Dave Brandstetter 3 - Troublemaker Page 2

  The address book had letter tabs along the page edges. He picked the letter J. There were three names that meant nothing to him. But at the bottom of the page were two numbers unattached to any name. One had been scratched out. He looked for a telephone. It crouched on a low shelf by a cluster of brown-glazed clay pots. Handsome. The kind that came out of local kilns. The kind Doug Sawyer's new shop was waist deep in. Most of those had been thrown by a lank, bushy-haired youth named Kovaks. Dave shrugged Kovaks away. He was going to mean trouble but he wasn't trouble yet and right now Dave had work to do. He dialed the number.

  It rang once and the connection opened with a crash and dogs barked into his ear. He flinched and held the receiver away. A girl's voice scolded the dogs and yelped, "Hello?" The dogs kept barking. The girl called, "Will you please get them out of here?" Someone swore. The dogs barked. A door slammed. Silence. Dave asked, "To whom am I speaking?"

  "To whom did you want to speak?" Quick, sweet and wary. This wasn't some kid he could con information out of. He'd better cut his losses.

  "Larry Johns," he said.

  "I'm sorry, he's not here now."

  Dave felt himself grin. The only address the Los Santos police had for Larry Johns was off his driver's license. A cheap hotel in Brownsville, Texas, the kind of place that didn't know where you'd come from or where you'd gone. Especially not if it was the law asking. Where Larry Johns had gone was, of course, Los Santos, a quiet town that clambered the tree-green oceanside hills northwest of L.A. But small as it was, Los Santos had thousands of street numbers. And Larry Johns wasn't telling which was his. Why didn't seem to interest Lieutenant Tek Yoshiba. It interested Dave. He said carefully, "When do you expect him?"

  She did it again —answered a question with a question. Sweetly. "Who's calling, please?"

  He told her and she asked him to wait and he waited, watching a bluejay hammer a pine cone on a rock outside the windows. Then someone picked up an extension. A male voice said, "What about insurance? I've got insurance. I'm collecting on it right now."

  "I'm not selling it," Dave said. "I'm trying to reach Larry Johns. Does he live there?"

  There were five dead seconds. "How the hell did you get this number?" Back of him, women exchanged loud words in a place that echoed. Heels clacked. Dave said, "It's in Richard Wendell's book." "Oh, Christ," the man groaned. Then he said sharply, "No, Gail, wait!" And a female spoke into the phone. Not the one who'd answered first, with the dogs. This voice was older. "You have the wrong number," it said, and the receiver slammed. But only on the extension. On the other phone he heard remote man-woman shouts. Then the dogs barked again. The heels neared. The connection broke. He hung up.

  He'd lapped his jacket over the back of the desk chair. Out of it he dug a small notebook and checked a number he kept there. Dialing it got him Ray Lollard at the central office of Pacific Telephone. Lollard was a plump, feminine man who collected antiques and had been a friend of Rod Fleming, a decorator Dave used to live with, who had died last fall. Rod had restored an old mansion —porches, cupolas, stained glass—on West Adams for Lollard. It was a showplace.

  "Davey!" Lollard sounded pleased but he always sounded pleased. "I keep thinking we'll run into each other at Romano's." He meant the West Los Angeles restaurant where they'd met in 1948. "But it seems you don't eat these days. Rod always said you'd starve to death if he didn't remind you. But of course, that's how you keep that elegant figure."

  "We'll set a date," Dave said. "Listen, Ray —find out who owns this number." He gave it. "If you can get it for me in say ten minutes, call me back here." He read Richard Wendell's number off the dial plaque.

  "Pleasure," Lollard said. "How are you? How's Doug? Happy? The new gallery flourishing, is it?"

  "He's lonely," Dave said. "Try to get around there, will you? None of it's old but he's got some really beautiful stuff. And he needs customers."

  "I gather you don't lack for customers."

  "People keep dying," Dave said. "Look, if I don't hear from you, I'll get back to you later. I don't know just where I'm headed."

  Lollard said something amiable that amounted to nothing. So did Dave. He hung up and went back to the desk, frowning. The envelope with the figuring on it was tough and bulky. He turned it over. Security Bank, 132 Pier Street, Los Santos was in the upper-left-hand corner. That was all. No addressee. It hadn't gone through any mail. And it wasn't quite empty. Inside, his fingers found three paper straps, each with "$500" rubber-stamped on it. He glanced at the phone but he didn't have a friend at Security Bank's central office. He'd have to go through channels. He tucked the straps into a jacket pocket.

