Gravedigger (23 page)

“Frightened? Come on.” Molloy opened a refrigerator door taped with children’s watercolor drawings. He brought out a can of beer. The drawings fluttered when he closed the refrigerator door. “You don’t ask your old man questions when he keeps putting a fist in your mouth. She doesn’t know. Why would she lie to you?”

“You don’t think Paul beat her up,” Dave said. “It surprised the hell out of you when she said that. You didn’t like him, but you know he wasn’t a wife-beater.”

Molloy pried up the tab opener on the beer can. “Then it had to be Silencio, didn’t it?”

Dave shook his head. “She didn’t know until this morning that he was out of prison. Anyway, what would be the point?”

Molloy sat at the table and took a long swallow from the beer can. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and belched. “He probably came looking for Paul, and when Paul wasn’t here, Ruiz beat up Angie just for openers, and she’s scared to say so because he’s still running around loose.” He looked at his watch again. “And the way this friend of yours is moving on the case, he always will be. ’Scuse me. You want a beer?” He half offered to get up.

“It’s a little early for me.” Dave judged Molloy to be twenty-five. He was already thick through the middle. It wouldn’t take many more years of drinking beer all day to turn him to flab. “Where’s the telephone?”

Molloy told him. The instrument sat on a spiral-bound leatherette book with lettered leatherette tabs on the page edges. He laid the book open at
B,
but the address for Ossie Bishop was local. He flipped pages ahead, pages following. Nothing. He lifted the phone, slid the book back under it.

He opened a door and saw bunk beds, stuffed animals, toy trucks, a poster of the Dukes of Hazzard. He closed the door, took a few steps, opened another. The bed was unmade. Women’s clothes lay around: skirts, blouses, jeans, crushed panty hose. Makeup and crumpled tissues littered a dressing table. He rolled open closet doors. A lone blue polyester suit hung on a wooden hanger. It smelled of dry-cleaning. Did she mean to bury him in that? There were two tan windbreaker jackets, a corduroy jacket, brown dress slacks, some heavy plaid wool shirts.

“You have to have permission,” Molloy said.

Dave didn’t answer, didn’t turn. He went through the pockets of Myers’s clothes and found a small address book. Knuckles rattled the front screen door. The door buzzer sounded. Molloy said, “For Christ sake, now what?” and went away. No new out-of-town address for Bishop was in the small book, but Dave pocketed it anyway and shut the closet. Where had Myers kept business records? Dresser drawers? Nothing but clothes. Drawers were under the closet doors, and he crouched and opened one. Sheets, towels, blankets. He shut that drawer and opened the other. Papers lay there, flimsies, dim carbon copies, pink, blue, green. He grabbed a handful, stuffed them into an inside jacket pocket, closed the drawer with a foot, and went to find Molloy.

Jaime Salazar was saying, “Then there’s no need to bother your sister at work. You can tell her.” He was slim and dapper in a lightweight blue denim suit, maroon shirt and socks, blue knit tie. Heat had already begun to gather in the small living room, but Salazar looked cool. His skin was smooth, pale brown. He wore a neat mustache and sunglasses. “There you are,” he said to Dave.

“What kept you?” Dave said.

“Trying to find an ex-convict called Silencio Ruiz. Paul Myers’s testimony got him convicted of armed robbery year before last. He said he’d kill Myers when he got out. He’s out two days and pow—Myers is killed.”

Molloy grinned at Dave. “What did I tell you?”

“That bomb was no amateur effort,” Dave said.

“He could have paid somebody to make it for him.”

Dave said, “Why would he bother? Silencio was a street-gang member. Whatever happened to switchblade knives?”

“He’s disappeared. He was supposed to see his parole officer yesterday. He only slept at his parents’ house his first night. They haven’t seen him since. His gang has a hangout at a liquor store down by the creek. They haven’t seen him either—not since Myers’s so-called accident was on the breakfast news.”

“What reason would he have to run,” Dave said, “if the whole world believed it was an accident?”

“When we catch him, we’ll ask him.” Salazar looked out through the open blind. “Did that happen to your car here, this morning?”

“Gifford Gardens doesn’t have a red carpet,” Dave said.

Molloy said, “Care for a beer, Lieutenant?”

“Orange Crush?” Salazar asked wistfully.

“I’ll look. Maybe she keeps some for the kids.” Molloy went away whistling, pleased with himself.

Salazar tilted his beautiful head at Dave. “You don’t buy it? You think the wife did it for the insurance money?”

“She says he beat her. It wasn’t smart to tell me that. It also wasn’t true. She’s scared of whoever beat her. Since he’s dead, that makes no sense. I think whoever beat her also killed him. Why they would do that puzzles me. But if it was to keep her from telling what she knows, it had the desired effect.”

“If it wasn’t her, what’s left for you to do?”

“Life insurance can be tricky,” Dave said. “Ever hear of a two-year conditional clause? It lets the company back off if it turns out the insured lied to them. Paul Myers outlined for Pinnacle the kind of cargo he hauled—routine, machine parts, unfinished furniture, clothing. Nothing out of the way. Nothing anybody would want to blow him up for. So maybe he was lying.”

“If he was—she won’t get anything?”

“Something. Not a hundred thousand.”

Molloy came in and held out a frosty purple can. Salazar took a step backward and put his hands behind him. He said in an appalled voice, “Grape?”

“It’s all there is,” Molloy said.

“No, thanks,” Salazar said. “Thank you very much.”

“I’d better go,” Dave said, and went.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1982 by Joseph Hansen

Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

978-1-4804-1680-2

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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