Gravedigger (6 page)

“Happy birthday.” Dave kissed his neat little ear.

“And I drove it straight to you. Well, maybe ‘straight’ is not the word I want. Maybe I mean, I drove it gaily to you, all right?” He laughed, sipped his brandy, grew solemn. His eyes were big and reproachful again. “Shit, I was scared when you didn’t come. You don’t know all the thoughts I had out under that tree. I was colder inside than I was outside. What if you forgot all about me? What if you didn’t care anymore?”

“You didn’t write,” Dave said.

“I wrote,” Cecil said, “I just never mailed what I wrote. It wasn’t what you’d call decent, you know? I was writing with my cock. What good would that do you—what good did it do me?”

Dave snubbed out his cigarette. He stood and shed the sheepskin coat. “It will be warm up in the loft now,” he said. He picked up his glass, cigarettes, lighter, went into the shadows for the brandy bottle, went to the foot of the stairs. “You want to see how warm it is?”

Cecil unfolded his long bones from the couch, tossed the leather cap on the couch, dropped his car coat there. He came to Dave. “You could put it like that,” he said.

The Juilliard School of Music had not Lyle Westover seen since nearly a year. That was how the young woman with the German accent who answered the telephone there put it. She was a student. It was not her job, answering this telephone. She had answered it because the office staff had left for the day. But she did know Lyle, and he had not last fall returned to Juilliard his classes to resume. She did not know whether he was with friends in New York staying, but she could not names of his friends give to strangers on the telephone. She did remember that he had a student instructorship been awarded for last summer at Buenos Vientos—that was in California. She hoped nothing bad to Lyle had happened.

“If he shows up,” Dave said, “will you let me know, please?” He gave her his number, thanked her, hung the yellow receiver of the cookshack phone back in its place on the endboard of a knotty-pine cupboard. Corn bread was baking in the oven of the stately old steel-and-porcelain country kitchen stove Amanda had had refitted to run on gas. Heat leaked from the oven and made the cookshack pleasantly warm. He glanced out the window. Cecil came out of the rear building in a starchy new white robe with deep kimono sleeves. He was scrubbing his hair with a big white bath towel. He stepped from the shadow of the live-oak into sunlight, turned his face up to the sun, blinking, feeling for warmth. Dave felt a sweet ache in his chest and turned away. It had been a long time since he had reacted to anyone this way. It was dangerous. Too many years separated them, decades. He was being a fool. He filled two yellow mugs with coffee and set them steaming on the country kitchen table Amanda had found in some junk-shop and stripped down to its original yellow pine. There were country kitchen chairs to match. The works of the refrigerator were new, but concealed in a gigantic old oak icebox of many doors.

“Thank God it’s warm someplace.” Cecil came in and shut the door. “This is southern California, man. Supposed to be desert. Keeps on like this, I will turn into a licorice Popsicle.” He hung the towel over a chairback and sat down. “Ah, hot coffee.” He took the mug in both hands. “Did you get New York? Something sure smells good.”

“Corn bread,” Dave said. “If you want to phone New York, you don’t wait until two-thirty in the afternoon, Pacific standard time. You get out of bed like ordinary people.”

“I liked it in bed,” Cecil said.

“So did I,” Dave said. The grille was ready, the eggs were beaten, the jack cheese was shredded, the avocado cut up. He made omelets. “I got somebody on the phone. I don’t think Lyle is in New York.” He bent and got the corn bread out of the oven. He lifted a corner of an omelet with a spatula. It was golden brown on the bottom. He folded both omelets. Burning his fingers, he cut generous slabs of the corn bread and let thick pats of butter melt into them. He laid them in a basket with a yellow napkin over them and set the basket on the table. He slid the omelets onto plates, set the plates on the table. “To give you back your strength.” He sat down across from Cecil. “Salt, pepper?”

“Look at that,” Cecil said, and poked at the omelet with his fork. “What is
in
there, man?”

“Avocado,” Dave said. “Cheese.”

“Oh, wow.” Cecil took a mouthful. His eyes widened. He opened his mouth and panted. “Hot!” he gasped.

“You wouldn’t like it cold,” Dave said. He pushed the basket of corn bread at him. “You want to play detective with me today? Or have you things to do?”

“Only thing I have to do is you,” Cecil said. “Forever. From now on. All right?”

“All right.” Dave smiled. “But I won’t hold you to it.”

“Hold me,” Cecil said, “any way you want. Only the last time I played detective with you, you nearly got killed. That big dude with the beard on the smuggling boat?”

