Fadeout Read online

  “But he came back?”

  “Oh, yes. He was only gone a day.” The coffee was drinkable now. She swallowed some. “He said Fox has made quite a little success. Married . . .” Small, crooked smile. “Imagine. All these years. Got a grown daughter, married herself now. Fox . . .” She clucked disbelief. “He’ll always be sixteen, seventeen, eighteen to me. Doug says he’s losing his hair. He had so much. His aunt was always after him to get it cut. Asked me to back her up. I did, of course. But it seemed a shame. All that shaggy yellow hair. Pretty, I thought.”

  “Did Doug say he’d met Fox’s wife?”

  “Why . . .” She chewed her lip. “No, come to think of it, he didn’t.” She drank again, frowning. “That’s odd, isn’t it?” The fond smile returned. “Can’t imagine what kind of girl Fox would marry. Seems—well, impossible.” She laughed at herself. “But that’s foolishness, of course. Why shouldn’t he marry?”

  “She’s small, dark, slender.” Dave tipped his head at the photo. “Like your son. He didn’t marry?”

  “Doug?” The smile, the little headshake regretted, apologized. “No. But he adopted a young French boy, war orphan. Jean-Paul Raideur. That’s where Doug’s interest in cars comes from. The boy was a mechanical—well, genius, I suppose you’d say. But Doug never cared about cars when he was that age. Oh, he and Fox had an awful old rattletrap they used to get to school in. But neither one of them could fix it when it broke down. And it broke down seems like every week or so. . . .” She laughed, recollecting. “But Jean-Paul . . . Doug housed and fed him and sent him through school. Then the army had an automotive training course and somehow Doug fixed things so he could be in that. Then, afterward, he bought him a car to race in. Cars. I think he broke every bone in his body one time or other. But he did win. I don’t know how it works exactly, but if you win often you make all kinds of money. Then he was killed. Just about the time General de Gaulle shooed NATO out of France. All the same, I don’t think Doug would have come home. Not if Jean-Paul hadn’t died. At Le Mans it was.”

  The wound opened inside Dave’s chest again. He turned and walked to the glass door and stared out at the empty street with the rain glazing it. A run-down neighborhood business district like a hundred others in sprawling Los Angeles. Shabby one-story stucco buildings. Hairdresser. Florist. Bicycle shop. Without turning, he said, “Now, then, you told me he’s not here because he got a telephone call. Wednesday afternoon. October eighteenth.”

  “He’d been kind of quiet since he saw Fox. Depressed, I thought. But when that call came, well, I’ve never seen him so excited. His hands were shaking so that when he tried to hang up the receiver he dropped it. The whole phone fell on the floor. His eyes were shining, just shining. He went straight to his room and started packing.

  “‘Who was it?’ I asked him. But he said he couldn’t tell me. Nor what it was about, either. Well, I assumed it was the government calling him for a job. He’d expected them to phone—only he didn’t think he’d accept. But I guess it must have been a better offer than he’d expected.

  “‘Where will you be going?’ I asked him. ‘I hope not overseas again.’ He came and gave me a little kiss on the cheek and a hug and said he was sorry but he couldn’t tell me that either. So I just decided it was top secret. He promised he’d write me after he got settled.”

  Dave turned. “Has he written?”

  “No, but it’s only been a few days. . . .” She cocked her head, frowning, wary. “Mr. Brandstetter, you don’t think that phone call was from Fox.”

  “Wednesday, October eighteenth, was the date Fox disappeared.” Dave came back to the counter. “May I see your telephone directory?” She stooped and rummaged it from under the counter. Birdseed rattled out of it when he turned the pages looking for the area-code number of Pima. “I’d like to call long distance. The town where Fox lived. I thought I’d talked to everyone there who could tell me anything. Now I’m not so sure.” He laid down the phone book, dug out his wallet and put a five-dollar bill into her hand. “This should cover the call.” It would feed a lot of feathery dependents, but she hardly noticed it. Her stare was anxious. She gave a meager nod. When the Pima operator got him the number, the phone rang for a long time. He almost gave up. Then the voice was the one he wanted to hear, young, sullen.

  “Signal station.”

