Troublemaker (5 page)

He sighed and put a foot on the floor. "So
—they get into scrapes or get depressed, they get on the phone. But when Rick came in at three-thirty, he said, yeah, he'd gotten the call at home. Then he phoned home and, the way it sounded, took up an argument he'd been having with Heather about her not getting out enough. He kept asking her to promise him she'd take in a flick that night,
The Sundown Studs.
She'd like the horses."

"She didn't like what they did to them," Dave said.

"But she went," Kegan said. "He really gave her a hard sell, argued with her for a half hour, telling her what a great movie it was. And I happened to know he'd never seen it. It only opened Friday. He hadn't got a night off to see it. Or an afternoon either. Not on a weekend." He frowned to himself, nodded. "Yeah, I should have figured out what he was up to." He gave Dave a bleak smile. "But frankly, Bobby was on my mind. That damn contest. On looks, he can win it going away. But a couple of dudes in that line-up have got a little intelligence, a lot of charm."

"When Wendell left early that night," Dave said, "that didn't add it all up for you
—that there might be another Monkey in the picture?"

"No," Kegan said, "and I'll tell you why. It was Monday. Business was slow. We were just standing around. He said he might as well see the flick with her. It was natural."

Feet thudded on the deck outside. Bobby stood in the door opening. His long, blond muscles were slick with sweat. "Salad?" he panted. "Steak? I don't smell any charcoal."

Kegan looked at his watch. "It's not half an hour," he said. "Okay, okay. Go shower. It'll be ready when you get out." He watched the boy disappear down a dim white hallway, hopping, shedding the little shorts. Between the sun brown of his torso and legs, his butt gleamed white. Kegan sighed and started for the kitchen. "Steak for you?"

"Thanks but I've got to go," Dave said. "What about the Mr. Marvelous contest? How serious is it?"

"It's ridiculous." Kegan opened the refrigerator again. From beside the plastic flowers Dave watched him turn, arms loaded with lettuce, scallions, cucumbers, tomatoes, and dump them on a yellow Formica counter. "You mean, how serious do they take it?"

"You read me," Dave said.

"Well
—it means a lot of free publicity for the bar that wins." Kegan found a paring knife in a drawer and sliced cucumbers. "That is, if they can keep the kid around for a few weeks, which isn't always easy. The kid himself wins clothes, cuff links, sporting goods, maybe a bicycle. You know, stuff put up by local merchants. It was mostly gay businesses at first. Now the straight ones ante up too." He flashed Da
ve the sidelong wise grin again. "Pardon the word. And"
—he brought a big yellow bowl out of a cupboard and started tearing lettuce leaves up and dropping them into it—"maybe a spot in a fuck film. Plus cash. Not much—whatever the participating taverns chip in. Last year it was maybe four, five hundred."

Dave said, "How stable are the kids?"

Kegan laughed. "They're hustlers, from anyplace, everyplace
— dropouts, orphans, losers. Pathetic nobodies." He began work on the scallions with the paring knife. "Would-be movie actors who can't even memorize their own names, would-be rock stars who don't know a guitar from a frying pan."

From the end of the hall came the splash of a shower. Over the noise, Bobby sang in a cracked falsetto, " 'Sunshine on my shoulders makes me hap-peee!' " Dave looked that way and said, "You know, Bobby is the same type as Johns
—build, coloring, hair, mustache. Prettier, but the same type. Could somebody have it in for your entry?"

The knife rattled out of Kegan's fingers. He stared at Dave and he was pale under his tan. "Jesus," he breathed. "I never thought of that." His eyes narrowed. He drove a thick fist into a thick palm. "Yeah. What if one of those sick bastards decided they couldn't go up against Bobby? They could have tried to kill this Johns, thinking it was him, and got poor Rick by mistake. Christ
—if Rick picked up Johns outside The Hang Ten and they drove off together ..." Kegan looked sick. "Man, there's all kinds of animals around these days."

"And the other contestants would know Bobby?"

