Troublemaker

by Joseph Hansen

  “It’s California,” Dave said.

  Delgado grunted, bent to open a drawer, to bring out a bottle. Jack Daniel’s. Built into the brick wall over his head were clock hands in black wood. They made the time only minutes past noon. But Delgado, with hands that shook, poured steeply from the bottle into clear plastic throwaway glasses, put the bottle out of sight again, pushed one of the glasses toward Dave, between the clutter of files. “And what’s on your mind?” he asked. The tone was meant to be resentful but it was too tired.

  “They’re all after you, are they?” Dave asked.

  Delgado drank. “There’s a reason.” His smile was wan. “I’m not doing any work.” He shook his head like a man jarred. “I don’t understand it, Dave. We were getting along fine. No change. Not in ten years. I still can’t believe it.” He shut his eyes and emptied the glass and shuddered. It was probably six straight ounces. “Never could have believed we’d split. And if I could have believed it, I sure as hell wasn’t ready for what it’s doing to me. I can’t function.” He pushed savagely at the files. “I can’t even read these fucking things. You’re just lucky I happened to be here today. I haven’t been in this office three hours running, not in a month.” He took out the bottle again. His bruised and sorrowing eyes flicked at Dave’s glass but Dave hadn’t touched it. Delgado refilled his own glass. “I should have knocked her up. That’s what my old man says. Keep ’em pregnant and you’ll keep ’em. In the old country a woman was fat and ugly after five years of marriage. Nobody else would want her. That was how they did it.” He drank again. “Repulsive, right?”

  “Buried there”—Dave nodded at the files—“have you got reports on two accidents to a household on the beach in Los Santos? Owens? Ewing?”

  Delgado squinted, pushed at his thick, expensively cut black hair, hunched forward, began shifting the folders around. He did it sweating, slow, as if they were too heavy for him. He pulled this batch out from under that batch, peered at labels, dropped the first bunch in another place, pulled a second batch. But he grew impatient after half a minute, slammed the last handful down. Papers slithered out of them and lisped to the thick carpet. “Christ, I don’t know. When? What’s it about?”

  “Gail Ewing, the woman, owned a Vega that her daughter drove.” He named the Sunday of the rock festival. “She ended up rolling down a hill into a tree in Topanga Canyon. The brakes had failed. Now… I’ve just come from the police garage. They said you hadn’t been there. And I believe them. Because you’re good at your job and even if you weren’t, you couldn’t have missed on this one. Johnny—there wasn’t any brake fluid in the master cylinder.”

  “A leak?” Delgado frowned, rubbed his stubbly face.

  “No leak,” Dave said. “Somebody drained the fluid and didn’t replace it.”

  “Car been in for repairs before that?”

  Dave said, “Never. It was a new car and nothing had gone wrong with it to warrant a checkup.”

  Delgado groaned and finished off his drink.

  “Why don’t you stop that?” Dave asked. “Work will do the same thing. And you come out into daylight.”

  “Yeah, right.” Delgado nodded. “Right, but too late. I’m out. I just got the word. Very kindly, very understandingly, but I’m fired. All I’m in here for is to get my personal stuff and get the hell out.”

  “One more thing and I’ll leave you to it,” Dave said. “This Ewing woman’s brother, Thomas Owens, two days after the car accident, fell from a deck of his house that overhangs rocks in the surf and broke both his legs. The bolts that held the deck rail in place had been removed. I have proof.”

  Delgado for the first time looked out of his eyes, past the blur of pain. “I remember,” he said. He glanced at the pile of folders. “They’re not here. I signed them, Dave. I signed a lot of stuff. It was the second week. Everything had accumulated, like now. I just signed them all. I walked in here after receiving a very choice letter from my wife’s attorney. And I was smashed and I sat down in this chair and I said, ‘The hell with it,’ and I took ’em all on. I didn’t read ’em—I signed ’em, signed ’em all.”

  “That’s costing Sequoia,” Dave said. “Which doesn’t much matter. What does matter is that somebody was trying to kill Thomas Owens. Both those times they missed. I think there was a third time. They missed Owens then too. But someone else got a bullet in the chest and died. It wouldn’t have happened, Johnny—not if you’d looked at that car, looked at that deck rail.”

  Delgado was a bad color. “Get out of here,” he said thickly. “Just get out, will you, please?”

