Troublemaker (2 page)

"They said Johns had to stand trial. That's all. It doesn't bind the jury that will hear his case. They won't even know about it. And if they acquit Johns, it complicates things for my company. If Richard Wendell took his own life, we can't pay. It's in the policy."

"Yes." Her mouth twisted in a sour smile. "And that would suit your company, wouldn't it?" She bunched her fists. "Well, it won't happen. It's not common sense. A man doesn't commit suicide with someone else present. A stranger." She stepped toward Dave and her words came like thrown rocks. "The explanation for the powder burns is obvious. Rick was holding
the gun. Probably found
the boy trying to steal. They struggled.
The gun went off. Right
against Rick's chest."

"Maybe," Dave said.
"Johns tells it a little differently."
The sun beat down. Dave shed his jacket,
hung it over an arm.
"He claims they were in bed and Richard
Wendell heard a sound in
the den. He went to investigate. Johns heard
voices
—
your son's,
another man's—and a shot. He was frightened and
it took him a
minute to move. When he came out of the bedroom, your
son lay on
the floor. He bent over him, shook him. No sign of life. Blood.
The
gun. He picked it up because he Was too dazed to be careful.
Then
he realized he'd made a mistake and what he had to do was wipe his prints off it, get his
clothes and run. Only the clock ran out on him. You walked in."

"And took the gun away from him." Her mouth twitched contempt. "Six feet tall, one of those long mustaches, long hair. He cried like a girl, begged, pleaded. Oh, I heard his story. Half a dozen times while we waited for the police." Her laugh was brief and scornful. "Lies. Pointless. He killed Rick."

"For money?" Dave asked. "Your son's wallet lay on the chest in his bedroom, undisturbed. Two hundred dollars in it. Ones, fives, tens, twenties."

"In case they ran short of change at The Hang Ten," she said. "He always carried it. Of course it was there. The boy hadn't taken it because there wasn't time. I interrupted him."

"What about the open door?" Dave said. She looked blank and he told her, "You found the door open, remember? What they were doing they wouldn't leave the door open for, would they? They wouldn't only have closed it, they'd have locked it."

"There's no lock," she said. "There is
—but there's no key. And the spring lock's painted shut. This is an old place. When we bought it, there wasn't any need for locks up here. Too remote. And we had Homer, our big Dane. Dead now."

"But it was standing open," Dave said. "That's going to help Johns's defense."

"He has no defense," she said flatly. "He'd opened it himself and left it open and Rick heard him out there and came out and
—"

"Naked?" Dave said gently.

"I don't know what that means," she said, "but he's a hippie. They're all over up here. Why hadn't he wandered in? Who knows what goes on in their heads? It's common knowledge they've ruined their minds with drugs. He didn't come by car. At least the police haven't found a car."

"He says your son picked him up and brought him here," Dave said. "And his clothes weren't in the den, Mrs. Wendell. They were in the bedroom."

She opened her mouth and shut it hard and turned to tramp off up the board slope into the stable. "I have work to do." When she came out, her big fingers clasped a square wood-backed brush, a coarse-toothed metal comb that glinted in the sunlight. She let herself into the paddock and began working on the sorrel.

Dave walked to the fence, put a foot up on the lowest bar, crossed his arms on the top bar and rested his chin on them. "I went to the theater last night," he said. "In Los Santos. Talked to the night crew. You're not somebody who'd go unnoticed, Mrs. Wendell. Nobody remembers seeing you."

The brush stopped its motion. She turned. "Mr. Brandstetter, my fingerprints are also the only ones on that gun. Neither circumstance means anything. Since you don't appear to have the wit to see that, I shall explain it to you. My son earned twelve to fourteen thousand dollars a year. Gave me a roof over my head, clothes for my back, food to eat. He let me indulge my hobby, which is an expensive one. Not without protest
—but he never in the end denied me anything. Now ... why would I kill him? For twenty-five thousand dollars insurance money?"

