Early Graves (5 page)

“The end to it was coming anyway,” Dave told Judith Ober after the man went back to the kitchen. “He had AIDS.” She frowned, spoon still midway to her mouth. She set the spoon down with a rattle in the saucer under the goblet. She took her glasses off. “You’re not serious.”

Dave nodded. “You never suspected he was gay?” She blinked thoughtfully. “He had that boyish charm. But this is a man’s town, Mr. Brandstetter. And he was very much the man among men. No. It never crossed my mind to think he was gay. What a con man.”

“Was he conning his family about his long hours? All those nights he worked on through, never went home?”

“Did he tell them that?” She smiled wryly. “It’s not in character. If he couldn’t turn work into play, he didn’t do it. He breakfasted with investors, played tennis, racquetball, golf with potential lessees, took contractors to dinner at expensive restaurants, threw parties for them all every weekend at his home. He met with his accountant once a month, his lawyer every three months. Opened his own mail, made his own phone calls. His voice was beautiful. I’ll miss it.”

“Opened his own mail? But didn’t you type the answers?”

Her mouth twitched. “To the letters he let me see.”

“Where was he, then, those nights he didn’t go home?”

“His mileage vouchers say far away,” she said. “His banks, S and Ls, restaurants, bars, golf courses, all his contacts, business, social, were in this area. Yet he drove hundreds of miles each week. Where to—Los Angeles?”

“If you want to lead a double life,” Dave said, “the big city is the place to go, and Los Angeles is closest.”

She picked up her spoon, tried the ice cream, remembered something. “Do you know what? He used to keep a leather jacket in his closet at the office—the kind with chains, you know, sort of Hell’s Angels-ish? And boots, those low ones with straps and buckles. Motorcycle boots. Good God.” She laughed at herself. “Cliché of clichés, and I didn’t add it up at all.” She smote her forehead with the heel of a hand. “And I called Gerda Nilson naïve.”

“The jacket and boots,” Dave said. “They aren’t there now?”

“I haven’t seen them in months.”

“Do you remember a construction worker named Art Lopez?”

She didn’t answer for a minute. She looked into Dave’s face, blinked, put the glasses back on. Mechanically, she took another spoonful of ice cream. Then she said, “Oh, boy,” and laid the spoon down. “Yes, I remember Art Lopez. And shall I tell you why? Because of all the people involved out at the construction site, half a dozen different contractors and their foremen and their crews—the only one I ever saw more than once or twice in the office was Art Lopez. And he was a hard hat, that’s all. Riveter, welder? Something.” She fluttered a hand. “And not much more than a kid. Small, but good-looking. He took to coming to the office to see Drew about the time I was set to go out to lunch.”

Dave said, “Was he still there when you got back?”

“Sometimes,” she said. “So that was how it was?”

“You tell me,” Dave said. “What became of Lopez?”

“He got sick and quit. Then someone said he died.”

Dave told her how Art Lopez died.

“I guess I don’t want to eat this.” She pushed the glass away. “What are you saying? That it was Art who gave Drew AIDS?”

Dave shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe the other way around. It can stay in the system years before it surfaces, you know. With Dodge, it surfaced as Pneumocystis carinii. Which meant he had thirty-five weeks to live.” Dave looked around for the sunburned youth, saw him, raised a hand, called, “Coffee, please?” Dave looked at Judith Ober again. She had lost color. He said, “Don’t worry. Office managers can’t catch it from washing the boss’s coffee mug.”

She touched her face. “He used to kiss me on the cheek.”

“Or from being kissed on the cheek,” Dave said.

“How do you know so much?” she said crossly.

“I’m a great reader,” Dave said. The gas pump jockey came with their coffee. When he’d gone, Dave said, “Have you got a complete list of personnel at your office? I could ask the LAPD for it, but they don’t want me interfering with their case.”

“Ask them for what?” she said dully.

“Art Lopez’s address,” he said.

She picked up her cup, blew at her coffee. She nodded, but absently. She was worrying behind those glasses. Not with her common sense. With primal panic. Thinking she was too young to die. From a coffee mug, from a kiss on the cheek. Thinking it was a hell of a note.

I
T WAS THREE IN
the afternoon, and still raining. Art Lopez had lived on a side street of look-alike apartments near Hollywood Boulevard and Western. The buildings were beige stucco boxes propped on tall steel pipes, living quarters above, parking below. The structures turned square, blind faces to the street. Stairs climbed to galleries along the side, where doors and windows showed. Stairs and galleries were beige too, with railings of frail wrought iron. Potted begonias sat here and there, drooping in the rain. They gave a touch of color, but the main effect of the street was one of dreary tidiness.