  The plank roadway that crossed the dunes to the stiff wooden sails of Tom Owens’s house was too narrow for cars to pass on it. So when the Vega came out of the shadow of the port now, Dave braked the Electra and pushed the lever to Reverse. Then he saw Jomay’s bright hair through the windshield and shifted to “N” instead and stepped out. Gail Ewing halted her car, tapped the horn, called sharply:

  “We have a plane to catch!”

  He walked to her. Larry Johns was in the cramped rear of the little car, where there was no room for his legs. He sat crossways on the fake leather seat, head pulled down to his shoulders to avoid the low ceiling.

  “Where did you come from?” Dave asked.

  “Tom got his lawyer on my case,” Johns said. “Mr. Greenglass. It was only manslaughter if it was anything, he says, and that’s not like murder, where they can hold you without bail.”

  “Legal technicalities had nothing to do with it,” Gail Ewing snapped. “It was Tom’s fifty thousand dollars. That was where the judge set bail—which shows you what he thinks of the case.”

  “It’s not a case yet,” Dave said. “And I’m not sure it’s ever going to be.”

  “Doubt away,” Gail Ewing said, “but right now I must ask you to move your car.”

  Dave looked across at Jomay. BB lay asleep in the girl’s narrow lap, golden head between her little breasts, rosebud mouth drooling on a fresh white blouse, probably one of Trudy’s. Dave asked, “Back to Texas?”

  Jomay nodded sulkily. “I give my statement about Huncie to that man in the baseball cap. They had it typed up. I signed it. They don’t need for me to stay.” She glanced bitterly at Gail. “I would have stayed. Tom—he says I’m more’n welcome.”

  “He gave you the fifteen hundred,” Johns said. “That’s what you come out here to get, isn’t it?”

  Jomay twitched her mouth, tossed her hair.

  Dave asked Johns, “You’re going to the airport to say goodbye? I thought you said goodbye in Austin fifteen months ago.”

  “I want to see that Delta jet take off,” Johns said. “Watch it till it’s out of sight.”

  Jomay turned sharply on the seat. “It was Mama drove you off,” she yelled. “Wasn’t that what you said? Makin’ you clean up her beauty parlors and never payin’ you? Now you talk like it was me you hate.”

  He sighed and said gently, “I don’t hardly remember you, Jomay. Why don’t you try that? Just forget me.”

  Jomay picked up the limp baby under its arms and shook it at him. “This here is yours!”

  The baby began to cry and Johns turned his thin child face to look out the rear window.

  “It’s good flying weather,” Dave told him. “The plane will get off all right. I’m sure Mrs. Ewing here will report back accurately. I need to talk to you. And Tom. There are some developments.”

  “For heaven sake!” Gail Ewing threw open the door, got out of the car, yanked the bucket seat forward against the steering wheel. “Get out if you’re not going. We’ve got less than an hour now.”

  Johns half crawled, half fell out of the tight little car. Gail slid behind the wheel again, slammed the door, raced the engine. Dave returned to the Electra, backed it along the hollow-sounding planks to the wide place on the coast road shoulder where the drive began, swung it out of the way. The Vega shot past, Jomay’s face flushed, BB still wailing. Her cries mingled with th
ose of the gulls wheeling the emotionless blue sky above the dunes.

  Dave rolled the heavy car to where Johns stood waiting, squinting up at the gulls, his hands in the hip pockets of the worn Levi’s. They came into the house down stairs into the kitchen, where the dogs jumped and barked around Johns. He dropped his Levi’s and the pumpkin-color dog snatched them and the others ran after him barking. Johns wasn’t quite naked. He wore very small yellow swim trunks. He peeled off his T-shirt as he led the way along under the gallery to the room at the far house corner, where Tom Owens said from his hospital bed:

  “Good—you didn’t go.”

  He held out his arms to Johns, then saw Dave and dropped the arms and dropped his smile. It was the best smile Dave had seen in a long time and he hated to see it go.

  “What is it?” Owens said. “Larry’s free. Isn’t that fine?” The boy perched on the bed edge. Owens stroked his shoulder. He cocked an eyebrow at Dave. “Aren’t you pleased?”

  “It’s too early,” Dave said. “I’ll be pleased when they refund your bail money and he crosses home plate, but he hasn’t crossed home plate—not yet. And that’s only half of it. The other half is you.”

