Early Graves

by Joseph Hansen

  “Nobody up here cares about Drew Dodge anymore.”

  “Only you. Don’t get yourself killed, okay? Remember, this one is armed and dangerous.”

  “I remember,” Dave said. “It’s Drew Dodge’s gun, I expect. The kid must have taken it off his body. Dodge bought it the day after he talked with the kid at home.”

  “You’re on top of it, all right.” Leppard’s voice held grudging admiration laced with annoyance. “How did you get that letter Berman wrote Dodge? Out of Dodge’s files, right? You entered the house without permission, while the family was at the funeral.”

  “Letters were blowing on the wind today,” Dave said. “There was a beauty from one of our distinguished Sacramento lawgivers. But I’ll tell you about that after you hear from Seattle. Hell, I even have a letter from the kid.”

  “Jesus. You know where to find him?”

  “There’s no return address,” Dave said.

  The food in the Oaktree Inn restaurant was better than he expected. He liked watching a log fire burn while he ate a veal and mushroom concoction in a cream, butter, and wine sauce. The list of California wines had good labels on it. He chose a Rutherford liebfraumilch. The Scotches in his room had picked him up and made him hungry. The food and wine left him ready to sleep. A good thing, since he hated watching television by himself, and there was no decent music to listen to, and he had no wish to read travel magazines. He began shedding his clothes almost before the door of his unit shut behind him. He yanked back the covers on the wide bed, went into the bathroom, reached for the shower handles, and the telephone burred. It was on the wall by the shaving mirror. He took it down and said “Brandstetter” into it.

  “I left messages.” It was Tom Owens. He didn’t sound right. “Why haven’t you returned my calls?”

  “I got Mel Fleischer’s information from Larry,” Dave said. “I thought that was what it was about. Larry said—”

  “Listen to me, Dave. I’m a hostage.”

  Dave squinted. “What was that word?”

  “Hostage. In a trailer on the beach. In a cove three miles north of the Rancho Vientos turnoff. We’re at a pay phone now. He says the only way he’ll let me go is if you come to the trailer. Alone. No police.”

  Dave sat down on the closed toilet. “The tall, thin kid with long hair?”

  “He was watching us at the church. From the hills. But he was too far off. The change of cars confused him. He followed the BMW thinking you were in it. He forced me off the road, and—wait, let go!”

  The phone clattered. “Tom?” Dave called. “It’s okay. Tell him I’ll come. Right away. I’m sorry about this.”

  “Don’t come!” Owens shouted. “He’ll kill you, Dave.”

  The connection broke. Dave stared at the receiver, listened to it hum. His heart was thudding. He hung up the phone, put his clothes back on, the trenchcoat, the tweed hat, and went out into the cold and wet to find Morales. He moved along a sheltered walkway, looking at parked cars till the lights of one near the end. Morales rolled down the window and sneezed. He held a big paper cup of coffee and he looked miserable. “I thought you were in for the night,” he said, and sneezed again. “Damn.”

  “Did you draw this assignment for life?” Dave said.

  “It’s fascinating.” Morales wiped his nose with a crumpled handkerchief. “I wouldn’t miss it.” He set the coffee on the dashboard and started the engine. “Where are we going now?”

  “I’m going to Thousand Oaks. I checked with my answering service. Apex Insurance Agency needs me. Now. An auto crash that might be suicide.” Dave pushed back the cuff of his trenchcoat to see his watch. “It’s only eight. I should be back by midnight.” He held out his Oaktree Inn key. “That’s a rotten cold you’ve got. Go on in, crawl into bed, get warm. There’s no need for you to follow me.”

  Morales’s eyelids were heavy as he searched Dave’s face. “I wish to hell I could believe you.”

  “It’s out of the danger zone. I’ll be okay.”

  “No way.” Morales shook his head, sneezed again, twice, blew his nose again. “What kind of police officer do you take me for? I’m here to protect you.” He shuddered. “I’m going to protect you.”

  “Well, at least take a hot bath. I’ll fix you a stiff drink. Go on like this, you’ll get pneumonia.”

  Morales tried to answer but coughed instead, a rough, deep cough that brought tears to his eyes. He stared, and gasped out, “A hot bath? Oh, boy.” He pushed open the car door, tottered out, locked the door. He turned Dave a pitiful smile. “Lead me to it,” he said.

