Gravedigger (8 page)

Dave drank more of the scalding coffee, set the mug down. “She hasn’t come back, of course?”

“She went up first in the morning. I saw her pass, saw her come down too, not more than an hour after. She tore right on through, lickety-split. I guess I was busy when she drove up there the second time. Never saw her. Then, of course, here she came, barging in wild-eyed, out of breath. Quick—where was the nearest hospital?”

“Thanks,” Dave said. “Where is it?”

Cascada huddled dreary in cold rain. Its Main street store fronts were red brick, brown brick. Feed and grain, hardware, drugstore. Modern crisp-lettered white plastic signs gleamed, so did the windows at McDonald’s and the Pizza Hut, but no one was around, and the effect was sad. He found the hospital at the end of Main street, where the motherly woman had told him it would be—a new, sand-color stucco building with a white rock roof, one story, maybe twenty rooms. The lawn around it was bright with new grass, the plantings of eucalyptus trees young and lacy. He left the Triumph on the new blacktop of a parking lot almost empty, glossy with rain. Plate-glass doors led him into a shiny little reception area. An elderly nurse pointed him down a hallway. In the hallway, he found Anna Westover, seated on a stiff, minimally upholstered armchair, and looking drawn and bitter.

“What are you doing here?” she said.

“I told you I was looking for him,” Dave said.

“He’s in a coma,” she said. “He tried to kill himself with sleeping pills. God, that child, that child.” Her voice shook. On the big, soft leather bag in her lap, her thin hands clutched each other so tightly the knuckles shone white. She was angry—at Lyle, or at herself? “What in the world is the use?” It was a cry from the heart. She looked up at Dave with tears in her eyes. “You struggle to raise them, to understand them, to make life easy for them, to train them not to make the stupid mistakes you’ve made. And what in the world is the use?”

“If you did all that,” Dave said, “you don’t have anything to reproach yourself for. He’s a big boy now.” He sat down on another of the stingy chairs. A low table was between the chairs, on it a jug-shape terra-cotta lamp, old copies of
Westways
and
Sunset
magazines, a terra-cotta ashtray glazed blue inside. “What does the doctor say?”

“That he’ll probably be all right.” She muttered it, rummaging in the big bag for tissues, wiping her eyes, blowing her nose. “But what’s to stop him trying it again? If life is so terrible for him?” A squeaky sob jerked out of her. She drew breath sharply, bit her lip, shook her head, squared her shoulders. “Did you find his father?”

“No. I hoped Lyle could tell me where to do that.” Down the hallway, crockery and metal clashed. A bald, red-faced orderly in rumpled white brought trays out of rooms and dumped them into rubber bins on a trolley. Dave lit a cigarette. “Trio Foley brought him here. Where is she?”

“Eating,” Anna Westover said flatly. “Every hour on the hour. It comforts her, I suppose. She feels terribly guilty, poor thing. She blames herself.”

He had been mistaken in thinking the Pizza Hut was empty. She sat at a rear table whose shiny orange top, reflecting into her face, made the pimples stand out. A wheel of pizza lay in front of her, heaped with, as the white plastic letters of the sign over the counter put it,
EVERYTHING
. Three wedges of the pizza were already gone and she was choking down a fourth. Dave sat across from her.

“Oh, God.” Her eyes opened behind the thick glasses.

“I thought you were going to telephone me.”

She gulped the mouthful of dough and sauce, cheese, sausage, anchovies. She drank from a big wax-paper cup of cola. Tomato sauce smeared her mouth and chin. She wiped them with a wadded fistful of paper napkins. She said, “I was afraid you’d frighten him.”

“Why? I didn’t frighten you.”

Her dimpled fingers fumbled loose another slice of pizza. She lifted it toward her mouth. He caught her wrist

“Wait a minute with the eating, please? Tell me what happened. He’d been living up there at the camp, cooking and eating and getting along. Then you showed up, and he swallowed Seconals. Now, what’s it all about, Trio?”

“I told him.” Her cry ricocheted off the shiny glass and plastic of the empty place. The blond boy and girl in uniform behind the counter stopped chatting and stared. “I went to make him leave there before you could find him but he didn’t want to. Then I did just what I was afraid you’d do. I didn’t mean to, but one thing led to another. Why had I come, and who were you, and what were you doing at the house, and why were you an insurance investigator, and—and—it all just came out, you know? About his father and his sister and the insurance and—” She couldn’t go on. She picked up the pizza wedge and stuffed her face with it and sat there with tears streaming down her face, chewing, chewing.

