Skinflick Read online

  He braked the Electra at Sunset for a red light. Across the broad curving stream of traffic lay the park with the little lake, the ducks in the rushes, the muggers in the bushes, the sunburned tourists rowing battered little skiffs and peering through Instamatics at the glass skyscrapers beyond the tops of palms. When the light turned green, he swung left, making for Bethel Evangelical Church. But he changed his mind because the door of Lon Tooker’s shop hung open under a red-and-white tin sign, KEYHOLE BOOKS. It took a while to find a tilted street he could swing into and back up out of, but at least there was no parking problem. Except for a corner Mexican grocery, the rest of the flat-roof one-story brown-brick store buildings along this stretch held businesses that flourished only after dark.

  The carpet inside Tooker’s place was thick enough to make it dangerous for anybody with weak ankles. It was gold color. Flocked gold-color wallpaper rose above the bookshelves. Gold-color paint was new on a ceiling from which hung fake crystal chandeliers. Plastic-wrapped magazines lay back at forty-five-degree angles on low shelves. The color printing was sharp but the subjects were monotonous. Spread legs, lace underwear, girls lifting massive breasts while they leered and coaxed. Or youths displaying bulky penises. No little girls. But then, this wasn’t all the stock. A few feet farther on, stairs carried the thick, gold carpet upward between frail wrought-iron railings. Thumps seemed to be coming from there. Dave went up.

  Fake fur covered deep square chairs. On wood-grain Formica coffee tables glistened green bubble-glass ashtrays. Here the shelves were packed—except for those already stripped by the youngster with knobby elbows who was dumping magazines, big picture books, and paperbacks into cartons. He was sweating so hard his shoulder-length blond hair looked as if he’d just brought it out of a swimming pool. He didn’t wear a shirt. Pimples the size of boils flamed across his coat-hanger shoulders. He winced at Dave for a second before turning away again for more books.

  “Ah, Christ, did she leave that door open? Look, dad, we’re closed.”

  “Forever?” Dave asked.

  “You got it.” The boy dumped a stack of magazines into a carton and worked at the carton flaps, tucking one under another, to keep it shut. “No more Keyhole Books.”

  “Not even a going-out-of-business sale?”

  “Mort Weiskopf over on Western’s taking the stock.”

  “What’s the hurry?” Dave dropped into one of the fur chairs. “Money for lawyers?”

  The skinny boy hitched at his pants. “What do you know about it? Where do you come from?”

  “The company that insured Gerald Dawson’s life.”

  “Yeah, the money’s for lawyers. That son of a bitch goes right on making trouble even when he’s dead. You know he came in here with a bunch of potbelly bastards from that church one night and tossed the place? Threw books all over. Dumped paint on the rugs.”

  “That was the time to get the lawyer,” Dave said.

  “We couldn’t prove who it was. They wore masks. I mean, we knew but the lawyer said they had alibis—they got this club at the church, right? They were all there. On their fat knees. Praying. For us sinners.”

  “It could have been six other people,” Dave said.

  “Except Dawson was yapping orders,” the kid said. “Quoting the Bible. Sodom and What’s-its-name? All that shit. It had to be Dawson. Nobody else had a voice like that. High and gravelly, and cracking all the time.”

  “But the lawyer said you couldn’t get him?”

  “Dash, across the street, tried it.” The kid grunted, squatting, heaping up magazines. “The guy who owns the Oh Boy! Lives halfway up the hill. Sees a funny light outside in the middle of the night. Comes out. His VW is on fire. Sitting there in his driveway. On fire all over. He knew it was Dawson and his vigilantes. But no, they were having a meeting, singing hymns. Shit.” He heaved tottering to his feet under a load of coated paper and dropped the load into another carton. “And the cops don’t care, you know? Fag-bar owner’s car burns up. That’s funny. To them that’s funny, right?”

  A young woman in a man’s white shirt that she’d tied under her breasts, and in very small white shorts, stopped at the head of the stairs. She was honey color.

  “We’re closed for business,” she said. She tried to lift the carton the kid had closed, squatting for it, trying to rise up. “Jesus. What’s inside—bricks? We’re not taking the building, are we?”

  The skinny kid didn’t look at her. “You want the cartons half full, say so.”

  “I don’t want them at all,” she said. “This is Lonny’s idea. He gets so panicky.”

