Little Dog Laughed (23 page)

“I can’t hurt her like that,” Cecil said.

“It will hurt more the longer you let it go on.”

“Dave, she needs somebody who gives a damn.”

“And sex is the only way to convey that?” Dave asked.

“It beats gin rummy,” Cecil said. The cars ahead began to crawl. He shifted gears and followed. The rain-sleek band of white concrete bent westward. He touched a signal switch and eased the van into the leftmost lane. He would use the Santa Monica Freeway on-ramp at La Cienega. “Dave, what do you want from me?”

Dave laughed bleakly, twisted out his cigarette, pushed the ashtray shut with a clack. “You’ll brace anybody—truck bombers, homicidal maniacs, terrorists. But you haven’t got the guts to tell one young girl the truth.”

“It’s not the same thing,” Cecil said, “and you know it.”

“And you know what I want from you,” Dave said. “I want you to stop living a lie.”

“I’m not living a stupid lie,” Cecil shouted. “I’m not sleeping around. God knows, I’m not sleeping with you.”

“God may not,” Dave said, “but I sure as hell do.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how you wanted it. You made the rules. Only you’re forgetting one today, aren’t you? You weren’t going to talk to me like this. It was none of your business. It was up to me to sort it out and do the honest thing, right?”

“Right. But I didn’t know it would take you months.” The blue velvet passenger seat was on a swivel. Dave turned it so as to face Cecil. “You know what I’ve begun to think sometimes, these nights alone? That I was wrong. When you came to find me, and said you wanted to stay, I thought this is nice but it can’t last. He’s young, he’ll move on. But then I got to know you, and like a fool I let myself believe we had a bond between us nothing could break.”

“We did.” Tears ran down Cecil’s face. “We do.”

“Don’t do that.” Dave reached across and wiped away the tears with his fingers. “Nature decides. We like to think we can control it, but we can’t.” He swiveled the seat again, stared woodenly ahead. Past the moving wipers, cars crawled up the freeway on-ramp between banks of rain-washed ground ivy. “So, now it’s Chrissie’s turn. Lucky Chrissie.” He forced a smile. “Well, you and I had four good years. When we get home, we’ll drink to that. One last drink together.”

“God damn you,” Cecil said.

And no one said anything after that for a long while. Cecil jounced the van down into the yard of Dave’s place from crooked, climbing Horseshoe Canyon Trail. Shrubs and trees here dripped onto uneven brick paving and made puddles. Dave’s brown Jaguar stood by the long row of French doors that were the face of the front building. The storm had strewed the car with leaves and twigs.

It was noon, but the light here was dusky when they got down from the van, and Cecil dragged out of it Dave’s grip and attaché case. Dave draped the trenchcoat over his shoulders again, and followed Cecil as he rounded the shingled end of the front building to a bricked courtyard shadowed by the gnarled branches of an old California oak. Cecil made a sound, stopped in his tracks, Dave blundered against him and banged a shin on the suitcase. He opened his mouth to ask, then didn’t have to ask. He saw what Cecil saw.

A circular wooden bench hugged the thick trunk of the oak. On the bench stood potted plants. But a space had been left in case anyone wanted to sit on the bench. And a man was seated there. He leaned back against the tree trunk, head lolling to one side, hands open in his lap. The rain had soaked his hair and clothes, tweed jacket, wool slacks, good shoes.

“Is he asleep?” Cecil said.

“In this weather? If he is, he must be drunk.” Dave went to the man, bent over him. His eyes were closed, but he wasn’t asleep. He wasn’t breathing. A pink stain was on his shirt, to the left of the breastbone. The rain had washed the bright red away, but it was a bloodstain. Dave laid fingers against the man’s face. “He’s dead.”

“What’s this?” Cecil bent and picked up something white and soggy and small from the wet bricks at the man’s feet. A business card. He squinted at it in the gray light, gave a soft grunt, and passed the card to Dave. Dave dug reading glasses from a jacket pocket, put the glasses on, and read the printing on the card. He blinked surprise. “It’s mine,” he said, and put the reading glasses away.

“Who is he?” Cecil said.

“Beats me,” Dave said. “Come on. He’s sat here too long already.” He moved toward a rear building, almost the same as the front ones, long and low. Both had been stables in some far gone past. The front one was now a rangy living room, the rear one had lofts for sleeping, a long couch in front of a big fireplace, Dave’s desk and files. “He’s cold as ice. Must have been here all night.” He fitted a key into a door, pushed the door, and moved down the long room between knotty pine walls under naked pine rafters, to lift the receiver from the telephone on his desk. “At least all night. Maybe longer than that. Maybe days.”

