Dave grunted. “You know me better than that. I need to know about that telephone call. And about two dates Alexander wrote on Vaughn’s sheet in that envelope. That’s why I’m here. Those dates mean something.”
“Did you figure I thought you were here because those skinheads scared you off?” Cecil took the sharply curved ramp down to La Cienega Boulevard. “I do know you better than that. I wish you were a coward. Every time you show up in bandages, I wish it again. But”—he sighed and swung into the traffic heading north for West Hollywood and home—“nothing’s going to change you. Only be warned. If you’re even thinking of going back to Winter Creek, I go with you.”
“No way,” Dave said. “You’re the wrong color. If you show up there, George Hetzel’s storm troopers will do things to your testicles that street kid from Santa Monica never even dreamed of.” Dave turned him a tired grin. “And that would upset me no end. Don’t even consider it.”
Cecil didn’t look at him. He watched his driving, but he scowled through the windshield. “So you are going back?”
“Not if I don’t have to.” The cross street was Beverly Boulevard, and Cecil started to move the Jaguar into the left-turn lane, to head for Laurel Canyon and home. Dave said, “No. Let’s go to Max’s.”
“Ah, Dave.” It was a quiet protest. And loving. Cecil knew it was no good to keep stirring up old memories, wakening the ache Dave felt over the loss of the old restaurateur. And other losses that loss kept bringing to mind. But he knew sensible arguments at least for the present had their limits, and he bleakly kept out of the turn lane. When they’d driven on a couple of blocks, he asked, “What dates?”
Dave told him, “May twenty-first, nineteen seventy-six, and July thirteenth, nineteen seventy-seven.”
“And they connect to Vaughn Thomas?” Cecil swung west off La Cienega. “But how? He was only twenty-one, Dave. Back then, he’d have been a little kid—what, eight, nine years old?”
“About the time his mother died, and his father married a woman he didn’t like,” Dave said. “Neil O’Neil thinks it was to try to regain his father’s attention that Vaughn desecrated Jewish cemeteries in high school, painted swastikas on fraternity houses in college. The jealous, sorrowing, panicky child crying, ‘I miss my mother. I’m all alone. Look at me. Look what I’m doing. Punish me. Anything. But show me you know I’m here. Care about me.’”
“You think he started even earlier?” Cecil said.
“Alexander wrote those dates down for a reason,” Dave said. And then he saw the familiar brick-and-beam front of Max Romano’s restaurant, and his heart nearly stopped. Plywood panels covered the stained-glass windows. An X of planks crossed the door. A mound of smashed plaster and splintered wood blocked the sidewalk by the driveway. CLOSED FOR REMODELING read a long white banner flapping from the eaves. “Dear God,” Dave said. “Already?”
“I knew we shouldn’t come here.” Cecil shifted gears, started to speed away.
“No, wait,” Dave told him. “Drive in, please.”
“Dave, why torture yourself?” Cecil said. But with a grim sigh he braked the Jaguar, backed it, swung it into the driveway, drove along the deep side of the restaurant and into the parking lot.
It was empty except for one car, a late-model bronze Accord, parked near the faded red trash module that always stood beside the kitchen door. The trunk of the Accord was open. The kitchen door was open. Cecil put the Jaguar beside the Accord. And out the kitchen door came Alex Giacometti, carrying a large cardboard carton.
Gaunt, pockmarked, fiftyish, with caved-in cheeks and hollow eyes, Alex had been Max Romano’s chef for decades. Back when Dave first came to Max’s, Max himself still did much of the cooking. But success soon made this impossible. Max’s charm and infectious good humor were needed out front. And a day at a time, by slavishly hewing to Max’s legendary ways with pastas and cheeses, breads and sausages, meats, chicken, fish, tomatoes, onions, garlic, oregano, basil, and all the other simple ingredients of which mortal cooks could make no more than food, but with which Max made magic, Alex came to rule the kitchen. Now he stopped and stared at Dave.
Dave stepped out of the Jaguar. “You’re not leaving?”
