Gravedigger (10 page)

“He was about to saw me up on that table,” Cecil said.

“Like Pearl White?” Dave said.

“Pearl?” Cecil said. “White? Will you be serious?”

But both of them were laughing too hard.

A voice said, “I thought I’d find you here.”

Romano’s was quiet in its aromatic shadows, white napery and candlelight. It was early for dinner. Silver and glassware glinted on empty tables. Dave had come straight here from dropping off Cecil. He would pick him up at midnight. It was going to be a long evening. He had begun killing it with double Scotches. Then there’d been a simple little salad, fresh-baked salt bread, sweet butter. Now there was
ris de veau à la créme et aux champignons,
and a bottle of Sunny Ridge
pinot blanc
1975. He was trying to keep from feeling sorry for himself. He looked up.

Miles Edwards looked elegant in handloomed tweed. His smile was tentative. He held a manila envelope. “All right if I join you?” Dave lowered his head and went on eating. Edwards sat down. He laid the envelope beside his place setting. “I’m not here to apologize,” he said.

Dave tore off a chunk of bread and buttered it. He didn’t look at Edwards. “I’m pleased about you and Amanda. Delighted. I thought I’d made that clear.”

“About Cecil,” Edwards said. “I’m here to explain.”

“If I wanted an explanation,” Dave said, “I’d have asked for it. An explanation isn’t going to undo the mischief you’ve made. Suppose we forget it.”

Edwards tugged at the snowy cuffs of his linen shirt so that they showed an inch below his jacket cuffs. “He’s very young,” he said.

“So are you,” Dave said, “or you wouldn’t be trying this.” He looked around the hushed restaurant. “Where’s Amanda?”

“Dining with clients. In Malibu.” A waiter came in a black velvet jacket with gold trim, and Edwards asked for Wild Turkey. Conspicuous consumption, 110 proof. “I could have tagged along, but I thought we ought to have this talk.”

“Some people”—Dave laid his fork in his plate and faced Edwards squarely—“don’t mind being manipulated. Some are too stupid to notice. Some can’t live without it. I don’t like it. Don’t try it again. Not now. Not ever.”

“You’re good at what you do,” Edwards said. “You’re a superstar. You didn’t get that way with a closed mind. You’re acting emotional. Why can’t you be fair with me?”

Dave laughed, shook his head, picked up his fork again, and went to work on the creamy sweetbreads and mushrooms. He drank some of the crisp wine. He touched his mouth with his napkin and laughed again. “Emotional,” he said. “Why in the world would I be emotional?”

Edwards said, “Because you love that boy, or think you do. What about him? What about his future?”

“He wants to be a death-claims investigator,” Dave said. “He helped me out on a case, year before last, and decided it beat running around rainy airports shoving microphones in the faces of politicians. He still thought so, until you took it upon yourself to tell him he wouldn’t be a death-claims investigator—that he’d only be a dirty old man’s fancy boy.” Dave picked up his fork and laid it down again. “‘Be fair’? What was fair about that?”

“It was important.” Edwards’s mouth tightened inside its neat frame of black beard. “It was my duty.”

“Jesus.” Dave sighed, picked up his fork, and ate the rest of what was on his plate. He drank wine again, and refilled his glass. “You’re a prig, aren’t you?” he said. “I didn’t think they cropped up in your line of work.”

“By ‘be fair,’” Edwards said, “I meant, do me the courtesy of letting me explain. I meant, make an effort to understand. I had a reason.” The waiter brought his drink and a menu and went away. Without looking at it, Edwards laid the menu on the manila envelope. “I meant, why won’t you listen to me?”

“If he wasn’t a male,” Dave said, “we wouldn’t be having this cozy chat, now, would we?” He lit a cigarette and raised a hand to bring the waiter back. The odds were awful, but he still wanted to enjoy this. He would have coffee and brandy. Maybe he would act like Trio Foley and devour one of Max’s giant chocolate mousses. “If he was one of those jiggly young women you brought around—the ones who throw pies on television? You’re worse than a prig—you’re a bigot.”

“Wrong.” Edwards shook his head emphatically. “No way. Why not give your paranoia a rest for a minute and just listen to me?” He was showing anger now, and that pleased Dave. He watched the boy’s sun-browned hand shake as he picked up his stubby glass and drank. “I went through what you’re about to put Cecil through.” He set the glass down, slid the envelope from under the menu, and pushed it at Dave. “Look inside.”

