Death Claims (3 page)

"I don't think so, no. He was going through changes. You do at that age. He was different from when he'd come down last summer. But not toward John. They were still good together. Warm and easy and funny with each other. But Peter was away a lot. At the Stage, the little theatre. Acting was new with him. Books had been pretty much it till then. And his guitar. Now it was all acting. John and I went to the last play. A costume thing. Peter was very good. Natural. Mr. Whittington said afterward he had a great future if he'd keep working."

T
HE WATERWHEEL WAS
twice a man's height, wider than a man's two stretched arms. The timbers, braced and bolted with rusty iron, were heavy, hand-hewn, swollen with a century of wet. Moss bearded the paddles, which dripped as they rose. The sounds were good. Wooden stutter like children running down a hall at the end of school. Grudging axle thud like the heartbeat of a strong old man. 

A wooden footbridge crossed below the wheel. The quick stream under it looked cold. The drops hitting it played a chilly tune. The base of the mill wall next to the stream was slimy green with lichen. Higher, it showed rough brick. The building was tall, massive, blind as a fort. Old eucalypts towered around it, peeling tattered brown bark, their shadows ragged blue on the whitewashed walls. 

A barn door fronted the mill. Posters were tacked to it, photos curling off them, actors, smiles bright, scowls deep. A smaller door had been carpentered into the big one, top and bottom halves separately hinged, a box-stall door. Above it, gold letters flaked off a crackled black signboard
—
EL MOUNO STAGE
. Churchly. A bent finger of black iron poked through a slot in the door. He rattled it up and walked in. 

The lobby was chilly and dim. Three steps from the door a long table on spindly aluminum legs trailed a white paper cover stained with coffee. A big coffeemaker stood on it, thumbsmeared chrome like the napkin dispensers, the screw tops of sugar jars. Polyethylene tubes that had held styrofoam cups lay crumpled like ghosts of sleeves. Cigarette butts, ticket stubs, playbills strewed the plank floor. The high false wall of white plasterboard back of the table had a poster too, and photographs. The boy in the one labeled
PETER OATS
had the face of a young Spanish Christ. 

Dave went through a doorway in the false wall and in the dark his shoe nudged steps quieted with carpet. He climbed them and stood behind ranks of wooden theatre seats, six or eight shadowy rows. Matching rows went off at right angles to these. They framed on three sides an empty oblong of flooring over which, in deep reaches of gloom, boxy black spotlights clutched splintery rafters like tin owls. At the far end of the floor space daylight leaked around the edges of a black partition. 

Beyond it he found a half-open door and beyond the door a big room with two high, narrow windows. Down one side of the room racks of iron gaspipe held costumes, glinting gold braid, shimmering satin, plummy velvet. The rest of the room was booths, two-by-fours and fiberboard, head-high. Empty coat-hangers dangled off the partitions. Bentwood chairs faced pine counters littered with wadded Kleenex, spent greasepaint tubes, empty soft-drink cans, under squares of cheap mirror, lightbulbed on either side, flecked with powder. 

In a rear corner doors tagged
MEN
and
WOMEN
hung half open on darkness. A faucet dripped. In the other corner an iron staircase spiraled up. Its cleated treads gonged under his shoes. At the top he rapped a black door. Nobody came. He turned the knob, pushed, and the door opened. He wasn't sure what he'd expected 
—
an office, a storeroom? It was a little of both, but it was also an apartment. Thick whitewashed walls and canted ceilings with charred beams. Dormer windows, small. Furniture from a dozen different periods. 

"Hello?" he said. "Anybody here?" 

No answer. The rugs were two and three deep, so there was no way to move but silently. He ducked the beams in the small dining space. A lot of copper hung against the mill's original brick in the kitchen. No sign or smell of meals past or to come. The pitch of the ceiling, the low beams were a real hazard in the bedroom. The bed was no place to sit up quickly. But the naked youth in the bed didn't show any sign of sitting up quickly. He lay on his front with a rumpled sheet tangled between his legs and breathed out stale fumes of alcohol. One hand hung off the bed edge. On the floor under it an eight-by-ten picture frame lay on its face. Dave picked it up, turned it over-carved wood brushed with gilt. There was no picture in it, only the glass and the cardboard backing. He frowned at the sleeping boy. He was dark, but his face was turned away. Dave wanted to see the face. He reached to touch the boy's shoulder and heard feet on the iron staircase. He set the picture frame on the bedside stand and left the room. 

