Dave let the porch door close softly and went back through the dark house and let himself out through the front doors, with their etched-glass panels.
It wasn’t far to the hospital, but by the time he reached it, all light had gone from the sky. He left the van in the parking lot slot of some doctor he hoped had gone home for the day or wouldn’t arrive too soon. The parking lot was otherwise filled, unbroken rows of cars—a number of them Mustangs in various stages of repair—among the long strips of ivy geranium and the decorative palms. The long, curved fronds of the palms blew in a southeast wind that had risen with the coming of night. The wind was cool and Dave turned up his jacket collar, making his way toward the lighted glass side doors of the hospital. He looked up bleakly at the ten stories of shining windows, and lowered his eyes. He didn’t want to think about the misery behind the glass. His horror of hospitals had been sharpened by Cecil’s recent ordeal. But it had originated when Rod Fleming died slowly in a hospital a dozen years ago—of a kind of cancer they were now learning how to cure. There was no humor in the irony of that. He had lived with Rod for twenty-two years. He would never stop missing him.
But his spirits lightened when he found Cecil in a big, lamplit room of couches and easy chairs, where the sick and the well made ready to leave this place. Cecil sat talking with Luther Prentice, whose glasses and bald head gleamed. Cecil saw Dave coming, making his way through a clutter of empty wheelchairs, and smiled and waved. Dave smiled back. He shook Prentice’s long, kindly hand. The preacher said, “My wife tells me you have made a generous donation to the victims of the shooting. Please accept my gratitude. It was a terrible thing to happen. I don’t know what I was thinking of, bringing all those people there, putting them in danger of their lives.” Behind the shiny lenses, his eyes misted. “I have asked the Lord to forgive me for my foolishness, and I expect He has, but I don’t know that I will ever be able to forgive myself.”
“You only wanted to feed people,” Cecil said.
“You couldn’t know what would happen,” Dave said.
“Someone more worldly-wise than I am”—Prentice shook his head sorrowfully—“would have realized that with their leader back out of prison, that gang would get up to something evil again.”
“Your wife doesn’t think it was Silencio’s doing,” Dave said. “She thinks he was trying to stop it.”
Prentice’s smile was gently tolerant. “She is even less worldly-wise than I am.” He sighed. “No, I’m afraid this is only the beginning of the shootings, ambushes, deaths. The Edge will want revenge. And then—” He straightened. “Ah, here comes Mrs. Prentice now.” He looked at an old silver watch on a bony wrist. “She is behind time. Prayer meeting begins at seven.”
She came and spoke in her soft, musical voice to Dave and Cecil, her gentle brown eyes reflecting the suffering she had just been witness to, even while she smiled politely at these two strangers. Then she and her stilt-tall husband excused themselves and went away into the night. Luther Prentice’s voice drifted back as he pushed open the heavy glass door for her. “We’ll be late.”
“The Lord will wait,” she said. “He always has.”
Dave said to Cecil, “Is he right? Are there going to be more ambushes, more deaths?”
“It’s a good thing all the G-G’s are in jail,” Cecil said. “If The Edge ever gets hold of any of them, they won’t live through it.”
“Shall we go?” Dave said, and moved back toward the wheelchairs, toward the parking-lot doors beyond the wheelchairs. Cecil came along behind.
He said, “I’ll be glad to get out of here. I’ve had enough of hospitals to last me the rest of my life.” Dave pushed the door open. Wind gusted in. “Whoo! That is cold.” The door closed behind them. Cecil put his head down and hugged himself. They trotted toward the van. “Spooky wind, too. Can’t make up its mind where it’s coming from.” They climbed into the van and slammed the doors. “Hot today, too.” Cecil shivered and rubbed his arms.
“Looks like the end of summer,” Dave said. He started the engine. “You talked to The Edge. Which ones?”
“Rollo Poore. He’s the head honcho. He’s got a bullet in his thigh. Must have been some bullet. I would judge him to be made of some very tough alloy. I tried to talk to the ones leaning around looking mean in the hallways, but Rollo—he the spokesman. Nobody else gave me squat. All they did was point at this particular room and say, ‘Talk to Rollo Poore.’”
Dave backed the van, changed gears, joined the red and yellow lights of traffic heading away from Gifford Gardens toward the freeway. “And what did Rollo say?”
