Nightwork (15 page)

“Cecil told me about your track record.” The firelight flickered orange-red behind Melvil. “You a real, live private eye. I didn’t know they had those. You don’t look it, you don’t act it. You famous, too.” He poked a last bite of hamburger into his mouth, wiped his mouth with the destroyed napkin, wiped his fingers, tossed the napkin into the flames. “Guess I should have known.” He came back to the desk. The straw chair creaked under his weight.

“Did your mother know what your dad was doing?” Dave sat in his desk chair, high-backed, leather, swivel. “The Duchess seems to think so.”

“I don’t know what Mama knew. I got it together when Paul Myers came over when Dad was sick and had that magazine article about the symptoms you get from handling toxic wastes, pollutants, all that jive.”

“You overheard their talk?”

“I plain listened. Something those drivers said at the truck stop came back to me. I wasn’t sure what it meant at the time. Then, when Paul talked about what was in that magazine, I understood.”

“Your mother said Paul left the house angry.”

“He was going to expose the Duchess and the whole rotten operation. That what he say.” Melvil laughed wryly to himself and shook his head on its thick neck. “Folks talk big and bad, times like that. It the mob back of the Duchess, ain’t it? Organized crime? What’s some nobody truck driver going to do against organized crime?”

Dave said, “I think he meant it. I think he tried. He loved your father, you know. I read that magazine article. It must have been obvious to Paul from that, that your father was going to die.”

“Tried how?” Melvil peered into the darkness behind Dave. “There water back there?”

“And glasses,” Dave said, “and ice. Help yourself. There’s a refrigerator under the bar, if you want a cola.”

“Water be fine.” Melvil pushed up out of the chair. “Cola rot you teeth and make you jumpy.” He went into the darkness, silent on his soft-soled shoes. “Those babies—you think they grasshoppers now?” Ice clacked into a glass. Water drummed in a small steel sink. “Used to be they was into cola. Whoo. They was nonstop, eighteen hours a day.” Melvil came back with the glass and sat down again. “What make you say he tried?”

“The Duchess brought her boys and beat up Paul’s wife.”

Melvil frowned, cocked his head. “Her? Not him? I thought they broke you legs.”

“You can’t drive a truck with broken legs,” Dave said. “The Duchess preferred to have things both ways. Paul frightened into silence and still working for her. She managed that by abusing and threatening his family.”

Melvil was staring gloomily at the fire. “Yeah. It wasn’t herself Mama was scared for, taking off for Halcon that way right after the funeral. It was for us. Told me ten times a day, never say nothin’ to nobody about what happened to Dad. None of it.” His laugh was brief and bitter. “I wasn’t about to. I knew more than she did, and what I knew scared me so I was afraid to go to sleep nights for fear I’d say something in a nightmare.” He shook his head sorrowfully. “Turned out, she the one who talked. And look at her now.”

Dave frowned. “It doesn’t add up. The Duchess came for the truck. She got the truck. She went off with it. The night before Cecil and I talked to your mother.”

“Then who fired at you from the rifle range?”

“Accidents have happened there,” Dave said. “The storekeeper’s dog was killed. That had to be a stray bullet. A customer was wounded, carrying sacks out to his car.”

“The dog and the customer weren’t trailing the Duchess,” Melvil said. “Asking Paul Myers’s widow questions. Drinking coffee with Ossie Bishop’s widow.”

“There’s Smithers,” Dave said. “Tall, bald, drives a Mercedes?” Melvil looked at him curiously and nodded. Dave added, “Did your mother tell you what Smithers wanted?”

“Pretty much what you wanted,” Melvil said. “What was Paul carrying up in Torcido Canyon the night he got killed? Exactly where did he take it? Stuff like that.” Melvil got out of the chair, went to stand looking at the fire. The flames had died down. There was a lot of smoke. He shifted the screen aside, found the poker, jabbed at the logs. Sparks flew up the chimney. “Oh, and about Ossie. He wanted to know did Ossie ever go up that canyon. See, he knew Ossie got Paul the nightwork.”

“He learned that from Angela Myers,” Dave said.

“What are you worrying about Smithers for?” Flames worked on the logs again. Melvil rattled the poker back into its glinting brass rack and hauled the screen once more across the rough brick hearth. “You think it was him shot at you, shot my Mama?”

