Little Dog Laughed (8 page)

“It’s only July,” Dave said.

“February wouldn’t be too early,” she said. “I’m getting calls from buyers right now, wondering where their shipments are. You can’t believe the nervousness of people.”

Some of the ornaments dangled on strings from rafters. Dave studied them. “Handsome,” he said. “You design them all yourself?”

“Santa’s helpers aren’t what they used to be,” she said. She touched the sharp tip of a blue pencil to her lips and bent over her very crisp drawings on a glaring white board. “You don’t run a boutique,” she said, and carefully drew a serpentine, using a French curve made of amber plastic. “And you certainly don’t buy for a department store. There isn’t a department store article on you.” She gave him a quick, raffish glance. “Unless it’s your underwear.”

“I forget,” he said. “Tell me about the Gernsbachs. Where have they gone? I have to find them.”

She stopped drawing and frowned at him. “Are you a police officer? Is it about Adam Streeter? Their neighbor?”

“No,” Dave said, “and yes. You want to answer my question?”

“If you’re not a police officer, you have no right to ask.”

He showed her his license and told her a lie. “I’m investigating for his life insurance company. It’s routine.”

“Where it might have been suicide?” She went back to work.

“That’s right. The Gernsbachs. Special friends of yours?”

“Lily, yes. We went to art school together. She had a lovely talent, a real talent. I didn’t—which is why I design and manufacture expensive Christmas tree ornaments. I wanted to paint. So did she, till she met Harry Gernsbach. What a waste. I mean, I’m sorry for his childhood in a concentration camp—but he hasn’t an artistic bone in his body.”

“Where have they gone?” Dave said. “She left you her key, and said to feed her cat. She didn’t tell you then where they were going, how long they’d be gone?”

She sat back and studied her handiwork. “Like it?”

“It looks like an Eskimo ivory carving, a walrus tusk. What do they call it? Scrimshaw work, right?”

“Right.” She cocked an eyebrow. “You are a man of discernment. Lily didn’t say where they were going. She was in and out of here—not here, but my apartment upstairs—in twenty seconds flat. It wasn’t like her. She hated to hurry.”

“Was she frightened?” Dave said.

“Frightened?” Sarah Winger frowned. “Of what? Why?”

“The Gernsbachs’ apartment has French doors that face those of Adam and Chrissie Streeter.”

“That poor child,” Sarah Winger said. “What’s going to become of her now?”

“She has a mother,” Dave said. “Of sorts.”

“Yes, I’ve heard about her,” Sarah Winger said. “She does not sound like the answer. Chrissie and Adam got along so well.” A shadow crossed the thick makeup of the determinedly youthful middle-aged face. “But it wasn’t meant to last, was it? I mean—he was a man who lived dangerously.” She tilted her head, forehead wrinkled. “They’re saying on the news that someone murdered him. That Mike Underhill who worked for him. Is that the truth?”

“If I thought so,” Dave said, “I wouldn’t be here.”

“It could have been that clergyman,” Sarah Winger said. “They had a terrible argument.” She blinked the long false lashes at the rafters. “When, last week sometime. I was sitting with Lily in her bedroom. Adam Streeter’s study was straight across from there. And we couldn’t help overhear—the priest was shouting so. He was absolutely furious. They literally fought, struggled, wrestled, I mean. That we could see—but the sunlight was so bright on the patio we didn’t know really what happened, which man was which. Then it was over as suddenly as it had started.”

“Chrissie didn’t mention this to me,” Dave said.

“She must have been out. With Dan’l Chapman. At the beach, the pier, sailing, maybe. He’s good to her. Adam’s too busy to take her usually. Dan’l is always ready for whatever she wants. Poor child, I think he’s in love with her.”

“He is,” Dave said. “You can’t identify the priest?”

The fat girl came to the drawing table, panting, her bangs damp with sweat. “We’re getting awful low on staples, Miz Winger. I don’t think there’s enough to last the day out.”

Miz Winger told Dave, “I never saw him before and I couldn’t see him all that well. Smallish, I’d say. Glasses. Partly bald.” She told the fat girl, “Then take the truck and run over to Pitzer’s and get what we need. Tell Ralph to phone me for confirmation.” She dropped keys into the fat girl’s hand, who waddled away, looking efficient.

“Lily Gernsbach didn’t say they were going to Washington?”

“D.C.?” Sarah Winger’s eyebrows rose. “Oh, you mean for the Senate hearings on the collapsing savings and loan industry. My God, what a dreary man that Harry Gernsbach is. Awful accent and all. No, I’m sure she didn’t.”

