They felt their way down the steps. Their shoes had thick silent soles, but these still crackled leaves now and then and snapped twigs. It wasn’t going to disturb O’Neil. But it mustn’t disturb the neighbors, either. Dave’s foot came down on some kind of big, dry seedpod. It burst with a sharp report. The dog barked again, but no human ear had heard, or if it had, it hadn’t roused its owner. They reached a deck fronting the house. Dave dug a penlight out of a jacket pocket and ran its beam quickly along the front of the house. Windows. Darkness beyond them. Cecil went to the end of the deck, turned a corner.
“Here,” he whispered.
Dave went to him. There was a door. He reached for his wallet. In the wallet he kept small blades helpful sometimes in opening locks. No wallet. “Damn,” he said.
“Ssh,” Cecil said. He went along the side of the house. Dave stayed where he was. Then he heard a thump, as if a knee had bumped the wall of the house. He went toward the sound. Cecil had disappeared through a small, high window. His long legs in pale jeans were just vanishing inside. Dave went back to the door, and in a moment locks clicked on its far side and the door swung open. Dave could see Cecil’s teeth grinning against the darkness.
“You know the bathroom window’s always open.”
“But my climbing days are over.” Dave stepped inside and closed the door. He went around the room, stumbling into furniture, bruising his shins, knees, thighs, closing curtains. He switched on a lamp. The furniture was rattan and wicker from Pier One. The stereo equipment was elaborate but most of it was just piled on the floor. The television set measured forty inches, a VCR on top of it, stacked with tapes. The room beyond showed drafting tables, with lots of paper and tagboard in big sheets, lots of plastic mounted alphabet strips in every conceivable typeface, thick loose-leaf catalogues, ad layouts hanging off the walls, colored paper samples, T-squares, triangles, French curves. A computer monitor turned them a blank face.
Cecil bent over a low wicker table and turned the pages of an investments magazine. “What are we looking for?”
“We’ll know when we find it,” Dave said.
“Anything connecting this O’Neil to Vaughn Thomas?”
“That too,” Dave said, and went through the dining room/office, pushed a swing door, and switched on a light in the kitchen. It had been handsomely remodeled, central burner deck, ovens mounted in the walls, rows of beautiful hanging pots and pans. But the fridge was full of supermarket frozen dinners. That didn’t tell Dave anything useful. He went to a bedroom where the bed awaited making up, the sheets in masculine brown stripes. So why did he smell a feminine perfume? The louvered white doors of a walk-in closet were partway open. He opened them all the way. The perfume gusted out. In the closet hung clothes for a young man, yes, but also a woman’s clothes, dresses, blouses, slacks. Not many. Enough for emergencies. All peach color. He turned away, frowned, turned back again, bent, picked up off the closet floor a camouflage coverall. New. Worn maybe once. Combat boots lay on the closet floor too. Also new. A helmet with the usual shield to protect the eyes. He knelt and searched, pushing aside shoes, tennis rackets, Frisbees. No paintball gun. He was poking around the bathroom and finding nothing when a car door closed up on the road. He pulled the closet doors near shut again, pocketed a closeup of O’Neil from among twenty snapshots stuck into the mirror over the dresser, then switched off the light. To Cecil, who was pawing through file drawers in the office, he said, “Let’s go—and don’t forget the attaché case.”
In the broad bed on the sleeping loft, Cecil sat propped against pillows, watching the late news on Channel Three. Beside him, back turned, Dave dozed. The familiar voices of the pretty anchor people scarcely reached him. He was almost asleep. Then he heard a cry. Mr. Kaminsky? He looked wildly around the leafy West L.A. patio. Kaminsky was shouting for help. But where was he? Dave flung off the covers and was on his feet before he realized he was dreaming. Cecil switched off the television set. “Hey. Easy, Dave. What’s wrong?”
“Kaminsky.” Dave sat on the side of the bed. He was panting. His heart raced. “I dreamed about him.”
“You heard his name on the news,” Cecil said. “Apartment manager? Where Vaughn Thomas lived? He’s dead. Fell from a second-floor balcony tonight, broke his neck.”
Dave turned and peered into Cecil’s face. “Dead?”
“Police searched the apartment earlier. When they got called tonight, door was open, furniture shifted around. They figure he was straightening up. No one saw him fall.”
Dave laughed hopelessly. “Poor Kaminsky. He was so excited about being part of a murder case.”
“Was he—part of it, I mean?”
“It surprises hell out of me,” Dave said.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Joseph Hansen
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-1678-9
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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THE DAVE BRANDSTETTER MYSTERIES
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