Early Graves Read online

  “Ever heard the name?” Leppard tucked the license back into the wallet. “Still can’t say how he came by your card?”

  “Never heard the name,” Dave said. “Still can’t say.”

  The two men from the coroner’s wagon were young, one Asian, one Latino. The Asian had skin like ivory. The Latino’s face was scarred by acne. He was trying to grow a beard to cover the scars, but the hairs were sparse and silky. He said, “Lieutenant, can we have the body now?” A body bag hung folded over his arm. A collapsed gurney leaned against the leg of the Asian kid, raindrops twinkling on its chrome-plated frame.

  When Leppard nodded his head, the Asian kid clicked and clacked the gurney open. The Latino boy laid the body bag on it and ran its zipper down. The Asian boy took the rigid shell of Harold Andrew Dodge in its rain-sodden clothes under its arms, the Latino lad took it under the bent knees, and they shifted it onto the gurney on its side, and worked the body bag over it and zipped the body bag. They wheeled the gurney away, rattling and tilting over the uneven bricks. “What about Cecil?” Leppard said. “Does he know him?” Dave said, “He doesn’t know him.” But was that a fact? I’m not sleeping around. Why had he said that? Dave had never suggested it. He trusted Cecil totally, as if a long life in a harsh business had taught him nothing. Cecil was startled to find Dodge’s body here. But more startled than normal? Dave hadn’t thought so. Yet he had cleared out fast after that drink. He had been in a tearing hurry to get away. Dave shook his head angrily to clear out the doubts. Leppard was manipulating him.

  “He does live here with you.” Leppard put watch, chain, the rest of the trove from the dead man’s pockets into a five-by-eight manila envelope. He wrote on the envelope in ballpoint ink that the rain began to smear at once. He lifted the envelope to his mouth to lick the flap, then didn’t lick it. Instead, he folded the flap and fastened it with the little metal prongs provided.

  Dave said, “You’re afraid of catching it.”

  “You damn right,” Leppard said. “Aren’t you?” Dave felt cold in the pit of his stomach. Not for himself. For Cecil. Suppose that cry of denial had been false this morning. Suppose his shock at seeing Dodge sitting here had been deeper than he showed. Suppose Dodge had been Cecil’s answer to a need Chrissie couldn’t fulfill. And Dave wouldn’t fulfill out of a stubborn sense of rectitude.

  “It kills you in eighteen months,” Leppard said. “But that’s not the worst.” His expression was wooden. Dave knew a joke was coming. “The worst is, you lose all this weight. I couldn’t wear any of my clothes. Hell, half of them aren’t even paid for yet.”

  “Eighteen months makes killing them seem pointless,” Dave said. “Who is this crazy with a knife?”

  “Somebody who always hated queers. Like the religious nuts. All he needed was AIDS to set him off. I don’t know. But eighteen months gets precious when it’s all you’ve got. You said Cecil brought you home from LAX.”

  “But he doesn’t live here anymore. He’s got an apartment in Mar Vista. He married Christina Streeter, remember? The foreign correspondent’s daughter?”

  “Pretty blind girl,” Leppard said. “Slipped my mind.”

  “Because it didn’t fit your equation,” Dave said.

  Out in front, the heavy rear door of the coroner’s wagon thudded shut. The side doors slammed. The starter whinnied, the engine rumbled, and in the damp noon quiet they could hear the tires crunch twigs as the black car rolled off down the canyon.

  “What equation is that?” Leppard said.

  “That I was homosexual, which meant Cecil was homosexual, and homosexuals don’t marry. You don’t want to think in accepted patterns, Lieutenant. Not in your job. Not about people in crises. I’ve been dealing with them for forty years. They seldom do what you expect.”

  Leppard looked at him but didn’t answer. He drew breath. “The connection could be Junipero Serra hospital. The first five were all in there, one time or another. Maybe this one was too. They get sick a lot. That’s what the virus does.”

  “Right,” Dave said. “Knocks out the immune system.”

  “So they go in for swollen lymph glands,” Leppard said. “Or night sweats. Or diarrhea that won’t stop.” The rain began to come down hard. He winced up at it, hunched his shoulders, moved toward the cookshack at the side of the courtyard. Dave followed him. “Or sudden weight loss. Or weakness—can’t stand on their legs to get dressed to go to work.”

