Nightwork (9 page)

“You going to take the shower before I run out of martini?” Cecil watched the tube. He was a news junkie. “In my diminished state, I could dry up and blow away.”

“Give me ten minutes.” Dave snatched briefs and jeans from an unpainted pine drawer and started down the stairs. “Meantime, phone Jack Schuyler at Pinnacle Life, will you? Introduce yourself and ask him who referred Paul Myers to them. It should be on his application.”

The shower didn’t take ten minutes. When Dave got back up to the loft, Cecil held out his empty glass. “It was a friend,” he said. “Bruce Kilgore.”

“Do tell.” Dave took the glass, found his own, and made for the cookshack. He hoped a second martini would work up Cecil’s appetite. Then they would leave for Max Romano’s. Everything on Max’s menu was fattening.

T
HE VAN CLIMBED THROUGH
a crooked pass where ragged rocks thrust up high and cramped the narrow road. And here was the valley. The hills all around were brown, brushy, strewn with bleached boulders. The valley itself was green with groves and meadows. But the sky was hard as he remembered, a relentless Southwest blue, yellow heat in it, even so early in the morning.

Twice Cecil had come out of the back, bored with lying on the couch, watching the coastline, the stucco roadside motels and eateries, the monotonous blue glitter of the Pacific, bored with the magazines he’d brought, the cassettes. Dave had sent him back. Now he came out again and dropped his lanky self into the passenger seat. Dave glanced at him. He looked all right. When he was tired—like last night by the time they’d finished dinner at Max’s—his skin took on a dry, dusty finish. It glowed now, and his eyes were clear.

“Pretty,” he said. “Picture postcard.” He saw something, bent forward, peered upward through the windshield. “Look at that. Hawk circling.”

“
Halcon
,” Dave said. “That’s the name of the place.” He saw the hawk and remembered another time when he’d seen a hawk against a sky like this. From the top of a bare, brown mountain back of Sangre de Cristo, up the coast. He’d parked his car outside a bleak concrete-block building there, a television station where a few minutes later he was to encounter Cecil for the first time. He told Cecil about this now. “Maybe it means good luck.”

Cecil smiled. “You know it means good luck.”

The road sloped down to the valley floor. The tidy rows of round and glossy orange trees looked as if Grant Wood had painted them. Sprinkler pipes worked among the avocado trees, whose branches drooped and tangled. Beneath them the light was undersea light. On tilting, sunswept pastures, Rainbird sprinklers cast sparkling arcs, strewing the grass with emeralds under the hoofs of stocky black cattle that browsed and did not look up as the van passed.

White letters on a modest green sign read
HALCON,
and here, in the long morning shadows of old live oaks, buildings clustered—metal filling station, railroad-car diner, bat-and-board tavern with
COOR’S
in red neon in the window. The general store was barn-red shiplap, with a long plank front porch and a neat red, white, and blue enamel sign:
U
.
S
.
POST OFFICE
.
Dave wheeled the van onto gravel and parked at the end of the long building. He opened the door and stepped stiffly down, glad for the chance to stretch his legs. And a bullet whined past.

Cecil called, “Look out. They’re shooting at us.”

Dave lay on the ground, the side of his face stung by gravel and by the sharp, dry, curled little leaves of the oaks. Far off, he heard shots. Four, five? He flinched, waiting for the bullets to strike him, to kick up gravel around him, to bore into the sleek metal of the van, to plunk into the crooked gray boles of the oaks. Nothing like that happened. The distant gunfire ceased. Silence. A meadowlark sang. Nearer, a rooster crowed. Dave turned his head and called:

“Are you all right?”

“I want to go back to the news business,” Cecil said.

“Where are you? Your voice sounds funny.”

“I am in here with my face in the carpet,” Cecil said. “That can mess up your diction worse than a course in Afro-American English.”

“Stay there.” Dave rose cautiously. Gravel clung to his face, the heels of his hands. He brushed it off. The van door hung open. He brought his eyes to window level and looked out past the oaks. Flat land stretched away, empty in the sun. Chainlink fencing glinted far off. He wished he had De Witt Gifford’s binoculars. Did tiny figures move out there against the dry brown background of the mountains? Was that a line of parked automobiles? Yes. Sunshine glanced off a windowpane. A moment later, dust rose and traveled. A car the size of an ant crawled off. A second. A third. The line of dust stretched out along the foot of the hills. When it settled, he saw no parked cars. He drew a deep breath, straightened, and looked into the van. Cecil had done his panicked best to fit his gangly body under the control panel. Dave reached across and touched him.

