Little Dog Laughed (5 page)

“The writer? Down at the marina?” Barker sat down.

“I found only old stuff,” Dave said. “His daughter told me he was working on a hot story about Los Inocentes. There’s nothing there. Not even a note.” Barker nodded at a chair and Dave took it. Day was dying outside the wide vertical steel strips that were blinds on the windows. The place was called the glass house. Until the blinds went up, all that glass made it too hot. Lord, how long ago that was. “He was an active and successful writer. There should have been papers. I’d like to look at them.”

“Just a minute,” Barker said, “I’ll check.” He worked a telephone on his desk, murmured instructions into it, and hung up the receiver. “You’re on this for which insurance company? Not Medallion.”

“Somehow,” Dave said, “they never think of me. No, it’s Banner. Otis Lovejoy. I wish I had a secretary.”

“What about that youngster, Harris?” Barker said.

“You saw his bullet scars,” Dave said. “He’s gone back to television news. If you look sharp, you may see him.”

Barker nodded. “I have.” He got out of his chair. Not with the spring of thick muscle he used to possess. Heavily. He opened a cabinet of burled wood. Inside stood bottles and glasses. “Martini?” He didn’t turn to see if Dave nodded. He bent to the bottom section of the cabinet and found ice cubes there. “Just the other night.” Barker dropped ice cubes into glasses. “That shooting in San Feliz—the young Latino with no ID. Your kid was right on top of it. He knows how to ask questions.” Barker came with Dave’s drink, set his own on the desk, went back and folded shut the glossy cabinet doors. He sat behind the desk, lifted his glass, gave Dave a tight little grin. “I wonder where he learned that.”

Dave twitched him a smile. “I wonder,” he said.

The phone rang and Barker picked it up. He listened and frowned. He listened some more, grunted, hung up the receiver. “Leppard didn’t find any papers. Just like you.”

“Is he looking for them?” Dave said. “I think the papers are what got Streeter killed. Find the papers, find the killer. Leppard doesn’t strike me as wide awake.”

“He was this morning,” Barker said. “He arrested the killer. A writer called Mike Underhill.”

“Did Underhill have the papers?” Dave said.

“No, but he had something better—a hundred thousand dollars in cash. Streeter’s money from a deal he’d struck with a television producer. Leppard got confirmation of that from Streeter’s bank.”

“It was to buy a Cessna 404 from a man named McGregor.”

Barker cocked an admiring eyebrow above his glass. “You’ve been getting around. But that’s a scam. Underhill is famous for scams. And McGregor is shadier than he is. McGregor doesn’t sell aircraft. He flies hot television sets and dirty money south, and drugs and brown babies north. He’s well known to us.”

Dave stared. “Brown babies?”

“Mexican newborns,” Barker said. “To childless couples. Five thousand dollars the mortal soul. It’s not big in California yet. It’s mostly a Texas racket.”

“Dear God.” Dave tasted his martini. It was bottled, premixed, not very good. “I don’t think Streeter was into smuggling. He liked danger, but a different kind.”

“What he was into isn’t the point,” Barker said. “The point is, what was Underhill into. You know what Leppard found lying right beside his typewriter? An airline ticket. One way. To North Africa somewhere. Algiers? Algiers.”

“It doesn’t prove murder,” Dave said. “There’s a guard on the gate at Streeter’s place. Did Underhill visit him at three in the morning? Did Leppard ask the guard?”

Barker nodded. “He asked, and the guard said only tenants came. And nobody late. But sea air makes you sleepy. The guard could have nodded. Underhill could have reached in and worked the switch to open the gates.”

Dave lifted and dropped a hand. “Whoever killed Streeter didn’t come in that way. They came in off the balcony to Streeter’s workroom. Third floor. Don’t ask me how they got there—from the roof, I suppose. They knocked over two flowerpots on their way. I saw the flowerpots.”

Barker sat still. “Did Leppard see them?”

“I’ll ask him when I see him. I want to see him.”

Barker read his watch. “Tomorrow.”

Dave tasted his drink—it was no better this time. “And one more favor, if I may,” he said. “The registration on a late-model white BMW.” He recited the license number on the car of the woman who had argued about the cat with De Lis at the condominium gates this morning. Barker penciled the numbers on a pad, picked up the phone, murmured instructions and read the numbers into it, and hung up. He downed another gulp of whiskey and grinned at Dave. “You’re right,” he said. “A secretary is a wonderful thing.”