Dave blinked at him, shrugged, opened the flap, and slid from the envelope eight-by-ten glossy photographs. They were of a naked young man. The top one was. He was slender, his skin was dark, his hair very long, he had no beard or mustache, but it was Miles Edwards. If nothing else showed that, those pale gray eyes did. The waiter came back and looked over Dave’s shoulder. Dave glanced at Edwards, who looked pained if not panicked. Dave slid the first photograph off the stack. The second one involved Edwards with a long-haired blond boy. Naked, and at play on a beach. Not volleyball. Dave looked up at the waiter, young, stocky, his crinkly black hairline low on his forehead. His name was Avram, and he grinned.

“Don’t stop now,” he said.

Dave smiled and obliged, turning the photographs over slowly. Some involved two youths, some three, but all featured Edwards. In some, he was alone, but even in these he was sexually active. Dave slid the photographs back into the envelope.

“Nice prints,” the waiter said. “Good lab work.” Sweat moistened his upper lip. His eyes were large and dark and they pleaded with Edwards.

“Coffee, please,” Dave said, “and Courvoisier.”

“And you, sir?” the waiter asked Edwards.

Edwards was surly, growled, “Wild Turkey,” and handed over his glass. The waiter almost dropped it. He went off, and Edwards said, “I got lost in that world. The man who took those pictures picked me up from a high-school playground. He made me feel special. I lived like a little god. Nothing I could think up he wouldn’t give me, no place in the world he wouldn’t take me—cars, watches, clothes, Jamaica, St. Tropez, Paris, Rome, Tokyo.”

“If he could just peddle your pictures, right?”

“It didn’t seem much to ask. He didn’t need the money. He had independent means. Photography was just a hobby. Or maybe not. Maybe only beautiful boys. Anyway, one night when I was asleep, a beautiful boy killed him. On the docks at Marseilles. And there I was, without even a ticket back to the States. I sold the Rolex he’d given me, the camera. I peddled my ass in New York till I nearly froze. Then it was San Francisco, and three successive cases of the clap, and getting locked out of the last ratty room I could get. Then I went back to my family. I was damned lucky they forgave me.”

“I don’t pick up sailors,” Dave said.

“But you’re going to die,” Edwards said, “long before he does. You know that. What kind of lies are you telling yourself?”

“I’ve listened to you,” Dave said. “I don’t want to listen to you anymore, all right?”

Edwards stood up. “Where’s the men’s room?”

Dave pointed. “On the way to the kitchen.”

Edwards went that way. The waiter brought Dave’s coffee and brandy and Edwards’s whiskey. He gazed at Edwards’s empty chair as if his heart would break. Dave told him, “Forget it. He’s going to marry a pretty lady.”

The waiter’s shoulders slumped. He went away. Dave smoked, finished his coffee, his brandy. Edwards hadn’t come back. Dave checked the men’s room. Empty. He pushed the kitchen swing door. He asked the tall, sunken-cheeked chef named Alex. Edwards had left by the alley door. Back at his table, Dave frowned at the manila envelope. Edwards had forgotten his pictures.

P
EREZ DIDN’T APPEAR TO
have any point, unless it was the wild flowers—lupines, poppies—blue and gold, that carpeted the desert for miles around in all directions these few weeks in February. A road sliced through the town, kept minimally paved, probably for the sake of those same few weeks. Perez had a gas station for wild-flower viewers. It had what a faded signboard boasted was a
DESERT MUSEUM & GIFT SHOP
, where a two-headed rattlesnake could be seen, and where maps were sold of abandoned mines and ghost towns. A board structure with a high false front claimed to be an
EATERY
. A tired wild-flower viewer could even sleep in Perez, at the
ROAD RUNNER MOTEL
, six scaly stucco units, each with a weedy patch of cactus garden.
VACANCY
—naturally. On the bone-gray wooden side of the grocery store, the paint faded on a sign for
OLD GOLD
cigarettes. Wax shone on ten dented wrecks in the dirt lot of
JAY’S GOOD USED CARS
. The tavern was called
LUCKY’S STRIKE
. From at least one window of every structure in sight hung a rusty air-conditioning unit.

Dave had already seen Azrael’s ranch, three sad shacks painted blue, doors and windows lately broken out, the wind moving through them, through the littered rooms, stirring cheap Indian cotton hangings in the doorways, shifting pathetic scraps of clothing, tufts of mattress stuffing, feathers from ripped pillows across cracked linoleum. Death and desertion. Behind the buildings, in what had been a sometime attempt at a vegetable garden, the wind had begun filling in the holes from which, two weeks ago, had been dug up the rotted bodies of Azrael’s pitiful young disciples. Serenity among them? Each corpse had a gap in its chest. None had a heart. At Azrael’s ranch there had been nothing to see, nothing to remember. So why did Dave know that he was never going to forget it?

