Nightwork (7 page)

“Where was Gene that night?” Dave said.

“He’s over there, isn’t he? At Angie’s? That’s where you come from, I suppose.” Terence Molloy looked at the small table beside his chair. The lamp was painted china with a fluted shade. Under it clustered pill containers and medicine bottles. He frowned. Then he began poking with his hand down between the chair arm and the cushion. He came up with a round snuff can, fidgeted it open, tucked snuff into his cheek. He looked anxiously over his shoulder, closed the can, tossed it to Dave. “Hide that. They want you to relax, but anything that would relax you—tobacco, booze—you can’t have those.”

Dave pushed the can under the sofa cushion. “Where was Gene? Here?”

“I wouldn’t let him through that door. Living off some woman, probably. His mother spoiled hell out of him. Angie always had a soft spot in her head for him. You watch, he’ll live off her the rest of his useless life.”

“She seems to know how to handle him,” Dave said.

Terence Molloy snorted. “He’s there, isn’t he? And Paul not cold in his grave.”

“It wouldn’t be worth it to him for her wages as a waitress,” Dave said. “She’ll barely make ends meet that way for herself and the kids.”

The old man’s attention wasn’t on him. He was staring blankly, slack-jawed, at the blank television screen. His nails needed trimming. With them, he was plucking at his beard stubble. Under his breath, he sang, quavery and off-key. Some old Irish song. “‘And in all me life I ne’er did see such a foin young girl, upon my soul…’” He looked at Dave with sudden sharpness, and said, “It’s for the insurance money. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? You said you were from the insurance company.”

“It will be a lot of money if it’s paid,” Dave said. “Would Gene be sure enough of Angie’s taking him in to cause Paul to have an accident that would get him out of the way so he, Gene, could live happily ever after on the insurance?”

The old man stared, mouth open. “Are you saying it wasn’t an accident?”

Dave told him what it was.

Faith Molloy came in with coffee in a cup and saucer, and bent to set it on a little table at Dave’s elbow. “Who would do such a thing?”

“I was wondering if it could be Gene,” Dave said.

Still half bent above the table, face close to the lampshade, white as the lampshade, Faith Molloy went still. For a moment her face was expressionless. Dave could see where Gene’s good looks came from. She must have been a beauty, forty years ago. At last she found her voice, enough to whisper, “Gene?”

“It would be a fitting end,” the old man said. “The hangman’s noose.”

The woman turned on him in fury. “He never harmed anyone in his life. He’s weak, that’s all. He’d never hurt anybody.” She looked at Dave. “It isn’t in him.”

“Weak? He’s a liar, a thief, a gambler, a drunk, and a lecher. No morals. No scruples. No self-respect. What did you expect, woman?”

“You shut your crazy old mouth.” Faith Molloy screamed this. She turned frantically to Dave. “Don’t listen to him. He’s sick. His mind’s gone. Half the time he doesn’t know his own name.”

“Gene’s at your daughter’s now,” Dave said. “Where was he living before?”

“I’ve got it written down.” She threw a savage look at her husband and left the room, muttering, “You wicked old devil. Your only son. Your flesh and blood. Name of your name.”

Terence Molloy picked up a metal crutch from beside his chair, reached out, and with its rubber tip pulled the television button. The game show returned. Gold curtains flew open. A new blue automobile gleamed on a turntable. A young red-haired woman in green jumped up and down with joy and hugged the wrinkled MC, who raised his eyebrows in simulated surprise. Terence Molloy let the crutch fall. “I’d beat her with that,” he said, “if I had the strength. I was a strong man once. She wouldn’t have dared plague me then as she does now. Now all I can do to her is spill my food and piss in the bed.”

“Here it is.” Faith Molloy came hurrying back in her clumsy shoes and pushed a scrap of paper into Dave’s hand. “Gene has a lot of friends. He’ll have been with his friends. He likes to have a good time. They’ll have seen him that night. They’ll tell you.”

“Thank you.” Folding the paper, tucking it away, Dave got off the sagging couch. “There’s nothing to worry about, then, is there?”

“Oh, my dear man.” She shook her head despairingly. “I hope you never know how much there is to worry about.”

“If you’d be quiet,” the old man said, “I could hear the television. This man doesn’t want to know your troubles. People have troubles of their own.”

Dave moved toward the open front door, the screen with the sunlight glaring on it. Faith Molloy tagged after him and plucked his sleeve. “You won’t stop the insurance coming, will you?”

