Carrion

by Gary Brandner

  “Somebody has to sign for it.”

  Gooch seized the boy’s order pad and scribbled something indecipherable. “There you go.”

  The delivery boy still looked doubtful, but he let Gooch take the package from him.

  “That’s all,” the reporter said. “You can go now.”

  The boy returned to his van. Gooch walked purposefully toward the entrance gate as the van drove past.

  As soon as the van was out of sight, Gooch turned and went back to his car. There he examined the package. It was wrapped with green paper and string. Leanne Kruger’s name was typed on the delivery label. He carefully opened it and checked the contents.

  Skin creams, fungicides, pancake makeup, perfume, deodorant. Odd assortment, but so far it meant nothing. He rewrapped the package, left his jacket and necktie in the car, rolled up his sleeves, and went back across the street.

  “Delivery from Bel Air Pharmacy,” he told the guard at the gate. Gooch waited while the man phoned the house for confirmation.

  “Okay,” he said. “Take it around back.”

  All was quiet inside the grounds as Gooch walked up the curving drive to the house. In the rear he found what he took to be the service entrance and rang the bell.

  A pretty, young Mexican woman opened the door.

  “Bel Air Pharmacy,” he said, holding up the package.

  “Thank you. I will take it.”

  He pulled the package back. “I have to get Mrs. Kruger to sign for it.”

  “Mrs. Kruger don’t see anybody,” the maid said. “She is sick.”

  “She is here?”

  The maid’s eyes flickered up at the ceiling. “She’s here, but she don’t see anybody.”

  “Gee, I don’t know. I’m supposed to get her to sign before I leave the stuff.”

  “I can ask Mr. Kruger if he come and sign it.”

  “That’d be okay,” Gooch said. He peeled the label from the package and handed it to the maid. “Here, you can just get his signature on this so he doesn’t have to come out.”

  As soon as the maid walked out through one swinging door, Gooch stepped swiftly through another. He found himself in a formal dining room that looked as though it had not been used recently. Moving quietly, he enjoyed the heart-pounding sensation of danger that he had not felt since his days on the police beat. He knew a kind of wild exultation that had been missing in his years as a feature-page columnist.

  He made his way through the kitchen and found a back stairway. He climbed silently to the second floor. There all the doors except one were open onto the wide hallway. Gooch hurried toward the closed room, glancing into the empty bedrooms on either side as he passed them.

  He tapped lightly on the door. There was a rustle of movement from inside, and a voice said something he could not make out.

  Feeling like a burglar and loving it, Gooch tried the brass door handle. It moved. The door opened inward.

  The room was dark. Heavy curtains across the windows blocked any light from outside. A single lamp glowed pale pink on a bedside table. Something moved on the bed.

  “Peter?” The woman’s voice had a shrill, grating quality. “Peter, is that you?”

  “Mrs. Kruger?” Gooch advanced two steps toward the bed.

  The woman sat up. Her face was shadowed, the eyes two darker holes in the darkness.

  “Who are you?” she said.

  The air was heavy with a cloying perfume. Under the heavy sweetness something smelled bad.

  “My name is Gooch, Mrs. Kruger. I’m a reporter.”

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” said the woman.

  A man’s voice, angry but weak, said, “No, Mr. Gooch, you’re not.”

  He whirled to see Elliot Kruger standing in the doorway, silhouetted in the light from the hall.

  “Mr. Kruger, I — ”

  “Come out of my wife’s room,” the old man said.

  With a last look at the woman on the bed, Gooch eased past Kruger into the hallway. Kruger pulled the door firmly closed.

  “I would be within my rights to call the police.”

  But you’re not going to call any police, are you? Gooch thought. Feeling himself out of danger, he took the offensive. “I understand your wife is ill, Mr. Kruger?”

  “My wife’s physical condition is none of your affair. Now I want you to go downstairs and leave the way you came in.”

  “Those ointments and skin treatments from the pharmacy — they have something to do with Mrs. Kruger’s problem?”

  Some of the old strength returned to Kruger’s voice. “Damn you, if you don’t get out of here, I’ll have you thrown out.”

