“Shit,” Cecil said. “Dave? Where are you?”
“Give me a minute.” Dave made to crawl out from under the car, and the pain from his shoulder was so bad he fainted. He woke to find Cecil on hands and knees, peering at him, eye-whites, a glint of teeth.
“Are you okay?”
“He cut me, but I’ll live,” Dave said. “Switch the lights back on, will you?”
“Damn.” Cecil scrambled to his feet and went off to the power box. Dave heard Amanda’s quick steps in the wet. She sounded breathless. “What’s happened? Dave? Cecil?”
“Call an ambulance,” Cecil said. “He’s bleeding.”
The lights came on. And Dave saw that Cecil was right. He lay in a puddle the wrong color for rain.
7
DAVE HADN’T HEARD THE rain stop. He had slept deeply, darkly, drugged by painkillers an emergency room nurse had shot him full of at a hospital where they’d sewed up the slash in his shoulder. Samuels from the LAPD had looked wan in the glare of the white room. Leppard was off duty and couldn’t be located. Samuels, in his fly-front coat, pointed a pocket tape recorder at Dave, while Dave sat on a steel table with his shirt off, being repaired. Every time the doctor made a move, Samuel winced as if he was the one wounded. The puffy hand holding the recorder trembled. “Did you get a look at his face?”
“It was too dark. Maybe it wasn’t a him. It could have been a her.”
“Jesus,” Samuels said. “You think so?”
“I think it was the tall skinny street kid your witness saw hanging around Carmen Lopez’s apartment building before Drew Dodge was killed. Long blond hair. Headband.”
“Girls aren’t generally tall.”
“Not generally.” Dave nodded. “Forget I said it could have been a her. It’s a habit I have—never taking anything for granted.” He forced a smile. “All right?”
“No, you got a point there,” Samuels said. “The car?”
“Old, an American economy model from the late sixties or early seventies. Dark. I don’t know the color.”
“License number?” Samuels said hopefully.
“Sorry.” Dave shook his head. The dope was taking hold of his brain. “The time was 7:10 P.M. He pulled the main switch on the power box and knew I’d come to see what was the matter, and he waited and jumped me in the dark.” Dave looked past Samuels’s pale bulk at solemn Cecil and anxious Amanda waiting for him beyond the half-glass doors of the emergency room. “My friends came out of the house and scared him off.”
“You see the knife?”
“Not to be able to identify it,” Dave said.
Samuels squinted uncertainly at the small metallic box in his hand, found what he appeared to hope was the correct button, and switched off the recorder. To bandage Dave’s shoulder, the doctor shifted position. Samuels peered around him at Dave, forehead wrinkled: “What do you think? Was this our serial killer?”
“Dodge was robbed,” Dave said. “None of the others was robbed. I’m not young. I don’t have AIDS.”
“Yeah, right.” Samuels sounded discouraged. He said thanks, said he’d be in touch, dropped the tape recorder into a pocket of his pale coat, and pushed out of the room. He threaded his way between a crowd of hurting men, women, children waiting with faces dulled by pain, standing, sitting on molded plastic chairs, lying on the floor, eyes closed.
The doctor’s name was Patel. He was small, spare, brown-skinned, with large, luminous dark eyes, long lashes, and a grave demeanor. In his elegant Karachi accent, he insisted Dave stay in the hospital overnight, in case infection developed, fever, who knew what complications. He had already arranged for a room for Dave. But Dave wanted to go home. He was dogged about it. He was fine. There’d been no nerve damage. The sewn-up cut would mend. He wanted to sleep in his own bed, on his own loft, under the skylight. In the end, not liking it, Patel gave him pills and let him go.
Cecil had dropped him and Amanda back at the house on Horseshoe Canyon Trail, then gone on to pick up Chrissie at the marina, and take her home with him to their Mar Vista place. Amanda had stayed, had slept in the guest room on the loft, watchfully, getting up to look at Dave from time to time. The boards of the loft had loud creaks built into them, but he hadn’t heard her. He’d stayed under in his dreamless darkness until noon. Then she’d fixed them breakfast in the cookshack. Like Dr. Patel, she’d argued hard against his leaving his bed.
