Troublemaker (16 page)

Someplace out of sight and half out of hearing, the dogs began to bark.

"Take it easy, Mrs. Ewing." Yoshiba stepped in front of her. "We just want to talk to the boy."

"What do you
mean!"
Trudy came down the stairs at a run. She was barefoot again, in the same gray bells and appliqued shirt, breasts showing firm through the thin cloth. She didn't wear the sunglasses tonight, though, and the bruises around her eyes, along with the missing teeth, made her young face an old mask. "Talk to him about what? He didn't do anything. He couldn't!"

"He wasn't here Monday night," Dave said. "Your uncle said you were alone in the house with him when Larry turned up missing. Where was Mark?"

She said defiantly, "He went to see a man in the Audio-Visual Department at UCLA. Someone he had a letter of introduction to from his department head. He'd been putting it off. That night he decided to go and get it over with."

"And not take you?" Dave asked.

"I had to be here." She explained it to him as to a little child. "To look after Tom."

The door swung inward. They all looked at the black oblong. Sea wind came in and so did two uniformed men holding Mark Dimond by the arms between them. He was bare-chested, barefoot. "He was going to take off, Lieutenant. In the El Camino."

"Let go of him!" Trudy flung herself at them.

Yoshiba caught her. "Easy," he said. "It's going to be all right. We just want to ask him a couple of simple questions."

Trudy stared frightened past the lieutenant's bulky shoulder at the boy with the helmet of black hair. She was asking her own questions. Not aloud. With her eyes.

Larson said, "You were up at the Wendell house on Monday night, weren't you?"

Dimond was very pale. "I don't get this," he said. "I don't get this at all." He squinted, twisted his face. "What house?"

"Wendell. He was killed that night, remember?" Yoshiba said. "A kid who lived here, kid by the name of Larry Johns, is being held for his murder. Does that clear it up for you?"

"Oh, Christ," Dimond breathed. His eyes were on Trudy's face. They seemed to plead.

"So you do know who I'm talking about?" Yoshiba asked.

Dimond tried a mystified laugh. "What would I be doing up there? I went to UCLA that night."

"Is that right? Did you see the man you had the letter of introduction to? What's his name?"

Something went out of Dimond's face. "He wasn't there. Nobody was there. But that doesn't mean
—"

"Somebody was at Wendell's," Yoshiba said. "He tells us a pickup with the name Thomas Owens on the door was parked at the foot of the stairs. By the mailboxes. On Pinyon Trail. Mrs. Ewing, here, didn't drive the car. Mr. Owens didn't drive it. He told Brandstetter his niece was here with him that night. She says you weren't. And you do have a key to that car. That's the key, there, in your hand, isn't it?"

"I want a lawyer," Mark Dimond said.

"Mark!" Gail Ewing gasped. "Oh, my God!" She was very white. She caught at Larson's arm. He steadied her. Mark Dimond watched her, bewildered.

"What's wrong with you? You hated Larry Johns as much as I did. More."

"Oh, but, Mark
—the death of an innocent man—"

"What! What the hell are you saying?" Dimond struggled in the grip of the officers. "Now, wait—wait just a fucking minute, Gail. I didn't kill anyone." He looked wildly from Yoshiba to Larson to Khazoyan to Dave. "I never said that. I didn't, I didn't!" "He didn't,"

Trudy said. "He couldn't have."

"Fine," Yoshiba said. "So what were you doing there?"

Dimond sulked. "I want a lawyer."

"I think I can tell you what he was doing there," Dave said. "He followed Larry Johns. And he took along his trusty tape recorder. It's a portable, hangs in a case on a shoulder strap. That was what Dwayne Huncie mistook for a woman's handbag when he saw him running off through the trees."

"That how it was?" Yoshiba asked Dimond. Sick, the boy turned his head. After a moment's disgusted silence he drew breath, let it out and said wearily, "Yeah. I'd brought the dogs inside. There's a room for them at the back, under the carport. And I heard Larry on the kitchen phone. Asking for money. Agreeing to meet this Rick on the coast road, eight that night. It proved what I knew he was." He looked at Trudy. "A hustler. The kind that peddles sex to perverts."

