Early Graves (3 page)

“I’ll have to ask the mother if she knows you.”

“Of course. But don’t tell her I’m coming to see her.”

“Maybe it won’t be a mother. Sometimes it’s a lover, a brother, a sister. Sometimes it’s nobody. Everybody in their life deserts them. Like it was the plague. Leprosy.”

“You didn’t bring latex gloves.” Dave returned to the big, hulking stove, all white enamel panels and nickel-plated trim, and eyed the sandwiches. “But the M.E. did. In the beginning, didn’t the coroner’s crews refuse to pick up AIDS bodies? Do we call this progress?”

“They threatened to fire them,” Leppard said. “So, you going out to Rancho Vientos tomorrow? It’s not your case.”

“You going to stop me? He was sent to me. That makes it my case.” Dave pulled plates down from a cupboard, laid the sandwiches on the plates. “This is rudimentary,” he said, “but it should fill up the empty corners.”

“Looks great.” Leppard put out his cigarette, bent over the plate Dave set in front of him. “Smells great.”

“I forgot napkins.” Dave turned back for them, handed one to Leppard. They were yellow, to match the cupboards. He sat down, opened his napkin in his lap. “Why was he sent to me? Plenty of places to dig a shallow grave up here unseen.”

Leppard shrugged, mouth full. He took his time, chewed, swallowed, drank a little more of his whiskey. “You’re famous. On Ted Koppel with professors, attorney generals. In
Time
,
Newsweek
,
U.S. News
. Any crazy could have picked you out.”

“You’re forgetting about the card,” Dave said. “Do you remember Hunsinger?”

Leppard grinned. “You mean, speaking of crazies?”

“No.” Dave bit into his sandwich. It was as good as he’d hoped. He wished it was Cecil sitting where Leppard sat. “He’s a psychologist. Looking after the street loonies, druggies, all the misfits, right? And writing books.”

Leppard wiped his mouth, nodded. “Reams of paper.”

“Well, he had a theory,” Dave said, “that nobody does anything unaccountable, anything by mistake. Someplace in the back of the mind, there’s a reason for everything we do.”

“Like leaving a murdered stranger on your doorstep.”

“Like that,” Dave said. “I wish I knew the reason.”

“So do I,” Leppard said.

When Leppard left, Dave cleaned up the cookshack, switched off the light, closed the door, crossed through the rain to the rear building again. He lit the desk lamp, took ruled yellow pads out of the attaché case, set the case on the floor. He sat at the desk, lifted from a deep drawer a flat black case that held a little battery-powered typewriter. He zipped open the case, set the machine in front of him, rolled paper into it, stared at the blank sheet.

The big room was cold and damp. He went to the fireplace, slid back the screen. Kindling lay on crumpled newspapers in the iron basket. He set fire to the paper, placed a stringy-barked wedge of eucalyptus log on the sparking, snapping kindling, drew the screen across, went back to the desk. In Fresno, he hadn’t used the yellow pads in order, so now he tore the scribbled sheets off, and shuffled them to get them straight.

Glasses on his nose, he put fingers on the black keys with their white letters. For a moment. Then he gave a sharp sigh and picked up the telephone receiver. He punched the number of Cecil’s workplace, the newsroom of Channel Three. In a minute, Cecil was on the line.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Dave said, “but did you know Dodge?”

“Who’s Dodge? The dead man? That his name?”

“Harold Andrew Dodge of Rancho Viento,” Dave said. “You asked me if I knew him. Now I’m asking you.”

“If I’d known him,” Cecil said, “I’d have told you, Dave.”

“That’s what I thought,” Dave said. “Just checking. Thanks.” And he hung up and got to work, easy in his mind.

R
ANCHO VIENTOS LAY IN
a valley between low green hills. Big old oaks grew on the hills. The sea was not far off. Wind blew from the sea, strong, steady, with a salt tang to it, and today cold and damp. The sky was low, clouds in shades of ragged gray. This was still ranch country, cattle, horses, isolated barns in need of paint, in need of propping up. Here and there, a white clapboard farmhouse back from the road showed him fruit trees blossoming pink and white in door yards, a goat or two, chickens pecking damp earth.

Beyond barbed wire, small herds of stocky, white-faced beef cattle browsed. A young palomino mare with a colt tagging her raced along beside a fence the length of the field, as Dave’s Jaguar passed. Her taffy mane and tail blew in the wind. To his left, now, lay a sprawl of new, low, yellowish buildings on acres of freshly seeded, hardly sprouted grass. Oaks had been spared by the landscapers and they tempered the rawness of the buildings, walks, quads. A community college—that’s what the roadside sign said it was.

