Gravedigger

by Joseph Hansen

  Salazar held the receiver to his ear. He punched the phone buttons with the rubber end of a yellow pencil. He asked Dave, “Marks or scars?”

  “The tip of one ear is missing. The informant doesn’t remember which ear. He’s just a neighbor kid.”

  Salazar relayed Westover’s description to someone in an office who had to do with keeping track of unidentified corpses. None of the unidentified corpses on hand fitted the description. Salazar tried another number and told someone about the Rolls. He waited a long time, receiver trapped at his ear by his shoulder, drank coffee, finished his cigarette, snubbed out the cigarette in a square glass ashtray heaped with short, yellow-stained butts. He said “Yes” into the receiver, listened some more, grunted “Thanks” and replaced the receiver. “No abandoned or smashed-up Rollses, either,” he said.

  “Because it isn’t in the garage,” Dave said, “doesn’t have to mean Westover drove it away. A car like that? Why didn’t somebody steal it? The garage is padlocked, but that doesn’t signify. He could be in the house tied up and gagged. He could be in there murdered. It’s an expensive house in an expensive neighborhood. Why didn’t somebody break in, kill him, plunder the place, and steal the car?”

  “Because that’s not the obvious explanation,” Salazar said. “The obvious explanation is that the man has huge debts he can’t pay. He was grabbing at straws, trying to defraud your insurance company. When it didn’t pay off right away, he packed up and cleared out.”

  “His son disappeared at the same time,” Dave said. “Eighteen, nineteen. Name of Lyle. Music student.”

  “What are you saying now?” Salazar asked. “That the son killed him and drove off with the family car?”

  “Off the record,” Dave said, “no. But if I said yes for the record, would you send a team out there?”

  “Look at this mess.” Salazar picked up and dropped the loose stack of files, papers, photographs, on his desk. One of the photographs slid to the floor on Dave’s side. He bent and picked it up. A middle-aged black in a Hawaiian shirt lay in a leakage of blood by a back-alley trash module. Dave laid the photo on the desk. The black’s bulging eyes stared at him. He looked as if the last thing he could imagine was being dead. Salazar said, “We had one thousand five hundred and thirty-two homicides in this county in the last eight months.” He tried to straighten the papers. “You haven’t even got a crime. Why won’t Westover be back tomorrow? Why won’t the kid? Have you got another cigarette?”

  Dave gave him another cigarette.

  Romano’s was crowded for lunch. It was dark after the sunglare of the street, and inside the door he blundered against backs and elbows. The bar at the front was small, couldn’t hold a lot of patrons, and latecomers waiting for tables had to stand out here by the reservation desk with their drinks, if they’d been so lucky as to get drinks. Narrowing his eyes, trying to adjust them to the lack of light, Dave looked for Mel Fleischer. Mel was late too. Dave excused himself and edged between the drinkers, hoping Amanda had got here on time. Max Romano would have held the corner table for Dave forever, but Dave had finally talked him out of that. Dave’s showing up was too often chancy. It wasn’t fair to the hungry, it wasn’t fair to Max. Today, everything was all right because Amanda was there, in a nubby natural-wool thing, bright blue scarf knotted at her throat, a puffed-up mockery of a 1920s boy’s cap, oatmeal-color, tilted on her neat little skull. She had a tall margarita for herself and a smile for him. A young man sat with her—a stranger to Dave. Amanda seemed pleased with him.

  She said, “Dave Brandstetter, Miles Edwards.

  Edwards rose and was tall. He shook Dave’s hand firmly, smiled with handsome teeth, claimed it was nice to meet Dave, and sat down again. He wore a suit that looked expensive without making an issue of it. His dark hair and trim black beard and mustache, his long, dense, dark childlike lashes, contrasted with the pale gray of his eyes. He was tanned, except where dark glasses had kept the sun from his skin.

  Amanda studied Dave. “You look tired and not happy.”

  The chairs were barrel-type in crushed black velvet. Dave sank into his with a sigh. “This case is not a case like any case I ever had before, and nobody is helping me—almost nobody.”

  “Take heart.” Amanda offered him a cigarette, one of the long, slim, brown kind. “Remember the Little Red Hen.” She lit the cigarette for him, then sat straight and waved into the candle shadows. “Glenlivet please, a double, on the rocks?”

