Early Graves (7 page)

“Is this the right ship?” he said. “It doesn’t look big enough for all those animals lined up out there.” He peeled off the windbreaker and hung it up. Dave closed the door, shut out the cold, the rain, the sound of the rain. He looked at Cecil, who ambled over to Amanda to give her a kiss. He looked at Amanda.

“It’s a plot,” he said. “I knew it.”

“That must be what it means to be a detective,” she said.

“Ho-ho.” He went back to the table. Cecil joined him there, holding plates on which lasagna steamed. It was a recipe Dave had wangled out of Max Romano decades ago—the best lasagna in the world. Cecil set a plate at Dave’s place, another at Amanda’s. Before Dave could reach it, he snatched the wine bottle and took a corkscrew to it. “My favorite food. My favorite people.” Dave peered at the label of the bottle in Cecil’s hands. “A wine straight from the wedding at Cana. Don’t tell me it’s not a plot.”

“Sit down.” Amanda brought a third plate to the table, laid it at Cecil’s place. He squeaked the cork out of the bottle. She shed her apron, hung it up. Playing cellarer, Cecil splashed an inch of wine into Dave’s glass for him to taste. Going along with the foolishness, Dave tilted up the glass, rolled the wine on his tongue, swallowed, nodded. Cecil grinned and filled all their glasses. He set the bottle down in the middle of the table, and pulled up his chair. Amanda laid a napkin in her lap. “It’s a plot,” she said. “Eat.”

Dave looked hard at Cecil. “The animals lined up two by two. Where’s your mate? Where’s Chrissie? Doesn’t she get any supper?”

“At the marina,” Cecil said. “With Dan’l Chapman and his folks.” He laughed briefly and shook his head. “Little old Dan’l is still crazy about Chrissie. He really hates my guts. When I dropped her off, he was there to meet us at the condominium gates, you know? I thought he was going to punch me out right then.”

“There’s a thought,” Dave said. “Maybe he and I between us could beat you up. Childhood and old age.”

“Dave, will you stop that old age nonsense,” Amanda said sharply. “I never knew anyone younger in my life.”

“Chrissie and Dan’l talk on the phone every day. Hours. She says he’s lifting weights at a gym.” Cecil crowded his words with food, chewed for a moment, swallowed, drank some wine, set the glass down with a click. “He’ll be able to take me on alone—in two or three years. He isn’t exactly bulging with muscles yet.”

“You’re dodging the point.” Dave tasted the lasagna. “Why are you here, the two of you, and not Chrissie?” The food was flavorless. Not because Amanda didn’t know how to follow a recipe. If Max Romano had cooked it himself, Dave wouldn’t have enjoyed it. Not tonight. “You want to move back. And not alone. You want to bring Chrissie with you. You want to hop from one sleeping loft to the other, right? You think Chrissie is so blind she wouldn’t catch on?”

“Dave, stop,” Amanda said.

Cecil sat staring down into his plate. He waited for a moment. Then he said quietly, “She likes you and she misses you. You know how much overtime I put in. She needs more company than that. She’s alone in the dark, Dave, all the time. I’m not enough.”

Dave drank some wine, took another mouthful of the food he didn’t want. “She and I would be company for each other—is that what you’re saying? You really screwed up, didn’t you? You wanted her to be happy. You want me to be happy. But neither of us is happy. And you’re miserable.” A tinny car door slammed out on the trail. Frowning, he got to his feet. “Straighten it out, young Harris. Tell her why you did what you did, apologize to her, and—”

The lights went out. In the kitchen and outside. Dave tumbled his chair over backward. He moved through darkness as deep as that Chrissie lived in, groped for the door, found the knob, pulled the door open, pushed open the screen. Amanda said something behind him, but he didn’t catch the words. He stepped out onto the wet bricks before he remembered his shoes. He’d taken them off. At his shoulder, Cecil said: “It’s the circuit breaker. I’ll go.”

“No.” Dave caught his arm and dragged him back. Very roughly. “You stay here, look after Amanda. It’s probably an outage, a line down. A tree. Rain loosens the roots and they fall. But if it isn’t, then I think I know what it is. And I’m sore as hell at you, but I don’t want you killed.”

“I don’t want you killed.” Cecil jerked from his grip.

