Fadeout

by Joseph Hansen

  “Maybe,” Dave said. “Only maybe. His life had some pretty big rips in it. . . . You’re sure about Sawyer?”

  The boy shrugged. “Who else knew Olson was here?”

  “Hippies? Don’t some of them have a little problem about what belongs to whom?”

  “He wasn’t robbed,” the deputy said. “Close to four hundred bucks in his pockets when we found him. Cash.”

  “Have you found the gun?”

  “Scuba crew got it out of the water this morning. Fifty feet from the pier.”

  “Sawyer’s?”

  “Olson’s.” He swiveled the chair, opened a file drawer, laid the gun on the desk. A red identification tag dangled from the trigger guard. It was a tidy Colt’s .32. “His wife identified it. Also he’d registered it with the L.A. police. Nineteen forty-three. She said he was working in a bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard then. Some GIs held it up. The owner wouldn’t buy a gun. Olson bought this. Had it ever since.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “One. A thumbprint on one of the shells. Olson’s. That’s all. Gun was oily. Just cleaned before it was fired. Whoever used it wiped it before he threw it off the pier.” The deputy held the gun in his clean kid’s hand for a moment, tossed it lightly once, then turned and dropped it back into the file drawer. “Look”—he blinked, turning—“have you got some reason to doubt Sawyer killed him?”

  “None. It’s logical. Maybe inevitable. I’m sorry, that’s all. I think Olson had counted on Sawyer to save him. They were old friends.”

  “They had a fight,” the boy said. “A brawl. Mrs. Kincaid heard it. Yelled and swore. Threw stuff. Sawyer took off. This was two, three nights ago.”

  “He wasn’t killed two, three nights ago,” Dave said. “He was killed last night.”

  “Sawyer must have come back. The room was a wreck. And Mrs. Kincaid wasn’t home last night.”

  “Hasn’t she any other tenants?”

  “Hippies,” the deputy snorted. “They were having a party. They had their door shut. Didn’t see anybody, didn’t hear anything. Making too much noise themselves. Even if they hadn’t been, they wouldn’t tell me. I’m the fuzz. The man. They won’t talk to you unless you’ve got a beard and your clothes are glued to you with your own dirt and stink.”

  “The room was a wreck,” Dave said, “but Olson wasn’t found dead there. He was found dead on the pier.”

  The deputy nodded. “Under the Chute. But he could have been dragged there.”

  “At eight, nine, ten o’clock? I know it’s a dead town, but that dead? How far is the Kincaid house from the pier? How strong a man is Sawyer? I thought he was slight. If the shooting happened in the room there should have been bloodstains. Were there?”

  The boy’s face reddened. “No. And Sawyer wasn’t any muscle man. And Kincaid’s is a good three blocks from the pier. . . .” The boy yawned wide, shut his eyes and let his head hang for a minute. When he looked up his eyes were bloodshot. “I don’t know. When we find Sawyer, maybe he’ll tell us. . . .”

  The door opened. Hot air came in. Also a fat, pasty-faced man carrying a heavy wooden kit by its leather handle.

  The deputy stood up. “You the coroner?”

  “I’m the autopsy surgeon,” the fat man said in a bored voice. “Where is it?”

  Dave lifted a hand to the deputy and left.

  CONDEMNED. DANGER. NO ADMITTANCE.

  The wire-mesh fence slumped as if the signs were too heavy for it. At one point it lay like a rusty circus net. It sprang like a circus net when he stepped across it. In the shadow of the Chute he found the place where Fox Olson had died. Crude chalk outline on the planks. He knelt and stared. Between the slats he saw movement—his shadow on the sun-striped sand below. Pushing to his feet, he dusted his hands. The sand went but not the grease. Black. Automobile grease? He wiped it with his handkerchief, walked to the rail, leaned on it. It left a chalky line across his jacket. He brushed it off. In the stinking dark forest of splintery posts under the pier lay pizza tins, beer cans, cigarette wrappers, condoms—the joyless detritus of American joy. Beneath the spot where Olson had bled was a black splotch. Also a nailhead-size heap of—what? Pale sand? He bent to touch it. Soft. He moistened a finger, picked up a few grains, sniffed it. Sawdust.

