Dave Brandstetter 3 - Troublemaker

by Joseph Hansen

  The man in the white tuxedo returned, applauding, to the microphone. "Our thanks," he said, "to the management of The Flower Lei for sending us Mei Mei, Tei Tei and Laverne." Laughter. "Seriously, if that didn't get you in the mood, lie down, dears—you're dead. All right. So much for foreplay." Laughter, his own with the crowd's. "Now, I know you're all dying for a look at the stars of the evening —those handsome and talented and sexy finalists for the title 'Mr. Marvelous.' What?" He turned from the mike, stepped toward the back of the stage. "Yes, right." He faced the crowd again. "They're ready—isn't that nice? They've only had four months. Anyway—take a good look at them with their clothes on. It will be your last chance tonight." Cocked eyebrow, open hand on breast. "Did I say that? All right—here we go. First, from The Barracks, contestant number one, Skeets Mclntyre—five eleven, one sixty, actor, bronco buster, Texan from top to toe. Let's hear it for Skeets Mclntyre!" He backed from the microphone, applauding. Mclntyre appeared in the spotlights. His eyes were too close together.

  The parade ran on while the smoke thickened and the comments of the M.C. thinned and the judges squinted upward appraisingly and made notes with chewed pencils. The biggest applause came for Bobby Reich. But as Dave understood it, appearance was only a step. Somehow or other, as the evening wore on, talent and intelligence were supposed to be displayed. He set his drink between his feet on the sawdust and applauded Bobby. It might be his only honest opportunity. More balloons were loosed. Two of them banged this time. He wished that would stop. Here was a hairy lad in skin-tight wet-look black plastic from The Rawhide. And last, a lissome prince— princess?—from The Queen and Court.

  He reached down for his glass and nearly bumped heads with Ace Kegan, who was crouching in front of him, trying to make himself heard over the din of clapping, cheering, stamping, music, the clatter of empty beer cans underfoot. At the same moment, Dave noticed Vern Taylor trying to come back, working his way past the knees and floor-tangled camera cases of the news people who now filled the chairs. Except that no one filled the chair next to Dave. Where the hell was Larry Johns? Dave bent toward the broken face of the little ex-boxer. If this was bad news about Bobby Reich, then his worries about this evening were off target. He cupped a hand to his ear. But what Kegan said was:

  "You're wanted on the phone. By luck I was there when the call came. They won't page anybody—not with a crowd like this. Too many people afraid the boss might learn where they were. But I heard the dude who took the call speak your name. It's some kind of emergency. Somebody's mother. Otherwise I wouldn't have bothered. You don't exactly top my list of people I want to do favors for." He got to his feet, jerked his chin. "Phone's back of the bar."

  "Thanks." Dave stood, pushed his chair aside, headed for the mirrors. While he fought his way, he squinted around him, trying to locate Larry Johns. Nowhere. He swore to himself. The phone receiver lay like a stunned thing by a silver-painted wrought-iron cash register halfway along the back bar. Dave worked the trick latch of the gate at the bar's end. A hefty youth in a leather vest and waxed mustaches blocked his way. He gave his name. The youth went back to the tall, spooled spigot handles and the foaming steins he was supposed to be minding. Dave picked up the phone.

  "Get to the pet store, will you?" It was Doug. "On the double, please. Dave, she's really done it this time. She's liberated everything. The God damn sky is alive with parakeets and cockateels. Rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, white rats down every storm drain, cats and monkeys up every tree. They were political prisoners. She's Secretary General of the U.N. or something. Declared a worldwide general amnesty. I got the turtles back and a couple of toads. I'm quicker than they are. And, thank God, she didn't think of the fish. Yes, the fire department's coming. And the S.P.C.A. They say. But I need you. " While he listened, Dave watched the stage. The pastor of gay sheep came to the microphone. His sweet, swamp-water tones met a hush of beery reverence. Head thrown back, eyes closed, hands folded demurely at his crotch, he told God what had happened to big, gentle, lovable Rick Wendell. As if God let cases stack up on his desk like Johnny Delgado. The prayer ended. An electronic organ with bronchial problems and a subnormal pulse began "The Lord's Prayer." A plump, balding young man stepped up to sing the words.

