“It’s so humiliating.” Cecil pushed himself upright, washed the pill down with a swallow of brandy. “I’m tall and I’m fast, and he made a fool out of me.”
“It’s a question of mental patterns,” Dave said, and stroked Cecil’s beautiful skull. “The rules he lives by are different from yours. Fairness doesn’t figure in them.”
Cecil smiled feebly. “Go for the jugular, right?”
“Something like that,” Dave said. “I’m sorry it happened to you.” He bent and kissed the younger man’s mouth, then pulled out another chair and sat at the table. “You going to be all right?”
“I don’t know anybody ever died from it,” Cecil said. “Happened to me a few times when I was a kid in Detroit. Wondered if I’d ever grow up. But I did.”
“Fully,” Dave said with a grin.
“Yeah.” Cecil winced. “Oh, don’t make me laugh.”
“Drink your brandy.” Dave reached for the instrument on the end of the yellow cupboard. “I have to talk to the police in Winter Creek.”
It didn’t help. He reported to an adenoidal deputy named Underbridge that Jemmie Engstrom was probably there, that the man she’d been living with in Los Angeles was freshly murdered, that Jemmie with Mike appeared to be running for her life, and that her armed and probably dangerous husband, Dallas, was on his way down there after her, and that they should locate her and see that she was protected. Five minutes of glossolalia would have got through just as well to Deputy Underbridge. He didn’t know who any of these people were, he didn’t know who Dave was, and if there was a murder in Los Angeles, wasn’t that the responsibility of the Los Angeles police, and if they wanted the help of the Winter Creek sheriff’s department, then they better phone for it, hadn’t they? Click.
Dave groaned disgust, and hung up the yellow receiver. “It’s no use. I’m sorry. I wanted to stay with you.” He pushed the chair back. “But there’s nothing else for it—I’ve got to go to Winter Creek.” He rose and started out of the cookshack. “Are you sure you don’t want me to drop you at a hospital?”
“No. I’m feeling better already.” Cecil threw Dave his best smile this time, but he still got up off the chair as if he hurt. “I’ll lie down till it’s time to go to work.” He read the worry in Dave’s face. “No, really. The brandy and the codeine are working. I’m turning numb. Don’t worry, I’ll be fine, time you see me next.”
When Dave came down from the sleeping loft wearing a blue gingham shirt, Levis, the Sig Sauer in its Bianchi shoulder holster under his leather jacket, Cecil was stretched out full length on the corduroy couch. Dave bent over him. “I’ll phone you as soon as I can.”
Cecil’s hand came up and tapped the bulge the gun made. “You remembered your gun. That is scary.”
“If Charlie Pratt still has his shotgun, maybe I won’t need it. But Dallas Engstrom owns a lot of firepower.”
“You better take me with you.” Cecil made a move.
Dave shook his head. “You don’t own any cowboy boots. Anyway, you’ve got editing to do, remember? On your piece about the hostel for runaway teens. It airs tonight—right?”
“I’ll phone in sick,” Cecil said.
“Forget it. I’m not taking you with me. Look what happens to you when you try to help me.” Dave turned away. “I’ll be all right.” He was almost at the door when he remembered and stopped. “What did you get out of O’Neil?”
“Ho-ho-ho.” Cecil tried to sit up, and fell back with a suppressed moan. “You’ll love it. I waited out in front of the house in my van, across the street, till he came out. It was so early, and you know how shadowy it is there, I couldn’t really see too well—but he came up the steps, opened the trunk, and he’s got his arms full, and he drops whatever it is into the trunk. Well, I call to him, jump out, run over with the attaché case. He looks at me, I say my name, and that I’m your associate, and he left his case last night, and here it is, and he’s so surprised—he’d figured to come past here to get it, right?—so surprised that he forgets to close the trunk. And guess what’s in there. The camouflage suit and boots and helmet.”
Dave went back to the couch. “Interesting.”
“Isn’t it?” Cecil’s arm lay across his eyes but he smiled a smug little smile. “And I said, ‘Hey, do you play paintball too? What was it—did Vaughn get you into it when you worked together, or what?’ And he stammered and stuttered around and finally said that yes, that was it, but he’d only gone once. It wasn’t his kind of thing. He prefers tennis and squash.”
