“I took a minute at lunchtime to check you out. And you’re very, very big time.” O’Neil’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you investigating Vaughn’s death? He wasn’t at Channel Three long enough to qualify for group insurance.”
“Right.” Dave smiled. “I figured you were too shrewd to believe that for long.”
O’Neil scowled. “You lied? Why? Who for?”
“For someone who doesn’t accept that Vaughn’s death was an accident. I can’t give you my client’s name. That’s confidential. But I’m sure it would surprise you.” Dave grinned. “I know damned well it would surprise Vaughn.”
O’Neil stared for a long moment, puzzled, wary. He was pale. He read his watch, set down his glass so hastily it almost fell over. He grabbed for it, straightened it, stood up. “I have to go. Sylvia expects me back tonight.” He tried for a smile and missed, then went away down the room at a run. The door that had stood open slammed after him.
Dave plugged in the telephone on the desk and it rang.
“We gave that apartment a thorough going-over,” Joey Samuels said. “We didn’t find much. Wornout pantyhose, a plastic tricycle.” While the police detective talked, Cecil came in the door. He passed Dave, touching his shoulder, hung his jacket on the hat tree by the bar, got a bottle of Beck’s from the refrigerator. Samuels said, “A paintball gun and ammo. The jungle suits they wear to play those action combat games. Boots, helmets, belts.”
“A paintball gun,” Dave said. “No real guns?”
“He stuck to make-believe—war magazines, you know?”
“What about the mailing labels on the magazines?”
“No good—they didn’t come through the mail.”
“Telephone bills?” Dave said. “They’re helpful.”
“They didn’t have a telephone,” Samuels said. “But all the normal papers—auto registration, bank statements, sales receipts, canceled checks—all those were gone. She must have taken them with her.”
“Those big shoulder bags have their uses,” Dave said.
“A black transvestite hooker in Hollywood hit me with one once,” Samuels said. “I heard bells for a week.”
Dave laughed. “Thanks,” he said, and hung up.
Cecil sat on a corner of the desk, pointed with the green bottle, and asked, “Who belongs to the attaché case?”
Cecil parked his flame-painted, blue-carpeted, picture-windowed van on a steep, twisty hillside street in Burbank, switched off the engine, switched off the lights. It was quiet here, and dark, untrimmed trees hanging over the narrow, tar-patched paving, screening out the scant street-lighting. Bungalows lurked among the trees, below the road on one side, uphill on the other. Clapboard, some of them, some stucco, none of them new. It wasn’t late. The windows glowed. When Dave got out of the van and closed the door, a dog barked somewhere. But no human voices sounded. Everybody was indoors watching television. Cecil climbed out on his side of the van, brought out the attaché case, closed his door. He stood beside Dave, looking down wooden steps that led between thick brush into darkness.
“Looks like he still isn’t home,” he said.
Dave had tried to telephone Neil O’Neil, at work, at home, and got no answer. He’d heated pastrami, piled it thick on sour rye bread, and they’d eaten supper at the big scoured deal table in the cookshack while they watched Channel Three’s six o’clock news. Cecil’s segment on the Combat Zone looked good, sounded good. He was pleased with it. Now that he’d been promoted, he was a producer. That meant he was still a field reporter but had to work twice as hard. The pay was better but not two times better. It didn’t matter. What mattered was, he was getting somewhere. He was black, and getting somewhere in television. After the news, Dave stretched an arm up for the yellow telephone attached to a cupboard in the cookshack and tried to reach O’Neil again. Still no answer. Now in the dark, standing beside O’Neil’s mailbox at the road edge in Burbank, he said, “That’s what I was hoping. Come on.”
They felt their way down the steps. Their shoes had thick silent soles, but these still crackled leaves now and then and snapped twigs. It wasn’t going to disturb O’Neil. But it mustn’t disturb the neighbors, either. Dave’s foot came down on some kind of big, dry seedpod. It burst with a sharp report. The dog barked again, but no human ear had heard, or if it had, it hadn’t roused its owner. They reached a deck fronting the house. Dave dug a penlight out of a jacket pocket and ran its beam quickly along the front of the house. Windows. Darkness beyond them. Cecil went to the end of the deck, turned a corner.
“Here,” he whispered.
