Nightwork (19 page)

“I’ll be there,” Dave said. He hung up. “Got to go,” he said, and lifted Cecil’s head. “Get hold of the Sheriff substation in Gifford Gardens—or whichever one is nearest Gifford Gardens.” Dave went down the long, shadowy room for his raincoat. “Send them to De Witt Gifford’s. Someone’s trying to break in.” Dave flapped into his coat and unbolted the door. “He thinks it’s The Edge. Since he’s got Silencio with him, I wouldn’t be surprised.” Cecil came to him, holding out the Sig Sauer. Dave shook his head. “I won’t need that. You keep it handy.” He dragged open the door on rain and cold and darkness. “Melvil may be right. Smithers may be back.”

The tall iron gates with their chain draperies stood open. Spotlights from brown-and-gold County cars shone on them. The cars stood in the street outside the high, vine-grown walls, whose leafage sparkled and dripped. More cars were at the far end of the drive, by the tall, jigsaw-work porch. They were hidden by the overgrown shrubs and untrimmed trees, but lights said they were there. Dave left the Jaguar, crossed the street, showed a Japanese deputy his ID, and started to explain his presence. The deputy said, “Lieutenant Salazar is expecting you.” He sat in his patrol car and used a dashboard microphone. His thumb came away from the microphone switch. A loudspeaker crackled, staticky, in the car. Dave couldn’t make out the words, but the deputy told the microphone, “Ten-four,” and hung it up. He leaned out of the car into the rain and called to another deputy in rain gear beside the gate, “Let this man through.”

Men moved around the grounds with flashlights. Sometimes the light streaked a yellow slicker. Voices called through the darkness. Someplace off in the night, a siren wailed. The elegant etched glass of the front double doors was smashed out. Both doors stood open. Salazar waited in the doorway. Dave climbed the high, gaunt porch steps to him. Salazar looked disgusted.

“He got away again,” he said.

“Is Gifford all right?” Dave said.

Salazar snorted and turned aside. “He tried to shoot that .30-30 of his. The rifle? It blew up. I don’t think it had been cleaned in twenty years. Wonder is”—Salazar followed the beam of a flashlight toward the staircase—“it fired at all. Blew half his head off.”

“Dear God,” Dave said.

“He was trying to save lover boy.” Salazar located a staircase on the second floor and went up it, Dave following. “And maybe he did.”

“What about The Edge? Your people get here in time?”

“We can’t hold them for much.” Salazar moved along a hallway to a door that stood open on stairs leading to the attic. “Breaking and entering.” Salazar climbed the stairs. “Carrying concealed weapons. Killing the dogs.”

“Beautiful animals.” Dave climbed after Salazar. “Not savage enough. Not against
Homo sapiens
.” They reached the attic. Dave stopped to catch his breath. He ought to quit smoking. He asked Salazar, “How did you get here before me?”

“I live about ten miles closer.” Salazar shone his light over the heaped trunks, cartons, packing cases. “I left word at the substation out here to phone me at home if anything went down around the Gifford place. You said maybe Silencio was still here. I kept thinking about that. Look at this mess! You could hide King Kong up here.” Shaking his head, he moved down the crooked, narrow aisle between the walls of dusty junk that were De Witt Gifford’s legacy to an uncaring world. Dave followed. Salazar stopped. “Coroner hasn’t come yet,” he said.

The old man, what was left of him, still sat in the motor wheelchair. Salazar brushed him for only a second with the flashlight’s glare and swung it away. Blood had spattered the portrait of naked Ramon Novarro, forever young, on the wall above the bed. Were he and Gifford together now? Dave didn’t believe it, but he figured Gifford would have appreciated the thought.

Shoes clumped on the stairs below. Voices spoke. Someone laughed. The doorway at the end of the aisle of junk glowed with moving lights. Men’s silhouettes filled the door. Someone called, “Body up here?”

“Over this way.” Salazar shone his light along the aisle again, then backed to make way for the men to pass. They were big men, young. One of them carried a collapsed gurney, whose metal fittings clinked. To get himself out of their way, Dave stepped past the grisly old man and found himself in the tower room, where the tall, curved window panes were murky yellow from the lights of the patrol cars far below. Like a big dead white bird, the ledger lay open on the coffee table.

Dave pulled the reading glasses from his jacket pocket, also the penlight. He sat on the crackly old Empire couch and bent above the book, moving the thin beam of the penlight along the lines of Gifford’s fussy, old-maidish writing, checking dates and times. He frowned and turned back a page. And almost spoke aloud. Gifford had lied to him about the Mercedes. He read the entry twice, closed the book, pushed glasses and penlight back into their pocket, and got up from the couch, smiling grimly.

