Nightwork (8 page)

Wrightwood tilted his head. “You know this woman?”

“Not yet,” Dave said. “But I’m looking forward to it. Thanks for your help.”

T
HE PLACE HE LIVED
in had, he judged, started life as riding stables. He left the Jaguar beside Cecil’s van, walked past the end of the long, shingle-sided front building, crossed the uneven bricks of a courtyard sheltered by an old oak. He unwrapped and laid on plates in the cookshack pastrami sandwiches he’d picked up on Fairfax, built Bloody Marys, and carried these on a bent-wood tray across to the long, shingle-sided rear building. The arrangement of the place was awkward, but it amused more than bothered him. The last of his dead father’s nine beautiful wives, Amanda, had made the buildings handsome and livable inside. If, during the short winter, getting from one building to another meant being soaked by rain or chilled by wind, novelty was on its side. It was never boring.

The back building was walled in knotty pine. There was a wide fireplace. The inside planking of the pitched roof showed, and the unpainted rafters. Above, Amanda had designed a sleeping loft. Climbing the raw pine steps to it now meant climbing into heat. The smell of sun-baked pine overlaid the old, almost forgotten smell of horse and hay that always ghosted the place. Cecil sat naked, propped black against white pillows, in the wide bed, sheet across his long, lean legs. He gleamed with sweat. His collarbone and ribs showed. Dave kept trying to fatten him up. It didn’t seem to be working.

“Hey.” Cecil tossed aside the latest
Newsweek
and smiled. “How was Gifford Gardens?”

“Words fail me.” Dave set the tray on the long raw pine chest of drawers, carried his glass to Cecil, bent and kissed his mouth. “How are you?”

“I rested, like you told me,” Cecil said. “Nearly driving me crazy.” With a wry little smile, he raised his glass. “Cheers,” he said cheerlessly, and drank.

Dave tasted his drink, then brought the sandwiches and napkins. He sat on the edge of the bed. “It’s a little bit racist out there. Eat that. They also have gangs.” He bit into his sandwich. That was the best delicatessen in L.A. When he’d washed the bite down with Bloody Mary, he said, “Can I borrow your van tomorrow?”

“Something happen to the Jag?” Cecil looked alarmed.

Dave told him what had happened to the Jag.

“Aw, no. Shit. It’s my fault. I heard the kind of place it was, when I worked for Channel Three News.” Cecil shook his head slowly in self-disgust. “I should have warned you.”

“I wouldn’t have taken you seriously.” Dave set his plate on the bed and shed his jacket. “The place is beyond belief. Next time I’ll drive a junk heap.”

“Next time, just don’t go,” Cecil said. “Wonder is you came back with a car at all. Wonder is you came back alive. That is a killing ground out there. Grannies, little children, policemen.” Cecil stretched out a long, skinny arm to take the cigarette pack from Dave’s jacket where it lay on the bed. “I should have been with you.”

“You’re not supposed to smoke,” Dave said. On a deadly night of rain last winter, in the lost back reaches of Yucca Canyon, flames leaping high from a burning cabin, bullets had punctured the boy’s lungs. Cecil acted as if he hadn’t heard. He lit the cigarette with Dave’s lighter, and choked on the smoke. Coughing bent him forward, shook him. “Damn.” He wiped away tears with his knuckles. “Damn.”

Dave took the cigarette from him, stubbed it out in the bedside ashtray. “That’ll learn you,” he said.

For a moment, Cecil got the coughing under control. Eyes wet, voice a wheeze, he asked, “Where you going tomorrow? Where you taking my van?”

“San Diego County,” Dave said. “And no, you can’t go. It’s too far. Look, will you please eat?”

Cecil coughed again, fist to mouth. When he finished, he picked up the sandwich. Wearily obedient, he bit into it. With his mouth full, he said, “Seem to me, if you take my van, it’s only fair you take me.” He gulped Bloody Mary, wiped tomato juice off his chin with the napkin. “Dave, I can’t eat this. I’m not hungry.” He laid the sandwich on the plate. His eyes begged. “I’m sorry. Maybe later.”

“Right.” Dave knew his smile was stiff, mechanical, false. He was growing discouraged. And frightened. “I’ll wrap it in plastic and put it in the fridge. Don’t forget it, now, okay?” Cecil nodded mutely and handed him the plate as if looking at it was more than he could bear. Dave rose and set it on the tray. He turned back. “I’ll take you tomorrow, if you promise me something.” The rear of the van was lushly carpeted—floor, walls, ceiling—in electric blue to contrast with the flame colors of the custom paint job. Picture window. Built-in bar, refrigerator, drop-leaf table. Electric blue easy chair. Electric blue wraparound couch. “You lie down. All the way.”

