Skinflick (4 page)

“I’ve been at it a long time,” Dave said. “You’re about to break the Dawson case wide open, are you?”

Shumate laughed. “I don’t think so. But it did seem a little odd at the time, a little out of character. It was after Sunday-morning service. In the parking lot. I went around there, wheeling an elderly parishioner in his chair. He only gets out on Sunday. It cheers him up to have a man to talk to for a few minutes. He’s surrounded at home by a wife and three daughters. And after he was in the car and I was putting the wheelchair into the trunk, I noticed Jerry Dawson in a far corner of the lot talking to a big young fellow in a cowboy hat, cowboy boots.”

“A stranger,” Dave said.

“I’d never seen him before. He had been inside for the service, though, way up in the balcony at the back. He was noticeable because he has a beard.” Shumate smiled faintly. “Like an Old Testament prophet. And bright blue eyes. Black beard, black brows, blue eyes.”

“You didn’t hear what they were talking about?”

“No, but I think they were quarreling. The boy swung away angrily. He slammed the door of his truck. It was one of those outsize pickup trucks, with big, thick tires. Some sort of machinery in the back. He burned rubber leaving that parking lot. But that wasn’t all that was unusual. Jerry Dawson looked as if he’d seen a ghost. I waved to him, since he’d noticed me watching. But he didn’t speak or wave back. He just walked off to his car.”

“And he didn’t bring the matter up to you later?”

“There was no later,” Shumate said. “In two days’ time, he was dead.”

“No idea who the bearded kid was?”

“Dawson’s business is renting and leasing film equipment. You know that, I suppose. Quite often Christian filmmakers come to him. He’s known for giving them discounts. Since this young fellow sat through the service, I thought his connection to Jerry might be that. He could have been an actor.” Shumate shrugged. “Director? I don’t know. It’s hard to judge people by their appearance anymore.”

“His partner might know.” Dave stood up. “Thanks for your time.” Shumate rose and they shook hands. Dave went to the door, opened it, and turned back. “One more thing. Did he make any extra donations lately?”

“No.” Shumate cocked an eyebrow. “Why do you ask?”

“In the last two months, his bank records show he wrote a check for seven hundred dollars and another for three hundred fifty. Not part of his banking pattern.”

Shumate scratched an ear. “I don’t know,” he said.

D
AVE PARKED IN A
lot with the laughable name Security half a block below Hollywood Boulevard. Smells of onion, garlic, Parmesan, were thick in the hot air because the kitchen door of Romano’s stood open. The old brick had been painted white. Iron barred the windows. He walked out the alley to the street front where the windows had cute green shutters and boxes of geraniums. He paused under a striped sidewalk canopy, thought about a drink, changed his mind. He passed a house-plant boutique, a jazz club with black shutters, a staircase door marked with the names of dentists, a place that hired out tuxedos, and came to the wide plate-glass front of
SUPERSTAR RENTALS CINE & SOUND
.

Inside, red camera cranes reached for a ceiling hung with spotlights large and small, round and square. Dollies squatted on thick wheels on a broad floor of vinyl tiles. Microphone booms glittered. There were movieolas, tape recorders, portable and immovable; there was equipment he couldn’t put a name to. Cables and cords snaked underfoot. Long-haired youths in bib overalls and straggly moustaches explored the chrome-plated undergrowth. A pale girl in a wrinkled floor-length dress and sandals clutched a clipboard and checked items off a list with a felt pen. All of them whined and neffed at each other and at a resigned, rumpled, obliging bald man who led them to this corner and that, and kept rummaging out for them this scruffy substitute, that battered one. Dave asked him:

“Jack Fullbright?”

“Office,” the bald man said, and jerked a thumb at a door beyond a glass counter filled with lenses and microphones on velvet. To reach the door, Dave had to step over a stack of empty thirty-five-millimeter reels. Then he was in a long room where more equipment stood around under weak fluorescent light gathering dust, or lay on steel shelves gathering dust. The aisle between the shelves was made narrow by strapped black wooden cases made for toting film onto and off of jets. Stickers on the boxes showed they’d been to Japan, India, and Beirut, to Spain and Iraq and Yugoslavia. Stacks of film cans also narrowed the aisle, and stacks of brown fiberboard boxes for mailing film reels.