In the attic, Salazar holding the light, the hulking youths had got the frail old body onto the gurney. They began steering it on wheels back along the aisle. Dave’s foot encountered something soft, huddled on the floor. He bent for it and picked it up. Salazar shone his light on it. A woman’s cerise velvet hat, turban-style, a crumpled satin bow at the back. 1920? Sometime around there. Dave took three steps and dropped the hat over the stooped back of the coroner’s man, onto Gifford’s body under its cover.

“You’re kidding,” the coroner’s man said.

“He wasn’t,” Dave said, and watched as the gurney was half wheeled, half hoisted down the aisle. Salazar’s flashlight played on the stacked trunks, crates, barrels again. Dave frowned, turned back, took the flashlight from Salazar, and carefully probed the cobwebs with it. “Good God,” he said, and put the light back into Salazar’s hand.

“What did you see?”

“It’s what I don’t see. There was a World War II life raft up here. It’s gone. Which suggests that the place you’ll find Silencio Ruiz is downstream.”

“The creek? Have you seen how that creek is running?”

“People raft it for fun all the time,” Dave said. “Why wouldn’t he try it to escape being killed?”

“It’s only a different way to be killed,” Salazar said. “We’ve had four drownings in this storm alone. Teenagers, grown men. People are crazy, Dave.”

“I wonder what makes them that way,” Dave said. “Can you run a check on a license number for me, please?”

“A forty-year-old life raft?” Salazar said. “Laying up here all that time? It would be rotten.”

“Probably,” Dave said. “I need this number.”

“In the morning,” Salazar said.

T
HE RAIN STOPPED IN
the night. The early-morning sky was clear of clouds and very blue above the chilly spur canyon called Concho. The water of the creek still ran hard and deep beside the crooked road, but the dips in the blacktop no longer held overflow. In a few hours the stream would be a trickle, the rocks and sycamore trunks dry again.

He stopped the Jaguar at the place where trucks left the road at night. He got out and stood gazing along the ruts between the oak tree trunks to the place of rusty barrels and dead ferns. Except for the rush and rattle of the creek, the canyon was dead quiet. Birds sang on a morning after rain. Not here. A breeze pushed at his hair. The breeze brought the bad smell from the dump.

He turned away and, wincing against the brightness of the sky, looked up at the house hanging off the canyon wall high above. No sign of life. Maybe whoever lived there was asleep. He had come early so as to catch them before they left for the day. To work? From a house like that? In a setting like this? Why not? It had to be paid for. Everything had to be paid for.

He got back into the Jaguar and drove on, looking for a road up. But all he found were bridges where the creek bent and the road found better footing on the other side. The road petered out after a couple of miles, where the canyon narrowed and a waterfall came splashing down among rocks and ferns to start the creek. He drove back the way he had come. The street map book showed no road along the ridge of Concho canyon, but he explored for it because it had to be there. It took a quarter of an hour.

The road on the ridge was no more than a driveway, one car wide, the asphalt almost new. It ended where a six-foot-high cedar plank fence ended. Dave parked beside the fence and got out into silence. The noise of the creek far below hardly reached here. Quietly he shut the Jaguar’s heavy door, and he walked quietly to where a double gate of cedar planks was closed and padlocked. He peered through the slot. A Winnebago camper stood alone in a two-car port. It looked brand-new, meant to go everywhere, never been anywhere. Maybe this was wilderness enough for it. Another gate opened farther along the fence. A leather thong hung down beside it. He pulled this and sleigh bells rang.

But no one came. “Hello!” he called. “Anybody home?” His voice echoed in the canyon hush. No other voice spoke. He waited. He jangled the bells again. He called again. Then he took out his wallet, slid a shiny pick from it, and gently worked the spring lock that was a round shine of brass in the rough cedar. The gate opened on a narrow deck on whose rails stood potted creepers and succulents. Some of the succulents bore very small, bright orange flowers. Below the deck, the roofs of the house made sharp angles. He swung the gate to close it behind him, and its lower edge scraped envelopes. There was a mail slot in the gate. He gathered up the envelopes and closed the gate.