Hilda Vosper, a gray but chipper widow who lived just up the trail, appeared in the Jaguar’s headlights. She wore jeans, sneakers, a boy’s windbreaker jacket, and was walking her ragged little dog. Dave braked to say a neighborly hello. The dog barked and jumped like a fur yo-yo. Hilda Vosper laughed and waved a small friendly hand, and Dave jounced down into the yard of the converted stables where he lived. The front building was dark. Of course. Cecil’s van wasn’t here. No one was home. Dave locked the Jaguar, and rounded the raw-shingled end of the building to a courtyard sheltered by a big old live oak. He was used to the roughness of the weathered brick paving, but it jarred him tonight. Jumping that fence had been a mistake. He ached.

He unlocked the heavy door of the front building, stepped onto deep carpet, touched a switch so that lamplight made warm circles in the vast, raftered room with its several levels, several groupings of comfortable furniture, and closed the door with relief. Not happiness—he hated coming home to an empty house. He’d never lived alone. First, he’d lived with his father and a succession of beautiful stepmothers—until the Army took him. After the war, he’d lived with Rod Fleming for twenty-two years, until Rod died of cancer. Then there’d been Doug Sawyer, a nice man but one who needed somebody Dave was not. And now there was Cecil Harris, a young black newsman he’d met on a case four or five years ago, up the coast.

Driving here from Parker Center, feeling tired, Dave had hoped Cecil would get time off for dinner tonight. He was working two shifts this week. Dave was missing him badly, and it was only Wednesday. He stepped behind a bar at the near end of the room and built himself a double martini. He switched on sound equipment, and violins, viola, cello sang from a compact disc—the Haydn opus 20, number 5 quartet. He sat down, pried off his shoes, and with a sigh stretched out on a couch to drink his martini, smoke a cigarette, and listen. And the telephone rang. Of course. He stretched an arm for it.

“I’ve been trying to reach you all day.” It was Otis Lovejoy at Banner Insurance, a sleek black executive with sad eyes. “You should get an answering machine.”

“I have one, but I hate the damn things, don’t you?”

“It’s about the Streeter death,” Lovejoy said. “They’ve got the killer. A man who worked for Streeter.”

“Mike Underhill,” Dave said. “I know, but—”

“He had a hundred thousand dollars of Streeter’s money, and he was about to fly to Algeria with it.”

“So why hadn’t he packed?” Dave said. “His grips are in his bedroom closet, covered with dust.”

“You were at his place?” Lovejoy chuckled. “I’m always amazed at how fast you work.”

“I thought he’d have Streeter’s papers. They’re missing. They shouldn’t be missing, Otis. Whoever killed him took his papers. Underhill didn’t have them, so it wasn’t Underhill.”

“What kind of papers?” Lovejoy said.

Dave told him. He finished, “The story was so dangerous he didn’t want his daughter to know about it. It was so dangerous it killed him. That’s what kind of papers.”

“Forget it,” Lovejoy said. “All we needed to know was that he didn’t kill himself. He met death at the hands of another. And the other was not the beneficiary. I’ve already approved payment on the policy to his daughter.”

“Don’t send the check,” Dave said. “Make up excuses. If you send it now, the mother will spend it on booze.”

“All right if I send you your check?” Lovejoy said.

“All donations gratefully received,” Dave said, and rattled the receiver into place. And Cecil came in, smiling. Dave smiled back. “I was hoping for this.” He started to get up. “A drink?”

“I’ll get it.” Cecil went behind the bar and bent his long, lean self over the small refrigerator there. He came bearing a frosty green Heineken bottle and a glass. “Whew.” He plumped down on the couch, and tilted the bottle so the beer piled up foam in the glass. “They are working my black butt off at that place.”

“God forbid.” Dave leaned up and gave him a quick kiss. “Do you have to go back tonight? You look used up.”

“I’m on call, all right? Till ten thirty. And until ten thirty, I am very likely to sleep.”

Dave knocked back his martini and rose, pushing feet into shoes. “I’ll fix you something to eat, first.”

Cecil caught his belt and pulled him back down. “Relax. No need to cook. Supper’s in the cookshack, the warming oven. I stopped at Max’s on my way home.” He meant Max Romano’s restaurant, Dave’s favorite haunt. Cecil set glass and bottle on a coffee table among fancifully painted Mexican pottery owls and cats. He went to the bar with Dave’s glass. “I figured you’d be tired too, up half the night typing that report for Goldring, then starting a new case today.” His hands worked in the shadows with gin, vermouth, and ice that jingled cheerfully in a Swedish crystal pitcher. “How does that one look?”

