Dave Brandstetter 3 - Troublemaker

by Joseph Hansen

  "Good—you didn't go."

  He held out his arms to Johns, then saw Dave and dropped the arms and dropped his smile. It was the best smile Dave had seen in a long time and he hated to see it go.

  "What is it?" Owens said. "Larry's free. Isn't that fine?" The boy perched on the bed edge. Owens stroked his shoulder. He cocked an eyebrow at Dave. "Aren't you pleased?"

  "It's too early," Dave said. "I'll be pleased when they refund your bail money and he crosses home plate, but he hasn't crossed home plate—not yet. And that's only half of it. The other half is you."

  "Me? I'm fine—now."

  "You're a target," Dave said. "Someone tried to kill you. Not once but twice." He eyed the boy with the blond mustache. "And possibly three times." Owens tried to interrupt. Dave didn't let him. He told about the brake fluid, the deck bolts, about how Johnny Delgado had neglected his job, about how the kid who worked for Elmo Sands hadn't.

  Owens was pale against his pillows. Reaching for cigarettes on the magazine- and book-strewn blankets, his hand shook. He fumbled the pack and dropped it. Larry Johns took it, lit two cigarettes from it, handed one to Owens. The architect looked bleakly at Dave. "That's right. The photographer posed me leaning on that rail. Backward and frontward. It was his idea."

  "So the caption was fiction," Dave said. "You didn't go out there every night at martini time to watch the sunset."

  "Sunsets," Owens said, "are usually in bad taste."

  "But you fell off there," Dave said. "How?"

  "Trudy and Mark were recording." Owens gave an ironic laugh. "I was minding their business."

  "The night before," Dave asked, "you don't remember the dogs barking? Somebody was out there removing those bolts. It had to be under cover of darkness."

  "We were catching a play at the Mark Taper—Larry and I. Gail?" He creased his forehead. "Where was she?"

  "Free child-care centers for working mothers," Johns said. He squinted in the smoke from his cigarette, probing for and finding the brown pottery ashtray. "What would happen to Gail if she ever had to mind her own business for a week?"

  Owens laughed without hope or humor. "The world would be up to its ears in stray infants and oil slicks." He frowned. "Mark and Trudy weren't home that night either. Where were they?"

  "Poetry marathon," Larry Johns said. "At that far-out bookstore in Santa Monica. Ninety-nine poets, or something, reading steady for two days and two nights. The store wanted to get it in the Guinness Book of World Records. They used up about fifty tape cassettes and found out afterward the mike wasn't plugged in. Remember?" This time Owens's laugh was real. "Yes—right."

  Dave said, "So whether the dogs barked or not, there was no one home to hear them. How about when the brakes on your sister's car were tampered with?"

  "That was no way to kill me," Owens said. "I never drive that car."

  That was on a weekend." Larry Johns tugged at the ragged ends of his blond mustache, frowning, thoughtful. "Maybe they weren't here. We left them for shots at the vet's one Saturday." He went to a file cabinet and brought Dave a slip of paper headed LOS SANTOS ANIMAL CLINIC. The scrawled date was right. Dave handed back the slip and the boy put it away again. Owens watched his thin nakedness. The yellow eyes smiled and looked hungry. Dave told Owens, "Madge Dunstan and Ray Lollard picture you as someone everybody likes. So does Elmo Sands. He says you have only friends."

  "I'd have thought so," Owens said. "In that way, at least, I've always been lucky."

  "Think. There's no one you've crossed?" Dave sat in one of the orange canvas director's chairs. "Suppose you hadn't come along— who would have built those expensive beach houses that made you famous?"

  "Anyone and no one." Johns sat on the bed edge again and Owens stroked his back. "It really doesn't add up, Dave."

  "Does Larry ever drive your sister's car?"

  "No." Owens stopped his moving hand. "Gail and Trudy. Larry drives my car, the El Camino. What are you getting at?"

  "You look alike—fair, slender, long hair, mustaches," Dave said. "And on the night Rick Wendell was killed, Larry wore your sarape and hat."

  The two on the bed watched him, puzzled.

  Dave told Johns, "Try to remember. We know now that Mark followed you that night. You evidently didn't notice him. Did you notice anybody else when you left the house and headed for the road where Wendell was waiting to pick you up?"

  "No. But I went out the driveway. In my cowboy boots. They made a lot of noise on the planks. If somebody went on the sand underneath I wouldn't have heard."