Cecil made a face. He poked grumpily at the ice cubes in his Bloody Mary with a finger. He licked the finger, tried for a smile, and almost managed it. “Okay. I promise.” He livened up a little. “Why are we going?”

“The reasons keep piling up.” Dave sat on the bed again, worked on his sandwich and drink, and reviewed the morning’s events for Cecil. He finished, “So I went to see Dr. Ford Kretschmer. Only his address is a storage lot for galvanized pipe. And the telephone number is out of service.”

Cecil stared. “He wasn’t a doctor at all?”

“Maybe not.” Sandwich and drink finished, Dave wiped fingers and mouth with his napkin, took Cecil’s empty glass and his own with his plate to the tray on the chest. “Whoever he was, the woman with him was no nurse. She was the same one who showed up with goons at the Myers house three weeks later.”

“The ones who beat her up?” Cecil said.

“You’ve got it.” Dave picked up his jacket and shrugged into it. “I have to take the Jaguar down to the agency so they can replace that window.” He dug from the jacket pocket the crumpled flimsies he had taken from the drawer under Paul Myers’s bedroom closet. He hesitated. “You want to rest while I’m gone, or you want to do some work?”

Cecil reached for the papers. “Busy hands,” he said, “are happy hands.” He began separating the papers, frowning at them. “What are these? What do I do?”

“Telephone those companies. Get hold of whoever is in charge of shipping. Get out of them, if you can, whether Paul Myers was hauling anything except what’s listed on those manifests. What did they think of Myers? Did any of them know him? If so, did they know who he was moonlighting for, what he was hauling? Anything, everything.”

“Do I pretend I’m you again?” Cecil said.

Dave grinned. “If it’s not too much of a strain on your natural femininity.”

Cecil threw a pillow at him.

Dave laughed and carried the tray down the stairs.

On sun-scorched lots where weeds grew through the asphalt, and faded plastic pennons fluttered from sagging wires overhead, he looked at battered cars not quite but almost ready for the junkyard. Two or three he test-drove. They bucked and gasped through trash-blown neighborhoods of desolate lumberyards, warehouses, and shacky motels, while salesmen in polyester doubleknit suits breathed mouthwash fumes beside him, lying about mileage, lifetime batteries, and recent overhauls. In the end, he escaped Culver City in a 1969 two-door Valiant. A sideswipe had creased it deeply from front to back. Its crackly plastic upholstery leaked stuffing. But its gears worked, the engine ran smoothly, and the tires still had treads. It was a vague beige color, a hole gaped where its radio had been, and Dave pried loose and handed to the surprised salesman its one remaining hubcap before he drove off. The car labored up the canyon, but it didn’t overheat. And when he left it parked on the leaf-strewn bricks of his tree-shady yard where the Jaguar customarily stood, he felt good. No one in Gifford Gardens would give this car a second look.

This time he fixed double martinis in the cookshack. And when he carried them into the rear building, music was in the air—Miles Davis, “Sketches of Spain.” The ice in the hefty glasses jingled as he carried them up the stairs. The flimsies in their pale pinks, blues, yellows, lay spread out on the sheet across Cecil’s legs. He told the telephone receiver “thank you” and put it back in its cradle. He reached for the martini and gave his beautiful head with its short-cropped hair a rueful shake.

“Not one of these companies shipped anything with Paul Myers but what’s listed on these manifests.” He patted the papers. “They all liked him. He was reliable, friendly, intelligent.” Cecil sipped the martini, hummed, and for a moment shut his eyes in unwordable appreciation. “They are all sorry he’s dead, but nobody can guess what he was hauling at night up in that canyon before he crashed.” Cecil held the glass up in a salute to Dave, who was shedding his sweaty clothes. “You came back just in time. I was about to die of temperance up here, all alone by the telephone.”

“Sorry about that, but when you hear what I’ve done, you’ll be proud of me.” Dave sat on the foot of the bed, perched his drink on the loft railing, shed shoes and socks. “I bought a jalopy to drive in Gifford Gardens. A genuine eyesore.” He tried his martini. Better than usual. Most things were, now that Cecil was with him. “When you chance to pass it, avert your gaze, all right?”

“I can’t promise.” Cecil gathered up the flimsies. They crackled and whispered together. “Morbid fascination may be too much for me. How did you force yourself to commit this act of sound common sense?”

