“Hey,” she said, looking him up and down, “sorry.”
“No harm,” Dave said, and smiled.
Her face was smeared with camouflage paint. She looked like a fat boy of thirteen. Dave stepped aside. She stepped aside in the same direction. She laughed. He didn’t laugh. “The tall fellow you were talking to. Is his name Dallas, by any chance?”
“Yeah,” she said, “he’s a fixture here.” Frowning, she looked Dave’s handwoven tweeds over doubtfully again. “You want me to introduce you?”
“I just need to know his last name.” Dave showed her his license. “It’s an insurance matter.”
“He don’t need insurance.” She glanced toward the woods, which were much noisier now, shouts, crashing underbrush, guns popping wildly. “He can look after himself.”
“I don’t sell it,” Dave said. “I’m handling a liability claim. He’s a witness, that’s all.”
“Yeah?” she said. “Car crash or something?”
Dave nodded. “His last name?”
“We don’t go by last names,” she said, and held out her hand. “I’m Maxine. Max the Ax.”
Dave shook the hand. “I won’t bother him today. Where does he live?”
“At the beach someplace.” She shrugged and wrinkled her childish brow. “Cormorant Cove?”
Film people, television people, rock stars, recording executives lived in Cormorant Cove. If you didn’t have three or four million dollars to spend on housing, real estate people didn’t take you there. Of course, what Ngawi Smith said was true—drug dealers, money launderers, video pirates looked like anybody else. They could afford to live in Cormorant Cove. Hell, they could buy out Cormorant Cove. Maybe they had. Maybe that made plausible what Max the Ax said, that Dallas lived there. No matter how corrupt your business, if it’s any size, you need hired hands.
“Cormorant Cove,” Dave said. “Good.” He looked at his watch. “I have to run. Nice to meet you, Max.” He walked away, with a lift of his hand. “Thank you for your help.”
“You want me to tell him you asked for him?” she called.
“Don’t bother,” Dave said. “He doesn’t know me.”
The road from the Combat Zone was a basic two-lane strip of pitted asphalt that sloped down through foothills, not twenty yards of it in a straight line. All land falling away on this side, rising on that. Where it met the highway was a cluster of houses and stores called Delmore Pass. He pulled into a filling station and used coins on the pay phone there. The idea of slipping a credit card into a phone hadn’t got as far as Delmore Pass yet. It took a half hour of trying, but at last he reached Joey Samuels at LAPD homicide division. He recited the license number of Dallas’s truck.
“It’ll take a few minutes,” Samuels said. “Lots of checking going on this morning. Give me the number where you are, and I’ll get back to you.”
“Thanks, Joey.” Dave gave him the number, hung the gritty gray receiver back in place, went and put gas into the Jaguar, stepped into the sheet-metal office. It was a surprising place. Books and magazines stacked everywhere. The attendant was a man so fat he didn’t try to get out of his chair, a recliner with splits in its leather. He had a cash register and a credit card gizmo and all else on a level where he could reach them from a sitting position. The man wheezed with every breath. His words came out as gasps. He fiddled with slips of paper and Dave’s card. His hands were swollen with fat. It was some kind of miracle that he could do anything with his fingers, but he did, and handed Dave his receipt with his card.
“You been up to the Combat Zone,” he said. “Twice.”
“Just visiting.” Dave signed the credit card papers.
“You don’t look like you’d play action pursuit,” the man said. “Mostly it’s kids in their twenties. Then there’s a few Vietnam veterans, didn’t get it out of their system. Nostalgia, maybe, wanting to be young again.”
“But all of them white—yes?” Dave said.
The man’s features were all bunched together in the middle of his bloated face. He blinked, considering the question. At last he said, “Disproportionately high number of blacks in the U.S. armed forces. But you never see them going up the road to the Combat Zone.”
“I didn’t think so,” Dave said.
The man snorted. “You ever meet Roy Saddler?”
“That’s why I asked,” Dave said.
“I was hoping his business was so poor he’d soon move on,” the fat man said. “I don’t want to be a neighbor to people like that—bigots. But now that that boy was shot to death up there, I fear good old Roy will be here till I die. The TV news will send curiosity seekers flocking up here.”
