Skinflick

by Joseph Hansen

  “Not without prompting a lot of questions,” Dave said. “It was better to take the chance of the cops assuming the killer had taken the whole bunch and thrown them away.”

  “And why didn’t he?” Salazar said.

  “Because Bucky drove the car and he still has them.”

  Salazar cocked an eyebrow, pressed his mouth tight, shook his head. “Barker says you’re very, very smart. But there are different kinds of smart, aren’t there? What I hear in all this is the rattle of a cash register. You’re trying to save that insurance company that hired you money. Tooker can’t help you. But the widow and orphan can, right?”

  “Tooker didn’t have anything to do with this.”

  “What about the horse stuff on the deceased’s clothes?”

  “Check the closet in unit thirty-six,” Dave said, “the shoes there, the dirt on the floor.”

  “Yeah, unit thirty-six.” Salazar brushed a fly away from the guacamole bowl. “What did the widow and the kid care about unit thirty-six?”

  “They didn’t care about anything else,” Dave said. “If you can’t grasp that, no wonder you don’t believe me. Let me explain it to you one more time. What they were trying to do by losing the keys to the place, bringing the body away from there, bringing the car away from there, wasn’t just to avoid a charge of murder one. They wanted it to look as if Gerald R. Dawson had never set foot in that apartment, never touched that girl. To them, the Strip is Sodom and Gomorrah. Gerald R. Dawson was a saint.”

  Salazar didn’t say anything. He only looked. He dipped a chip of fried tortilla into the guacamole, put it into his mouth, and munched. He licked his fingers.

  Dave said, “They wanted the police, the Times, the Examiner, the ‘Eyewitness News’, everybody, the world, to think their beloved husband and father was, in death as in life, the same upright and unsullied crusader for Christ they’d always believed he was. Hell, Bucky showed me that the first morning I saw him. He claimed those porno magazines he was burning were his. They weren’t. His father had ripped them off at Lon Tooker’s shop. But Bucky didn’t care about bringing what his unreal little world would call disgrace on himself. No matter what it cost him—he was going to protect his father’s image.”

  “Even if he had to kill him to do it.” Salazar picked up his orange-soda bottle and set it down again. He laughed. Not happily. Hopelessly. “Wow, that is weird, Brandstetter. You know that, don’t you? Weird.”

  “If your lab people will take their little vacuum cleaners and go over that apartment,” Dave said, “you’ll see it’s not all that weird. Mrs. Dawson wasn’t able to save her husband from hellfire. Lyle Shumate was his minister and friend but he failed. Bucky failed, and he couldn’t accept it. Maybe he talked it over with mama, maybe not. But he went back there and tried to use force and something went wrong. Bucky claimed his dad couldn’t fight but he must have tried. Anyway, he ended up dead.”

  “Weird,” Salazar said again, and stacked his dishes. “I mean, even if you accept it as accidental—it’s still weird. And, anyway, what about the girl? You’ve been in that unit. Her body’s not there. Where is she?”

  “Damned if I know.” Dave got off the creaky wooden chair. “I can’t see Bucky killing her in cold blood.” He picked up the check, took out his glasses, and read it. “But where did she go? I keep seeing twiggy little girls under haystacks of hair and hoping they’re her. They never are.” He tucked the glasses away. “I don’t find Bucky easy to believe but I can’t shake the feeling she’s still alive.”

  “Not if he killed his old man.” Salazar stood up and stretched. His fists struck the piñatas. They swung and jostled each other, rustling. “Not if she saw him do it.” He steadied the piñatas.

  Ducking under their trailing fringes, Dave went down through the dark doorway into the restaurant and paid the check. When he came back outside, Salazar was tossing dimes and quarters to the dancing children. Dave said to him:

  “Check out that apartment, please?”

  “Barker won’t like it,” Salazar said.

  “It will be one less case for him to worry about.”

  Hot daylight came down through the roof into the big room. Sawdust drifted in the shafts. Above, the shadows of the speechless sons moved. Their shoes clunked and shuffled. Saws whined, hammers banged. Amanda stood looking up, shading her eyes with a hand and trying to talk over the racket. Beside her stood Ken Barker. He nodded. He pointed. His bulk made Amanda look very small and fragile. With homo sapiens, nature was still building experimental models. They could have represented different species. He crossed the sawdusty floor to stand beside them. Barker turned him a sour look. Through the carpentry noises he said: “You’re making yourself damned unpopular.”

