Skinflick
A Dave Brandstetter Mystery
Joseph Hansen
In memory of Doctor Dreadful who left too soon
1
H
E PARKED IN SUNGLARE
on a steep narrow street whose cracked white cement was seamed with tar. The tar glistened and looked runny. He sat a minute longer in the icy draft from the dashboard vents. They’d been blowing since he got into the car twenty minutes ago, but the back of his shirt was soaked with sweat. And it was only ten in the morning. Los Angeles didn’t get like this often. He hated it when it did. And this time it was holding on. It had been brutal at the cemetery three weeks ago. His father’s nine widows had looked ready to drop. The savage light had leached the color from the flowers. The savage heat had got at the mound of earth from the grave even under its staring green blanket of fake grass. He’d stayed to watch the workmen fill the grave. The earth was dry. Even the sharp walls of the grave were dry. What the hell was he doing remembering that? He switched off the engine, grabbed his jacket, got out of the car.
The door fell shut behind him. In the oven air, he flapped into the jacket. He crossed the street. The house stared at him blind and sunstruck over oleanders. The curtains were drawn. The garage doors were down. The lots were hard to build on here. House front and garage front were only a step back from the street. On the short uptilt of driveway in front of the garage doors the tape the police had put down to mark where a dead body had lain had been pulled up. But adhesive from the tape had stayed on the cement, and summer dust and street grit had stuck to it and renewed the outline in grime. Tire tracks crossed it but there were no other stains. Gerald Ross Dawson hadn’t bled. He’d died of a broken neck.
Cypresses crowded the front door, cobwebby, untrimmed. He groped behind them till his fingers found a bellpush. He pressed it and inside quiet chimes went off. Dave knew the four notes. Sometime in his early teens, without quite understanding why, he had dogged the steps of a handsome boy addicted to Pentecostal meetings. The Dawson doorbell chimes picked out the start of a gospel chorus, “Love Lifted Me.” No one came to the door. He let the second hand go around the face of his watch once and pushed the button again. Again the notes played. Again no one came. He tilted his head. Did he smell smoke?
A path went along the front of the house, cement flagstones, the moss on them gone yellow and brittle in the heat. Arm raised to fend off overgrown oleanders, he followed the path. At the house corner, it turned into cement steps with ivy creeping across them. He climbed the steps, sure now that he did smell smoke. At the top of the steps, in a patio where azaleas grew in tubs and where redwood furniture held dead leaves, a dark, stocky boy of around eighteen was burning magazines in a brick barbecue. He wore Levi’s and that was all. The iron grill was off the pit and leaned at the boy’s bare feet. He acted impatient, jabbing with an iron poker at the glossy pages blackening and curling in flames the daylight made almost invisible.
He was half turned away from Dave. He was a furry kid, fur on his arms, even on his feet. A magazine was in his hand. He kept starting to toss it into the pit, then drawing it back. He wiped sweat off his face with his arm and Dave saw the title of the magazine—
Frisco Nymphets.
The color photo was of three little girls, aged maybe ten, without any clothes on. The boy poked savagely at the flames, making a small sound that reached Dave like whimpering. The boy flapped the magazine in a kind of frantic indecision, then dropped it into the flames. Dave could feel their heat from here. He didn’t want to go closer but he did.
“Good morning,” he said.
The boy whirled, mouth open, eyes wide. The poker fell out of his hand and clattered on the charred brick edge of the pit. Without taking his scared gaze from Dave, he groped out behind him to try to cover the magazines with his hands. That wasn’t going to work. He backed up and sat on the magazines. One slid away, off the barbecue surround, onto the patio flags.
Six-to-Niners.
The naked female children on this one held yellow ducklings. The boy snatched it up and threw it into the fire. The flames choked out and sour smoke billowed around them. Dave coughed, waved hands in front of his face, and backed off, jarring a thigh against a redwood table.
“Come over here,” he said.
“What is it?” the boy gasped. “Who are you?”
“My name is Brandstetter.” Dave handed the kid a card. “I’m an insurance investigator. It’s about Gerald Ross Dawson, deceased. I came to see Mrs. Dawson.”
“She’s not here.” The boy coughed and wiped his eyes with his fingers. He frowned at the card in the smoke. His brows were thick and black and grew straight across without a break. “She went to the funeral home. Some women came from the church. They went to see my dad.”
“You’re Gerald Dawson, Junior, then—right?”
“Bucky,” he said. “Nobody calls me Gerald Dawson Junior.”
“Were you cold?” Dave asked. “Did you run out of briquettes?”
“I don’t understand you,” Bucky said.
“That’s funny fuel. Where did you get those?”
“I found them in—” But Bucky changed his mind about that answer. “They’re mine. I’m ashamed of them. I wanted to get rid of them. Now was the first chance I had.”
“Magazines like that cost a lot of money,” Dave said. “How many were there—ten, a dozen? That’s fifty, sixty dollars, maybe more. You were lucky to get that kind of allowance. Your father must have thought a lot of you.”
“And look how I repaid him,” Bucky said.
“You can only use so many Bibles,” Dave said. “But shops that sell these don’t cater to kids. It must have been hard to get them. Doesn’t that count?”
“Not now.” Bucky shook his head. “I hate them.” Tears were in his eyes and not from the smoke this time. The smoke was trying to drift off. “He was so good. I’m such a sinner.”
“Don’t make too much of it,” Dave said. “Everybody has to be eighteen sometime. When’s your mother coming back?”
