“Will you shut up and listen, you dumb bastard?”
“Come to your senses, Engstrom. This ain’t the way.”
“I didn’t kill her, Dallas. It wasn’t me.”
Dave said into the microphone, “Emergency, emergency. Sheriff station. Man with a gun has the sheriff hostage.” The front door opened. Dave looked. The young man who came in was tall and wore suntans and a badge. He had a thin beak of a nose and little stupid eyes. He blinked surprise at Dave. He came for the counter. “Put that down. Who are you? What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Dave pointed at the open door. “In there. Watch out. There’s a man with an AK-47. He’s got the sheriff hostage.”
Underbridge, it had to be Underbridge, squinted where Dave had pointed, and took steps toward the door.
“You’ll need your gun,” Dave said.
“Oh, really?” Underbridge sneered. But he did take the gun from the holster on his hip. He went to the doorway, stood back to the wall beside it, peered around the door frame, as all law enforcement officers are trained to do. “Jesus,” he said to Dave with raised eyebrows, “it’s true.” Then he stepped into the doorway, knees bent, gun held out straight in front of him with both hands, and yelled, “Peace officer. Freeze. Drop your weapon or I’ll shoot.”
“Not unless you want me to drop your boss.”
“I’m giving you one more warning.” Underbridge stepped through the doorway now, still with his gun held out. “Drop that rifle or I’ll shoot.”
The AK-47 spoke. Underbridge staggered. His gun went off. Engstrom yelled in pain. Underbridge collapsed, groaning, clutching his midriff, curling into a fetal position on the floor. Then Dave heard Claude Rose.
“All right. That’s that, now, Engstrom, God damn it.” Dave heard a clink, the snap of handcuffs. “Look at the mess you made.” Rose backed into view, his own gun restored to its holster, the Sig Sauer tucked into his belt, the AK-47 in his hand. He must have fastened Engstrom to cell bars, but he was watching him all the same. He stepped over the fallen deputy, knelt by him, touching him gently, giving him quick glances but keeping Engstrom in his sights. “Underbridge? Let’s see. Ah—damn. It’s okay, son. You’ll be okay.” He stood up. “Brandstetter? You out there?”
“I’ll call the ambulance,” Dave said.
In an aseptic room with small children’s bright paintings taped to one white wall, a doctor young enough to be his grandson clipped and shaved a place above Dave’s ear, cleaned the cut made there by the barrel of Engstrom’s rifle, stitched up the cut, wrapped bandages around Dave’s head. While he did these things, he spoke in a quiet voice, almost a hum, the drowsy sound of bees in clover.
“What was it?”
“Assault rifle,” Dave said.
“Gives a new twist to the word,” the doctor said.
Dave said, “What about the deputy?”
“Abdominal gunshot wounds are tricky. Can’t say.” He stitched. “Engstrom has a shattered forearm.” He took another stitch. “You’re taking this very calmly.”
“It helps to know it’s the last time,” Dave said.
“How’s that?” the doctor said.
“I’m retiring,” Dave said. “This is my last case.”
“What are you—FBI or something?”
“Death claims investigator,” Dave said, “for insurance companies.”
“I thought that meant pushing papers.”
“I spend more time like this”—Dave winced as the last thread tightened and the doctor snipped it—“than pushing papers.” The doctor took his arm, helped him off the table, sat him on a molded plastic chair. Dave said, “Insurance companies are the richest in the country, the most powerful, the greediest, and the most ruthless.”
“Tell me about it,” the doctor said wryly, “I’m an M.D., remember?” He poured orange liquid from a covered plastic pitcher into a paper cup. “You should have my insurance rates.” He handed Dave the cup. “Excuse me—you were saying?”
“Just that now and then some otherwise sane citizen thinks he can rip them off.” Dave swallowed the liquid. It tasted like orange juice, but not much. “Thank you.” He handed back the cup. “My job, when murder is part of the scam, is to expose him. And when I start that, he can get mean, and put me in the hospital, and often has.”
