Nightwork (17 page)

“Bald?” Dave said.

“He was wearing a hat,” Amanda said.

The officer asked Dave, “Sure you can’t help us?”

“If I learn anything,” Dave said, “I’ll call you.”

Tapping woke Dave, the sharp rap of a finger ring against glass, one of the square panes of the door from the courtyard into the front building. He didn’t make a lot of use of the front building, though Amanda had made it handsome. He entertained in it. It had the best sound system, so he sometimes did his listening here. Otherwise he rarely entered the place.

But last night Amanda had put the little Bishops in the bed on the loft in the back building—the only bed in the place. So Melvil had slept on the one couch in the back building. And Dave and Cecil had slept on couches up here.

Daylight, gray and rainy, but daylight, came into the big, raftered place through clerestory windows above a curtained row of French doors. Dave turned on the couch, stiff, aching, fumbled on the floor for his watch, and squinted groggily at the time. Not yet ten o’clock. Clutching the blanket around him, he sat up and peered.

A big-shouldered man was doing the rapping. Not a tall, thin man. Dave shrugged off the blanket and, shivering in briefs and T-shirt, kicked into trousers and pushed as creakily as old Reverend Prentice up off the couch. He crossed deep carpet, climbed a level, unchained and unbolted the door, opened the door to cold dampness.

“Ken,” he said. “What is this?”

“Sony to wake you.” Rain dripped from the crumpled canvas hat of Captain Ken Barker, homicide division, LAPD. He had a broken nose, and eyes the same dark gray as the clouds that hung low over the canyon this morning. “But I understand a man came by last night to murder you. It awakened my protective instincts.”

“Come in,” Dave said. He rubbed his forehead. There was an ache there. Barker stepped in, dripping, and Dave shut the door. It closed with a stutter against the sill; the rains had swollen it. “Let me take your coat and hat.” Amanda had stationed a coat rack by the door. Dave hung Barker’s mac on it, hat stuffed in the pocket. “I didn’t get to bed until six.” Dave moved down into the room. “What else did you hear?”

“Westside went to work on Smithers.” Barker followed, lighting a cigarette, watching Dave, who sat on the couch again, picked up socks, found them damp and muddy, didn’t put them on. Barker said, “No Smithers owns any Mercedes—not in California. Why didn’t your lady get the license number?”

With slow, mindless motions, Dave folded the blanket. “Because, when it rains too much, the landscape lights in front short out. I keep forgetting to get them fixed.”

From down the room came Cecil’s voice: “Oh, man, do you know what time it is?” His head appeared above the back of the couch. He looked as cranky as he sounded. “We just got to sleep. Why do you want to start so early?” He saw Barker. “Oh, sorry.”

“Who are you?” Barker said.

“You got older,” Dave said, “and they made you a captain and gave you more help. I got older, but I had to round up my own help.” Cecil came from the couch, yawning, shuffling, wrapped in his blanket. Dave introduced them. They shook hands. Cecil’s blanket slipped off his shoulders. The scars showed on his ribcage. Barker recognized them for what they were and frowned.

“Where did you get those?” he said.

Cecil pulled up the blanket. “Line of duty,” he said. “You going to find Smithers?”

“He never registered that gun,” Barker said.

“It’s not his real name,” Dave said. “The case we’re working on is full of phony names—individuals, companies.” A coffeemaker was behind the bar. He loaded it and set it to work. Then he started the signal going on an intercom he had never used. Barker blinked. “We need dry clothes,” Dave explained.

“Out in the rain all night,” Cecil said.

“What kind of case?” Barker said.

Dave told him about the Myers case—omitting the parts involving Ossie Bishop and family. “Smithers appeared after the newscasts about the bomb. He didn’t realize I’d already been to see Angela Myers, and he tried to pass himself off as an investigator for Pinnacle Life.”

The beeper stopped. Melvil’s voice came from the intercom, cottony with sleep. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t find it. Looked high and low. How come you hide it?” Dave remembered only now that he had cleared the intercom in the back building off the desk as superfluous weeks ago and stowed it on a bookshelf. “Woke the babies up too.”

“They’ve had their sleep,” Dave said.

“That’s just the trouble.” The voices of the little boys were shrill in the background. “They got cartoons on up there. Use your bed for a trampoline.”

“We’ll feed them,” Dave said, “just as soon as you bring over dry clothes for Cecil and me.”

“I didn’t hear the phone ring,” Melvil said. “So they ain’t no news about Mama?”

