Death Claims: A Dave Bran[d]stetter Mystery

by Joseph Hansen

  [ death claims ]

  Other books by Joseph Hansen

  Fadeout

  Troublemaker

  One Foot in the Boat (verse)

  The Man Everybody Was Afraid Of

  The Dog & Other Stories

  Skinflick

  A Smile in His Lifetime

  Gravedigger

  Backtrack

  Job’s Year

  Nightwork

  Pretty Boy Dead

  Brandstetter & Others (stories)

  Steps Going Down

  The Little Dog Laughed

  Early Graves

  Bohannon’s Book (stories)

  Obedience

  The Boy Who Was Buried this Morning

  A Country of Old Men

  Bohannon’s Country (stories)

  Living Upstairs

  Jack of Hearts

  A Few Doors West of Hope (memoir)

  Ghosts & Other Poems

  The Cutbank Path

  Bohannon’s Women (stories)

  [ death claims ]

  A Dave Branstetter Mystery

  Joseph Hansen

  The University of Wisconsin Press Terrace Books

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or individuals— living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  The University of Wisconsin Press 1930 Monroe Street Madison, Wisconsin 53711

  www.wisc.edu/wisconsinpress/

  First edition published by George G. Harrap & Co. Ltd., U.K., in 1973 Copyright © 1973 Joseph Hansen All rights reserved

  5 4 3 2 1

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Hansen, Joseph, 1923– Death claims: a Dave Brandstetter mystery / Joseph Hansen. p. cm. ISBN 0-299-20564-9 (pbk.: alk. paper) I. Brandstetter, Dave (fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Insurance investigators—Fiction. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction. 4. Gay men—Fiction. I. Title. PS3558.A513D4 2004 813'.54—dc22 2004053562

  Terrace Books, a division of the University of Wisconsin Press, takes its name from the Memorial Union Terrace, located at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Since its inception in 1907, the Wisconsin Union has provided a venue for students, faculty, staff, and alumni to debate art, music, politics, and the issues of the day. It is a place where theater, music, drama, dance, outdoor activities, and major speakers are made available to the campus and the community. To learn more about the Union, visit www.union.wisc.edu.

  1

  ARENA BLANCA WAS right. The sand that bracketed the little bay was so white it hurt the eyes. A scatter of old frame houses edged the sand, narrow, high-shouldered, flat-roofed. It didn't help that they were gay with new paint—yellow, blue, lavender. They looked bleak in the winter sun. Above them gulls sheared a sky cheerful as new denim. The bay glinted like blue tile. The small craft at anchor might have been dabbed there by Raoul Dufy. It was still bleak. So were the rain-greened hills that shut the place off. He drove down out of them bleakly.

  The bleakness was in him. After only three months he and Doug were coming apart. The dead were doing it—Doug's dead, a French boy, skull shattered at a sun-blaze bend on the raceway at Le Mans; his own dead, a graying boy interior decorator, eaten out by cancer in a white nightmare hospital. He and Doug clung tight, but the dead crept cold between them. Neither he nor Doug knew how to bury them and in their constant presence they treated each other with the terrible, empty gentleness people substitute for love at funerals. It was no way to live and they weren't living.

  Where the road reached the beach a clump of country mailboxes leaned together, clumsy tin flowers, each a different color, their props deep in tough dune grass, The box labeled STANNARD was pink, which he guessed meant it belonged to the house on the left, out at the point. He dug a cigarette from his jacket, poked the dash lighter, turned the wheel. The road had been blacktopped but not lately. Sand and grass were reclaiming it. Near the point it was no more than ruts. Wind got to it here, spray, sometimes even surf—shell crunched under the tires, a thin litter of driftwood.

