Death Claims (20 page)

Dave asked him, "What's going on?" 

The boy didn't look at him. He waved a hand. "Stand over there, please." He started to walk off. 

"That's my house," Dave said. 

The boy turned back, frowning. "Let me see your identification." Dave found his wallet, slipped out of its plastic folder his driver's license, handed it to the boy. The boy tipped it to catch the greenish glare from the streetlight at the corner. He read it attentively, handed it back. His look was grim. "Where have you been?" 

"Out of town. Now, will you tell me—" 

One of the cars shifted position and the boy tugged Dave's sleeve to draw him out of the way. Two black officers were in the car. The one at the wheel backed it fast with a ripping sound from the transmission. When it was out of the way Dave saw the yellow Lotus. Parked directly in front of the house. Its curbside door hung open and by it squatted a muscular gray-haired man with a broken nose. He was talking to someone in the car. Dave couldn't see who it was. The headrest on the bucket seat was too high. But he knew the man. 

"Ken Barker," he said. "Is he in charge?" 

"He'll want to talk to you. Lieutenant?" 

Barker squinted into the beating red lights. He stood, spoke again to the one in the car, stepped into the street. "Dave." He shook hands, but he didn't smile. "What did Wade Cochran want with you?" 

"I'd only be guessing. That's his car. Isn't he in it? Ask him." 

"He isn't in it. He's on your doorstep. Dead.'' 

Dave felt punched in the stomach. He swung to stare at the house. Headlights glared across the ground cedar, dyeing it too green, lit up the new FOR SALE sign on its iron stem and threw hard against the front door the shadow of a uniformed officer with his head bowed. The thing at his feet wore a fringed buckskin jacket and its face was a wet glister of crimson. 

"Shot three times," Baker said. "The weapon was smallcaliber, but the range was close. Why, Dave?" 

Dave gave him a frail smile. "For our sins, Ken." He looked at the Lotus. "He brought his mother, right?" 

Barker nodded. "But she can't tell us anything. She's blind. Cochran got out of the car. She heard him go up the walk. He's wearing cowboy boots. This is a quiet street. She heard your door buzzer. Then another car pulled up, the door slammed, feet ran up the walk. Cochran said, "No," just once. The gun went off three times. The killer ran back to his car and drove away. The old lady leaned on the horn. Couple neighbors came. They phoned us." Barker checked his watch. "Twenty minutes ago. She could be away from here by now. She won't budge. She wants to talk to you. Said she'd wait all night if necessary." 

She sat stiff-backed, stoic, used to pain, stronger than pain. What ought to have been under her was a buckboard seat. Her raw dignity made the car's padded leather, glittering dials and gauges, sleek curve of windshield look ridiculous. Dave crouched in the ground cedar, touched her, told her who he was. 

She turned. "You got here." 

"Too late," he said. "I'm sorry." 

"Not your fault. He wanted to phone ahead. I said no phoning. We'll go. They listen in on phones all the time these days. We'll talk to him face to face." She lifted her head. "Barker, you still there?" 

"Yes, ma'am." He stood behind Dave. 

"Well, go away. Find my son's killer." 

"Everyone's looking for him," Barker said. "I have to hear what you're going to say." 

"All you have to hear is that killer's name and I don't know it." Her gnarled hand caught Dave's. "You get into this car." 

Dave stood and looked at Barker. A nerve twitched in Barker's face, but he didn't speak. He looked stonily at Dave. His gunmetal eyes said,
You'll tell me later
. Dave didn't nod. He held Barker's look for a slow count of three. Barker could make whatever he wanted out of that. Dave went around and got behind the wheel of the Lotus. His door fell shut. He reached across and shut her door. 

"This can't be kept quiet," he said. "There'll be newsmen here in five minutes." 

"What I've got to say can be kept quiet," she said. 

"Maybe. I don't need to ask why he came. He came because you made him come. What was he going to tell me?" 

"That the boy didn't kill his father." She stared straight ahead at nothing. The red lights winked off the flat black of the glasses. "He was up at the lodge." 

"But Wade wasn't. He went to Arena Blanca." 

"Prepared to pay," she said. "There's stairs. He climbed them. It was cold and raining, but the door was open. He looked inside. The lights was on. Plates on the table, meal just et. Coffee still steaming in the cups. Cigarette smoking in the ashtray. But nobody there. He called out, but nobody come. Well, I trained him better than to go into somebody's place when they're not home. He went down and waited in the car. But not for long. Afraid he'd be seen. He come back to the ranch. 