“Wouldn’t the coyotes have found him?” Cecil laid the attaché case on the desk, and carried the grip up raw pine stairs to the north loft. “What do you think? Could they smell him in the rain?”

“They didn’t.” Dave sniffed his fingers. They smelled of the man’s cologne. And tobacco. He lit a cigarette and waited, phone to his ear, to get through to Jefferson Leppard, Lieutenant, Homicide Division, LAPD. Leppard was a blunt-shaped, blunt-spoken young black with a passion for high-style clothes. “Brandstetter?” he said. “I hope it’s simple.”

“I doubt it,” Dave said. “I have a body for you.”

“What kind of body?” Leppard said.

“The dead kind,” Dave said. “Sitting in my patio.”

“I meant, give me a description,” Leppard said.

“Male, well-dressed, about thirty-five years old, fair hair, weight about one thirty, height about five eleven, a stab wound in the chest.”

“You didn’t touch it.” Leppard sounded alarmed.

“I only touched his skin to check his temperature,” Dave said. “He didn’t have a temperature.”

“Right,” Leppard said. “This sounds like number six.”

“I guess you’ll have to explain that to me,” Dave said.

Cecil came down the stairs at a loose-jointed run, sideways, two steps at a time. He lifted the coat from Dave’s shoulders, took it to a standing rack by the bar under the north sleeping loft. He hung the coat up, and began to rattle bottles. Dave sat in the desk chair and told Leppard:

“I’ve been out of town. Up in Fresno for a week. On a case. Arson to cover murder. I just now got back. Cecil picked me up at the airport. What do you mean—number six?”

“We have a new crazy in town,” Leppard said. “Serial killer. All stabbings, quick and clean and deadly.”

“That’s how this one looks—very little blood.”

“Victims all young males, in West LA and Hollywood mostly. Any reason for this one to end up at your place?”

“He had my business card,” Dave said, “but I don’t know him. He must have got the card from someone else.”

“Are you gay?” Leppard said.

“I thought you’d never ask,” Dave said.

Leppard laughed. “Sorry about that. But it’s the connection. All the victims have been gay. We’ve checked them all out. Families, friends, fellow workers, lovers, bars, bathhouses, hospitals.”

“Hospitals?” Dave said.

“That’s the other connection,” Leppard said. “That’s why I was worried you might have touched the wound. It’s blood that transmits the virus.”

“Are you talking about AIDS?” Dave said.

“They all had it,” Leppard said. “Every damned one.”

“You coming to collect him?” Dave said.

“With my latex gloves,” Leppard said, and hung up.

Cecil set a snifter on the desk. The brandy in it had a golden glow. Dave lifted the fragile bulb of glass and studied it. “Isn’t this for after lunch?”

“I’m not staying for lunch. It’s brandy because you said it’s our last drink, and brandy was what we drank first, the night I blew in here four years ago. Never had brandy before. Remember that night? You got home late. I’d waited hours for you. Sat out there where that dead man is sitting now. In the night like him. Cold like him.”

“Not cold like him,” Dave said. “Cheers.”

“Yeah,” Cecil said glumly, “cheers.”

And they drank together.

L
EPPARD DRESSED SUBDUED TODAY
, to match the weather—eggshell brown oxford shirt, knitted tie and sweater in cinnamon, charcoal gray two-piece suit, Tuscan brown shoes. A clear plastic raincoat protected his clothes. They merited protection—he had a month’s wages on his stocky body. A detective named Samuels arrived with him, a pale, fleshy youth in a fly-front coat. A lab man named Funt stepped around in puddles and snapped photographs of the dead man on the bench. Then he used a grubby little battery-powered vacuum cleaner on the dead man’s clothes, scraped his shoe soles, clipped fingernails and hair.

Carlyle was the medical examiner. Dave had met him a number of times over the years. He had his helpers move the plants off the bench and do what they could to change the position of the body. Rigor mortis made the change grotesque. Dave turned away. So did Leppard. They walked out to the front, which was crowded by an unmarked police car, a black-and-white with a light strip on its roof, Carlyle’s car, and a coroner’s wagon. Two young uniformed officers sat in the black-and-white. Leppard leaned down and talked to them.

He looked at his gold Rolex, and walked back into the courtyard. Carlyle adjusted the clothes on the corpse and closed his kit. A bony man with gray skin and long teeth, he told Leppard, “Body’s lost all heat.” Rain beaded his glasses. He took them off and dried them on a handkerchief. “Stomach contents will tell me the time of death when I get him downtown. But it sure as hell won’t be breakfast. He didn’t arrive here this morning. He arrived in the night.”