  The first level of the pink house was car stalls. The sagging door was up. A fifties Ford station wagon waited inside, scabbing its pink paint. The lighter clicked, he started the cigarette and left his car in the road. It wouldn't be blocking traffic. He climbed wooden outside stairs to a corner of deck and a door. Salt crusted the bell button, but it worked. He heard a buzz. A pan clattered. Quick footsteps shook the place. The door jerked open. A girl said shrilly:

  "Where have you been? Couldn't you phone? I—"

  She broke off. He'd been wrong—she wasn't a girl. Maybe last year she had been. She was a woman now. She tried for a smile, but the lines it made beside her mouth said strain, not happiness. Something had dulled her eyes to the faded blue of the man's workshirt she'd tucked into a dungaree skirt. No stockings, loafers with broken stitches. Her hands were wet and soapy. She wiped them on the skirt and brushed blond hair off her forehead.

  "I'm sorry," she said. "I was expecting someone else. Who are you?"

  "My name is David Brandstetter. I'm a claims investigator for Medallion Life Insurance Company." He handed her a card. She didn't glance at it. Her eyes were anxious on his face. He said, "I'm looking for Peter Oats. Does he live here?"

  "Investigator?" The word came out frayed. "Oh, no. Don't tell me there's something wrong with John's insurance. That was the one thing he—"

  "The insurance is all right," Dave said. "May I talk to Peter Oats?"

  "He's not here." Her shoulders slumped. "I wish he were. I can't find him. He doesn't even know his father's dead." The word hurt her to say. She bit her lip and blinked back tears. "Look, Mr. Brand—?" The name had gotten away from her. It got away from most people the first time.

  He repeated it. "And your name is Stannard?"

  "April." She nodded. "Look—come in. Maybe I can help." Her laugh was forlorn. "Maybe you can help me. The police don't seem to care." She turned from the door. "Excuse how things look."

  He couldn't see after the sun-dazzle outside. Then he heard the squeak of little pulleys. Drapes parted, flowered drapes, bleached at the pleats. The front wall was glass for the view of the bay. It was salt-misted, but it let him see the room. Neglected. Dust blurred the spooled maple of furniture that was old but used to better care. The faded chintz slipcovers needed straightening. Threads of cobweb spanned lampshades. And on a coffee table stood plates soiled from a meal eaten days ago—canned roastbeef hash, ketchup—dregs of coffee in cups, half a glass of dead, varnishy liquid, a drink unfinished that never would be finished.

  "Sit down," she said. "I'll get us coffee."

  He dropped onto the couch and his knee nudged a trio of books balanced on a corner of the coffee table. Heavy matched folios, handsome, in full tree calf, the boards unwarped, the grain scrupulously preserved, with the kind of patina that brings up the price of old violins. Eighteenth century, seventeenth? He reached for them, but she got them first.

  "Here, let me put those out of your way." Shelving lined two walls, floor to ceiling, crowded. She couldn't find a gap for the three big volumes. "That's odd. I don't remember these." She stood two of them on the floor to lean against the lower shelves, opened the third and gave a little whistle. "Cook's Voyages. A first edition." She frowned for a second, then shrugged, set it down and bent across Dave to gather up the plates, cups, glass. And a pocket-creased envelope—British stamp, elegant engraved letterhead. "I haven't done a thing," she said. "I'm ashamed. Everything's just the way he l
eft it." She went off, but she raised her voice while she rattled china in the kitchen. "If Peter had been here, I'd have pulled myself together. As it was, I couldn't bear it. I just let down. Until today. Today I've been trying to clean up." She brought coffee in cups that suited the room—flowery, fragile, feminine. Not, he thought, like this girl. She sat in a wing chair. "Began with the kitchen. I'm not ready for this room yet. Not without someone in it besides me."

  "I understand." He meant he remembered.

  "I was fine at the inquest. People. Alone, I haven't been fine. Not fine at all." She blew at the vapor curling on her coffee. "I lost my mother last winter. Now John. I wasn't ready for it."

  "Was he a relative?"

  Her smile was wan, the corner of a smile. "We were lovers. We were going to be married. When his divorce was final. What did you want to ask Peter?"

  "How old are you, Miss Stannard?"

