Death Claims: A Dave Bran[d]stetter Mystery Page 11

  "There was me." Dave stepped over the suitcase, pushed aside an empty carton with his foot, gripped Doug's shoulders and turned him. He was crying. "There still is me. I'm willing to fix whatever's wrong, but you'll have to tell me what it is. I know you don't want to. I know you want only to be kind. That's one of the better things about you, one of the reasons I don't want you to go to England." He gave the shoulders a gentle shake. "Come on, Doug. It's your turn. I won't hold it against you."

  "Yeah, okay." The voice was shaky, but the nod was firm. He went back to the table, to the cigarette lifting its blue smoke up into the inverted white bowl of the lamp. He picked the cigarette up, drew deeply on it, turned to face Dave. "You're pissed off because I keep a few pictures of him, some music, some books. You keep a whole God-damn house that says Rod Fleming to you all day. He remodeled it, redecorated it, chose the furniture, rugs, color schemes, the faucets in the bathroom, even the frigging pots and pans. He chose that nelly bed. It's not me that's lived with you in that house since last November. It's not me that's slept with you. It's him. No, you don't keep pictures of him. But Madge told me. I look like him." He didn't want the cigarette. He twisted it out. "And you come at me about Jean-Paul. Jesus!"

  "Don't start throwing things," Dave said. "Tell me what to do. List the house with Coldwell and Banker?"

  "Yes. Get someplace for us. Not you and Rod's ghost. You and me." Doug shut his eyes. "Ah, Christ!" He dropped onto the bed edge, bent forward, face in hands. "I'm sorry. It's too much. It's a beautiful house. Forget it. You shouldn't have made me say it."

  Dave sat beside him, put an arm over his shoulders. "Don't feel bad," he said. "You're right. I ought to have shed it all when he died. Madge told me. The sign goes up tomorrow, Doug. I'll drop keys off at R. Fleming. They'll take back the furnishings."

  Doug sat straight, dragged a sleeve across his eyes. "Thanks. And now for the ungrateful part. I'm not going back there, Dave. I'm not sleeping with you in that God-damn bed. Never again."

  "Right." Dave smiled and kissed the tear-salty mouth. "We'll go someplace else." He thought it would probably be Madge's. She had room and she'd like having them. But he didn't care where it was, so long as he could sleep. He'd never felt so tired in his life.

  16

  NOT MUCH MONEY had gone into the building of little Los Collados College. The architect, if there'd been one, had focused on utility. Red brick. Square corners. An even count of plain windows, plain doors. Like a child's drawing. But that had been years ago. And ivy had long since taken hold, masked the ugliness. The buildings faced each other across a long slope of good lawn sheltered by old oaks. At the far end, backgrounded by the worn tapestry of the Sierra Madres, a chapel aimed a mean steeple at the sky. At the crux of four brick walks a statue was green with bronze disease. Dave read the birdlimed plaque on its base. T. Knox McLeod, D.D. The founder. Dead 1913. He clutched a Bible and looked stern.

  Was the frown deepening? Past his feet, along the walks, flocked long-haired boys in frontier mustaches and fringed leather coats, girls in tight dungarees and boots. Some of them smoked and the cigarettes looked handmade and not tobaccofilled. Transistor radios blared rock. Over it the loud, cheerful talk was studded with words Dave doubted the Reverend McLeod would have countenanced. Eight in the morning was early for beer, but in the green woven-wire trashbaskets he passed Dave saw yesterday's empty Olympia cans. He grinned and shook his head. 1913 was a long time ago.

  All that was alive in the library was a hefty girl in a long peasant skirt and black tights practicing ballet kicks back of a golden-oak counter. She was judging the height of the kicks by the top of a wooden cabinet of index-card drawers. Her back was to him. The door made no noise opening, but she heard it close and got her foot down fast and turned. She had a creamy skin and it blushed rosily. But she didn't lose self-possession. She wiped her forehead with the back of a hand.

  "If you have a weight problem," she panted, "you have to do something. I don't eat anything—I mean, almost literally, nothing. And I still get fat. Ugh! Look at you. I'll bet you eat all you want and you're thin. There's not an extra pound on you."