"It doesn't add up," Dave admitted. "Neither does anything else about this case. That's what bothers me." He sighed, straightened, turned from the fence. "But it will. It will." He looked down at the gray shake roofs tree-shadowed below. "Are those his rooms, in the L of the house there?"

CHAPTER 2

She didn't answer
and he went down broken flag steps between terraced beds where wild oats, passion vine, sunflowers choked out iris, carnations, nasturtiums, and where fat white roses strewed cankered petals from neglected canes. A lizard scuttled ahead of him down the mossy passage between house and guesthouse and lost itself in a rattle of dry leaves among flowerpots where leggy geraniums withered. She'd gardened last year. There must have been fewer horses then.

The guesthouse door had square glass panes, a reed blind on the inside. He turned the knob, which was faceted, paint-specked glass, and went in. Richard Wendell had used lumberyard bargain birch paneling on the walls. Modular shelves held stereo equipment, a portable television set, a slide projector, records, books, stacks of magazines. The carpeting was mottled blue green. So were the curtains.

At the room's near end, basket chairs faced a fireplace. At the far end, a blue couch looked at windows that framed ferns and the trunks of big pines. The windows stood open. They had square panes too and went out on hinges and stayed out by means of long rods hooked through eyes dense with old paint. The screens were on the inside. A little light desk backed the couch. Next to the desk the carpet had been scrubbed and was still wet. Papers littered the desk.

There were bills, subscription blanks, an opened gaudy advertisement for a book about Renaissance Italy, with off-register reproductions of famous paintings. Blue Kleenex poked up out of a wooden housing meant to hide the box. A ballpoint pen stamped in cheap gilt
the hang ten
lay by a brown envelope. On the back of the envelope somebody had worked arithmetic problems, taking percentages of twenty-five thousand. Heather Wendell must have sat here last night sweating out her prospects. At a passbook five and a quarter percent, she'd about be able to feed the horses.

He opened a shallow center drawer. Stamps, paper clips, rubber bands, address labels in a little plastic box, pencils, more of the souvenir pens. He opened side drawer left. Envelopes, writing paper, an address book in fake leather. He lifted these out. Underneath was a scatter of little Kodachrome slides. He held one up to the light. Naked boys in a basic sex position. He tried some others. Same boys but the positions changed. He dropped them back and laid the stationery on them.

The address book had letter tabs along the page edges. He picked the letter J. There were three names that meant nothing to him. But at the bottom of the page were two numbers unattached to any name. One had been scratched out. He looked for a telephone. It crouched on a low shelf by a cluster of brown-glazed clay pots. Handsome. The kind that came out of local kilns. The kind Doug Sawyer's new shop was waist deep in. Most of those had been thrown by a lank, bushy-haired youth named Kovaks. Dave shrugged Kovaks away. He was going to mean trouble but he wasn't trouble yet
and
right now Dave had work to do. He dialed the number.

It rang once and the connection opened with
a
crash and dogs barked into his ear. He flinched and held the receiver away. A girl's voice scolded the dogs and yelped, "Hello?" The dogs kept barking. The girl called, "Will you please get them out of here?" Someone swore. The dogs barked. A door slammed. Silence. Dave asked, "To whom am I speaking?"

"To whom did you want to speak?" Quick, sweet and wary. This wasn't some kid he could con information out of. He'd better cut his losses.

"Larry Johns," he said.

"I'm sorry, he's not here now."

Dave felt himself grin. The only address the Los Santos police had for Larry Johns was off his driver's license. A cheap hotel in Brownsville, Texas, the kind of place that didn't know where you'd come from or where you'd gone. Especially not if it was the law asking. Where Larry Johns had gone was, of course, Los Santos, a quiet town that clambered the tree-green oceanside hills northwest of L.A. But small as it was, Los Santos had thousands of street numbers. And Larry Johns wasn't telling which was his. Why didn't seem to interest Lieutenant Tek Yoshiba. It interested Dave. He said carefully, "When do you expect him?"

She did it again
—answered a question with a question. Sweetly. "Who's calling, please?"