“Not I,” Dave said.

“Paul told us we wouldn’t have to worry if anything happened to him. He’d bought a hundred thousand dollars worth of insurance, and we were to get half.”

“He sounds like a good man,” Dave said.

“Oh, he was. Why is it the awful ones go on and on living?” She turned to glare at her husband. “Why does Our Lord always take the good?”

“Because nobody on earth deserves them,” the old man shouted over the television racket. “No woman—that’s for sure.”

The building was two-story brown brick, on a Hollywood corner opposite two filling stations and a hamburger shack with a tin sign:
BIGGIE’S
.
Downstairs, the brown brick building housed a bar called Liza’s, with caricatures painted on its windows of a young woman with wide eyes, scarlet mouth, long black gloves, champagne glass in one hand, long cigarette holder in the other.

Down the side street, near the back corner of the building, Dave found a door whose beveled glass bore the address that Faith Molloy had given him. He climbed narrow, newly carpeted stairs to a hallway of old closed doors. The air was hot and smelled of room deodorant. At the far end of the hallway, a window showed a slatted iron fire escape. But the inspectors hadn’t been here lately; across the window, shelves held trailing philodendrons.

Dave knocked on door number three. Music thumped up from the bar below, but no sound came from beyond the door. He knocked again. A door down the hall opened and a tall, reedy man stepped out. He wore an apron, short shorts, and cowboy boots, and he had a small gold ring in one ear. His hair ought to have been gray but it was strawberry color, upswept, shiny. In one scrawny arm he cradled a brown Mexican pottery bowl. It held yellow batter that he was whipping with a wooden spoon.

He said, “You’re too late, darling. The hunk has flown.”

“Gene Molloy?” Dave said. “You a friend of his?” The man shook his head. The strawberry curls quivered. “He didn’t have boyfriends; he had girlfriends.” The man let go of the spoon, laid the back of a hand against his forehead, sighed. “God knows, I tried. But that old green taffeta just doesn’t fool them anymore.”

Dave grinned. “I thought he lived with somebody.”

“
Off
somebody. Liza. You’ll find her downstairs. She’ll be the one gnashing her teeth. I’ve warned her it’ll play hell with those mail-order dentures, but women are so emotional.” He lifted the spoon and critically watched the batter run off it. “Look, I have to get this in the oven. My God, it’s hot. I’m dying for a drink. How about you?”

“I’ll die a little longer, thanks. Would you know—was he around here on the night of the ninth?”

The man turned his head, watched out of the corners of his eyes. “That was the night he smashed up the bar. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

“Late or early?” Dave said.

“Late—one o’clock. It was just Irish high spirits, but Liza got hysterical and called the cops.”

“Did they arrest him, book him, lock him up?”

“All night. But Liza bailed him out next morning.”

“He brought the body here in his own car,” Cole Wrightwood said. A plump, sleek black, he wore a dark pinstripe suit, a quiet tie, and a large diamond ring. The desktop in front of him was polished to a high gloss. Along its front edge in a planter grew a neat low hedge of marigolds. In corners of the paneled office, tall white baskets held sprays of gladioluses. The cool conditioned air was laden with the damp perfume of flowers. Electronic organ music—Fauré? Widor?—whispered from hidden loudspeakers. “And waited while I filled out the death certificate. As I expect you know”—Wrightwood smiled a grave, apologetic little smile—“the mortician fills in all the data—name, address, that sort of thing. The physician merely has to write in the cause of death and sign the certificate.”

“He has to have been the attending physician,” Dave said, “for at least twenty days. Otherwise there has to be an autopsy. The word of a man called in just for the emergency isn’t enough.”

Wrightwood nodded. “The departed’s wife, widow—she came along with the doctor. She said he was the family physician.”

“Did that seem likely to you? White, isn’t he?” A leaded window, diamond panes, churchlike, was at Wrightwood’s back. A long, glossy Cadillac hearse slid past the window. “Had you ever seen him before?”

“He was white.” Wrightwood’s smile was thin. “Most doctors are. I saw no reason to doubt the woman’s word. She was in tears, deeply grieved, shocked. In my experience, people don’t lie at times like that.”

“May I see the death certificate?”

Wrightwood stirred in his tall leather chair, but he didn’t rise. “You say Oswald Bishop was insured by this company you represent?” The card Dave had given him lay on the desktop. He blinked at it through large round lenses framed in heavy black plastic. “Pinnacle?”

