Nightwork Page 6

  Dave knocked on door number three. Music thumped up from the bar below, but no sound came from beyond the door. He knocked again. A door down the hall opened and a tall, reedy man stepped out. He wore an apron, short shorts, and cowboy boots, and he had a small gold ring in one ear. His hair ought to have been gray but it was strawberry color, upswept, shiny. In one scrawny arm he cradled a brown Mexican pottery bowl. It held yellow batter that he was whipping with a wooden spoon.

  He said, “You’re too late, darling. The hunk has flown.”

  “Gene Molloy?” Dave said. “You a friend of his?” The man shook his head. The strawberry curls quivered. “He didn’t have boyfriends; he had girlfriends.” The man let go of the spoon, laid the back of a hand against his forehead, sighed. “God knows, I tried. But that old green taffeta just doesn’t fool them anymore.”

  Dave grinned. “I thought he lived with somebody.”

  “Off somebody. Liza. You’ll find her downstairs. She’ll be the one gnashing her teeth. I’ve warned her it’ll play hell with those mail-order dentures, but women are so emotional.” He lifted the spoon and critically watched the batter run off it. “Look, I have to get this in the oven. My God, it’s hot. I’m dying for a drink. How about you?”

  “I’ll die a little longer, thanks. Would you know—was he around here on the night of the ninth?”

  The man turned his head, watched out of the corners of his eyes. “That was the night he smashed up the bar. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  “Late or early?” Dave said.

  “Late—one o’clock. It was just Irish high spirits, but Liza got hysterical and called the cops.”

  “Did they arrest him, book him, lock him up?”

  “All night. But Liza bailed him out next morning.”

  “He brought the body here in his own car,” Cole Wrightwood said. A plump, sleek black, he wore a dark pinstripe suit, a quiet tie, and a large diamond ring. The desktop in front of him was polished to a high gloss. Along its front edge in a planter grew a neat low hedge of marigolds. In corners of the paneled office, tall white baskets held sprays of gladioluses. The cool conditioned air was laden with the damp perfume of flowers. Electronic organ music—Fauré? Widor?—whispered from hidden loudspeakers. “And waited while I filled out the death certificate. As I expect you know”—Wrightwood smiled a grave, apologetic little smile—“the mortician fills in all the data—name, address, that sort of thing. The physician merely has to write in the cause of death and sign the certificate.”

  “He has to have been the attending physician,” Dave said, “for at least twenty days. Otherwise there has to be an autopsy. The word of a man called in just for the emergency isn’t enough.”

  Wrightwood nodded. “The departed’s wife, widow—she came along with the doctor. She said he was the family physician.”

  “Did that seem likely to you? White, isn’t he?” A leaded window, diamond panes, churchlike, was at Wrightwood’s back. A long, glossy Cadillac hearse slid past the window. “Had you ever seen him before?”

  “He was white.” Wrightwood’s smile was thin. “Most doctors are. I saw no reason to doubt the woman’s word. She was in tears, deeply grieved, shocked. In my experience, people don’t lie at times like that.”

  “May I see the death certificate?”

  Wrightwood stirred in his tall leather chair, but he didn’t rise. “You say Oswald Bishop was insured by this company you represent?” The card Dave had given him lay on the desktop. He blinked at it through large round lenses framed in heavy black plastic. “Pinnacle?”

  “I didn’t say.” Dave took from inside his jacket the leather folder that held his private investigator’s license, and held it out across the marigolds for Wrightwood to read. “Pinnacle has asked me to investigate the death of a close friend of Ossie Bishop.” He flipped the folder closed and slid it back into his jacket. “Another gypsy trucker. Paul Myers.”

  Wrightwood’s eyebrows rose. “That was on the news. An accident. He drove off the road in some canyon.”

  “No.” Dave told him what the Sheriff’s lab had discovered. “Now, Ossie Bishop was doing the same sort of night-work as Myers. He even got Myers the job. His death coming so close to Myers’s disturbs me.” Dave smiled. “I’ll regard it as a great kindness if you’ll let me see Bishop’s death certificate.”

  “What was this nightwork?”

  “I don’t know. You say Mrs. Bishop was distraught that night. She didn’t happen to say—didn’t blurt it out in anger or despair, perhaps?”

  “You mean you don’t know what these two men were doing with their trucks? Not even the one you insured?”

  “Myers seems not to have told anyone. That in itself isn’t exactly reassuring, is it? Not when you add the fact that he was very well paid.” Dave took out Myers’s bankbook and held it up. “He was making frequent fat deposits. In cash.” He put the bankbook away.

