Fadeout: A Dave Brandstetter Mystery (Dave Brandstetter Mysteries (University of Wisconsin Press))

by Joseph Hansen

  He found the house a mile beyond the bridge. It stood back and up from the road under towering, ragged-barked eucalyptus trees. The dark ivy that covered the slope in front was glossed by rain. So were the two cars in the drive —new red Mustang, battered old Chevy. He left his own car under a manzanita by the road. The house was one-story, rambling, sided with cedar shakes that hadn’t been painted and hadn’t had time yet really to weather. The place looked comfortable and expensive. He pressed the button beside the front door.

  The woman who opened it was small, not much above five feet. Thin, fine-boned, in her early forties, like himself. Her hair was brown with some gray in it. She had cropped it like a boy’s, smart and simple. Her hips were narrow as a boy’s and looked right in the brown corduroy Levi’s. She wore a brown checked wool shirt. No jewelry, no makeup except lipstick. She couldn’t have looked more feminine.

  “Mrs. Olson?” he said. “I’m Dave Brandstetter.”

  “And soaking wet,” she apologized. “I’m sorry about that. Come in.” With a glance at the weather and a shiver, she shut the door. “Give me those and I’ll hang them in the kitchen to drip. You go make yourself comfortable.”

  She took the trench coat and canvas hat away. He stepped down into the living room. It was long. Pitched roof, hand-hewn beams, knotty-pine paneling. Logs blazed in a fieldstone fireplace flanked by loaded bookshelves. He took a wing chair close to the fire, hoping his feet would dry. Above the fireplace hung a big painting. He couldn’t quite make it out—some kind of white trestle thing rearing up nightmarish against a black sky.

  “What is it?” he asked her when she came in.

  “Fox painted it. Quite recently. It’s very different from anything else he ever did. It’s called The Chute.’ He won’t—wouldn’t tell me what it means. He just says, ‘It’s a memory.’”

  A bottle of brandy warmed on the hearth. Christian Brothers. She poured splashes from it into two small snifters, handed him one and sat down across from him, feet tucked under her. On the coffee table between them, the mechanism of a lighter glinted in a burl of polished wood. When he set a cigarette in his mouth and reached for the lighter, she got it first and worked the flame for him. Automatically. Habit. Nothing meant. Except, evidently, that she had lit her husband’s cigarettes. Funny. She wasn’t the type. Not mousy enough. Not mousy at all.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  She sat back and gave a little businesslike smile. “Now, what’s this all about, Mr. Brandstetter?”

  “Routine.” He smiled back.

  “You said that on the phone. What does it mean?”

  “That my company—every insurance company—sends out investigators in cases like this.”

  “Like this?”

  “Where the policyholder’s body can’t be found.”

  “Can’t be—” She blinked. “Oh, but it will be. I’m sure it will. When the storm’s over.”

  “There was a lull in the storm day before yesterday,” he said. “They were able to find the car—”

  “And have you seen that car?” she asked.

  “Yes. This morning. At the police garage.”

  “And you drove up here just now. Which means you’ve seen the force of the water in the arroyo. Does it seem strange to you that Fox’s body wasn’t in that car?”

  “No. But it ought to have been in the arroyo.” The ashtray was black Mexican pottery. He put ashes into it carefully. “Twenty men searched for it. Police, sheriffs. They didn’t find it, Mrs. Olson.”

  “I know,” she said quietly. “I was with them. . . . But at the foot of the canyon is a storm drain that carries the arroyo water under the town to the river.”

  “A body reaching a storm drain,” he said, “would be caught in the gratings.”

  A corner of her mouth tightened in a kind of smile. “Have you been in that storm drain, Mr. Brandstetter?”

  “In it?” He raised an eyebrow. “No. Have you?”

  “Many times. I played there as a child. It was built when I was about ten. Before that the arroyo itself cut right through Pima. Every time there was a storm like this, it nearly washed the town away. Lloyd Chalmers built the drain. It was his first big job. He was just starting out in the contracting business. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty. He’s the mayor now, in his fourth term. My husband is running against him. Was.”

  “I know.” The posters were pasted up all over Pima, flaring reds and oranges, paper wrinkled in the rain. CHALMERS . . . GROWTH. Rugged, white-maned man. OLSON . . . HONESTY. Laughing man with thinning blond hair. “I’ve seen the posters. You were telling me about the storm drain.”

