The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of (20 page)

“All of a sudden,” Dave said wryly. He lay in a long, new room where high beds were shut off from each other by white canvas sheets laced inside pipe frames on wheels. He had the best bed, the one next to the window since the ward was empty. The private rooms of La Caleta’s little one-story hospital were filled. One of them with Al Franklin. Through the window, Dave could see the blue bay, the ragged black rocks, the floating brown kelp. A pair of otters played among the kelp. While he’d pushed a bland breakfast around with his fork, he’d watched an otter lie on its back in the water, clutch a leg-waving crab against its chest, rip it apart, and stuff the meat into its mouth. It looked as if it were chortling. “So you went to the gallery and asked for him in a loud voice and let Mona Windrow keep you talking while he beat it out the back door and down to his boat.” Dave coughed a short, hurtful laugh. “Maybe you didn’t need me. I sure as hell needed you.”

“Never.” Jerry Orton shook his neat head. “You handled the bastard.” He sounded disgusted at himself. “You handled it all. Just fine.”

“Not in the right order,” Dave said.

“I got in your way,” Orton said. “I apologize.”

Dave shrugged. And winced. His muscles ached. “You were trying to protect your family. So tell me—what does Franklin say? Why did he kill your father?”

“Self-defense. My father was going to turn him in. When Franklin walked through the patio doors, carrying one of those things—to show him the trip had been, well, a success—my father was waiting for him with a gun.”

“What kind of success?” Dave wondered.

“Hell, he’d got what he went after. My father financed the trip. It was Mona Windrow’s idea. Franklin’s her brother. He knows Mexico, Yucatan, Guatemala. She told us this morning. All about those old idols, or whatever you call them.”

“An archaeologist?” Dave said.

“He worked for them—museums, universities. Managed the expeditions, the practical side, supplies, ships, jeeps, trucks, all that. He must have known the right places to dig. He brought back a whole shipload, didn’t he?”

“So why did your father meet him with a gun?”

“Because he’d found out it was illegal. Those things are national treasures, even the ones still buried in the jungle. The Mexican government practically kills you for taking them out of the country, and the U.S. cooperates. It’s kind of ironic—something my father read in that book on Mexican art Mona Windrow gave him tipped him off. And he wrote to the experts at the L.A. County Museum. I found the letter they sent him in his den last night. That’s how I know for sure.” His eyes were blue, clear, and innocent. He stood like a staunch Cub Scout. “But I told you before. My father would never get mixed up in anything illegal.”

“You told me.” Dave nodded and shut his eyes. He was getting double vision again, and the pain in his head was coming back. “I didn’t believe you then. He framed Lester Green on a marijuana charge. He burned down Eddie Suchak’s paper when it was going to print the reason why. He had a pretty specialized view of what was legal and not.” Dave opened his eyes. “I still don’t believe you. What does Franklin say—was that the explanation your father gave him?”

“All Franklin says is what happened, not what anybody said or why.” Orton’s face was red. “Why would you believe him and not me? A smuggler. A murderer.”

“Because you accepted everything your father ever told you,” Dave said. “You never questioned him in your life. You’re a true believer. They make bad witnesses.”

“You don’t understand,” Orton said. “There are times the law is too slow. It’s not flexible. There are wrong things that get done that aren’t in the statute books. You have to deal with them when you’re a law-enforcement officer. You can’t let them go on.”

“Like your sister marrying Lester Green?”

“That was a personal thing, a private, family matter,” Orton said. “This was a government thing. My father was a loyal American.”

“Explain one thing to me.” Dave heard the fragile jingling of a trolley and looked toward the open door at the end of the long aisle between the sterile, empty beds. “If your father didn’t know what he was putting his money into was illegal, why did he fix up the cannery as a place to dock and unload the boat in secret?”

