Troublemaker

by Joseph Hansen

  He dialed it and it rang a long, long time, but they checked the phone. “It is off the hook, sir. If this is an emergency, we can use a howler on it.”

  “Great,” Dave said. “Make it a loud howler.”

  “They’re not very loud,” the girl said. Whether it was or not, Tom Owens didn’t seem to hear it. “No one answers,” the girl said.

  “Right, thanks.” Dave hung up and bent to twist out his cigarette in the ashtray on the floor. Hell, he’d only wasted time. What good would it do to warn Tom Owens someone was coming to kill him? He couldn’t move from that bed. Dave dialed another number.

  “Los Santos police. Officer Zara speaking.”

  Officer Zara didn’t sound more than sixteen.

  “Lieutenant Yoshiba, please. Dave Brandstetter calling. It’s an emergency.”

  “I’m sorry, sir. He’s not here. Matter of fact, I’m the only one that is here. If you’re calling about the trouble in Paradiso—”

  “I wasn’t. What’s the matter?”

  “It’s the college kids again. They’re trashing the mall again. They’ve occupied a bank. They’re burning it. And somebody’s sniping at the police. Everybody’s there.” He sounded wistful, left out.

  “Well, look, Officer Zara,” Dave said. “I have reason to believe there may be an attempt at homicide. The Thomas Owens house.” He gave the R.F.D. address on the coast road. “Can you send somebody? The man’s alone there, laid up in bed, legs in casts.”

  “He hasn’t called us,” the boy said.

  “He doesn’t know the danger he’s in,” Dave said. “And while we’re talking—”

  “Okay, sir. I understand. I’ve written down the address. I’ll try to radio a car, send them out there. He’s alone like that? No nurse?”

  “No nurse. The whole family’s away tonight.”

  “What about dogs? Those people out on the dunes, they usually have a dog.”

  “Right,” Dave said. “They’ve got dogs.”

  The big dog lay just inside the open front door. It lay on the polished floorboards among splinters of glass. A panel had been smashed out of the door. Dave crouched by the dog. The light was poor. It came a long way—from the hanging wicker lamp above the wicker furniture at the room’s far end. But it was enough to show him a puddle of drying blood under the dog’s head. He touched the motionless body. It had begun to lose heat in the cool beach night, begun to stiffen. The fur had lost its sheen and felt coarse. There was no sign of the other dogs.

  A breeze sighed across the sand outside. There was the splash and sibilance of surf. Somewhere in the house, as in a ship, a beam creaked. He stood. And then he heard it, the sound of a voice. It came from beyond that far bulkhead, insistent, on a single pitch, no shift in tempo. It sounded not quite sane. But he knew the voice.

  If he’d had any doubt about whom he was chasing out those red-taillight-streaked miles of freeway and coast road after escaping the tangle of city traffic, the doubt had been wiped out by what he’d found, a minute ago, leaking oil on the clean planks of Tom Owens’s otherwise empty carport. It was a battered ten-year-old European mini. The slatted engine cover at the back was still hot.

  Now he pried off his shoes and went quietly along beside the great painting under the gallery. Toward that edgy voice. The boxy hall the other side of the bulkhead was dark below but light came out through the tall opening above Tom Owens’s closed door. It went high into a roof peak windowed by dark triangles of glass. The voice went up there too. And banged back down to Dave in the dark.

  “…Makes you want to vomit, doesn’t it? Just hearing about it. Well, I lived it—two years of it, five months, eleven days. And you know why? Because once you get busted, they never leave you alone. They watch you all the time and they grab you. Make a mistake nobody else would notice and they grab you. Also, you have a record. You can’t get a job.”

  “Vern,” Tom Owens said patiently, “I’m sorry. Why didn’t you tell me all this the other day? Hand me the phone. I’ll get you a job right now.”

  “It’s too late. Anyway, that’s not what I wanted from you. I asked you for all I ever wanted from you that summer when we were seventeen. You remember. At the Cahuenga Park pool. To go on the way we had been, Tommy, the way you started us. Don’t forget, it was your idea. You were the oldest.”

  “Vern, it was a long time ago. Forget it. All right, yes. What I did to you was heartless and I’m sorry. But, Vern, I was only a kid.”

