Death Claims: A Dave Bran[d]stetter Mystery Read online

  "I didn't say the blow on the head killed him. He drowned. I believe the coroner." He gave her a thin smile. "I believe him the way you do—uneasily. You can't figure John Oats going to swim in the rain."

  "The police believe him," she argued.

  "You told me yourself the police don't care. They've got a verdict that doesn't involve them. It's not their problem anymore. It's still my problem." He lit a cigarette. "He could have been knocked unconscious here in this room, undressed and dragged down to the beach and into the water."

  "Not by Peter." Her face set stubbornly. "He couldn't, he wouldn't. Why would he?"

  "For twenty thousand dollars." Dave walked to the fogged glass wall. A trawler inched along the far blue edge of the horizon. "You say he had supper with his father. Maybe his father told him he was changing beneficiaries. Did Peter need twenty thousand dollars?"

  "No. Whatever for?"

  "I'd like to ask him." Dave turned. "Why don't you know where he is? Weren't you on speaking terms?"

  She flushed. "I invited Peter down here to live. Before his father, even. I felt sorry for him. He was miserable with his mother. Especially after she—" Her voice dropped. "After she did what she did. But they never got along. While John was in the house it was, well, at least possible. With John in the hospital, he simply couldn't take it. There was room here. I said, 'Stay at the beach place.' I was still living at the family house then. In time I sold it. Had to. There were so many bills, such huge bills."

  "Not yours, though. John Oats's—right?"

  She nodded. "There was operation after operation. Specialists. Skin grafts. Hideous. There were so many times he thought he couldn't take it anymore, when he was ready to give up, when he just wanted to be allowed to die and get it over with."

  "So Peter came to live here?" Dave bent at the table to use the parakeet ashtray. "Then you came. And finally you brought John Oats when he was released from the hospital. And Peter moved out."

  "No. John was here in time for Christmas. Peter didn't move out till—what?—two, three weeks ago. He'd had a birthday. He'd graduated from El Molino State."

  "You don't know where he went. Do you know why?"

  "Well, it wasn't because he was underfoot. When he wasn't at school, he was at the El Molino Stage. It's the community little theatre. But even if he hadn't been, he wasn't childish. He was happy for John and me. Yes, it's a small place. Yes, John and I slept together. It's not the nineteenth century anymore, Mr. Brandstetter. Especially not to people under twenty-one."

  "I'll have to change my calendar," Dave said. "The one with the kittens and the satin bows." He picked up his cup and swallowed some coffee. "If you were getting along with him, why didn't he tell you his reason for going'? He had to say something."

  "I wasn't here for him to say anything to. I was working again. He didn't come home the night before. Next evening when I got here he'd moved out."

  "Just like that. What did his father say?"

  She breathed in sharply. "Look, Mr. Brandstetter, suppose you leave now. I really don't think I have to answer your questions. I've told the police all about this. Captain Campos. If you really feel you need to know, I'm sure his records will be open to you, just as the inquest transcript was." She stood up.

  "You don't want to send me to the police, Miss Stannard." He looked at her hard and straight. "Not unless you've got it in for Peter for some reason. See, they don't know yet that John Oats was about to erase Peter as his beneficiary."

  Her mouth was a tight line for a minute. Then she went to the window. Her words came to him flattened by the glass. "John didn't say anything. 'I don't want to discuss it,' was all. He drank more than usual that evening. I thought I could get an explanation from him then. I couldn't."

  "Was he angry?"

  She turned. "Not angry. Depressed. Terribly. He loved Peter. They'd gone through so much together. That woman was such a bitch. I don't think either of them could have made it alone. They'd been a team. Now, suddenly they weren't a team anymore."

  "He had another woman now." Dave gave her a smile. "One who wasn't a bitch."

  She returned the smile, but dimly. "Maybe. I'm afraid I acted like one right then. I hated for him to be so unhappy. I hated Peter for having done it to him. I guess I was jealous too. It was the first time he'd ever shut me out that way. We'd always been open with each other. But he'd suffered so much I couldn't turn on him. Instead I said a lot of harsh things about Peter. John didn't respond right. He just stared at me. Sad. So sad." She shivered, clutched herself, turned back to the window.

  "Maybe he brooded about the boy." Dave bent to twist out his cigarette. "Maybe he could have walked into the surf in the rain, not wanting to come out."

