me again."
"That worked out," Yoshiba said.
Johns gave him a disgusted look. He said to Dave, "But I was in a bind. What could I do? I don't mean I wasn't going to pay him back. I'd have paid him back."
"All right," Yoshiba cut in. "He gave you the money. What did you do with it? Shove it up your ass?"
"Watch that," Khazoyan droned again.
"He showed it to me when we got there," Johns said hotly. "He opened the envelope and showed it to me. In twenties, all neat, with those paper bands around the bundles, you know? That was what Huncie asked for
—cash, small bills. So Rick got it that way. New twenty-dollar bills. You can tell Huncie is crooked. Who asks for money in cash, you know? That much money? Why not a check made out to Jomay? I mean, it's her bread, right? By the law—every second word Huncie says is 'law'—it's Jomay's money. And BB's."
"Beebee?" Yoshiba looked and sounded blank. "The baby. She's eighteen months old."
Yoshiba said, "He wanted you to make child payments
—this Huncie?"
Khazoyan in his hoarse high voice gave the lieutenant the facts. Yoshiba said, "Good grief."
Dave said gently, "He showed you the money? Took it out of the envelope, then put it back? What?"
"Well"
—Johns squirmed on the chair, his tired young face flushing —"he had his mind on"—thin fingers tugged at the straggly mustache —"on what he brought me there for. I mean, the money wasn't going anyplace."
"It went," Khazoyan said. "You didn't notice it was missing when you came out of the bedroom?"
"With him laying there on the floor with blood pouring out of his chest?" Johns frowned. "Was it missing?"
"It still is," Khazoyan said.
Dave said, "Huncie told you to deliver the money Tuesday morning. To him. Where?"
"He was coming back for it. To Tom's, the beach house. Ten o'clock."
Dave pushed his chair back. The worn rubber leg tips stuttered on the tiles. He stood up, touched Yoshiba's bulky shoulder. "May I use your phone?"
"Help yourself," Yoshiba said. And to Johns, "How come you open up today? I'm a nice fellow. What is it
—you don't trust Orientals? Why cover up all this time and break out for him?"
"I was trying to protect Tom," Johns said. "Now that doesn't mean anything. He found out about Tom."
Tom Owens answered the phone. The barking of the dogs echoed off the hard inlets and tall groins of the wooden house. "Gail isn't here," he said, "but I've been trying to reach you. Shall we say frantically? There's a girl here, young woman. Claims she's Larry's wife, ex-wife. She's got a baby with her. Says it's Larry's. She says he was going to get money for her
—money he owed her. Court-ordered. Fifteen hundred dollars."
"I've been talking to him," Dave said. "I know."
"There was some man," Owens said, "helping her."
"Dwayne Huncie," Dave said. "Is he there?"
"No. Wait a minute. I'll put the girl on."
When Dave walked back into the interrogation room, Yoshiba was sitting on the floor, clasping thick knees in thick arms, his back against the wall, and staring up from that bland moon face of his at Larry Johns, still on the chair. Dave told him:
"You might put out an all-points bulletin for a camper with Texas license plates, registered to Dwayne Huncie."
"He'll be back in Texas," Yoshiba protested. "It will take a month and letters from two governors to get him back here. What are you trying to say
—that this Huncie walked in and picked up the money while Johns and Wendell were doing it in the next room?"
Dave looked at Johns. "Did you hear anything?"
"Before what I told the cops? Well, yeah. Yeah." He sat straight, excited. "I heard something. I said, 'What's that? Somebody's out there.' Rick just said for me to stop being so nervous and relax. So I did. But the next time, he heard it too. And we both knew somebody was out there. And he went out to see. And that was when I heard voices and the gun went off."
"How long after the first time?" Yoshiba asked.
"Aw, hell." The frail shoulders lifted and fell. He'd smoked the cigarette down short. He leaned to snub it out in the chipped ashtray on the table. "I wasn't exactly looking at my watch right then. Five minutes?"
Yoshiba stood up. "So Huncie came after the kid here to make sure of getting the money and Wendell came out and caught him and tried to stop him with the gun and Huncie turned it on him?"
"Huncie can tell you," Dave said. "Find Huncie."
"Even if we got extradition," Yoshiba said, "it would cost a bundle to get him here
—jet fares for him and two guards. This is a small
town, Brandstetter."
Dave shook his head. "Huncie has a brother in Saugus. He'd spoken of going there."
"Spoken? Who to? Who did you just telephone?"
"Tom Owens. Jomay Johns is at his house. Now."
Larry Johns groaned and held his head.
Dave said, "Monday night, Huncie picked her and the baby up at a theater where he'd parked them. About eleven. They went to a MacDonald's. He'd been crying about being broke but that night he peeled a twenty-dollar bill off a big fat roll and gave it to her to pay for their hamburgers. Then he excused himself to go to the men's room. And never came back."
"I'll put out the APB." Yoshiba went to the door. "But only for California."
"It was an Indian Head camper," Larry Johns said. "On an old orange Chevy pickup with a smashed headlight."
Yoshiba opened the door. "License number?"
"You're kidding," the boy said. Yoshiba grunted and left. The boy looked at Dave with tear-filled eyes. "You're really something else," he said. "You're going to get me out of this."
"Don't count on it," Dave said. "Not yet."
Outside in the corridor, a knee-high child bumped into him. It wore a T-shirt with orange juice stains and little Levi's that looked ready to fall off. A fist held a grubby string. The string dragged a yellow wooden duck. On its side. Dave crouched and set it on its red wooden wheels. The child went off down the hall without any change of expression. The duck's head turned around as it traveled. The wheels made a clacking sound and a small bell jingled.
