Death Claims (10 page)

"I'm sorry about the books. Shall I take them?" 

"Oh, no, no, no." Squeeze of the arm. "I'll just put them back in stock. Not your kind of thing.
Hollywood in the Forties
.
The Films of Joan Crawford
. His kind of thing." 

"Right." Rod would have cheered. He'd have torn open the brown wrapping in the car before they left the parking lot. At home, he'd have grabbed corn chips and beer from the kitchen, kicked off his shoes, settled with food, drink, books in a corner of a couch, feet tucked under him like a girl. He'd have shouted with laughter. He'd have jumped up repeatedly to show Dave this photo of Ann Sheridan sultry in five-inch wedgies, that photo of Barbara Stanwyck in square-shouldered mink, a Luger smoking in her hand. And Dave? He'd have hunched down lower and grimmer in his chair, trying to focus on
The New Republic
or
Scientific American
. At first he'd have glanced up to grunt at the pictures. Then he'd have snarled. And Rod, feelings hurt, would have sat quiet. But not for long. Soon he'd have started chuckling. Then guffawing again. Then:
My God, this you have got to see
. When Dave would have slammed down his magazine. Or thrown it at Rod's head. Ah, Christ, forget it. What was Kellogg saying? Something about a price cut on the James Joyce letters. "Yes, send them out. But all I'm really here for today is information." 

Kellogg's eyebrows rose. "You've bought every book in the reference section." 

"Not that kind of information. About a girl who works for you. Part time. April Stannard." 

Kellogg nodded. "Nice girl, nice girl. Wish we could take her on full time. Knows her books. Just haven't had an opening. She wants to work at the El Molino branch. Only two people there. What did you want to know about her?" 

Dave named a date. "Did she work that night?" 

"You could ask her. She's—" 

"I've asked her. Now I'm asking you." 

Kellogg stiffened. "Well!" It sounded offended. He heard how it sounded and said it over again, amiably this time. "Well, all right." He rubbed his hands, sat down at the desk, pawed among bills, checks, receipts, for a pair of Ben Franklin glasses. He probed into a green tin file box. "Here we are." He held a four-bysix card out to Dave. In turning, his left elbow nudged a stack of books. It tottered and fell. He didn't notice. "The dates and times are all on there," he said. 

Dave put on his horn rims. The listings were in different handwritings with different ballpoint pens. There was one for the date of John Oats's death. The hours were noon till nine at night. He handed back the card and noticed beyond the desk a slim figure. Familiar but blurred by the glasses. He took them off. April Stannard stood there, books in her arms, the books Kellogg had knocked off the desk. It was routine at Bancroft's—picking up after Kellogg. He dropped change, sales slips, packages. The nearest clerk retrieved them for him. April wore blue wool, cut boxy, like a Norfolk jacket, and only an inch or two longer. Her blond hair gleamed. She'd brightened her mouth with lipstick. But grief was still in her eyes. She watched Kellogg tap the card back into the file. She looked across his stocky bulk at Dave. 

"That's my card. Why?" "People lie to me," Dave said. "Not all people, but some people. It helps to know which." 

"You thought I could have—" She broke off, glancing at Kellogg, color coming into her face. She set the books down hard, turned fast, walked away. 

"Just a minute." Pushing the glasses into his pocket, Dave went after her, knocking against browsers at tables, shelves. She moved briskly but blindly into a trap, a doorless corner of the children's section under the mezzanine. Fluorescent tubes close overhead here, glaring off the flat, bright colors of the books. He caught her arm, turned her, she jerked away, tear tracks crooked down her face. Her words came out low, trembling, very angry. 

"Why? Why would you think such a thing?" 

"I don't think anything." He handed her his handkerchief. "I'm trying to find out what to think." 

"And you don't care"—she blotted the tears, blew her nose— "who you hurt in the process." 

"I won't hurt anyone the way John Oats was hurt." 

"I didn't hurt him. Why would I? I loved him. I don't understand how your mind works. You say he was killed for his insurance money. I wouldn't have gotten that. I suppose it must have been me he was going to write in as his beneficiary. But he hadn't." 

"In my job, money is almost always the motive for murder. But police statistics put money way down on the list. And I don't like long odds. You were closest to him. Lovers kill each other with depressing regularity, Miss Stannard. For all kinds of reasons." 

"You are a terrible man," she said. 

Kellogg lumbered up. "Something wrong?" 

"Miss Stannard and I are friends. We're having a small misunderstanding. It won't take long." 