“I didn’t say.” Dave took from inside his jacket the leather folder that held his private investigator’s license, and held it out across the marigolds for Wrightwood to read. “Pinnacle has asked me to investigate the death of a close friend of Ossie Bishop.” He flipped the folder closed and slid it back into his jacket. “Another gypsy trucker. Paul Myers.”

Wrightwood’s eyebrows rose. “That was on the news. An accident. He drove off the road in some canyon.”

“No.” Dave told him what the Sheriff’s lab had discovered. “Now, Ossie Bishop was doing the same sort of night-work as Myers. He even got Myers the job. His death coming so close to Myers’s disturbs me.” Dave smiled. “I’ll regard it as a great kindness if you’ll let me see Bishop’s death certificate.”

“What was this nightwork?”

“I don’t know. You say Mrs. Bishop was distraught that night. She didn’t happen to say—didn’t blurt it out in anger or despair, perhaps?”

“You mean you don’t know what these two men were doing with their trucks? Not even the one you insured?”

“Myers seems not to have told anyone. That in itself isn’t exactly reassuring, is it? Not when you add the fact that he was very well paid.” Dave took out Myers’s bankbook and held it up. “He was making frequent fat deposits. In cash.” He put the bankbook away.

Wrightwood sat for a few seconds longer, moving his chair very slightly from side to side on its swivel base. He shrugged and rose. “It was a heart attack.” He rounded the desk, crossed deep purple carpeting, opened one of a pair of tall, carved, double doors. Through the doorway came the quiet chatter of a typewriter. Wrightwood spoke. The typewriter ceased. Branches of firethorn showed outside the window. Small birds were harvesting the berries, then-squabbling shrill beyond the panes. Wrightwood returned and handed Dave a manila folder marked
BISHOP, OSWALD B
., with a date a month old.

Dave put on reading glasses and opened the folder. The shadow of Wrightwood came between him and the window light. The cushion of the big desk chair sighed as Wrightwood’s two hundred sleek pounds settled on it. Written after
CAUSE OF DEATH
was
Massive coronary occlusion.
TIME OF DEATH:
1:50
A
.
M
.
ATTENDING PHYSICIAN:
Ford T. Kretschmer, M.D. Kretschmer had written down an address and telephone number. Dave took off the glasses, folded them, pushed them into a pocket, closed the file, handed it across the sunny little flowers to Wrightwood. “Thank you.” He got to his feet. “I appreciate it.”

“It’s on file at the Hall of Records.”

“You were nearer,” Dave said. “I’m sorry for the trouble. Anyway, you’ve told me things they couldn’t at the Hall of Records.”

Wrightwood turned his head slightly, wary. “It was a heart attack. Big, heavy man. He’d overworked himself.” Wrightwood got to his feet, buttoned his jacket. He didn’t appear worried about his own weight. “Hypertension kills a good many of my people. I see men who have gone down in their prime all the time.” He had come around the desk again, and now took Dave’s arm to walk him to the door. His grip was as gentle and comforting as if Dave had just brought him a dead friend. “You interest me.” He didn’t let go Dave’s arm. With his free hand he gripped the fancily wrought bronze handle of the tall office door, but he didn’t move it. “Just what have I told you besides the obvious?”

“That the widow came here.” Dave didn’t want a cigarette, but he wanted the undertaker’s hand off his arm. Nobody was dead around him—he didn’t want to be treated as if somebody was. So he reached for a cigarette, found it, found his slim steel lighter, lit the cigarette. “Did the oldest son come too? Melvil?” He put the lighter away.

Wrightwood shook his head. “A woman came. I assumed she was a nurse—perhaps the doctor’s receptionist.”

“What made you think that?”

Wrightwood turned the handle and opened the door. “She fit the role. You develop an instinct about people in this business. She had that self-assured way about her. They boss their bosses.” They were in a quiet reception room now. He gave the slim, pale black, fortyish woman at the desk a grin. “Don’t they?”

She looked up at him, wide-eyed, and patted her beautifully set hair. “I can’t think what you’re talking about.” Her laugh was soft and dry.

Dave smiled at her and moved toward the doors that would take him along a hushed corridor hung with ferns and caged canaries, a corridor that passed rooms where the embalmed dead slept in coffins, rooms where damp-eyed families sat on spindly chairs, and past the chapel. It was the route he had taken to get here. With the door open, he turned back. “Can you describe her for me? Stocky, middle-aged, well-dressed?”