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

  New Year's it had been. Hard blue sky. Two-mile stretch of clean white grandstand. Flat black drag strip. Cars like toy-shop sharks, hammerheads. Crawling on squat tires. Then rawthroated engine roar. Track a jagged slash through new green landscaping. Along it McLarens, Lolas, BRMs screaming, snarling, skidding. For the inside, the front, the money. Average speed maybe ninety. Top speed maybe twice ninety. And off to the north, indifferent-brown mountains. Afterward, Doug, eyes shining, down in the clean concrete pit where the French team drank and laughed. Madge with him, very gay. Dave outside, above, hands jammed into car-coat pockets, shoulders hunched against wind that wrapped torn programs around his legs—watching, thoughtful.

  "It was a little too real. Sure, you enjoyed it. But not that much. And not that way. You don't enjoy things that way. Doug didn't know, but I knew."

  "Mmm." She had a mouthful of tequila, lemon, salt. She shook her head, swallowed. "No, no. You mustn't think I don't like him. I do. That makes it sadder."

  "Than what?"

  A hand touched his shoulder. He turned. A silver-haired man smiled deferentially. He wore a robe of brown velvet, ankle length, open down the front, gold-edged, with hanging sleeves. Am an attendant lord, Dave thought, one that will do to swell a progress. . . .

  "The dining room is beginning to fill, sir. May I reserve a table for you and the lady?"

  "Thank you." Dave slid a bill from his wallet and folded it in the man's hand. "Not too near the fire, please. And can you leave us a menu?"

  He did. It was folio size, the parchment cover stamped with the shield, the hound, the hawk, in crusty gilt. He dug out his reading glasses, let the bows fall open, slipped them on, opened the menu and turned it so the torchlight flickered on the lists. Crude blackletter type. Quaint spelling.

  "No four-and-twenty blackbirds?" he wondered.

  "Steak-and-kidney pie." Madge pointed it out. Steke & Kydney Pye was how the hired scholar had rendered it. "It's beyond belief."

  "Like the rest of the place." Dave dropped the menu, clicked the glasses shut, pushed them away. "Hungry?" And when she nodded, he stubbed out his cigarette, laid bills on the bar, got down from his stool and handed Madge off hers. "Send another margarita to our table, please."

  "Another Glenlivet for you, sir?" The barmaid's accent was Hollywood Cockney.

  "Thanks." He nodded and moved with Madge to the crooked steps again and down to where the firelight now had human faces to ruddy. The waiters were playing-card characters from Alice in Wonderland. Belted, open-sided tunics, green velvet, hound and hawk stitched in gold on the back. Yellow tights, a riband at the knee. Loose shirts with puffed white sleeves. They looked embarrassed. Dave wondered if their wives laughed at them. Their kids wouldn't—not kids these days. The problem would be to keep the kids from expropriating. Especially the slouchy yellow velveteen caps. Their waiter was missing his. Dave bet it was at a drive-in movie right now, a basketball game, a taco stand. After their drinks had arrived and he'd ordered and spoken to the cellarer—in a robe like the host's, only wine red, of course—he lit cigarettes for himself and Madge and asked her:

  "Why did you wait till now?"

  "Because you're the giver of wise counsel. Remember me? Twenty wrong choices in as many years. I never had anything but questions. You had answers."

  "I've run out. I'm ready for yours."

  "He looks like Rod. That was all there was to it. I was shocked you'd be so simple."

  "He's a good human being. He's a grownup."

  "That was always your formula for me." Her smile, her headshake were rueful. "I never followed it."

  "Until Sylvia." Miss Levy was plain and thirty-five, a college librarian, nothing like the handsome, coltish boy-girls Madge—a clever and successful designer, not of her life, but of textiles and wall-coverings—had pursued from one calamity to the next through a wreckage of years. None of them had been worth her time, certainly not her grief. Most had simply used her. It had pained Dave to witness. "How is Sylvia?"

  "Wonderful." Madge glowed. "It was good advice, Davey, even if it did take two decades of disaster to make me accept it. I'm grateful."

  He shrugged. "Other people's problems are easy."

