Skinflick (26 page)

“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?”

Dave winced. “Maybe. Later. We’ll see.” Max went off shaking his head, face puckered with worry. Dave told Edwards, “One person you never miss around Max is your mother.”

“You never had one,” Amanda said.

“I had nine,” Dave said, “in rapid succession. But you’re the nicest.”

“Known Max a long time?” Edwards said.

“Since before you were born,” Dave said. He took in some whiskey and lit another of Amanda’s cigarettes. “And while I was sitting here boozing with dead friends and lovers, what were you doing with those thirty-four years?”

Edwards grinned. “Only thirty,” he said. “I’m a lawyer. Entertainment personalities, TV, pictures.”

“Would you believe?” Amanda said.

She meant that he looked like a film star. That didn’t surprise Dave. Carl Brandstetter had looked like a film star too. But Carl Brandstetter had been sixty-five when Amanda married him. So what surprised Dave was Edwards’s youth. He was still older than Amanda but not much. It was only a surprise. It wasn’t important. What was important was that he earned a living and probably a good one. He wasn’t after Amanda for her money.

Dave wasn’t only old enough to be Amanda’s father—he worried about her like a father. The way she had moped around that big, empty Beverly Glen house after Carl Brandstetter’s sudden death had troubled him, and he’d tried to take her mind off her loss by putting her to work, remodeling and decorating the ramshackle place he’d bought to live alone in up Horseshoe Canyon. When that was done, he’d talked her into opening a business, and in no time she’d got more clients than she could handle, and was too busy to mourn. But he was uneasy that she seemed to shun all men except him, an aging homosexual. Now here she came with a man, and Dave was jealous. Ridiculous. He laughed at himself.

“Dave?” Amanda’s eyes were bright. “We’ve got something to tell you.”

But Mel Fleischer arrived, tall, balding, patrician, in dark green tweed, lavender shirt, pale green tie. He was a heavy contributor to the philharmonic and the museum, collected California painters, and was a senior vice-president of Proctor Bank. He and Dave had been lovers—though that was a flowery word for it—in high school, when the world was young. They had remained friends. Trailing Mel came Makoto, the Japanese college boy he slept with, stocky, broad-faced. A shiny red jacket was open over his muscular brown torso. He wore red jogging shorts, white gym socks with red trim, and no shoes. Roller skates dangled from his square, brown hand—white tops, red wheels. From across the room, Max watched Makoto with a sad shake of the head, mourning a restaurant dress code long defunct.

Dave made introductions. Makoto sat down, dropped the skates on the thick carpet, lounged in the chair. Mel sat straight, a Renaissance cardinal holding audience.

Amanda told Makoto, “Those are beautiful skates.”

Makoto nodded a head of shaggy black hair and showed terrific teeth. He didn’t talk much. Spoken English was not easy for him. Amanda handed him her menu. Edwards tried to give his to Mel. Mel smiled and shook his head.

“Scallops,” he said. “They sauté them beautifully here, in brown butter.” He passed Dave an envelope. “The sad story of Charles Westover—financial only, but I often think a good novelist could reconstruct a whole life from a study of a man’s bank statements, don’t you?”

“Balzac,” Makoto said. He pronounced it Borzock. “
César Birotteau.”
The last name was easy for him.

Dave put on glasses and peered at the pages from the envelope. “Credit check here, too. Thanks. I see he’s keeping up the house payments. Jesus, a third mortgage!”

“He’d better. But, as you can see, his debts elsewhere are staggering. In round figures, two hundred thousand dollars. The house and car are all he has.”

“Ahem!” Amanda said. Dave laid down the papers and took off the glasses. She was holding Edwards’s hand on the table, and she was radiant. “I have an announcement, please. Miles and I are getting married.”

“Ho!” Dave was startled. She’d never kept a secret before. “Wonderful. Congratulations.” He kissed her cheek and shook the hand of Edwards, who grinned happily.

“Champagne!” Mel waved his arms. “Champagne!”

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1979 by Joseph Hansen

Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

978-1-4804-1681-9

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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