Early Graves (4 page)

“I passed the construction site on my way into town,” Dave said. “It looks like quite a project.”

“Oh, millions of dollars,” she said. “Why, it’s going to change the whole lifestyle of this valley. Sears-Roebuck, fashion shops, an enormous supermarket, anything you can name.” She remembered, and the sparkle went out of her eyes, the years showed up in her face. “Was. I don’t know, now.” She regarded him in the gray rainy light. “No, he never spoke your name. And I don’t know what he’d need with your services. Except that he wasn’t himself after he came back from the hospital. He was depressed and jumpy. Not himself at all.”

“Because of his health?” Dave said.

“Oh, no. That was fine. He’d lost all this weight, and now he felt so much better, and he was going to gain it back, and, oh, no, he was real cheerful about that. No, it was something else. Trouble with the shopping mall. What else could it be?”

“He didn’t talk to you about his business problems?”

“He wouldn’t worry me.” She shook her head decisively. “He wouldn’t worry Katherine or the children. He was cheerful and sunny all the time—no matter how hard he worked, sometimes all night long. It was his nature.” Her lower lip trembled. She bit it. Tears showed in her eyes. “He was the dearest boy. The dearest boy.” She used the dish towel to wipe away the tears. “Come in. It’s cold out here.” She opened the door, motioned Dave inside ahead of her, hung his coat in a crowded closet. In the entryway, two spider bikes, one red, one blue, leaned between two six-foot-tall ficus trees in tubs. Stairs led down to a long, beam-ceilinged living room with an inglenook fireplace and furniture that looked comfortable and jumped-on. Videotape boxes were strewn on the wall-to-wall carpet in front of a big console television set.

Dave said, “Do you live here, Mrs. Nilson?”

“I live in Minneapolis,” she said, “but I come out for Thanksgiving and stay through till the snow melts back there. Mr. Nilson died five years ago, and I’ll admit it—I get lonesome. But I think they like having me. I try to pay my way, cooking, looking after the youngsters. That lets Drew and Kathy have some time together.” She gave a short laugh. “It did, until this shopping mall thing took over Drew’s life. Then I was company for Kathy, wasn’t I?” She tried for a smile. “Sit down. I’ll get us some hot coffee.” She moved off with a laugh. “It’s not sunny California today.”

“I wonder if you can let me have a picture of Drew?”

“A picture?” She turned. “Oh, no. He was deathly afraid of cameras. There’s not a picture of him in the house. So easygoing he was about most everything. But no pictures. Not on your life. We had to laugh about it.”

“Can you tell Mrs. Dodge I’d like to see her?”

“I’ll take her some coffee too.” She paused in a far doorway. “Dr. Trowbridge gave her something to make her sleep, but maybe coffee will keep it from working right away. I’ll try.”

“Thank you,” Dave said.

And she came, barefoot in jeans and a bulky sweater, looking pale and drawn, dark circles under her eyes, eyes red, maybe from fatigue, maybe from weeping, maybe both. She was her mother’s daughter, no mistake. Same snub nose, same slightly uptilted blue eyes. But slim and trim. Among those cassettes must be Jane Fonda’s workout tapes. Fragile Kathy Dodge did not look. Strong enough to drag her husband’s body from dark Horseshoe Canyon Trail into Dave’s courtyard in the rain, and prop it on that bench? The dead man hadn’t been heavy. Dave watched her drop disconsolately onto a couch and set the coffee mug that matched Dave’s and her mother’s on a table piled with architecture and interior design magazines, investment magazines, kids’ magazines. Dave said:

“I’ll be quick about this. I know you’re tired.”

“I’m more than tired,” she said. “I wish I were dead.”

“My name is Dave Brandstetter,” he said. “Did Drew ever mention my name to you?”

“No.” She eyed him dully, shook her head. “Never.”

Dave pulled a typed paper from inside his jacket, unfolded it, put on his reading glasses. “Did he ever mention any of these people to you? Bill Bumbry? Art Lopez? Sean O’Reilly? Frank Prohaska? Edward Vorse?”

She rubbed her forehead, sat wearily forward, picked up the coffee mug. “I don’t know.” She drank. “I don’t think so. I don’t remember. I’m sorry. I’m just—too damn tired.”

“Try, Kathy,” her mother said. “Mr. Brandstetter’s had a shock, too. It was in his patio where they found Drew.”

“What?” The young woman jerked her head up, both hands pushing at her hair. “Found Drew? Where?”