“Roy was counting on it,” Dave said, “but so far it doesn’t seem to be happening.”
The fat man wheezed a laugh and raised his eyes to look at a clock that bore the red-white-and-blue insignia of an oil company on its face. “Hell, it’s early yet. Not even eight o’clock. They’ll be along, I promise you.” He pawed around beside his chair and came up with a brightly striped, crackly plastic sack. He held it out. “Chocolate chip?”
Dave smiled, shook his head. “It’s too early for me.”
The fat man laughed, pushed a cookie into his mouth, laid the package in his lap. Spraying crumbs, he said, “You’ll see. People just can’t stay away from the scene of a calamity. You can hear every morning on the radio how they jam up the freeways slowing down to gawk at a crash. Nothing like the misfortunes of others to set us staring.”
“It won’t bother the dead boy,” Dave said.
“No, that’s true enough,” the fat man said, and poked another cookie into his mouth.
“And if it’s good for Roy Saddler’s business,” Dave said, “it’s surely going to be good for yours.”
The fat man opened his eyes wide. “By golly,” he puffed. “You’re right there. That’s life. ‘In time of plague, the undertaker prospers.’”
“Did you know the boy?” Dave said. “Vaughn Thomas?”
The man turned glum suddenly. “He stopped here once. Sneery kind of a kid. Didn’t say it to my face, but walking back to his car, after he paid me, he says as if he’s talking to himself, ‘Sooee, sooee, sooee, pig, pig, pig.’”
“You’re not mourning for him, then?” Dave said.
The fat man smiled wanly. “I mourn for all who lose their lives. Life is all we’ve got. He was young. He might have grown wiser and kinder—if he’d had time.”
Outside, the pay phone began ringing. No mistake. The bell was as loud as a burglar alarm. “Excuse me,” Dave said. The fat man didn’t answer. He had already picked up a book, opened it, and was reading, totally absorbed. Dave crunched across gravel to the phone, lifted down the receiver. “Brandstetter,” he said.
“It’s a 1972 GM,” Samuels said, “registered to Dallas Eric Engstrom, two seven zero Lemon Street, Winter Creek.”
“He doesn’t live there anymore,” Dave said. “I’m told his new address is in Cormorant Cove.”
“I haven’t got anything on that,” Samuels said. “You’ll have to get it from the phone company.”
“Thanks,” Dave said. “I’ll try.”
But if Dallas Engstrom answered a phone in Cormorant Cove or in any nearby beach town, the phone wasn’t his. Dave returned to the Jaguar. Time was nagging at him. If Dallas and Jemmie had been husband and wife, Jemmie probably came from Winter Creek too. He knew the town. He’d worked on a case there, how long ago now, thirty years? Spent almost two weeks getting to the bottom of it. A sluttish woman’s sixteen-year-old son, in a mixture of outraged love and fury at her whoring, had knocked her senseless, driven the car to a deep ravine, put her behind the wheel, sent the car over a cliff. Winter Creek hadn’t liked Dave for turning up the truth. It was a small town in 1960. It wouldn’t have stayed that way—no place in California had. But it shouldn’t be hard to find Jemmie’s father who bred horses. Then again, what if homesick Ngawi Smith was wrong—and she hadn’t gone to ground a
t her parents’ place? He shrugged impatiently. It was no good worrying about details now.
He started the Jaguar. He could be in Winter Creek by ten-thirty. He was a mile down the highway when he scowled, drove onto the shoulder, and stopped. He really was getting old. He’d forgotten Dallas. Jemmie was far away. And maybe she was safe there. She thought she would be—and she knew more about it than Dave did. Jemmie was not in his hands. Dallas was. And why wasn’t Dallas the killer Jemmie had looked for so worriedly out the back window of Smith’s cab on the way to the bus station? Max the Ax would be sure to tell Dallas Dave was looking for him. It should flush him out of the woods. Dave made a U-turn on the empty pavement, drove back to where the side road met the highway, parked in brush behind the raw plank COMBAT ZONE sign, and waited.