  “This is Brandstetter, the dirty old man who gave your bird a hitch night before last. Remember?”

  “She says you’re a private eye. Figures. You can’t get any dirtier than that.”

  “I’m an insurance investigator. Very clean-living. Fox Olson was insured for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I think he skipped out, split. You want to help me find him?” It sounded feeble in his own ears, as if he was trying to con a six-year-old. But a cynical kid is still a kid. He was vulnerable. Adventure. Excitement. Revenge. Just like on TV.

  “Sure. Why not? The son of a bitch.”

  “Good. Do you remember a Ferrari gassing up at your place maybe two weeks ago?”

  “Yeah. French plates.”

  “Did you see it only that once?” Dave swallowed dry-ness. “Or . . . did it come back?”

  Pause. “It came back.” Grudgingly. “You’re sharp.”

  “The night Olson crashed his T-bird in the canyon?”

  “Check. Late. Raining to beat hell. It didn’t have the French plate in the front anymore.”

  “It’s nailed up on Buddy Mundy’s ceiling,” Dave said. “Did you notice where the Ferrari went? Did it turn up the canyon?” His heart thudded.

  “Yeah. I watched because it’s such a bitchin’ car. I stood there just to listen to the engine till I couldn’t hear it anymore.”

  “And . . . you didn’t hear it again?”

  “I closed up right after that. Went home.”

  “How come you didn’t tell the fuzz about this?”

  “They never asked me.”

  “Sure,” Dave said. “Okay. Thanks.”

  “Shove the thanks. Send bread.” Sandy hung up.

  Dave put down the receiver. He told the little woman, “Doug was in Pima that night.”

  Light glinted off the thick lenses. “Are you saying my son would help Fox cheat your insurance company?”

  Dave said gently, “If Fox asked him to, do you think he’d refuse?”

  12

  In his office on the tenth floor of the new glass-and-steel Medallion building on Wilshire Boulevard, Dave hung up the phone. Wearily. He’d been using it all afternoon. His hand was cramped. His ear felt bruised. He shook his head at the man standing in the doorway, lean, erect and ruddy. Only his white hair hinted at his age. Late sixties. He was Dave Brandstetter’s father and the man Dave Brandstetter worked for. He dropped into a hairy white goat’s-hide chair. His voice was as handsome as the rest of him.

  “God knows,” he said, “you’ve tried.”

  “The police haven’t turned up any Ferrari in Fresno. That would be the nearest town to Pima with an airport you can call an airport. Just the same, I’ve had three of our people check all flights from there starting zero hours October nineteen. Also from the bay area. No luck.”

  “Obviously Sawyer owns a passport. Does Olson?”

  “I couldn’t reach his wife to confirm it. Nor McNeil, his what—boss, manager? Both away somewhere this afternoon. But I doubt he had one. He’d been poor until pretty lately. Bureau says no application is being processed for him. Which leaves Mexico or Canada.”

  “And explains why the car hasn’t turned up abandoned somewhere. They’re driving it.”

  “I hope so,” Dave said. “Junking a Thunderbird’s one thing. But a Ferrari? Painful idea.”

  “You tool down to the border,” his father said. “It’s possible one of the guards will remember a car like that. Especially with French tags.”

  “Thanks. I’ll do that.” But Dave was thinking that the United States of America is a big country: two hundred million people. If you wanted to lose you
rself, you really wouldn’t have to leave it. There was no point in saying so. They both knew it. He smiled and made the expected polite inquiry. About stepmother number nine, or was it ten? “How’s Nanette?”

  The older man snorted. “I’m preparing to shed Nanette. Someone, as the old fairy tale puts it, has been sleeping in my bed.”

  “That’s too bad,” Dave said.

  “It could be worse.” His father rose with a wry smile. “She could have caught me sleeping in somebody else’s bed. That can be very costly.”

  “She lasted a long time,” Dave said. “Three years? Four?” He took Old Crow from a cabinet that was metal patterned to look like wood. Chunky glasses. Ice cubes.

  “Damn near five,” his father said behind him. “She was beginning to bore me anyway.”

  “Drink?”

