Dave Brandstetter 3 - Troublemaker

by Joseph Hansen

  Dave pulled the glasses down his nose, looked at her over the top of the menu. "Shouting what?"

  "I can't say. It upset the dogs and they were barking. It's impossible to hear anything once they begin." She drew breath. "Anyway, soon Larry followed the man out to the highway. Not, I'd say, willingly."

  Dave set the menu back between the lightless candle chimney and glass salt and pepper shakers. "Out to the highway?"

  "There was a camper parked there. Quite grimy. When they got near it, a girl stepped down out of the cab —a young woman. Larry stopped in his tracks. From that moment on, the only one who seemed to be talking was the man. He gesticulated a good deal. Then the girl went to the back of the camper and opened the door. At which point, Larry turned and started to walk off."

  Dave tilted up the last of his drink. "Go on."

  "Well, the man lunged after him and caught his arm. Larry jerked free and came running for the house. Out the plank driveway Tom had built over the dunes. The man took half a dozen steps, then stopped and just stood there with Larry's jacket sleeve in his hand. The girl climbed out of the camper. Backward. I'm sure there was someone inside, someone she was coaxing to come out. But then the man went and spoke to her and she got back into the camper and shut the door and in a minute he drove the thing away."

  The stout woman loomed out of the brown dimness now, holding an order pad and pencil. She'd left the soiled apron someplace. Dave said to Gail Ewing, "Sure you won't eat?" and at her headshake ordered for himself. The stout woman picked up Dave's empty glass and went away. Dave said, "And that was when Larry Johns called Rick Wendell —right?"

  "I don't know whom he called," she said sharply. "I heard him come into the house by the door from the carport. And when I got downstairs, he was using the kitchen phone. I suppose he'd heard me on the stairs. He lowered his voice. But it was obvious that he was upset and the call was urgent."

  "You didn't hear him mention money?"

  "I heard him say his own name," she answered. "That's all. He repeated it several times. As if giving it to someone who'd never heard it before. I didn't lurk. The dogs and the children had given the livingroom hard use on Sunday. I went to pick up. When Larry came out of the kitchen and saw me, he begged me not to tell Tom about the man who'd come to see him."

  "And you didn't," Dave said. "Why?"

  The yellow eyes went hard, the voice went hard. "Because he was in trouble and that was where I wanted him. Tom would only have rescued him. And I didn't want him rescued. I wanted him out."

  "Which is also why you took the phone away from Tom when he saw the TV news and wanted to call a lawyer. And why you hung up on me when I phoned."

  "People take advantage of Tom."

  Dave's smile was thin. "Other people. Not you."

  Her eyes widened, then narrowed. She said through clamped teeth, "What do you mean?"

  "Why are we talking here? Why not at Tom Owens's house? At Tom Owens's bedside? Because you don't want him to know what you did to him. Not to Larry Johns —to him, your beloved brother."

  She snatched up the gloves and purse. "I've never hurt Tom Owens in my life!" She slid out of the booth and stood, trembling. "Where do you think he'd be today if it weren't for me? You don't know him." Tears leaked down her face. Impatiently she knuckled them away. "He has no common sense, no sense of self-preservation. Without me to protect him —"

  "Yes," Dave said. "He mentioned that. You've made a lot of decisions for him. That was a kind way of putting it. He strikes me as a kind man —taking you and Trudy in, supporting you all these years."

  "He's very generous," she snapped.

  "I'm not talking about nickels and dimes," Dave said. "I'm talking about sacrificing any life of his own. He told me he'd never brought anybody home before Larry Johns."

  "He has too much respect for me, for his family." She tugged the gloves on, motions jerky. Her voice sulked. "He could have done as he pleased. I never interfered. He'd no right to accuse me of that."

  "Did you give him any encouragement?"

  "Suppose I had." She was scornful. "You've seen an example of his taste and judgment. You've seen what Larry Johns turned out to be."

  "I don't think he's a killer," Dave said.

  "The police don't agree with you. Nor do I."

  "The police are busy. And you don't like the boy. Those don't impress me as sufficient reasons to lock him up for the rest of his life."

  She dug keys out of her bag and looked at him. "And your reason for defending him? Isn't it the same as Tom's? You're another of those, aren't you?"

