Nightwork (10 page)

Dave rose. “Thank you for your time.” He took his coffee mug and Cecil’s to the sinks and set them there. “You have no idea who would have wanted to kill Paul Myers? It didn’t occur to you that your husband’s death wasn’t natural? There is no Dr. Kretschmer, you know.”

She was wiping the handles of cupboard doors. She frowned at him. “I seen him plain as I see you now.”

“He has no address, no telephone number, and no Ford T. Kretschmer is licensed to practice medicine in the state of California.” Louella Bishop gave no sign that she was listening. She wiped drawer pulls. Dave said, “The Duchess and her handymen beat up Angela Myers a short time before Paul was killed. These are bad people, Mrs. Bishop. You shouldn’t protect them.”

“What was your husband hauling for them?” Cecil said.

The massive woman gave him a brief dismissive blink. At the sink she rinsed the sponge again, then took it to the table, bent over the table, began wiping the glossy old planks. She asked Dave, “Did Angela Myers tell you it was them that beat her up?”

“I have a witness. No, she didn’t tell me.”

“And why not?” Louella Bishop straightened her back and faced Dave, calm, monumental, fists on her hips. “Because she know worse could happen.”

Cecil said, “Worse than having her husband killed?”

“She got little children, same as me.” Louella Bishop set the chairs neatly at the table. “None of them got any daddy to look out for them now. Nobody but mama.” She threw Dave a look of sour reproach. “You think I don’t know what kind of people they are?”

“Someone has to stop them,” Dave said. “What’s her name? She had to sign the check. For the truck.”

“Wasn’t no check,” she said. “She brought cash.”

High-school boys in gym trunks collided with each other, dodged and ducked each other, bounced a basketball, threw a basketball, waved their arms, missed the hoop, on sunbaked asphalt beyond a chainlink fence. Their trunks were shiny green. Their skins were shiny with sweat. Up in Los Angeles these days, teenage boys cut their hair short, 1930s-style. Here in the boonies they still wore it long and floppy. Its color ranged from taffy to white, and the skin colors too. But there were two brown-skinned boys and one with black skin.

This was Melvil Bishop. He was thickly built. Basketball wouldn’t be his true game, if he had a true game. He looked like a wrestler or a shot putter. He stood by a bench under an old pepper tree and talked to Cecil. Dave watched from the van across the street. Melvil looked sulky. He kept shaking his head. At last, with a bony shrug and a lazy lift of his hand, Cecil came away. He climbed into the cold, conditioned air of the van, looking disgusted.

“Don’t help, my being black,” he said. “He still would have talked more to you than he did to me. He never saw the Duchess before last night, never saw the phony doctor, never saw the heavies. His father died of a heart attack. He never said what he was hauling in his truck at night, or who he was working for. The old preacher is lying; Melvil never said anything to his mother about any doctor at any grave. Louella Bishop is just plain scared. Melvil—I’d say he was scared with all the extras.”

“You want to drive now?” Dave said.

Cecil brightened. “All the way home?”

“Till you get tired,” Dave said.

They changed seats and Cecil started the engine. “Why did the Duchess buy that truck?” He released the parking brake, frowned into the side mirror, steered the van down the sleepy morning street past old white frame cottages. A dog ran out and raced beside them, barking and trying to nip the tires. “Jesus.” Cecil twisted the steering wheel, left, right. The tires squealed. “That is one ignorant dog. Going to get himself killed.” Sweat broke out on Cecil’s forehead. He pawed for the buttons that controlled the windows. His window slid down. “Get away, fool. Get away.” He tramped on the brakes.

“Take it easy,” Dave said. “He’ll be all right.”

It was the end of the dog’s block. He left off barking and chasing, trotted back across the street, and went uphill along a sidewalk strewn with bright children’s toys, his plumy tail waving. Cecil leaned his head on the steering wheel. He was trembling. “Shit,” he said. He sat up and for a moment stared straight ahead through the windshield. He shivered. Eyes shut, he drew in air deeply, held it, blew it out. It didn’t stop his trembling. Dave touched him. He looked at Dave. Tears were in his eyes. “I can’t do it. Can’t even drive a car anymore.”

“You can,” Dave said. “Of course you can. Just get your composure back, now. It’s all right. Everything’s cool. The dog is fine. No harm done.”