  “Before driving? In weather like this? Haven’t you learned anything from twenty years in the insurance game?”

  “Twenty-two years.” Dave drowned the cubes in the glasses, handed one to his father. “I’ve learned driving is so dangerous I haven’t got the guts to do it sober.” He grinned and lifted his glass.

  “You can joke.” His father’s eyebrows signaled surprised approval. “That’s good. I told you the smart thing was to get back to work. You’re feeling better, aren’t you?”

  Dave said, “Somebody remarked last night that the fun goes out of mourning after a while.”

  His father sat down, making a face. “Not too tactful.”

  “The truth seldom is.” Dave perched on a corner of his desk. “I’m all right.”

  His father tried the whiskey, started to speak, frowned, wasted time with a cigarette and a gold butane lighter. Finally, solemn, clearing his throat, he said, blunt, businesslike, “All right. Now he’s gone. That infatuation’s done with. You’re forty-four years old. It’s time you found a wife and settled down.”

  Dave laughed. “Look who’s talking about settling down.”

  “Well, damn it, you know what I mean. Kids, a family. Future. I at least gave you life.”

  “A slipup and you know it,” Dave said. “What is it you’re getting at? You want to be a grandfather? That I find very difficult to believe.”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “What the hell kind of genetic legacy are we supposed to bequeath to the world of tomorrow? An old satyr and a middle-aged auntie!”

  His father winced. “You’ve got a very ugly mouth sometimes.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dave said, “but you’re not being honest and you know it. You don’t mean a word of it. When you go all conventional and Reader’s Digest like this, I don’t know what to do—laugh or throw up.”

  “When you’re older . . .” His father rose and he wasn’t straight now. There was an old man’s slump to his shoulders. Probably, Dave thought, intentional. “. . . you’ll become aware that there is some kind of good purpose behind the conventions you sneer at.”

  “I sneer at!” Dave’s laugh was impatient. “You’ve always considered them sacrosanct, of course. Especially the ones touching on Holy Matrimony.”

  “Maybe now I regret that. I’m not sure I could have done any differently if I’d tried. But I’m sorry. Because I’m beginning to get the picture. One lifetime’s not enough. A man wants another chance. And he’s not going to get it. Unless he has children. And grandchildren. They’re his second chance.”

  “Romantic drivel,” Dave said. “You know damn well you don’t regret the way you’ve lived. All those dewy young girls, one after another. Aside from me and my kind, there isn’t a man alive who wouldn’t envy you.”

  His father showed his teeth in what was meant for a vain and lecherous grin. But his eyes were haunted. “Of course. You’re right. . . .”He drained his glass and set it on the liquor cabinet and moved for the door. But before he opened it, he turned. “Now let me ask my brutal question. Why be a middle-aged auntie if you don’t want to?”

  “Did I say I didn’t want to?”

  His father blinked at him for a moment, then, with a resigned shrug, turned and walked out.

  The girl wore a blue denim dress with a skirt about eight inches long. There was a smudge of ink on her nose. She was no more than a kid but she was the entire office staff of the Provence School of Art at night. Dave had noticed the black-and-white Mondrian front of the school lighted up in the rain as he drove past up Western. And he’d swung into the parking lot. Why? Because you tried everything when you needed a lead in a case. But also because he dreaded going home. The emptiness of the house had hurt last night. Enjoying mourning? Not honestly. The pain was too real. He asked the girl for records dating twenty-six years back. She was making an imitation Aubrey Beardsley drawing, bending over the black counter with the pink tip of her tongue sticking out of a corner of her mouth. She didn’t want to be bothered. But when he gave no sign of going away, she sighed and laid down the pen and came from behind the counter and led him down a hall past high rooms where corduroyed youngsters with beards daubed canvases, where a model with flesh like lard sat surrounded by kids charcoaling sheets of newsprint, where a shrill, dumpy, red-haired woman ricocheted instructions off bare walls above the wooden clatter of potter’s wheels turned by young bare feet on treadles—led him to a big, still room lined with big, still paintings that were like escaped segments of red-and-white signboards, where a dainty, ravaged old man waved transparent hands at a trio of lean-flanked boys on ladders, who were hanging the pictures.