  It was time to retreat. Gooch headed down the stairs, with Kruger following. On his way to the door the reporter took one more shot. “Have you been in touch with McAllister Fain?”

  “Out of here,” Kruger said.

  Gooch left through the kitchen where a frightened-looking maid stood, still holding the label he had torn off the package. Feeling jaunty, he gave her a wink and left through the service door, saluting the frowning security guard as he headed for the street.

  Back in his car, Gooch jotted quick notes in his personal shorthand. Something was very wrong at the Kruger house. Leanne Kruger had been widely described a few weeks ago as vibrant and alive, looking none the worse for her year in deep freeze. The apparition on the bed was far from vibrant. Although he could make out no details in the dim light, Gooch could see that the woman was not healthy. The whole room had an aura of decay. Decay! There was his hook. Dean Gooch closed his notebook and, humming, drove east across the city.

  • • •

  He pulled the Thunderbird to the curb on the quiet street in Alhambra and double-checked the address of the Ledo family. This was it, all right. Neat little house, trimmed lawns, flowers. A new Chrysler was parked directly across from him. Not exactly ghetto. Too bad, in a way. A ghetto story would have been more dramatic.

  He crossed the street and approached the Ledos’ studio bungalo, walking up the short concrete path to the front door. The sound of voices shouting inside brought him to a stop. Gooch caught only a few of the Spanish words, but the angry tone was unmistakable.

  The front door burst open, and a balding man in a dark suit rushed out. He held one hand wrapped in a white cloth on which a dark red stain was spreading. A woman Gooch recognized as Maria Ledo appeared in the doorway. She held out her hands as though to pull the man back.

  “Doctor!” she cried. “Por favor, no vaya!”

  Ignoring Gooch, the man turned and spoke to her in angry machine-gun Spanish. All Gooch could make out were the words for “son,” “bite,” and “lunatic.” More than enough to convince the reporter he was on the right track.

  He stepped into the path of the departing man. “Excuse me, sir. I’m with the Los Angeles Times. Can you tell me what’s going on here?”

  “No,” the man said brusquely, and tried to step around the reporter.

  “May I have your name?” Gooch persisted. “Are you a member of the Ledo family?”

  “I am not. I am Dr. Horacio Vasquez. Please let me pass.”

  “Is Miguel sick, doctor? What happened to your hand?”

  “I have nothing to say. Please move aside.”

  The doctor marched determinedly past Gooch and headed for the Chrysler.

  As the woman started to close the door, Gooch hurried toward her. “Mrs. Ledo?”

  She looked at him doubtfully. “Yes?”

  “My name is Dean Gooch. May I talk to you for a moment?”

  “I don’t know you.”

  “I’m a reporter. The Times?”

  “What do you want from me?”

  “Just to talk. People are wondering how Miguel is getting along.” He caught the flash of pain in her dark eyes. “Is anything wrong?”

  “My boy is … not well.”

  Gooch used a portion of his tiny Spanish vocabulary. “Lo siento, señora. I’m so sorry. Is there an
ything I can do?”

  “No. Nothing. Uh, thank you, Mr. — ”

  “Gooch. I wonder if I could see the boy.”

  Alberto Ledo came out of the house behind his wife. His face was dark with anger. “I told you the boy needed a strapping. Now look what he has done — bitten the doctor’s hand to the bone.”

  “Miguel bit the doctor?” Gooch said.

  Alberto whirled. “Who are you?”

  “I’m a reporter. Los Angeles Times ”

  “Go away.”

  “Mr. Ledo, I’d like to help you.”

  “Nobody can help us. Something is wrong with our boy, and nobody can help. Not you, not the doctor, not God.”

  Maria’s hand went to her mouth. “Berto, don’t say that.”

  “I’ll say what I please. The first thing we did was go to the church and give thanks to the Blessed Virgin. And look what we have — a boy I don’t know. A boy who stinks of the slaughterhouse, who will not do his lessons, who hurts his little friends and fights the doctor like an animal. Don’t tell me God is good.”