“All clear,” he said.

Cecil looked up, forehead wrinkled. “Who was it?”

“Too far away to tell,” Dave said. “Come on.”

Their heels drummed hollowly on the planks of the long porch. Past a screen door, across which angled a shiny metal bar printed
DRINK DR
.
PEPPER,
was a wooden door with a top panel of glass. Inside the glass hung a sign:
Closed. Sorry We Missed You, Please Call Again.
Dave read his watch. Two minutes past nine. He went on along the porch with Cecil following. Plank steps went down, and so did they.

Behind the store, a frame cottage stood inside a picket-fenced yard. The house was barn-red, like the store. So was the fence. Grass grew in front of the house. In a bare side yard, white hens pecked near a doghouse that bore the name
DIGGER
.
From a cleat beside the doghouse door a rusty chain hung dragging in the dust. Dave reached over the gate to work the latch, when the house door opened and a stocky brown man came out, buttoning a red and black checkered flannel shirt. His hair was cropped close to his scalp. He pulled the door shut, turned, and gave a little jerk of surprise when he saw Dave and Cecil. He was short, but with a big man’s chest and shoulders. He came to the gate bandy-legged in cowboy boots.

“What can I do for you?”

“Tell us about the sharpshooters,” Dave said.

The man glanced over his shoulder. “They out there again?”

“Bullet just missed us,” Cecil said.

“Damn.” It was an apology. “I didn’t hear them.” He unlatched the gate. “Did they quit at nine?”

“And not a moment too soon,” Dave said.

“It’s the Sheriff’s rifle range.” The man let the gate fall shut and walked toward the front of the store. Dave and Cecil followed. Above the beat of their footfalls on the planks, the man said, “Been there forty, fifty years. But I don’t think rifles fired so far then.” He jingled keys, unlocked the door of the store, and with the scuffed, pointed tip of a boot, kicked a brown rubber wedge under the door to keep it open. “No limit to them now. All the way to Moscow.”

The store was gloomy and smelled of onions, cheese, new blue jeans. The man followed a crowded aisle of canned goods—soup, baked beans, chili, Spam—on shelves and in cartons on the floor. He passed out of sight around a stack of new bushel baskets. A cash register beeped. Dodging rakes, hoes, brooms hanging from rafters, Dave and Cecil went after him. He stood behind a counter on whose front a faded sign read
KEROSENE
.
Open boxes of candy bars and chewing gum and digestive tablets lay on the counter. On little wire racks hung cellophane packets of beef jerky, yellow envelopes of corn chips. At his back, shelves held bottles—whiskey, rum, gin, vodka. Cigarette packs were pigeonholed. The man dug a wad of currency from a pocket of his Levi’s and sorted the bills into compartments in the shallow gray metal drawer of an electronic cash register. “What I think,” he said, “is they want me out of here. Fellow got shot right outside here, four months ago. Walked out with two sacks of steer manure to his car and a bullet hit him. He still don’t walk right. They killed my dog.”

“Isn’t there anything you can do?” Dave said.

“This is the main road,” Cecil said. “People could get hit in their cars.”

“They have to quit at nine now,” the man said. “That was all I could get. County supervisors told them they could only use it in the early morning when there’s nobody around. Digger wasn’t nobody. Just a dog. They didn’t give a damn about a dog.” He pushed the cash drawer shut angrily, and the machine emitted a stutter of protesting beeps. “People around here tell me go to court, sue.” A wry smile twitched his mouth. “I say, ‘I’m no Sioux—I’m a Ute.’” He sobered. “How much do I sue for? Money’s not going to get me Digger back. He’s dead. Anyway, the lawyers would get all the money. And I haven’t got time to hang around courthouses. I got a store to run.”

“And a post office,” Dave said. From a shirt pocket he took the slip of paper on which Luther Prentice had written Louella Bishop’s address. “Can you tell me how to find this place?” He held out the slip.

The man rummaged under the counter for dime-store reading glasses, put them on, took the slip, peered at it. “Oh, sure.” He turned the paper over and, with a ballpoint pen from a plastic cup on the counter, drew a map. “There you go.” He handed the paper back to Dave, dropped the pen back into the cup, which had a round, yellow
49¢ EACH
sign pasted to it. “Nice lady, Mrs. Bishop. Comes in here a lot. Shops for the Hutchings. Funny thing. You’re the second ones to come looking for her.” He eyed Cecil. “You a relative?”