  "Twenty-four, and John was forty-nine." Her chin lifted, her eyes cleared. "And his poor body was a mass of scars. And he'd lost everything he'd worked a lifetime for, business, home, money. But I loved him. He was the finest human being I ever knew or ever expect to know." Her words snagged on tears and she drank coffee, blinking. When she'd steadied, she shook her head and frowned. "I suppose it must have been the pain. They said at the inquest he'd been taking morphine. He never told me. You see how he was?"

  "Are you suggesting"—Dave set the pansy-painted cup in the pansy-painted saucer—"he killed himself?"

  "No, not really. We were so happy. It's just that"—her shoulders moved—"I don't have any explanation for what happened. He wouldn't go to swim in the rain. It doesn't make sense. Yes, he did swim at night. He didn't want to be seen. He was worried that the scars would shock people, repel them, offend them. He always swam at night. But not in the rain."

  A pair of china parakeets billed on the frilly rim of an ashtray stuffed with dusty butts, three different brands of filter-tips—Kent, Marlboro, Tareyton. Dave stubbed out his cigarette among them. "You weren't here?"

  She gave her head a quick shake. "It was one of those—I thought—lucky days when I got a call to work. I'd been hunting a job, you might say desperately, for weeks. But I'd only gotten this off-and-on thing at Bancroft's. Books are all I know. I've been into books since I was, like, four. I didn't have to have a job at college, but I was in the bookstore su much I guess they figured they'd better pay me." Faint smile. "Afterward I went to work for John. That was how we—came to know each other." Her face went still with remembering for a moment. Then she took a breath. "Anyway, one of Bancroft's clerks was out with flu and would I come in for the afternoon and evening? We were down to half a jar of peanut butter. I went."

  "To the branch in El Molino?"

  "No, worse luck. The main one, the big one, on Vine in Hollywood. Not exactly in the neighborhood." She breathed a rueful little laugh. "And the car isn't exactly new. It was Mother's. A bangwagon."

  "It could use some paint," Dave said.

  "It could use a lot of things. Mother kept it just for this place, summers. My own I sold. To help pay John's doctor bills. His went for the same reason, long ago. So you drive, when you drive, prayerfully. I got there all right, but, coming home, the fan belt broke. On the coast road, a long way between filling stations. It was late when I got back. And John wasn't here. I didn't know what to think. He never left the place except to drive with me to the shopping center up the highway. It would be an awfully long walk."

  "You didn't find him that night," Dave said.

  She tilted her head. "You already know. How?"

  "I read the transcript of the inquest."

  Her clear forehead creased. "Why?"

  He gave her half a smile and told her half the truth. "Routine. It's what they pay me for.''

  "But now you're here." She sat still, guarded.

  "I'm here because insurance companies don't much care for verdicts like 'death by misadventure.' You found him in the morning?"

  "I looked that night. Put on a raincoat and went down to the beach, calling him. My flashlight's old and feeble, but I might have found him. I didn't go clear to the point. I guess I couldn't really believe he'd be out there drowned. Too melodramatic. Things like that don't happen."

  "You didn't think of calling the police?"

  "That's a little melodramatic too, isn't it?"

  "Maybe. What about his friends?"

  Her laugh was scornful. "He had no friends. A lot of people knew him. He knew a lot of people. He thought of them as friends. He was theirs. They were only customers. He gave out all this warmth, charm, humor. I wish you'd known him. A nice man, a beautiful man, all the way through. He remembered them, all their names, the subjects they were interested in, titles, authors. He was a good bookman, but more than that, a good man—period. Anything personal they'd ever told him—setbacks, advances, ailments, wives, children, dogs, cats—he remembered. He really cared. Only a handful ever showed up at the hospital. And most of them only once." It still angered her. "It was a lesson in human nature he didn't deserve." She looked too young for it herself, slender and pale against the faded flower fabric of the wing chair. "I brought him down here afterward. If any of them bothered to find out, they didn't give any evidence of it. Luckily, he didn't care by then. We had each other. It was all either of us wanted."

