“What?” Thomas’s glass tilted. Whiskey spattered his trousers. He stared at Dave, appalled. “Kill him? It was an accident. The police said so. A deer hunter—”
Dave set down his glass and rose. “If it was an accident, why did Jemmie take Mike and run? She loved Vaughn. Why didn’t she stay to see him buried?”
Thomas seemed to wither in his chair. He nodded bleakly. “She was afraid. I could see it in her eyes, as soon as I told her he’d been killed. I knew the look. Vaughn had it too when he came back from wherever he’d been those months. He was suntanned, trim, healthy. It was plain he’d had a good jolt of what he liked best—God’s great outdoors. But you could see in his eyes he was afraid, Mr. Brandstetter. Deathly afraid.”
“It looks like he had reason, doesn’t it?” Dave said.
Thomas’s voice trembled on the edge of tears. “I wanted to believe it was an accident,” he said.
3
DETECTIVE SERGEANT JOEY SAMUELS was a pale man, skin, hair, eyes—always had been. Two years ago, trying to save Dave’s life, on a rainy day on a steep Hollywood side street, he’d taken a bullet in his chest. It had come close to killing him, kept him hospitalized for months and an invalid at home for a long time after that.
That Samuels should trail Dave on a case to prevent his being harmed had been Captain Ken Barker’s idea—not Dave’s. So it wasn’t rational for Dave to blame himself when the crazy kid he was pursuing had shot Samuels—it wasn’t rational, but he’d blamed himself all the same. He’d gone often to the hospital to see Samuels. He’d visited him at home, taking him books, records, elegant foods, flowers for Sophie, his wife, toys for his small son, Pepper.
But this was the first time he’d run into Samuels at his green metal desk in the wide green detective’s room at the Glass House—LAPD headquarters downtown. The place was noisy with telephones, typewriters, clicking computer keyboards, whining printers, slamming file drawers, and the loud voices of police officers. And that Samuels looked as if he’d never had a day’s pain made Dave feel better. Samuels smiled, stood up, shook Dave’s hand, sat down.
“Lieutenant Leppard had to go out. He left the file with me.” He laid a pale, thick hand on the thin folder in front of him. Around it lay stacks of files, loose forms, photographs. It was a busy desk. They were all busy. Los Angeles had more murders in a month than most countries in the Western world tallied up in a year. Weekends were nightmares now—eight to a dozen drive-by gang shootings from Friday night to the dawn of Monday morning. And it was getting worse. “The bullet blew half his head away,” Samuels said, “but there’s no way except accident that bullet will ever be found in those woods. So we don’t know what kind of gun it was—high-powered, large-caliber, that’s it.”
“Did you know he was living in West L.A. with a young woman called Jemmie, and her five-, six-year-old boy?”
Samuels opened the folder, bent and blinked at it. “The address in his wallet was in Beverly Hills. His father and mother’s house.”
“Stepmother,” Dave said. “Sylvia—she runs Thomas Marketing. The old man wanted him there, but Sylvia took against the girl, so Vaughn went off with her to live on his own—though he worked for Sylvia for a while.”
“Yeah—we got that part. Then he went to work for Channel Three, selling advertising.” Samuels smiled a pale smile. “That Sylvia, she’s a dynamo,” Samuels said. “But she didn’t say anything about the girl. Or about her son—stepson—not living at home.” He tilted his head. “You don’t expect lies when you go to tell parents their son has been shot to death. Do you?”
“You expect lies wherever you go,” Dave said. “In this case, I wouldn’t attach much importance to it. She hated the girl, was furious and ashamed at the boy she’d raised taking up with what she called a redneck. She wouldn’t want strangers to know, especially not official strangers, and she wouldn’t want it in a police report, where it could be picked up by the six o’clock news.”
Samuels laughed wryly and shook his head.
“But you have to look at that apartment.” Dave gave him the address. “There might be a lead there. Jemmie ran away for a reason. Vaughn’s father went and told her the bad news right after you’d told him. He said it terrified her. The manager said she was out of there in twenty minutes, running scared. The taxi driver told me she kept looking back, afraid someone was following her to the bus station.”
Samuels frowned, tilted his head. “She figured the one who killed her boyfriend was going to kill her too?”
“And she was probably right,” Dave said.
“Why—what the hell had they done?” Samuels said.
