Early Graves (15 page)

Standing in the rain, he studied the steep hillside that rose back of his place. It was thick with undergrowth, dark with dripping trees. He had never climbed it. It would be nice if he were in better shape now that he had to, but life wasn’t like that. He ducked under the winter-bare vine on its arbor that backed the courtyard, hitched his way up the stony retaining wall and, using his good right arm to push aside the brittle branches of wet wild privet, began to climb, crouching, dodging, feet slipping on matted leaves and mud. He stumbled more than once, grubbying his hands, sending stabs of pain into his shoulder, soiling the knees of his trousers. But he made it to the top, another loop of Horseshoe Canyon Trail, where Nakamura waited in the Jaguar. Grinning, the mechanic reached across and opened the passenger door for Dave.

“I always liked playing cops and robbers,” he said.

“Be devious.” Dave got in and shut the door. “Take Faro down to Mesquite. That way they won’t see us. I’ll drop you at your place and take it alone from there.”

“Aw,” Nakamura said. “I’m disappointed.”

The trees had lost their yellow blossoms. The rains and winds had stripped them. Street sweepers had cleared them from the gutters. He parked and locked the Jaguar about where Drew Dodge had left his car on the night he died. Dave climbed a set of steps like those that led to Carmen Lopez’s apartment across the street. The door he wanted today was the first of the row of brass-numbered doors along the outside gallery. By this one, glass wind chimes hung tinkling from the roof overhang that kept the rain off Dave while he waited for the door to open.

Sonia White was surely eighty, maybe older, skinny, stringy, but weirdly girlish. She didn’t work at this—her withered face was innocent of makeup, her hair was cropped, the color of oatmeal. What appeared to be a lens, rectangular, framed in sturdy black plastic, almost like a welder’s mask, was fastened around her head with a black strap. She had hinged it up above her large, bright hazel eyes so she could look at Dave. She did this with the brisk attentiveness of a bird.

“Yes?” Her voice was chirpy. “How can I help you?”

“By talking to me”—Dave held out his investigator’s license to her—“about the boy you saw hanging around on the night of the murder across the street.”

She jerked a little with surprise. “Ah, indeed? I thought that was all over. They caught the killer. Night before last. I saw it on the news. Dreadful. So sad.”

“But he wasn’t the boy you saw,” Dave said. “The boy you saw was tall and thin and had long blond hair.”

“True.” She frowned and worried that fact for a second, then shivered and brought Dave into focus again. “Oh, do come inside. It’s cold, isn’t it? What wretched weather we’re having.” She backed into the room, clutching a slate-blue jacket closed at her throat with spidery, ink-stained fingers. She hurriedly shut the door. Dave remembered—it was a Chairman Mao jacket. “Well, then,” she said, dismissively, “my boy had nothing to do with it, did he? After all, I didn’t see him stab that man, Dodge, in the garage across the street. I only saw him loitering.”

The room smelled strongly of incense. The same time-server had laid out this apartment as had laid out Carmen Lopez’s. The plan was identical. But this was no living room, it was a workroom. It held three long tables on tubular metal legs, the Formica tops bound with metal strips. The tables were piled with books, papers, scrolls. Strong lights bent over them on armatures, like fishing herons. Many of the books were large, old, calf-bound. Ceiling-high shelves lined the walls, crowded with books. A cat slept curled up on an old manual typewriter in a corner. Age-stained cardboard cartons overflowed with handwritten pages on the shelf between the living room and kitchenette.

“What about hot tea?” she said, and hurried off in her floppy Mao trousers, calling back, “It keeps me going, I’ll tell you. I don’t know where I’d be without hot tea. The kettle’s always on here. Now, you kitties, please make room.” Dave heard thumps and meows of protest. “They lie on the stove, as near to the hot water as they can get.” She laughed briefly. “I love them, but they’re not always as considerate of others as they might be. Yes, pretty things. Now, then, be careful. You’ll knock the pot right out of my hand.” China rattled.

“Can I help?” Dave said.

“It’s all right,” she fluted. “I’m used to it.” In a moment, she came in breathless, bearing a Chinese-patterned cup on its saucer in each hand. “Though I do imagine sometimes that they realize I’m getting frail, and they push their luck a little more each day.” She laughed again and set the cups down on a bare corner of the nearest table. She looked around. “Let’s see. A place to sit.” She took a stack of old wooden in-cut boxes off a straight wooden chair, gave Dave a smile of bright false teeth. “There, now.” She turned and wheeled a secretary’s chair up close. “Do sit down.” Dave sat. Cats came and jumped up on the table to sniff at the steam from the cups, eyes half closed, noses wiggling. The steam was aromatic. “It’s China tea. I’m thankful to Mr. Nixon. Whatever his faults, he let me have my China tea again.”