“Where did Vaughn take him—to the Combat Zone?”
“He ‘guesses’ that’s the name of the place, yes.”
“Sunday morning?” Dave held up a hand. “Never mind. Don’t tell me. He was much too busy with Sylvia winding up the Shopwise promotion—right?”
Cecil nodded groggily, and mumbled, “Mush too busy.”
“I’ll call you,” Dave said, and left.
Winter Creek lay among rolling hills, fifty miles inland from the Pacific, the San Gregornio mountains hulking to the northeast. It was a quiet place, mostly avocado ranches. But avocados, even with all the improvements in shipping that had come with the years, were still a chancy crop, and a lot of the growers had given up harvesting them long ago. The prices they could get weren’t worth the effort. Where they could, Dave saw, they’d sold off the land. But not yet for tract development. As Engstrom had said, people with money were settling here, so the new, rail-fenced ranch houses sprawled on broad acres. Horses browsed the hills. A buckskin yearling, still coltish in the legs, raced along a fence, mane and tail flying, keeping pace for a moment with the Jaguar on the road.
On the outskirts of town, the sheriff had a new sand-color building and a tall flagpole on a neat little grassy five acres that used to be a field with goats and burros and a tumbledown shed. McDonald’s had set up yellow arches, a tarmac parking lot, and a glass-and-stone shop on a corner where Dave remembered a sheet-metal gas station. Many more small frame houses looked through aluminum-framed windows at the streets that angled off Main, but Main Street itself was little changed from his last time here. Nothing but the signs on the hardware, barber, and dress shops were new. W. T. Grant’s was gone, but K mart had taken its place. Two old men in straw hats sat on kitchen chairs beside the door of the grocery store. A show card taped to the window of the drugstore read VIDEO RENTALS. The movie theater was boarded up. A little more stucco had scaled off the Elks Hall. The tavern, the New Corral, had added cedar planks to its front. A banner across these, UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT, faded in the sun, but the door of the place was in no better repair than when it was just the Corral. Someone had put a boot through it.
And here was the Twin Oaks Café, with a sagging, red, composition roof and faded red trim to its windows, crouching under the big trees that gave it its name. Pickup trucks stood on a rutted parking space beside the café. Dallas Engstrom’s wasn’t among them. Dave had been keeping an eye out for it as he drove into town. He parked, put on his Stetson, pulled open a squeaky hinged screen door, and walked into smells of chili and barbecue sauce. The counter stools were creaky. Not many were occupied, none of the booths. It was well after lunchtime. The half-dozen drivers of the pickup trucks outside—Levis, work boots, T-shirts washed so often they’d lost their mottos, logos, advertising slogans—lean, leathery men, potbellied men, boys just out of their teens, stuffed with barbecued ribs, chicken-fried steaks, hamburgers, lingered over coffee and filled the air with talk and cigarette smoke.
Hides of coyotes, raccoons, the skin of a rattlesnake were nailed to the Twin Oaks’ simulated wood paneling, and over the swing door to the kitchen—faded red again, like the counter top, the tabletops, the cracked false leather of the seats—was mounted a puma’s head, tawny fur moth-eaten, mouth open in a dusty snarl, yellow glass eyes dulled by kitchen grease. Under this stood three women in waitress garb, red with white trim, smoking, sipping diet sodas, laughing together, the toughest parts of their day, brea
kfast and lunch, done with. But they’d noticed Dave the minute he stepped in, and now one of them lounged over. She was forty, growing dumpy, had dyed her hair black, and wore it slicked back to a heavy bun at the nape of her plump neck. A red plastic rose was stuck over her ear. Unlikely as it seemed, somewhere in Winter Creek she’d found a lipstick to match it. The tube wasn’t going to last long. She laid it on thick. The name tag on her starchy blouse read CLARICE. She raised amiable, drawn-on eyebrows at him.
“Beck’s?” he said with faint hope.
“Dear God,” she said. “Where do you think you are, honey, on board of the Concorde?” She patted his hand that lay on the counter. “We got three kinds of beer—West’s, and West’s light, and West’s the expensive one.” She glanced along the counter in mock fear. “You want to keep your voice down when you talk about any other brand in Winter Creek. Them West brothers—they got spies everywhere. Word was to get out anybody here even heard of any other beer, their life wouldn’t be worth a plug nickel.”
