Gravedigger (3 page)

“That was playacting,” Anna Westover scoffed. “For my benefit. I was divorcing her cherished father. She was punishing me, trying to drive me back to him.”

“And you weren’t having any,” Dave said.

“I knew him,” she cried. “Serenity didn’t. It wasn’t reasonable. I’d forgiven him everything. There was a case where he won, and he was wild with elation—and the next day, the very next day, both principal witnesses were killed. Oh, certainly, by accident. Yes, of course. One drove off a cliff, the other set fire to his bed with a cigarette and immolated himself. I knew those weren’t accidents. So did the district attorney. Those witnesses had been bought, hadn’t they? And then killed to keep them from blackmailing Chass or his client later. They were not nice men.”

“The district attorney couldn’t make a case?”

“Not then,” she said bitterly, “but he remembered and he waited and he made a case at last. Chass bought one too many witnesses for those gangsters who paid him so well. I knew. But what did Serenity know? How could I tell her?”

“You like folk wisdom,” Dave said. “How about, ‘The truth never hurt anybody’?”

“You never had children,” she said angrily. “She was fifteen years old. You can’t reason with them at that age. The truth is the last thing they want to hear. He could do no wrong—don’t you understand? So if I was divorcing him when he was in the deepest trouble of his life, who was wrong? Chass?” Her laugh despaired. “Forget it.” She stood up. “And now you tell me she ran to that monster Azrael and he cut the living heart out of her and dumped her in a dirty hole in the desert. And that’s my fault, too, isn’t it?” She doubled her fists. “Oh, you are a horrible man. Get out. Get out of here.”

“Just the messenger,” Dave said. “I don’t know that she is dead. No one knows. Why jump to conclusions?”

“Because that’s she!” Anna Westover cried. “That’s Serenity. Standing right next to him in that snapshot. That is my little girl, mister.” And suddenly she was weeping. Hard and loud. She covered her face with her hands and ran stumbling into the washroom. She slammed the door and went on sobbing behind it. He went to the door and rapped gently. She quieted. He said:

“Don’t cry. You could be right. He tried fraud, and when he didn’t get the check, he figured someone like me would be coming around for the facts, and there weren’t any facts, and anyhow what good was twenty-five thousand dollars going to do him? It wasn’t enough to go to jail for. And that’s why he disappeared. Where would he go, Mrs. Westover? Friends? His parents?”

“The only friends he had were vicious. He’d saved their rotten skins for them, but when he got into trouble, did any of them come to help him? Be serious.” She opened the door, wiping her nose with tissues, wiping her reddened eyes. “He had no parents.” Her laugh was brief and rueful. “That was part of his charm for me, wasn’t it? An orphan. The pathos of it.” She touched Dave. “Find Serenity, Mr. Brandstetter.” Her hand trembled against his chest. “He doesn’t matter. Find her. Find her alive.”

“Nothing would please me more,” Dave said, “but I have to find her father too. It’s my job. Where is he?”

“I don’t know,” she wailed. “How many times must I tell you that? Don’t know, don’t care. I’m nothing to him anymore, nothing to Lyle. They’re nothing to me.”

He didn’t believe her. He changed the subject. He said, “Was there a woman?”

Her mouth opened in surprise. Then she laughed. Bleakly. “Sorry. He lied and cheated. But not that way.”

“Sometimes the wife is the last to know.”

“I’m not going to tell you how I know,” she said, “but I do know—believe me.”

“Right. Thank you.” Dave crossed the shiny floor. When he reached for the doorknob, she caught up to him and gripped his arm. “Find Serenity,” she begged again. “I don’t want her to be one of those girls. That letter is old. She wouldn’t stay with that monster. Why would she?”

“You tell me,” Dave said.

“Don’t believe Scotty.” She shook her head, frantically. Tears were in her eyes again. “She wasn’t bad. She just couldn’t handle the breakup between Chass and me. That’s all. She’s a good child. Cheerful and bright.”

“Try not to worry.” Gently Dave pried her fingers from his sleeve. “He was betting on a long shot. There hasn’t been a payoff. I don’t think there ever will be. You keep remembering that.”

And he stepped out into the cold noon sunshine.

“S
O HE’S MISSING,” SALAZAR
said. He dealt with homicides for the L.A. county sheriff’s office. Dark-haired, honey-color, handsome, he looked sick today, sallow. His steel desk was heaped with files and photographs and forms. The photographs had ugly subjects, what Dave could see of them. “Does his family want him back?”