Dave went to him. There was a door. He reached for his wallet. In the wallet he kept small blades helpful sometimes in opening locks. No wallet. “Damn,” he said.
“Ssh,” Cecil said. He went along the side of the house. Dave stayed where he was. Then he heard a thump, as if a knee had bumped the wall of the house. He went toward the sound. Cecil had disappeared through a small, high window. His long legs in pale jeans were just vanishing inside. Dave went back to the door, and in a moment locks clicked on its far side and the door swung open. Dave could see Cecil’s teeth grinning against the darkness.
“You know the bathroom window’s always open.”
“But my climbing days are over.” Dave stepped inside and closed the door. He went around the room, stumbling into furniture, bruising his shins, knees, thighs, closing curtains. He switched on a lamp. The furniture was rattan and wicker from Pier One. The stereo equipment was elaborate but most of it was just piled on the floor. The television set measured forty inches, a VCR on top of it, stacked with tapes. The room beyond showed drafting tables, with lots of paper and tagboard in big sheets, lots of plastic mounted alphabet strips in every conceivable typeface, thick loose-leaf catalogues, ad layouts hanging off the walls, colored paper samples, T-squares, triangles, French curves. A computer monitor turned them a blank face.
Cecil bent over a low wicker table and turned the pages of an investments magazine. “What are we looking for?”
“We’ll know when we find it,” Dave said.
“Anything connecting this O’Neil to Vaughn Thomas?”
“That too,” Dave said, and went through the dining room/office, pushed a swing door, and switched on a light in the kitchen. It had been handsomely remodeled, central burner deck, ovens mounted in the walls, rows of beautiful hanging pots and pans. But the fridge was full of supermarket frozen dinners. That didn’t tell Dave anything useful. He went to a bedroom where the bed awaited making up, the sheets in masculine brown stripes. So why did he smell a feminine perfume? The louvered white doors of a walk-in closet were partway open. He opened them all the way. The perfume gusted out. In the closet hung clothes for a young man, yes, but also a woman’s clothes, dresses, blouses, slacks. Not many. Enough for emergencies. All peach color. He turned away, frowned, turned back again, bent, picked up off the closet floor a camouflage coverall. New. Worn maybe once. Combat boots lay on the closet floor too. Also new. A helmet with the usual shield to protect the eyes. He knelt and searched, pushing aside shoes, tennis rackets, Frisbees. No paintball gun. He was poking around the bathroom and finding nothing when a car door closed up on the road. He pulled the closet doors near shut again, pocketed a closeup of O’Neil from among twenty snapshots stuck into the mirror over the dresser, then switched off the light. To Cecil, who was pawing through file drawers in the office, he said, “Let’s go—and don’t forget the attaché case.”
In the broad bed on the sleeping loft, Cecil sat propped against pillows, watching the late news on Channel Three. Beside him, back turned, Dave dozed. The familiar voices of the pretty anchor people scarcely reached him. He was almost asleep. Then he heard a cry. Mr. Kaminsky? He looked wildly around the leafy West L.A. patio. Kaminsky was shouting for help. But where was he? Dave flung off the covers and was on his feet before he realized he was dreaming. Cecil switched off the television set. “Hey. Easy, Dave. What’s wrong?”
“Kamin
sky.” Dave sat on the side of the bed. He was panting. His heart raced. “I dreamed about him.”
“You heard his name on the news,” Cecil said. “Apartment manager? Where Vaughn Thomas lived? He’s dead. Fell from a second-floor balcony tonight, broke his neck.”
Dave turned and peered into Cecil’s face. “Dead?”
“Police searched the apartment earlier. When they got called tonight, door was open, furniture shifted around. They figure he was straightening up. No one saw him fall.”
Dave laughed hopelessly. “Poor Kaminsky. He was so excited about being part of a murder case.”
“Was he—part of it, I mean?”
“It surprises hell out of me,” Dave said.
4
ENID SADDLER WASHED COFFEE mugs inside the shacky combined gun rental office, equipment store, and canteen at the Combat Zone. It was early. Dave hadn’t been sure the place would be open yet. But in the foggy woods, the far-off voices were calling, the paintball guns were popping. Not many. Not often. But he had rolled the Jaguar in among a half dozen cars and campers parked on the rutted earth near the telephone-pole gate. The smell of coffee reached Dave from yards off. He leaned on the counter and told the skin-and-bones woman, “Good morning.”