  “Mr. Kohlmeyer,” the girl called. “This man wants to see you.”

  Kohlmeyer did a surprised girl whirl, brows arched, eyes wide, a boy coquette. Except that time had done awful things to this boy. “Yays?” He came toward Dave in his ecru velour shirt and black wide-wale corduroys and his expensive sandals and black dyed hair and mascaraed lashes as if it might be the last walk he would take. Very unsteady. Sick. He dismissed the girl with an embalmed smile. “Thank you, darling.” And she went away, with the boys watching her pert little ass.

  “This is probably pointless,” Dave apologized. “I won’t keep you if it is. My name is Brandstetter. I’m a claims investigator for Medallion Life Insurance Company. One of our policyholders has disappeared. I’m trying to locate him, trying to learn all I can about him. He once went to school here. Maybe you can help me.”

  “Ah? How intriguing.” Kohlmeyer was watching the boys again. Not the pictures. The boys. Dave agreed. They were more beautiful. The difference was that the pictures would keep their beauty. Such as it was. The boys would wake up ugly one morning. “What was his name?”

  “Olson,” Dave said. “Fox Olson.”

  Kohlmeyer turned so sharply he staggered. “Really?”

  “Yes . . . why?”

  “Oh . . .” A delicate shrug. “It’s only that you’re the second person who’s come inquiring about him lately. After a lapse of twenty-odd years. Isn’t that strange?”

  “You remember him?” Dave nodded at the boys hoisting another big canvas into position. “They must come and go. I’d think they’d blur after a while.”

  “Blur . . .” Kohlmeyer’s laugh was a death rattle. “Yes, that’s very well put. They do, most of them.” He gave Dave a flat meaningful stare. “Even the loveliest.”

  Dave didn’t like being tagged. Not by Kohlmeyer’s kind. “Was Olson one of those?” he asked.

  “Yes . . .” Kohlmeyer blinked into the past. “Fresh blond skin, lovely mouth, and a simply divine shock of golden hair. The young preferred crew cuts then. Awful. Remember? Not Fox. He anticipated the shaggy sixties.” Quick cap-and-bells smile. “No . . . I remember him first because of his very odd name. . . .” Pause.

  “And second?” Dave prompted.

  “Because he was so in love.” Kohlmeyer set the two words out like Valentine chocolates from a jar of formaldehyde. “With another boy. I can never remember his name. Something out of Mark Twain.”

  “Sawyer,” Dave said. “Doug Sawyer.”

  The lin
ered eyes widened. “Why, that’s it. How ever did you know that?”

  “How did you know they were in love? Any proof?”

  The withered mouth turned down, mocking. “Really, does one need proof? The young are so obvious. But, yes. As a matter of fact, quite graphic proof. They spent a summer together at a place called Bell Beach. Some very naked and explicit snapshots resulted. Taken with the aid of a delay mechanism on the shutter. I’d lent it to young Sawyer myself, not knowing, of course, why he wanted it. I found the negatives dangling from clothespins in the school darkroom. Drying. Shocking carelessness. Anyone might have got hold of them.”

  Dave wondered if he’d given them back, and bet not. For half a dozen reasons, none of them noble. He asked, “Who was it came inquiring about Fox the other day?”

  “A public relations man. Big, bluff type. Expensive clothes, but rumpled. The unmade-bed syndrome. It seems Fox has become something of a popular idol in a small way. Radio? Music? I can’t recall. . . .” Vague wave of the hand. “This man’s been commissioned to do a biography. I told him everything I could remember.”

  Dave felt cold in the pit of his stomach. “Everything?”

  “Well, I assumed anything Fox doesn’t like he can always take out of the manuscript.” Sardonic smile.

  Dave felt sick. “And the pictures? He got those too?”

  Kohlmeyer shouted, “No, no!” But not at Dave. At the boys sweating with a gigantic curve of red across white. He tottered toward them. “You’ve got it upside down.”

  Dave followed. “He paid you. Right?”

  “I’m dying, Mr. Brandstetter. Of cancer.” The mouth twitched bleakly. “That can be very expensive. . . . Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m pressed for time.”