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

  "Did he ever give Mr. Oats hypodermic injections?"

  "Why, no. Only a registered nurse—" She stopped and stared. "Oh. It's about the morphine, isn't it? That he wasn't supposed to have."

  "That's what it's about," Campos said.

  Dave said, "You told me no one came to see him at your place. No one but Dr. De Kalb and Jay McPhail. You want to change that now?''

  "You said friends. I didn't think of him. I guess I wanted to forget him and I did. Yes, he came. John hadn't been out of the hospital two days when he showed up. In an old wreck of a Volkswagen. I was supposed to think it was kind and thoughtful of him. I couldn't. I know it's not fair, but he makes my flesh crawl. I told him John wasn't there, but John came out of the bedroom to see who I was talking to and invited him in. I brought them coffee. But I couldn't stay in the same room. I went back to the kitchen. And when I heard him going I followed him outside. I felt guilty, but it was my house and I didn't want him in it. And I did admit it to John afterward. I told the boy not to come back."

  "He came back," Dave said. "Did you see him?"

  She shook her head. "Once or twice I thought I heard that rattly motor. After dark, while John was having his swim. I went out on the deck to look, but I couldn't see. And since he didn't come to the door, I didn't worry about it again," Her mouth took a little sorry twist. "I should have worried, shouldn't I?"

  "You didn't hear that car the night he died?" Campos asked. "No. . . you weren't home. I remember." He sighed, stood, forced the tired smile again. "Okay, Miss Stannard. Thank you. I think we know where we are, now. He'll tell us the rest. Not right away, but in a few hours. He'll need help then and he'll talk. I'll call you. I'll call you, Brandstetter."

  10

  THE PHONE RANG. It cost effort, but he opened his eyes. Grayness trying to be daylight edged the curtains. He groaned and shifted stiff joints on the white couch. It seemed only a minute ago he'd shed his clothes—fingers numb from too many hours clutching a steering wheel along too many fast lanes of too many freeways—parted the white shutter doors to the hall and, moving softly in slatted lamplight, dragged down a blanket from a high shelf of the linen closet. He'd wrapped himself in it, switched off the lamp and dropped here, dropped into sleep before there was time to arrange his bones. He sat up, ran a hand down his face, shivered. His watch lay on the orange Parsons table. He picked it up, held it close. 6:17. It had been 3:40 when he got here. He pushed to his feet and stumbled through shadows to the kitchen. He unhooked the receiver and dropped it. It swung on its tether of red rubber-coated cord, knocking its mouth against the wall. He fumbled for it, recovered it, croaked his name into it.

  "It's no good,"Jesus-Maria Campos said. "It looked very good, but it's no good. On the night Oats drowned, this kid was locked up. In Oxnard."

  "In jail? What for?"

  Doug pulled open the shutter doors from the dining space and stood holding them. He wore a yellow terry-cloth robe, rubber thongs. His hair was tousled. One of his hands was wrapped in white gauze. In the dimness he could have been Rod. His eyes were like Rod's had been—opaque, shiny, like stones fresh from a lapidary's tumbler. Their look now was reproachful.

  Campos said, "Stolen car. He wasn't the driver. He'd only hitched a ride. But he got held just the same. Till the next morning. It was sundown when they got stopped. Oats wasn't drowned till after dark."

  "Right. But he did take the stuff to Oats?"

  "In fifty-dollar fixes," Campos said. "The kid had close to three thousand dollars in his room. Oats wasn't the only one. Thanks for putting me on to this."

  "Por nada." Dave hung up, turned away, lit the kitchen. Off the burner deck he took the coffeemaker, separated the parts, emptied and rinsed them at the sink. The doors stuttered be.hind him. Had Doug come in or gone out? Did it matter? He ran water into the lower section of the pot, reached down a bright can from a cupboard and with a little yellow plastic scoop measured coffee into the top section. The doors stuttered again. He turned. Doug held out his old blue corduroy robe.

  "You were here earlier," he said.

  "You were busy." Dave fitted the top part into the bottom part. "Anyway, I had to go back."

  "You weren't coming," Doug said. "For undisclosed reasons. You were going to phone me in the morning."

  "I obviously should have phoned last night." Dave took the robe and shrugged into it. "It's what's called discretion—right?"