  The coast road lay deserted in the night and the rain. The rain fell harder here on the ocean side of the hills, wind off the ocean driving it in gusts. Dave swung onto the highway and headed north, an eye on the odometer. The windshield wipers batted away the steady wash of rain down the curved glass in front of him. The headlights bored yellow through the rain, which sometimes blew in slanting sheets. Even though the windows were closed, he could hear the crash of the surf off to his left. Its weight shook the roadway. He could feel it thud and thud. It was a dark and stormy night. He smiled thinly to himself.

  At three miles, he slowed. The guardrail to keep cars from going over the sharp drop to the beach was white and he could see it faintly. But he saw no gap in it anywhere wide enough to admit a car. Yet the distance had to be right—the kid wanted Dave to come and be killed. The kid must have hauled his trailer down onto the beach by an access Dave had already passed, or one that lay ahead. The kid wanted Dave to come to the trailer on foot.

  He shrugged, swung the Jaguar around, parked it on the road shoulder. He groped a flashlight out of the glove compartment, got out into the lashing rain, dropped the flashlight into the left-hand pocket of the trenchcoat, where it balanced the weight of Morales’s police special in the right-hand pocket. He had lifted the revolver quietly from the holster Morales had hung on the bathroom doorknob when he stepped into the steaming tub. Dave’s Sig Sauer seemed always to lie in that pine drawer on the sleeping loft. He never had it with him when he needed it.

  He locked the car, walked along beside the guardrail to the break, shone the flashlight downward. The feet of swimmers, surfers, picnickers had worn a narrow path into the steep face of the bank. It trickled rainwater. Dave stepped down onto it cautiously, and made his way, bracing himself with a hand against the crumbly bluff face, down to the beach. Clumps of rough rock jutted out of the sand here. He shone the light around, looking for a trailer. And not finding it. High rocks shelved out ahead of him. Maybe around behind them he’d find the trailer. Tucked out of sight from the road. A place to hide. A place to hold a hostage.

  He plodded, head down, through the sucking sand, making for the outcrop, and finding the rushing surf washing over his shoes. Where the rocks reached into the tide, the waves crashed over them. If he was going to get across, he was going to get wet—no way out of that. He studied the timing of the waves in the beam of the flashlight for a minute. Then he pushed the flashlight away and made a dash for it. He twisted an ankle, scraped a knee, but he made it to the other side of the promontory. The trenchcoat was heavy. His shoes squished. He shivered with cold.

  He didn’t want to shine the flashlight here, and he didn’t have to. A light burned in the trailer. Dim behind a curtain, but there. Probably a camper’s lamp. The trailer was no more than a hulk of blackness. The car too. Not hitched to the trader, standing behind it on the sand. Dave crouched and groped on the sand for stones. He didn’t find any. He moved on a few steps, crouched again, and had better luck. He started for the trailer, and the door opened. Blue-white light streamed out into the rain. The figure of the tall, skinny kid stood there. He squinted against the dark. The light behind him caught and shone in his long fair hair. A pistol hung in his hand.

  “He ain’t here,” he said. “Where the fuck is he?”

  Someone answered from inside, but Dave couldn’t make out the words. The door slammed shut. It made a tinn
y sound. The trailer was metal. The rain made a racket, beating on the trailer. It would be noisy inside. Add that to the noise of the wind and the surf, and a crowd could arrive out here and not be heard. He trudged to the trailer and put his ear to the cold, wet siding. The kid was shouting. “Why did you have to go and say I was gonna kill him, you God damn fool? I should have shot you like I said I’d do, right there at the phone. He ain’t a-comin’ for you. So what good are you to me?”

  Again, Dave couldn’t hear Tom Owens’s answer.

  “No good, that’s what. I’m gonna have to shoot you anyways. You seen my face.” Footsteps shook the trailer, the door yanked open again. The light fell out into the rain. Dave stepped back into darkness. The boy began to wail now. “I don’t know how the Lord Jesus could let this happen to me. I never done nothin’ in my life but look for my daddy. I never meant to kill nobody, now it looks like there ain’t no end to it. Why? Why did he have to draw a gun on me?”

  Three metal steps went down from the trailer door to the sand. Dave heard the steps rattle now. He took another step back into the dark. The boy’s keening voice came on the wind from out on the beach. “Him that run out on my mom and me sixteen year ago. And her dyin’ of drink, grievin’ for him. A rich millionaire. And for all our pain and sufferin’ and dyin’ he ain’t goin’ to pay one nickel. No. He’s goin’ to get this big-time detective after me, and run me off.”