  “And that car,” Dave said. “You and I should never shop together. My tendency to impulse buying is bad enough without you backing me up. That car is a bone-cracker.”

  “What kind of car?” Edwards said.

  “TR,” Dave said. “It had to be small to get into my driveway.” To Amanda: “Does he know about my driveway?”

  “There’s no way to describe it,” she said. “Where have you been—a long way?”

  “Up the coast beyond Zuma,” Dave said, “back to a nursery school in West L.A., downtown to the sheriff’s. Then out the freeway to Hollywood, and you. It’s like riding in a dice cup.”

  “What car should we have gotten?” she said.

  “That big brown Jaguar.”

  “But the driveway,” she said.

  “I’ll hire a bulldozer. I’ll change the driveway.”

  “Also you wanted to save gas,” she said.

  “Now I want to save me,” he said. Max Romano himself, plump, his few remaining black curls plastered across his bald dome, brought the Glenlivet, squat glass, much whiskey, little ice, the way Dave liked it. “Thanks, Max.”

  “You look pale.” Max handed menus to Amanda and Edwards. Dave waved his away. Max frowned. “Are you sick?”

  “Not hungry,” Dave said. Usually he liked the thick garlic-and-cheese smells of Romano’s, but this noon, they made him feel a little queasy. “I’m all right, Max. Just bad-tempered. I got up too early. Ruins the whole day.”

  “Something light on the stomach,” Max suggested. “A fluffy little omelet”—he wiggled fat fingers to indicate delicacy—“with mozzarella?”

  Dave winced. “Maybe. Later. We’ll see.” Max went off shaking his head, face puckered with worry. Dave told Edwards, “One person you never miss around Max is your mother.”

  “You never had one,” Amanda said.

  “I had nine,” Dave said, “in rapid succession. But you’re the nicest.”

  “Known Max a long time?” Edwards said.

  “Since before you were born,” Dave said. He took in some whiskey and lit another of Amanda’s cigarettes. “And while I was sitting here boozing with dead friends and lovers, what were you doing with those thirty-four years?”

  Edwards grinned. “Only thirty,” he said. “I’m a lawyer. Entertainment personalities, TV, pictures.”

  “Would you believe?” Amanda said.

  She meant that he looked like a film star. That didn’t surprise Dave. Carl Brandstetter had looked like a film star too. But Carl Brandstetter had been sixty-five when Amanda married him. So what surprised Dave was Edwards’s youth. He was still older than Amanda but not much. It was only a surprise. It wasn’t important. What was important was that he earned a living and probably a good one. He wasn’t after Amanda for her money.

  Dave wasn’t only old enough to be Amanda’s father—he worried about her like a father. The way she had moped around that big, empty Beverly Glen house after Carl Brandstetter’s sudden death had troubled him, and he’d tried to take her mind off her loss by putting her to work, remodeling and decorating the ramshackle place he’d bought to live alone in up Horseshoe Canyon. When that was done, he’d talked her into opening a business, and in no time she’d got more clients than she could handle, and was too busy to mourn. But he was uneasy that she seemed to shun all men except him, an aging homosexual. Now here she came with a man, and Dave was jealous. Ridiculous. He laughed at himself.

  “Dave?” Amanda’s eyes were bright. “We’ve got something to tell you.�
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  But Mel Fleischer arrived, tall, balding, patrician, in dark green tweed, lavender shirt, pale green tie. He was a heavy contributor to the philharmonic and the museum, collected California painters, and was a senior vice-president of Proctor Bank. He and Dave had been lovers—though that was a flowery word for it—in high school, when the world was young. They had remained friends. Trailing Mel came Makoto, the Japanese college boy he slept with, stocky, broad-faced. A shiny red jacket was open over his muscular brown torso. He wore red jogging shorts, white gym socks with red trim, and no shoes. Roller skates dangled from his square, brown hand—white tops, red wheels. From across the room, Max watched Makoto with a sad shake of the head, mourning a restaurant dress code long defunct.

  Dave made introductions. Makoto sat down, dropped the skates on the thick carpet, lounged in the chair. Mel sat straight, a Renaissance cardinal holding audience.

  Amanda told Makoto, “Those are beautiful skates.”