“It looks all wrong.” Dave told Cecil about it. Halfway through, Cecil brought him an icy glass and set it in his hand. He dropped onto the couch and slumped there, long legs stretched out, sipping at his beer, and listening while Haydn sweetened the background. Dave finished, “But whatever it was, it wasn’t suicide, and so I’m off it.”

Cecil got up and went for another Heineken, saying, “Streeter was at my workplace the night he was killed.”

Dave sat up straight. “You’re not serious.”

“You remember how late I got home? Working on that killing down in San Feliz?”

“Three o’clock,” Dave said. He’d been unable to sleep for worry, had kept waking every ten minutes to reach for the clock with its red glowing numerals, wondering if Cecil had been right, after all, to go back to the news business. Working with Dave had once got him shot almost to death. Working with Dave had put a gun in his hand and forced him to kill a man. But was the news business any safer? Where the hell was he, anyway? In the dark, Dave had pawed out for the telephone, then drawn back his hand. He was going to make a fool of himself, and of Cecil, which was worse. Instead, he got out of bed, went down the raw wooden steps from the raw wooden sleeping loft in the rear building, poured Glenlivet over ice cubes in a thick glass, and found a book to read. He stretched out on the corduroy couch in solitary lamplight, listened for the sound of Cecil’s van, and told himself grumpily not to be a mother hen. “You got to the studio at one and then you had to edit the film. Unidentified young Latino, face down in the water of an irrigation canal, shot through the head.”

“Nobody knew him,” Cecil said. “Nobody ever saw him before. Everybody muttered and crossed themselves a lot and rolled their eyes. Some of them were throwing kids and chickens into pickup trucks and leaving before I could start asking questions. Weird scene. You could smell the fear in the air. Sharper than chili peppers.”

Dave tasted his drink. “You make a mean martini.”

But Cecil was brooding. “They’re never going to find out who did that. He’s just dead meat. Not even a name to put on his grave. Wasn’t any older than I am. Where did he come from? He had to be staying in one of those shacky little so-called houses with all those old people, pregnant girls, kids, young men looking fifty. But no one knew him, not a stoop laborer, not a foreman, not a rancher.”

“They knew him,” Dave said. “They just didn’t want trouble with Immigration and Naturalization. Tell me about Streeter. What did he want at your television station?”

“A talk with the news director. Urgently.”

“Donaldson—is that his name?”

Cecil nodded. “Who does not work that shift, right? And Jimmie Caesar and Dot Yamada said, tell us, but he wouldn’t tell them. I was busy. I’d just gone along the hall to the men’s room. That was how I happened to see him. Doors are half glass there. He was loud, agitated. Door was closed, but it didn’t stop the sound. He was saying just what his daughter told you.”

“That he had the hottest story of the decade?” Dave said. “That surprises me. Did they find Donaldson?”

“They were scared to try.” Cecil took a fast gulp of beer. “He’s a bear. And he’s got a wife and five kids, but he sleeps around, tells her he’s at the station when he’s really bedding down some pretty new lady, all right? So they didn’t want to phone. Couldn’t very well explain that to Streeter, could they? Seeing their faces, I couldn’t help but laugh.”

“But they knew who Streeter was, surely,” Dave said. “A Pulitzer Prize winner? They had to take him seriously.”

“If they didn’t know before,” Cecil said. “They knew it after he got a sore throat yelling at them. He was—how shall I put it—just a little bit keyed up.”

“Not frightened?” Dave wondered.

“Frightened?” Turning the word over in his mind, Cecil sat forward, tilted the remaining beer from the green bottle into his glass, piling up the foam again. The Haydn strings traced lacy patterns in the canyon stillness. “Maybe.” He looked hard at Dave. “What makes you think so?”

“He was a print journalist, not a broadcaster.” Dave’s jacket lay over the couch arm. He rummaged in it for cigarettes. “He stood to make a lot of money and build his reputation with a story on paper—for the
New York Times
, the
Washington Post
, some place like that. Yet here he is, suddenly ready to rush the story out on television.” He clicked a slim steel lighter to set his cigarette going. “Also, he dashed home and started to pack. Someone was after him, and he was running scared. That’s what it looks like.”

“Not so scared he was giving the story to hired hands,” Cecil said. “It had to be the head honcho or nobody. So finally Dot Yamada picked up the phone and rang for Donaldson. He’d never forgive Jimmie, but maybe he’d forgive a pretty lady.”