“Dave asked, “When did Robinson quit you?”
“Eight months, two weeks, and six days ago,” Shevel said. He said it grimly with a kind of inverse satisfaction, like counting notches in a gun butt.
“Did he give a reason?”
“Reason?” Shevel snorted and worked on his drink again. “He felt old age creeping up on him. He was all of thirty-two. He decided he wanted to be the one who was looked after, for a change.”
“No quarrels? No hard feelings?”
“Just boredom.” Shevel looked at his glass but it was empty. Except for the ice cube. It still looked new. He wheeled abruptly back to the bar and worked the bottle again. Watching him, Dave tried his drink for the first time. Shevel bought good Bourbon with Medallion’s money. Shevel asked, “If there’d been hard feelings, would he have come back to borrow money?”
“That might depend on how much he needed it,” Dave said.
“Or thought he did. I hear he was desperate.”
Shevel’s eyes narrowed. “What does that mean?”
“Trying to keep a champagne boy on a beer income.”
“Exactly.” Shevel’s mouth tightened like a drawstring purse. “He never had any common sense.”
“So you didn’t lend him anything,” Dave said.
“I told him not to be a fool. Forty-nine percent of the world’s population is male.” Shevel’s chair buzzed. He steered it back, stopped it, tilted his glass, swallowed half the new drink. He looked toward the windows where the rain was gray. His voice was suddenly bleak. “I’m sorry he’s dead. He was life to me for a long time.”
“I’ll go.” Dave walked to the bar, set down his glass, began shrugging into the trench coat. “Just two more questions. Manuel. Does he take you deer hunting?”
Shevel looked blank.
Dave said, “Your thirty-thirty. When did you use it last?”
Shevel squinted. “What are you talking about?”
“A deer rifle. Winchester. Remington.”
“Sorry.” His bony fingers teased his white wig. He simpered like a skid row barroom floozy. “I’ve always preferred indoor sports.” He was suddenly drunk. He looked Dave up and down hungrily. “Next question.”
“Those magazines of yours,” Dave said. “The new Supreme Court decision on obscenity. You’re going to have to do some retooling—right?”
Shevel’s eyes got their old hardness back. “It’s been on the drawing boards for months. A whole new line. Home crafts. Dune buggies. Crossword puzzles. And if you’re suggesting I shot Robbie with his rifle in order to get the money to finance the changeover, then you don’t know much about publishing costs. Ten thousand dollars wouldn’t buy the staples.”
“But you do know how much the policy paid.”
The crooked smile came back. “Naturally. I bought it for him. Years ago.” The smile went away. “How typical of him to have forgotten to take my name off it.”
“And the thirty-thirty. Did you buy that too?”
“I paid for it, of course. He had no money.”
“I’ll just bet he didn’t,” Dave said.
The development may have looked sharp to start with but it had gone shabby fast. It was on the coast road at the north end of Surf, which had gone shabby a long time ago. You couldn’t see the development from the coast road. You had to park between angled white lines on the tarmacked shoulder and walk to a cliff where an iron pipe railing was slipping, its cement footings too near the crumbling edge.
Below, along a narrow rock and sand curve of shore, stood apartment buildings. The tinwork vents on the roofs were rusting. Varnish peeled from rafter ends and wooden decks. The stucco had been laid on thin. It was webbed with cracks. Chunks had broken out at corners showing tarpaper and chickenwire underneath.
Dave saw what Ken Barker had meant. The only access to the place was down cement steps, three long flights against the cliff face. There’d been too much sand in the cement. Edges had crumbled. Today rain washed dirt and pebbles across the treads and made them treacherous. No—no wheelchair case could get down there. He was about to turn back when, the way it will sometimes for a second, the surf stopped booming. It charged and fell heavily, like a big, tired army under one of those generals that never gives up. But it breathed.
And in the sudden silence he heard from below a voice, raised in argument, protest, complaint. He went on down. The iron rail was scabby with corrosion. His hand came away rusty. He left cement for a boardwalk over parts of which sand had drifted, sand now dark and sodden with rain. He passed the backs of buildings, slope-top metal trash modules, the half-open doors of laundry rooms. The voice kept on. He turned between two buildings to walk for the beach front.
