Troublemaker

by Joseph Hansen

  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 folded 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.

  Canaries sang. The little parrots and finches kept up a shrill clamor. Kittens mewed. Pups whined. Gerbils ran in squeaky wheels. Tiny spotted mice pirouetted in the sawdust of glass boxes. Cavies hopped over the backs of stony gopher tortoises munching trampled lettuce. Doug Sawyer punched a cash register, blinked at Dave, and went on talking with a woman in pants and hair curlers who held by its leather handle a cat carrier of new plywood and bright screen.

  Doug’s little mother, in her flowered smock, peered with her one bright bird eye from the back room. A brown-and-white young rabbit was cradled in her arm. Her free hand held a medicine dropper. She gave Dave a smile of bright false teeth and lifted her chin, summoning him. The back room smelled of wood shavings and alfalfa. Tarnished cages went up the walls—parrots, monkeys, a hunched and scraggly raven, a cross-eyed Siamese cat who paced.

  “I hope you can forgive me,” Belle Sawyer said. She kept a hot plate on a shelf and a glass pot of water always simmered for coffee. Bottles of instant mix and powdered cream substitute and a box of cube sugar grew dusty there. A small pan with some glutinous carroty substance covered the second burner now. Into this the pet shop woman dipped the medicine dropper, filled it, edged its tip in at a corner of the young rabbit’s mouth. The brown nose twitched. The plush little body struggled. “I’m always keeping Doug.” The thick glasses glittered up at Dave. One lens had white cloth neatly pasted inside it. She’d lost an eye to a hawk’s talon years ago. “He can’t get on with his own life at all. I hope you know I don’t mean it.” She rubbed the rabbit’s fur throat, smiled satisfaction when it swallowed, and murmured comfort to it.

  “Maybe it’s over for a while now. It’s my circulation. Old age. Too many years on my feet here, I suppose. Whatever, the veins don’t let the blood through to my brain.” She filled the dropper again and gently squeezed the liquid into the rabbit’s mouth. It shook its ears. They made sounds like big moth wings. “There, that’s enough for now.” She bent, dropped it into a cage, where it crouched in shavings and shredded paper. She clicked the wire door shut. There was a stained and meager sink with a steel tap. The plumbing shuddered when she turned it on to rinse the medicine dropper.

  “Coffee?” She didn’t wait for his answer. She used a cracked plastic spoon to dip brown powder into a plastic mug. Pouring in water, she said, “It’s so maddening, because it all seems quite serious and normal when I’m going through it. I was President this week—I expect Doug told you. And I really did issue orders, stacks of them, that everything was to be ‘all right.’ Can you imagine?” She clicked the spoon busily in the mug and handed it to Dave. Her bright eye mocked. “I felt so confident, so secure. I haven’t felt that way since Mr. Sawyer was alive.” Her mouth turned down in a wry smile. “But of course it was all a delusion. Even the Capitol at Mount Rushmore. You know, where the Presidents are carved
in the mountain?”

  “The Black Hills.” Dave blew at his sudsy coffee.

  “That’s it.” She nodded. “I’d moved the government to the Black Hills. For safety. The coasts are sinking into the sea.” She laughed. “Aren’t they?”

  “Hold the thought.” Dave lit a cigarette. “But it goes away?”

  “Exactly like a dream,” she said. “I’m nervous, of course. I must have mailed those presidential orders. I don’t have the least idea to whom. I hope I simply made up names and addresses but it seems to me one went to the Queen of England. Dr. Simpson says I probably didn’t stamp them—a President doesn’t have to. Heavens! The Black Hills. I’ve never even been there!”

  Doug stood in the doorway. “She’s okay,” he said.

  “Looks that way,” Dave said. “That’s good.”

  “I’ll be all right now.” But her chirpiness didn’t last. “Oh, dear. I’ve said that before, haven’t I?”

  Doug said, “Don’t worry about it. That’s the main thing. It’s not your fault. And it’s not hurting anybody, right?” He put an arm around her shoulders, kissed her frizzy dandelion hair. “Whoo! Glover’s dog soap!” He wrinkled his nose, rubbed it with the back of a hand.