  The raving voice came and went. Dave dodged a quick look. The kid was walking in circles on the sand, waving his arms. “And when I says if he don’t pay me I’m a-gonna tell all the wickedness he done back in Arkansas, damn if he don’t pull out this here gun. On his own little boy that’s been a-searchin’ and a-seekin’ for him all these years.” Footsteps crunched in the wet sand. The boy ran up the steps. The trailer door banged shut. But the unstoppable words came through the walls. “And he fired that gun, Mr. Owens. Jesus is my witness. Fired off that gun right past my ear. What was I supposed to do, Mr. Owens?” The boy’s voice broke into choking sobs. “My own daddy tried to kill me.” He wept hard for a minute. Then, suddenly, he said, “Brandstetter ain’t comin’. He don’t care if I kill you. And I don’t know what else to do.”

  Dave stepped out and threw a stone at the trailer door. The door flew open, and the kid fired wildly into the dark. Dave yanked Morales’s gun from his pocket, and thumbed back the Hammer. “Drop it!” he shouted. The boy swung and fired at him. He heard the whine of the bullet. He raised Morales’s gun and squeezed the trigger. The gun kicked. The shot was loud. The boy’s thin body gave a jerk, took a half turn, and pitched out onto the sand.

  20

  MAX ROMANO’S PLACE WAS quiet. It was early. In the small, dark-paneled bar, a handful of commuters hung on, clinking ice in glasses, and swapping stories, reluctant to face the rain-slick streets, the gridlocked freeways. From the kitchen came good smells, the muted rattling of pans and the banging of oven doors. The dining room tables with their snowy linen, neatly laid-out silver, crystal glinting in candlelight were vacant. Except for Dave’s table in its corner under a stained-glass panel. Here he worked on a double manhattan, and tried to improve Ken Barker’s temper. The bulky police captain drank Old Crow, and glowered at Dave with eyes the color and coldness of gunmetal.

  “We put out money and effort to protect you. And you act like a hotshot high school kid. You could have been dead on that beach. Washed out to sea. We could still be looking for you.”

  “Better me than Morales,” Dave said. “Samuels was enough, Ken. I couldn’t let that happen twice. Protecting me was your idea, remember. I never wanted it.”

  “You made that plain,” Barker growled. “But Morales is still in trouble. For the worst mistake an officer can make—letting his gun be taken away from him.”

  “Cary Dean Duval is as crazy as they come,” Dave said. The kid was under double guard in the hospital ward of the county jail near Rancho Vientos. The bullet from Morales’s gun had shattered a bone in his upper right arm. He had lost blood while Dave crouched over him on the sand and Tom Owens drove the Jaguar to that public phone he’d used earlier to summon Dave. Dave had laid blankets from the trailer over the kid, but he’d gone into shock before the ambulance arrived. He was out of trouble now. He’d live. “He came out shooting. I knew he would. I wasn’t putting Morales in his line of fire.”

  “You interfered with a police officer in the performance of his duty,” Barker said stubbornly. “If Abe Greenglass wasn’t your lawyer, I’d nail you for that.”

  “Samuels may never be the same,” Dave said. “If you get off his case, all Morales has is a bad cold.”

  Barker’s mouth twitched, but he didn’t answer. He picked up Max’s big menu and studied it through glasses with heavy horn rims. “Samuels doesn’t hold what happened to him against you. You’re oversensitive.” Barker lowered the menu. “I do not think.” He raised the menu again, and said from behind it, “When are you going to stop being a pain in the butt to me? When are you going to retire?”

  “Maybe when you do.” Dave took a brown envelope from inside his jacket, and laid the envelope in front of Barker. “Somebody official ought to do something with that. And Jeff Leppard isn’t speaking to me, won’t let me near him, won’t return my calls.”

  “Smart kid.” Barker picked up the envelope, untucked the flap with thick fingers, peered inside. “What is this stuff? Bank statements?”

  “And a letter.” Dave told Barker about Bud Hollywell. “I’d have put it in the hands of the local district attorney but I don’t know him. I don’t know where his loyalties lie. I thought if LAPD gave it to the State’s Attorney here, and he turned it over officially to the man up there, something useful might happen.”

