Early Graves (25 page)

It was a broad, shallow-draft houseboat. Metal. The kind that loaf around the Sacramento delta. How had it got down here? They weren’t built for life on the bounding main. This one showed rust at its rivets. On the roof, a young blond man lay on the faded orange canvas webbing of a tubular deck chair. He wore only swim trunks and sunglasses. Nearby, a tattered Hawaiian shirt hung over a corroded railing and flapped in the breeze. Dave called:

“Hello, on board the
Wanderer.
”

The young man sat up. Dave winced. Long angry red scars in which the stitching showed marked the young man’s belly. His arms and legs were sticks, his ribs stuck out. He took off the sunglasses and squinted. “What do you want?”

“I’m helping with Andy Flanagan’s defense,” Dave said.

“The stupid son of a bitch is going to need all the help he can get.” Delicately running fingers over his marred belly, the young man pondered Dave, trying to make up, his mind. At last, he nodded. “Okay. Come on.” He reached to snag the shirt and put it on, moving as if he hurt. “On your way, will you duck inside and ask my wife for another soda, please?”

Sea salt had pitted the chrome on the railings of the main deck. He crawled between these. His feet gonged the plating of the deck. The door to the living quarters stood open. He rapped the tin doorframe and poked his head inside. On a sink counter, a young woman with short reddish hair, was changing a baby’s diaper. She wore a large man’s shirt with long tails. She called, “Just a minute,” clipped shut a last safety pin, picked up the baby with a laugh, laid it in a bassinet. She crouched to retrieve a soiled diaper from the floor and, wrinkling her nose, carried this past Dave, to a round metal receptacle on the deck, pulled off the lid, dropped the diaper in, replaced the lid. She turned Dave a half smile. “Did I hear the captain order grog?”

He touched the brim of his canvas hat. “Yes, ma’am.”

She went back inside, a refrigerator door sucked open, thumped closed, she brought two icy green cans, and looked somber as she put them into his hands. “Don’t stay too long,” she said. “He’s weak and everything tires him.”

“I’ll make it quick,” Dave promised.

“I wanted him to nap.” She looked reproachful. “He can’t sleep at night. He lies awake and worries.”

There was a ladder to climb. Dave put the cans into jacket pockets and climbed, the effort bringing back a twinge of pain where his shoulder had been knifed by a half-crazy teenager last winter. He reached the roof deck, and stood for a moment, catching his breath. Then he handed the young man on the deck chair one of the cans. He popped the lid, swallowed some of the contents, held out a hand.

“Ralph Mannix,” he said. “Who are you?”

Dave shook his hand, spoke his own name, showed his license, said, “You didn’t like Flanagan?”

“Hardly knew him. We only came down here six months ago. Last resort, all right?” He made a face. “I’ve been very sick. Diverticulitis. You know what that is? Your guts develop leaks. Inside. It’s a mess. The doctors made it worse. I had to have surgery, and surgery to repair the surgery, and surgery to repair the repairs.”

“I saw the scars,” Dave said.

“They’re only half of it. I owned a delivery service, rush mail, small parcels. It was growing fast. I’d just put in extra phone lines, a computer system. We’d bought a nice place in Westwood—swimming pool, sauna, you name it. When I came out of the hospital the third time, I was stripped. No business, no house, no car, nothing in the bank, and still deep in debt. My wife’s folks used their last thousand bucks to buy us this tub. She’s got the baby and me to look after, can’t go out to work, so she takes in typing here. It’s our only income.” He turned his face away for a minute, drew a few deep breaths, drank from the green can, worked up a kind of smile. “I’m sorry. I’m alive. That’s what counts, isn’t it? Where there’s life, there’s hope.” Gloom reclaimed him. “Only now we’re going to be chased out of here, and where will we go?”

“You blame Flanagan?” Dave said.

“The committee chose him because he was vocal,” Mannix said. “I’d have chosen Norma Potter. She’s got some sense. Flanagan’s crazy, if you want the truth.”

“Crazy enough to murder Le?” Dave said.

“That’s what the police think,” Mannix said. “And the way he felt about Vietnamese, maybe they’re right.”

Out past the bridge, a steel loading crane swung atop its tower. Dave watched its cables lift a freight container into sight. He couldn’t see the ship the container came from. Slowly the container spun against the sky. “But you didn’t know him long.”

“I didn’t know him long, and I didn’t want to. I don’t remember the war. I was only thirteen when it ended. But I guess older people figure he’s got a right to be bitter. Some of them, anyway. Some of them say the war wasn’t Vietnam’s fault. We had no business going in there. I don’t know. But it isn’t just Vietnamese he hates. He hates the Army for sending him there. Hates the Veterans Administration, hates the government—doesn’t matter it’s not the same as it was then. Hates pretty much anybody and everybody.”