Dave left the Jaguar under a big tree that was dropping powdery yellow blossoms into the gutter. These trees lined both sides of the street. He looked at them thoughtfully, remembered Funt, leaned on the wet hood of the Jaguar, and bent a knee so as to see the sole of his shoe. Yellow blossoms were mashed onto it. He was in luck. He noted a pair of bulky motorcycles under blue tarps on greasy, gritty cement in one of the garage spaces. He climbed stairs, walked the gallery, looking for a door numbered nine. It was the last door. He pushed its bell button. Except for the gentle patter of the rain, the neighborhood was quiet. No one came, and he worked the bell button again, keeping his thumb on it. Radio music stopped inside. And after thirty seconds, the door opened. A young woman stood there in a terrycloth bathrobe, drying her hair with a blue bath towel. She was brown-skinned, not fat but sturdy, in her early twenties. Her hair was black and cut boy-short. Her soft brown eyes opened wide. She knew who he was and she was surprised as hell to see him. But she didn’t say so. She said: “Who are you? What do you want?”

“Art Lopez used to live here. Did you know him?” Dave held out his license in its folder. “Can you tell me anything about him?” He tucked the folder away.

The brown eyes studied him. A pink tongue moistened a well-shaped mouth. She looked away for a moment, glanced quickly at Dave, and turned back into the apartment, scrubbing her hair once more. “Come in,” she said. Dave stepped in and closed the door. The place smelled faintly of ammonia. It was not a feminine place. It was nothing in particular. Beige walls, beige carpet, matching couch and chairs in tough yellow-and-brown-striped fabric. A small television set on a cart. A plain blond coffee table. She went down the room, crossed a little hallway, sat down in a bathroom to comb and blow-dry her hair. Over the whine of the dryer, she called, “Art lived with me after he got AIDS. He was my brother, and my mother and father threw him out.”

“He gave this address at work.” Dave shed his coat. “I thought he quit work when he got sick.” Dave sat down.

“He didn’t quit till he couldn’t hold his welding torch no more. He kept sending them money from his pay, even when they treated him how they did.”

Piled on the coffee table were dog-eared magazines,
Time, Newsweek, U.S. News,
others, next to a gray mound of newspaper clippings. He shuffled through them. The subject was always the same. AIDS. He had a file drawer filled with identical grim reading matter up in the canyon. Labeled, dated, tucked in manila envelopes. The news kept changing.

“How did it come,” he called, “that Art was well enough to go out and get stabbed in the street?”

“With AIDS you get remissions sometimes. The doctors—they can patch you up, make you feel better. For a while. He was going blind. Chorioretinitis. You know about that?”

“CMV,” Dave said. “Ordinarily harmless.”

“If you got AIDS,” she called, “nothing is harmless.” The whine of the drier stopped. She moved out of the bathroom, to her left. She called, “He didn’t feel great, but he wanted to see everything while he still had time, you know? I took him around, Disneyland, Magic Mountain, Universal Studios Tour.” She came out of the hallway, dressed in pudgy fresh jeans, a fresh blue sweatshirt. “What the hell. He looked after me when we were little. He took me around. A girl, a pest, a baby, but he was always good to me.”

“He was alone when he was stabbed,” Dave said.

“I work from four to midnight.” She went into a little kitchen of wood-grain plastic cabinets. “At a hospice for AIDS victims. When I seen what was happening to Art, I got some training. Everybody don’t want to do it, you know. They are scared. They don’t believe you can only get it from having sex or sharing needles. Hospital workers don’t get it. A little Clorox bleach will clean up the worst mess you can think of.” Pottery rattled. “It’s my wake-up time. I made coffee. Will you have coffee? Or a beer? I kept beer here for Art.”

“That’s fine,” Dave said. “Why did he go out alone?”

“He was gay. From about fifteen, he liked to cruise. I think he got to remembering that, missing it. Got lonesome for the parks, the bars, the streets.”

“He was sick, dying,” Dave said: “Didn’t he care that he’d give his sickness to others, that they’d die too?”

“He cared.” A refrigerator door sucked open and slapped shut. “Did I say he went out for sex? He was too weak for that. He just went out to visit the old places at night, where he’d had good times, okay?”