“There’s no way you can take the blame for that,” Dave said. “That was my own mistake.”

“I shouldn’t have left you by yourself,” Cecil said. “I won’t ever leave you by yourself again. This is better corn bread than Mama used to make.”

“Ground the dried corn herself, did she?” Dave said. “Down on the old plantation?”

“Up in old Detroit,” Cecil said. “Got it out of a ready-mix box from the supermarket. You add milk and an egg. No—she didn’t have time to cook much. Always working. Working till it killed her. To turn my holy brother into a dentist, to buy me that van when I got to be twenty-one. What kind of case are you working on that kept you out till five in the morning?”

Dave told him. By the time he had finished, the plates were empty, the breadbasket was empty, they were drinking second mugs of coffee and smoking cigarettes. Dave took from a pocket of his blue wool shirt a flimsy pink form, rumpled, a carbon copy, smudged. He unfolded it and pushed it across the table to Cecil. “That was what I found—not in the files, on the desk. Westover rented a truck. If I’m right—on the very day he disappeared.”

“If he took his Rolls-Royce”—the cigarette hung in a corner of Cecil’s mouth, tough-detective style; he narrowed his eyes against the smoke while he read the form, and he used a Bogart voice—“what did he want with the truck?”

“Get dressed,” Dave said, “and we’ll try to find out.”

Cecil got up. “Come with me while I dress.”

“If I did, we’d never get out of here,” Dave said.

The man behind the counter was a woman old and gray.
The lines of the nonsense rhyme jumped into his mind and he had to suppress a grin in the storefront office of Momentum Truck Rentals in Santa Monica, where the walls were woodgrain plastic, and the plants that hung in baskets or crouched in corners were plastic. The woman in charge was a caricature little old lady, frail, in a doubleknit lavender pants suit stiff as cardboard. But he had no right to grin. He was gray himself and, if not as old as she was, still old. Cecil was making him forget that, making him remember that silly verse from his childhood. He showed the woman the pink flimsy.

“He didn’t bring it back.” She piped, she quavered.

“You mean he owes you money on it?”

“I mean he abandoned it,” she said. “If you
read
this”—she tapped the flimsy with a bony finger—“you’ll see he said he was going to return it the next day. Well, he didn’t return it the next day. He never returned it, just climbed out of it and left it.”

“You know that?” Dave said. “How do you know that?”

“Because we notified the police, sheriff, highway patrol. A prowl car spotted it, notified us, and we had it back here, noon the following day.”

“Did he come in alone?” Dave said. “Were you on duty?”

“He had a boy with him.” The twang of guitars crashed from a loudspeaker in a corner over a pair of chairs and a plastic veneered table. She looked up at the speaker. She trembled back to a woodgrain plastic door, yanked it open, and shrilled into a room where a long-haired youth in a ten-gallon hat sat with his feet on a desk, munching a hamburger, “Turn that racket down. I have people out here.” She slammed the door and came back. The guitars faded to a whisper. “Skinny, curly-headed boy,” she went on, as if nothing had happened. “Man’s son, I guess. Looked like him, a little. Had something wrong with him. Couldn’t talk right.”

“Why did he talk at all?” Dave said.

“I don’t think he wanted the man to rent the truck,” she said. “Hard to understand him, mouth full of marbles. I did catch one thing, though. Says, ‘If you do this, you’re no better than O’Rourke.’ Reason I remember the name, my first husband was an O’Rourke. Dead now.” She frowned, folded the pink slip, handed it back to Dave. “No, the boy was angry, nervous. While I made up the papers, he kept walking out like he was going to leave, just have nothing to do with it—but he always came back in after a minute.”

“Did Westover pay in cash?” Dave asked.

“Most people use credit cards,” she said, “but he had cash.”

“Did you notice what kind of car he came here in?”

“Couldn’t help it, could I?” she said. “Rolls-Royce, vintage. Now, you see your share of Rollses, especially if you drive through Beverly Hills, which I do, coming in to work every day from the Valley. But they don’t often show up here. People like that don’t rent trucks. They get their furniture hauled by moving companies.”

“Did he say he was moving?” Dave asked.

“He didn’t say what he was doing,” she said. “It’s none of my business. I wondered, of course. Guess I wondered out loud, but he didn’t say. Not that I remember. He made the boy drive the truck, he followed in the Rolls.”

“Where did they abandon the truck?” Dave said.