“Did his folks tell you,” Dave asked, “that on his twenty-first birthday, Vaughn collected five thousand dollars from his late mother’s estate and took off for points unknown and stayed away for three or four months?”
“Yeah, I guess somebody mentioned it,” Samuels said.
Dave nodded at the file. “Look in there, and see if they by any chance dropped a place name. They told me Vaughn wouldn’t tell them where he’d been.”
Samuels made to turn over a page in the folder, then closed it instead. “I don’t have to look. I remember. They said he wouldn’t talk about it.”
“He brought the girl and the little boy back with him from wherever it was,” Dave said. “Steven Thomas said Vaughn looked like he’d spent those months outdoors. Kaminsky called Jemmie a country girl. O’Neil, Mrs. Thomas’s assistant, told me her father breeds horses.”
Samuels sighed. “We could check lists of horse breeders, if we knew her name. Jemmie what?”
“Her father’s name wouldn’t help. She was married—probably to a big, rangy, long-haired ranch-hand type who came and raised hell at the apartment one day. Kaminsky heard Jemmie call him Dallas. But it could be a first name. Anyway, Jemmie never called herself Dallas. Always Mrs. Thomas. Even before she filed for divorce.”
“I wish people wouldn’t keep secrets,” Samuels said.
“I’ve got to find her.” Dave read his watch and rose. “Before Vaughn’s killer can find her and kill her too.”
“We’ll search the apartment.” Samuels reached for his telephone. “I’ll let you know if we find anything.”
Dave ran out of energy with unexpected suddenness these days. When the Jaguar, scraping its underside, lurched down off crooked, slanting Horseshoe Canyon Trail into the brick forecourt of his house, he was tired. He parked the car as always beside the row of French doors that made the front wall of the front building of this oddly laid-out place, turned off the engine, and sat for a minute dully, trying to think of something to like about growing old. He couldn’t think of anything.
With a sigh, and a little stiffly, he climbed out of the car, closed the door, and locked it, the motions mechanical. The brush and scrub oak that edged the brick paving needed trimming again. He liked them overgrown, but there was, he supposed, a limit. Stumbling a little on the uneven bricks, he walked around the shingled end of the front building. Fallen leaves from the oak that spread gnarled limbs to shade the main courtyard crackled under his soles. He hadn’t eaten lunch, so he veered toward the cookshack, its low roof sheltered by tall eucalyptus—then changed his mind. He lacked what it took even to decide what to eat, let alone to fix it.
In the back building—it had once been a stable and it still, in rainy weather, smelled faintly of horses—he trudged over beautiful Navajo rugs, past the couch that faced the big, raised hearth fireplace of distressed brick, past his desk and computer and files, to the bar, where he took an icy glass from the little refrigerator and built a double martini for himself. Maybe it would revive him. Maybe it would make him hungry. Then he wearily rummaged records from the files, sat at the desk, put on his reading glasses, and began phoning about his stolen credit cards. It took half an hour. The martini stunned him. He had what it took only to unplug the phone, climb the raw pine stairs to the sleeping loft, rid himself of jacket, trousers, shoes, socks, tie, an
d fall, already half asleep, onto the bed. He’d had a glimpse of blue through the skylight then.
When the hammering of the door knocker below woke him, the sky was streaked with red. He tried to call out, but only a rasp came. Blinking, struggling to get upright and swing his feet to the floor, he cleared his throat and shouted, “Just a minute, please. I’m coming.” His shirt was rumpled and sweat-soaked. He peeled it off, found a clean sweatshirt in a drawer, pulled this on, kicked into sweat pants. In the mirror over the unpainted pine chest of drawers, he saw his hair was rumpled. He couldn’t locate a comb. To hell with it. He thumped barefoot down the stairs.
He blinked at the young man with attaché case standing outside the door in the sunset glow. “O’Neil?” he said.
“Sorry to bother you.” The olive-skinned youth eyed Dave worriedly. “Are you okay?”
“I was just having myself a nap,” Dave said. “Come in. It’s all right.” He backed up, gestured at the room. O’Neil came in, a little hesitantly, and Dave let the door stand open. The air outside seemed cooler than in here. That was the effect of the sun striking the glass of the skylights in warm weather. “I sleep too much. Sit down.” He pointed to one of two red leather wing chairs flanking the fireplace. Bookshelves loomed to the rafters beside them. “It’s quite a drive up here. Like a drink?”