  “Well, we children used to play in it, as I say. It’s huge and shadowy and cool. And of course, in summer, dry and completely safe. But there are no gratings, Mr. Brandstetter. It’s simply a concrete tunnel. Oh, there are overhead gratings, from the streets. But cross gratings would only defeat the drain’s purpose. They’d be choked with debris in no time.”

  Dave nodded. “Scrub, tree branches—yes, I can see that. But it’s that sort of material that ought to have caught and held your husband’s body in the arroyo itself. Someplace in the four or five miles between the bridge and town.” He swallowed his brandy. “The police agree with me. A human body is a heavy, clumsy, floppy thing. A dead body. With clothes to snag. It should have been in the arroyo.”

  “Well, it wasn’t.” She got up for the brandy bottle. “Which means that Fox—” But she couldn’t manage that. She stood with her back to him, rigid, for a minute. When she turned it was abruptly and her voice was harsh. “The body was swept through the drain into the river. That’s all. He’ll be found after the storm, when the water level falls. Of course he will.” She put an inch of brandy into his glass and her own. Her hand shook.

  “Maybe,” he said. “My company doesn’t think so.”

  “What in the world do they think?”

  “They won’t know what to think till I’m through.”

  She set the bottle back on the hearth. It clinked. “And when will that be?”

  “After I’ve asked a lot of questions.”

  “Captain Herrera asked a good many. Couldn’t you—”

  “I’ve talked to Captain Herrera.”

  “I was honest.” She managed a dry smile and she was in control of her voice again. But when she sat down this time she kept her feet on the floor. “No, Fox wasn’t sober, not quite. He was on his way to KPIM to tape some commercials. He hated them. Kept putting them off. That was why he left so late. But . . . he’d driven this canyon many times less sober. When my father stayed here sick and we’d come back from a late party, for example, Fox would drive the nurse home and not even remember it the next morning.”

  Dave interrupted her. “I wasn’t going to ask whether he was drunk.”

  “No?” She frowned and tilted her head. “Well, then, perhaps you think he committed suicide? You’re going to ask me if he was worried about money.”

  “He wasn’t. I’ve checked with the bank.”

  “Well, then, his health. Had he told me of some awful pains he was having—?” She broke off. “What’s wrong?”

  Bright and fierce he pictured again Rod’s face, clay-white, fear in the eyes, as he’d seen it when he found him in the glaring bathroom that first night of the horrible months that had ended in his death from intestinal cancer.

  “Sorry.” He got up quickly, blindly, and walked down the long room to stare out the glass doors into the flagged patio, rocks and moss, where rain wept into a dark lily pond under mournful ferns. He said savagely, “No, I’m not going to ask you questions like that. Because I don’t think your husband had an accident, Mrs. Olson. I don’t think he committed suicide. I don’t even”—he swung around to look at her—“I don’t even think he’s dead.”

  She was facing him, standing. Her mouth sagged open. She looked the way people her age, his age, wish they didn’t when they see themselves in the bathroom mirror first thin
g in the morning. “What did you say?”

  “I think he shifted that white T-bird of his into neutral at the top of that slope down to the bridge, stepped out, let the hand brake go, watched the car crash into the arroyo, and then walked off and didn’t come back.”

  “But why? Why should he do such a thing?”

  Dave shrugged. “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  “But . . . that’s mad. You can’t be serious.” She almost laughed at him. “You honestly believe, because poor Fox’s body can’t be found, that he—he and I”—she groped for words—“have concocted some James M. Cain sort of scheme to collect his life insurance?”

  “It’s one explanation,” Dave said. “A hundred thousand dollars is a lot of money, Mrs. Olson.”

  “Not enough,” she said, and stopped smiling. “If Fox Olson were alive, he’d be here, Mr. Brandstetter. And I’m going to show you why.” She came toward him, her mouth tight with scorn, her eyes looking straight and hard into his. She slid back the glass door to the patio. Cold wet air came in. She nodded and he stepped out into it and she followed him and shut the door behind her. “Come with me, please. We’ll clear this nonsense up right now.”