“A man who goes around passing himself off as someone he isn’t just naturally worries me. I know what the Duchess’s stake is in all this. Where does Smithers fit?” Dave drank, scowled, chewed his lip. “How did he locate your mother? Angela didn’t tell him—she doesn’t know. Did he follow Cecil and me to Halcon?” On that long drive, had Dave been too concerned about Cecil to notice a conspicuous car trailing them, mile after mile? Shouldn’t reflex have alerted him, a lifetime’s experience? The years were catching up to him: he was losing sharpness. Annoyance at himself was in his voice when he said to Melvil, “What does Smithers want? Who is he?”

“Maybe he after the Duchess too.” Melvil came back to the desk. He watched Dave light a cigarette. “You shouldn’t do that. Ruin you lungs.” Dave picked up his glass. “Alcohol too. Make you old before you time.”

“It is my time,” Dave said, and drank. “All right. To hell with Smithers. We’ll go after the Duchess.” He examined the boy’s square, solemn face. “You really want to show me that truck stop? She’s a deadly lady.”

“You going to try to take her?” Melvil sounded awed.

“I’d prefer to leave it to the Sheriff. He has troops. I have a feeling troops are going to be needed. But you don’t want anything to do with the Sheriff.”

“If Mama die,” Melvil said, “who going to look after those babies except me?” He laid a hand on the telephone. “Do you think, if I was to get on here now and tell the Sheriff what I know, I’d still be alive to testify when they put the Duchess on trial?” He withdrew his hand, sat down. His look at Dave was grave. “If it was a matter of troops, Mr. Bannister, how come she never been on trial yet? This been going on since before I was born. They never going to catch her. Nobody know who she is.”

“Maybe we can find out.” Dave rolled open a deep drawer of the desk, meant to hold files but holding cameras, binoculars, tape recorders. Elaborate and expensive equipment. None of which he had ever found a use for. “It will help to have a picture of her, won’t it?” He lifted out a camera by the long strap on its case. “Something for me to show to Lieutenant Salazar, to accompany my description of the Duchess at work and play. Mine and Cecil’s.” He looked at Melvil. “Not yours. We’ll keep you a secret.” Beside the camera on the desk, Dave laid a camera-shop sack filled with little boxes. “How far away is this place? When should we start?”

Melvil peered into the sack. “You can’t use these. Flash one bulb, everybody leave.”

“Not those—this.” Dave probed the sack and brought out a box of film and held it up. “Infrared-sensitive. For taking pictures in the dark.” He unsnapped the camera case. “When do they meet at this truck stop?”

“Late. Midnight.” Melvil watched Dave turn the camera over in his hands, frowning. Melvil said, “You don’t even know how to get the film in there, do you?”

Dave held it out to him. The stocky boy put his hands behind him, shaking his head. “Don’t ask me.” He laughed. “This going to be some evidence-gathering expedition.”

Dave set the camera down. “Cecil will know,” he said.

The door flew open, and the small boys hurtled in. Two of them. The third, the chunky one, was riding on Cecil’s back. Cecil rolled his eyes. “Will somebody please take these monkeys off my hands?” The two skinny ones rattled up and down the stairs again, raindrops sparkling in their hair.

“Cool it!” Melvil shouted.

They came to a halt and stared at him. The chunky one slipped silently down off Cecil’s back. They stood chastened. Melvil looked at Dave. “What we going to do with them? Do you know any baby sitters?”

“Amanda,” Dave said, and reached for the phone.

Amanda said, “But I don’t know anything about children.”

“We were all children once,” Dave said. “Some of us still are.”

“Ah-ha!” she said. “I’ll bring electronic games.”

I
T WAS A LONELY
place, a long way from anywhere. Miles before they reached it, they saw the glow it made above the dark, rolling hills of the endless valley. When they did reach it, Dave drove on past. It was a black-topped acre or two, where the boxy hulks of tractor-trailer rigs loomed up against the lights of a filling station, a cinder-block motel, a glaring, glass-walled eatery. On the roof of the eatery, red neon spelled
GOOD BUDDY
.
Plumes of smoke rose from the tall, plated exhaust pipes of some of the rigs. The rain laid a shine on the trucks, the paving, the jackets of men climbing down out of cabs, moving among fuel pumps, heading for or coming from the café. But the shine did nothing to change the bleakness of the place.

“There her van,” Melvil said. “She here.”

In the rear seat, the camera burred and clicked. Cecil had spent the evening hunched at Dave’s desk, studying the instruction manual. He had fitted the camera with a night telephoto lens. At the time he bought the cameras, Dave had let the clerk sell him every sort of gadget and attachment. The motor traveled the film in the camera. Cecil clicked the shutter again. “Do you see her?” he said.