  Barker grunted. “Something had better.” He pushed the envelope info his pocket. “I’ll see to it. Thanks.”

  “Now you tell me something,” Dave said. “What was in those manila envelopes in Duval’s trailer?”

  “Aha. Now we get to the real reason for all this.” Barker gestured at the handsome, shadowy room. “You don’t prize my company. You just lured me here to pump me.” He showed his teeth in a kind of smile, and laid the menu down. “Okay. Pay for it. I’ll have the Maine lobster and filet mignon.”

  Dave said, “Hell, you can get that anywhere. Let me tell you about Max’s scaloppine, his incomparable—”

  Barker said, “I’m ordering it for the price.”

  Dave grinned. “Tell me about those envelopes.”

  “There was the kid’s birth certificate,” Barker said. “Barely readable, I understand. Wine spills, coffee stains. But his mother was May Ellen Stubblefield, his father was Henry Arthur Duval.”

  “Same initials as Harold Andrew Dodge,” Dave said.

  “He had documents of his own, Dodge did.” Barker took a swallow of his drink. “They’re fakes, the sheriff says, but he hasn’t traced where they came from yet.”

  “But he was the same man?” Dave lit a cigarette.

  “The fingerprints on record with the California Department of Motor Vehicles match those of Duval the police have in Hackett, Arkansas, the last place he served time.”

  “For those ‘wickednesses’ the kid was going to tell about unless Dodge paid him?”

  Barker made a face. “Dodge was in and out of jails all over the Deep South for check-kiting and various confidence games. He had the good looks that cause silly women to fall over themselves to trust him with their money.”

  “And silly men,” Dave said, “Dodge himself at the head of the line. He could have grown a beard, couldn’t he, but he wouldn’t hide those looks. So he settled for not letting himself be photographed. It wasn’t enough.”

  “He was vain, all right. Did you know—he wasn’t thirty-five, he was forty-two.” Barker smiled wryly, shook his head, and finished off his Old Crow. “The kid was born in 1970, and Duval didn’t stay around much longer. May Ellen became an alcoholic and part-time prostitute. Somebody right out of Tennessee
Williams, mooning over her lost love. She hung onto every scrap of newsprint about his checkered career while they were together, read them over and over year after year till they’re falling apart. Dragged little Cary Dean all over the map, trying to find his dad. And when she was dying of cirrhosis, she made the kid swear on the Bible that he’d never stop looking.”

  “And he never did,” Dave said. “Photographs?”

  “Clipped from the papers. Also snapshots. Cary Dean must have studied them. He sure as hell knew his daddy when he saw him on the TV in that Venice bar. High school pictures. Wedding pictures. Baby pictures. Picnics. A canoe trip. Up until Daddy walked out of that jail in Hackett, Arkansas, when nobody was looking.”

  “And all the way to California and a shiny new life.”

  “Shiny and short,” Barker said. “Ah, here’s Max.”

  The rain was only a drizzle this noon, but steady. The splintery old pier was deserted except at its far end, where a solitary brown-skinned woman bundled in sweaters under a yellow slicker and sou’wester patiently held a long fishing pole, and leaned on the white wooden rail, a bucket at her rubber-booted feet. Dave passed the carousel where the orgatron wheezed, drummed, clashed its mechanical cymbals for no visible ears, where the sleekly lacquered horses rose and fell on their brass poles, and the mirrors framed in gilt and crimson flashed back the pewter light of the dreary day. Nobody rode.

  The booths were shut up behind scarred, painted plywood—the baseball toss, the dart throw, the shooting gallery. No one wandered the creaky aisles of the penny arcade. The gypsy lady automaton in her glass box gazed blankly at the rain from under her faded purple satin turban. At her back, electronic games flickered fitfully and beeped, begging quarters from absent pockets. In their tall, metal-raftered pavilion, the bumper cars in carnival blues, reds, yellows, squatted in disarray. Nobody rode.

  But a white-painted outdoor lunch counter was open. The flaking tin sign above it read FRIED SHRIMP HAMBURGERS HOT DOGS. Rain wept down the letters. Dave smelled the grease and onions before he reached the counter. Chrissie sat there in a plastic hooded raincoat on a rusty stool, shrimp and french fries in an oval red plastic basket in front of her, coffee steaming in a wax-paper cup, a paper napkin crumpled in a fist. Her white cane with the red tip hung off the edge of the counter, and she looked about as cheerful as the weather.