  Wrightwood sat for a few seconds longer, moving his chair very slightly from side to side on its swivel base. He shrugged and rose. “It was a heart attack.” He rounded the desk, crossed deep purple carpeting, opened one of a pair of tall, carved, double doors. Through the doorway came the quiet chatter of a typewriter. Wrightwood spoke. The typewriter ceased. Branches of firethorn showed outside the window. Small birds were harvesting the berries, then-squabbling shrill beyond the panes. Wrightwood returned and handed Dave a manila folder marked BISHOP, OSWALD B., with a date a month old.

  Dave put on reading glasses and opened the folder. The shadow of Wrightwood came between him and the window light. The cushion of the big desk chair sighed as Wrightwood’s two hundred sleek pounds settled on it. Written after CAUSE OF DEATH was Massive coronary occlusion. TIME OF DEATH: 1:50 A.M. ATTENDING PHYSICIAN: Ford T. Kretschmer, M.D. Kretschmer had written down an address and telephone number. Dave took off the glasses, folded them, pushed them into a pocket, closed the file, handed it across the sunny little flowers to Wrightwood. “Thank you.” He got to his feet. “I appreciate it.”

  “It’s on file at the Hall of Records.”

  “You were nearer,” Dave said. “I’m sorry for the trouble. Anyway, you’ve told me things they couldn’t at the Hall of Records.”

  Wrightwood turned his head slightly, wary. “It was a heart attack. Big, heavy man. He’d overworked himself.” Wrightwood got to his feet, buttoned his jacket. He didn’t appear worried about his own weight. “Hypertension kills a good many of my people. I see men who have gone down in their prime all the time.” He had come around the desk again, and now took Dave’s arm to walk him to the door. His grip was as gentle and comforting as if Dave had just brought him a dead friend. “You interest me.” He didn’t let go Dave’s arm. With his free hand he gripped the fancily wrought bronze handle of the tall office door, but he didn’t move it. “Just what have I told you besides the obvious?”

  “That the widow came here.” Dave didn’t want a cigarette, but he wanted the undertaker’s hand off his arm. Nobody was dead around him—he didn’t want to be treated as if somebody was. So he reached for a cigarette, found it, found his slim steel lighter, lit the cigarette. “Did the oldest son come too? Melvil?” He put the lighter away.

  Wrightwood shook his head. “A woman came. I assumed she was a nurse—perhaps the doctor’s receptionist.”

  “What made you think that?”

  Wrightwood turned the handle and opened the door. “She fit the role. You develop an instinct about people in this business. She had that self-assured way about her. They boss their bosses.” They were in a quiet reception room now. He gave the slim, pale black, fortyish woman at the desk a grin. “Don’t they?”

  She looked up at him, wide-eyed, and patted her beautifully set hair. “I can’t think what you’re talking about.” Her laugh was soft and dry.

  Dave smiled at her and moved toward the doors that would take him along a hushed corridor hung with ferns and caged canaries, a corridor that passed rooms where the embalm
ed dead slept in coffins, rooms where damp-eyed families sat on spindly chairs, and past the chapel. It was the route he had taken to get here. With the door open, he turned back. “Can you describe her for me? Stocky, middle-aged, well-dressed?”

  Wrightwood tilted his head. “You know this woman?”

  “Not yet,” Dave said. “But I’m looking forward to it. Thanks for your help.”

  8

  THE PLACE HE LIVED in had, he judged, started life as riding stables. He left the Jaguar beside Cecil’s van, walked past the end of the long, shingle-sided front building, crossed the uneven bricks of a courtyard sheltered by an old oak. He unwrapped and laid on plates in the cookshack pastrami sandwiches he’d picked up on Fairfax, built Bloody Marys, and carried these on a bent-wood tray across to the long, shingle-sided rear building. The arrangement of the place was awkward, but it amused more than bothered him. The last of his dead father’s nine beautiful wives, Amanda, had made the buildings handsome and livable inside. If, during the short winter, getting from one building to another meant being soaked by rain or chilled by wind, novelty was on its side. It was never boring.

  The back building was walled in knotty pine. There was a wide fireplace. The inside planking of the pitched roof showed, and the unpainted rafters. Above, Amanda had designed a sleeping loft. Climbing the raw pine steps to it now meant climbing into heat. The smell of sun-baked pine overlaid the old, almost forgotten smell of horse and hay that always ghosted the place. Cecil sat naked, propped black against white pillows, in the wide bed, sheet across his long, lean legs. He gleamed with sweat. His collarbone and ribs showed. Dave kept trying to fatten him up. It didn’t seem to be working.