“Stay here, damn it,” Dave said, and ran into the dark, stumbling, the uneven bricks bruising his feet. He ran toward the looming silhouette of the front building. The power box was at the far front corner of that building, where the lines could reach it handily from the trail. There was a streetlamp that hung high among leafy branches where Horseshoe crossed Sagebrush Road. A little light from that far corner reached here, but not much. He reached the front of the building where his car stood, Amanda’s runabout, Cecil’s van, all of them glinting faintly with rain.

He ran between Amanda’s car and the French windows that fronted the building. And somebody jumped out at him. He flung himself to the side, felt the fender of the Bugatti bang his thigh, felt a searing pain along his shoulder. He saw a ghostly glimmer of blond hair, saw a skinny arm raised, the flash of a steel blade. He dropped to the bricks, and rolled under the car. Cecil shouted. A gun went off. Dave knew the sound. It was the Sig Sauer nine-millimeter semiautomatic he kept in a drawer on the loft of the rear building. Cecil had more presence of mind than he did. Fast footsteps fled over the bricks, splashing rain. The Sig Sauer went off again. Close by. Out on the trail, the tinny car door slammed, a rackety motor revved and clattered off downhill.

“Shit,” Cecil said. “Dave? Where are you?”

“Give me a minute.” Dave made to crawl out from under the car, and the pain from his shoulder was so bad he fainted. He woke to find Cecil on hands and knees, peering at him, eye-whites, a glint of teeth.

“Are you okay?”

“He cut me, but I’ll live,” Dave said. “Switch the lights back on, will you?”

“Damn.” Cecil scrambled to his feet and went off to the power box. Dave heard Amanda’s quick steps in the wet. She sounded breathless. “What’s happened? Dave? Cecil?”

“Call an ambulance,” Cecil said. “He’s bleeding.”

The lights came on. And Dave saw that Cecil was right. He lay in a puddle the wrong color for rain.

D
AVE HADN’T HEARD THE
rain stop. He had slept deeply, darkly, drugged by painkillers an emergency room nurse had shot him full of at a hospital where they’d sewed up the slash in his shoulder. Samuels from the LAPD had looked wan in the glare of the white room. Leppard was off duty and couldn’t be located. Samuels, in his fly-front coat, pointed a pocket tape recorder at Dave, while Dave sat on a steel table with his shirt off, being repaired. Every time the doctor made a move, Samuel winced as if he was the one wounded. The puffy hand holding the recorder trembled. “Did you get a look at his face?”

“It was too dark. Maybe it wasn’t a him. It could have been a her.”

“Jesus,” Samuels said. “You think so?”

“I think it was the tall skinny street kid your witness saw hanging around Carmen Lopez’s apartment building before Drew Dodge was killed. Long blond hair. Headband.”

“Girls aren’t generally tall.”

“Not generally.” Dave nodded. “Forget I said it could have been a her. It’s a habit I have—never taking anything for granted.” He forced a smile. “All right?”

“No, you got a point there,” Samuels said. “The car?”

“Old, an American economy model from the late sixties or early seventies. Dark. I don’t know the color.”

“License number?” Samuels said hopefully.

“Sorry.” Dave shook his head. The dope was taking hold of his brain. “The time was 7:10 P.M. He pulled the main switch on the power box and knew I’d come to see what was the matter, and he waited and jumped me in the dark.” Dave looked past Samuels’s pale bulk at solemn Cecil and anxious Amanda waiting for him beyond the half-glass doors of the emergency room. “My friends came out of the house and scared him off.”

“You see the knife?”

“Not to be able to identify it,” Dave said.

Samuels squinted uncertainly at the small metallic box in his hand, found what he appeared to hope was the correct button, and switched off the recorder. To bandage Dave’s shoulder, the doctor shifted position. Samuels peered around him at Dave, forehead wrinkled: “What do you think? Was this our serial killer?”

“Dodge was robbed,” Dave said. “None of the others was robbed. I’m not young. I don’t have AIDS.”

“Yeah, right.” Samuels sounded discouraged. He said thanks, said he’d be in touch, dropped the tape recorder into a pocket of his pale coat, and pushed out of the room. He threaded his way between a crowd of hurting men, women, children waiting with faces dulled by pain, standing, sitting on molded plastic chairs, lying on the floor, eyes closed.

The doctor’s name was Patel. He was small, spare, brown-skinned, with large, luminous dark eyes, long lashes, and a grave demeanor. In his elegant Karachi accent, he insisted Dave stay in the hospital overnight, in case infection developed, fever, who knew what complications. He had already arranged for a room for Dave. But Dave wanted to go home. He was dogged about it. He was fine. There’d been no nerve damage. The sewn-up cut would mend. He wanted to sleep in his own bed, on his own loft, under the skylight. In the end, not liking it, Patel gave him pills and let him go.