5
CORMORANT COVE WAS BUILT in shelves on sharply rising hills above a deep, round, inward curve of beach. A few little shallow-draft sailboats lay on the sand. Jagged black rocks poked up in the small, blue bay. The tide splashed and foamed around the rocks. Cormorants had been scarce on this stretch of coast when Dave used to come here, years before there’d been any houses. Then DDT was outlawed, and slowly the cormorants came back. A flock of them perched lean and beaky and black on the black rocks now, holding out their wings to take the morning sun.
The houses here were big and most of them no more than ten years old, a few sensible frame-and-shingle, like beach houses anywhere ought to be, but most pretentious, sterile, white modifications of the Mediterranean. They looked cold as refrigerators. It was in at the drive of one of these, three tiers up from the beach, that Dallas Engstrom swung his clanky pickup. Dave rolled to curbside up the block. Signs corroded by salt air told him parking wasn’t allowed here. It made sense. The curved streets were too narrow. But he had no choice.
He ambled down the road, gazing at the sand and surf below, and stopped opposite the garage, where a quick glance showed him Engstrom had left his truck beside a gleaming Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud. They made an incongruous pair. It was a triple garage. Dave wondered what the other car was. Engstrom was climbing stairs. Dave’s ears told him that. He chanced another glance over his shoulder. A staircase mounted the outside of the garage. At its top, Engstrom unlocked and went through a door. Into a chauffeur’s quarters? It seemed a fair guess. A shower, shave, change of clothes would take him fifteen minutes.
Dave wandered on down the road, around the next curve, out of sight, stood and watched the water dash against the rocks and send up spray, creep up the sand, turning it dark for a moment. Shore birds stilted along the tide’s edge, stitching the sand, hurrying on. He kept checking his watch. At the end of fifteen minutes, he ambled back the way he had come. In time to see Engstrom, now wearing a white houseman’s jacket and trousers, very starchy clean, go along a narrow passageway and disappear around a rear corner of the house. Dave crossed the narrow road and followed him.
Through a barred black metal screen door came cooking smells. Dave rapped the door. In a minute Engstrom stood there, looking taller close up. “You were at the fields,” he said, more than a hint of country in his speech. “What did you do—follow me from there? Max says you was asking about me. Who are you? What do you want?”
Dave gave his name, took out his license in its ostrich-hide folder, dropped it open though no one could read it against the light through that tough security screen. “I’m a private investigator looking into the shooting death of Vaughn Thomas.”
Dallas made a noise that was not speech.
“You knew he was killed at the Combat Zone, Sunday?”
“Killed? Vaughn? Christ, no.” Dallas shook his head. “At the fields? Nobody said nothing to me about it.”
“It was on the news,” Dave said.
“I watch basketball,” Dallas said. He grinned, he almost chuckled. “So somebody snuffed the little bastard.”
“We have to talk,” Dave said. “I need to come in.”
“What for? I got work to do.”
“He stole your wife,” Dave said. “You hated him. You went to his apartment in L.A. and threw him down the stairs. You tried to talk Jemmie into coming back to you. When she wouldn’t, you tried it out on little Mike. Now I find you play war games at the Combat Zone, just like Vaughn. I think those are good reasons for us to talk, don’t you?”
Engstrom hesitated, rocking on his long legs, looking ferocious. But at last he unlatched the screen and pushed it open. “All right,” he growled. “You got it all wrong. I can see that. Come on in.” Dave stepped into a big kitchen where three brown, underweight Asian men, wrapped in white aprons, worked at high-flame burners and at long counters. The air was keen with smells of crab, lobster, shrimp. “Damn Swanhilde ain’t here, anyway,” Engstrom grouched. “‘Get back before noon, Dallas,’ she says, ‘or I’ll cut you down to fit Danny DeVito’s wardrobe, darling.’” Dallas led the way out of the kitchen, down a long white hallway, and out onto a broad white terrace that faced the ocean. “And where the fuck is she? A note? A message with the slants? Forget it. I hope the fucking paparazzi blind her with their strobes.” He dragged lacy white wrought-iron chairs to the railed edge of the terrace. “Sit down.”
Dave sat. “Were you at the fields Sunday morning?”