The voice came from halfway up wooden steps to a second-story deck. A small man stood there under a clear plastic umbrella. He was arguing up at the legs of a young black police officer above him on the deck. The officer wore a clear plastic slicker.
The little man shouted, “But I’m the goddamn owner of the goddamn place! A taxpayer. It’s not Chief Gates that pays you—it’s me. You know what the taxes are here? No—well, I’m not going to tell you because I hate to see a strong man cry. But they got to be paid, friend, if I rent it or don’t rent it. And have you looked at it? I was screwed by the contractor. It’s falling apart. Nineteen months old and falling apart. I’m suing the son of a bitch but the lawyers are breaking me. Not to mention the mortgage. A storm like this, carpets get soaked, plaster falls down. Could be happening in there right now. Why do you want to make things worse for me?”
Dave climbed the steps. When he’d come up to the little man, the officer said, “Mr. Brandstetter. That make three. This one. Robinson’s ex-boss. Now you.” His grin was very white. “This a real popular spot this morning.”
“Turning people away, right?” Dave said. “Because the apartment’s sealed, waiting for the DA?” He looked past the little man. Up the beach, a clutch of slickered cops was using a drag with deep teeth on the sand. Plastic wrapped their caps, their shoes. Nothing about them looked happy. It was work for tractors. But there was no way to get tractors down here.
The black officer said, “DA been and gone.”
“Yeah.” The little man goggled at Dave through big hornrims. “They talk about human rights. What happened to property rights? I own the place but I get treated like a thief. I can’t get in till Robinson’s brother comes and collects his stuff.” His nose was red. And not from sunburn. There hadn’t been any sun this month. “You’re not his brother, are you?”
“Not the way you mean,” Dave said. And to the officer, “Flag me when he comes, will you?” He went down the stairs and down the rain-runnelled beach. The sergeant he talked to wore plainclothes and no hat. His name was Slocum. Rain plastered strands of pale red hair to his freckled scalp. Dave said, “What about the surf?”
“Running too high. You can’t work a launch on it. Not close in where we have to look. Keep washing you up all the time.” He glanced bitterly at the muddy sky. “Storm doesn’t quit, we’ll never find it.”
“The storm could be your friend,” Dave said. “Ought to wash anything ashore—all that power.” And fifty yards off a cop yelled in the rain, bent, picked something out of the muddy surf, came with it at a trot, waving it above his head like a movie Apache who’d got the wrong room at Western Costume. “See?” Dave said.
“No wonder you’re rich,” Slocum said. It was a rifle. The cop offered it. Slocum shook his head. “You’ve got gloves, I don’t. You hold it. Let me just look at it.” He stared at it while the cop turned it over and it dripped. “Thirty-thirty Remington,” Slocum said. “Eight years old but like new. Won’t act like new—not unless they get the seawater out of it right away.”
“Seawater doesn’t erase prints,” Dave said, and turned back toward the apartments because he heard his name called above the slam of surf, the hiss of rain. The black officer was waving an arm from the deck. A bulky man was with him. Dave j
ogged back. The landlord was yammering to a girl with ragged short hair in a Kobe coat at the foot of the stairs, but there wasn’t any hope in his voice now. Dave went up the stairs.
“Reverend Merwin Robinson,” the black officer said. “Mr. Brandstetter. Insurance.”
“Something wrong with the insurance?” The reverend had a hoarse voice. The kind you get from shouting—at baseball games or congregations. A thick man, red-faced. A big crooked vein bulged at one temple.
“What’s wrong with it is the beneficiary,” Dave said.
Robinson stiffened, glared. “I don’t understand.”
“Not you,” Dave said. “Bruce K. Shevel.”
Robinson blinked. “You must be mistaken.”
“That’s what Shevel said.”
“But I’m Arthur’s only living relative. Neither of us has anyone else. And he’d left Shevel. Said he never wanted to see him again.”
“He saw him again,” Dave said. “Tried to borrow money from him. I gather he saw you too.”