Funt’s bulbous nose was red. He blew it on tissues and stuffed the tissues into a black raincoat pocket. He had a rubbery look, did Funt. His necktie knot was always crooked. “He didn’t die here.” Funt’s voice was a wheeze. “There’s grease, grit, old tire residue on him. He was stabbed in a garage, parking facility, maybe the street.” He held up flakes of yellow in a plastic pouch. “Off his shoes.”

“Some kind of flower?” Leppard said.

“Locust tree.” Funt coughed. “At a guess.”

Leppard grunted thanks, and now it was his turn with the body. He pulled a watch from a wrist, a chain from around the dead man’s neck, rifled pockets for keys, coins, checkbook, wallet, an amber vial of pills. He opened the wallet and frowned. “No money. That’s a switch. None of the other victims was robbed.” Leppard passed a driver’s license to Dave. Harold Andrew Dodge, born September 10, 1954. The photo showed a man thirty pounds heavier than this one but the same, no mistake. The address was in Rancho Vientos, formerly Fergus Oaks, now an expensive development. Dave gave the license back to Leppard, and put away his reading glasses. “I still don’t know him.”

“Ever heard the name?” Leppard tucked the license back into the wallet. “Still can’t say how he came by your card?”

“Never heard the name,” Dave said. “Still can’t say.”

The two men from the coroner’s wagon were young, one Asian, one Latino. The Asian had skin like ivory. The Latino’s face was scarred by acne. He was trying to grow a beard to cover the scars, but the hairs were sparse and silky. He said, “Lieutenant, can we have the body now?” A body bag hung folded over his arm. A collapsed gurney leaned against the leg of the Asian kid, raindrops twinkling on its chrome-plated frame.

When Leppard nodded his head, the Asian kid clicked and clacked the gurney open. The Latino boy laid the body bag on it and ran its zipper down. The Asian boy took the rigid shell of Harold Andrew Dodge in its rain-sodden clothes under its arms, the Latino lad took it under the bent knees, and they shifted it onto the gurney on its side, and worked the body bag over it and zipped the body bag. They wheeled the gurney away, rattling and tilting over the uneven bricks. “What about Cecil?” Leppard said. “Does he know him?” Dave said, “He doesn’t know him.” But was that a fact?
I’m not sleeping around.
Why had he said that? Dave had never suggested it. He trusted Cecil totally, as if a long life in a harsh business had taught him nothing. Cecil was startled to find Dodge’s body here. But more startled than normal? Dave hadn’t thought so. Yet he had cleared out fast after that drink. He had been in a tearing hurry to get away. Dave shook his head angrily to clear out the doubts. Leppard was manipulating him.

“He does live here with you.” Leppard put watch, chain, the rest of the trove from the dead man’s pockets into a five-by-eight manila envelope. He wrote on the envelope in ballpoint ink that the rain began to smear at once. He lifted the envelope to his mouth to lick the flap, then didn’t lick it. Instead, he folded the flap and fastened it with the little metal prongs provided.

Dave said, “You’re afraid of catching it.”

“You damn right,” Leppard said. “Aren’t you?” Dave felt cold in the pit of his stomach. Not for himself. For Cecil. Suppose that cry of denial had been false this morning. Suppose his shock at seeing Dodge sitting here had been deeper than he showed. Suppose Dodge had been Cecil’s answer to a need Chrissie couldn’t fulfill. And Dave wouldn’t fulfill out of a stubborn sense of rectitude.

“It kills you in eighteen months,” Leppard said. “But that’s not the worst.” His expression was wooden. Dave knew a joke was coming. “The worst is, you lose all this weight. I couldn’t wear any of my clothes. Hell, half of them aren’t even paid for yet.”

“Eighteen months makes killing them seem pointless,” Dave said. “Who is this crazy with a knife?”

“Somebody who always hated queers. Like the religious nuts. All he needed was AIDS to set him off. I don’t know. But eighteen months gets precious when it’s all you’ve got. You said Cecil brought you home from LAX.”

“But he doesn’t live here anymore. He’s got an apartment in Mar Vista. He married Christina Streeter, remember? The foreign correspondent’s daughter?”

“Pretty blind girl,” Leppard said. “Slipped my mind.”

“Because it didn’t fit your equation,” Dave said.

Out in front, the heavy rear door of the coroner’s wagon thudded shut. The side doors slammed. The starter whinnied, the engine rumbled, and in the damp noon quiet they could hear the tires crunch twigs as the black car rolled off down the canyon.