Little Dog Laughed Page 6

  “You want to help Underhill, don’t you?” Cecil said.

  “That’s why I came here.” Hunsinger took down his hat and put it on. He said to Dave, “You’ve got a big reputation. Fleur said you also care about people, and I guess you do.” Hunsinger pushed the screen door, stepped out, held the door. “Someone set Underhill up for that murder. He’s a creep, but they’re worse. Someone has to help him. It can’t be me—not the way I stand with the police. They’d laugh at me, if they didn’t lock me up.” Hunsinger walked away. The screen door wheezed closed on its patent piston. The latch clicked. Hunsinger’s voice drifted back out of the darkness. “You help him. Only don’t send me a bill, okay? All the mail I ever get is bills.”

  6

  LEPPARD WAS THIRTY-FIVE AND black, bulky and muscular. White streaked his clipped hair from front to back above his left ear. Someone made his clothes to measure, someone gifted. He stood at his desk, watching Dave uneasily. “I saw the flowerpots,” he said. “I saw a lot of things, mostly a dead man on the floor in his own blood, mostly that, and this gun with the silencer on it, and this young blind girl with a coffee stain down the front of her blouse, standing there so quiet she could be dead too. I forgot about the flowerpots.”

  “And you also forgot that she hadn’t heard anyone come into the house except her father,” Dave said.

  “Hadn’t heard the gun go off, either,” Leppard said, and sat down. “Teenagers sleep hard, Mr. Brandstetter. I didn’t think it meant much what she heard and didn’t hear.”

  “It did, because whoever killed him came over the roofs, swung down to the balcony, knocking over the flowerpots on his way, and walked in through the open French doors.”

  “That’s television cop-show stuff,” Leppard said.

  “The guard is no teenager. The guard didn’t see Underhill.”

  “Didn’t need to. Underhill could have been in that house waiting all the time. Hours. The girl is blind. No one can verify that he was home or where he was. Why wasn’t it him kicked over the flowerpots, leaving afterward?”

  “How did you come to arrest him?” Dave said.

  “We got a telephone tip,” Leppard said. A uniformed officer with blond hair and rosy cheeks came in with mugs of coffee on a brown tray, little envelopes of sugar and powdered creamer, a rattle of white plastic stirring sticks. He set the tray on Leppard’s paper-strewn desk and went away, closing the door. “Said Underhill did it for a hundred thousand bills Streeter had lying around, and we better move on him because he was fixing to fly away to Africa and disappear. Sure enough—”

  “Sure enough, you found the airline ticket for Algiers,” Dave said, “lying right there in plain sight beside his typewriter on the dining room table.”

  “Sure enough,” Leppard said with a smile. He reached across the desk and set one of the steaming mugs close to Dave. “Sugar? Cream?” With beautiful pink nails he tore open little packets and emptied them into his mug. “But mostly, sure enough, we found the hundred thou in a brown envelope. And sure enough, the bank confirmed they had given it to Streeter in exchange for a cashier’s check from some TV producer.”

  Dave fixed his own coffee. “A setup,” he said. And told Leppard what Hunsinger had told him. “They didn’t break in to steal anything,” he finished, and sat down, holding the mug. Pigeons cooed and strutted on the windowsill. He watched them. “They broke in to leave something. That airline ticket.”

  Leppard took a Dunhill cigarette from a dark red box. He lit it with a Dunhill lighter. Smoke trickled through his smile. He shook his head. “The ticket clerk at the airline counter at LAX saw his picture and gave us a positive ID. The man even showed his passport. Mike Underhill bought that ticket.”

  Dave tried the coffee. “And his passport was lying there on the table by the typewriter with the ticket—am I right?”

  “You’re right,” Leppard said.

  “So a slender man in his forties, five eleven, brown eyes, thinning black hair, and olive skin, flashing Underhill’s passport—unnecessary, but so he’d be remembered—bought a ticket to Algiers, climbed through Underhill’s window, left both items in his house, and then phoned you to come arrest Underhill.”

  “Underhill worked for Streeter.” Leppard studied Dave across the desk, across the coffee mugs, through the cigarette smoke. “You know associates kill associates far more often than strangers. Who told you about the camouflaged dudes?”

  “A witness I’m inclined to believe,” Dave said.