  Sawdust?

  16

  The Kincaid house was frame, a big shingle place with cupolas and with fretwork porches all around. It tried to be yellow and managed a sick pale brown. Its unwashed windows stared at the muddy surf across a broken boardwalk and a belt of dirty brown beach. The front door gaped like a senile mouth.

  Down the steep porch steps came Hale McNeil, portable-typewriter case in one hand, guitar in the other. The rear of the station wagon was open. Thorne Olson laid clothes inside. Not many. An armload. New sweatshirts, candy-striped swim trunks, chinos, a bright new pair of red tennis shoes.

  Dave had left his car at the corner and come walking. She didn’t see him until she straightened and stepped aside to let McNeil set what he’d brought inside. Her face was even tighter now, her movements jerkier. Her heels sank in the sand, which didn’t help. Then she saw Dave, and before McNeil could stop her, she flared:

  “Are you following us? Why don’t you leave us alone?”

  “Easy,” McNeil said, and to Dave, “She’s upset.”

  “I’m not following you,” Dave told her. “Remember me? I’ve been trying to find him. I’ve got questions. Now he can’t answer them. I thought I’d talk to Mrs. Kincaid.” He looked hard at them both. “Or do I have to? Maybe you’ve got the answers. Why did he leave? Why did he come here? Why was he killed?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.” Shrill, from the raveled edge of hysteria. McNeil’s arm went around her. Understandably. She was a widow. He was an old friend. Nothing out of keeping about the gesture. Except that he thought so. He turned color and started to jerk his arm away. No need. She twisted aside, ran for the front of the car, flung herself in and slammed the door.

  “It’s the sheriff’s job,” McNeil said. “Why not let him get the answers?”

  “Because I don’t think he knows the questions,” Dave said, and climbed the steps.

  Mrs. Kincaid looked like a line backer. Not one who had scrimmaged lately, but still muscular. She wore a one-piece knit swimsuit that looked as if she’d always worn it. The sun had faded it and tanned her until they were the same color. The effect was arresting. She was about sixty-five. She came out of the back of her tousled apartment carrying a battered aluminum coffeepot, and when she saw Dave standing in the doorway of her front room—it was one of those old-fashioned sliding doors and standing open —she gave him a grin that couldn’t have been friendlier if she’d had teeth. As a matter of fact, she did have teeth. In a glass someplace. She went and got them.

  “There,” she said. “Hello. Looking for a room? I got a dandy. Great big. Upstairs at the front. Just vacant though. I haven’t had a chance to clean it up yet.”

  “Fox Olson’s room?” Dave asked.

  “Oh.” She was disappointed. But disappointments weren’t new to her. She didn’t give this one much time. She was curious. “Who are you?”

  Dave told her. “I’d like to see the room.”

  “I guess it’s all right. But look here. . . .” She sat on a humpy old sofa. Books and papers were strewn on the coffee table. She poked among them, hunting something. “His wife just left. She gave me his birth data. I’m an astrologer.” She found dime-store reading glasses and began making jottings with a stub of pencil. Her free hand waved toward a banner on the wall.

  It was about six feet square and appeared to be painted on heavy oilcloth, MADAME VERA, it said, SEES PAST, PRESENT, FUTURE IN YOUR STARS. The lettering was fancy. It encircled a zodiac chart that held bad drawings of crabs, scorpions, goats and the like. Sometime the banner must have hung outside one of those ruined booths on the pier.

  “Look at that,” she said.

  “I’m l
ooking,” Dave said.

  “No, no. I mean here. Come on.” She slapped the sofa and he sat beside her and bent to look at the paper. Another zodiac chart. No animals this time. Symbols and numbers. “See that? Born with the sun in the eighth house. Bound to die this year or early next. You’re in the insurance business. This is something it’d pay you to know. Eighth house natives die in their forty-fifth year. He had Mars there too. Means death by violence. President Kennedy had the same thing. Funny. Both of them had Saturn in the tenth house too. Downfall from the heights—that’s what that means.”

  Dave said, “Too bad you couldn’t have warned him.”

  “Didn’t have his birth data or I could have.” She poured coffee into a cracked cup. “Want some?”