  "And you didn't notice a car following you when you drove up into the canyon with Rick?"

  "Tell you the truth"—Johns blushed scarlet, got off the bed, went to stand looking out the window—"Rick had kind of busy hands. Well, one hand, anyhow. A couple times I thought we'd go off the road."

  "So you weren't watching the rear-view mirror. You didn't see the headlights of the El Camino that Mark was driving. You didn't see headlights from another car?"

  "Sorry." Johns stepped to the bed to put ashes into the brown pottery tray. "What you think is the same one that tried to kill Tom by rigging those brakes and the deck rail came back and saw me leaving and mistook me for Tom and followed along to try to kill me?"

  Owens, pale again, took the boy's hand, gripped it hard. He looked at Dave. "You think he went right into Wendell's place and that was what Larry heard and—"

  "And that Wendell came out to investigate, found a stranger, snatched the gun from the desk, the stranger tried to get the gun away from him and it went off. Yes."

  "Jesus," Johns whispered. "He saved my life."

  "It was someone who didn't know me that well," Owens said with sudden conviction. "He tampered with the wrong automobile, then with that deck rail, where it was only by bad luck I happened to lean." He breathed in sharply. "He'd seen that magazine picture."

  "And believed the caption," Dave said. "And you wore the sarape and hat. Also on television, right?"

  "For color." Owens's smile was self-mocking.

  "But you can't think of anyone who wants you dead." Dave got up grimly from the director's chair and went to the door with the high wall break above it. "Try, Tom. Give it hard thought. There's got to be someone. And if we don't find him, Larry isn't going to stay free."

  Johns wasn't listening. Worried, he tugged at his mustache again. "Tom? They're running in a memorial to Rick at that Mr. Marvelous shuck tonight. I know Gail and the kids will be out. But I ought to go. I won't stay late. I mean—hell, he did save my life."

  "A friend." Owens's voice was heavy with irony but his smile was kind. "Sure, go. I'll be all right."

  "I couldn't go to the funeral," Johns explained.

  "Don't sweat it," Owens said. "It's okay." Watching them, the boy standing by the bed, the man in the bed holding his hand, smiling up at him, Dave had a sudden nightmare sense of deja vu.

  "Wear the sarape and hat," he said. He left them staring blankly at each other.

  CHAPTER 14

  ALONG A STRETCH of wide West Santa Monica Boulevard where the city criminal code didn't reach, signs, red, blue, yellow, flashed names at the rental cars of tourists that crawled past, bumper to bumper, while the Iowans inside, eyes circled by white from desert sunglasses, marveled. The signs read INSTITUTE OFORAL SEX, DO IT MODELING STUDIO, PEEK IN ADULT BOOKS, PUSSYCAT THEATRE. In calligraphies of glass, GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS wrote itself on the wide black slate of the night sky—TOPLESS, BOTTOMLESS, GO-GO DANCERS, BOYS BOYS BOYS, TOTAL, the signs said, NUDITY. And there were neon drawings of gigantic naked hips and breasts and smiles.

  Surprisingly, but only to those who didn't know Los Angeles, in the midst of all this loomed an old-time livery stable, newly painted red with white trim—THE BIG BARN. It was the largest L.A. gay bar, logical host to the Mr. Marvelous contest. Day-Glo banners fluttered on its country front. A swivel klieg light mounted on a noisy flatbed truck sent a blinding blue-white shaft into the high darkness. Barbra Str
eisand wailed from loudspeakers over an entryway lit by electrified ranch-house lanterns.

  A strip of incongruous red carpet crossed the sidewalk. At the curb, glossy rented limousines halted and discharged beautiful youths who looked nervous and a little too muscular for their hired tuxedos. The way traffic inched along gave Dave time to study them. He'd met the majority. But the clothes, the grooming, varnished them to sameness. And they hadn't glowed like this in their jeans and work shirts at the bars. Only Bobby Reich. Clothed or unclothed, Bobby dazzled. He stepped out now from Ace Kegan's shiny little Fiat.

  A crowd five rows deep behind red silken ropes made a gantlet of the stretch from curb to door. They gasped and sighed. Camera bulbs flashed. Microphones glittered toward smiling mouths like drunken missiles toward the moon. A bored-looking man with a motion picture camera saddling a shoulder pushed onlookers. Dave reached a corner and idled up a side street where the dense leafage of old acacias dimmed the street lamps. He was three blocks off before he found a parking space that would take the Electra.