“It’s all right.” Dave folded the paper, pushed it away, sat forward, made to stand up. “I won’t keep you anymore.”

But she held up a hand. “No, wait.” She frowned at the pocket where the paper had disappeared. “Let me see.”

He pulled the list out and gave it to her. She frowned over it for a moment, then passed it back. “I think Art Lopez worked for him. At the construction site. He died.”

“The same way as Drew.” Dave pushed the paper away and rose. “Thank you.” He turned to the mother. “Thank you, Mrs. Nilson.” He walked toward the steps up to the entryway, stopped there, turned back. “One last thing. Did he seem frightened to you lately?”

“He had terrible nightmares,” Katherine Dodge said. “He’d wake up screaming. But he wouldn’t tell me why.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Dave said.

He got his coat and went out into the rain again.

H
EADING FOR THE CONSTRUCTION
site, he changed his mind on Main Street when he saw lettering on windows above a corner hardware store. The building was narrow brick, 1887 on its cornerstone. The ground-floor windows were large and framed in wood many times painted white. On the panes of the upstairs windows was lettered
DREW DODGE ASSOCIATES
.

It was no trouble to find a parking space. Few cars lined Main Street. In the square across the way, rain dripped from seesaws and swings under big, dark, weeping trees. He pushed coins into a parking meter, turned up his collar, and looked for the door. It was down a side street, thick glass, DDA lettered on it. It wasn’t locked. He climbed a narrow, walled-in staircase. Under its thick new carpeting, old treads creaked. There was a smell of paint.

At the top, instead of the narrow, dim hallways and brown office doors that must have been here once, he found a cheerful, open reception room under a ceiling of lighted panels. There were planters, bookshelves with clusters of pottery. Handsome chairs and couches. No one sat at the reception desk where a telephone burred and blinked small lights. A Rolodex sat next to it. He dug out reading glasses and standing, knees bent, riffled through the little cards. But he found no names that meant anything to him.

“Anybody here?” He put the glasses away.

The drawer of a file cabinet rolled closed somewhere, and a woman came from behind a partition. She wore a tight-waisted blousy sort of jumpsuit in a shiny black cotton fabric, with a wide belt that had a gold buckle. Her eyeglasses were very big, with round lenses tinted amber toward the tops. A heavy gold chain circled her throat. She was as trim and slim as Katherine Dodge but fifteen years older. Her throat was stringy. She brushed dust off her hands, whose nails were long and painted to match her amber glasses and the amber tint of her fluffy hair. She crouched and unplugged the telephone cord at the wall, stood again, smiled.

“How can I help you?” she said.

He gave his name, showed his license, said he didn’t want to interrupt but had a few questions. Who was she?

“Judith Ober,” she said. “I manage the office. Did.”

He shook her hand and put one of his cards into it. “Have you seen one of these before? Did Drew Dodge ever mention my name to you—or in your hearing?”

She frowned at the card, looked up. “No. Why?”

“Because when I found his body on my doorstep the other day, a card like that was on the bricks between his feet. Where did he get it? He was a stranger to me.”

“Your doorstep? I didn’t know. How awful for you.”

“But you did know he was killed. Yet you’re working. Why is that? They’re not working at the construction site.”

“I’m not working. I came to get my belongings. I have a future, Mr. Brandstetter, but it isn’t in Rancho Vientos. Drew Dodge Associates was Drew Dodge—period. All by his clever, charming, handsome, devious self. Without him”—she lifted and let fall her hands—“all this will vanish.”

“Where will you go?” Dave said.

“North. Silicon Valley, I think. Don’t worry about me. I’m a treasure, and that’s the kind of money I make.” She laughed briefly, sadly. “I can’t get out of it now. It’s far too late. They printed statistics lately on us career gals over thirty-five. Nobody is going to marry us. I kissed the boys goodbye after college. I knew what I wanted. And I got it. And I loved it. And now I’m stuck with it. Forever. Which makes you think. Somebody ought to write a self-help book—
Never Make Decisions When You’re Young
.”

“If you don’t,” Dave said, “someone will make them for you. That’s no good either. Will you get severance pay?”

“Surely you jest,” she said. “I haven’t been paid in weeks. Cash flow. You know cash flow? Well, around Drew Dodge Associates, cash stopped flowing some time ago.”

“Then it’s not out of respect for the boss’s memory that the construction workers aren’t out there today. It’s because they haven’t been paid.”

