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

by Joseph Hansen

  “Who is it?”

  “Coffee, Mr. Brandstetter.”

  “Good.” He wanted that. He flapped into the bathrobe. Under his feet the floor felt clammy. He opened the door. Beyond the heavy white arches the rain-drenched leafage of the patio garden sparkled in sunlight. He squinted. Between him and the dazzle, a young Japanese smiled and held out a black tray painted with Mexican flowers and birds. On the tray steamed a painted pottery jug. There was a cup to match, a spoon, packets of sugar and powdered cream. Dave didn’t take the tray. He said, “Your name’s Ito, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Dave jerked his head. “Come in. I want to talk to you.” The boy came in and put the tray down on a coffee table that had patterned tiles set into its top. Dave shut the door. “You worked for Fox Olson once, right?”

  Dave’s portable typewriter stood in its case on the floor by the coffee table. The boy looked at it, then at him. “Are you a reporter?” he asked. “I can’t tell you much. I only worked for him one day.”

  “I’m an insurance investigator.” Dave picked up the crumpled cigarette pack from the bedside stand. He held it out. The boy shook his head. Dave set a cigarette in his own mouth. “Last Christmas, was it?”

  “That’s right.” The boy took a matchbook from his white jacket and lit the cigarette. Quick and graceful. “Mrs. Olson hired me. As a surprise for him.”

  “Thanks.” Dave bent and poured coffee from the jug. It smelled great. “Was he surprised?”

  “Very.” The boy grinned. He had beautiful teeth. “He almost fell down.”

  “But he wasn’t pleased? Look, if you get another cup . . .”

  “It’s okay,” Ito said. “I’ve already had enough coffee to surf in.” He had no Japanese accent. Strictly California. He blinked thoughtfully. “He seemed pleased. Mrs. Olson told me he was. That was Christmas Day.” He raised his shoulders, held his hands out palms up. “Next morning—bop! You’re fired.”

  “No reasons given?” Dave sat down on the edge of the bed, blew at the coffee, sipped it.

  “No reasons.” Ito smiled. “Just a very fat check. Not two weeks’ wages. Two months’. Mrs. Olson said she was very sorry, she’d made a mistake. She’d thought Mr. Olson would want me working for him. He didn’t.”

  “Whose check? His?” The ashtray was full of butts. When he tapped ashes into it, Ito took it and emptied it into the frayed Indian basket by the dresser.

  “Hers,” he said, putting the ashtray back. “She handled the money. I heard somebody talking about that, Christmas Day.”

  “What else happened that day?”

  The boy shrugged. “They had a lot of people in. It was a beautiful day. Clear and sunny like this. Only dry and warm. I was really happy. I mean, it’s a nice house, beautiful surroundings. The kitchen was perfect. That’s what bugged me worst. I never got a chance to cook a real meal there.”

  “You like to cook?” Dave asked. “You don’t cook here.”

  “No. But it’s a good job. I’m saving my chips. When I get enough I’ll open my own restaurant.”

  “The Olsons paid you well?”

  “Better than any job I ever had. And I liked them. Especially him. He was somebody else, man. Always, like, ‘If it’s convenient’ and ‘Don’t go to any extra trouble’ and ‘When you have time’ and ‘Aren’t you getting tired? Would you like a break? I can look after things. . . .’ Always jumping up to help me whenever I came in sight with a tray. They were mostly out in the garden and around the pool. Even if he was singing or something, he’d take time to ask me if I was okay, did I need anything. Great guy.”

  “Except he fired you,” Dave said.

  Ito laughed. “Yeah. And they talk about inscrutable Orientals.”

  “No incidents with him? Arguments? Criticism?”

  “No.” The boy frowned. “Unless . . . I don’t know whether you’d call it an incident, exactly. But after I got everything cleared up that night, real late, I was getting ready to sack out. I’d just had a shower. He knocked at my door and called my name and I said, ‘Come in.’ It was probably two-thirty, three by now. It’d been a long day. And he was kind of stoned. He opened the door and for a minute he just stood there staring at me. I was drying myself off. Then he said, ‘Excuse me,’ and started to back out.

