Early Graves (21 page)

But kill him? It still made no sense. Dave swallowed his whiskey, put out his cigarette, rose and went to the telephone. He poked the numbers of the Glass House in LA, and said to Jeff Leppard, “Do something for me, will you?”

“Morales says you’re hotdogging up there,” Leppard said. “Did you light at the Oaktree Inn as promised?”

“I did. Get the police in Seattle to send somebody smart around to talk to a woman named Virginia Hollywell. And ask her if she had a houseguest from Rancho Vientos staying with her lately. She may have been warned I’d be checking on her, so she may lie. Make sure Seattle verifies her story. Complete with dates.”

“What for? Who the hell is this woman?”

“It would take too long to explain. But if her granddaughter Matilda wasn’t with her, then maybe she was down in LA killing Drew Dodge. Please check it out.”

“You saying it was a girl?” Leppard said.

“I don’t know many boys named Matilda,” Dave said. “I told Samuels the night I got knifed it might be a girl. And I thought so again when the kid shot at me and hit Samuels. It just might be. How is Samuels?”

“He’s coming along okay,” Leppard said. “You had Morales turn in one Murray Berman. I’ve got the sheriff’s report on that. But it doesn’t take us anywhere. We already knew what the kid looked like, the kind of car he drove.”

“The gun is the point. Dodge had a gun and used it. Oh, I talked to Sonia White. She heard the gun go off too. But she thought it was a backfire.”

“She never mentioned any backfire to me.”

“She forgot till I came along. What’s this about jurisdiction in the Dodge case? The sheriff blocking you from working out there?”

“Don’t pretend you mind,” Leppard said. “Just red tape. Judge will fix it tomorrow. Meantime, the sheriff has to share what he gets with me, only he isn’t trying.”

“Nobody up here cares about Drew Dodge anymore.”

“Only you. Don’t get yourself killed, okay? Remember, this one is armed and dangerous.”

“I remember,” Dave said. “It’s Drew Dodge’s gun, I expect. The kid must have taken it off his body. Dodge bought it the day after he talked with the kid at home.”

“You’re on top of it, all right.” Leppard’s voice held grudging admiration laced with annoyance. “How did you get that letter Berman wrote Dodge? Out of Dodge’s files, right? You entered the house without permission, while the family was at the funeral.”

“Letters were blowing on the wind today,” Dave said. “There was a beauty from one of our distinguished Sacramento lawgivers. But I’ll tell you about that after you hear from Seattle. Hell, I even have a letter from the kid.”

“Jesus. You know where to find him?”

“There’s no return address,” Dave said.

The food in the Oaktree Inn restaurant was better than he expected. He liked watching a log fire burn while he ate a veal and mushroom concoction in a cream, butter, and wine sauce. The list of California wines had good labels on it. He chose a Rutherford
liebfraumilch.
The Scotches in his room had picked him up and made him hungry. The food and wine left him ready to sleep. A good thing, since he hated watching television by himself, and there was no decent music to listen to, and he had no wish to read travel magazines. He began shedding his clothes almost before the door of his unit shut behind him. He yanked back the covers on the wide bed, went into the bathroom, reached for the shower handles, and the telephone burred. It was on the wall by the shaving mirror. He took it down and said “Brandstetter” into it.

“I left messages.” It was Tom Owens. He didn’t sound right. “Why haven’t you returned my calls?”

“I got Mel Fleischer’s information from Larry,” Dave said. “I thought that was what it was about. Larry said—”

“Listen to me, Dave. I’m a hostage.”

Dave squinted. “What was that word?”

“Hostage. In a trailer on the beach. In a cove three miles north of the Rancho Vientos turnoff. We’re at a pay phone now. He says the only way he’ll let me go is if you come to the trailer. Alone. No police.”

Dave sat down on the closed toilet. “The tall, thin kid with long hair?”

“He was watching us at the church. From the hills. But he was too far off. The change of cars confused him. He followed the BMW thinking you were in it. He forced me off the road, and—wait, let go!”

The phone clattered. “Tom?” Dave called. “It’s okay. Tell him I’ll come. Right away. I’m sorry about this.”

“Don’t come!” Owens shouted. “He’ll kill you, Dave.”

The connection broke. Dave stared at the receiver, listened to it hum. His heart was thudding. He hung up the phone, put his clothes back on, the trenchcoat, the tweed hat, and went out into the cold and wet to find Morales. He moved along a sheltered walkway, looking at parked cars till the lights of one near the end. Morales rolled down the window and sneezed. He held a big paper cup of coffee and he looked miserable. “I thought you were in for the night,” he said, and sneezed again. “Damn.”