  She turned back, stung. "I was here."

  "Not that day. It might have been too long for him. There are days like that."

  "No. He wouldn't. Not after the fight he'd put up to stay alive. Not after the way I'd fought to keep him alive. He wouldn't. He wouldn't do it to me."

  Dave moved to the shelves, prying reading glasses out of his jacket pocket. The books were ninety percent old. Some of them respectably, some just shabbily. But they all had a chosen look. He put the glasses on. "I don't know what sent him to the hospital."

  "Burns. They'd bought a new house. Not new, but expensive. Not his idea. Eve's. That was how she was. Never satisfied. Always asking him for more, more."

  "Some men need that," Dave said, "or think they do." He took down a book in dark-blue cloth with worn gold bars stamped across the thick spine. Look Homeward, Angel. Scribner, 1929. The "A" below the copyright data made it a first edition. "He stayed with her."

  She let that pass. "It was a hillside house, with a storage room under it on the down slope at the back. He wanted to use it for books. There were always more than the shop could hold. It's the same with every bookseller. The car sits rusting in the street because the garage is filled with books."

  He set the Thomas Wolfe book back. There were others beside it—Of Time and the River, stocky black and green, From Death to Morning, soft coffee brown.

  "There were grease stains on the cement floor and John wanted to be able to set books down there while he arranged them on the shelves he was going to build in. And so—" The tough dungaree of her skirt whistled against the chintz as she sat down again. "He got a can of gasoline and was going to scrub up the grease stains. The weather was cold. The door and windows were shut. The gas hot-water heater was in the corner. And when he splashed the stuff around, either the gas itself touched the pilot flame or maybe just the fumes. Anyway, in a second the floor was a sheet of flame and he was burning. It happens so fast, fire does. You don't have a chance with it. Human beings are so—"

  "Vulnerable." Dave looked at the other Wolfe books. They had the "A" too. 1935. Three years afterward the big writer had shared his pint of rye with a sick man on a Victoria-to-Vancouver steamer and caught the virus that killed him at thirty-eight. Eleven years younger than John Oats was when he died. "And it took a long time to patch him up. And you were around all the while, sold your house and your car to pay the bills." He turned and she was a blur because that was what the reading glasses made of everything distant. He took them off, folded the bows with a click, tucked them away. "He had life insurance. Didn't he have any other kind?"

  She shut her eyes and gave her head a quick shake. "Only the usual automobile things. No health insurance. I mean"—her hands lifted and dropped—"he was so young, thought so young, moved so young. His body wasn't a man's nearly fifty. It was trim and hard, you know? Just naturally. He wasn't an exercise addict, he never dieted. Maybe if he'd had that kind of mind he'd have had Blue Cross or something. He didn't. He took his body for granted. It never occurred to him anything could go wrong with it because nothing ever had. It had always worked for him, it always would."

  "Till it stopped completely," Dave said. "Life insurance he did have. And more than average."

  "That was for othe
rs," she said. "Look, it wasn't just my house and car. It was his too, and the business, the bookstore, his part of it. Charles Norwood bought him out, his partner. It was everything. Even Eve. That was worst. While he was getting ahead, succeeding, she stuck with him. But when this happened and the doctors said he could die and that even if he didn't he probably couldn't lead a useful life again, she divorced him."

  "Nice woman," Dave said.

  "You can understand why Peter wanted out, then?"

  "I can understand. And why he came here. You're special, Miss Stannard."

  "Is that a way of saying 'crazy'?" she wondered. "Most people think I am—Mother's friends, the people down here in Arena Blanca, the doctors. What did I want with a man half eaten away by fire? Well, he wasn't 'a man.' He was John Oats. And I loved him. Before it happened and afterward and forever." Tears drew silver lines down her face. She smeared them with thin girl fingers, the nails short and without enamel. "I'm sorry."

  "Did something happen to Peter's love?"

  "I don't think so, no. He was going through changes. You do at that age. He was different from when he'd come down last summer. But not toward John. They were still good together. Warm and easy and funny with each other. But Peter was away a lot. At the Stage, the little theatre. Acting was new with him. Books had been pretty much it till then. And his guitar. Now it was all acting. John and I went to the last play. A costume thing. Peter was very good. Natural. Mr. Whittington said afterward he had a great future if he'd keep working."