  “You know that’s what I’ve always used. Made you use it too, when you were little enough for me to boss you.”

  “They barked at me in third grade,” Doug said.

  “Nonsense,” she said. “It’s a good, clean smell. And it’s very healthy for the hair.”

  Doug looked at his watch and at Dave. “Four forty-five. You want to finish that?”

  “There’s no need,” Belle Sawyer said. “I know it’s terrible stuff.” She reached for the mug and Dave let her take it because she was right, it was terrible.

  Doug crouched by the rabbit cage. “How’s he doing?”

  “Who can say? They’re so delicate.” She touched his shoulder. “You run along. I’ll close up. I feel absolutely sane.” She smiled at Dave. “It’s not as much fun as being President.” She frowned to herself. “I don’t think I even had a Congress. Just me, in the oval office, signing orders. And everything was going to be just fine.”

  They left her standing in the shop doorway, a small hand lifted, and smiling wistfully at nothing.

  The stereo components sat on the bare floor in the big, empty front room. From them echoed the heartbreak of the Haydn Symphony 93 largo cantabile. The old gent had been homesick in the London of 1791 and mocked his loneliness with that wry bassoon honk at the end. Dave smiled at it when he came out of the shower and shrugged into his terry-cloth robe. He lit a cigarette, picked up from the floor beside the bed this week’s New York Review and headed for the kitchen. Before he got there, the whine of the blender motor cut through the music. Wincing, he walked into the good onion, garlic, fried chicken smells of the high, tiled room.

  “You like poule à la mexicaine?” Doug, in a faded denim happy coat, mop of gray hair still wet from his shower, went to the refrigerator. “Then don’t make faces. I have to purée the pimientos.”

  Dave eyed the little orange-pink storm in the jar atop the infernal machine with its row of color-coded push buttons. “That’s puréeing?”

  “Among us twentieth-century types.” Doug handed him a martini. “It’ll be over in just a minute.”

  Dave grunted, took the martini and, with the paper tucked under his arm, wandered out to crank the painty old latch of the twin French doors to the roof deck. He shouldered them open and started for the redwood chaise, chair, table in the big leaf shadows of the rubber trees. He stopped. At the far end of the deck, something glared in the downing sunlight. Squinting, he went toward it. It was square, about four feet high, maybe a yard wide, forty inches deep—pale brick sheathed in shiny plate steel, a rectangular opening in the top, steel doors in the front, stumps of lead pipe at the side.

  Around this were piled cartons full of big Mason jars, labeled with chemical names, holding colored powders. There was a gathering of plastic trash barrels in dull green dribbled with duller gray. Slip was what they’d held, liquid pottery clay. Under a shelter built of four-by-fours and roofed with rippled sheets of hard opalescent plastic, where plank shelves were meant for potted plants—a project he and Doug hadn’t got to yet—terra-cotta-colored molds for pots and jars waited beside a clay-crusty potter’s wheel with a little electric motor under it, trailing a cracked rubber coated cord.

  Dave blinked, frowned, worked his teeth together gently. He drank the martini, slowly, smoked the cigarette down. He took it to the ashtray on the table to crush it out. Leaving the paper but taking his empty glass, he went back into the apartment, back into the kitchen. He said very mildly, “Doug?”

  Doug, at the stove, wiped sweat from his face with his sleeve. “Something wrong?”

  “What does a potter’s kiln look like?”

  “Kind of like an oven.” Doug reached down a can of chicken broth from a cupboard shelf. The electric can opener sang and danced with it, “Brick, I think. Why?”

  “There’s one on the roof deck.” Dave opened the fridge and refilled his glass. Doug’s stood cradling a drying olive on the tile counter next to the stove. He floated the olive again and put the pitcher back. “At least I think so. Whatever it is, it must weigh a ton.”

  Doug emptied the gold-lumped broth into the skillet, where it sizzled gently. He poured in the pimiento purée. “On our roof deck?”

  “Yonder.” Dave pointed. “You didn’t know?”