  “Me? I’m fine—now.”

  “You’re a target,” Dave said. “Someone tried to kill you. Not once but twice.” He eyed the boy with the blond mustache. “And possibly three times.” Owens tried to interrupt. Dave didn’t let him. He told about the brake fluid, the deck bolts, about how Johnny Delgado had neglected his job, about how the kid who worked for Elmo Sands hadn’t.

  Owens was pale against his pillows. Reaching for cigarettes on the magazine- and book-strewn blankets, his hand shook. He fumbled the pack and dropped it. Larry Johns took it, lit two cigarettes from it, handed one to Owens. The architect looked bleakly at Dave. “That’s right. The photographer posed me leaning on that rail. Backward and frontward. It was his idea.”

  “So the caption was fiction,” Dave said. “You didn’t go out there every night at martini time to watch the sunset.”

  “Sunsets,” Owens said, “are usually in bad taste.”

  “But you fell off there,” Dave said. “How?”

  “Trudy and Mark were recording.” Owens gave an ironic laugh. “I was minding their business.”

  “The night before,” Dave asked, “you don’t remember the dogs barking? Somebody was out there removing those bolts. It had to be under cover of darkness.”

  “We were catching a play at the Mark Taper—Larry and I. Gail?” He creased his forehead. “Where was she?”

  “Free child-care centers for working mothers,” Johns said. He squinted in the smoke from his cigarette, probing for and finding the brown pottery ashtray. “What would happen to Gail if she ever had to mind her own business for a week?”

  Owens laughed without hope or humor. “The world would be up to its ears in stray infants and oil slicks.” He frowned. “Mark and Trudy weren’t home that night either. Where were they?”

  “Poetry marathon,” Larry Johns said. “At that far-out bookstore in Santa Monica. Ninety-nine poets, or something, reading steady for two days and two nights. The store wanted to get it in the Guinness Book of World Records. They used up about fifty tape cassettes and found out afterward the mike wasn’t plugged in. Remember?”

  This time Owens’s laugh was real. “Yes—right.”

  Dave said, “So whether the dogs barked or not, there was no one home to hear them. How about when the brakes on your sister’s car were tampered with?”

  “That was no way to kill me,” Owens said. “I never drive that car.”

  “That was on a weekend.” Larry Johns tugged at the ragged ends of his blond mustache, frowning, thoughtful. “Maybe they weren’t here. We left them for shots at the vet’s one Saturday.” He went to a file cabinet and brought Dave a slip of paper headed LOS SANTOS ANIMAL CLINIC. The scrawled date was right. Dave handed back the slip and the boy put it away again. Owens watched his thin nakedness. The yellow eyes smiled and looked hungry. Dave told Owens, “Madge Dunstan and Ray Lollard picture you as someone everybody likes. So does Elmo Sands. He says you have only friends.”

  “I’d have thought so,” Owens said. “In that way, at least, I’ve always been lucky.”

  “Think. There’s no one you’ve crossed?” Dave sat in one of the orange canvas director’s chairs. “Suppose you hadn’t come along—who would have built those expensive beach houses that made you famous?”

  “Anyone and no one.” Johns sat on the bed edge again and Owens stroked his back. “It really doesn’t add up, Dave.”

  “Does Larry ever drive your sister’s car?”

  “No.” Owens stopped his moving hand. “Gail and Trudy. Larry drives my car, the El Camino. What are you getting at?”

  “You look alike—fair, slender, long hair, mustaches,” Dave said. “And on the night Rick Wendell was killed, Larry wore your sarape and hat.”

  The two on the bed watched him, puzzled.

  Dave told Johns, “Try to remember. We know now that Mark followed you that night. You evidently didn’t notice him. Did you notice anybody else when you left the house and headed for the road where Wendell was waiting to pick you up?”

  “No. But I went out the driveway. In my cowboy boots. They made a lot of noise on the planks. If somebody went on the sand underneath I wouldn’t have heard.”

  “And you didn’t notice a car following you when you drove up into the canyon with Rick?”

  “Tell you the truth”—Johns blushed scarlet, got off the bed, went to stand looking out the window—“Rick had kind of busy hands. Well, one hand, anyhow. A couple times I thought we’d go off the road.”