“Maybe,” Dave said. “What’s your name?”

“Carmen.” She came and put a cold can of beer into his hand. “One good thing. He never knew what hit him in that alley. He couldn’t hardly see nothing at night no more.” She returned to the kitchenette. “The police, that black cop, asked me all this. Wasted hours. Why? Why aren’t they out catching this maniac?” She came back with a coffee mug, stood holding it, blowing at it, watching Dave through the steam. “And you? Why have you come?”

“You know why.” Dave tasted the beer. It was very bad. “A sixth man has been murdered in the same way as your brother and the others. Someone left his body at my house for me to find. I didn’t know the man. So why was he brought to me? I live in Horseshoe Canyon, he lived in Rancho Vientos, a long way off. I drove out there this morning. And I was told this man knew your brother. That’s why I’ve come. To find out about Drew Dodge.”

She blinked, but her round, smooth brown face showed no expression. She drank some of her coffee. “I never heard of him,” she said.

“Art never mentioned him?” Dave said. “He and Dodge were lovers. Wouldn’t he have told you that?”

“You don’t listen,” she said. “He cruised. He didn’t have lovers. All he wanted was one-night stands.”

“I think Dodge came to see your brother.”

“If you got AIDS, nobody comes to see you. Nobody came.”

“How would you know? You said you work at night.”

Her young face settled into hardness. “Why would he come all that way? Not for sex. Art was dying, here.” She turned sharply away, banged refrigerator and microwave doors. “I am one who is trying to help, to make the pain a little less for these suffering ones. Would I murder them?”

“No one’s accusing you,” Dave said.

“Then why come here about this Dodge?”

“He was here,” Dave said. “They found yellow blossoms from the trees out front here on his shoes.”

“Those trees grow all over LA,” she said. “If you want to get involved—” She leaned on a counter that divided kitchenette from living room. Small potted vines sat there, salsa bottles, cardboard salt and pepper shakers, a stack of paper napkins. “Go find the one who stabbed my brother to death. The police will do nothing. What do they care? He was only a faggot. Worse than that, he had a disgusting disease from doing disgusting things with his sex. They are happy Art is dead. They wish all faggots were dead.” A microwave timer dinged, and she turned away. “I have to eat now, and get to work.”

“I’ll go.” Dave set the beer down, pushed to his feet. “If I can just make a quick trip to the bathroom?”

“Sí.” Her back was turned. “Help yourself.”

He glanced at her as he passed. She stood eating small supermarket burritos off a blue pottery plate. In the little hall, he closed the bathroom door smartly, then stepped through a door at right angles to the bathroom door. Into a bedroom. Clothes were strewn around, the same sort she was wearing today. The door of a closet stood open. Sweaters and jeans, a handful of simple dresses, cotton prints mostly, blouses. Her raincoat, teal blue. He rummaged. At the end of the rack, he found a leather jacket, well-worn. In the rainy light from a window, he made out flaking painted initials on the back. A.L. Then his hands touched more leather. This jacket he pulled off its hanger and held up to look at. It was newer than the other, heavier, more expensive, a larger size. No initials on this one. Of course not.

“What are you doing in here?” Carmen stood in the door.

“This was Drew Dodge’s.” Dave dropped the jacket on the bed, bent into the closet, came up with a pair of heavy, low-top boots. “So were these. He came here, Carmen. He came here night before last. The night he was murdered.”

“You can’t prove it.” Her eyes were scared.

“Before that”—Dave set the boots back in the closet—“he hadn’t been here for five or six weeks, had he?”

“Why do you want to make trouble for me?” she said.

“You managed that all by yourself,” Dave said. “He’d been in the hospital, very sick. He was only just back on his feet, only just able to drive again.”

Her laugh was harsh. “Why would he come here? Art is dead—remember?”

“You’re his sister. You sheltered Art, looked after him. That cost you. You don’t bring home big paychecks from that hospice, do you? Drew Dodge was well off. Why didn’t he come to bring you money? And to talk about Art? He had a wife and children, he had straight friends. But nobody he could talk to about Art. Nobody but you.”

She looked paler. She pressed her mouth tight, so her lips lost their nice shape. She worked her lips tightly together, as if trying to keep the words inside. At last, she said softly, “Sí. All right.” She nodded. “He did come here. He was good and kind. He did bring us money. To pay the rent. He brought the microwave, to make cooking easier for me when Art was sick.”