  "Sometimes it's just called manners," Doug said. "What made you change your mind?"

  "A girl alone on an empty beach at night." Dave set the coffeemaker on its burner and twisted the knob. With a soft pop, flame drew a blue asterisk under the pot. Dave stared at it. "The man she loved drowned a week ago. She doesn't like me. I keep bringing her news she doesn't want to hear. All the same, tonight she asked me to stay with her. For a drink, she said, but she meant more. It was dark. Any man would have done. I just happened to come by. And—" He patted the old robe's pocket, wanting a cigarette. Doug held out his pack. Blue. Gauloises. Dave took one. "And it reached me how it feels to be left alone. By the dead. Really alone." He watched Doug steadily while Doug lit the cigarette for him, lit his own. "You know?"

  "You know damn well I know.'' Doug shook out the match, dropped it in a red ashtray on the counter. "Better than you. Twice over I know.''

  He was talking about Fox Olson. After Jean-Paul had been killed, Doug had quit his job with NATO and come back from France to Los Angeles. And by crazy luck he'd found again the man he'd loved when they were kids. After more than twenty years apart. But in those years too much had happened to Olson. He and Doug had managed a few good days. Then he lay in the dark on the splintery planks of a deserted amusement pier with lumps of metal in his chest that made his heart stop. And, trapped jn trouble deep as trouble can get, Doug met Dave.

  "Granted," Dave said. "Well, it turned me around. I told myself all that's wrong with us is misunderstanding. That's not good, but it's not the worst. The worst is not having anyone to have a misunderstanding with. It's not ecstasy. But it beats nothing. So —I came home. A mistake. Or was it? Don't tell me now. I have to use the bathroom. Unless, of course, it's occupied by your friend."

  "Lorant?" Doug's laugh was brief and ironic. He shook his head. "Lorant's not here. He wasn't here when you came home the first time. He left shortly after dinner. Left in a hurry. Which explains the jacket. It seems he doesn't sleep with men. It upset him that I thought he would. I hope there's another place like European Motors in town. I don't think I can go back to European Motors. Not comfortably.''

  "Too bad," Dave said. "Excuse me a minute."

  When he came out of the bathroom he looked to his left. The bedroom door stood open. Beyond, in shadow, a white bed loomed. It was too big for the room. Wickerwork, of all things—whorls, sprays, serpentines. A joke, but built to last—not true of most furniture at the time he'd bought it, December 1945. He'd come back from the snowy rubble of Germany to the gray rains of L.A., out of the Army but still in uniform because he'd fined down and none of the clothes he'd left behind fitted anymore. He couldn't see living with his father again, or rather with his father's women, and because apartments were scarce, he'd used money put by when he was a kid for a college education he didn't want, to make a down payment on a house—this one, old even then, small, on a dowdy side street. And he'd needed something to sleep on. Nothing so ridiculous. But he'd have bought whatever the clerk showed him, that particular clerk, a small, dark, effeminate boy whose name had been Rod Fleming and with whom he'd slept in that absurd bed—barring times of illness, anger, absence—every night since. Till death did them part. That Lorant might have put his stranger's nakedness into that bed last night made Dave's fists tighten. He opened them. His mouth twitched disgust at himself. A bed, for Christ sake, was a collection of sticks and springs and ticking. And Rod? Rod was even less than that now. Dave turned and went back to the bright kitchen, where Doug was alive—not smiling, but alive—and holding out coffee to
him in a big pottery mug, terra-cotta color, one of a pair he and Rod had always used at breakfast. He took it with a nod. Doug asked him:

  "Do you know what I wished when I bloodied myself yesterday?" A cigarette burned in the fingers of his damaged hand. As he smoked, the white bandage lifted and fell like a distress signal. "I wished you were with me. When the doctor sewed me up, I wanted you there. And when I came home, I wanted you. Not a voice on the telephone, seventy-five miles away, promising to call me in the morning. You. Here."

  "I said I was sorry about your hand."

  "But you hated me for not wanting to drive."

  "You fixed Chicken Marengo for Lorant." Dave set down his mug and shook a cigarette from Doug's blue pack on the counter. "That takes both hands."