  3

  THE WATERWHEEL WAS twice a man's height, wider than a man's two stretched arms. The timbers, braced and bolted with rusty iron, were heavy, hand-hewn, swollen with a century of wet. Moss bearded the paddles, which dripped as they rose. The sounds were good. Wooden stutter like children running down a hall at the end of school. Grudging axle thud like the heartbeat of a strong old man.

  A wooden footbridge crossed below the wheel. The quick stream under it looked cold. The drops hitting it played a chilly tune. The base of the mill wall next to the stream was slimy green with lichen. Higher, it showed rough brick. The building was tall, massive, blind as a fort. Old eucalypts towered around it, peeling tattered brown bark, their shadows ragged blue on the whitewashed walls.

  A barn door fronted the mill. Posters were tacked to it, photos curling off them, actors, smiles bright, scowls deep. A smaller door had been carpentered into the big one, top and bottom halves separately hinged, a box-stall door. Above it, gold letters flaked off a crackled black signboard—EL MOUNO STAGE. Churchly. A bent finger of black iron poked through a slot in the door. He rattled it up and walked in.

  The lobby was chilly and dim. Three steps from the door a long table on spindly aluminum legs trailed a white paper cover stained with coffee. A big coffeemaker stood on it, thumbsmeared chrome like the napkin dispensers, the screw tops of sugar jars. Polyethylene tubes that had held styrofoam cups lay crumpled like ghosts of sleeves. Cigarette butts, ticket stubs, playbills strewed the plank floor. The high false wall of white plasterboard back of the table had a poster too, and photographs. The boy in the one labeled PETER OATS had the face of a young Spanish Christ.

  Dave went through a doorway in the false wall and in the dark his shoe nudged steps quieted with carpet. He climbed them and stood behind ranks of wooden theatre seats, six or eight shadowy rows. Matching rows went off at right angles to these. They framed on three sides an empty oblong of flooring over which, in deep reaches of gloom, boxy black spotlights clutched splintery rafters like tin owls. At the far end of the floor space daylight leaked around the edges of a black partition.

  Beyond it he found a half-open door and beyond the door a big room with two high, narrow windows. Down one side of the room racks of iron gaspipe held costumes, glinting gold braid, shimmering satin, plummy velvet. The rest of the room was booths, two-by-fours and fiberboard, head-high. Empty coat-hangers dangled off the partitions. Bentwood chairs faced pine counters littered with wadded Kleenex, spent greasepaint tubes, empty soft-drink cans, under squares of cheap mirror, lightbulbed on either side, flecked with powder.

  In a rear corner doors tagged MEN and WOMEN hung half open on darkness. A faucet dripped. In the other corner an iron staircase spiraled up. Its cleated treads gonged under his shoes. At the top he rapped a black door. Nobody came. He turned the knob, pushed, and the door opened. He wasn't sure what he'd expected —an office, a storeroom? It was a little of both, but it was also an apartment. Thick whitewashed walls and canted ceilings with charred beams. Dormer windows, small. Furniture from a dozen different periods.

  "Hello?" he said. "Anybody here?"

  No answer. The rugs were two and three deep, so there was no way to move but silently. He ducked the beams in the small dining space. A lot of copper hung against the mill's original brick in the kitchen. No sign or smell of meals past or to come. The pitch of the ceiling, the low beams were a real hazard in the bedroom. The bed was no place to sit up quickly. But the naked youth in the bed didn't show any sign of sitting up quickly. He lay on his front with a rumpled sheet tangled between his legs and breathed out stale fumes of alcohol. One hand hung off the bed edge. On the floor under it an eight-by-ten picture frame lay on its face. Dave picked it up, turned it over-carved wood brushed with gilt. There was no picture in it, only the glass and the cardboard backing. He frowned at the sleeping boy. He was dark, but his face was turned away. Dave wanted to see the face. He reached to touch the boy's shoulder and heard feet on the iron staircase. He set the picture frame on the bedside stand and left the room.

  The knob of the black door rattled and a fat man pushed in, clutching brown paper sacks loaded with groceries. He must have weighed close to three hundred pounds. He was fair and blue-eyed. Pale reddish hair lay thin across his pink scalp. He puffed a little and turned to nudge the door shut. He had a musical voice. It almost tinkled. "Here we are. Food at last. Rise and shine. The shower head is a little tricky. If you-" He didn't finish the instructions. He saw Dave. The tinkling stopped, as if a screwdriver had been jammed into a music box. He tried to look outraged. He only managed to look scared. "Who are you? What do you mean—?"