  "It's a matter of metabolism," Dave said. "Don't wear yourself out. It'll only make you old before your time."

  "I'll bet you're old," she said, "but you don't look it. How old are you?"

  "A hundred and forty-five," Dave said. "Can you direct me to the College Press office?"

  She looked blank.

  He explained. "A few years ago something called Los Collados College Press published a book by your Professor Ingalls. About Thomas Wolfe."

  "Oh, I see what you mean. No, really, there's no office. I mean, the College doesn't publish all that much. What did you want?"

  "My name is Eugene Gant," Dave said. "I teach at Altamont in North Carolina." He watched her. If she'd read Look Homeward, Angel, she'd react. She hadn't read it. He went on, "I'm preparing a critical bibliography of books and articles on Wolfe. I'd like to look over the reviews Dr. Ingalls's book received. Usually publishers keep files of reviews."

  "Oh, sure. Those are here. I mean, not out here." She waved tapering fat-girl fingers. "They're in the library office." She nodded at a far door. He started for it. ''Wait. There's no one there yet."

  "There's no one here yet, either," Dave said.

  "No, there isn't, is there?" With a little shrug of her big, plump shoulders she came from behind the counter. She moved lightly, almost floating, the peasant skirt billowing around surprisingly trim ankles, her long hair drifting after her like smoke. She moved quickly and the breeze she stirred smelled of lilac. "Here you go." She opened the door and sailed through.

  Dave followed. Desks, typewriters, mimeograph, Xerox machine. A green metal workbench where a big screw-down press held the glue of bright new bindings to stacks of old pages freshly trimmed. A harp of cotton string for resewing loose signatures. Tools with worn red handles for stamping catalogue numbers on book spines. Above the bench, among trussed and tagged bundles of magazines, aged and ailing books waited for treatment on green metal shelves.

  From a green metal four-drawer file the girl pulled a manila folder, handed it to him, smiled her one and only time and went away. He put on his glasses, sat on a creaky tin posture chair and for a half-hour attentively leafed through yellowed clippings—from newspapers, magazines, but mostly from academic and literary quarterlies. For twenty minutes of that half-hour he doubted his hunch. Then he didn't doubt it anymore.

  Grimly he laid the folder on top of the file cabinet and went out into the library. The girl wasn't alone anymore with the sunlight through the windows. Students worked at tables, slammed catalogue drawers, squinted at shelves. The girl was busy. Dave found for himself the thick volume of Wolfe's letters on a bottom shelf and crouched there, reading carefully the sad final pages. Then he pushed the book back, got stiffly to his feet, called thanks to the girl and went to find the bursar's office.

  Through the shaggy pines that lined the road the sky overhead was as blue as it was going to get. But the sun hadn't climbed high yet, and down below the road, among its dense trees and shrubs, Dwight Ingalls's house was in cold shadow. Dave shivered and rapped the loose screen door. The redwood door inside it was shut now, like a sleeper's face. He turned from it. Above, on the road, a yellow schoolbus passed, its engine rattle drowned by shrill kindergarten voices. Downhill a dog barked. Farther off a rooster crowed. Dave heard the door open and turned back.

  Framed by the screen, Ingalls blinked sleepily. He was barefoot. His hands fumbled with the tie of a brown bathrobe. Recognition didn't come right away. When it did, his hand went for the door as if to close it.

  Dave said, "No, don't do that. You were seen leaving John Oats's place the night he died. You didn't mention you'd gone there that night. Why not?"

  "It was—" Ingalls's voice came out hoarse. He cleared his throat. "It was the same situation. He called me for money. I took him money. It would only have been inviting complica
tions to have brought it up."

  "You didn't have to invite them," Dave said. "They're here. Yesterday you told me your wife died ten days ago. Ten days ago yesterday was when John Oats died. My impression was that you cared deeply for your wife. Aside from the time you had to spend teaching, you looked after her yourself. But that night, of all nights, you weren't with her. You were in Arena Blanca, a hundred miles from here, in the rain. What kind of hold did John Oats have over you?"

  "Hold?" Ingalls's voice came out cracked and he was too white even for a man who's just wakened. His larynx jumped in his throat like a trapped animal. "I don't know what you're talking about."