  Makoto nodded a head of shaggy black hair and showed terrific teeth. He didn’t talk much. Spoken English was not easy for him. Amanda handed him her menu. Edwards tried to give his to Mel. Mel smiled and shook his head.

  “Scallops,” he said. “They sauté them beautifully here, in brown butter.” He passed Dave an envelope. “The sad story of Charles Westover—financial only, but I often think a good novelist could reconstruct a whole life from a study of a man’s bank statements, don’t you?”

  “Balzac,” Makoto said. He pronounced it Borzock. “César Birotteau.” The last name was easy for him.

  Dave put on glasses and peered at the pages from the envelope. “Credit check here, too. Thanks. I see he’s keeping up the house payments. Jesus, a third mortgage!”

  “He’d better. But, as you can see, his debts elsewhere are staggering. In round figures, two hundred thousand dollars. The house and car are all he has.”

  “Ahem!” Amanda said. Dave laid down the papers and took off the glasses. She was holding Edwards’s hand on the table, and she was radiant. “I have an announcement, please. Miles and I are getting married.”

  “Ho!” Dave was startled. She’d never kept a secret before. “Wonderful. Congratulations.” He kissed her cheek and shook the hand of Edwards, who grinned happily.

  “Champagne!” Mel waved his arms. “Champagne!”

  4

  AT TWO IN THE morning, the sprawling, low-roofed houses along Sandpiper Lane were dark. He stopped the Triumph by the little palm again, and got out into wind as relentless as yesterday morning’s wind but colder. The little palm rattled its fans. Far down the road, around a bend, a solitary streetlamp shone. Here it was very dark. He looked up. No moon. Not even stars. He went up the driveway toward the black bulk of the house. Leaves and pods crackled under his feet when he stepped up into the front-door recess. The eucalyptus smell was musty.

  From his key case he chose one slim shaft of metal after another. The third worked in the lock but the door wouldn’t open. There must be a dead bolt. He found his way along the side of the house, feeling with his hands. The brick was rough. He shuffled and went slowly. Twice he stepped up into the spongy yield of mulch in planters to test windows. Both were fastened. At the rear of the house was a roofed, screened patio. Its door was locked, would have been easy to open, but he didn’t open it, figuring the door into the house itself would be bolted.

  He went around front again, to the garage door. The padlock gave easily. Holding its pitted coldness in his hand, he turned and looked up and down the street. No one. He dropped the padlock into the pocket of his sheepskin jacket, bent, and lifted the garage door just enough to be able to slip under it. Inside, in the smells of dusty tires, grease, gasoline, he let the door drop shut softly. He put his face close to the dusty little pane. No one. He risked probing the darkness for a second with the beam of a penlight. Nothing lay for him to stumble over on his way to the house door. He switched the light off and went to the door. It was not locked. He stepped up and into the house and closed the door behind him.

  He stood braced for bad smells, death, decay. He didn’t smell anything like that. The air was warm. Westover or Lyle had forgotten to turn off the thermostat. He went toward the front of the house. He felt rather than saw a large room open to his right. As if blind, he walked a slow step at a time, silent on carpet. He groped out with his hands. He bumped furniture. Something flimsy and metallic fell with a delicate clatter. He waited. No one had heard. His hands found curved, polished wood. A piano? What he wanted to find were curtains. He found them. Drawn across their windows. He thought he remembered that from yesterday morning.

  He risked using the penlight again. The curtains were drawn on all the windows. What he had mistaken for a piano was a harpsichord. On its closed top lay a flute and an oboe. Dust muted the shine of their wood, their metal. What he had knocked over was a music rack. There were two more, each with music open on it. He righted the fallen rack. Printed on the cover of the music was Anton Reicha: Strings, Woodwinds, Continuo. He set it on the rack, which trembled with its weight. He touched a key of the harpsichord. It sang sweetly. The harpsichord had two manuals.

  He listened. He followed the penlight’s thin beam into all the rooms, closing the curtains, switching on lights. No one—alive or dead. One room was a den, an office—desk, typewriter, files. He left that to look at bedrooms. There were four. In two, the beds were unmade. Over one hung framed photographs, eight-by-tens, six of them, in two rows. He recognized Wanda Landowska in beaky profile at a keyboard. He peered at the signature on another photograph. Igor Kipnis—another harpsichordist. Bookshelves stood in this room. On them, elaborate stereo equipment shouldered record albums, untidy heaps of music, books about music, composers, performers. Nothing distinguished the other bedroom. In both, clothes lay folded in the chests of drawers, clothes hung in closets. Shoes. Luggage.