Dave read his watch again. “Amanda should be at the hospital by now, unless the traffic was bad. She’ll be calling soon.”

“Hope so. Those babies going to miss Mama pretty quick now. They all start crying together, you never heard nothing like it.” Melvil sighed. “All right—I’ll bring you clothes.” The intercom went silent.

Dave found mugs under the bar. He said to Barker, “Mrs. Myers was at work.” He peered into the mugs. Dusty. He rinsed them at the little bar sink. “But her brother was at home. All muscle and gut. Bright enough to guess Smithers was lying, but dumb enough to show off how smart he was by flashing my card.”

“And letting Smithers walk off with it,” Cecil said.

“Pinnacle never heard of him?” Barker said.

“You should be a detective.” Dave dried the mugs with a starchy little towel and set them on the bar. They looked good—hand-thrown, with a drizzly brown glaze. Expensive. Of course. Amanda had chosen them. “We’ll have some coffee here shortly.”

“Good.” Barker leaned on the bar. “Is your lady sure he came to kill you? Or did she jump at that when she saw his gun?”

“Let me tell you how it went.” Dave took the cigarette pack from the breast pocket of Barker’s whipcord jacket. “I’ve got a client staying here.” Lighting a cigarette, Dave nodded at the intercom. “The boy whose voice you just heard. Also his three little brothers.”

“Name of Bishop,” Barker said, taking back his cigarette pack, tucking it away. “I read the report.”

“Then you know Amanda was babysitting while Cecil and I took Melvil with us on this stakeout.”

“I want to hear about the stakeout next.”

Dave shook his head. “No, you don’t. It’s not your worry. It connects to the Myers matter, and that’s County, not City. I promised to lay it on Jaime Salazar’s desk. I’m going to do that this morning—for what it’s worth.”

“Smithers came here.” Barker stubbed out his cigarette in a brown pottery ashtray on the bar. “This is City.”

“Amanda had tucked the kids in.” Dave tilted his head. “You’ve been here. You know the layout.”

Barker nodded. “Loft in the rear building.”

“And she thought she’d like to relax with television,” Dave said, “and she didn’t want the kids to wake up again, so she turned down the lamps back there, put on her raincoat, and started for this building.”

“And she saw a guy skulking around with a revolver,” Barker said, “and she was closer to this building by then, so she ran for it.”

“And he saw her,” Cecil said, “and chased her.”

“He didn’t shoot at her,” Barker said.

“It was me he wanted to shoot.” Dave took the pot and filled the mugs. “Amanda and I don’t look alike—not even in the dark.” He set the pot back in place.

“She locked and bolted the door there.” Barker’s somber eyes measured the door, unhappy at all those glass panes, thick though they were, and even though the old wood that clinched them was heavy and strong. “And she very sensibly did not turn on the lights.”

Dave slid one of the mugs at him. “She started for the phone over there. To summon your people.”

“But he banged on the door.” Cecil came to the bar, still wrapped in his blanket. “And gave his name—if that is his name,” He was tall enough to bend far over the bar and peer beneath it. “Sugar?” he asked Dave. “Cream?”

From the little refrigerator Dave brought a brown pottery sugar bowl, a cold spoon leaning in it. “Afraid you’ll have to rough it.” He showed Cecil a blue pint carton. “This cream is dated two months ago.”

Making a face, Cecil spooned sugar into his coffee.

Barker said to Dave, “So he yelled through the door that he had to see you. It was urgent. He knew you were here because your car was here. He meant the van out there with the flames painted on it.” Barker gave the semblance of a laugh. “He doesn’t know you very well.”

“It’s Cecil’s van.” Dave tried his coffee and it made him feel better right away. “I drive a brown Jaguar these days. It’s in the repair shop for the moment.”

“She insisted you weren’t here and told him to go away and he went away,” Barker said, “but only out to his car, to wait for you to show up. That’s what bothers me. He had to know she’d call the police.”

“He wasn’t here when they got here,” Cecil said.

Barker nodded, frowned, worked on his coffee. “But it’s as if he meant to be. At first. Then changed his mind. That’s puzzling.” With a thick finger, Barker dug out his cigarettes again, extended the pack to Dave, to Cecil. Dave’s cigarette still burned. Cecil wanly shook his head. Barker’s lighter was an old Zippo, embellished with a small police badge in worn gold and silver. He lit his cigarette and put pack and lighter away. He lifted his coffee mug and frowned at Dave over it. “Has it occurred to you that Smithers might be an investigator? Federal, state? Even County? The grand jury’s investigating the illegal dumping of toxic wastes.”