  “They lock you up for murder,” the kid said, “it’s probably hard to stay calm. Are you going to load the car or not? You want me to carry, you fill the cartons?”

  She picked up the carton without seeming effort. Her thighs were boyish and hard-muscled. “If he didn’t buy horses, he wouldn’t need money.” She turned with the carton and saw Dave again. “You look like you could afford a couple of overpriced palominos. How about half a dozen? Come on, beautiful. It’s for a good cause.”

  “The seat’s too high off the ground,” Dave said. He got up. “Here. I’ll carry that.” She started to protest and he told her, “It’s for a good cause, right?” Her car was two doors off in a weedy vacant lot between brick walls spray-painted with street-gang graffiti. The car was one of those eighteen-thousand-dollar Mercedes sports models with the roof that dips. The trunk space was limited. She was going to have to make a lot of trips to Western. “The kid says Dawson is the vigilante chief.”

  “We all say so,” she said, “but we can’t prove it. The straights went after the vigilantes when they ripped down the bushes in the park. Pensioners. Housewives with kiddies. They ruined their park to keep the fags out of the shrubbery at two in the morning. At two in the morning, who cares what’s in the shrubbery? And they couldn’t nail them. So what can us pre-verts and smut peddlers expect?” She slammed down the trunk lid.

  “Did your friend Lonny take the short route?”

  She stared. Her eyes were flecked with gold. “What does that mean?”

  “Get fed up waiting for justice?” Dave said. “Eliminate Dawson before Dawson eliminated him? Replacing that kind of carpeting could run into money if you had to do it very often.”

  “You know what kind of a man Lonny Tooker is? The kind of a man that sets broken bird’s wings.”

  “Hitler loved dogs and babies,” Dave said.

  “He’s a big, strong guy. He could kill anything alive with his bare hands. A bull, an elephant.”

  Dave put a hand over her mouth. “You didn’t say that.”

  Her eyes widened. “Oh God. No. I didn’t say it. What I meant was—he’s gentle. A big, soft gentle dreamer. A lover. He loves everything that moves and breathes. He’s dumb as hell but he wouldn’t hurt anybody, let alone kill.” She looked at her watch. “Come on. I have to hurry.”

  Dave trotted after her. It was too hot for that but he did it anyway, shedding his jacket as he ran. At the top of the stairs, he asked the skinny kid, “Was Dawson in here the night he was killed?”

  “Nobody was in. It was a dead night. About five stragglers. But nobody was here after ten. Just Lon and me. We played gin.”

  “Who won?” Dave laid his coat on the stair rail.

  “I can answer that.” The girl had another carton and was halfway down the steps with it. “Lon won. He wins any game you win by getting low points.”

  “She’s right,” the skinny kid said. He patted stacks of paperbacks inside a carton. He stood, and treated himself to a look at a magazine, flapping the sleek, flesh-tone pages over, but not, Dave thought, really seeing the tangles of bodies in the photographs. The kid slapped the magazine shut and tossed it into a carton at his feet. He reached for the cigarette Dave had lighted. Dave passed it to him. The kid blew the smoke out appreciatively. He took another deep inhalation and handed the cigarette back. “You know,” he said, “those creeps are h
ypocrites, you know?” He tipped his head, frowning. “Is that the right word? Anyway—what I mean—they cream themselves over this crap. They pretend it shocks them, but you can see from the way they lick their lips, they’re practically coming in their pants.”

  “What kind of masks?” Dave asked.

  “Ski masks. I kid you not. They were drooling. They want to look at this stuff like anybody. Only they didn’t have the nerve to walk in and ask for it and pay for it and like that. Oh, no. They toss the place, wreck it, make out all they want is Lon to get out of the neighborhood, see?”

  “I don’t know,” Dave said. “Do I?”

  “Sure you do. We put the stock back on the shelves. And guess what? Some magazines are missing.” The kid snorted a cynical little laugh and reached for Dave’s cigarette again. “Somebody couldn’t control theirself.”

  “Pictures of little girls,” Dave said.

  The kid squinted. “Yeah. How did you know?”

  “Just a wild guess,” Dave said.

  “Not all real little,” the kid said. “Up to about twelve or something. Creepy, though—right? I mean, acting like they’re Mister Clean?” He looked at the cigarette. “You want the rest of this?” Dave shook his head. The kid sucked in smoke and let it out with a question. “What do they do—pass them around at those prayer meetings of theirs?”

