Dave Brandstetter 3 - Troublemaker Read online

  Khazoyan in his hoarse high voice gave the lieutenant the facts. Yoshiba said, "Good grief."

  Dave said gently, "He showed you the money? Took it out of the envelope, then put it back? What?"

  "Well" —Johns squirmed on the chair, his tired young face flushing —"he had his mind on"—thin fingers tugged at the straggly mustache —"on what he brought me there for. I mean, the money wasn't going anyplace."

  "It went," Khazoyan said. "You didn't notice it was missing when you came out of the bedroom?"

  "With him laying there on the floor with blood pouring out of his chest?" Johns frowned. "Was it missing?"

  "It still is," Khazoyan said.

  Dave said, "Huncie told you to deliver the money Tuesday morning. To him. Where?"

  "He was coming back for it. To Tom's, the beach house. Ten o'clock."

  Dave pushed his chair back. The worn rubber leg tips stuttered on the tiles. He stood up, touched Yoshiba's bulky shoulder. "May I use your phone?"

  "Help yourself," Yoshiba said. And to Johns, "How come you open up today? I'm a nice fellow. What is it —you don't trust Orientals? Why cover up all this time and break out for him?"

  "I was trying to protect Tom," Johns said. "Now that doesn't mean anything. He found out about Tom."

  Tom Owens answered the phone. The barking of the dogs echoed off the hard inlets and tall groins of the wooden house. "Gail isn't here," he said, "but I've been trying to reach you. Shall we say frantically? There's a girl here, young woman. Claims she's Larry's wife, ex-wife. She's got a baby with her. Says it's Larry's. She says he was going to get money for her —money he owed her. Court-ordered. Fifteen hundred dollars."

  "I've been talking to him," Dave said. "I know."

  "There was some man," Owens said, "helping her."

  "Dwayne Huncie," Dave said. "Is he there?"

  "No. Wait a minute. I'll put the girl on."

  When Dave walked back into the interrogation room, Yoshiba was sitting on the floor, clasping thick knees in thick arms, his back against the wall, and staring up from that bland moon face of his at Larry Johns, still on the chair. Dave told him:

  "You might put out an all-points bulletin for a camper with Texas license plates, registered to Dwayne Huncie."

  "He'll be back in Texas," Yoshiba protested. "It will take a month and letters from two governors to get him back here. What are you trying to say —that this Huncie walked in and picked up the money while Johns and Wendell were doing it in the next room?"

  Dave looked at Johns. "Did you hear anything?"

  "Before what I told the cops? Well, yeah. Yeah." He sat straight, excited. "I heard something. I said, 'What's that? Somebody's out there.' Rick just said for me to stop being so nervous and relax. So I did. But the next time, he heard it too. And we both knew somebody was out there. And he went out to see. And that was when I heard voices and the gun went off."

  "How long after the first time?" Yoshiba asked.

  "Aw, hell." The frail shoulders lifted and fell. He'd smoked the cigarette down short. He leaned to snub it out in the chipped ashtray on the table. "I wasn't exactly looking at my watch right then. Five minutes?"

  Yoshiba stood up. "So Huncie came after the kid here to make sure of getting the money and Wendell came out and caught him and tried to stop him with the gun and Huncie turned it on him?"

  "Huncie can tell you," Dave said. "Find Huncie."

  "Even if we got extradition," Yoshiba said, "it would cost a bundle to get him here —jet fares for him and two guards. This is a small town, Brandstetter."

  Dave shook his head. "Huncie has a brother in Saugus. He'd spoken of going there."

  "Spoken? Who to? Who did you just telephone?"

  "Tom Owens. Jomay Johns is at his house. Now."

  Larry Johns groaned and held his head.

  Dave said, "Monday night, Huncie picked her and the baby up at a theater where he'd parked them. About eleven. They went to a MacDonald's. He'd been crying about being broke but that night he peeled a twenty-dollar bill off a big fat roll and gave it to her to pay for their hamburgers. Then he excused himself to go to the men's room. And never came back."

  "I'll put out the APB." Yoshiba went to the door. "But only for California."

  "It was an Indian Head camper," Larry Johns said. "On an old orange Chevy pickup with a smashed headlight."

  Yoshiba opened the door. "License number?"

  "You're kidding," the boy said. Yoshiba grunted and left. The boy looked at Dave with tear-filled eyes. "You're really something else," he said. "You're going to get me out of this."