At the end of the aisle a glass box of light was labeled
OFFICE.
He opened the door and typewriter chatter met him. A young woman who looked like most of the young women on the fronts of magazines these days stopped typing and gave him a smile that by the tiny lines it made in her sun-gilt skin said she wasn’t going to be young a lot longer. The wrinkles in the J. C. Penney cheap-rack granny dress of the girl out front had come from sleeping in it. The wrinkles in the loose, unbleached cotton top this young woman wore had cost her the way the trendiest fashions always cost. Her hair was an artfully uncombed tumble of frizz. It was the color of the lenses of her big glasses—amber. Except that in the lenses, the amber turned smoky toward the top. Her voice was warm and jaunty.

“You don’t want to rent anything,” she said. “You’ve got everything—right?”

“I’m missing facts.” Dave laid a card in front of her. “I need to see Jack Fullbright, please.”

She read the card and her face straightened. She looked up gravely. “About poor Jerry? There’s nothing wrong with his life insurance, is there? There couldn’t be. I paid his premiums. The bills came here. I paid them with the rest.”

“It’s not that,” Dave said. “It’s his death that’s got something wrong with it.”

“Everything,” she said. “He was a fine man.”

“His personal accounts came here,” Dave said. “You paid all his bills for him—household, and so on?”

“That’s right” She tilted her head, frowning. “I don’t understand, do I? I mean, it says here you’re an investigator. Death claims. What does that mean?”

“Nothing, if you go out quietly in your bed,” Dave said. “If you end up the way poor Jerry did, somebody like me comes around to look into why and how. Is Jack Fullbright in, please?”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” She glanced at the telephone on her desk. “He’s on overseas with London. A shipment got lost. A crew on their way to the north of Norway for a documentary about Lapps or reindeer or moss or something. What do you bet the equipment’s in Rio? Luckily, we didn’t ship it—they did. Now they want replacements by air freight—at no extra charge.”

Dave looked at the glowing button on the phone. “How long can it take?”

“Till Jack wins,” she said. “Look—the police already investigated. That lovely tough man with the big shoulders and the broken nose. Lieutenant what?”

“Barker,” Dave said. “Ken Barker.”

“He seemed to know his job,” she said. “Do you always go around checking up on him?”

“He’s overworked,” Dave said. “He can give any one case only so much time. Los Angeles is big on people killing each other. Happens every day. Sometimes twice. He has to keep moving on to the next one. I don’t.” Dave glanced behind him. Against a wall of combed plywood, tacked with typed price lists and with calendars big on the phone numbers of sales representatives and freight haulers and small on dates, stood two chairs with split Naugahyde seats. They were heaped with
American Cinematographer
and
Stereo Review
magazines. “Which means I can wait.” He set one of the stacks on the floor, sat down, lit a cigarette with a slim steel lighter, and smiled at her. “All right with you?”

“Maybe I can help,” she said “I hope I don’t look it, but I’m the man of all work.”

“I’ve been to his bank,” Dave said. “The computer printouts puzzle me. I need to see his canceled checks.”

“Oh.” She gave a little doubtful shake to her head. “I guess I couldn’t authorize that, could I?”

“Who is Mrs. Dawson’s doctor?” Dave said.

“Dr. Spiegelberg. Irwin. Out near USC.”

“She didn’t change lately? To a Dr. Encey, out near UCLA?”

She blinked surprise. “Not that I know of. Maybe the bill just hasn’t come yet. Did you ask her?”

“I don’t believe her,” Dave said.

“Oh, my!” Her eyebrows went up. “What kind of nasty, suspicious mind have we here? Not believe Mildred Dawson?”

Dave looked for an ashtray. “When she tells me he gave her a prescription for birth-control pills?”

“Ha!” She had a fine big laugh. “You’re kidding. Just flick the ashes on the floor. It’s fireproof.”

“Where did he keep the girl friend?” Dave asked.

“Girl—” She looked genuinely shocked. “Oh, no, my dear, gorgeous Mr.”—she peered through the amber lenses at his card—“Brandstetter, baby. Absolutely not. Never in a million years, love.”

Dave shrugged. “His wife’s half paralyzed. She’s a lot older than he was.”

“You don’t know Jerry Dawson. There was an obsessively religious man. I’m not talking about Sunday. I’m talking about Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday,
and
Sunday. You better believe it. As for sex—the subject just plain didn’t exist.” She gave a crooked little remembering smile. “I mean, there was a man who could genuinely blush when a woman said ‘damn’ in his presence. Definitely up-tight aw-shucks down-home.” She gave a little ironic laugh. “A girl friend! Wonderful.”

