“He didn’t,” Trudy said. “He couldn’t have.”
“Fine,” Yoshiba said. “So what were you doing there?”
Dimond sulked. “I want a lawyer.”
“I think I can tell you what he was doing there,” Dave said. “He followed Larry Johns. And he took along his trusty tape recorder. It’s a portable, hangs in a case on a shoulder strap. That was what Dwayne Huncie mistook for a woman’s handbag when he saw him running off through the trees.”
“That how it was?” Yoshiba asked Dimond.
Sick, the boy turned his head. After a moment’s disgusted silence he drew breath, let it out and said wearily, “Yeah. I’d brought the dogs inside. There’s a room for them at the back, under the carport. And I heard Larry on the kitchen phone. Asking for money. Agreeing to meet this Rick on the coast road, eight that night. It proved what I knew he was.” He looked at Trudy. “A hustler. The kind that peddles sex to perverts.”
“You’re eating Tom Owens’s food,” Dave told him. “Sleeping under his roof. That’s a hell of a word.”
The dark boy flushed. “Okay. Homosexuals, gays—whatever you want. I’m sorry.” He looked at Trudy again. “I told you, but you wouldn’t believe me. He was so sweet, he’d had such a lousy life. I had to prove to you what he was. So”—he faced Yoshiba again—“I took my recorder and stood outside Wendell’s windows and I got a tape.”
“Mark!” Trudy said. “You didn’t! That’s revolting. Sneaking, spying. What are you?”
“In love with you, dummy.” Mark struggled to break from the officers again. He said to Yoshiba, “I’ve still got it. I kept it. Didn’t play it for Trudy because after that night Larry was gone anyway. If you’ll let me, I’ll get it and you can hear it. You’ll love it, Trudy. You’ll really love your fair-haired cracker when you hear that tape.”
Yoshiba said, “Go with him, Ramirez.”
Minutes later, the tape recorder, black leather case laid open like the lid of a coffin, stood on the big low deal table under the light, its five-inch reels of clear plastic winking as they turned. Gail Ewing sat stone-faced on the long wicker couch, Trudy next to her, biting her nails, watching Mark, who stood over the machine. Yoshiba and Dave flanked him. Larson and Khazoyan stood at the end of the table. The uniformed officers leaned by the front door. Jomay Johns sat in the dark at the top of the stairs with BB asleep in her lap. Their hair glowed like that of angels in a painting darkened by centuries of soot. Dave wished he had a drink.
The tape stopped hissing to itself. Distances of crickets skirred. There was the far, lost drone of a jet plane. A voice deep and rumbling that still managed to have something feminine about it said, It’s in here, safe and sound. I haven’t even opened it. Fifteen hundred dollars in small bills. Wasn’t that what you said? Paper rattled and tore. See? There. Do you want to count it? Go ahead, count it if you want to. Another rattle of paper.
Aw, Rick, I don’t want to count it, man. This was Larry Johns’s voice, hard and echoey in the room. And look, I’ll pay it back. I promise. I mean it. There was a knocking sound. Perhaps a shoe had kicked a desk leg. Wendell’s voice again above a rustling whisper of cloth: Oh, Larry, no. It’s my gift. You don’t know what it means to have you come back. How I’ve dreamed, hoped, wished, prayed. When you phoned today, I cried, I really cried with happiness. I—
Larry Johns’s voice cut across Wendell’s. No, I don’t take money for sex, Rick. It’s a loan, man. I’ll get a gig and pay you back. Otherwise—
All right, Larry, all right. Now just let me hold you. Oh, God. A long silence. A low moaning. Then a whispered, Now, Larry? Please—now? Yes, in here. Yes, yes. A latch rattled, a door swung, brushing carpet, hinges squeaking slightly. A door closed. The crickets went on with their shrill plaintive pulsing. There was a scuff of shoe leather on cement, a crackling of leaves under soles. The tape clicked. The empty hissing started again. Mark Dimond leaned, reached, punched a plastic key. The reels halted.
Yoshiba stood frowning for a moment in the sea-sighing silence, then touched the machine with a shoe. “They don’t exactly beat the camera, do they? What went with the dialogue?”