Kellogg blinked, worked his jaw, grunted. He took a nervous step backward. A pale little boy squatted at a book rack. His floppy gray T-shirt was stenciled
PROPERTY OF SAN QUENTIN PRISON
. Kellogg bumped him, sidestepped. "Well, look, it's not busy. Why don't you go out and get a cup of coffee?" 

"We'll do that," Dave said. 

She walked sullen, wordless beside him, head bent as if she were reading the brass celebrity names set into red stars on the gray terrazzo sidewalk. She wasn't reading them. At a corner, a big, glistening white stall had its front open to the street. While he ordered coffees at a high counter from a white-aproned girlboy with a purple bruise on his neck, she sat at a narrow shelf facing windows cheerful with morning sun, her mouth tight, her eyes half shut in outrage. When he set coffee in a disposable cup in front of her and took the stool next to hers, she said: 

"We are not friends." 

"Did Captain Campos phone you?" 

"Yes. That creepy boy didn't kill John." 

"But he did deliver morphine to him. Where did John get the money to pay for it? I checked his bank, his former bank. The account had been closed and empty for a long time. I had my office check your bank this morning. You're broke, Miss Stannard." 

"I told you that. What good does it do to tell you anything?" 

"That card on Kellogg's desk shows you've worked more often than I'd gathered from what you told me—but still not enough to meet the going price for illegal morphine. Where did the money come from?" 

"I don't know. Peter wasn't earning anything." Her hand shook, lifting the cup. "Sometimes we could hardly buy food." She sipped at the coffee. "I just can't believe John would have hidden money for—that." 

"You forget—he broke into a drugstore to try to steal 'that.' Drugs do unattractive things to people." He took a new cigarette pack from his pocket, stripped the cellophane, thumbnailed the silver-paper corner, tapped the pack on the heel of his hand, held it toward her. She shook her head. He lit a cigarette for himself, tried the coffee. It tasted like cardboard. "Yesterday you showed me the mail that had come to your house since he died. Among the envelopes was a telephone bill. I'd like to look at that." 

"Really?" Puzzled frown. "I don't see—" She didn't finish. She shrugged and gave a little baffled laugh. "All right. Why not? It just happens I brought it with me. I get my pitiful wages today. I was going to the post office on my lunch hour, buy a money order and pay it." Her handbag was soft natural leather lashed with rawhide thongs. Out of it she dug a fold of flimsy blue-andwhite paper and passed it to him. 

He got out his glasses, slid them on, opened the bill. Only two toll calls were listed, with their dates and times. He put a finger on them and slid the bill toward her. "Did you call these numbers?" 

She peered. "No. And Peter only called the Stage—that's local. And, of course, John wouldn't." 

"Why wouldn't he?" 

"He wasn't in touch with anyone. I've told you, we were alone down there. The three of us until Peter left. The two of us after that." 

"And sometimes"—Dave stretched for an ashtray down the shelf among yellow and red plastic squeeze bottles of mustard and ketchup—"only one of you, when you were up here working. Do you recognize the numbers?" 

She took a quick gulp of coffee, set the cup down, frowned at the bill. "Let me think. The Hollywood one?" Her neat little teeth worked on her lower lip. She gave a sharp child's sigh, shook her head. "No. I think I've called it. Back when I worked for Oats and Norwood. But I can't remember whose it is. This one, though"—her face cleared—"'has to be Dwight Ingalls's. He teaches at Los Collados College. American Literature. He was an old customer. One of those John thought of as friends—till he didn't show up after the accident." 

"Maybe he did," Dave said.

12

M
ESQUITE TRAIL CLIMBED
narrow and crooked between steep slopes overgrown with orange-pink lantana, blue plumbago, stands of lavender joe-pye. Old oaks cast speckled shadow on the worn blacktop. Warmed by noon winter sun, tall, rough-barked Japanese pines dropped pungency. Back from the road, up scaffolded flights of paintless wooden steps, or down steps cut into the earth, old redwood houses, deep-eaved, dark-windowed, low-porched, half hid themselves in green winter brush. Magenta bougainvillaea glowed on a shake roof. Scarlet geraniums blazed in a clump of sun beside a shed. 