The knob of the black door rattled and a fat man pushed in, clutching brown paper sacks loaded with groceries. He must have weighed close to three hundred pounds. He was fair and blue-eyed. Pale reddish hair lay thin across his pink scalp. He puffed a little and turned to nudge the door shut. He had a musical voice. It almost tinkled. "Here we are. Food at last. Rise and shine. The shower head is a little tricky. If you-" He didn't finish the instructions. He saw Dave. The tinkling stopped, as if a screwdriver had been jammed into a music box. He tried to look outraged. He only managed to look scared. "Who are you? What do you mean
—
?" 

"Is your name Whittington?" 

"I think I'm the one to ask the questions." His eyes kept swiveling to the bedroom door. Sweat broke out on his upper lip, his forehead. "This is my home. I'm not accustomed to
—
" 

"The place is public," Dave said, "a theatre, a community theatre. The doors weren't locked. I walked through them. I'm looking for Peter Oats." He jerked his head toward the bedroom. "Is that Peter Oats?" 

"Certainly not. That's my nephew. He's in the service. On leave. He spent the night." Whittington edged haughtily past Dave and up the short steps to the eating area. He waltzed, dodging the beams, got to the kitchen and set the stacks down with an annoyed tin-can clatter. "Not that it's any conceivable business of yours." 

"It's my business." Dave went after him. Not carefully enough. He banged his head. He stood rubbing the bruise for a minute, then leaned in the kitchen doorway and watched the fat man empty the sacks and stow his haul away in cupboards and refrigerator. "Peter Oats's father drowned last week. His life was insured by the company I work for, Medallion. Peter was his beneficiary. The young woman where he used to live doesn't know where he's gone. I thought you might know. She said he used to spend a lot of time here." 

" 'Used to'?" Whittington's laugh was unamused. "Yes. She's right there. Lots of time. But not anymore." He cracked eggs into a mixing bowl as if they were hateful little skulls. "Now, if you don't mind
—
" He bent to flap open shutter doors under the sink. A wastebasket was alone there like a dwarf prince in a dungeon 
—
royal-purple plastic embossed with gold fleur-de-lis. Whittington winced and the hand with the eggshells hesitated a second as if it pained him to put the elegant thing to use. Then with a little twitch of his mouth he chucked in the shells and shut the doors. "I have breakfast to prepare, that boy to get fed, bathed, shaved, dressed and in his right mind. I have to drive him to the bus station in town and be back up here for a rehearsal at one. I haven't a minute to spare. If I had, I couldn't tell you a single useful thing." 

"Peter Oats was pretty deep into theatre." Dave lit a cigarette. "What suddenly turned him off it?" 

With the sharp point of a paring knife Whittington slit the cellophane on a block of yellow cheese. He dropped the knife back into its drawer, found a grater and rubbed the cheese against it over the bowl that held the eggs. "You're utterly insensitive, aren't you?" 

"I've got a job to do," Dave said. 

"Peter got a swollen head, if you must know." 

"How?" Four latticy white iron chairs stood at a latticy white iron table with a glass top at the near end of the room. A rococo pair of white plaster candelabra on the table sheltered a white fluted plaster urn full of fake peaches, apples, walnuts, autumn leaves. A big bivalve shell was there too, its pearly lining sooty. Dave tapped ashes into it and drew out a chair and sat on it. "I had the idea he was a nice kid, unspoiled." 

"So had I." Whittington rewrapped the cheese and put it back in the refrigerator. "El Molino Stage has a reputation." He blasted the grater with hot water at the sink and stood it on the counter to drain dry. "As a result, people from Hollywood
—
the television companies, the film studios, the talent agencies
—
come here shopping for new material. A situation I deplore. But they pay for their seats. There's no way to keep them out." 

"And one of them bought Peter Oats?" Dave asked. 

Out of pink butcher paper Whittington spilled a string of little pink sausages into an iron skillet. He cut butter into another. He twisted burner knobs and circles of blue flame drew themselves under the pans. "Excuse me," he said and went out of the kitchen. 