“Don’t tell her I was doing this,” Bucky said.
“I only ask questions,” Dave said.
“The police already asked them all,” Bucky said. “Why do you want to start it over again? It’s too late. Everything’s too late. They even kept his body downtown ten days.” He turned sharply away, trying to hide that he was crying. He went back to the barbecue and poked blindly at the smoldering paper. Smoke huffed up again. He blew at it, making a wet sound because of the crying. Small flames licked up. “They’re finally going to let us give him his funeral tomorrow. Can’t you just leave us alone?”
“Where was he the night he was killed?” Dave asked.
“I don’t deserve to be called by his name,” Bucky said. “He never did anything dirty in his life. Look at these. I’m always dirty. I pray and pray”—he jabbed at the flaming magazines, outraged, despairing—“but I can’t be clean. Look at me.” He turned suddenly, flinging out his arms. Flakes of pale ash had caught in the black wool of his chest and belly. “Covered with hair. Anybody can see what I am. An animal.”
“Genes,” Dave said. “Did he often stay out all night?”
“What?” The boy blinked. His arms lowered slowly. It was as if Dave had wakened him from sleepwalking. “No. Never. Why would he? Sometimes he was late. But that was church work.”
“Do you know what kind?” Dave said.
“This neighborhood”—Bucky began shredding up a magazine and wadding the shreds and throwing them hard into the flames—“isn’t a fit place for Christians to live. It isn’t a fit place to bring up children. Stuff goes on in that park there isn’t even any name for. Have you seen those smut shops, those pervert bars, the movies they show? Filthy.” He ripped at the magazine. “Filthy places, filthy people. Burn!” he yelled to the fire. “Burn, burn!”
“He was trying to clean it up?” Dave said.
Bucky went guarded and sulky. “I don’t know. You know where he was. The police found stuff on his clothes. He’d been where there were horses. He’d made an enemy of Lon Tooker.”
“Keyhole Bookshop,” Dave said.
“Right. And he’s got horses where he lives, in Topanga Canyon. That’s why they arrested him. Don’t you know anything?”
“I read the police report,” Dave said. “That’s why I’m here. It doesn’t satisfy me.”
“You? What difference does that make?”
“Fifty thousand dollars’ difference,” Dave said.
Under the soot that smeared his face, he turned a pasty color. “You mean you could hold back his life insurance? That’s to put me through college. That’s to keep my mom. She can’t work. She’s handicapped.”
“I don’t want to hold it back,” Dave said, “but a couple of things are wrong and I have to find out why.”
“The only thing that’s wrong is he’s dead,” Bucky said. The tears came back. “How could God do that? He was God’s servant He was doing God’s will.”
“Lon Tooker was in his shop till midnight.”
The fur boy scoffed. “The creep who works for him says. Anybody who’d work in a place like that—what would they care about lying?”
“The shop hours are posted on the door,” Dave said. “Noon till midnight weekdays. And if he kept those hours, then he couldn’t have been home to his horses till two or after. Topanga’s a long drive from here.”
“What’s that mean?” Bucky began shredding another magazine. “My mom didn’t find my dad’s body till she went out to get the
Times
in the morning.”
“But the medical examiner says he died between ten
P.M.
and midnight.”
“I got home at midnight,” Bucky said, “from basketball practice at the church. He wasn’t there. I would have seen him.” Another wad of glossy paper went into the fire. For a second, a naked fifth-grader looked seductively over a skinny shoulder at Dave, then blackened and vanished. “Lieutenant Barker says the medical examiner could be wrong.”
“‘Could be’ doesn’t mean ‘is,’” Dave said.
“He got home, got out of the car to unlock the garage, and Lon Tooker jumped him,” Bucky said. “The stuff from the horses rubbed off Tooker onto him.”
“Nifty,” Dave said. “Did you hear the struggle? Where do you sleep?”
Bucky jerked his head at corner windows. “There. I didn’t hear anything. I was tired. I slept hard.” He ripped at another set of pages. “Anyway, what kind of struggle do you think there was? Tooker got him from behind and snapped his neck. You learn how to do that in the Marines. Tooker was a Marine in World War II.”
“It looks easy in the movies,” Dave said.
“It happened,” Bucky said.
“Tooker would have to be fifty-five,” Dave said. “Your father was ten years younger.”
“He didn’t know anything about fighting,” Bucky said. He poked at the burnt paper and big loose fragments sailed up through the heat like sick bats. They settled up above on the ivy-covered slope. “He was a Christian.”
“Not a soldier of the Lord?” Dave said.
“Are you laughing at him?” Bucky turned with the poker in his hand. “What are you? An atheist or a Jew or something? Is that why you don’t want my mom and me to have his insurance money? Because we’re born again?”
“If he was trying to open the garage door,” Dave said, “where were his keys? They weren’t in his pocket. They weren’t on the ground.”
“Tooker must have taken them,” Bucky said.
“He was searched,” Dave said. “So was his shop. His home. His car. They didn’t find those keys.”
Bucky shrugged and turned back to jab at the fire. “Tooker threw them away someplace. What good would they be to him?”
“Exactly,” Dave said. “So why take them at all?”
“Why don’t you get off my case?” Bucky said. “Don’t you think we’ve got enough trouble, my mom and me, without you coming around and—” Down on the street, a car door slammed. The poker clanked again. Bucky turned pasty again. He stared alarm at Dave. “There’s my mom, now. Oh, look, listen—don’t tell her about the magazines. Please.”