“I’ll bring your breakfast on a tray.”
He pushed clumsily to a sitting position, swung his feet to the floor. “No need for that. But I’ll need help dressing, if you don’t mind.”
“You’re going out? Dave, no way.”
“Have to go out.” He tottered to his feet, pulled open the pine doors of a wardrobe. “Dig back in here for me, will you, please?”
She dug and brought out shabby, secondhand clothes he’d bought at thrift shops. “What in the world are these?”
“Camouflage,” Dave said.
“You’re not going to shave?” she said.
“More camouflage.” It was clumsy getting into the clothes but they managed it between them. He pushed his feet into stained and ragged tennis shoes. “Sorry. Can you tie these for me?” His arm was in a sling. She knelt and helped him. “Why camouflage?” she said.
He smiled and stood up. “The game is afoot, Watson.”
“Oh, please,” she said. “Don’t joke. Look at you. You’re white with pain.”
“That’s hunger,” he said.
After breakfast she demanded he let her drive him wherever it was he simply had to go. He’d used up precious energy talking her out of it. He sat in the Jaguar now, thankful for a minute to rest. The ride the machine gave him was gentle, but the painkillers were wearing off and the slightest motion made his shoulder hurt. He had to let the pain come back. He couldn’t drive drugged.
Kevin Nakamura owned a service station down the canyon at a main cross street. The station was yellow flagstone and glass, and sheltered by slim eucalyptus trees. Nakamura, in starchy suntans, was using a wide, stiff-bristled push broom to sweep leaves, twigs, seedpods into the sun-dazzled street. He was a tidy young man. Neatness mattered to him. He concentrated, and did a thorough job. One of the help could be doing it, but the help were working under cars in the shop, and filing receipts in the office among shiny stacks of motor oil cans. And their sweeping wouldn’t have satisfied Nakamura. He kept his head down, and got every last twig, leaf, pod.
Dave tapped the horn. Nakamura came to the car. Dave wore a moth-eaten ski cap. Nakamura said, “You want the old car.”
“Will it start?” Dave said. “Is there gas in it?”
“I keep it ready for you,” Nakamura said. “That was our agreement, right?” He grinned with large, white teeth. When he did that, his eyes almost closed. He shook his head. “You look like a real bum.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Dave said and, moving carefully, got out of the Jaguar. At the moment he did that, the sun stopped shining. He looked up. Black, ragged clouds were scudding in from the southeast. It was going to rain again. He watched Nakamura walk off bowlegged to the rear of the station building. In a moment, he came back into view, driving a pale yellow sixties Valiant with a deep crease along one side, where it had got the worst of a sideswipe collision someplace in its past. It was as tinny as the car driven last night by the kid who had attacked him. On another case, years ago, Dave had driven the Jaguar into a neighborhood of street gangs and nearly had it stripped. He wasn’t going to repeat that mistake.
He handed Nakamura the keys to the Jaguar. “Don’t let anything happen to it.”
“I’ll tune it up,” Nakamura said. “When will you be back?”
“Before you close,” Dave said. He winced, wangling his long lean limbs into the small car. The seat was tattered under him. Getting a grip on the door to close it was awkward.
Nakamura saw that, and closed it for him. He leaned at the window, worried.
“What happen
ed to your arm?”
“Somebody tried to remove it,” Dave said.
“You sure you’re all right to drive?”
“No,” Dave said. “But it’s too far to walk.”
It was Chandler Park. And not as he remembered it. He remembered it from his teen years. A gospel temple with a big white dome loomed above the trees north of the park. For a few months in high school, Dave had yearned over a handsome classmate who adored Lizzie Tremaine, the flashy evangelist who had built the temple and presided noisily over its meetings in flowing white robes and brassy yellow hair. And Dave had tagged down here after the boy for a few Sundays, just to be near him. It was useless. Jesus was the only male that boy would ever love.