He passed a new colonial style motel, the Oaktree Inn. And a mile farther along, the earth was torn up at a construction site. Dump trucks stood around office trailers. So did big-barreled cement mixer trucks. But no one tramped around in the mud in boots and hard hats. No power saws whined. No hammers banged inside the raw concrete shells of what promised to be handsome buildings. No nails squealed from scaffolding being pulled down. Was it because of the rain no one was here? No. The answer was on a white enamel metal signboard in black lettering, on unpainted four-by-fours stuck in the ground. DREW DODGE ASSOCIATES, LAND & DEVELOPMENT. Everybody was in mourning.

Half a mile farther on, the highway turned into main street, a few blocks of old buildings, one story, two story, yellow brick, brown, red brick, chunky stucco, weathered frame. Hardware, seed and feed, auto parts, barber, farm machinery, Mexican, Chinese, all-American eateries, a movie theater with a blank marquee. On a corner, a rickety three-story American Gothic hotel, brave with fresh white and green paint and polished bay windows with flowers sitting in them. A slumping red stone church. Where a new filling station stood shining across from a new two-story motel, Dave turned out of the main street, and made for the hills.

Here, handsome ranch houses sat on large lots behind white rail fences. Some were of used brick dry-brushed white or left in its own rough reds, with lots of sloppy mortar in between. Diamond-paned windows. Shake roofs. Shaggy old pepper trees, gnarled old olive trees, slim eucalyptus. Ivy geranium in the front yards, bougainvillea drooping off eaves. The roads curved with the curves of the hills, and driving the roads he glimpsed sometimes below him, shielded by high plank fences, grapestake fences, the blue of swimming pools in big backyards.

The house he wanted had a curved white gravel drive. The place was frame, bat and board, with the usual deep eaves. A big new American car, very dark blue, stood in the driveway. The garage doors, which faced the street, were down. He got out of the Jaguar and misty rain touched his face. The entry-way to the house was deep, flower boxes on each side, marigolds, pansies. The entryway was flagged in shades of brown, yellow, red. The door was red with a brass knocker. It opened and a man came out. He carried a case. He was slight and for a moment in the poor light looked young to Dave. But he stepped from under the shelter of the roof edge into the sunlight and his hair was white and his face lined and there was loose flesh under his chin. He stopped in mid-stride when he saw Dave.

“No reporters, please,” he said. “I’m Mrs. Dodge’s doctor. She’s exhausted. Didn’t sleep all night.” He looked past Dave in surprise. “No camera? No microphone?”

“I’m an insurance investigator,” Dave said. “Have to ask her a few questions. It’s just routine.”

The doctor said, “The damned television news people are outrageous. There ought to be a law.”

“There is,” Dave said. “It’s called the First Amendment. Were you his doctor too? The family doctor?”

“Trowbridge,” the doctor said, and held out his hand.

“Brandstetter,” Dave said, and shook the hand. “Were you aware that he had AIDS?”

Trowbridge reddened. “Who told you that?”

“Foster Carlyle, the Medical Examiner in L.A.,” Dave said. “He didn’t tell me. He told the investigating officer, Lieutenant Jeff Leppard. Leppard told me. Last night.”

“It’s not the sort of information that needs to be spread,” Trowbridge said. “No, I wasn’t aware of it. He came to me last fall. He was losing weight. He was having night sweats.” He squinted upward. “Going to rain again.” He crunched across the gravel to his car. “It wasn’t surprising to me. He’s a workaholic. Puts himself under terrific stress. Never takes time for decent meals. I recommended a month’s vacation—preferably out of reach of the telephone. Regular meals. Regular sleeping hours.”

“And he never came back,” Dave said.

The doctor opened the car door and put his case inside on the seat. He looked over the rooftop of the car, on which the sifting rain was spreading a shine. “No, he never did.”

“You didn’t know he’d been in Junipero Serra hospital,” Dave said, “for Pneumocystis carinii?”

“I’ve only seen the children,” Trowbridge said. “It’s impossible. That medical examiner must have mixed Drew’s report up with someone else’s. He couldn’t have AIDS. He despised all of that—the drug culture, as they call it.”

“Doctors are busy fellows,” Dave said, “so maybe you haven’t had time to read the statistics. Only seventeen percent of AIDS victims are intravenous drug users. Seventy-three percent are homosexuals.”