  “Sure, you’re sorry,” Taylor sneered, “with my gun at your head. Anyway, do you think ‘sorry’ can wipe out seventeen rotten years? Hell, I didn’t care if you took up with Nofziger and those guys with cars and rich parents. Even when they called me fag. Even when you did. All I asked was for you to save a little time for me.”

  Owens interrupted. For a minute they both talked at once and the echo off the high boards of the hall broke the words and Dave couldn’t understand them. Then Taylor was saying:

  “I smell like flophouses, cheap bars, public toilets. I can’t get clean. And you—you came out all shining. Let me tell you about this gun. I bought it on Main Street in L.A. From a black guy who hustles TV’s—not machines, hustlers that dress like women. He sold it to me for five dollars. I walked out of the Ricketts Hotel after I saw you on the lobby television. I bought a gun to kill you with, Tommy.”

  Dave put his hand on the doorknob.

  Owens said, “But you didn’t use it. Instead you drained brake fluid out of the car, hoping I’d crash. Then you took the bolts out of the deck rail, wanting me to fall.”

  “I remembered bullets can be traced,” Taylor said. “But you didn’t die. It would have been on the news. It wasn’t. So I came back. With the gun. At night. I waited out on the dunes because the lights were on. And then I saw you leaving. Only it wasn’t you, just that boy in your clothes, only I didn’t know that, it was too dark out there. He got in a car on the road and that big man kissed him and I thought, I’ll kill them in bed together. Can you understand that, Tommy?”

  “He was killed with his own gun,” Owens said.

  “I dropped mine,” Taylor said. “He heard it. That was why he came out. And I ran at him and—”

  “So you haven’t used your gun,” Owens said. “You can’t be traced. Why don’t you just—”

  “Not shoot you?” Taylor jeered. “Sorry, but I have used it. Tonight. There were a lot of people around that old house. A kid outside the windows with a tape recorder. A big man in a cowboy hat. When he came, the kid ran up in the trees where I was. So close I could smell him sweating. He went after the big man went but there was someone else. A little man with a broken nose. When I ran back up to my car, I almost bumped into him. And he was at that Mr. Marvelous contest tonight. He saw me and he went straight to tell that insurance man, Brandstetter. I had to kill that little man, Tommy.”

  “But now Brandstetter knows,” Owens said. “Vern, it’s time you gave up. It’s all going wrong.”

  “It always did,” Taylor said. “For me. Everything always went wrong. It didn’t seem so bad when I saw in the paper how they were holding that boy for murder. I knew what he must be to you. That’s why I came to see you that day, Tommy. To watch you crying for him the way I used to cry for you. But he’s out. I saw him tonight. I ought to have known he wouldn’t stay locked up. You had money to get him out. Money can buy anything. There was only one way somebody like me could hurt somebody like you. Kill you and—”

  Tires rumbled heavily on the driveway planks.

  “What’s that?” Taylor asked.

  “My family’s come home,” Owens said. “You can still get away, Vern. Go out by the stairs just around the corner. Out there in the hall.”

  “No!” Taylor said. “I’ll kill them all. They mean something to you. I never could, but they do. Maybe I won’t even kill you, Tommy. I’ll kill them instead, and you can live the rest of your life knowing you caused it.”

  Rubber-shod footsteps made the floo
r shake. Dave let the doorknob go, flattened himself against the dark wall. The door opened. Taylor moved toward the livingroom. Dave moved after him, silent, swift.

  Far off, at the foot of the stairs that spiraled wooden down from the gallery, a door opened, brightness streamed out, then the long shadow of Larry Johns in the sarape and hat. “Tom?” he called. “Whose car is that up there? What’s the matter with Hans and Fritz? They’re out on the dunes and they won’t come. They—” He broke off, ran to the dog, knelt. “Barney! Barney?” He touched the dead body, drew his hand back. “Aw, no, no!” He looked up.

  And Taylor lifted a little nickel-plated revolver. Light slipped orange along its barrel. Dave struck Taylor’s arm down. The gun spat fire and a bullet drew a groove in a polished floor plank. Taylor half turned. Dave chopped him across the windpipe with the edge of a hand. The gun clattered away. Taylor dropped, making a hoarse, rasping sound, clutching his throat, trying to take bites of air.