  There were three large bathrooms lined with mirrors, but only one had the look of having been in use. Pressure cans of shave cream, tooth powder, toothpaste, a pair of toothbrushes, two plastic-handled throwaway razors. Why won’t Westover be back tomorrow? Why won’t the kid? Something red sparked in the shag weave of a bathmat. He bent for it. A capsule. He checked druggist’s amber plastic vials in the medicine chest. No Seconals. But he thought this was a Seconal. In the kitchen a few unwashed dishes were stacked on a sink counter. On a breakfast bar like the one at Scotty Dekker’s across the street, slices of dark bread had slumped from a clear plastic wrapper and dried out. A quarter-inch of milk had soured in the bottom of a tall glass. Butter had puddled in its oblong dish. Cheese slices were growing green mold in their open packet. A half-empty jar of mayonnaise gaped, its lid beside it. A fly had died in the mayonnaise. Ferns hung in baskets over the breakfast bar. The fronds were drying out and turning brown. He rinsed the milk glass at the sink and watered the ferns.

  Back in the den, he sat in the chair that had a tall padded leather back and padded leather arms and that swiveled, could turn to the desk, could turn to the typewriter table. Typed sheets lay stacked on the desk, facedown. A half-typed sheet was in the typewriter. It was a late-model electric typewriter. He switched on a desk lamp and peered at the typing. It didn’t make a lot of sense. Something about making sure the mark didn’t telephone the bank. He turned over the stack of pages. “Confessions of a Con Man,” the top page read, “by Howie O’Rourke, as told to Charles Westover.” Dave put on his glasses and leafed through the pages. An introduction claimed that O’Rourke knew every swindle cunning and greed had devised since time began, had worked most of them, and had spent years in prison for getting caught at it. This book was going to tell all—no one who read it could ever be flim-flammed out of his hard-earned money again. Dave checked the rest of the typescript, didn’t find anything about insurance frauds, laid the sheets back together, tapped the edges on the dusty desk-top to straighten them, laid the stack on its face again, and rose to look into a brown steel file cabinet. In a folder labeled with the title of the
book he found copies of query letters to twenty publishers. The letters asked for an advance of $200,000. Twelve publishers had replied. Negatively. None had even made a counteroffer.

  Dave heard a noise. Not the wind. He slipped the folder back, quietly closed the file drawer, and switched off the desk lamp. Taking off his glasses, he moved in the dark to the door of the den and stood there listening, straining to hear. He had turned off the lights in each of the rooms as he left it. His eyes strained against the darkness. What had the noise been? The garage door. It went up and down on armatures and these were equipped with big springs which sang baritone when they stretched. That was what he had heard faintly. But the house was dead quiet, the night, the neighborhood, except for the snore of the wind under the eaves and, far off, the surf. He waited, heartbeats thudding in his ears. He thought he heard the soft click of a door latch. He didn’t listen for footfalls. There was all that thick carpeting. Then a girl’s voice, tentative, timid, called:

  “Lyle? Are you here?”

  Light glowed at the end of the hall. He went toward it. He said, “Lyle isn’t here.” He came out into the room with the harpsichord. Lamps glowed in the room, and a girl was standing on the far side of the room, a fat girl whose hips bulged in too-tight jeans. Her big shoulders and bulky bosom were covered by a hand-loomed Mexican pullover, red, yellow, orange, with its hood laid back. She wore wire-rimmed, round glasses, and her hair was long, straight, straw-color. She looked surprised but not scared. He said, “Who are you?”

  She said, “Who are you?”

  “I’m an insurance investigator,” he said, “and my name is Dave Brandstetter. Now it’s your turn.”

  “Where’s Lyle?” she said. “I keep phoning and no one answers. I keep coming. I need my flute and my oboe. Nobody answers the doorbell. So today I tried getting in. Somebody phoned the security patrol. Luckily I saw them coming and ran around back and climbed the wall. If they’d found me I’d probably be in jail now. For attempted burglary. Are you going to call the police on me?”