“Go to bed for the rest of the day,” the doctor said. “You lost blood, so drink plenty of liquids and eat well.” He made jottings on a form, clipped it together with the admittance waiver Dave had signed, carried it to the room door. Hand on the knob, he said, “If your head aches, take aspirin.” He pulled the door open. “There’s no concussion. You’ll be all right.” He went out into a corridor. “Come back in a week to have the stitches out.”
“I don’t live here,” Dave called.
The answer drifted back. “Any doctor can do it.”
Blood had run down and dried on the leather jacket and soaked into his shirt and stained his Levis. He bought a brown safari jacket, red wool shirt, and chinos at the K mart store, changed into them at the motel, left the Sig Sauer there, and returned to the hospital, where he found Charlie Pratt on his bunged-up old knees, fitting cowboy boots onto the small feet of his grandson. He looked happy. Mike sat on the hospital bed. He was dressed in a brand new checked flannel shirt, Levi pants, and a brass-button jacket. A cowboy hat was on his head. He held and fiddled with the Transformer toys Dave had given him, while the teddy bear lay beside him, legs in the air. How did Mike look? Happy, no. Unhappy, no. Lost, yes. Waiting, yes. But now he saw Dave and brightened a little.
“Look at me,” he said. “I’m going to ride horses.”
“Around here”—Charlie Pratt, taking hold of the bed to help himself, creaked to his feet—“they call themselves cowboys when all they ride’s a bar stool.” He picked Mike up and hugged him. “But you’re going to be a real cowboy.”
Mike’s hat didn’t fit because of his bandages. It fell off. Dave picked it up and handed it to him. “That’s going to be fun,” he said. “I’d like to be you.”
“No,” Mike said, with a sad shake of his head. “I don’t have any mother.”
“You’ve got a grandpa, though,” Dave said. “You didn’t have a grandpa before.”
Mike frowned. “What happened to your head? Did somebody shoot you too?”
Dave smiled. “I ran into something.” He hoped no one had told the child what his father did this afternoon and what happened to his father. He guessed they hadn’t. He guessed even Charlie Pratt didn’t know. He said to Mike, “It’s nice you can leave here, isn’t it?”
“I guess so,” Mike said in a small voice. “But I wish Dallas would come. I’d like to go home.”
“You’re going to live with Grandpa Charlie, now. You’ll like it, I promise.” Charlie Pratt set Mike on the bed again. “Tell you what—if you want, you and me can sleep out in the stables with the horses.”
Mike said warily, “Horses are pretty big.”
“They won’t hurt you. They’ll be in their stalls, and we’ll be in our bunks. But it’s nice to hear them breathing in the night, moving around. Nice to smell them. No nicer smell in the world than horse.”
Mike nodded and forced a little smile. “I guess so.”
“You bet.” Pratt gave him a friendly poke in the tummy with a gnarled finger, and he obliged with a giggle, and Pratt saw that Dave wanted to speak to him, and they went out into the hallway. “What’s the matter?”
Dave told him about Dallas Engstrom.
“Dear Jesus,” Pratt said. “It’s all coming apart at once. No mother—now a father in jail. On a murder charge.”
“It may not be that bad,” Dave said. “The deputy may pull through.”
Pratt gave a skeptical grunt. “Why didn’t she listen to me six years ago? Now look at that poor little kid. What kind of substitute am I for a mother, for Christ sake?”
“The loss will wear off,” Dave said. “He’ll forget her in time. And so
on you’ll be the only person in his life.”
“Yup—that’s the way it goes, all right.” Pratt sighed. “But then what? How much time have I got left, shape I’m in? I could die any time now. Then what happens to him? And if I do last till he’s old enough to take care of himself, I’ll be used to having him around, and he’ll take off like Jemmie did, and then what’ll my life be?”
“Stop thinking so far ahead,” Dave said. “Enjoy him while you’ve got him.”
“You’re right. Thanks.” Pratt moved across the hallway to look through one of those glass doors into the patio, where the afternoon sun put leaf patterns on the tiles and on the walls. “You know, I did the same to my old man, same damn thing as Jemmie. My name is Charles Darwin Pratt, you know. My father was a high school teacher. He expected me to go to college and become a scientist, biologist—so did I. What he taught me fascinated me. I couldn’t get enough of amoebas and plant cells through a microscope. I memorized the Latin names for everything alive, read every word Darwin ever wrote. Then I got on horseback for the first time. And never wanted to get down. That ended science for me. Instead of going to college, to the old man’s disgust I became a stable boy.”