“You should have seen that room. Like something out of an old Edward G. Robinson movie, only all black, of course. The heavy standing outside the door. The heavy leaning against the wall by the window. Sulky. Watching me like he was thinking up ways to take me apart and put me back together again all wrong. Mrs. Prentice—I saw her before I saw Rollo. She said the authorities won’t let The Edge carry weapons. No weapons in the hospital, she said. But I swear, the one in the room had a gun stuck in his pants. His jacket covered it, but it was there.”
“I’m sorry,” Dave said. “I ought to have gone.”
“You’re the wrong color. He’d never have talked to you.” Cecil had stopped shivering. “It’s a good heating system in this van. Rollo said, when he gets out of bed, he and the rest of them are going to find Silencio Ruiz and kill him. How was your crazy old peeper today?”
“Makeup an inch thick,” Dave said. “He denied it before, but he has a man around the house. I wondered who smoked the cigarettes, who washed the windows, kept the kitchen and the bathroom spic and span. I wondered who looked after the dogs. I saw him today.”
“Hired hand?” Cecil asked.
“They take their meals together,” Dave said. “I don’t know what else they do together. What does Silencio Ruiz look like? Did you see his picture on the news last night? Well built, six feet, curly hair? Ramon Novarro?”
“I don’t know who that might be,” Cecil said, “but if you mean is he pretty, you got it.”
“He was feeding the dogs,” Dave said. “It figures. Gifford’s been looking out for him for a long time.”
“That was why he paid off Bruce Kilgore not to leak it about the bail and the expensive lawyer. To keep Silencio’s gang from suspecting what was between him and Gifford. It wouldn’t fit the macho image.”
“That’s the explanation that makes sense,” Dave said.
“And when Silencio learned about Paul Myers’s death, he ran to Gifford’s enchanted castle to hide out, right? Lucky old Gifford.” They sloped onto the freeway. “What are you going to do?”
“Tell Salazar.” Rain began to spatter the windshield. “Get Silencio into jail with the rest of the G-G’s. To keep The Edge from killing him.” Dave switched on the wipers. “And that silly old man.”
12
IT WAS A LAZY rain, the warm, tropical sort that now and then drifts up from Mexico. It fell all night on the shingles above the loft and made sleeping good. It was still coming down from ragged, gray-black clouds when they went their separate ways next morning. Cecil took his van. Dave took the sideswiped car. Rain had leaked into it, probably because the rubber around the doors was rotten. The floor was puddled. The rubber of the wiper blades was also shot. He stopped at a filling station for new ones, then wheeled onto the first of three freeways that would take him out east of Pasadena to a plant called Tech-Rite. That name, and the names Chemiseal and Agroplex on the new batch of waybills taken from Paul Myers’s closet drawer, had interested Dave.
Tech-Rite occupied long buildings far off across empty land backed by rain-shrouded mountains. The buildings were flat-roofed, windowless, featureless. Big white storage tanks loomed behind them. To a security guard in a black rubber hat and poncho, Dave showed his license and explained his business. The guard made a phone call from inside his white stucco booth. Light flickered off his rain-slick poncho from a small bla
ck-and-white television set in the booth. He hung up the phone and came down out of the booth and leaned to the car window. A gnarled hand pushed something shiny at Dave, a card enfolded in clear plastic, printed with the name TECH-RITE, the word VISITOR, and some blank lines.
“Write your name on there, will you?” the guard said. “Truth is, I’m supposed to, but I can’t hold a pen too good anymore.” He appeared past retirement age. The raindrops on his drooping, hound-dog face looked like tears. “When your name is on it, pin it to your jacket and I’ll open the gates and you can drive on in.”
Dave did as he was told. The guard continued to lean at the window, watching but probably not seeing. Dave pricked a finger pushing the pin through his lapel. He sucked the finger. “That do it?”
“Fine, thanks.” The guard stepped creakily up into the booth again and shut the door. The wide, high, chainlink gates swung open. Dave drove the rattly car through, and headed it up a two-lane strip of blacktop that glistened in the rain. He passed parking lots filled with cars parked on the bias in neat, shiny rows. He drove on. A sign read EXECUTIVE PARKING LOT. He slowed and almost swung in at the arrow painted on the paving, then saw ahead through the rain another sign—VISITORS. He left the battered Valiant there, among new Audis, Cutlasses, BMWs, and hurried, head down, toward double glass doors that glowed with light in the bleak, unbroken plane of the building front.