But Cecil shook his head and lifted his butt up off the dark blue velvet of the driver’s seat. Dave swiveled aside, then slid back of him and sat behind the wheel. Cecil sat in the passenger seat, long fingers interlaced hard between his knees. He sat looking down at his hands and said nothing. Dave got the van to Main Street, with its sallow brick and bright signs and dusty pickup trucks and shiny shopping carts. He got the van out of town, brown hills on the right, blue glitter of ocean on the left. He looked at Cecil. His eyes were closed again. Tears ran down his face. Tissues were in a dark blue box on the control panel. Dave pulled two out and nudged Cecil with the hand that held the tissues. Cecil opened his eyes, mutely accepted the tissues, wiped his face, dropped the wet tissues into the blue trash receptacle, clasped his hands between his knees again, slumped in the seat, chin on his chest.

“We can stop for a drink,” Dave said. “Will that help?”

Cecil said, “You don’t understand, do you?”

“I’d like to,” Dave said. “Why don’t you make me?”

Cecil managed a damp, crooked smile. “I’ll make you later. Now, I’ll explain.” He looked somber. “You know what is going to happen to me if a bullet ever comes at me again? I am going to die. I don’t mean if it hits me. If it hits me or not, I am going to die. Rifle range? Shit!”

“You held up fine all morning,” Dave said.

“What kind of dog do you think Digger was? ‘They killed my dog,’ the man said.” Cecil swiveled the seat, stared straight ahead again, fingers of both hands pressed flat against his mouth, tears running again. At last he dropped his hands. He drew a long, shuddering breath. “When he said that, I could feel the bullet going in. I don’t want to kill anybody’s dog.”

“Right,” Dave said, and handed him more tissues.

Cecil dried his eyes and blew his nose. He dropped the used tissues into the blue bin. “Why did the Duchess buy that truck?” he said. “Why now? Why not before? This a long way to come.”

“Since she got here before nine,” Dave said, “she must have left L.A. about the time of the afternoon news. When they said the Sheriff didn’t think it was an accident anymore, what happened to Paul Myers.”

“So what happened to Ossie Bishop wasn’t an accident, either? And the truck has got evidence in it of that?”

Dave smiled. “You have a future in this business.”

“If I can keep away from bullets,” Cecil said. “If I can keep away from dogs.”

D
AVE SWUNG THE VAN
in at the Myers driveway, those two narrow strips of cracked cement leading past the side of the house to the garage, whose overhead door gaped, slumping in the middle. Dave slid the van into the garage and stopped it. “Come on,” he said. “On the double.” He jumped down out of the van and so did Cecil. Outside, Dave reached and caught a frayed rope end and dragged the garage door down. “If nobody’s watching, it will be safe for a few minutes.”

Cecil glanced around. “I don’t like the odds.”

“We’re not staying.” Dave crossed grass so dry it crackled underfoot. At the back door, he rapped the frame of the screen with his knuckles. No one stirred inside the house. He peered, holding hands at his eyes as blinkers. The sun was far to the west and low, but it still glared against the smoggy sky. He could make out nothing indoors. Cecil climbed on a bricked square meant for a planter, in which nothing grew but a few dry weeds. He peered through a window. “Looks like nobody’s home,” he said.

“That’s all right. I didn’t come to talk to anyone.” Dave slipped a thin steel pick from his wallet and worked the screen-door lock. The lock of the wooden door, with its glass pane, was even easier. That required only the insertion of a credit card between lock and frame. When the door opened, the children’s artwork fastened to the refrigerator fluttered. Empty beer cans stood on the kitchen table, a full ashtray. Dirty dishes were piled in the sink. The smell this time was of peanut butter. Dave left the kitchen for the hall.

The door to the children’s room was open. Inside, a portable radio whispered rock music. Nothing in Angela Myers’s bedroom was different from before except that possibly more underclothes were strewn around. Dave went straight to the closet, straight to the drawer with the shipping manifests. He knelt, pulled it open, and released breath he hadn’t even known he was holding. He’d feared Salazar might have beaten him to it. Or the Duchess. This time he took them all. Half the stack he handed up to Cecil.

“Stash those on you, out of sight,” he said. The other half he folded and pushed into the inner pocket of his jacket. He closed the drawer and rose. “Let’s go.”

They were rolling backward out the narrow driveway when someone shouted. Dave braked the van. Weighed down by bulging white plastic supermarket sacks, Gene Molloy halted on the front sidewalk. The children were with him. Each of them carried a sack. Molloy set his down and jogged to the van. “I want to talk to you,” he said. “I want to show you something. Better not leave this out where the jigs can see it.” He meant the van. In the sun glare he hadn’t noticed Cecil. Or maybe he had and didn’t care. “Put it in the garage and close the door,” he said. “I’ll let you in the back way.” He let them in the back way, frowning. “I know damn well I locked these doors.”