  Dave opened the cookshack door for him, reached in and switched on lights, followed Leppard inside. Leppard un-snapped his raincoat. The stiff plastic rattled as he got out of it and hung it on a brass wall hook by the door. Dave closed the door, and began to look into cupboards.

  Leppard said, “Or they get pneumonia. Or blue spots on the skin that turn into lesions.”

  “Kaposi’s sarcoma.” Dave brought sour rye bread from a cupboard. “Intestinal parasites. Brain parasites.” He found butter, cheese, mayonnaise in a big refrigerator whose state-of-the-art works were disguised behind the oaken doors of a very old icebox. “I know they go in and out. Until they’re too sick, too blind, or too crazy to go out again alive.” He set the stuff from the refrigerator on the counter. “Sit down. A drink? They didn’t go to any other hospitals?”

  “Sure.” Leppard drew out a pine chair at an old deal table scoured white, and sat down. “But Junipero Serra is a constant. I’m thinking of that male nurse a few years back, who killed all those dying old people.”

  “Not out in the street,” Dave said. “Not in some parking garage, some driveway. In a hospital—with injections.”

  “Right.” Leppard sighed. “Sure, a drink. Thank you.”

  Bottles stood in sleek ranks on a counter. Dave looked at them and raised his brows at Leppard. “Bourbon, please.” Dave got glasses and ice. He poured Wild Turkey over ice cubes in a stocky Swedish glass for the lieutenant, and Glenlivet over ice cubes in a glass like it for himself. He took the bourbon to Leppard, who tasted it, opened his eyes wide, and said, “Now, that is something. Tell me, how do I go about becoming an insurance investigator?”

  “What you want to ask”—Dave cut butter onto a grill—“is how do I get hold of thirty percent of the shares of a big insurance company. And the answer is, be the founder’s only son—all right?”

  “I’ll start arranging that today,” Leppard said. He drank lovingly again, and frowned. “If people act the opposite of what you expect, can you ever get so smart beforehand you know what the opposite is going to be?”

  Dave shrugged. “Time and a long history of hit and miss help. And luck at the moment you need it.” He busied himself stroking mayonnaise onto slices of bread. He rummaged out a bottle of Dijon mustard and smeared some of this on too. He poked inside the refrigerator again, hefted out half a ham, cut thick slabs from this, laid these on the bread. He grated crumbly yellow cheese and piled this on the ham, closed the sandwiches, used a spatula to lay them in the sizzling butter on the grill. Now and only now, he shed the trenchcoat, hung it beside Leppard’s coat, and brought his drink to the table. “Someone had a reason for bringing Dodge to me.” He sat down opposite Leppard, lit a cigarette, tasted his Scotch. “It wasn’t to threaten me. I don’t know the man. I don’t have AIDS. So it wasn’t the killer who brought him.”

  “According to your theory”—Leppard reached across and drew a cigarette from Dave’s pack on the tabletop, and used Dave’s slim steel lighter to light the cigarette, and laid the lighter down again—“it was the opposite. Which means his mother brought him, right?”

  “You’ll have to ask her, won’t you?” Dave said. “If she exists, you’re the one who has to tell her that her son is dead. You have to do that, even if she already knows it.”

  Leppard shifted unhappily on his chair and sighed. Smoke blew out of his nostrils. He looked at the cigarette in his thick fingers. “You know, I haven’t smoked in three months? See what this is doing to me? I hate that. I hate that part worst of all. Telling the family.”r />
  “Be blunt.” Dave went back to the looming stove, took a look at the sandwiches, and turned them over with the spatula. His timing was right. The downsides were golden and crisp. The cheese was beginning to melt. “If you upset them, they may blurt things out they’d keep secret otherwise.”

  “I read the interrogation textbook,” Leppard said.

  “Forgive me,” Dave said. He came back to the table for another swallow of Glenlivet, a pull at his cigarette. He didn’t sit down this time. “I’m getting old. The old think nobody knows anything but them.”

  “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.

  3

  RANCHO 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.”