"Sure. Their pictures are in all the bar magazines." Wiping his hands on the Levi's again, he went past Dave to the coffee table and picked up a slender fold of coated stock. He flapped it open and pushed it into Dave's hand. Bobby was there with his unsure smile and not much else. So were eleven others. Kegan was right. None of them was as handsome as Bobby
—unless the photos lied. Kegan said, "Take it along, if it'll help." He blinked up at Dave from under those swollen brow ridges. "You think there's really anything to it?"

At the hall's end, Bobby sang, " 'Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry.'"

Dave folded the magazine into a side jacket pocket. "If I were you," he said, "I'd cancel the runs up the beach. Unless you run with him."

Ace was gazing unhappily down the hall. But he heard. "Yeah," he said faintly. "Thanks."

CHAPTER 4

Seven draft beers
and the glare of sunlight off windshields on freeways had given him a headache. He left the car under an old fig tree by someone's board back fence in a corner of the lot where he and Doug had leased spaces, and walked, tie loosened, jacket over arm, up Robertson past awninged shops where worm-eaten rocking horses, wicker dog baskets, brass bedsteads crowded the sidewalk, to ft blue stucco building they'd rented that let Doug's gallery face the street and left the two of them big, ungainly sunlit rooms to echo around in upstairs.

The gallery doors were a pair, tall, carved, unvarnished and locked. He squinted at his watch. Only a quarter past four. He turned, lifted a tired hand to the portrait of himself, tall and alone in the Spanish arch window, and used a key on a blue door at the building's corner. It opened on narrow, straight stairs, the one feature of the place he disliked. As the door shut behind him and he started to climb, he heard voices. The acoustics in the hall were bad. There was loud rock music. He couldn't make out words.

When he reached the top of the stairs he went to where the voices were. Doug's room
—skylight, easels, a paint-clotted zinc-top table
with multiple shallow drawers for paints and brushes, blank canvases, on stretchers leaning against a wall. Kovaks sat on the edge of an open bed, naked
—pale urban skin, black stand-up hair, scraggly mustache. He leaned forward, elbows on knees, head hanging, a can of beer in one hand. Doug Sawyer, compact, dark-skinned, gray-haired, stood in the open doorway to a long roof deck where rubber trees rooted. in plank boxes threw shadows on redwood garden chairs. Kovaks raised bloodshot eyes to Dave, gave him a crooked smile and said groggily:
                                                         
                                 

"Hi, Dave."

Dave only looked at him and only looked at Doug when Doug; turned to face him. Doug said, "He had lunch and fell asleep. I've been at my mother's." The beaky little woman kept a pet shop on a lost L.A. side street between a bicycle store and a beauty parlor. She'd begun having trouble with her mind lately
—forgetfulness, delusions. The doctors said it had to do with poor circulation. Doug was having to spend more and more time looking after her.
                 
             

Dave crouched and picked up a shallow bowl of thick bubbly amber glass from a scatter of ash on the floor beside the bed. In it lay the twisted butts of handmade cigarettes, burned down short. Dave held it out toward Doug. "Joints. I make it three."
                              

"I'm coming down," Kovaks said sullenly, then giggled. "That's what the brew is for." He drank from the steamy can.
                  

"I didn't ask you," Doug said. "You volunteered, remember? Gung ho. You were going to frame those awful daubs for Mrs. What's-her- name." He walked to a farther room and the rock racket did an audial downcurve and quit. "I didn't expect that, but I did expect you to be there."

"I was there from nine-thirty to one," Kovaks said. "Then I got hungry. Yeah, I also felt like a low, lazy high afterwards. Then I got sleepy. I was only going to shut my eyes."

Doug leaned in a doorway and with a sad smile shook his head at Dave. "He was spread out there like smorgasbord."

"Come on," Kovaks said. "Kosher smorgasbord?"

"I want a shower," Dave said and passed Doug in the doorway. Doug brushed his ear with a kiss.

"Whew! You smell like a brewery."

"I have been interviewing gay-bar owners," Dave said. "It's a long, dull story. I'll tell you later." He went on into his own room, which was the right size and shape to play
jai alai
in, and began dropping his clothes, hearing Doug say to Kovaks:

"See these? Cards. Stuck in the door. Madge Dunstan and Ray Lollard. Friends. Both of whom would probably have bought something if the gallery'd been open. They might even have bought one of your pots."