  “I asked if there was anything more I could do for him. He looked kind of funny for a minute. He didn’t answer. Just stared with his mouth half open. Then finally he gave a smile like maybe he was feeling sick or something. He said, ‘No, thanks, Ito. It was a very nice Christmas. . . .’ And he turned and bumped into the door and mumbled, ‘Thanks for all you did . . .’or something like that, and he was gone.” The boy knelt, picked up the scattered scripts. “That was the last time we ever talked.”

  “It’s a small town,” Dave said. “You must have run into each other now and then.”

  “No. I don’t move in the country club set. My speed is the movies and the bowling alley.” Ito tamped the edges of the scripts on the dresser top and laid them in a neat stack. “If I was going to see him, it would almost have to be here. It was. Only a couple weeks ago. He drove in in that white T-bird of his. To see a guest. Guy from France. I was raking the garden. Mr. Olson passed me. He nodded and smiled. That was all.” Ito frowned and sighed. “Just the same, I’m sorry he’s dead. He was the nicest guy I ever expect to meet. . . .”

  In the sunlit Daffodil Café, while Dave ate scrambled eggs and fresh country sausage, the little yellow plastic radio played Fox Olson again. Telling one of his stories this time. A lot was missing when you read them to yourself. The book would be funny. But a better idea would have been to put the stories on disks. Olson’s easy, dry delivery gave them a—what word did he want?—drollness that print never could.

  On the stools along the counter, at the tables in the booths, truck drivers, shopkeepers, ranch and vineyard hands grinned and chuckled and guffawed, forgetting the good coffee, the bacon and buckwheat cakes, the buttery breakfast rolls growing cold in front of them.

  The story was about Aunt Minnie Husk, who, when the Cottonwood Corners water tower was toppled by beavers who’d mistaken the props for saplings, used the tank as a mold in which to bake the world’s biggest cupcake, and how the resulting invasion of the town by millions of mice had been solved by the providential arrival of owls, “who gorged themselves till they were too heavy to fly. They could only sit on the ground and belch. . . .”

  Dave had read it and laughed at it last night. He laughed now, all over again. Next to him sat a pair of high-school girls, Cokes in front of them, books in their laps. One was pretty and dark and wore braces on her teeth. The other was red-haired, freckled and fat. Pinned to each of their blouses was a big orange-and-blue campaign button: OLSON FOR MAYOR. When the story ended and a cigarette commercial twanged and everybody began eating again, Dave nodded at the buttons.

  “Isn’t it a little late for that?”

  The pretty one gave him a cold look. “No. Everyone in school’s wearing them. We loved him.”

  “Anyway,” the freckled one said, “we don’t think he’s dead.”

  Dave nearly choked on his coffee. “You don’t? Why not?”

  The pretty one said dramatically, “Because his body was never found. Only his car.”

  “So I heard.” Dave lit a cigarette. The tiny counter ashtray was yellow plastic. It looked flammable. He shook the match out carefully. “But if he’s not dead, what happened to him?”

  The freckled girl was poking a pair of bent paper straws among the melting ice chips in the bottom of her glass, noisily sucking up the last drops of sweetness. She stopped that for a second to say, “He was kidnapped.”

  “You’re kidding. By whom? What for?”

  “Mayor Chalmers, of course.” The pretty girl was disgusted to have to explain anything so obvious. “Till the election’s over.”

  “Come on, Lou Ann.” The fat girl got off her stool. “If I’m late again, my mo
m will confiscate my tapes.”

  Picking up her books, Lou Ann told Dave, “Doreen’s got every Fox Olson broadcast—”

  “Till school started.” Doreen made the correction over her shoulder, hurrying toward the Daffodil’s screen door. There was a lot of her. All of it jiggled.

  The street was as dry now as if it had never rained. By afternoon it would be dusty. Cars parked on the bias in Pima. He nosed his to the high curb between a pair of identical, mud-crusted pickup trucks piled with empty orange crates. The building he faced was old red brick. Two stories. On the downstairs windows peeling gilt lettering read PIMA VALLEY SUN. When he was on the sidewalk he saw through the windows that the paint inside was time-darkened, the desks and woodwork nicked. The morning was already warm and the front door stood open and sounds came out, jangle of telephones, stammer of two-finger typing, chitter of linotypes. He passed. He wanted the other door, the one with the KPIM logo on it.