“Mor-ning.” Enid didn’t so much say it as sing it. But busy arranging mugs on a tray—each stenciled with a bad drawing of a Green Beret holding his M-16 at the ready in case of a Cong assault—Enid didn’t look up for a moment. When she did, the light went out of her eyes. Her voice lost its music. “Oh, it’s you again.” She was not pleased, but all the same she drew coffee from an immense square cornered aluminum machine, brought the mug with a spoon and a tiny paper napkin, set it in front of him. “I thought we were finished with that killing business. Police, television. They done their work and says thank you and goodbye, but not you. You’re back.”
“Just with a quick question.” Dave reached for his wallet, remembered, dug in a pocket and took out a fold of bills. He’d borrowed them from Cecil. He laid a one on the counter. “Thank you for the coffee.”
She pushed the one back at him. “We don’t charge law enforcement officers.” She smiled. It was as false as the teeth that made it possible. “What did you want to know?”
Dave tasted the scalding coffee. “Where’s Roy?”
“Ailing again,” she said grimly. “I don’t know how long he’s going to last, and that’s the truth. Some days he’s weak as a baby. That cough. You ever hear Roy cough? Them cigarettes is killing him, but he won’t stop.”
Dave’s hand had moved to his jacket pocket to take out his Marlboros. He didn’t complete the action.
“Says it’s your time to go, you go.” Enid went back to her cramped kitchen and began taking doughnuts from gray, grease-spotted cardboard boxes and stacking them on platters. “Says his Daddy lived to ninety-one and he never saw the man without a cigarette in his life.” She brought a platter of doughnuts to the counter. “Try one of these. They’re fresh delivered this morning.”
“Everybody gets up early around here,” he said.
She laughed. Briefly. And her flat eyes stared out at the woods. “I swear, some of them are like children. Can’t think of anything but playing paintball. Crack of dawn, they’re up and out. Listen, if we put in a restaurant like Roy wants, and showers, and all that, they’ll play all night too, I swear they will.”
“This one?” Dave pushed the snapshot he’d plucked from O’Neil’s bedroom mirror across the counter for her to look at. “Did he ever come here?”
She had powdered sugar on her fingers. She licked them, wiped them on her apron, picked up the photo, and studied it. She shook her head and passed it back to Dave. “Maybe, but you have to understand, they come here with their helmets on, a lot of them with that war paint on their faces, it’s hard to tell one from the other.” She breathed another of those sharp little laughs of hers. “Boys from the girls, for that matter. And it’s only a field to play games in—we don’t check IDs. People don’t give names. Hell, half that come here regular, I don’t know their last name. Mostly only nicknames—Gorilla George, Grace the Mace, you know?”
“I do now.” He looked at the photo. “Is there a chance you could show this to Roy? I think this man was here the day Vaughn Thomas was shot. I’d like a witness.”
“I thought you was going to start that up again.” Enid’s face closed like a slammed door. She stood rigid, mouth clamped tight. “That boy was killed by a stray bullet and it didn’t come from here. We don’t use bullets.” She marched off, reached up to a shelf, returned with a colorful carton that she opened. From it she brought a long plastic tube. “These are what we use. Balls made of gelatin with washable paint inside. Couldn’t kill anybody.”
“I’m aware of that. But you don’t have security here. And the paintball guns I saw yesterday, and the ones hanging up there behind you—some of them are made to look like assault rifles, AK-47s, Uzis, AR-15s, Galils, Steyr AUGs. On purpose. To add realism to the games.”
She stared at him icily. “That’s right.”
“So do you think you or Roy would notice if instead of a paintball imitation, this fellow”—Dave flicked the edge of O’Neil’s photo with a fingernail—“were to walk in here with the real thing?”
“It was a deer hunter’s bullet,” she said sullenly.
“It blew half his head away,” Dave said, “and went right on into these woods. The police don’t know the exact kind of bullet it was.”
“You going to drink that coffee or not?”
“I’ll drink it,” Dave said, “while you show this to Roy, please.” He held out the photo. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell anyone that comes you’ll be right back.” She stood uncertain. “Please? To help a law enforcement officer?”