He waited an hour for Lorin Shields, in the reception room of offices marked PUBLIC RELATIONS. He was not neglected. He was served tea from a Worcester pot in a Worcester cup and saucer. At a guess, English breakfast tea. There were English muffins. There was English marmalade. The young woman who served them on a Japanese lacquer tray was oriental herself. She apologized smoothly and smilingly for Shields’s tardiness at first. He was rarely late. It must be the rain. He had a long way to come. But as time dragged on, she became embarrassed. Little lines appeared between her beautiful brows when she glanced up from the whispering electronic typewriter at her desk, saw Dave, saw the clock.
Dave, trying to make sense of a trade journal article on the molecular structure of a new breed of plastics, gave her a smile. “It’s all right. I have no other appointments. I don’t mind waiting.”
“I can’t think why he hasn’t telephoned.”
In the end, a blond, rosy-cheeked, chubby lad named Jochim led him into an office that did not have a name on its door, and that was some little walk from Shields’s door, which not only had Shields’s name on it, but SENIOR VICE-PRESIDENT as well. Jochim probably wasn’t even a junior vice-president. But he was friendly and welcoming. For a while, at least. At the word “murder,” his smile faded. He watched worriedly as Dave brought out a rumpled cargo manifest from his jacket, unfolded it, held it out.
Jochim read it, frowned. “But this was weeks ago.”
“He didn’t have a waybill for what he was hauling that night. Did it come from here? Could you check your files? Night of the ninth?”
“Why?” Jochim gave back the paper. “Why Tech-Rite?”
“It’s someplace to start. The records, Mr. Jochim?”
“We’ve nothing to hide.” Jochim touched an intercom button. “Shipping records for the ninth of this month.” He tilted his head at Dave. “But surely this man hauled all sorts of cargoes, from all sorts of businesses.”
“Not a lot that was dangerous,” Dave said.
“Dangerous?” Jochim’s voice squeaked like a high-school boy’s. “What are you implying? We observe the strictest standards of safety in all our manufacturing processes. We have to. Most of our contracts come from the U.S. government. You’ve no idea of the restrictions they impose.”
“That suggests that some of the materials that go into Tech-Rite products aren’t exactly harmless.”
Jochim drew breath to answer, and the door opened. The young oriental woman looked in. “I’m sorry, Mr. Jochim, but files from around that time are missing. No one in Shipping or Order has them. Shall we keep looking?”
Jochim raised pale brows at Dave. Dave shook his head. Jochim said, “That’s all right, Frances. Forget it. Thank you.” When the door closed behind her, Jochim said to Dave with a thin smile, “The environmentalists really make very little sense. Why would Tech-Rite or any of us manufacture products that would harm the very people we want to serve and serve again? Think about that.”
“There was the asbestos business,” Dave said. “And the coal-mining business. Not to mention the lead business. But okay. Even if what you make is harmless—poisons, pollutants, carcinogens come out of the manufacturing process, don’t they? It’s in the papers all the time. What does Tech-Rite do with its toxic wastes?”
“Just a damn minute.” Jochim’s face was red. “Are you holding Tech-Rite responsible for this trucker’s death?”
Dave looked blank. “Why would you think that?”
“Then I don’t understand your line of questioning,” Jochim said. “And I don’t like it.”
“Let me explain,” Dave said. He outlined the story of Paul Myers’s lucrative, secretive, late-night hauling operations, the beating of Paul Myers’s wife, the earlier recruitment of Myers by Ossie Bishop, the curious circumstances of Ossie Bishop’s death. “I went down to Halcon to talk to his wife about it. She won’t talk. She’s frightened. But that I expected. What I didn’t expect was that Ossie’s truck was sold. For cash. In a great hurry.”
“Yes?” Jochim asked warily. “To whom?”
“To a woman known as the Duchess. Ever hear of her?”
“Sounds like a cheap television show,” Jochim said.
“Doesn’t it? Unhappily, it’s real. Why did she want that truck to disappear just when it was discovered that Paul Myers’s death was no accident?”
