Death Claims: A Dave Bran[d]stetter Mystery Page 3

  "I should have known better than to star Peter in Lorenzaccio, but he was simply so right for it I couldn't resist, inexperienced as he was. I got my comeuppance. He was seen by, of all people, Wade Cochran."

  Dave turned, squinting disbelief. "The Sky Pilot?"

  Whittington nodded sourly. "Television's sagebrush saint. He was here night after night. Ostensibly to assess my abilities. But one night, very late, I heard a sound downstairs and found Peter, who'd come back for something he'd forgotten-his watch, I think. When he left, it was in Cochran's car. Not a car you'd confuse with any other-a bright yellow Lotus."

  "Maybe he'd offered Peter a contract."

  "I wasn't told and I wasn't about to ask."

  "What would be wrong about that? What do you want for your people?"

  "Theatre. Television is to theatre"—Whittington forked over the sizzling sausages—"what a billboard is to a Cezanne landscape. No, I think what happened to Peter, if indeed it did happen, is tragic."

  "But you do know where he is," Dave said.

  The fat man dropped slices of bread into a toaster that swallowed them with a growl, like a shiny animal. "I do not know where he is.''

  "You mean he didn't stick with Cochran?"

  "I mean people like Cochran are monotonously predictable. They lure innocent youngsters with promises they have no intention of keeping. They use them and discard them."

  "Cochran's image is different," Dave said. "He's supposed to be as wholesome as he looks, as the part he plays. Lives with his old mother, always does what she tells him. Devout churchgoer, no smoking, no drinking. The morals good people held to when the West was young. Bible Belt."

  "Tooled, no doubt," Whittington said.

  And the boy came into the kitchen, the boy from the bed under the hazardous black beams. He was still naked and he was holding the empty picture frame. He did look like Peter Oats except without the trim edge of beard along the jawline. Also there was nothing saintly in his brown eyes. There was almost nothing at all. His handsome mouth asked Whittington:

  "Whose picture was it? You said you'd tell me."

  "Take your shower," Whittington said. "Breakfast will be ruined if you don't hurry. Leave the spray head alone or all you'll get is a totally unmanageable gush."

  "Was he your lover?" the boy asked. Then he saw Dave and lowered the frame to cover his crotch.

  "His name was Peter Oats," Dave said. "He used to act here."

  "Act?" The boy looked blank.

  "This is a theatre," Dave said.

  "Is it?" The boy's smile apologized. "It was kind of late when we got here. And I was pretty juiced." He frowned, tilted his head, blinked at Dave. "Are you a homosexual too?"

  Whittington roared: "Take. Your. Shower."

  "Sure. Okay. Sorry." The boy fled.

  Whittington glared at Dave. "You know nothing about that picture."

  "I know you threw out a good many others you had of Peter Oats." With his heel Dave nudged the shutters under the sink. "Which supplies the answer to the boy's question. He was your lover."

  Whittington went red in the face. "For your information, Peter Oats is as straight as the proverbial stick. Now, I've asked you politely to get out and it hasn't worked. Shall I order you? Or"— he bunched muscles the fat didn't hide—"shall I throw you out?"

  He had the weight. Dave went.

  4

  THE RANCH HAD a small valley to itself in rock-strewn hills five miles back from the coast highway. The herd was token, maybe twenty head, breeding stock, broad-backed, slab-sided, shortlegged, rust and white. They browsed on grass t.hat looked too green to be real. Horses moved in a rail-fenced paddock, half a dozen palominos, coats glossy in the winter sun. Beyond them, a framework of overhead sprinkler pipes glass-beaded the shiny leafage of an orange grove. Stable, outbuildings, the ranch house itself looked like a movie set—plain, bat-and-board-sided, lowroofed, sheltered by old oaks, red geraniums in window boxes.

  The yard was flagged and cars stood there, a wide new Chrysler station wagon, a black Lincoln limousine that looked as if it got a lot of polishing but was filmed with country dust now. And a yellow Lotus, looking like what it was, a lethal toy. When he left his own car, a red setter got up lank off the green-painted boards of the long, one-step-up gallery of the ranch house and stood looking at him. A bitch with pups somewhere. He walked to her, spoke, bent and held out the back of his hand to her. She touched it with a cold nose and her tail swung amiably. He scratched her ears.