“Forever.” Alex went, gloomy as a priest conducting last rites for his father, and set the heavy carton in the trunk. Dave stepped closer. The carton was heaped with packets of grubby file cards held by rubber bands, and with loose-leaf binders, soiled and splotched from years of use, pages sticking out, edges tattered. Recipes. Extensions of Max’s self. And Alex’s. Alex slammed the trunk and sighed. “This is the end. I will never come back here.” He started again for the kitchen door, stopped, turned, frowned. Alex had a powerful frown. It had cowed generations of pastry and salad chefs, pot boys, waiters. Even Max, at times. “What are you doing here, Mr. Brandstetter? It’s all over. There is no more Max Romano’s. Finito, finito.” He pulled shut the broad, steel-clad kitchen door and locked it.
“You going to cook someplace else?” Cecil said. “Tell us where? We’ll come there.”
Alex snorted a laugh, with no humor in it. “No, you won’t come there. I’m going back to New Jersey. Why not? The kids are grown. California kids. They’d freeze to death in New Jersey. But I—I like it, my wife likes it, we’ve missed it all these years. We’ve saved our money. Maybe I’ll miss working, so I’ll open a little place of my own. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll rig up a hammock in the backyard and listen to the birds. In the fall I’ll rake the leaves, pick apples, listen to the rain on the roof. In the winter I’ll shovel the snow off the walks, go inside, kick off my galoshes, hang up my coat, light a fire in the fireplace, look at the TV.” He climbed behind the wheel of the Accord. His starved, sad face peered out at them. “It will be a dream come true.” He twisted a key in the ignition, the car started quietly. “I can’t stay here,” he said in a suddenly changed voice, and tears glazed his sunken eyes. “Not with how they’re wrecking Max’s. I know it’s nothing. Only a restaurant. There’s a million restaurants. Who remembers?”
“I remember,” Dave said.
“Me too.” Alex nodded gloomily, and began backing the car into the vacancy of the parking lot. “And it hurts, Mr. Brandstetter. No use lying about it. It hurts.”
“I wish you’d think it over before you go,” Dave said.
“Goodbye, Mr. Brandstetter,” Alex said, and steered the car toward the driveway. “Goodbye, Mr. Harris.”
And he was gone. Another one gone.
Dave was so tired when they reached the canyon house that he didn’t give another thought to eating. All the energy he had left went into taking a shower and dragging himself up the raw pine stairs to the sleeping loft. Cecil had poured him Glenlivet and set the glass on the pine chest. He touched the whiskey to his mouth and found he didn’t want it. He dropped onto the bed, stretched out, shut his eyes, sighed. Cecil drew the sheet and blankets up over him. He was dimly aware of that. The next moment he was asleep.
He woke at sunrise. Sitting up, swinging leaden feet to the floor, he knew he needed more rest, another six hours at least. But he had places to go. So he shaved and dressed instead, gave a gentle nudge to sleeping Cecil—face in the pillow, one long arm out of the bed, hand touching the floor, one long, pink-soled foot sticking out where he’d untucked the sheet, as he often did in a bed not built for sleepers well over six feet tall—and went downstairs.
He scooped up mail that had accumulated on his desk and carried it across the leaf-strewn bricks of the sunny courtyard to the cookshack. There he started coffee, laid big country sausage patties in a cast-iron pan over a slow fire, mixed batter for cornmeal pancakes, sat down with a mug of coffee and a cigarette, put on his reading glasses and began sorting the junk mail from the real mail.
The ratio was something like ten to one. Lively little Amanda, his father’s last widow, young enough to be Dave’s daughter, sent a postcard from Chicago, where she was attending a home decorating convention. Years back, when she’d felt
lost and useless after Carl Brandstetter’s death, Dave had set her to fixing up this place. She’d done it with sense and style and soon had a thriving business going for her. She was a good friend, and he missed her when work kept her away for any time at all. He missed her now, and read the postcard twice before he laid it aside.
A letter from Ray Lollard, a telephone company vice-president, Dave’s friend from high school days, whom he often saw and had never stopped liking, was briefly personal—Ray’s antic, wild-haired lover Kovaks was being honored for his pottery by some society or other in New York—but the letter was mainly devoted to a bid for “another of your wonderfully generous gifts” to help rescue some sandy-floored beach-town gallery of arts and crafts, whose collapse was certain “if something isn’t done immediately.” Dave chuckled to himself and shook his head. Half of these places he was certain only Ray had ever heard of. But Dave would send the check.