"Forgive," Kovaks said in a broad and phony Russian accent. "Kovaks bad. Do better next time. He promise." The accent quit. "Oh, God," he moaned, and metal crumpled. "The can's dry. Get me another beer and I'll give you a kiss. Anyplace you name."

Dave went into a big bathroom that was paved, walled and domed In gaudy flowered Spanish tile. He took three aspirins, cranked the shower handles and stepped under the spray. He'd forgotten Ray Lollard after phoning him at noon from a sun-hot booth of salt crusty glass on Los Santos Pier. He'd gone to the pier, remembering how good the food used to be at a white wooden shack there called The Abalone. He hadn't reached Lollard
—out to lunch. And The Abalone's management had changed. For the worse.

Sand dabs sauteed in butter and sprinkled with sesame seeds had been his favorite. These were uneatable, half cold, half raw. He made the best of the view, the good feel of the slow blue surf shaking the old pier stakes under the floorboards, and a cup of coffee, and laid open the bar magazine to study the addresses of the sponsors of entrants in the Mr. Marvelous contest. He made himself a mental map to follow. With some to-ing and fro-ing, he could hit seven on his way from Los Santos back to L.A. A fair start. He could get to the remainder tonight.

There'd been a sameness to them that was already blurring the places in his aching mind. Decor ranged from raw plywood (The Bunkhouse) to flocked crimson wallpaper (The Queen and Court). But the sad, aging patrons were interchangeable. So were the tunes on the jukeboxes. And so were the owners
—around forty, too fleshy or too bony, in clothes too young and wigs styled sharply for last year —men long in the tooth and chatty. Dave had met five of the contestants too. All gathered at The Rawhide.

Kegan had been right. There was some charm, even some wit among them. The night Rick Wendell was murdered, this bunch had been together at a party in the Hollywood hills, celebrating the completion of a film in which they'd acted
—if that was the word. Dave suspected it of being the same kind of film he'd rolled on Rick Wendell's bedside projector this morning. The sponsors of the other two boys said they'd been in the bars that evening, which, if it was true, narrowed down his list. He didn't regret that—not the way the bad beer and the worse bar air had left him feeling now.

He lathered, let the shower wash him down, first hot, then cold, and decided he'd live. He stepped out of the shower and Kovaks was standing at the toilet. Still naked. He pushed the flush handle, turned, looked Dave up and down. "You've got a nice body for a geriatric case."

"My heartfelt thanks," Dave said. "Excuse me." He reached past the lanky youth to get down a towel and walked out into the bedroom, using it. He heard, or maybe felt, Kovaks at his back and asked, "Where's Doug?"

"Down in the gallery." Kovaks blew on the back of Dave's neck and, chuckling softly, ran a hand along his shoulder, down his arm. "We won't be disturbed."

Dave pushed the towel at him. "You're already disturbed. Hang that up, please, then go get your clothes and drift back to your clay and wattles."

"There's a wattles shortage." Kovaks fell backward across Dave's bed and dropped the towel over his face. "Every wattles station in L.A. is closed. They paste up signs on the pumps
—crooked, faltering, childlike lettering: 'Out of Wattles.' It's a conspiracy on the part of the
wattles producers to bring the American economy to its knees
."

In the mirror over the chest where he was poking into drawers after underwear and socks, he saw Kovaks throw off the towel and sit up. His dark, long-lashed eyes went grave and pleading. He held out his hands. "Come on, Dave. Let's make it. I have this need."

Dave pulled on shorts. "It's all in your mind." Picking up the towel, he went back into the bathroom, rehung it and started brushing his teeth at the basin. In the doorway behind him, Kovaks said:

"It's a four-letter word for a part of the human anatomy but it's not m-i-n-d."

Dave spat peppermint suds, rolled his eyes up, said, "Aiee!" and rinsed his mouth. Pushing past Kovaks, he told him, "Try a cold shower." He went back to the chest for denims.