“Did you draw this assignment for life?” Dave said.

“It’s fascinating.” Morales wiped his nose with a crumpled handkerchief. “I wouldn’t miss it.” He set the coffee on the dashboard and started the engine. “Where are we going now?”

“I’m going to Thousand Oaks. I checked with my answering service. Apex Insurance Agency needs me. Now. An auto crash that might be suicide.” Dave pushed back the cuff of his trenchcoat to see his watch. “It’s only eight. I should be back by midnight.” He held out his Oaktree Inn key. “That’s a rotten cold you’ve got. Go on in, crawl into bed, get warm. There’s no need for you to follow me.”

Morales’s eyelids were heavy as he searched Dave’s face. “I wish to hell I could believe you.”

“It’s out of the danger zone. I’ll be okay.”

“No way.” Morales shook his head, sneezed again, twice, blew his nose again. “What kind of police officer do you take me for? I’m here to protect you.” He shuddered. “I’m going to protect you.”

“Well, at least take a hot bath. I’ll fix you a stiff drink. Go on like this, you’ll get pneumonia.”

Morales tried to answer but coughed instead, a rough, deep cough that brought tears to his eyes. He stared, and gasped out, “A hot bath? Oh, boy.” He pushed open the car door, tottered out, locked the door. He turned Dave a pitiful smile. “Lead me to it,” he said.

The coast road lay deserted in the night and the rain. The rain fell harder here on the ocean side of the hills, wind off the ocean driving it in gusts. Dave swung onto the highway and headed north, an eye on the odometer. The windshield wipers batted away the steady wash of rain down the curved glass in front of him. The headlights bored yellow through the rain, which sometimes blew in slanting sheets. Even though the windows were closed, he could hear the crash of the surf off to his left. Its weight shook the roadway. He could feel it thud and thud.
It was a dark and stormy night.
He smiled thinly to himself.

At three miles, he slowed. The guardrail to keep cars from going over the sharp drop to the beach was white and he could see it faintly. But he saw no gap in it anywhere wide enough to admit a car. Yet the distance had to be right—the kid wanted Dave to come and be killed. The kid must have hauled his trailer down onto the beach by an access Dave had already passed, or one that lay ahead. The kid wanted Dave to come to the trailer on foot.

He shrugged, swung the Jaguar around, parked it on the road shoulder. He groped a flashlight out of the glove compartment, got out into the lashing rain, dropped the flashlight into the left-hand pocket of the trenchcoat, where it balanced the weight of Morales’s police special in the right-hand pocket. He had lifted the revolver quietly from the holster Morales had hung on the bathroom doorknob when he stepped into the steaming tub. Dave’s Sig Sauer seemed always to lie in that pine drawer on the sleeping loft. He never had it with him when he needed it.

He locked the car, walked along beside the guardrail to the break, shone the flashlight downward. The feet of swimmers, surfers, picnickers had worn a narrow path into the steep face of the bank. It trickled rainwater. Dave stepped down onto it cautiously, and made his way, bracing himself with a hand against the crumbly bluff face, down to the beach. Clumps of rough rock jutted out of the sand here. He shone the light around, looking for a trailer. And not finding it. High rocks shelved out ahead of him. Maybe around behind them he’d find the trailer. Tucked out of sight from the road. A place to hide. A place to hold a hostage.

He plodded, head down, through the sucking sand, making for the outcrop, and finding the rushing surf washing over his shoes. Where the rocks reached into the tide, the waves crashed over them. If he was going to get across, he was going to get wet—no way out of that. He studied the timing of the waves in the beam of the flashlight for a minute. Then he pushed the flashlight away and made a dash for it. He twisted an ankle, scraped a knee, but he made it to the other side of the promontory. The trenchcoat was heavy. His shoes squished. He shivered with cold.

He didn’t want to shine the flashlight here, and he didn’t have to. A light burned in the trailer. Dim behind a curtain, but there. Probably a camper’s lamp. The trailer was no more than a hulk of blackness. The car too. Not hitched to the trader, standing behind it on the sand. Dave crouched and groped on the sand for stones. He didn’t find any. He moved on a few steps, crouched again, and had better luck. He started for the trailer, and the door opened. Blue-white light streamed out into the rain. The figure of the tall, skinny kid stood there. He squinted against the dark. The light behind him caught and shone in his long fair hair. A pistol hung in his hand.

