Nightwork (14 page)

“You mean the Duchess’s goons shot her?”

“Sheriff say it was an accident.” Melvil’s tone was contemptuous. “First she talked to you. In the morning. Later on to Smithers.” Melvil looked sharply at Dave. “Claim he work with you. It’s a lie, isn’t it?”

“It’s a lie,” Dave said. “I don’t know him.”

Cecil said, “Shot her at Hutchings’s?”

Melvil shook his head. “You know the store in Halcon? General store? Post office? Indian dude run it?”

Dave stared. “The rifle range? A bullet from the rifle range?” He glanced at Cecil.

Cecil looked sick. “That almost happened to us.”

“No ‘almost’ about this.” Melvil’s fists bunched in the pockets of his Padres windbreaker. His feet, in worn jogging shoes, nudged wet leaves on the bricks. He watched them. His voice wobbled. “She could die.”

“I’ll phone the hospital.” Dave turned up his jacket collar and started off. “Collect your brothers and come inside.” He took a few steps, then turned back. “Better get your car out of sight. Cecil, drive it up to Hilda Vosper’s, will you?” She was a neat little gray-haired widow who lived up the road with a feisty little ragbag dog, and had helped Cecil out of trouble once. “She only uses half her garage. She loves you—she’ll let you hide it there.” Cecil saluted, and Dave hunched his shoulders and hurried around the end of the front building, across the uneven bricks of the courtyard under the old oak, and into the rear building.

His desk waited at the far end of the long, high, plank-walled room. He sat at the desk and used the phone for a jokey, neighborly call to Hilda Vosper. Then he got to the process of connecting with the hospital down the coast. Before he managed it, Melvil came in, shepherding the small boys, two of them skinny, one stocky, a miniature Melvil. The room was gloomy, so their teeth and eye whites shone. They rolled their eyes. Plainly, they had never seen a place quite like this one. Come to that, neither had Dave.

“Cecil manage your car all right?” Dave called.

“Say he be back in a minute.” Melvil shut the door. “Then he going to cook. These babies don’t only always have to pee, they always hungry. He going to fix food for these here babies.” Melvil gave the little boys quick, rough, affectionate shoves. “Don’t push me, man,” they said in small, high voices. “Look out who you messing with,” the stocky one said. “I got me a big brother can beat the shine out of you.”

“Where? Bring him on. I ready.” Melvil scowled around him in mock truculence, and jabbed the air with blocky fists. The two skinny boys jumped on him from behind, clutching his shoulders, circling his neck, dragging him to the floor, where they piled on him and pummeled him.

At the Escondido end of the telephone line, a nurse, deceived by Dave’s fast talk about insurance into believing he had a right to know, told him that Louella Bishop was in stable condition after surgery, though she was still unconscious. Dave thanked the nurse and hung up. Melvil had heard his voice, and now sat up on the floor, brushing the giggling little boys off him, his eyes anxious. Dave rose, went to the broad fireplace, crouched there, and, with the aid of a gas jet, set kindling crackling and smoking under logs in the grate. Melvil came to him.

Dave got to his feet. “She’s holding her own.”

Melvil said darkly, “Why won’t they sneak in and kill her in the hospital?”

“Intensive-care wards are busy places, filled with doctors and nurses,” Dave said. “She’ll be all right.”

“I wanted to stay and guard her,” Melvil said, “but they’d only kill me too. They know I know.”

“If it’s like that, why didn’t you tell the Sheriff?”

“If Mama got shot for talking to you and Mr. Smithers, what do you think would happen, they see me talking to the Sheriff? Deputy phoned me at school, told me Mama had this accident, and could they come and get me, take me to the hospital? I say okay, but I didn’t wait. I had the car. Mama used one of the Hutchingses’ cars when she had errands. And I drove to the grade school and scooped up the babies and we came here.”

“That’s all right.” Dave switched on lamps at either end of the long, corduroy-cushioned couch that faced the fireplace. “But I don’t know why.”

“Because Mama trust you. I yelled at her for talking to you. She say it’s all right. You a fine man.” He dug into his windbreaker pocket. “Gave me your card. Say if there was ever trouble, I was to get you.” He showed the card. “I didn’t know where else to go.”

Dave looked at the little boys, who were playing tag up and down the pine stairs to the loft. He said to Melvil, “Why don’t you take them to the cookshack? Then come back here and tell me what it is they know you know.”

“All I want is to hide,” Melvil said.