“Who was going to pick up their car from the airport?”

“Perhaps someone at Harry’s office.” Sarah Winger took up a handful of colored pencils and began shading in the sharp outlines on the bristol board. “Lily didn’t ask me. Only to feed Trinket. What a name for that savage brute.” She worked in silence for a moment. The machines clanked. The shiny paper whispered. She said to her deftly moving hands, “Maybe they didn’t fly. They own a beautiful big boat.”

“Then why leave the cat behind?” Dave said.

“Because she’s not like other cats,” Sarah Winger said. “She has no fear of the water. She tries to swim to shore. And the Coast Guard has issued notice. Twice was enough. They will not come on the double to rescue Trinket again.”

“What was the priest furious about?” Dave said.

“His son was killed,” she said, “and he blamed Adam.”

The woman was a fresh-faced forty. She looked at him with frightened eyes through a screen door of bright new aluminum that contrasted with the weathered shingle siding of the house. The house crouched under gloomy deodars behind a shingle-sided church. The house was one-storied, typical of Sierra Madre, a town that had changed some since he had known it in his boyhood—but not on these back streets. He had visited this very church, St. Matthias, as a chorister. He had owned a clear, sweet soprano voice in those days and, in a red cassock and starchy white lace-trimmed cotta, with his blond hair, he’d looked angelic. He had not been angelic, but that was another story. Now he said to the woman, whose hair was cut sensibly short, who wore blue jeans, a cambric shirt, and jogging shoes without socks, and who wiped anxious, thin fingers on a kitchen towel:

“Reverend Pierce Glendenning, please?” The man’s name was lettered Gothic style in flaking gold on a cracked black signboard posted in ground ivy in front of the church. This was the place. “Is he here?”

“Are you a reporter?” She took hold of the wooden house door to swing it shut. “I’m sorry. We don’t want to talk anymore about Rue’s death. Not to news people. Please, go away and leave us alone.”

“I’m not a reporter.” He told her who he was, speaking loudly so as to be heard by whoever lurked back there in the dusky rooms behind her. He held out the ostrich-hide folder with his license for her to read through the screen if she could. “I’m looking into the death of Adam Streeter.”

“No.” Her eyes opened wide for a second. Since she wore no makeup, it was easy to see her flush. “We didn’t know him.”

“Mr. Glendenning knew him.” Dave tucked away the folder in an inside jacket pocket. “Perhaps he never told you.”

A door slammed at the rear of the house. So loudly that it made the young woman jump. Dave left the cool porch with its earth-smelling pots of nasturtiums, geraniums, marigolds set along the wide redwood railing. He went quickly to the corner of the house. Out back, footsteps hammered stairs. Dave ran up the cracked cement driveway alongside the house. In the rear, wooden stairs climbed a steep hill densely overgrown with scruffy shrubs and eucalyptus trees. He caught glimpses of the man, legs for a moment, taking the steps two at a time, a hand hauling him upward by a two-by-four railing, a flash of bare scalp, a glint of spectacles where sunlight found its way down through the thick leafage. The woman came out the back door of the house.

“Leave him alone,” she cried. “He had nothing to do with Adam Streeter’s death.”

Dave glanced at her, then studied again that long zigzag of rickety stairs. He was still bruised, his muscles still ached from jumping that fool fence at Hunsinger’s. He smoked too much: he didn’t have the wind to get halfway to the top without a rest. He kept telling himself to retire. When was he going to listen? Far above, Glendenning’s shoes stopped knocking wood. He had reached a street up there. Dave turned to the woman.

“He shouldn’t have run,” he said. “It looks like an admission of guilt.”

“It isn’t,” she said sharply. “He didn’t kill Adam Streeter. What makes you think he did? How did you find us?”

“He had a violent argument with Streeter,” Dave said, “a few days ago. There was a witness. There were two.”

“Oh, God,” she said miserably. “I begged him not to go.” She put fingertips to her mouth like a nerve-shattered ten-year-old, and snatched them away again as if her mother had called to her through the kitchen window not to bite her nails. She said to Dave, “He was grieving, don’t you understand? Beside himself with grief. For Rue. Our son. A beautiful, gifted boy. Murdered at twenty-two.” Tears brimmed her eyes. Her voice trembled. “Pierce Glendenning is a gentle, kind, caring man. Patient. Understanding.”

“And angry,” Dave said.