"And rode up to the lodge. The boy was there, but Wade didn't tell him where he'd been and why. It was like you claimed it was between them. Love, you called it. I can't accept that. Bible doesn't and I can't. Lived my whole life by the Word of God. Raised him by it. He knew better, knew he was in the wrongotherwise he'd have spoke to me about it. But that's not here nor there now. 

"What is, is that this man John Oats says his son told him he was going to live with Wade and why—just like you guessed. Threatened to tell. Unless Wade brought him money. Wade was sure the boy never knew his father was a dope fiend." She gave a little dry laugh that had only despair in it. "Like you said about me. Love don't let you doubt.
Believeth all things
. First Corinthians, thirteen, seven." 

"I think he was right. The boy didn't know." 

"Mebbe." She clipped the word short. "I can't like him. You can't ask me to like him. My son was all right till he come along. He was fine. Just fine. The whole world thought so." Her voice trembled and went old-woman thin. "And now look what's happened. Look how it's ended." 

"The boy tried to save him," Dave said. 

"Because it was his fault and he knew it. He thought Wade had killed his father. Oh, yes." Her smile was crooked, triumphant. "If it was love, it ended right then and there. The day you first come to the ranch. Wade sized you up. You wouldn't stop till you found that boy. And tracking him, you'd find where they ate, that motel where they lay together in abomination. You didn't say anything about the dope, the blackmail, but you'd find out about them too. And come back." 

"He could have washed under those fenders." 

Curt headshake. "That wouldn't have stopped you. Not once you learned about the phone call from John Oats. He didn't know where to turn. Every time he'd had trouble in his life before, there'd been his mother to talk to. He couldn't talk to me about this. The boy was all he had. And the boy thought he did it. But"—the twist of her smile was bitter—"he couldn't let Wade take the blame. Not seeing he'd brought the trouble.
He
'd take the blame. There was no point in living now, anyways." 

"And Wade would have let him," Dave said. "If it hadn't been for you, Wade would have let him go straight to the gas chamber." 

"But the boy was wrong!" Her cry had a crow's harshness. "Wade didn't do it. You know that now. Somebody else did it. The same one that shot Wade." 

"Right." Dave found the door handle, lifted it, pushed the door open. "The same one." 

With a low siren moan, an ambulance edged its way around the cluster of black-and-white cars. It was a tall brown carryall. On its roof a wan orange light revolved under a plastic blister. The machine tilted clumsily into the driveway, followed by an unmarked car with a whip antenna. Men in white jumped down from the ambulance cab and in the headlight beams of the second car opened the rear doors to slide out an aluminum-tubing stretcher and a bulky fold of gray plastic, a sack for the dead. They headed for the front door. From the unmarked car a roundshouldered man with a small black grip trudged after them— Grace of the coroner's office. From the same car two.men followed, trampling the ground cedar, carrying camera, lights and glittering, spidery tripods. 

Dave got out of the Lotus, then turned back, bent, poked his head inside. "You said he was afraid he'd be seen. That night in the rain at Arena Blanca." 

"He wasn't," she said. "He told me he wasn't." 

"He was," Dave said. "Shall I phone Katy for you?" 

She set her jaw. "I'll stay here with my son." 

But she wouldn't. As he straightened, Dave saw a mannish young woman in trim uniform get out of a newly arrived patrol car. She came toward the Lotus with a look of gentle firmness. Dave shut the door and glanced around for Barker. The white flashes of the cameraman's strobes outlined him, near the body, watching the crouched doctor. Dave started toward him, then halted. To hell with him. He didn't have jurisdiction in El Molino. He could wait. Dave made for his car. 

A stocky man who looked anxious came fast along the sidewalk. A milkweed stalk clung to the cuff of his pants. He'd picked it up crossing the vacant lot. Dave saw his car around the corner, white, marked with radio-station call letters. ALL THE NEWS ALL THE TIME. A tape recorder in a scuffed leather case bounced at the man's hip. He waved a shiny microphone. 

"Excuse me. Our man at the Glass House got the flash Wade Cochran's been shot to death. The TV star. Do you know anything about it? Whose house is that?" 

"Grandmother's." Dave kept walking. "Only there was a wolf in the bed." 