  "Don't count on it," Dave said. "Not yet."

  Outside in the corridor, a knee-high child bumped into him. It wore a T-shirt with orange juice stains and little Levi's that looked ready to fall off. A fist held a grubby string. The string dragged a yellow wooden duck. On its side. Dave crouched and set it on its red wooden wheels. The child went off down the hall without any change of expression. The duck's head turned around as it traveled. The wheels made a clacking sound and a small bell jingled.

  Dave was watching it and laughing to himself when a door opened near the end of the hall. Vern Taylor came out in his nice new sneakers. He didn't look Dave's way. He went ahead of the child toward open doors at the end of the corridor. He went out the doors down a walk between hibiscus bushes with flowers red as his wind-breaker jacket. He went off up a sunlit street.

  Dave thought he wanted to look at the door, PAROLE was lettered on its fogged glass. That was interesting. He hadn't expected anything interesting from Vern Taylor. He went inside. A woman with faded red hair worked an electric typewriter at a desk off the same assembly line as Yoshiba's and Khazoyan's, even to the piled-up papers. She bent her head and looked at him over wire-rimmed goggles she'd pulled down on a long, thin nose. Her eyebrows asked what he wanted.

  He laid down a card. "The P.O. handling Vern Taylor?" The offices were boxed off by partitions, wood below, frosted glass above. The one the woman nodded him to was big enough for what it held and no more—a file cabinet, a desk, two chairs. And a small man who looked no heavier than the weight of his bones, there was so little but bones to him. He pushed a manila folder into a file drawer, rolled the drawer shut, turned. And jerked his bald head in surprise. "Dave Brandstetter! Long time."

  He came around the desk, smiling, holding out a hand. Dave shook it carefully. It felt fragile. "Years," he said. "So this is where they stuck you."

  The man's name was Squire. It had been a couple of decades since Dave had begun asking him questions. He made a wry face. "I asked for it. Thought it would be different from L.A. It's the same." He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk. "Probably be the same anyplace. Sit down. You like coffee or something?" He started to get up again.

  Dave shook his head and dropped onto the other chair. "What I'd like is what I always like from you. Information that's none of my business. I just saw Vern Taylor walk out of here. Why?"

  "He'll be walking in and out of here every week for the next two years. I'm not sure it'll be enough. On the record, he needs a keeper." Squire took the folder out of the cabinet again and sat down again. "He just came out of Chino." Squire opened the folder, put on dime-store reading glasses, the kind with lenses like dry half moons, leaned forward, blinking while he leafed over the papers the folder held. "Ah, it's pathetic. Felonies, yeah, but 288.A, for Christ sake." The number was from the California Penal Code. It stood for oral copulation. "Plus 290." That meant failure to register as a sex offender. "Because his record goes back. A long time." He took the glasses off. "You want it all?"

  "I don't know why," Dave said. "But yes, if you're not too busy. I'm into a case that's like a jigsaw too many little kids have fooled with on too many rainy Sunday afternoons. Half the pieces are missing. Taylor probably isn't one of them. I can't see where he'd fit but he is underfoot. Let's hear it."

  Squire put the glasses back on, peered at the papers again, drew a deep breath and let i
t out windily. "Okay. He's been in sex scrapes starting twelve, fifteen years ago. Parks, bus station men's rooms, the old familiar places. The Astor Bar on Main Street. Always 647.A." It was the code, for solicitation to commit a lewd act. "Misdemeanors, right? You pay a little fine and walk out after a night in the slams. But if your employer learns about it you can lose out. He had a good job. Civil service. Second bust, they found out and shed him."

  "Drafting," Dave said.

  Squire's mild eyes peered at him over the glasses. "You know all this?"

  "Almost none of it," Dave said. "Go on."

  "By not mentioning his arrest record and because nobody checked, he got on with a private building contractor. Three more arrests. Somehow he kept it from them. But on number four some bastard in the Department made sure they heard all about it."

  "Friendly," Dave said.

  "Well, Christ," Squire said. "Taylor had to know it was a losing game. Didn't he? Dave, what the hell is the matter with those people?"

  "They're crazy," Dave said. "Like the rest of us."

  "Not like the rest of us," Squire said, "or there wouldn't be laws against it." He sighed and picked up the papers again. "Then, believe it or not, he tried teaching. No shit. Summer term, high school. I doubt they'd ever have found out except a bar was raided. The Black Cat, on Sunset. You remember that?"