“That won’t work forever,” Dave said. “Maybe if you had talked to Cecil yesterday, your mother wouldn’t be in the hospital now. Maybe the sooner you tell what you know, the sooner you can stop hiding, the safer you’ll be, and your little brothers and everybody else.”

Melvil eyed him skeptically. “Insurance? What do you think you can do?”

Dave shrugged, smiled. “I sometimes surprise myself.”

Melvil didn’t look persuaded, but he rounded up the little boys and herded them, jumping and skittering, out into the rainy dusk. Dave made himself a drink and stood at the desk, listening to messages on his answering machine. Gene Molloy’s voice, excited, exasperated. Salazar’s voice, bored, exasperated. The voice of Amanda, his very young stepmother, widowed a few years back when Carl Brandstetter’s heart stopped in his Bentley on a freeway. Amanda was cheery. She’d just got a new interior-decorating job and wanted to celebrate by taking Dave and Cecil to dinner. No more voices came from the machine. Dave reset it, lit a cigarette, picked up the drink, started for the couch, and the telephone rang. He sighed, sat down at the desk, picked up the receiver.

“You ought to stay home more,” Salazar said. “Gene Molloy showed me those sketches of the brake system of a tractor-trailer rig that Kilgore drew. Kilgore doesn’t look it, but he’s weak. In ten minutes I had him in tears. And now I’ve got him in jail.”

Dave raised eyebrows at the phone. “You mean he admitted blowing up Paul Myers? For Angela’s half of the insurance money?”

“Not yet, but he will. He was read his rights, but he babbled. He admitted he was planning it.”

“Planning it is one thing,” Dave said, “doing it is another.” He took a quick gulp of whiskey. “What about Silencio Ruiz? Did you pick him up?”

Salazar’s laugh was short, sharp, humorless. “That crazy old Gifford! You didn’t tell me he’s got a fortress out there. Electrified fence on top of the wall. Iron gates. Dogs that will tear your throat out.”

Dave frowned. “Your men out there knew that.”

“Yes, well, I didn’t know it, did I? And Silencio is important to me. I got a warrant and went myself. And I blew it. No way was he going to let me in there. And no way was I going to risk ramming those gates. Those were little machine guns Silencio’s boys took to the church barbecue. He could spray us with bullets from that tower.”

“Right. So you staked the place out?”

“It’s too big for that. We patrolled the walls. I did flyovers in the helicopter. It’s got a spotlight on it to rake the ground, you know? Only with all those trees and bushes in there, what could we see? There’s a loudspeaker. I kept telling Ruiz to come out, surrender. All it did was keep the old freak awake.”

“He never sleeps much,” Dave said.

“He complained anyway. This morning. When he came down in his wheelchair. To let us in. Holding up a pink Japanese parasol to keep off the rain. It was paper. It came to pieces while we watched.”

“Did he have his rifle?”

“No rifle. You don’t understand. He was a welcoming committee. I don’t know what the hell he thought he was wearing. It looked like a glass bead curtain. ‘Come in, come in,’ he says. ‘By all means, search the house and grounds. Freely. Take all the time you want. No need to worry about the dogs. I wouldn’t let them out in the rain.’” Salazar snorted. “Sons of bitches were out in the rain all night, jumping at the walls, barking, snarling.”

“Silencio got away,” Dave said. “I hope when he went over those walls, The Edge wasn’t watching.”

“They were hanging around,” Salazar said. “A crowd gathered when they saw all those County cars, all those spotlights, guns, uniforms. The noise of the chopper brought more. I saw Edge jackets.”

Dave said, “Maybe he’s still inside.”

“No way,” Salazar said. “We practically tore up the floorboards. The place is a museum, did you know that? No, he escaped in the dark. I’d feel worse if it was the first stupid mistake I ever made. I’d feel better if it was the last. It was a great tipoff, Dave. Sorry.”

“He didn’t blow up Paul Myers,” Dave said. “I don’t think he led the raid on the barbecue. I believe the minister’s wife. I think he tried to stop it.”

“No way. Everybody was hysterical. I don’t blame them. But witnesses are unreliable enough under normal circumstances. What am I saying? This is getting to be normal. Backyard terrorism. An American pastime.”

“Bigger than divorce.” Dave twisted out his cigarette and drank again. “No, I believe her because of something Gifford said—that prison changed Silencio. Gifford must have seen the G-G’s from his tower, heading for the barbecue with their new guns, and told Silencio, and Silencio ran to try and stop them, and got there too late.”

Salazar said, “Dave, Silencio Ruiz is human garbage.”