  “I can’t hear you,” Dave lied. He kissed Amanda’s forehead and led Barker out into the courtyard, where grouchy one-armed dad still sat in the speckled shade of the big oak, methodically clamping bricks between his knees and whacking mortar off them with his trowel. Amanda went to him and they conferred. Dave led Barker into the cookhouse, got beer from the refrigerator, pried off the caps, and handed a bottle to Barker. “Salazar drinks orange soda pop with his Mexican food. I thought I better have as clear a head as he had.”

  “Mrs. Dawson is getting out a restraining order against you, Barker said. “She told me and the DA you were harassing her and accusing her son of murder. I don’t have to ask you if it’s true. I know you.”

  Dave leaned against the sink counter and told him the whole long story. He was getting bored with it now. Also uneasy. There was a warped, pathetic kind of logic to Bucky’s killing his father. An inevitability. Dawson had set standards he couldn’t live by himself. His son was too young yet to have begun to doubt them. The thing had been building from the day Bucky was born. But not Charleen’s death. They made an awkward match. He didn’t put this into words for Barker. He finished his Dos Equis and his story. “There’s no restraining order against you. Go through Bucky’s room. You’ll find those keys.”

  Barker dug into a pocket. He held up keys on a small bright ring that dangled off a stiff leather fob. Dave put out a hand for them. Barker dropped them into his hand, JESUS SAVES was stamped into the fob. There had been gilt in the letters once. It had almost all rubbed off.

  “Where did you get them? Not from Tooker.”

  Barker’s smile was ironic. “Bucky. This morning. After your visit, he thought it was time to tell the truth, the whole truth. He and his mother did go to the Strip to collect dad’s car—but in the morning, after she found the body, before she phoned us.”

  “Meaning they didn’t know he was dead till then?”

  “You got it.” Barker set his empty bottle down on the cold stove, opened the refrigerator, brought out two full bottles. He stretched in arm past Dave for the opener on the counter. The bottles went fft! when he uncapped them. He handed one to Dave and tilted one up himself.

  “Why isn’t that just another lie?” Dave said.

  “Because Bucky remembered a witness. A black in a starchy security uniform who’s too old to care about sleeping anymore and who looks after Sylvia Katzman’s underground garage. He isn’t too good at standing around these days.” Barker reached into Dave’s shirt pocket for a cigarette and let Dave light it for him. “So he parks his 1962 Corvair right next to the driveway on the street. And he sits in it. Until some tenant slopes in. Then he gets out and looks alert and protective with that big revolver on his hip until they leave the garage. Then he gets back into his car. He can see a lot from there. Not just who drives in, but anyone who walks up the stairs to the front door. He saw Mildred Dawson around eight, Lyle Shumate around nine, Bucky around ten. Come and go. He saw Bucky again when he came to fetch his father’s car, a little after dawn next morning. They even exchanged some words about it.”

  “But he didn’t see Bucky a second time the night of the murder?” Dave lit a cigarette for himself. “At eleven?”

  “Negative,” Barke
r said. “And never any Charleen—not at any time. Or any Gerald Dawson—dead or alive.” Barker went and leaned in the doorway, gazing across the courtyard at the stolid sons on the front roof. He blew away tobacco smoke. It didn’t drift much. The air was still. “Of course, he has to go to the toilet. The old prostate isn’t what it once was. He could have missed Bucky coming back and carrying out two dead bodies. He doesn’t think so. And neither do I.”

  “We know where Dawson’s body went,” Dave said, “but not Charleen’s. It’s not in her apartment—I’ve been there. But Cowan saw her try to run away and saw Bucky drag her back inside. And that’s the last anyone ever saw of her.” He frowned to himself. “She must have been hurt. She wasn’t drunk. There were no liquor bottles in the place.”

  Barker turned and drank beer and studied him. “You know, you sound shaky. You’re always on target. On this, you’re missing all over the place. What is it? No ground under your feet? I knew you meant a lot to Medallion. I didn’t think Medallion meant that much to you. You’re all of a sudden insecure, right?”