Dave took the fragile cup up and touched the hot tea to his mouth. “So that’s what they mean by tea,” he said.

“Yes,” she laughed, “not made from twigs, is it?”

“Wonderful,” he said, set down the cup, dug out his reading glasses, and peered at the work on the table under the hard light. “Chinese,” he said. “What are you working on, may I ask?”

“I’d be devastated if you didn’t.” She laughed at herself again, but it was probably the truth. “A long, long novel, variously called
The Dream of the Red Chamber, The Story of the Stone,
and
The Twelve Beauties of Jin Ling.
Written by one Tsao Shwe Chin, sometime around 1765.”

“You’re translating it,” Dave said.

“I have been, it seems, for a lifetime.” She sighed, pushed at the papers in front of her with those veined and bony hands of hers. “It’s taken altogether too long. The whole thing’s been published lately by translators in England—1980, I think it was. Five volumes.” She picked up her cup, gave him a brave smile, said, “But I press on. I’ve found innumerable bits to quarrel with their version.” She sipped some tea, clicked the cup back in its saucer. “As any Chinese translator would, of course. The written or printed characters can be enormously complicated, you see, and the eye is sometimes fooled.” She pulled a large book to her, opened it, laid a finger on a character. Dave peered. She said, “Here, for example—inside all of these strokes lurk what are called radicals—simple symbols for ordinary concepts, bamboo, house, man, horse, and so forth. And to find the correct meaning of this particular ideogram, one must determine which is the operative radical.” She dodged a glance at him, and closed the book. “Oh, dear, I’ll bore you silly. Never mind. At least my version will be in American English. It seems wrong to me somehow for those dear little Chinese servant girls to speak like London scullery maids on public television.”

“What made you look outside that night?” Dave said.

“What? Oh, dear—I don’t know. Resting my eyes, I suppose.” She touched the lens contraption on her head. Then she laughed and put her hands on her back. “Or my poor, aching sacroiliac. I get absorbed and sit too long, and how it aches when I remember.” She blinked to herself, drank a little more tea. “And then I sometimes open the door when it rains. I love the freshness of the washed air.” She frowned, held up a hand. “Wait. I remember. So many car doors closing on this ordinarily quiet street.” She nodded firmly. “That was it. I went to have a look.”

“And where was the boy, exactly?”

“I told the police.” She lifted a cat down onto her lap from the table. “But perhaps they didn’t tell you.”

“Not in detail,” Dave said.

“He drove up the street, just as I stepped out on the gallery.” She frowned to herself and spoke slowly. She stroked the cat. It purred. “He parked about two doors along. It was a rackety old car, some dark color. He got out of it straight away, and turned to look back. I heard still another car door slam, just out in front here. And I saw the man whose name I later learned was Dodge, poor fellow, cut at an angle across the street toward the building opposite this one. I have an impression, actually, of two men, Dodge and someone shorter, but the light was poor. They exchanged words, but I couldn’t make them out. Anyway, the tall blond boy began to run towards them. Then the wind blew rain into my face, and I came back inside.” She said to the cat, “Oh, what a lovely purr, Bao-Chai.”

“The boy and Dodge didn’t quarrel?”

“The police asked me that too. I didn’t hear them.” She set the cat on the floor, stood, reached for his cup.

“I’d better go.” Dave pushed his glasses away, rose, and began buttoning his trenchcoat. “You’ve plainly got a lot of work ahead. I’d feel guilty keeping you from it.”

Her large, clear eyes said she’d rather he stayed—the work would always be here. But she resignedly set her cup down, and followed him to the door. She watched him put on the tweed hat. When he pulled open the door, she filled her lungs gratefully with the damp air. He stepped outside, and she said, “Something slipped my mind when the police were here. I wonder if it meant anything, if I ought to have told them.”

“What was it?” Dave said.

“A noise. Startling in the quiet. I’d only just got back in my chair, adjusted my reading glass, and found my place in the text, when there was this loud pop.”

Dave tilted his head. “A gunshot?”