The minister’s mouth twitched. “Never at my invitation. And years would go by. He knew my stand. On how he lived. The same saintly mother raised us. He knew what the Bible says about him and his kind.”
“But lately he tried to borrow money,” Dave said.
“He did.”
The black officer had opened the glass wall panel that was the apartment door. Robinson saw, grunted, went in. Dave followed. The room was white shag carpet, long low fake-fur couches, swag lamps in red and blue pebbled glass.
“Of course I refused. My living comes from collection plates. For the glory of God and His beloved Son. Not to buy fast automobiles for descendents of the brothels of Sodom.”
“I don’t think they had descendents,” Dave said. “Anyway, did you have that kind of money?”
“My church is seventy years old. We’ve had half a dozen fires from faulty wiring. The neighborhood the church serves is just as old and just as poor.” Robinson glanced at a shiny kitchenette where a plaster Michaelangelo David stood on a counter with plastic ferns. He went on to an alcove at the room’s end, opened and quickly closed again a door to a bathroom papered with color photos of naked men from Playgirl, and went into a room where the ceiling was squares of gold-veined mirror above a round, tufted bed.
Dave watched him open drawers, scoop out the contents, dump them on the bed. Not a lot of clothes. A few papers. He slid back closet doors. Little hung inside. He took down what there was, spilling coat hangers, clumsily stooped, pushed the papers into a pocket, then bundled all the clothes into his arms and turned to face Dave. “That ten thousand dollars would have meant a lot to my church—new wiring, shingles, paint, new flooring to replace what’s rotted—” He broke off, a man used to having dreams cancelled. He came at the door with his bundle of dead man’s clothes and Dave made way for him. “Well, at least these will keep a few needy souls warm for the winter.” He lumbered off down the length of the apartment, onto the deck and out of sight.
Dave looked after him. The view was clear from this room to the deck—maybe forty feet. Lily could have stood here with the thirty-thirty. At that distance the bullet hole wouldn’t be too messy. Dave went for the door where cold, damp air came in. Also the little man who owned the place. He collided with Dave.
“Your turn,” Dave said.
“It rents furnished,” the little man said. “A preacher, for God sake! Crookeder than a politician. Did you see? Did he take kitchen stuff? I saw that bundle. Anything could have been in it. All the kitchen stuff stays with the place. Sheets, towels? All that’s mine.” He rattled open kitchen drawers, cupboards, slammed them shut again, dodged into the bathroom, banged around in there—“Jesus, look what that fag did to the walls!”—shot out of the bathroom and into the bedroom. Merwin Robinson had left the chest drawers hanging. From the doorway Dave could see their total emptiness. The little man stopped in front of them. His shoulders sagged. In relief or disappointment?
“All okay?” Dave asked.
“What? Oh, yeah. Looks like it.” He didn’t sound convinced.
Downstairs, Dave pressed a buzzer next to a glass panel like the one directly above that had opened into Arthur Thomas Robinson’s apartment. While he’d talked to the dead man’s brother and the black officer, he’d looked past their wet shoes through the slats in the deck and seen the short-haired girl go into this apartment. She came toward him now with Daily Variety in her hand, looking as if she didn’t want to be bothered. She still wore the Kobe coat but her hair wasn’t short anymore. She had on a blonde wig out of an Arthur Rackham illustration—big and fuzzy. She slid the door. A smell of fresh coffee came out.
“Were you at home when Robinson was killed?”
She studied him. Without makeup she looked like a ten-year-old boy dressed up as the dandelion fairy. “You a cop?”
He told her who he was, gave her a card. “The police like to think Lily killed him because it’s easy, it will save the taxpayers money. I’m not so sure.”
She tilted her head. “Whose money will that save?”
“Not Medallion’s,” he said. “I’d just like to see it go to somebody else.”
“Than?” She shivered. “Look—come in.” He did that and she slid the door to and put the weather outside where it belonged. “Coffee?” Dropping Variety on a couch like the ones upstairs, she led him to the kitchenette, talking. “Who did Robbie leave his money to?” She filled pottery mugs from a glass urn. “It’s funny, thinking of him having money to leave when he was hitting on me and everybody else for twenty here, twenty there.” She came around the counter, pushed a tall, flower-cushioned bar stool at Dave and perched on one herself. “He was really sick.”