  Dean Gooch cursed himself for not bringing a tape recorder, but he tried to remember Alberto Ledo’s words as closely as possible to help him build the growing story.

  “Mr. Ledo,” he said, “I wonder if I could just — ”

  Alberto jerked his head around in surprise, as though he had forgotten Gooch was there. “I got nothing to say to you. All you reporters with your cameras and your microphones — maybe it was you made my son crazy. You get out of here now while you still got your cojones.”

  Gooch did not need a translation of that. He nodded to both parents and retreated hastily across the street to his car. He drove out of sight before stopping to add new notes to what he had written after the visit to the Kruger mansion.

  • • •

  Willowbrook is an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County jammed in between Compton and the Harbor Freeway. It was not quite a slum, but still several steps down from the tidy little street in Alhambra. Here were liquor stores, their windows boarded over, the boards splattered with graffiti. It was a neighborhood of greasy hamburger joints, auto-body shops, dark taverns, and old houses chopped up into cramped rooms and tiny apartments.

  Old men with hopeless eyes and bagged bottles wandered aimlessly. Scowling younger men strutted the streets, proudly wearing the colors of their gang — blue for the Crips, red for the Bloods. In alleys and doorways and parked cars dope was bought and sold with little attempt at concealment.

  Dean Gooch rolled up his windows and locked the doors as he drove slowly along, watching the street numbers. He was relieved to see that the block on which the Jacksons lived was in a somewhat more civilized area. He parked and locked his car in front of a little grocery store and, painfully conscious of the eyes on him, walked to the square brick apartment building.

  Mrs. Urbana Jackson was listed on the third floor. Gooch climbed through layers of cooking odors and loud, recorded rhythm and blues. On the third floor he found the right door and knocked. No answer. He knocked a second time and a third. Nothing.

  Annoyed, he turned and started down the stairs. Then he froze.

  Three black youths ranged themselves across his path halfway down. They were not smiling. The only good news for Gooch was that they were not wearing any gang colors.

  “Hey, man, you lost?” said the biggest of the three. He wore a black muscle T-shirt that showed off his gleaming brown deltoids. One of his companions was tall and blade-thin, the other chunky and watchful. Dean Gooch had the feeling any one of the three would kill him if he twitched the wrong way.

  “I was looking for Mrs. Jackson,” he said carefully. “Guess she’s not home.”

  “What you want with her?” said the one with the muscles.

  “Actually, it’s Kevin I wanted to see.”

  Three pairs of opaque eyes watched him without expression.

  “I’m a reporter. Working on a story for my paper about Kevin?” Was he sounding too white? Gooch wondered. Hell, it was probably safer than trying to sound street hip and getting the idiom wrong.

  “Ain’t no story here,” said the spokesman.

  “Guess not,” Gooch said, working his lips into a smile. “That’s the way it goes some days.”

  The three black youths made no move to get out of his way. Gooch began to perspire.

  “Well, see you,” he said, and moved tentatively down the steps. When they still failed to move, Gooch swallowed hard and said, “‘Scuse me, men.”

  The tall, thin one spoke for the first time. “You got any money?”

  Big trouble. “Well, uh, yeah, I’ve got a little.”

  “Just a little, huh?”

  “Forty dollars. Fifty, maybe?”

  The young men looked at each other. Gooch felt his scrotum tighten like a fist.

  “Man, you shouldn’t walk around here in them nice clothes with forty, fifty dollars on you. Sheeit, man, they’s people rip your throat out for that little bit.”

  Gooch’s windpipe closed up on him. Dear God, he thought, don’t let me faint.

  “I was you, man, I’d tuck that money away, get in my T-bird, and hustle on back to my own part of town. Hear?”

  “I hear.” Gooch scarcely recognized his own voice.

  They moved just enough to allow Gooch to squeeze between the muscular one and the tall one. He walked swiftly down to the second-floor landing, then around and down again toward the street. From above him he heard the boys’ rich laughter. In his relief, he could have joined them.

  Back in the blessed sunshine, he hurried to his car. “Hey, man.”

  Gooch had the car door open when the voice called him. He turned to see the chunky black youth come out of the building. Keeping one foot inside the car, Gooch waited as the boy approached.