“Probably literally, by now,” Dave said. “The trash collectors will find him in a dumpster soon. That was why I wanted you to jail him.”

“You don’t think he killed Myers. You don’t think Kilgore killed Myers. Who do you think it was?”

“I haven’t got names,” Dave said. “Only suspicions. Give me a little more time, and I’ll lay it on your desk.”

“You always say that,” Salazar said, “then you try to do it all by yourself. You can get killed that way.” Salazar had it backward. Dave never acted on his own, except when Salazar or Ken Barker of LAPD couldn’t or wouldn’t help. He didn’t remind Salazar of this. He only said, “Tell me about it.” And Melvil came through the door, out of the rain.

H
E WAS EATING A
hamburger. Cecil made hamburgers with lots of mayonnaise, catsup, sweet pickle relish. The paper napkin in which Melvil’s was wrapped was soaked with all these, and the juices of rare ground beef, tomato slices, onion slices. He came down the room through the circles of soft lamplight, the soft flicker of firelight, and laid another hamburger, swaddled in a napkin, on the desk in front of Dave, who nodded and watched it begin to ooze through the napkin while he wound up his talk with Salazar.

“Was Angela Myers in on Kilgore’s plans for Paul?”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Salazar said. “That would lose her the insurance, wouldn’t it—whether they actually killed him or not? Conspiracy to defraud? I questioned her. In my opinion, she didn’t know Kilgore was using her. She’s sick about it. She’ll never speak to him again.” At Salazar’s end of the line, someone shouted his name in the background. “Listen, my wife’s on the other line. I’ll talk to you later. Don’t do anything crazy, all right?”

Dave said he wouldn’t, and cradled the phone. He regarded the hamburger on the desk and pushed it toward Melvil, who was standing, chewing, wiping mouth and fingers on his ruined napkin. Dave told him, “You have that one too. I finished a big lunch only an hour ago.”

Melvil wrinkled his forehead. “You sure?” Dave nodded. Melvil tossed the crushed napkin side-arm down the room into the fireplace, where flames were lapping around the logs now. He picked up the second hamburger and lovingly peeled back half the wrapper. “That Cecil,” he said, “make the best burger I ever tasted. Something about my people—what they cook taste better.”

Dave grinned. “I taught him everything he knows. Bring that chair over and sit down.” It was a wicker barrel chair. Melvil’s stocky body fitted it exactly. “Who is the Duchess?” Dave said.

“I don’t know her real name,” Melvil said. “Don’t guess nobody know that. She a broker. Work for factories that wants to get rid of poisons the cheap way. Hire truckers to take it off and dump it wherever they can. No questions asked.”

“Did your Dad tell you this?”

Melvil looked ashamed. “I wanted to know what he was doing nights. We used to have good times together. Basketball games, Dodgers, boxing. All that stopped. Says with the new taxes and all that, he had to get more work. I don’t know.” Melvil shrugged, took a large bite from the hamburger. A scrap of lettuce pulled loose and hung at the corner of his mouth. He poked it inside. He spoke with his mouth full. “Was I mad at him, or jealous, or curious? Little of each, maybe. I wanted to be with him. He wouldn’t take me. Course not.” Melvil swallowed. “He knew how dangerous it was. Most truckers that did it—they knew. Acids to burn you, poisons to make you sick, fumes to make your eyes itch so you nearly blind, give you cancer, make your wife’s babies come out deformed.”

“And yet they do it?” Dave sipped his drink.

“The Duchess pay big bucks, man,” Melvil said.

“He wouldn’t take you. How did you learn?”

“Sneaked in the cab. They a big space behind the seat. Sometimes, some rigs, it living quarters, a bunk, all that. Hid myself back there. Saw it and heard it all. Scared me half to death. Dad never knew. I never said a word. I also never went with him again.”

Dave lit a cigarette. “Where does this happen?”

“I’ll show you, if you want to go there.”

“A truck stop, rest area? Will the Duchess be there?”

“Sooner or later. This would be a good night. Raining. Not all that much traffic out late.”

“If I were you, I’d be afraid,” Dave said.

Melvil shrugged and munched his hamburger. A ring of raw onion tumbled down his front. He bent to pick it up off the floor. He carried it to the fireplace. “If it killed your father, you’d want to do something about it if you could, wouldn’t you?”

Dave’s drink was only ice now, no Scotch. He rose and went into the shadows where the bar was, and built a new drink. “A few minutes ago, you didn’t think I could be of much help.”