He laid the letter aside and frowned. Now, what was this? His name and address were scribbled in pencil in what was unmistakably European handwriting. He knew the style from his time in Germany. Only this looked not just spidery but drunken. He tore open the dime-store envelope. The pages had been crammed inside any which way. He wedged them out, sorted them, flattened them on the tabletop, frowning. The date was Monday. Dear Mr. Brandstetter, I am sorry. I have tried to telephone you for hours but no one answers. Excuse me please. I also tried to telephone the police. I could not make them understand. You see, I have done a great wrong, and this surely has caused terrible injury to Jemmie. I am afraid she is dead and it is my fault. I am afraid he has killed her. When she ran away, she begged me to tell no one where she had gone. And I kept my word. When you asked, I told you I did not know. I am sorry.
The screen door of the cookshack creaked. Cecil came in, wearing a white terry cloth robe, towel around his neck, fresh from the shower. Dave pulled the reading glasses down on his nose and looked at him over them. “I had a hunch he was lying,” he said.
Cecil went and looked into the mixing bowl on the counter. “Whoa, flapjacks.” He poured coffee into a mug and brought the mug to the table and sat down. “Who was lying?”
“Kaminsky.” Dave rattled the misfolded pages at him. “There was no phone in the Thomas apartment, but Kaminsky told me Jemmie had phoned for a taxi. She’d used his phone, hadn’t she, the manager’s phone? A nice, kind little man, an emergency? Of course. And told him all her troubles while she waited for that cab.”
Cecil said, “You didn’t learn the Thomases had no phone till later.”
“All the same,” Dave said, “I sensed he was lying, and I should have worked on him till he told me the truth. Jemmie would be alive, Mike would have his mother.” He slapped the pages with his knuckles. “Kaminsky would be alive. I’m slipping, young Harris. I’m no good anymore.”
“You going to talk rubbish,” Cecil said, and pushed back his chair, “I’ll cook the pancakes.”
Dave read the rest of the letter. But then in the night I saw out my window this light flickering around in the empty apartment. And I went softly up there, and with a flashlight a man in those spotted coveralls and helmet so I could not see his face was searching. I started to go and phone the police, but he heard me and caught me. He had a gun and put it to my head and asked me where Jemmie had gone. At first, I would say nothing, but then he said that already he had killed Vaughn Thomas, and he would be in no deeper if he killed me, and I broke down and told him. He left at once, and then it was I tried to telephone the police, but they did not understand me, and then you, but there was no answer. By now the handwriting had grown loose and sprawling and was hard to read. I have betrayed that innocent girl. He will kill her. Why is it in my life so often I have been forced on pain of death to do contemptible things? In the camps, then after the war, lies to survive, lies to cover lies. But I am not a murderer, Mr. Brandstetter. You must believe me. And that was the end of it. Drunk and despairing, he’d forgotten to sign his name. One last time.
Cecil laid napkins, knives, forks, spoons on the table, set out butter and maple syrup in a stoneware jug from Vermont. He refilled the coffee mugs, then brought plates crowded with pancakes and sausage, set one in front of Dave, one at his own place, and sat down. “What did he say?”
“That he could have kept Jemmie from being killed, and he didn’t.” Grimly, Dave unfolded the napkin in his lap. “He had that part right.”
“What part did he have wrong?” Cecil said.
“We’ll let Sergeant Samuels work that out,” Dave said.
The white front of the massive Spanish colonial in Beverly Hills reflected the sun from a clear autumn morning sky. A mockingbird sang one strong note over and over again in a big Brazilian pepper tree down the slope of smoothly mowed lawn. A gray stretch limousine stood on the curved driveway, two fiftyish men in dark suits waiting beside it, talking. Quietly, soberly. These were not types from the frantic world of advertising/marketing. These were mortuary men. Dave’s line of work had taken him to hundreds of funerals, and he would know these types anywhere—close up they would smell of mint mouthwash and damp cut flowers. The sight of them swung his thoughts back to Max’s funeral, two weeks ago now, but still vivid, still painful. He had to stop remembering. It was too damned sad. He passed the men without looking their way and angrily rang the doorbell with his thumb.
“Brandstetter.” Steven Thomas winced against the sun glare. On his bony frame hung a beautifully tailored new black suit. A glass of whiskey and ice was in his blue-veined hand. He glared at Dave. “What the hell do you want? Today of all days. This is the morning we bury the boy.”
