Obedience (27 page)

“He missed the Wehrmacht too,” Dave said. “But he tried—got expelled from college for painting swastikas.”

“Steve admitted that, did he? I’m surprised.”

Dave went to find cigarettes and lighter in his desk. “He claims the campus police were malicious, but Steve’s lawyers got Vaughn off. Vaughn couldn’t be anti-Semitic. Half the Thomas’s friends are Jews. Sylvia is Jewish.”

“Yeah, well,” O’Neil said, “that’s a story in itself. Vaughn didn’t know from Jewish when Steve married her—he was only eight. But he hated her from the start, nobody could take his mother’s place, and later, in junior high school, little Vaughn got caught vandalizing a Jewish cemetery. I’ll bet Steve didn’t fill you in on that, did he?”

“Tipping over tombstones?” Dave said.

O’Neil nodded. “And painting the walls with yellow six-pointed stars.” He tilted the glass up, drained it, ice cubes rattling. “Poor Sylvia.” He filled the glass again, the soda fizzing. “And Steve claims she was a wicked stepmother. Claims she hated Vaughn.”

Dave drank from his orange juice. “She didn’t?”

“It was the other way around, isn’t that obvious? But he was a child, Sylvia was an adult. She was patient and understanding and smiled and tried to win him over, didn’t she? Baked cookies for him, took him to Knott’s, Disneyland, Sea World. Wore herself out. Hell, Mr. Brandstetter, he wouldn’t have had any parenting at all if it wasn’t for Syl. Sylvia. Mrs. Thomas, I mean. Old Steve had plenty of time and charm to strew around among his clients, but he could forget about Vaughn for months on end. The kid needed him. Wasn’t that why he did the rotten things he did? To try to attract his dad’s attention?”

“I don’t subscribe to
Psychology Today
,” Dave said. “In my experience, some people just turn rotten early, Neil. It’s how they are.”

“I took a minute at lunchtime to check you out. And you’re very, very big time.” O’Neil’s eyes narrowed. “Why are you investigating Vaughn’s death? He wasn’t at Channel Three long enough to qualify for group insurance.”

“Right.” Dave smiled. “I figured you were too shrewd to believe that for long.”

O’Neil scowled. “You lied? Why? Who for?”

“For someone who doesn’t accept that Vaughn’s death was an accident. I can’t give you my client’s name. That’s confidential. But I’m sure it would surprise you.” Dave grinned. “I know damned well it would surprise Vaughn.”

O’Neil stared for a long moment, puzzled, wary. He was pale. He read his watch, set down his glass so hastily it almost fell over. He grabbed for it, straightened it, stood up. “I have to go. Sylvia expects me back tonight.” He tried for a smile and missed, then went away down the room at a run. The door that had stood open slammed after him.

Dave plugged in the telephone on the desk and it rang.

“We gave that apartment a thorough going-over,” Joey Samuels said. “We didn’t find much. Wornout pantyhose, a plastic tricycle.” While the police detective talked, Cecil came in the door. He passed Dave, touching his shoulder, hung his jacket on the hat tree by the bar, got a bottle of Beck’s from the refrigerator. Samuels said, “A paintball gun and ammo. The jungle suits they wear to play those action combat games. Boots, helmets, belts.”

“A paintball gun,” Dave said. “No real guns?”

“He stuck to make-believe—war magazines, you know?”

“What about the mailing labels on the magazines?”

“No good—they didn’t come through the mail.”

“Telephone bills?” Dave said. “They’re helpful.”

“They didn’t have a telephone,” Samuels said. “But all the normal papers—auto registration, bank statements, sales receipts, canceled checks—all those were gone. She must have taken them with her.”

“Those big shoulder bags have their uses,” Dave said.

“A black transvestite hooker in Hollywood hit me with one once,” Samuels said. “I heard bells for a week.”

Dave laughed. “Thanks,” he said, and hung up.

Cecil sat on a corner of the desk, pointed with the green bottle, and asked, “Who belongs to the attaché case?”

Cecil parked his flame-painted, blue-carpeted, picture-windowed van on a steep, twisty hillside street in Burbank, switched off the engine, switched off the lights. It was quiet here, and dark, untrimmed trees hanging over the narrow, tar-patched paving, screening out the scant street-lighting. Bungalows lurked among the trees, below the road on one side, uphill on the other. Clapboard, some of them, some stucco, none of them new. It wasn’t late. The windows glowed. When Dave got out of the van and closed the door, a dog barked somewhere. But no human voices sounded. Everybody was indoors watching television. Cecil climbed out on his side of the van, brought out the attaché case, closed his door. He stood beside Dave, looking down wooden steps that led between thick brush into darkness.

“Looks like he still isn’t home,” he said.