But it was then that Dave had come to know this place at the heart of LA. Brick apartments from the 1920s along one side, hulking old three-story frame houses with jigsaw-work porches and bay windows on the other two sides. The neighborhood hadn’t been exactly upscale even then. In the decades since, paint had peeled, window screens had rusted out, glass had been smashed and replaced by cardboard, or nailed over with plywood. The brick buildings had fared a little better, but not much. Shops were mostly deserted, doorways piled with blown trash. The lettering on painted signs faded over the doors of Mexican cafés. A corner grocery looked flyblown. A place that claimed to sell records and tapes had padlocked grillwork over its doors and windows, and no one inside. Still, life went on upstairs.
He heard voices when he parked the car and got out into a misting thin rainfall. Human voices, television voices. Music from boomboxes, very loud. The television voices spoke Spanish. The other voices spoke black. The music was black. A clutch of black teenage boys slouched at the far corner. Across from them, Latino boys slouched also, watching them. In the park, a solemn, white-haired, heavyset Mexican in plastic rowed a boat on the lake among ducks. He hinged the oars inside the boat, and rummaged in a white plastic supermarket bag, and began tossing bread to the ducks. A young pregnant black woman passed Dave as he fed the parking meter. She was pushing a pram with a baby in it. The baby was looking up at the rain, blinking, giggling. An old white woman bundled in many layers of coats and sweaters and stockings shuffled past. She was bent with the weight of four shopping bags. A man whose color no one could tell crept on hands and knees out of an alleyway and called to Dave. The man was hanging on to a bottle in a paper sack. Dave knew he was being stared at, so he swore at the man and went on.
He found the doorway he wanted. The number was right. It stood half open on a narrow stairway that stank of urine and years of greasy meals. Beer cans, fried chicken boxes, cigarette butts strewed the stairs. A bulging, green plastic garbage bag leaked stinking wetness where it had been dropped and forgotten. Light was supposed to come into the hallway of the second story from windows at either end, but the windows were grimy and the light outdoors was poor anyway. He looked up. In sockets along a smoky ceiling the splintery fragments of light bulbs showed. The walls were dense with spray-painted names and curses. He went along the hall, trying to read numbers on doors. Then he climbed to the third floor, and located the number, and knocked. Loudly, because the hall was filled with all those mingled noises.
A shout came from the other side of the door. He wasn’t sure of the words. He tried the knob. Locked. He sensed he was being watched. He stepped to the stairwell. Below, a plump man in a fly-front coat moved quickly out of sight. Samuels? Dave ran down the stairs. Nobody. He climbed back to the door, rapped again. “Who that? What you want?”
“Bill Bumbry,” Dave said.
“He don’t live here no more. He passed away.”
“Did you know him? Can you tell me about him?” Locks clicked, the door opened a crack, a face peered out, a black, bony face, bloodshot eyes. At Dave’s belt level. “Was you a friend of Billy’s? One of the gay ones?”
“Did he have any others?” Dave said.
The man smiled faintly. “Not white, he didn’t.”
“I’m trying to find out who killed him.” Dave took out his license and showed it at the narrow opening. “I’m a private investigator. Can I come in? It’s noisy out here.”
“And smelly.” The man shut the door, rattled the chain loose, opened the door. He sat in a wheelchair, in an old brown flannel bathrobe, a grubby blanket covering legs that ended at the knees. He let Dave step past him, and closed the door, whose spring lock clicked. “I don’t believe God would ever send a black person to hell. We got it here. Every day of our lives.” Chuckling, toothless, he rolled his wheelchair backward. This was easy: the room was almost empty. A narrow bed, beside it a little table with a lamp, a clock radio, a Bible. On the floor a television set with a cracked shell and bent rabbit ears. A doorless cupboard in a corner, shelves lined with cans of Dinty Moore beef stew. On the counter a hot plate and three charred saucepans. A grimy refrigerator, a sink with dishes in it. A door half open on a dark bathroom where the toilet box ran and ran.
“I can’t be too hospitable,” the man said, and tilted his head slightly, to indicate he meant the state of the room. “You can sit on the bed if you want. It’s pretty clean. I change it every week.”
“Thank you.” Dave sat on the bed. His shoulder hurt.