She turned to a computer keyboard and punched up the information. It came in cross-stitch letters on a television screen encased in grubby white plastic. “El Segundo.” She read off a street address. She smiled at Cecil. She had pearly little false teeth. “What are you so happy about? I swear, you’re grinning all over yourself.”

“Just married,” Cecil said, and bent double, and spun around, laughing. When he recovered himself, she made him a present, a tiny toy truck with
MOMENTUM
printed on its side.

The address was off the San Diego freeway in an area of lonely warehouses, abandoned rows of shops, weedy vacant lots strewn with automobile carcasses. Now and then an oil pump cast a nodding shadow in the long, late afternoon winter sunlight. Where people lived, existed, were clutches of shacks, broken-windowed, porches falling off, roof gaps showing fishbones of gray rafter. Black children in gaudy rags ran the cracked sidewalks, sick old black people hobbled, sick dogs dodged and slunk. In patches of shade among the rotting cars, tattered men sprawled, snoring openmouthed, clutching empty wine bottles.

“Soweto,” Cecil said.

“You can’t see this from the freeway,” Dave said.

“They landscape that, don’t they?” Cecil said. “Shit, you’re driving through the real America, and you don’t even know it. Green groundcover, flowering bushes, lacy trees. Fucking paradise. Here’s the street.” He steered the van away from the shacks, the blacks. Not a sound here. Grass sprouting through the asphalt. Bleak storage buildings—some of them cinderblock, the paint of sign lettering flaking, fading; some of them corrugated iron, the bolts weeping rust. It was one of these he stopped at. “This is it.”

They climbed down out of the van. Shadows of gulls flickered over them. In the distance a ship’s whistle sounded hoarsely. Again. They stared at the building. It had a loading dock and broad doors hung by wheels to a rusty rail. No one had used the loading dock or the doors in a very long time. Seasons of bramble crops had grown and withered in front of the dock. They crackled through the dead brambles and climbed plank stairs. At the far end of the doors was a window. They went to it and tried to see inside. The window was crusted with salt from the sea air. Dave spat on his fingers and rubbed some of the crust away. He put his face to the glass. Cobwebs that had trapped only dust were thick on the inside of the window. He wasn’t sure of what he saw but it looked like emptiness.

“We could break it,” Cecil said. “Nobody would know.”

Dave went to examine the place where the doors came together. Hasps held padlocks, corroded, one at waist level, one at shoe-top level. “Tire iron?” he asked Cecil. Cecil fetched a brand-new tire iron. Dave pried the hasps loose on the top lock. Cecil wedged the iron under the other hasp, yanked, and it came loose too. Dave gripped the edge of the right-hand door and pulled. There were rusty squeaks up on the roller rail but the door didn’t budge. Cecil took hold of the door with him and they hauled at it together. It didn’t yield.

“I’m going to smash out that window,” Cecil said.

“I think I saw a door along the side,” Dave said.

They trudged through weeds—last year’s tall, brown, brittle; this year’s short, feebly green; trash in the weeds, beer cans, dusty wine bottles—between this building and the next. The passageway was cold, as if the sun never reached it. Dave climbed plank steps to a rickety stoop that trembled under him. The door was thin, an ordinary room door, old. He tried the gritty knob. The door was locked. He stepped back and aimed a kick with his heel just below the knob. The door didn’t fly open. Instead, one of its panels fell out with a clatter that echoed. He knelt.

“Don’t go in there,” Cecil said. “Let me do that.”

Dave poked his head inside. The light was poor but there was enough to show him the place was empty. He withdrew his head. “Never mind,” he said. He got to his feet and descended the steps, brushing dirt off his hands, off the knees of his pipestem corduroys. “There’s nothing in there—not even a broken crate.”

“What did they bring that truck here for?” Cecil said.

Dave headed for the sundown street. Cecil followed. Dave said, “Lyle can tell us.”

“You said you don’t know where he is.”

Dave opened the van door. “I’ve changed my mind,” he said. “Tomorrow, we’ll go ask him.”

Cecil slouched in a deep chair alone in a far corner of the room and watched the news on television. At this end of the room were laughter, the tinkle of ice in glasses, the munching of
dim sum.
Amanda and Miles Edwards had brought the food, warm in foil, and had unwrapped it in the cookshack. It was being consumed in the long front building of Dave’s place, which Amanda had made interesting by raising and lowering floor levels, expanding the fireplace, and adding clerestory windows so daylight could get in, because Dave refused to cut the trees that surrounded the place. It was past seven, yellow lamplight bloomed softly in the room, there were bays of velvety shadow, and the trees couldn’t be seen now through the french windows.