Fadeout (18 page)

"All right," Loomis croaked. "I was there. That don't prove I killed him. He wrote me a letter. Says where he is. Says if—" He broke off. "Don't matter what he says. I went. Old place on the seashore. He set there at the desk in that room, stuff all strewn around ever which way, cleaning that little six-shooter. He looked bad. We talked. I come away. I never killed him." 

"What did you talk about?" Dave asked. 

Loomis's bony shoulders lifted. "One thing another." 

"I think he told you why he left Pima," Dave said. "I think he wanted to come back." 

Loomis studied his bony feet. The bed was high. He swung the feet a little. It didn't remind you of a child. It reminded you of an anatomy class skeleton. When he looked up there were tears in his eyes and a break in his voice. "Yup. And I wouldn't let him. Says stay away. You come back and you'll wreck Thorne's life and Gretchen's life. Everything. My life." He laughed at that bleakly. "I took cash with me. All I had in the house. Near four hundred dollars. I give it to him. Says I'll send you more. Regular. Not checks. Money. You keep hid. Keep moving.... I liked the boy. A whole hell of a lot, tell you the honest truth. But ... " He looked at the swaying skeleton feet again. "What in the world could a body do?" 

Dave knelt to fit the tip on the cane. Under the chair lay an envelope. Black-and-white Mondrian design in the upper-left-hand corner.
The Provence School of Art
. He picked it up. He stood up. To the Mexican woman he said, "
Senora. Salga nos, por favor. Un poco tiempo
." She looked doubtfully to the old man and he nodded and she went, shutting the door. Dave told Loomis, "I think you knew what to do." 

The old man's mouth gave a hopeless twist. "Not till too late." He didn't look at Dave. He looked at the envelope. It was turning brown at the edges. It had a dusty feel. Inside were twelve glossy photographs. Fox Olson and Doug Sawyer, naked and young, laughing and sex up, in the daisy-papered second-story-front room of Vera Kincaid's Bell Beach rooming house, summer, 1941. Dave sat on the chair and began tearing them up, one by one, into small pieces. "Not till too late," the old man said again. "Not till Herrera come and told me he was dead. Then I went to do what Fox should have done in the first place. Chalmers's car was gone. I waited. Hours. Not where anybody'd see me. Trees and brush along his private road. Stopped him on the road. He's big and tough. I'm half dead. But a shotgun's an equalizer. I told him flat I was going to kill him. He thought I never meant it. Thought the pictures was all I wanted. They wasn't. I meant it." 

Dave stood up. "Bathroom?" Loomis nodded at a door and Dave walked into a glaring green mosque and turned the envelope upside down and watched the fragments shower into the toilet. He made fragments of the envelope and dropped those too. He flushed the toilet and went back. Loomis didn't look at him. He lay on the bed now, staring at the ceiling, seeing something nobody else could see. "Not till too late," he said again. 

The shotgun was on its rack in the bare white office. Dave reached for it and the Mexican woman said behind him, "It is clean,
Señor
. I cleaned it myself."

When she opened the door her face looked young and flushed. Loved. Her eyes were brandied. He didn't give her time to say anything. He walked past her into the long, raftered room. The only light came from a fire dying in the grate. It was enough to show him that the painting of the Chute was gone. The coffee table had been pushed aside. Two snifters glinted on the hearth with the bottle. Cushions were on the deep rug. So was the black Mexican ashtray. Two brands of filter cigarette had been stubbed out in it. Gauze was wrapped around her hands. 

"I didn't see that this morning," he said. "You were wearing gloves." 

"I'm not very clever in the kitchen," she said. "What do you want? It's after midnight. If there are papers I have to sign, I should think they could wait till morning." 

"It didn't happen in the kitchen," he said. "It happened in your husband's room at Bell Beach. You burned the pages of a novel he'd written there. Which seems a little odd, after the way you've hung onto all the others." 

"She didn't burn it." Hale McNeil came out of the dark, tucking in the tail of an expensive wool shirt. "She burned herself trying to rescue it. I burned it. It was disgusting. The whole filthy episode is disgusting and I don't know why you can't leave it alone." 