  “You want to hear about Kevin?”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “Huh-uh. He don’t hang out with us no more. He don’t hang out with nobody. Keeps to himself all weird like.”

  “Tell me about it,” Gooch said.

  “What’s it worth?”

  “Twenty dollars.”

  “This for all three of us, man?”

  “Thirty?”

  “Fifty.”

  What the hell, he could write it off. “You got it.”

  Gooch popped the lock, and the chunky youth climbed in on the passenger side. “Nice car. Let’s go for a ride.

  Don’t look good for me to be sittin’ talkin’ to a white dude.”

  Gooch started the engine and pulled away from the curb.

  “First time we seen Kevin goin’ weird was one day he was shootin’ some baskets….”

  • • •

  Half an hour later, when Gooch dropped the boy back on Kevin Jackson’s street, he parted happily with the fifty dollars, figuring it might have just brought him one hell of a story.

  Chapter 23

  McAllister Fain leaned back in the burgundy leather judge’s chair behind the desk in his Eagle’s Roost office. Warner Echols sat across from him. Fain idly made shiny red balls multiply and vanish between his fingers as Echols held up eight-by-ten glossy photographs for his inspection.

  “I like that one,” Fain said, pointing. “It gives me kind of a macho Clint Eastwood look.”

  “It’s good,” Echols agreed quickly, “but is macho really what we’re looking for here? I mean, for your book jacket something a little more spiritual, I think.” He held up another photo in which Fain appeared to be looking at something off in the misty distance. “This, for instance.”

  “I remember that one,” Fain said. “Somebody walked in just as Zeno took the shot. I’m looking up to see who it is.”

  “That brings up another point,” Echols said. “About Zeno … I know you like his work, but we have professionals at F-A who specialize in this kind of thing.”

  “Olney Zeno is my man,” Fain said, putting an end to the discussion.”

  “Right, Mac.
It was just an idle thought. Do you suppose we can choose one of these now? The publisher wants to move them into the stores by the end of next month. He’s already got orders up to here.”

  “You don’t like the Eastwood shot?” Fain said.

  “I’m not saying I don’t like it, just questioning whether it’s right for this application.”

  Fain made four balls turn into one and then vanished the last ball. “Okay, I’ll go along with the mystical look if you think it’ll help sell books.”

  “It fits the image,” Echols said.

  “Yeah, the good ol’ image.” Fain was thoughtful for a moment; then he got businesslike. “Will the book be available when I start the tour? A lot of people will want to buy it while I’m in their city.”

  Echols carefully squared up the stack of glossies. “About the tour, Mac — I wonder if that’s such a good idea right now.”

  “What are you talking about? I’ve been planning on it. We’ve got rooms full of mail. Those people want to see me in action.”

  “I know we’ve got mail, but they aren’t all fan letters, you know. A considerable number are pretty vicious. Threatening, even.”

  “So what? Even the pope gets hate mail.”

  “And you remember what happened to the pope. The truth is I’m worried about your safety.”

  “My safety? Hell, the Russian ambassador goes wherever he wants to, and he’s got to have more people out to hit him than I have.”

  “The Russian ambassador has the protection of the United States government. You are a private citizen. All security arrangements would have to be privately arranged. A national tour like you’re talking about would just put too much strain on our resources.”

  “You’re telling me I have to stay locked up here in this mausoleum when I’m probably one of the ten most popular men in the country?”

  “No, no, nothing like that. You can move around the area all you want; we can have men assigned to you full-time here. It’s just the cross-country thing we object to.”

  Fain moodily rolled a half-dollar across his knuckles.

  “All right, I’ll shelve the tour for now, but I do want to go back to work.”

  “Work?”

  Fain spoke with exaggerated diction. “Yes, Warner, work. Doing what I do. I haven’t been active since the Jackson kid. People are dying every day who wouldn’t have to stay dead. Families are torn up with grief. Widows are left without funds. Little kids are orphaned. God knows there are enough tragic stories in one day’s mail to supply a year of soap operas. I can fix some of those things, Warner.”