  And a gun went off. Not that near, but near. The sound was nothing like the bursting of balloons. Bad nerves had tricked his memory. The crowd didn't know the difference. The organ and the off-key baritone wobbled on and they listened. But Dave knew the difference and felt very sick. Larry Johns. Why had he wandered off when Dave had warned him? Where was Vern Taylor? Why had Doug's disaster had to happen now? He told the phone, "Doug, I can't. Not now. I'm sorry." He blundered the receiver into place and ran.

  He didn't bother with apologies now, plowing his way backstage. He ended bruised and with a torn jacket pocket by the time he got there. In dim amber light, the contestants were stripping down to swim trunks. Silent. Out of respect for dead Rick Wendell and their own stage fright. The Big Barn's owner, bony, bucktoothed, sixty, in a silver-braided baby-blue satin cowboy outfit, was running an electric shaver over the bulging chest of his champion. Tenderly. Dave took it away from him, thumbed the switch to stop the waspish little motor, pushed the shaver into the boy's hand, took the man's stringy arm, led him away.

  "There's been a shooting," Dave said quietly. "Out in back, I think. How do we get there?"

  The man blinked, went pale, swallowed hard. But he moved. He led the way around a plank-and-stud partition that made a kind of hallway. To one side, doors were labeled us and THEM. There was a zinc-covered kitchen door with no light, no activity behind it. At the end of the hallway, a red EXIT sign was dim over a door with many bolts and chains. They weren't fastened. The bucktoothed man pulled the door open. The bulb outside was even dimmer, forty watts in a cage. It threw more shadow than light. There were big, scarred trash modules, stinking galvanized-iron garbage barrels, crates filled with smashed bottles. And in a chain-link fence corner clotted with soggy wastepaper—a man. He lay face down in a puddle that showed rainbows of oil. And something darker. Blood.

  "My God!" The bucktoothed man put out a hand.

  Dave knelt by Ace Kegan, laid fingers against the big vein in his neck. Life still beat there. But no thanks to Dave. Anger churned in him, disgust. Granted there'd been a lot of ways to be wrong in this case—did he have to try them all? And always too late? He got to his feet. "He's not dead," he told the bucktoothed man. "Phone the police. They'll bring an ambulance."

  "What are you going to do?"

  "I'm going to the beach." Dave headed for the glare of neons at the end of the alley. "As fast as I can get there. I hope to God it's fast enough."

  CHAPTER 15

  BUT HOLLYWOOD TRAFFIC on a summer weekend night was geared down. There was no way to get through it fast. In a three-block-long jam-up that had lasted through ten minutes of signal changes, he got disgusted. He left the car idling in the middle lane near La Cienega and Santa Monica and closed himself in a telephone booth. It stood against the curved stucco wall of a topless dance place. It smelled of marijuana smoke. He dug in his pocket. And the coins were wrong. Many yards off on an opposite corner, a Rexall drugstore promised change. There wasn't time. The signal went green. Horns began to blare behind the abandoned Electra. He dodged back to it. It was his turn at last and he made it across Santa Monica, but the achievement meant nothing. Down the long slope of restaurant row, the traffic clogged forever. When after another five minutes he reached a side street, he swung west toward Robertson. He'd phone from the apartment.

  He sat on the bed, sweating, working his way out of his jacket, tugging down the knot of his tie, and listening to the phone buzz busy at Tom Owens's end. He tried twice more. Hopeless. He lit a cigarette and dialed Operator. His shirt was soaked. The night breeze through the big empty rooms made him shiver. "Look, I'm trying to reach this number." He gave it. "And it's busy. Can you break in on the line? It's urgent." "One moment—I'll give you the
supervisor." The supervisor took more than a moment. And when she did get around to him, it didn't help. "I'm sorry. That number is out of order. I'll report it."

  "Oh, no!" Dave said. "Look, the party's an invalid. Maybe he knocked the phone off the hook."

  "I wouldn't be able to give you that information," she said. "You'd have to call Repair Service. They can check it for you. Dial 611." He dialed it and it rang a long, long time, but they checked the phone. "It is off the hook, sir. If this is an emergency, we can use a howler on it."

  "Great," Dave said. "Make it a loud howler."

  "They're not very loud," the girl said. Whether it was or not, Tom Owens didn't seem to hear it. "No one answers," the girl said.