Dimond flushed darkly, shifted his feet, rubbed his smooth brown chest. “Well—he, uh, took the envelope out of his jacket. He tore it open and took out packs of bills. He tried to give them to Larry but he wouldn’t touch them. So the big stud, Wendell—he, like, thumbed the edges, you know? As if to show Larry the bread was all there or something—right?” The dark boy gestured uneasily. “What do you want me to say? I mean, okay, he dropped the envelope and money on the desk and—” Dimond glanced unhappily at Gail and Trudy on the couch, up into the dimness where Jomay sat silent. “Well, it was kind of freaky to watch, you know? Made me feel a little nauseated. I mean, he started running his hands over Larry. Like he was a girl. Wow! Through his hair and all that.” Dimond looked at the floor, blew air out through his nostrils, mumbled, “Held his head, tipped it back, you know, and kissed him on the mouth. Took him in his arms, you know?” Dimond looked up. “Hell, Lieutenant, I don’t want to—”
“Yeah, okay, kid. They went into the other room?”
“Right. And I was relieved when they did.”
“And you left, did you?” Dave wondered.
“I wanted to but the windows on that other room were open too because it was a hot night. I knew I ought to go there if I was going to get real proof for Trudy. And I took a step in that direction when I see the door from outside open and this lifelike, inflatable Gabby Hayes pokes his head in. Whiskers, chewing tobacco—you could smell stockyards twenty feet off. He takes a quick look around, walks straight to the desk, picks up the bread, and walks out with it. Wow! I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t do anything, could I? I mean, I was in a very ridiculous position.”
“That wouldn’t be my word,” Dave said.
“It was contemptible.” Trudy sprang up and walked into the dark. “Disgusting. It makes me sick.”
Yoshiba said, “So you ran, did you?”
Dimond was looking worriedly after Trudy. “What? Yeah, I ran. Waited up in the trees till I heard his truck drive off down the road. Then I got out of there.”
Yoshiba looked at Larson. “I want to book him on failure to report a felony.”
Larson glanced at the beautiful expensive room. “He’d be out on O.R. tomorrow morning.” He put the Little League cap on again. “Waste of time.”
“Nobody saw him leave,” Yoshiba said.
“Ho,” Larson said. “You want to book him for the murder? You’d have to let Johns out, then.”
Khazoyan said, “That sounds good to me.”
“Forget it,” Yoshiba said.
“I should think so,” Gail Ewing said indignantly.
“Just don’t go anywhere,” Yoshiba told Mark Dimond.
12
BELOW PINYON TRAIL, AT the foot of a fern slope where a summer-scant creek threaded among moss-rusty boulders, deer lay in the morning shadows of the pines. Three of them. When Yoshiba drove the unmarked Los Santos Police Department car past above them, they didn’t get up. They only raised their heads, swiveled big soft ears. Their eyes were wide and calm.
“Will you look at that?” Yoshiba said. “What are we—twenty miles from downtown L.A.?”
“If that,” Dave said. “We forget—the interloper is man. Hold it. This is the place.”
Three cars crowded the patch of yellow dirt in front of tin mailboxes on paint-chalky posts. One car had the high rear fender fins of the fifties. That would be Billy Wendell’s. One was a station wagon, a broad one from the sixties, the tailgate down, weighted with baled alfalfa. Heather’s, of course. The third was a VW with a cloth top. Rick’s. Dave had seen it here the other morning. Was she going to let the weeds and creepers have it? Yoshiba slowed but didn’t stop.
“What’s on up the trail?” he asked.
“I’m told it makes a loop,” Dave said.
Yoshiba moved the lever to “L” an
d put a square foot on the accelerator pedal. The car climbed a wide, bumpy half circle in the cool shadows of the pines. At the top, where Heather Wendell’s ruined blacktop driveway raked downward from the trail, he braked the car, killed the engine. In the sudden quiet, a quail called. Yoshiba opened his door and stepped out. Dave did the same. Yoshiba nodded to where gray wood shingling showed through the trees below.
“That’s the place.”
“Garage,” Dave said, “where she stables her horses.” He shifted ground. “Here. From here you can see part of the house, farther down.”
Yoshiba came, looked, grunted. His blunt shoetip nudged the dust of the road edge where footprints showed. “Looks like somebody waited around up here. Deck shoes. New ones. Kegan?”
“Probably.” Dave checked his watch. “We’d better catch her before she gets out on those horses. There’s country up here where you can’t follow by automobile.”