“Was that why you called him stupid?” Dave said. “Or did you have a particular reason?”

“He arranged to meet Le without telling any of us. We’re a committee. We’re supposed to vote on these things. He went off half-cocked, trying to prove what a born leader he was, and he wrecked the last chance we had.”

The sun beat down. Dave tilted up the soda can at his mouth and drank. “What chance was that?”

“Le really didn’t know much about the whole thing. Or care, apparently. He’d been stalling, driving the developers nuts. He didn’t seem in any hurry to sell the Old Fleet. He sure as hell wasn’t hurting for money. Maybe he’d have listened to our side. Now there’s only those damn lawyers of his. Them we’ve met. We’ll get no breaks from them.”

“Did you hear the shot that killed Le?”

“We slept over at my in-laws in Long Beach,” Mannix said. “I’d been up there yesterday to get checked at the hospital. We only got back”—he read a Timex that looked too heavy for his wasted wrist—“three hours ago.” His laugh was dry. “Missed all the excitement, right?”

“Flanagan ever offend you personally?” Dave said.

“He sneered when he saw me on the protest committee. What did I have to worry about? My wife’s folks were Jewish. Jews have plenty of money. Deb and I and the baby would be all right. The rest of them here were in real trouble. I was so weak, I could hardly stand up. But if I was myself, I’d have beat the shit out of him, one arm or not.”

“Norma Potter thinks he was framed.”

Mannix tilted his head, wrinkled his brow, weighed the idea. “To shut him up? Naw. He was a pain in the ass to the developers and the City Council, but he couldn’t really hurt them, could he?”

“Yesterday, when you weren’t here, he got your plight onto television and into the newspapers. That kind of story rouses public sympathy, turns them against cold-hearted corporations. Maybe that made them take him seriously.”

“You don’t honestly believe that.” Mannix drank off the rest of the soda and set the green can on the deck, wincing when the motion pulled at his scars. “Norma reads too many detective stories. Why wasn’t Le just mugged?”

“There was over six thousand dollars in his pockets.”

“Well, that lets me out as a suspect.” Mannix gave a tired laugh. “I’d have taken the money. Believe it.” He went quiet. Dave frowned at the skeletal form stretched out on the flimsy deck chair. He thought Mannix’s eyes were closed behind those dark lenses. But his lips moved, he spoke, a whisper. “No—Flanagan just went off his rocker at last.” He sighed. “That’s all.”

“I guess not. Someone here saw the killer.” Dave bent to pick up Mannix’s empty soda can from the deck. He pushed it into a pocket, his own into the opposite pocket. “He told Norma Potter. He didn’t happen to tell you too, did he?”

Maybe Mannix was asleep. Maybe he was only shamming. Whatever the case, he didn’t answer. And Dave climbed down the steel ladder and went to the open cabin door to hand in the cans. “Thank you,” Mannix’s wife said with that pale half-smile of hers. “Each one is worth a penny.”

He lit a cigarette, and started along the dock, looking for the next boat wired to a power pole. Movement caught his eye. Maybe thirty yards ahead. He stopped and stood, waiting for whatever it was to show itself again. It was quiet. Water lapped the pier stakes. The whine of the engine that powered the loading crane came to him. Nearer by, gulls cried their creaking cries. A dog, shut up on one of the boats, yelped to get out. Somewhere he heard the muffled quarrelling of soap-opera actors.

Then he saw again what he thought he’d seen before, but hadn’t believed. A face, half black and half chalk white, flickered into sight and out of sight on a boat far down the row. Panic was in the eyes that looked at him out of that face. He threw his cigarette into the water, and used long strides to get him to that boat. It was a slim, white, forty-foot sailing craft that hadn’t sailed in a long time.
STARLADY
was painted on its bow.

He didn’t ask permission. He swung aboard. Litheness had left his lean body some years back. He knew that, but at moments like this, mind on his work, he forgot. He damn near fell into the water. Hitting the deck, he sprawled. And a tall, running figure tripped over him, scrambled up, and tried to swing over the side to the dock. Dave grabbed one of his long, lean legs.

“Let go.” The leg tugged. “I have to go to work.”

Dave climbed to his feet, changing his grip from the leg to an arm in a floppy jacket. Under the jacket, the torso was half black, half chalk white. To match the face. So were the leotards. “To work where—Merrill Lynch?”

“Oh, funny. The Arts Festival, man. Crowds downtown, looking to have a good time. I’m a mime, a juggler, a street performer. If I make people laugh, they throw me money.”

