Authors: Joseph Hansen
“That’s enough,” Dave said.
“Then it’s over?” Cecil asked. “Tomorrow you write up your report, and Banner sends him his twenty-five thousand dollars?” It was one in the morning, rain on the roof. They sat watching the fire, sat on the couch under the looming rafter shadows of the big rear building, and ate wedges of warm quiche, and drank cold white wine. “Only where do they address the envelope? That’s not your problem, right?”
“Tomorrow I do not write my report,” Dave said.
“But now you know she was there to the end.”
“Alive,” Dave said. “Lucky saw her alive. Banner wants proof she’s dead. They want to know that unclaimed corpse in the San Diego County coroner’s refrigerator is Serenity Westover’s. I can’t prove that.”
“Perfect teeth, perfect bones, dark hair.” Cecil stood up, holding his own empty plate, and reached for Dave’s. “Same size, same age. Don’t you think it’s her?”
“Just leave those till morning,” Dave said.
Cecil looked doubtful. “Draw ants,” he said.
“Too cold and wet for ants,” Dave said. “Sit down.” Cecil set the plates on the hearth, picked up his glass from the pine couch arm, grinned, and sat down. Dave put an arm around his bony shoulders. “I’m nearer to thinking it’s her now. I was sure it wasn’t when I was down there to talk to the medical examiner the other day. That’s why I didn’t go to Perez then, didn’t even think of it. The postmark was old. These kids go to a place like that, get restless, wander off to some other place they’re not going to like any better.”
“Unless it’s Guyana,” Cecil said. “They didn’t wander off from there, did they? And they didn’t wander off from Azrael’s ranch, either, look like. Blue paint?”
“Sky blue,” Dave said.
Cecil said, “If you couldn’t get proof for them, how do they think they are ever going to get it?”
“When someone catches him,” Dave said.
Cecil shivered. “Would you want to catch him, touch him, even look at him? Would you want to hear what comes out of his mouth?”
“I don’t want to think about it anymore today, all right?” Dave turned Cecil’s face from the firelight and kissed his mouth. “What are we sitting here for? It’s late. Why aren’t we in bed?”
“I been wondering that, myself.” Cecil tossed off the last of his wine. But halfway up the steps to the loft, Dave following him, hands on his narrow hips, Cecil stopped. “I forgot. There’s a message on your answering machine. I was here. I answered the phone, but I couldn’t understand him.”
“Lyle Westover,” Dave said.
“Finally, I apologized all over the place, and said why didn’t he call back, and I wouldn’t answer, and he could put the message on the tape, and maybe you’d understand it”
Dave sighed, let go Cecil’s hips, and went back down the stairs. “It could be important,” he grumbled, and punched keys on the machine. He had to listen three times, but at last he puzzled out the message. Lyle was back in the house on Sandpiper Lane. Checks should have been waiting for him from the musicians’ union. They weren’t. The mailbox was empty except for a gas bill, new. Did Dave think Lyle’s father was picking up the mail? Dave hoped so. He lifted down the sheepskin jacket from a big brass hook beside the door. He called, “I have to go out. See you for breakfast.”
“What!” The bedframe jounced. Heels thumped the loft planks. Cecil scowled down at him over the railing. He was naked, the firelight glancing off his blackness. “You going out? You leaving this?” He showed Dave what he meant. “What am I supposed to do with it here all by myself all night long?”
“You can bring it with you.” Dave shrugged into the coat. “If you don’t mind missing your sleep.”
“Sleep would not be what I missed.” Cecil vanished from view. “Wait for me. I’ll be right there.” Cecil’s head lay on Dave’s shoulder. The boy was asleep, his breathing soft, slow, regular. They sat in the Triumph on Sandpiper Lane in the dark and the cold rain that the sea wind kept catching and rattling like grains of sand against the window glass. The wind, the rain, smelled of the sea. Dave stared at the heavy-headed silhouette of the iron mailbox down the street at 171. He checked his watch. Not that there was any point to that. Westover might come for his mail at any hour, so long as darkness held. It was twenty minutes past three.
Moving carefully so as not to disturb Cecil, Dave shifted his position an inch or two on the grudging bucket seat. Painfully he drew up one cold-stiffened leg until the knee touched the little leather-wrapped steering wheel. He straightened the other leg, the knee joint snapping. He tugged up the woolly collar of his coat and huddled down into the coat a little farther, seeking warmth. Cecil murmured but did not waken. Dave fell asleep.