  “Underhill claims Streeter gave him all that cash to—”

  “Buy an aircraft from a man named McGregor down the coast,” Dave said. “It’s not a bad story. McGregor will confirm it.”

  “We can’t find him,” Leppard said. “He’s disappeared.”

  “Which ought to suggest something to you,” Dave said. “A boy who lives in a condominium near Streeter’s, Dan’l Chapman, told me Streeter was planning to buy a plane.”

  “He’ll make a good witness for Underhill,” Leppard said.

  “Unless he disappears too. The couple whose apartment faces Streeter’s across the patio with the swimming pool—people name of Gernsbach—they’ve disappeared. Did you know that? Within hours of the time Streeter was killed. Don’t you find that interesting? I do.”

  Leppard sighed impatiently. “The DA likes Underhill for this, a con man with a record of outsmarting himself.”

  “A man can be a lot of bad things,” Dave said, “and still not be a murderer.” He swallowed coffee again, grimaced, set the mug on the desk. “Find Gernsbach, sergeant. His windows look straight across at the room where Streeter died. Maybe he saw who did it and ran away in fear. Find him.”

  Leppard’s big hand came to rest on a stack of manila file folders on the desk. “With all this to do? We have a lock on Underhill. No need to look further, no time for it.”

  Dave took a deep breath and told Leppard about Streeter’s hot story. “I think he learned the identity of the people who snatched Cortez-Ortiz, and they killed him before he could write it—or broadcast it.” He told about Streeter at the television station. “He knew they were after him. That was why he was packing his bags.”

  “If you were a terrorist”—Leppard delicately scratched his head—“and made that kind of coup, wouldn’t you tell the world instead of keeping it secret? Ask for an exchange of prisoners for him? Or money to run your revolution?”

  “No one has,” Dave said. “That seems to answer that.”

  “It still doesn’t make plausible the idea that Central American terrorists are climbing condominiums at the L.A. marina and prowling the streets of shacky old Venice beach in combat boots and berets, breaking into bungalows—now does it?”

  “Before they broke in,” Dave said, “they rang Underhill and asked him to meet them somewhere, didn’t they?”

  “Down at the fishing pier. That’s what he says. But nobody saw him there that we can find. As an alibi, it stinks. He was down at Streeter’s, shooting him.”

  “The Desert Eagle .357 Magnum was his, then?”

  Leppard shrugged. “We’re checking, but anybody with loose change can buy a gun in Venice. Look, Captain Barker says you are the best in your business. So why can’t we get back to reality—simple murder for money? Underhill owes his publisher a mint. A hundred thousand in one easy grab—wouldn’t that be hard for a type like Underhill to resist?”

  “And for terrorists too.” Dave rose. “But they resisted, didn’t they?” He gave Leppard a tight smile. “Which suggests that you’re right about one thing—money is back of it. But a whole hell of a lot more than a hundred thousand dollars.” He moved to the door. “Simple, sergeant? I guess not.” He pulled open the door and noise from the detectives’ room hit him, laughter, arguments, typewriters, telephones. “Thanks for your time.” He let the door fall shut behind him.

  The place stood on a narrow street two blocks from the beach in Santa Monica, varnished planks and plate glass glaring in the sun.
Angled roofs, skylights, plank-walled outside staircases. The only doors at street level were for cars. Dave locked the Jaguar at the curb, fed a parking meter, dodged a bare-chested boy in shorts and hightop shoes weaving down the sidewalk on a skateboard and wearing bright yellow headphones.

  Dave climbed stairs and looked in at an open second-story door. Women in smocks worked at long tables inside. The room was wide as the building. Machines showed glints of metal under fluorescent lights. The women worked the machines by hand. He couldn’t make out what material they were die-cutting, embossing, and stapling. It shone like metal in reds, greens, blues, gold. No one noticed him, so he stepped inside.

  When his eyes adjusted from the day-glare, he saw Sarah Winger on a high stool at a drafting table, pushing around T-squares, triangles, pencils. He went to her, edging between the women, young, middle-aged, old, assembling slices of coated paper into festive shapes. Only one or two gave him a glance. A fat girl in short-shorts bustled past with a red plastic basket of finished work. She bumped him with a wide hip, and didn’t apologize, or seem to hear his apology or want it. She looked as if there simply wasn’t time. Everybody here looked as if there wasn’t time.