  "I would have fixed it for you." Doug picked up the red iron skillet from the burner deck, held it under a hard, hot spray from the swing tap. "You didn't want it." With his good hand and a soft ball of copper mesh, he scoured the pan's black insides. "And when you hung up, I thought how very different it was. Jean-Paul would have come. Because I was hurt. Not badly—just hurt. So"—Doug twisted the knob marked HOT so the spray stopped, pulled paper towels off a roll, dried the pan—"it was him I missed. The dead, right? Who can't come back." He set the pan on the burner deck, took the one that had held wild rice to the sink, splashed it full of water, left it to soak. "And I was like your girl on the beach. I thought of the nearest man." He opened the refrigerator. His laugh at himself was wry. "My choice was no better than hers."

  "But you are not," Dave said, "alone."

  "No?" Doug brought out a flat, plastic-wrapped pack of bacon, a carton of eggs, a stick of butter. "That was how I felt. I don't know how it is with you." The big door swung shut with a smack of rubber insulation. "With me it's an ache in the lower right arm. Why there, I can't say. But when it comes, I know it's real." He laid bacon strips in the skillet. "You forget I'm a stranger here. I don't know anyone but you." Bending to watch the flame, he turned the heat on low. "The days get long."

  "They wouldn't get so long"—Dave reached down a snowy little can of orange-juice concentrate from the freezer, watched it waltz with the electric can-opener—"if you'd forget France. Scrap the records, throw out the magazines with his picture, get rid of the Ferrari." He shook the icy orange cylinder into the jar of thick glass that waited on top of the blender. "Cars were his thing, Doug, not yours." He filled the little can with water, poured it in, capped the jar. "One of the first things your mother told me about you was that you didn't know a camshaft from a carburetor." The blender had stops enough to confuse E. Power Biggs. Dave pushed the one he was sure of. The little motor whined. Inside the jar, chaos began, like the explosion of a miniature sun. "You still don't. That's why you need European Motors. Be honest. Let it go. Let him go."

  He turned. No Doug. The doors wagged. From its hook in a row of hooks he got down a square skillet, set it beside the one where the bacon sizzled, cut butter into it, lit the burner. Doug brought in the smeared table clutter from last night, stacked it on the counter by the sink, stood next to Dave to turn the bacon with a steel fork. He said:

  "I've wondered what you'd be like, upset. I'd have bet on this." His mug stood on the brick surround of the burner deck. He picked it up, drank from it.

  Dave took eggs from the carton. Cradling them cold in his hand, he asked, "On what?"

  "On how you are. Rational, analytical and ruthless." His look held Dave's for a second. Then he set the mug down and turned the bacon again. Dave broke eggs into the pan, one to a corner. Doug said, "The phone in the bedroom clicks when you dial out here. It woke me when you came home the first time. I waited for the call to end, for you to come in. When it ended and you didn't come, when I heard the back door close, heard your car start, heard it drive off up the street, I came out. And saw the jacket." He stepped across the waxed bricks to switch off the blender. "I thought a lot of different things." He took glasses from a cupboard, filled them from the jar. He held one out to Dave, hurt in the shiny stone eyes. "Most of all, I thought how gentle you are. But you're not gentle, are you?"

  "Ruthless." Dave set the glass down, rummaged a spatula from a drawer. "It's a habit of mind you get into when your job is to find the truth and not accept substitutes."

  Doug said, "What is the truth?"

  "In this case?" Dave carefully turned the eggs. "I am." He nodded at the other pan. "You want to drain the bacon?"

  Doug flattened a thickness of paper towels on the counter and forked the strips onto it. He got down plates and held them out, frowning, while Dave slid the buttery eggs onto them. "I don't understand." He turned to lay bacon on the plates.

  "It's very simple." Dave refilled the coffee mugs. "Jean-Paul is dead. I'm not dead."

  "It's not simple, God damn it," Doug said.

  "Let's eat," Dave said.

  11

  FLOYD KELLOGG—tweeds, sideburns, briar pipe—got up from a desk barricaded by stacks of new books in flashy jackets. New books in flashy jackets crowded the high shelving back of him. Bancroft's on Vine just off Hollywood Boulevard was a tall, bright cave of new books in flashy jackets. Kellogg was big. His grip crushed Dave's hand.