“Nobody’s worried about him but me,” Dave said.

“Signs of foul play?” Salazar drank coffee that steamed in a styrofoam cup. It burned his beautiful mouth. He breathed a little puff of steam. “Jesus,” he said, and pawed for a cigarette pack among the papers. It was empty and he crumpled it. Dave held out his pack and, when Salazar took a cigarette, lit it for him with a slim steel lighter. He lit a cigarette for himself. Salazar turned in his chair to look out at the cold blue sky. “You have any real reason to think he’s dead inside the house?”

“He expected money,” Dave said. “Go look and see.”

“His car there?” Salazar tried the coffee again, cautiously this time, eyeing Dave over the rim. “Did you check the garage?”

“It’s empty,” Dave said. “The mailbox is full.”

Down the hall a man began to curse in Spanish.

“So he went someplace,” Salazar said, “and didn’t come back.” Salazar’s office was one of a row of cubicles that looked through plate glass at a broad room where fluorescent light fell cold on desks where telephones kept ringing, and at some of which men typed, or leaned back in chairs, talking to other men who stood holding papers. Or the men at the desks talked into the insistent phones. They frowned and made notes on pads with pencils or ball-point pens. Now Salazar looked past Dave out into that room. A scuffle was going on out there. The Spanish curses were louder now, and there were shouts from the English-speakers. Furniture slammed. There was a crash. Dave turned to look. Far off across the big room, where everyone was now standing up to watch, two men in neat jackets and short haircuts were struggling with a fat, brown-skinned boy whose hair was long and held by a rolled bandanna. They all three fell to the floor and were hidden from view by desks. Some of the men from the desks headed for the fight. Salazar said to Dave, “I could check to see if he’s turned up dead after an accident. What kind of car was it, do you know?” He reached for his telephone.

Dave shook his head. “Have you got a phone book that covers that area?” Salazar had the book. Stacked with others on the floor. He crouched for it, slipped it out of the stack, wiped dust off its slumped spine with his hand, laid it in front of Dave. Dave studied him. He was sweating and breathing hard. “You’re sick,” he said. “Should you even be here?”

Salazar sat down, making a face of disgust. “Fucking flu,” he said. “Had it since Christmas. Makes you weak. I’m all right.” He wiped the film of sweat off his face with tissues from a torn, flower-patterned box almost empty. He nodded at the directory. “You going to call somebody?”

Dave flopped open the book. In the big outer room, the fat brown boy stopped cursing in Spanish and began snarling like an animal. Metal furniture crashed again. Dave turned to look. A file cabinet lay on its side, spewing paper. Six men loaded the brown boy out of the room like a captive beast. Dave blinked at Salazar.

“PCP,” Salazar said. “It takes them that way.”

Dave located the name Dekker and found a Dekker paired with Sandpiper Lane in a gray column on a gray page. He punched for an outside line. He punched the Dekker number. Scotty had not gone to school. He told Dave what Dave asked to know, Dave thanked him, hung up, and passed the phone to Salazar. “It’s a Rolls, late sixties, a four-door hardtop, two-tone, brown and gold. Westover is five ten, hazel eyes, brown hair beginning to thin on top at the back, no extra weight on him, maybe one-forty. Lately, he didn’t always remember to shave.”

Salazar held the receiver to his ear. He punched the phone buttons with the rubber end of a yellow pencil. He asked Dave, “Marks or scars?”

“The tip of one ear is missing. The informant doesn’t remember which ear. He’s just a neighbor kid.”

Salazar relayed Westover’s description to someone in an office who had to do with keeping track of unidentified corpses. None of the unidentified corpses on hand fitted the description. Salazar tried another number and told someone about the Rolls. He waited a long time, receiver trapped at his ear by his shoulder, drank coffee, finished his cigarette, snubbed out the cigarette in a square glass ashtray heaped with short, yellow-stained butts. He said “Yes” into the receiver, listened some more, grunted “Thanks” and replaced the receiver. “No abandoned or smashed-up Rollses, either,” he said.

“Because it isn’t in the garage,” Dave said, “doesn’t have to mean Westover drove it away. A car like that? Why didn’t somebody steal it? The garage is padlocked, but that doesn’t signify. He could be in the house tied up and gagged. He could be in there murdered. It’s an expensive house in an expensive neighborhood. Why didn’t somebody break in, kill him, plunder the place, and steal the car?”