  "Right, thanks." Dave hung up and bent to twist out his cigarette in the ashtray on the floor. Hell, he'd only wasted time. What good would it do to warn Tom Owens someone was coming to kill him? He couldn't move from that bed. Dave dialed another number. "Los Santos police. Officer Zara speaking." Officer Zara didn't sound more than sixteen. "Lieutenant Yoshiba, please. Dave Brandstetter calling. It's an emergency."

  "I'm sorry, sir. He's not here. Matter of fact, I'm the only one that is here. If you're calling about the trouble in Paradiso—"

  "I wasn't. What's the matter?"

  "It's the college kids again. They're trashing the mall again. They've occupied a bank. They're burning it. And somebody's sniping at the police. Everybody's there." He sounded wistful, left out.

  "Well, look, Officer Zara," Dave said. "I have reason to believe there may be an attempt at homicide. The Thomas Owens house." He gave the R.F.D. address on the coast road. "Can you send somebody?

  The man's alone there, laid up in bed, legs in casts."

  "He hasn't called us," the boy said.

  "He doesn't know the danger he's in," Dave said. "And while we're talking—"

  "Okay, sir. I understand. I've written down the address. I'll try to radio a car, send them out there. He's alone like that? No nurse?"

  "No nurse. The whole family's away tonight."

  "What about dogs? Those people out on the dunes, they usually have a dog."

  "Right," Dave said. "They've got dogs."

  The big dog lay just inside the open front door. It lay on the polished floorboards among splinters of glass. A panel had been smashed out of the door. Dave crouched by the dog. The light was poor. It came a long way—from the hanging wicker lamp above the wicker furniture at the room's far end. But it was enough to show him a puddle of drying blood under the dog's head. He touched the motionless body. It had begun to lose heat in the cool beach night, begun to stiffen. The fur had lost its sheen and felt coarse. There was no sign of the other dogs.

  A breeze sighed across the sand outside. There was the splash and sibilance of surf. Somewhere in the house, as in a ship, a beam creaked. He stood. And then he heard it, the sound of a voice. It came from beyond that far bulkhead, insistent, on a single pitch, no shift in tempo. It sounded not quite sane. But he knew the voice.

  If he'd had any doubt about whom he was chasing out those red-taillight-streaked miles of freeway and coast road after escaping the tangle of city traffic, the doubt had been wiped out by what he'd found, a minute ago, leaking oil on the clean planks of Tom Owens's otherwise empty carport. It was a battered ten-year-old European mini. The slatted engine cover at the back was still hot.

  Now he pried off his shoes and went quietly along beside the great painting under the gallery. Toward that edgy voice. The boxy hall the other side of the bulkhead was dark below but light came out through the tall opening above Tom Owens's closed door. It went high into a roof peak windowed by dark triangles of glass. The voice went up there too. And banged back down to Dave in the dark.

  ". . . Makes you want to vomit, doesn't it? Just hearing about it. Well, I lived it—two years of it, five months, eleven days. And you know why? Because once you get busted, they never leave you alone. They watch you all the time and they grab you. Make a mistake nobody else would notice and they grab you. Also, you have a record. You can't get a job."

  "Vern," Tom Owens said patiently, "I'm sorry. Why didn't you tell me all this the other day? Hand me the phone. I'll get you a job right now."

  "It's too late. Anyway, that's not what I wanted from you. I asked you for all I ever wanted from you that summer when we were seventeen. You remember. At the Cahuenga Park pool. To go on the way we had been, Tommy, the way you started us. Don't forget, it was your idea. You were the oldest."

  "Vern, it was a long time ago. Forget it. All right, yes. What I did to you was heartless and I'm sorry. But, Vern, I was only a kid."

  "Sure, you're sorry," Taylor sneered, "with my gun at your head. Anyway, do you think 'sorry' can wipe out seventeen rotten years? Hell, I didn't care if you took up with Nofziger and those guys with cars and rich parents. Even when they called me fag. Even when you did. All I asked was for you to save a little time for me."

  Owens interrupted. For a minute they both talked at once and the echo off the high boards of the hall broke the words and Dave couldn't understand them. Then Taylor was saying:

  "I smell like flophouses, cheap bars, public toilets. I can't get clean. And you—you came out all shining. Let me tell you about this gun. I bought it on Main Street in L. A. From a black guy who hustles TV's —not machines, hustlers that dress like women. He sold it to me for five dollars. I walked out of the Ricketts Hotel after I saw you on the lebby television. I bought a gun to kill you with, Tommy."

