Skinflick (19 page)

“And you rent stuff to filmmakers,” Dave said. “So you have connections with producers. She thought you could get her into the movies.”

“Also I had a boat,” Fullbright said. “She hadn’t been on a boat before. She thought it was glamorous, only if I took it out she got seasick and if I didn’t she got bored.” His voice ran down. He blew out breath again and shook his head again. He was having trouble holding it up. “She was about to quit me. Then Jerry found my private records and ripped up Odum’s studio and all that.” Fullbright shut his eyes and shuddered, hunching down inside the big robe. He fumbled for the hood and pulled it crookedly over his rumpled hair. “Man, I have to sleep. I can’t go on with this.”

“They’re bringing coffee,” Dave said. “So you got Odum to promise to put her in a picture by offering him everything he needed free. And in return for that, you got Charleen to lead Dawson into temptation—remembering all those skinny girl children in the sex magazines that Dawson found so attractive, right? And you stationed yourself outside the motel room window and snapped photographs of Dawson he wouldn’t like featured in his church bulletin.” Dave bent to touch a drawer under the couch. “Using one of the cameras you keep here.”

“Most people,” Fullbright said drowsily, “don’t realize they can have their picture taken in the dark.” He smiled wanly to himself. “It shut him up. It backed him off.” He whispered a laugh, opened his eyes to the extent that he could open them, and looked at Dave. “It also hooked him on Charleen. He couldn’t get enough of her—even though he knew she’d agreed to frame him for me. Nothing mattered but sex with Charleen. He’d gone around all his life lusting in his heart after grammar-school girls—what’s the word?—nymphets, right?”

“And keeping hands off,” Dave said.

“Yeah, well—” Fullbright’s eyes closed again and his chin rested on his chest. “He’d have broken sometime. He sure as hell broke completely when he broke.”

Delgado came in with a big Japanese pottery mug of coffee. The hand that didn’t hold the mug held Ribbons. Dave took the mug. Ribbons and Delgado sat on the couch again. Rick stood in the companionway. He didn’t speak. He only looked. He appeared worried.

“Drink some of this,” Dave told Fullbright. He seemed always to have to be doctoring the man. He put the mug at Fullbright’s mouth. Fullbright jerked up his head. “I don’t want it. There’s nothing more to tell.”

“Where did Charleen go after Dawson was killed?”

“I never saw her again.” Fullbright, as if his hand weighed almost more than he could lift, tried to push the mug away. “I swear it. Think what you want, do what you want. I never saw her again.”

“You were going to take those records out to sea and drown them. Is that what you did with Charleen? She was a witness to Dawson’s murder, wasn’t she? And you couldn’t depend on her to keep quiet. You had to get rid of her.”

“No. I didn’t kill him.” Fullbright rubbed his forehead. “What night was it?”

Dave named the date. “Between ten and midnight.”

“I was here. I picked up a film from Cascade after I left work and brought it straight here. You can check their records.” Fullbright numbly took the mug. He blew at the steam. He sucked up a little coffee and flinched. “Hot. It was
Deep Throat.
” He pointed overhead. A rolled-up movie screen was hooked to the ceiling inside its brown metal tube. “The projector sits over there.” He looked at the companionway and saw Ricky. “What is it?”

“I was here that night,” Ricky said. “Jude and Pepe were here.” He turned and called up the companionway. “Hey!
Deep Throat.
You remember when Jack showed it?”

Jude was the girl in the Levi’s jacket and not much else. Pepe was a brown boy a little bit overweight. He was chewing. A smear of white was at the corner of his mouth. Jude numbered the night when Gerald R. Dawson was killed. “It was a Monday,” she said.

“I remember because that’s my tennis night with my yuck little brother. Believe it, I canceled when I heard what was going down.”

“Yeah.” Pepe rubbed his crotch and grinned. “Going down.
Es verdad
!”

Jude looked at Dave with her eyes very wide open. “How does she
do
that?”

Ribbons, huddled down inside the big sweater on the couch, kept her sulky look. “Did you ever hear of special effects?” Then she giggled. “Trick photography?”

The children in the companionway laughed.