  “How would I know? I’ve been away since eight-thirty this morning. I hope that old idiot in the bicycle shop is more alert than he looks. I told him to keep an eye on her and let me know.” Doug spooned into the skillet yellow-green powder from a small jar. Cumin. He opened his eyes at Dave. “You think I put it there?”

  “We both know who put it there,” Dave said. “I just had a laughable idea that he might have asked permission. But of course that’s ridiculous.”

  Doug carried the cumin jar and the spoon out of the kitchen, out the French doors, and down the deck. He stopped, shook his head, said something about merde.

  “He didn’t have permission?” Dave asked.

  “Of course not.” Doug touched the pale brick, the steel sheathing. “My God, how do you suppose he got it up here? Look at the thing.”

  “At least a ton,” Dave said. “And he’s moved his whole shop here with it—molds, wheel, clay, the works.”

  “It was default,” Doug said suddenly. “He told me, Dave. I thought it was fact. It wasn’t fact, it was a warning, only I was too dense to take it in. The place where he had his shop is being torn down. Some old warehouse in east Santa Monica. He had to get out.”

  “Fine,” Dave said, “but he didn’t ask—”

  “If he’d asked, I’d have asked you,” Doug said.

  Dave eyed him. “But you’d have considered it.”

  “Maybe.” Doug shrugged. “I don’t know. It never crossed my mind.” He smiled, touched Dave’s face. “What do you think? I don’t want Kovaks. I like his work is all. We’ve been over that.”

  “He intends to stay,” Dave said.

  “Well, I guess it wouldn’t hurt, would it? I mean, if he wants to work here, there’s plenty of space.”

  “You tell him he can work here, and next week he’ll be living here. That’s all it’s about.” Dave went back into the hollow rooms, into the shimmer of Haydn’s strings, and fetched the pot in its carton from where he’d set it down at the stairhead. Doug was in the kitchen again. Dave showed him the carton, the pot, the card. “The lunatic wants to sleep between us.”

  “I guess so.” Doug frowned while he used a long-handled wooden spoon to move the chunks of chicken around in the thick pale-red sauce with its snippets of green pepper. “I got one too. Yesterday. It came with the rest of the gallery packages. By United Parcel.”

  “Same card, right?” Dave asked.

  “Same card.” Kovaks showed his beautiful teeth in the kitchen doo
rway. “Am I in time for a drink? I’m pooped.” He wore dirty white duck shorts. A dirty white yachting cap was stuck on the back of his bushy hair. Sweat greased his pale skin. He held out grimy hands. “Why aren’t you cheering?”

  “How long did it take to get that kiln up here?”

  “Over four hours, a power winch, and three hairy hardhats. Tell you the truth, I didn’t think we’d get done before you showed up. They weren’t expensive enough. They kept stopping for beers.”

  “Let me guess,” Dave said, “Paying them took your last dime, correct?”

  “Absolutely correct. You’re uncanny.” Kovaks found the martini pitcher in the refrigerator and a frosty glass in the freezer compartment. He filled the glass. “I don’t know where I’d have turned to if it wasn’t for friends like you.”

  “Help yourself to a drink,” Dave said. “Make yourself right at home. But you look tired and hot. Wouldn’t you like a shower? Sure, you would.”

  Kovaks stood very still, watching him. Doug watched him too. He asked Doug cheerily:

  “There’s plenty of chicken, isn’t there?” He didn’t wait for Doug’s answer. Doug’s jaw looked dislocated. “Sure—stay for dinner, Kovaks. We’ll open some champagne. Go ahead, have that shower. There’s time, isn’t there, Doug?”

  “Oodles.” Doug mismanaged a smile.

  Kovaks came to Dave and put a hand on the pocket of the terry-cloth robe. The hand was warm. “Cigarette?”

  “On my dresser,” Dave said. “Help yourself. Find clean clothes in there too.” He sized Kovaks up. “I think my stuff will fit you. Anything at all.”

  Kovaks narrowed his long-lashed eyes, turned his head slightly away, worked his tongue skeptically behind closed lips. Then grinned and shrugged. “Okay—right, thanks.” He walked out.

  Doug said, “What are you up to?”

  Dave picked up the pot in its carton. “I’ll be down in the gallery for a little while,” he said. “The packing room.”