  Dave put his hand on the doorknob.

  Owens said, "But you didn't use it. Instead you drained brake fluid out of the car, hoping I'd crash. Then you took the bolts out of the deck rail, wanting me to fall."

  "I remembered bullets can be traced," Taylor said. "But you didn't die. It would have been on the news. It wasn't. So I came back. With the gun. At night. I waited out on the dunes because the lights were on. And then I saw you leaving. Only it wasn't you, just that boy in your clothes, only I didn't know that, it was too dark out there. He got in a car on the road and that big man kissed him and I thought, “I’ll kill them in bed together. Can you understand that, Tommy?"

  "He was killed with his own gun," Owens said.

  "I dropped mine," Taylor said. "He heard it. That was why he came out. And I ran at him and—"

  "So you haven't used your gun," Owens said. "You can't be traced. Why don't you just—"

  "Not shoot you?" Taylor jeered. "Sorry, but I have used it. Tonight. There were a lot of people around that old house. A kid outside the windows with a tape recorder. A big man in a cowboy hat. When he came, the kid ran up in the trees where I was. So close I could smell him sweating. He went after the big man went but there was someone else. A little man with a broken nose. When I ran back up to my car, I almost bumped into him. And he was at that Mr. Marvelous contest tonight. He saw me and he went straight to tell that insurance man, Brandstetter. I had to kill that little man, Tommy."

  "But now Brandstetter knows," Owens said. "Vern, it's time you gave up. It's all going wrong."

  "It always did," Taylor said. "For me. Everything always went wrong. It didn't seem so bad when I saw in the paper how they were holding that boy for murder. I knew what he must be to you. That's why I came to see you that day, Tommy. To watch you crying for him the way I used to cry for you. But he's out. I saw him tonight. I ought to have known he wouldn't stay locked up. You had money to get him out. Money can buy anything. There was only one way somebody like me could hurt somebody like you. Kill you and—"

  Tires rumbled heavily on the driveway planks.

  "What's that?" Taylor asked.

  "My family's come home," Owens said. "You can still get away, Vern. Go out by the stairs just around the corner. Out there in the hall."

  "No!" Taylor said. "I'll kill them all. They mean something to you. I never could, but they do. Maybe I won't even kill you, Tommy. I'll kill them instead, and you can live the rest of your life knowing you caused it."

/>   Rubber-shod footsteps made the floor shake. Dave let the doorknob go, flattened himself against the dark wall. The door opened. Taylor moved toward the livingroom. Dave moved after him, silent, swift.

  Far off, at the foot of the stairs that spiraled wooden down from the gallery, a door opened, brightness streamed out, then the long shadow of Larry Johns in the sarape and hat. "Tom?" he called. "Whose car is that up there? What's the matter with Hans and Fritz? They're out on the dunes and they won't come. They—" He broke off, ran to the dog, knelt. "Barney! Barney?" He touched the dead body, drew his hand back. "Aw, no, no!" He looked up.

  And Taylor lifted a little nickel-plated revolver. Light slipped orange along its barrel. Dave struck Taylor's arm down. The gun spat fire and a bullet drew a groove in a polished floor plank. Taylor half turned. Dave chopped him across the windpipe with the edge of a hand. The gun clattered away. Taylor dropped, making a hoarse, rasping sound, clutching his throat, trying to take bites of air.

  Larry Johns stood by the dead dog, staring, while Owens called from the next room, "Larry, are you all right? For Christ sake, Vern, what have you—?"

  "It's all right!" Larry shouted. He came running down the room to Dave, careful to side-step the gun. He eyed the gun as if it were a snake. He looked uncertainly at Dave. "Isn't it all right?"

  "As it's ever likely to be," Dave said. "Where did you disappear to at The Big Barn?"

  "The men's room," Johns said. "Sorry."

  Dave grunted. He touched the twisting, gasping Taylor with a foot. "Find something to tie him up with. He may be on our hands for a while. The police are busy tonight." He retrieved the gun, dropped it into a pocket. "I'll phone them again."