  It smelled good. He nodded. She hollered from the back of the apartment, “But warning him wouldn’t have done any good. Eighth house people carry a heavy load of karma. They don’t make their life, their life makes them. Fate.” She came back with another cup, this one so chipped the word shard would have described it better. But it held the coffee, which was as good as it smelled.

  “What do you mean, sun in the eighth house?” Dave asked.

  “Anybody born around four in the afternoon.”

  “Wouldn’t that include a lot of people?”

  “Very few. Fact. Probably the rarest time of all to be born. See, it’s dying time, really. Ask anybody works in a hospital—they’ll tell you. Tide goes out, life goes out.” The glasses had slipped down to the end of her nose. She took them off. “Astrology calls the eighth the house of death.”

  “Especially,” Dave said, “when something like this happens. Something that fits.”

  She wasn’t hurt. “Astrology’s never wrong. It’s the astrologers make the mistakes.” She cocked her head. “You’re a Venus-Moon type. Not natural for them to be so skeptical.”

  “It’s an occupational disease.” Dave set down the cup and stood. “It’s upstairs?”

  She made a whistling sound in her throat getting up but she did it without hands. “Same room they had before. Summer 1941.”

  Dave had started to turn. He halted. “You remembered them?”

  “Nicest pair of boys ever stayed here. Oh, naturally, I didn’t know them right off the bat. It’s been twenty-six years. They’re men now, not kids. But soon as they says who they were I remembered. They figured I would. Just asked me to keep it a secret.” She bent and shut her books and began making a stack of them. “They wanted a couple weeks’ peace. Didn’t want to see anybody. And would I go along with the gag. Well, naturally, I loved them for remembering me and this place and that summer and coming back. Made me feel real good. I says sure.” She straightened. “I’m used to keeping people’s secrets. Been doing it all my life.”

  “Which is why you didn’t tell the deputy their real names.” Dave grinned. “I’m not surprised they came back here. . . . May I see the room?”

  “It’s awful untidy.” She hung back. “See, Fox and Doug had kind of a fight the other night.”

  “The deputy told me.”

  “I knew there’d be a cleanup job to do. Broken glass and all that. Doug had left. And when Fox passed my door next morning on his way out someplace—grocery, it turned out—I grabbed the broom and the vacuum and stuff and hiked upstairs to put things in shape. Not right away. Did my own dishes first.

  “Well, I’d just walked into the room when Fox comes back. Nothing in the grocery bag that didn’t jingle. He tells me, don’t bother. Leave it like it is. He wants to write. He looked terrible. Sick and lost and scared. Poor thing. I let him be.”

  “Then the wreckage the deputy told me about wasn’t from last night?”

  “No. Room was just like I saw it the morning after the fight.” She blinked into the sea glare that came through the front window. “Monday, that was. Fox stayed up there. Ran the typewriter a little. Paced around a lot.” She looked at the cracked ceiling. “It’s an old place. Floorboards creak. He walked like an animal in a cage. Guess he got pretty drunk too. . . . But no, I never did get a chance to clean up the room.”

  “Then there’s no evidence Sawyer came back?”

  She scowled. “You mean and killed Fox?”

  “Deputy can’t figure anybody else doing it.”

  “He’s no more than a baby,” Mrs. Kincaid snorted. “If he knew anything about people . . . Of course Doug never killed him. Doug couldn’t hurt a fly. It’s not in him.”

  “But you don’t know that he didn’t come back,” Dave said. “You weren’t here.”

  “That’s right. Mr. Pickett and I ride up to Encinitas to the picture show. Regular. Every Wednesday night.”

  “Ride?”

  “Bicycles. It’s only a few miles. And we’ve got good strong headlights. Mr. Pickett got some of those great big red glass reflectors they use on road construction thingamajigs and I sewed them to web belts and we wear them right across our backs. Pick up headlights from two hundred yards. Not that much traffic comes down the coast road at night to see us. Nor in the daytime either. It was letting that road go to ruin that wrecked Bell Beach. Mr. Pickett used to operate the merry-go-round. He thinks Bell Beach can come back. I wish he was right, but I doubt it. Not before us two old fossils are in our graves.”