Orton flushed. “So my mother wouldn’t know. About him and Mona Windrow. If they unloaded at the bayfront and carted the stuff to the gallery in broad daylight right in front of God and everybody, people would ask questions, they’d make the connection, they’d gossip and she’d hear about it. And she was jealous. It was only a business arrangement, but she wouldn’t see it that way. I don’t know why. She didn’t have any reason. He wasn’t that kind of man. They had a perfect marriage.”

The pain in Dave’s head got worse. He had to close one eye to see Orton right. The nausea was coming back. He said, “Ask your wife what kind of man he was.”

“No.” Orton shook his head desperately. “Not Dad.”

“Tyree Smith had a nice, safe life up there in his little back room at Mona Windrow’s gallery in Monterey,” Dave said. “Then your father and Franklin broke it up.”

“What’s Tyree Smith got to do with this?”

“He had some letters.” Dave looked prayerfully toward the door again. “From Al Franklin to Mona Windrow. They’d lied to your father. They weren’t brother and sister. They were lovers.”

“We burned all that junk from his trailer,” Orton said. “Made a bonfire right there on the point.”

“They weren’t in his trailer,” Dave said. “You know where they were. That letter from the museum wasn’t all you found in your father’s files last night.”

Orton looked sick. “How did you find out?”

“I didn’t. But I need an explanation that adds up. Your father wouldn’t blow a smuggling operation that was about to pay off in ten-thousand-dollar bills just for the sake of the Grand Old Flag. Even you can’t believe that now. He wasn’t that kind of man, Jerry. But he was the kind of man that would try to kill Al Franklin once he’d seen those letters. And he did.”

“Why can’t you leave anything alone?” Orton shouted. “Why can’t you believe in anything?”

“Don’t cry,” Dave said. “Tell me how Franklin did it.” A tall, flat-chested nurse wheeled in the trolley. Dave said. “Your father wasn’t young but he looked in pretty good shape. And he had a gun. How did Franklin kill him?”

“He charged,” Orton said sulkily. “My father pulled the trigger. He missed but Franklin fell down as if he’d been hit. My father went and bent over him and Franklin grabbed a broken chunk of the figure and hit him with it.”

The nurse showed horsey teeth in a clockwork smile. “I’m sorry, but it’s time for this patient to rest now.”

Orton picked up his badge-mounted cap. “Anything I can do,” he mumbled and walked off.

“Get me a new set of tires,” Dave said.

The nurse folded back the sheet. A hypodermic glinted in the sea light. “Can you turn on your side, please?” she said.

Something soft and light landed on the bed. He opened his eyes. A black face blurred above him. He tried to smile. He reached out. His mouth was dry and numb from the painkillers they’d shot him up with but he made it shape words. “I wondered if you’d ever get here.”

“He never did,” the blurred face said.

Dave squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again.

The blurred face said, “And he never will. I brought you back the gift you gave him. And I want you to understand me. You keep away from him, from now on. Is that clear? Are you conscious?”

Dave got the man into focus. He wore a neat, new, pale suit, silver-framed goggles, a moderate Afro. Dave said, “I’m as conscious as they let me get in this place.”

“This is the fourth college I put him in. To get him away from it. And it worked till you showed up. But you aren’t staying. That’s what he says. You belong in L.A. And that is fine. You go back to L.A. and let Cecil alone.”

“He’s twenty-one,” Dave said.

“Not for eighteen months, and I told our mother when she died that I would look after him, and with the Lord’s help I am going to keep my promise, and you are no part of it. If you come near him again, I’ll see that you go to jail.”

“His brother’s keeper,” Dave said.

“You got it,” the neat man said, “and it is not easy.”

“It won’t get any easier,” Dave said.

“It will, if you go away,” the neat man said.

“I will if you will,” Dave said, and turned to the window.

When he woke again, it was the flat-chested nurse who stood beside the bed. She blinked at the yellow hat. Dave hadn’t touched it. It lay where the neat man had dropped it. She picked it up and turned it in her hands. Brows raised, she looked from the hat to Dave and back at the hat again.

Dave said: “I thought I’d wear it out of here. To hide the bandages.”