Cecil had dropped him and Amanda back at the house on Horseshoe Canyon Trail, then gone on to pick up Chrissie at the marina, and take her home with him to their Mar Vista place. Amanda had stayed, had slept in the guest room on the loft, watchfully, getting up to look at Dave from time to time. The boards of the loft had loud creaks built into them, but he hadn’t heard her. He’d stayed under in his dreamless darkness until noon. Then she’d fixed them breakfast in the cookshack. Like Dr. Patel, she’d argued hard against his leaving his bed.

“I’ll bring your breakfast on a tray.”

He pushed clumsily to a sitting position, swung his feet to the floor. “No need for that. But I’ll need help dressing, if you don’t mind.”

“You’re going out? Dave, no way.”

“Have to go out.” He tottered to his feet, pulled open the pine doors of a wardrobe. “Dig back in here for me, will you, please?”

She dug and brought out shabby, secondhand clothes he’d bought at thrift shops. “What in the world are these?”

“Camouflage,” Dave said.

“You’re not going to shave?” she said.

“More camouflage.” It was clumsy getting into the clothes but they managed it between them. He pushed his feet into stained and ragged tennis shoes. “Sorry. Can you tie these for me?” His arm was in a sling. She knelt and helped him. “Why camouflage?” she said.

He smiled and stood up. “The game is afoot, Watson.”

“Oh, please,” she said. “Don’t joke. Look at you. You’re white with pain.”

“That’s hunger,” he said.

After breakfast she demanded he let her drive him wherever it was he simply had to go. He’d used up precious energy talking her out of it. He sat in the Jaguar now, thankful for a minute to rest. The ride the machine gave him was gentle, but the painkillers were wearing off and the slightest motion made his shoulder hurt. He had to let the pain come back. He couldn’t drive drugged.

Kevin Nakamura owned a service station down the canyon at a main cross street. The station was yellow flagstone and glass, and sheltered by slim eucalyptus trees. Nakamura, in starchy suntans, was using a wide, stiff-bristled push broom to sweep leaves, twigs, seedpods into the sun-dazzled street. He was a tidy young man. Neatness mattered to him. He concentrated, and did a thorough job. One of the help could be doing it, but the help were working under cars in the shop, and filing receipts in the office among shiny stacks of motor oil cans. And their sweeping wouldn’t have satisfied Nakamura. He kept his head down, and got every last twig, leaf, pod.

Dave tapped the horn. Nakamura came to the car. Dave wore a moth-eaten ski cap. Nakamura said, “You want the old car.”

“Will it start?” Dave said. “Is there gas in it?”

“I keep it ready for you,” Nakamura said. “That was our agreement, right?” He grinned with large, white teeth. When he did that, his eyes almost closed. He shook his head. “You look like a real bum.”

“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Dave said and, moving carefully, got out of the Jaguar. At the moment he did that, the sun stopped shining. He looked up. Black, ragged clouds were scudding in from the southeast. It was going to rain again. He watched Nakamura walk off bowlegged to the rear of the station building. In a moment, he came back into view, driving a pale yellow sixties Valiant with a deep crease along one side, where it had got the worst of a sideswipe collision someplace in its past. It was as tinny as the car driven last night by the kid who had attacked him. On another case, years ago, Dave had driven the Jaguar into a neighborhood of street gangs and nearly had it stripped. He wasn’t going to repeat that mistake.

He handed Nakamura the keys to the Jaguar. “Don’t let anything happen to it.”

“I’ll tune it up,” Nakamura said. “When will you be back?”

“Before you close,” Dave said. He winced, wangling his long lean limbs into the small car. The seat was tattered under him. Getting a grip on the door to close it was awkward.

Nakamura saw that, and closed it for him. He leaned at the window, worried.

“What happened to your arm?”

“Somebody tried to remove it,” Dave said.

“You sure you’re all right to drive?”

“No,” Dave said. “But it’s too far to walk.”

It was Chandler Park. And not as he remembered it. He remembered it from his teen years. A gospel temple with a big white dome loomed above the trees north of the park. For a few months in high school, Dave had yearned over a handsome classmate who adored Lizzie Tremaine, the flashy evangelist who had built the temple and presided noisily over its meetings in flowing white robes and brassy yellow hair. And Dave had tagged down here after the boy for a few Sundays, just to be near him. It was useless. Jesus was the only male that boy would ever love.