  The right-hand desk drawer was an indifferent shambles of canceled checks, paid bills, tax forms, wish-you-were-here postcards, snapshots. He thumbed through these. Most were of the sorrel horse and a harlequin Great Dane. A couple caught Heather Wendell sitting the horse or holding the dog's leash. Here was a big, grinning young man leaning against a car. As that ski sweater had suggested, a giant.

  At the back of the drawer were red, silver and blue rosetted ribbons. Los Santos Dog Show: 1950s, 1960s. On the bottom of the drawer lay a yellowing eight-by-ten glossy of a dark, curly-haired little youth in boxing trunks. He scowled above raised fists that were wrapped in gauze. Across the picture's lower corner an ungifted penman had written: To Rick —All My Love—Ace. Dave laid the picture back and covered it up again with the waste paper of Rick Wendell's life.

  Suits, pants, jackets off the X-large rack hung in the bedroom closet. Big towels lay wadded on the checkerboard tiles of the bathroom floor. The shower dripped behind a plastic curtain. The bed was a scrimmage of creased sheets. The blankets had half fallen to the floor. By the head of the bed was an eight-millimeter projector with reels on it. Facing the bed foot, a spring-roller screen glittered on a metal tripod. Dave drew the blue-green curtains across the windows and flipped the projector switch.

  On the screen boys naked except for cowboy hats, gun belts and tooled boots had sex with each other on what looked like a Baja beach. Some such sunburned place. Sweat stuck sand to their pale city skins. They acted bored. Dave snapped off the projector, opened the curtains, walked around the bed, looking at the floor. A comb, a leather packet of keys, a dime and two pennies. And a pair of Jockey shorts. He picked them up. Size 32. No giant's. He dropped them and something changed the light in the room. He looked at the door.

  A giant stood there, a big-boned old man. His thick gray hair needed cutting. His cheap suit needed pressing. The white shirt, the black tie, looked as if they'd just been bought, though. And he'd used a lot of polish to fill the cracks in the uppers of his shoes. Dave smelled Shinola. The man's eyes were pouchy and the skin over his cheekbones and nose was a river map of small broken veins. But a carefully tended mustache said he'd been vain once. He asked, "Who are you?"

  "Brandstetter," Dave said. "Medallion Life." He held out his hand. The man folded it in a grip that had long ago given up trying to hold on to anything.

  "This is the Wendell house, isn't it?" He licked dry, cracked lips and his bloodshot eyes fidgeted around the room. Looking for something. A drink, probably.

  "It's the Wendell house," Dave said. "I'm trying to find out what happened here."

  "Thought the police had the son of a bitch locked up." The man turned back into the living room. Dave rounded the bed and went after him. He was opening cabinet doors below the modular shelving. He found a bottle and glasses. "Join me?" He lifted them at Dave. "I'm Billy Wendell. Rick's father. I don't think he'd mind his old man having a blast, do you?"

  "It's a little late to ask him," Dave said. "Don't you know?"

  "Hadn't seen him for a while." Wendell poured three thick fingers into a glass and handed it to Dave and poured five for himself and set the bottle down. "His mother and I weren't speaking." He jerked his long jaw up in silent ironic laughter. "Not for some years." He drank, studied his glass, looked at Dave. "Insurance, huh? That's a good racket. I w
as in it once." He made an unamused sound and drank again. "I was in about everything once. But it's been used cars lately. Lately? Last twenty years. Now it's dying under me. You don't need a gas hog, do you?" He handed Dave a card, looked him up and down. "You don't look like money gives you bad dreams."

  "I drive a company car," Dave said. "You've come back for the funeral, right?"

  Wendell nodded. His voice went to pieces. Tears leaked down his face. "My boy. My only son. Jesus —least I could do. Poor kid. Not forty, years old yet and some crazy pervert murders him." He wagged his head. "The one thing I could be a little bit proud of —fine son." He gulped the last of his drink.

  "Sure," Dave said. "How did you find out about it? Your wife write to you?"

  "Hell, she wouldn't know where to reach me. No, I saw it on television. The Times was where I got the address. Had to look sharp to find it. Guess there are too many murders anymore for it to be news."