  “Mr. Pickett the man in the tam-o’-shanter I saw on a bicycle earlier today?”

  She nodded. “Nicest man,” she said. “Come on. Fox’s wife took his clothes and typewriter and stuff. But that’s the only difference. I haven’t had the heart to go in there and get it ready, to tell you the truth.” She led Dave into the looming, sandy-floored hallway and started up the stairs. “Just haven’t had the heart.”

  The door on the other side of the hall, which faced Mrs. Kincaid’s, a sliding door like hers, was open now. The room beyond it was dark. Out of it came running a small sunburned boy about four years old. Naked. He was yelling defiance and running across the porch when a blond girl came after him. She wore a shift made out of ticking. And that appeared to be all. She was thin. A cigarette hung in the corner of her sullen mouth. She caught the baby before it reached the steps, lifted it by one arm and swung it around so it straddled her hip. She toted it back into the dark telling it it had to have its breakfast.

  Dave glanced at his watch. It was two in the afternoon. They were at the landing. Mrs. Kincaid saw his gesture. “They stay up late,” she said. “Playing drums, tambourines, whistles.”

  “The baby too?”

  “It dances,” she said. “They’re wild people. Strange. Never used to be anything like that. Do you know what caused it?”

  “No. Don’t the drums keep you awake?”

  “One night. The first. But I been renting rooms to folks for a long time. And a good part of that time I couldn’t afford to be choosy. Had to make up my mind to mind my own business and hope the place didn’t burn to the ground and that’s all. Nobody stays forever. Repair the damage after they’ve gone. So . . . after this tribe came—that’s what they call themselves, you know, a tribe, and sometimes there’s twenty of them in there—after they came and drummed and tootled all night, I just said, it’s not any noisier than the surf, Vera. You’ve slept with that for forty years. Go to sleep. And I did. Still do.”

  They turned to climb the rest of the stairs and over the rail Dave glimpsed a boy with a beard and long tangled hair standing staring up at them. Handsome body, flat as a lath. Wearing only a jockstrap. He didn’t react to being seen. He stared into Dave’s stare until he got tired, then ambled back into the dark room. Dave caught up with Mrs. Kincaid at the top of the stairs.

  17

  She was right. The room was untidy. There was a bay window at the front. A chair had been thrown through it, a yellow kitchen chair. It lay broken on the porch roof outside among shattered glass that glittered in the hard sun. There was glass inside too, on the scarred floor, on the yarny supermarket throw rugs. A bottle had been smashed against the yellow daisy wallpaper and left a runny stai
n.

  Books were strewn around. Their open pages stirred in the hot draft from the window. So did papers that had spewed out of a daisy-painted wastebasket with its side kicked in. So did ashes in the fireplace. An overstuffed chair lay on its back like a felled rhino. Mrs. Kincaid righted it and yanked its bleached slipcover straight.

  “You can bet that made a thump,” she said. “Thought the roof had fallen in. . . . Listen, I been trying to get my swim for hours now. I realize there’s been a death, and nobody feels worse about it than I do. He was a sweet boy and just as sweet a man. Sweeter. Cuts me up he had to come here and die. Plan was to be happy. And he was happy. Till Doug left.”

  Her mouth twisted sadly. She gave her head a shake. “But . . . life goes on. Has to. I need my swim, I’m used to it. Don’t know what you expect to find. That tadpole deputy didn’t find anything. But you hang around long’s you want.” She started for the door. Her rubber go-aheads were held together by grubby strips of adhesive tape. They kicked something that bobbled away like a small brown animal. She picked it up. “I’ll say good-bye now, case you’re gone when I get back. I don’t mean to hurry, pretty day like this.”

  “If Sawyer didn’t kill him,” Dave asked, “who did?”

  She frowned. “Forlorn’s an old-fashioned word. But that’s how he was, the little I saw of him, yesterday, day before. Awfully forlorn. Maybe he took his own life.”

  Dave shook his head. “They found the gun fifty feet from the pier. No fingerprints. You don’t shoot yourself through the heart, wipe off the gun, walk to the rail and pitch it into the ocean, go back and lie down and die.”