  "All right. Let me try at yours." She tasted the margarita, set it down, looked grave. "Yes, he's a good human being. Yes, he's a grownup. As are you. But when you found each other, you were both in deep trouble. Not used to loneliness. Not able to cope. You'd had Rod. All your adult life. He'd had Jean-Paul. He's shown me photographs of Jean-Paul.'' In magazines, newspapers, souvenir programs, French, English, Italian, yellowing at the edges. Dave knew them. In a cardboard carton in a closet. More than once he'd started to throw them out. Madge said, "He was underweight, with beautiful square shoulders. Like you." She reached across to brush the fall of straight hair off his forehead. He liked her touch, cool, dry. "Blond like you, blue-eyed." She took the hand back and her smile regretted. "It couldn't have been a sadder coincidence."

  "People have to look like somebody," he said.

  She frowned, picked up her glass, studied him across its circle of salt. "Why don't you want to go home and sleep with him tonight?"

  "For the same reason he didn't want to come up here and have dinner with me.''

  She nodded, tasted the drink, set it down. "Because he can't be Rod. Because you can't be Jean-Paul."

  "I guess we both figured it out about the same time." With a finger he turned the little block of ice in his glass and watched the straw-yellow whiskey curl around it. "Not very quick. Not very bright."

  "You could try loving each other. Under your real identities. You're both worth loving."

  "You've told me. Who's going to tell him?"

  "You are. Tonight. When you get home."

  "Home?" he said. "Where's that?"

  7

  A VERY SMALL girl opened the door. It was a heavy door and it took her backward with it a few steps before she remembered to let the knob go. Her yellow flannel sleepers were printed with drawings of the comic-strip dog Snoopy. A rubber band tugged her taffy hair into a topknot, but some strands had got away and were damp. She was rosy from scrubbing. She clutched a plastic duck.

  "I had my bath," she said. "Now Daddy's going to read to me about snakes."

  "That sounds like fun," Dave said.

  Back of her, in a long sunken living room where gentle lamplight glowed on glossy new Mediterranean furniture, a pair of older children, six, eight, sat on deep gold wall-to-wall carpet and watched television. Winchesters crackled. Orange Indians tumbled from purple horses. A young woman came between him and the action. She wore splashed denims, but starchy white was what she was used to. She moved like a nurse. She was blonde as the child, her eyes were Delft blue like the child's—but not childish. Armed.

  "Dr. De Kalb," Dave said.

  "He doesn't see patients at home." One hand eased the child backward, the other began to close the door. "If you'll call the office tomorrow morning and make an appointment—"

  "I'm not a patient. I'm from Medallion Life."

  "Thank you." Her smile flicked on and flicked off. "We have all the insurance we need."

  "The death-claims division," Dave said. "It's about a former patient of his. A man who drowned."

  "Oh?" She frowned, but she stopped moving the door. She turned and spoke into the room. "Phil?"

  The chair De Kalb unfolded from faced the television set, but he hadn't been watching. He'd been reading. The book was in his hand. Gray and heavy. A medical text. He kept a finger in it as he came to the door. He looked young, but he walked old, a stoop to his shoulders. He was tall and lanky, a towhead like his wife and kids. His eyes were Delft too but hidden under a bony thrust of brow. His ears stuck out. They didn't look adaptable to a stethoscope.

  "Thanks," he told his wife, and she gave him a smile that was brief but real and led the little girl away, and he asked Dave, "What's the problem?"

  Dave gave him a card. "It's about John Oats."
<
br />   "Ah." De Kalb winced and shook his head. "That was tragic, damn it." He stepped back. "Come in."

  The room he led Dave to was down steps and out of range of the television gunshots. Desk and coffee table were deal. Easy chair and couch were tawny corduroy. The walls were knotty pine and crowded with glittering sports trophies on wooden brackets, sports photographs in frames. A few were team pictures—baseball, basketball. But most were of De Kalb solo. Younger but unmistakable. Head thrown back, muscles strained like wires, face twisted in agony, chest snapping a track-meet tape. Leaping straight as an exclamation point to slam back a high drive on a tennis court, packed bleachers in the background. Jackknifed in mid-air over a tourney swimming pool. No wonder he walked old. He laid the book on the desk, dropped into the easy chair, nodded at the couch.

  "I don't understand it," he said. "John was doing just fine. Considering the extent and severity of his burns, he'd come back very well. No sign of liver dysfunction, which is what you really fear in these cases. He was a happy man the last time I saw him. Why would he kill himself?"