No wonder film producers came to Winter Creek. The natives had already memorized the dialogue. “The expensive one,” Dave said, and when she brought it back with a glass that featured the West name and dishwasher spots, “thank you.” With a pro forma, “You’re welcome,” she started back to the klatch under the puma’s head, and Dave said, “Wait—do you happen to know Dallas Engstrom?”
She swung around, startled. “Yes, but he doesn’t live here now—been gone for months.”
“He’s coming back.” Dave poured his beer. “If he isn’t here already, he will be soon.”
She glanced at a telephone that sat beside the cash register at the end of the counter, then frowned at Dave. “But if he comes back here, the sheriff will lock him up. He’s got a warrant out for him. Assault. He knows that.”
“He wants his wife and little boy,” Dave said.
“They left too, same time he did. Jemmie Pratt,” she said. “What a silly fool that girl was. Marrying Dallas Engstrom. He’s no better than an animal.” She edged off, eyeing the phone again. “I better make a phone call.”
“Jemmie came back on Sunday. You haven’t seen her?”
“No.” Clarice shook her head. So hard the rose fell off her ear. She caught it and put it back with trembling fingers. “No, nobody’s mentioned her in here. Listen, just excuse me a minute, okay?”
“Is it Barney Craig you’re going to phone?”
“Dallas nearly killed him that night,” she said, “beat him up so bad, he was in the hospital for a month. Now, Barney’s no angel, either, but him and Dallas—” She broke off and blinked at Dave. She came back to him, leaned close, peering. “Who are you? How do you know so much?”
“Dallas told me all about it. This morning, in L.A. He thought Barney was sleeping with Jemmie,” Dave said. “It was a mistake. He knows that now. Barney’s in no danger. But Jemmie may be. I have to find her.”
“Why?” Clarice was leery now. She straightened, took a step backward. “Who are you? You’re not a cop—I’ve handed out free doughnuts and coffee to cops all my life, and I know a cop when I see one.”
“I’m a death claims investigator for insurance companies. My name is Brandstetter.” He laid the open license folder on the counter, pushed it toward her between the sugar jar and a bowl of salsa.
She squinted at it a moment, then eyed him warily. “Death claims? That means somebody died and you have to pay, right? Who died, Mr. Death Claims?”
“A boy called Vaughn Thomas.” Dave put the folder away. “Last Sunday morning. Somebody shot him with a high-powered rifle.” Dave took a sip of beer and looked at her over the glass. “He lived down here for a while—did you know him?”
“The Majorette?” She snorted a brief scornful laugh. She called out to the other waitresses, “Guess what? Somebody shot Vaughn Thomas.”
The youngest waitress, all baroque blond hair and high school puppy fat, said, “What with—a paper clip and a rubber band?” Horse-faced, the third waitress showed long teeth and snickered.
Dave stood, laid money on the counter. “How do I get to Charlie Pratt’s place?”
Clarice gave him directions.
Pratt was a leathery little man with a stiff left arm and a bad limp. His ranch was rolling pasture land with handsome rail fences. The house was board-and-batten, painted red. The stables looked and smelled clean. Hired hands groomed the big paint horses in the box stalls, exercised them on a long oval track, held lunge straps while they trained colts in paddocks. Out on the meadows other horses grazed. Dave could see this out the windows of Pratt’s comfortable office in the house. Trophies, plaques, photographs of a younger Charlie Pratt stood on shelves, hung on the varnished pine plank walls. A bronze racehorse stood on the desk. Pratt stared at Dave over it.
“No, she’s not here. Running for her life?” He slapped the desk top. “I knew it. Death is what they live for, that lot.” Sometime long ago Pratt had passed time in England. It was still in his speech, just a trace. “Hatred, violence, bloodshed. I tried to warn Jemmie.” He blinked. “You got children of your own, Brandstetter?”
“Afraid not,” Dave said.
“Then you don’t know how girls get. You can’t tell them anything. Suddenly, they’re eighteen, and they know it all. I was just an old meanie, telling her to keep away from Dallas Engstrom and all his kind.”