“No, but she there.” Melvil twisted on the seat to peer back through the rain. “You want her license number.”

Dave stretched across him, opened the glove compartment, took out pad and pen, dropped them in Melvil’s lap. The boy held the pad close to his eyes and traced the numbers large and slow. “Look it up,” he said, “find it belong to somebody dead, most likely.”

Dave squinted past the batting wiper blades. “You picked the right night,” he said, “but won’t the weather keep her indoors? Won’t she make her contacts in the cafe?”

“She work in the dark.” Melvil stowed pad and pen in the glove compartment. “She don’t trust but a few.” The little door clapped shut feebly. “Where we going?”

“To find a side road,” Dave said.

“Where would a side road go out here?” Cecil said.

“Maybe noplace,” Dave said, “but we sure as hell are not going to drive into that truck stop and announce ourselves, now, are we?”

“She don’t know this car,” Melvil said. “Ain’t that why we brought this car? Figure she know Ossie’s car. Maybe she know Cecil’s van. She don’t know this car.”

“She knows
you
,” Dave said.

A truck lumbered out of the rest stop and onto the road. Its headlight beams glared in Dave’s rearview mirror. He winced and moved the Valiant along faster. But very soon the diesel finished clashing its gears and roared up behind them. Dave looked for a wide, flat shoulder he could pull off onto. The headlights didn’t show one. The diesel gave a blast of its air horn. Dave pulled onto a narrow, tilted shoulder and felt the rear wheels slide. The truck howled past, red lights glaring off its towering rear. The red lights dimmed and disappeared in the darkness and the rain. The Valiant stalled. It coughed when Dave tried to start it. But at last it started. He shifted into drive, and the rear wheels spun, whining.

“Oh-oh,” Melvil said, and got out into the rain.

Cecil got out the back door. “Yuck,” he said, “mud.”

Dave stretched across the seat and looked out. He had turned off the headlights. Cecil and Melvil were almost invisible, a tall shape, a bulky shape in the blackness. Melvil lifted one foot, then the other. They came away with a sucking sound. “What do we do now, coach?”

“Should have brought Amanda’s car,” Cecil said. “Too light to get stuck.” He didn’t have a hat. He pulled his jacket up over his head.

“Too small,” Dave said. It was an Alfa-Romeo two-seater. No room for his knees. Certainly no room for Cecil’s knees. “There are three of us, remember?”

Cecil moved. “That’s why we are all right.” His voice came from farther off. “Two of us to”—he grunted—“push!”

“Not you.” Dave got out of the car quickly and lunged for the rear, skidding in the mud, almost falling. The two leaned their weight against the trunk. Dave caught Cecil’s arm. “You drive. You’re in no condition for hard labor.”

“Ah, listen, I’m okay,” Cecil said.

“You want to go back to the hospital?” Dave said.

Cecil sighed and, with slumped shoulders, went and got into the car, behind the steering wheel. The whirling rear tires plastered Dave and Melvil with mud. But they got the old car onto the paving. And they found that side road. The trouble with it was that as it climbed into the hills, it veered away from the lights of the truck stop. Slithering and sliding, they backtracked.

“This is the closest point,” Dave said. “Stop here.”

“It quit raining,” Melvil said. “That’s nice.”

Snagging themselves on barbwire fences, sometimes up to their ankles in mud, they slogged across farmland, uphill, toward the glow in the sky. Cecil’s legs were longest and he led, camera case, equipment case, binocular case swinging from their shoulder straps, banging his lean hips. Breathing hard, muscles aching from the bad footing, they topped a ridge. Below lay the truck stop.

Dave unsnapped the binocular case. The view was good. A stout woman in a dark raincoat, a dark slouch hat shadowing her face, stood beside the high tractor of an eighteen-wheeler, out near the edge of the shiny blacktop, where the light from the buildings was poor. A hulking man held a clear plastic umbrella over her, though the rain had stopped. In his other arm he cradled a stack of big brown envelopes wrapped in clear plastic. The long door of the truck cab opened and the driver climbed down, in a cowboy hat and dirty leather jacket. The woman passed him one of the envelopes. The binoculars were 7 x 50s with night lenses. Dave could see the driver’s beard stubble, the pores under the woman’s thick makeup. He handed Melvil the glasses.

“Is that the Duchess?”

“Where?” Melvil had trouble finding in the lenses that brought her close a figure that a moment before had been tiny. “Oh, yeah, that’s her. See the big ugly with the stupid umbrella? He always with her.”