“I know,” Dave said. “I’m sorry to intrude. But I’m still trying to find out who killed him. That matters too, doesn’t it?” He stepped inside, took the door from Thomas’s frail grip, swung it closed on the shouts of the mockingbird. A couple of tall white wicker baskets holding elaborate flower sprays stood on the tile floor of the entryway beside the twisting staircase. Remembrances from friends? Not Vaughn’s, Dave guessed. Sylvia’s, probably. “I’ve got two questions, that’s all,” Dave said. “The answers won’t take any time, and they are probably very important.”
“What’s important,” Thomas said, walking away, shaking his head, tears in his voice, “is my only son is dead, and that finishes me.” He wandered to a deep chair in that huge impersonal room and dropped limply into it. He stared ahead of himself at nothing. “That finishes Steven Thomas and any point there ever was to his life. Success? Money?” He snorted irony, then raised his eyes to Dave. “I’m seventy-five years old, Brandstetter. He was only a boy. What kind of justice is there in that?”
“He told Jemmie Engstrom he was about to get a lot of money,” Dave said.
“She’s alive, then?” Stevens said. “She’s all right? Poor little thing. I didn’t think she had enough defenses to make it in this world.”
“You were right,” Dave said. “She’s dead. Whoever killed Vaughn caught up to her before I could.”
“Oh, no,” Thomas said. “Oh, no.” He gulped from his whiskey. “I’m so sorry. If Sylvia had just—if I’d only—”
“It was her little son who told me. About this money Vaughn was about to get. A lot of money, he said. Enough to take him and Jemmie and Mike to Africa to live. Where was that money coming from, Mr. Thomas? You?”
“Africa?” Unexpectedly Thomas smiled. “Yes. He had a love for Africa. All his life. Read about it all the time. When he was small, it was the animals, of course. Later on it was the wars. After England and France and the rest of them let those countries have their independence. Vaughn wanted to be part of those wars, get over there in the jungles. A mercenary. Putting his life on the line—not for any cause, just for the adventure of it.”
“And the sport of killing blacks,” Dave said.
“What? I told you he wasn’t like that. How could he be? Growing up in this household?”
“He managed it, I’m afraid. You didn’t promise hi
m money?”
“I couldn’t if I’d wanted to,” Thomas said, and glanced past Dave at the hallway. “Sylvia wouldn’t have it. Said he was too young to handle it. I’d always given him whatever he asked. And she was right—he threw it all away.”
“As he threw away his mother’s legacy when he turned twenty-one?” Dave said. “He gave it to George Hetzel—did you know that? All of it?”
Thomas shut his eyes, shook his head. “No. I didn’t know that.” He opened his eyes. “Who is George Hetzel?” Dave told him, but Thomas didn’t want to hear. He waved his hands. “Not today, Brandstetter. Not this morning. I don’t want to remember that side. All that hate stuff. That was my fault. Some way I failed him.”
“Some way he failed you,” Dave said. He sat on a coffee table in front of Thomas’s chair and said, “These dates.” He named the dates Ralph Alexander had jotted on Vaughn’s personnel sheet. “What do they mean?”
“Oh, get out,” Thomas said. “Mind your own business.” He stood up with a suddenness Dave wouldn’t have gauged him capable of. Whiskey sloshed from his glass, and cold drops struck Dave’s face. “Nineteen seventy-six?” Thomas scoffed. “Nineteen seventy-seven? He was a little child then. What difference does it make what he did?” Thomas crossed to the hall. “He didn’t know there was any harm in it. Anyway, what possible connection could it have to his murder?” Dave followed him. “Leave it alone, Brandstetter. Leave me alone.” The words echoed in the round stairwell. He raised his head. “Sylvia, are you ever coming down here? You never loved that boy, you never loved him.” He didn’t wait for a response but yanked open the front door, and still gripping the whiskey glass, went down to the waiting limousine. A mortuary man opened the car for him, he dropped inside, the door slammed. He sat slumped on the rear seat, drinking, staring ahead at nothing, looking very old.
Dave quietly closed the house door. The big white rooms were as silent as if no one were home. Puzzled, he climbed the steps. His soles were soft and made no sound on the tile treads. At the top of the stairs he stopped and listened. Somewhere a voice spoke, low, insistent. Sylvia’s. He wanted to talk to her. He looked at three doors, black in the white walls, located the sound, walked toward it, but with his hand raised to knock, he stopped.
The Boy Who Was Buried This Morning: 11 (The Dave Brandstetter Mysteries) Page 14