  "How many arrests did they make that night? Twenty?"

  "And all the names got in the papers," Squire said. "Which put an end to his teaching career. And respectability, if that's the word. The next arrest was a 647.B."

  "Prostitution?" Dave said.

  "I guess he still looked young," Squire said. "Anyway, he was living off it. If you call a room at the Ricketts Hotel living." The place was six sagging stories of dingy brick standing to its knees in a wash of greasy neon on Los Angeles's skid row. "He'd score in the Astor downstairs and take the Johns up to the room. Only one night he chose the wrong trick. A vice squad officer."

  "A felony," Dave said. "What did he draw?"

  "That woman lawyer, the one with the two Persian cats she always took into court on silver chains," Squire said. "She bargained him out. But it cost him."

  "The Duchess," Dave said. "Those Pershing Square faggots worshiped her and she exploited them down to their last rhinestone. We should all have friends like May Sweeny."

  "So he tried for a real job again. Through one of those gay social service agencies. They put him in a candy factory run by two old aunties who didn't give a damn about his record. But they only paid a buck an hour."

  "I know the place," Dave said. "And how privileged the boys feel. So how did he end in Chino? When?"

  "A year ago last December," Squire said. "Christmas Eve, God help us. They busted him on 288.A. In an alley doorway back of a garment place on Broadway. In the rain. Oral copulation in the rain, no less. He came up before Judge Macander and you know what happened. Macander read his record"—Squire rattled the typed sheet at Dave—"and gave him five years and a thousand dollars."

  "And he just got out?" Dave asked.

  "About a month ago," Squire said. "Back to the Ricketts but not for long. He changed bases and he's in Surf, so I inherited him."

  "Macander wanted jail to straighten him out," Dave said. "Forty years of disappointments haven't dimmed his faith in jails. Did it work?"

  Squire shut the folder and got up to put it away again and to shut the file drawer. "He thinks it was bad luck. All his life it's been bad luck. Not bad judgment, not stupidity, not failure to learn from life. Just bad luck."

  "Yup." Dave rose. "If he'd been born rich, none of it would have happened, right?"

  Squire dropped the dime-store glasses on the desk. "You've talked to him. You didn't need all this."

  "I guess not," Dave said. "I don't know what to do with it." He went to the office door. "Come on, let me buy you a drink."

  "Like old times," Squire said, and came with him.

  CHAPTER 9

  A SQUARE PACKAGE stood on his desk. Brown paper. Twine. It was alone there. He kept the desktop empty. It was a good-looking desk that he'd hunted a long time to find. Slabs of oiled teak hung in a brushed steel frame. Door whispering shut behind him, he frowned and went grimly down the long, cold room. He kept the thermostat low. Somebody had asked him once, "What do you do—hang beef in here?" Doug, he supposed. Doug had accused him before and since of subnormal warmth.

  He put on his horn rims and picked up the package. The label was neatly lettered but without a return address. He held it to his ear. Nothing ticked inside. But maybe this one wasn't meant to tick. Maybe opening it was what would trigger it. He dropped into a saddle leather chair that turned its back to a glass wall that showed blank blue sky, a lone helicopter. Out of a deep drawer he lifted his phone but he didn't dial. His father came in.

  Carl Brandstetter was a straight, ruddy man of sixty-five with handsome white hair, blue eyes and an expensive tailor. He turned back to say something out the door, let it fall shut, nodded to Dave and walked to a cabinet where liquor, ice, glasses hid themselves behind insulated steel finished to look like wood. He bent to open doors and take out bottles. "Go on with your call."

  "It can wait." Dave stood. "What did the doctor tell you?"

  "To stop smoking." Carl Brandstetter snorted, dropped miniature ice cubes into a pitcher of thick Danish crystal. "And drinking." He measured gin with a squat glass jigger. "And working." He measured vermouth, set the bottles back, found ajar of stuffed olives, shut the door. "And sex." From the snowy little cave that was the freezer compartment he took stem glasses and dropped an olive into each.

  Dave said, "That doesn't leave you many options."

  "Backgammon." His father moved the crowded ice with a glass rod. "At the senior citizen center. And a little light shuffleboard, maybe once a week." He poured from the pitcher, turned, smiling, holding out a frost-crusted glass to Dave. "But no tournaments. Nothing to work up the adrenaline."