  "I try not to let it get in the way of my work," Dave said. "Mrs. Ewing, Larry Johns was simply a catalyst. His phone call from your kitchen triggered a chain reaction that ended in a man's death." Dave pushed out of the booth and stood facing her. "If you'd told your brother what you've told me here today, it's possible that man might still be alive."

  Her mouth worked but she didn't answer. She turned and marched out into the street glare. Dave used a scarred black pay phone screwed to the wall by the cash register. Yoshiba was still out. He went back to the booth and ate his goulash.

  CHAPTER 8

  YOSHIBA SAID, "I checked you out." His hands were blocky like the rest of him. One of them shoved a bulging manila folder away from him on a crowded desktop. "With Ken Barker of the L.A.P.D. He votes for you. You're smart and you always win." He raked together a sprawl of ugly eight-by-tens —a half-naked female body dumped among ashcans—tamped their edges straight, set a telephone on them. He lifted a flat-nosed, expressionless face. "But to me you're a pain in the ass."

  Dave shrugged. "You were the one who phoned me."

  "Old lady Wendell wants me to post officers to keep you away from her place. Ace Kegan's lawyer wants me to get you off his back."

  "Let me tell you about that pair."

  When Dave had learned at the front desk that Yoshiba was back from lunch, he'd dropped coins into a glossy red machine in a tiled foyer under a Spanish dome and collected tall Cokes in flower-printed wax-paper cups. He set one of these in front of the Los Santos police lieutenant now, sat down, and told about Heather Wendell and Ace Kegan.

  Yoshiba drank the Coke noisily and crunched the ice chips. He dragged down the knot of his tie and unbuttoned the collar constricting his thick neck. He turned shirt sleeves up bulging forearms. He swiveled his chair to frown at the window. It was already open. Sun glared off ranks of parked cars outside.

  "All right, all right," he said.

  "When they got to the house in the canyon, things went wrong. They didn't want him dead. They only wanted to shock him out of wrecking everything they had together. A confrontation. It ended in a fight and sudden death. Which was why Kegan went home and drank himself senseless —a man who doesn't drink."

  Yoshiba's blunt thumbnail peeled curls of wax off his cup. "And that call from Owens's kitchen —it was to the bar? And he gave Kegan his name?"

  "And Kegan's lying. He knew that name. He told me himself Wendell was a loose talker. He'd told Kegan about Johns. Certainly Wendell and Johns weren't strangers meeting for the first time that night."

  "So Kegan smelled trouble, the same old kind, right? And checked the bank on a hunch and learned about the fifteen hundred. Why didn't he tell Mrs. Wendell?"

  "Maybe he didn't have to," Dave said. "Maybe she knew it first and told him."

  Yoshiba shook his head. "No good. She'd have mentioned robbery to me."

  "Why? Johns obviously didn't have the money. It would have messed up a simple case and put her and Kegan in the middle. She was careless, leaving that empty envelope there. But no more careless than you were."

  Something glinted in Yoshiba's black eyes. "I wasn't trying to save my company twenty-five big bills." He shook his head. "It's frail, Brandstetter. I mean, it's abnormal psychology, for Christ sake. I've got a suspect locked in. What do I need with abnormal psychology?

  I'm working sixteen hours a day now." He lifted and dr
opped the heavy manila folder. "This is new today. This whole stack. The gun was in the kid's hand."

  "But your own lab says he didn't fire it."

  "Hoo." Yoshiba blew out air and stood up. "You've only got the Ewing woman's word for the phone call. And she didn't hear anything about money. That could have been exactly like Kegan told it —to buy hot furniture off a truck."

  "To revamp an already revamped bar?" Dave said. "Let's ask the boy."

  "Impossible," Yoshiba said. "The D.A. —"

  Dave stood up. "Owens didn't get him a lawyer, so what he's got is the public defender, right? Down the hall? What's the P.D.'s name? He'll go for this, if you won't."

  "Khazoyan is his name." Yoshiba leaned out the window and drew deep breaths. He pulled his head in. "Sure, he'll go for it. A lawyer with a client who won't even talk to him? He'll kiss you on both cheeks. But you have to jump over the D.A. first."

  "Not if you don't tell him," Dave said.

  "You want a lot for a Coke," Yoshiba said. But he grinned.