“We farm out shipments to many independent truckers,” Jochim said impatiently. “We really have no control over their activities, outside of their work for us. As for this missing truck—”
“I can’t help thinking the Duchess wanted it out of the way because it contained evidence that would link Myers’s death to that of Ossie Bishop. And I wondered what sort of evidence that would be. The truck was empty. Like Myers’s. But law-enforcement laboratories don’t regard ‘empty’ as the rest of us do. The Duchess must have been afraid traces of whatever Bishop was hauling at midnight in that truck were still there for electron microscopes to find.”
“Are you suggesting that Tech-Rite—?” Jochim began.
“I read a disturbing article last night,” Dave said. “In Scientific American. It describes the reactions of people who have handled toxic wastes carelessly. Violent diarrhea, vomiting, coughing, lung congestion, paralysis of the diaphragm—the same symptoms Ossie Bishop showed before he died.”
“I see.” Jochim gave a short nod and stood up. “Let me show you something. Can you spare me”—he looked at his wristwatch—“half an hour, forty-five minutes?” He didn’t wait for an answer. He opened a closet, took out a pale raincoat, a rumpled rainhat. “I’m sure I can clear away all your doubts and dark suspicions.” He smiled and opened his office door.
Dave smiled back. “Best offer I’ve had all day,” he said, and followed Jochim out of the building. It was still raining in those fat, lazy drops, out of the sort of sky water-colorists like best, smudgy grays and whites. Beyond the hulking curves of the storage tanks, the mountains had already begun to show a tinge of green on their tawny summer hides. Dave walked beside Jochim into the executive parking lot. Coming out of the lot, hurrying in a clear plastic raincoat that rustled, a tall man nearly collided with them. Rain dripped from the brim of his rough Irish tweed hat as he glared at Jochim. The tall man was Lorin Shields.
“This is Mr. Brandstetter,” Jochim told him. Dave wondered why the name seemed to startle Shields. Or was he imagining things? Jochim said, “He’s an investigator for insurance companies. He’s interested in our system of disposing of hazardous wastes. I thought I’d just show him.”
“Good idea.” Shields ga
ve a brisk, executive nod, twitched a smile and tugged the brim of his hat to Dave, and loped off toward the bright doors of Tech-Rite.
Dave got into Jochim’s Cimarron. “Your Mr. Shields looks like a man under a lot of strain.”
“Lost his wife recently.” Jochim drove down the long wet tarmac strip toward the gates. “Very suddenly. It was a shock. She was young. Beautiful. He worshipped her, built her a glorious new house. Married in April. Dead in September. Lorin hasn’t collected himself. This place used to mean everything to him. Now he doesn’t even come in, half the time.”
The kitchen help, in rumpled, food-stained white jackets and pants, were eating when Dave stepped into Max Romano’s through the back door. Steamy heat embraced him. The smells were overpowering—of garlic, cheese, fish, onions, basil, oregano. Alex, the skinny head chef with caved-in, acne-scarred cheeks, looked up from his plate of Alfredo and gave Dave his graveyard smile. The other men in puffed white hats—fish, soup, salad, dessert chefs—murmured welcomes. Dave pushed out a zinc-covered swing door into the quiet dining room. Max—short, fatter than ever, his few remaining curly locks combed glossily over his pate—was counting lunchtime checks by a tiny bright lamp at the cash register. Cocking an eyebrow at Dave, he turned back a snowy cuff fastened by a big diamond stud to read his watch, and shook his head in mock-fatherly reproach.
“You late again,” he said. “Keep everybody waiting.”
Dave laid a hand on his shoulder, then moved between white, empty tables to the corner table where Cecil sat. He gave him a kiss and sat down. “Sorry. I was treated to a demonstration of how scrupulous Tech-Rite is about dumping its toxic wastes.” He laughed. “Or what was meant to be that.” A little green bottle stood beside Cecil’s wineglass. Perrier water bubbled in the glass. “You’re not drinking?”
“I didn’t know how long you’d be,” Cecil said. “Didn’t want for you to have to carry me out over your shoulder.” He glanced through the shadows, looking for Max, but Max was already in the little bar. The restaurant was so quiet they could hear the clink of bottles, glasses, ice, that told them he was fixing their drinks. Cecil said, “What was it instead?”
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