  "Heart?" Dave took the glass, tasted the drink.

  "It appears to be broken." Carl Brandstetter sat in a white goat-hide chair and placed his glass on a low glass-and-steel table where an Aztec metate—rough gray stone on three legs—was the ashtray. "That would give some women in this city a laugh."

  "It was always their hearts," Dave said. There had been nine of them, if you included only wives. Carl Brandstetter wasn't a collector —he was a discarder. Dave watched him start a cigarette with a gold lighter that for shape and incising matched his cuff links. "You're smoking. You're drinking."

  The older man said, "I feel fine. When I'm dead I'll no doubt think giving it up would have been worth it. Right now, it's unreal. The sun is shining. I have a lovely and devoted young wife who will stop in the Bentley shortly to drive me to dinner at—"

  "The women," Dave said, "it won't matter a damn to. It will matter to me."

  The board chairman of Medallion Life raised white brows. "Sentimentality? From you?"

  "Just fact," Dave said. "Why not cut down a little?"

  "What's in the package?" his father wondered.

  Dave sipped his drink. "Do we own a metal detector?"

  "Not that I know of. Why?" Carl Brandstetter rose, hefted the parcel, read the label. "Hmm. Anonymous."

  "It's possible somebody would like me dead," Dave told him. "It's happened before—remember?"

  "On this Wendell matter?" Carl Brandstetter set down the box, went to pick up his glass. "I'm told there's been static. The mother is turning attorneys loose on us. The business partner wants you fired."

  "I'm still not sure those two didn't kill him." Dave lit a cigarette, sat on a desk corner, spelled out his reasons. "But there are new characters in the drama. A little ex-wife from Texas. The suspect's. Her baby and her backwoods lawyer, demanding fifteen hundred dollars in delinquent child-support payments."

  He went on with that part of the story while Carl Brandstetter took a gold penknife from a pocket and cut the twine on the package. He fo
lded back the brown paper. More twine bound the carton inside. He cut this too, folded the knife blade with a click, put the knife away. He grinned at Dave.

  "You don't want to leave the room?" Dave said, "You never did have any imagination."

  "You've got enough for both of us," his father said. "The Johns boy killed him. It's more obvious now than before. The fifteen hundred dollars was the motive."

  "He didn't get it," Dave said.

  "Who did?"

  "I'd suggest you ask the first police officer on the scene. They're badly paid."

  Carl Brandstetter opened the flaps of the carton and pulled out fistfuls of shredded paper. Dave leaned to look inside. What rested there was a handsome pot in brown and black glazes. A three-inch envelope gleamed in the bottom of the pot. He thumbed it open, slid out a linen-finish card. With half my love—Kovaks.

  His father was watching him quizzically. Dave handed him the card. "Half?" Carl Brandstetter asked.

  "The other half is for Doug," Dave said.

  His father grimaced and handed back the card. "You should get out of that life." He went back to the goat-hair chair, walking heavily, sitting heavily. Magazines lay on the table, three issues of Apollo, large and thick and glossy. He leafed one over. Dave glimpsed Queen Anne legs, broken-faced Greek marbles, plummy 1890s English genre paintings. Carl Brandstetter said without looking up, "You plan to go free lance when I die, I hope. Because you know the board will fire you. And why."

  Dave shrugged. "I like the job," he said. "But I feel about it the way you feel about your heart. I'm not ready to give up my sex life for it."

  When he opened the palsied aluminum screen door of Sawyer's Pet Shop, small birds flew up like scraps of colored paper in the window. The window was backed by wire mesh. The space made a flight cage for parakeets and finches. There were crooked stick perches, little wooden ladders, hanging gourds, hollowed out and gaily painted. The sheet-metal floor was graveled, strewn with grain and dried corn. Button quail pecked there.

  Along one wall of the shop bubbled aquariums filled with wavery green light and the dim dream dartings of improbable fish. Along the other wall shelves held cans of dog food, boxes of birdseed, cuttlebone, catnip, spray-can deodorants and mange cures. Wire racks on swivels were hung with plastic-bagged sticks and knots of hide for dogs to chew, rubber bones, flannel mice, collars rhinestoned, studded, belled, bright leashes of dyed leather, glittering chain leashes. Shiny new cages hung from the ceiling. Cat pans in gaudy molded plastic were stacked on the floor between dog baskets and heaps of heavy printed paper sacks of cat sand and kibble.