  Khazoyan's hair was silken and thinning. He was olive-skinned, had a thick, high-bridged nose and sunken cheeks. He slouched in a fake-leather swivel chair like Yoshiba's, with his feet on a desk stacked higher with paper than Yoshiba's. He wore new blunt-toed shoes with one-inch soles and two-inch heels. His shirt was lace. He ate a corned-beef sandwich on rye bread that was disintegrating. He licked mayonnaise and mustard from thin fingers and stretched a tired arm for a paper cup of coffee on his desk. His eyes were brown, bulging and luminous. His voice was tired as his motions, weak, high and hoarse. Above a very wide knotted necktie his larynx jumped as if it were trying to escape.

  "Yeah, it sounds important. He won't tell you, though. He won't tell anybody anything. He must have been jolted out of his mind — always supposing he's got a mind —when that old woman walked in on him. Otherwise he'd never have told her his name. He sure as hell never told anyone else. She told Yoshiba. For all the kid said, she could have made it up. If it weren't for his driver's license, I wouldn't believe it."

  "He also has a local habitation," Dave said, "and a history. Those people in the camper are part of it. Which also makes them part of his future."

  "Metaphysics." Khazoyan worked black brows, pushed the last bite of sandwich into his mouth, got his feet down off the desk. He sat forward and, while he chewed, wiped his hands on a meager paper napkin. He drained off the rest of his coffee, dropped the balled napkin into the cup, let the cup fall under the desk, where a metal wastebasket clanked. He got to his feet. "Okay." A jacket with tiny flowers stitched into the weave lay over the back of a metal chair. He pulled it on. "Let's give it a try." He opened the door into the hall.

  Larry Johns said, "The sarape and the hat. They're Tom's. Will you take them back to him?"

  When Dave had described the boy to Ace Kegan, he'd only seen a police photograph, read a police description. Johns was slighter than Bobby Reich. He looked frail, seated in faded Levi's and wilted T-shirt and scuffed cowboy boots on a stiff chair in a bare white room. He faced Dave and Khazoyan across an empty table. His long, straw-color hair was snarled. There was patchy beard stubble at the point of his chin. His eyes looked bruised.

  Dave told him, "Maybe you can take them back to him yourself soon. Why did you wear them?"

  "That son of a bitch Huncie tore the sleeve off my windbreaker," Johns said. "Tom bought me a suit but you don't hustle Johns in a suit. And it's cold at the beach at night. I had to wear something. Besides —" But he moved a hand instead of finishing the sentence.

  "Yes?" Dave said. "The hat?"

  The boy sat forward, looked at the square red tiles of the floor, moved his thin shoulders, mumbled, "I wanted to wear something of his. I wasn't leaving. I just had to get some bread fast, that was all." He looked up. "I'd never leave Tom. Tom's the best thing that ever happened to me." The blue eyes were miserably earnest. "He liked that sarape and that hat. I don't know —it made me feel like I wasn't really going anyplace."

  "But you were," Dave said. "Who saw you?"

  "Nobody. Tom was asleep. Doped. He took pills when the itching got too bad —you know, his legs, those casts. There's stairs up to the deck, around the corner from his room. I left that way."

  "And waited on the coast road for Wendell?"

  "He was there. He said eight and I was a minute late."

  "I'd like an explanation," Dave said.

  The blue eyes turned reproachful. They looked guardedly at Khazoyan, who was using a yellow pencil on a long yellow pad, then back at Dave. "He said he'd give me the money I needed."

  "Fifteen hundred dollars," Dave said. "For what? And why Wendell? Why not Owens? He was your friend."

  The boy's face closed. "I couldn't ask him for money. Not Tom. What we had wasn't like that."

  "So he told me," Dave said. "But that's not all of it, is it? You didn't want him to know what the money was for. You were afraid to tell him."

  Khazoyan stopped writing and lifted his head.

  The boy looked at him, at Dave. Unhappier than he'd looked till now. He got out of the chair and stood at the window, back to them. He said, "Yeah. Okay. You're right. Well, Jesus." He turned back, hands held out. "It was for child-support payments. To my ex-wife."

  Dave half smiled. "What had you told Owens you were —a virgin?"

  "No, but —Tom's got high standards. I'd run out on my responsibilities—right? Anyway, I'm living off him. What am I supposed to do—lay a wife and baby on him too?"