“And then you ran away,” Dave said, “leaving him all by himself with the knowledge that either his sister had been horribly murdered, or his father was so rotten that he had tried to defraud the insurance people by pretending he believed that had happened. Good Christ, girl, you were the one who said he was fragile, who wanted to protect him.”

“Stop it!” She clapped her hands to her ears. “Stop it!” She had to wriggle mightily to free her bulk from the cramped space between table and banquette, but she did it with surprising quickness, and was on her feet and running for the door, all jiggling two hundred pounds of her, wailing like a siren. Dave sighed, got up, walked after her.

“Hey, mister, wait a minute.” It was the blond boy behind the counter, rosy-cheeked, maybe seventeen but brave. “What happened? What did you do to her?”

“Gave her bad news,” Dave said, “not gently enough.”

The boy looked doubtful. He glanced at the blond girl. She nodded toward an orange telephone gleaming on a kitchen wall. Dave didn’t wait for them to call the police. He pushed out into the rain and trudged after the wide, wobbling figure of Trio running away from him down the sad, empty street When he caught up to her, she was hunched in a hospital hallway chair, trying to stop crying, Anna Westover bending over her, murmuring comfort. The woman glared at Dave.

“You bring joy wherever you go,” she said.

“Trio,” Dave said, “you saved his life. The mistake doesn’t count. You fixed it. He’s going to be all right”

She looked up at him, reproachful, face sleek with tears, glasses smeared with tears. She hiccuped. “I’m still hungry,” she said, and burst out crying again.

He did look fragile, as if the least little tap would shatter him. Against the hospital pillows, his thin face was sickly pale, with a stubble of dark beard. His hair curled, soft as a child’s, on his elegant skull. His eyes were large, brown, sorrowful. As Trio had said, he was beautiful, and looking at him made you want to shelter him. Yet his wide, mobile mouth was able to smile. The smile was sheepish for the trouble he’d caused, but it was real.

Dave was alone with him now. He had left the hospital at midnight, checked into a motel, tried to telephone Cecil and got no answer, had slept hard anyway. He’d headed back here through gray drizzle at seven. Passing the steamy plate glass of bright McDonald’s, he had glimpsed Trio stowing away scrambled eggs and muffins. He’d met Anna Westover wearily crossing the hospital parking lot to her car, on her way back to L.A. to look after other people’s children. She told him Lyle was awake, out of danger, calm, apologetic, and able to talk—if that was the word for it.

From the look of the tray beside Lyle’s bed, he’d been able to eat. His talk came out mostly vowels. Dave looked around for paper and pencil so the boy could write his answers. Pencil and paper were there none. So he strained to understand, and before long, he didn’t have to ask Lyle to repeat—at least not everything.

“The cap came off, and they spilled all over the bathroom,” he was saying now. “I was in a hurry to get out of there, away from him. I almost left the pills. But I felt like dying. I was so ashamed. And I knew him. He’d do something even worse next time. I didn’t want to know about it. So I picked them up and put them in my pocket”

“But you changed your mind at the camp.”

“It’s beautiful there, and far away, and quiet. I could think. Why should I take them? Whatever I did, he’d go on trying to save himself any dirty way he could. I wouldn’t change him by dying. I was getting ready to go home. Then Trio showed up, and told me this thing he’d done about Serenity, and I got hysterical again, and she got scared and ran, and I took the pills. I began to get very cold, and I crawled into the sleeping bag, and I was drifting off, and I realized I still had my boots on. It seemed very important to get those boots off. And that’s the last I remember.” He tried to smile at himself.

“You got them off,” Dave said. “Tell me—what had your father done to make you so ashamed? You and he rented a truck that night. Was that part of it?”

Lyle said two words. Dave couldn’t make them out. He must have looked blank, because Lyle repeated them, slowly, working his beautiful mouth, frowning with the effort. “Howie O’Rourke. You know about him?”

“He and your father were writing a book,” Dave said.

“Publishers kept turning it down,” Lyle said. “It wasn’t going to get him the money he wanted.”

“You were giving him money,” Dave said.