Cecil shook his head. “Friend,” he said.

Dave said, “Let me tell you who the others were who came looking for her. Last evening, was it?”

“I keep open till nine. Folks forget things, and I’m the only store. They’d have to drive clear up through the pass to town if it wasn’t for me.”

“A stocky woman,” Dave said. “Middle-aged. Well dressed. A pair of big men with her. Goons.”

“Drove a white unmarked van,” the storekeeper said.

“Right.” Dave turned away. “Thank you.”

“They called her Duchess,” the storekeeper said.

“She wanted to buy the truck.” Louella Bishop’s haunches were vast as she bent to set breakfast-soiled plates, cups, saucers in the white racks of a dishwasher. Her upper arms were thick as a man’s thigh and their flesh jiggled. Above the dishwasher, twin stainless steel sinks were set in a surround of flower-painted shiny Mexican tiles. The electric stove was so surrounded, above it a dark copper-lined hood whose ventilator pipe went up among black rafters. The walls of the kitchen were roughly plastered and very white. The floor was waxed squares of terracotta. In planters outside deep-set windows, geraniums grew intensely green and red in the morning sunshine. Louella Bishop rolled the rack back into place, its glassy burden jingling, and closed the dishwasher door. With a wheeze of breath she straightened up. “And she bought it. Nothing more to tell.”

“Why did you sell it?” Dave and Cecil sat at a plank table of wood almost as dark as the rafters, built sometime in the 1920s to imitate a refectory table from a California mission. Coffee mugs were in front of them. “I thought your husband’s plan was for Melvil to begin driving as soon as he got out of high school.”

“His plan was not to cough and choke himself to death at an early age,” Louella Bishop said. “To die in convulsions in the middle of the night. And he gone now. And it’s me that going to do the planning now. And it is no way in my plans for Melvil to end up like his father.”

“The doctor said it was a heart attack. Dr. Kretschmer. The one who came to your house in Gifford Gardens. The one you called. He didn’t put anything about convulsions on the death certificate.”

“Ossie—he come home one morning, about three o’clock, three-thirty. He was working nights, you know, to get extra money. They put on all these new taxes—license, tires, no end to it. And he was trying to put money by so as to get another truck, like you say, for Melvil when the time came. We wanted him to get his education first. Anyway”—she filled a mug from a pottery urn, brought it to the table, lowered her bulk onto a chair—“Ossie was sick. Stumbled in the door. Looked like death. Couldn’t catch his breath. Says he had to get to the bathroom but he couldn’t get across the kitchen. Fell to his hands and knees. Soiled himself, like a little child. Oh, I tell you, that man was sick!” She wagged her head gloomily and sipped her coffee. “Doctor come and give him a shot, and that cleared up the trouble with his bowels.”

“Dr. Hobart?” Dave asked.

She looked at him sharply. “Ossie say no Dr. Hobart. Say to call this here Dr. Kretschmer. Something to do with the nightwork. Had to be secret. I shouldn’t be telling you, now. I’m talking too much.”

“Did the Duchess come with him that time?”

She stirred on the chair, shifting from one mighty flank to the other. She drew a deep breath. Her big bosom rose with it. “I think you better go now.”

“What’s her real name?” Cecil said.

“Seemed like Ossie was going to get better after that,” Louella Bishop said. “But it wasn’t more than a few days, and he was dead.”

Dave said, “Did Paul Myers come to see your husband when he was sick?”

She frowned. “You say they blew him up?”

“Who do you think they were? The Duchess and her strongarm boys?”

She opened her mouth to answer but she caught herself. “Yes, Paul came. He was a true friend. Had this here magazine with him. Something about science. But I don’t know what they talked about. That’s the truth. Paul closed the door, and they spoke low. When he left, he was pale, and he was angry.” She put her hands flat on the table and heaved herself to her feet. “You best go now. I have a whole big house to clean.”

“Why?” Cecil said. “You got a lot of money for that truck. Stands to reason. And what about all the money your husband saved, moonlighting?”

“I’ve got children to raise and send through school. Melvil’s going to college. Be something. It’s a good place to raise children down here.” She rinsed a yellow cellulose sponge at the sink and wiped the handsome tiles. “I worked for the Hutchings before I got married. Says, ‘Louella, if ever you want to come back, you come. You a part of this family and you always will be.’ And they meant it, too.” She glanced at Cecil. “Lord, child, I can’t be idle the rest of my days. A person has to work.”