Pratt shook his head.
“Never a thought for how it made him feel. Never crossed my mind he had any feelings. But it hurt him, all right. I know that now, just how miserable it made him—miserable as it made me when Jemmie left.” His glance at Dave was grimly self-mocking. “She was crazy about horses from the time she could toddle. Lived, ate, slept, dreamed nothing but horses, which you can imagine suited me fine.”
He laughed a sad laugh.
“Then, all of a sudden, it wasn’t horses anymore. It was boys. She was pretty, and they knew it, and they told her, and it turned her head in a way I couldn’t believe. She was so sensible, down to earth, no foolishness. And good and kind and thoughtful and cheerful and loving. We got along wonderful well. And all of a sudden we was strangers, nothing to say to each other. Overnight, Brandstetter, I swear it—overnight.”
“Mr. Pratt?” The plump nurse who looked like a choir singer came. “We need you to sign some papers at the desk.”
The little man snorted. “And empty my wallet, I expect.” He started off with the plump, white woman, then turned and asked Dave, “Will you tell Mike I’ll be back?”
Dave nodded and crossed the hall. Mike was on hands and knees under the bed, running the toy tank, buzzing it across the very clean vinyl tile. Dave guessed the sparks it shot out looked brighter in the shadow of the bed. The buzzing stopped. Mike turned the gun turret on the top of the gray toy. “Blam,” he said. He turned the gun forward and said, “blam,” again, and to the left. “Blam.”
Dave was crouched down, looking at him. “Your grandfather will be back in a few minutes. He’s very happy you’re coming to live with him. You like horses, don’t you?”
Mike looked sobered by the question, and thought for a moment before he answered. “Yes. But I like giraffes and rhinoceroses better.”
Dave tilted his head. “Those are African animals.”
“I know. Vaughn brought a video home.” Now Mike came on hands and knees from under the bed, stood up, and faced Dave at eye level. “He was real excited. He said he was going to get a lot of money soon, and then we were going to Africa to live, and I could see giraffes every day.”
“A lot of money?” Dave said. “Where from?”
Mike shrugged. “I don’t know, but he’s coming when he can. That’s what Jemmie said. So you can ask him.”
It seemed a long time ago that he’d promised himself that drink. So much had happened. Too much. He felt as tired as he’d ever felt in his life. He wheeled the Jaguar into its slot at the Ranchero motel, remembering as he got out and locked the car that he hadn’t eaten today. No wonder he was tired. But he couldn’t face food. Not now, not yet. He limped wearily down the cement strip with its roof overhang to the door of his unit, turned the key in the lock, pushed the door open, stopped.
He flattened himself against the wall beside the door and reached under his jacket for the Sig Sauer. He didn’t have it. He’d left it behind here when he’d changed his clothes. Heart thumping, he waited. He strained to hear, but inside the room no one spoke, no one moved. On the street, cars passed noisily. A stereo raved rock music in a nearby unit. Other tenants ran television. Crows flew over, cawing, black against a cloudless sky, flapping their way from one stand of towering old eucalyptus to another. In starchy white jacket and pants, pushing her cart of towels and sheets, one of the young Latino women who cleaned the rooms came out of a breezeway and stopped and stared at him.
“Qué pasa?” she said. “Is something wrong, señor?” Her eyes were dark and glossy. They studied his bandages. “Are you all right?”
“This is my room,” he said. “Someone’s been in it while I was out. Maybe they’re still in it.”
Before he could stop her, she passed him and stepped through the door. “Madre de Dios,” she said. “Why does it look like this? Who would do such a thing?”
Dave looked into the room. Drawers had been pulled out of the chest, dumped on the floor, bottoms smashed out. Sheets and blankets had been torn off the bed. The phone had been crushed to pieces, the television tube shattered, and the machine thrown into a corner. The Johnny Walker bottle was smashed. The long mirror over the chest was slivered. Someone had cut himself. Blood stained the washroom basin, and scrawled under a double lightning bolt in dribbling red on the shaving mirror was: GET OUT OF WINTER CRIK OR DY.