  The deep eaves of the house formed a sheltered walkway around the patio. Then they were in the rain, climbing flagged steps between rock-walled flower beds under Japanese maples. Fallen leaves clung to his shoes. Sheltered again, this time by the overhang of a shake-sided cabana, they passed the swimming pool, rain whispering into it. At the far end of the pool, a tall hedge of bamboo partly hid a two-story double garage. They climbed its outside stairs. The door at the top wasn’t locked. She swung it open.

  He heard Fox Olson’s voice singing inside.

  2

  In the Daffodil Café in Pima, where he’d stopped for coffee this morning after the long wet drive from L.A., that voice had come from a nine-dollar radio on top of a refrigerator. The pudgy, white-haired woman in starched yellow gingham, tending the counter, had stood in front of him with the glass coffeepot forgotten in her hand, while she listened, her faded blue eyes staring far away.

  Wanting the coffee, he’d naturally paid attention to what she was listening to so hard. A catchy, forgettable little Western song. Guitar, clip-clop hoofbeats. Mild baritone. Pleasant, whimsical delivery. But nothing special. Yet tears were running down her soft old cheeks when the song ended. With a sad little smile she shook her head as she poured Dave’s coffee.

  “Wasn’t he wonderful?” she sighed.

  “Who’s that?” Dave hadn’t heard the announcer.

  “Who!” She was indignant. “Why, Fox, Fox Olson, of course. Who’d you think?”

  “I didn’t know.” Dave smiled apology.

  “Then you must be a stranger,” she said.

  “I am.” He tried the coffee. It was good. He lit a cigarette. “I gather Fox Olson’s a local celebrity.”

  “Was,” she said. “Oh, we miss him. The day they stop playing his songs . . . Well, you know, they tried. Right after he was killed in that car crash up the canyon. They just stopped playing him. As though we was such hicks we didn’t know there’s such a thing as tapes these days. Like now he was gone, we wasn’t going to hear him no more.

  “But everybody hollered so. Oh, I tell you, Pima kicked up a fuss. I don’t expect there was anybody in town, except Mayor Chalmers, of course, that didn’t phone up KPIM”—she said it as if it were a name, not call letters—“and say, put Fox Olson back on the radio. Well, they did, They got recordings of all his old broadcasts. They keep playing parts of those. They better.” Her jowls set firmly, she turned and banged the coffeepot back on its hot plate. “They better not stop. . . .”

  Out of the radio the voice had sounded tinny. Here, now, in the rain, on the slatted wooden landing at the top of the garage stairs, hearing it through the open door, it sounded real. It wasn’t. It was a recording. Ten-inch reels turned on a big professional tape rig against the wall opposite the door. Stainless steel panels, knobs, dials. Black speaker cones next to the ceiling. Once inside the room he could hear tape hiss. But for a moment there he’d have sworn he heard a living man.

  A girl in blue sat at a big, sleek, clean-lined desk. Her hands were on the keys of a new electric typewriter but they were still She was sitting with her face turned up, listening, wearing the same rapt expression as the old Daffodil waitress. Only her eyes were shut and she was young and her face was like a flower with rain blessing it. Had been, for an instant. Then Mrs. Olson shut the door, crossed the room and struck a switch and the voice slurred and died. The girl opened her eyes, startled blue.

  “I wish you wouldn’t, Terry. I’ve asked you before.”

  “I’m sorry, Thorne.” The girl was very blond. She blushed like a white rose. “You said you had an appointment. I didn’t think you’d be coming out.”

  “Neither did I. And I apologize for interrupting your . . . work.” Thorne Olson eyed skeptically the half-typed page in the machine, the heap of mimeographed scripts on the desk. “But I felt it was important for Mr. Brandstetter, here, to see Fox’s studio.” Her smile at Dave was mechanical. She gestured, already turning away. “Miss Lockridge, my husband’s secretary.” She crossed the room to a small, glossy bar, where she found brandy and two more little snifters. She said, “Tell him what you’re working on, would you, Terry?”

  “Why ...” The girl had a nice, shy, high-school smile. Her voice was a whisper. “It’s a book. Of Fox’s—Mr. Olson’s stories. He used to tell them on the air, read them. I’m typing them up from his scripts.”

  Thorne Olson named a major New York publisher. “We sent them tapes of a few of the stories. They were wild about them. Terry’s just getting the copy into shape for the typesetters.”