He slammed inside his car, started it, yanked the lever to reverse. He floored the gas pedal and the tires screamed, caught, jerked the car backward along the curb to the empty cross street, where he cramped the wheel, cornered, braked so the tires shouted again. And a third time when he set the lever to drive and took off along Yucca. A glance over his shoulder told him no one in the red-light nightmare had noticed. Not even the reporter. He was arguing with the towheaded kid in uniform.

I
T WAS BACK
in the dark, fourth on the left in a jogged row of one-story apartments. Sharp-edged pale stucco, neat and ungenerous. Clean, short cement steps up to aluminum screen doors. White-painted wood doors with beveled panels. White Venetian blinds at the windows. But no light inside. Not at number four. Only the imbecile insistence of a telephone, ringing, ringing. Dave walked out to the street again. A narrow cement strip led back of the apartments. He used it. The shiny screen on the back door of number four was unlatched, but the half-glass door inside it was locked. While his hand was on the knob the telephone stopped. He went on out to an alley. The only light was the pale reflection in the sky of lights from a business street two blocks away, but it let him see to his right a row of car stalls, open crates of blackness. 

He laid a hand on the hood of a Galaxy, of a Chevelle, on the rear slope of a Volkswagen. Cold. Then he heard small sounds. Two cars farther on. A little old Sunbeam with a worn fold-down roof.
Tick
.
Ping
. The engine bonnet was warm. He pulled open the rusty little door, lit a match, leaned inside to check the registration slip in its yellowed celluloid folder on the steering post. Yes. He blew out the match. 

He shut the door, took a step, crouched, reached up under a fender, scraped with his nail, stood and moved out into the alley. He held his open hand close to his eyes. The white sand grains glittered. He brushed them away, bent and tried the corrosionrough handle of the Sunbeam's luggage compartment. It didn't turn easy, it turned with a squeak, but it turned. He lifted the lid. Nothing inside but a spare tire and tools. 

At the back of the car stalls, built high so that the grilles of the cars could nose under, was a row of storage lockers, unpainted tongue-and-groove boards. Padlocked. He picked up the Sunbeam's tire iron, edged between the little car and the Mustang next to it, raised the jimmy and pried at the cheap hasp. The pine was soft. The hasp gave, the padlock rattled, the screws pattered on the cement at his feet. He opened the door. 

Matchlight flickered yellow on old books bundled with twine. Cardboard cartons jaundiced with age and damp. A dusty Tyrolean hat of checkered green, in its band a clip of red feather that had once been jaunty. A dry pair of leather motoring gloves with holes at the fingertips, bent to grasp, as if there were hands still in them. Dribbled cans of enamel, varnish, thinner. A clutch of used paintbrushes. A dented red ten-gallon gasoline tin. 

And a guitar. 

The telephone was ringing when he reached the back door again. The lock was the kind that twists inside a brass knob. He used the jimmy gently to pry loose the flat wood strip on the right side of the doorframe. Just a crack. The telephone stopped. From his wallet he took a plastic-coated card, calendar on one side, ad for whiskey on the other. He slid this in where he'd loosened the strip, eased it between the catch and the tongue of the lock, nudged the door open. A loose metal weather strip along its bottom ticked like a dollar alarm clock. 

"Who's there?" Dim to his right, light came on. 

He went toward it fast between the shadowy outlines of stove, refrigerator, counters. A room divider, wood veneer cut with fleur-de-lis and sprayed gold, separated a dining space with ferns and twinkling cut glass from a living room upholstered in yellow plush. Next to the divider was width for passage. Charles Norwood stood there. Coatless, no shoes, no glasses, hair a fuzzy nimbus around his head. And in his hand a snipe-nosed .22 target pistol. His voice sounded choked. 

"What the hell does this mean?" 

"It means you thought Wade Cochran saw you the night you drowned John Oats. He didn't. He didn't see anyone. You killed him for nothing." 

"But he turned on his headlights just as I came around the corner of the house. Naked. Dripping wet. I walked right into them. And he drove away before I—''

 "Could see who he was, right? And you've been wondering ever since who owned that yellow Lotus. Sick with worry that he'd hear what happened down there that night and come forward and say he'd seen you. But there was nothing you could do about it. Till I walked into the bookstore tonight and told you the man's name and where to find him and that he knew about John Oats's murder.