  When he got back to The Big Barn, the crowd was funneling inside. Ahead of him, he glimpsed the cheap red windbreaker and childlike brown hair of Vern Taylor. When he himself got inside and handed money to a rosy-cheeked boy-man in the oiled and hand-rubbed horse stall that was making shift as a box office, Dave turned to search the press of men and boys behind him. In the doorway stood Kovaks and Ray Lollard—Lollard beaming with pride and joy, Kovaks unshaven, in clay-stained bib overalls. Dave chuckled. It was to Lollard he had mailed Kovaks's gift pot. Tonight at dinner with Madge, Doug had told him that Kovaks was moving his workshop into the carriage house back of Lollard's old mansion.

  The main room of The Big Barn was enormous, propped by splintery posts and overhung by haymows. The wired barnyard lanterns glowed everywhere, amber mostly but sometimes red and green, now and then even white. Sawdust was thick underfoot. Sets of spurs, cracked oxen yokes, lariats coiled and lacquered into uselessness, hung against the walls. Dave's foot kicked a brass spittoon. Strictly ornamental—it sprouted plastic flowers. This was the West—but only West L.A.

  On the room's far side, long mirrors in old mahogany frames, probably bought on the back lot of some defunct film studio, reflected glittering bottles. Maybe he could get a drink. He began muttering excuses and using a shoulder and an elbow. In five minutes he had reached the long bar that matched the mirrors. Brunswick would probably have been the manufacturer's name but too many elegantly clad pelvises were in the way—he couldn't look for the label.

  He had to wait awhile but a double Scotch came to him at last. It tasted like a prescription by a dropout pharmacist. But the commingled smells of strong colognes around him overpowered the taste and he drank it. He felt himself grin at the painting above the bar. No buxom Gay Nineties lady on a tufted red velvet sofa but cowboys taking each other's Levi's off in a moonlit bunkhouse—cowboys pretty as girls and hung like stallions. A voice at his ear said:

  "I haven't seen you in here before."

  Dave didn't look around. "Just passing through," he said. "As quickly as possible."

  The owner of the voice turned away. "You're right—she's vice."

  "Vice?" someone else said. "Impossible. She's wearing matching shoes."

  A change came in the dense warp and weft of talk that stretched across the huge room. He glanced at his watch, then looked toward the end of the place where spotlights fingered down. There on a makeshift stage under the planking of a loft, a slim man in a white tuxedo, shirt ruffles, a silver wig sprinkled with mica, clutched a chrome microphone stand. A sunburst of colored foil backgrounded him. On a table beside him three brass trophy cups gleamed above watches and cuff" links in jewelers' boxes and a display by an expert window dresser of shirts, sweaters, pants, jackets.

  The man on the stage moved his mouth but no sound reached across the wide blue lake of tobacco smoke. Laughter and shouts pelted him. We can't hear you, Vic, darling! He visored his eyes with a hand on which rings sparkled. He peered toward the darkness beyond the end of the stage. Suddenly, electronic feedback howled through the room. There were shrieks. Then, "Welcome!" came from the man in white. It came too loud and folded back on itself in a ringing echo. He stepped away from the mike, laughing, put a hand on his hip and squinted into the darkness again. He tried again. And this time all was well—or as well as could be expected.

  "Welcome to the Third Annual Mr. Marvelous Awards! I'm your host, Vic Waverly. These have always been superb evenings. This one will top them all, I promise you, my dears. From the point of view of entertainment, from the stunning quality of the men—and I lay stress on that word, oh, do I lay stress on that word, darlings!—who have become finalists in the competition. You'll meet them in a minute. But first, I want to ask the judges to stand up so you can meet them. They're distinguished members of the Southern California Gay Community. Taking them in alphabetical order—"

  First was a minister, complete with dog collar, though he'd got his training in backwoods Baptist seminaries in the deep South. Next was a moon-faced man with a belly who had begun as a gay activist at fifty after a lifetime of bailing out likely youths from jail, and now spent his nights on television talk shows explaining the gay mystique, whatever that was. Last was an acne-scarred publisher who served the homosexuals of fifty states with a sleek magazine that glamorized sadism and Texas mass murderers. There wasn't much applause but Dave knew better than to be gratified—the reason was, everyone held drinks and glossy program books.