He told her and she asked him to wait and he waited, watching a bluejay hammer a pine cone on a rock outside the windows. Then someone picked up an extension. A male voice said, "What about insurance? I've got insurance. I'm collecting on it right now."

"I'm not selling it," Dave said. "I'm trying to reach Larry Johns. Does he live there?"

There were five dead seconds. "How the hell did you get this number?" Back of him, women exchanged loud words in a place that echoed. Heels clacked. Dave said, "It's in Richard Wendell's book." "Oh, Christ," the man groaned. Then he said sharply, "No, Gail, wait!" And a female spoke into the phone. Not the one who'd answered first, with the dogs. This voice was older. "You have the wrong number," it said, and the receiver slammed. But only on the extension. On the other phone he heard remote man-woman shouts. Then the dogs barked again. The heels neared. The connection broke. He hung up.

He'd lapped his jacket over the back of the desk chair. Out of it he dug a small notebook and checked a number he kept there. Dialing it got him Ray Lollard at the central office of Pacific Telephone. Lollard was a plump, feminine man who collected antiques and had been a friend of Rod Fleming, a decorator Dave used to live with, who had died last fall. Rod had restored an old mansion
—porches, cupolas, stained glass—on West Adams for Lollard. It was a showplace.

"Davey!" Lollard sounded pleased but he always sounded pleased. "I keep thinking we'll run into each other at Romano's." He meant the West Los Angeles restaurant where they'd met in 1948. "But it seems you don't eat these days. Rod always said you'd starve to death if he didn't remind you. But of course, that's how you keep that elegant figure."

"We'll set a date," Dave said. "Listen, Ray
—find out who owns this number." He gave it. "If you can get it for me in say ten minutes, call me back here." He read Richard Wendell's number off the dial plaque.

"Pleasure," Lollard said. "How are you? How's Doug? Happy? The new gallery flourishing, is it?"

"He's lonely," Dave said. "Try to get around there, will you? None of it's old but he's got some really beautiful stuff. And he needs customers."

"I gather
you
don't lack for customers."

"People keep dying," Dave said. "Look, if I don't hear from you, I'll get back to you later. I don't know just where I'm headed."

Lollard said something amiable that amounted to nothing. So did Dave. He hung up and went back to the desk, frowning. The envelope with the figuring on it was tough and bulky. He turned it over.
Security Bank, 132 Pier Street, Los Santos
was in the upper-left-hand corner. That was all. No addressee. It hadn't gone through any mail. And it wasn't quite empty. Inside, his fingers found three paper straps, each with "$500" rubber-stamped on it. He glanced at the phone but he didn't have a friend at Security Bank's central office. He'd have to go through channels. He tucked the straps into a jacket pocket.

The right-hand desk drawer was an indifferent shambles of canceled checks, paid bills, tax forms, wish-you-were-here postcards, snapshots. He thumbed through these. Most were of the sorrel horse and a harlequin Great Dane. A couple caught Heather Wendell sitting the horse or holding the dog's leash. Here was a big, grinning young man leaning against a car. As that ski sweater had suggested, a giant.

At the back of the drawer were red, silver and blue rosetted ribbons.
Los Santos Dog Show:
1950s, 1960s. On the bottom of the drawer lay a yellowing eight-by-ten glossy of a dark, curly-haired little youth in boxing trunks. He scowled above raised fists that were wrapped in gauze. Across the picture's lower corner an ungifted penman had written:
To Rick
—
All My Love
—
Ace.
Dave laid the picture back and covered it up again with the waste paper of Rick Wendell's life.

Suits, pants, jackets off the X-large rack hung in the bedroom closet. Big towels lay wadded on the checkerboard tiles of the bathroom floor. The shower dripped behind a plastic curtain. The bed was a scrimmage of creased sheets. The blankets had half fallen to the floor. By the head of the bed was an eight-millimeter projector with reels on it. Facing the bed foot, a spring-roller screen glittered on a metal tripod. Dave drew the blue-green curtains across the windows and flipped the projector switch.