  "Mr. Brandstetter. How are you? Haven't seen you in quite a while. How's Mr. Fleming?"

  They still asked. He wished they'd stop. "Dead, Mr. Kellogg. Last September. Cancer."

  "Aw, that's too bad. He was a young man." For a second, primeval fear showed in Kellogg's eyes. Then primeval relief. Somebody else, not me, not this time. "Can't get over it. I had some books piled up in back to show him when he came in." Headshake, tongue-cluck. "Shock. Real shock."

  "I'm sorry about the books. Shall I take them?"

  "Oh, no, no, no." Squeeze of the arm. "I'll just put them back in stock. Not your kind of thing. Hollywood in the Forties. The Films of Joan Crawford. His kind of thing."

  "Right." Rod would have cheered. He'd have torn open the brown wrapping in the car before they left the parking lot. At home, he'd have grabbed corn chips and beer from the kitchen, kicked off his shoes, settled with food, drink, books in a corner of a couch, feet tucked under him like a girl. He'd have shouted with laughter. He'd have jumped up repeatedly to show Dave this photo of Ann Sheridan sultry in five-inch wedgies, that photo of Barbara Stanwyck in square-shouldered mink, a Luger smoking in her hand. And Dave? He'd have hunched down lower and grimmer in his chair, trying to focus on The New Republic or Scientific American. At first he'd have glanced up to grunt at the pictures. Then he'd have snarled. And Rod, feelings hurt, would have sat quiet. But not for long. Soon he'd have started chuckling. Then guffawing again. Then: My God, this you have got to see. When Dave would have slammed down his magazine. Or thrown it at Rod's head. Ah, Christ, forget it. What was Kellogg saying? Something about a price cut on the James Joyce letters. "Yes, send them out. But all I'm really here for today is information."

  Kellogg's eyebrows rose. "You've bought every book in the reference section."

  "Not that kind of information. About a girl who works for you. Part time. April Stannard."

  Kellogg nodded. "Nice girl, nice girl. Wish we could take her on full time. Knows her books. Just haven't had an opening. She wants to work at the El Molino branch. Only two people there. What did you want to know about her?"

  Dave named a date. "Did she work that night?"

  "You could ask her. She's—"

  "I've asked her. Now I'm asking you."

  Kellogg stiffened. "Well!" It sounded offended. He heard how it sounded and said it over again, amiably this time. "Well, all right." He rubbed his hands, sat down at the desk, pawed among bills, checks, receipts, for a pair of Ben Franklin glasses. He probed into a green tin file box. "Here we are." He held a four-bysix card out to Dave. In turning, his left elbow nudged a stack of books. It tottered and fell. He didn't notice. "The dates and times are all on there," he said.

  Dave put on his horn rims. The listings were in different handwritings with
different ballpoint pens. There was one for the date of John Oats's death. The hours were noon till nine at night. He handed back the card and noticed beyond the desk a slim figure. Familiar but blurred by the glasses. He took them off. April Stannard stood there, books in her arms, the books Kellogg had knocked off the desk. It was routine at Bancroft's—picking up after Kellogg. He dropped change, sales slips, packages. The nearest clerk retrieved them for him. April wore blue wool, cut boxy, like a Norfolk jacket, and only an inch or two longer. Her blond hair gleamed. She'd brightened her mouth with lipstick. But grief was still in her eyes. She watched Kellogg tap the card back into the file. She looked across his stocky bulk at Dave.

  "That's my card. Why?" "People lie to me," Dave said. "Not all people, but some people. It helps to know which."

  "You thought I could have—" She broke off, glancing at Kellogg, color coming into her face. She set the books down hard, turned fast, walked away.

  "Just a minute." Pushing the glasses into his pocket, Dave went after her, knocking against browsers at tables, shelves. She moved briskly but blindly into a trap, a doorless corner of the children's section under the mezzanine. Fluorescent tubes close overhead here, glaring off the flat, bright colors of the books. He caught her arm, turned her, she jerked away, tear tracks crooked down her face. Her words came out low, trembling, very angry.

  "Why? Why would you think such a thing?"

  "I don't think anything." He handed her his handkerchief. "I'm trying to find out what to think."