The maid said, “It was not like this before. I clean the room at eleven.” She looked up at Dave very earnestly. “I tell you the truth, señor. It was not like this.”
“Of course not,” he said.
“And I didn’t see nobody, nothing,” she said. “Nobody seen nothing, señor.” She looked over her shoulder, as if invisible agents of evil might be lurking here. “How could they get in?”
He reached across the tiled shower stall whose grout a thousand travel-grimy lather-splashers had turned from white to brown, and slid open the frosted glass of a small high window there. “They must have got in this way. From the back. There’s nothing but scrub land out there. And they wouldn’t be seen from the street.”
“But why, señor?” She was staring at the bloody words, but Dave guessed she couldn’t read them. “People who would do this thing—what have such pigs to do with you?”
“Nothing.” Dave remembered the heating vent low down in a corner. The grill had been unscrewed and lay on the floor. So the Sig Sauer he’d hidden there was gone, wasn’t it? No need to look. “They want me to go away,” he said. “What do you think?” He gave her a smile. “Shall I go, or stay and make them pay for this? What would you do?”
She frowned, crouched, and picked up the telephone, the fragments of the telephone, its insides trailing out. “How is this possible?”
“With steel shoes,” Dave said.
She dropped the phone and stared. “Skeenheads?”
He said, “I think so.”
“Oh, sí, go away.” Nodding hard, she backed toward the open door as if being near him put her in danger, which maybe it did. “Go quickly, señor—that is what I would do.”
13
THEY WALKED OUT OF the Channel Three building to the parking lot that was on two terraces carved out of a hillside in Elysian Park. Once, long before the coming of Dodger Stadium, this had been a ragged wilderness of trees, steep slopes, deep ravines where a few frame and shingle cottages crouched, hidden from the world. He tried to remember now the name of a bearded college kid he’d slept with briefly one long-gone summer who had a shack up here and was writing a paper on “The City of Dreadful Night.” It was before the war. Dave was still in high school. How he’d met that lean, earnest, bespectacled youth he couldn’t think. But to get to his shack, you had to cross a shaky wooden footbridge. He remembered that clearly. He must be tired. Asleep. Dreaming. He pulled the keys from the K
mart safari jacket to open the Jaguar, and Cecil took them away from him.
“You’re dead on your feet,” he said. “I’ll drive.”
Halfway down the hill, Dave said, “Why did Ralph Alexander telephone Channel Three?”
“I don’t know who Ralph Alexander is,” Cecil said.
“Sorry, I’ll tell you in a minute,” Dave said, “but can you ask in your advertising department about that call?”
“I will,” Cecil said.
“Alexander had written a lot of telephone numbers on an envelope in his files. As you can imagine, that one jumped out at me. The envelope had material in it concerning Vaughn Thomas. His family home address was on it, and the phone number. Also those of his last employer. Maybe Alexander tried the Steven Thomas house first, got nowhere, so he tried Thomas Marketing to catch him at his workbench—those numbers I wouldn’t recognize. But someone at the office, maybe Neil O’Neil, told him Vaughn was at Channel Three, and Alexander tried to reach him there.”
“And you know because I told you”—Cecil stopped for a red light—“he hated picking up his phone himself.”
“Which I hope means someone took a message,” Dave said.
“Right. What time frame are we talking about?”
Dave shrugged. “Start with last week.”
The light turned green, Cecil crossed the intersection. “What would this Ralph Alexander want with Vaughn Thomas?”
“That’s what I’m asking you to find out,” Dave said.
“Okay. Now—who is Alexander?”
Dave told the story as they sloped onto the Santa Monica Freeway and headed west behind an endless curving train of red taillights into the setting sun. Miles later, he finished. “The gun, the camouflage suit, his being in L.A. Sunday morning, the visit to Craig’s place, the shaky alibi for yesterday afternoon—and the way he lied to me—”
“Makes him sound like suspect number one,” Cecil said.
“Not yet,” Dave said. “I need more.”
Cecil threw him a small ironic smile. “You need more—or you hate it being him because he’s black?”
The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning: 11 (The Dave Brandstetter Mysteries) Page 13