She snatched the photo and marched off with it. Dave lit a cigarette and worked on the coffee. Enid didn’t have to worry. She could always open an eatery. It was wonderful coffee. Or maybe it tasted so good because he was drinking it outdoors in early morning country air. Anyway, for a few minutes, he was happy. Then Enid came back, Roy trailing behind her, whiskery, tucking shirttails into his pants, shuffling in untied shoes. He grunted at Dave, drew coffee from the machine, came to the counter with it, laid the picture down, and shook his head.
“He didn’t come with Vaughn Thomas that day?”
“They know each other?” Roy said, and coughed, and fumbled a cigarette out of his shirt pocket, and lit it with a kitchen match, and coughed again. These weren’t serious coughs. He didn’t appear to have strength enough for those.
“Worked together for a while,” Dave said.
Roy burned himself on the hot coffee and said, “Shit.” He fixed the cigarette in a corner of his mouth, picked up the photo and squinted at it again, then held it out in a shaky hand for Dave to take back. “Nope. Don’t place the face. Anyways, I told you, Vaughn always come alone. A loner. Ask around here. They’ll all tell you the same.”
“The Channel Three reporter is a friend of mine,” Dave said. “He asked around. They said what you said.”
“A friend of yours?” Roy blinked. “The nigger kid?”
“We live together,” Dave said.
Roy turned. “Enid, did you ever hear the like of that?”
Dave backed the Jaguar from among the other cars, shifted gears, was moving for the gate, when a rusty pickup truck with a camper on the back barged through, kicking up dust. Dave braked. The pickup missed him by an inch and rattled to a halt. The man who got out of the pickup didn’t so much as glance Dave’s way. Dressed in camouflage with the sleeves rolled up, a brown beret tilted on his long yellow hair, he locked the truck’s cab, tramped around to open the camper, reached inside, and brought out ammunition belts. He hung these all over himself, then leaned in and came out with an armload of guns. He was very tall, and his long arms managed the guns easily. He used a knee to slam the door of the camper, then headed for the Combat Zone’s all-purpose shack.
&nb
sp; On the rear bumper of the pickup Dave saw a ragged, faded bumper sticker—a stylized double lightning bolt. The mark of Hitler’s Waffen SS troops. Dave had gone into Germany as a U.S. Army intelligence lieutenant just after the surrender. He knew that mark well. It was among the ugliest symbols of a nightmare time. A classy crowd Roy Saddler drew here. Dave watched from the Jaguar while the tall type paid his tariff, got a mug of coffee and half a dozen doughnuts, and sat on a log to eat. From the woods appeared a plump girl whose outfit was splashed with paint. She sat down beside him on the log, laid her gun across her knees, and told him how it happened, with flying gestures and shrill laughter. He grinned and wagged his head.
Now another vehicle came tearing between the telephone poles. This was a dusty white van, an old VW, and out of it jumped four more camouflaged and combat-booted young people. They cheered when they saw the tall one on the log. He gave them a doughnut-filled grin and a wave. They slammed the van doors and ran to him. Dave eased the Jaguar back again into the parking place he’d left, switched off the engine, set the parking brake, and sat quietly watching while the newcomers got coffee and sat on the log, on rocks, on the ground, loading the paintball guns the tall one supplied, and talking and joking and making plans for the game. They were many yards distant, so the words didn’t reach him, just the voices. He wasn’t interested in the words. He was interested in the tall brute. Kaminsky’s word for him—if this was him. Long hair—looked like he came out of the backwoods someplace.
When at last he rose and led his troops into the fog-bound trees, Dave got out of the Jaguar. He glanced through the dusty, rain-spotted windows of the camper as he passed. Just glanced. His actions could be seen from the canteen. Sunlight so fell through windows on the other side of the camper that they lit up two rectangles that showed Dave guns. He didn’t dare pause to make sure, but he judged these were not paintball guns—and a coldness formed in the pit of his stomach. He hadn’t brought his Sig Sauer 9mm pistol. It was at home, in a dresser drawer up on the sleeping loft. He had a gift for forgetting it. Carefully not looking toward the service window, he trudged around the canteen’s far end. He’d seen doors there when he was here before, doors with rustically carved signs MEN, WOMEN. He pushed inside, used the urinal, rinsed and dried his hands, came out, and the plump young woman bumped into him.
The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning: 11 (The Dave Brandstetter Mysteries) Page 4