  “Forget it,” Dave said disgustedly. “I make mistakes all the time. You know that. What did Salazar do—only tell me he’d look at that apartment?”

  “He’s got a team there,” Barker said. “I happened to stumble across him. But Dawson wasn’t killed there, and you know it” He cocked his head. “You’ve been through the place. You’d have found the signs, wouldn’t you? He died of a broken neck. Broken neck, strangulation, suffocation—ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the muscles that control the bladder and bowels let go. They had let go, Dave.”

  “When you got to the body, yes,” Dave said. “More than six hours afterward. In hot weather, that’s normal. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred is a sloppy figure.”

  Amanda came to the door. “Ah-ha! Do I get beer too?”

  “In judicial hangings, where the neck is broken,” Barker said, “it’s a hundred percent.”

  “In judicial hangings,” Dave said, “there’s anxiety beforehand, there are nerves at work. Dawson wasn’t expecting his neck to be broken.”

  “Dear God.” Amanda ducked in past Barker, peered into the dark refrigerator, and brought out the cardboard carton the Dos Equis had come in. It was empty. She said in a faint, wavery voice, trying to smile, “Time to go storeside.”

  “I’ll go.” Dave took a step.

  “No, no. You two stay and have your cheerful little chat.” She looked pale. “I think I’d like to miss it.”

  “I’m sorry all over again,” Dave said.

  Barker asked, “Did I say something wrong?”

  Amanda gave her head a wan little shake. “It comes with the territory,” she said, and fled. But she came running back, breathless, after a moment. “I forgot. Someone called Randy Van has been on the phone for you. Strange voice. Would it be a boy type or a girl type?”

  “He hasn’t made up his mind yet,” Dave said. She looked blank and went away, and Dave told Barker, “Anyway, Tooker can go back to his horses.”

  “Not if Dawson was killed in front of his house,” Barker said. “And I still think he was.”

  Dave shook his head. “That old black man was asleep.”

  16

  THE WIG WAS DIFFERENT and so was the costume, if costume wasn’t an unfair word. The wig was brown with sunny streaks in it, and the dress was shirtmaker, beige, twill, with agate-color buttons. The handbag lying on the bar matched. So did the big shoes, heels hooked over the braces of the bar stool. Nail polish and lipstick were red-orange this time. But nothing was different about the smile. It said Dave was welcome, more than welcome.

  The sunlight was slivered by the bamboo blinds on the windows again. There were fewer agents and lawyers and clients in the room, and at the far end of it no one fiddled with the musical instruments on the bandstand. Dave took the stool next to Randy’s and looked at the drink he was holding.

  “Margarita,” Randy said. “Will you?”

  “Dos Equis,” Dave told the coveralled bartender. He said to Randy, “So Odum lied. He does know Charleen.”

  “She never worked in any of his pictures,” Randy said, “but she was going to.”

  “‘Was’?” Dave said. The bottle came and a cold, wet glass. “He changed his plans?”

  “‘Is’, then,” Randy said. “I only meant it hasn’t happened. He’s writing a script for her. He showed me her photo. I said, ‘Why, in God’s name?’ And he said it was a favor for a friend.”

  “Photo?” Dave said.

  Randy upended the handsome purse. Out came cigarettes, lighter, lipstick, coins, a rattle of keys. The big male hand with the scrupulously female nails pushed a glossy snapshot along the bar at Dave. It looked as if it had been taken in a motel room. There was something wrong about the light—he wasn’t sure what. She was naked and she really did look twelve years old. The obscene pose was pathetic. He raised eyebrows at Randy. “What friend?”

  “Jack Fullbright,” Randy said. “I think he took the picture.”

  “Odum parts easily with things to you,” Dave said. “Things and information.”

  Randy licked salt off the edge of the margarita glass. “We’ve been close. We still are, every now and then. He likes boys who dress up in women’s clothes. I told you that. He’s warm and funny and kind.”

  “And not everybody likes boys who dress up in women’s clothes,” Dave said. “And all boys who dress up in women’s clothes don’t like fat, fiftyish pornographers.”

  “It’s symbiosis,” Randy said. He batted his false eyelashes at Dave and swallowed delicately from his drink. “Is that the right word? Or do I want ‘exploitation’?”