What woke him he did not know, but he sat up fast and straight. Cecil mumbled “What?” and rubbed a hand down over his face. “It’s him,” Dave said, and with a sleep-numb hand fumbled for the key in the dash. Through the drizzled windshield he watched a figure yank open the mailbox at 171, grope inside it, shut it again, and, hunched up against the rain, scurry across the black glossy pavement to a big dark car that waited with glowing taillights.
Dave’s fingers found the cold little key and twisted it. The motor stuttered, coughed, quit. Cold. Dave twisted the key again. The starter mechanism gave its singsong whine. The big car moved away up the street. The Triumph’s motor caught, Dave pedaled the accelerator. The motor choked and quit again. “Shit!” Cecil’s hands gripped the dash, he bounced in his seat. “Come on, baby, come on. We gonna lose him, for sure.” The red lights of the big car disappeared around the bend where the lonely streetlamp glowed sallow in the rain. The Triumph’s motor caught, sputtered, smoothed out. Dave pawed for the leather-covered knob of the gearshift, moved it, remembered just in time to release the handbrake, eased down on the gas pedal, and they were moving.
Dave didn’t waste time with the tangle of curved streets. He headed for the beach, the coast road. At the top of a hill, they saw the big lonely car below just as it swung onto the coast road, heading north. Skidding on the curves, they followed. Dave kept distance between them. There was no traffic, nothing but occasional massive eighteen-wheelers hulking along at seventy and eighty miles an hour, their turbulence knocking the Triumph almost out of control as they roared past. Not the big dark car. It held a steady pace on a steady course.
“He doesn’t know we’re tailing him,” Cecil said.
The harsh lights of another semi glared in Dave’s eyes from the rearview mirror. He edged the Triumph to the road shoulder. The truck hurtled past, huge wheels churning loops of water over the Triumph. Muddy water. It took the wipers a moment to clear the windshield. The high, square-cornered shape of the truck with its points of warning light diminished ahead of them. Under a high black bluff, it turned from sight. But down the clear highway the dark car was nowhere to be seen.
“We lost him,” Cecil said.
“He turned up a canyon,” Dave said.
Yucca Canyon, it was called. The road was narrow and crooked and steep. The little wheels of the Triumph hammered in potholes. Water dashed against the underside of the car. Big rock outcrops loomed in the headlights. Old oaks bent crooked limbs over the road. They didn’t sight the dark car again. Maybe this hadn’t been Westover’s turnoff after all. Maybe Dave had guessed wrong. If Westover had realized he was being followed, all he’d have had to do was switch off his lights for a minute and crawl, say, into the shadow of that bluff to be out of sight. Visibility was that bad. Dave was ready to turn back, but then there the big car was again, a hundred yards on up the winding road, rounding a bend, yellow headlights raking brush and rock sparkling with rain. Dave pressed the gas pedal hard, and the Triumph began skidding on turns. The canyon yawned deep and dark below them, and Cecil’s eyes grew big and he sat very still.
The pitch of the road turned downward, and soon they sped past a crossroads where a filling station slept, a building-supply yard behind hurricane fencing, a frame building that was a grocery store. Weak, watery night lights lit them dimly. The big car was out of sight again, but in a moment it would reappear up ahead. It had done that twenty times in ten miles. But now they drove fast and for a long time and didn’t see it again. Dave pulled the Triumph up under a clump of dripping manzanita. He backed it, swung it around, and headed it down the way they’d come. At the crossroads, he took the turnoff he should have taken first. They crawled along twisting, climbing roads quick with flowing water, for half an hour, peering through the blackness. Dave braked the car again and looked at Cecil.
“Are you cold and miserable?”
Cecil nodded, cold and miserable.
“Let’s go home and get warm,” Dave said.
Yucca Canyon was even wilder and more empty than he had thought last night. At first, the road wound up from the coast among broad, low foothills, then entered a narrow pass, where it edged an arroyo overhung with the leafless, white, and twisting arms of big sycamores. Rain runoff plunged down the arroyo, foaming muddily, tumbling boulders with its force. As the bent road climbed, the arroyo widened, dropped below road level deeper, full of oaks, and the mountains reared higher, rockier. Sometimes the road was a narrow shelf cut into cliff faces almost straight up and down. The drop from the road edge was steep and far to the bottom. That was what Cecil had been able to see or sense last night from the passenger seat while Dave had skidded the car around these crimps of ragged blacktop, what had made him silent.