  “Did Lonny kill Dawson?” Dave asked.

  “Over ten bucks’ worth of magazines wholesale?” The kid bent and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray. “Forget it.”

  “Over trying to wreck his business,” Dave said.

  “You don’t know Lon. All he wants is to play his guitar and ride his horses.”

  “Does he come to work in the clothes he rides in?”

  “No way. Never. Always right out of the shower, always neat and, what do you say, crisp? You smell horse in here? Never. Look, he’s stupid, but sweet stupid, okay? Not mean stupid. You should hear the songs he writes. They make ‘Feelings’ sound like a Nazi march or something. And what he never wants is trouble. Not with anybody.”

  “He picked a troublesome business,” Dave said.

  “To help people feel good nobody cares about.”

  “A kindly philosopher,” Dave said.

  “Yeah, well, the money’s not that bad. And Lon hates to worry about money. It gives him headaches.”

  The girl called from below, “Car’s loaded. I’m off.”

  “Don’t drive under any trucks,” the kid called.

  “Did Lon go home that night?” Dave asked.

  “If you had something like her waiting for you”—the kid jerked his lank-haired head at the stairs—“where else would you go?”

  “She wasn’t there,” Dave said. “According to the police report, Karen Shiflett didn’t reach Tooker’s Topanga Canyon place until morning. She’d been with a sick brother at a hospital all night.”

  “He’s a hype. He tried to OD. Yeah.”

  “So there’s no proof Lon didn’t kill Dawson.”

  “He set himself up,” the kid said glumly. “Asshole. He should never have called the cops after that raid and told them it was Dawson.”

  “He couldn’t foresee Dawson would be murdered.”

  “He could stop believing in uniforms,” the kid said.

  3

  BETHEL EVANGELICAL CHURCH WAS a clumsy hulk on a backstreet corner. From outside, the stained-glass windows looked muddy. The structure was old frame, and the dazzling new white paint that covered the shiplap siding didn’t hide that the lines were all off kilter. What didn’t lean sagged, and what didn’t sag bulged. Pigeons waddled in and out of latticework high on a bulky steeple. They made pigeon noises. Dave came down the off-line cement steps he’d climbed to a pair of brightly varnished doors that wouldn’t open. He winced up at the pigeons. Then he walked a strip of new cement along a sun-hot side of the building to another set of steps that went up to a door.

  It was marked OFFICE and he opened it and stepped into cool air that smelled of mice and mildew. The place had stood empty and neglected for too long, but now new paint was in here too, a sprayed fiber soundproof ceiling. The same sort of deep carpet covered this floor as the floor at Lon Tooker’s sex shop, only here it was holy blue. Wood-grain Formica made the desk in front of him glossy. It held a white pushbutton phone. Beside the desk was a sleek electric typewriter. Slick-paper color pamphlets on alcoholism, abortion, divorce, narcotics, stood in a plastic rack.

  Behind the desk, a closed door had a brown plastic tag on it incised in white, PASTOR’S STUDY. He knocked on the door. Silence. A third door faced the one he’d come in. He opened it and was on the platform of the church auditorium. There was a square pulpit. Back of a railing were blue-plush theater seats for the choir. Organ pipes went up, the new gilt on them looking crusty. On the carpeting, plastic buckets waited, filled with cut flowers. For the funeral tomorrow of Gerald Dawson? He turned around. Out in the stained-glass dimness, varnished pews ranked a half acre of newly carpeted flooring. The emptiness was big.

  His father’s widows would have liked it. The tiny, crowded mortuary chapel hadn’t let them sit far enough apart in their gloves and veils. None of them had dared fail to show; attorneys, executors, were there as witnesses. Absence would have conveyed indifference to the millions in cash and shares Carl Brandstetter hadn’t been able to take with him. To have claimed not to know of his death wouldn’t have convinced anyone. A long obit had appeared with his Viking-handsome picture in a weekday Times business section, recounting his single-handed building of one of the nation’s life-insurance giants, Medallion. A Sunday Times article had focused on his splashy not-so-private life. His death from a heart attack while driving his Bentley on a two A.M. freeway was on every TV newscast.