Here a pair of goats was tethered, there a burro.
RABBITS
, a hand-lettered sign said. FRESH EGGS. Inside a paddock knocked together out of secondhand lumber a pair of dun horses turned their heads and pricked up their ears as he passed. With a scissoring of blue wings a jay cut past the windshield. A ground squirrel hopped and halted across the road. Dave tapped the horn, frowned, looking for a name on a mailbox. And there it was, outside a gate in a redwood grape-stake fence, where a bright-red pickup truck waited with its tailgate down. 

He swung his car around and parked behind the truck on the dusty road shoulder. He got out, shut the door, read the lettering on the truck.
SICKROOM SUPPLIES
. A striped mattress lay trussed in straps on the truck bed. The gate hung partway open. Nailed to it was an enameled tin sign.
FOR SALE
. A realtor's name, phone numbers.
DO NOT DISTURB OCCUPANT
. He pushed the gate. Two men in white coveralls carried up toward him sections of a brown metal bed. Below, on a square porch where ferns died in hanging baskets, the chrome tubing of a wheelchair glinted. Next to it a pair of chipped green oxygen tanks stood strapped to a red dolly. Dave stepped off the cracked cement steps onto a thick mat of dark ground ivy so the men could pass. Then he went on down, the drooping branches of old pepper trees brushing his shoulders, dried berries crunching under his shoes. 

Dwight Ingalls blinked at him through a dusty, bulging screen door. He was a bald, spare man in an old turtleneck pullover, old corduroy pants, linty corduroy slippers. In one of his hands was a sheaf of typed papers, in the other a half-empty glass of milk. A smear of peanut butter was at a corner of his mouth. He chewed, swallowed, frowned. 

"Mr. Brandstetter? It's not one o'clock." 

"I'm sorry," Dave said. "Getting here didn't take as long as I thought it would." It was a lie. Los Collados, tucked in folds of the Sierra Madre foothills east of Pasadena, was twenty minutes from the freeway. He'd known that, starting out. But to reach a place early meant you learned things you weren't supposed to learn. Mostly they were useless things. Now and then they helped. He made the offer he always made but rarely got taken up on. "I'll go away and come back later if you like." 

"No need. Come in. I'm just finishing my lunch." He knocked back the rest of the milk and with the hand that held the empty glass pushed open the screen. "Can I offer you anything? Anything simple, that is. I'm down to basics. Crackers, sardines. Alone, you tend to let the larder go to hell." 

"I know," Dave said. "Thanks—I've eaten." 

The screen door lapsed shut behind him. There was no hall. They were in a broad, low-ceilinged living room, redwoodpaneled chest high, white-plastered above. Built-in bookcases. Window seats. Arched brick fireplace. Chairs, couch, coffee table were Mission style, flat-armed golden oak, fifty, sixty years old. Comfortable, the cushions covered in good-looking plain fabrics.
Vast
would have had to be the word for the carpet. Oriental, rich plums and russets, scuffed in places but still darkly splendid. The colors repeated themselves in stained-glass panels above the wide windows. Art Nouveau flowers and leaves. 

"Sit down. I'll be with you in a minute." 

Ingalls went away into the rear of the house. Old plumbing shuddered. Tapwater splashed. Dave put on his glasses and crouched to look at the books on the shelves. Wright Morris. Nathanael West. H. L. Davis. And Thomas Wolfe, first editions again, as at April Stannard's. There was a hefty volume of Wolfe's letters too, the wide backstrip in soft black cloth. And next to it, in hard-finish beige buckram,
Thomas Wolfe's Western Journal: The Lost Pages
. A slim book. He took it down, opened it.
Edited with an introduction by Dwight Ingalls, Los Collados College Press, 1958
. 

There was no noise from the soft-soled slippers on the thick rug, but a creaking board made Dave aware of Ingalls passing through the room. He set the book back. The screen door made a wooden sound. Dave stood with a snap of knee joints. Outside, Ingalls said something. One of the truckers answered him. Dave pushed the glasses back into his pocket. There was the hollow bump of the wheelchair down the porch steps. Dave dropped onto the couch. The screen door closed. Ingalls came back. 

"And that's that," he said bleakly. "That's that." 

He'd left the milk glass, the peanut-butter smear and the handful of papers somewhere. He sat in a chair by a lamp that was a pear-shaped Arab water jar of hammered copper, shaded by a drum of rough brown burlap. The table the lamp stood on was crowded with paperback books; pamphlets, literary quarterlies. Among them Ingalls found a crumpled Tareyton pack. He dug into it with a thin finger. Empty. He twisted it, dropped it into a hammered-copper ashtray already glutted with butts. Dave held out his own pack.