He slept now, lean, long, naked, sprawled facedown in the broad bed on the loft, warm under blankets, unaware, Dave hoped, that he was alone. Dave had kept waking up, wondering if it was time yet to come back here. At dawn he had crept quietly into clothes, shaved, fixed coffee in the cookshack and heated a Danish and eaten it. He’d put on the sheepskin coat and started the Triumph, worrying at the protests of the noisy little valves, afraid they would waken the boy. They hadn’t. Now he checked the time on his wrist. Eight-thirty. He wasn’t going to be too early. In fact, was he ever going to encounter human life?
It was miles before he saw the first sign of it—a shacky ranch, board buildings under massive eucalyptus trees, bark hanging in brown rags, leafage shaggy dark reds, three rough-coated horses nodding in the morning sun in a muddy paddock fenced with splintery rails. Then no more signs of life for miles. Then leaf-strewn, night-damp rooftops below road level, sets of wooden stairs leading downward from clumps of tin mailboxes. Then nothing again for miles. He wanted that crossroads. Did it really exist? Now trails began breaking off the main road. Through the trees he glimpsed here a flash of window glass in sunlight, there a chimney with a wisp of smoke rising from it. A car passed him, heading down the canyon. A rooster crowed.
And then the road dropped sharply, and he remembered that, and at the bottom of the long drop he found the fenced building-supply yard, the frame grocery store, the filling station. A wash of mud filmed the blacktop around the gas pumps and a boy in a blue coverall was washing the mud into the road with a garden hose. He had long straw-color hair and a big frontier mustache. Dave hated to sully the asphalt he’d only just purified. He ran the Triumph up beside the pumps anyway. The boy turned off the hose around a corner of the station office, then came at a bowlegged jog to see what Dave wanted. From under the long, mud-stained legs of the coverall the scuffed points of cowboy boots showed. They were worn down at the heel.
“Fill her up, please,” Dave told him, and got out of the little car and stretched. The boy reached for the gas hose, said “Shit,” and jogged into the office for keys. He unlocked the pump and took down the hose and stuck the nozzle into the Triumph. The pump began to whirr and ping. Dave said, “You worked here long?”
“All my life,” the boy said without joy. “My old man owns it. Why?”
“Then you must know most of your customers,” Dave said. “The people that live in the canyon?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” the boy said. And again, “Why?”
“I’m a private investigator.” Dave showed the boy the license in his wallet. “I’m looking for a man named Charles Westover.”
“I don’t know him.” The boy pulled the nozzle out of the tank. “You didn’t need much gas.”
“Maybe I need some oil,” Dave said. “Would you like to check it? And the water?”
“It’s my job.” The boy hung the gas hose back on the pump and worked the hood of the Triumph. “No Westover. Not unless he pays cash. Nobody pays cash for gas.” He bent in under the hood, pulled out the oil stick, and wiped it with a blue rag from a hip pocket. He stuck it back in place and pulled it out again. “You don’t need any oil.” He replaced the stick, turned, stooped for the water hose. “You get to know their names from their credit cards. Everybody uses stinking credit cards. Country’s going to hell.”
“He drives a Rolls-Royce, two-tone, brown and gold,” Dave said, “about fifteen years old. It’s not the kind of car you’d forget.”
The boy twisted off the radiator cap and fed a few jets of water in. The water overflowed. He dropped the hose, which snaked itself back across the wet tarmac and into its hole. The boy screwed the cap back on and slammed down the hood. “I remember it. Only been in one time, but I remember it. Sure.”
“Westover is about forty-five, slight build, the tip of one ear is missing.”
“It wasn’t him.” The boy wiped his hands on the rag and stuffed the rag back into its pocket. “It was a girl. Maybe a teen-ager, maybe older, twenty or so?”
“Brown eyes?” Dave’s heart thumped. “Dark hair?”
“Blond,” the boy said. “I couldn’t see her eyes. She wore dark glasses.”
Dave took the snapshot from inside the sheepskin jacket and handed it to the boy. “The girl in front?”
The boy shook his head. “Too fat,” he said. “This one was skinny, sick-looking, kind of, pale.” He handed back the snapshot. “Tacky, too. Ragged old sweater, dirty jeans, barefoot. I wouldn’t have remembered, except what was somebody like that doing driving a Rolls?” He watched Dave put the snapshot away. “Is that Azrael?”
“That’s who it is.” Dave read the meter on the gas pump, dug out his wallet, handed the boy a twenty-dollar bill. “Keep the change. And tack this up somewhere, so it doesn’t get lost.” It was his card. “And call me if that Rolls comes in again, will you, please?”