"You're eating Tom Owens's food," Dave told him. "Sleeping under his roof. That's a hell of a word."

The dark boy flushed. "Okay. Homosexuals, gays
—whatever you want. I'm sorry." He looked at Trudy again. "I told you, but you
wouldn't believe me. He was so sweet, he'd had such a lousy life. I had to prove to you what he was. So"
—he faced Yoshiba again—"I look my recorder and stood outside Wendell's windows and I got a tape."

"Mark!" Trudy said. "You didn't! That's revolting. Sneaking, spying. What
are
you?"

"In love with you, dummy." Mark struggled to break from the officers again. He said to Yoshiba, "I've still got it. I kept it. Didn't play it for Trudy because after that night Larry was gone anyway. If you'll let me, I'll get it and you can hear it. You'll love it, Trudy. You'll really love your fair-haired cracker when you hear that tape."

Yoshiba said, "Go with him, Ramirez."

Minutes later, the tape recorder, black leather case laid open like the lid of a coffin, stood on the big low deal table under the light, its five-inch reels of clear plastic winking as they turned. Gail Ewing sat stone-faced on the long wicker couch, Trudy next to her, biting her nails, watching Mark, who stood over the machine. Yoshiba and Dave flanked him. Larson and Khazoyan stood at the end of the table. The uniformed officers leaned by the front door. Jomay Johns sat in the dark at the top of the stairs with BB asleep in her lap. Their hair glowed like that of angels in a painting darkened by centuries of soot. Dave wished he had a drink.

The tape stopped hissing to itself. Distances of crickets skirred. There was the far, lost drone of a jet plane. A voice deep and rumbling that still managed to have something feminine about it said,
It's in here, safe and sound. I haven't even opened it. Fifteen hundred dollars in small bills. Wasn't that what you said?
Paper rattled and tore.
See? There. Do you want to count it? Go ahead, count it if you want to.
Another rattle of paper.

Aw, Rick, I don't want to count it, man.
This was Larry Johns's voice, hard and echoey in the room.
And look, I'll pay it back. I promise. I mean it.
There was a knocking sound. Perhaps a shoe had kicked a desk leg. Wendell's voice again above a rustling whisper of cloth:
Oh, Larry, no. It's my gift. You don't know what it means to have you come back. How I've dreamed, hoped, wished, prayed. When you phoned today, I cried, I really cried with happiness. I
—

Larry Johns's voice cut across Wendell's.
No, I don't take money for sex, Rick. It's a loan, man. I'll get a gig and pay you back. Otherwise
—

All right, Larry, all right. Now just let me hold you. Oh, God.
Along silence. A low moaning. Then a whispered,
Now, Larry? Please
—
now? Yes, in here. Yes, yes. A
latch rattled, a door swung, brushing carpet, hinges squeaking slightly. A door closed. The crickets went on with their shrill plaintive pulsing. There was a scuff of shoe leather on cement, a crackling of leaves under soles. The tape clicked. The empty hissing started again. Mark Dimond leaned, reached, punched a plastic key. The reels halted.

Yoshiba stood frowning for a moment in the sea-sighing silence, then touched the machine with a shoe. "They don't exactly beat the camera, do they? What went with the dialogue?"

Dimond flushed darkly, shifted his feet, rubbed his smooth brown chest. "Well
—he, uh, took the envelope out of his jacket. He tore it open and took out packs of bills. He tried to give them to Larry but he wouldn't touch them. So the big stud, Wendell—he, like, thumbed the edges, you know? As if to show Larry the bread was all there or something—right?" The dark boy gestured uneasily. "What do you want me to say? I mean, okay, he dropped the envelope and money on the desk and—" Dimond glanced unhappily at Gail and Trudy on the couch, up into the dimness where Jomay sat silent. "Well, it was kind of freaky to watch, you know? Made me feel a little nauseated. I mean, he started running his hands over Larry. Like he was a girl. Wow! Through his hair and all that." Dimond looked at the floor, blew air out through his nostrils, mumbled, "Held his head, tipped it back, you know, and kissed him on the mouth. Took him in his arms, you know?" Dimond looked up. "Hell, Lieutenant, I don't want to—"

"Yeah, okay, kid. They went into the other room?"