  "There were always too many," Dave said. "You live in L.A., then?"

  "Torrance," Billy Wendell said. "If you could call it living." He set clown the glass where it would make a mark in the finish. "Is there a bathroom?"

  Dave jerked his head. Wendell went out, moving his long legs as if they pained him. Dave checked his watch, looked at the phone. It didn't ring. He tasted the whiskey, walked to the bottle and turned it so the label showed. Right. They didn't cart this in by the truckload for the bar. He rummaged his jacket for a cigarette, lit it with a narrow steel butane lighter, and the scuff of clumsy shoes outside turned his head toward the door. Heather Wendell stopped there, the withering geraniums flaring red behind her.

  "You see, Mr. Brandstetter, I know about death. It's not the dead we ought to mourn for. It's the living. When my father died, his troubles were over. Mine had only started. I was twenty-five —a grown woman. But he'd sheltered me like a child. I'd never had to lift a hand. Everything I'd needed or imagined I needed was given me. Then suddenly it was all taken away. I had nothing. And a three-year-old boy to raise."

  "You had a husband," Dave said.

  She shook her head. "When the money stopped, he left. He was no better equipped to face reality than I was. It was no surprise to me." The corner of her mouth tightened in a kind of smile. "Do you know how I managed? By doing for a living exactly what you found me doing this morning —cleaning stables, grooming horses. Horses were a ll I knew. Then came the war and the aircraft factories. They hired women because women were what there were to hire. Whether they knew anything or not. I bucked rivets for four years." The crooked smile tried itself again and failed. "Well, you don't want to hear the rest. I don't want to remember it. At last Rick took hold and my nightmare was over." Her shoulders lifted a little, as if shedding the weight all over again. "Naturally, if I'd had my choice, it wouldn't have been the kind of business it was. But I didn't have my choice, did I? Come to think of it, never once in my life did I choose —"

  The toilet flushed. She frowned puzzlement at the bedroom door. Dave picked up his drink and tasted it again and Billy Wendell came in, zipping a fly that didn't work well. He stopped, blinked. "Heather," he said heavily.

  She squinted, head craning forward. "Billy?" She took a step into the room, a hand half held out. "Dear God —what's happened to you?"

  "Happened?" he said. "I'm sixty-five years old."

  "I'm sorry," she said. "It's such a shock is all. Where did you come from?" She looked at him, grieved.

  "Not far." He made for his glass like a drowning man for a piece of driftwood. He gulped from it, wiped his mustache with the back of his hand. "You want a drink? It's your booze."

  "You mean you've been close by" —she didn't say it angry, she said it sad—"and never come around, never shown your face?"

  "I didn't know where you'd got to." He bent creakily for another glass. "Not till I read about Rick in the paper." He dumped whiskey into the glass, set the bottle by, carried the glass to her. "You landed on your feet. Pleasant place here, nice furnishings." He tilted his head. "Portrait of you on the wall in there, with a big dog." He looked her up and down as he'd done Dave, smiled to himself as he walked back to put more whiskey into his glass. He was wasting a beautiful bottle in a hurry. "Horses again, eh? You know" —he drank—"I'm happy about that. I was afraid you'd never have them anymore. Costs a lot of money to keep horses."

  "You worried about me?" What she wanted in her smile was disbelief but her damp eyes showed she was touched. "I worried about you, Billy."

  "You had a right," he grunted. Back to her, he opened the top magazine in a stack on a shelf. Dave caught a glimpse of naked male bodies. In color. Billy Wendell shut the magazine fast. He turned to face his wife. "I didn't land on my feet. Charm and good looks weren't in a seller's market in those days. By the time they were, I was an old wreck."

  "No," she protested gently. "Ah, Billy. There's so much to talk about." She glanced back at the open door, the morning light. "Will you come with me? To the stable up the hill?"

  Dave said, "In a minute, Mrs. Wendell." He picked up his jacket, dug out the flattened paper straps. "These were in that empty envelope on the desk. From the bank." He laid them in her hand. "What do they mean? Where's the fifteen hundred?"

  She frowned at the straps, then at him. "Fifteen —" She paled, then reddened. "That damned boy!"

  "He was naked, remember?" Dave said and took back the straps. "Each of these held twenty-five twenty-dollar bills. They'd make a bulge even if he'd had pockets."