Lyle made a face. “After the house payments we were lucky to have anything left over for food. He had to have two hundred thousand dollars. Thought he had to.”

“To clear the title to the house,” Dave said, “so he could sell it and get out from under. Explain the truck.”

“Howie found a way to get the money. Crooked, of course. He’d run into a man he’d known in prison, who had a truckload of hijacked stereo equipment he couldn’t sell himself because the police were watching him.”

“Excuse me,” Dave said. “A truckload of what?”

It took a minute, but Lyle made him understand.

“There was two hundred thousand dollars worth of it, hidden in an old warehouse. The man only wanted twenty thousand for it.”

“Only? Did your father have that kind of money?”

“No.” Lyle looked at the rainy window. Tears started down his face. “That was what made me want to die. He got it from Don Gaillard.” He drew a long, wobbly breath.

“I don’t know who that is,” Dave said.

“The nicest man that ever walked,” Lyle said. “My father’s oldest friend. When I was little, I thought he was my uncle. He wasn’t. They were just very close—in high school, college, law school.” Lyle’s hands lay on the coverlet, which was threadbare, bleached from too many washings. The beautiful thin fingers moved, running silent scales. He watched them for a moment, then gave Dave a wan smile. “I wasn’t too happy when I was small. My father was very busy making money. And my mother never forgave me for not being able to talk right. Oh, she tried not to let it show, but I knew. I was really surprised to see her here.”

“She wants you to live, she wants you to be happy.”

“That’s not easy, is it?” Lyle said.

“Not for her,” Dave said, “not when you act this way.”

“I didn’t think. It was my father who was on my mind. Did you admire your father?” When Dave nodded, Lyle said wryly, “So did I. Then there wasn’t anything to admire anymore.” He drew another shaky breath. “Anyway, I loved Don. He had time for us. We loved having Don come over.”

“So he was almost a member of the family,” Dave said. “Why shouldn’t your father go to him for a loan? Isn’t that what friends are for, to be there when we need them?”

“Only they hadn’t been friends—not for years and years. The break was sudden. Serenity and I couldn’t understand. Where was Uncle Don? And they told us to forget Uncle Don, never mention Uncle Don again. I was too young to understand, but I figured out after while that Don must have told my father he didn’t like the way he was going—criminal law, all that. He got out of law himself, began building furniture in his basement. Which made him poor, too, didn’t it? At least not like the crowd my parents were in, the beach club, all that. Big cars. The best of everything. Old Don just didn’t belong, did he?”

“They hadn’t spoken in years?”

“That’s it.” Lyle nodded disgust “I couldn’t believe my father would be so creepy. Don isn’t rich. He works hard for his money, works with his hands.”

“But he had it,” Dave said, “and he gave it?”

“Gladly. He’d give my father anything. That’s how Don is. The kindest man, the kindest man. It probably was every cent he’d saved in his life.”

“So you went to the warehouse with the truck and Don Gaillard’s twenty thousand dollars to pick up the loot.”

“Not the money. My father had already passed that to Howie to pay his jailbird friend. Howie was supposed to meet us at the warehouse.”

“Why us? Why did your father take you?”

“To help with the loading. Someone he could trust. I said he was doing wrong. He’d be caught and go back to prison. It was a stupid risk. He wouldn’t listen. I had to go, didn’t I? I couldn’t let him go alone.”

“And Howie wasn’t there, was he? And the warehouse was empty. It was a con game, wasn’t it? How could your father have fallen for it, knowing Howie the way he did?”

“He couldn’t believe Howie would do it to him. We sat out there in the dark waiting and waiting. Howie was sure to show up. Hell, hadn’t he taken my father around and introduced him to the man that was going to fence the stuff? I was sick. Don’s money—gone with that creep Howie.”

“Maybe that was why your father filed that insurance claim. To get Gaillard his money back.”

“Maybe. But that was even worse, don’t you see? That was what had happened to my father. Anything for money.”

“You don’t know where he’s gone?” Dave said.

“Maybe he told me. He was trying to talk to me, get me to forgive him. He was crying. I wouldn’t listen. I was throwing my stuff in that duffel bag. All I wanted was out. He was crying outside the bathroom door while I was picking up those stupid pills. If he said, I didn’t hear.”

“But he was still home when you left?” Dave said. And when Lyle nodded, he said, “Report him missing as soon as you get home. Sheriff? Missing persons? It could help.”