  A string of varnished gourds, peppers, squashes hung gaudy next to the front door. Below it was a bell push. He thumbed it and inside chimes played four notes of a tune he hadn't heard since World War II. A gospel tune, "Love Lifted Me.'' He remembered a bleak barracks and the lonesome wheeze of a dollar harmonica. Then suddenly everybody singing. Everybody but him. He hadn't known the words. But he'd learned them. There was no way not to. Also obscene variations. He grinned to himself and a bony, freckled girl in a starchy green shirtmaker dress opened the door. No makeup. Frizzy red hair yanked back and knotted. Pencil stuck in the knot. Horn-rim glasses. In a forties movie she'd have turned out lovely in the last reel.

  "Yes?" she said crisply. "May I help you?"

  "I'd like to see Mr. Wade Cochran."

  Her smile was weary. "So would several million other people. How did you find this place?"

  "It took some telephoning. About an hour's worth. By me and a team of secretaries in my office. Screen Actors' Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, two agents, a business manager, a television studio, a recording studio, three police departments, sheriffs' offices in two counties, the state highway patrol, the bureau of records in Sacramento, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Cattle Breeders Association and I'm sure I've left out a few. I think I deserve to be rewarded for sheer persistence."

  She wasn't amused. "Have you a card?"

  He gave her a card and she read it and said, "But you telephoned. I told you he couldn't see you."

  "Your error," Dave said. "You should have told me he was out."

  "Mr. Cochran doesn't permit us to lie." She half shut the door, then opened it again, said, "Will you wait, please?" and closed it. Tight.

  He crouched beside the setter, whose muzzle lay between her long front paws on the green boards. He scratched her ears again and she shut her eyes and rumbled contentment. His look strayed to the empty hills. Not empty. A lone horseman rode the ridge at a walk. High above him a red-tailed hawk drifted on a lazy wind, sun haloing its wings. Behind Dave the door opened and the red-haired girl's voice said:

  "Come in, please."

  The set decorator had been here. The room was 1880. Pinks and bachelor buttons in the wallpaper. Furniture machine-carved walnut and oak glowingly refinished, upholstered in tufted black leather. Coal-oil lamps on marble-top tables with red ball-fringe throws. The girl led him across a floor of gleaming pine planks and braided oval rugs. Briskly. So he only glimpsed by the fieldstone fireplace at the room's end a white-haired woman in dark glasses, seated in a wheelchair. Gaunt, big-boned, leathery. Mrs. Pioneer. A man with a mane of straw-color hair and a face like a new plow blade bent toward her from a platform rocker, talking. Mr. Evangelist.

  The red-haired girl opened double doors with narrow panels of fernleaf-patterned frosted glass. And it was the last half of the twentieth century again. A big swimming pool glittered blue in a flagged patio walled in by ells of the house. A swimmer angled toward the bottom of the pool. Dave's heart jarred. A man lay down there on his face, a clothed man, inert, limbs stirred by the motion of the water. The swimmer reached him, slid an arm under his chin, pushed backward and up, kicking for the surface, following the bubbles of his spent breath. He broke the surface, gulped air, shook back blond hair and, still gripping the throat of the limp man in the crook of a muscular arm, half turned and with his free hand stroked for the pool edge.

  When he reached it he grimaced, struggling to lift the unconscious weig
ht. Dave ran to help him, crouched, gripped the body under the soggy arms and heaved upward. He staggered backward and nearly fell. Because it wasn't heavy. It had almost no weight at all. For seconds he stood there stupidly clutching it while its wetness soaked into his clothes. It wore a plaid flannel shirt and Levi's and cowboy boots, but it wasn't a man. It was a dummy. He heard a chuckle. The swimmer grinned at him. In two easy motions he was out of the pool. "Thanks," he said. "But he's as near resuscitated as he's ever going to get. You don't need to bother with him anymore. Just let him down easy." He picked up a towel from a redwood chaise and dried his hair.

  "What's the idea?" Dave asked.