  "He was extorting money from former customers. Not borrowing it. Extorting it. You weren't in any position to lend him money. You said as much. You told me you had to get an advance on your wages to give him that first hundred in January. I drove away from here thinking it was kind of you. It wasn't kind. You were afraid. And you got more afraid. I've just talked to the bursar's office. Eleven days ago you withdrew another five hundred dollars. You gave as your excuse an emergency involving your wife. Right?"

  Ingalls's hand went to the hook on the screen door, pried it up, let it drop rattling. He pushed the door at Dave, who took it. Ingalls turned away. In a dead voice he said, "Come in."

  Dave went in. The handsome room was dim, chill with the dampness of old houses hedged too thickly by trees. There were shut-up smells of stale tobacco smoke and old books. Ingalls made no move to lighten the darkness. Dave wanted to see him. He bent and pulled the chain on the hammered-copper lamp. It drew wan circles on ceiling and floor. The light through the burlap shade gave Ingalls a parchmenty look. It went with the sickness in his tone.

  "I need coffee," he said.

  Dave nodded and went with him through the murky dining room into a kitchen where dishes had accumulated beside a sink where a faucet dripped. Ingalls clicked a wall switch, went to a range that dated from before the war, lifted a worn drip coffee pot that stood on a dead burner. Dave heard coffee slosh inside the aluminum. Ingalls lit the burner with a wooden match. Shaking it out, he looked at Dave. Bleakly.

  "You don't trust me out of your sight."

  "The man who saw you leaving Arena Blanca said that when he got to the house out at the point, no one was home. He arrived just after you left. Oats had made an appointment with him. And Oats didn't have a car to go anywhere in. He ought to have been there. Especially since he was desperate for money."

  Ingalls's smile was skeptical but thin. "You believe I killed him, dragged his body into the surf?"

  "That was the night it happened. Did you have a reason to kill him?"

  "Your profession," Ingalls said, "has given you an outlook I can't share. I've never been able to conceive of a 'reason,' as you put it, for one human being to kill another. My life for the past ten years has been devoted to keeping death away from one human being. To the best of my ability. Which wasn't enough."

  "Maybe my witness is lying," Dave said. "Maybe he killed John Oats. Was Oats there to be killed when you left?"

  Ingalls shook his head. Beyond the window over the sink a pair of butterflies played tag in a sudden streak of sunlight. Black wings with yellow borders. Nymphalis antiopa. The irony of their common name was almost too obvious here, now. Mourning Cloak. Ingalls turned from watching them to open a cupboard, take down cups and saucers.

  "No," he said. "He wasn't there. Lights were on inside, the door was standing open, but when I rang the bell no one came. I went inside and called. No answer. I sat down to wait. I smoked a cigarette."

  "Three," Dave said. "That adds up to a half-hour."

  "It seemed longer," Ingalls said. "It was cold."

  A built-in table between built-in benches under another window was spread with student papers, pens, pencils, open books. A red-striped cigarette pack lay there. Ingalls picked it up. He used another of the wooden matches to light a cigarette. Through the smoke he said, "When his body was found, was there five hundred dollars in his pockets?"

  "He was wearing swimming trunks," Dave said. "The bathrobe he always wore down to the beach was on the sand. Soaked through, of course. There was nothing in the pockets."

  "And did the police find five hundred dollars when they searched the house?"

  "They didn't search the house," Dave said. "They didn't think it was murder. They don't think so now. Murder's inconvenient. It makes a lot of work. People do drown. They prefer to settle for that. That he was murdered was my idea. Should they search the house?"

  Ingalls shook his head. "There'd be no point. I didn't leave the money. There was no one to leave it with. I still have it. If you'd like me to show you—"

  "You'd still have it if you killed him," Dave said. "I wouldn't take a man's life for five hundred dollars. Or five thousand. Or five hundred thousand."