  "Then —" She looked at her hand as if surprised to find the glass there. She drank from it. Her blue eyes on Dave's were uncertain. "It —it must have gone with Rick to the bar. Of course." "Out of the envelope?" Dave said. "Obviously," she said.

  "All right." Dave shrugged into the jacket. "Thanks for your help." He went to the desk for the envelope, tucked the straps into it, held it up. "I'll take this if it won't inconvenience you."

  For a moment she looked doubtful. Then she shrugged. "Why not?"

  "Why not?" Billy Wendell said. Loudly but to himself, rattling bottle against glass. Then softly. "Why not? That's what I say. What does anything matter now? Rick's dead. My son's dead." He turned toward his wife and the tears were streaming now.

  "Billy, Billy!" She went toward him with her arms held out. Big strong arms he'd made a mistake ever to leave. They embraced him, held him.

  Dave went out into the sun.

  CHAPTER 3

  ACE KEGAN SAID, "It's a hassle to change names."

  The years had taken the curl and most of the black out of his hair and there wasn't a lot of it left. What there was he combed forward into bangs. His waist had thickened but he still looked hard and muscular. He stood shirtless and barefoot in faded Levi's and watched through open glass slide doors while outside on a slatted deck a slender suntanned kid of maybe eighteen in very short shorts fisted a punching bag on a shiny spring-steel pole. His shoulder-length yellow hair flopped. He had a silky yellow mandarin mustache. Backgrounding him, the Pacific wrote white scribbles to itself on a blue slate under a wide smile of sky. The surf lipped pale sand beyond a stagger of red dune fences.

  Kegan went on, "I'd have liked to take The Square Circle with me when we bought the place. But what the hell, who knows boxing down here? Down here it's surfing. And the Hang Ten sign was already there and neon costs like you wouldn't believe. Anyway, fags aren't into prize fighting." His sidelong grin at Dave showed chipped teeth that were very white. His nose was mashed. Scar tissue was thick over his eyes. An ear was crumpled. He still managed to be handsome. Dave let himself grin back.

  "Are they into surfing?"

  "Into surfers" —Kegan laughed—"they wish." He raised his sandpaper voice. "Bobby, come in here and make the man and me a drink." He took Dave's elbow and steered him among barbells, a rowing machine, an Exercycle, to a couch that was long and low and covered in white fake fur. "Sit down, Mr. Brandstetter. What did you want to know?"

  Dave said, "What excuse did Richard
Wendell give you for not being at work that night —Monday?"

  "He was at work," Kegan said. "Half an hour early: three-thirty. He didn't split till nearly eight." He told the boy, "On the double, Bobby, please," and dropped onto the other end of the couch. "What'll you have to drink?"

  "Whatever you're having," Dave said, hoping for coffee. But what the boy brought from the kitchen beyond a chest-high room divider banked with plastic flowers was a tall, thick, creamy mixture colored orange. Kegan took a long gulp of his and smacked his lips. Dave watched him, doubtful. "Go ahead, try it. Every vitamin and mineral you can name. One glass and you can go fifteen stand-up rounds." Bobby stood in front of them, straddling barbells and staring at Dave's glass with willful, empty brown eyes. Kegan asked him, "Right, baby?"

  "Aw, shit," Bobby said. "A piece of dry toast and black coffee for breakfast. I'm hungry, Ace."

  "Yeah, and you're also a lard collector. You know what it does to you. Bobby Reich, shake hands with David Brandstetter. Check his build. I'll bet he doesn't even eat breakfast." Ace turned over a thick wrist to check a multidialed watch. "Go run for half an hour. But when you get to the pier, keep away from the chili dogs, right? I got you looking like Apollo Belvedere now. Don't wreck it before the big night." ,

  "Yeah, okay." Bobby headed eagerly for the door.

  "And no Cokes, either. None of that lousy sugar water. When you get back here, I'll build you a salad, broil you a steak."

  "Gee, thanks." Bobby made a six-year-old's face.

  "You'll thank me when you walk off with all the marbles," Ace said. "You got T. S. Eliot this afternoon, remember? Before we hit the funeral. And La Boheme after. Did you read about Puccini last night, like I said?"

  "I fell asleep," Bobby answered.

  "Yeah," Ace said. " 'I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.' Recite that on your way."

  "Jesus!" the blond youth said and left.