Dallas, a long brown cigarette in the corner of his mouth, and using a big, clean workman’s hand to shield the flame of a battered Zippo lighter from the sea breeze, stared at Dave. “You think I killed him?”
“Somebody who knew how to make it to look like an accident, somebody familiar with the place, somebody who owns a high-powered gun. You wanted your wife and son back. Maybe you figured with him out of the way, that would happen.”
“Jesus.” Engstrom got the light for his cigarette and clapped shut the top of the Zippo. “Doesn’t it bother you, sneaking around nosing into people’s private business?” He eyed Dave with distaste while the sea breeze made thin shreds of his cigarette smoke. “It makes me sick. Somebody’s watching. Somebody’s listening. This used to be a free country. I bled for this country in Nam, two goddamn tours, and I get treated like a fucking criminal.”
“Where were you Sunday morning?” Dave said again.
“Right the hell here,” Engstrom shouted. He waved a hand to take in beach, sky, terrace, house, all. “You can ask Sampan or whatever his name is in the kitchen. His people got lost trying to find the place. He had me up at six A.M. to help him. And I mean, there wasn’t time to take a leak, for Christ sake. A hundred people coming”—the watch he looked at was a very old underwater model, heavy enough to fell a man at a single blow—“like today. I didn’t only have to do half the kitchen work, when I can’t understand ninety percent of the directions the son of a bitch was giving me, I had to do all the setting up out here. Including the fucking flowers.”
“And after that you served the drinks,” Dave said.
“Damn right.” Engstrom nodded. A white headband held his hair, but its long ends blew in the breeze. “Until the last sitcom star cleared off in his Mercedes at close to two. He was figuring on climbing into bed with Swanhilde. She picked him up and held him out the window up there.” He pointed at the high white face of the house. “Squealed like a pig, stupid midget.” He laughed sourly. “Ask Jeffie Strickland if I was here.”
“You never ran into Vaughn Thomas at the Combat Zone?”
“If I had,” Engstrom said, “I’d have tied him to a tree. By his neck.” He stopped himself, red-faced. “Forget I said that. No, I never knew he went there. Ask me, I’d have told you he was finished with war games.”
Dave said, “Where did you meet him?”
“Winter Creek,” Engstrom said sulkily. “He shows up one day in this fucking top-down little red Italian sports car, asking the way to George Hetzel’s.”
Dave had heard the name. In what connection? Something unpleasant. He waited.
“He’d read about Hetzel in Soldier of Fortune magazine or one of those,” Engstrom said, “and he was down h
ere to take training. Hetzel’s got a hundred twenty acres of fields, woods, ravines, rivers.”
“But not like the Combat Zone,” Dave said. “Not for recreation.”
Engstrom waved a dismissive hand. “Hell, no. Hetzel is serious. He runs full training programs in commando tactics, guerrilla warfare, jungle crawling, the works. Real bullets, grenades, booby traps, mortars, even a mine field. He wants to give this country back to the white people.”
Now Dave remembered the man. He’d been Grand Dragon of the California Ku Klux Klan. Then he’d made a run for State Assembly and missed. Now he was mustering skinheads, white suburban teenage boys whose specialty was kicking and stomping with steel-toed shoes Jews, blacks, Mexican illegals, homosexuals—the list was long. Dave looked out at the glittering bay. “And Vaughn Thomas wanted to be part of it?”
“Five thousand dollars worth,” Engstrom snorted. “Was a time you had to be a man to get in. But Hetzel—I guess all the publicity—Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone—went to his head. He’s turning just like the rest of the country. Money and fame is all that matters.”
“Vaughn gave him five thousand dollars for a few weeks’ military training? He could have had it free in the marines. And better too, probably.”
“Not and been a major soon as Hetzel inducted him.” Engstrom snorted again. “Shit. You ever hear anything so disgusting? You ever see Vaughn Thomas? Frail as a goddamn girl. He couldn’t do any of it. None of it. Everything he tried he fell off of or tripped over. He was a joke. Everybody was laughing at him. He complained, and Hetzel cracked down, and after that he got the idea he was top dog. No shit.”
“You were in Hetzel’s band of merry men?” Dave said.
The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning: 11 (The Dave Brandstetter Mysteries) Page 5