“Because that’s not the obvious explanation,” Salazar said. “The obvious explanation is that the man has huge debts he can’t pay. He was grabbing at straws, trying to defraud your insurance company. When it didn’t pay off right away, he packed up and cleared out.”

“His son disappeared at the same time,” Dave said. “Eighteen, nineteen. Name of Lyle. Music student.”

“What are you saying now?” Salazar asked. “That the son killed him and drove off with the family car?”

“Off the record,” Dave said, “no. But if I said yes for the record, would you send a team out there?”

“Look at this mess.” Salazar picked up and dropped the loose stack of files, papers, photographs, on his desk. One of the photographs slid to the floor on Dave’s side. He bent and picked it up. A middle-aged black in a Hawaiian shirt lay in a leakage of blood by a back-alley trash module. Dave laid the photo on the desk. The black’s bulging eyes stared at him. He looked as if the last thing he could imagine was being dead. Salazar said, “We had one thousand five hundred and thirty-two homicides in this county in the last eight months.” He tried to straighten the papers. “You haven’t even got a crime. Why won’t Westover be back tomorrow? Why won’t the kid? Have you got another cigarette?”

Dave gave him another cigarette.

Romano’s was crowded for lunch. It was dark after the sunglare of the street, and inside the door he blundered against backs and elbows. The bar at the front was small, couldn’t hold a lot of patrons, and latecomers waiting for tables had to stand out here by the reservation desk with their drinks, if they’d been so lucky as to get drinks. Narrowing his eyes, trying to adjust them to the lack of light, Dave looked for Mel Fleischer. Mel was late too. Dave excused himself and edged between the drinkers, hoping Amanda had got here on time. Max Romano would have held the corner table for Dave forever, but Dave had finally talked him out of that. Dave’s showing up was too often chancy. It wasn’t fair to the hungry, it wasn’t fair to Max. Today, everything was all right because Amanda was there, in a nubby natural-wool thing, bright blue scarf knotted at her throat, a puffed-up mockery of a 1920s boy’s cap, oatmeal-color, tilted on her neat little skull. She had a tall margarita for herself and a smile for him. A young man sat with her—a stranger to Dave. Amanda seemed pleased with him.

She said, “Dave Brandstetter, Miles Edwards.

Edwards rose and was tall. He shook Dave’s hand firmly, smiled with handsome teeth, claimed it was nice to meet Dave, and sat down again. He wore a suit that looked expensive without making an issue of it. His dark hair and trim black beard and mustache, his long, dense, dark childlike lashes, contrasted with the pale gray of his eyes. He was tanned, except where dark glasses had kept the sun from his skin.

Amanda studied Dave. “You look tired and not happy.”

The chairs were barrel-type in crushed black velvet. Dave sank into his with a sigh. “This case is not a case like any case I ever had before, and nobody is helping me—almost nobody.”

“Take heart.” Amanda offered him a cigarette, one of the long, slim, brown kind. “Remember the Little Red Hen.” She lit the cigarette for him, then sat straight and waved into the candle shadows. “Glenlivet please, a double, on the rocks?”

“And that car,” Dave said. “You and I should never shop together. My tendency to impulse buying is bad enough without you backing me up. That car is a bone-cracker.”

“What kind of car?” Edwards said.

“TR,” Dave said. “It had to be small to get into my driveway.” To Amanda: “Does he know about my driveway?”

“There’s no way to describe it,” she said. “Where have you been—a long way?”

“Up the coast beyond Zuma,” Dave said, “back to a nursery school in West L.A., downtown to the sheriff’s. Then out the freeway to Hollywood, and you. It’s like riding in a dice cup.”

“What car should we have gotten?” she said.

“That big brown Jaguar.”

“But the driveway,” she said.

“I’ll hire a bulldozer. I’ll change the driveway.”

“Also you wanted to save gas,” she said.

“Now I want to save me,” he said. Max Romano himself, plump, his few remaining black curls plastered across his bald dome, brought the Glenlivet, squat glass, much whiskey, little ice, the way Dave liked it. “Thanks, Max.”

“You look pale.” Max handed menus to Amanda and Edwards. Dave waved his away. Max frowned. “Are you sick?”

“Not hungry,” Dave said. Usually he liked the thick garlic-and-cheese smells of Romano’s, but this noon, they made him feel a little queasy. “I’m all right, Max. Just bad-tempered. I got up too early. Ruins the whole day.”

“Something light on the stomach,” Max suggested. “A fluffy little omelet”—he wiggled fat fingers to indicate delicacy—“with mozzarella?”