“That’s very kind.” O’Neil set his attaché case by the door and went to sit in the wing chair. “I don’t drink. Have you got a soda?”
Dave went back to the bar. O’Neil called, “I live in Burbank, so this place is really on my way home. And I wanted to explain some things to you. You must have gotten a pretty bad impression of Syl—of Mrs. Thomas today.”
Dave laughed. “I hardly had time.”
“This Shopwise campaign is terribly important to her,” O’Neil said. “It’s been terrifically successful, but it’s been a lot of work. Thomas Marketing will be among the top ten in the country now. But it’s almost killed her.” Dave handed him a tall glass of ice cubes and a cold can of Coke. The young man smiled. “And me too. All of us. Talk about tension. Talk about stress.” He looked at the can and glass in his hands. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Dave sat on the couch. He’d brought orange juice for himself. Plain. No booze. It tasted good.
“Vaughn quit because of the pressure,” O’Neil said. “He hated that campaign. That’s why he went to work at Channel Three.”
“Was that it?” Dave said.
“Yes, that was it.” O’Neil’s hand shook, pouring the drink. He glanced at Dave sharply as he set down the red-and-white can. “Did Steve tell you it was something else?”
“We didn’t talk about it,” Dave said. “Steve did say Vaughn didn’t like desk work. He liked the outdoors. You told me Jemmie’s father breeds horses. What else do you know about her?”
O’Neil studied Dave puzzledly for a few seconds. “Why is she important? I only met her once or twice, and we never really talked much, but she didn’t strike me as very bright. A really nothing girl. I don’t know what he saw in her.”
“She’s important because she ran away,” Dave said. “It wasn’t for nothing. Either she knows who killed Vaughn and figures that person knows she knows. Or she knows the reason Vaughn was killed, and thinks the killer will guess that and come after her. Or both. What did Vaughn tell you about her? Anything—I don’t care how trivial.”
O’Neil seemed dazed for a second, then shrugged. “Only that he was crazy about her. She was the sweetest, prettiest, most honest girl he’d ever met. But he and I hardly ever saw each other except at the store, and when I’m at the store, I’m pretty much always with Sylvia. And he wouldn’t mention Jemmie where Sylvia could hear and make a comment.”
“All right,” Dave said. “He didn’t ever happen to mention Jemmie’s last name? Her father’s name? Her husband’s? She was married, you know.”
Neil smiled thinly. “Mike was five or six years old. He couldn’t have been Vaughn’s.”
“What was his father’s name? Dallas?”
O’Neil tilted his head. “No … I never heard that.”
“Well, then, did Vaughn ever say where he met her?”
“No, but it had to be the place he disappeared to those months after he turned twenty-one, didn’t it?”
“Most places have names,” Dave said.
“All I know is, he was excited because he’d had a chance to do real military training there,” O’Neil said. “Combat training. It was brutal, he said. Crawling through the mud, swinging over streams on ropes, climbing cliffs, getting shot at with real ammo. Days all alone being hunted down.” O’Neil made a face, drank some of his Coke, laughed sourly. “You should have seen his eyes shine when he told me about it. What a weird kid. It killed him he’d missed Vietnam.”
“He missed the Wehrmacht too,” Dave said. “But he tried—got expelled from college for painting swastikas.”
“Steve admitted that, did he? I’m surprised.”
Dave went to find cigarettes and lighter in his desk. “He claims the campus police were malicious, but Steve’s lawyers got Vaughn off. Vaughn couldn’t be anti-Semitic. Half the Thomas’s friends are Jews. Sylvia is Jewish.”
“Yeah, well,” O’Neil said, “that’s a story in itself. Vaughn didn’t know from Jewish when Steve married her—he was only eight. But he hated her from the start, nobody could take his mother’s place, and later, in junior high school, little Vaughn got caught vandalizing a Jewish cemetery. I’ll bet Steve didn’t fill you in on that, did he?”
“Tipping over tombstones?” Dave said.
O’Neil nodded. “And painting the walls with yellow six-pointed stars.” He tilted the glass up, drained it, ice cubes rattling. “Poor Sylvia.” He filled the glass again, the soda fizzing. “And Steve claims she was a wicked stepmother. Claims she hated Vaughn.”
Dave drank from his orange juice. “She didn’t?”