  “Christmas tree ornaments?” he said to Sarah Winger.

  She looked up, surprised. A green plastic triangle slid down the tilt of the drafting table. She caught it. “Do I know you?” She peered up between false eyelashes from under very blue eye shadow, which intensified the blue of her eyes. “No, I don’t. But I saw you yesterday. At the marina. The brown Jaguar. Who are you? What do you want? I’m very busy.”

  “It’s only July,” Dave said.

  “February wouldn’t be too early,” she said. “I’m getting calls from buyers right now, wondering where their shipments are. You can’t believe the nervousness of people.”

  Some of the ornaments dangled on strings from rafters. Dave studied them. “Handsome,” he said. “You design them all yourself?”

  “Santa’s helpers aren’t what they used to be,” she said. She touched the sharp tip of a blue pencil to her lips and bent over her very crisp drawings on a glaring white board. “You don’t run a boutique,” she said, and carefully drew a serpentine, using a French curve made of amber plastic. “And you certainly don’t buy for a department store. There isn’t a department store article on you.” She gave him a quick, raffish glance. “Unless it’s your underwear.”

  “I forget,” he said. “Tell me about the Gernsbachs. Where have they gone? I have to find them.”

  She stopped drawing and frowned at him. “Are you a police officer? Is it about Adam Streeter? Their neighbor?”

  “No,” Dave said, “and yes. You want to answer my question?”

  “If you’re not a police officer, you have no right to ask.”

  He showed her his license and told her a lie. “I’m investigating for his life insurance company. It’s routine.”

  “Where it might have been suicide?” She went back to work.

  “That’s right. The Gernsbachs. Special friends of yours?”

  “Lily, yes. We went to art school together. She had a lovely talent, a real talent. I didn’t—which is why I design and manufacture expensive Christmas tree ornaments. I wanted to paint. So did she, till she met Harry Gernsbach. What a waste. I mean, I’m sorry for his childhood in a concentration camp—but he hasn’t an artistic bone in his body.”

  “Where have they gone?” Dave said. “She left you her key, and said to feed her cat. She didn’t tell you then where they were going, how long they’d be gone?”

  She sat back and studied her handiwork. “Like it?”

  “It looks like an Eskimo ivory carving, a walrus tusk. What do they call it? Scrimshaw work, right?”

  “Right.” She cocked an eyebrow. “You are a man of discernment. Lily didn’t say where they were going. She was in and out of here—not here, but my apartment upstairs—in twenty seconds flat. It wasn’t like her. She hated to hurry.”

  “Was she frightened?” Dave said.

  “Frightened?” Sarah Winger frowned. “Of what? Why?”

  “The Gernsbachs’ apartment has French doors that face those of Adam and Chrissie Streeter.”

  “That poor child,” Sarah Winger said. “What’s going to become of her now?”

  “She has a mother,” Dave said. “Of sorts.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard about her,” Sarah Winger said. “She does not sound like the answer. Chrissie and Adam got along so well.” A shadow crossed the thick makeup of the determinedly youthful middle-aged face. “But it wasn’t meant to last, was it? I mean—he was a man who lived dangerously.” She tilted her head, forehead wrinkled. “They’re saying on the news that someone murdered him. That Mike Underhill who worked for him. Is that the truth?”

  “If I thought so,” Dave said, “I wouldn’t be here.”

  “It could have been that clergyman,” Sarah Winger said. “They had a terrible argument.” She blinked the long false lashes at the rafters. “When, last week sometime. I was sitting with Lily in her bedroom. Adam Streeter’s study was straight across from there. And we couldn’t help overhear—the priest was shouting so. He was absolutely furious. They literally fought, struggled, wrestled, I mean. That we could see—but the sunlight was so bright on the patio we didn’t know really what happened, which man was which. Then it was over as suddenly as it had started.”

  “Chrissie didn’t mention this to me,” Dave said.

  “She must have been out. With Dan’l Chapman. At the beach, the pier, sailing, maybe. He’s good to her. Adam’s too busy to take her usually. Dan’l is always ready for whatever she wants. Poor child, I think he’s in love with her.”

  “He is,” Dave said. “You can’t identify the priest?”