  "Did he?" Dave sat and lit a cigarette. "The coroner's jury called it accident."

  "Hah. They never swam with him." De Kalb stretched a long arm, rattled open a drawer of the desk, brought out an ashtray. "Scars and all, he could outlast me."

  It was a little glass square, the kind non-smokers keep. A redand- black ad for an unpronounceable drug product was stenciled on its bottom. Dave set it on the couch arm. "Where?" he asked.

  "Arena Blanca. He asked me there for drinks and dinner, Christmas week. After sundown, we swam. Before, we sailed. With a friend of Peter's. His boat? I don't know. Catboat, twentyfooter. Very pleasant. That's a pretty bay, sheltered by those hills. Calm."

  "Do you remember the friend's name?" "I wouldn't have, but I've run into him since. Jay McPhail. He works nights and weekends at the drugstore in that new shopping center. On the coast road. Not far from the turnoff to Arena Blanca. Yup. Some developer will make a packet off all that white sand and blue water, once the rich old widows who own those rickety places die off."

  "One of them did. April Stannard's mother."

  "Nice girl." De Kalb frowned. "That's another thing. Why would he kill himself when he had a lovely girl like that? She really cared about him. She was at that hospital—"

  "Night and day," Dave said. "Eve Oats told me. She also told me to ask you if he was still in pain."

  De Kalb stared. "Pain? Certainly not."

  "Then why was he on morphine?"

  De Kalb sat up sharply. "What?"

  "You weren't at the inquest?"

  "No. I was in New York. For a meeting of dermatologists." Bleak smile. "Also for the Indoor Track and Field Champion- ships. Took off from L.A. International that same night. The night John died. Didn't know that then, not till I got back. But flying you remember the weather. And it was raining, yes, but you couldn't really call it a storm. No wind to speak of. The bay wouldn't have been rough."

  "He was found on the rocks out at the point."

  Headshake. "He wouldn't swim out there."

  "That's what I think. All right. What about the morphine? Was he on it at the hospital?"

  "Oh, yes, certainly. At first. It was indicated. But no longer than necessary. The danger of addiction isn't exactly news to us."

  "And you took him off it?"

  "When we could. Too soon for him. He begged. They often do, afraid the pain will come back. It won't. We don't start withdrawal until we know it won't. But there can be panic. That's not easy to face. It's one of those times you have to be ruthless. With them and with yourself."

  "It was in his system when he died," Dave said. "There were the usual needle marks, lots of them. He never did get off it."

  De Kalb made a grim sound and pushed up out of the chair. Hands shoved into pockets, he moved to a window. It was a black mirror. He glowered at his reflection without seeing it. "We change the dispensary locks. It doesn't help, Too many people have to have keys. Regulations are strict, but emergencies happen. Doors get left unlocked, keys fall into unauthorized hands." He turned back, a pallbearer slump to his shoulders. "And, as I expect you know, the drug-addiction rate among physicians is high. That makes it awkward for the nurse in charge when things turn up missing. The police most often don't get called. It's a mess. And it doesn't get better. It gets worse."

  "No idea who gave it to John Oats?"

  "Probably an orderly." De Kalb's sigh was harsh. He dropped loose-jointed into the chair. "They come and go. The work is hard, sometimes gruesome, the pay is poor. We've caught them in the past. They find out what patients are being withdrawn. It's a way of picking up an extra five, ten dollars."

  "It would be a way of picking up a lot more than that after the patient was out of the hospital."

  De Kalb's head tilted. He blinked, puzzled.

  "I mean, in the back of his mind the hospital patient who's an addict knows if he's caught he'll be taken off the stuff in easy stages. But once outside he's on his own. I understand abrupt withdrawal can be unpleasant."

  "It starts with yawning that you can't control," De Kalb said. "Sometimes it breaks the jaw. Shivering that seems as if it will shake you to pieces. You sweat in a way you can't believe a human being could. If you're lucky, you sleep. After a fashion. But you wake up. And the mucus begins running. You think you'll drown in your own mucus. Some do. And you're cold and there's no way to get warm. Then the vomiting starts and the diarrhea. Your muscles go crazy. You try to cover yourself and get warm, but your legs keep kicking the blankets off. You get up and walk. If you've got the strength. It doesn't help. Nothing helps. You lie on the floor. And you scream."