  "The girl in the camper," Dave said.

  "Jomay," Johns said sourly. "And BB. She dragged BB all the way here. To show me how big she is now. That was when I took off. If I wanted to know how big she was, for Christ sake, I knew where to find her. That creep Huncie. Jomay'd never have found me by herself."

  "Huncie?" Khazoyan wondered.

  " 'Uncle' Dwayne Huncie," Johns said disgustedly. "The turnip-nosed old son of a bitch. He's running a game. Calls himself a lawyer. Specializes in tracking down husbands that skip. But I'll bet he takes most of what he collects. Fees, you know? Plus which I bet he lays her every chance he gets, in that camper."

  "Only this time he didn't collect," Khazoyan said.

  "He would have. He leaned hard. And what could I do? I owed it. Jomay's old lady owns three beauty parlors. She didn't need it. But the judge said I had to pay it. So I thought of Rick and I promised Huncie I'd have the bread for him next morning. He'd have braced Tom for it otherwise. I told him there was some other dude who said he'd give me money anytime I asked. I'd get it from him."

  "Did you give him Wendell's name?" Dave asked.

  "I had to," Johns said. "Huncie's a mean bastard. He wasn't buying anything vague. Didn't trust me. He wanted to know exactly who and how and when."

  "Did you give him Wendell's address?"

  "I didn't know it then —only the bar. I gave him the name of the bar—The Hang Ten."

  "The home address is in the phone book," Khazoyan said wearily. "So you told this Huncie character where you were going to get his fifteen hundred dollars."

  "How did you know Wendell would come through?" Dave asked. "That's a lot of money."

  Johns eyed him bleakly. "It's what he told me. The one time we made it. He took me home from The Hang Ten. Afterward he said if I'd keep doing it with him, he'd give me anything I wanted. I said I wasn't ready. Anytime, he said. All I had to do was ask. So —" He watched Khazoyan take out cigarettes, light one, put the pack away, start writing again, squinting an eye against the smoke from the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. Dave held out his pack to Johns. The boy took a cigarette, tried for a smile and missed.

  "So?" Dave snapped the lighter for him.

  Johns said dully, "So I asked." He lit the cigarette, took it from his mouth and looked at it. "Thanks."

  "You telephoned the bar first," Dave said.

  The door opened behind him. Johns looked over Dave's head but he answered, "He wasn't there yet. Gail keeps all the cloc
ks set fast. Ten minutes. I kept forgetting. So I phoned his house. Rick's."

  "Who answered?" Yoshiba asked from the doorway. Down the hall back of him a child was crying.

  "His mother," Johns said.

  Dave and Khazoyan spoke together and stopped.

  The door clicked shut and Yoshiba stood at Dave's elbow. "Did you give her your name?"

  "Sure," Johns said. "She asked. Why not?"

  "You never gave us your name." Yoshiba swung a thick thigh onto a corner of the table. "You opened up to her. Did you tell her what you wanted with her son?"

  "Watch that," Khazoyan said to his tablet.

  "Forget it," Yoshiba said.

  "I didn't tell her anything," Johns said. "I told Rick when he got on the phone. He was cheered up. Wow! I felt like a shit. Because I wasn't going to stay with him. I was going to do it that night and take the bread and he wasn't ever going to see me again."

  "That worked out," Yoshiba said.

  Johns gave him a disgusted look. He said to Dave, "But I was in a bind. What could I do? I don't mean I wasn't going to pay him back. I'd have paid him back."

  "All right," Yoshiba cut in. "He gave you the money. What did you do with it? Shove it up your ass?"

  "Watch that," Khazoyan droned again.

  "He showed it to me when we got there," Johns said hotly. "He opened the envelope and showed it to me. In twenties, all neat, with those paper bands around the bundles, you know? That was what Huncie asked for —cash, small bills. So Rick got it that way. New twenty-dollar bills. You can tell Huncie is crooked. Who asks for money in cash, you know? That much money? Why not a check made out to Jomay? I mean, it's her bread, right? By the law—every second word Huncie says is 'law'—it's Jomay's money. And BB's."

  "Beebee?" Yoshiba looked and sounded blank. "The baby. She's eighteen months old."

  Yoshiba said, "He wanted you to make child payments —this Huncie?"