  “Stories?” Dave sat on the desk corner and picked up the top script. A green-and-blue logo, KPIM, was printed in its upper-left-hand corner. The Fox Olson Show. He started to leaf through it. But Thorne came back and took it out of his hands and pushed brandy at him instead. She dropped the script back on the pile.

  “Later,” she said. “I’ll give you some scripts to take with you, if you like. Right now I want you to listen to me, please. We haven’t a lot of time.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m expecting . . . someone at four.” She turned to the girl. “Terry, we’ll be in your way. Suppose you take the rest of the day off?”

  The girl blinked at her, then gave a little so-what shrug, got up and took from a corner closet a white raincoat. Wasting no time, she put it on while she walked to the door. She threw Dave a small smile, gave Thorne Olson a look that might have meant anything or nothing, then went out and shut the door. They heard her feet go fast and young down the outside stairs.

  “Fox spoiled her.” Thorne covered the typewriter. “Of course, I’m letting her go. There’ll be nothing for her to do once the book is finished. If”—irony was heavy in her voice—“she ever finishes it. Unless I’m out here with her, she spends all her time mooning over Fox’s tapes. She adored him, of course.”

  “I gather a lot of people did,” Dave said.

  “Thousands.” She drew the curtains from a big window that looked down the canyon. The view today was full of muted colors, like a Sung landscape. A couch faced the window—deep, square-built, comfortable-looking. “Shall we sit down?” she said. Then, “No, wait. First, I want you to look at this room. Carefully. Go ahead.”

  He did. It was big and nearly square, ceiled and walled with perforated Celotex tile, soundproof, painted eggshell white to set off the pictures. Neat, bright, posterlike, they were signed “Fox Olson,” but they were very different from the looming stiff white skeleton thing above the fireplace in the house.

  Like the drapes and furniture, the carpeting was mottled autumn reds and yellows. Black cables snaked across it, leading from the elaborate tape-recording equipment to microphones that hung from glittering booms. There were guitars and cases for guitars, a spinet piano piled with music manuscript. T squares, tr
iangles, French curves glinted on an orange square of pegboard above a broad soft pine expanse of drafting table. Sleek, hand-rubbed Danish teak cabinets held art supplies, a hi-fi rig.

  He saved the books and records for last. There were lots of them, on handsomely carpentered shelves. The books ran to biographies of American writers. There were novels. Only the best. Not always the popular best but always the knowledgeable best. The records came as a surprise, considering what he’d heard on the Daffodil radio. There was no popular stuff. A lot of Mozart, a lot of the late romantics, Mahler, Bruckner, Sibelius. A lot of opera. But that was forgivable in a singer.

  He turned away. “All right.” He smiled. “It’s a nice layout.”

  Thorne sat watching him from a corner of the couch, her feet tucked up, an arm in its checked wool sleeve extended along the back of the couch, a cigarette burning in the fingers. She said, “It’s everything he ever wanted.”

  Dave walked toward her, brows raised.

  “After a lifetime of wanting,” she said. “Let me tell you about this man Fox Olson.”

  He let himself down on the other end of the couch and lit a cigarette and smoked it and sipped his brandy while she talked.

  “He had talent, intelligence, taste, sensitivity. He was good-looking. He had charm and a sense of humor. He could write, paint, sing, play, compose—”

  “A thousand and one admirers,” Dave said.

  “I was the first in line.” She smiled, maybe a little bitterly. “He was nineteen when I met him. I was a year younger. It was during the war. The aircraft factories—remember? I’d just graduated from high school. Here in Pima we were . . . out of things. All the excitement. I wanted to be in the middle. I ran away to Los Angeles and found a job. They were hiring anybody and everybody, you know. Lots of women, lots of girls. I riveted P-38s and Hudson bombers for Lockheed. Fox was a timekeeper.”

  “Why wasn’t he in the service?”

  Small lines appeared between her brows. She shook her head. “I don’t know. He never told me and I didn’t ask. I was just thankful. I was in love with him. He was the most romantic creature I could imagine. He was writing. He had a little room at the very top of an old frame house in Hollywood. Franklin Avenue. He’d work graveyard shift and, when he got home in the morning, write. He had an ancient Underwood and he hammered it as if he were beating down doors.”