“Sick?” Dave tried the coffee. Rich and good.
“Over that Eddie. Nothing—beautiful junk. Like this pad. Robbie was nice, a really nice, gentle, sweet, warm human being. Of all things to happen to him!” She took a mouthful of coffee, froze with the cup halfway to the countertop, stared, swallowed. “You don’t mean Robbie left Ed Lily that money?”
“That would be too easy,” Dave said. “No—he left it to Bruce K. Shevel.”
“You’re kidding,” she said.
Dave twitched an eyebrow, sighed, got out cigarettes. “That’s what everybody thinks. Including Shevel.” He held the pack for her to take one, took one himself, lit both. He dropped the lighter into his pocket. “Was Shevel ever down here?”
“How? He was a wheelchair case. Robbie told me about him. It was one of the reasons he chose this place. So Shevel couldn’t get to him. The stairs. Why would he leave Shevel his money?”
“An oversight, I expect. After all, what was he—thirty-two? At that age, glimmerings of mortality are still dim. Plenty of time to make changes. Or maybe because Shevel had bought him the policy, he thought he owed him something.”
“Robbie owed him? That’s a laugh. He used him like a slave for ten years. If anything, it was the other way around. Shevel owed Robbie. But he wouldn’t shell out a dime when Robbie asked for it.”
“So I hear,” Dave said. “Tell me about Lily.”
She shrugged. “You know the type. Dime a dozen in this town. They drift in on their thumbs, all body, no brains. If they even get as far as a producer, they end up with their face in his pillow. Then it’s back to Texas or Tennessee to pump gas for the rest of their lives. Only Eddie was just a little different. Show business he could live without. Hustling was surer and steadier. He always asked for parts in pictures but he settled for cash. A born whore. Loved it.
“I tried to tell Robbie. He wouldn’t listen. Couldn’t hear. Gone on the little shit, really gone. You want to know something? Eddie hadn’t been here a week when he tried to get me into the sack.” Her mouth twitched a half grin. “I told him, ‘I don’t go to bed with fags.’ ‘I’m not a fag,’ was all he said. As if I and every other woman in the place didn’t know that. Woman. Man. Everybody—except Robbie.” She turned her head to look down the
room at the glass front wall, the gray rain beyond it, the deserted beach, the muddy slop of surf. “Poor Robbie! What happens to people?” She turned back for an answer.
“In his case,” Dave said, “murder.”
“Yeah.” She rolled her cigarette morosely against a little black ashtray. “And he never said a wrong word to Eddie. Never. Eddie was all over him all the time—I want this, I want that. You promised to introduce me to so-and-so. Take me here, take me there.”
Dave looked at the ceiling. “Soundproofing another thing they cheated the owner on?”
“I got pretty familiar with Robbie’s record collection. Sure, I could hear damn near every word. And a lot that wasn’t words. The bedroom’s right over mine too.”
“Was that where the shot came from?” Dave asked.
“I wasn’t here. Didn’t I tell you? I was on location in Montana. Up to my elbows in flour in a tumble-down ranch house with little kids tugging at my skirts and my hair hanging over one eye. Twenty seconds on film. All that way on Airwest for twenty seconds.”
“Too bad,” Dave said. “Were you ever up there?”
“Robbie’s? Yeah, for drinks. Now and then.”
“Ever see a rifle?”
“They found it, didn’t they?” She jerked the big fuzzy wig toward the beach. “Talking to Dieterle, I saw the cop fish it out of the kelp and run to you with it. You brought them luck. They were raking for it all day yesterday too.”
“But did you ever see it in the apartment?”
She shrugged. “It was probably in a closet.” She drank some coffee and frowned. “Wait a minute. I helped Robbie move in. No, I didn’t know him. I parked up at the cliff edge and there he was with all this stuff to carry. I just naturally offered to help. And I hung around helping him settle in and we had a drink.”
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