“He was a family man,” Trowbridge blustered. “Lovely wife, devoted to each other, two beautiful children.”

Dave looked around at the handsome setting in its veil of rain. “Back in the real world,” he said, “marriages last nine years with luck. Divorces are as common as weddings. Fifty percent of children are being raised by their mothers alone. Sex films come into your bedroom on television. On every street corner in LA boys run out to your car when you stop to sell you little envelopes of crack, Mom is a junkie, and the apple pie is laced with PCP. You lead a sheltered life out here, doctor. You’re out of touch.”

“Drew was no homosexual—he loved sports, for heaven’s sake, racquetball, jogging, the gym. Before he got caught up in this shopping mall project of his.” Trowbridge grimaced. “Then there was no time for anything but work.”

“Contaminated blood?” Dave said. “From a transfusion? Any transfusions in the last seven years you remember?”

Trowbridge shook his head. “No accidents. No surgery. No transfusions. No.”

Dave gave him a thin smile. “We seem to be narrowing the options, don’t we? You never suspected? He never came to you with a venereal disease? Herpes, hepatitis? No rectal injuries? Nothing that would suggest to you—?”

“Absolutely not.” Trowbridge acted fretful. “He was under a lot of stress, lately. Maybe he saw”—the frail shoulders moved uncomfortably—“some, some, some woman. Prostitutes spread AIDS.”

“That would be nicer, wouldn’t it?” Dave said.

Trowbridge glared. “I’m due at the hospital. But I’m going to phone that medical examiner. He’s made a mistake.”

“Then so did whoever killed Dodge,” Dave said. “We have a serial murderer in LA these days. Five young men stabbed to death in the same way as Dodge. All of them AIDS victims. All homosexuals.”

“You didn’t know Drew.” Trowbridge glanced up grumpily at the rain. “He was the most open, sunny, natural, outspoken young fellow in the world. It’s fantastic to suggest he had some dark, sordid sex life no one knew about.”

“Someone knew,” Dave said.

“Well, don’t upset Katherine.” Trowbridge put a leg into his car. “Don’t tell her.”

“I expect she already knows,” Dave said. “She’ll have had a phone call from the health authorities by now.”

“Then she kept it from me. She wouldn’t do that.”

Trowbridge dropped into the big car, slammed the door, started the engine. Dave rapped on the glass of the passenger-side window. With a grimace of annoyance, the doctor touched the button to lower the window.

“You’ll have to tell her, if she doesn’t know,” Dave said. “And if they were the loving couple you think they were, you’ll also have to treat her. You’ll also have to watch her die.”

Trowbridge glared at him and angrily rolled the window up again. He drove the dark blue car away over the crackling gravel of the drive, out past the white rail fence, down the curving street. Dave turned, took steps over the flagstones, lifted and let fall the polished brass knocker on the red door. He had time to glance twice at his watch before the door opened.

A short woman in her fifties stood there, in a fresh blue warm-up suit, new jogging shoes, a dish towel in square freckled hands. She was stocky, gray-haired, wholesome-looking. “I’m Gerda Nilson. What do you want?”

Dave told her his name, took from a pocket the ostrich-hide folder that held his private investigator’s license, let it fall open for her to read. “I need to ask Mrs. Dodge a few questions. I won’t keep her long.”

“Can’t you read the police report?” the woman said. “That black man—Lieutenant Leppard from Los Angeles—he asked a hundred questions. Yesterday. It took hours. I thought he’d never leave. In my time, Negroes—”

“Came to the back door,” Dave said.

Her blue eyes narrowed, she tilted her head. “Brandstetter? He mentioned you. It’s not an easy name to say, but it’s hard to forget.”

“He said Drew Dodge’s body was found at my house, right?”

“Yes.” She frowned. “So, you’re not investigating for somebody who hired you, like on TV?”

“Nobody hired me,” Dave said. “I’m investigating on my own. I never saw Drew Dodge in my life till yesterday. Am I right—you’re a member of his family?”

“His mother-in-law,” she said.

“Did he ever mention me? He had my business card. I didn’t give it to him. Do you know who did? Or why?”

“Why he’d need a private investigator?” Her mouth twitched grimly at a corner, she stepped out to him, and pulled the door shut back of her. She lowered her voice. “Lately, he’d run into bad trouble. I don’t know the particulars, but it must have had to do with the mall. It was worrying him before he went to the hospital, but this last week, I’d say things had got really bad.” She stood tiptoe to reach Dave’s ear. “I think he was scared to death.”