A prefab black iron spiral staircase went down from the deck. He took it. Even his soft shoes made it gong. If the inhabitants were asleep, maybe that would wake them. The deck down here was wider, and trees in wooden tubs stood in its corners. The wall of the house that faced it was panels of sliding glass—closed, curtains drawn. Dave stood regarding it, absently straightening the edges of the pack of envelopes in his hands. He wandered down the deck, looking for a door. It was a double door, when he found it. Locked. He didn’t know this type of lock.

An elaborate system of cedar-plank staircases and decks surrounded the house. Someplace there might be an open window or a door with an easier lock. He went from level to level, downward, where the shadows of the tall trees made the morning chill again. The room he got into without trouble was functional, wooden-walled, at one end a workbench under a neatly ordered rack of tools, at the other end a bare desk, a home computer, a file cabinet. A row of windows looked out into trees, the canyon slope falling off steeply below. He looked down. The road beside the stream was visible from here, though the tops of the oaks obscured the dump. Had the raw-throated roar of the big diesels in the silence of the canyon night ever wakened the people who lived here? Were they the ones who had agitated for the fallen signboard? He guessed he wasn’t going to find out. Not today.

The desk seemed the right place to leave the mail. He laid it there, turned away, turned back. He dug his reading glasses from his jacket, put them on, blinked at the name typed on the top envelope.
Mr. Lorin Shields.
He frowned. Didn’t he know that name? He sorted through the other envelopes.
Mr. & Mrs. Lorin Shields. Jennifer & Lorin Shields. Lorin Shields.
He let the envelopes fall to the desktop. Hell, yes. Lorin Shields was the senior vice-president he’d waited for the other morning at Tech-Rite, met for a moment as the man had hurried on long legs out of the executive parking lot. Tall, thin, intense.

But Tech-Rite was thirty, forty miles from here. He stared at the envelopes. And inside his head, Shields’s sleek oriental secretary said again,
He’s rarely late. It must be the rain. He has a long way to come.
What had been the apple-cheeked lad’s name out there? Jochim. The one so flummoxed by the picket line at Foothill Springs. He’d said something about Shields’s wife.
He built her a glorious new house.
Dave saw in his mind’s eye Shields’s face again, under the dripping brim of an Irish tweed hat—drawn, tormented, pain in his eyes. And something else. Startlement, maybe even fear, when Jochim told him Dave’s name. Dave had wondered then if he’d imagined it. What kind of sense did it make?

He climbed glossy inner staircases past stretches of polished plank flooring scarcely broken by isolated arrangements of furniture—never more than three or four pieces. He was reminded of those big, unused rooms at old De Witt Gifford’s. Except that life had left those. Here, it looked as if life hadn’t really had time to get started. The beautiful tall shafts reaching for light, the high sheets of glass framing the trees, the floating lofts and quiet wooden bays of the empty house didn’t breathe or speak of a past or a future. Nor even of a present. In a bedroom that gave the effect of resting lightly in the tops of trees, only half of the wide bed had been slept in, sheets and blankets thrown back, one pillow dented. A lonely sight. In the house entryway, Dave took down from one of a row of thick wooden pegs an Irish tweed hat.

Somewhere a telephone rang, the jangle echoing in hollow, wooden vacancy. He stood holding the hat, listening, counting the rings. Did they mean that someone was commonly here at—he checked his watch—eight-thirty in the morning? If so, would whoever that was return soon? It wouldn’t be Shields, would it? This was a workday. To reach Tech-Rite from here and keep business hours, he’d have left long ago. His wife? The Jennifer of the envelopes? No.
Lost his wife recently,
Jochim had said.
Very suddenly. It was a shock. She was young.
Dave hung the hat back on its peg. The telephone stopped on the tenth ring.

Down in the workroom again, he pulled open the top drawer of the file cabinet. Like the desk, the cabinet was handsome dark Danish teak. But like the house around it, it hadn’t had much use. The few manila folders in the drawer did not stand up. They lay on their backs in a loose stack, as if hastily dropped in and forgotten. He put the reading glasses on again, lifted the files out.
TECH-RITE
.
Shipping Dept. Do not remove.

He sat down at the desk and leafed over the papers, yellow flimsy carbon copies of waybills. Two bore Paul Myers’s signature. Dave couldn’t puzzle out, from the strings of numbers and letters typed on the waybills, what he had carried. He hadn’t trucked for Tech-Rite on the ninth, when he was killed. But one date did interest Dave. It was the date on the latest of the waybills in these folders—and it was the date on which the news broke that Myers’s truck had not simply crashed but had been bombed. That was when Lorin Shields had brought these files home.