Dave heard him clap hands briskly and scatter words like merry bells around the bedroom. He got off the chair and crouched to open the shutter doors under the sink. The wastebasket held color transparencies, dozens of them, in tidy white cardboard frames. He lifted one into the steep slant of light from the window over the sink. Peter Oats, suntanned in swim trunks, at the tiller of a sailboat, grinning, hair blowing, blue water, blue sky. Another. Peter Oats startled by a flashbulb at a ginghamed cafe table, fork half raised to half-open mouth. A third, Peter Oats in Renaissance tights, short velvet jacket, slashed puff sleeves, sword half drawn, snarling. Then the floor creaked where Whittington waltzed among the rafters and there was no more time. Dave dropped the slides, shut the doors and was standing staring out the bright window when the fat man came in. 

"I should have known better than to star Peter in
Lorenzaccio
, but he was simply so right for it I couldn't resist, inexperienced as he was. I got my comeuppance. He was seen by, of all people, Wade Cochran." 

Dave turned, squinting disbelief. "The Sky Pilot?" 

Whittington nodded sourly. "Television's sagebrush saint. He was here night after night. Ostensibly to assess my abilities. But one night, very late, I heard a sound downstairs and found Peter, who'd come back for something he'd forgotten-his watch, I think. When he left, it was in Cochran's car. Not a car you'd confuse with any other-a bright yellow Lotus." 

"Maybe he'd offered Peter a contract." 

"I wasn't told and I wasn't about to ask." 

"What would be wrong about that? What do you want for your people?" 

"Theatre. Television is to theatre"
—
Whittington forked over the sizzling sausages
—
"what a billboard is to a Cezanne landscape. No, I think what happened to Peter, if indeed it did happen, is tragic." 

"But you do know where he is," Dave said. 

The fat man dropped slices of bread into a toaster that swallowed them with a growl, like a shiny animal. "I do not know where he is.'' 

"You mean he didn't stick with Cochran?" 

"I mean people like Cochran are monotonously predictable. They lure innocent youngsters with promises they have no intention of keeping. They use them and discard them." 

"Cochran's image is different," Dave said. "He's supposed to be as wholesome as he looks, as the part he plays. Lives with his old mother, always does what she tells him. Devout churchgoer, no smoking, no drinking. The morals good people held to when the West was young. Bible Belt." 

"Tooled, no doubt," Whittington said. 

And the boy came into the kitchen, the boy from the bed under the hazardous black beams. He was still naked and he was holding the empty picture frame. He did look like Peter Oats except without the trim edge of beard along the jawline. Also there was nothing saintly in his brown eyes. There was almost nothing at all. His handsome mouth asked Whittington: 

"Whose picture was it? You said you'd tell me." 

"Take your shower," Whittington said. "Breakfast will be ruined if you don't hurry. Leave the spray head alone or all you'll get is a totally unmanageable gush." 

"Was he your lover?" the boy asked. Then he saw Dave and lowered the frame to cover his crotch. 

"His name was Peter Oats," Dave said. "He used to act here." 

"Act?" The boy looked blank. 

"This is a theatre," Dave said. 

"Is it?" The boy's smile apologized. "It was kind of late when we got here. And I was pretty juiced." He frowned, tilted his head, blinked at Dave. "Are you a homosexual too?" 

Whittington roared: "Take. Your. Shower." 

"Sure. Okay. Sorry." The boy fled. 

Whittington glared at Dave. "You know nothing about that picture." 

"I know you threw out a good many others you had of Peter Oats." With his heel Dave nudged the shutters under the sink. "Which supplies the answer to the boy's question. He was your lover." 

Whittington went red in the face. "For your information, Peter Oats is as straight as the proverbial stick. Now, I've asked you politely to get out and it hasn't worked. Shall I order you? Or"
—
 he bunched muscles the fat didn't hide
—
"shall I throw you out?" 

He had the weight. Dave went.

T
HE RANCH HAD
a small valley to itself in rock-strewn hills five miles back from the coast highway. The herd was token, maybe twenty head, breeding stock, broad-backed, slab-sided, shortlegged, rust and white. They browsed on grass t.hat looked too green to be real. Horses moved in a rail-fenced paddock, half a dozen palominos, coats glossy in the winter sun. Beyond them, a framework of overhead sprinkler pipes glass-beaded the shiny leafage of an orange grove. Stable, outbuildings, the ranch house itself looked like a movie set
—
plain, bat-and-board-sided, lowroofed, sheltered by old oaks, red geraniums in window boxes.