  Dave pictured the widows scattered in the jammed pews. One had stood through the ceremony, at the rear, beside a fake twelfth-century baptismal font. Evelyn, if he remembered rightly. The stepmothers of his childhood were clear enough in his mind, whether he wanted them there or not. The later ones blurred. Most had been buxom blonds in their twenties who’d run to fat on their alimony payments, waiting for this funeral, when Dave had seen them together for the first and only time. But three or four, like the latest and last, Amanda, were dark. One of these, nineteen, his own age at the time, he’d almost fallen in love with. Lisa.

  When she’d taken his hand in her small gloved one between flowering shrubs outside the mortuary doors, and turned up to him big doe eyes that didn’t glow anymore, it was as if he saw her on old movie film, faded, scratchy. Her voice hardly reached him, and then it sounded ugly, guttural, all the long-ago romance of the foreign accent now scrap. Lines marred the beautiful bones and shadows of her face. She’d been slim and soft. She’d become scraggy. They’d tried reminiscing—this ballet with Eglevsky, that Heifetz concert at Hollywood Bowl—but not for long. His father’s ashes weren’t the only ones in that damp, fern-murky little chapel. Ah, the hell with it.

  “Hello!” he shouted. To no one.

  Outside, at the rear of the church, where the sun hammered an almost empty blacktop parking lot, he found a set of steps down into an areaway. The door at their foot opened into a hallway of small meeting rooms with steel folding chairs, now and then a piano, little red chairs, a hamster rustling in a box with a wired front. A sound reached him from double doors at the end of the hall. Loud slaps. They were swing doors. He pushed through them and was in a gymnasium where a tall man of maybe forty, jacket off but still wearing his tie, was dribbling a basketball, pivoting, shooting. Dark sweat patches were under his arms and down his spine. He saw Dave and let the ball ricochet off the backboard and bounce to the other end of the court where long church-supper tables with folded-up legs leaned against the wall. The man came at a lanky jog to shake Dave’s hand. He panted. He mopped his face with a handkerchief.

  “Tuesday morning ordinarily nobody comes,” he said, “nobody phones. I sneak down here to see whether it’s come back or
not. I had it in high school. I got a college scholarship on it—Wheaton, Illinois. But by the time the term started in the fall, I’d lost it.”

  “You probably grew,” Dave said. “It happens.”

  The tall man compressed his mouth and shook his head. “I don’t know. Eye-hand coordination, whatever—it was gone, simply gone. I was frantic. I worked. I prayed. It never came back.” He laughed at himself. “In my secret dreams, one of these days I’ll come down here and it will be back the way it was.” He raised a warning finger and his grin was a kid’s. “‘Call no man a fool,’” he said.

  “All right.” Dave watched him pick up a seersucker jacket that matched his trousers. “My name’s Brandstetter. I’m investigating the death of Gerald Dawson. For Sequoia Life and Indemnity.” He almost said Medallion, a twenty-five-year habit. But the morning after his father’s death, he’d cleared out his handsome office high up in Medallion’s glass-and-steel tower on Wilshire. This was his first free-lance assignment. “The police don’t seem sure of where he was the night he was murdered. That bothers me.”

  “I don’t know, myself,” the tall man said.

  “You’re the minister here?” Dave said.

  “Lyle Shumate,” the tall man said. Jacket over his arm, he headed for the double doors. “We’re going to miss Jerry Dawson. A born leader. True Christian.”

  “He had a men’s group.” Dave followed the preacher. “They didn’t meet that night?”

  “Their meetings were frequent but not regular.” Shumate went into the kindergarten room under pink and blue crepe-paper streamers and crouched to squint at the hamster. It came out of a heap of wood shavings and looked at him, bright-eyed. It was chewing. Shumate touched a bottle hung on the wire of the cage. There was water in it. “You’re okay, my friend,” he said, and stood.

  “The Born-Again Men,” Dave said.

  “They’d get together by telephone,” Shumate said, “and set a time.” He pulled open the outside door. Heat and glare struck in. He let Dave go out before him and pulled the door shut. “But they didn’t meet that night.” His soles went gritty up the steps. “Some of our kids have a gospel rock group. They used the Born-Again Men’s room that night.” He climbed to the door marked OFFICE and again motioned Dave through it ahead of him. “It must have been noisy in the basement that night.”