“He couldn’t kill anyone,” she said.

“Then he won’t mind talking to me.” Dave held out a card. “Give him this. As soon as he comes back, please. Tell him to call me. If he doesn’t call me, I’ll go to the police tomorrow morning. Is that clear?”

She nodded numbly, took the card, pushed it into a shirt pocket. Her lips moved, but she decided not to say any more. She turned forlornly and went back inside. The screen door here was old, wood-framed, the mesh black and bulging. He couldn’t see through it, but he heard her fingers rattle a hook, and click it closed.

I
T WAS EARLY AT
Max Romano’s. A few afternoon drinkers hung on in the small dark, wood and leather bar. Now and then, laughter came from there, the jingle of ice in glasses. But the dining room was empty except for Dave and Cecil at their usual table in a far corner. The other tables waited under heavy white cloths, candlelight glinting on silver and glass. Good smells of herbs, cheese, garlic drifted in from the kitchen.

In front of Cecil, on an oval platter of crushed ice, lay a row of handsome big shrimp. He hummed over them happily, and rubbed his palms together. “Look at that,” he crooned, “will you just look at those beauties.”

“I have my oysters,” Dave said. “I am content.”

“I will not look at oysters.” Cecil picked up a shrimp, bit it in two. “Oysters,” he said as he chewed, “are alive. You are about to devour a living creature.”

Dave’s platter of crushed ice held a dozen oysters on the half shell. He squeezed lemon juice over them, lifted one of the shells, rough to the fingers, cold, tilted its contents into his mouth, swallowed it. It was his turn to hum. He grinned at Cecil, who was pulling a disgusted face, and said, “You don’t know what’s good.”

“Shrimp,” Cecil said, and finished off the first one. He wiped his fingers on a heavy white napkin. “They are not going to admit it.”

“Jimmie Caesar and Dot Yamada,” Dave said.

“Those two.” Cecil nodded and took a swallow of champagne. “When I told them what I saw and heard, they turned green. Adam Streeter, in their office, at two in the morning? Was I crazy? What was I trying to do to them?”

Dave slid another oyster down his throat. “They hadn’t seen you out there, eavesdropping in the hallway?”

Cecil bit another big shrimp in half. “No way.” He shook his head. “No light in that hall, except way down at the end. They thought I was toiling away in my sweaty little editing room, didn’t they?”

Dave tried the champagne. It lacked edge. It was too far over on the fruity side. The bottle leaned in an ice bucket on the thickly carpeted floor beside his chair. He bent for it, lifted it dripping, squinted at the label. Blurry. He fumbled reading glasses out of his jacket, got them onto his nose, read the vineyard name and the year, and twisted the bottle back into the ice. The year was all that was wrong. He wouldn’t order 1973 again. Not with that label. He put the glasses away, and finished off three more oysters.

“It is one of the advantages,” Cecil said, “of being black. One of the unnumbered advantages.”

“
Invisible man
,” Dave said.

Cecil nodded, working on another shrimp. “Only how Mr. Ellison saw it—it was a disadvantage. Mostly.”

“They’re afraid of being drawn into a murder case,” Dave said. “Afraid of what their infantile trick led to. And I can’t say I blame them.”

“Looked at each other with their mouths hanging open,” Cecil said, “and looked at me, like their heads were on one swivel, and both of them started talking at once.”

“You imagined it?” Dave said. “It never happened?”

“I must have it in for them,” Cecil said. “Why else would I make up a story like that? I’m trying to lose them their jobs. They’re in the way of my unbounded ambition, right? Another pushy nigger.”

“They didn’t say that,” Dave said.

“They didn’t have to. Not to me. But they’ll say it to somebody, if I make it known, won’t they? And you know how that will go. There are two of them and only one of me. Odd man out, right?”

“Don’t make it known,” Dave said. “It doesn’t go anywhere.”

The shrimp were gone. Cecil looked forlornly at the heap of coral-crisp shells on the platter of ice. Dave’s oysters were gone too. A waiter named Avram, a stocky youngster whose large soft brown eyes always yearned at Cecil, came in his gold velveteen jacket and took the platters away. Cecil wiped his mouth and fingers on the napkin again.

“What
does
go somewhere?” he asked.

“Possibly the father of young Glendenning,” Dave said.

Cecil’s eyebrows went up. “The reporter killed in Los Inocentes?”

“Afterward, the father went to Streeter. He’s an Anglican priest. They had a loud argument. They had a fight.”