  "Next script I film"—there was a terry-cloth robe on the chaise; he flapped into it—"I got to rescue the boy in the story from drowning in a river." He knotted the sash. "It won't be easy as this, but I'm trying to keep the current and all that in mind." His grin made handsome gouges in his face. "That's where the acting comes in."

  "Like the struggling you did just now to wrestle him out of the pool?"

  "Like that. They'll have to weight him more in the river. But he'll never be more than fifty-sixty pounds, I expect." The accent was modified Southwest. Nothing else was modified. He stood six feet four and perfect. There were probably more beautiful men alive. Dave hadn't seen them. The actor stuck out a hand. "I'm Wade Cochran. You're Brandstetter. Katy tells me you went to a lot of trouble to track me down. What can I do for you?''

  "I'm looking for someone. A boy. His father drowned last week. He was insured by my company. The boy is the beneficiary. His name is Peter Oats."

  Cochran looked blank. "I don't know him."

  "He was seen in your car late one night at the theatre, the old mill, up the canyon back of El Molino. Remember? He had the lead in a play called Lorenzaccio. You were in the audience every night."

  "Ah!" Cochran slapped his forehead. "That kid. Of course. Sure." He looked past Dave, who turned. The red-haired girl still stood at the end of the pool beside a black cluster of video tape equipment. Cochran called to her, "Katy, will you bring us out some of that cranberry juice?"

  She walked brisk and prim along the far edge of the pool and vanished into a breezeway. A door closed.

  Cochran said, "I drove him back to the theatre one night. We'd been to a seafood place down in town there. Las Gaviotas. He'd been begging to talk to me." Cochran sat on the chaise. A redwood table was next to it, where an open shooting script lay. Then there was a chair. He tilted his head at it. Dave sat. "People pester you. But he had talent and I like to be fair." The far door closed again and he turned to watch Katy bringing a fat glass jug of red liquid and tumblers with ice cubes on a tray of Mexican hammered tin. She set it on the table.

  "Will you be going to the lodge tonight?"

  "I was. Who wants to know?"

  "Your mother." Katy unscrewed the cap on the jug and filled the glasses. "She'd like the Reverend to stay over. He will if you're going to be here."

  "All right," Cochran said. "I won't go till after supper and I'll be back to have breakfast with him. You can tell her."

  Katy twisted the cap back on the jug. "She'd rather you stayed over. She's told the network people. They want to get footage of you here together. Tonight."

  Cochran's mouth tightened. He wasn't happy, but he said, "Okay. If it's all right with the Reverend.''

  Katy smiled. "Oh, she's already arranged it with him. Thank you. She'll be so pleased." She went away.

  "While we were eating," Cochran said to Dave, "the kid missed his watch. He was afraid to leave it up there, afraid somebody'd take it. 'Rip it off is the way he put it. He didn't have a car. It's too far to walk. I drove him back."

  "After the play closed, he stayed away from the theatre," Dave said. "Whittington, the man who runs it, has the impression you made him some kind of offer."

  Cochran shook his head and gulped from his glass. "You couldn't cast him in the stuff we shoot. He's too slight. Speech is too good. I don't expect to find anybody at that place—not for Westerns." He nodded at Dave's glass. "Try that. It's good stuff. Healthy. They say you drink enough cranberry juice, you'll never get cancer."

  Dave tasted it and wondered how much would be enough. "Very good," he said. "Thanks. Why did you keep going back? Why did you stop after Peter Oats stopped? Why did he leave home about that time and not tell anyone—anyone living—where he was going?"

  Cochran shrugged. "You're asking the wrong man."

  Dave gave him a cold smile. "Not about why you kept going back to the play."

  "I'm planning a feature on the life of Saint Paul. People said Whittington's a genius. You know, he was very big on Broadway, but when they started doing nothing but junk on Broadway he left. He made a couple films. Quit for the same reason. He's got integrity. I don't want some Hollywood hack. Those people are all corrupt. The director I hire's got to have brains and taste."

  "And reverence?" Dave said.

  "My team and I will supply that." Cochran swallowed more juice. "Anyway, I heard about Whittington and I went to size him up for myself. He was as good as they say, but I wasn't about to make a snap decision. This will take a couple million dollars, this picture, most of it my own. I'm walking around it a lot."