  “What’s Fullbright doing for him?” Dave drank beer. He felt big, heavy, awkward. Every move he made seemed like an act, a fake. His voice sounded too deep. It couldn’t be sad. He’d never wanted to wear a dress. It had to be funny. He bit his lip to keep from laughing. “Or had Fullbright already done this favor?”

  “He’s going to let Spence have all the equipment he needs free,” Randy said. “What’s funny?”

  “You make me feel like Jack Youngblood,” Dave said.

  “And who might that be?” Randy tilted his head.

  “A man who knocks people down on football fields.”

  Randy shrugged. “If you’re butch, you’re butch.” He made his laugh giddy and patted his wig. “But football is not my kind of contact sport.”

  “When you were playing your kind with Odum,” Dave said, “did he tell you why Fullbright wanted this favor?”

  The margarita glass was empty. Randy pushed it to the back edge of the bar and lifted his chin to the bartender. “I suppose to keep the girl happy.” Randy peered at the snapshot. He turned it toward himself. “Though I honestly can’t think why.”

  “I can’t, either,” Dave said. “He’s got a different little package of female bones now. Probably has twenty a year. I’d bet on it. What kind of script?”

  “He’s the one with the boat?” Randy’s new drink came with a neat frosting of salt around its rim. He took a ladylike sip and chose a cigarette and pushed the pack at Dave. “Boats are sexy.” Dave lit the cigarettes with his manly steel lighter, grinning again. Randy said, “The script? Something about a schoolgirl and her dikey gym teacher and the gym teacher’s horny boyfriend. Who knows?”

  “It sounds confused,” Dave said.

  “It’ll be funny,” Randy said. “That’s why he can’t make any money. The creeps that want to see sex movies don’t want to laugh, and he keeps putting all these laughs in. It’s the only way he can stand making the things. His problem is, he’s got too many brains.”

  “It’s not brainy to lie,” Dave said. He watched a scarecrow youth at the end of the bar pull music sheets out of an attaché case and lay them in front of a plump man in a Cardin suit. “No, I wouldn’t give you a dollar for his brains and Fullbright’s in one package—one very small package.” He looked at his watch. “How come you’re not
doing your Bertha-the-Sewing-Machine-Girl routine?”

  “Because the immigration people are always rounding up the illegals and tossing them back over the fence, right? And it takes time for them to fix it up with the coyotes to get back in again, right? And Morry Steinberg’s sweatshop gets very vacant during those periods. And however illegal Randy Van may be in however many ways, he, she, or it was born right here in the good old USA. Do you know Mitchell, South Dakota?”

  “No, but don’t hum a few bars for me,” Dave said.

  “Funny,” Randy Van said. “Anyhow, when every other machine in the place is gathering dust, Randy’s up there whipping out dem new blue jeans. So when I ask for time off, Morry never complains.” He cocked a jaunty eyebrow at Dave and rocked his head. The hand that held the cigarette was bent far back at the wrist “And today, I thought it would be fun to play Nora Charles, you know? Myrna Loy?”

  “Odum is going to hate you,” Dave said.

  “Why? He didn’t hurt anybody. And you’re not going to hurt him.” But the frivolity was gone. Randy looked at Dave anxiously. “You aren’t, are you?”

  “Earlier today, I’d have said no.” Dave scowled at the brown bottle as he poured the last beer out of it. He shook his head, drank some of the beer. “Now I wonder.” He looked gravely into the chorus-boy face with its thick coat of makeup. “That’s what it means to be Nick Charles. A case makes perfect sense at noon. By one o’clock it makes no sense at all. But one thing I am sure of. This little girl”—he tapped the murky photograph—“was in the middle of it And still is—alive or dead.”

  “Dead?” Randy forgot about his voice. It came out baritone. He cleared his throat and said, “Dead?” again, up an octave.

  “Maybe, maybe not. You were in Spence Odum’s living quarters, am I right? Any signs of her there?”

  Randy laughed. “His living quarters are half wardrobe department half prop room. Also carpenter shop. Also film-editing department. Also projection room. It’s pure chaos. You could hide an elephant there. I didn’t see any sign of her, no. I can’t picture Spence hiding a girl there, not a real, honest-to-God girl. Why would he?”