"When you took the typewriter this morning," Dave said, "you ought to have taken the rest of the stuff, emptied the desk. Then I'd be leaving it alone. I'd agree with the deputy in Bell Beach, that only one man knew where he was, therefore that mall had to be the one who killed him. But those envelopes were there. Nine of them. The kind you buy at your neighborhood friendly. In packs of a dozen. A dollar booklet holds twenty stamps. This one had only seventeen. So he'd mailed three letters. With Bell Beach postmarks. Which meant that not just one man knew he was there. That's why I can't leave it alone." 

"He was writing a novel," McNeil said. "Why weren't those letters to publishers?" 

"I don't know why, but they weren't." Dave looked at Thorne. "One was to you. Terry not only opened it, she read it." 

"Oh, no!" Thorne whispered. 

"That little bitch!" McNeil snarled. "All right. So Thorne got a letter from him. What does that prove? It was a pretty sad document, I'll say that. Apology. Panic. Self-pity. His boyfriend had run out on him. He was all alone. The walls were closing in. What was he going to do? Didn't anybody care? Help, help, help!" 

"Hale, stop it!" Thorne was white. 

"Sorry." McNeil turned away. "But they're all alike. I know. I had one for a son." He picked up a wedge of eucalyptus trunk and laid it on the fire. The tattered bark sputtered. "Very nice and charming. Sweet guys. Till they get themselves into some loathsome scrape. Then they fall apart. And the people they've betrayed are expected to pick up the pieces." 

"Is that why you went to Bell Beach last night?" 

"You mean this morning." McNeil jabbed at the log with the poker. "When Captain Herrera came and told Thorne he was dead." McNeil set the poker in the rack and walked into the shadows talking. "She telephoned me. We went together." He came back with another snifter. He poured into all three. "This morning. You saw us." 

"And I acted badly," Thorne said, "and I'm sorry. But the letter wasn't like that." She sat small in a comer of the couch, feet tucked up, facing the fire. "It wasn't a whine. The typing was bad. I think he was drunk when he wrote it but it wasn't a whine. I wish I had it to show you. I don't. Hale burned that too." Her look was unforgiving when MeNeil handed her brandy. "It was the saddest thing you ever read. Did you know . . . everything I bragged so to you about the other day, all of it, all the bright, shiny success—he didn't want it? He was just trying to please me." 

"I've talked to Sawyer." Dave took his drink from McNeil and sat down. "He said something about it." 

Thorne's mouth went bitter in the firelight. "Of course. He would have told
him
." 

"He was too decent to tell you. Till it was over." 

McNeil sat cross-legged on the hearth, big, handsome, assured. "Decent?" he scoffed. 

"Damn decent. And a lot of other old-fashioned words. Kind. Faithful." They didn't like that one. So he told them the Ito incident. "And it was the same when Doug Sawyer came. Sawyer wanted him. He wanted Sawyer. But he sent him away. For you. Both of you. Even knowing what was going on between you . . . It's rude as hell, but we all know manners aren't what they once were.... Why, when everything was coming your way, when everything you'd dreamed of for him came true—why did you stop with him?" 

"It is rude," Thorne said. "But at least you care, which is more than he did. Or seemed to." She got up from the couch, walked to the edge of the firelight and stood gazing down the room to where the flames were reflected in the glass doors to the patio. She said, as if reciting something long memorized, "He needed me. All those years. Trying and trying and getting nowhere. He needed me. Then . . . he didn't need me anymore." She gave a sad shrug. 

"Some marriages," Dave said, "should be called on account of darkness." 

"That's very clever." She came back into the light. "And very true. I thought I was making him happy. He thought he was making me happy. And we were both wrong." She blinked into the fire. "Neither of us got what we wanted. Not for each other. Not for ourselves." 

"Oh, I don't know," Dave said. "You got McNeil." 

She turned sharply, stung. "He got Doug Sawyer." 

"Not soon," Dave said. "And not for long." 

"For a lifetime," she snapped. "Not that I was bright enough to realize it." Her laugh had a rusty edge. "Twentyfour years and I never understood. The shine in his eyes when he used to talk about him . . . Of course he was in love with him. Had been long before I met him. Would be forever." The hurt was still new, still raw. She dropped down by McNeil. His arm went around her. He drew her head against his chest, stroked her hair. She gave a long trembling sigh. "How good it is not to have to be the strong one anymore." 

"They're all alike," McNeil said. "No guts." 

"I'm sorry about your bad luck with your son," Dave said. "But you don't want to let it short-circuit your brain. Olson had guts." 

"Not enough to knock Chalmers down and take those pictures away from him." 