Dave was watching it and laughing to himself when a door opened near the end of the hall. Vern Taylor came out in his nice new sneakers. He didn't look Dave's way. He went ahead of the child toward open doors at the end of the corridor. He went out the doors down a walk between hibiscus bushes with flowers red as his wind-breaker jacket. He went off up a sunlit street.
Dave thought he wanted to look at the door,
parole
was lettered on its fogged glass. That was interesting. He hadn't expected anything interesting from Vern Taylor. He went inside. A woman with faded red hair worked an electric typewriter at a desk off the same assembly line as Yoshiba's and Khazoyan's, even to the piled-up papers. She bent her head and looked at him over wire-rimmed goggles she'd pulled down on a long, thin nose. Her eyebrows asked what he wanted.
He laid down a card. "The P.O. handling Vern Taylor?" The offices were boxed off by partitions, wood below, frosted glass above. The one the woman nodded him to was big enough for what it held and no more
—a file cabinet, a desk, two chairs. And a small man who looked no heavier than the weight of his bones, there was so little but bones to him. He pushed a manila folder into a file drawer, rolled the drawer shut, turned. And jerked his bald head in surprise. "Dave Brandstetter! Long time."
He came around the desk, smiling, holding out a hand. Dave shook it carefully. It felt fragile. "Years," he said. "So this is where they stuck you."
The man's name was Squire. It had been a couple of decades since Dave had begun asking him questions. He made a wry face. "I asked for it. Thought it would be different from L.A. It's the same." He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk. "Probably be the same anyplace. Sit down. You like coffee or something?" He started to get up again.
Dave shook his head and dropped onto the other chair. "What I'd like is what I always like from you. Information that's none of my business. I just saw Vern Taylor walk out of here. Why?"
"He'll be walking in and out of here every week for the next two years. I'm not sure it'll be enough. On the record, he needs a keeper." Squire took the folder out of the cabinet again and sat down again. "He just came out of Chino." Squire opened the folder, put on dime-store reading glasses, the kind with lenses like dry half moons, leaned forward, blinking while he leafed over the papers the folder held. "Ah, it's pathetic. Felonies, yeah, but 288.A, for Christ sake." The number was from the California Penal Code. It stood for oral copulation. "Plus 290." That meant failure to register as a sex offender. "Because his record goes back. A long time." He took the glasses off. "You want it all?"
"I don't know why," Dave said. "But yes, if you're not too busy. I'm into a case that's like a jigsaw too many little kids have fooled with on too many rainy Sunday afternoons. Half the pieces are missing. Taylor probably isn't one of them. I can't see where he'd fit but he is underfoot. Let's hear it."
Squire put the glasses back on, peered at the papers again, drew a deep breath and let it out windily. "Okay. He's been in sex scrapes starting twelve, fifteen years ago. Parks, bus station men's rooms, the old familiar places. The Astor Bar on Main Street. Always 647.A." It was the code, for solicitation to commit a lewd act. "Misdemeanors, right? You pay a little fine and walk out after a night in the slams. But if your employer learns about it you can lose out. He had a good job. Civil service. Second bust, they found out and shed him."
"Drafting," Dave said.
Squire's mild eyes peered at him over the glasses. "You know all this?"
"Almost none of it," Dave said. "Go on."
"By not mentioning his arrest record and because nobody checked, he got on with a private building contractor. Three more arrests. Somehow he kept it from them. But on number four some bastard in the Department made sure they heard all about it."
"Friendly," Dave said.
"Well, Christ," Squire said. "Taylor had to know it was a losing game. Didn't he? Dave, what the hell is the matter with those people?"
"They're crazy," Dave said. "Like the rest of us."
"Not like the rest of us," Squire said, "or there wouldn't be laws against it." He sighed and picked up the papers again. "Then, believe it or not, he tried teaching. No shit. Summer term, high school. I doubt they'd ever have found out except a bar was raided. The Black Cat, on Sunset. You remember that?"
"How many arrests did they make that night? Twenty?"
"And all the names got in the papers," Squire said. "Which put an end to his teaching career. And respectability, if that's the word. The next arrest was a 647.B."
"Prostitution?" Dave said.
"I guess he still looked young," Squire said. "Anyway, he was living off it. If you call a room at the Ricketts Hotel living." The place was six sagging stories of dingy brick standing to its knees in a wash of greasy neon on Los Angeles's skid row. "He'd score in the Astor downstairs and take the Johns up to the room. Only one night he chose the wrong trick. A vice squad officer."
"A felony," Dave said. "What did he draw?"
"That woman lawyer, the one with the two Persian cats she always took into court on silver chains," Squire said. "She bargained him out. But it cost him."
"The Duchess," Dave said. "Those Pershing Square faggots worshiped her and she exploited them down to their last rhinestone. We should all have friends like May Sweeny."
"So he tried for a real job again. Through one of those gay social service agencies. They put him in a candy factory run by two old aunties who didn't give a damn about his record. But they only paid a buck an hour."
"I know the place," Dave said. "And how privileged the boys feel. So how did he end in Chino? When?"
"A year ago last December," Squire said. "Christmas Eve, God help us. They busted him on 288.A. In an alley doorway back of a garment place on Broadway. In the rain. Oral copulation in the rain, no less. He came up before Judge Macander and you know what happened. Macander read his record"
—Squire rattled the typed sheet at Dave—"and gave him five years and a thousand dollars."