  Larry Johns stood by the dead dog, staring, while Owens called from the next room, “Larry, are you all right? For Christ sake, Vern, what have you—?”

  “It’s all right!” Larry shouted. He came running down the room to Dave, careful to side-step the gun. He eyed the gun as if it were a snake. He looked uncertainly at Dave. “Isn’t it all right?”

  “As it’s ever likely to be,” Dave said. “Where did you disappear to at The Big Barn?”

  “The men’s room,” Johns said. “Sorry.”

  Dave grunted. He touched the twisting, gasping Taylor with a foot. “Find something to tie him up with. He may be on our hands for a while. The police are busy tonight.” He retrieved the gun, dropped it into a pocket. “I’ll phone them again.”

  “Brandstetter?” Owens called.

  Dave walked into the shiny plank room, picked up the phone from where it had spilled on the floor. “How did this happen?” he asked, and began to dial.

  “I must have knocked it off in my sleep. It woke me, making a squawking sound. I couldn’t reach it.”

  “Sorry about that.” While at the other end of the line the phone rang and rang, Dave looked at the strung-up casts on Owens’s legs. They were painted with flowers, bright primary colors, kindergarten draftsmanship. LOVE, in happy, drunken letters. “Was that how you spent the afternoon,” he asked, “when you were supposed to be remembering someone you crossed once, someone with a grudge against you?”

  The taut skin of Owens’s high cheekbones reddened. He gave a sheepish nod. “Larry did it. We were celebrating his being back.” He shook his head. “Seriously—I couldn’t think of anyone.”

  “There’s always someone,” Dave said.

  And officer Zara answered the phone.

  Turn the page to continue reading from the Dave Brandstetter Mysteries

  1

  IN 1964 A TIDAL wave knocked down the shacks next to the abandoned fish cannery at La Caleta, and the wreckage the Pacific didn’t take, bulldozers did. The cannery itself was strong and it remained as built, one end on the beach, the rest over the water, its paint scaling under a rusty corrugated-iron roof. Boards had dropped out of its side decks but the pilings were upright and still supported a winch crusty with old salt. A chainlink fence topped by sagging barbwire enclosed the cannery grounds, NO TRESPASSING signs hung off the fence. Double gates fastened with a shiny chain and padlock cut off the road down to the loading bays. Weeds had broken the blacktop, and sand had half smothered it.

  Dave could remember when the place functioned. Back before the war, back when he was a kid. Mexican people lived in the vanished shacks and worked in the cannery. You could see it from the highway. On trips north, ignoring the complaints of this or that young stepmother, he used to make his father stop the Marmon, the Auburn, the Lincoln Zephyr, so he could stand at the road edge and watch the wide, wallowing boats unload their cargo, slippery silver in the sun. There would be strong stinks of raw fish, of fish cooking, the rumble of the canning machines above the roar of surf, the wind-torn shouts of fishermen and dockers. It was a long time ago.

  He was middle aged now. His father was an old man, maybe as old as he was going to get. He lay this morning on a high bed in a gray room whose coral-color door was marked INTENSIVE CARE. A triangle of foggy plastic masked his nose and mouth. Thin tubing snaked from the mask to an oxygen tank. Frail wires were taped to the bruised backs of his hands. They fed into metal boxes at the head of the bed. One of the boxes had a blue disk across which a shaky line of lavender scribbled news of his torn heart. On the other box an orange light winked, winked, stammered, winked out, winked on again.

  All night, leaning on the foot of the bed, Dave had watched the lights, while girls in starchy white moved in and out of shadow, making notes, counting the sick pulse. Twice they had put Dave out in the hall to sit on a chair of coral-color molded plastic and read his watch and smoke his mouth dry. When he’d gone back in, nothing had changed. Once, his father’s head had lain against the bed’s guard bars. He’d straightened it on the alien pillows.

  At six-thirty this morning, when Amanda appeared—in jeans and boots, turtleneck jersey, Navajo necklace, cowhide shirt-jacket—Dave left. If his father woke, he’d be as happy to see his new young wife as his aging homosexual son. Maybe happier. If he didn’t wake, he’d never know the difference. There was nothing Dave could do. And he hated the helplessness. He went to work.