“What happened to your arm?” the man asked.
“Somebody attacked me with a knife in the dark last night,” Dave said. “I wondered if it might be the same one that killed Bill. I came to find out if anyone ever saw Bill in the company of a skinny blond kid with long hair. Maybe a teenager. Keeps the hair back by folding a bandanna and tying it around for a headband.”
“Not me,” the man said. He held out his hand. “I’m Dixon.” The knuckles were swollen, gnarly. Dave shook the hand gently. “Billy’s uncle. I haven’t lived here long. He lived here with his daddy, my brother. I saw Billy sometimes. He had his troubles, being so, well, like a girl? From a little child, you know—it made things hard for him with the other children. Poked fun at him, hit him. Lost his mama early too. That made it worse. His daddy tried to beat it out of him. Mason would never hit Dandy—that his dog. Just the boy. And I was the one Billy run to. I let him cry to me, I was kind to him. Why not? Wasn’t his fault. God made a mistake, is all—put a girl in a boy’s body.”
“But he lived with his father?” Dave said.
“Right here. I’d have had him with me, but I’m crippled. Railroad accident. No way I could look after a child. No money. Railroad lawyers seen to that. Disability all I get, and that ain’t scarcely enough for one, let alone two.”
“He grew up,” Dave said. “Why did he stay?”
Dixon shook his head. “Don’t make sense, do it? But he did. And he earned the money. Short-order cook. Suited Mason fine, laying around all day, free food and lodging, all the six-packs he could drink. Never changed how he treated Billy—same ugly mouth. But Billy looked after him. And the dog. See that wallpaper? Billy’s hand. He loved things to be pretty.”
“I think he knew who killed him, all of them did. The medical examiner couldn’t find any sign they’d put up a struggle before they were knifed. You never met his friends?”
“Police asked me that too,” Dixon said. “He never brought nobody when he come to see me.” The wrinkles in his forehead deepened. “Could you call them friends, that kind?”
“Did he mention any names?” Dave said. “Did he know any of the other young men killed the same way—Art Lopez, Sean O’Reilly, Frank Prohaska, Edward Vorse, Drew Dodge?”
Dixon listened hard, frowning, but he shook his head. “No, I heard those names on the TV news, but not from Billy.”
“Why isn’t his father living here now?” Dave said.
“Scared of infection. Billy got AIDS, you know. And Mason, he took Dandy and moved out. Took all the nice furniture Billy bought too. Left Billy here on a mattress on the floor, sick by himself. Claimed to me he was feeding him. You know what that meant? He got hamburgers in bags, and he sent Dandy up the stairs with them. ‘Go take it to Billy,’ he�
�d say, standing down there in the street door. Well, Dandy, he just a dog, and when he got up the stairs out of Mason’s sight, he ate the food. He never brought it up here, never.”
“Wonderful,” Dave said.
“But they good folks in this building, some of ’em. And one come and told me Billy was alone and sick and starving, and I used a pay phone and called around County offices I know, and one of ’em sent help, got him into a hospital. I paid the back rent here and moved in to hold the place for him. And after a while, he got strong enough to come back. I didn’t know him, he was so wasted. And then he went out the other night, and somebody killed him with a knife.”
“He never said he was afraid that would happen?”
Dixon shook his head. “All he was afraid of was AIDS.”
8
HE FOLLOWED PATCHY TRAFFIC up Alvarado through the rain. There was an odd tightness in his throat. Cold sweat covered him. He wanted the rattly car to get him home. It had been a mistake to come out. He would hit the bed and sleep. Or maybe he wouldn’t make the effort to climb to the loft. He’d just pass out on the couch. It had been a long time since he’d felt this bad. Motorcycles stood bunched at a curb in front of a shabby stucco building with a sign in faint, sputtery red neon tubing, THE MOTO-CROSS. It had the look of a place used only after dark, but a youth in chain-hung leather, boots, greasy dark curls, came out the door, carrying a crash helmet. He winced at the daylight, paused to put on the helmet, then straddled one of the motorcycles.
Early Graves Page 6