  Music came through loudspeakers. Hawaiian, of all things. Dave flinched, tilted up his glass, found only ice and asked for another drink. While he waited he ran a troubled look over the room again. And smiled grim satisfaction to himself. There was the white Stetson, the gaudy sarape. He dropped bills on the counter, picked up his glass. The time had come to move. If there was going to be action, he didn't want anyone hurt. Or dead. He began shouldering his way with apologies through the crowd.

  But when he reached the spot by a post with fake cattle brands burned into it where he'd seen Larry Johns, the boy wasn't there.

  Dave pushed on, craning to get another glimpse of the hat through the acres of fashionable haircuts, edging and jostling first to one side of the room, then the other. He ended up in an open area in front of the stage. It surprised him. There were even empty chairs, two rows of the folding kind, gray metal tubing, white padded plastic seats. They faced the backs of the judges, huddled over charts and photographs.

  A fat little black-bearded man hung with straps and leather cases crouched, flashing camera bulbs at them. Behind the stage more bulbs flared. This space, these chairs, were for the press, of course, when they finished with the shiny-headed contestants back there and the gray-headed managers. Dave glimpsed Ace Kegan's knotty hands fidgeting with Bobby's tie. Dave dropped onto a chair and lit a cigarette. Maybe Larry Johns would find him. But it wasn't Larry Johns who touched his shoulder. He turned and looked up into the silver-marred smile of Vern Taylor. Taylor said:

  "I saw you come in and I was pretty surprised. I mean, I knew you were gay—I can always tell. But I didn't think you'd come for this. I thought your life style would be different. You'd have a lover, somebody permanent. And you'd go places like ballets and operas and plays and art galleries. Together. You wouldn't cruise bars like this, and baths, and all that."

  "I'm working," Dave said. "Still trying to find out about Tom Owens's accident."

  Taylor didn't answer. He eyed Dave for a moment, then looked at the stage. So did Dave. A trio of slim little Polynesian youths, brown, sleek, smiling, had come out of the dark. They were wrapped to the waist in bright missionary cotton. Their small hands did graceful flower-in-the-wind turns, their narrow hips twisted dreamily. Taylor made a sound. Dave looked at him. His eyes were bright. He licked his lips.

  The tempo of the tune quickened. As one, the boys gave slow winks. Slowly, not missing a beat or a gesture, they turned their backs. Slowly their hands found
the cloth knots at their sides, twitched them, and the bright print wraparounds dropped. They were naked. Whoops. Whistles. They waggled little brown butts and, still keeping time with the music, slowly turned to face the crowd. Cheers. Jeers. Someone shouted, "My God, it's an invasion of field mice!" The boys joined in the laughter.

  Dave turned to check Taylor's reaction but Taylor had moved off. The red jacket showed among a knot of people that had formed where steps came off the side of the stage. But Taylor wasn't watching the dancers. He was watching Dave. From here he looked about sixteen. Except for his expression. Dave didn't know what it meant. Startlement but something else too—something ugly. And the look wasn't at him. It was at something past him. He turned. Larry Johns stood there, not sure how much to smile, fingers nervous at his ragged young mustache. He plucked at the bright sarape. "I did like you asked," he said. "I don't know why."

  Dave stood. Maybe simply to shield the boy from that basilisk stare of Taylor's. He said, "Your photo was in the Times. Evidently before Yoshiba got you away from there, reporters came. You were on those long cement stairs down from the Wendell place. Wearing that outfit."

  "Yeah." Johns's clear brow wrinkled. "So?"

  "Have you thought," Dave asked, "why someone tried three times to kill Tom—then didn't try anymore?"

  "Oh, wow." Johns sat down as if maybe his legs were unsteady. He watched the bare brown boys a moment without really seeing them. He blinked at Dave. "No, not really. It's kind of funny, though, isn't it?"

  "I hope it stays funny," Dave said. "But I'm betting it won't. Keep close to me—right?"

  "What's wrong?" Johns looked around, alarmed.

  "Take it easy," Dave said. "I'm working on a hunch. They're not always reliable."

  The music reached a final whining upslide of guitars, the brown boys snatched up their fallen sarongs and fled the stage, giggling like the three little maids from school. Applause clattered off the wooden walls. For this, people had abandoned their drinks. Confetti showered from the lofts. A few colored balloons wagged toward the high, shadowy rafters. Someone on a loft reached out and punctured one. It popped like a shot.