  He went in and climbed straight stairs into air-conditioned silence. The place smelled of newness and success. It glowed with clean light from fluorescent tubes masked by frosted glass. Underfoot the blue-green speckled carpeting was deep. The white walls and ceiling were cushiony with thick, fibrous plaster. Long rectangles of double plate glass looked into studios and control rooms where equipment glinted, records turned, shirt-sleeved men laughed without sound. Down the hall, somebody used a door. Thick and heavy, it sighed, closing.

  In Hale McNeil’s office floor-to-ceiling drapes, crisp blue-and-green-striped, shut out the view of ugly Main Street. The furniture was burnished steel and saddle leather. On the white wall hung a big Peter Hurd painting. McNeil wore buckskin-colored corduroy on his big frame, pockets leather-edged, modified cowboy style, expensive. His face was tanned and rugged, his dark hair handsomely gray at the temples. Dark brows and lashes made his blue eyes startling. The eyes mocked Dave.

  “Thorne tells me you don’t think Fox is dead.” Dave gave a small amused shrug. “Neither does the student body of Pima High. None of them at your house?”

  “Grown and gone,” McNeil said. “But . . . I suppose at that age he’d have worn the fool button. Probably tacked the poster up in his room too.”

  “Which, of course, his mother would have loved.”

  McNeil’s face hardened. “His mother and I were divorced when Tad was fifteen months old. The reason? She was a drunk and a tramp. Prettiest girl in the graduating class of Pima High School, June 1939.” His mouth twisted. “A drunk and a tramp.”

  “Who raised the boy? You, by yourself?”

  “My folks. They did their best. So did I. But . . . there’s an old saying: Wash a dog, comb a dog, still a dog. I don’t know what’s become of him. Don’t care.”

  “But you do know about Mayor Chalmers’s kidnap plot?”

  “All. And now you come along with something even wilder. Fox cracked up his car to make it look as if he’d been killed, and walked away from everything. Why?”

  “I keep asking,” Dave said. “Somebody will tell me.”

  “I hope so. Nothing would please me more than to have him back here.” McNeil glanced at his watch, pushed a button on his desk. Music came into the room. Fox Olson’s guitar, Fox Olson’s voice. Another harmless, tuneful, mildly clever little Western. Probably Olson’s own. McNeil let it play itself out, then, when an announcer began talking, switched off the speaker. “I can use all of that I can get. You’d know what I mean if you’d seen this place a year ago. Dingy, like downstairs. I mean, we were broadcasting, we were making a profit, but—”

  “Why did you cancel it after the car crash?”

  McNeil’s eyes were steady on him. “You know the answer to that. It was a matter of taste.”

  “But the listeners didn’t figure it that way.”

  “As far as they were concerned it was all a dark plot.” McNeil laughed soundlessly and shook his head. “Funny as hell, you know. I mean, the old ladies hollering about a Fox Olson blackout on KPIM, the kids with their cheap TV-inspired kidnap plot, and now you. I mean, if you’d known Fox . . . He was open and candid as a child. He had no more dark side to him than—than the sun.”

  “What about Mayor Chalmers?” Dave wondered. “Does he have a dark side?”

  “Lloyd?” McNeil threw back his head and laughed. It took him a minute to straighten his face. “No, Mr. Brand-stetter. I’m afraid not. Lloyd’s all shoulders. AH”—he thrust out his jaw and made his voice gruff—” ‘Let’s get the God damn job done!’ The type that built the West. Lloyd could no more connive than he could hook doilies. Anyway, he never took Fox’s running against him seriously. I doubt if he even noticed.”

  “Did you take it seriously?”

  Amused, McNeil gave a quick headshake. “No. It was a gag to start with. Fox was rambling on one morning on the air about a mayoralty race in Cottonwood Corners—his imaginary small town, you know?”

  Dave nodded. “Mrs. Olson lent me some scripts.”

  “Great, aren’t they?” McNeil asked it mechanically. “Well, it gave me an idea. Just a promotional idea was all. Why not start a campaign over the station, Fox Olson for mayor?”

  “And it got out of hand?”