  "That should drive prices up," Dave said.

  De Kalb's hands made big, knobby fists on the chair arms. "I'll get whoever did it."

  Dave shook his head. "Get the police. Ask for Captain Campos. He bought the verdict on John Oats, but only because he's overworked and it saved time. This will turn him around. And he'll handle it well." Dave stood. "In my job I meet police officers. I'd take Campos for one of the bright ones."

  De Kalb got up. "I'll call him in the morning."

  "Doesn't that hospital have a night shift?" Dave asked. "Call him now. It was nine this morning when I saw him, but police hours are long. He may still be at work." A telephone in woodgrain plastic sat on the desk. Dave picked it up and held it out to him. "If not. call him at home. When he knows what it's about, he won't mind."

  The little girl came down the carpeted stairs. Sideways. One step at a time. "Daddy, Daddy!" She was flapping an open book. Dave glimpsed a diamond-back rattler mottled among mottled leaves. "Read to me. Mommy says she doesn't like snakes." Tears were in the blue eyes. The pink mouth trembled. "And you promised, you promised."

  De Kalb set down the phone and picked her up. "I promised," he told her, "and I will. Just as soon as I make one telephone call." He used a fingertip to wipe her tears away.

  "I'll go," Dave said.

  8

  THE SHOPPING CENTER was a cry of light against the hulking darkness of the hills. Its signs were crisply lettered sheets of milky plastic, its shopfronts naked glass, the interiors ice-white fluorescent. Brave but lonely. Safeway, laundromat, Kentucky Fried Chicken, liquor, Newberry's, hairdresser, drugs. Three cars waited on space enough for thirty. Dave left his pointed at the drugstore and pushed inside.

  The silence was large, but a typewriter was snipping little holes in it. Slowly. At the rear. Dave went there between hedges of toothpaste, deodorants, laxatives. The counter was chin high and topped by old-fashioned glass urns filled with dried herbs, for cuteness, not use. The urns were labeled in Spencerian script. The sign overhead was Spencerian too, gold on a white oval: Prescriptions. A boy looked at him between the urns. His tightly curled black hair was parted in the middle and combed over his ears. His brown eyes dreamed and his mouth was a dark rose. He could have posed for a Rossetti drawing. He could have been Rossetti, youn
g, before the bloat set in.

  "McPhail?" Dave said.

  "McSucceed," the boy said. "At least till now. What's wrong?"

  "Does something have to be wrong?"

  "You didn't say Mr. McPhail, you didn't say Jay McPhail. You said McPhail. For some reason, that sounds official. And you look official. Did I mess up on a prescription?"

  "You're a friend of Peter Oats. I'm looking for him. I'm from the company that insured his father's life. His father's dead. Peter was the beneficiary."

  "Just a second." The typewriter tapped some more. The platen ratcheted. The boy came to the end of the counter where its height dropped and there was a coral-color cash register and a flat glass-top display box of razor blades and small flashlight batteries. His white jacket was open. Under it was a pirate-stripe skivvy shirt. His pants were bell-bottoms, tie-dyed purple. A little bottle sparkled in his hand. He licked the label he'd typed and pasted it to the bottle that held cotton and some red-and-gray capsules. "I haven't seen Peter for a while. I'm going on with school. He's not. He's into acting. Would you believe?"

  "Would it be difficult?"

  "It's far out, man. I mean, he's so quiet. He taught himself guitar, you know? He's got a good voice. Would he sing for anybody? Hell, no. He liked lonely things, climbing, riding, swimming. He doesn't look strong, but he is. Mostly he read, listened to records, classical music. Then, all of a sudden, he's acting. With Whittington and the rest of those fags."

  "Is he a fag?" Dave said.

  McPhail's Pre-Raphaelite eyes hardened. "I was his best friend all through EMSC. Do I look like a fag?"

  "I don't know what a fag looks like," Dave said. "And neither does anyone else. You took him sailing Christmas week. With his father and Dr. De Kalb."

  "In my folks' boat. That was the last time I saw him. Except around town with Whittington. Always with Whittington. Jesus!" He scrawled a name on an envelope that was printed with a yellow mortar and pestle, dropped the pill bottle into it, tucked it away under the counter. "Too bad about his father. I really grooved on him."