“He ain’t here,” he said. “Where the fuck is he?”

Someone answered from inside, but Dave couldn’t make out the words. The door slammed shut. It made a tinny sound. The trailer was metal. The rain made a racket, beating on the trailer. It would be noisy inside. Add that to the noise of the wind and the surf, and a crowd could arrive out here and not be heard. He trudged to the trailer and put his ear to the cold, wet siding. The kid was shouting. “Why did you have to go and say I was gonna kill him, you God damn fool? I should have shot you like I said I’d do, right there at the phone. He ain’t a-comin’ for you. So what good are you to me?”

Again, Dave couldn’t hear Tom Owens’s answer.

“No good, that’s what. I’m gonna have to shoot you anyways. You seen my face.” Footsteps shook the trailer, the door yanked open again. The light fell out into the rain. Dave stepped back into darkness. The boy began to wail now. “I don’t know how the Lord Jesus could let this happen to me. I never done nothin’ in my life but look for my daddy. I never meant to kill nobody, now it looks like there ain’t no end to it. Why? Why did he have to draw a gun on me?”

Three metal steps went down from the trailer door to the sand. Dave heard the steps rattle now. He took another step back into the dark. The boy’s keening voice came on the wind from out on the beach. “Him that run out on my mom and me sixteen year ago. And her dyin’ of drink, grievin’ for him. A rich millionaire. And for all our pain and sufferin’ and dyin’ he ain’t goin’ to pay one nickel. No. He’s goin’ to get this big-time detective after me, and run me off.”

The raving voice came and went. Dave dodged a quick look. The kid was walking in circles on the sand, waving his arms. “And when I says if he don’t pay me I’m a-gonna tell all the wickedness he done back in Arkansas, damn if he don’t pull out this here gun. On his own little boy that’s been a-searchin’ and a-seekin’ for him all these years.” Footsteps crunched in the wet sand. The boy ran up the steps. The trailer door banged shut. But the unstoppable words came through the walls. “And he fired that gun, Mr. Owens. Jesus is my witness. Fired off that gun right past my ear. What was I supposed to do, Mr. Owens?” The boy’s voice broke into choking sobs. “My own daddy tried to kill me.” He wept hard for a minute. Then, suddenly, he said, “Brandstetter ain’t comin’. He don’t care if I kill you. And I don’t know what else to do.”

Dave stepped out and threw a stone at the trailer door. The door flew open, and the kid fired wildly into the dark. Dave yanked Morales’s gun from his pocket, and thumbed back the Hammer. “Drop it!” he shouted. The boy swung and fired at him. He heard the whine of the bullet. He raised Morales’s gun and squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked. The shot was loud. The boy’s thin body gave a jerk, took a half turn, and pitched out onto the sand.

M
AX ROMANO’S PLACE WAS
quiet. It was early. In the small, dark-paneled bar, a handful of commuters hung on, clinking ice in glasses, and swapping stories, reluctant to face the rain-slick streets, the gridlocked freeways. From the kitchen came good smells, the muted rattling of pans and the banging of oven doors. The dining room tables with their snowy linen, neatly laid-out silver, crystal glinting in candlelight were vacant. Except for Dave’s table in its corner under a stained-glass panel. Here he worked on a double manhattan, and tried to improve Ken Barker’s temper. The bulky police captain drank Old Crow, and glowered at Dave with eyes the color and coldness of gunmetal.

“We put out money and effort to protect you. And you act like a hotshot high school kid. You could have been dead on that beach. Washed out to sea. We could still be looking for you.”

“Better me than Morales,” Dave said. “Samuels was enough, Ken. I couldn’t let that happen twice. Protecting me was your idea, remember. I never wanted it.”

“You made that plain,” Barker growled. “But Morales is still in trouble. For the worst mistake an officer can make—letting his gun be taken away from him.”

“Cary Dean Duval is as crazy as they come,” Dave said. The kid was under double guard in the hospital ward of the county jail near Rancho Vientos. The bullet from Morales’s gun had shattered a bone in his upper right arm. He had lost blood while Dave crouched over him on the sand and Tom Owens drove the Jaguar to that public phone he’d used earlier to summon Dave. Dave had laid blankets from the trailer over the kid, but he’d gone into shock before the ambulance arrived. He was out of trouble now. He’d live. “He came out shooting. I knew he would. I wasn’t putting Morales in his line of fire.”