"Knocking people down doesn't occur to everybody as a way of solving problems." 

"It doesn't occur to faggots," McNeil said. 

"I can name you a welterweight faggot who beat an opponent to death in the ring a couple of years ago. . . . But I'm interested in your philosophy. Does it extend to guns? Are they another problem-solving device you endorse?" 

McNeil's eyes narrowed. "What the hell do you mean?" 

Dave tilted the little globe, watching the brandy swirl in the red firelight. "Say the little .32 Fox Olson was cleaning when you got to his room last night." 

McNeil started to get up. 

"No ... " Thorne's bandaged hand stopped him. "He wasn't cleaning the gun. He wasn't there. No one was. The door was standing open. It was the loneliest-looking place I ever saw. He'd tacked a note to the door. Felt pen on yellow paper." 

Dave nodded. " 'On the pier.' Right?" 

She frowned. "Yes. How . . . did you know?" 

"Terry saw it. And her boyfriend. She made him drive her to Bell Beach. I take it he couldn't leave until his shift was up. They got there after you. The papers were still smoking. When did you leave here?" 

She grimaced. "I . . . hate the mail. Fox loved it, adored all those funny little people with their grubby little pencils." 

"Pretended to," McNeil growled. 

"Yes ... that's right—pretended to." She gave a wan headshake. "Anyway, I didn't want to face it. And I found other things to do. Nothing things. For hours. Finally, long after Terry left, I went out and tackled it. But it was three by the time I found Fox's letter. Since it was addressed to me, I should have guessed Terry had been up to something. She normally sets my mail aside. This was in with all the fan mail." Her mouth made a thin, pained line. "God, when will it ever stop?" 

"I wouldn't have gone," McNeil said. "He was drunk when he wrote it. He was probably already sorry he had. But Thorne insisted." 

"So you left when?" Dave asked. "It was before four. I tried to telephone you then. From Los Angeles. About something that doesn't matter anymore." 

"Ten minutes to four," McNeil said. "But I fouled up the detail. Drove a good twenty miles past it on the freeway. Had to backtrack. Must have been nine-thirty by the time we got there. Hell of a place to find." 

"A lot of people found it," Dave said. 

"And so there was the note," Thorne said. "And we went out on the pier. And he was there. . . ." Her voice wobbled. She got up and went quickly into the dark. "Dead." 

"Under the Chute." Dave tilted his head at the blank chimney facing. "What happened to it, by the way?" He raised eyebrows at McNeil. "Your incendiary propensities at work again?" 

"If you mean did I burn it"—McNeil scowled—"hell, yes, I burned it. Why should she be reminded?" 

"It was a good painting," Dave said. 

"Not when you knew what it meant." 

"Yup." Dave set down the brandy. It didn't taste good anymore. "So you left him lying there. Right? He was great, wasn't he, as long as he was making a mint for you? He was great to be so obliging about his wife—" A sharp sound came from Thorne somewhere. "But when he turned out to be queer, and a murdered queer at that, very possibly murdered by another queer . . . then he wasn't a friend anymore, a husband anymore. He was just another corpse, like some dead wino in a skid-row doorway." 

"That was what he wanted," McNeil said stubbornly. "That was why he left Pima—to protect Thorne and the rest of us. You don't know what a scandal like that can mean. I do. The one over Tad killed my father.... We didn't have any choice. We had to leave him there. To have gone to the authorities would have canceled out what he himself did, made it worthless, meaningless." 

"Neat." Dave stood. "All right. You live with it. I'm glad I don't have to." He headed for the hall, the way out. Thorne stood there in the dark, hunched, miserable.

 "There'll be a scandal anyway," she said tonelessly. 

"Just one nice thing," Dave said. "It can't hurt Fox Olson. Not now." 

He went out and shut the door.

The shack slept under its ragged walnut trees. He put the car where he had put it last time. He climbed the broken stoop again and rapped the new aluminum screen door. But no light went on. Nobody came. In the weeds ten acres of crickets sang. The sky was the scoured black of an iron frying pan, with stars like spilled salt. He knocked again. Waited. Nothing. Frowning, he opened the screen and tried the warped door. Locked. He left the stoop then and, stumbling on rutted ground, walked around the shack. The kitchen door was locked too. But from a window at the far back yellow light poured. Buddy's window? He found a weathered orange crate and stood on it.