A
CAR HE DIDN’T
know was parked in the dark by the piled cement bags, the sand heap, the stacked lumber in front of the French doors. He went into the courtyard. The fencing room was lighted up. A stranger was in there. He sat on the bed, phone on the floor at his feet, receiver at his ear. The light in the room was overhead, two hundred watts, a naked bulb, bleak. Dave stood under the white flowers and trailing tendrils of the vine at the back of the courtyard and watched the man through the open door. He was half turned away but he looked young and spare. He wore a brown double-knit suit and shoes that gleamed. His brown hair was cut 1930s style, neat, the latest. He spoke into the phone and Dave thought he knew the voice. He went through the doorway and walked to the bed.

Randy Van looked up and smiled. He picked up the phone, rose, handed Dave the phone, handed Dave the receiver. Dave took them dumbly, staring. There wasn’t a trace of makeup. There was no enamel on the nails. Dave said “Brandstetter” into the phone.

“The soil samples from the closet floor at unit number thirty-six,” Salazar said, “match the stuff from the clothes of the deceased, Gerald R. Dawson.”

“Dandy,” Dave said. “Anything else?”

“A lot of fingerprints. Who knows how long it will take to sort them out and get a line on them? Your witness, Cowan, told me she brought pickups there. She must have been busy. She sure as hell was too busy ever to clean the place. But he wasn’t murdered there, anyway, Brandstetter. When the neck is broken—”

“The muscles that control bladder and bowels let go,” Dave said. “I know that. I also know it doesn’t always happen. Only almost always.”

“Almost is good enough for me,” Salazar said. “I don’t want this case and I don’t get this case.”

“Don’t hang up,” Dave said, and put a hand over the mouthpiece. Randy was sorting through a stack of record albums on the floor. Dave asked him, “How long have you been here? Any other calls?”

“About an hour. Yes. A Lieutenant Barker of the LAPD. He got the report from the lab where we left that envelope of Karen’s. They phoned him, like you asked.”

“Did he tell you what they said?”

Randy nodded, studying a glossy color caricature of Mozart with a croquet mallet. “It’s decomposed granite. It doesn’t match. The other was alluvial.” He looked up at Dave. “He’s going to the district attorney about it.”

“Thanks,” Dave said. “You look very nice.”

“I feel ridiculous in these clothes,” Randy said. “Does that mean the one with the horses gets out of jail?”

“That’s what it means,” Dave said. “Why don’t we drink to that? The cookhouse is over yonder.”

Randy got to his feet, and put a kiss on Dave’s mouth. “You’re a nice man,” he said, and went away. He didn’t sway his hips.

Salazar whistled into the phone. Dave took his hand off the mouthpiece. “Sony,” he said, and told Salazar about getting the soil sample from looker’s place in Topanga and about what the lab had said and about Barker’s reaction. “Now—I can ask him to do it or I can ask you to do it, but somebody has to do it,” he said.

“What’s that?” Salazar said.

“Test Bucky’s shoes,” Dave said.

“To see if what’s on them matches what was in the closet?” Salazar asked. “You know, I don’t see how just eating lunch with a guy could do this to somebody, but I’m starting to think like you. And it hasn’t helped. I checked out the kid’s shoes. Negative. I even showed the kid to Cowan. Cowan isn’t so sure now. He says Bucky looks smaller. But maybe it was the light. It was dark before.”

“It’s still dark,” Dave said. “I don’t know. I just damn it don’t know.” He sat on the bed, scowling to himself, chewing his lower lip. Salazar asked him if he was still there. “I don’t know where I am,” Dave said. “Look, thanks very much. I’m sorry to have put you to all the trouble. I appreciate your cooperation, your help.”

“Any time,” Salazar said.

“Somebody killed that man,” Dave said.

“Not the widow and orphan,” Salazar said. “Write them their check and forget it.”

“Sure,” Dave said, but he wasn’t listening. He was thinking about Bucky’s size. He asked Salazar, “Are you going to be there for a while?”

“I’m already into my fifth hour of overtime,” Salazar said. “I’m going home to bed.”

“What about your stolen-property office? Can you leave word with them that I—”

“Nine to five, Brandstetter,” Salazar said. “Somebody in this crazy place keeps normal hours.”

“I’ll see you in the morning,” Dave said and hung up.

Randy came back carrying stubby glasses with what looked to be scotch over ice cubes. He handed Dave one of the glasses. “Does that mean we’ve got all night?”

“I have something to do before sunrise,” Dave said.

“You mean besides right here?” Randy said.

“After right here,” Dave said. “You know, you should get dressed up funny more often.”