  “Did you ever have a kite pull you right off the ground when you were a kid? Then you know the feeling. But . . .” He shrugged. “We decided to go along with the gag. Fox went through the signing-up routines. And for the first time in the memory of a lot of the younger citizens of Pima, Lloyd Chalmers had somebody running against him for his office. His. Believe me. He built half this town. Nobody’s going to disabuse him of the idea that he owns it. Not soon.”

  “But . . . he didn’t take the campaign seriously?”

  “Ask him,” McNeil said. “He’ll laugh at you.”

  “Was anybody going to vote for him? Olson, I mean.”

  McNeil chuckled. “Just everybody old enough.”

  “And then what? Did he want to be mayor of Pima?”

  “I think he did.” McNeil narrowed his eyes, tugged his lower lip. “Yes, I think he got to taking it kind of seriously after a while. But . . .” He shook his head, gave a crooked smile and stood up. “How could he?” McNeil walked to a filing cabinet, pulled open a drawer, brought out a fat manila folder. He laid it on the desk in front of Dave. “Look at these.”

  Expensive stationery. Lavish multicolored imprints. Dave turned over letter after letter. Radio. Would Fox Olson come and guest for a week with Arthur Godfrey on his morning show, tell some of his hilarious stories, sing a few songs? Television. Would Fox Olson do a segment for Ed Sullivan? Would Fox Olson consider dramatizing the Cottonwood Corners stories for a series, would he star in them himself? Records. Would Fox Olson record a dozen of his songs? Las Vegas. Would Fox Olson appear twice nightly in the Rodeo Room? Concert management firms. Motion picture studios . . . Dave closed the folder and looked up.

  McNeil asked, “Where would he get time to be mayor?”

  “Was he going to do all these things?” Dave tapped the folder.

  “Are you kidding? My Christ, man, Fox Olson had been slaving a lifetime for success. Before he got this program I’d swear he was a man ready to put a bullet through his head. He’d given up. If it wasn’t for his wife—” McNeil broke off. “Sorry. The answer is yes, he was going to do all these things. The record contract was already signed. With Dot. The rest of it was waiting till we could figure out a way to find time. See, Fox refused to do anything that would interfere with what he considered his obligation to me. KPIM came first. Hell, he hadn’t even taken a vacation in a year and a half.”

  “I see,” Dave said. Then, “What about the man from France? What kind of an offer was that?”

  “How?” McNeil looked blank.

  “Olson spoke to a man from France a couple of weeks ago. Somebody who’d come here to see him. Stayed at the Pima Motor Inn. Olson talked to him there. He didn’t say anything to you about it?”

  “Not that I remember.” McNeil’s phone rang and he re
ached for it. “Excuse me.”

  “I’ll go,” Dave said. And went.

  8

  The sun was hot. On a flat, smooth stretch of lawn a gaunt old man threw his cane. Hard and a long way. Two dogs chased it, big lean dogs, hounds of some kind. Rough blue-gray coats. They moved clumsily, like rusty machines. But fast. One of them got the cane and came back with it to the old man. It was a heavy cane but in the dog’s jaws it looked fragile. The other dog stood where the cane had been and made a hoarse, rumbling sound that was supposed to be barking. The old man took the cane from the first dog and grabbed its collar. He heaved the cane to the other dog. Holding the collar hampered his throw so the cane didn’t go as far this time. The free dog shambled to it, picked it up, came back with it.

  Dave had been following the housekeeper, a middle-aged Mexican woman, square-built, the color and hardness of mahogany. There was flour on her hands, her apron, a streak of it in her hair, and when they came through the kitchen there was the smell of baking. Now as they neared the old man Dave could hear him breathing hard. The Mexican woman said, “The cane is to help you walk. You will kill yourself, throwing—”

  “Oh, go back in the house.” The old man spoke without even glancing at her. “Leave me be.” He bent and took the cane from the second dog. “God damned rain kept me penned up inside for ten days. Man’s got to have exercise. Dogs got to have exercise.” He threw the cane again. It cut the air with a whining sound. The dogs creaked after it. The old man turned, grinning like a kid, a sick kid. “Hell, Carmelita, I never felt better in my—” He saw Dave. His face kept the smile the way an old barn keeps a sign. “Howdy?” It was a question.

  Dave told him who he was and what he wanted.

  Loomis’s eyes went prairie flat. “Clear off,” he said. “Git. Go home and tell your outfit my son-in-law is dead.”