“I had the man at the Jaguar showroom in Beverly Hills run me over to the used-car lots on Washington in Culver City. You should have seen his expression. He couldn’t believe the place.” Dave hiked his butt and shed his trousers. He stood, holding the trousers up to get the creases straight. “The poor man kept repeating that he’d furnish me with a loaner until the window was fixed. I didn’t have to do this desperate thing. He was almost in tears.” Dave took down a wooden hanger from a wide knotty-pine wardrobe, and hung the pants on it. “But I was firm.” He retrieved his jacket from where he’d draped it over the rail, and hung that on the hanger too. “If I made him strand me there, I’d have to buy wheels to get home on, wouldn’t I?” He hung the suit in the wardrobe. It was damp with sweat and must go to the cleaners, but that could wait. What would he wear to Gifford Gardens next time? A raveled sweater and an old picture hat? He closed the wardrobe doors. “I knew nothing less would force me into it.” He went to get his drink and saw Cecil watching him soberly and big-eyed over the rim of his martini glass. “What’s the matter?”

“You saying it’s going to get you to San Diego County? You don’t need my van, so you don’t need me?”

“I’ll be stretching my luck if it gets me to Gifford Gardens and back.” Dave took off his tie, unbuttoned his shirt, picked up his glass, sat on the bed. He put a hand on Cecil’s thigh. Too thin. “No, if you feel up to it at five tomorrow morning, we’ll go in the van, the two of us.” He smiled. “I know I sound like the witch in the wood, but what will you eat for supper that’s fattening?”

Cecil’s eyes brimmed with tears. “Man, I am so tired of being sick and weak and no good to you and skinny and ugly and full of scars. I am so tired of that.”

“Hey,” Dave said. The boy was weeping, and Dave took the glass out of his hand. “If you’re going to turn into a maudlin drunk, I’ll have to put you on Perrier water. And there are no calories in that.” He pulled tissues from a box by the clock and the lamp. He dried Cecil’s face and kissed his salty mouth. “Come on, cheer up. You’re home. That means you’re going to get well. All it needs is time. I’m glad you’re home. Aren’t you glad you’re home? If the answer is yes, smile.”

Cecil worked up a forlorn smile. It didn’t last. “Burden on you,” he said gloomily. “I didn’t come back to you for that.”

“You didn’t come back to me to get shot up, either,” Dave said. “How do you suppose I feel about that?”

“Comes with the territory.” This time there was some conviction to Cecil’s smile. He reached out. “Give me back my strengthening medicine.”

Dave put the glass in his hand. “I need a shower. You think you can wait here and not cry anymore?”

Cecil read the big black watch bristly with stops on his skeletal wrist. Miles Davis’s thoughtful trumpet had gone silent. “Time for the news.” Cecil nodded at the television set on the far side of the bed. “How can I cry, with all the happiness they are going to spread out for me, in all the colors of the rainbow?” He groped around in the bed for the remote switch. The set came on.

The picture was file film—of a charred eighteen-wheeler lying on its top in a canyon among blackened rocks and scorched brush. The big tires of the truck still smoked. Men in yellow hardhats and rubber suits crunched around the wreckage. High above, fire vehicles and a wrecking truck stood at the edge of a cliff road. Sheriff’s cars. A television reporter’s voice came through the speaker.

“…but today, Sheriff’s investigators revealed that the semi, owned and driven by independent trucker Paul Myers, thirty-six, of Gifford Gardens, exploded before it plunged off the road into Torcido Canyon. Laboratory evidence has uncovered the presence of an explosive device, a bomb, under the cab of the truck. Myers was killed in the explosion and crash. He leaves a wife and two children.”

Jaime Salazar stood in dark glasses in glaring sunlight.

“We’re talking to Lieutenant Salazar, who is heading up the investigation for the Sheriff’s department.” The reporter was a chubby-cheeked blond boy. His microphone wore a round red cap to keep the wind out. “Lieutenant, any motive for the killing? The trailer of the truck was empty. Had there been a hijacking?”

“We don’t know.” The wind blew Salazar’s soft, dark hair. He smoothed it with a hand. “It’s one of the possibilities we’re looking into.”

“Before we went on the air here,” the reporter said, “you mentioned a suspect you wanted to question.”

“A convict named Silencio Ruiz,” Salazar said.

“Right.” The reporter turned to face the camera. “We’ll have a photograph of Ruiz on our five o’clock segment of the Channel Three News. Anyone with knowledge of the young man’s whereabouts…”

“That’s your case.” Cecil tried not to sound proud.

Dave grunted, frowned, picked up the flimsies, and sorted through them. On the day before he died, Myers had trucked leather coats from a loft in downtown L.A. to a cut-rate retailer in Covina. Later he’d hauled pet supplies from Glendale to Ventura. The manifests had been dropped into the drawer in order, the latest on top, but there was no manifest for what Myers had hauled up Torcido Canyon after midnight. That one would have burned, wouldn’t it, with the truck, with the man himself?