  “So you weren’t watching the rear-view mirror. You didn’t see the headlights of the El Camino that Mark was driving. You didn’t see headlights from another car?”

  “Sorry.” Johns stepped to the bed to put ashes into the brown pottery tray. “What you think is the same one that tried to kill Tom by rigging those brakes and the deck rail came back and saw me leaving and mistook me for Tom and followed along to try to kill me?”

  Owens, pale again, took the boy’s hand, gripped it hard. He looked at Dave. “You think he went right into Wendell’s place and that was what Larry heard and—”

  “And that Wendell came out to investigate, found a stranger, snatched the gun from the desk, the stranger tried to get the gun away from him and it went off. Yes.”

  “Jesus,” Johns whispered. “He saved my life.”

  “It was someone who didn’t know me that well,” Owens said with sudden conviction. “He tampered with the wrong automobile, then with that deck rail, where it was only by bad luck I happened to lean.” He breathed in sharply. “He’d seen that magazine picture.”

  “And believed the caption,” Dave said. “And you wore the sarape and hat. Also on television, right?”

  “For color.” Owens’s smile was self-mocking.

  “But you can’t think of anyone who wants you dead.” Dave got up grimly from the director’s chair and went to the door with the high wall break above it. “Try, Tom. Give it hard thought. There’s got to be someone. And if we don’t find him, Larry isn’t going to stay free.”

  Johns wasn’t listening. Worried, he tugged at his mustache again. “Tom? They’re running in a memorial to Rick at that Mr. Marvelous shuck tonight. I know Gail and the kids will be out. But I ought to go. I won’t stay late. I mean—hell, he did save my life.”

  “A friend.” Owens’s voice was heavy with irony but his smile was kind. “Sure, go. I’ll be all right.”

  “I couldn’t go to the funeral,” Johns explained.

  “Don’t sweat it,” Owens said. “It’s okay.”

  Watching them, the boy standing by the bed, the man in the bed holding his hand, smiling up at him, Dave had a sudden nightmare sense of déjà vu.

  “Wear the sarape and hat,” he said.

  He left them staring blankly at each other.

  14r />
  ALONG A STRETCH OF wide West Santa Monica Boulevard where the city criminal code didn’t reach, signs, red, blue, yellow, flashed names at the rental cars of tourists that crawled past, bumper to bumper, while the Iowans inside, eyes circled by white from desert sunglasses, marveled. The signs read INSTITUTE OF ORAL SEX, DO IT MODELING STUDIO, PEEK IN ADULT BOOKS, PUSSYCAT THEATRE. In calligraphies of glass, GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS wrote itself on the wide black slate of the night sky—TOPLESS, BOTTOMLESS, GO-GO DANCERS, BOYS BOYS BOYS. TOTAL, the signs said, NUDITY. And there were neon drawings of gigantic naked hips and breasts and smiles.

  Surprisingly, but only to those who didn’t know Los Angeles, in the midst of all this loomed an old-time livery stable, newly painted red with white trim—THE BIG BARN. It was the largest L.A. gay bar, logical host to the Mr. Marvelous contest. Day-Glo banners fluttered on its country front. A swivel klieg light mounted on a noisy flatbed truck sent a blinding blue-white shaft into the high darkness. Barbra Streisand wailed from loudspeakers over an entryway lit by electrified ranch-house lanterns.

  A strip of incongruous red carpet crossed the sidewalk. At the curb, glossy rented limousines halted and discharged beautiful youths who looked nervous and a little too muscular for their hired tuxedos. The way traffic inched along gave Dave time to study them. He’d met the majority. But the clothes, the grooming, varnished them to sameness. And they hadn’t glowed like this in their jeans and work shirts at the bars. Only Bobby Reich. Clothed or unclothed, Bobby dazzled. He stepped out now from Ace Kegan’s shiny little Fiat.

  A crowd five rows deep behind red silken ropes made a gantlet of the stretch from curb to door. They gasped and sighed. Camera bulbs flashed. Microphones glittered toward smiling mouths like drunken missiles toward the moon. A bored-looking man with a motion picture camera saddling a shoulder pushed onlookers. Dave reached a corner and idled up a side street where the dense leafage of old acacias dimmed the street lamps. He was three blocks off before he found a parking space that would take the Electra.