  “Hey.” Cecil tossed aside the latest Newsweek and smiled. “How was Gifford Gardens?”

  “Words fail me.” Dave set the tray on the long raw pine chest of drawers, carried his glass to Cecil, bent and kissed his mouth. “How are you?”

  “I rested, like you told me,” Cecil said. “Nearly driving me crazy.” With a wry little smile, he raised his glass. “Cheers,” he said cheerlessly, and drank.

  Dave tasted his drink, then brought the sandwiches and napkins. He sat on the edge of the bed. “It’s a little bit racist out there. Eat that. They also have gangs.” He bit into his sandwich. That was the best delicatessen in L.A. When he’d washed the bite down with Bloody Mary, he said, “Can I borrow your van tomorrow?”

  “Something happen to the Jag?” Cecil looked alarmed.

  Dave told him what had happened to the Jag.

  “Aw, no. Shit. It’s my fault. I heard the kind of place it was, when I worked for Channel Three News.” Cecil shook his head slowly in self-disgust. “I should have warned you.”

  “I wouldn’t have taken you seriously.” Dave set his plate on the bed and shed his jacket. “The place is beyond belief. Next time I’ll drive a junk heap.”

  “Next time, just don’t go,” Cecil said. “Wonder is you came back with a car at all. Wonder is you came back alive. That is a killing ground out there. Grannies, little children, policemen.” Cecil stretched out a long, skinny arm to take the cigarette pack from Dave’s jacket where it lay on the bed. “I should have been with you.”

  “You’re not supposed to smoke,” Dave said. On a deadly night of rain last winter, in the lost back reaches of Yucca Canyon, flames leaping high from a burning cabin, bullets had punctured the boy’s lungs. Cecil acted as if he hadn’t heard. He lit the cigarette with Dave’s lighter, and choked on the smoke. Coughing bent him forward, shook him. “Damn.” He wiped away tears with his knuckles. “Damn.”

  Dave took the cigarette from him, stubbed it out in the bedside ashtray. “That’ll learn you,” he said.

  For a moment, Cecil got the coughing under control. Eyes wet, voice a wheeze, he asked, “Where you going tomorrow? Where you taking my van?”

  “San Diego County,” Dave said. “And no, you can’t go. It’s too far. Look, will you please eat?”

  Cecil coughed again, fist to mouth. When he finished, he picked up the sandwich. Wearily obedient, he bit into it. With his mouth full, he said, “Seem to me, if you take my van, it’s only fair you take me.” He gulped Bloody Mary, wiped tomato juice off his chin with the napkin. “Dave, I can’t eat this. I’m not hungry.” He laid the sandwich on the plate. His eyes begged. “I’m sorry. Maybe later.”

  “Right.” Dave knew his smile was stiff, mechanical, false. He was growing discouraged. And frightened. “I’ll wrap it in plastic and put it in the fridge. Don’t forget it, now, okay?” Cecil nodded mutely and handed him the plate as if looking at it was more than he could bear. Dave rose and set it on the tray. He turned back. “I’ll take you tomorrow, if you promise me something.” The rear of the van was lushly carpeted—floor, walls, ceiling—in electric blue to contrast with the flame colors of the custom paint job. Picture window. Built-in bar, refrigerator, drop-leaf table. Electric blue easy chair. Electric blue wraparound couch. “You lie down. All the way.”

  Cecil made a face. He poked grumpily at the ice cubes in his Bloody Mary with a finger. He licked the finger, tried for a smile, and almost managed it. “Okay. I promise.” He livened up a little. “Why are we going?”

  “The reasons keep piling up.” Dave sat on the bed again, worked on his sandwich and drink, and reviewed the morning’s events for Cecil. He finished, “So I went to see Dr. Ford Kretschmer. Only his address is a storage lot for galvanized pipe. And the telephone number is out of service.”

  Cecil stared. “He wasn’t a doctor at all?”

  “Maybe not.” Sandwich and drink finished, Dave wiped fingers and mouth with his napkin, took Cecil’s empty glass and his own with his plate to the tray on the chest. “Whoever he was, the woman with him was no nurse. She was the same one who showed up with goons at the Myers house three weeks later.”

  “The ones who beat her up?” Cecil said.