“This is my associate, Cecil Harris,” Dave said. “Gene Molloy.” Molloy shook Cecil’s hand, but his Irish eyes were not smiling. Cecil muttered something polite. Dave said, “Did you ever hear your brother-in-law mention someone called the Duchess?”

Brian, the Myers boy with the white sheepdog hair, took cans out of the slithery white sacks that lay bulging on the kitchen chairs. He climbed a short aluminum ladder to stow the cans on cupboard shelves. He set boxes—cereal, crackers, tea bags—on the shelves. Stretching, he put plastic-wrapped chicken legs and hamburger into the freezer. A deep tin drawer rattled when he opened it to drop in lettuce, tomatoes, carrots.

“I told you,” Molloy said, “I wasn’t around here that much. A Duchess? What kind of sense does that make?”

“A nickname. Someone he worked for. Possibly the one he was working for nights.”

Cecil helped the child by arranging boxes of frozen vegetables along a freezer-door shelf. He said, “Possibly the one who killed him.”

Molloy glared at him. “Watch your mouth.”

Cecil touched the boy’s shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” the boy said. He looked at Molloy. “I did my half. It’s Ruth Ann’s turn.”

“Go get her,” Molloy said. And to Dave, “It wasn’t any Duchess. I know who it was. I’ve got proof. Come on. I’ll show you.” He left the kitchen for the living room. Up the hall, the rock music was loud now. And louder still were the voices of Brian and Ruth Ann. Quarreling. Molloy turned back, pushed past Dave and Cecil, went to the door of the children’s bedroom, and put his head inside. “Knock it off. Right now. Ruth Ann, God damn it.” He disappeared into the room. The music broke off. “Get out to that kitchen and put the rest of those groceries away, and when you finish with that, wash the dishes. By yourself.”

“See, stupid,” Brian’s voice said.

“I’ll stupid you,” Ruth Ann’s voice said.

She came out of the room with Molloy behind her, his hands on her shoulders. When he had deposited her in the kitchen he came into the living room, where Dave and Cecil stood waiting. “Look at these,” he said, and dug under the cushions of the sofa and brought out crumpled sheets of paper. He pushed them at Dave, who took them, frowned, reached for his reading glasses, turned the pages around, studied them. Cecil peered over his shoulder. Molloy lit a cigarette and smiled grimly. “You know what those are?”

“This is Kilgore School stationery,” Dave said. “Is this Brian’s work, Ruth Ann’s? They look like diagrams.”

“I don’t think any kids drew those,” Cecil said.

“I’m ashamed to have to say it,” Molloy said, “but Bruce Kilgore has been sleeping with my sister.”

“So I’ve heard,” Dave said.

“What do you think his reason was?” A crash sounded from the kitchen. Molloy grimaced and left the room. Ruth Ann wailed. Molloy shouted. Dave frowned at the copies of
Scientific American
on the coffee table. He picked up the top one and leafed through it. Silence reigned in the kitchen. Molloy returned with cans of beer. He handed one to Dave, one to Cecil, and popped the opener tab on one for himself. “Maybe you think it was love,” he said.

“Possibly loneliness,” Dave said. He held up the magazine. “I’d like to borrow this, if I may.”

Molloy shrugged. “Be my guest. I can’t read the God damn things. No, there’s lots of lonely housewives. Why Angie? She’s sure as hell no
Playboy
centerfold.”

“What are you trying to say?” Dave rattled the papers. “What have these got to do with it?”

“Look.” Molloy sat on the couch and balanced his beer can on the arm. A large, thick book lay on the coffee table with the magazines. Molloy sat forward, spread the book open, leafed over glossy pages, some of them smeared and thumb-printed. It was a truck-repair manual. When Molloy found the page he wanted, he slapped it and reached up for the Kilgore School papers. Dave handed them to him. Molloy swiveled the book so it faced Dave, and laid the pages beside it. “Check this out.”

Dave bent above the book, hands on knees, the glasses slipping down his nose. The diagram in the book covered two pages. It detailed the air-brake system of an eighteen-wheel truck and trailer. The Kilgore School pages broke the diagram into three parts, but each part had plainly been copied from this book or another book of the same sort. Dave pushed the glasses up his nose, and straightened. He said, “You think Bruce Kilgore drew these?”