“And he’s not around to con them into believing they’ll get their checks any day now. He could do that.” Her smile was mournful. “He was a charmer-and-a-half, that boy.”

Dave frowned. “The shopping mall won’t be finished?”

She shrugged. “All I know is it’s going to take money. And money there is not.”

“What happened to it?” Dave said.

“Cost overruns and leasing shortfalls—a deadly combination. Most of Drew’s investors were small-time—doctors, dentists, lawyers, professors at the local state college, businessmen, shopkeepers, people who want to see the valley grow. Bud Hollywell, our Senator in Sacramento. Pete McCaffrey, who owns the local paper. Drew kept close to Pete.”

“Because he could influence opinion?”

“Why, Mr. Brandstetter”—she batted her eyelashes—“what a thing to say. Haven’t you ever heard of friendship for friendship’s sake?”

“What you’re saying is that there weren’t enough big investors, and the small ones had run out of money?”

“They’d given till it hurt; most of them. A good many their entire life savings. Drew was persuasive.”

“Maybe they were having second thoughts,” Dave, said. “His mother-in-law says he was worried. About the mall.”

“He had three hundred thousand in materials and labor to pay off in the next ninety days. That would worry most of us. It’s the obvious guess, isn’t it? But I was closer to Drew than his mother-in-law. Gerda? As innocent as they come. You can’t help loving her, but Minneapolis is never going to turn anybody into a sophisticate.”

“‘The dearest boy,’ she called him,” Dave said. “Wasn’t he the dearest boy?”

“Among other things,” Judith Ober said. “But it wasn’t like him to let money get him down. Money wasn’t that important. He never had any trouble in his life getting money when he had to. He started with nothing, you know, and made himself a millionaire by age thirty.” She picked up a handbag. “You want a drink? Lunch? There’s a tiny place at the end of a little shopping arcade up the street that fixes divine crêpes.”

In Rancho Vientos? Dave didn’t believe it, but he wanted a drink, so he let her lead him there. The room was small, with blond tables and woodwork, fake Tiffany lamps, a corner bar stocked with good liquor. And she was right about the crêpes. He had sweetbreads, she had shrimp. She drank a martini from a glass the size of a birdbath. Dave drank Glenlivet. It was quiet. No other customers came. The rain whispered on a skylight above hanging plants.

“A man like Drew Dodge,” she said, “doesn’t let sensitivity to others slow him down. He made his start by selling the house the Nilsons had given Katherine and him for a wedding present. With the profits, he began buying up places seized by the State for delinquent taxes.”

“Was that what killed Mr. Nilson?” Dave said.

“Funny you should mention him. You look a lot like him. No, John thought Drew was smart as paint. Rags to riches in five years? What a son-in-law!” She worked on the martini, took tiny bites of the crêpe. “Drew got into land qua land after that. Bigger and bigger parcels. At first, he sold to developers. Then he thought, why let them make all the money, and he opened this place and became a developer himself. Not with his own money. With anybody’s he could get his hands on. He was good at that. As you say, ‘The dearest boy.’” She twitched a wry smile. “Not that he ever lied to anybody—not intentionally. He talked himself into believing what he was selling, and then turned around and sold his fantasies as if they were rock-solid truth.”

“And always figured he could do it one more time?”

“And he could, too. If he hadn’t gotten sick.” Her bright toughness went slack for a second. She was angry and gloomy. “That’s what did it. Those weeks in Junipero Serra with that terrible pneumonia. You should have seen what it did to him. He tried to keep going here, but he wasted away. He was so weak. Finally we had to send for an ambulance.”

“And he lost his grip on the shopping mall project?” Dave said. “You couldn’t have carried the responsibilities for him? You said you were a treasure.”

“He never told me enough,” she said grimly. “But even if I’d known it all, it needed him, his personality, his plausibility, his optimism. I don’t know.” She sighed, shook her head, drank deeply from her big glass again. “It’s too bad, damn it. I’d love to have seen him pull it off. He was feeling well again, scared of something, but not the shopping mall thing. He’d have found a way. And then some LA crazy stabs him and puts an end to it all.”

A youth who didn’t look like a waiter but who wore a starchy white coat came and clumsily took away their plates. A ranch hand was what he looked like, nose sunburned, back of his neck sunburned. Or maybe a pumper of gasoline and changer of spark plugs at a highway filling station. He brought the desserts—ice cream in goblets with Grand Marnier poured over it. He carried the glasses with great care, as if he’d only encountered such fragile items for the first time today.