“It was the other way around, isn’t that obvious? But he was a child, Sylvia was an adult. She was patient and understanding and smiled and tried to win him over, didn’t she? Baked cookies for him, took him to Knott’s, Disneyland, Sea World. Wore herself out. Hell, Mr. Brandstetter, he wouldn’t have had any parenting at all if it wasn’t for Syl. Sylvia. Mrs. Thomas, I mean. Old Steve had plenty of time and charm to strew around among his clients, but he could forget about Vaughn for months on end. The kid needed him. Wasn’t that why he did the rotten things he did? To try to attract his dad’s attention?”
“I don’t subscribe to Psychology Today,” Dave said. “In my experience, some people just turn rotten early, Neil. It’s how they are.”
“I took a minute at lunchtime to check you out. And you’re very, very big time.” O’Neil’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you investigating Vaughn’s death? He wasn’t at Channel Three long enough to qualify for group insurance.”
“Right.” Dave smiled. “I figured you were too shrewd to believe that for long.”
O’Neil scowled. “You lied? Why? Who for?”
“For someone who doesn’t accept that Vaughn’s death was an accident. I can’t give you my client’s name. That’s confidential. But I’m sure it would surprise you.” Dave grinned. “I know damned well it would surprise Vaughn.”
O’Neil stared for a long moment, puzzled, wary. He was pale. He read his watch, set down his glass so hastily it almost fell over. He grabbed for it, straightened it, stood up. “I have to go. Sylvia expects me back tonight.” He tried for a smile and missed, then went away down the room at a run. The door that had stood open slammed after him.
Dave plugged in the telephone on the desk and it rang.
“We gave that apartment a thorough going-over,” Joey Samuels said. “We didn’t find much. Wornout pantyhose, a plastic tricycle.” While the police detective talked, Cecil came in the door. He passed Dave, touching his shoulder, hung his jacket on the hat tree by the bar, got a bottle of Beck’s from the refrigerator. Samuels said, “A paint
ball gun and ammo. The jungle suits they wear to play those action combat games. Boots, helmets, belts.”
“A paintball gun,” Dave said. “No real guns?”
“He stuck to make-believe—war magazines, you know?”
“What about the mailing labels on the magazines?”
“No good—they didn’t come through the mail.”
“Telephone bills?” Dave said. “They’re helpful.”
“They didn’t have a telephone,” Samuels said. “But all the normal papers—auto registration, bank statements, sales receipts, canceled checks—all those were gone. She must have taken them with her.”
“Those big shoulder bags have their uses,” Dave said.
“A black transvestite hooker in Hollywood hit me with one once,” Samuels said. “I heard bells for a week.”
Dave laughed. “Thanks,” he said, and hung up.
Cecil sat on a corner of the desk, pointed with the green bottle, and asked, “Who belongs to the attaché case?”
Cecil parked his flame-painted, blue-carpeted, picture-windowed van on a steep, twisty hillside street in Burbank, switched off the engine, switched off the lights. It was quiet here, and dark, untrimmed trees hanging over the narrow, tar-patched paving, screening out the scant street-lighting. Bungalows lurked among the trees, below the road on one side, uphill on the other. Clapboard, some of them, some stucco, none of them new. It wasn’t late. The windows glowed. When Dave got out of the van and closed the door, a dog barked somewhere. But no human voices sounded. Everybody was indoors watching television. Cecil climbed out on his side of the van, brought out the attaché case, closed his door. He stood beside Dave, looking down wooden steps that led between thick brush into darkness.
“Looks like he still isn’t home,” he said.
Dave had tried to telephone Neil O’Neil, at work, at home, and got no answer. He’d heated pastrami, piled it thick on sour rye bread, and they’d eaten supper at the big scoured deal table in the cookshack while they watched Channel Three’s six o’clock news. Cecil’s segment on the Combat Zone looked good, sounded good. He was pleased with it. Now that he’d been promoted, he was a producer. That meant he was still a field reporter but had to work twice as hard. The pay was better but not two times better. It didn’t matter. What mattered was, he was getting somewhere. He was black, and getting somewhere in television. After the news, Dave stretched an arm up for the yellow telephone attached to a cupboard in the cookshack and tried to reach O’Neil again. Still no answer. Now in the dark, standing beside O’Neil’s mailbox at the road edge in Burbank, he said, “That’s what I was hoping. Come on.”
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