“Well, of course, there was violence over there, but I didn’t know that then, did I? I thought it was a backfire. You see, when Mr. Dodge used to come, he and the boy across the street often rode out on motorcycles at night. They kept the machines garaged over there. And sometimes they were noisy. Well, I’d seen Mr. Dodge arrive, so that was my assumption, a backfire.” She frowned. “Was it a gunshot? It was a knife that killed him.”

“That’s right,” Dave said. “Thank you. May I trouble you just a minute more? I’d like to use your phone.”

She was delighted. He rang the coroner’s office and got Carlyle on the line. “Can you examine Dodge’s hands for gunpowder?” he asked. But it was too late. Dodge’s body had been released to his family for burial.

T
HE HOUSE LOOKED FROM
the coast road much as when he’d last seen it—raw boards, tall reaches of glass, jutting beams, roof angles, decks. A long bridge of planks crossed the dunes to the house. The bridge looked sturdy, held together by big, rust-bleeding bolts, but it rumbled and shook under the weight of the Jaguar. He parked on a stretch of deck beside garages attached to the house, and got out into a mist of rain, the smell of ocean, the heavy thud of surf. He stood gazing at the surf for a moment, trying to put a name to its color. Rose gray? The color of the sand it was churning up. White foam laid lace on the glassy sand, reaching clear up under the house. Over the sharp roofs, ragged clouds hung, smudged grays and blacks. He poked a bellpush under a metal tag,
THOMAS OWENS, AIA
. When he’d come here first, dogs had barked at him from inside, clawed the door.

“What happened to the dogs?” he asked Tom Owen.

“It’s been twelve years.” The man with the knobby face and odd yellow eyes smiled. “They’re dead, Dave. Old age. Trudy took one, Gail the other.” He meant the niece he’d raised, and her mother, his sister. “But they’re gone now. Barney was killed that night, you know.”

Dave knew. To gain entrance to the house, Owens’s would-be killer had shot Barney, a big, quiet fellow, fawn-colored, with a black saddle marking, droopy ears, and yellow eyes like his master’s. The other dogs were small, and had run frightened out onto the dunes in the dark. “I remember,” Dave said, and let Owens help him off with his coat. He pushed the hat into a pocket. Owens hung the coat in a shallow closet that breathed out cedar when he closed the door. Dave said, “Did Trudy marry that boy Dimond?”

“Dimond?” Owens’s brow wrinkled as he searched his memory. “Oh, right. The one devoted to tape recording every sound in nature.” Owens’s short laugh was ironical. “And some not quite so natural.”

“That one,” Dave said, and walked down into the vast main room, where he stood gazing again at the stormy blue-black abstract painting that stretched along the wall opposite the windows that looked out on the beach. The room lofted high, with steep angles, tall shafts. It was the best-looking room he knew. “I guess not, right?”

“The son of Gail’s psychoanalyst. The one Gail went to for help. It came to that. You were the catalyst, did you know? You made her see”—Owens grew aware of Dave watching him closely, poker-faced—“made us both see our attachment to each other was unhealthy. Misplaced mutual dependency. Destroying both of us.”

“That doesn’t sound like me,” Dave said. “I’m given to short words when I can find them.”

“In the form of questions, right, that’s true.” Owens passed him, led the way down the room, past groupings of unpainted wicker furniture with sailcloth cushions, and into a high-reaching hallway where Dave remembered standing tense that heart-pounding night while beyond this door right here the man who’d come to kill Owens whined his twisted reasons, if they could be called that. “No, the words are the analyst’s.” Owens opened the door. “But you were the diagnostician.” The room beyond the door had served as a hospital room that long-ago time. Owens had lain here with both legs in casts. It was easier to nurse him downstairs. Now the room was back to its original use. It was a drafting office, with stretches of beautiful tilted white pine tables, glinting drawing instruments, scrolls of plans and blueprints, a pair of glossy computers. Owens opened a gray metal storage cabinet, bottles and glasses shelved inside. “A drink before lunch?” he said, and with a smile, “It’s good having you here again. It’s been too long.”

“I agree. I love this house. I don’t know why I’ve never been back. I regret the occasion. It shouldn’t have taken a death to bring me. Malt whiskey, thanks.” He had spotted Glenfiddich in the cabinet. He watched Owens pour into roomy glasses. “So, Trudy married the psychoanalyst. What about Gail? She was the one who needed a man to look after in place of her brother.”