“I know the story,” Dave said. “Dallas told me.”
Pratt laughed sourly. “He didn’t tell you I was right, did he? Probably told you I was a communist.”
Dave grinned. “I doubted it. Not in Winter Creek.”
“If you mention the Bill of Rights down here,” Pratt said, “you’re a communist. If I could, I’d leave, but I can’t face moving. Too old, too crippled up.” He swiveled his chair and gazed out the window for a moment at the horses on the hills, the mountains in the background, the cloudless sky. “Anyway, it’s beautiful. I love it. Besides, I’ll be dead soon. And Jemmie—what does she care?”
“Where would she go, since she didn’t come here?”
“Why did she come back at all?” Pratt countered.
“I don’t know that she did,” Dave said, “but if she did, it’s to hide from Vaughn’s killer.”
Pratt smiled bitterly. “She sure can pick ’em, can’t she? Think she didn’t have good sense. Engstrom was bad enough”—he got to his feet, wincing—“but that Thomas kid—he was certifiable, from what I hear. Deranged. Lucky, I expect, he was killed before he could harm my grandson. Where? I don’t know. Engstrom’s partner, Craig, I suppose.” He limped to the door. “Excuse me, but I’ve got a sore-footed mare to see to.”
Dave stood up. “Where does Craig live?”
Pratt went out the door. His boots knocked the red painted planks of the porch. His voice drifted back, bleak, indifferent. “Try Persimmon Street.”
7
THE CRAIG HOUSE WAS one-story pink-cinder-block set on a fifty-by-hundred-fifty-foot lot behind apricot trees. Plump, golden fruit bent the branches, lay splitting open in brown grass. A four-foot-high wire web fence framed the yard. A pickup truck and a stake truck and some kind of yellow-painted earth-moving machine stood on the driveway beside the house. When Dave got there, two sheriff’s patrol cars were parked at angles in the street, doors open, top lights turning, staticky voices coming from their two-way radios. Dave parked the Jaguar in roadside weeds across the street, got out, stood watching.
Inside the house, whose door was also open, a man was shouting. Raving might be more accurate. Certainly cursing. And in a minute he came in sight in the doorway, a square-built, balding man of forty, handcuffed behind his back, struggling in the grip of two young, uniformed sheriff’s officers whose eyes looked scared, though they kept their pale faces expressionless. They got him down the steps of the poured cement stoop and steered him, lurching and straining, down the walk to the open gate.
“It wasn’t me, you donkeys,” he said, “it wasn’t me.”
&nb
sp; A goose-necked, slope-shouldered man of sixty followed. He was in uniform too. The uniforms were tan. Those on the two boys were sharply pressed, and maybe this man’s had started the day that way, but it was wrinkled, rumpled, crushed now. Even the brown necktie. The two deputies wrestled their stocky captive out the gate, across the width of weeds where a sidewalk might have been if Winter Creek had sidewalks, and into a patrol car. The doors slammed. The two youngsters drove off with the man still raving inside. “If I done it, why didn’t I run?”
The goose-necked man turned back toward the house, then heard a siren and stopped to wait until a long black car with the Fortuna County seal on its door pulled up. Not a car, a hearse. The siren moaned into silence. A reedy man in a cowboy hat climbed out of the car, said something to the sheriff, reached back inside for a black leather case, and carrying this walked beside the uniformed man up the path and into the house. Dave crossed the street, followed them, stopped in the open doorway.
The boxy living room was dim because the metal venetian blinds at the windows were closed. But Dave made out a big Nazi flag on one wall, Bavarian beer steins on the mantel under a rack of rifles, a glass case of military decorations on another wall—German, no doubt. And on the pale vinyl tile floor a small young woman lying very still in a position no one would choose to sleep in, legs and arms all wrong. She had been shot. Bullet holes crossed her breast, belly, thighs. There was not a lot of blood. She had died right away. Running and hiding had been no use. He turned away and looked at the untroubled blue sky above the TV-antennaed rooftops of the scruffy little houses. He breathed deeply a few times. Then he swung to the doorway again.
The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning: 11 (The Dave Brandstetter Mysteries) Page 7