It wasn’t sunrise. It was after. But the old black man in the starchy tan uniform sat upright and wide-eyed in his faded blue Corvair next to the driveway ramp down into the garages under Sylvia Katzman’s apartment complex. The street was steep and the worn right front tire of the car was turned hard against the curb. Dave put the Triumph into the lowest gear he could find with the stubby shift knob and climbed the hill. He got lost on twisting, narrow, shelflike streets but he found the place he wanted finally, and parked and got out. It was the place where the chain-link fence was cut at the bottom, the corners folded back. He looked down. There were the kitchen windows of the top row of apartments. The one on number thirty-six was still open the way he’d left it on his first visit. It was plain from here that climbing had taken place up the bank. The slant of the early sunlight, already promising heat again, showed up the marks of dug-in shoes or boots. And of something heavy having been dragged. He got back into the Triumph and lost his way again getting back down to the parked Corvair. The old man was drinking coffee out of a red plastic cup that was the cover of his Thermos bottle.

“Yes,” he said, consideringly. “I saw a truck like that. Those big wheels that set it up high. Four-wheel drive, I expect. It rumbled. A lot of power.”

“Machinery in the back?” Dave asked.

“Oh, yes.” The old man nodded. He reached across to a glove compartment held shut by an arrangement of thick rubber bands. He worked these with arthritic fingers. “I have some cups in here.” The metal door of the glove compartment fell open. “Perhaps you’ll share a little coffee? Tastes good first thing in the morning.” He pulled a cup out of a nest of six and carefully filled it from the Thermos. His motions were slow and tidy. He handed the cup through the window to Dave. “It was posthole-drilling equipment.” The old man recapped the Thermos. He put the cups back into the glove compartment and fixed it shut again with the rubber bands. “And on the front, there was an arrangement to attach something, probably a grader for laying down roads, you know?”

“The coffee’s good,” Dave said. “Thank you. When did you see the truck?”

“It was parked back up there.” The old man raised a slow hand to point with a thumb over his shoulder. “I drive up there to turn around and come back down here to park in this space. This is a good old machine but it doesn’t have much left in reverse. Two weeks ago?” He wrinkled an already deeply wrinkled forehead. “Not quite.”

“It was here when you arrived?” Dave said. “That would be what—seven o’clock in the evening?”

“Right about then,” the old man said. He drank coffee and stared thoughtfully through the windshield. He shook his head. “No, that wasn’t the first time. First time was Sunday, the day before. Early. I was fixing to leave. Boy with a black beard got out of it. He couldn’t get in the building. They have to know you are coming so they can come unlock the lobby door for you.”

“Who came?” Dave asked. “Who let him in?”

“Maybe he never got in,” the old man said. “He was still standing there when I left. He had on a cowboy hat.” Now he looked hard at Dave. “Do you know,” he asked, “the Monday when I saw the truck up there—that was the one they been asking me about. The police. The sheriff. Who came and went that night? Yes, sir! They been asking me about that night.” A little weary smile twitched his mouth. “But they never asked me one time about that truck. You the first one, the only one.”

“But the boy with the beard wasn’t in it when you saw it?” Dave asked.

“Nobody was in it. But later on there was. Must’ve been getting on for midnight by then. He come out and tramped up right here past me, so close I could have stretched out my hand and touched him. He unlocked the truck and climbed in and slammed the door and drove it right on up the street to the top, like you did just now.”

“Alone,” Dave said. “No skinny little blond teenage girl with him?”

“Alone,” the old man said. He sipped coffee and thought again for a minute. “You want to know why I remember that? Why I paid special attention? Him getting in that truck and driving off?”

“Why was that?” Dave said.

“Because he didn’t look the same without the beard.”

“I’d bet on possibly a wallet,” Dave said. “Almost certainly a duffel bag, maybe even Marine or Army issue. And clothes—work clothes, Levi’s, chinos, work shoes, maybe cowboy boots. Underwear, probably dirty since he didn’t know his way around.”

The dark kid in uniform kept pulling cartons and parcels off steel shelving in the big room full of steel shelving. He and Dave looked into the cartons and parcels. When Dave shook his head, the kid pushed the cartons and parcels back in place. “You know,” he said, “once I make detective, I’m going to quit and get into your line.”

“I won’t tell them you said that,” Dave said. “You need time to think it over.” He reckoned the child’s age at about twenty. He was dark, with a rosy flush under smooth skin. “When you’ve had time, you’ll change your mind.” A date scrawled on a carton in felt pen made him stop. “Let’s look in this one.”