But Yoshiba was crouching. “Two cars were parked here lately. Look. Different sets of tires, side by side. Both small cars. This one”—a short, thick finger made a circle in the air above a dark patch soaked into the dust—“had a bad oil leak.”
Dave glanced around. Across the road a hill climbed to a crest maybe thirty feet above. A few dying pines but mostly scrub and rock. Nothing was built there, nothing to the left or to the right. Only below. “It could be a place where kids park to make out.”
“Almost have to be.” Yoshiba grunted, got to his feet. “Let’s go down this way.”
At the foot of the drive, beside the garage-cum-stable, Heather Wendell and her gaunt husband sat horses, she the little paint mare (Buffy doesn’t like men) and he the sorrel gelding. The woman wore a plaid shirt, jeans, a black charro hat; the man Levi’s pants and jacket stitched for someone bulkier—his son, no doubt. A bowl-brimmed straw sombrero shaded his long, rutted face. The horse hoofs moved noiselessly on the pine needle cushion of the yard. The man and woman drew rein and stared.
“What is it?” Heather Wendell asked Yoshiba. “I told you to keep him”—she jerked an angry nod at Dave—“away from here.”
“You don’t want to be ungrateful,” Yoshiba said. “He got you back quite a chunk of money you’d never have seen again. Close to twelve hundred dollars.”
She sat up straight, blinking puzzlement.
“From that brown bank envelope on Rick’s desk,” Dave said. “Remember? You let me take it away the other morning, with the wrapper tabs, each marked five hundred dollars. A check with the bank showed Rick had withdrawn that amount Monday afternoon.”
“What for?” she said.
“Rick had promised it to Larry Johns. On the telephone at noon. You picked up the phone for that call. He told you his name. But you made out to me you’d never heard it until that night.”
Her mouth twitched. “I’d forgotten.”
“Come on now, Mrs. Wendell,” Yoshiba said.
“Now, look here!” Billy Wendell tried to make himself sound ominous. He shifted in the saddle, kicking a foot free of its stirrup, as if he were going to dismount. But he didn’t. He finished lamely, “I don’t like your tone.”
“It’s possible the name didn’t mean anything to you at that point,” Dave said. “Johns says he was up here before with your son. A few weeks ago. But it was after the bar closed. You told me your hours differed, so maybe you didn’t know about it. But if you did and then Larry Johns turned up again, you’d have had reason to suspect he represented the same threat to you other boys had done—Monkey, Savage.”
She paled and seemed to sag in the saddle.
“You’re guessing,” Billy Wendell blustered.
“Based on this,” Dave said. “That your wife and Ace Kegan had a conference Monday night.” He looked at Heather. “You didn’t go to that horse film as you told me. You went to the Chardash restaurant next to the theater and talked the situation over with Ace. He’d had a phone call where Larry Johns gave his name too. And you both knew it spelled trouble. Possibly disaster. That was why neither of you ate.”
She touched dry lips with a dry tongue.
“Then you drove up here,” Yoshiba said. “To try to stop the thing before it could get under way. Your son didn’t like being interrupted and browbeaten and he went for his gun to run you off. Kegan rushed him and your son ended up dead. Wasn’t that how it was?”
“No!” she said loudly. “Ace wasn’t even here. He has a dreadful temper. It was still under control when he got into his car in the theater parking lot but by the time he got up here to the house, he’d worked himself into a fury. He said if Rick didn’t listen to reason, he’d beat it into him. And he could do it. He was a prize fighter. His fists are like hammers. Yes, I know Rick was bigger, but he hadn’t any fight in him.”
“He had the gun,” Dave reminded her.
“The gun never came into it.” Heather swung out of the saddle. The stocky little horse took a step backward, shaking her head, clinking bridle fastenings. “Because Ace didn’t see Rick that night. He was raving. I won’t repeat what he said he’d do to that boy.”
“Raving,” Dave said. “But you made him go?”
“It wasn’t easy but he respects me and finally through his rage he heard me. He knew what had happened before. He’s very nearly gone to prison for beating people. And he’d be heartsick afterward if he hurt Rick. They were very close.”
“And he left?” Yoshiba asked.
“With bad grace,” she said, “but yes, he left. I watched him get into his car and start it before I went on up the stairs.”
“What about this twelve hundred dollars?” Billy Wendell’s big hand smoothed the sorrel’s mane. “Have you got it with you?”
“It’s evidence,” Yoshiba said. “The court will hold it till the man who stole it is tried.”