"Right. And I was relieved when they did."

"And you left, did you?" Dave wondered.

"I wanted to but the windows on that other room were open too because it was a hot night. I knew I ought to go there if I was going to get real proof for Trudy. And I took a step in that direction when I see the door from outside open and this lifelike, inflatable Gabby Hayes pokes his head in. Whiskers, chewing tobacco
—you could smell stockyards twenty feet off. He takes a quick look around, walks straight to the desk, picks up the bread, and walks out with it. Wow! I didn't know what to do. I couldn't do anything, could I? I mean, I was in a very ridiculous position."

"That wouldn't be my word," Dave said.

"It was contemptible." Trudy sprang up and walked into the dark. "Disgusting. It makes me sick."

Yoshiba said, "So you ran, did you?"

Dimond was looking worriedly after Trudy. "What? Yeah, I ran. Waited up in the trees till I heard his truck drive off down the road. Then I got out of there."

Yoshiba looked at Larson. "I want to book him on failure to report a felony."

Larson glanced at the beautiful expensive room. "He'd be out on O.R. tomorrow morning." He put the Little League cap on again. "Waste of time."

"Nobody saw him leave," Yoshiba said.

"Ho," Larson said. "You want to book him for the murder? You'd have to let Johns out, then."

Khazoyan said, "That sounds good to me."

"Forget it," Yoshiba said.

"I should think so," Gail Ewing said indignantly.

"Just don't go anywhere," Yoshiba told Mark Dimond.

CHAPTER 12

Below Pinyon Trail,
at the foot of a fern slope where a summer-scant creek threaded among moss-rusty boulders, deer lay in the morning shadows of the pines. Three of them. When Yoshiba drove the unmarked Los Santos Police Department car past above them, they didn't get up. They only raised their heads, swiveled big soft ears. Their eyes were wide and calm.

"Will you look at that?" Yoshiba said. "What are we
—twenty miles from downtown L.A.?"

"If that," Dave said. "We forget
—the interloper is man. Hold it. This is the place."

Three cars crowded the patch of yellow dirt in front of tin mailboxes on paint-chalky posts. One car had the high rear fender fins of the fifties. That would be Billy Wendell's. One was a station wagon, a broad one from the sixties, the tailgate down, weighted with baled alfalfa. Heather's, of course. The third was a VW with a cloth top. Rick's. Dave had seen it here the other morning. Was she going to let the weeds and creepers have it? Yoshiba slowed but didn't stop.

"What's on up the trail?" he asked.

"I'm told it makes a loop," Dave said.

Yoshiba moved the lever to "L" and put a square foot on the accelerator pedal. The car climbed a wide, bumpy half circle in the cool shadows of the pines. At the top, where Heather Wendell's ruined blacktop driveway raked downward from the trail, he braked the car, killed the engine. In the sudden quiet, a quail called. Yoshiba opened his door and stepped out. Dave did the same. Yoshiba nodded lo where gray wood shingling showed through the trees below.

"That's the place."

"Garage," Dave said, "where she stables her horses." He shifted ground. "Here. From here you can see part of the house, farther down."

Yoshiba came, looked, grunted. His blunt shoetip nudged the dust of the road edge where footprints showed. "Looks like somebody waited around up here. Deck shoes. New ones. Kegan?"

"Probably." Dave checked his watch. "We'd better catch her before she gets out on those horses. There's country up here where you can't follow by automobile."

But Yoshiba was crouching. "Two cars were parked here lately. Look. Different sets of tires, side by side. Both small cars. This one"
—a short, thick finger made a circle in the air above a dark patch soaked into the dust—"had a bad oil leak."

Dave glanced around. Across the road a hill climbed to a crest maybe thirty feet above. A few dying pines but mostly scrub and rock. Nothing was built there, nothing to the left or to the right. Only below. "It could be a place where kids park to make out."

"Almost have to be." Yoshiba grunted, got to his feet. "Let's go down this way."