  "Did you ask him? Will he do it?"

  "I asked him," Cochran said. "He won't."

  "He doesn't like the mass media," Dave said.

  Cochran nodded. "Rather starve in that backwater, doing what he wants, what he thinks is important. Man can't help but admire that."

  "He looks as if he gets enough to eat," Dave said.

  "He's draining all his savings into that place," Cochran said. "My manager made inquiries. The city cut his budget this year. It wasn't but a few thousand to start with. Now it's nickels and dimes." He breathed a short laugh. "Know why he sent you here? Nuisance value. I gave him a check and he didn't like that. Oh, he kept it, but he hated me for being able to give it."

  Dave said, "And you don't know what happened to Peter Oats?"

  "Kids take things hard. Maybe after I turned him down he decided acting was no use. Maybe he was ashamed of failing and that's why he ran off. Didn't want to hear 'I told you so' from his folks. Lots of parents discourage their kids from acting. I thank the blessed Lord every day for giving me the mother He did." Again Cochran looked past Dave. Again Dave turned.

  The double doors with the frond pattern stood wide. The whitehaired woman sat there in her wheelchair, the evangelist standing behind her. "Can't you quit and get in here now?" The way she turned her face toward where he wasn't told Dave she was blind. But she had a voice to holler up field hands against a prairie wind. "The Reverend will think I never taught you manners."

  "Be right there." Cochran got up from the chaise. "Sorry I can't help. I expect when he gets over his bruises he'll turn up. You hang on to that money for him."

  Dave rose. "It may not be payable."

  Cochran blinked. "What's that mean?"

  Dave told him what it meant. "No." Cochran scowled.

  "No, you don't know him. He couldn't. Why, he's as gentle as—"

  "With twenty thousand dollars," Dave said, "he might not need a lot of help with his career." He held out his hand and Cochran shook it. Reflexively, still scowling, troubled. Dave told him, "Your girl Katy has my telephone number. Let me know if he should happen to get in touch with you."

  "Sure." Cochran was unsmiling. "But he won't."

  Dave scratched the setter's ears again on the porch. A horseman rode in at the yard gate. The same rider he'd seen on the ridge. Slight. Dark. But when he neared, he turned out to be forty, the skin on his bony face brown and creased as old harness. Not Peter Oats.

  5

  OVALS OF LEATHER patched the elbows of Charles Norwood's jacket. It was rugged Scots tweed and had been expensive some time ago. Soft gray fuzz sprouted on the back of his neck above a shirt collar that was frayed. A hinge screw of his glasses had been replaced by a snipped-off pin or paperclip. But
his mustache was neatly trimmed, his shave was clean and close, his hands, straightening books already straight on a table marked REDUCED, were well kept. His speech was modulated, the voice deep but a little old-maidish. His smile regretted.

  "Peter? He hasn't been in here for months."

  Here meant OATS & NORWOOD: ANTIQUARIAN BOOKS, in one of those arcades of shops favored in El Molino. Tall wrought-iron gates standing open in a thick archway to a courtyard paved with terra-cotta squares and enclosed by buildings of rough white stucco with roofs of curved red tile. Olive trees, dusty green and gray. A fountain weeping into algaed water from beneath the sandaled feet of a stained cement Saint Francis blessing stained cement doves. Real doves grieved overhead. The noise of lateafternoon street traffic was muted.

  The shop was dim and hushed. But it probably was dim and hushed at high noon too. Its centerpiece was a big eighteenthcentury globe of the world, rich with mottled greens and browns, cradled in a curved rack of time-mellowed wood. Dave spun it idly on its brass axis. His fingers came away dusty.

  "Since his father burned himself?"

  Norwood nodded. "He left home about that time. Went to live with a girl in Arena Blanca. The same girl John went to after his discharge from the hospital."

  "You know her name. She worked here."

  Norwood smiled chagrin. "April Stannard. I've made a habit of avoiding it."

  "For whose sake? I get the impression she was the only one, aside from Peter, who gave a damn for him. His wife walked out."