  "Is your name Whittington?"

  "I think I'm the one to ask the questions." His eyes kept swiveling to the bedroom door. Sweat broke out on his upper lip, his forehead. "This is my home. I'm not accustomed to—"

  "The place is public," Dave said, "a theatre, a community theatre. The doors weren't locked. I walked through them. I'm looking for Peter Oats." He jerked his head toward the bedroom. "Is that Peter Oats?"

  "Certainly not. That's my nephew. He's in the service. On leave. He spent the night." Whittington edged haughtily past Dave and up the short steps to the eating area. He waltzed, dodging the beams, got to the kitchen and set the stacks down with an annoyed tin-can clatter. "Not that it's any conceivable business of yours."

  "It's my business." Dave went after him. Not carefully enough. He banged his head. He stood rubbing the bruise for a minute, then leaned in the kitchen doorway and watched the fat man empty the sacks and stow his haul away in cupboards and refrigerator. "Peter Oats's father drowned last week. His life was insured by the company I work for, Medallion. Peter was his beneficiary. The young woman where he used to live doesn't know where he's gone. I thought you might know. She said he used to spend a lot of time here."

  " 'Used to'?" Whittington's laugh was unamused. "Yes. She's right there. Lots of time. But not anymore." He cracked eggs into a mixing bowl as if they were hateful little skulls. "Now, if you don't mind—" He bent to flap open shutter doors under the sink. A wastebasket was alone there like a dwarf prince in a dungeon —royal-purple plastic embossed with gold fleur-de-lis. Whittington winced and the hand with the eggshells hesitated a second as if it pained him to put the elegant thing to use. Then with a little twitch of his mouth he chucked in the shells and shut the doors. "I have breakfast to prepare, that boy to get fed, bathed, shaved, dressed and in his right mind. I have to
drive him to the bus station in town and be back up here for a rehearsal at one. I haven't a minute to spare. If I had, I couldn't tell you a single useful thing."

  "Peter Oats was pretty deep into theatre." Dave lit a cigarette. "What suddenly turned him off it?"

  With the sharp point of a paring knife Whittington slit the cellophane on a block of yellow cheese. He dropped the knife back into its drawer, found a grater and rubbed the cheese against it over the bowl that held the eggs. "You're utterly insensitive, aren't you?"

  "I've got a job to do," Dave said.

  "Peter got a swollen head, if you must know."

  "How?" Four latticy white iron chairs stood at a latticy white iron table with a glass top at the near end of the room. A rococo pair of white plaster candelabra on the table sheltered a white fluted plaster urn full of fake peaches, apples, walnuts, autumn leaves. A big bivalve shell was there too, its pearly lining sooty. Dave tapped ashes into it and drew out a chair and sat on it. "I had the idea he was a nice kid, unspoiled."

  "So had I." Whittington rewrapped the cheese and put it back in the refrigerator. "El Molino Stage has a reputation." He blasted the grater with hot water at the sink and stood it on the counter to drain dry. "As a result, people from Hollywood—the television companies, the film studios, the talent agencies—come here shopping for new material. A situation I deplore. But they pay for their seats. There's no way to keep them out."

  "And one of them bought Peter Oats?" Dave asked.

  Out of pink butcher paper Whittington spilled a string of little pink sausages into an iron skillet. He cut butter into another. He twisted burner knobs and circles of blue flame drew themselves under the pans. "Excuse me," he said and went out of the kitchen.

  Dave heard him clap hands briskly and scatter words like merry bells around the bedroom. He got off the chair and crouched to open the shutter doors under the sink. The wastebasket held color transparencies, dozens of them, in tidy white cardboard frames. He lifted one into the steep slant of light from the window over the sink. Peter Oats, suntanned in swim trunks, at the tiller of a sailboat, grinning, hair blowing, blue water, blue sky. Another. Peter Oats startled by a flashbulb at a ginghamed cafe table, fork half raised to half-open mouth. A third, Peter Oats in Renaissance tights, short velvet jacket, slashed puff sleeves, sword half drawn, snarling. Then the floor creaked where Whittington waltzed among the rafters and there was no more time. Dave dropped the slides, shut the doors and was standing staring out the bright window when the fat man came in.