  "What about his partner? Didn't he come?"

  "Charles?" She shook her head. Her smile was wan. "I'm afraid he's jealous. Of me. Poor Charles."

  "What made you look for John in the morning?"

  "I didn't." Color came into her face. "I walked on the beach again, but not looking for him. You see, I'd made up a story by then, sitting here, waiting. I decided Peter had come and they'd gone off together. To look at whatever place Peter was living."

  "Does Peter own a car?"

  "No, but other things said Peter. There were two plates for supper, two cups but only one glass. Peter doesn't drink—he only just turned twenty-one. Also, when he moved out he left his guitar. And it was gone from his room. Anyway, who else could it be but Peter? I didn't think about the car. Kids borrow cars. But of course there was a big flaw in my story. John would have left a note for me and there was no note. Still—I had to believe something."

  "Something non-melodramatic," Dave said.

  She gave a little nod. "And by morning it had become absolutely true to me. And I was hurt. If John had tried to phone before I got home, to explain he was staying over with Peter on account of the rain, he could have kept phoning till he got me. Or Peter could have, if John was too tired—he could tire suddenly. So I was feeling sorry for myself. Taken for granted. Abused. And when it got daylight and the phone just sat there and I couldn't bear to look at it anymore and I couldn't bear the emptiness of this place without him, I went down and walked on the beach again. It was still raining, but not hard—gentle, sifting. Gray, you know? Mournful?" She breathed a wry laugh at herself. "Like a scene from a film. Young girl alone on empty beach, shivering, forsaken, deeply hurt. In the rain, with the sad gulls crying. Romantic." Her mouth tightened in a grim crooked line. "Until I found him." She spoke it harshly and her hand shook when she tried to drink from the cup. "The dead are terrible," she said. "They won't help you at all. No matter how you loved them. No matter how they loved you."

  She was right and he didn't want to think about it. He said, "Wasn't Peter in the way?"

  2

  SHE STIFFENED. "I don't understand you."

  "Of the love you keep talking about," Dave said. "Yours and John Oats's. This isn't a very big house. Wasn't a college boy underfoot?"

  She set down her cup. Too fast. Coffee tilted into the saucer. She stood up. "I don't think you're going to help me," she said coldly.

  Dave stood up too. "I'm going to find him. That's what you want, isn't it?"

  She watched him distrustfully. "I did. Do I now? What's your reason for wanting to find him?"

  "A piece of mail from my company arrived here the day
after his father drowned. Addressed to John Oats. Did you open it?"

  She shook her head. "I didn't even collect the mail-not for days. Then I got to thinking there might be word from Peter and I made myself look. There wasn't any word from Peter. I didn't open the rest."

  "Is it here somewhere?"

  A door broke the wall of shelves. She went out through it and came back with envelopes and put them into his hands. They felt dusty. He shuffled them. Phone bill. Book-auction catalogue. There it was—gold medallion in the corner. He held it out to her. Frowning, she tore it open and took out the folded sheets. She blinked at them, then at him.

  "It's some sort of form," she said. "The letter says to fill it out and return it."

  "He phoned Medallion the morning of the day he drowned. He said he wanted to change the beneficiary of his life insurance. It's a simple procedure. The clerk sent him the necessary papers."

  She stared at him for a moment, not understanding. Then her eyes widened. She dropped into the chair. Her tongue touched her lips. The words came out a whisper. "Peter was the beneficiary."

  "Does that answer your question?"

  "No." She moved her head from side to side. Slow. Stricken. "Oh, no. You can't believe Peter would kill his father. Oh, you don't know him. You didn't know John. You don't know what they meant to each other. You don't know—"

  "I know he'd been struck on the head."

  "By the rocks!" She shouted it. "The surf smashes on those rocks in a storm. It picked him up and— It's in the coroner's report." Her hands were clenched, the knuckles white as the papers they crumpled. "Why can't you believe the coroner? He's seen more drowned men than you have. John's lungs were full of water."