“If the grand jury wants me,” Dave said, “sending a prowler with a gun in the middle of the night seems an odd way to go about it.”

“And that isn’t all,” Cecil said. “That same man—”

Dave reached to clap a hand over Cecil’s mouth, when the door opened and Melvil came in with an armload of clothes wrapped in dry-cleaning-shop plastic. “I didn’t know what you needed, so I brought everything I could think of.” Melvil looked around the big, comfortable, multilevel room. “Where shall I put them?”

“Thank you,” Dave said. “On that couch is fine.”

Barker turned to watch Melvil carry the clothes to the couch and lay them down. Behind Barker’s muscular back, Dave frowned at Cecil and put a finger to his lips. Cecil showed bewilderment, but he gave a shrug of acceptance. The blanket slipped off his shoulders again. He pulled it up.

“This plastic wet,” Melvil said, and began to unwrap the clothes. “Listen, those babies want breakfast. Be all right with you, if I was to—?” The telephone rang. It sat on a table at the end of the couch. Melvil didn’t wait for Dave. He stepped to the phone and picked it up. He started to say “Hutchings,” but caught himself and said, “Bannister residence,” instead. Then he listened. It was quiet in the room. The rain pattered on the roof, splashed on the bricks outside, pinged on the parked cars. Melvil’s face lit up. He put a hand over the mouthpiece and said, “She all right. My mama going to be all right.” He said into the phone, “Mama? How you doing? No, they fine. We all fine. Mr. Bannister looking after us. I will. I’ll thank him. I want to see you too. Soon as it safe. Won’t be too long now. You take it easy, hear me? I be calling you.” He put the phone into Dave’s hand.

“Amanda?” Dave said.

“She saw the man who shot her,” Amanda said. “He stepped from behind the store. It was Smithers.”

A
FTER HE HAD DELIVERED
the film to Salazar, along with his clumsily typed report of last night’s watch—bearing his own fingerprints in bacon grease because he had been too hungry to forgo breakfast, and in too much of a rush not to work while he ate—after he had delivered these, he didn’t wait around. The Jaguar was ready. The agency had telephoned just as he was going out the door of the back building in Horseshoe Canyon—or trying to go out the door, hobbled by Melvil’s giggling little brothers clinging to his legs. From the Sheriff’s, he drove out the Santa Monica Freeway to Beverly Hills, the junkyard car developing croup as the wet miles passed. He left the snooty dealership the embarrassment of returning the Valiant to his house, and himself drove the Jaguar to a gun shop.

It stood on a quiet street in West L.A., in a row of shops climbed on by vines that gave them a cozy look. Knitting yarn should have been sold in this one, or dolls. The place was hushed by carpeting. The paneling looked almost real. Gentility seemed to be the aim. The salesman wore a quiet, high-priced, three-piece suit, a handsome white mustache, an English accent. His coloring harked back to that old rhyme about the good roast beef of England. He was affable and ready to chuckle. He was selling death.

Dave let him place on top of a glass showcase several brands of death—Colt, Smith & Wesson, Browning—snubnosed .38 Detective Specials, the .45s favored by television cops. Dave hefted them by turn, let them nestle cold in his hand. The man found good and bad to say about each one, his bloodshot blue eyes watching Dave closely, sensitive to the slightest signal of acceptance or rejection. To relax the man, Dave said the gun should be simple and reliable, and be able to shoot many times without reloading. The cost didn’t matter.

He walked out onto the dripping, tree-lined street with a Sig Sauer nine-millimeter automatic, pride of the Swiss army, able to fire eight thousand rounds in the field without a hitch. It held thirteen rounds in the clip, one in the chamber, cost five hundred fifty dollars, and rode snugly in a Bianchi holster against his left ribs. He would never be comfortable with it. He had never wanted a gun. For decades he had managed without one. But times had changed. The game he loved had turned lethal. People kept trying to kill him and his.

As he unlocked the Jaguar, folded himself into its comfort, started the quiet, powerful engine, listened to it purr, the notion came to him again that had surprised him often lately—that he ought to quit. That would be sensible. He wasn’t getting any younger. He didn’t need the money; his father had left him a great many shares of Medallion stock. But sensible was boring. What the hell would he do with his days and nights? He grimaced, read his watch, looked in the side mirror for a break in traffic, swung the Jaguar in a fast U-turn, and headed back to Horseshoe Canyon to pick up Melvil.