“Who?” A fortyish man who looked harried came out of an inner office. He baked himself a lot by swimming pools. His shirt was open to the navel on a body he plainly worked hard to keep looking young, flat-bellied, chisel-chested. He wore tight linen slacks. A little silver chain circled a throat not quite but almost stringy. He had a blond frontier moustache and blow-dryer hair that looked as if he’d been running his fingers through it. He came to a stop and looked at Dave through big silver-rim dark glasses. “Who are you? I’m Jack Fullbright.” He came on, holding out a brown, long-fingered hand.

“Brandstetter.” Dave got up and took the hand. It was sweaty but the grip was firm. Fullbright’s smile showed big white teeth too even not to have been capped. “I’m an investigator for Gerald Dawson’s insurance company. I’ve got a few questions. Can you give me a little time?”

“Sure, sure.” Fullbright tilted his head at the office door. “Go right in. Pour yourself a drink. I’ll be right there.” He bent over the poodle-haired girl, spreading rumpled carbon copies of shipping manifests on her desk. “We’ll split the air fare. This is what they need, absolute minimum. Get it off by Emery as soon as Rog can collect and pack it, right? I’ll talk to him about the overtime—don’t worry. Meantime, get SeaLanes to put out a tracer from San Pedro. They’re already doing that from Southampton. Got it?”

“You’re going to split the charges?”

“Not till SeaLanes makes it up to us. Good baby.” He came into a room that didn’t look as if it bore any relation to the girl’s office. There was a lot of real paneling and genuine cowhide. Where there was no sense in there being a window, since outside were only trash cans and parking lots, stood an eighteenth-century Japanese folding screen—or a good reproduction. People in small boats admiring a moon above piny mountains. The bar that Fullbright went behind wasn’t Formica—it was honest-to-God teak. “Hey, sorry to keep you waiting.” He rattled Swedish crystal and a bottle of Schweppes from a refrigerator he had to stoop to. Ice cubes fell out of his hands into the glasses as in a conjuring trick. He waved a green bottle. Tanqueray. “Gin and tonic all right with you? I mean, I’ve got Heineken’s here.”

“Gin and tonic is fine,” Dave said. “Thanks.”

Fullbright poured. “What’s wrong about Jerry? I thought the police had the case taped. He tried to put a local, friendly pornographer out of business, and the local friendly put him out of business instead. No?”

“You don’t sound moved,” Dave said.

“He knew this operation.” Fullbright dropped sprigs of mint on top of the ice and bubbles in the glasses. “He handled money well.” Fullbright came from behind the bar, handed a glass to Dave, and sat down at his desk. “But he was a sanctimonious pain in the ass.”

“His wife and your secretary tell me his canceled checks are here,” Dave said. “Can I see them? He wrote a couple in the last few weeks that need explaining.”

“Why? To whom?” Fullbright looked wary.

“To me. Nobody knows where he was that night. That bothers me. I think something was going on in his life besides this business, that church, and his family.”

“He was out with his ‘Keep Our City Clean for Christ’ squad.” Fullbright shrugged disgust and drank. “Ripping up the seats of X-rated movie houses and castrating faggots. Saving our children, as the orange-juice lady says.”

“I don’t think so,” Dave said. “The checks?”

“Have you got the right?” Fullbright set down his drink and reached for his phone. “I better check with our lawyer.”

“As long as I go on thinking,” Dave said, “that Lon Tooker didn’t kill Gerald Dawson but that maybe Mildred did, or Bucky, Sequoia Life and Indemnity is going to keep the fifty thousand dollars Dawson meant for them to have. Have you got something against them?”

Fullbright was staring. “Mildred? Bucky? You think they killed him?”

“For reasons that would make you laugh or cry if I named them to you,” Dave said. “Let’s clear up my sordid imaginings, shall we? Show me the checks.”

Fullbright’s hand was on the phone but his suntan had turned a little yellow. He let the phone go and stood up. “Come on,” he said without expression, and went out of the office, across the plywood room where the secretary was pointing out things on the shipping manifests to the bald man, and into another office where a big film poster featuring a hilltop crucifixion against a stormy sky was framed above a desk coated with dust. Fullbright pulled open the top drawer of a green metal file cabinet. “In here.” He gave Dave a sour glance and started out of the room. “Help yourself.”

“Leave the door open,” Dave said.