  The fat girl came to the drawing table, panting, her bangs damp with sweat. “We’re getting awful low on staples, Miz Winger. I don’t think there’s enough to last the day out.”

  Miz Winger told Dave, “I never saw him before and I couldn’t see him all that well. Smallish, I’d say. Glasses. Partly bald.” She told the fat girl, “Then take the truck and run over to Pitzer’s and get what we need. Tell Ralph to phone me for confirmation.” She dropped keys into the fat girl’s hand, who waddled away, looking efficient.

  “Lily Gernsbach didn’t say they were going to Washington?”

  “D.C.?” Sarah Winger’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, you mean for the Senate hearings on the collapsing savings and loan industry. My God, what a dreary man that Harry Gernsbach is. Awful accent and all. No, I’m sure she didn’t.”

  “Who was going to pick up their car from the airport?”

  “Perhaps someone at Harry’s office.” Sarah Winger took up a handful of colored pencils and began shading in the sharp outlines on the bristol board. “Lily didn’t ask me. Only to feed Trinket. What a name for that savage brute.” She worked in silence for a moment. The machines clanked. The shiny paper whispered. She said to her deftly moving hands, “Maybe they didn’t fly. They own a beautiful big boat.”

  “Then why leave the cat behind?” Dave said.

  “Because she’s not like other cats,” Sarah Winger said. “She has no fear of the water. She tries to swim to shore. And the Coast Guard has issued notice. Twice was enough. They will not come on the double to rescue Trinket again.”

  “What was the priest furious about?” Dave said.

  “His son was killed,” she said, “and he blamed Adam.”

  The woman was a fresh-faced forty. She looked at him with frightened eyes through a screen door of bright new aluminum that contrasted with the weathered shingle siding of the house. The house crouched under gloomy deodars behind a shingle-sided church. The house was one-storied, typical of Sierra Madre, a town that had changed some since he had known it in his boyhood—but not on these back streets. He had visited this very church, St. Matthias, as a chorister. He had owned a clear, sweet soprano voice in those days and, in a red cassock and starchy white lace-trimmed
cotta, with his blond hair, he’d looked angelic. He had not been angelic, but that was another story. Now he said to the woman, whose hair was cut sensibly short, who wore blue jeans, a cambric shirt, and jogging shoes without socks, and who wiped anxious, thin fingers on a kitchen towel:

  “Reverend Pierce Glendenning, please?” The man’s name was lettered Gothic style in flaking gold on a cracked black signboard posted in ground ivy in front of the church. This was the place. “Is he here?”

  “Are you a reporter?” She took hold of the wooden house door to swing it shut. “I’m sorry. We don’t want to talk anymore about Rue’s death. Not to news people. Please, go away and leave us alone.”

  “I’m not a reporter.” He told her who he was, speaking loudly so as to be heard by whoever lurked back there in the dusky rooms behind her. He held out the ostrich-hide folder with his license for her to read through the screen if she could. “I’m looking into the death of Adam Streeter.”

  “No.” Her eyes opened wide for a second. Since she wore no makeup, it was easy to see her flush. “We didn’t know him.”

  “Mr. Glendenning knew him.” Dave tucked away the folder in an inside jacket pocket. “Perhaps he never told you.”

  A door slammed at the rear of the house. So loudly that it made the young woman jump. Dave left the cool porch with its earth-smelling pots of nasturtiums, geraniums, marigolds set along the wide redwood railing. He went quickly to the corner of the house. Out back, footsteps hammered stairs. Dave ran up the cracked cement driveway alongside the house. In the rear, wooden stairs climbed a steep hill densely overgrown with scruffy shrubs and eucalyptus trees. He caught glimpses of the man, legs for a moment, taking the steps two at a time, a hand hauling him upward by a two-by-four railing, a flash of bare scalp, a glint of spectacles where sunlight found its way down through the thick leafage. The woman came out the back door of the house.

  “Leave him alone,” she cried. “He had nothing to do with Adam Streeter’s death.”

  Dave glanced at her, then studied again that long zigzag of rickety stairs. He was still bruised, his muscles still ached from jumping that fool fence at Hunsinger’s. He smoked too much: he didn’t have the wind to get halfway to the top without a rest. He kept telling himself to retire. When was he going to listen? Far above, Glendenning’s shoes stopped knocking wood. He had reached a street up there. Dave turned to the woman.