A pair of big, dusty motorcycles stood in front of Lucky’s Strike. The place inside was cavernous and dim. Country-western music twanged from a jukebox. At the far end of the room, beyond a sleeping pool table, the riders of the motorcycles—boots, filthy Levis, scabby insignia on jacket backs—operated electronic games that knocked and beeped and winked. The barkeep—Lucky?—appeared to have been beaten about the head a good many times in the remote past. His nose and ears were crumpled, scar tissue jutted above his eyes. He set the beer Dave had asked for in front of him, blinked at Dave’s P.I. license, and looked obediently at the snapshot of Serenity standing at the ranch with the blond, bearded, mad-eyed Azrael and the other smiling girls.

“I seen her with him. They wouldn’t come in here: he didn’t believe in booze, you know. But I seen them in town, when he come in, in that van of his, to pick up supplies for his place. Yeah, I seen her.”

“The important thing,” Dave said, “is when. Was she with him any time close to the end, when he killed the sheriff’s men and cleared out?”

“They was friends of mine,” Lucky said. “You know why they was there? Sanitation. To serve a paper. Some preacher wanted him and his girls out of there. Sex cult, he says.” Lucky laughed grimly. “Worse than that, wasn’t it? Only nobody knew it then. We was all on their side. Hippies, forty miles from noplace—nobody to see them but lizards and kangaroo rats. If they wanted to do it on the roof, who cared? But this preacher couldn’t rest. He must have watched them through a spyglass. Claimed the place was filthy, a pigpen, not fit. Raised hell with the department of health and sanitation. County. They wrote up the paper just to get the son of a bitch off their back. And Lon and Red drove out there to serve it. Marked car, of course, uniforms, revolvers on their hip, of course. And they park the car and start for the door, and this Azrael’s there with a shotgun. Didn’t wait to hear what they was there for. Thought they’d found out he murdered all them girls, didn’t he? Blew their heads off, just like that.”

The door opened and let in sunlight for a moment, along with three youngsters swinging crash helmets—more motorcyclists? No. Two of them were girls in very short shorts, kneepads, high-top shoes, padded vests over T-shirts stenciled Sand Hoppers in a circle surrounding a drawing of a dune buggy. Lucky served them, and the squat, black-bearded youth with them, Coors in cans, which they carried along to the electronic games. Lucky returned to Dave. “I can’t say for sure how long before that I seen her.” He pushed the snapshot away from him. “Why do you want to know?”

“It’s an old picture,” Dave said. “The last her family heard from her out here was two years ago.”

“That a fact?” Lucky drew the picture toward him and squinted at it again. He shook his head. “No, that’s her. She was usually the one who come into Perez with him. Always wore one of them, whatyacallit, dashikis? Nothing under it. Sun in the street, you could see her naked right through it.” He handed the picture to Dave. “No, I’d say no more than a month, six weeks ago.” He watched Dave slide the picture into his jacket pocket. His mouth was grim. “Guess that means she was the last one he killed, don’t it? Who the hell do you suppose he fed the heart to?”

Dave stared. “What did you say?”

“After he killed one, he made the other ones eat their heart. Didn’t know that, did you?” He looked smug.

“Am I supposed to believe it?” Dave said.

“Lon and Red wasn’t my only friends in the sheriff’s office. There’s this diary this Azrael left behind. They ain’t saying nothing to the TV people and the newspaper writers about it. District attorney’s got it under lock and key for the trial.”

“Names,” Dave said. “The names of the girls?”

“If they was in there, you wouldn’t be here, would you? The D.A. wouldn’t have kept the names back—parents all over the country wondering if that’s their little girl that ran off? Nope. Come to writing about them girls, he’d draw a little flower, or a moon, or a star, or a cloud—I don’t remember what-all. No names. Oh, yeah, one was a bird, too—that’s it, a little drawing of a bird.”

“Dear God,” Dave said.

“But let one of them do anything he didn’t like—talk back, disobey some crazy rule he made—he killed her, cut her heart out, roasted it, made the other ones eat it so they’d remember to do like he told them. Lot of other stuff in there, too, stuff you wouldn’t believe. He was a mad dog. You know what Azrael means? Angel of death. Another beer?”