“Who was he?”
Dave told the story of Dwayne Huncie.
Yoshiba said, “It’s too bad about the three hundred. Especially when you see the clothes he got himself with it—if you could call them clothes. But the balance—once the trial’s over, it’ll be released to you. I don’t know how soon that will be.”
“What do they need with it?” Billy Wendell asked. “The bank won’t have a record. Not if the bills were only twenties. They don’t record them unless they’re hundreds or larger.”
“You’ve been watching ‘Police Story,’” Yoshiba said. “But you’re right. I’ll see if I can shake it loose for you.”
“There’s a feed bill,” Heather explained.
“There’s also three weeks’ back rent at Billy’s motel,” Dave told her. “You didn’t see anyone, hear anyone, after you shed Ace?”
She shook her head. “Was there someone?”
“There had to be someone, Heather,” Billy said.
“There did not!” she snapped at him. “All there had to be was that boy Larry Johns. Yes—I saw him.” She shut her eyes a moment. “I’ll never forget it.”
“Are you absolutely sure Ace Kegan left the area?” Yoshiba tilted his head. “Up at the top of your driveway there are tire marks that indicate cars parked beside the road. He didn’t drive up there and walk down the back way, here, so you wouldn’t see him? He didn’t get to your son before you did? You stopped to fix hot milk, remember?”
“Ace had shaken me. I’m aware I don’t look as if anything could, but you’ve never had to deal with him when he’s angry. I wanted to calm down before I confronted Rick.”
“Should have had a drink,” Billy Wendell grunted.
“So,” Yoshiba began, “it’s possible that Ace—”
“It is not!” she cried. “I heard the shot while I was climbing the stairs. Ace had driven off and Rick was dead when I got to the door of his room. I told you.”
“You did,” Dave said. “Was it true? Do you know why Lieutenant Yoshiba came with me this morning?”
“Because of you.” The heavy old woman pulled herself into the saddle again. “Because you won’t rest until yo
u can involve me in my son’s death. Or prove it was suicide. To save your company twenty-five thousand dollars. Which I’m sure it desperately needs.”
“Wrong,” Yoshiba said. “I’m here because you lied to me. Innocent people don’t have to lie.”
Billy Wendell snorted. “They do if they want to stay out of trouble.”
Dave asked, “Why couldn’t it have been suicide? He wasn’t so humiliated when you burst in on him that he shot himself? It’s been known to happen. Your kind of mother love can get to be too much to live up to.”
Yoshiba jerked his head back, like a batter from a high inside fast ball. “What the hell does that mean?”
“It’s abnormal psychology.” Dave smiled thinly. “Not your field—remember?”
“It wasn’t like that,” Heather Wendell said stubbornly. “He was dead on the floor and Larry Johns was standing over him with the gun.” She slapped the pinto’s rump and it stepped out, startled, past the standing men. Billy Wendell nudged the sleek sides of the sorrel with the heels of cowboy boots that must also have belonged to his dead son. Nodding, the sorrel followed the paint.
“Not Ace Kegan?” Yoshiba asked.
Heather Wendell’s back stiffened but she didn’t answer. Above the clop of hoofs, she and her scarecrow ghost of a husband swayed on up the scabby drive, leather creaking. Yoshiba looked at Dave, shrugged, stepped off in their wake—not to follow them but to reach the car.
“Let’s go find out,” he said. “Who’s the old joker?”
“Ex-husband,” Dave said. “Father of the deceased.”
“Back to cash in?” Yoshiba frowned. “Where was he?”
“Forget it,” Dave said. “He was at a birthday party at a tavern in Torrance. For a long-lost small-time movie star named Lilian Drill.”
“Who?” Yoshiba said.
“Sorry,” Dave said. “Before your time.”
Floor-to-ceiling curtains blinded the glass front of Ace Kegan’s apartment. The deck was blanker than the beach. The sun had possession of both. But the sand had a few gulls and sandpipers. Yoshiba found a bell button in the redwood frame to the right of the glass sliding panels and pushed it. Nothing happened. He pushed it again. And a third time. Then there was sound from the apartment. Dave felt the deck shock faintly under him. The curtains jerked back. Kegan winced at them. His broken hands knotted the tie of a short gold velour robe. He clicked the lock on the aluminum doorframe and threw the panel aside.
Troublemaker Page 12