Dave had tried to telephone Neil O’Neil, at work, at home, and got no answer. He’d heated pastrami, piled it thick on sour rye bread, and they’d eaten supper at the big scoured deal table in the cookshack while they watched Channel Three’s six o’clock news. Cecil’s segment on the Combat Zone looked good, sounded good. He was pleased with it. Now that he’d been promoted, he was a producer. That meant he was still a field reporter but had to work twice as hard. The pay was better but not two times better. It didn’t matter. What mattered was, he was getting somewhere. He was black, and getting somewhere in television. After the news, Dave stretched an arm up for the yellow telephone attached to a cupboard in the cookshack and tried to reach O’Neil again. Still no answer. Now in the dark, standing beside O’Neil’s mailbox at the road edge in Burbank, he said, “That’s what I was hoping. Come on.”

They felt their way down the steps. Their shoes had thick silent soles, but these still crackled leaves now and then and snapped twigs. It wasn’t going to disturb O’Neil. But it mustn’t disturb the neighbors, either. Dave’s foot came down on some kind of big, dry seedpod. It burst with a sharp report. The dog barked again, but no human ear had heard, or if it had, it hadn’t roused its owner. They reached a deck fronting the house. Dave dug a penlight out of a jacket pocket and ran its beam quickly along the front of the house. Windows. Darkness beyond them. Cecil went to the end of the deck, turned a corner.

“Here,” he whispered.

Dave went to him. There was a door. He reached for his wallet. In the wallet he kept small blades helpful sometimes in opening locks. No wallet. “Damn,” he said.

“Ssh,” Cecil said. He went along the side of the house. Dave stayed where he was. Then he heard a thump, as if a knee had bumped the wall of the house. He went toward the sound. Cecil had disappeared through a small, high window. His long legs in pale jeans were just vanishing inside. Dave went back to the door, and in a moment locks clicked on its far side and the door swung open. Dave could see Cecil’s teeth grinning against the darkness.

“You know the bathroom window’s always open.”

“But my climbing days are over.” Dave stepped inside and closed the door. He went around the room, stumbling into furniture, bruising his shins, knees, thighs, closing curtains. He switched on a lamp. The furniture was rattan and wicker from Pier One. The stereo equipment was elaborate but most of it was just piled on the floor. The television set measured forty inches, a VCR on top of it, stacked with tapes. The room beyond showed drafting tables, with lots of paper and tagboard in big sheets, lots of plastic mounted alphabet strips in every conceivable typeface, thick loose-leaf catalogues, ad layouts hanging off the walls, colored paper samples, T-squares, triangles, French curves. A computer monitor turned them a blank face.

Cecil bent over a low wicker table and turned the pages of an investments magazine. “What are we looking for?”

“We’ll know when we find it,” Dave said.

“Anything connecting this O’Neil to Vaughn Thomas?”

“That too,” Dave said, and went through the dining room/office, pushed a swing door, and switched on a light in the kitchen. It had been handsomely remodeled, central burner deck, ovens mounted in the walls, rows of beautiful hanging pots and pans. But the fridge was full of supermarket frozen dinners. That didn’t tell Dave anything useful. He went to a bedroom where the bed awaited making up, the sheets in masculine brown stripes. So why did he smell a feminine perfume? The louvered white doors of a walk-in closet were partway open. He opened them all the way. The perfume gusted out. In the closet hung clothes for a young man, yes, but also a woman’s clothes, dresses, blouses, slacks. Not many. Enough for emergencies. All peach color. He turned away, frowned, turned back again, bent, picked up off the closet floor a camouflage coverall. New. Worn maybe once. Combat boots lay on the closet floor too. Also new. A helmet with the usual shield to protect the eyes. He knelt and searched, pushing aside shoes, tennis rackets, Frisbees. No paintball gun. He was poking around the bathroom and finding nothing when a car door closed up on the road. He pulled the closet doors near shut again, pocketed a closeup of O’Neil from among twenty snapshots stuck into the mirror over the dresser, then switched off the light. To Cecil, who was pawing through file drawers in the office, he said, “Let’s go—and don’t forget the attaché case.”

In the broad bed on the sleeping loft, Cecil sat propped against pillows, watching the late news on Channel Three. Beside him, back turned, Dave dozed. The familiar voices of the pretty anchor people scarcely reached him. He was almost asleep. Then he heard a cry. Mr. Kaminsky? He looked wildly around the leafy West L.A. patio. Kaminsky was shouting for help. But where was he? Dave flung off the covers and was on his feet before he realized he was dreaming. Cecil switched off the television set. “Hey. Easy, Dave. What’s wrong?”

“Kaminsky.” Dave sat on the side of the bed. He was panting. His heart raced. “I dreamed about him.”

“You heard his name on the news,” Cecil said. “Apartment manager? Where Vaughn Thomas lived? He’s dead. Fell from a second-floor balcony tonight, broke his neck.”

Dave turned and peered into Cecil’s face. “Dead?”

“Police searched the apartment earlier. When they got called tonight, door was open, furniture shifted around. They figure he was straightening up. No one saw him fall.”

Dave laughed hopelessly. “Poor Kaminsky. He was so excited about being part of a murder case.”

“Was he—part of it, I mean?”

“It surprises hell out of me,” Dave said.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1988 by Joseph Hansen

Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

978-1-4804-1678-9

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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