  "But you might to save your career," Dave said. "And I think you did. This morning in the college library I checked the reviews of your book. Most of them were excellent. But there was one in a Seattle paper that said Wolfe's journal was complete the way it was published originally in 1951. The reviewer had been a crony of the newspaperman who went with Wolfe on that trip. He'd never heard of the events described in your book. He doesn't think they happened. It was the only demurrer in that file, but it was there. Then I checked out Wolfe's letters. It's true he told people he had thirty to fifty thousand words in his notebooks on that trip. But the editor of the letters says he always overestimated. Is she right? Is the man in Seattle right?"

  Ingalls looked at the window again. But the butterflies were gone. He shut his eyes and nodded. "Yes." His voice sounded hollow. "The notebooks were a forgery. John knew it. There was very little he didn't know about any contemporary American writer. It seems they were found in the effects of a man who died in Spokane. He'd been an admirer of Wolfe. He'd told his family Wolfe had given them to him after a typist had transcribed them. But in the package were three crumpled pages of what looked like a letter begun by Wolfe and thrown away. The handwriting on those was genuine. That in the notebooks was faked by someone else.

  "A dealer up there had come into possession of them and shown them to John. The dealer didn't know they were forgeries any more than the family did. John told him, but said he thought he could sell them. I was the first prospect he tried. But I'd examined hundreds of Wolfe manuscripts. At Harvard. At Chapel Hill. I knew immediately he hadn't written those notebooks. Just the same, it was a heaven-sent chance."

  Dave frowned. "For professional advancement?"

  "No. I was secure here. I had no desire to leave Los Collados. On the contrary. But there was Julia. That was the beginning of her illness. She needed specialists. It was terribly expensive. I'd already mortgaged the house, borrowed from relatives. Neither of us has rich relatives. So"—he drew a long, grim breath and let it out with a sag of his shoulders—"I authenticated the journals and advised the College to buy them. John set a very steep price, but I assured the department they were worth it. They spent an entire year's funds."

  "And Oats kicked back to you?"

  Ingalls nodded. "Fifty percent." The smell of coffee had grown strong. He turned to the pot. It bubbled. He lifted it. The black stuff came out into the cups sizzling. "On the phone that first time —January third?—he didn't bring the matter up. But the last time he said he'd written out the details of the transaction, was prepared to have them notarized and sent by registered mail to the Chancellor. Or I could bring him money. I told him to do his damnedest and hung up. But in the end I lost my nerve. I drew the money and went." Ingalls smiled faintly as he handed Dave a cup. "It wasn't the best day of my life. But I didn't turn it into the worst, Mr. Brandstetter. I didn't kill anybody."

  Dave set the cup down. "Telephone?" he said.

  It was in a dim hall of bedroom doors. The room Dave could see into while he dialed was empty. Even the pictures were down. Darker squares on faded little-girl wallpaper showed where they'd hung. Ingalls's face,
standing there watching him, had the same forsaken look. When Campos was on the line, Dave said:

  "John Oats was blackmailing ex-customers to support his habit. Two of them were in Arena Blanca the night he died. One didn't have much left to lose. But if Oats had exposed the other it would have destroyed him. I'm with him now. In Los Collados. I don't know how you want to handle it. But I'll stay with him till you come or send somebody."

  "Apologize to the man," Campos said. "Peter Oats walked in here yesterday afternoon around two. I tried to let you know, but you're never in your office, you're never home."

  "Let me know what? What did he say?''

  "He said he killed his father."

  17

  CAMPOS LEANED DELICATE elbows on a white formica shelf and spoke through an opening in a tall glass partition to a teenage Mexican girl in a white orlon mini-uniform and kepi. She was backgrounded by stainless-steel kitchen equipment and bright plastic signs. BURRITOS. CHILI DOGS. TAMALES. COKE. SPRITE. ORANGE. Campos pushed bills through the opening in the glass. The girl slid a paper plate at him. She made change and rattled it into his hand. He pocketed it, turned and started for one of the outdoor tables where long-haired high-school kids and brown-uniformed motorcycle patrolmen already sat eating. He saw Dave and stopped. His skin was a dull clay color. There were dark circles under his eyes. The eyes didn't look friendly.

  "I'm pissed off at you," he said. "The kid's mother told me you'd been looking for him. It was him you thought did it all the time. To catch the insurance money before his old man could take his name off the policy and write the Stannard girl in. That's a police matter, Brandstetter. You should have told me."