“Here’s money.” Dave took out his wallet, slipped a twenty-dollar bill from it. “And you don’t have to make me laugh. Just tell me who you saw last night on the dock at eleven. And I don’t mean Andy Flanagan.”

“Keep your money.” His eyes were fixed on the bill Dave held in front of them. He spoke the words faintly. “I don’t know nothing about that.” He moved to go away again. Dave caught him, pushed the bill into a pocket of the floppy jacket. The young man shook his head hard. “I mean it. I never saw nobody.” He waved an arm. “It happened way up the dock, there. How could I see from here?”

“I guess you weren’t here,” Dave said. “I guess you reached the Old Fleet on the last possible bus from the music center in L.A. You walked to the pier and saw what you saw. And it scared you so you ran and hid. Which is why the police missed you when they questioned everyone else here. But you couldn’t keep it to yourself. You had to tell somebody. And that somebody was Norma Potter.”

The painted head shook hard. But the eyes were brighter than ever with fear. “No way did I tell her. How could I tell her? I didn’t see nothing. Nobody. I swear it to you. Look, I have to go. It will be dark before I get to UCLA. That’s all to hell and gone.”

“Hell and gone is where you’ll end up, telling lies that can send your neighbor to the gas chamber.”

“Don’t talk theology to me,” the painted head said. “I am not some rag-head Baptist nigger. I am an artist and an intellectual. I am a secular humorist, and proud of it.” He paused. “Who are you, anyway?”

Dave showed his license and told him why Tracy Davis had hired him. “Andy Flanagan hated a lot of people and a lot of things. And you were among them, isn’t that right? He didn’t like having you for a neighbor. He avoided you. Because you’re black.”

“And gay,” the painted head said. “Don’t ask me to feel sorry for that pig-track Irish Catholic bigot. I hope they gas him up the ass and hold a match to his mouth.” He pulled the twenty-dollar bill out of his pocket and pushed it back at Dave. “Here’s your money. I’m going now.” He turned away, swung a leg over the side.

Dave caught his jacket. “Wait a minute. Cecil Harris. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“The lovely, tall brother with the smile?” The painted head turned and cocked an eyebrow. “On the Channel 3 news? I never met him.” Eyelids batted coquettishly. “But I sure would adore to.” He grinned.

“Good. He’s a friend of mine, and I think he’d adore to meet you too,” Dave said. “You’d make a great story for him. The Old Fleet is news, right now—”

“That filthy rich old chino throwing us out. I’m glad he’s dead.” He snorted. “Looks like Flanagan was good for something in this world, after all, wasn’t he?”

Dave finished his thought: “—and what you do for a living is off-beat, interesting, and a tie-in with the Arts Festival, which is also news right now.”

Paint-head’s eyes narrowed. “He’d put me on TV, doing my act? You jiving me, Mr. Brooks Brothers?”

“That could change your life, couldn’t it?” Dave said. “Where will he find you tonight? What’s your name?”

“Carlton Simes,” paint-head said. “Cotton, to my friends. There’s a big event at Royce Hall. I’ll be on the steps—the long, broad steps, you know, ones that face West? But I’ll only be juggling tennis balls. Wouldn’t dare try cups and saucers tonight.” Cotton jumped lightly over the rail onto the dock. “If that sexy Cecil Harris really did show up, the breakage would be terrible.”

Dave lay in bed on the sleeping loft in the dark, gazing up at the skylight. The long rectangles of glass were strewn with leaves. Between the leaves stars shone. The red LED numbers of the bedside clock said one forty-nine. The phone hadn’t rung. Where was Cecil? Dave had stared hard at the eleven o’clock news on the big television set in the front building, smoking too much, drinking too fast, worried that Cotton Simes wouldn’t get his fifteen seconds of celebrity. Cecil had resented the whole thing, grumbled there was no way he’d ever get the piece past the news director. The story at the Old Fleet was murder, not mime.

“There’s a link,” Dave said, “and when he discovers that later on, he’ll be pleased as hell. He’ll give you a raise.”

But when Dave had left the station, he wasn’t sure Cecil would even try. He hadn’t just tried. He’d used ingenuity, steered clear of Le’s killing, slighted the boaties’ protest, used stock teasers of Arts Festival events, shots of other street artists playing instruments, singing, eating fire, then sinuous Cotton doing his sly, mocking mime act on the lamplit, tree-shadowed steps at UCLA. It was the last piece on the show. On a night when news seemed in short supply, the artistry of Cotton Simes been given a generous twelve solo seconds. It was in rotten taste, on the air only because of a vicious murder, but would anybody notice? On a television newscast? Dave doubted it.