  “You’ve got it.” Dave picked up his jacket and shrugged into it. “I have to take the Jaguar down to the agency so they can replace that window.” He dug from the jacket pocket the crumpled flimsies he had taken from the drawer under Paul Myers’s bedroom closet. He hesitated. “You want to rest while I’m gone, or you want to do some work?”

  Cecil reached for the papers. “Busy hands,” he said, “are happy hands.” He began separating the papers, frowning at them. “What are these? What do I do?”

  “Telephone those companies. Get hold of whoever is in charge of shipping. Get out of them, if you can, whether Paul Myers was hauling anything except what’s listed on those manifests. What did they think of Myers? Did any of them know him? If so, did they know who he was moonlighting for, what he was hauling? Anything, everything.”

  “Do I pretend I’m you again?” Cecil said.

  Dave grinned. “If it’s not too much of a strain on your natural femininity.”

  Cecil threw a pillow at him.

  Dave laughed and carried the tray down the stairs.

  On sun-scorched lots where weeds grew through the asphalt, and faded plastic pennons fluttered from sagging wires overhead, he looked at battered cars not quite but almost ready for the junkyard. Two or three he test-drove. They bucked and gasped through trash-blown neighborhoods of desolate lumberyards, warehouses, and shacky motels, while salesmen in polyester doubleknit suits breathed mouthwash fumes beside him, lying about mileage, lifetime batteries, and recent overhauls. In the end, he escaped Culver City in a 1969 two-door Valiant. A sideswipe had creased it deeply from front to back. Its crackly plastic upholstery leaked stuffing. But its gears worked, the engine ran smoothly, and the tires still had treads. It was a vague beige color, a hole gaped where its radio had been, and Dave pried loose and handed to the surprised salesman its one remaining hubcap before he drove off. The car labored up the canyon, but it didn’t overheat. And when he left it parked on the leaf-strewn bricks of his tree-shady yard where the Jaguar customarily stood, he felt good. No one in Gifford Gardens would give this car a second look
.

  This time he fixed double martinis in the cookshack. And when he carried them into the rear building, music was in the air—Miles Davis, “Sketches of Spain.” The ice in the hefty glasses jingled as he carried them up the stairs. The flimsies in their pale pinks, blues, yellows, lay spread out on the sheet across Cecil’s legs. He told the telephone receiver “thank you” and put it back in its cradle. He reached for the martini and gave his beautiful head with its short-cropped hair a rueful shake.

  “Not one of these companies shipped anything with Paul Myers but what’s listed on these manifests.” He patted the papers. “They all liked him. He was reliable, friendly, intelligent.” Cecil sipped the martini, hummed, and for a moment shut his eyes in unwordable appreciation. “They are all sorry he’s dead, but nobody can guess what he was hauling at night up in that canyon before he crashed.” Cecil held the glass up in a salute to Dave, who was shedding his sweaty clothes. “You came back just in time. I was about to die of temperance up here, all alone by the telephone.”

  “Sorry about that, but when you hear what I’ve done, you’ll be proud of me.” Dave sat on the foot of the bed, perched his drink on the loft railing, shed shoes and socks. “I bought a jalopy to drive in Gifford Gardens. A genuine eyesore.” He tried his martini. Better than usual. Most things were, now that Cecil was with him. “When you chance to pass it, avert your gaze, all right?”

  “I can’t promise.” Cecil gathered up the flimsies. They crackled and whispered together. “Morbid fascination may be too much for me. How did you force yourself to commit this act of sound common sense?”

  “I had the man at the Jaguar showroom in Beverly Hills run me over to the used-car lots on Washington in Culver City. You should have seen his expression. He couldn’t believe the place.” Dave hiked his butt and shed his trousers. He stood, holding the trousers up to get the creases straight. “The poor man kept repeating that he’d furnish me with a loaner until the window was fixed. I didn’t have to do this desperate thing. He was almost in tears.” Dave took down a wooden hanger from a wide knotty-pine wardrobe, and hung the pants on it. “But I was firm.” He retrieved his jacket from where he’d draped it over the rail, and hung that on the hanger too. “If I made him strand me there, I’d have to buy wheels to get home on, wouldn’t I?” He hung the suit in the wardrobe. It was damp with sweat and must go to the cleaners, but that could wait. What would he wear to Gifford Gardens next time? A raveled sweater and an old picture hat? He closed the wardrobe doors. “I knew nothing less would force me into it.” He went to get his drink and saw Cecil watching him soberly and big-eyed over the rim of his martini glass. “What’s the matter?”