She shook her head and hung it on the lamp. “It isn’t you,” she said.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Dave Brandstetter Mysteries

H
E PARKED IN SUNGLARE
on a steep narrow street whose cracked white cement was seamed with tar. The tar glistened and looked runny. He sat a minute longer in the icy draft from the dashboard vents. They’d been blowing since he got into the car twenty minutes ago, but the back of his shirt was soaked with sweat. And it was only ten in the morning. Los Angeles didn’t get like this often. He hated it when it did. And this time it was holding on. It had been brutal at the cemetery three weeks ago. His father’s nine widows had looked ready to drop. The savage light had leached the color from the flowers. The savage heat had got at the mound of earth from the grave even under its staring green blanket of fake grass. He’d stayed to watch the workmen fill the grave. The earth was dry. Even the sharp walls of the grave were dry. What the hell was he doing remembering that? He switched off the engine, grabbed his jacket, got out of the car.

The door fell shut behind him. In the oven air, he flapped into the jacket. He crossed the street. The house stared at him blind and sunstruck over oleanders. The curtains were drawn. The garage doors were down. The lots were hard to build on here. House front and garage front were only a step back from the street. On the short uptilt of driveway in front of the garage doors the tape the police had put down to mark where a dead body had lain had been pulled up. But adhesive from the tape had stayed on the cement, and summer dust and street grit had stuck to it and renewed the outline in grime. Tire tracks crossed it but there were no other stains. Gerald Ross Dawson hadn’t bled. He’d died of a broken neck.

Cypresses crowded the front door, cobwebby, untrimmed. He groped behind them till his fingers found a bellpush. He pressed it and inside quiet chimes went off. Dave knew the four notes. Sometime in his early teens, without quite understanding why, he had dogged the steps of a handsome boy addicted to Pentecostal meetings. The Dawson doorbell chimes picked out the start of a gospel chorus, “Love Lifted Me.” No one came to the door. He let the second hand go around the face of his watch once and pushed the button again. Again the notes played. Again no one came. He tilted his head. Did he smell smoke?

A path went along the front of the house, cement flagstones, the moss on them gone yellow and brittle in the heat. Arm raised to fend off overgrown oleanders, he followed the path. At the house corner, it turned into cement steps with ivy creeping across them. He climbed the steps, sure now that he did smell smoke. At the top of the steps, in a patio where azaleas grew in tubs and where redwood furniture held dead leaves, a dark, stocky boy of around eighteen was burning magazines in a brick barbecue. He wore Levi’s and that was all. The iron grill was off the pit and leaned at the boy’s bare feet. He acted impatient, jabbing with an iron poker at the glossy pages blackening and curling in flames the daylight made almost invisible.

He was half turned away from Dave. He was a furry kid, fur on his arms, even on his feet. A magazine was in his hand. He kept starting to toss it into the pit, then drawing it back. He wiped sweat off his face with his arm and Dave saw the title of the magazine—
Frisco Nymphets.
The color photo was of three little girls, aged maybe ten, without any clothes on. The boy poked savagely at the flames, making a small sound that reached Dave like whimpering. The boy flapped the magazine in a kind of frantic indecision, then dropped it into the flames. Dave could feel their heat from here. He didn’t want to go closer but he did.

“Good morning,” he said.

The boy whirled, mouth open, eyes wide. The poker fell out of his hand and clattered on the charred brick edge of the pit. Without taking his scared gaze from Dave, he groped out behind him to try to cover the magazines with his hands. That wasn’t going to work. He backed up and sat on the magazines. One slid away, off the barbecue surround, onto the patio flags.
Six-to-Niners.
The naked female children on this one held yellow ducklings. The boy snatched it up and threw it into the fire. The flames choked out and sour smoke billowed around them. Dave coughed, waved hands in front of his face, and backed off, jarring a thigh against a redwood table.

“Come over here,” he said.

“What is it?” the boy gasped. “Who are you?”