  The road he now drove skirted the cannery fence, cut into a bluff, climbed from the beach and curved off, so that the cannery went out of sight. The road was private. It led to a 1920s Spanish colonial house of white stucco with red tile roofs. The house stood alone among trees and looked down at a quiet cove of the rocky little bay that gave La Caleta its simpleminded name. The house had been built by the cannery owner. After the war finished off his business, it had stood empty for years. Ben Orton had bought it in the early fifties, lived in it, raised a son and daughter in it, died in it. By violence, of course. Orton was a rough man.

  Dave left the car by the road under a big oleander drunk with pink blossom. Gravel crunched beneath his shoes as he climbed a curved driveway edged by whitewashed rocks and flowering ivy geranium. A double garage made a wing of the house. One of its doors was up. A pale lavender Montego waited inside. Sun glared off the house windows. They were set in wide arches and the curtains were drawn. Deep in a smaller arch he found a door with rough black iron hardware. He used the knocker. Hollowness echoed beyond it but he knew she was home. He’d telephoned ten minutes ago just to hear her say hello.

  He stepped out of the doorway shadow to look between the slim trunks of lacy eucalyptus trees to the bay below. It was an assortment of blues. Tangled rafts of brown kelp floated there. Sea otters lived among these. He looked for the bob of a sleek head or for a gull darting low over the surface. Otters were sloppy feeders; a gull or two always hung around for scraps. He’d need binoculars to be sure but he doubted there were otters today. The gulls soared high and lazy in the warm blue air. He heard heel taps, the rattle of a latch, and he turned to the open door.

  She was plump, blond, forty-five, with dark patches under her eyes that said she’d been sleeping badly. Television crews had filmed Orton’s funeral. Clips had made the six o’clock news even 250 miles down the coast in Los Angeles. Uniforms, flags, gun salute. Orton had once been a Marine. On the nineteen-inch diagonal screen his widow had worn this dress, black, simple, set off by a single strand of pearls. Her hair had looked newly set. It still did. Her lipstick was muted pink and matched the enamel on her nails, except she’d been picking at the enamel, chipping it. Her eyes were round and. blue and they widened at him.

  He said, “Mrs. Orton? Brandstetter—Medallion Life.” He handed her a card that she didn’t look at. She kept the little girl eyes on him. They looked wary. He explained, “Your husband’s life was insured with us.”

  She said bitterly, “That didn’t save it.” Her voice was childlike too, and the words it had spoken seemed to shock her. “Excuse me
. I’m not myself.” She drew breath, turned up the corners of a sweet mouth. “What may I do for you?”

  “In cases where a policyholder’s death is not from natural causes, we make an investigation.”

  “Investigation.” Her laugh said she thought he was joking. “My husband was chief of police here. There’s been a thorough investigation.”

  “I read the police reports,” Dave said, “this morning.”

  “And the arrest report? The man who killed Ben is locked up, Mr.—” she glanced at the card, “Brandstetter. The case is closed.”

  “It looks that way,” Dave said. “But I have to follow routine.” He gave her a half smile. “A policeman’s wife must be familiar with that word. I can’t copy reports. I have to do my own digging and come up with my own answers.”

  “But it seems such a waste of time.” She folded the card, making the crease sharp with her nails. “What can one man expect to find that a whole police force couldn’t?”

  “Probably nothing.” He shrugged amiably. “That’s the usual outcome of routine, isn’t it?” He coaxed her with another smile and took a step forward. “I’ll try not to take up much of your time.”

  “Oh, time.” Her mouth twisted bleakly. “What have I got but time?” But she didn’t retreat and ask him in. She tilted her head and frowned. “Your accounting people need a report from you before they can send a check, is that it?”

  “That’s it.” He smiled one more time.

  She didn’t return the smile. “Mr. Brandstetter—Ben Orton was killed by a blow that shattered his skull. That couldn’t have been suicide.”

  He didn’t tell her that other things besides suicide could get in the way of payment on a policy. He said, “I’ve been checking out death claims for twenty years, Mrs. Orton. The investigation of your husband’s murder not only wasn’t thorough—it hardly happened.”